From the daily archives:

Thursday, May 3, 2007

Bah oui, anomie

by Frank Paynter on May 3, 2007

â€œAujourdâ€™hui, maman est morte. Ou peut-Ãªtre hier, je ne sais pasâ€

Almost a year ago I was in San Francisco at BloggerCon n and Jeneane told me to give Doc a hug for her. Mumbling ascii down the chat line to Jeneane, I allowed as how I like Doc a lot but we don’t hug, exactly… shucks. And Jeneane says, well I should give Jory a hug for her then and that was easier for me to — um — get my arms around. So there I was in an unconference room with Mike Arrington maundering on about how ill treated he is and how the meanies in his comment space make him feel bad and somehow that has something to do with blogging core values. Steve Gillmor was in a seat against the back wall wearing a scowl and in a mood as foul as Arrington’s.Â I split for the lobby where I wouldn’t have to listen to that crap. Jory was in the lobby, busy with business but gracious enough to allow an interruption and I gave her Jeneane’s greetings and she hugged me. It was a sweet hug after which the world seemed a nicer place. All this was before I received the phone call about Molly’s accident.

So I returned to the session where that old so-and-so Mike Arrington was rambling on about himself, kind of marketing his own conversation which — after all — markets ARE, conversations that is, even if you are only talking to yourself. And there he was stroking it in front of a room full of well informed people who had better places to be and better things to do than act as mirrors reflecting the anomie he projected. Arrington did set a tone for BloggerCon n and I think it’s no coincidence that my dog almost died that weekend.

Later in the day, I told Doc that Jeneane said I should give him a hug, and what do you know, there we were giving each other a hug. Now Doc’s not Jory, but he is a kind and giving man, and I felt rewarded by that hug, warmed.

A while back I listened to an old Gillmor Gang podcast, and Steve and Doc were saying fuck and asshole and all the other naughty words and if you listen carefully you will find that Gillmor sounds a lot like Madge Weinstein. Imagine my surprise a month or two ago when I heard that Gillmor was an old Firesign Theater guy. It’s true. You can Google it. I wonder if Madge hung out at Wally Heider’s?

My education has these huge gaps that you could put the entire Monty Python show into. I mean, I knew about the killer rabbit and stuff but I have come late to an appreciation of Cleese. The Firesign theater had my friends just rolling on the floor in the seventies. They were famously funny. But while I was aware of them, I wasn’t — you know — into them.

That day in San Francisco, Steve Gillmor seemed to suffer the same malaise that was plaguing Arrington. These guys were down. Something had them bummed out. Who knows what?Â But it seemed to be contagious.

[tags]ennui, anomie, borderline personality disorder, narcissism, occupational hazard, killer rabbit[/tags]

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First Drafts

by Frank Paynter on May 3, 2007

I looked at what I wrote last night and I would like to change it in a hundred ways. Most of what I slap up on the screen here is like that. I’ll start in the middle, cast about for where that came from, eventually get back to the beginning, and then look for some glib way to tie everything together and end the post.Â For example…

The day before yesterday we celebrated the fourth anniversary of George Bush’s stunning victory in Iraq. “Mission accomplished,” he said. While some of us thought him less than sincere, less than accurate, everyone was a little relieved that he’d shared his delusion. This wasn’t a quagmire like Vietnam, a rat hole we were stuffing with million dollar notes. This was a brief excursion into glorious imperialism. The global strategists among us, the boys down at the local bar who would as soon talk politics as baseball, agreed that it was important to have a place to build forward bases now that the Saudis were throwing us out. Iraq looked like a good place from which to project power into those underdeveloped oil fields of West Asia. So it was nice that the mission was accomplished and we could send in the construction crews to build us a couple of permanent bases before the Saudis threw us out of their kingdom once and for all.

But of course the mission wasn’t accomplished, unless the mission was to turn Iraq into a land torn by sectarian strife and to bring US national power to bear on the problem of US corporations’ lust for Iraq’s petroleum resources. It’s reasonable that Bush would veto the funding bill, because while it had enough loopholes to be meaningless, it did at least open the vision of Congressional authority and the possibility of setting goals that can actually be accomplished.

[tags]fragments, mission accomplished, bush veto[/tags]

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