\nEditor\u2019s Note: Marlow returns this morning with ironic flourish as the world considers the passing of the longest-serving consort to the British Monarch. <\/p>\n
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\nAt 99 years of age, Philip was a presence across my life, born the same day (though three decades sooner) on a table-top on the island of Corfu. The Royal family has weathered the storm of change better than most of us, and we offer condolences to the Queen and her people. In the meantime, the rising winds batter our own ship of state. Here is Marlow\u2019s take on the rake of our common rising wind in the concrete canyons of a place called Chinatown.<\/p>\n
– Vic
\n—–<\/p>\n
Author\u2019s Note: This remains little more than a meander, but it\u2019s a start. Where it leads may come later. <\/p>\n
It might need more of a Chinese Indo-Pacific backdrop, or perhaps just a domestic crowd of very seedy people with three-day old beard growth, tattered and worn ballcaps or bowlers on their heads, crumpled packages of cigarettes in their shirt pockets, burning kerosene lamps hung from rusty no longer hooked-up gas chandeliers in dingy rooms where most of the plaster has fallen and the lathes are showing through. <\/p>\n
Naw, neither of these Chinatowns are believable, eh? Especially the snowflakes. <\/p>\n
Still, I\u2019ve always wanted to end a story with \u201cForget it, Jake. It\u2019s Chinatown.\u201d <\/p>\n
– Marlow<\/p>\n
PS I remain hard at work editing and extending Coastal Empire follow-ons to my last scribbling. <\/p>\n
After the Whirlwind <\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n
That\u2019s what\u2019s left . . . it\u2019s like a sports car accident — hideously twisted and broken — gutted with fire, all that what was left of it after it was vandalized by souvenir hunters was a hulk after the accident . . . if it was an accident. Our country was meant by its founders to be an eternal present to their countrymen and women. Before we changed our minds, it was still beautiful and a beacon of hope and love for all mankind. <\/p>\n
Several of its last leaders tried to save it at great current-dollars cost with the payoffs coming at some later unspecified dates — but you just can\u2019t prevent folks or countries from committing suicide. Or so the story goes. <\/p>\n
Most of our country\u2019s elites and outside admirers are certain \u201cit\u201d (or more honestly were they able to admit their role \u201cthey\u201d) did not intend to drive (it) off that bridge that spanned a deep chasm. \u201cIt was too clich\u00e9 an ending\u201d they said, avoiding their more effete word-of-choice denouement. <\/p>\n
It died last summer just shy of its birthday, July second — it\u2019s much too early to guess what history will decide about it. <\/p>\n
I\u2019m putting this together from many sources — from all that video posted by the TV and documentary filmmakers as well as hordes of unnamed citizens on social media who blankly witnessed live its slow rolling fall way down in the hole. <\/p>\n
Please excuse my choices of material since this is at best an initial attempt to sketch a likeness through all these different viewfinders. <\/p>\n
American elite\u2019s own unfinished daily account on public TV forms most of my narrative testimony on this whirlwind. <\/p>\n
Yes, there were lots of characters in this story — girls in chic dressing gowns, equipment grips, party guests in suits with soiled ties, washed up in-and-out of office politicians of various stripes, hollow eyed editors and opinion makers, tweedy academics, vapid bloggers, trolls, provocateurs cum authors, \u201cjournalists,\u201d athletes with attitudes who screened well with audiences, and, Oh My God, hell yes, line upon line of dwarves shoulder to shoulder for inspection and ogling. This was and remains a circus side show for our overboiling masses, n\u2019est-ce pas? We must have these on angled close-ups. (a sotto voce) The nudes will be put in with the midgets in later more highly restricted for sale edition releases. <\/p>\n
We shall leave room for gruesomely realistic dummies — exact duplicates of the originals who gifted us with this wreckage — those super stooges in the beltway\u2019s on-camera tea sipping, off-camera bourbon swilling mafia and strap hangers. <\/p>\n
Perhaps at some later old-age date, we, who still abide, will be assigned personal assistants to do all our dirty jobs, which\u2019ll include giving us paid ticket holders to this shit-show holy hell. Meanwhile, as is our wont, there\u2019ll be music striking up — small brass, New Orleans style bands for us and the dummies. <\/p>\n
(Sidenote reminder before I forget: I want to ride with the nudes, but I\u2019ll likely be assigned to shepherd the midgets or even worse trail-boss the dummies to cross country promotional events . . . ratf*ck.) <\/p>\n
An over budget picture show like some big-deficit countries today can always be a success — just think of the rerun and syndication rights as well as the merchandising possibilities. Who\u2019ll ever remember what it cost? <\/p>\n
First of all, we should talk about DC\u2019s secret commissions for unpatriotic activities. Made up entirely of supernumerary dummies aka the elected ones, select family members, senior staff members and assorted lifelike plastic dummies. You\u2019ll be able to tell them apart as the more lifelike ones — the dummies — appear to have a pulse. To avoid being swept away off the streets of the capitol, keep a dummy propped up alongside yourself at all times, when in town. It\u2019ll have the added benefit of making you look important and that you have staff attending to you. <\/p>\n
Political geeks and freaks are now in control of what we see, hear, read, and \u201cknow\u201d — just bleak, blank silence is what we get from America\u2019s greatest living historians and biographers. <\/p>\n
They can see it and through it, no? <\/p>\n
Or maybe they too only see what little snatch of passing reality is in our drivers\u2019 crazily tilted, rearview mirrors. Don\u2019t they notice these chauffeurs\u2019re wearing sunglasses after nightfall? <\/p>\n
Our chosen-for-us interlocutors are comrades, disciples, highly-successful, youthful looking, talented and compulsive impressionists who know a bit less than squat. They uneasily jump from one \u201cvoice\u201d aka view to another as the off-air, curated-by-the-producer facts roll in over their earpieces as the perfectly choreographed frenzy of interviews and panel discussions goes on and on and on. Makes me wonder why we don\u2019t get it that today\u2019s camera is a phallus and who\u2019s on the receiving end. <\/p>\n
I wish they\u2019d drive a little slower. We all are quite dangerously sprawled on the back of the car, clutching our smartphones afraid we\u2019re gonna fall off <\/p>\n
All my professional life I stuck my nose into other people\u2019s wrinkles. I know the little signs. It\u2019s not like the hard to detect somethings you could faintly smell back during the old too-little-info days. Hell, the words and visual affect we are being treated to are obscenely troubling. What their flacks\u2019 responses were was what Romani gypsies said when caught with the goods. <\/p>\n
They just matador\u2019d and ole\u2019d us. <\/p>\n
In essence they\u2019re an old-style wolf-pack. They still do that nowadays, that\u2019s how they want to be perceived. It\u2019s always good to be feared. <\/p>\n
Meanwhile we old guys have stopped trying to \u201cget with it.\u201d We\u2019re simply trying to settle for \u201cgetting it.\u201d Post facto. <\/p>\n
I\u2019ll try to explain — as we go along. <\/p>\n
As a political drama freak, I am forced to say that they were all actors. Worse than that — most of the earliest ones were Irishmen and women. (Like some of my readers I\u2019ve got plenty of family history here.) What else was there to be? You carried bricks, got into politics, or went on the stage. <\/p>\n
High tragedy on the stage before the Civil War for the first generation. The second generation made it into high society as pioneer snobblazers, who left a deeply marked trail for the Kellys and the Kennedys. For them bootlegging for sure, but no gentleman jewel thieving there. There was too much to lose doing that. <\/p>\n
Censorship? That\u2019ll have to be covered later. Much later. Can\u2019t gun this car too early cause it\u2019ll leap forward out-of-control. <\/p>\n
Sorry for the preceding attempt to provoke my readers to a mirthless chuckle about my forebears as props in old American cliff-hangers. Yet, today we\u2019re treated to bombs, mass-shootings, buzz-saw threatening endings, pits full of CGI\u2019d deadly serpents, sundry world ending disasters and race war baloney. Hollywood moved east and took control of the script news. <\/p>\n
———<\/p>\n
It\u2019s such a small-time mud-show in a motorcyclist camping site. Exhilarating. <\/p>\n
All that\u2019s missing is frank fryer. How about a weenie roast so we can eat? <\/p>\n
The rest is history as they dreamed up this crazy communications orgy, where the younger people of the beast — whatever that means — are let loose on us. Well, effing happy birthday, America. <\/p>\n
——— <\/p>\n
Just like those of us before them, they come, and they go. Like what our parents said of us, they sure n\u2019hell can go. None of them were discovered as we were. No, we didn\u2019t pearl dive for \u2018em and squeeze \u2018em out of an oyster shell. They had a plan, marketed themselves, created themselves from whole cloth in short digital videos and scripts of a few 100 characters at a time. 100s and 1000s of them. <\/p>\n
Sadly, the scenes leading up to the predictable bomb explosions are always missing. Hence, the barely concealed look of surprise on the faces and in the voices of our interlocutors when the real breaking news is broadcast or streamed live from on-scene. <\/p>\n
BOOOOM! What was that bomb for? Jesus, they don\u2019t effing know. Ever. Talking mindless, eyeless, earless assholes. <\/p>\n
Even midday summer skies darkened by endless formations of bomb carrying monster enemy airplanes screaming low overhead would befuddle them. <\/p>\n
—— <\/p>\n
For our network HQ hosts\u2019 use, there\u2019s going to be film later released which shows a hoodie guy dropping off suspicious looking packages. These LEA dummies stop looking at film at this point only to miss the real bombers dropping off their packages earlier the previous day when these places were crowded with workaday folks going to\/from lunch or the gym. <\/p>\n
It\u2019d be better for them to read a script — oops they can\u2019t even do that. <\/p>\n
—— <\/p>\n
These creeps and freaks aren\u2019t as much fun as real gypsies, and they\u2019re unlike the real trickster nomads who can smell death a mile away. Something about them sets my teeth on edge as they do their chic and manly things. We don\u2019t sulk and commence bitching away. No. We bend over and take a good hard sniff. <\/p>\n
Gypsy stuff was real; they gave it a palpable existence like hand molded clay. These poseurs cut their stuff from Kleenex single sheet tissue paper with a pair of kid-safe scissors. <\/p>\n
—— <\/p>\n
Life for our surly tribal cohort was whiskey and red steaks but no whores. Our lives were \u201cLeave it to Beaver\u201d tales or so say our scripts and biographers. <\/p>\n
Our asses may be tired, but we don\u2019t sit on \u2018em. We get out and hustle staying abreast and keeping up with all of this. We know power — it\u2019s always the answer. We don\u2019t keep going just playing golf. <\/p>\n
Perfect serenity is ours as we watch our current benevolent leader and Prophet in a blinding flash of light, that Old Mister White Whiskered and Haired one shoots his latest thunderbolts our way — er, back to his mamma-wife — as he plays to his gallery, maybe even his last words, mark you, from the Last of the Male Chauvinist Grabbers. <\/p>\n
We can\u2019t make sense of them, even with the artful restating and reframing brilliance of his press secretary. <\/p>\n
——– <\/p>\n
We\u2019re not all ruled by the winds, are we? But the whirlwind renders the universe of physics illogical. Thus, do we find ourselves in what remains of its un-scattered ashes. <\/p>\n
The man himself we\u2019ve no idea, the whole healthful look . . . ain\u2019t all that much. That chest ain\u2019t near as muscled, trim, or hairy as he\u2019d like us to think. Guy\u2019s a big, pink lobster — nothing\u2019s really strong or tough except the suited shell. <\/p>\n
A little more whiskey should be helpful in making his ever brief appearances more natural. <\/p>\n
His smile often goes a little blank way too early. Our grandparents would have described the look using the word chinaman. Even \u201cChinese\u201d nowadays would be unacceptable and obscene. <\/p>\n
Maybe the brief pictures and images aren\u2019t really what matters. He\u2019ll finish his time in office mouthing his lines until the moment he exits stage left in Homeric style. <\/p>\n
It\u2019s still a distant hope. <\/p>\n
When our clocks toll 6:30 PM, the 4K ultra high-def screen above the fireplace all but shouts \u201cMeanwhile, back at the ranch . . . \u201d <\/p>\n
——– <\/p>\n
Old friends are old, and that\u2019s the trouble with \u2018em. They don\u2019t grow old — it\u2019s just something they stumble over and fall into. They all seem so . . . surprised. Poor shits — they look at the other as though there was something one could do about it. <\/p>\n
Copyright \u00a9 2021 From My Isle Seat
\nwww.vicsocotra.com <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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