Upright Citizen's Brigade

Out of sheer randomness, tuned in Comedy Central's Upright Citizen's Brigade.

Goddamn. What a slap in the face.

Basically, it's four improv comics who approach their material with fearless, fierce intensity. Weird routines about a "bucket of truth" and a DEA agent named Captain Lunatic (pronounced loon-a-tic). Wow. "Second City on acid" would be the cliche thing to say. Not quite. "Second City on rage" would be more accurate. The missing element is hostility. The naked, subversive decision not to be nice, not to kiss up to the audience.

Gusty, original stuff.

I'm hooked.

O Florida. Arrrrgh Florida

Florida, Florida, Florida. One of these days I'll take a stab at writing about me own hometown as my cousin suggests. For now, here's the big picture...

Florida is a very strange place: a nonplace place, scrubbed clean of placeness. This notherethereness is a quality as old as swampland and suckers; the first hand-tinted postcards actually had the palm trees painted in (before palm trees were planted); image coming before reality. Our house was always foundationless, built on sand.

The postcards said: welcome to Florida, land of the endless vacation, heaven on earth! But heaven, of course is for the dead. Somewhere behind the Rufus T. Firefly handbills, unedited reality lurked. Florida, land of smuggling and crime. Florida, land of pioneer hardscrabble. A place where you could find farmers who got their hands dirty. Not to mention cowboys and indians.

The crackers go back to the original Florida pioneer mentality -- a pioneer mentality a little to the left of the usual Calvinist mania. Where typical overachieving USofA pioneer cried out "I WILL FORGE AN HABITATION OUT OF THE WILDERNESS IN ORDER TO GO AND FORGE AN HABITATION OUT OF THE NEXT WILDERNESS! I WILL WORK FOR MORE WORK!" (insert heroic pioneer statue here) the Florida pioneer said "I will forge an habitation out of the wilderness and then to hell with it. The porch is sagging? Let it sag."

Instead of More! Onward! Upward! Higher! Deeper! the pioneer goal, in our case, was to kick back and relax. You want food? Fish. You want something else? Hunt. House need painting? I don't hear the house complaining.

As to citified Florida, creating the illusion of eternal vacation was work enough in itself, and led to a kind of creative insanity -- evidence of which you could see in the buildings. Some futuristic, like the steel and glass latticework structures of the Sarasota school of architecture -- or ebuillient, like the architecture you see in Miami's South Beach deco district. Not to mention the goofball school (similar to all the hotdogshaped hotdog stands in SoCal).

All of this mixed up with fantastical/recreational stuff like winter baseball, the circus -- and untold myriads of cheesy but delightful roadside attractions. Outward and visible signs of inward and spiritual nuttiness.

And then Satan came.

Touching/inserting his horned finger into the heart of our state, said digit miraculously disguised as an appendange on a giant Mouse's enormous white-gloved three-fingered hand.

Ha-ha.

The undead Disney, like some vicious Maxwell's demon sucking entropy from everywhere else in the system, sucked all the fantasy in my blackholesunshine state into its imagineered deathcamp where children's dreams from around the world are sorted, numbered, selected, burned and turned into soap and lampshades.

Disney's Dream Inc. killed all the lesser dreamers -- no Mom'n'Pop could compete with the Mouse, after all...

And so, step by step, inch by inch, the roadside attractions died; the fantastic pink and aquamarine hotels were painted brown or torn down entirely; the palm trees died of blight; the circus left, along with most of the baseball teams.

There was nothing left but real estate.

Which all goes back to what CJ said -- we've been malled. We are a place without history.

This is not to say we never had a history. But Florida's history has been scrubbed over, remodelled, and torn down into nothingness. Thomas Wolfe said you can't go home again. Round here, you can't go home again if you drive away and come back the next fucking WEEK. Buildings go up; buildings go down -- workers zipping around like bees -- don't blink or you'll miss it. It's like that scene in The Time Machine where the Time Traveler sees the sun arcing in one fibrillating blur until it's one arc of fire across the sky like a neon tube.

The history we had was interesting, but the people who come here from Someplace Else don't come here for any history -- anymore than YOU want to see somebody else's turds floating in the toilet bowl in a strange motel room. What they want is clean shiny generic motel, with clean shiny motel rooms. Above all, they a clean shining bathroom -- with a nice, clean, gleaming, sterile bowl of porcelain, a strip of paper in its toity-bowl smile proclaiming SANITIZED FOR YOUR PROTECTION.

And they sure as hell don't give a rat's ass about John Ringling, Jose Marti or Billy Bowlegs.

Just tear it down and pave it over, baby.

What they want is that perfect, virginal, sanitized toity bowl motel room...

A place to go where nobody knows your name. A place where you, small fish in big pond there, are now the big fish in the small pond here with lots and lots of money.

A place for people with money to have an endless vacation.

A place for old people with money to die.

A place that isn't, above all, New York City or Kansas City or Detroit or Columbus or Chicago.

The people who've come here from Someplace Else have made a deliberate decision to leave their history behind. They trash their own past with hooting satisfaction that some people get cleaning out their attics and throwing away all of grandpa's old photographs. All that history is a large part of what they've left behind. The last thing they want when they come here is a place with a history of its own...

What they want is utopia -- a place that's noplace. A nonplace place, scrubbed clean of placeness. (Which, of course, is what they got.) Florida -- or the Florida the developers built. Heaven on earth...

As close to being dead as you're ever going to get without actually being dead.

* * *

And so, in post-Mouse Florida, the developers' dream of a place that is noplace has been built and, goddamnit anyway, it's just like that cornfield movie: "If you built it, they will come." Around here, at any rate, it works.

All of which leaves the native Floridian in the position of living in a colonized, conquered, dishonored nation in his/her own damn state. Florida is sortof the Third World of America -- within America! A low-wage, two-tier economic colony, right smack in the continental United States -- yes!

Gnash! Snarl!

The People from Someplace Else have a habit of hiring from Someplace Else as they think anyone from Florida (especially if you've got even a lingering Southern accent) is some kinda gap-toothed, drooling, inbred, banjo-picking, worm-ridden "Squeal piggy!" degenerate out of Deliverance.

Folks from Around Here, who tend (at least with regards to fools like me who didn't leave) to slip below the stations proper to their natural abilities -- also tend to get into that twisted, passive-aggressive love-to-hate mentality you see in a lotta colonized countries. (Ah, it's the goddamn Brits, you see. They stole our birthright, they did. If not for them, ah, the greatness that could've been ours, me boyo. The greatness that could've been ours...pass us another pint wouldja now?)

Yes, my friends. It is a dependent, contingent kiss-ass, suck-up lifestyle here in Florida. As a wiseman once said, "A service economy is an economy of servants."

And that's exactly what we are.

Servants of the fawning, bowing, scraping variety. Basil Fawlty types, who appreciate the opportunity to beg for scraps from our colonial masters.

Of course they're better than we are. Obviously! There's no point in arguing. Consider the contrast ...

Because -- instead of inventing things, producing things, building things, or making something happen -- it's so much easier to wait tables or sell drugs or cook up some con-game or, in general, feed off of somebody else's money and then bitch about it.

The People from Someplace Else get to feel superior. We get to feel victimized. What a deal!

And that's the kind of sickness I see. Florida is corrupt (which is what's so damn interesting about it). So far, the best contemporary writing I've seen about it is Carl Hiassen's stuff.

My own idea is to (A) write a group of short stories patterned after Joyce's Dubliners. (B) A parable of sick growth patterned after Frazier's The Golden Bough. Big, big ideas as usual. I've got lots of 'em, yep. And I'll get around to writing this stuff, I really will....

Pulp Fiction Analysis

Tarantino opens Pulp Fiction with two dictionary definitions.

Pulp – a shapeless lump of soft matter.
Pulp – a lurid fiction.

Rather than dangle and tease, I'll cut to the chase. I think QT is giving a clue about the big point behind the movie. I think the point is this:
Human beings are essentially pulp – soft, vulnerable, weak biological beings that can be killed very easily. One false move, one bad decision, one wrong assumption, one bit of bad luck, one fuck up and you’re dead just like that. Suddenly. When you least expect it. At any fucking time. That’s our reality – and our minds can’t handle it. So, to compensate, we don't face the reality of our own vulnerabilities. We tell ourselves stories to deal with it. I.e.: pulp fictions.

So, look at the movie. Subtract the stories the characters are constantly telling each other and what's left is a series of random incidents of people getting pulped.

Jules and Vince Vega blow away a pair of yuppie punks who tried to rip off their boss, Marcellus Wallace. Nothing to it. Then, another punk hiding in the bathroom leaps out with a 45 and unloads a clip right at them. Every shot misses. It’s only by the grace of God that they don’t get killed. The remaining punk is not so lucky.

On the ride back to Marcellus’ place, Vince and Jules debate the theological implications of the recent apparent miracle. Vince absent-mindedly turns around to get some input from the kid in the back seat. He absent-mindedly blows the kid's head off.

Pumpkin and Honey Bunny assume that robbing a coffee shop is the easiest thing in the world. They’re insured, full of terrified customers “to cut down on the hero factor.” The manager and underpaid busboys and waitresses won’t lift a finger. So they pull a robbery. It turns out that two badass motherfuckers, two very heavy hitters, two professional killers – aka Vince Vega and Jules – are eating there. It’s only by the grace of God – Jules’ recent religious conversion – that Pumpkin and Honey Bunny don’t get killed.

Pumpkin and Honey Bunny also forgot to check the bathroom where Vega, all oblivious, was taking a shit reading Modesty Blaise. Meanwhile, Jules, Pumpkin and Honey Bunny are in a 3-way standoff. Jules is talking them through it, calming everybody down. Vince bursts out at the last minute and almost succeeds in getting X killed.

Back at Marcellus’ bar, Vince feels like shit (and a little disrespected) for blowing the kid’s head off. Vince takes out his frustrations on a boxer named Butch – he totally disrespects the guy. Marcellus has just paid this guy to throw his next fight. Vince’s disrespect makes him change his mind

Vince is given the assignment of taking Wallace’s wife Mia out on a non-date date. They’ve just had a fine evening, he’s taken her home and doing his best to keep his pecker in his pants. Out of sheer bad luck – his dealer was out of condoms (the usual container for heroin) and sold him some heroin in a baggie instead -- typically the container for cocaine. Mia goes through his stuff, sees it, snorts it – thinking it’s cocaine. She goes into cardiac arrest. He’s fucked.

Out of sheer dumb luck, courage and panic, Vincent succeeds in stabbing a spike-like hypo of adrenaline through her breast bone into her heart. She survives – he’s not fucked. Both agree to keep this quiet.

Butch has successfully fled – but his French girlfriend forgot his watch. (A precious heirloom from his dead father, which his dead father’s buddy shoved up his ass to keep from the Vietcong jailers.) He’s got to go back to his apartment – where Marcellus is sure to be waiting.

He goes back. He gets the watch. It’s a miracle or sheer dumb luck that he isn’t killed. Absent minded Vince is once again on the toilet reading Modesty Blaise. He’s also forgotten the gun. Butch, popping some pop tarts in his toaster, sees the gun and figures this out. Vince emerges from the toilet. The toast pops. Vince is toast.

Butch has gotten away with it. Out of sheer bad luck, Marcellus – filling in for the now-retired hitman Jules – is returning to Butch’s apartment with Big Kahuna burgers. He crosses in front of Butch’s car – then sees him.

Butch tries to run him down – Marcellus tries to blow him away. They chase each other, crash into a gun shop. Out of sheer bad luck, the proprietors are a pair of Deliverance style perverts who like to abduct people and bugger them in the basement. They do so to Marcellus. Butch manages to escape – but the same honor that sent him back for the watch sends him back into the room – now armed with a samurai sword – to save Marcellus from being buggered. Butch kitchen slices one redneck with a katana; Marcellus blows the balls off the other – with more torture promised in the future. Marcellus and Butch are now square.

All this violence is, basically, random shit. These incidents are wrapped, Tootsie Roll style, in a tasty candy shell of stories and bullshit -- i.e., pulp fictions. We hear about Tony Rocky Horror's fall through the greenhouse, what Big Macs are called in Amsterdam, etc., etc. These fictions shouldn't disguise the immoral moral of the movie.

It's a chaotic universe that will probably kill you. If you drop your guard and spend too much time on the toilet, it probably will.

End of Evangelion

Maybe it’s just me. But director Hideaki Anno seems to be off his meds.

Not a feel-good movie, kids.

More like clinical depression with giant robots and subtitles.

It all ends in a Jackson Pollock blood-splatter. The angels kill everybody. On the planet. (Or, depending on how you look at it, everybody merges into one collective consciousness inside a planetary sea of red LCL jello.) But, from where I’m sitting, it looks like everybody dies, except Shinji, that little shit, and Asuka. They wind up on a beach, alone in a dead world, and things just don’t look good for the new couple.

By way of analogy ...

If Anno had written Return of the Jedi, Luke Skywalker would have curled into a foetal position on his last mission and the second Death Star would have destroyed the rebel fleet. We would see them all die, in a long, drawn-out montage with lyrical music. Princess Leia would’ve survived, barely. Luke would have masturbated in her hospital room while she lay there in a coma. Then, after finding out all their friends were dead, Luke would have attempted to strangle her before impotently giving up. Leia would’ve moaned “I feel sick.” Roll credits.

But, hey, if all the Ewoks got wiped out?

Definitely an improvement.

Microsoft vs Megahard

OK, the US gummint is going after Microsoft in a Sherman Act trustbusting court case. The cause: bundling Internet Explorer with Windows, which stomps the competition -- Netscape and friends. Why did Gates do that in the first place? What's he up to?

This has been said before, but let me boil it down for the record.

Gates has foreseen (like SF writers 15 years ago) that the PC is going to evolve from a home number-cruncher for writing letters and doing taxes. It's going to turn into a media platform, connected to the pipeline of the Internet the way your tube is connected to coaxial cable (and Comcast and other monopoly mofos pumping in content and charging what the traffic will bear). Once a fiberoptic network gets put in place, bandwidth will shoot through the roof. This bandwidth will allow bigass sound and video files to zip into your CPU with ease. Granted Moore's law, the box of the future will have a shitload of processing power. People will watch TV and movies -- and possibly create their own TV and movies -- on their PCs. Like Colossus and his commie AI counterpart, TV and PC will probably merge.

I'm not exactly sure who owns -- or is going to own -- the emerging fiberoptic spiderweb. The phone companies? Comcast? The government? Is it a public utility? Is it subject to common carrier laws? Don't ask me.

But I'm pretty sure Bill Gates is not going to own it.

So, if you can't own the road -- own the toll booths. Own the portal at the end of the web where all the content pumps into the user's PC. In other words, own the Internet Browser.

That's his strategy. Gates has seen that the PC will become a media platform -- and the receiving end of a media pipeline connected to a media market. I.e.: content for sale. It's a safe bet that he'll be selling. Like Sony -- he's also going to go into the content creation and distribution business. Probably buy a TV network and a recording company or two, maybe a movie studio. Or build Gates Studios in Seattle from scratch. Or create a virtual studio, networked together from content creators all over the country. But he'll be selling.

That's what makes this important. It ain't the monopoly of today Gates is interested in. It's the monopoly of tomorrow.

Bundling IE lets him get a leg up on the competition of future content providers. If he pulls it off, Gates will potentially have a record store, a video store, a movieplex -- and who knows what else -- inside your computer. Gates will be in the position of the old Hollywood Studios, who owned both the production end and the distribution end -- the movie palaces where audiences paid to watch their content. This will not be an official monopoly, but he'll dominate the market. It'll just be easier to go to the Bill Gates jukebox and click the tune you want. If he gets his infrastructure in place ahead of the competition, that is.

I'm of two minds about this. On the one hand, I hate monopolies. On the other hand, monopolies get things done -- especially in terms of massive, infrastructural networks. Like railroads, electricity, telephone, etc.

This sorta thing works on a feedback loop. If the network's in place, folks buy more stuff which prompts the network builders to expand and upgrade the network allowing the sale of more stuff; hence creating another feedback loop jump starting the creation of more content for this new market; and another feedback loop energizing smarter and better PCs with more and more processing power.

We could easily wind up with the giant, flatscreen, voice-operated, high definition computer/TVs as seen in Back to the Future II by 2005. If the government busts Microsoft cyberspace landgrab -- or even slows it down -- this quantum leap of tech could take another ten years or so. The tech firms and venture capitalists gambling on this wave of business opportunity could wind up on their collective ass. Silicon Valley could turn into Death Valley. That's probably pessimistic. But it's probably realistic to think a Microsoft antitrust bust will put the future on hold.

I hate monopolies.

But I want my flatscreen, voice-operated MTV.

It's a dilemma, ain't it?

Scalia Redux

Mayday! Mayday!

Sorry if this isn't funny, goddamnit, but now that I'm thinking about this shit I can't stop...

And it's not funny.

The Clinton witchhunt is a symptom of a larger, well-orchestrated attempt to destroy American civil liberties -- an attempt very much along the lines of the earlier attempt by Reagan's crew to undermine the social and economic structures of the New Deal and Great Society that well, uh, essentially, how shall I put this...worked.

I.e.: they've axed entitlements -- and now they're chopping away at rights.

Because the people behind this investigation -- in terms of their basic philosophical worldview -- don't believe in rights. They believe you have the right to do the right thing at all times. And if you don't...

The state has the right to do whatever it has to do to find you out -- even if that happens to be, well, sorta, kinda illegal, and even if the target happens to be the President. 

Which is what's happening now...

It's a Holy Crusade, so holy it feels entitled to bend the rules in its zeal to stick the sacred spear where the spear must be stuck. And it's the Crusade that bothers me, not what Willy does with Little Willy.

But Jack...what he did was wrong. He put her hand on his dick...

Yeah, well, I'm worried about these knights on horses with swords in their hands.

But what if he did something really bad? That's not just sexual harrassment, that's sexual assault.

Sorry, I'm more worried about that guy on fire over there...

But what he did was wrong. Don't you care?

Look. Whether Clinton did something wrong -- even wrong, not just in the eyes of somebody's system of morality but in the eyes of the law -- is irrelevent. The key issue is the fact that the investigation into Clinton's private life is illegal, unconstitutional and unjustified, no matter what dirt it uncovers. 

Illegal? Yep.

What we're really talking about is a constitutional revolution by stealth, a revolution striking at the heart of "government of laws, not of men," and the foundation of that government -- namely the separation of powers.

(Much of this stealth revolution was funded and fought for our friends at Christianity Inc. with all the money and mindless followers that represents -- though it's pretty damn obvious that behind the Religion of Money there is ultimately the Money of Money, which is the true Godhead source of the Plastic Jesus who walks the earth today in His quest to cast liberals and leftists everywhere into hell and make the earth safe for corporations. But I digress...)

The shape of this revolution is a blurring of the distinction between judiciary and legislature as anything other than one fighting force on a crusade to enact the will of the Right which, at the moment, seems to be for Bill's head (big or little remaining to be seen) on a plate...

Why?

The moral, godfearing reason: he has broken the commandments and must be punished.

The amoral, realpolitik reason: the executive branch, inconveniently, has still not been entirely absorbed in the Republican fighting amoeba. 

Which is the ultimate end of the stealth-revolution.

The foundation for this stealth-revolution was laid via the court-stacking in the Reagan revolution. Watch and learn how your government works!

The effect of an increasingly right-wing judiciary and a Republican supermajority in Congress was the defacto elimination of the separation of powers between the legislative branch and the judicial branch. This was expressed via a series of rotten legal decisions whose rottenness was revealed by their lack of basis in any consistent judicial philosophy -- but only the immediate needs of political expediancy.

Not: from this legal principle that legal conclusion follows.

But: it's in our interest to axe this agency, gut this law, punish this maverick, therefore we'll change the law and the principle behind it to get what we want.

Our agenda now=the law now.

For now.

Faux-conservative judicial activism, in other words. A government of men, not of laws.

Which began as a stealth-revolution very soon was not so stealthy. It all came out in the open with three bad Supreme Court decisions: one stripping away the right to privacy and against self-incrimination in regards to private diaries and notes and minutes concerning Presidential staff meetings and legal counsel not deemed specifically relevent to his executive duties (what's that mean? Well...show us the notes and we'll decide); another decision opening up the Presidency to attack from civil law suits; another, back in 1988, establishing the authority of an Independent Counsel to examine abuses by the executive branch.

More than anything else, it was that decision which led to the erosion of the separation of powers and the rule of law -- 

For the reason for that, consider Justice Scalia's dissenting opinion...

as an illegal right wing conspiracy has blurred the distinction between judiciary and legislature, merging the two together into one efficient fighting force to enact the will of the extreme right wing of the Republican party and the money for which they stand. 

A conservative justice worthy of the name because, whether I agree with his principles or not, the man at least has them.

Clinton may have compromised, but not enough, baby...

And what's the point of having a Death Star if you can't show what it can do?

that people are people, as opposed to some being born to rule and some being born to serve; I believe that governments exist for people, not the other way around; I believe that people give their governments the right to exist, not the other way around; I believe that rights adhere to the individual, as opposed to being granted to the individual by the state; I believe that it's the job of government to keep some people from taking away the rights of other people; aside from basic respect for the law, I don't believe the people owe any sort of active duty to the state -- especially when it comes to a state-sponsored prescription for somebody's notion of morality. 

This sphere of freedom, paradoxically, includes the freedom to give up your freedom -- consensually -- whether through contract, bondage and discipline, or the claims of religion. I support your freedom of self-enslavement, whether by wearing tennis shoes and drinking cyanide to join the great Mother Ship in the sky or wearing brown shoes and joining the Promise Keepers. The Kingdom of God, as blowdried pulpit demagogues are fond of bellowing, is not a democracy. Jesus is the head of the church; the body of Christ is knit together by obediance; each part performs its rightful function -- the janitor, in his rusted Volvo, being the janitor, the Senior Pastor, with his leased Lexus, being the Senior Pastor, all being servants, really -- children should obey their parents, wives should obey their husbands, everyone should obey the state, because all authority is ordained of God and the centurion does not bear the sword in vain -- and, at least in theory, there is no right to Christian revolution, only the right to turn cheeks, walk extra miles and (following David's example) not grumble against the King, no matter how big an asshole he is. Up to you.

It's called freedom of religion just so long as it's up to you.

It's called fascism the minute it becomes ordained by the state.

(All this goes back to the covenential/governmental theology of St. Augustine who held that the Church, the "City of God," was properly God's literal kingdom, establishing dominion on earth and replacing the forfeited convenant of those disobediant, Christ-killing Jews. Protestants have held a schizoid view along these lines ever since the split, some (particularly Lutherans and Calvinists) holding that it's the duty of the Church -- us that is, not those rotten Papists -- to take over the kingdoms of the world for Jesus, others (particularly any denomination with roots in the Anabaptist movement) holding that the world and its governments are essentially corrupt, and that it is the duty of Christians to stay separate from all that shit.)

(Speaking of which, I may think this kinda thing is the pursuit of happiness in a different form, you may think it's a disease. Even so -- )

fags, communists, drug dealers, pornographers, prostitutes 

You as a Christian of course know that people are rotten with the disease of sin -- especially all those other people. You should know that any 

The cure is worse than the disease -- and none of the Government's business.

which is why we've had slavery, the slaughter of native Americans and Japanese internment camps on the one hand, 

I am, essentially, a turncoat libertarian, having turned my coat after I discovered that corporations and the power of money are just as capable of abusing human freedom as the gummint. That being said, my opinions don't fall into neat liberal/conservative categories. I'm a liberal in the original sense. I am someone who believes that freedom is a good thing.

Sounds cracker-barrel obvious, even, well, self-evident, don't it?

What "believing in freedom" means is: I believe in the tenets of Liberalsm -- namely, 

Chopping away at rights? "GORRSHHH!" as Goofy might say. "Who'd wanna go and do a thing like that?!?" Well, you see, Goofy, not everyone thinks that human rights are a good thing -- or even exist. "But...we're talking about freedom! Doesn't everybody think that freedom's a good thing?"

Well...no.

Our seemingly cracker-barrel (if not self-evident) notions of freedom and human rights goes back to original recipe 18th century enlightement Liberalism -- which held that it's the right of the state (and the proper sphere of law) to tell people not to do wrong. This displaced earlier authoritarian notions -- divine right of kings, chain of being and all that -- which were grounded -- surprise surprise! -- in Christianity. 

The old view: the King is the head of the state, the people the body. The people derive all "rights" from the King's good pleasure, rights which the King can revoke, however arbitrarily, at any time. The King is answerable to no man but only to God -- before Whom he will have to give an account on the last day. Duty, on the part of the King's subjects, is active. Life is, properly, one sustained act of Christian service and devotion to God, performed under submission to the authority of God's servant, the King, authority which flows through the King's ministers, submission to which properly includes tithing, religious service, speech not tending to blasphemy and profanity and respectful to the rightfully ordained Authorities along with, of course, what you do with your naughty bits.

The new view: rights are inherent to individuals, the protection of which is conferred to the state by individuals, which is why the state has a right to exist. The state can't take away your freedom because your rights, ultimately, are inalienable. The people, however, have the right of revolution when the state no longer serves them. The state's sphere of authority is negative -- meaning you're free to pursue happiness as you see fit, just so long as you don't violate someone else's rights. The state can tell you not to do wrong. The state can't tell you to do the right thing. That's none of the state's goddamn business.

In theory.

Since history is messy (and people hypocritical) the new view never exactly replaced the old one. The two existed side by side, jumbled up, and there has always been a contingent in the West that never really quite believed in this "unalienable rights" crap. 

So, you see Goofy, not everyone was actually enlightened in the Enlightenment in the West. And some of those people have been fighting the theory and practice of original-recipe Liberalism since day one.

Namely the extreme right wing -- by whatever name they've chosen to call themselves over the years...

In our century, this point of view has been represented in the West by fascists (who now like to call themselves "authoritarians") and religious extremists, usually Christians, who feel that the state should be subsumed into the Kingdom of God. What these two groups have in common... 

Fascism (sometimes harkening to various divine revelations, sometimes survival-of-the-fittest pseudo science, sometimes both) holds, as does the political expression of radical Christianity, that freedom is the freedom to do what's right -- at all times.

Just like it was back in them there "divine right of King" days.

The notion, usually screamed with great outrage, "NO ONE HAS THE RIGHT TO DO WRONG!" is, of course, the standard excuse for violating civil liberties. Dirty Harry grinds his bootheel on the raw hamburger bullethole wound in Scorpio's leg as Scorpio screams like a pig because, goddamnit, Dirty Harry has to find out where Scorpio has buried alive the girl he kidnapped in time to save her. We'll break into your house or tap your phone illegally -- because we know you're a drug dealer. We'll beat a confession out of you, because we know you did it. We'll send Dreyfuss to rot on Devil's Island because we know he's not a patriot -- he's a Jew. We, the righteous death squad, will beat the nuns, rape them and kill them because we know they're not nuns -- they're communists.

And we'll feel like righteous, avenging angels every step of the way.

This contingent has always been around: in France, in England, in Italy, in Germany, in the United States. And sometimes they take over.

My problem with this crowd and their agenda is that is I'm an unreconstructed, authority-hating hippyfreak addicted to the Satanic messages I hear when I play my Frank Zappa albums backwards. Ustinjay's problem, as a righteous True Believer, should be with the possibility of the cruel shoe winding up on the other foot one day, especially considering that (at least according to the press releases) he comes from a religion whose founder was killed in an "illegal trial." 

In the interest of forcing people to do good, and rooting out all the nasty hidden wrongs...the True Believers are giving another class of people, namely the forcers and the rooters, an immeasureable, ungovernable, unaccountable power. They may uncover and punish a few dirty deeds -- but at the cost of stripping away civil liberties and the right to privacy.

Is it worth it? 

A network of finks, wiretaps and hidden surveillance cameras could eliminate all kinds of abuses from kidnapping to copyright fraud -- and why stop there? Come to think of it, a  small elite contingent of Waffen SS paratroopers could, very quickly, find all the bad people in a given community and kill them, after which the new Christian State would establish the Kingdom of God on earth, as people would, once again, be compelled by law to Do the Right Thing under the whiphand of somebody.

Abortion could be eliminated, cultists, from Hindoo to Pagan, made to endure the fate of the Mideanites; pornography and obscenity banned; divorce made illegal; the right to beat wives and children restored to male heads of Christian households; profanity, blasphemy and disrespect for authority driven out of TV and movies; drinking and Sabbath-breaking made illegal on Sundays; smut removed from libraries and prayer restored to the schools. 

The True Believers' idea of heaven on earth is close to my idea of hell on earth. On the bright side? Well...

If they ever really did get what they prayed for...

...instructed by barbed wire, cattleprod and truncheon, they would soon find their brave new Jesus State to be no peaceable Kingdom. 

So the cure is worse than the disease in any case.

The reason being: going back to the Enlightenment, there have always been a few people who didn't buy into this "inalienable rights" crap. People we lovingly refer to as the extreme rightwing.

An original-recipe Liberal is concerned, more than anything else, with preventing the State from applying its cures for human rottenness.

Which is why we have a Constitution and a Bill of Rights -- documents which are more concerned with checking the abuse of power than compelling people to do good.

All this may sound extreme in connection with Clinton. We're not talking barbed wire and concentration camps...we're talking an investigation into whether he's kept his willy where it's supposed to be.

But it's still, primarily, DotheRightThingGate. It's all about "character," after all, not a specific incident or allegation. Certain people with large sums of money just knew he was a rotten fellow -- and got an investigation going (in press and judiciary) which culminated in the current urethra probings of the absolutely unaccountable Independent Counsel -- all the better to find something, anything, on this rotten guy.

And maybe they did. But at what cost and what motivation?

The Prisoner's Dilemma

I originally posted this in the alt.prisoner newsgroup. These are my thoughts on the meaning of The Prisoner, the enigmatic British TV show from the late 1960s. I say there's a very good reason the meaning of the show is ambiguous. I advance the theory that The Prisoner has two authors and they don't agree on what the show means.

The Prisoner left three questions hanging. Who is Number One? Who's running the Village? Why did you resign?

The Prisoner never really answered those questions. The reason -- there was more than one show. There was Patrick McGoohan's Prisoner. He didn't care about the answers. There was George Markstein's Prisoner. He cared--but he never got to give the answers in his head.

Patrick McGoohan (PMG) wanted to create an allegory. But he’s not the one who thought of the concept in the first place -- executive story consultant George Markstein was, based on his experiences in realworld espionage (including intelligence that something very much like the Village existed).

Markstein didn't want an allegory. He wanted to tell a realistic tale. To Markstein, it was all very real, and the questions the show asked were important. To Markstein, the Village was a physical place obeying all Aristotelian unities. This matters... Because, to me, he’s as much the “auteur” of “the Prisoner” as PMG.

Which leaves us in a situation of two very brainy, very creative dudes with very different ideas about what The Prisoner was. As I said, it's as if there were two shows: Markstein’s version, a coldwar drama about a real person in a real place; McGoohan’s version, an existential allegory wrapped in a pitch shrouded in pop existentialism.

So, if The Prisoner was really two shows, if you’re looking for answers to its questions, you really should be looking for two sets of answers. It all boils down to what each of the two brains behind it had in mind. Intention is everything...

(And to hell with the “intentional fallacy” and the rest of that postmodern crap.)

The problem I have now is I have to start with one or another. If I start with McGoohan's version, Markstein’s realworld conception will seem pedestrian and simpleminded. If I start with Markstein, PMG’s allegory will seem like a bag of symbolic wind...

Markstein’s realistic concept tends to get drowned out -- so let’s start there.

What follows is an educated guess -- as the show never got a chance to deal with its original, realistic, implications. Here’s my hunch of what Markstein had in mind...

I think it’s fairly obvious if you think about it.

The Village is an experiment in mind control and a society based on mind control -- a turnkey Utopia built from the ground up. Supposedly it’s a prison for those who “know too much or too little,” but that doesn’t make much sense if you think about it. The place is too expensive, too difficult to maintain if that’s all it is. Why go to so much trouble? Hell, you don’t see the Chinese party bosses slapping up a model community for the student demonstrators out on the Mongolian border somewhere. Truncheon, jackboot and “the room” are as effective as they ever were...

It makes sense that the stated reason for the Village is a pretext, that what it’s really for is what everybody’s working so hard to make it: a model society, like the “Noble Experiment” that Oglethorpe attempted to create in colony of Georgia.

Which leads to what the concept of a model society is -- namely a pretty damn peaceful place where everybody’s material needs are satisfied and there’s lots of community spirit and togetherness.

“Can’t we all just get along?”

Sure, Rodney. Come to the Village.

This togetherness is maintained by beyond state-of-the-art technology, particularly, but not limited to, mind control technology.

Rover seems to be a form of artificial intelligence; "Speedlearn" is surely lightyears ahead of Hooked on Phonics; the General had Bill Gates beat in 1967.

These folks are good. Beyond good.

Which leads to the question of who They are...

It’s obviously an elite group within the intelligence community and, as this is the Cold War era, that means either the Russians, the West (i.e.: the Americans) or a combination of both.

It has to be both.

If only one side possessed this mind control technology and also ran the Village -- that technology is so advanced they could easily destroy (or utterly control) the other side. If both sides possessed this technology, the Village would have been penetrated. There’s an alliance...

Since this alliance hasn’t consolidated world control yet, it’s more likely a conspiracy from below and not a cabal from above. This isn’t the putative leaders of East and West, but a shadow conspiracy working under their noses. Who are They?

The most likely hypothesis (if you forget the allegory and simply consider the world being shown to you) is that it’s a consortium of spies, research psychologists and scientists from both sides of the Iron Curtain who decided to form common cause -- and create a model for a utopian society to test and refine -- before that model could be applied to the whole world. Before the world blows itself up...

They’re trying to engineer Utopia. They’re trying to get everybody to get along. The spy prison scenario is a pretext...

Though if you can turn spies into totally mutual Villagers you can do it to anybody.

And spies are, of coure, the ideal change agents to send back into their respective governments.

Which means that the character of the Prisoner is either:

*The ultimate make-or-break test subject. He’s either what he seems to be -- a refusnik British spy with a bad conscience -- or quite possibly one of the original conspirators -- identity erased and reconstructed as in “Total Recall.”

*Someone sent in from outside the conspiracy in order to crack the conspiracy. (He resigned in order to get captured -- which is what They suspect.)

*One of the original conspirators -- the person who thought it up, as a matter of fact -- who finally decided to opt out. (Which is why they keep asking “Why did you resign?” Which is why it’s so important...) And why he has to destroy the Village -- namely because he realizes that the cure (of a mind controlled society) is worse than the disease (human violence and self-destructiveness).

I think the latter is more dramatically interesting. I think that what Markstein had in mind for the last two episodes was to reveal all this -- and have the Prisoner character destroy the experiment he had once created -- the model Village where mind-control technology allows humanity to live in peace. The utopian folly which, even in its prototype form, was already starting to turn ugly...

Obviously I’m no damn mind reader -- but considering the premises of the show (if seen realistically) -- I think this is where Markstein was taking these premises. (Story has logic which is something you know if you’ve ever sat next to someone playing “Guess the Movie.” screaming Ooooh! Ooooh! I know! Verbal is Kaiser Soze!) Markstein was setting up a mousetrap (detective story-style) and
the cues to the trap he planned to spring were there, starting with the first episode. When the questions were asked: Why did you resign? Who is Number #1 ...? Which side are you on? -- it’s safe to say Markstein had answers in mind, whether McGoohan did or not.

In Markstein’s mind, the story was flowing to a realistic end in synch with its realistic beginning.

Watch “Arrival.” Watch it as if you’re watching it for the first time. Then play “Guess the Movie.” Ask yourself where this story is going. What it’s hinting. Then watch “Fall Out.”

Different tone, mood...different everything.

My ending fits his hints. Right or wrong, we’ll never know...

Since, as most of you probably know, sometime before “the Girl Who Was Death,” McGoohan and Markstein had a falling out over the ending of the show. Markstein left (or was fired). McGoohan got to do it his way -- totally.

Chances are there was a loud, shouting story conference. Markstein was pushing the idea that the Prisoner should be #1 -- saying this is what he’d intended all the time. McGoohan, who’s gone a few nights without sleep and is totally wired on speed, keeps saying it’s a stupid idea and cutting him off. Markstein persists. It gets ugly...

McGOOHAN: You’re always saying that and I’m always saying I don’t want that. Don’t
you listen? It’s an allegory. I see it as an allegory.

MARKSTEIN: It’s also a story.

McGOOHAN: Right. You mean a spy story. (contemptuously) We’ll have Harry Lime in the doorway and tell them the Butler did it.

MARKSTEIN: Let me just tell you what I...

McGOOHAN: (shouting) I don’t want to hear it, George. (louder) IT’S A BLOODY STUPID
IDEA AND I DON’T WANT TO HEAR IT. I’m sorry if that offends you but you have no idea what I’m trying to do here, how hard I’m working, all the -- everyone’s fighting me, everyone’s against me, everyone’s trying to bring me down and I’m holding it together -- IT’S ON MY BACK, NOT YOURS -- why do you think I’m doing this, hmmm? Number One is you, Number One is me, he, she, it, everyman, all and nothing at all -- I don’t want to give them your stupid little answers and spell it out for them -- no one understands what I’m trying to do, I thought you’d understand but... (losing steam) I’m sorry I screamed at you like that but you understand the strain I’m under...

MARKSTEIN: I understand the strain you’re under. You always say that, you know.

McGOOHAN: Excuse me?

MARKSTEIN: I try to talk about the story and where it’s going. You scream at me. Then you apologize and then you tell me you’re under a strain and the subject is changed and we never talk about the ending. Over and over again we have the same dialog, the same conversation. Line for line, word for word.

McGOOHAN: That’s very amusing, George. Now if...

MARKSTEIN: We don’t talk about the story -- we talk about not talking about it. Once again you spend 15 minutes talking about talking all to prevent me from saying something that would take about 5 minutes. We do all this talking about not talking.

McGOOHAN: Which is another way of saying you’ve wasted a great deal of my time. And I don’t have time for this.

MARKSTEIN: Of course you don’t. And, of course, once again we don’t talk about the ending.

McGOOHAN: I don’t want to talk about the ending.

MARKSTEIN: And I’ve been trying for nearly a year.

McGOOHAN: (shouting again) And I’ve been telling you I DON’T WANT TO LISTEN for nearly a year.

MARKSTEIN: Tell me your idea?

McGOOHAN:  I don’t have any.

MARKSTEIN: You...

McGOOHAN: The ending will happen.

MARKSTEIN: That’s what I’m afraid of.

McGOOHAN: What are you afraid of?

MARKSTEIN: The ending that happens when the ending happens -- your ending. It’s a cheat.

McGOOHAN: (amused) George...it doesn’t exist yet...I don’t even know what I’m doing yet...and you know it’s a cheat?

MARKSTEIN: I know.

McGOOHAN: Why?

MARKSTEIN: I know you. You want to play Felini. Big scenes and jump cuts and screaming and symbolism and nothing makes sense. So it’s all just a big dream and nothing makes sense and everybody walks away with questions and, congratulations, there is now more avant garde crap in the world.

McGOOHAN: (amused but angry) And that’s what I’m going to do? You know this?

MARKSTEIN: I know you.

McGOOHAN: Who am I, George?

MARKSTEIN: You’re Mister Avant Garde filmmaker and you think stories are for stupid people. You won’t tell them why he resigned, what it was for, who runs it, anything -- but you’ll make a big noise. That’s you, that’s what you want...

McGOOHAN: Is that it?

MARKSTEIN doesn’t say anything.

McGOOHAN: I mean...don’t stop now. Perhaps you’ve left something out? Tell me what
you think. Tell me everything. I yelled at you -- now you can yell at me. I’m
not going to fire you.

MARKSTEIN still keeps his mouth shut.

McGOOHAN: You seem to have such a clear idea of what I’m going to write for the ending -- perhaps you could write that down and save us all a great deal of time.

MARKSTEIN: You can’t cheat the audience.

McGOOHAN: Or pander to them.

MARKSTEIN: Stop talking like your bloody character!

(McGOOHAN starts laughing)

MARKSTEIN: It’s not funny -- you think it’s funny? You think I’m funny? It’s a joke to you?
(McGOOHAN still laughing)

MARKSTEIN: It’s not a joke to me, Pat. I believe in this place -- I believe in the Prisoner -- I believe in the story. The people who watch believe in the story. I just want to tell the story.

McGOOHAN: Of course you do. (long silence) But it’s my story.

MARKSTEIN: No it isn’t.

McGOOHAN: It’s my money.


At which point, Markstein walks out. He resigns.


Ironically, he never explains his reasons in public. The world never knows why he resigned.