Death Slam

Allen Grossman

At the end of the obituary of Allen Grossman (“Allen Grossman, a Poet’s Poet and Scholar, Dies at 82,” NYT, 6/29/14), Bruce Weber  cites one of the deceased poets critical works, The Sighted Singer: Two Works on Poetry for Readers and Writers. Grossman is quoted as saying: “Poetry is a principle of power invoked by all of us against our vanishing. The making of poems is a practice—a work human beings can do—in which civilization has invested some part of its love of itself and the world. The poem is a trace of the will of all persons to be known and to make known and therefore, to be at all.” Pretty cool, huh? Sure what Grossman is saying about poetry could also be said about many human endeavors. Having children who remember you after you’ve died is one. The therapeutic encounter in which the psychiatrist or analyst becomes the repository of memory is another, albeit a more fragile one since the vessel may predecease the source of existential material with which it’s being filled. Nothing is immortal. In billions of years when the earth dies, it’s unlikely Shakespeare’s sonnets will be preserved in some form of celestial ether. However, sure poetry is a bulwark against oblivion, with great poems rising like cream in the vortex of time, to the point where they actually achieve the illusion of immortality. And on a democratic note, don’t even human beings who have never heard of the metaphysical poets or read Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent," have their fifteen minutes of fame? Don’t everyone’s s-mails, e-mails, don’t their inadvertent utterances, their cries of pain or joy, at one time or other, rise to a certain level? Doesn’t everyone, in the course of their miserable lives, write at least one great line of poetry that would have lived after them if it had been recognized?

Mike Baker and the Temple of Doom

CNN was interviewing someone named Mike Baker who was identified as “a former CIA covert operations officer.” The interview was about the United States beginning to fly surveillance missions over Syria, as a prelude to bombing ISIS positions. The problem with Mike Baker was that he looked like he’d come out of central casting. He had a chiseled face and the spikey gelled hair of a seasoned actor in the kind of movies where Navy Seals successfully emerge with grateful hostages. If only the footage from Iraq and Syria had been out takes from some film where everything worked out happily ever after. Mike Baker was as unreal as the footage was real. But the question is how someone like Baker was ever a covert operative. His appearance which was about as covert as the name of the company he was identified as running--Diligence. If I were ISIS and I saw him on the street, he’d be a goner. He looked and talked with such poise and confidence that you wondered if he actually had done a stint in Hollywood before joining the CIA or created his role at the Actor’s Studio. Everything was rational including his point that something more would be required than bombing to root ISIS out of Syria. And what would that something be perchance? Troops on the ground? Another private contractor named Blackwater had run into their fair share of problems for murdering civilians in Iraq (“Blackwater Shootings, ‘Murder,’ Iraq says,” NYT, 10/8/07, but maybe Diligence LLC could provide that extra something in a more constrained and humane way. You could just imagine Mike Baker in his camouflage outfit, his face blackened with grease leading his team out of a chopper. You could see them disappearing into the smoldering remnants of some ancient civilization ISIS had just destroyed, like say Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

What’s Gross About Europe’s GDP?

photo of vintage Bayer heroin bottle by Mpv_51

The following appeared in a Times article entitled “Sizing up Black Markets and Red-Light Districts for G.D.P,” (NYT, 7/9/14): “The point of counting everything, including the wages of sin, is to get a more accurate reading of each country’s gross domestic product.” The gist of Liz Alderman’s piece was to show the extent to which European countries are willing to go “to reduce debt as a percentage of their economies,” which might mean not simply reducing debt but finding extra shekels of productivity in places that might not normally have been counted. So the key word becomes “gross,” which according to Merriam-Webster can mean “rude and offensive” or “very disgusting” or when used in the context of the GDP as defined by the OECD, “an aggregate measure of production equal to the sum of the gross values added of all resident institutional units engaged in production (plus any taxes, and minus any subsidies, on products not included in the value of their outputs)," One can’t avoid the significance of the double entendre. What is it saying about Europe’s economic prospects if gross elements like sexual slavery (which must be counted in with prostitution) and drug addiction become necessary to avoid having certain countries falling below the permissible amount of debt for the size of their economies? Sure it’s fun to play with words, but the little anecdote Alderman describes at the beginning of the piece where one Jose Roca, “the spokesman for the National Association of Sex Clubs in Spain…received a call late last year from the government statistical agency.” What will come next, will the leaders of criminal organizations like the Italian mafia be interviewed? Will the fees paid to hit men, no matter how gross, be considered part of the gross national product? Will illegal weapons production be counted? Will terrorism be deemed a quantifiable activity that can help in establishing the solvency of a country?

New Perspectives in Proctology

gris for a proctological giant

What does it mean to be a giant in proctology? A proctological giant? Of course there are people who have made huge contributions to disciplines which don’t have the glamour of neuroscience or law or astrophysics. Not everyone can be a Oliver Wendell Holmes whose decision in “Schenck v. United States” tested the limits of free expression or a Frankfurter who could make his mark in “Brown v. Board of Education." But there are the eminence grises who are responsible for less heralded frankfurters such as the kind which are masticated. Here is where the travails of those unsung heroes, whose plastic gloves have gone where angels fear to tread, begin. You won’t find a famous proctologist popularizing the field in the way Oliver Sacks did neurology in his contributions to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. You are not going to find too many readers of Conde Nast publications who want to know about the way a human being can compensate for abnormalities of the rectum. Dr. Timothy Leary became the poster child for LSD as did Jonas Salk for the vaccine that was named after him. But you are not going to find too many posters or centerfolds of proctological giants. Charmin is not seeking to get a proctologist to provide a superstar endorsement for its product. The famous heart transplant pioneer Christiaan Barnard leaped from the OR to international high society, but the anal sphincter doesn’t produce such celebrity. Like the highly secretive intelligence operatives whose existence is not even recognized by the government, proctologists work to find solutions to those kinds of problems that occur at the end of food’s journey through the body. Nobody would want that journey to wind up in a cul de sac. Would they? Yet few want to talk about much less attend to these matters. Brave proctologists like Chilean miners descend each day into darkness, sacrificing their lives for the sake of assholes.

Your Average Joe (Neanderthal)

                                         photo: Eric Draper

This headline is a sitting duck: “Neanderthals in Europe Died Out Thousands of Years Earlier Than Some Thought, Study Says” (NYT, 8/20/14). The substance of the piece is rather bland and one wonders why it even received the amount of space it did, considering the fact that the world is on fire. The crux is that Neanderthals were formerly estimated to have disappeared 30,000 years ago and now the estimate has been changed to 40,000. Big fucking deal! “Where’s the beef?” There is one telling paragraph, however, which reads: “A recent analysis of Neanderthal DNA shows that Neanderthals and modern humans not only crossed paths, but also interbred. For non-African people living today, 1 to 4 percent of their genome has Neanderthal origins.” As Warner Wolf used to say, “let’s go to the videotape!” 1-4%? There must be some sort of mistake. If you look around there are still Neanderthals all over Europe including certainly Russia, Southeast Asia and the Americas and many of them occupy positions of enormous influence and power. Vladimir Putin is a major example of a political leader who seems to possess a good many Neanderthal genes. But the newly indicted Governor of Texas, Rick Perry is someone whose genome should be immediately tested. Turning our attention to the Middle East Bashar al-Assad, along with the recently deposed Prime Minister of Iraq, Nouri al-Maliki should receive immediate genome testing by the CDC or whoever is responsible for genetic monitoring of international leaders.  Of course, Neanderthals are not only limited to prominent politicians. Neanderthal like behavior is identifiable at all the levels of society. Despite the article in Nature which is the basis for the Times piece, it’s obvious that Neanderthals are everyone.