Date: Wed, 6 Nov 2002
Subject: Re: post-election day blues

Ah, yes. Apocalypses! With their spectacle of
red-rouged Whore of Babylon (anti-feminist, the e-poet
Mez has pointed out to me) and Seal of The Beast (bad
P.E.T.A.), all very Fellini. Read backwards, it's

ESP-y La Copa !

I, too, have been overly fond of apocalypse, in my
day.

The poet Jane Miller wrote that, in apocalypse,
everyone goes through the misery together, everyone.
So it's antithetical to individual suffering.

Maybe some "consoling thoughts, words, bromides,
slogans, lines, epithets" are to be found in the
serendipity of today also being the day that---
actress Winona Ryder was found guilt of shop-lifting,
in Beverly Hills!

Twice now, I've been out on the street and seen
suspiciously effeminate men wearing T-shirts that read
"FREE WINONA", with a stencilled caricature of her
behind bars.

http://www.bobfromaccounting.com/bfastore/freewinonadetails.html

People have stencilled pumpkins "FREE WINONA":

http://www.yque.com/frewinmiscle.html .

If the Republican Party is the vehicle that most fully
serves and manifests the historical-economic force
that we naively used to call "capitalism,"--- then
where's the surprise that it's increasingly propelled
into full execution of those prerogatives, and that
everything is swept up into its momentum,

as if unbelievably driven by the winds from the
flapping of the Angel of History's wings? :)

 

Rick Lyman reports in The New York Times, 11/07/02:

'Today, after the verdicts, Ms. Rundle [deputy
district attorney] was asked if prosecutors knew why
the actress had commited the crimes.

'"I cannot get inside her head," she said. "She may
have been stealing for the thrill of it or to see if
she could get away with it."'

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/07/national/07WINO.html

Meanwhile, over in Adam Nagourney's article in the
same issue, other people are also asking an Unanswered
Question:

'The loss forced a day of soul-searching and
hand-wringing among Democrat officials intent on
figuring out what had gone wrong, and what it meant
...'

Perhaps, in a sense, the "what had gone wrong" that
Democrat officials search after and "why the actress
commited the crimes" and what it meant come down to
the same Charles Dodgson answer: an unstoppable,
hypnotic, compulsive drive against conscience, reason,
or moderation, toward glitz, lucre, inanity, doggerel,
hyperreality; the two coasts flanked by their
respective grands dames: the 105 year-old Madame
Chiang Kai-shek living out her last months on the
Upper East Side in Manhattan with her three dogs,
Winona in Beverly Hills.

How could they have voted the way they did? Why had
the actress commited the crimes?

It can be very instructive and revealing, what sort of
tactics and aesthetics people choose when they're
finally, irreconcilably overwhelmed into an apparently
interminable defeat and powerless against an
invincible imperial force. How do you resist the
unbeatable? There's an introduction to an English
translation of The Mishnah that suggests that that's
what the Talmudists were doing. While the Rome that
had overpowered them was devoted to nothing so much as
the monumental, the colossal, Hadrian's immense
marbles, grandeur,--- the pharisaic Jews, having lost
everything and with no hope beyond faith, converged
upon a project of the picayune, the fussy, the small,
the lost, encyclopedic minutiae, in the assembling of
The Talmud.

"The Talmud specifies how we can accurately
distinguish between kosher and non-kosher eggs. Any
egg that has both ends that are either rounded or
sharp is definitely the sign of a non-kosher egg. The
rounded edge represents suffering and the sorrow of
mourning. For the Talmud tells us that mourning is
like a sphere which revolves around the world,
eventually reaching everyone. The egg's sharp edge
represents the exact opposite of the round edge,
denoting laughter and rejoicing. People who
exclusively live for the pleasures of this world, who
are frequently found celebrating at empty and
meaningless parties and indulging in many other empty
pleasures, pay little or no attention to the
inevitable final, solo, one way trip we must all make
to the cemetery."

http://www.breslov.com/world/parsha/vaeschanan_5754.html

The Times reports that Winona stole $5,500 worth of
designer goods from a Beverly Hills department store:

"including a cashmere Marc Jacobs sweater worth $760,
various Frederic Fekkai hair adornments worth about
$600 and several pairs of socks, including a cashmere
pair from Donna Karan worth $80, inside two shopping
bags and a garment bag."

But--- $760 + $600 + 80 does not equal $5,500 worth of
designer goods!

$760 + $600 + 80 = *$1,440!*

Isn't this artfully concealed discrepancy just more
proof of the unabashed trammeling of justice that goes
on in this country!?

WHAT were the remaining $4,060 worth of designer goods
that Winona supposedly took!?

And WHY isn't that hateful New York Times TELLING
US!!?