When you get what you want...

Political chaos is connected with the decay of language... one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. George Orwell

I don't know about yours, but in my neighborhood, when everything goes to hell, we become silent. We're so quiet, even the animals imitate us. You won't hear a peep, a chitter, or a bark from the birds, squirrels, or dogs. The quiet is thick, like a fog.

The day of 9-11, it was the same way. I walked up and down the sidewalks here, and had the sense of weight and waiting, of people hunkered down. When I went to the grocery, hoping to see someone I knew, the few shoppers there moved as though underwater: slowly, ploddingly, as if quick gesture would shatter us all. I remember a gentle conversation with a man holding a can of dog food, but I don't remember what we said.

After the stock market went ::boom:: yesterday, I did what a lot of people probably did. I cruised the Internet like a shark, but what was I looking for? I don't have any stocks, and I don't understand the market. If I was looking for comfort, it was the wrong day for that.

GK Chesterton said that incarcerated burglars should be the happiest men alive, since they'd gotten the only reward their job naturally bestows. Similarly, the Current Occupant, the Neocons, Phil Graham, and the Republican caucus should be singing like larks, since they've gotten exactly the results you'd expect, given their actions.

I can't remember who said, When everything is permitted, nothing is allowed.

Honey, we're there.

Find the girl......

If you're a reader here, you know that every so often I wet my index finger, then stick it in the air to divine how the cultural winds are blowing. Nowadays I'm a big reader of newspapers, mags, and blogs for my zeitgeist info, but it wasn't always so. Used to be, I only paid attention to cars, software, fashion, and painting. What those four have in common is a breathtaking faddishness. With software and painting, I can understand why--both can be done speedily, and reflect prevailing changes almost as they happen. That monolithic industries like cars and fashion are equally prone to caprice is odd, but even so, they're dependable bellwethers.

Sometime back, I gave up the idea, and certainly all attempts, to follow fashion. The clothes I saw in the hag mags were expensive beyond imagining and practicality. For a while, I tried buying some debased version of the latest thing, only to discover that was like buying a print of Starry Night and pretending it was a real van Gogh. So occasionally, like an art historian, now and then I'll pop for a fashion mag, and study What It All Means. This is actually a pretty dicey proposition, since it leads you into standard but dumb ideas vis a vis short skirts and heavy eyebrows mean a wartime economy, tiny waists mean an authoritarian government, lots of jewelry indicates women-viewed-as-commodities etc.

So, to add a little context to my study, I use Street Mail. Street Mail is a concept I happened upon while puzzling my way through life. Broadly, it's anything that blows into your world, like flyers under the windshield, a button on the sidewalk, money in the couch cushions, and a tune on the radio. You can view this stuff as so much crap, or you can see it as a special letter from the universe, addressed just to you. And why not, I say. Taking my list of crud here, suppose the flyer on your car was for a window washing service, the button might be a signal to de-slut your appearance, dimes discovered in the furniture could be an admonition to start saving, while the jingle for Stanley Steemer might mean you need to clean up a bad relationship or a rotten habit. In all, that particular chunk of Street Mail is saying, Stop slobbing around and get to it. Whatever that it might be.

And so, given the pix of the little darling above, what I see is a wish (from whom or for whom, I don't know) to melt into the patterns of the world, disguised by plumage like a bird or a bug. Is her tired flop against these fabrics an understandable female exhaustion with the cube-farm job, the fatherless child, and the Match.com-picked guy? Again, I don't know. The Street Mail I got with this was an article about the debasement of feminism, and quoted Gloria Steinem on Sarah Palin, "Having someone who looks like you and behaves like them — who looks like a friend but behaves like an adversary—is worse than having no one." And my photo is certainly of a girl like me, but not like me at all.

The way she's dressed, in life might she have been invisible to me?

Could I have glanced at her strange softness, her indolence and seen her outlines?

Or would I overlook her?

Could she be my enemy disguised? One in camouflage, who simply waits?

Is this our collective fantasy woman? Someone there, but hardly seen?

You decide.

Lest we forget...

The Kennedy /Nixon Presidential Debate 1960

....and tonight's the night for another.

Your opinion, a post script...

My husband just read today's post and hit my list of questions posed by the Aquarium Toilet. "What about when you flush it" he asked, "What would happen to the fish?" "I guess I assumed the tank was just for show," I said. We both peered at the tank pictured. "Nope," I said, "I can see all the flushing mechanisms right in there." My husband said, "So that means all the fish would be thrown around in the water, and then they'd lie there gasping until the tank fills up." "Make for a bunch of freaked-out fish," I said. See example of a freaked-out fish pictured below.

Example of a freaked-out fish

This is a coelacanth, a very old and very ugly fish, considered extinct for thirty million years until it was pulled out of the sea off South Africa in 1938. One of the first scientists inspecting the fish is reputed to have fainted shortly after laying eyes on it. I don't imagine the fish was happy either. And after its being thought extinct and off the radar, suddenly everyone got hot for a coelacanth. Today, they're still caught by deep sea fishermen.

So? It's just your opinion...

I'd be willing to bet that there thousands, maybe millions of people who would buy this toilet in a hot minute. That it's not a shrieking success can only be due to lousy marketing.

In fact, I can think of one person right now who would kill to own it.

Back in Iowa, when my then-husband was a reporter and I was a penniless grad student, we were invited to a Christmas party at a local mogul's house. This being Iowa, the reigning moguls had created their vast fortunes from either agribusiness (aka a giant farm, underwritten by Cargill), or some money-maker that also fed the hungry hordes. Our mogul-host happened to own a bunch of supermarkets.

I don't remember much about that night. My husband and I were so out of place, we looked like a cockroaches on a wedding dress. That didn't bother me since it wasn't the kind of gathering I was whimpering to join. And after all, we were only there because my husband had written a story on the guy's supermarkets. However, I do recall that the carpet was so deep you could barely walk upright, and all the inside doors were smoothly automated. You opened and closed them with keypads embedded in the walls, which still seems strange to me. I also remember that the hostess's toy poodles wore Christmassy corsages on their heads and their toenails were lacquered a bright red. But most of all, I remember the toilet.

On my lone visit to the bathroom, I saw that it was immense and intensely pink, with pink fluffy things arrayed on cold pink fixtures, and little bowls of pink soap. But when I looked over at the john, I saw a big bucket next to it, which seemed peculiar and out of place. When I peered inside, I saw that it was a bucket full of single gardenia flowers. Then I glanced down at the toilet bowl, saw a gardenia blossom placidly floating there in ultra-bright blue water and everything became clear. After you used the toilet, you flushed the floating gardenia, and then replaced it with one from the bucket stash. I wish now I'd emerged from the bathroom wearing several gardenias, but the thought didn't occur to me then. What did occur to me was that I could not use that toilet. Not then, not ever. Instead, I came out of the john, found my husband and whispered cryptically, Just make sure you replace the gardenia.

Today, if I'd been rude enough to give it, I imagine my true reaction to her floral toilet would have infuriated the hostess.

In fact, I know it would have. It's the usual reaction from someone with a bad idea, a rejected bad idea. My art students behaved the same way. When faced with an imaginary portrait, say, stickily rendered in green acrylic, featuring huge staring eyeballs, snakes coming out of the head etc., I'd critique it honestly. I was generally met with rage and the hot rejoinder, So? It's just your opinion. I'd then explain that it wasn't my opinion but a reasoned, educated assessment. The student would hear me out, scowling and impatiently fidgeting, before delivering his parting shot, Who cares? It's all revelant anyhow. Revelant, I decided, was a student portmanteau word, cobbled together from relevant and relative. (I loved that word.)

I know my Iowa hostess would have snapped up the Aquarium Toilet without thinking twice. Of course, like most terrible ideas, it poses more questions than it answers: how can you enjoy the fish if you're sitting in the opposite direction? Besides, cleaning the john, now you gotta clean the aquarium too? What's all the steam going to do to those fish? But none of that would have given her a moment's pause.

She'd have thought the Aquarium Toilet was totally, totally revelant.

By request...

The Japanese Noodle Shield

About which, more later.

Later. Okay, I submit the Japanese Noodle Shield as a recognizably Bad Idea all sane beings can agree on. And, no, it doesn't depend on how you eat your noodles, unless you're institutionalized and like to plunge face forward into the bowl. Even then, the Japanese Noodle Shield is a piss-poor defense.

On the other hand, that poor tattooed schmuck pictured in my last post, would find an entire state's population (maybe more if you count everyone in prison), who would line up tomorrow for an identical tattoo job, skulls and all. More than that, they would rejoice every step of the way.

The Japanese Noodle Shield, not so much. So do we judge a Bad Idea by the number of people who accept it? A friend of mine, an excellent painter, used to pose this riddle. How do you know if something is avant garde rather than completely insane? He used to give this example: if he were to show up in a zoot suit to teach his classes, the question of insane vs. avant garde would be moot. The next day, however, if twenty-five students showed up wearing zoot suits, he would be merely avant-garde. Should no one appear wearing a zoot suit, he would be insane. (Note: for illustrative purposes, see zoot suit pictured below.)

The Zoot Suit

So for discussion purposes, is our tattooed guy nuts? Ans. No, because of the high probability that many like-minded guys would love a tattoo just like his.

But we have to deal with the possibility that he might be a real avant-garde type. The next great thing.

It wouldn't surprise me at all.

They may not mean to, but they do...

Trust me, here. I'd written a great post deconstructing this sad-sack's tattoos. It was witty, yet incisive and cast a bright light on larger issues. And then, in a self-congratulatory haze, I started screwing around with the html and lost the whole thing. It was my bad judgement at work, of course. But I still glared at the happy loon pictured above and blamed my fumbling on him. I never should have clipped this picture, I thought. I should have used the Japanese Noodle-Shield for my Bad Idea series. But I didn't.

There are bad ideas and bad ideas, not all of them equal. No one in a sane frame of mind would strap the Japanese noodle-shield on his head, but there are plenty of buff young guys who would turn themselves into a tattooed fright-fest. This young man, for instance. He's obviously not foreseeing a life in corporate America, and he probably has friends festooned with skulls, dripping daggers, swastikas, and Old English letters that spell out Death To All Mud People. He may have felt so much like Mr. Cool Ice on the inside, that he couldn't understand why everyone didn't see that. Probably he didn't feel quite...normal, you might say, until he'd spelled it out.

It's a bad idea a lot of people could could agree on, whereas not too many folks could go for the Japanese Noodle Shield.

It's all relative and, then again, it's not.

On the march with bad ideas cont...

As my fellow Americans stare down the proposed bailout with a frowning, Say whaaaaat? and as I continue to hear the word socialism misused (hint: with socialism, people actually get something for their taxes), me I'm perusing the Patent Office files. Foolishly, I didn't check the date on the pix above, but if I had to guess, I'd say the '70's, a true renaissance of godawful ideas. I particularly remember the heated love affair with all things plastic and chemically man-made. That little bubble, f'r'instance, the one cupping the dog's snout, is a fine example. Those little bubbles cropped up all over the place, in remodeled homes and brand new ones too. They cost pennies to make, were easy to install as a cheapie skylight and, of course, became wildly, if dismayingly popular.

The downside of the bubbles was revealed quickly, usually within three weeks of their installation or the first rain, whichever came first. If you somehow avoided downpours and the inevitable leakage, your new bubble speedily assumed the cloudy regard of an old cataract, no matter what.

Sometimes, when my husband and I go for weekend drives in the funkier neighborhoods, we amuse ourselves by pointing out likely dope houses. I'm not talking about meth labs or squats full of no-hopers smoking rock. I'm talking a 70's style dope house, built by a dealer who made a million or so flying in bales of marijuana under the radar. And it's these (now moldering) homes that bear mute witness to the bubble-fad. Look closely, and you can still see their dim remains.

The 70's doper-dream house generally incorporated design themes from the wavy 60's, fern bars, the Biba boutique, and all things California. This mish-mash translated into stained glass windows, hanging crystals, macrame, lots of raw redwood and cedar, plus bubbles and skylights to the max, all compressed into a hulking three story presence stuffed into a large lot, one with no landscaping and an invisible driveway. As I said, it's possible to glimpse their dinosaurish remains here and there. The cedar has gone gray, as has the redwood, the skylights and bubbles are completely opaque and wet around the edges, while the lot looks like a steroid-fed rain forest. You can imagine these places inhabited by a shaggy oldster, befuddled by too much acid and too many rousts, now lapsed into muttering and playing scratchy LPs of The Band.

But then, the 70's were a universally Bad Idea for most of us, what with a rotten economy that wasn't budging, bad clothes, bad hair, and, as the crowning insult, disco. Still, we soldiered on, dreaming of better days. Knowing how it was, I am right there with this 70's inventor, on fire with his idea for a Dog Window, sawing a circular hole in the fence, carefully fitting the bubble over it, and coercing his unwilling beagle to stick its face inside. It won't do me any good to tell him that his idea is just a streaky receptacle for dog-slobber, and that his neighbors will complain. He won't listen. He's pinned all his hopes on the Dog Window: his ticket out of crappy times, his pass to the Big Rock Candy Mountain.

I can't blame him. We love our desperate dreams.

Bad ideas...

Just in case you can't see all the detail here, and how could you, these are instructions for building your very own "Snoop Camera" 1954 style. A plywood casing containing your peep camera clamps onto a wall. The hidden camera can then be raised to peer over the wall so you can take secret pix of that honey lounging by the kidney-shaped pool next door. Oh, baby! Looka that!

I post this to remind myself that this country has never had a noticeable shortage of bad ideas. Some can be spotted by anyone (or anyone's pet for that matter). For example there's the male breast-feeding assembly to be worn over a business suit. But the "Snoop Camera" falls into a grayish area, where it's possible to imagine a 1954 fourteen-year-old thinking, Man, what a great project! And those are the bad ideas to watch out for.

Reading about the mega-bail-out the government has in mind, I started thinking about my own gum-ups. I've certainly made huge mistakes in my life, but I've made most of them only once. After windmilling over several cliffs, I developed some useful meta-rules for recognizing crap ideas, no matter how temptingly wrapped. I'm offering them to the federal government since our government seems to like diving into cesspools, and caution be damned. If just the government and its over-paid lobbyists were drowning in this pool of shit, I'm not sure I'd pipe up, but the gov'mint seems happy to drag in innocents as well. So, without further adoo-doo, here are my cautionary rules...

1. When you are told you have to do something right now, don't do it.
2. When you think you have to do something right now, you don't.
3. When someone tells you they can solve your giant emergency, they can't.
4. If someone has already screwed up your house and your car, then announces they are ready to do your taxes, don't let them.
5. If someone says trust me, you shouldn't.

You get the idea. Sometime last night, I remembered a quote from an Iris Murdoch novel, A Severed Head, where one of the characters notes, Only lies and evil come from letting people off. I have to say I agree.

In fact, maybe that's my #6.

By the people, for the people...

Arise ye pris'ners of starvation
Arise ye wretched of the earth
For justice thunders condemnation
A better world's in birth!
No more tradition's chains shall bind us
Arise, ye slaves, no more in thrall;
The earth shall rise on new foundations
We have been naught we shall be all.

Refrain:
'Tis the final conflict
Let each stand in his place
The International Union
shall be the human race.

lyrics from The International

It's times like this that give a girl pause. The financial world is going glug, glug, glug and many of us saw this coming years ago, as the natural result of snaky trades and buy-ins. The problem was, no one was taking our phone calls, reading our letters, or our emails.

I can forgive the Current Occupant a lot, but I have a hard time forgiving him for hitting my country head on, then racing off, leaving it bleeding in the road, tire tracks across its broken back. It'll be a long time coming before I write that one off.

When my family first came to Washington DC, my father needed a job. So, before we went to the apartment we had rented, we pulled up by the curb next to the senate office building, and went in to see our congressman. We didn't have an appointment but the senator was in and seemed glad to see us. That's about all I remember, except that we did it. "Why not?" my father asked later. "I was his constituent. Who else would I go see?" Every week, my father and grandfather both wrote their congressmen, chiding them about certain bills, patting them on their backs about others. And every afternoon, you could see Harry Truman taking a quick stroll on the sidewalk around the White House, snapping off answers to reporters as he breezed along. I can go on, I suppose, and tell you about the hours I spent sitting in the visitors' area in the senate chambers, eating in the senate cafeteria. I could tell you how Linda, LBJ's daughter, let us park our car in her garage when we were garageless, or how my little sister spent a happy afternoon in Hubert Humphrey's office and had his full attention. Back then, the government seemed as near to me as the cat snoozing on my desk now.

I haven't felt the government was mine for a long, long time, not the way I used to. And although I thought Clinton was an improvement over Daddy Bush, I never thought he was part of my government. My government no longer exists, and hasn't for a while. I don't know when it got spirited away, when it became separate and apart from all our lives. When it was no longer responsible to us, for us. It's gone now, shattered and scattered like blown cherry blossoms on The Mall, and while some of us care, the rest, it seems, prefer to be governed by a faceless entity...preferably an entity with prerecorded messages and some entertainment value during election years.

But it no longer matters what any of us want. We're all in deep weeds now, and I'm not sure where we go from here.

And I'm pretty sure no one else knows either.

Mexican Coke cont...

What with the financial end-times and my tendency to brood, I realized nothing was going to perk me up except a Mexican Coke, so I drove up to my neighborhood CVS. Gratifyingly, they've got a whole refrigerated section of Mexican sodas and a mineral water you'd kill for. I loaded my cart with Mexican Cokes, then wheeled them up to the checkout and the waiting Hispanic clerk. Nearby, another clerk, a young guy with a spiky jelled do, was restocking candy bars, pausing now and then to slug back a Monster energy drink accompanied by refreshing doses of Beer Nuts.

I come to this CVS a lot, so I'm known by sight, and this Hispanic clerk and I have exchanged pleasantries now and again. She's stocky, with heavy black hair worn coiled up, and a mostly impassive expression, which belies a fast tongue and a hefty CVS expertise. "Mexican Coke," she said musingly to no one, scanning the bottles, "now what makes these Mexican Cokes? You drink them and start speaking Spanish or something?" "They're made with sugar," I said, "not that corn fructose." "Sugar," she said, shaking her head, "that's bad. Bad for children." "They taste better," I offered, "at least to me they do." The clerk looked over at the stock boy. "Watchoo drinking?" she asked him. He held up his Monster can. "What's in it?" she asked. "Sugar and caffeine," he told her. "You know I don't got a sweet tooth," she announced. "I come home and there's candy all over, but I don't want it."

The boy looked our way, "Ever since I been eating healthy, you know what I don't want?" The clerk and I both shook our heads. "Chocolate," he said, "Don't want it. I could stock these candy bars all day long, not think anything about it." I swiped my card, wondering if I should talk up my Mexican Coke choice: they don't leave you as thirsty, you're not bolting down 32 ounces of godknowswhat, you can recognize most of the ingredients, the bottle looks cool. But they were deep into a discussion of Monster vs. Red Bull, the pros and cons, so I left.

What I didn't say is that I'm a Mexiphile, which is faintly ridiculous since I've never been there. Like Palin spotting Russia from Alaska, I've looked across the border but that's it. I also collect retablos, Day of the Dead stuff, and I loved Frida Kahlo before she was Frida Kahlo. This particular CVS caters to the neighborhood, which has lots of Hispanics, so it also stocks Mexican patent medicines and cosmetics. I'm always intrigued by the packages and the claims printed on them, accompanied by pix of the Virgin of Guadalajara. With my scraps of Latin and Italian, I can usually read what they're about: a pearly skin or certain relief from arthritis. For years, I kept a Mexican calendar in my studio that advertised Jesus Coffee, just as a reminder that my world was really bigger than white-bread Dallas, Texas.

When I suck down a Mexican Coke, it's a taste of exotica to me, just a brief touch of sweetness but still good.

Viva.

Madmen, loony women, and those crazy mixed up kids...

I've been blogging more since making the mundane connection between new stuff and new readers. Also my stats have gone up after adding pictures. Nothing surprising there either. So, lately, after I finish the day's blog, I surf a while, looking for a pix that tickles my fancy and, finding one, copy it into a draft for the next day. Like the image above.

So last night, I kept wondering about the question in that day's blog: Why do people believe crap ideas? Believe me, I'm still there today. Take the financial crash...please (cue laugh track). From the beginning, I thought that basing wealth on brokered loans to people who couldn't pay them back, was shaky ground to begin with. But I told myself that I wasn't a financial whiz-kid, so what did I know anyhow? Then I remembered that I do know wild honey from sheepshit, and decided to view all proceedings from my normal if jaundiced perspective.

While the housing bubble was on full boil, and rapacious real estate brokers combed my normally sleepy neighborhood like a wolf pack, I read that this innovative financing was the new paradigm. And lo, here we are. With banks cratering, and the government playing whack-a-mole trying to grab up one after the other.

I'm old enough that the hairs on my neck prickle when I hear talk of a new reality, as opposed, I guess, to the real reality. Such chatter was popular during the tech bubble too, which I was in the middle of for some years...during the high times and during the ::pop:: Then the Current Occupant appeared, and Karl Rove declared sneeringly that the new kids created their own realities, while liberal dummies were still flubbing around in that shop-worn real reality.

Maybe you remember that reality: it was the one where actions led to predictable consequences. It's the reality we decided to ignore.

During such times, times like now, when History with a capitol H is on the move, snatching up anything in its path, I've found it's best to lay low, eat cheese crackers, and watch a lot of TV. That's how I happened on Mad Men and, despite what its blinkered young producer says, the show is a syrupy backward glance to an age when Everything Was Better.

During that time period, I worked in an ad agency too, doing paste-ups of those supermarket newspaper inserts, the ones reading Delmonte Peaches for $.10! The agency I worked for had good accounts and a full crew of Madison Avenue types and I thought the whole situation sucked. Like all the women in the firm, I too wore undergarments with lots of elastic, nylons, stiletto heels, and form-fitting dresses (see picture above), lots of make-up, and looked the way girls were supposed to look, I should have worn stained bluejeans to work. Being in that agency was like being on a road crew, but without the fresh air. All the women's jobs were low, mean, and underpaid. Guys ruled, although I don't think their reality was too hot either.

It was a constricted, rigid, authoritarian time which, as such times do, led ultimately to madness, and a cultural melt-down. It's a time that could teach us something now, if we didn't have this habit of glomming onto history, making it into a TV series and discarding it, when the ratings drop. Never mind any so-called edgy shows, all TV reinforces sappy ideas that are sloshing around in our national psyche anyway. Patriotism is good, brave men always triumph, beautiful women always win except when they screw married guys, animals can understand us, kids are cute, etc. etc. etc.

TV is a lot like cheap cologne. You can sniff it, but you shouldn't drink it.

(fade to black, credit roll)

The viral impact of hideous ideas...

Barely 100 students attend classes at Harrold, a tiny town in north-central Texas. But the school board's decision to allow teachers to carry concealed weapons has drawn national attention. By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr. Published: August 28, 2008

I remember this decision quite well, and also recall wondering why Texas hadn't climbed all over this idea earlier. Given the mindset of the state, it seemed like a natural. I also recalled that in late '81, I was working for a mega-electronics firm, doing R&D at a site way out in the boonies. There were row after row of pick 'em up trucks, all fitted with gun racks, holding shiny rifle and shotguns. When I asked about this, an obvious nervous quaver in my voice, I was told, simply, It's causa the varmints. And sure enough, I would later spot engineers with coyote skins stretched on their bulletin boards.

But teachers packing guns in 2008, also reminded me that way back, when I was a high school teacher in Greenfield, Massachusetts, word came to the faculty that the teachers in Springfield had been cleared to carry concealed. At the time, Greenfield was a near twin to that Pennsylvania town in The Deer Hunter: all smokey factories, packed-together asbestos shingled houses, a Savonarola-esque version of Catholicism rampant, lots of drugs, and yes, deer hunters. I remember enthusiastic gun talk in the teacher's lounge that I tried to ignore, and quit that year, although not because of guns. At the time I could see a tidal wave of awful ideas gathering force: state testing, schools functioning as a holding-pen, putting retarded kids into regular classes, religion snaking its way into the public system etc. Awful ideas I tried not to think about. Of course, most of these have since come to a stunted fruition with predictably godawful results.

So now, gazing upon the pillaged mess that remains of Wall Street, I'm wondering about the spread of crap ideas. I know very little about the stockmarket, except to note its nervous-nellyism: how it can plunge precipitously because of either rumors or facts. Commentators mumble about our 24/7 news cycle, and the vast array of technology that spreads every little whisper. But my observation is that notions zoom through the culture without any of that. Witness the half-million hippies who showed up for Woodstock when, believe me, there wasn't much publicity about a groovy concert. Also, because my loner instincts have led me to making art in un-artful places, I've explored what seemed like peculiar ideas, without knowing why or where they came from. Much later I'd find out my work was like many other artists', artists who lived a thousand miles away.

As the years have rolled by, I've noticed that when a bad idea is loose in the land, there's not much you can do, except to point out its probable failure, then steel yourself for ridicule and sneering. Happily though, the same is true of good ideas. Some of them can't be ignored either, no matter how impossible they seem given the times. Check out: Civil Rights, the Women' Movement, nuclear disarmament, anti-war activism etc.

William Burroughs came up with what he called a viral theory of information, which I never fully understood. I'm clearer on it now, although I wouldn't call it that. I think, rather than being viral, the phenomenon is closer to flocking. Flocking is a shared but fragmentary consciousness that leads, say, to a thousand crows sitting on neighboring telephone wires. Somehow, a shared scrap of information gets transmitted among a thousand tiny brains. To me, flocking explains the heedless rush towards ruin these past eight years, all based on rotten but widespread ideas.

But maybe this fragmentary consciousness functions for our adaptive good. Maybe someday, we'll be able to tell the difference between wild honey and sheep shit, so the flock only shares good ideas.

Personally I don't think so but then, I don't want to be a bird on a wire. Haven't liked it when I was.

A religious kind of day....

KINSHASA, Congo — Accusations that a soccer player was using witchcraft during a match in eastern Congo sparked a riot that killed 13 people, a U.N.-funded radio station reported Monday. Reported by The Huffington Post 9-15-08

Today I had to skip out of the office and do some finicky shopping with a scratched through and heavily annotated list. The kind of list that includes things like: AAA batteries (optional) AA batteries (need!), get-well and b'day cards, b'day gift, T-shirt, catfood (gravy-style), Mexican Coke, Mac and Cheese (if Cheesiest, otherwise no). You get the idea. I probably need to add that the Mexican Coke on my list is not, um, Mexican coke. It's Co'Cola from Mexico, and it's made with sugar, not corn syrup, so it tastes better. It comes in a tall thin green Cokesque bottle, and has a real bottlecap. If you see it, try it out. If you can't get the Mexican stuff, kosher Coke is also made with sugar, but only appears in my supermarket during Jewish holidays. And here we are, into religion already...

When I emerged from Marshalls, sweating heavily, a tall young black guy approached me clutching a fistfull of flyers, talking as he came. M'am. I want to tell you about the story of Cain and Abel, which is a story about brothers. 'Course today we still got brothers against brothers, young brothers killin each other in the streets now, fightin with each other, gettin they heads smashed in, goin to jail, gettin out and smokin that rock. But now lemme tell you the good news is that these same brothers got a place to go and get off the rock if they accept Jesus Christ. I want to testify to you today that the rock once reached out an grabbed me, but today I have been clean, sober, single, and celibate for nine years. Course none a this is free cause we live in the world we do, so a donation of five dollers...

That was all I needed to hear, since it indicated a break from his monolog, which I wasn't following very well anyhow. I hauled out a five and gave it to him. Thank you, mam, an you have a blessed day, an' for your donation we givin you a key holder we make oursels that got the initials for What Would Jesus Do right on it.

At which point I dropped my car keys, and my Hawaiian surfer key holder fell apart on the pavement. "Look like God want you to have a new key holder," Harold noted, for that was his name. "Looks like," I agreed. We chatted amiably for a few minutes, mostly about addiction. "I figure it's a mind thing, addiction is," Harold said. "I bet you're right," I said.

Once home, I'd just started hammering on my blog, when the doorbell rang and my husband answered it. I could hear him responding to someone, and figured it was a freelance yard guy. My husband came back to my office and said, "It was two Mormon guys, who really wanted to come in. I told them my interest in Mormonism is about this much," here my husband indicated an inch with his thumb and forefinger. "They said that was okay, we could just talk about Jesus. They asked me if I liked Jesus and I said You bet, but I didn't want to talk about Him."

What would Jesus do? Ans. Beats me.

All this fit nicely into my internal musings today. I'd spotted the witch doctor pix and news story last night, and was thinking about the freak-out at the soccer game in Kinshasa. I'm no stranger to witchcraft. Coming from a Southern family, as I do, mojo of all types ran its snakey course through our lives. My grandmother, an educated common-sense type, consulted psychics and stayed in bed on Friday the 13th. My mother could witch warts off people. I watched her do it and observed that
sometimes she told the wart-afflicted to run a raw potato over the wart and bury it at midnight, sometimes she told them to put a compress of cucumber peelings on it, sometimes she would wrap the wart in a specially blessed Kleenex. I finally asked her which method worked the best. "They all do, honey," she said. "See it doesn't matter what people believe in. It just matters that they believe in something."

To which I sort of agree. Belief is powerful. It can erase warts and addiction, no doubt about it. Belief can also make people vote for a fruitcake, a fruitcake nominated to be Vice President of the United States.

So I take people's beliefs very seriously indeed. Especially people who believe in bad things.

The smart people, continued... and the road goes on forever...

One of the chief consolations of age is that the crap you're going through isn't that different than the crap you've already been through. It's just as enduring too, hence the fascination in those Seven Deadly Sins we keep trying to zortch away. For example, fashions change and the hair is a little different, but the same pig ignorance endures. Take that pix of the young dope in today's post. Different, yes, from the dopes of the 50's and 60's, but by the 70's, except for the cargo shorts, he would be as comfortable being stupid in that decade as in this one. In fact, during the 70's, when dopes started looking exactly like him, I decided to quit hitchhiking.

Taking a peek at this dope's sign, I'm reminded of my days teaching both morans and dummies. As an art teacher, I taught one of the two classes the special ed kids took. Into my classroom, full of fun and sharp tools, poured kids whose IQ's averaged about 55, depending. For the most part, my special ed kids were a weird delight, since they had a pretty good sense of how the world viewed them, and their creativity absorbed and reflected that skew. Also, their retardation was caused by a variety of ills, from Down's Syndrome, to brain tumors, to lack of oxygen at birth. As a result, they weren't limited in the same way, didn't act the same way, didn't talk the same way. But the dopes I taught were identically dopey.

When I went on to teach college, I discovered the same dummies, usually arrayed in the back of the room, lightly sketching penises in their notebooks before skipping out early. But I was still a young teacher then, encumbered by the saddlebags of hip-pedagogical-thought, which promoted the idea that there were no dummies, only unmotivated, emotionally-limited teachers. And so, wondering if this was true, I began my Save-the-Dope Campaign. This took the form of reaching out to them and attempting to really communicate, for it was another hippie tenet that no one could withstand the force of honest sharing. So I snatched them back as they tried to scurry off for a cigarette, sat them down, stared into their dull eyes, encouraged the shit out of them, and listened to their responses, which consisted of a defensive So?

They had no business in college, of course, but we were just venturing into one of America's Bright Ideas, which postulated that universities, especially third-tier crap universities, could be a money-making proposition. All you had to do was accept anyone with a pulse. Of course I got exactly nowhere with my Save-the-Dope Campaign, and decided that, like the poor, dopes are always with us. Still, what I took away from the experience is confirmed in these troubled times. Lest I be accused of heartlessness, I want to say that my use of the words dope, dummie, and stoopid mf is precise. I'm referring to a being who is placidly convinced they are always right, is willfully ignorant, does not know the difference between fantasy and reality, has a simple faith only in rich people and the people who beat them up.

And so, it doesn't help to get our bowels in an uproar over the dummies who are currently loving Sarah Palin, who is a better-looking dope than most, and who probably appears rich compared to your average dullard.

Let the stoopid mfs rage and holler. Just pray they forget to vote.

But we need to vote. We surely do.

Farewell my lovely...

RIP David Foster Wallace

Richard Cory

by Edwin Arlington Robinson

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,

We people on the pavement looked at him;

He was a gentleman from sole to crown,

Clean favored, and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,

And he was always human when he talked;

But still he fluttered pulses when he said,

“Good-morning,” and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich—yes, richer than a king—

And admirably schooled in every grace:

In fine, we thought that he was everything

To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked, and waited for the light,

And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;

And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,

Went home and put a bullet through his head.

The smart people...

Throughout this year my husband has been getting slammed by spam of the right-wing nut-job variety: how Obama is a Muslin terrist and a mixed-race guy (aka nigger). I'm not the recipient of this rancid brand of spam. My own (un)funny spam tends to be of the NPR variety and takes as its subject self-denigrating topics like (ho-ho) how funny it is to be an ageing woman (the humor of menopause, forgetting stuff etc.) and how funny Sara "Barbie" Palin is (photoshopped pix of Sarah as a pig wearing lipstick, photos of pigs smeared with lipstick etc.). And, while my spam doesn't rocket up my blood pressure, it's just as tiresome.

Yesterday my husband wrote his spammers a supremely eloquent email asking to be taken off their email lists. He'd had it, he told me, with being pelted by winger-lies from people whose minds would never be changed by the truth. At the time, I confess, my mind was on cleaning out the refrigerator, so I just made a mooing noise of agreement. But today, in the cold thin light of late-morning, I feel both a swell of love and pride for him, and an uncomfortable sense of shame myself.

Sometimes I refer to our generation, my husband's and mine, as "the last good kids".
By that, I mean we were the generation who beavered away at school and extra-curricular activities, applied to Ivy League schools, wanted to be doctors, lawyers, and Indian chiefs, picked our dating partners with the knowledge they might be our spouses, and in short, were the very models of good post-Eisenhower-post-nuclear war teens.

Later we would enjoy many brands of muddled thought, brought on by drugs and oddball spiritual quests. We would live together in muddy communes and get vitamin deficiencies. We would shack up with crazy people and marry them outdoors, wilting wild-flowers decorating our long shaggy hair. But underneath the alarming clothes, pharmaceuticals, and cursing remained the kids who turned in their homework on time and who were imprinted by their mothers' counsel to Be nice.

This blog is about words and language, but it's also, I see, about good manners, which are deeply ingrained in me. Often, I become confused, thinking that civil behavior and Be nice are the same. They are not. Manners are as intensely concerned with how to say No! as they are with Why don't you? and How nice. Polite behavior doesn't mean putting up with hate-filled verbiage from fools, and my husband's actions yesterday are a stark reminder of that. In fact, the origin of what we know as civilization rests on manners, specifically The Courts of Love, founded by Eleanor of Aquitaine. She became understandably sick of testosterone-fueled knights wandering around the countryside raping and pillaging anyone in their paths. The Courts of Love established civilized conduct for warriors, using (what else?) sex.
But that part is another story entirely. Still, I cannot leave Eleanor, though, without dropping this odd factoid, courtesy of Wikipedia: John McCain is her direct descendant.

I am too prone to hippie tolerance, courtesy of Fritz Perls: You go your way, and I go my way. If we meet, it's beautiful, if not, it can't be helped. But the real world and common courtesy both tell me it's not always beautiful, and something should be said about that. Loudly. For the past eight years, I have tolerated vile abuse directed at all the values I hold dear, by people who wish me (and most of the planet) no good. With Be nice firmly canceling out all thought-processes, I've ignored much of it. But I don't think that's such a great idea. Not now.

It's bullshit, and it's bad for ya. Bad for me too.

When spunky l'il gals go bad...

In the final part of Doris Lessing's Golden Notebook, the heroine, a writer named Anna cracks up over the fearful state of things. Actually, the bleak English post-war atomic world has nothing to do with her craziness. She's simply been dumped by a heartless guy. Then Stalin suddenly dies, and Anna really loses it. She retreats to one room, papered over with newspaper articles, and stares glassily into space. You see, Stalin was her daddy-hope for fixing the world, although she always conveniently ignored his bad self when it came to those mass Soviet purges.

The Golden Notebook was, I thought at the time I read it, a life-changer and life-line. It was comforting to me that she had gone nuts, since I was nuts too. I'd married in haste, was in the repent-at-leisure stage, and sunk in a clinical depression. My German Freudian shrink told me to accommodate myself to the voman's role, give up my writing and, I guess, learn to make sourbraten. I was also too young to understand that rad-lib writer Anna, was mostly in a bad dating cycle, rather than being too-sensitive for this evil world. And so I concluded that to change anything (myself for starters and then society) I'd have to write lumpy important books and be a commie.

In fairness to my befuddled young self, there wasn't much around to support women who wanted choices other than The Big Five: wife, stewardess, librarian, teacher, or nurse. You had Little Women, The Gold Notebook, The Feminine Mystique, and The Second Sex, and the last two made me want to kill myself. Three years later I got my cum laude degree, became (yes) a teacher and a department head, enrolled in grad school, and then got a package from my dyke cousin in NYC. What tumbled out was a bunch of smearily printed pamphlets from the Red-Stocking League, including the lunatic screed from Valarie Solanis, The SCUM Manifesto. Also, around and about my little college town, women were gathering in consciousness-raising groups. The long and short of it, was that I read the smeary pamphlets, talked to other women, and began to consider my life, using my very own nascent brain.

This stuff is on my mind, since I hear Sarah Palin referred to as a feminist, and it ain't so. Either that, or the term has become so debased we need another word that comprehends the simple angry female cri du coeur for equality. Sarah, on the other hand, is one in a long line of what guys approvingly call a spunky l'il gal and, going back to 1930's musicals, spunky l'il gals have always been accepted as long as they remember to wear a face-full of make-up, and wrinkle their noses cutely. Most of us grown-up pissed-off gals recognize her for what she is, and would do about anything not to be in the same room with her.

Having lived through the torment of a choice-free pre-feminist world, and then the Second Wave of Feminism, my life has not been without fights, self-doubt, and large costs. But during those years, when the life I wanted was locked and barred from me, unscaleable as a Visigoth fortress, and defended by cruel dopes, it never occurred to me that the battle wasn't worth it.

My problem with the Sarah Palin's of the world is their blithe dismissal of history and it's costs. They are ignorant, arrogantly rejoicing in their knee-jerk world. And they sure as shit haven't paid their dues.

A Zen koan asks, What do you do when a visitor spills ashes on your Buddha statue?

Ans. You tell your visitor to clean up the mess, and get the hell out of your house.

Crazy like the world...

I'm sorry to report that once a day, for the past year now, I've turned to my husband/friend/drugstore clerk and asked, "Have we all lost our fucking minds?" Okay, I don't say that to the drugstore clerk, whose life is hard enough without being pestered by an old hippie. Still, I think our society has become nuttier than I can remember its ever being, and I think you adapt to it at your extreme peril. But that's just me, so imagine my potent joy on finding an article on AlterNet.com this AM, that also asks the chewy question Has America Gone Insane? by Bruce E. Levine.

He quotes Erich Fromm, who says in his book, The Sane Society that, "An unhealthy society is one which creates mutual hostility (and) distrust, which transforms man into an instrument of use and exploitation for others." (Emphasis very much mine.) This was written in 1955. Since the culture was already pretty screwy in the 50's, no one got around to discussing this idea until the 60's, when Fromm was required reading for baby radicals. But it's still innaresting, since this description also fits today's society so neatly. I think I pick up on the words, "mutual hostility and distrust", since there seems to be a lot of that going around.

And from some dank psychiatric cellar comes the notion that exhibiting our disappointment and rage is good for us. In the field, this is called abreactive expression; around my house it's called going batshit and it's bad for ya. In fact, as you may have discovered yourself, the angrier you are, the angrier you are. But never mind. Let the angry guys and red-faced ladies have their aneurysms and strokes in peace, since they seem to want them so badly. The loss, in this pitiless time of rudeness, envy, and selfishness, is that we no longer enjoy the real pleasures of a civil society.

Since I'm a free-lance writer, isolation is my natural condition. But to keep my spinal cord from shriveling up, when I go into the world at large, I truly need every encounter I have. Even more, I need those encounters to be pleasant. This is where the vocabulary of manners comes in. Generally, to clerks, produce managers, bank tellers, or whoever I come across, I ask, "How are you?" and I smile. Whether I get a grunt, surly silence, or an answer, I'll press on doggedly and inquire, "How's your day? Are you busy or has it been slow?" If I can, I make a little joke. And then when I take my leave, I try to make full-fledged eye-contact. Generally, my reward is a real smile from a real person, and my tiny encounter has become a bit more than two checked-out people dealing inaptly with one another.

I also need to remember that there exists a troublesome entity called Arsisiety, which causes unending dark nightmares. I had this friend, a rich lady with lots of diamonds, a big house and a pool, who continually and bitterly complained about sexism, crime, kids-today, and black folks. This bewildered me, since she didn't encounter any of these things in her upper-echelon white-person's aerie. When I asked her to list real-life instances of crime-addled youth, and sexist black people, she would hand me magazine articles instead. Gradually, I realized she was living in Arsisiety: a fictional place populated by labels and bad dreams. A place that was entirely imaginary. Her actual society was pretty nice.

But I still think we've lost our fucking minds. At least for now.

Sorbet...

I've been riffling through my historical Rolodex of ghastly events, trying to comfort myself by remembering times that were worse and crazier than this one. I can come up with a few that were grizzlier and probably more dangerous, but my ruminations will have to wait. I've got information burn-out. Instead, what I need is a taste of lemon sorbet to cleanse my taste buds, and remove the greasy, too-rich flavors of celebrity gossip, dirty politics, and idiots-at- large.

For my virtual sorbet, I need a stupid and frivolous topic, a Seinfeldian one dealing with some microscopic issue that irritates but doesn't matter squat in the cosmic scheme. So, drawing a line in the guacamole dip, I've bravely decided to tackle the Blogger profile. Specifically, I'm taking issue with the Random Question that's included. 

If you click on my profile, you'll discover I'm a Leo, that I deeply love movies of the 70's and the novels of Robert Stone. But you'll also hit the Random Question, which asks:  The first time you had your shoes taken off - how surprised were you to see that you still had toes? And I reply whatever I reply: something about being born without toes, which is a blatant lie. I have toes! What isn't apparent is that there's no way to bypass the Random Question in filling out or updating the profile page. You can go through a boatload of different questions, though, in trying to find one that's not written in broken English or isn't flatly insane.

I object to the Random Question because it's pointless, it gives the reader no good information about me, and I have no talent in coming up with cute answers. Like a lot of people who spend time drenched in language, I'm terrible at word games. I guess a near-relative to this lack of talent is the truism that people with a good sense of humor rarely tell jokes. Following the Buddhist precept that no experience is pure, I've tried to figure out why the Random Question is a good idea.

The only answer I can think of is that, like a Zen koan, it could bust the brain out of its preconceived hamster wheel. But it's a pretty weak argument, especially for us more seasoned types who have already seen most ideas, fads, and fashions traipse past our jaundiced gaze time and time again. None of the Random Questions I've been presented with make me feel other than cross and sleepy. 

So, why are you persisting with this dopey exercise, Blogger? Answ. It's cool.  

Okay. I see. I've written a story with no possible resolution, which reminds me of last night's episode of Law and Order. It ended with a Lady or The Tiger-style finale, which is not allowed in The Magic Kingdom of Stories. All tales must have an ending, otherwise they're not stories, they're Life. More on that topic sometime.

I feel some better. Maybe I'll tackle a chewier idea tomorrow. Maybe not. Being a light-weight has its perks, insubstantial though they are. 

Just call me Angel Cake, and I'll come runnin'.

Sick unto weary death and beyond...

In my younger days, when I was probably a much nicer person, I got a number of minor NEA grants. All this largesse had something to do with supporting art in the schools, art in the community, art in the nursing home and, it turned out, art among the criminally insane. To fulfill my Tinker Toy grant requirements, I was supposed to trip around from one venue to the next, lecturing or making a painting, or teaching a one-day workshop in something or other. Gruesome as it may sound--showing trembly old folks how to paint clouds and trees, or lecturing on Van Gogh to stoned junior high kids--even so, I was all for it. It fit with the times and it fit me, because, at my deluded core, I was something of a 1930's Woody Guthrie-type populist who really believed in bringing art to the masses. I may even have said those words aloud: I bring art to the masses. 

At the same time, being half hermit as well, I'd also become fascinated with outsider art. The art I was actually trained in had everything to do with culture. By culture, I don't mean culcha...the opera, extended-pinkie teas, formal dinnahs, and good books. I mean whatever swirls around us: the slang, the fashions, the food, the bad guys, the wars, the leaders, the news, the books...the perpetually moving stuff that gives our time a particular flavor. 

At the same time, I wondered about people who were utterly outside a common society: the bitterly poor, the jailed, the crazy, and the religious zealot. What kind of art did they have?

Because of one or other of my grants, but really to answer my own questions about the dispossessed, I agreed to a two-week residency at the Iowa Institute for the Criminally Insane. While the name conjures up a creaking Victorian manse, screams in the night, and chain-clanking inmates, it wasn't like that. It was a broad sunny place, painted bright yellow, with lots of arts and crafts rooms, and even a tattoo removal clinic. People got assigned to the institute to be evaluated as either too crazy, or not too crazy to assist in their own defence. Or they had already been sentenced, and some lingering doubt put them there, to determine their prison-worthiness, as the phrase went. 

I stayed two weeks and did a painting, one that was highly abstract. My painting was the cause of daily loud speculation among the inmates as to whether I could really draw or was just full of shit. I think full of shit won out. There's much I recall about that period, but mostly I remember dragging my ass home every night, bone-weary and dog-tired. I have a sketch-book from then that notes, I'm worn out from all the lying. It's as though everything is code, and I have to go through some weird deciphering to figure out the truth. And I'm exhausted by the time I do it, if I do it at all. It's a quality I learned all criminals have. They lie. All the time.

Today I said to my husband, "I'm already sick of Sarah Palin". "But the campaign's just started," he said. "Come on." "Doesn't matter," I told him. "I'm wiped. I'm done." And then I wondered, Where is this coming from? And it came back to me. "It's the lying," I told my husband. "It just clobbers me." 

I haven't figured out all the mechanisms that create my frazzled nerves and desire for a good long nap. It's something about my brain getting a message, then having it short-circuited by a tiny neural cop who hollers, Halt! Then my mind, which has already shoved the furniture around and made space for a new factoid, has to scurry about and find something to put there: like the exports of Bolivia, or a new King Ranch Chicken recipe. It's an unnecessary and stupid effort.

But right now, I'm just tired of Sarah Palin, tired of her self-satisfaction and bewildered kids, tired of the poor fools who believe her, tired of the newspeople who give her a moment's thought, tired of the sweaty flapping liberals.  Tired of the people who have forgotten about the war, the unjust taxes, the ill and sickening kids, the black folks in prison, the dying polar bears, the crappy schools, and the stacked deck. I'm tired of the house winning all the time. But most of all, I'm tired of the circus, tired of the tootling music, and the dumb magic acts we've already seen.

Like dear old dead George Carlin used to say: It's bullshit and it's bad for ya.

And it is. 

We need to get away from this bullshit and fast as we can.

We need to run like the wind itself.

Loving your zombie...

I've been eavedropping on the Republican Convention, plus surfing around the blogosphere, reading accounts of VP candidate Palin and her views. As to one view, I gather she is so against abortion, she elected to have a Down's syndrome child, and that even if her daughter became pregnant as a result of rape, she would still be against her having an abortion. This is probably on her mind pretty constantly, since there seems to be a lot of pregnancy over there at the Palins.

I realize all this anti-abortion stuff arises from the notion that we are fully-fledged little humans from a single-cell on. Personally, as an ex-teacher, I've always thought it took about twenty-eight years just to seem vaguely human. That's how old my grad students were when their parents quit storming into my university office, threatening to kill their kid barehanded. Now that I'm older, I've upped my figure and adopted my grandparents' outlook. They didn't consider a person capable of sensible conversation until he or she was at least fifty-five.

I started out in life wanting to be a microbiologist, so I've spent a bit of time staring at jellied dabs through a microscope. When I couldn't tell a turtle-jelly from a people-jelly, it made me wonder why the Catholics were so hot to sanctify it. Of course, this was during a brief crack in time when the Catholics were the only demographic getting weepy over people-jelly. Later on, the Evangelicals would focus just as near-sightedly on people-jelly, and become utterly undone over fetuses.

Personally, with their love of semi-life, I think the right-wing missed a bet by overlooking zombies. With all this discussion of the unborn who, face it, you don't even get to meet for nine months, I've heard zero about protecting the undead. Instead of mooning over a petri dish, I'd think it would be more satisfying to bop over to Haiti and grab yourself a zombie. You could then bring an adopted zombie stateside for the photo-ops, just like Angelina Jolie and Brad. Surely the undead would be measurelessly grateful, since they work all the shit jobs in Haiti anyhow. But in America, you could get your zombie a job at the 7-11 and he'd work all three shifts without a murmur. None of the stunned regulars buying scratch-offs would see anything strange about the clerk. From my forays into 7-11's, I know I wouldn't. Of course, if the 7-11 bosses started working your zombie seven days a week and all three shifts, month after month, you'd have to say something. You know, stand up for the rights of the undead. On the other hand, he'd be a good little earner, your zombie, and how much money do the undead really need?

Lots to think about here. Maybe I could write a quick note to the RNC and suggest they stick an Undead-Rights plank into the platform. It's last minute I know, but hell, so was their pick for VP.