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