I was gratified that some alert readers inquired as to my health, due to the absence of the Daily Blather the last couple days. I have to confess that all the crazy stuff going on has driven young Mr. Socotra underground, and provoked a serious off-line discussion with other tellers-of-tales.
It is a challenge. Life is imposing some remarkable changes on my personal circumstances- some good, some not so, but all of them different. Meanwhile the blizzard of the bizarre freak-show our society has become continues. I should worry more about Egypt and Syria, since everything we have tired to do in foreign policy seems to have exploded like a trick cigar.
I am trying to follow the Zimmerman case- I don’t know why- since as a matter of law, it appears that this has devolved into nothing more than a show-trial about guns and race relations, neither of which have a great deal to do with what happened that night. I saw this morning there were more fireworks yesterday from the bench, as the Defense continued its efforts to get Mr. Martin’s twitter feed introduced into the record. The proceedings went until ten at night.
And how does one regard the shenanigans regarding the un-Affordable Care Act? This law is so fundamentally flawed that by the time the cities have offloaded the failed contractual obligations to the public sector unions onto the general public through the mechanism of the Federally guaranteed Health Exchanges, there will be no going back.
The delay of the Employer Mandate- unworkable at the moment- was the subject of an article in the Times about the impact on a restaurant in Ellicott City, Maryland. The owner candidly said the “50 employee” threshold meant that his business decision was more about whether to stay open rather than growing. His business could not stand the increase in costs if he hired more people.
Unintended consequences? Or was it intentional, and so breathtakingly cynical that the train wreck is intended to force the nation into a single- payer system like Great Britain? Since everything the Government says is either a half-truth or an outright lie, you can’t blame folks for wondering out loud.
That loss of trust directly feeds the stream of controversy over the nature of communications meta-data and the Star Chamber proceedings of the FISA court. My cohort of retired Spooks continues to rage, pro and con, about what has been revealed. The factoid I internalized this morning was that the Supreme Court ruling that the “externals” of messages and phone calls are not protected, constitutionally, is thirty years old.
The idea that the Government could do what it is doing would be simply unimaginable to those jurists. It would have been beyond science fiction that the State would be able to take a picture of every envelope carried by the US Mail, register the location, origin and destination of all phone calls, and copy the whole Internet daily.
The situation is mind boggling enough now, much less in a pre-internet world. Another unintended consequence that will be exceptionally hard to walk back from- if we even really wish to do so.
What is privacy? A significant component of the population does not appear to care. What is to be done? Where are we going?
I dunno. As you have noticed, I am reduced to writing stories about talking animals and the delights of the blue sky and the rich luster of the green leaves.
I was having a conversation about that with my Cajun pal, Boats. He recently fled from his most recent career to take refuge down on the Bayou, and has a little more time to scribble now that he is semi-retired.
I find myself in the same position, and due to my dilemma about how to handle the decline and fall of the West, we got to talking about the nature of The Narrative and how we each told our stories.
I had grand plans to be a writer when I was a kid- and when I left my first grown-up job with the publishing house on the Avenue of the Americas in New York City, I thought I would sit down and write the Great American Novel.
Hahaha. Came up dry on that, and realized I had to go live some life to write anything relevant about it. I found that life was crazy enough, and the places I went exotic enough that the stories essentially told themselves, and I did not have a great deal to do with the process. Boats came up a different way.
He put it this way: “I really I don’t make my stories up. My College Creative writing instructor, Mrs. Green, thought that I was some salt-water version of Mark Twain and put me up for honors English. But really I was 24 in that class and had served in the Navy and Coast Guard since I was 17.”
“I grew up in south Louisiana and was an accomplished fisherman, fur trapper, and poacher between the years of 11 and 16. There was no real competition from my middle class WASP 18-and-19 year old classmates who were on their first year or two way from home.”
“That sums me up, Boats,” I said.
“Even Mrs. Green was only 27 and you can figure that her life was college, then a parent-sponsored Master’s, getting a first teaching job, and then marrying a fellow academic.”
“That is pretty thin gruel for a Great American Novel,” I responded cautiously.
“By contrast, I was an up from the bayou, up from the foc’sle, and I had genuine wheel -turning, whistle-tooting, paint slinging, knotting and splicing, mount captaining, boarding-team-leading BM-1 experience. I just wrote real sea stories as I remembered them, and told them the same way.” He looked up at the ceiling, imagining that long-ago classroom.
“No plot outlines, no character profiles, no real character development. I don’t want the actual name of the ship or the company getting out and while I’m pretty sure most of my shipmates were long dead I didn’t want to use their real names. But that’s as close to fiction as I ever really get.”
“Yeah, ‘bout the same here. I may improve some of the dialogue, but I am not sure I even do that.”
“What’s truly brilliant are those writers who can create memorable characters from whole cloth. I just meet ’em and describe ’em. Really I had to go to college, and do a stint inside a law firm before I began to see my world as others might perceive it, to me its was just the world. I still live with more than one foot in it.”
“You got that right, Boats. Nail hammered on the head.”
Boats turned a little pensive. “Another old pilot named Mark Twain said it like this:
“…the lie as a virtue, a principle, is eternal, the lie as a recreation, a solace, a refuge in time of need , the fourth Grace, the tenth muse, man’s best and surest friend is immortal”
“Well,” I said. “If I’m lying I’m dyin’.”
Boats nodded. “Let me tell you about a guy I used to know. I will call him The Judge…”
“For reasons that will become obvious, I’m sure” I said. “I hope he doesn’t have anything to do with the Zimmerman trial. But that will have to be tomorrow morning, won’t it?”
Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com