Ships in the Night

A hospital floor is the design opposite of a Starbucks, substituting glaring lights for recessed, white and pastel for earth tones, steel for wood, and people in uniforms for civilians. Yet, if you look beyond the giant machines and small flashing lights you will find the same hushed one-on-one conversations where something important is said, or the time is passed.

Sit quietly and watch for a while at the people in uniform and you will see a disconcertingly unsafe process of ships passing in the night. As each person rotates through the room, hospital doctor, specialist, HMO doc, nurse for pm, nurse for morning, tech for pm, tech for morning, small bits of information about the patients desires, needs, problems, treatment options, and adverse reactions are partially recorded, partially lost, partially shared through electronic medical records that are hardly read, as though the internet, by analogy, had consciousness.

And as anyone who has read NTSB accident reports knows, catastrophe comes from a series of small human errors, someone didn't know something, misunderstood something, relied on a common practice in exceptional circumstances, wasn't assertive enough because they weren't in charge... With all its technology a hospital floor lacks the most important human factor"needed for hard cases, someone careful, conscious and watching, like air traffic control at O'Hare, assigned to each patient.

The Cusp of Magic

Is there a piece more meditative and disturbed than "Fratres" by Arvo Part (b. 1935), a piece I think reflects the tragedy of Estonian occupations from WWII on? There are two versions, one a series of long chords, and one with a searing solo line, both with many arrangements. For the meditative version try the Kronos Quartet, for the disturbed version try Sandor Falvai/Tibor Parkanyi (piano/cello) or Keith Jarrett/Gidon Kremer (piano/violin). It's one of three important pieces Part wrote around 1977, Tabula Rasa, Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten, and Fratres.

Ok, maybe it's not as disturbing as the creepy Emily and Alice by Terry Riley from the Cusp of Magic. But there's nothing meditative about that. But what do we mean by disturbing? How about a Brahms Quartet?

Hims

Fenced in yards and hearts,
Waiting for a dog.

For DFW: Raccoon Pandemonium

Imagine a grey haired middle aged bourgeois lobbyist full of wise saws and armed with a red rapid fire Super Soaker Flash Fire who, a day of vexing memos and meetings behind him, is confronting two presumptious raccoons peering in at the living room window from a ripe fig tree while his hysterical pillow-sized pugnacious bichon frise (ft. literally “curly lap dog”) stands on its back feet barking with all its might and, contrary to urbanite animal philosophy, fires away and inundates the raccoons who beat a hasty but tactical retreat and then, since the dog won’t stop barking, considers giving the dog a spout, but backs off, realizing that only Sara Palin and Dick Cheney would take out the raccoons, their own pets, Harry Whittington, the caribou, voters without photo ID and the Iranians, all without regret.

Have the R's been kidding us all along?

So we need to violate human rights at home and abroad, spend trillions on defense, and fight an absurd war in Iraq ostensibly to protect national security in a dangerous post-9/11 world? But when John McCain chooses a potential successor, he picks a short-term governor of Alaska who is not sure what the Vice President does? Doctor Drivel humbly suggests that if we are secure enough to go along with the latter course, it is finally time to abandon the former.

Does your dog bite?

Does your dog bite is a important question made famous by Peter Sellers (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXn2QVipK2o ), and one that preoccupied me for decades after being bitten as a five year old while riding a tricycle. The dog and I locked eyes from across a street, he was on a high porch of a row house, and I was immediately off down the sidewalk toward home. He caught me just as I entered 15th and Buchanan, and I tumbled into the street. I see a group of people standing around me as I stare up into the sky.

This doesn't mean that I became indiscriminately anti-dog, I became very discriminately pro-dog. "Anti" the dogs that bark mindlessly at children on Halloween "because their owners are too cowardly to do it themselves," and "pro" the dogs who are friendly, well-mannered, at times amusing, and with interests of their own. In this category I would put my childhood friend's dog Sable, a german shepherd as well as, let me think...

So today is a big day. At the insistence of J (eighth grade), and despite a string of demanding and weird questions I asked the shelter staff, a little Bichon Frise-like dog is entering the house. At this point I will enter that huge society of dog owners who, like those who served in the military or went to law school, form some kind of non-obvious fraternity/sorority out in the civilian world, denying that their dogs bite, barking at them to be quiet.

Was Cheney duped into invading Iraq?

Did Iranian intelligence services, using Mr. Chalabi, dupe Mr. Cheney and the neocons into attacking Iraq? http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/may/25/usa.iraq10 ? This is quite possible and pretty much ignored by the press, but not my favorite theory for the war in Iraq. More plausible was a desire by U.S. bureaucratic and economic interests to show that conventional armies and weapons are still important, when 9/11 showed that intelligence and the ability to mount small-scale operations against small pockets of criminal elements (currently officially described as terrorists in a war on terror) is what really matters.

Speaking (up)

Two reflections:

A story from the retirement party yeserday: A man dies and goes to heaven. Saint Peter asks him at the gate, show me your scars. The man has no scars and Peter asks, "was there nothing on earth worth fighting for?"

An excerpt from Garcia Lorca used in "Ancient Voices of Children."

The little boy was looking for his voice.
(The king of the crickets had it.)
In a drop of water
the little boy was looking for his voice.

I do not want it for speaking with;
I will make a ring of it
so that he may wear my silence
on his little finger.

In a drop of water
the little boy was looking for his voice.

Old School

Went to two retirements yesterday, both long time labor leaders, both with an old school commitment to treat everyone cordially and respectfully regardless of their station in life, regardless of the time it took. Reminded me of my father, who could turn a short walk to the store into a long social outing. I recall the loss of Old School being vividly described in an Updike story called "the Gun Shop," read a long time ago, but I remember the modern urban father at the shop for a repair on a trip, unable to carry on a conversation with the owner, at a loss for words.

August 4--judgment day --"excellent and fair"

and one thing we do know transcendentally is that assailants, bullies, abusers, predators, thugs appear in every corner of the messy world, in every system of government, in every time in history and hence should be brought to justice, without some Foucaultian pale cast of thought, in every corner of the world, in every system, at all times

Doc Drivel -- Idealist

Doc Drivel realizes, watching Gone Baby Gone, that an intersection with religion has left him forever idealistic and Manichaean, trying to impose a framework of good and evil on a messy world. He is also idealist in a Kantian sense, the messy world only exists as a result of the framework of the mind., and would blink out of of existence if we did. Whether the universe exists out of my mind, its mind, or His mind, we do agree that, as Dr. King said, the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

Doctor Drivel's favorite movie quote

From the Year of Living Dangerously

BILLY And the people asked him, saying, What shall we do then?

GUY What's that?

BILLY It's from Luke, chapter three, verse ten. What then must we do? Tolstoy asked the same question. He wrote a book with that title. He got so upset about the poverty in Moscow that he went one night into the poorest section and just gave away all his money. You could do that now. Five American dollars would be a fortune to one of these people.

GUY Wouldn't do any good, just be a drop in the ocean.

BILLY Ahh, that's the same conclusion Tolstoy came to, I disagree.

GUY Oh, what's your solution?

BILLY Well, I support the view that you just don't think about the major issues. You do whatever you can about the misery that's in front of you. Add your light to the sum of light. You think that's naive, don't you?

GUY Yep.

BILLY It's alright, most journalists do.

GUY We can't afford to get involved.

BILLY Typical journo's answer.

Registering a rifle

Recently brought B's inherited Winchester 22 rifle (Model 67a) into DC when I noticed in one of the briefs in the Supreme Court handgun case that rifles have been allowed all along. Some hoops I just went through to register it (trying to get in before the handgun rush) included:

1) bringing a signed affidavit that, among other things, I haven't been convicted of being a prostitute, abrogating strikers, or running a bawdy house
2) paying $48
3) being fingerprinted extensively
4) producing a passport size photo
5) taking a test and most exciting of all

(drum roll)

6) bringing the rifle today into DC police headquarters at 300 Indiana following their advice to have a family member stay double-parked outside (so I don't have to walk far with it) while I carried it in

To lower the troubling risk of being misinterepreted as a threat, I focused carefully on clothes, wearing a wrinkled white "polo" shirt with khaki shorts, along with beat up Nike tennis shoes, so I looked like just another sporting, shlepping boomer carrying heat.

The initial response at the 300 Indiana metal detector was more interpretative than anything, as if I was a sort of oversized rorschach inkblot. "He can't bring that in here." "No that's handguns you can't bring in.." "Wait a minute." "Let me call someone." "Why don't you give that to us." "We're getting you an escort." All the while I follow my main lesson from my 30 minutes of FBI training 25 years ago, "don't move."

And in less than five minutes I was escorted upstairs to gun registration, where they helped me out with great friendliness and enthusiasm, though with some bemusement, I think, at my handwriting, the lack of a serial number on the rifle, my suggestion that the gun was an antique, and my inability to describe what I might use the gun for. "Shooting varmints? " one officer asked. "Write down that you plan to keep it unloaded and locked in your room," advised another.
As I strolled outside to the car only a half hour later the brilliant Washington summer sun glared at everyone, but I smiled and carried my rifle nonchalantly, as though I did it every day.

The Social Sciences: As Perceived by a Philosophy Major

Alasdair MacIntyre critiques the social sciences in After Virtue; among other faults, they can't seem to predict anything. Another flaw...or virtue: the ideas in a social science tome can be, and usually are, adequately summarized on the jacket, often making the book itself superfluous.

What is the still point?

In his first post, Dr. Drivel is trying to figure out whether Eliot is talking about:

a) the North Pole (depth, 13980 feet)
b) Martha Graham
c) problems at the intersection of the mind and the noumenal world when it comes to Time (Kant)
c) Zen
d) a car without gas in front of a night club

Burnt Norton

"At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.