11.11 11:00

In Flanders Fields

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

— Lt.-Col. John McCrae

Morning

Move On Up

[Update: here now.]

The Wire vs. The Wire

Here is a transcript of the date scene, set at Georgia Brown's ("Slapstick," Episode 9 in Season 3):

McNulty: "That’s good food. How’d you know about this place?"

Terry D'Agostino: "It was big when Clinton was in. This and the Red Sage. Now it’s all steakhouses and cigar bars."

"So you live here, but you spend a lot of time in Baltimore, right?"

"I have work up there. And the alumni stuff with St. Mary’s on the Hill. I went to UM Law, so I still have connections there, too. Actually, I grew up in Homeland."

"Yeah?"

[D'Agostino nods head]

McNulty: "Lauraville for me."

"Where’d you go to college?"

"Loyola. Only one year. My girlfriend go pregnant, so…"

"So?"

"So, uh…"

"So you became a cop in Baltimore. How’s that working for you?"

"It’s pretty good. You know, I do a lot of high-end drug stuff. Wiretaps. Prolonged investigations of violent offenders, that kind of stuff. Fact is, there’s not a lot of guys in the department do that kind of thing, you know, it takes a certain…I don’t know, you gotta love it. Thrill of the chase and all that."

McNulty: "So you do what in politics?"

"I do political campaigns."

"You mean like a campaign manager?"

"More of a strategist really. Not so much the day-to-day stuff but the strategy of how a candidate can win. A consultant…of sorts."

"You strategizing for anyone in Baltimore?"

"I shouldn’t say. I mean, he hasn’t officially announced anything yet."

"He any good?"

"Hey, if you’re for him I’ll throw the guy a vote. What the hell."

"Who’d you vote for this time?"

"What, you mean Bush and what’s-his-name?"

"Kerry."

"You didn’t vote for president?"

"I thought about it, yeah, and, you know…Bush seemed way over his head, I know, but he wasn’t gonna win in Maryland, anyhow. Besides, these guys? It doesn’t matter who you got. None of them has a clue what’s really going on. I mean, where I’m working every day? The only way any of these guys is even gonna find West Baltimore is if, I dunno, Air Force One crash-lands into Monroe Street on its way back to Andrews. It just never connects. Not to what I see, anyway."

[D'Agostino looks uncomfortable, starts playing with her food with her fork…long pause]

McNulty: "Hey, that’s just me, though."

[D'Agostino turns head slightly in McNulty’s direction, but doesn’t look at him. Very awkward silence.]

The Chicago Way

Election time was nearing and a Negro Republican precinct captain asked me to help him round up votes. I had no interest in the candidates, but I needed the money. I went from door to door with the precinct captain and discovered that the whole business was one long process of bribery, that people voted for three dollars, for the right to continue their illicit trade in sex or alcohol. On election day I went into the polling booth and drew the curtain behind me and unfolded my ballots. As I stood there the sordid implications of politics flushed through my mind. “Big Bill” Thompson headed the local Republican machine and I knew that he was using the Negro vote to control the city hall; in turn, he was engaged in vast political deals of which the Negro voters, political innocents, had no notion. With my pencil I wrote in a determined scrawl across the face of the ballots:

I Protest This Fraud

I knew that my gesture was futile. But I wanted somebody to know that out of that vast sea of ignorance in the Black Belt there was at least one person who knew the game for what it was. I collected my ten dollars and went home.

--Black Boy, p. 298

Religious Tastes

Today I read:

[I]t seems to me that antiquity's religion is a far better proxy for reality as we know it than many of the other religious fictions I've encountered. To be sure, I don't believe in the Greek gods, but it seems to me that belief in the Greek gods and all they entailed would be far more conducive to happiness than the alternatives.

Today I read (xii):

Buddhist cosmology anticipated what contemporary science has recently discovered. The parallels are impressive. Astronomical time and space, which irrevocably smashed the West's previous worldview, slip into the folds of Buddhist cosmology without a ripple. If we turn from macrocosm to microcosm, from the infinite to the infinitesimal, we find the same uncanny prescience. While the Greeks were positing atoms that were eternal because not composite (a-tomas--indivisible, that which cannot be cut), Buddhists were teaching that everything corporeal is impermanent (anicca) because constituted of dharmas as minuscule in duration as they are in space--remarkably like the fleeting blips that particles register on the scientists' oscilloscopes.

(And, just before that, somebody named Lynn White was quoted, saying: "It may well be that the publication of D. T. Suzuki's first Essays in Zen Buddhism in 1927 will seem in future generations as great an intellectual event as William of Moerbeke's Latin translations of Aristotle in the thirteenth century or Marsiglio Ficino's of Plato in the fifteenth.")

"in which what is normally forbidden is briefly permissible"

Hans Magnus Enzensberger:

In most democratic countries the campaign season is the time when the gray routine of party politics is transformed into public theater. An election is an exhibition bout, a carnival, a purification rite--a kind of football championship of rhetoric in which pent-up aggressions and suppressed emotions surface. It's an outlet for the frustrations, defeats, and disappointments of everyday politics. And especially when nations feel that their future might be at stake, the election is like a destructive potlach, a national brawl in which what normally is forbidden is briefly permissible: open rivalry, ruthless polarization, the eruption of hatred, dissatisfaction, and ill will.

That's from "Swedish Autumn," in Europe, Europe (p. 4).

Except in the United States of the first decade of our shiny new millennium, "open rivalry, ruthless polarization, the eruption of hatred, dissatisfaction, and ill will" never seems to dissipate. Perhaps it's a function of the permanent campaign. I moved to this country in 2004, so I've lived here now through two elections and the whole space in between, and that's all there ever is, it seems. It was different on my first visit after 9/11, in November of that year. When did things change?

I know enough about Obama not to be particularly hopeful about the conduct of his administration over the next 4 or 8 years, though a McCain administration would almost certainly turn out worse. But at least one can still hope that, with an Obama victory, one's friends and neighbors from the metroprovincial "urban archipelago" and the university towns will recover their sanity, at least for a little while. Even if, up top, the "open rivalry" and "ruthless polarization" continue unabated among the competing factions of the American power elite.