Daily Blague

As Kathleen is spending the day with her partners in "retreat," there was no time for a big breakfast, so I slept in. It was gloriously cozy, and I ought to have stayed in bed. Because when I got up and read the Times, my spirits hit an iceberg. Ordinarily I'm dismayed by the current regime, but distanced enough to hope that my countrymen will know whom to thank when it comes time to swallow their medicine, but occasionally I wonder if any conceivable medicine will cure what seems to me to be an approaching catastrophe (cherchez les dollars?), and then I get really upset. On top of that, it's very boring to sound like Chicken Little. Is the answer to avoid the Times?

¶ The deaths of Atlanta judge Rowland Barnes and several others is not a story about gun control, although I have heard of judges who have ordered their deputies to refrain from bearing firearms in court, precisely to avoid what happened on Friday. It is a story about human depravity, and as such not, perhaps, to be commented on very extensively, much as one might mourn a good jurist. But if race turns out not to have anything to do with this story - in the form of inferior everything for most blacks - I'll be surprised.

¶ Not wishing to sound like Chicken Little, I'll say nothing about this latest in a series of alarming editorials that, in my view, understate the problem. Oops, I almost goofed there.

¶ A story from Thursday's Times has been bothering me, and the falling-dollar editorial underscored it, for the biggest irony going these days is that America is responding to an era of untrammeled globalization with official isolationism. Adam Liptak reported that the United States has withdrawn from the protocol that would permit the International Court of Justice at The Hague to hear the claims of fifty-one Mexican nationals who claim that they were tried in American courts without the right to consult a Mexican consul. The Bush Administration has ordered local prosecutors to review and reconsider these claims in light of international law; the point of our withdrawal from the protocol is that we're going to do the policing and not let a foreign tribunal interfere. It has been pointed out that only thirty percent of signatories to the consular convention subscribe to the protocol, and that the United States is now with the majority. So much for our fine, shining example to the world.

¶ Peter C Whybrow has diagnosed the American public as emerging from a manic streak. As anybody ought to know, manic binges are usually followed not by periods of healthy good sense but by deep depressions, and it is really to stave off the inevitable that bipolar people push their mania further and further into unsustainability. There is also a nasty note to manic exuberance that, once you have heard it, makes it very easy to distinguish enthusiasm from something darker. And I realize that I have been hearing that nasty note for years now. Not from anyone to whom I’m close, but in interviews with ordinary people and with the tempo of the popular culture itself. There is also a mania in blogging, as I’ve discovered. Dr Whybrow claims that Americans are beset by a mania for the acquisition of goods and status that are supposed to take the place of personal relationships, so insofar as I’m really trying to connect with other people on my four sites, I don’t think that my efforts are a substitute for something else. But I’d be lying if I denied that I want to be more widely read and recognized than I am, and the suddenness of my ambition has almost unbalanced me.

Writing about American Mania in today's Times, Irene Lacher notes that the book has been criticized for failing to offer "solutions." Dr Whybrow quite rightly respond that the "solution" is for everyone do to what he or she can do to check the mania. Since this mania is caused not by malfunctioning neurotransmitters but by a toxic popular culture, one good idea might be to - yep - turn off the TV.