THE MACHINE

The government murder of Troy Davis this week -- under odd evidential circumstances -- has once again thrust capital punishment up for public discussion.

As my contribution to death penalty abolition, I recently wrote The Good Doctor Guillotin, a novel about the first use of the guillotine during the French Revolution --  an occasion sufficiently removed from current politics as to allow the issues to be seen more clearly.

Tobias Schmidt was the machine's builder, a piano maker. And Charles-Henri Sanson was the executioner of Paris.

The novel itself is intricately woven, but here's a stand-alone short chapter describing the testing of the machine before use. It may provide some food for reflection:

29. The Machine

It was fourteen feet high, its beams and posts painted blood-red—a nice touch, that. It would be called “End of the Soup,” “Old Growler,” “Sky Mother,” “the Last Mouthful.” It would be called by the feminine form of someone’s name, someone who had repudiated it. As if it were his daughter. Assemblymen called it “the Timbers of Justice.”

The victim, once attached to the plank, his head in the fatal window, would become a part of it, a cog in the machine of egalitarian justice. His blood would be shed not by the unsteady hand of his fellow man but by this lifeless, insensible, infallible instrument, a doctor’s idea become oak and iron.

The materials gathered, over the course of a week Tobias Schmidt and two hired workers constructed the frame. Two four-sided posts were grooved and chiseled as guides for the falling blade. When the seventy-pound holder and fifteen-pound blade came back from the blacksmith, they were fitted loosely between the posts and the posts joined by an upper crossbar with a hole for the rope. A lower crossbar was angle-braced to its stand for stability. Rope guides were placed.

On the back side of the device, the executioner’s side, another crossbar was attached to hold the lunette—two wooden pieces, each with a half-circular hole to contain the client’s, the patient’s, the package’s neck. The diameter was that of Pelletier’s. A smaller one for women could be substituted as needed. When fitted together, the pieces formed a lovely “little moon” whose upper half could be lifted on a hinge to permit a head to enter.

That was it. Simple. A weighted blade and its frame. Though it required two strong men to carry it, it could be loaded onto a heavy cart and transported wherever it was needed, along with its separate bench, long and strong enough to hold a giant—or an ox—and fitted with thick leather straps.


Before dawn on Tuesday, April 15, 1792, a sound of clattering wheels was heard on southern streets two miles from the center of Paris. It was a four-wheeled wagon, drawn by two horses, carrying a long object covered with heavy black cloth and tightly bound with chains. Four guardsmen with bare swords on horseback rode silently in front of the wagon, and four behind. Bringing up the rear was a smaller wagon with several sheep. If going to market, they were being taken in the wrong direction. They advanced slowly, gray and black in the pale early morning.

The procession was heading for the suburb of Bicêtre, just outside the city gate, home to the great hospital for venereal disease, its hospice for the needy poor, and its maison de correction, locked wards for hardened criminals, some awaiting execution.

When seen from a distance, Louis XIII’s building looks quite imposing. Set on the brow of a hill, from afar it retained something of its former splendor and the look of a royal residence. But now, three Louises later, the palace had in fact become a hovel. Its dilapidated eaves were shameful and its walls diseased. Not a window was glazed but only fitted with crisscrossed iron bars through which, here and there, pressed the harrowed face of a patient or a prisoner.

Already waiting in a small inner courtyard were Charles-Henri Sanson, with two assistants, Tobias Schmidt, and the doctors Antoine Louis and Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, the latter most reluctantly.

Early-morning eyes gawked from behind bars as the first sheep’s head was placed in the lunette, its neck the size of Pelletier’s. The upper half moon was locked in place. One of the assistants let loose the rope from its tie-off so Sanson could better observe.

Disaster: The heavy blade jerked stickily into motion, jolted downward between the grooves, and sliced into the animal without killing it. All mental ears were stopped against its terrifying cry. Sanson was dismayed. He had the blade wound back up and released again. It bit into the neck again but did not sever it. The victim howled. Once again the blade was raised and dropped, but the third stroke only caused a stream of blood to spurt from the sheep’s neck, without the head falling. Five times the blade rose and fell; five times it cut into the sheep, which cried five times for mercy. It remained standing on the platform, an appalling, terrifying sight. Sanson straddled it and hacked away with a butcher knife at what remained of its neck. Twenty pounds of lead shot were added to the blade-carrier, and three more sheep were neatly dispatched thereby. The march of science.

After nightfall Schmidt took the machine back to his workshop in the Cour du Commerce, Rue St.-André-des-Arts, just opposite the printing shop in number 8 where Marat’s paper was printed. He lined the grooves with brass for a smoother drop and bolted more weight to the blade assembly.

Two days later, on April 17, assisted by his son and his two brothers, Sanson repeated his experiments on the improved machine, this time with three human cadavers from a military morgue, three well-built men who had died in short illnesses that had not caused them to grow thin. Among the spectators were the two doctors concerned, along with Michel Cullerier, the chief surgeon of Bicêtre; Philippe Pinel, the resident alienist; several physician members of the National Assembly; and delegates from the Council of Hospitals of Paris. Strapped to the bench, the three corpses, good soldiers all, were successfully beheaded without protesting, to the applause of most of the onlookers.

I BET YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT A FOMITE IS

Heathglyph, our glyph

A fomite is a medium capable of transmitting infectious organisms from one individual to another. So, for instance, doctors are not supposed to wear ties as they lean over one patient and then another. Stethoscopes are fomites. Door handles.

It had always struck me that books were fomites, passing the germs of an author's mind to the reading community. And didn't Tolstoy say that
the activity of art is based on the capacity of people to be infected by the feelings of others"? He did.

In the last years, I'd been to several readings at which I'd thought, "Wow, that stuff is really good. It should be published." But of course it wouldn't be published. Why? Because it wasn't good in a bottom-line way. It wasn't good in an it's-by-a-well-known-writer-with-a-pushy-agent way. It wasn't good in a sexy beach-book way. It wasn't good in a "I was raped by my priest and survived cancer" way. It was simply good --terrific -- in a literary way.

After thinking enough times "that should be published," it struck me that my wife, Donna, and I should publish it. She and I had published for six years a monthly neighborhood newspaper, The Old North End RAG, and missed doing that. We had over the years been intrigued with the new print and production technologies evolving with home computers and networks, but while I was involved at the level of "Oh man, like wow!", she, the techy, was actually reading the specs and the on-line commentaries, and had a sense of how we might actually proceed. Plus a quilter's stick-to-itive-ness and commitment to detail.

Our old RAG cohort, Ron Jacobs, gave us one of his novel manuscripts to experiment with; we did the editing, design and production work on it, and uploaded it to a print-on-demand service to see what might come back. We feared the worst: some god-awful, do-it-yourself piece of crap we'd be embarrassed to have on our shelves.

But when we opened the envelope, there was -- a book, a book that looked like a real book, a beautiful book with a striking cover, one that someone might actually want to buy. We were actually shocked.

Let me explain "print-on-demand". In the old model, a publisher does a print run -- a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand books printed up -- depending on expectations and promotion budget. These books would then be stored in a warehouse, distributed to bookstores, sold to make up the money spent -- or not. The returns had to be dealt with, and were often just pulped if the book did not do as well as expected. Very expensive, and very wasteful of trees, gas, warehouse space, and therefore quite limiting as to what was published, i.e. only those books that stood a good chance of surviving the gauntlet: best-sellers, genre books of the moment. But not the kind of literary material I heard at the readings.

Print-on-demand, on the other hand, prints a book only after it is ordered and sold. No wasted trees, no warehouse rents, no truck gas. Someone orders a book, or ten, or a hundred, the file goes into the computer, and the printer prints, binds, and ships the copies. This has got to be the wave of the future on a shrinking planet, we thought.
And then there are e-books. You take a manuscript, format it correctly, upload it, and there it is, ready to be downloaded. No paper at all, everything cheap and instant.

These were the technologies with which we wanted to experiment. We thought, too, that we'd like to try another kind of "business" model, one where authors got everything and publishers just enough to survive to publish again. The old way: A paperback edition of one of my novels, for instance, sell a for $15. I get 75¢. (Bookstore pays publisher $7.50, author gets 10% of that sale.) Fomite, using volunteer labor, can give its authors 80% of net income, and take only 20% to cover costs of ISBN numbers, galleys, shipping, website rental, software, etc. If people want, they may actually make some money from their books.

It turns out we can make beautiful books and ebooks very cheaply. The problem remains: how to bring attention to them with essentially zero advertising budget. In union there is strength. A little strength. Each of Fomite's books are advertised in every other Fomite book. Every author brings his or her network to others, and can share review and reading sites. We try to keep Fomite authors in touch with one another for collective efforts, pooling resources for advertising or event participation, and utilizing each other's web skills as we enhance our own.

Donna, a quilter and photographer, is having a great time designing books and covers, and solving tech problems. She can separate Fomite work from her day job. For me, it's more difficult. My job is writing novels. And it's hard to write novels when you spend your days looking at other people's work on the screen. It's hard to say no. It's even harder to edit the work of other writers, especially good ones.

But I think we're doing a good thing, contributing to the writing community, and in some small way to the evolution of American culture. We intended to publish novels, short stories, and poetry which might not otherwise appear in the current publishing environment. Non-fiction, we thought, sells well enough without us, but I was open to something sufficiently strange, and now we've found it with a book called The Derivation of Cowboys and Indians. So I guess we now publish odd-enough non-fiction. And then we thought we'd see how graphics came out, so we are doing a volume of Bread & Puppet Kasper Komix and Tragix. That's way more than we had planned. We wanted to debut Fomite with six local authors. Now we have eighteen -- one from Bulgaria. We'll reopen for submissions at www.fomitepress.com once we catch up with ourselves.

NIEBELUNGENLIED 911

In a continuing email exchange about the future strategy of any kind of 9/11 truth movement, Charles Simpson alerts us to diverging uses of the idea of "myth" in an important on-line talk by David Ray Griffin. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXw3jJ3021o

Simpson notices that on the one hand, Griffin characterizes the official story as being intentionally raised -- by government and media -- to "mythic status", "mythic in the sense of an organizing narrative that defines collective identity, purpose and legitimacy." Such myth, both Simpson and Griffin observe, is not to be measured or refuted by empirical data, and is thus secure against any suggested investigation.

He criticizes Griffin for shifting ground from the "organizing narrative" definition of myth to a more trivial and colloquial one in which myth becomes simply "an empirically false account of events," and then proceeding in his lecture to disprove the official assertions with empirical data.

Consequently Simpson -- unlike Griffin -- concludes that the 9/11 truth movement should avoid its own version of scholasticism, "a too-narrow preoccupation with our own set of 9/11 facts", "a focus on forensic details" that "draws us in a cult-like direction away from others" -- since such details, such fact-checking, does not make sense or speak to a rhetorical/psychological public world beyond empirical analysis.

It seems to me that neither Simpson nor Griffin -- at least here -- have seized on the most important function of myth: not to hide, not to falsify, but to reveal. Any deep study of folk tales and parables show them to illuminate patterns so deeply built into experience as to be otherwise invisible.

Alberich wants to steal the gold from the bottom of the Rhine, and so do Cheney and Rubin and Obama and Geitner and Summers and...all of them, and the institutions behind them. But Wagner's Ring shows us much more than that people, politicians, and banks are greedy. In the 15-hour telling of the myth we come to perceive a web of interactions, the forswearing of love, the need to self-destruct, the relation of generations and lovers, bosses and slaves, the many questions raised by heroism... and much else. That is the difference between mere narrative and myth.

Seeing into myth involves audience awareness. Little children believe in the myth of Santa Claus, and then as bigger children, decide that the myth isn't true. But what do wiser adults make of myths, fairy- and folktales, biblical and other parables? They understand that these ancient story collections are not only not trivial, but are essential to a deeper understanding of the human and natural world. The dimensions of myth have to probed by those who understand it. That, it seems to me, is the function of the 9/11 truth movement -- not to move out beyond the "single-issue politics" of 9/11, but to responsibly explore the myth of it.

What does the 9/11 story collection, and the reactions to it, tell us about society and government, about science and Faustian striving, about individual and social psychology, about greed, love, fear, and heroism? The 9/11 mythos easily becomes a simultaneous focusing and broadening lens to see into these opacities.

But first we must understand these dimensions ourselves, master the empirical data and the rhetorical approaches, see ourselves as teachers of this story in its broadest and deepest context at levels appropriate to any given audience. Sometimes one can use empirical evidence to open well-guarded doors. Sometimes one has to start by discussing things at more personal or philosophical levels.

Right now the characters in our opera are predominantly the Alberichs of press and power, and a large population of in-the-darkness Niebelungen slaves, toiling underground and in the killing fields to fashion wealth for their dictators. By and large, Americans seem to believe much of what they're told about 9/11. Some largish percentage have been polled as not quite believing it -- but not enough to do anything other than become more cynical.

Our role is to move the Niebelungen above ground at least, cognizant of the possibilities and deeper meanings of this never-ending, no-limits story -- precisely by exploring the myth as myth, and bringing the underworlds into focus.

THE PISS OF ALTERITY

In an eloquent response to my 9/11 essay below, Charles Simpson, a sociologist friend, seems to be arguing for an end to the 9/11 truth movement. His letter is not online, and is too long to be quoted in full.  But let me respond here by quoting a few sections which may give you as sense of his points.

Charles points to the "roadblock" that has frustrated all 9/11 truth seekers, the "room without an echo", and calls for "the next move", a "way out", engaging instead with "broader social movements", "face-to-face localism", and "alternative ways forward in the construction of meaningful lives" which will more likely resonate with American tastes, understandings of the world, and current conditions.

The irony of his call to leave 9/11 issues behind is the pessimism behind his suggestion.  Charles argues that people do not "want to go there" (9/11) because of a deep survival instinct towards optimism.  According to him, most people choose to avoid "the pitfall of despondency" that might threaten should one come to a realistic understanding of power relations in the capitalist world.

I find his hypothesis, however, too deeply pessimistic. The implication is that facts don't matter to human survival, that assembling evidence about important issues, even evidence packaged in "easy-to-digest" formats, can be a socially meaningless act, readily trumped by shoddy cultural misdirection.

I am not claiming that cultivating local gardens is unimportant, given the immanence of large-scale catastrophes. What I mean is that to give up hope for the rational component of human existence, is simply to give up hope.

Jung maintained that human consciousness was capable of four distinct functions: thinking, feeling, judgement, and intuition. To flee from such truths as 9/11 research may uncover is to give up two, if not three, of those capacities. I don't see how such emptying out can advance our capacity for survival.

The 9/11 research movement (my preferred term) wants to keep insisting -- in the face of much resistance -- that facts matter, that humans can reason on the basis of evidence, can intuit further directions for investigation, and can make judgements based on what is found. It may be pissing in the current wind, but eventually, the world must begin to smell the illuminating piss of alterity.

9/11 TEN YEARS IN

The U.S. is now in six overt wars, droning, bombing, killing, starving people in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, and Libya -- all illegal.

Obama’s justifying rhetoric turns, as did all of Bush’s, on the constantly whupped-up justification of “9/11”:

"We did not ask for this fight. On September 11, 2001, nineteen men hijacked four airplanes and used them to murder nearly 3,000 people. They struck at our military and economic nerve centers. They took the lives of innocent men, women and children without regard to their faith or race or station. Were it not for the heroic actions of the passengers on board one of those flights, they could have also struck at one of the great symbols of our democracy in Washington, and killed many more.”

And so Obama needs 10K soldiers and “contractors” to fight the “less than 100 operatives” (Gen. James L. Jones, US National Security Advisor) left in Afghanistan, and their vague sporulations blooming worldwide. 9/11. The Global War on Terror. Or Obama’s “Kinetic Overseas Contingency Operations.” Not to mention secret prisons, justified torture and expanding surveillance in "the homeland".

Aside from the absurdity of proportion, the demonstrated ineffectiveness of the approach, and the barbaric “collateral damage” -- global and domestic -- accompanying it, the entire package is based on, justified by, and pitched via a most problematic “fact” -- the "official story" of 9/11, 19 Arab hijackers with boxcutters, etc.

Absolutely every one of the major and minor elements of this tale has been shown to be inconsistent with demonstrable physical events and surrounded with impossible and suspicious behavior.

After ten years of study, thousands of serious researchers in many technical areas can confidently assert the complete falsity of the "official story", along with slightly differing alternatives, diffuse along the edges, but solidly agreeing at the core: the "official story" is completely impossible, and a new, independent, supoena-empowered investigation must be conducted to examine the contradictions, and answer the questions raised by 9/11 truth groups: Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, Medical Professionals for..., Scholars for..., Physicists for..., Intelligence Professionals for..., Firefighters for..., Pilots for..., Political Leaders for..., Lawyers for..., Religious Leaders for..., Media Professionals for....

These are not "tin hats" "conspiracy nuts", or "crackpots" as culturally labeled. Google any of their websites, and see the facts and discussions enabled by their collective expertise. Vast amounts of material has been available online since the first explorations and organizations debuted eight or nine years ago.

And yet the same, tired, much-wounded story continues to justify the exercise of our killing machines, military and financial, around the globe -- including here at home where our own population is being starved of humane goods and services.

The 9/11-justified “war on terror” (by whatever fancy name Obama chooses to call it) remains the be-all and end-all of our secure existence -- all action based on a set of demonstrable, manipulated falsities. The media has enshrined the official story; any challenge to it -- at least in this country -- is off the table of the public mind.

PROGRESS IN RESEARCH

The earliest researchers simply noted the contradictions of story and fact:

-- Plane crashes leave wreckage. The one at the Pentagon left only a few scraps -- none related to a 757.
-- The initial hole in the outer wall of the  Pentagon was not large enough to accommodate a 757; the grass leading up to the wall was unscathed; windows were unbroken, and although the official story has the wreckage "vaporizing" because of the extreme heat (including the titanium steel engines that burn the fuel), neighboring rooms contained wooden desks and paper books -- unvaporized.
-- Steel frame buildings had never before collapsed from fires burning much more fiercely and longer than those in the twin towers. The collapses were at free-fall speed, demonstrating the removal of all supporting structures.
-- Building Seven, a 47-story office block, collapsed in the late afternoon without being hit by planes or demonstrating significant fires.
-- There were no bodies and no wreckage at all found at the purported site of the "Let's roll" heroic self-sacrifice crash of the Shanksville plane.
-- Cell phone calls describing the now-mythic events on board the hijacked airliners were not possible in 2001.

Beyond these prima-facie physical contradictions, quickly and easily noticed by any open eyes were a host of behavioral oddities:

-- the apparent stand-down of the NORAD air defense system, charged with scrambling fighters and protecting US air space.
-- the scrubbing of initial reports on all TV networks concerning explosions and demolitions.
-- the odd behavior of the president and the secret service at a grade school.
-- the immediate FBI confiscation of all videotapes from cameras inside and outside the Pentagon.
-- the BBC news report -- 20 minutes before it happened -- of the collapse of Building Seven.
-- the prompt illegal removal of all evidence from the crime scenes.
-- the flight-training history of the purported hijackers.
-- the resistance of the Bush administration to an official investigation.
-- the hand-holding, secret testimony of Bush and Cheney concerning the events of the day.
-- finally, the appointment of an investigatory commission run by an administration insider who chose what evidence would be presented and what excluded from the official report.

In The New Pearl Harbor (2004), David Ray Griffin listed the contradictions, and considered the implication that our own government was complict in the events of 9/11, and not a mere victim -- either of intelligence failures or incompetence. In a nuanced discussion of complicity, Griffin distinguished eight possible levels, from simply lying about events to maximize political effects, through intentionally allowing expected attacks, to actual involvement in planning them. At the time he did not make specific accusations, or even hypothesize a "true" version of what happened. But he did challenge people to undertake unflinching investigations of all the contradictions, with clear reporting of results, and most difficult, courageous drawing of conclusions, no matter how "unthinkable" or outrageous they may appear.

Over the next seven years, research communities responded: interested individuals and the professional organizations listed above brought their expertise to the problems. Structural forces, melting points, evidence of explosives, aerodynamics, photo and video forensics, witness testimonies, and many other angles were explored in detail, and all information made public online at the various sites.

But ten years and many Bush/Obamaogenic catastrophes later, people still refuse to confront the ever more abundant evidence.

Let’s take only the single most obvious strangeness: Building Seven collapsing without planes or significant fires. Curious? But somehow not so curious as to arouse curiosity. You’d think folks might get the hint that something was up.

However, talking with many news-aware friends over the years, I’ve found that very few had even heard of Building Seven. When I mentioned it was a classical example of a controlled demolition, I would almost always get exactly the same response:

Gesture: Elbows bent, both hands up to shoulder level, palms out. Followed by
Sentence: “I’m not going there.” One woman added: “I don’t want to live in a world where such a thing is possible.”

Any further talk of details got those hands moving, flapping outward from the shoulders, go away, “I really don’t want to go there.”

All those who have put many hours into reading books and scholarly papers, exploring photos and videos -- guess what…they’re all—all— nuts, crazies, lunatic fringe not worthy of media or political discussion. Cass Sunstein, Obama's Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, has written extensively about the need to "cognitively infiltrate" such truth groups, to interrupt and correct their false thinking. Even the prominent lefty analysist have refused to cover, much less feature, the results of so many person-hours of research, and all assume the official story to be true in their articles on blowback from the evils of American imperialism. They too just won't "go there."
What an enormous and pervasive need-not-to-know.

STUPIDY, FEAR AND GREED

Albert Einstein once noted that “Three great forces rule the world: stupidity, fear and greed.”  Interesting choice of qualities. Something non-intelligent certainly seems to be ruling the world. Einstein's trio may go partway toward explaining the need of not-knowing.

Stupidity? The grand narrative of American Realpolitik?  “Too complicated for me.”  When you put that sort of thing together with most people not knowing much about history, or geography, or math or science, it does add up to a semi-dysfunctional stupidity endemic in the population, annually measured and bewailed.

But as Chomsky points out, this is not native stupidity, but stupidity engineered by the system. People are plenty smart on the street, he observes, or concerning the statistics of sports. But intelligence about history or politics is not encouraged. “Best to trust the experts.” (Chomsky takes no blame for being one of the engineers of 9/11 stupidity.)

Fear. The fear factor is obvious, a major tactic of all authoritarian institutions, from elementary school to Guantanamo.  The more one knows, the more there is to be afraid of.  Like possible administration complicity in 9/11?  Best not to know.

Greed may be what drives it all.  Why is America afraid?  In large part because it has it and they want it.  Share equitably?  Forget it.  The best way to avoid guilt is not to know -- not to know other languages, international dynamics, the ecological state of affairs, who the criminals are. Not to know the misery greed creates. Our need not-to-know is urgent.

Ten years later, some people know a lot more. Most don't want to.

ROOSTING WITH THE GODS

I'm not sure if announcing the release of one's latest novel gets this post into the "shameless commerce division", but I do think people who like my writing may be interested.

When the Gods Come Home to Roost has just been published by Spuyten Duyvil, a wonderful small publisher that produces gorgeously made books. (They did my last one, Tsim-tsum.)

Here's the story:

When his 35-year old trophy girlfriend, Demi, dumps 65-year old George, a classicist at Berkeley, he decides to attempt to actualize some of the Greek and Roman myths he has been teaching for four decades, specifically the one in which Aphrodite transforms Phaon from an ugly old man into a beautiful youth.

He accepts the (mephistophelian) offer from a plastic surgeon in his UU congregation to turn him into a genuine 17-year old through a combination of surgery, hormonal therapy, nutritional therapy, psychotherapy and yogic practice. The rejuvenation succeeds, and for the acid test, George enrolls at The Putney School, the high school attended by Zoe, Demi’s daughter, a young woman he had raised to be the daughter he always wanted. They fall in love — as well they might, being so perfectly matched in worldview, frames of reference, and jokes.

The moral status of this relationship is challenging. George, after all, has been changed. He is really 17, not her erstwhile stepfather, but an appropriate, non-blood related, first lover. But maybe he’s not really 17. You get the issue. Lots of interesting classics and music stuff on the path. A plastic surgeon you wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley.

Gods was born in this wise:

The first seed was planted by a Harpers magazine article quite a few years back which struck me with its beautiful and alarming illustrations. It concerned a plastic surgeon who thought that medical ethics should not exclude individual patients' desires to express themselves through bodily transformation. Faustian striving and overreach has been a continual theme in my novels, and here was a great set of possibilities for crime and punishment. I tucked it away somewhere in my subconscious.

The next poke came a few years ago, when I was reading in bed, holding up a book, and noticed the skin on my arm was wrinkled. First time I had noticed. Geez, I'm getting old.

Putting those two together a year or so later, the story emerged of a guy getting old who meets up with a plastic surgeon ethically capable of anything -- and there you have it: Faustian striving, mephistophelian manipulation, and whatever consequences might result therefrom.

The most interesting thing, as always, is that novels never work out the way you think they're going to. Plots fulfill themselves, characters enter and exit unexpectedly, and tell you what to do. I am not the only writer who has experienced this. In my case, the unexpected banana peel was the happy end. Well, maybe not entirely happy, and certainly not securely happy, but happy–ish nevertheless.

I had always been a fervent fan of Marlow's Faust, and Thomas Mann's, as opposed to Goethe's. Why the hell should Faust get off so easy? Away to hell with him. A deal's a deal. No salvation for unknown causes.

And yet, here I have my Faust (George Helmstetter was the original Dr. Faust's real name) undertaking a deal with the devil, getting his unholy goodies, and walking off with his Gretchen into the sunset. Why can't I control these things?

The other interesting switcheroo was discovering that Mephistopheles himself has quite Faustian qualities, always striving for greater agency and control, his own demon being, perhaps, the once-innocent John Stuart Mill. You just never can tell.

I do finally have to say that the last thing on earth I, Marc Estrin, would want, is to do it (or anything) all over again.

Here's the book at Amazon. If you like it (or hate it) put up an Amazon review.

Thanks,

Marc

UP, UP, AND AWAY...

Though two summers away, an invitation by the mayor to discuss inviting another Burlington air show, "Wings Over Vermont", has elicited some interesting letters to the Burlington Free Press, the state's largest paper.

For those outside of Vermont who may not have seen a similar event, such an air show consists of  "a blend of high-performance military jets and much more sedate civilian aircraft, such as biplanes." As the Free Press notes without comment, "The sound impact of jets, generated by the likes of the Blue Angels and other precision flying teams, probably would fill up to two hours of the five-hour program."

In practice, the show takes place down at Lake Champlain during a crowded day with a July 4th atmosphere. For those not at the event, the cross-overs and low-altitude fly-arounds of the team of "high-performance military jets" is admittedly an auditory trial. Many people leave town while others just gripe.

The virtues or sins of the show are not my subject here. Rather, what interests me is the nature of some of the commentary from the supporters of the show addressing those against.

A most common notion among them is that American freedom to publicly express opinions have been made possible by the existence of the military.

"They are the reason why we all have the freedom to meet," wrote one. And another: "Your freedoms to express freely your 'opinions' have been protected and insured by generations of men and women who proudly served in the military." (The quotations marks around "opinions" are also interesting.)

To one letter writer, the sound of the jets is "the sound of freedom," and another asserts that true patriots are "not bothered by the sounds of the people who allow them to live their dream in freedom."

It seems to me, rather, that the freedom to form and speak our opinions and to freely assemble is not a military issue, but rather a basic gift of the U.S. constitution. If the military is functioning to protect those constitutional rights, you'd never know it as they serve to support administrations in hot pursuit of those rights, dead or alive.

For all the high- and low-tech wonders of flight (it still astounds me to see a huge plane take off), there is a disturbing leitmotif of jingoist war chants among some of the comments:

"There is no better sight in the world than one of those 'fast movers' streaking into the battle delivering their payload on top of the enemy," rhapsodizes one, the enemy, of course, being anyone upon whom a payload is dropped.  "Is it noisy? You bet," writes another. "Does it burn fossil fuel? It sure as heck does. Is it patriotic? You better well believe it."

Speaking against an anti-show writer, one letter predicts that "When the bad guys from across the pond attack again, he'll be grateful for our military, but it will be too late." Concerning his probable reference, 9/11, one may note that our jets -- for reasons still unclear -- were unable to scramble that day against four errant airliners clearly bent on destruction.

(This has been a week containing a rape by a power-driven, hyper-sexual world leader, and the postponed invitation by a Savior for meeting in the skies with his elect. It is hard for me to avoid sensing a relation of themes here. But I will leave such meta-interpretations to readers so disposed.")

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of these freedom-loving comments has been the depiction of those who oppose the air show: "Moonbats," they are, "whack jobs", "tree-hugging wing nuts" (these descriptors from different letters). What to do with them? "Progressives and liberals should be MADE to watch the air show. Maybe then they will pack up and leave."

And a warning: "If you don't stand behind our troops, PLEASE feel free to stand in front of them.

The vibes are chilling.