STAR WARS SPOILER: GEORGE LUCAS CAUSED THE WAR ON TERROR. AND EVERYTHING ELSE.

In retrospect, George Lucas was John the Baptist to Ronald Reagan's Jeebus. Whatever its provenance, the retroactively but perfectly named "A New Hope" could not have been calculated as a more effective salve to stop its audience scratching at the memories of the pictures of the people on fire, the people shot point-blank in the head, entire families and entire villages burned and murdered—by Americans. By white hat-wearing Gary Coopers with fucking napalm. For having the audacity to live in a place whose leaders went communist.

HOORAY! shouted the collective American subconscious on 19770525: Real good guys fighting real bad guys! Poof! the moral ambiguities of the Vietnam War evaporated like a dream on waking. Thanks to the perfect good-and-evil simplicity of the Star Wars-fronted political zeitgeist, by the time Mr. Reagan was caught covertly rewarding Iran for getting him elected, America's rash was not only healed but immune to relapse. What fuddled the American war machine anaphylactic in the 1960s and early '70s would never again give us pause. Episode III contains a telling—and appalling—moment early on in which Obi-Wan and Anakin share a smart-ass Hollywood zinger and a hearty chuckle just as their high-flying action sequence causes collateral civilian damage. Fuck 'em: they didn't even get name billing. Just like those two million dead gooks.

And I'll say this again: That moral absolutism, that fundamentalist Amurka is right by definition mentality, is propped up by the Force. Back in the day, savants noted that Lucas was cashing in on the defection in record numbers of Americans from their organized dogma-saddled churches into the squishy realm of "personal spirituality". The Force deftly avoided all the objectionable aspects of "God" (largely his schizoid personality); and it sidestepped the unsolvable question of how a benevolent god could countenance such a sustained fortissimo of evil in the world. No consciousness, no remorse or glee, just an undiscovered law of physics that happens to favor... I dunno, pretty people? People who wear earth-tones? No, I know, I'm kidding; we all know precisely what the Force favors: Amurka! Freedom! Human rights! (well uh some of them anyway). This! The Force loves my Ford truck!

Egoless and unaccountable but still absolute—basically "karma" in chivalry drag—the Force is the perfect modern religion. It still allows for—indeed, it insists on—immediate cranial access to omniscience. A scant hour into the filmic literature we are shown, beyond any reasonable doubt, that the Force exists: Luke effectively defends himself against a floating remote droid without the aid of his vision—a trick that sets up his climactic Death Star-destroying shot an hour later. That's it, Luke! Trust your feelings!

Whatever in the highwire fuck. Trust your feelings? Trust your fucking feelings?! Could there by a more irresponsible sentiment to aphorize? Trust your feelings means "[Insert your cause here] is right. Its army is right. I am right. I am doing the right thing. I am killing the right people." Granted, Ep. VII opens with someone thinking outside that constraint and defecting from stormtroopery, but c'mon: he WAS on the wrong side and he was only trusting his feelings which he got from the Force! Just as organized forms of religion have always done, the Force makes morality and moral behavior tautological: "The higher intelligence to which I have immediate brainwave access says x is right and y is wrong; and in ambiguous situations, the higher intelligence will guide me and I will do right because righty-right-rightness is right right right!" Right?

I cannot speak to any possible alternate present-day. Absent the Star Wars behemoth some other fundamentalism-abetting formulation would doubtless have presented in some other blockbusta. And I cannot say what goes through the head of somebody who, say, bombs an abortion clinic. I think it's safe to say nobody who does such a thing does so because they believe the fucking Force is strong with them. But it's much the same thing. What I am saying is that "God" and "the Force" are first cousins. Their activity in human brains works in precisely the same way. And if we live in a world (and we do) where even secularism is drenched in magical thinking and fantasies of moral certitude (courtesy of our popular entertainments) they ain't no way the genocidal, prepuce-collecting god of Abraham is waiting behind any velvet ropes. Or police tape.

Late in the narrative...

... we have a scene that tries to swing the sort of molto stretto feeling achieved by Goodfellas right about the time "Memo from Turner" starts to play, all black-'copter paranoia and cokesweat—but on a much tamer and more legal scale: Chick and Ellen have a new recreational vehicle to which they've just applied to coat of some kind of protectant—not quite paint, not quite plastic, but water-resistant and somehow aggressively beige. Bright beige, if there is such a thing. Krazy Khaki. Day-Glo mlin. And the clock is ticking because for ill-disclosed reasons they need to get the vehicle to Richmond by a certain time, and that time is just under an hour from now and we're a good 30 minutes away and it's raining.

Ah, never mind: that ticking clock scenario is old and tired and there are other narrative threads to explore. Besides, if you can't come up with a tangible reason for going to Richmond...

So Ellen, Chick, and I prep the vehicle—which, it becomes clear, is sometimes a boat—for a more dalliant sally, or perhaps salient dally. Prep happens in the manner of a camping "pop-up": the roof, shaped a bit like an ice cream truck roof, though larger and, did I mention, aggressively beige, is raised on high, and we get inside. It's bigger on the inside. There's a queen-sized bed in the main compartment, and we need to set it up as bunk beds, which is actually fairly easy since the headboard includes an electric forklift contraption that raises a platform for the second box spring and mattress. The upper berth is mine. There's a strange glass plate in the stack of bedding, rectangular and lipped, like a bed-sized microwave plate, from days before build-in carousels. I say, We should stow this; and Mom (oh, yeah, Mom is there now) asks Why? and I say Because I don't see any reason it should be part of the bedding. And we put the glass plate in the back of the closet—which is now Nanny and Poppop's bedroom closet in their trailer—and I put the box spring and mattress up on the fork and my bed is magically already made.

Once we get the RV on the road, there's this guy hanging around who is at least attempting to socialize with Chick but is also possibly attempting to interview him for more structured journalistic purposes. Chick is having none of that. He's terse and brusque and retiring. The journalist makes the most of it, speaking aloud, framing his documentary story elsewhere so Chick seems never to have been his focus but just a random encounter. While he speaks he paints various parts of the boat. Chick is having none of that, nor, and paints them over a different color. It seems to me this is vaguely about Ireland in a green-and-orange way, but neither of the colors they apply is green or orange. I think it's black and red. At least the whole damn thing isn't so fucking beige anymore.

In what must be a flashback I am hurrying through the refrigerated section of a supermarket—and it is not my first time through this supermarket on the same errand, to lade in supplies for the RV trip. I pass a very sparse display with a few boxes of Cap'n Crunch, all askew from customer handling. It is the only breakfast cereal in the whole store—I am reminded there is a cereal shortage and I wonder whether I can afford the time to drive to a different grocery—or maybe a pyramid, offers Ben Carson—where my luck might be better.

And then I realize I have a lit cigarette in my hand. How the hell do I have a lit cigarette in my hand? Did I just forget I had one lit upon entering? That's very, very strange: it is not 1970. But of course I wish to dispose of it quickly and as unobtrusively as possible. For some reason it never occurs to me to throw it on the floor right where I am and stamp it out; I guess I'm looking, with increasing panic, for an ashtray or -bin. Maybealso I don't want anyone to actually see that I have a lit cigarette, and if I stamped it out they would see and I would be arrested. It doesn't help that the store is very crowded, so as I head to the front left corner of the store, where the customer service counter is, I'm maneuvering through closer and closer batches of humans, all the while bobbling a still-lit cigarette in my hands like a particularly hot potato.

And somehow I end up putting it on the floor anyway, and the spot I pick is disastrous: it is one foot away from an infant whose mother is on the floor as well, keeping her baby entertained while the line she's waiting in goes nowhere. And while I smoosh the burning cigarette with my shoe I cannot seem to extinguish it: indeed, new embers keep cropping up, five, ten seconds later, and inches closer to the baby! The mother keeps her child (who's maybe a year old) safely away from the residual fire, saying, "Let's stay away from those golden pearls!" but the baby is clearly interested. Don't start smoking, baby!

And I'm on the floor, extremely close to these people, feeling like the biggest asshole in the world. It was all accidental; I had no intention of; I'm usually a very courteous smoker! Nope: biggest asshole.

Somehow, though, I get a mulligan. The entire supermarket scene replays, and at the end of it I manage not only to get the cigarette out more efficiently, I somehow charm and quip my way through the villainy of having tried to light a baby human on fire—I watch myself ingratiate myself to the young mother with smiles and self-deprecation and wordplay. (I am at least part Noah Wyle here, in a fetching blue shirt.) I ask about the little girl, but mom says it's a little boy. At the end of the scene mom kisses her son's cheek, and I lean over and kiss him, too. We're still all on the supermarket floor.

Several years later and this same child is now mine, or at least in my care. It is bedtime and we are having supermarket stories. "Did you really used to shoplift?" he asks me.

—All the time, I tell him. Back when I lived in Delaware I stole packs of cigarettes from the Pathmark. (I omit to tell him about the more elaborate bouts of boosting and the occasional fraud.)
—Really, all the time?
—Well, I don't know. Maybe it was just a few times. I think every time I went, I was more and more afraid that this was the time I'd get fingered for the heist.
—Fingered. (Ah, we're playing the thesaurus game! This is a reliable precursor to sleep. He'll tell me when I've reached an acceptable word; if he doesn't, he's sailed off.)
—Picked up by the police. Caught. Arrested. Nabbed. Pinched.
—Nabbed.

I thought sure he'd go for "pinched"; and my mind does a tailspin on the workings of his mind: Is his brain doing a sort of routine statistical normalization, trying to adjust for the possibility that its positive response to "pinched" was artificially heightened by its coming right after "nabbed" which brain also liked?

—Ok. Nabbed for the heist.
—Heist.
—Theft. Lift job. Caper. (I flash on "I got pinched mid-caper" and then I really want to amuse him with "I shall pinch your caper and tickle your olives" but this is possibly too Dada for him. And then, brain stalls, moves on to verbs.) Steal. Boost. Promote. Nick.
—Nick.
—Perfect. I was afraid it was my turn to be nabbed in the nick. Or nabbed mid-nick.

And my brilliant sleepy boy says: I wanna be Nabs McNick for Halloween. Make me a costume.

The New Shkrelism

This screed was occasioned by a friend's FB status, but the further rhetoric it responds to cannot be attributed to that friend; I'm engaging an imagined (though very real in innumerable Amurkin iterations) combatant. Anyway, the prompt read thus:

"I looked at the Pharma hyper-prices as a Medicaid/insurance scam that backfired. / If everybody is insured and nobody can be dropped for a condition then after the deductible is met the sky is the limit on what to charge, a company or the gov't will pay it (thats the strategy anyway)... / Not agreeing with this strategy at all, would be fine seeing the execs shot but I expect a lot more (though not as obvious/expensive) such business models to come!"

Yes. Unfortunately Capital (and its thronging legion of carefully under-educated, underpaid stooges—see also Maleficent's minions) is perfectly happy with any scenario that provides even easier access to your tax dollars. Pharma and the rest of Health Care have been eyeballing their share greedily for the last half-century as Armaments and Warmaking proved themselves infallibly spill-free (well, except for all that blood) siphons of the American wallet.

But as much as Pharma loves its new easier access to our tax dollars, they would much rather take a step back—after all, Medicaid/Medicare and other federal assistance programs are just that same half-century old themselves—than a step forward to a single-payer system. So here's the part where Capital screams itself hoarse about how this and similar "failures of Obamacare" prove socialist solutions don't work—yes, you heard that right: uber-Capitalist creosote stain Martin Fucking Shkreli proves that socialism doesn't work—and so we need to go back to the Great American Bootstrap where Ronald Reagan lent you a chicken to pay your doctor.

The problem isn't government assistance. The problem is insurance. We grew up being taught to accept the whole concept of insurance as benign if not outright beneficent. "It takes care of you when you need it" and suchlike. Actually, it's one of seven REAL deadly sins—the most evil things humankind has ever done to itself—the other six being religion, slavery, war, advertising, modern country music, and Neti pots). Maybe "healthcare insurance" was initially created to be helpful, but it quickly metastasized into a universal malignancy. And it did so with the full connivance of Capital and Capital's neocon buddies.

Boehner and Obama rehearse the mirror scene from Duck Soup

The example here of Pharma price-gouging is a single, simple, common-sense lesson in economics: NEVER set up a fucking system whereby a group of sellers and a group of buyers are operating in a de facto capitalist market but without any practical economic contact with each other—without any real reference to market value of products and services. Universal insuredness ENSURES [ahem: with an 'e'] artificiality of market value. Obamacare doesn't do anything for the health care of Americans except patch the holes where everybody's tax dollars might have leaked out. It hones and perfects exactly the sort of vacuum Martin Shkreli so jauntily moved to exploit. Shkreli's sin was not his actions per se but rather how far he stretched the system and his LOLling insouciance about it. Capital was all, like: "Dude, knock it off. You're drawing attention. People are noticing."

But what people were noticing and screaming about is exactly the corporate behavior which Big Healthcare had been practicing for decades—just done cartoonishly big—and which they continue to refine and perfect under the Affordable Care Act.

Read up on Mr. Nixon's Health Maintenance Organization Act of 1973 if you're interested in the precise moment Big Healthcare first jizzed in their pants. Mr. Obama, like all good corporate capitalists, duly painted his new installment with a bright blue HOPE logo and sold it to what passes, embarrassingly, for liberals in this country. The flashing red lights and angry hollering was all side-show—well, mostly side-show; scaremongering about socialism remains itself a lucrative racket—but everybody that counted knew it was (a) an inevitability and (b) a blank check for industry printed up to look like a big Band-aid.

"And here we have a textbook example of obligatory payment..."

So with an entire nation trained to ignore Insurance itself as an immutable feature of the landscape, and struggling to make do with their shriveling paychecks, is it any surprise that the most common response to the New Shkrelism is "See? That's what we get for handing out government assistance instead of MAKING AMURKINS TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR THEMSELVES like our parents and grandparents did!"

We are an evil people. I don't know why that is; I don't know how we came to this pass; but America is a fucking wasting disease.

Late last night and earleye this morning

I am playing hearts with four other people, two men and two women—don't ask me how five people play hearts; it's not real hearts anyway, as the deck we're dealing from contains at least three regular poker decks, maybe four, and shuffling is a shared ordeal each time. It is obviously impossible to shoot the moon when you don't even know how many hearts exist in a hand. Nobody seems bothered by this.

The two men are almost certainly Tonys DiNozzo Junior and Senior;

the women are NPCs—I knew them slightly last night but don't know them now. Everyone is dressed up fancily for nightlife and while we're at our card table we appear to be in a jazz club. Between hands, however, I have to make a toilet run. I push the table slightly forward and it rolls or skids fractiously into Robert Wagner's ribcage, threatening to spill all our drinks. He is only slightly huffy about this; still, I do not like making Robert Wagner huffy. I make a note to be careful of the overly touchy table when I return, then head across the club to the Men's room...

...which is on the other side of the garden center, or perhaps public banquet facility, with "outdoor" garden areas for wedding rentals and such—though "outdoor" and "indoor" are hardly meaningful since the change from one to the other happens much more gently and organically than the usual business of traversing doors.  While I am on a broad wooden deck strewn with autumn leaves and dappled with late sunlight, horses idling in my brain if not elsewhere, I remember that Renée asked me to pick a song to sing with her, just one, for the upcoming occasion we're both invited to. In real life this would almost certainly be "Babes in the Wood"...

...which Renée and I have known since 1987 or '88; here, however, the song we've decided upon appears to be something different. Moreover it is represented as a physical object—a tote bag, folded and stowed among many tote bags, presumably all representing songs. I pull out the not-quite-Babes in the Wood bag, unfold it, and examine it. Yes, this will do.

Returning from the bathroom to the card game is a longer affair as I must circumnavigate the enormous amphitheater, which is simultaneously a dramatic stage and a water park show tank, the sort of place humans line up to get splashed by a fellow mammalian predator almost as deadly as they. The seating area is correspondingly a mélange of staid, plush theater seats and outsize resin half-shell thingies, looking like nothing so much as rows of upturned contact lenses and painted a garish aquamarine.

I fear I have dawdled, with my song-bag reverie, and so now I sprint back toward the card table, spameloping deftly up and down sets of steps and around discrete sections of contact lenses; I take this auditorium like a known and practiced obstacle course—though my brain registers a warning: "You sha'n't be doing THIS sort of thing for long, Methuselah!"—all the way over to the back corner, where my company has hiked their card table up enormously high on a hydraulic rig. I'm not even certain it is my table; I need to get up that high to make sure it's my party; so I start to climb... and what do you know, we have a Fear of Heights Dream™—like inane stories about "chosen ones," they just never stop making these. I eventually persuade my company to come back down to a reasonable altitude, but it is no matter. The card game is over.

Much later, after many forgotten adventures, I have gotten extensively tattooed, across my entire (ventral) thorax and both arms—not exactly sleeves, but pretty crowded. I have buyer's remorse. It was apparently Marya who convinced me to decorate myself so—it is not clear to what extent the ink is her design, but it's certainly not all her original drawing—and while looking around the bedroom for lost garments—an Herculean labor given that the bedroom is strewn knee-deep with discarded garments—I contemplate making a public statement. It was of course my decision to have myself tattooed but I blame Marya anyway, loftily, in public, before all our friends. To her credit, she is having none of that bullshit; yet it's clear she is personally upset that I do not like the results of her art direction.

James approaches me shortly thereafter with helpful information about the shipping lines of tattoo ink and how—though the tattoos I already have a permanent—how I might prevent further tattooing by disrupting the ink shipments. He has a box of spent ink canisters, like oversize fountain pen cartridges; there is perhaps a scheme to substitute these for new cartridges, a great train robbery sort of caper. It seems sensible; James is always a font of useful information and good ideas.

And then we have wakeys.