American Mythos

This is the wedding portrait of Ty Ziegel and Renee Kline. The picture was taken in Cincinnati by photographer Nina Berman while she was on assignment for People magazine. Berman titled the photo "Marine Wedding."

Ty is a Marine. Here, he's about to get married. While we normally find great joy in marriage or getting married, here, no one is smiling.

Ty cannot smile due to the extent of the injuries he received while serving as a Marine in Iraq. He has scar tissue covering over 90% of his head and face. Renee has no facial injuries, and Renee is not smiling either. That's likely due to the extent of Ty's injuries in light of her engagement to him prior to him leaving for war. And now Renee is looking forward to a life-long commitment to a short sale. She promised her hand in marriage to her high school sweetheart prior to his tour of duty, and now she is about to consummate that love on her wedding night to a scarred and drugged war alien. Ty's face is wrapped in pale scar tissue; holes serve for his nose and ears; and his mind, shattered by a suicide attack, is encased in a plastic dome. War has transformed another patriotic young man into an existential Other.

When Nina Berman took their picture, Ty had yet to recover his health. And Renee had yet to fathom what a life-long commitment to an injured war veteran means. And like a crying child handed an ice cream, their community, their friends. the military, the press, the American war zeitgeist scooted Ty and Renee before the altar to consummate not a marriage, per se, but a return to normalcy for the two and their community and a symbol for America's resolve in the face of war. But the only face of war is his. It reflects the seriousness of marriage commitments, the seriousness of war, the seriousness of an IED explosion, the seriousness of military technology and battlefield triage medicine. The sheer gravity of all the institutions brought to bear on this moment pulls Renee's face and Ty's body into a forlorn monument to burden.

Medicine learns a lot from war by treating the wounded and studying the echoes of war, living on in the twisted visages and shattered mental states of its most wounded survivors. Most of what medicine knows about orthotics, prosthetics, plastic surgery, and neurology comes from the profusion of war-specific injuries suffered on the battlefield. One could think of the advances in these fields as the unholy alliance of scientific method with national military recruitment, enrolling the brave and the few to stand in the way of projectiles, bombs, shrapnel, and fire as its subjects in order that it can determine the efficacy of its weapons, its tactics, and its medicine. We have to thank Ty for teaching medicine a lot about treatment: treatment of severe burns, treatment of concussions, treatment of brain swelling, treatment of skull removal, and treatment of affect, the affect of the soldier in the aftermath of a most traumatic experience. There, trapped in his overturned patrol vehicle, burning alive, Ty survived a hell to then come home decorated, honored, and soon to be married to his high school sweetheart, Renee. And there he had to cope with being a grotesque, Humpty Dumpty monument of war's sheer horror and the medical attempts to embalm him alive and memorialize him as a hero. 

This is the American flag. It first emerged from the skilled hands of Betsy Ross in 1776. The flag is a symbol representing, in this case, a new nation. The thirteen stripes represent the thirteen original colonies who revolted against British colonial rule and founded a new nation. The red represents the blood of sacrifices by those original revolutionists. The white represents the bandages wrapped around them in order that they may live to see freedom. The stars on a blue background symbolize a new constellation. This would become a confederation and subsequently a republic, consisting of fifty states, hence the fifty stars. I learned most of what I know about the flag through drill in my Taekwondo class, which Marines had brought back to the United States after the Korean War.

This flag is a symbol, a collection of shapes and colors, the heraldry of which is arcane to some but the feeling of which is palpable to most. Flags have consequence. People fight and die for them. The blood symbolized by the red stripes is what gives the flag impetus, ultimate meaning, power. The bandages are what provide citizens with living exemplars, the war wounded and veterans. These tattered trophies of freedom represent the ultimate sacrifice. To have your legs blown off or your face twisted like a melted plastic bottle by the weapons of war and then to live if not to tell but at least to represent a nation's conviction to its sovereignty then you understand just how utterly consequential that flag is. The veterans were the heroes when you were a child. And so, in aspiration, you joined the effort and became one yourself. The fact is, the sacrifices that make the flag meaningful historically become the impetus for future generations to sacrifice so that this flag can be consequential to future generations of recruits. Ty was well aware of this and inspired by this, and so he joined the war effort. But Ty wasn't fighting for our freedoms really. He was fighting for his understanding of them. Ty was fighting for his flag and all that it meant to him in that particular way that patriotism sets up in small towns like his: "Dad and uncle Joe fought in the war. They fought for my right to be here and live the way I do. And I will do the same." This provincial view of freedom is the key to its authenticity for most in the US. It is draped upon cherished objects, people, and places close to home.

Nina Berman's award-winning photo is all that remains of Ty and Renee's wedding. Their wedding lasted from 2006 to 2008. Ty, then single, permanently so; Ty, then disabled, permanently so, decided to go on living his normal life, propped up on a platoon of pills, some of which he called 'don't kill your wife pills.' Ty had a practical view on objects that related to consequences. When Ty viewed the flag, he knew the consequence; he must sacrifice for it. This flag was a totem for that thing underneath the symbols we use to represent the nation. In the sequence of human actions the flag leads others to march into the maws of unfathomable hell, proudly, naively for the sake of an even more ambiguous concept: freedom.

At the heart of the American mythos are a set of symbols, some visual, some spoken, which are supported by the ideological puppetry of soldiering off to war, sacrificing for war, supporting the cause, and siding with leaders. Behind war is a fundamental desire, the desire to live or to survive. Behind war is a fundamental desire, the desire to kill or to prey. Pairing the two makes warfare an engine of sacrifice set in a theater of war. Upon this sacrificial altar the nations laps up the blood of their citizen, adding flesh to their ideological skeleton. Meaning is created through their sacrifice. This dialectic between survival and state-sanctioned murder supports the nation and its ambiguous concepts. For many in the US a purpose of waging war is to 'protect,' protect what? our freedoms. Behind war is that dialectic, which is, primordial to symbolism itself, on/off, yes/no, good/bad, action/reaction stimulus/response, 1/0. Dialectics is an expression of our neurology. And dialectics is about finding boundaries, segments in a sequence, actions and reactions, differences that make the difference. The very basis of meaning is in the margins that define the relationships between things. War is about boundaries, their protection, their expansion. And nations march their citizens-cum-soldiers out to those margins like communal scapegoats, to die "for God and country," adding flesh to the vaunted rhetoric of nation-state ideology. Soldiers marched out to the margins carry the sacrificial stain of the scapegoat.They are sent to die; their suspension between life and death is a matter of warfare technology to enhance the probabilities of outlasting a conflict.

At its most fundamental, war is about probabilities: the probabilities of projectiles finding flesh, the probabilities of winning strategies and winning wars, the probabilities of living or dying. As for the architects of war, their lethal weaponry enhance the probability that if you're marched out to that margin your purpose is to follow kill orders until you finally succumb to your war injuries and die. The only probability in your favor is the architects' designs to make equipment that extends your life to war's end. And at war's end the soldier-as-scapegoat brings those margins home: war's gut-wrenching fear, its cries of pain, death, burning, dying, its suffering internally, mentally in a ward, in a home, or on the street ignored and forgotten between bouts of drug abuse, its fighting to speak again, walk again, live a normal life back in the bosom from which one sprung again.

Ty tried to return to his old life and its sense of normalcy. Ty died in December of 2013 from a fatal dose of alcohol and heroin. Ty left for war a starry eyed and patriotic soldier, much like many who sacrifice for their country. Ty returned a hero, a miracle of modern medicine, a cyborg of synthetic parts and grafts, sewn together into a symbol, much like those thirteen stripes and those fifty stars. Ty returned a new constellation. But Ty was no totem. Ty was a man. Ty is now dead and the flag waves goodbye.

Why I don't write screenplays: Exhibit 1

The man with only one wish

by Jason Lesko

12/31/2009

Summary:

A man is diagnosed with a terminal illness, possibly cancer, and sets about finding meaning in his life. He gets some of his life in order, pays off his debts, and does some of the things that he had always wanted to do. Since he spent the majority of his life in a successful professional career he failed to meet and marry a woman let alone have a child. This, he proposes is his last wish, the one wish he wants fulfilled before he leaves this world.

He begins enlisting his friends to help him, and while canvassing the area one suggest that he post a want ad in Craigslist. Desperate, he thinks this is a good idea. He meets a few potential women and one sticks out as the potential candidate. She’s friendly and obliging throughout. She appears genuine in her interest and intent. After all, she confided in him that she wants a baby more than anything else and has been looking for the right man to father her child. He thinks he has met the perfect mother for his child, so he prepares for the child’s future as they work at having a kid. Success.

The man hires a lawyer and gets his will in order. He entrusts the woman with his savings and with an antique watch that has been in the family for generations. He wants the woman to give his child the watch. She agrees and he prepares for his departure. His illness gets progressively worse and he passes on.

EXTERIOR: PAWN SHOP

A car pulls up. The woman and expectant mother exits the vehicle. She enters the shop.

A brief exchange occurs where the pawnshop clerk consults some manuals and appraises the value of the watch. He hands her cash, and she leaves the shop.

EXTERIOR: MEDICAL BUILDING

The woman’s car pulls up. She exits and greets a man in a suit, her lawyer. The brief exchange between the two indicate that he has found a loophole in the will. If a doctor can find medical grounds on which to abort the fetus then, legally, she is granted the right to do so. This particular doctor is prepared to go through with the procedure. She hands her lawyer the cash, and he goes inside to broker a deal with the doctor.

INTERIOR OF DOCTOR'S OFFICE

The doctor is visibly intoxicated and quiet rough for his age. He is willing to perform any number of operations given the right price. He agrees to perform the operation as well as forge the medical documents to deem the fetus ‘non-viable.’ 

INTERIOR: OPERATING ROOM

The scene is the operating room. The woman is in stirrups, prepped for her abortion. The doctor walks in and prepares for the procedure. The viewer is entreated to the sonogram view of the abortion as the doctor inserts his instruments into the woman to extract the fetus. Something occurs which causes the instruments to shut down. He goes for other instruments and has the woman help him push out the fetus that he has grabbed with forceps. After a few moments the extraction is successful. The doctor takes a look at what he has extracted and is horrified to see a fully formed and fighting small baby. The baby begins to cry.

The crying and struggling of the baby are, we find out a language, and so the crying and gesticulations of the fetus are given subtitles.

BABY
 “Stop it! I’m alive damn you!”

“Get it away from me. I want to live!”
“I want to live!”

The doctor cuts the child’s throat and blood slowly pours from the wound and its mouth. He turns to his assistant.

DOCTOR

“Speak of this to no one, EVER!”
 

In the distance a devil man peers in the window approvingly, laughing a menacing laugh.

EXTERIOR: HOUSE, DAYTIME

An auctioneer has set up and is preparing to convene an estate sale. People begin bidding on the man’s items.

CONCURRENT SCENE: SHOPPING

The woman, dressed elegantly, is shopping. Happy music (“Walking on Sunshine”) plays over a montage of the woman shopping while the estate sale of the man's items occurs. The woman tries on clothes. Buyers are active in bidding on items.

EXTERIOR: HOUSE, DAYTIME

The final scene is the exterior of a home. It is day. The woman’s car pulls up and she exits carrying with her several bags. The final shot is of woman’s car seat. A small pool of blood has formed where she sat. A disembodied cry of a child is heard.

Moby Dick, Chapter 16: Captain Bildad

"Like Captain Peleg, Captain Bildad was a well-to-do, retired whaleman. But unlike Captain Peleg--who cared not a rush for what are called serious things, and indeed deemed those self-same serious things the veriest of all trifles--Captain Bildad had not only been originally educated according to the strictest sect of Nantucket Quakerism, but all his subsequent ocean life, and the sight of many unclad, lovely island creatures, round the Horn--all that had not moved this native born Quaker one single jot, had not so much as altered one angle of his vest. Still, for all his immutableness, was there some lack of common consistency about worthy Captain Bildad. Though refusing, from conscientious scruples, to bear arms against land invaders, yet himself had illimitably invaded the Atlantic and Pacific; and though a sworn foe to human bloodshed, yet had he in his straight-bodied coat, spilled tuns upon tuns of leviathan gore. How now in the contemplative evening of his days, the pious Bildad reconciled these things in the reminiscence, I do not know; but it did not seem to concern him much, and very probably had long since come to the sage and sensible conclusion that a man's religion is one thing, and this practical world another. This world pays dividends. Rising from a little cabinboy in short clothes of the drabbest drab, to a harpooneer in a broad shad-bellied waistcoat; from that becoming a boat-header, chief-mate, and captain, and finally a ship-owner; Bildad as I hinted before, had concluded his adventurous career by wholly retiring from active life at the goodly age of sixty, and dedicating his remaining days to the quiet receiving of his well-earned income." (p. 76)

Moby Dick: Chapter 16: The Ship

"You may have seen many a quaint craft in your day, for aught I know;--square-toed luggers; mountainous Japanese junkets; butter-box galliots, and what not; but take my word for it, you never saw such a rare old craft as this rare old Pequod. She was a ship of the old schoool, rather small if anything; with an old fashioned claw-footed look about her. Long seasoned and weather-stained in the typhoons and calms of all four oceans, her old hull's complexion was darkened like a French grenadier's, who has alike fought in Egypt and Siberia. Her venerable bows looked beaded. Her masts--cut somewhere on the coasts of Japan, where her original ones were lost overboard in a gale--her masts stood stiffly up like the spines of the three old kings of Cologne. Her ancient decks were worn and wrinkled, like the pilgrim-worshipped flag-stone in Canterbury Cathedral where Beckett bled. But to all these her old antiquities, were added new and marvellous features, pertaining to the wild business that for more than half a century she had followed. Old Captain Peleg, many years her chief-mate, before he commanded another vessel of his own, and now a retired seaman, and one of the principal owners of the Pequod,--this old Peleg, during the terms of his chief-mateship, had built upon her original grotesqueness, and inlaid it, all over with a quaintness both of material and device, unmatched by anything except it be Thorkill-Hake's carved buckler or bedstead. She was apparelled like any barbaric Ethiopian emperor, his neck heavy with pendants of polished ivory. She was a thing of trophies. A cannibal craft, tricking herself forth in the chased bones of her enemies. All around, her unpannelled, open bulwarks were garnished like one continuous jaw, with the long sharp hempen thews and tendons to. Those ran not through base blocks of land wood, but deftly travelled over sheaves of sea-ivory. Scorning a turnstile wheel at her reverend helm, she sported there a tiller; and that tiller was in one mass, curiously carved from the long narrow lower jaw of her hereditary foe. The helmsman who steered by that tiller in a tempest, felt like the Tartar, when he holds back his fiery steed by clutching its jaw. A noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy! All noble things are touched with that." (p. 72)

ball of hate

"His body was a collection of taut sinews wrapped around a ball of hate."

Life, God

God is the answer to creation. God furnishes an answer for a being's sudden self-regard and the abyssal terror of the ambiguity to its origin. The story of God bridges that abyss. But in this sense God is both the absent cause and the story we tell to explain origins. God is, in fact, 'God.' God the subject. God the predicate. God the sentence. God the primary cause behind the motion in the universe. The primordial subject from which all action derives is God in the narrative cosmology of human beings. And this is the reason behind 'God.' 'God' must be spoken.

Life is a self-replicating system living within an environment from which it takes molecules that this system can use to sustain its existence. Survival, in situ, is a penultimate behavioral trait of life. The ultimate 'behavior of life,' its bookends, is the ability to replicate through time. Every enclosed system making up life, the cell, carries this capability deep within its nucleus in chains of proteins that serve as the information for survival and replication.

At this basic level let us stand in amazement at the very notion of a molecule, made up of atoms with certain affinities for attraction and repelling becoming a self-replicating molecular mechanism. Already at this level, the simplest of arrangements, based in the constituent 'stuff' of this universe, appears to have a motivation, an impetus toward living. And living, in its most fundamental sense, is avoiding the inevitability of a coherent system fall apart. At this level, the nuclear material of a cell, offers a blueprint for replication, repair, and survival.

The one addition to earth and to the living systems that emerged on it, which cannot be ignored, is the sun. The sun provides warmth and light, two properties that living systems have evolved to appropriate. Plants use the action of photons to  produce sugar. Living creatures capture photons in light sensitive membrane extensions of their nervous system to perceive the world around them. The eye and the chloroplast are but two adaptations to a world bathed in the radiant heat and light of a nearby sun. From that light, life springs forth.

A metaphor for power and for control

A fulcrum is a pivot point used for leverage. Fulcrums are one way that people realize greater power to move things. Place a long board above a fulcrum and set that fulcrum close to the thing that you want to lift and you realize this power.

People leverage great power through computer interfaces, which allow them to interface with a great store of information and wide access to people. Software and its graphical analogies of information and space allow people to readily comprehend and effect action through computer interfaces. The fulcrum that search allows us is great. We can key in a search term and magically produce millions of pages of information with relevance decaying by the distance of the scroll from the top.

And here we are, before an interface, tied to a unique IP, a single point in a vast pond of data. That fulcrum point is the IP address-delineated interface itself. And here we are but inches from it, tapping and swiping away. Set that fulcrum close to the thing that you want to lift and you realize this power.

Time is a ghost

Time is a ghost haunting the living tissue of humanity.
Time is the faintest affordance for reflection, which allows a sense of itself to exist.
Time is, but time isn't when and where identity co-opts and co-exists with it.
That co-opt and co-exist dialectic is hermeneutically symmetrical; time-as-such and time-for-self co-exist, theoretically, but the use of time to perceive a self requires a neuronal capacity that cannot, at its basest activity, share both a sense of the time to regard itself and to sense time as such.
There and then time becomes the substance of self-identification in an ongoing process of self-discovery.
There and then time is 'consumed' by the neuronal capacity to order it; the neurophysiological processes that constitute an awareness of a self require time to occur, and in that occurrence the activation of neuronal capacities require a baseline of cellular action, which, before and after their activation occlude the pure existence of time outside the very thing that gives time its unique requirement in the substance of self-discovery.
In other words, existence as a subset of self-regard through time is but a fleeting moment off and on in the capacity for a mind to order the world around it.
Reflex breaks time down into organic units of action-potential and refraction along an axon.
This brief moment of complexity--breaking sensory information of a world down into discreet neurophysiological actions and conveying this information to a brain, which then orders and gives second sense to it--is the thing that turns time on itself.
Time becomes a unit of knowledge as it slows into the vast and orchestrated sensorium.
That sensorium or self-and-world-awareness is at once the universe of sensory data and also a moment of detached regard.
These moments of detached self-regard are the constitutive ground for existence's self-awareness, and that makes for being.
Slowing the detection of time down detaches it from the stream of time, as such, focusing it into a subset of time.
A unique and contributing factor to this subset of time is that it has hermeneutic affinities with the infinite, which is the non-realizable container for all potential self-knowledge past and future; that is Being.
Time--as both the substance of self-identity's existence and as the stream of existence that persists prior and after consciousness has passed through it--is at once essential to being and indifferent to it.
Time is an essential requirement for the process of self-regard.
Being emerges as a transcendent non-entity to moments in time yet remains inextricably tied to it.
That sense of a self is revealed partly in moments of self-reflection, but the whole of self-understanding transcends these moments.
The neuronal sequestration of these moments in time and the reflex networks that keep those moments in time, like a volleyball in play, cobble together a self that exists alongside the continuous stream of perceived time that frames an existence in dynamic interplay with the world.
Time is infinite, but it is perceived in discreet, neuronally substantiated moments.
This tether between the finite and local and the infinite and universal sets the ground for a being to co-exist with Being.
Being is all time, whereas being is time used for self-awareness.
The fabric of time that both Being and being share is the hermeneutic symmetry that leads from self-awareness to god-awareness and vice versa.
Being and being are two sides of a coin minted out of time itself.
The infiniteness of Being and the finiteness of being affords being the ability to achieve transcendence through allegiances with Being.
The infiniteness of Being is, in theory, a pernicious concept for being, in local time, to worship.
The local being, through worship, can become obedient to a conceptual world made meaningful only through the transcendent Being of infinite time.
This obedience opens up the possibility for a death impulse in being in that being orders its time around concepts that conform to the worship of Being.
In placing one's stake in a time outside of the local time of one's perceptive existence one has conceded to fictional ideologies whose mere existence is bound by the persistent neuronal capacities of its believers.
That reality of beings structured around Being is only so real as the time that beings consume in an awareness of self that is in the shadow of Being.

Time is from another universe. Material networks that detect time, indirectly, allow time to come into existence in this universe.
While time is essential to self-awareness and to the very understanding of the universe in which a self exists that time is also pernicious to a life, localized around a discrete entity whose limits to understanding are the limits of its grasp of time and those moments that it allows itself to wade out into this infinite time.
Infinite time is realized as the persistent death of being and a return of that localized existence to Being.
For all of it was fabricated out of time, in time, and remains a fact,continuously, to the being, through time.

in defense of goo

To para-mangle the Bible: "How you treat the least of us you treat me." --God.

In fact this is Matthew 25:40 and the King James passage attributes it to "the King."

That Elvis was a wise guy.