Disclosure Day
For some years, after I started this Rags and Bones column, I also wrote one called Colchicine ("culture scene", ha) in which I reviewed books and movies. I abandoned it after a year or so, because I was discussing books of which no one was waiting for reviews (nineteenth century biographies of forgotten presidents) and movies no one would ever see (obscure 1964 Polish science fiction) or for which no one needed my review (the latest Spielberg).
But here goes. Disclosure Day is a terrible movie. Spielberg's reputation is based around his talent for kinetic improvisation (the fight scene on the plane wing in Raiders is my favorite). He has made good movies when more or less forced to use a strong script (Empire of the Sun, Minority Report). But when he gets to be the auteur and makes up the story, the result is always gibberish. I never believed that a private corporation would exist, and thrive, for a century, with the mission of covering up UFO incidents, nor did it make any sense that the aliens' way out, or revenge, would be to abduct and indoctrinate two children in the hope that forty years later, they would remember what they learned, meet each other (what if one of them took a job with an NGO in Africa?) and save the aliens. The scenes towards the end where the entire population of Earth stops what it is doing and looks at its phones were laughable: I have had the experience of pointing out a humpback whale one hundred feet offshore to people walking on my beach, who thought I was crazy and did not turn to look. But it is possible Spielberg never actually strolls on a beach among the plebs, because all his "memories" are of other people's (better) movies. If you set out to recycle every Trite Trope, at least do it with Snark. But Spielberg, I hear, was born with an almost crippling Irony Deficiency.
In a publication so much concerned with Ontology and Epistemology,I should aso note how much of a break we cut Spielberg, as if (like his child protagonists) he were a very Special Boy. As long as he shows us Emily Blunt clinging to the side of a train, he is good to go! His movies are messy fingerpaintings we all affix to the refrigerator.
Local Politics
I have had years of involvement in some really absurd goings on in East Hampton, to which I don't believe I have ever adverted here. But something remarkable is worth mentioning. The Town is run by a degraded Democratic political machine, which in fifteen years has become visibly exhausted, self-involved, incompetent, and lacking any narrative. Among other activism, in that time I became friends with three people oppressed by that machine, spending hundreds of hours of my time representing two of them in pro bono litigation at some personal risk. Now, when the machine is barely functioning and completely vulnerable, a sort of Napoleon, the mayor of the adjoining village, is sweeping in unopposed to take everything. He is a much better organized totalitarian who, in plain sight, has very effectively bullied and silenced people like us, and installed a license plate reader in the Village which has been accessed by other police departments 5.4 million times, including by a creepy Texas sheriff searching for a fugitive woman who had had an abortion. The punch-line: my three former friends have all endorsed Napoleon. Sheesh. Humans are so disappointing. Walking on a country road here, I saw a beautiful black racer snake yesterday, only the fourth live snake I have seen in the Hamptons in forty years. For the instant it looked at me before retreating very rapidly into the underbrush, it radiated a simplicity, an honesty, lacking in my ex-friends-- and reminded me there is still something to fight for out here.
About an hour later-- I went out for a walk on that same road, and had an Exercise Epiphany: Omigod, my so-called friends only wanted to be complicit, and the machine, with insane stupidity, wouldn't let them! This rhymes with an insight in an artifact I am gleaning for the Mad Manuscript, a collection of essays by people involved at street level in the 1960's "war on poverty", that a large subset of the activists they encountered in the African American community privately shared the values of white conservative Republicans from the suburbs, and were fighting for inclusion in the racist power-hierarchy, and not for revolutionary change.
The last takeaway is that at this late date, and after all this experience, I am really fucking naive.
The Smell of Trump Universe
I often wonder why I don't write more about Trump Universe, both from my usually Spectacle-ish (Spectacular?) five thousand foot perspective, but also from street level, where I am having some experiences worth recording (an unexpectedly friendly Department of Justice attorney tells me he has read the Spectacle, or a twenty-year-old client calls crying from Montreal at 11 pm to say that American customs won't let him board his flight home to the U.S.). After all, I kept an almost obsessive hour-by-hour diary of the pandemic. Why not now?
I think the answer is that Trump Universe is tacky and boring on the whole.
In adventure literature and particularly in that corner of it called "science fiction", there is a "strange weather phenomenon" Trope, particularly the "strange wind". (Mad Reader (if there is one), please note the effect I may try to trademark as the "Montaigne Swerve". Montaigne is dead, and can't complain.) (But swerves on montaigne roads can be very dangerous.) (Also, invoke Talking Heads' "Listening Wind" here, and, come to think of it, Paul Simon's "Boy in the Bubble".) Mark Twain wrote some embarassingly tacky Tom Sawyer sequels, which are justly forgotten, (another Montaigne swerve!) (really a swerve within a swerve, like turning into a skid) including one in which he and Huck are carried into the Arabian desert in a balloon (no shit) and survive a sandstorm. The deadly sandstorms in Dune are known as "Coriolis storms" and the Fremen call them "El-Sayal".
I remember (but may be inventing) a farce version of the Trope, which I can't say if I encountered in William Burroughs, Harlan Ellison, Hunter Thompson, Ishmael Reed, or William Gibson-- the extremely local Kitsch version of a cyclone, which instead of sand, carries old postcards, tin can tops (which can dangerously slice you), styrofoam peanuts and the smell of toilets.
That is the Stanch of Trump Universe. We have all been living in it for eleven years (the Stanch-cyclones did not stop during the Biden years). Why would I want to write about it?
The Overton Window
I probably first learned of this concept fifteen years ago.(See also Hallin spheres, for an independently invented, very similar idea.) The Overton window is the collection or range of topics of discussion that society will engage with. Someone following up on Overton's original essay suggested that the range of topics can be Ontologized as "unthinkable,radical, acceptable, sensible, popular [and] policy". (In Hallin's model, each of these is a concentric circle). All but the first two are inside the window. I seem to specialize in the "unthinkable" and "the radical", which are outside.
When, even earlier, I first understood the concept of the Prisoner's Dilemma, I had the awe-ful epiphany that everything in life is a PD. Since "hammer/nail" is boring, I later invented an aphorism, thanks to a wonderful science fiction novel, The Witches of Karres: "When you have a vatch lock, everything looks like a vatch". Now, Overton is offering that same type of universality.
As a (bragging alert) small tour de force, let's look at each of the foregoing snippets sub specie Overton. I have been told, a number of times, (the first time by Dr. Eleanor Wallace, my mother,) that detesting Steven Spielberg is radical and even unthinkable. When I write my almost-weekly letter to the local paper about the shameful and silly manifestations of local politics, I am shouting into the Overton Window from outside, and people in power respond with public silence (but during Napoleon's campaign, the window is expanding, as people afraid to criticize the Democratic machine now feel entitled). The third snippet, on the stench of power in today's U.S., is only very midly radical these days-- probably the most mainstream speech in this month's Rags (Note, however, that real rather than metaphorical unpleasant smells are almost always outside the window.)
But I note that even the Overton Window is outside itself (ha), as it is unthinkable to admit that any speech is unthinkable. "The first rule of Fight Club is: You do not talk about Fight Club."