|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
August 23, 2005FUCK YOU YOU FUCKING FUCKis a sentiment I saw adorning a t-shirt in a Manhattan gift shop one New Year’s Eve. Of course my friends and I immediately latched onto it and made it our happy holiday catch phrase: “Hey! Happy New Year!” “People stared at me in East Germany because I wore a man’s Stetson hat.” “Mayor Newsom endorsed Andrew Sullivan yesterday.” “I’m doing this for your own good.” You’d never believe how many occasions for which it is the perfect response—but never was it more called for than when I heard the price tag for W’s inauguration festivities: FFFUCK YOU YOU FFFUCKING FFFUCKKKKKK!! It shot out of my mouth like a bullet at a bull’s-eye. Now I like a good party and so do you, and as a society we celebrate and perform rituals of passage and initiation. We know this. But cut us a break, fucker. Bumper sticker on Fillmore: Economically, environmentally, educationally, diplomatically, constitutionally, categorically, tragically, completely—George Bush is a national disaster. And when it comes to disaster itself, George Bush is the biggest disaster of all. Terrorists devastate the citizenry, and instead of capitalizing on the good will of the world, he instead starts an irrelevant criminal war whose cost in money and lives in turn further devastates the citizenry and alienates the world. Instead of leading the world in lending assistance to victims of one of the world’s greatest natural disasters, he less than two months later throws a sixty million dollar party—for himself! Instead of showing the men and women serving in his personal war respect and honor by waiving extravagant recognition of his reelection he sanctions the ultimate indulgence. I cannot think of anything more arrogant and inappropriate. The holidays are full of festive gatherings, but my mostly annual Russian Christmas (January 7th by the Julian calendar) Royal Gala is where I really like to pour it on thick, in the manner of the sumptuous display of holiday revelry in Bergman’s “Fanny and Alexander.” This year I had planned to combine it with the housewarming party I never had, and channel my alter ego, Czarina Alexandra, draping myself in lace and $2 strands of thrift shop pearls (although really the Czarina was a not-so-nice person from the let-them-eat-cake school of royalty). I prepared an invitation and emailed it around, then headed east for the holidays. While I was visiting my mom in Philadelphia, there came a news report of an earthquake and tsunami that was ravaging South Asia and had already claimed 12,000 lives. Wow. Later at my sister’s house I remembered, oh yeah, did you hear about the tsunami? Clicking the TV on, we learned the death toll had already risen by tens of thousands. We stayed glued to CNN for the next few days, the toll continued to rise incrementally with every news bulletin, and rescue efforts had begun. I weighed how much I could contribute and where to send it. Having just sprung for the trip east, I had only about $300 available, which I’d planned to use for the party. I thought if I could spend that much on a party I could certainly spend that much on this, but it wasn’t a good month for both, so my next thought was: don’t have the party. It seemed distasteful to me to wax festive with his horrible tragedy fresh off the front page. So back in town I did cancel it with another email: “This is not the time,” I wrote, “to indulge in an extravagant display of American plenty. I can’t justify spending $xxx on champagne and caviar when that same money could mean someone’s survival.” Too bad our own President couldn’t show my restraint. Aside from the $40 million in contributions from his rich friends, Washington DC and other local governments absorbed over $20 million in security and other costs, some of it coming from homeland security funds. Why didn’t those friends of the President be friends to the nation instead? If they have that much to give away, why not stand up and say, “In honor of George Bush’s inauguration, I hereby contribute $1,000,000 to the soup kitchens of Washington D.C.” “I hereby donate in George Bush’s name $2,000,000 to underfunded inner-city school programs.” It could be like an auction where people see how much they can outbid each other to do good works. “I see your $2,000,000 and I raise you $3,000,000 for AIDS research and treatment programs!” “$4,000,000 to cancer research and hospice services!” “$5,000,000 in scholarships for children of slain servicemen and women!” “$6 million for improved armor for our troops!” “$10,000,000 to fund infrastructure for converting gas stations to biodiesel providers!” That’s still only $33M—the remaining $7M can go to low-income housing. Let’s break down the forty mil as UNICEF might have spent it. Just $5 donated to them will provide “an emergency health kit with medical supplies to cover basic health needs for one person for three months.” The party fund would have financed 8,000,000 of these kits. A gift of $87 pays for “ten family water kits containing water purification tablets, detergent, soap, a wash basin, towels and a bucket.” Forty mil buys close to 460,000 of these. A $188 donation buys a “’School-in-a-Box’ kit containing basic education supplies for 80 children during times of crisis.” $40M = 213,000 kits affecting over 17,000 children. And as many combinations thereof as you can calculate. OR the good ole boys can all wake up hungover and self-satisfied while the world explodes and burns. Remember the Peter Principle, whereby a person rises to the level of his incompetence by getting promoted and promoted until he reaches the plateau where he is unable to perform but is unlikely to be demoted? Isn’t the Bush Administration the living demonstration of this inevitability? By the time he or she is in that top position of power, no one dares question his or her abilities, or if they do, they’re considered a threat to national security. Elsewise why are Rumsfeld and Rove still pulling down federal paychecks? And why does Bush continually embarrass his nation with every new opportunity that presents itself? With far less resources to work with but far more sense of decency than Bush, I cancelled my holiday house party and donated the funds to UNICEF. Well goody freakin’ two shoes for me! I be noble! The need was obvious and immense so I was impelled to respond immediately—but the world’s needs are always obvious and immense. I am faced with (and ignore) this same challenge every day. Exactly when it is appropriate to spend $xxx on champagne and caviar? The money would always save someone’s life somewhere. We are all constantly presented with opportunities to help that we don’t take. We can raise $14,000 to catch the guy who ran over some ducks, but we walk right past human beings lying in doorways and don’t even give them a quarter. They blend into the urban streetscape like the other garbage in the gutter. I was walking down First Street about to stuff an almond croissant in my mouth when I stopped to consider giving it instead to the panhandler outside the deli door. But I wanted it! So I reached in my pocket and gave him whatever was there—some 3 bucks or so. It would have been cheaper to give him the croissant but I also had to pay for my guilt at being solvent. Whenever we keep something for ourselves, it is denied someone else. I don’t see myself handing $300 to a cripple on the street—what a difference it would make to him or her!—but I just walk by on my way to work. I don’t see myself volunteering for a soup kitchen or inviting the homeless guy from the soup kitchen into my home so he can sleep in warmth. I’m a moody loner and I don’t have a “service personality” as Jodie Foster described her character of Clarice Starling. I am more likely to donate my money than my time. But somehow we must strike a balance between what we have and what we give. “A hand up and a hand out,” I once put it, “Give and take—the path to an equitable life.” Everyone draws the line somewhere different, whether because of temperament, lack of character, being raised by wolves or whatever. There is what we do give, what we could give (if we did not want it or need it for ourselves), and what we can never give because we haven’t the means. No one, for instance, has the means to “save the world.” Does that mean we throw up our hands? Somehow we aim to end world hunger and given that we cannot may find it beside the point to do anything at all for someone starving right in front of us. Giving two bits to this guy won’t put a dent in ending homelessness. So what? It’ll buy him two bits worth of whatever it is two bits buys. Whatever you are giving, you are giving. That’s the point. You’re on the plus side of the equation, not the minus. This counterpoint appears in “Schindler’s List,” with Oskar Schindler (who bought the lives of Jewish prisoners with his assets by paying off Nazi monster Armon Goeth, ostensibly because he needed them to work in his munitions factory) lamenting to his accountant Itzhak Stern that he hadn’t done enough to save more lives.
All the statements are true—all at the same time. He didn’t do enough to save six million, but he did do enough to save a thousand. No one can feed the world forever, but one can feed one hungry man right now. Can one mourn over the one and still rejoice over the other? At one and the same time? In the contrary landscape of human emotion, yes. But we must achieve balance in order to live with ourselves.
Everyone has either more or less than you do. The one who is dead sees the one who is living and considers himself cursed. The one who is living but has nothing sees the person with anything as blessed, and thinks himself destitute, while the one with anything at all sees the one with something more and pities himself. The one with something sees the one with nigh everything and thinks himself poor, and the one with everything for all we know may well be the most miserable one of all. Perhaps he envies the dead one. Each one is saying, “If only I had what he has…” To me the most moving part of the film is the epilogue when the real Schindler’s Jews and their “generations” appear on the horizon and file by his grave to place stones on his marker, rendered especially poignant by the haunting accompaniment by Itzhak Perlman of the heartbreaking violin theme. It is the living demonstration of how much something, if not everything, can do; of how sometimes all that someone can manage is all that someone else will need. The credits reveal that while there are fewer than 4,000,000 Jews in Poland today, there are more than 6,000,000 of Schindler’s Jews and their descendants. Yet Schindler was not proud but despairing over the lives he couldn’t save. I’ve never understood the metaphor of the half empty/half full glass—is it half empty or half full?—when the answer is so clearly BOTH, at one and the same time. We don’t know what constitutes half unless we know how much the glass can hold altogether. If there were no concept of full, there would be no realization of half. But if you took the full glass and poured it into a glass twice as big as the first, the previous “full” portion would now render the new glass half empty. If you took the same portion and poured it into a glass half as big, the same portion would read as full. We have a certain amount of something and no more. But the “more” in both theory and practice still exists. You have $10 but you know someone who has $20—the $20 is “out there,” and the idea of “double the money.” You have only half as much money as he, but twice as much as your neighbor with $5. So when you’re half as rich as the chap two steps above you on the ladder of wealth you are simultaneously twice as rich as the fellow below you. It’s all proportion, perspective. Itzhak Stern presents Oskar Schindler with a ring inscribed with these words from the Talmud: Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire. And I would add: Whoever takes one, kills himself. However one measures things up, there is one assessment that by now cannot be denied: George Bush is on the minus, empty side. Fuck him, that fucking fuck! Role Models for the 21st Century (choose one):
Oskar Schindler Epitaph: He learned from his mistakes.
George W. Bush Epitaph: He learned from his mistakes -------------------------------------------------------- is an ancient collaboration between Lives crumble in the distance --------------------------------------------------------
Fuck You You Fucking Fuck |
 |
 |
 |
 |
