![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_cameraSo many conflicting narratives swirling around Soleimani's assassination that I’m getting whiplash. It seems to have broken every international norm that’s been in place since WWII. As the mother of a 25-year-old son who’s prime canon fodder, the situation makes me very nervous.
Scenario 1: Soleimani's assassination is a 21st century remake of Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s assassination. Get ready for nuclear winter!
Scenario 2: The Iranian government is being deliberately provocative in order to start a war so that public sentiment, which is very anti-government these days—remember all those protests back in November? —will coalesce into unquestioning support for the regime once again. A war with the U.S. would cement the current regime’s grip over Iran.
Scenario 3: Trump is manufacturing a war to distract from the impeachment proceedings and provide a rallying point for his 2020 reelection campaign. This would seem to be borne out by the current slough of Facebook ads:
In case it isn’t clear, my opinion of Donald Trump is that he’s human pond scum.
But I’m not going to allow my loathing for Trump to become a manipulation point. I haven’t yet seen any “noble Iran” type propaganda from the Blue Church, but if I do, I’ll reject it. Entirely.
Thing is, Trump is not entirely wrong when it comes to Iran. Just like he’s not entirely wrong when it comes to China trade.
###
Else?
It’s been a harrowing couple of days.
Max reinjured his Achilles tendon.
I don’t think I wrote about this, but Max tore his Achilles tendon playing pickup basketball shortly before I descended upon California in November. One of the reasons we got into all those fights is because I kept telling him that I thought it was fucking stupid of him to drive all the way from Berkeley to southern California on an injured ankle.
He blew me off. Of course! “The doctor says it’s fine.”
How could it be fine? The foot needs to be kept elevated to promote healing, and you cannot elevate a foot in a car.
Anyway, he’d elected to have surgery once he got back to the Bay Area. The surgery had gone well; he’d started physical therapy. Then he was drunk Saturday night in San Francisco and decided to run across a street to make a green light, and bam!
He is beating himself up over his stupidity.
I didn’t actually know what to tell him.
Yes, it was stupid, but everyone does stupid things constantly—if they pretend they don’t, then they’re liars—and what’s done is done. All you can do is resolve to learn from your mistakes. Beating yourself up only distracts you from the other stuff you should be doing—which in Max’s case is a lot since he overschedules himself more than any other human being I’ve ever known. There’s work—the ACLU plus some progressive Berkeley think tank. There’s school—he has to start writing his dissertation. There’s all the volunteer stuff he does—he’s the student rep on several U.C. Berkeley governance boards; he sits on a Berkeley police review board, etc, etc. etc.
I guess he ups his Welbutrin dose as needed and soldiers through it.
My own strategy for getting through particularly ghastly stretches of life is to imagine my life as some sort of conveyor belt that inexorably, inevitably pulls me through the bad parts. In a month, this will all be over, and I’ll never think of it again, I tell myself.
But I didn’t say this to Max because I don’t think he’d find that strategy useful.
Instead, I told him, “When I’m in that state, I go to a lot of movies.”
He sighed. “Yeah. I’m watching a lot of television.”
“No, not television,” I said. “Television is a distraction, but what you’re aiming for is a reset. I find that there’s something about sitting in a dark movie theater and watching someone else’s narrative magnified fifty times larger than life on a giant screen that can really take me out of whatever’s going on in my head. Doesn’t really matter what those narratives are. Bad movies work just as well as good movies for this purpose.”
He lives within easy walking—or should I say, limping—distance of a number of movie palaces.
But I don’t think he’s gonna take my advice.
Anyway, he has surgery rescheduled for the 22nd.
###
More else?
TaxBwana training started yesterday.
There are some absolutely bizarre things in the tax code that applies to your 2019 returns.
Like for instance: Spousal support can no longer be declared either as income or as a deduction, which certainly works to the financial advantage of people receiving spousal support.
There were jeers from all the white, middle-aged male tax preparer presumptives in the class.
I turned around and said loudly, “What? You think women don’t have to pay men spousal support? Well, think again.”
That shut them right up.
Also, in the state of New York, if you’re a deadbeat Dad (or Mom, I guess), and the Division of Child Support goes after you and garnishes your wages, you are eligible to receive Earned Income Credit as a noncustodial parent! Parents who voluntarily meet their child support responsibilities are not eligible to receive Earned Income Credit as noncustodial parents! Figure the logic behind that one.
The training is always very bor-r-r-r-r-ing, so I amused myself, as I always do, by counting the number of people wearing white socks versus the number of people wearing colored socks, and dividing that result by the number of people who were wearing sneakers to create a ratio—that would mean what exactly? Something essential about the nature of TaxBwana-hood.
Also watched Soylent Green last night. The Criterion Channel is hosting a 70s science fiction series. Seventies science fiction movies have a lot to do with why I think the way I do, so I am eager to revisit them.
Soylent Green is almost a good movie in a contemporary sense. I’ve always thought Charlton Heston is underrated as an actor, and, of course, Edward G. Robinson—Soylent Green was his last movie—is superb. The death scene to Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony actually made me weep.
(In real life, Robinson died exactly 10 days after the film wrapped, which adds to the poignancy.)
It was made in 1973, and I think Charlton Heston’s hardboiled detective character Thorne must have had a huge influence on Harrison Ford’s Deckard in Blade Runner, which was made nine years later. Yeah, yeah, Blade Runner is based on Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? But PKD’s novel is a comedy. And Blade Runner, most certainly, is not a comedy.
One big difference between the movies: Blade Runner focuses on artificially created demand in the future tense; Soylent Green focuses on need. Need that’s going unmet.
Here is the New York City of Soylent Green’s future:
As dystopian movies go, Soylent Green is right there in the upper echelons.
Scenario 1: Soleimani's assassination is a 21st century remake of Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s assassination. Get ready for nuclear winter!
Scenario 2: The Iranian government is being deliberately provocative in order to start a war so that public sentiment, which is very anti-government these days—remember all those protests back in November? —will coalesce into unquestioning support for the regime once again. A war with the U.S. would cement the current regime’s grip over Iran.
Scenario 3: Trump is manufacturing a war to distract from the impeachment proceedings and provide a rallying point for his 2020 reelection campaign. This would seem to be borne out by the current slough of Facebook ads:
In case it isn’t clear, my opinion of Donald Trump is that he’s human pond scum.
But I’m not going to allow my loathing for Trump to become a manipulation point. I haven’t yet seen any “noble Iran” type propaganda from the Blue Church, but if I do, I’ll reject it. Entirely.
Thing is, Trump is not entirely wrong when it comes to Iran. Just like he’s not entirely wrong when it comes to China trade.
###
Else?
It’s been a harrowing couple of days.
Max reinjured his Achilles tendon.
I don’t think I wrote about this, but Max tore his Achilles tendon playing pickup basketball shortly before I descended upon California in November. One of the reasons we got into all those fights is because I kept telling him that I thought it was fucking stupid of him to drive all the way from Berkeley to southern California on an injured ankle.
He blew me off. Of course! “The doctor says it’s fine.”
How could it be fine? The foot needs to be kept elevated to promote healing, and you cannot elevate a foot in a car.
Anyway, he’d elected to have surgery once he got back to the Bay Area. The surgery had gone well; he’d started physical therapy. Then he was drunk Saturday night in San Francisco and decided to run across a street to make a green light, and bam!
He is beating himself up over his stupidity.
I didn’t actually know what to tell him.
Yes, it was stupid, but everyone does stupid things constantly—if they pretend they don’t, then they’re liars—and what’s done is done. All you can do is resolve to learn from your mistakes. Beating yourself up only distracts you from the other stuff you should be doing—which in Max’s case is a lot since he overschedules himself more than any other human being I’ve ever known. There’s work—the ACLU plus some progressive Berkeley think tank. There’s school—he has to start writing his dissertation. There’s all the volunteer stuff he does—he’s the student rep on several U.C. Berkeley governance boards; he sits on a Berkeley police review board, etc, etc. etc.
I guess he ups his Welbutrin dose as needed and soldiers through it.
My own strategy for getting through particularly ghastly stretches of life is to imagine my life as some sort of conveyor belt that inexorably, inevitably pulls me through the bad parts. In a month, this will all be over, and I’ll never think of it again, I tell myself.
But I didn’t say this to Max because I don’t think he’d find that strategy useful.
Instead, I told him, “When I’m in that state, I go to a lot of movies.”
He sighed. “Yeah. I’m watching a lot of television.”
“No, not television,” I said. “Television is a distraction, but what you’re aiming for is a reset. I find that there’s something about sitting in a dark movie theater and watching someone else’s narrative magnified fifty times larger than life on a giant screen that can really take me out of whatever’s going on in my head. Doesn’t really matter what those narratives are. Bad movies work just as well as good movies for this purpose.”
He lives within easy walking—or should I say, limping—distance of a number of movie palaces.
But I don’t think he’s gonna take my advice.
Anyway, he has surgery rescheduled for the 22nd.
###
More else?
TaxBwana training started yesterday.
There are some absolutely bizarre things in the tax code that applies to your 2019 returns.
Like for instance: Spousal support can no longer be declared either as income or as a deduction, which certainly works to the financial advantage of people receiving spousal support.
There were jeers from all the white, middle-aged male tax preparer presumptives in the class.
I turned around and said loudly, “What? You think women don’t have to pay men spousal support? Well, think again.”
That shut them right up.
Also, in the state of New York, if you’re a deadbeat Dad (or Mom, I guess), and the Division of Child Support goes after you and garnishes your wages, you are eligible to receive Earned Income Credit as a noncustodial parent! Parents who voluntarily meet their child support responsibilities are not eligible to receive Earned Income Credit as noncustodial parents! Figure the logic behind that one.
The training is always very bor-r-r-r-r-ing, so I amused myself, as I always do, by counting the number of people wearing white socks versus the number of people wearing colored socks, and dividing that result by the number of people who were wearing sneakers to create a ratio—that would mean what exactly? Something essential about the nature of TaxBwana-hood.
Also watched Soylent Green last night. The Criterion Channel is hosting a 70s science fiction series. Seventies science fiction movies have a lot to do with why I think the way I do, so I am eager to revisit them.
Soylent Green is almost a good movie in a contemporary sense. I’ve always thought Charlton Heston is underrated as an actor, and, of course, Edward G. Robinson—Soylent Green was his last movie—is superb. The death scene to Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony actually made me weep.
(In real life, Robinson died exactly 10 days after the film wrapped, which adds to the poignancy.)
It was made in 1973, and I think Charlton Heston’s hardboiled detective character Thorne must have had a huge influence on Harrison Ford’s Deckard in Blade Runner, which was made nine years later. Yeah, yeah, Blade Runner is based on Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? But PKD’s novel is a comedy. And Blade Runner, most certainly, is not a comedy.
One big difference between the movies: Blade Runner focuses on artificially created demand in the future tense; Soylent Green focuses on need. Need that’s going unmet.
Here is the New York City of Soylent Green’s future:
As dystopian movies go, Soylent Green is right there in the upper echelons.
no subject
Date: 2020-01-08 04:27 pm (UTC)When it comes to Trump, I'm betting on scenario 3, because my guess is that he's more coward than crook. After the vote catching moment he'll back off, especially if Putin's got influence in the region. So much for my powers of prophecy!
Wishing Max well as soon as possible X
no subject
Date: 2020-01-08 05:19 pm (UTC)The three scenarios are not mutually exclusive.
Soylent Green is definitely worth re-seeing.