Portrait de Francois Marie Arouet dit, 1694-1778, tenant l’annee litteraire. Peinture de Jacques-Augustin-Catherine Pajou (1766-1828), 18eme siecle. Paris, Comedie Francaise

Among other things, he was famous for saying, “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”

Wiki needs more than one entry to cover his c.v. Here’s the thumbnail backgrounder:

Born
François-Marie Arouet
21 November 1694
Paris, France
Died
30 May 1778 (aged 83)
Paris, France
Resting place
Panthéon, Paris, France
Pen name
Voltaire

François-Marie Arouet (French: [fʁɑ̃swa maʁi aʁwɛ]; 21 November 1694 – 30 May 1778), known by his nom de plume Voltaire (/voʊlˈtɛər/;[2] French: [vɔltɛːʁ]), was a French Enlightenment writer, historian and philosopher famous for his wit, his attacks on Christianity as a whole, especially the established Catholic Church, and his advocacy of freedom of religion, freedom of speech and separation of church and state.

Voltaire was a versatile and prolific writer, producing works in almost every literary form, including plays, poems, novels, essays and historical and scientific works. He wrote more than 20,000 letters and more than 2,000 books and pamphlets.[3] He was an outspoken advocate of civil liberties, despite the risk this placed him in under the strict censorship laws of the time. As a satirical polemicist, he frequently made use of his works to criticize intolerance, religious dogma and the French institutions of his day.

For our purposes, the work of most interest is a short novel called Candide, a kind of candied poison cooked up for the philosophers of his day. Wiki gives us the lowdown.

Candide, ou l’Optimisme (/kænˈdiːd/; French: [kɑ̃did]) is a French satire first published in 1759 by Voltaire, a philosopher of the Age of Enlightenment.[5] The novella has been widely translated, with English versions titled Candide: or, All for the Best (1759); Candide: or, The Optimist (1762); and Candide: Optimism (1947).[6] It begins with a young man, Candide, who is living a sheltered life in an Edenic paradise and being indoctrinated with Leibnizian optimism by his mentor, Professor Pangloss.[7] The work describes the abrupt cessation of this lifestyle, followed by Candide’s slow and painful disillusionment as he witnesses and experiences great hardships in the world. Voltaire concludes with Candide, if not rejecting Leibnizian optimism outright, advocating a deeply practical precept, “we must cultivate our garden”, in lieu of the Leibnizian mantra of Pangloss, “all is for the best” in the “best of all possible worlds”.

Candide is characterized by its tone as well as by its erratic, fantastical, and fast-moving plot. A picaresque novel with a story similar to that of a more serious coming-of-age narrative (Bildungsroman), it parodies many adventure and romance clichés, the struggles of which are caricatured in a tone that is bitter and matter-of-fact. Still, the events discussed are often based on historical happenings, such as the Seven Years’ War and the 1755 Lisbon earthquake.[8] As philosophers of Voltaire’s day contended with the problem of evil, so does Candide in this short novel, albeit more directly and humorously. Voltaire ridicules religion, theologians, governments, armies, philosophies, and philosophers. Through Candide, he assaults Leibniz and his optimism.[9][10]

If it hasn’t already, the name Pangloss will soon ring a bell.

Daniel Pangloss, Gadfly in Residence, Shuteye Town

He makes an appearance in the back room at Moon Books and many appearances in the cocktail lounges serving Shuteye Town’s subway travelers.

Unless you discovered this post by accident, you are here because you are looking for the missing text files of Daniel Pangloss’s Conversations in the lounges of the Shuteye Transit subway system. The good news is that we can give you one Pangloss conversation now (and live links to much more Pangloss here later on below…):

BAHAMMA BULL 

The Sugar Reef – A Millennium Eve Celebration

 

The Speakers of the Conversation: DANIEL PANGLOSS, a journalist; ROGER LANDERS, an emigré, and PATRICK RAYMOND, an entrepreneur. The setting is an open-air restaurant overlooking the night-darkened turquoise of the Carribbean Sea. A mild breeze washes the tables with the smell of salt and wet wood. There is a pervasive sense of nothing urgent in the air. Roger and Patrick have already had a leisurely dinner of fresh water lobster, and the empty shell carcasses are flanked by several empty bottles of champagne.

 

DANIEL: I see that everyone has started without me. You’d better order another bottle of Moet. I’ve got some catching up to do.
ROGER: You’re not the only one who needs to catch up. I’ve been dying to hear all the latest gossip from Ameria.
DANIEL: Surely, Patrick keeps you current on the news. I myself don’t pay much attention these days to goings on outside Shuteye Town. It’s a lot of responsibility working with the wonderful kidz of Ameria. Doesn’t leave much time for kibitzing on the great events of the day.
ROGER: Really? Even if the great events of the day seem increasingly to involve school shootings by the wonderful kidz of Ameria?
DANIEL: You see? You have been keeping up with things. I can’t think what I’d be able to add to your own perceptions and insights.
PATRICK: That’s where I’d say you’re being too modest, Daniel. I can inform Roger about the headlines since his escape—the tragic death of Lady Die, the empeachment of the Presdent, the ascent of the martyr Hillery, and the continuing sorrow of Ameria’s classrooms—but I’m at a loss to explain to him why it’s all for the best. And that is your new stock in trade, is it not?
DANIEL: I do my poor part to shed a ray of friendly light on fortune’s face. Would you prefer that I yielded to cynicism and fled the land of my birth?
ROGER: As I understand it, Ameria is consumed with curiosity these days about the phenomenon of their wonderful kidz shooting each other and their teachers to death. Patrick says the mass media are thrillingly sincere in their determination to find out why. Perhaps you could shed a friendly ray of light about that for us. You must remember, after all, that we are members of that low company who have yielded to cynicism. We are having a hard time, for example, understanding why the ‘why’ seems so impenetrable to the geniuses of the media.
DANIEL: Ah. I will confess that I, too, was puzzled for a time about that. Like you, I suppose, I considered the answer obvious. It took me some little while to work out the underlying beauty of the process which insists on transforming the self-evident into the inscrutable.
PATRICK: I would enjoy being able to see such an underlying beauty.
ROGER: Me too. I wonder what stands in my way. Is the beauty obscured by an intervening layer of ugliness? Or is it that the ugliness—unbeknownst to ignoramuses like Patrick and me—ought properly be regarded as a thing of beauty?
DANIEL: As an artist, Roger, you must be aware that beauty often contains features that would be ugly if they were not so harmoniously resolved in the whole. A beautiful woman is rarely pretty, just as a pretty woman is denied the attainment of true beauty by the predictable uniformity of her features. Yes, there is ugliness in the components of the school-shooting mystery. But there is also a triumphant beauty in the whole of the cultural response to that mystery.
ROGER: Just so we don’t get at cross-purposes in this discussion, can we agree on some matters of ugliness? For example, when we agree that the answer seems obvious, are we in fact agreeing that that obvious answer is the collapse of all institutions, professions, and disciplines which play any part in the raising of children? That everyone who dares to point a finger in any specific direction is also an accomplice? That it is not a question of deciding between video games and filmed entertainments, or between parents and teachers, or between child psychologists and juvenile court judges, child welfare bureaucracies and school administrations, rap and alternative rock music, drugs and corrupt role models—but that all of these are implicated, none of them incidentally, which means that there is no combination of censorship, surveillance, legislative extremism, and suppression of civil rights which can restore what has already been lost? Can we agree that this is the obvious answer we have been alluding to?
DANIEL: Yes, indeed. Absolutely. I thought it too obvious a point to articulate in this company, but I see that your cynicism has made you suspicious. Every individual and every institution is culpable. The society of Ameria exists in a state of universal abortion—which is to say that the Baby Boomers will not produce a generation of adults. Their offspring will grow to physical maturity and eventually to senility as superannuated children, locked forever in the absolute selfishness of the infant mind which has never been created as a self in the first place. We confront in our wonderful kidz an army of clothes hangers. But they are clothes hangers endowed with appetites, voices, and ceaseless motion. Their motion is like the milling of a crowd in some public place where there is nothing to see, nowhere to go, and nothing to do. Periodically, the milling builds to the semblance of a riot, but it contains no more real malice than a pot of soup brought accidentally to a boil. The boiled soup does not see itself as ruined. That definition exists only from the standpoint of those who stood ready to consume it.
PATRICK. We are still waiting for the beauty.
DANIEL. The beauty? Oh, yes. The beauty. I would say that the whole presents three distinct faces of beauty. The first is the beauty of poetic justice. The second is the beauty of perfect irony. The third is the beauty of a new birth, the emergence of a new form of being.
PATRICK: Now that you mention it, I do believe I see the irony. Here is a generation of parents who have been so consumed with their own desires and appetites throughout their lives that they embarked on a secret experiment—the attempt to sire a new generation without accepting the responsibility for raising them. Let the teachers teach them, let the television babysit them, let the mall and the mass media introduce them to the culture they would inherit. Meanwhile, the parents were free to do as they wanted. Free to be self-serving film producers, network executives, teachers, advertising copywriters, attorneys, politicians, journalists, and businessmen. Free to add their own little molehill of ugliness to the mountain of bad influence their children would have to surmount in order to raise themselves. Because this was a generation of parents who had also developed their own definition of freedom, meaning that freedom consisted of their right to act in their own self-interest even as they sought to limit the freedom of anyone who got in their way. Such a novel definition of freedom had to be accompanied by an equally novel definition of virtue—that whatever they did in their own self-interest was virtuous because they were the ones doing it, and whatever anyone else did in their own self-interest was something that needed to be regulated by the government.
ROGER: There was, to be fair, some guilt involved.
PATRICK: But a guilt denied. That’s why the irony is, as Daniel has suggested, so perfect. For the wave of denial has been the size of a tsunami. Parents who could not hold a hundred-word conversation with their own children professed a love and commitment to their kidz which was nauseating in its saccharine, self-serving hypocrisy. Citizens of the richest nation in recorded history, they lamented the declining standard of living that required both parents to hold full-time jobs, lest they be reduced to the penurious state of living without that second VCR, that third television, that fourth movie channel, that fifth trip this month to the restaurant. In penance—and in proof of their love for the kidz—they bought the little bastards off, with hundred-and-forty dollar sneakers, TVs, computers, cell phones, and all the baggy designer togs a kid might need to hide out in. And when anything went wrong with their little darlings, they were savage in their denunciation of the violence in the movies, the sex on MTV, the incompetence in the classroom, the easy availability of drugs, the danger of guns, and the dearth of fit role models for the sullen, resentful slugs they had spawned.
ROGER: And the irony? The beautiful, perfect irony?
PATRICK: I’m beginning to take Daniel’s point. The beauty of the irony is that they don’t know what’s wrong with the kids because none of them has ever really talked to the kids. If they had tried, they would know that it can’t be done. These are kids with only one skill—the ability to terminate any conversation attempted by an adult with a few inarticulate grunts. That’s why the teachers can’t teach them and don’t really try to. It’s why the mass media journalists can’t explain them, why child psychologists can’t help them, why the drug counselors can’t save them. Nobody knows why school shootings happen because nobody has any real communication with the kids, and everybody is denying that this is so. If the parents and teachers and child experts were any damn good, this wouldn’t, couldn’t be a mystery. The perception of mystery is, all by itself, the perfect indictment of universal neglect and incompetence. It really is kind of beautiful when you think about it.
DANIEL: If you can perceive the irony, you shouldn’t have too much trouble with the poetic justice.
PATRICK: You’re right. It’s your point about the soup. The Baby Boomers have flitted from one fad to another all their lives, looking for happiness and salvation in a world without meaning. Belatedly, they hit on the idea that having children would save them, especially as they began to fear the prospect of old age. They fully intended to consume the pot of soup. But the soup is spoiled. Their beloved kids won’t give a shit about them when they reach their dotage and need that soup. That’s another reason the mystery is necessary. Till the very end, the parents don’t want to admit the lonely old age that’s staring them in the face.
ROGER: And the third face of beauty?
DANIEL: Stop playing dumb with me, Roger. I know as well as you do that you didn’t leave your journal unfinished when you left. Everything important is already in there. You tell me about the new birth.
ROGER: Okay. From here on in it’s a new world. The technocratic system has come into its own now, and the X-Generation is perfectly adapted to that system’s wants and needs. There are two possible alternative outcomes—a long twilight of diminishing freedom and accelerating transactional velocity; or a cataclysm of some sort, a large-scale die-off that trims the human race back to manageable proportions. Either way, the principal attribute of the X-Generation—which is its undeveloped capacity for the experience of deep human emotion—will prove to be advantageous for the physical survival of the species. I cannot offer a helpful comment about the value of physical survival in the absence of emotional, intellectual, and spiritual survival. I am a cynic. I see no value in mere physical survival. But you, Daniel, I am sure you can articulate it if there is any.
DANIEL: I’m sure I can. Is there any more champagne?
PATRICK: Here comes the waiter now.
ROGER: It’s nearly midnight. Shouldn’t we be drinking a toast to the new millennium?
DANIEL: I’ll drink to that.
PATRICK: Me too.
ROGER: What the hell. Why not?

“Bahamma Bull” is not one of the missing texts of ST99. Because it didn’t take place in Shuteye Town. Daniel Pangloss spends much of his time outside Shuteye Town, in the fictional country of Ameria, otherwise known as Shuteye Nation. This is a place of its own, as much a creature of words as ST99 is of images, quite as vast in its own way and very intricately interconnected by hyperlinks. It has columns from the Shuteye Times and the Balow Star, as well as other mass media outlets from the years 2000 and 2001. It has its own Who’s Who listings of currently famous people, has-beens, foreigners, historical figures (to the extent we can remember them), a Glossary of the American language of the time that owes as much to Ambrose Bierce as the persona of Pangloss owes to Voltaire, and its own Undernet. Pangloss is a major content contributor at what may be the wildest component of Shuteye Nation, the Foreign Gazetteer. You’ll find him sharing his perspective on:

The Cuben Missile Crisis of 1962.

Snazi Germany

Pangloss on the Culture of Yurrup, specifically art, specifically boobs.

The Culture of Franch, specifically boobs, specifically philosophy, spectifically “La Danse Moderne.”

Pangloss moonlights as a travel correspondent, rearching the marvelous progress of Castrol’s Cuber.

At Amazon.com.

And as you might guess from the pic above, you can also read all the Lounge Conversations from the Shuteye subway line. They’re in print and waiting for your delectation. Good news, bad news: the Shuteye Nation stuff is free; the Lounge Conversations aren’t.

Old Blue Eye.

We’ve all seen this before. Raebert being Raebert. I took another photo, because I didn’t like the focus. No change in lighting or any other setting. just an iPhone and a dog.

Flash.

Coincidence or something. Another pic to test.

I’m not doing anything.

But he was doing something. This:

Flash.

And a third pic at the same setting in the same pose just to make sure:

I’m always doing SOMETHING.

Not arguing anything one way or another.

What?

Just a day in the life.

P.S. Next day in the life:

Different angle, same effect.

Is his mind growing in dreams?

Of course not. I’m 100 percent, absolutely, almost sure.

Something about old hat stuff like love and beauty and courage.

We just stumbled on it, escaping the news. It’s in Chinese with subtitles. It’s billed as a martial arts movie. It takes place in the ninth century.

But actually there isn’t that much combat, and it’s far less silly than usual when it occurs. The plot is more intricate than usual too.

Battle in a bamboo forest. Cool.

What we didn’t expect that kept us riveted all the way to the end. Absolutely gorgeous cinematography. Gorgeous lead actors. (Well, my wife said he was gorgeous too.)

You decide.

And they were even good at the acting. This is no Hong Kong fightfest with whooshing feet, endless nonfatal blows, and overwrought, nonsensical dialogue. It’s a movie, and in the end it is moving. Give it a look.

Trust me. You’ll be pleasantly surprised.

You can’t get much farther from the news. And the music is far away from everything.

Light at the end of the tunnel?

Sure, everything’s bad. Republicans fractured, caving in as we knew they would, pundits still grousing about the Ted Cruz quasi-filibuster.

But here’s the deal. Ted Cruz stood up against ObamaCare. That’s going to matter next year. Because ObamaCare is an utter, horrific disaster. It’s going to hurt almost everyone, in their pocketbooks and in their access to healthcare.

The failed website is actually a distraction from what will be painfully clear in another six months. The premiums will be higher, somewhere between 50 percent and 90 percent higher, and the deductibles will be approximately 400 percent higher.

This kind of cost increase is going to kill people. It’s not a political advantage for Republicans. It’s a rolling, escalating cataclysm. But it’s also a wake-up call for the American people.

There’s at least a chance they will notice that they can’t feed their families, that mom died because she couldn’t find a doctor, that their lives are worse and more filled with fear. Fear of a government that doesn’t care about anything but controlling them.

Toot toot, the whistle bloweth. The government train is coming down the tracks. At you.

If they notice they’re worse off, that’s a glimmer. But noticing isn’t something our people have been very good at lately.

What could be more important?

Almost all the nations of the world are broke and trading each others’ debt like stock. The Middle East is plunging into a new dark age fueled by religious hatred of everyone who achieved something like civilization. One or two of them are determined to build nuclear weapons to annihilate the infidels while the rest fiddle and turn away.

The United States, whose self imposed responsibility it was, for over a century, to keep this stinky stew of a world from boiling over is now being led (there’s a word) by a cartoon character as pompously boastful and brave as Daffy Duck, who hates absolutely everyone but uniformed dictators and Muslims.

Most recently, this whole nation is subsiding into penury and oppression, as Daffy’s malignant will to power steadily converts government services into tools of intimidation and tyranny.

Simultaneously, this same great nation is saddled with a generation of youth who can’t find their own country on a map and can’t be induced to pay attention to anything but exhortations to promiscuous sex, vampires, and zombies. Not a coincidence.

At the exact present moment, the federal government hasn’t had a budget in five years and is about to have its credit card declined at Sears, while millions of people are being compelled to sign over the responsibility for their healthcare to a government system that doesn’t even exist. This is called a glitch. A glitch.

But we’re asked to believe that a major issue of the day commanding our immediate attention is the 80 year old name of a professional sports team.

Really? Really? Really?

Even Ed Morrissey at the conservative Hotair website seems to think there’s something to think about here.

Thanks to a long and wonderful day with my granddaughters, I didn’t get a chance to watch the RedskinsBarrycaders-Cowboys game until well after halftime, and it turned out to be much as I predicted (which is rare enough this season, I grant you). I didn’t get to see the Steelers win their first game over the Jets, either. All of that was balanced by not having to sit through this rehash of a lecture from Bob Costas, who took two and a half minutes of halftime to tell the NBC audience absolutely nothing it already hadn’t heard repeatedly in the naming controversy in Washington…

Frankly, I don’t have an opinion on this topic, except to say that the opposing arguments have clearly been delineated, and have been for years. I am not a Native American, and don’t particularly feel the need to take offense on their part; I figure that Native Americans can express themselves perfectly well on that issue themselves, if they do take offense. I’m also not a Washington Redskins Barrycaders fan. Not only did Costas not say anything new, he didn’t even have the nerve to actually take a stand. He just meanders around for two and half minutes like a tourist through a debate museum, and then finishes by saying in essence, “Hey, maybe they had a point!”

Ed’s an ass. Of course Costas was taking a stand, and of course Ed’s a Native American. Indians, or Native Americans as Indians insist on hyperbolizing their identities (Canadians are more correct in referring to their ‘aboriginal peoples’), are already lavishly over-admired in our culture, endowed by an incessant PR effort with a wisdom and entitlement they’ve done no more than any illiterate neolithic tribe to earn. Spectacular success for a people whose principal contribution to our shared legacy is the scalping of defeated enemies. But since they mostly died toothless before the age of 30, we should probably make allowances. Would that the savages who inhabit the corridors of power in Washington shared the same fate.

Still. I was amazed to learn that not only the terms Redskins (self-named as I understand), Indians and Chiefs are considered a slur by Bob Costas and company but also ‘warriors.’

Really?

Where I beg to differ. If some damn tribe of redskin injuns had run into my tribal ancestors in the highlands of Scotland, they’d have learned what warriors really are. The Romans built a wall across all of England to keep Scottish warriors out. Injuns. We’d have butchered them. They’d be carrying their sorry asses back to South Dakota with both hands. If you know what I’m saying.

I’m guessing the Zulu, the Mongols, and the Vikings would have similar thoughts.

If you know what I’m saying.

How stupid do we have to be to get lulled into idiot non-controversies like this?

No. Don’t answer. Your explanation would be too depressing to read.

Deerhounds live for maybe eight years. I’ve lived maybe seven times that. Care to tell me what I don’t know?

Yeah. I know. You’re sick of everything. Withdrawing. I feel the same way. The mass media are all liars and shills. The new media are almost as bad, their message being, “The mass media are all liars and shills, which we’ll inform you about with passionate conviction while we continue to build our own careers and incomes.” Which would ring truer if they could write well, or even grammatically. Or with words correctly spelled.

Which leaves you where I am. Talking to myself. What do I talk to myself about? Everything.

I talk to myself about the nation. It’s not what I thought it was. I thought it would be proof against a temporary setback like we experienced in 2001. It isn’t. I thought we would always remember who we were, how we were founded, and where we might go. I was wrong.

I talk to myself about people. I had always believed that people were more good than bad. I don’t believe that anymore. Give them an excuse to give up and they will. Give them a title on the door and they will shove others into the dirt. Give them a cause and they will destroy everyone and everything in their path. Including themselves and everything they come from.

I talk to myself about right and wrong. Which can only be discerned by relying on the wisdom of history and the illuminated minds of our past, who have consistently humbled themselves before God. But in an age of no education, there is no history, which makes it possible for there to be no God, just one book or one band or one icon we’re willing to trade our own consciousness for.

I talk to myself about myself. I tell myself I should be nicer, but I can’t be. I tell myself I should be more accommodating, forgiving, tolerant, civil. But I can’t be. When almost everyone you know is steaming full speed ahead over a cliff — with a momentum that will probably take you with them — what are you supposed to do?

I talk to myself. Sometimes out loud. Everything I’ve ever believed in is still true, but it’s being poisoned by morons I actually went to school with. There’s almost no one left who can appreciate the monumental irony of how much good has been recast as evil, how much evil has been recast as progressive correctness.

Am I obsolete? Am I the guy the smart ones are waiting for to die? Yes. I’m obsolete because the terms in which I view things are no longer comprehensible to the illiterate poseurs who now control the public discussion. And, yes, they are waiting for me and my kind to die. Because we are an embarrassment. We know more, have always known more, and aren’t fooled by their platitudes.

But… But… But… I’m not done yet. They’ll have to come and kill me. With what I understand about ObamaCare and the NSA, the IRS, and the DOJ generally, they may. It won’t be because I stop fighting, though. I’m the old thing that doesn’t fade away. Is something that leaps at your throat obsolete? Uh, no. It’s a clear and present danger.

Just talking to myself.

So. However much you withdraw, I’ll still be here, equally withdrawn perhaps but spitting nails. Whether you show up or not. There’s always a new warrior willing to pick up the weapon you dropped in flight.

Fulcrum of life.

Yeah, the pic is a bit blurry at this size, but so is the boy. Let me explain.

I’ve had easily a dozen dogs in my life, many of them brilliant beyond the pronouncements of animal behaviorists. All of the brilliant ones showed a marked capacity for understanding and adapting to the family, with some determined exceptions regarding their own desires. An Irish setter who could ferry a pack of cigarettes to my dad in the bathtub. A fox terrier who — told to exterminate a troublesome mouse in the morning — presented the corpse of said mouse on the threshold of the bedroom doorway when the masters returned from work. A German Shepherd whose devotion first to me and then my dad made me regard her as a Catholic saint. A greyhound who feared men but immediately regarded me as a protector and never changed his mind, even when I participated in his euthanasia. A Scottish Deerhound who was loath to show his emotions but trusted me to the end.

Raebert is unlike any of them. He’s the whole span of dogdom. He’s the smartest and the dumbest, the best and the worst, the most dependent and independent, all at the same time. He’s like a visitation, an occupying force. Almost a lesson.

I’ve written and deleted a bunch of words about how different he is. They all boil down to this. He thinks he can make everything better, no matter what we think. At night he gets itchy. When my wife and I are on the couch, he mills, he roams, he poses, he demands (our) food and attention. What he really wants is to get on the couch with us. He wants to blanket us with his gigantic body, as if he could protect us from the fears and worries he detects in us, and he just knows that he can hold time hostage while he goes massively to sleep with his head on my lap and his invulnerable rear end on my wife’s lap.

That’s the only time I could ever call his sleep blissful. He goes out completely, limp and at peace. But he’s just so so heavy that you have to wake him up and push him off.

He’s not trying to adapt to us. He’s trying to adapt us to his mission, which is… What?

I’m the one prone to flights of fancy. My wife isn’t. She’s flummoxed. Early on, she thought it was a domination game. But now that he buries his head so submissively and constantly in her lap, she knows that’s not it. What she says is unnerving. “They’re the hardest, most demanding dog you can have, and I can’t imagine ever not having one again.”

Me? I keep thinking of my email user name “SigmaZrn.” It’s short for Sigma Zerone. Sigma being the mathematical symbol for summation. Zerone being a mathematical term I invented in my punk writer days, as the universe of possibility and meaning between zero and one, which is infinity, totality. Everything that happens occurs in the space between zero and one. Raebert is the living embodiment of Sigma Zerone.

This is not an abstraction. He needs to be near me. All the time. He is life itself. When I lose heart, I can put my hand on his impossibly huge chest, feel that great heart beating, and forget that there’s any time but time now.

What’s it like? It’s like having a unicorn curled up beside you. Unreal but miraculously hyper-real. He’s there but maybe he really isn’t. Nothing like this could be true, could it?

Why he looks so different in his pictures. Some days he’s this. Other days he’s that. He’s not always the same color. He’s as childish as they come. Then he’s a wise Scottish lord from aeons past. As I said, blurry.

He’s a gift from God. And being the ungrateful jerk I am, I keep thinking the gift can be withdrawn at any time. Maybe he’ll be taken away as abruptly as Psmith was. But to quell that pointless fear, all I have to do is reach over and stroke his shoulder. He’s right beside me, you see. As he will always be, one way or another.

Photography credit: My Wife.

When you forget who you are, go back to the land you come from. Not the nation or its institutions but the land itself.

My wife goes to work from here and up the Turnpike every day at dawn. Most people have their coffee and the radio and cruise control. The tunnel vision of the constant commuter, the road a ribbon to ride to the office. But not her.

Lately, she’s been pulling over en route to take pictures with her cellphone. Because she finds the land at dawn inspiring.

She’s sent me multiple photos, beautiful photos. This is the one I can’t get out of my head. Initially, I thought the telephone pole at left was a fault. It isn’t. Bent and ugly in the foreground, it’s the crap we have to look past in order to see what’s still vital and lovely.

Beyond the horizon, through that pink mist, lies the majestic Delaware River. The eye that took the picture knows that and could see it. This is no wasteland. It’s just part of the wave of life, which isn’t always battering but salving and life giving. Mist is water is life. And light is light.

I find it inspiring. I find my wife inspiring.

However dark it gets, I have this. And you have this. If you want it and can see it.

Darkness in Detroit.

Sometimes a movie doesn’t have to be great. It just has to have a timely context. This one dates to 2010. It’s a modest sci fi movie with a good cast and a better than average script. Not MUCH better than average, but better than Stephen King or Rod Serling could do. Not the TMI dialogue of King or the TMI messaging of Serling. Result? A movie length Twilight Zone episode without the precious sermonizing at the end. Like the Japanese do so much better than we do. (Oh wait. They already made this movie too. And it was haunting.)

Okay. This one isn’t haunting. It’s suddenly “Mystery Science Theater 3000” starring Hayden Christiansen, John Leguizamo, and Thandie Newton.

A palpable predatory darkness suddenly attacks the City of Detroit. People disappear, leaving only their clothes behind. The few survivors are those who were holding or wearing lights at the time. (Smokers who were lighting up got spared; amazing that NPR liked the film.)

You’re thinking, “Is this another episode of the dreary Left Behind franchise?” But NO, it isn’t. Or NPR wouldn’t have liked it, right?

Sunrise gets later, sunset gets earlier. Our focus is reduced to a bar bearing the lights “Sonny’s Happy Hour.” Cool.

When the inner jeering starts. What’s the darkness that’s stalking the survivors? It’s fucking Detroit. Maybe umpty generations of liberal tax and spend liberal politics that sucked the life out of everything. Or maybe it’s the Tea Party attacking the rights of the welfare state. Or is it even worse than that? One after another dies proclaiming the words “I exist,” which suggests that maybe we don’t, that there’s a new statist sense in which we don’t actually exist anymore. Even that our only freedom lies in surrender to the annihilating darkness.

It all works pretty damn good for the Detroit of 2013, don’t it? What I mean by context.

Watch this movie and there will be times you’ll be sure you can see the Obama administration flowing down the street.

Of course, the bottom line is the old reliable leftist truism of unforgivable sin. The only ones permitted to survive are children. The rest of us must die. Even the cars of Detroit have to die. The kids will have to escape on a horse fed by organic apples. How cool is that?

Who knows more about light than children who don’t know anything?