Not a game. Chaos.

When I was a kid, there were two card games that corresponded to politics. One civilized and one rowdy. The civilized one was War. The rowdy one was Spit. We’ve been playing Spit since the 2000 election. It’s not about gentlemen and ladies playing seriously across a table. It’s about being faster, more ruthless, more physical, and yes, more violent with your cards than your opponent. War doesn’t have an equivalent of the race card. Spit has nothing but. The so-called play is just short of fisticuffs. Which it sometimes leads to.

But there was a whole other game nobody really played. 52 Pickup. It wasn’t a game at all. It was a damnation of games. It consisted of simply throwing the whole deck up in the air and challenging anyone to make sense of the result.

Where we are with the NSA revelations. Left and right no longer entirely matter, and they are not predictive. Time to figure out where you really stand. This is a juggling of first principles, and I’m thinking it’s a litmus test it’s possible to fail utterly.

The contradictions and reversals are so huge that I feared I couldn’t find a way to illustrate them. But then I saw Fox News Channel’s show The Five this evening. Enough to start the discussion.

Bob Beckel. The crusty reliable lefty. Outraged. To the max. He referenced the Patriot Act, but he didn’t content himself with blaming Bush. He blamed Obama more for extending the surveillance to all Americans.

Dana Perino. She was inclined to trust the NSA. Huh? She wondered why the whistleblower ran away to Hong Kong and asked why he didn’t come to Washington, DC, to make his revelations. Really? He wouldn’t have been swarmed by 8000 federal agents and disappeared from view? Really?

Greg Gutfeld. Total sellout. Ultimate libertarian announces he has an End Of the World clause that justifies the end of liberty if it prevents a nuclear terrorist attack. He seemed, I’m sorry to say, in a state of near panic.

Kimberly Guilfoyle. Thought she was raising the central issue when she said, “if we’re talking the ends justifying the means…” But I forgot that she’s a former federal prosecutor. The only ends vs. means issue she saw was the whistleblower. He’s a boastful would-be hero who has to be prosecuted. In her red dress and corpse makeup, she had only one objective: prosecuting the accused who had broken the law. Unmindful of her own double irony. First that the moral question of whether ends justify the means applies only to the whistleblower and NOT to the federal government. Second, that she wanted the whistleblower taken into federal custody ASAP because al Qaeda would certainly want to capture him and torture his secrets from him. So, he’s doing this for fame and glory when you regard him as a beheading victim in waiting? Really?

Eric Bolling. I thought he would buy the Republican defense. He didn’t. Doesn’t. He’s right. He agreed with Beckel. It’s outrageous and utterly unacceptable. You know. A little thing called the Fourth Amendment that half or more of putative conservatives have cravenly forgotten about.

A few additional points.

It’s been at least a decade that critics of U.S. intelligence have been decrying the decline of human intelligence in favor of high-tech intelligence. The NSA programs we’ve been learning about are the ultimate proof. The FBI was unable to translate a human intelligence tip from the Russians about the Boston bombers. Interestingly, since the U.K. Became the most surveilled society on earth, that country’s crime solution rate has plummeted. Too much data and too little, uh, intelligence applied.

I once wrote a post about death. More than 6000 Americans die every day. Terrorism? Less than 2500 victims in the last dozen years. There are 300 million Americans. No, I won’t ask you to do the math. I know most of you can’t, and I AM talking about you, Gutfeld. Your fright is disgusting. Not even losing a city is worth abandoning the freedoms you have spent so much time proclaiming. 30,000 Americans die every year just bashing into each other in their cars. Maybe the government should monitor the new GPS apps in motor vehicles to find road rage and texting teens and slurring daddies. Screw the constitution if one life can be saved by hounding them to paralyzed paranoia.

Finally, I’m fascinated by the brand new Iron Curtain righties have discovered between the predatory Obama administration and the benign nexus of CIA/NSA/FBI and all the companies that funnel our private communications to them. I’m stupefied by the lack of imagination involved in assuming that “if you haven’t done anything wrong, you have nothing to fear.” Who decides what is wrong? Can’t envision people who think some phrase in a casual email is grounds to destroy your life? If somebody in the government decides you’re a threat or a pest. Ever heard of the recent media concept called the “narrative”?

Oh, just think. For once. Think of every google search you’ve ever done. If I wanted to cast you as a villain, what STORY could I concoct of who you are based on all those searches?

Just think.

Then come back at me sounding like Dana Perino, Greg Gutfeld, or even Kimberley Guilfoyle.

Actually, don’t. I don’t feel the need to respond to idiots anymore. They bore me so.

How does he always know what I’m up to?

I’m so rich I must be smart.

Oprah got her honorary degree. The Harvard grads got the wisdom of Oprah. I’m certain it ranks right up there with all the other luminaries who actually attended the school — you know, less wealthy folk like Ralph Waldo Emerson, T.S. Eliot, ee cummings, Henry James, John Updike, John Adams, John Hancock, Philip Johnson, Charles Bullfinch, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Orson Welles. Fortunately, the audio of her commencement address is permanently enshrined here. You’ll find it inspiring, I’m sure.

Unless, like me, you’d prefer to hear the thoughts of a real Harvard graduate who was not invited to this year’s festivities. An excerpt if you need that sort of incentive.

In high school you were National Merit Scholars, student council presidents and captains of your fencing teams. You took dozens of practice SATs, practiced viola for thousands of hours (violinists are a dime a dozen) and French-braided the hair of homeless veterans.

You masterfully tied together a set of emotional symptoms that looked enough like attention deficit disorder to buy you extra time on all your finals and standardized tests. Plus, you got to take the exams in special quiet rooms, where a test facilitator would sharpen the pencils outside, because the grinding sound triggered your acute sensory overload. (Which somehow didn’t preclude your part-time summer job at Blenders Juicery.)

You hired private college advisers to read your essays and hone your interview skills. Just think back to those valuable sessions where you learned to practically leap out of the chair talking about your passion for writing one-act plays in Cherokee, or how your heart raced that summer on the Mongolian steppes when you first spotted an ovoo monitor lizard, once thought to be extinct.

And you learned to deftly walk the college interviewer through your many achievements while still showing carefully modulated self-effacement: “Yes, I helped design the CO2 scrubber that will save humanity from global warming, but it was totally a team effort.”

Then you arrived at this great institution, where you dabbled in a couple of your passions, only to quit them after freshman year because you found new ones: playing hundreds of rounds of “Settlers of Catan” and having long debates into the night over which Stark son is hotter on “Game of Thrones.”

The keys of your $20,000 Powell flute became rusted shut after it was put to use as a bong for the last two years. Your Wilson Pro H22 tennis racquet quickly became a drying rack for your underwear once you found out that the college tennis team was filled with power-hitting recruits from Estonia and the Ukraine who could knock a flash drive off the top of your head with a backhand.

So you relaxed into college life—a well-deserved break after the exhausting race to get here. You’ve spent four years percolating in a warm stew of beer, gender studies and online pornography—which led to the subject of your senior thesis, “Jacobean Dramatic Tropes in Modern ‘Massage Surprise’ Videos.”

Yes, Rob LaZebnik knows his audience. If you want to see what advice he has for the spoiled brats who presently occupy the prestigious houses of Harvard, go here.

On the other hand, you might think he just has a bad attitude. There’s a lot of that going around these days.

Harvard is having a bad year. The football team sucks. Second to Penn? Talk about suck. The boss can hardly hold his head up since that happened.

Like my Adam’s apple? Implant.

It’s gotta be tough. To be smart. Really smart. But not brilliant, insightful, or breakthrough. To be just a glib repetitious cliche. You’re a Rhodes Scholar, well paid, and nothing but a propaganda mouthpiece for the lamest political agenda in 80 years.

All so so old. Why nobody watches anymore. Why you must be tearing your hair out. Touch of grey seems appropriate.

The gay brother is the coolest character.

It’s a tough call. The show deserves a row of Emmies. Delightfully subversive of all kinds of shibboleths without ever seeming to deviate from standard lib doctrine. The villain of the script is, finally, as it must be, corporate, but the villain of the subtext is totalitarian scientism, which regards all of us as indistinguishable units to be managed like cattle and if necessary slaughtered like cattle. Equally sly is the dynamiting of the false notion that homosexuality is genetic, which even geneticists concede it can’t be.

None of this is meant to suggest that the show itself is some kind of screed. It isn’t. It’s suspenseful, action-packed, hilarious, moving, and utterly absorbing. Ten episodes, complete season finished. Emmies obviously go to show, scriptwriter, and director. Where it gets hard is with the actors. Felix as the foster-brother of Sara is tempting as the top candidate. In the later episodes you worry that they might actually kill him off, which would cut your interest in half.

On the other hand are the actresses who play the clones. They’re all marvelous, starting with the crazed assassin Helena.

I’m a Ukrainiac. Kill, love, kill, love, kill.

But the soccer mom Alison is as subtly realized as Helena is over the top. Just as nuts yet it takes hours to realize how deep down batty she really is.

I just want my life back. Even if it kills you.

Cosima is even subtler, a weedy academic rational shell hiding a volcanically passionate emotional pushover. This far in, we’re still not sure who she is.

I’m smarter than everybody but me.

Still, the winner has to be Sara, streetwise, sexy, cunning, disreputable, and absolutely focused on protecting her five year old daughter. It’s a spellbinding performance, so good that you forget she’s not technically beautiful. It turns out that she is beautiful, as played by Tatiana Maslany.

I can do this. All of it.

Remember that name. She became a star in Orphan Black.

As long as I can touch I can relax.

So we’re doing better. After a week of looking after the hurt one my not so reliable knees gave out and one of the daughters had to take her for the X-ray and the prognosis. Which were both excellent. She’s healing fast. As she predicted she would.

Thought we could share one of her tonics.

We’re city folk.

The red tailed hawks at the Franklin Institute are scrutinized more closely than the IRS watches conservatives. The missus has been observing their babies for years on the “Bobble Cam.” She loves it most when the bobbles start “wingercizing,”getting ready to fly.

I’m not ever going to fly. I’m just keeping mom off my back.

She likes it especially now, given that she’s flying on one wing herself. But even she was startled to discover, just like the IRS, that sometimes the watched are also watching the watchers.

You see me, I see you.

We’re good. My legs are back. And she’s back to getting cross when I tease her. Nest righted. Hawks on the wing again.

Fast on the draw…

It’s glamorous to be a fast gun. Everyone knows you can shoot down the ones who rise to oppose you. They think you don’t ever need anyone else. Sometimes even the people you need. Why we intone our lonely prayer.

From childhood’s hour I have not been
As others were—I have not seen
As others saw—I could not bring
My passions from a common spring—
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow—I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone—
And all I lov’d—I lov’d alone—
Then—in my childhood—in the dawn
Of a most stormy life—was drawn
From ev’ry depth of good and ill
The mystery which binds me still—
From the torrent, or the fountain—
From the red cliff of the mountain—
From the sun that ’round me roll’d
In its autumn tint of gold—
From the lightning in the sky
As it pass’d me flying by—
From the thunder, and the storm—
And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view—

The author is Poe, the title is “Alone.” I forgot to add the ending. Amen.

I’ve always been looking out for the one who needs looking out for.

Don’t ever let your children hitchhike or think that it’s an acceptable mode of transportation.

But I’ve done it several times. Learned some things along the way. I’ll tell three quick stories. One humbling, one funny, and one I’m convinced is a world record.

Thought I knew everything about driving. Until I got a ride on a tractor trailer. Nothing like you think it is. Harsh harsh ride. Every bump hits your spine. No big deal. The big deal is that when you look out the windshield, you feel like you’re two lanes worth of wide. How does the driver make any decision about where to go, how to avoid all the other cars?

Funny. I had a GMC Jimmy when I was consulting with General Motors. The gas gauge was for shit. It said there was an eighth of a tank when the tank was empty. I KNEW this. But I ran out of gas between Findlay and Lima Ohio, which is precisely 25 miles from anywhere. I was so furious with myself that I got out of the car, slammed the door, and started walking, still cursing myself step by step. I informed myself that I deserved being stranded in the middle of nowhere and it would serve me right to walk for hours and hours… when suddenly I became aware of a kind of chugging sound behind me. I looked over my shoulder to discover that a huge tractor trailer was plodding behind me on the shoulder of the road. He was waiting for me to realize that he was rescuing me from my rank stupidity. He drove me to the next town and dropped me off at a garage that could get me back to my car. Don’t tell me people aren’t good.

World Record. One of those stupid ideas. I hitchhiked from Cambridge, Mass, to Poughkeepsie, New York, to visit my sister in college. She thought I was nuts. Then I hitchhiked back. Somebody dumped me on the New York Thruway, whereupon I was almost immediately picked up by a New York State Trooper. He looked at my duffel bag, asked if there were any drugs inside, and when I said no, he believed me. Then he drove me, at speeds averaging between 90 and 110 mph all the way to the Massachusetts border. No way I could have driven myself faster from Poughkeepsie to Cambridge than I got there that day.

Mine has been a blessed life. In almost every way.

Stay in your seats. Everything’s going to be okay.

Outstanding movie. The kind you’ll only see after your wife is propped up in her brace in the media room and you try to find something to put you to sleep late night on the back cable channels in the lonely bedroom. The High and the Mighty. Relic of a terrible, awful Tea Party type time when men wore ties everywhere and women cared what men thought of them.

The kind of airline disaster movie we couldn’t make today. No crash, no death, no outright heroics. Because emergencies (gasp) don’t always result in catastrophe. John Wayne, Robert Stack, Robert Newton, Claire Trevor, Jan Sterling, Sidney Blackmer, Laraine Day, Phil Harris, and multiple other character actors who make the Airport movies look like the expensive clunkers they were.

Not all the endings are happy. Everyone lives, but some will never be the same. I used to think only John Ford ever got a real acting performance out of John Wayne. This movie is an exception. Yeah, he slaps the pilot, but his best moments are when he’s calming the passengers. And if you’ve ever been in a bad moment on a plane, you wish he’d been there to allay your fears.

Great music too.

We all look alike. But we’re not all alike.

All deerhounds DO look alike. Watch the linked video to see how true that is.

I made a mistake thinking Raebert would be like Psmith. He’s nothing like. And I made a mistake thinking Orphan Black was like so many of BBC’s nihilistic end of world nightmare series. I was wrong. Turns out Orphan Black is also a deerhound in her way. Bear with me…

As you may know, the missus is incapacitated. She’s literally not allowed to move. Broken arm, yes, but she’s not permitted a cast people can write quips on. The bones can’t be set. They have to be persuaded to remain where they are with only a brace to help keep them there and her pain to tell her if she’s moving in a way that could require displacement and surgery.

Why entertainment becomes critically important. I have her planted in front of the TV. Ordered to immobility. Why I reopened the question of the BBC series Orphan Black. If it could be diverting, there were at least eight hours of drama for her to enjoy. While she dozed, I watched again the pilot that pissed me off. It was off-putting, lots of sleazy characters, a little bit lewd, and everything I hadn’t liked the first time. But this time I was more patient. The writing was crisp, the editing not at all bad, and the premise was, finally, gulp, intriguing. Grumble grumble. The acting not’s so bad either.

Upshot. When my wife woke up I invited her to watch the pilot again. She’s going to be immobile for eight weeks. Does wonders for patience. So, enough of our personal travails. Here’s the real lowdown on Orphan Black, which we have now watched eight of nine broadcast episodes of (on demand) with maybe two or three left to go in the season.

Absolutely brilliant. I was completely wrong in my early dismissal. In my defense, it’s positioned as a BBC series. It isn’t. It’s almost purely Canadian. The best series I have ever seen from that nation. It’s an old-fashioned morality play disguised as a hip, modern sci fi psychodrama. The Brits could not do this thing. Their taking credit for it is an entertainment crime.

I’m not going to give you any spoilers. The rasty, nasty beginning is merely a setup for jerks like me. Truth is, the heroine is exactly who she has to be to survive the situation she is walking blindly into. The lead actress is a wonder, playing multiple parts with extraordinary finesse. There’s also the most attractive gay character I’ve yet seen in movie or TV, the foster brother who is both femme and manly without making himself an oxymoron.

The premise is clones. Imagine suddenly finding that there are nine of you, exactly like you genetically, and someone is trying to kill you all. You’re an experiment, nobody can be trusted, and half of you are dead already.

What’s amazing is the questions the series raises in the course of potboiler action and sometimes absurdist comedy (as clones fill in for one another with artful coaching): What constitutes a human soul? Not at the end yet, but the answer is already implicit. And it’s subversive in the extreme to the totalitarian impulse that we are all merely units in a utopian fantasy. They can rig the plot at the end yet, but the gist of the content is clear. And I am inspired.

More importantly, my wife is not hurting when she watches.

…but I’m here.

As I told my wife’s daughter last night, I’m prone to getting a case of the “dreads.” The certainty that something terrible is going to happen. Had it the day before
Psmith died. Had it before the wedding we attended over the weekend. I was delighted that nothing bad happened there. Then yesterday happened. My wife fell and broke her arm. I was too far away for a rescue. But we got her home anyway.

She feels awful. When you get hurt it hurts. A lot. The good thing is that I’m a better nurse than you might think. So she’s in good hands.

What’s more, she is delighted at how everyone else around her responded. The staff at the hospital in Maryland were wonderful. A social worker even called her this morning to inquire, and I could hear secondhand over the phone that she was genuine in her concern.

We are, still, Americans, and we do take care of one another. How that monstrosity in Oklahoma resulted in so few deaths. America. WE are the miracle. Don’t you ever forget it.