Propeller Head. That’s me.

Two superior-sounding comments on the Luther post.

New commenter Bert said:

Who was that guy in the Navy Yard? You can watch all the drama you want but make sure you catch the news. Thats where the real deal is taking place.

And ErisGuy said:

Unexpectedly having plenty of time to watch TV, I watched “Luther,” “Ripper Street,” “Whitechapel,” and “Copper.” None were worth a second episode. Thanks, though.

I guess I’m just a Inspector Lewis and Adam Dalgliesh kinda guy.

Sorry. I’m calling shenanigans on both of you. Bert acts like a hit and run guy who has never noticed that I talk about the direst things in current events on a regular basis. But his comment is useful as a reminder that people need diversion from the unrelievedly bad news we’ve been experiencing since “The Wonderful O” became president.

ErisGuy is in more trouble. Thing is, I’ve always thought ErisGuy was younger than I am. Either he isn’t, which is unfortunate for his expected lifespan, or he’s a fuddy duddy of the first order. He’s also not paying attention.

I have never recommended Copper. Which sucks because it’s Brits trying to dramatize American experience, which they never do well, and also because the new Brit production craze for filming everything in the dark is a snore.

As for dismissing Whitechapel, Ripper Street, and Luther, I’m pretty sure I pointed out that patience is required, what with the Brits taking time to develop character in series not intended to last endless years of 22 episodes a season but just a few episodes that have a distinct beginning to end arc. Giving up in the first episode is actually kinda sad. Hell, I already had to fall on the sword about giving up too quickly on Orphan Black.

The good news is that I have multiple recommendations for ErisGuy. The reboot of Ironside is fantastic. We know everything and more than we’d ever want to know in the first ten minutes of the pilot. Hawaii Five-Oh is back too. And new seasons of The Mentalist, Bones, Castle, and please let’s not forget Law & Order SVU, which give us the unique opportunity to watch a good looking woman age into menopause without ever cracking a smile.

As for preferring Inspector Lewis and Adam Dalgleish…. Huh? Inspector Lewis is a weak sequel to Inspector Morse, and (if Lake would be so kind to dig it up) I did a number on Inspector Dogleash that should be the last word on the subject. (Yeah, I actually read some of the books… I’m in a recovery group for it.)

Signing off now.

Sincerely,
PropellerHead

P.S. my wife dug up the version of Dalgleish I wrote for Shuteye Town 1999. Here it is:

Bounden Duty

By P.J. Dames

Chapter One

The little girl named Sally walked the three miles from school every day, across the bleak yellow wasteland which had once been fields but were now little more than the wide, unhealed scar of a strip mine. A mile-and-a-half into her journey stood the one tree which had struggled futilely out of the raped soil to put forth a handful of leaves that turned yellow and fell off almost immediately, as if sickened by the land itself. The tree was the one milestone Sally looked forward to, and she had acquired the habit of counting the number of footsteps to the tree, and then from the tree to the featureless granite cottage where her mother listlessly waited to give her a joyless greeting. The number of steps to the tree was usually between three thousand-one-hundred-nine and three thousand-one-hundred-thirteen. If anyone had counted as Sally had in her doomed young life, they would have found her body at step number three thousand-one-hundred-seventeen. As it was, the Constable wrote down that he had found the body of the strangled schoolgirl at a distance of about ten feet from a dying aspen tree. Her mother didn’t weep when they told her, but she made a dry, hacking, empty sound in her throat that could have been a sob.

Inspector Alan Dogleash of Scotland Yard stared gloomily out the window of his office. The view was drably anonymous, as if the slate-colored modern building to the north had no name or sponsor but had merely appeared one day, like some appropriate fungus of technology. Pedestrians and cars passed in front of its facade without looking, as if they knew it had no identity and could not look to it for affirmation of their own. The inspector thought of the first line of a new poem, so cheerless and grey that it needed to be written down at once, and he was in the act of looking for a pencil when his secretary told him about the request for assistance from Minetown, the barren industrial city where he normally took his holidays.

“What did they say?” he asked, trying to remember the fugitive line of verse before it escaped into the mildewed dungeon of his unconscious.

“They requested assistance,” said Mrs. Awful with some asperity. She regarded all questioning as interrogation and beneath her. “They said they could probably solve it themselves but they’re all too tired and they’re still getting used to their new anti-depressant medication.”

Dogleash sighed. Minetown would be the perfect break in his routine. He had never known any place more destitute of beauty and hope. Perhaps he could extract another book of poetry from the experience.

Constable Down greeted Dogleash with polite uninterest and told him the details, such as they were, over a cup of black, astonishingly bitter tea. There was a fireplace in Down’s office, and its small flame crackled mirthlessly in the grate, warming neither the room nor the toneless voice of the constable.

“She had been strangled with her own knee sock,” Down reported. “No sign of a struggle. And there should have been. The ground there is always muddy, and it’s a clay mixture that retains its shape for quite a time. I’ve tried to think what that might mean, but I don’t have the energy. Do you want a scone?”

“No,” Dogleash replied, absently.

“Good,” said Down. “I’m out of scones. Haven’t had any scones for months.”

“What about the mother?” Dogleash asked. “Did she have any ideas?”

“I haven’t seen her yet,” Down said. “I was waiting for you brainy blokes from Scotland Yard.”

Dogleash sighed, and then, just to do something different, he yawned.

The granite cottage where Sally’s mother lived had been built twelve thousand years before, and the only improvements that had been made since then were the addition of a cheap single-pane window, a wireless in the sitting room, and a trio of small ugly appliances in the kitchen.

“Do you want a scone?” asked Mrs. Crap.

“No,” Dogleash replied, absently.

“I’d love a scone,” Down offered, with unusual vigor.

“Don’t have any,” Mrs. Crap told him, as if she, too, had been sconeless for months.

“Did Sally say anything unusual the week before?” asked Dogleash.

“The week before what?” Mrs. Crap looked dully bewildered.

“The week before the murder,” Dogleash said, gently.

“Oh. She said she didn’t know what it was all about.”

“What?”

“Life.”

“Oh that,” said Constable Down. “That’s nothing.”

Dogleash wondered if it was really nothing. It was true that all the people he knew and all the people he ran into on and off duty were always thinking about life, and how miserable and pointless and tedious and unbearable it was, but he couldn’t quite remember if little girls spent their time engaged in such thoughts. Weren’t they somehow involved with dolls, and dress-up, and little-girl pursuits like that? He put the question to Mrs. Crap.

“Not Sally,” said her mother. “The only thing she ever talked about was life. She said she supposed life might be worthwhile to some people, but she knew she was English, and so the only thing she could do with her life was try to figure out exactly how bleak it was, in the most excruciating possible detail, for sixty or seventy years, unless some merciful stranger would do her the favour of strangling her with one of her own knee socks.”

“You’re right,” Dogleash conceded. “It was nothing.” Sally had been, after all, a typical, ordinary girl, and there would be no sudden break in this case. It would unfold like all other cases, for hundreds of pages of cheerless fires, soporific conversations over tepid cups of tea, and thousands of incredibly depressing British innuendoes about the pure suffocating meaninglessness of it all—in short, the whole long drawn-out routine that had made his crime-solving exploits so popular throughout the English-speaking world. Well, he supposed it was time to get on with it. He thanked Mrs. Crap and Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.

Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.

Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.

[The Greeking is just a stand-in for what everyone knows comes next.]

My Boudica

What husbands and wives say to each other. Talking about the ones who are really married, not just cohabiting for a while. They’re not like other people. Apart, they’re only half a person. Why they need someone else to complete their sentences, their thoughts, their lives. Why they fall silent at times. The other half already knows, has heard all the stories, is thinking the exact same thing, and only one word is necessary to retune the symphonic instrument they both are playing.

It’s not always friendly sounding. Like, I know a woman who could be my wife’s twin, except my wife doesn’t have a twin. Her real sister is nice. But this other woman is eerily similar — Irish, redheaded, diminutive, shockingly smart, etc — except that she’s also controlling, interfering in other people’s business, and mean as a snake. You should hear her trash her husband of 40 years. You’d know in a second that she hates him, every detail and moment of their life together. Except that she loves him absolutely, as protectively as any mother, with the sole exception that he’s never to know just how much she loves and needs him. But of course he does know. Which is why he puts up with a stream of verbal abuse that would put me in a penitentiary for life. Married talk. It takes different people differently. As it should. The rest of us are always on the outside looking in. Or trying to.

And, no, I’m not talking code about my wife. Almost everybody is afraid of MY wife. She’ll spear your heart in a second. She’s fair, though, and far from psychotic. They fear her because she’s the smartest and most honest person they know. How did I get so lucky? Beats me. But I like to think we really are the two halves who found one another. That’s not a Hallmark Channel ad. It’s just the most plausible probability.

For example, from earliest childhood, she always wanted to live in this Godforsaken corner of New Jersey wilderness with its horses and marshes. I spent half a lifetime trying to leave it. I came home because you CAN go home again, Thomas Wolfe notwithstanding, and so here we are. It’s not a fight, not a compromise. It’s an arrival at the same place by different paths.

Same with everything else pretty much. Ever since Michael Vick, she roots for the Ravens of Baltimore. Because there’s no way she could ever care again for her once beloved Eagles. I admire that consistency of spirit, which is exactly as consistent as mine. We’re in tune, you know. Did I mention that? You should have heard her yesterday yelling the Eagles on when DeSean Jackson got loose in the secondary and was streaking toward the end zone while I was having a pit stop in the bathroom. “Go! Go! Go! Run! Run! Run!” Or words to that effect. The wall rattled. Made my heart sing, it did.

And this is really embarrassing. There was an interval of real human grownup time on Saturday when we were watching three college football games at once, one on the TV, one on the iPad, and one on her deftly programmed iPhone propped before her on its tiny stand.

Before me, she didn’t know college football existed. Before her, I didn’t know bleak Russian and Scandinavian dramas existed. Just you wait till I learn how to watch three of them at once. I know. The world trembles.

That makes it sound like a simple trade. It isn’t. It’s an expansion, a doubling. I’ve learned to love the Irish, she the Scottish. I’ve learned about greyhounds, she’s learned about cars and motorcycles. And Scottish deerhounds, which just couldn’t be any more complicated than the Christ-like simplicity of greyhounds (though I’m betting Jesus didn’t snack constantly on cat poop).

Yesterday, we learned the lowdown about Horatio at the bridge. Which I misremembered as a father son story. It’s much closer to being a marriage story. A thing about being the one who’s willing to make a stand when everyone else is just screwing around.

Would your wife care about Horatio at the bridge? Not trying to compare, because most men I know wouldn’t give a rat’s ass about Horatio either. It’s just that life’s biggest kick is feeling your own energy infusing another’s. My wife has actually become a Buckeye fan. Nobody can fake that. And, no, she’s still not what I would call a Sinatra fan, and I’m still lagging in the passion for birthday cards for everyone, but it’s swum into my ken. She’s enlarged me, and we do have an uncanny talent for finishing each other’s sentences.

Something else. She keeps showing me that she’s natively better at things I’m supposed to be good at. One example and then I’ll stop, I promise. I chafed at the fact that Brit TV dramas make it look as if the UK is demographically similar to the U.S., because when I looked it up the actual statistics are ridiculous. Blacks and Indians are both under two percent of the population there. You’d never guess it from their TV fare. Police, judiciary, all diversity personified. And, well, criminals too. Understandable, though. The Brits are two, three, or eight times more violent than we are… I announced the population facts somewhat indignantly a while ago, during one of the shows we both enjoy watching.

Yesterday, my wife proposed — while we were watching Luther — that she had figured it out: all the black people in the U.K. are employed as actors. Contradiction solved. Perfect.

See? Life is so much more fun than the cynics tell us it should be. Laughter really does cut through all the crap.

Not a sermon. Just an appreciation.

P.S. My wife just said something about a cow. It think it was about Mara Liasson from NPR. Now she wants to say something else. Geez. But here goes:

What a great picture. Wish I looked like that. A great post too.

The most famous New Yorker cover. Ever seen it? Thought not. By a guy named Steig. Go ahead. Blow it up with your fingers. Be my happy guest.

You get to do your own searches here. Far be it from me to tell you how. The pic ain’t just about New York. It’s about the power elite in the northeast. The country is just a huge geographical joke to them. And a class joke too. There’s a club you’d better belong to. If you don’t, you’re, well, a casualty, incipient or historical, but either way irrelevant. If you don’t believe me, ask the second most interesting man in the world, Harold Parmington. (He doesn’t always drink beer, because if he did there wouldn’t be any left.) He’s my wife’s second cousin and he can rebuild your Airstream from scratch in a week. How I know I can survive Obama; Harvard or not, I can do arc-welding. But enough about me…

Key point. The elect don’t like to be criticized by the vermin at large. You know. It’s much much better to be from Providence, Rhode Island, than Omaha, Nebraska.

Good news? Raebert doesn’t care who went to Exeter, Taft, or Choate. He would like some ketchup, tomato sauce or gravy instead.

Gravy’s good with the damn kibble. What’s the Boss barking about? Oh that. Easy. If you can’t get a Tafty, get a Choatie. Every hound knows that. Love the whole gay thing. Borzois are relieved as a group, believe me. Hah. I eat Borzois for breakfast. All hair, no brains. But I like tomato sauce with breakfast. Mommy?…

Thankfully, he’s right. Irony. They’re the ones dying day by day. We’re the ones living, thankful for each and every day. Raebert just burped. Oh. Right. He was making his usual contribution. Something called Screw’em. And the Yorkies they rode in on.

A combination of Dirty Harry and William Peterson’s Manhunter.

Listen up. The best three hours of television you can watch. Ever.

It helps to have watched the first season (six episodes) and the second (four episodes), but it’s not absolutely necessary. All you need to know is that Scotland Yard Detective Chief Inspector John Luther is a tormented man, a brilliantly intuitive if frequently fatal cop, and a man who works very very close to the edge of the law in whatever he does. He also has a failed case in his past — a genius female serial killer who was as charming as she was sinister and just plain got away with everything because she was even smarter than Luther. Her escape haunts Luther’s career and reputation.

The caption above tells you a lot about Luther’s character but not everything. Season 3 opens with that as the central question: is he a good cop or a vigilante wearing a badge?

Sound familiar, generic, formulaic? It isn’t.

Trying to avoid spoilers, but there’s something epic about it. Idris Elba, who plays Luther, is listed as executive producer. It’s tempting to think he’s just cashing a ready made check based on the popularity of Seasons 1 and 2. He isn’t. It’s as if this set of four episodes is the completion of a trilogy. And a beautiful one it is. A battle of good versus evil in the starkest and ugliest of real world terms, with all the muddled shades of gray in between any literary purist could ask for.

How is it different? Unlike most dark Brit police shows, it isn’t written by a woman. The characters are well drawn, not stereotypical, and male, with the lone exception of Luther’s present love interest. The acting is superb, notably Idris Elba, Idris Elba, and, well, Idris Elba. And then everybody else.

The plot moves, as my wife pointed out, which she’s noticed doesn’t always happen in Prime Suspect, for example, or, ahem, Broadchurch. (Women do write. Why sales of Melatonin aren’t higher.) The over-arching villain, an internal affairs cop intent on taking Luther down, is as malevolent and immediately hate-inspiring as any I’ve ever seen on film, regardless of budget. (Finished watching the series tonight. And I still want to kill him myself.) But 98 percent of the time, he doesn’t even raise his voice. Did I mention the acting?

Guess I did. but I haven’t mentioned the writing. The best reason you need to watch. Good and evil matter, but the relationship between them is not, as so many dramas insist, a blur. It’s far more interesting than that. It’s more like…

No. Won’t say. You have to watch. On BBC America, Comcast on Demand, or Xfinity. No, I’m not being compensated by anyone. I’m finding you the best television series you’ve ever seen.

My wife told me I’m not allowed to mention theology. Why I haven’t.

Gravy’s good with the damn kibble. But not as good as mint chocolate chip.

I know you’re all thinking he’s spoiled. He isn’t. I don’t give him the remains of my meals. My wife does the handoff.

What’s happening is more serious than spoiled. He’s decided the missus and me are his pack. He thinks the other dogs are just dogs and the cats are just noisemakers. Since he seems to understand most of what we say it’s hard to tell him he’s wrong. We’ve been unguarded in our discussions of other animals.

Why he now eats under the brocade parson’s chair and plays footsy with my wife when he isn’t trying to rest his huge head in my lap.

The other day I did give him a portion of Chex Mix to convince him to finish his damn kibble. Carelessly sprinkled it over the top. Response? He fished out every one of the pretzel sticks, spread them all over the floor, then ate his damn dinner, including all the Chex Mix. As it turned out, the pretzel sticks were dessert. Eaten last and lovingly.

Now tell me how much smarter you would be with him than we are.

P.S. I don’t eat mint chocolate chip. That’s something between Raebert and my wife. I think it’s a step too far in the world of ice cream.

The human being that isn’t.

The Japanese, who are more obsessed with robots than anybody, have coined a term for 3D human simulations that are so close to realism that people find them, well, disturbing. It’s called “The Uncanny Valley,” more technically known as coulrophobia. It’s the sense of discomfort we all felt watching the “Polar Express.”

Creepy, right?

Thinking these days that we should all have registered our discomfort with the Uncanny Valley of Obama. Have any of us ever seen him live?

He’s something like a person, only missing the human parts.

Think. We’ve seen him in Hollywood, on magazine covers, in constantly posed positions hooked to a TelePrompTer he was speechless without.

Are we having our first CGI president? I know I have the distinct sense of something inhuman about him. And his wife.

You?

Yeah. Love the plumes.

Okay. I like my back yard. You don’t? Bet you do.

And btw fuck Putin. Crazy queer czar. But I have a view of my yard Charlie Rose doesn’t.

My guy is not happy today. Working on it.

Glued to the Smithsonian Channel. Documentaries of destruction.

A terrible thing happened a dozen years ago. The greatest nation in history fell.

Nobody wants to be a prophet of doom. It’s the unfortunate fate of some of us. I share that awful title. I wrote a book called The Boomer Bible. It was a bible, with chapters and verses. I discovered after 9/11, almost as a curiosity, that it had 2001 chapters. It put a period on the United States.

It’s only now that I’m realizing the 9/11 attack wasn’t a blip, a hurtful hit, an opportunity to wake and strike back. It was the end of us. Everything after somehow led us to Obama, who is succeeding in destroying our country. While the people who should know better cheer him on.

A sorrowful day. A tragic anniversary.

Sadness has become a constant state.

The whole enterprise is going down. I wake up each day with Yeats’s lines in my head:

The best lack all conviction,
While the worst are full of passionate intensity

It’s the prefiguring of Catch 22. At some level I do lack conviction. I feel more forgiving than I used to. I feel more understanding than I was raised to be. I’d rather schmooze than fight. I can see more sides of arguments than I ever thought possible. But… The fanatics and ideologues make me want to cut their throats.

Where Yeats failed. He was an Irishman standing on a cliff. He thought that the “widening gyre” was something occurring below, an historical event he could somehow avoid. It’s a disease of poets. And even would-be poets. We think we’re just watching.

Maybe he knew better. Probably did. The chief attribute of a real poet is self hatred. The perception to realize all the darkest impulses, to feel them literally pulsing through your being, while knowing — actually seeing in some rare moments — what virtue might be.

Which means that The Second Coming is not a commentary on the 20th century. It’s a distillation of personal fury at one’s own self. Sorry. Here’s the whole thing:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

I console myself that he was Irish and I am Scottish, meaning I never ever give up. But when the best lack all conviction, as they do, and the worst are full of passionate intensity, as they are, I find myself slowly, gradually retreating. From everyone.

Then I reread the last two stanzas. Which whip my head right around. Stupid fucking mick. Only the Irish give up. The Scots always want to, beg to, need to, but we just can’t. Something slouching toward Bethlehem? Cut its fucking head off. End of poem.

The Irish have mastered the art of seeming surrender, the flight to other values, other worlds. Scots can’t do that. They just fight, no matter what, even if they’re certain to lose or get killed in the process. So, yes, the Irish are smarter and more lyrical. Why I love my wife so much. But no matter how hard I try, I can’t change myself. The battle, the war, is lost, our country is gone, and I can’t stop fighting.

Which means, I guess, to the eye of the greatest Irish poet ever, I’m one of the ones who is full of passionate intensity, even as I feel all my convictions fading.

Hmmmm. Maybe the poem isn’t about global civilization. Maybe it’s about each and every one of us. Can your center hold? And what would your own Second Coming be? Hell. Think for a change. Read the poem as if it were about you. Oops. Sorry. Even the old mick never thought of that. Mackerel-snapper bugger…

In my case I think I’ve had it. Don’t like it. But I’m adjusting. To the fact that we’ve had it. Sigh.

The Natural

The Syria mess takes us all the way back to questions I — and others — were asking years ago. Back in July 2009, I wrote:

Conservatives are presently in danger of adopting the same schizophrenic view of Obama that lefties had of George W. Bush. In one breath they would denounce his stupidity and in the next decry his fascist cunning. Frequently one could hear both these mutually exclusive characterizations issuing from the same mouth. That’s probably why Cheney ultimately became the favorite villain of the left; he was the way to reconcile the irreconcilable. Cheney manipulated the idiot Bush and led the neocon conspiracy behind the scenes.

Now it’s easy to hear the same kind of paradoxical descriptions of Obama. He’s naive, inept, inexperienced, and fumbling. Also, he’s a brilliant political mind who’s working a strategy far beyond what anyone else can even comprehend, which is why he’s so negligent about facts and details that would obsess lesser men. Which is it? It really can’t be both.

This is where my old concept of Serendicity comes in. I wrote about it years ago as a combination of Jung’s concept of synchronicity (i.e., the universe spontaneously posing/answering questions by means of startling events) and the older term for luck combined with inspiration known as serendipity. Serendicity is therefore the universe trying to tell us something combined with what looks to us like strange luck in terms of timing and a consequent opportunity to see something we otherwise wouldn’t have seen.

So here’s the key moment. On Wednesday, September 11th, the Congress will hear the testimony on behalf of the administration’s desire for war authority in Syria by one Donna Rice, the president’s national security adviser.

Holy shit. Take a long moment to think about this. The day of her testimony is the anniversary of the Benghazi attack — 9-fucking-11! — about which she demonstrably lied her ass off on national television to the American people, on five different Sunday news programs. And the White House has chosen her to carry the ball in the Red Zone of the congressional vote. What are the odds regarding the date, the stakes, the forum?

There are only a few ways to think about this.

1) The Obama administration is every bit as arrogant, tone-deaf, and incompetent as its worst critics have argued. If one were looking for a lower credibility advocate for the White House on a national security issue, where would you go to find it? Nowhere. She is, in this instance, The One.

2) The Obama administration is deviously clever to the Nth degree. The president has no desire or intention to attack Assad’s Syria. Seemingly embarrassed and thrust out on a limb by his own off-prompter remarks about a red line, Obama is cunningly getting off the limb and putting the Congress on it. In fact, according to pessimist pundits like Norman Podhoretz, this whole soap opera is simply a Machiavellian stratagem for continuing the destruction of American hegemony in the world he has pursued systematically since his first inauguation. If he’d cared about the Syrian situation, he wouldn’t have backed down at the last possible moment, he wouldn’t have spent a week overseas, he wouldn’t have assigned White House hacks to approach members of congress they didn’t know and who didn’t know them. He wants a no vote, and he wants the humiliation to American standing that will inevitably result.

3) It’s Serendicity. A way of seeing that both 1) and 2) above are simultaneously correct. Which would be useful information, let’s face it. Obama has never tolerated embarrassment. His Mussolini pictures should be proof of that. He can’t tolerate criticism, democratic opposition, or any skepticism whatever about his earth-shaking, world-saving brilliance. He’s never been able to acknowledge even one of his manifold failures as a leader, policy wonk, commander in chief, or man of his word. But sometimes there’s a peculiar genius in the otherwise mediocre or disabled.

Donna Rice testifying before congress on 9/11 is, in this context, a message from the universe. It’s so utterly doltish — and symbolic — as a political tactic that it begs the question of who and what Obama is. He is what in sports is called a Natural. Why perhaps he loves sports so much. But the Natural he is is Useful Idiot. Like all the victims of his economy killing policies who continue to vote for him, he is an ignorant sacrifice to his own stoutest beliefs.

He is destroying the country and will one day be loudly and inveterately blamed for that crime. But he has no idea about that. He has no idea that he’s the ultimate Alinskyite tool. His notion of the presidency has always been a shallow, narcissistic view of the office as a platform for posing as the demigod his sycophants have constantly assured him he is. Not once in five years has he shown the slightest sign that he understands his constitutional responsibilities, the American people he’s sworn to serve, the military he continually refers to as somehow belonging to him, or the pain experienced by hardworking people in an economy he tinkers with like the Supreme Soviet in its endless Five Year Plans.

He’s little more than an actor hired to play a part. But the genius of it is that he has all the right instincts for the part his mentors and sponsors intended him to play. He is indecisive when it serves the Alinskyite purpose. Eloquent, inarticulate, charming, remote, inaccessible, pandering, insincere, contemptuous, negligent, glib, and unprecedentedly imperious by turns, always at times and in ways that seamlessly serve the mission of destroying the United States of America. And he himself doesn’t have a clue that slowly but surely he is laying himself out on the altar of history as a horrendous exemplar of the worst that can be done by a tiny man in a giant office.

The Alinskyite bet is that the damage will be so total even our belated awareness will be to no avail.

They might well be right. Obama is indeed a Natural.

Don’t tell him about this post. He’d only run off to Sweden again.

Why we should be alert to the blushing cheeks of Serendicity that are our only clue about how much fate and the will of the universe might be in conflict.

PS. Oh. Explaining idiot-savant in case you didn’t infer it from the text: a president of the United States who cares more about NCAA basketball brackets than Marine Corpse-men from all the 57 states, especially the Carolina ports on the Gulf of Mexico.