Between this and this, we seem to be entering a pretty strange era for man-chicken relations.
Help me out with a headline here . . .
The Flying Imam?
Sorry, but I’m not sure I would’ve disrupted the president’s vacation in August 2001 if I received a CIA briefing titled, “Islamic Extremist Learns to Fly”.
We’re sinister, we’re gauche, and we’ve got the green jacket, bitch!
On behalf of lefties everywhere, congratulations to Phil Mickelson for winning the Masters!
Women
David Mamet writes about writing about women. Here’s a piece:
But true depiction of women is, I think, rather different, and takes into account two things: the ways in which they are similar to men, and the ways in which they differ. For to say that all people are equal is not to say they are the same; and to confound the political with the practical gave us the enormity of feminist literary theory.
Puts me in mind of some really disparate things: losing my virginity, a lifetime friend who doesn’t talk to me anymore, MTV’s The Real World in Las Vegas, and the New Jersey Nets.
A) Katya, the first girl I had sex with, gave me a copy of Mamet’s Writing in Restaurants, which includes the essay, “Women are Bitches.” She was the first Art School Girl of Doom in my life, and sometimes I wonder what became of her. But I don’t wonder enough to go webstalking.
B) John, whom I grew up with, gave me a copy of Three Uses of the Knife, another book by Mamet. He also staged Oleanna, the performance of which is the spur for today’s article by Mamet, but I was living in another area when John staged it, so I never got to see it. He stopped talking to me in September, and sometimes I wonder what became of him.
C) On The Real World in Las Vegas, there was some dude who, within 48 hours of moving in, was getting it on in the hot-tub with two chicks. All three of them were unstable in interesting ways, but one of the girls was particularly nuts. As I recall, she threw a fork at the guy during dinner a few weeks later. He flew into a rage, and wanted her tossed from the show. The group had a big meeting where the guy said something that sorta stuck with me: “She throws a fork and hits me in the eye: she’s just being a bitch. If I react and hit her, then I’m a guy who beats women, for the rest of my life.”
D) Three seasons ago, Jason Kidd got traded to the New Jersey Nets for Stephon Marbury. My buddy and I bought a half-season ticket plan that year. We’d gone to 10 games the year before, when the team was atrocious as usual. In Kidd’s first year, the team turned around completely and became the best squad in the east. They made it to the Finals that year, before getting whomped by the Lakers. Thing is, the reason a player of Kidd’s ability was on the trading block was that he’d punched his wife during an ugly incident, the season before. And I struggled for a while with the issue of cheering for the guy, because I’ve long considered hitting a woman to be one of those rubicons that you can’t really come back from.
I don’t know
My buddy in Iran is rightfully possessed by rage. I wish I knew what I could say to him.
My mother will be so proud . . .
The Head Heeb has linked to my almost-self-pitying Rwanda piece. As near as I can tell, this is the first link to Virtual Memories that doesn’t come from someone who knows me (blogrolling in our time, for those of you old enough to remember the later days of Spy magazine).
There was a pretty neat piece on Slate yesterday about the difficulties of reconciliation in the 10 years since the genocide. Evidently, the Tutsis have sorta cornered the market on grief, despite the fact that (hundreds of) thousands of Hutus were also killed during the massacres. Read it yourself.
Ow
“So is anti-Americanism just an exercise in onanistic hypocrisy, or does it have a real-world cost?”
Read on. (Thanks to Arts & Letters for this one)
Shame
Today’s the 10th anniversary of the start of the massacre in Rwanda, an atrocity that beggars description.
Over the course of 100 days, nearly one million people were murdered, which means almost 10,000 people were killed each day because of their ethnic/tribal descent. International response was minimal, and leading to after-the-fact hand-wringing about how the developed world just doesn�t care what happens in Africa (unless oil or other strategic resources are involved). This man did all he could to stop it.
When I think about what happened there, I’m filled with shame. It isn’t shame at being an American, because many other institutions completely failed to do anything while the massacre went on. I guess it’s shame at being part of the civilized world in general, where this sort of thing never truly enters my life, in a sense.
The biggest personal shame I have about what happened there is that I can’t tell you if it was Hutus massacring Tutsis or Tutsis massacring Hutus. I know how pathetic that sounds, but it’s just never meant so much to me that I bothered to remember it. And it’s that very mindset that shames me the most.
Samantha Power implores us not to let it happen again.
No Blood for Oil? Whatever you say, Mr. Hussein!
Clyde never could catch up to the fastball
“A compelling look at the lives of two electric fan salesmen”? And I thought I wrote bad sales copy!
That said, Seth is one of the better cartoonists working nowadays, so Clyde Fans is probably a pretty good collection of his recent serial. I quit reading it after an issue or two, figuring I’d wait till the collection.
I don’t know anything about this book, though.