Jim Frankenfield
==> 2003 in Review <==
2003 Holiday Meanderings
A few reflections from Christmas eve
I spent the 2003 holiday season working extremely hard in the Avalanche Center office in Corvallis, Oregon. On Christmas eve I went out for a bike ride just to escape the isolation of the small office, exchanging it for the isolation of a dark and deserted town deluged with rain. On my way back I happened to arrive at the rail crossing as one of the long freight trains which run in the final hours of the day passed by. Standing there in the dark cold rain, watching the endless string of cars, I couldn't help but ponder a passage from "The Crying of Lot 49" by Thomas Pynchon, a book with incredible insight into the true nature of America -
"She [Oedipa] stopped a minute between the steel rails, raising her head as if to sniff the air. Becoming conscious of the hard, strung presence she stood on knowing as if maps had been flashed for her on the sky how these tracks ran on into others, others, knowing they laced, deepened, authenticated the great night around her. If only she'd looked."
"Were the squatters there in touch with others, through Tristero; were they helping carry forward that 300 years of the house's disinheritance? Surely they'd forgotten by now what it was the Tristero were to have inherited; as perhaps Oedipa one day might have. What was left to inherit? That America coded in Inverarity's testament, whose was that? She thought of other, immobilized freight cars, where the kids sat on the floor planking and sang back, happy as fat, whatever came over the mother's pocket radio; of other squatters who stretched canvas for lean-tos behind smiling billboards along all the highways, or slept in junkyards in the stripped shells of wrecked Plymouths, or even, daring, spent the night up some pole in a lineman's tent like caterpillars, swung among a web of telephone wires, living in the very copper rigging and secular miracle of communication, untroubled by the dumb voltages flickering their miles, the night long, in the thousands of unheard messages. She remembered difters she had listened to, Americans speaking their language carefully, scholarly, as if they were in exile from somewhere else invisible yet congruent with the cheered land she lived in; and walkers along the roads at night, zooming in and out of your headlights without looking up, too far from any town to have a real destination."
I am often troubled with angst over how, in this land of the excluded middle, any efforts at equalization are frowned upon(1). While the first president in a position to arrogantly and openly states what has been understood but unspoken for a long time - "You're either with us or against us". Are the things they stand for really things I can conscientiously be "with"?
"What would the probate judge have to say about spreading some kind of a legacy among them all, all those nameless, maybe as a. first installment? Oboy. He'd be on her ass in a microsecond, revoke her letters testamentary, they'd call her names, proclaim her through all Orange County as a redistributionist and pinko, slip the old man from Warpe, Wistfull, Kubitschek and McMingus in as administrator de bonis non and so much baby for code, constellations, shadow-legatees. Who knew? Perhaps she'd be hounded someday as far as joining Tristero itself, if it existed, in its twilight, its aloofness, its waiting."
When I got home I did find some comic relief upon checking the CNN website to see if our heightened national paranoia level (orange) had yet been justified. It hadn't. Perhaps it had been intended only to create a period during which those annoying basic civil and human rights could be set aside. Instead I read the following headline -
"Queen's corgi killed by Princess Anne's terrier"
As a holiday headline on the media giant CNN it immediately brought to mind a passage in Walden, referring to the laying of the first Atlantic telegraphic cable (completed on Aug 5, 1858):
"We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate...We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough."
And it only got better on New Years when the headline informed the world that the same royal beast had now bitten a servant!
Ah, the difficulties and trials of royalty. Shared, thanks to modern advances in communication, with a world unwilling or unable to ponder anything deeper, let alone take any actions of conscience.
It seems that both Thoreau and Pynchon demonstrate an uncanny insight into the implications of modern communication.
And so 2003 came to a rather nondescript close and blended into 2004, just as tracks run into other tracks. The disinherited and disenfranchised go on as such, and those that dare to speak or act of belief or frustration become not only criminals (or redistributionists) but terrorists. Welcome to the New Year ...
(1) - Not only is distribution of wealth frowned upon within the US, it's not tolerated by the US in other countries where it is counter to the interests of our government and ruling class. See the film titled "The Revolution will not be televised" which covers an attempted coup in Venezuela which nobody even heard about, but which was undoubtedly instigated by the CIA. The name Kubitschek used by Pynchon was that of a populist leader in Brazil 40 years ago. You do the research and decide for yourself if anything has changed!
