Among my dreams this weekend was one in which I was a fornicating priest. I didn't have an erection when I woke up, either, which means my subconscious was really trying to Tell Me Something. My animal mind's reminder routines are usually about as accurate as fortune cookies, but I'll have a good time trying to figure the dream out anyway.

Watched the outstanding Spiderman 2, which made me thank god for Michael Chabon and character development both, and read plenty: finished A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide which I felt was coequally powerful and full of shit*; read Blindness by Saramago, which was a little too redolent of Camus but which also looked at the illness itself and its transfiguring power rather than using it as a plot device, something Camus was too busy propagandizing to bother with in The Plague. After that I tried to read Swann's Way but unfortunately every time I read the first page, about the narrator's sleeping habits, I fall asleep. I once made it 150 pages in, but have this year failed to make it past Marcel's brief contemplation of dreams.

The Fourth was predictably loud and smelly. My parents never let me play with explosives when I was growing up (watching my cousin's fourteen year old son, I understand why) so my family got a few laughs out of my gingerness with the bottle rockets. I gave up my last bottle of Bulletin Place shiraz in exchange for the pleasures of Teri's beef con mole. Danny- who's teaching me how to shoot a Colt .45 next weekend- brought a potato gun. It's basically a length of PVC with a screw-on sparkplug in the end. You shove a potato down the barrel, spray some hairspray into the opening in the butt, screw the sparkplug back on, and when you hit the igniter the hairspray catches fire, sending the potato flying out at terrifying speeds with a satisfying THUMP.

Last night I was hit on by a 50 year old ex-stripper named Rhonda with a taste for Billy Ray Cyrus and Aerosmith. How I ended up in this state is beyond me.



























* In order to make the case that America needs to start intervening in cases of genocide, the author, Samantha Powers, argues that genocide is not actually that difficult a matter. We know when it happens, and not sending in troops immediately is usually the result of self-interested parties in the House of Representatives and prevaricating Cold Warriors.

I believe, with Ms. Powers, that the "...not worth one American life..." line is a bunch of crap. Are a hundred thousand Kurdish, Cambodian, Bosnian, or Tutsi lives worth one American life, or even (I can hear the gasps) more than that? Sorry, but yes, and the very notion that American lives are the measure of utility or humanity strikes me as a moral disease. I agree that we should've sent support to the peacekeepers in Rwanda, and the military to Srebrenica, and to the Kurds in the 80s, and to Cambodia. But these are all the examples of genocide Powers examines (alongside the Holocaust and the Turks' murder of the Armenians in WWI, which of course hover over the whole book) and are by far the most obvious over the past century. In order to maintain her position- that it's always been evident when the world should and shouldn't have militarily intervened in the internal affairs of sovereign countries on humanitarian grounds- Powers ducks all the tough questions.

While I was reading I wondered: is what is occurring in Israel and Palestine genocide, and who is performing it on who, if so? Is it genocide if a President ignores an illness that seems to hit a disliked social group particularly hard? Were Soviet policies towards landowners genocidal since they were intended to demolish one culture and replace it with another, allegedly superior culture? What kind of intervention is the world morally obligated to perform? Should all countries everywhere send everyone necessary to halt genocide when it occurs, and is every soldier that stays at home a step towards an ethical abyss? Or are democratic nations allowed to take national interest/local politics into account when considering the extent of one intervention insofar as doing so might make enough wiggle room with the electorate for another, later humanitarian intervention? Isn't it a little ironical (or imperialistic) that a country that has many genocides in its own past should be expected to devise an schedule of interventions in the affairs of other states? Should genocidal leaders be killed? Should governments that survive genocidal leaders be toppled for the crimes of the last guy?

Infuriatingly, Powers skips over the ambiguities of foreign policy in service of the true and obvious point that America should've acted but didn't. I can't help but mistrust any book that has so little regard for me as a reader as to avoid complicated questions in service of any point, no matter how humane or necessary. This is why I detest Michael Moore. We on the Left- nay, we humans- should not be in the agitprop business. It is not worthy of us.