LUDIC LIVE

Attention media professionals, academics, authors, popular culture enthusiasts, seekers after wisdom, and other information-needing individuals and/or organizations:  today is your lucky day!  For today is the day I , Leonard A. Pierce Jr., announce that I am available for consultation on any and all topics — at a highly reasonable fee — as a Qualified Expert!

Ermm…on what, exactly?

On everything.

Could you be a bit more precise?

I am offering my expertise to you, your organization, your institution, company, conglomerate, website, pod-cast, think tank, ruling government and/or loyal opposition, criminal enterprise, rebel group, or ‘uncategorizable’ as a Qualified Expert on all things.  I will answer all questions, decide all issues, settle all arguments, reveal all secrets, pass all judgments, and provide all advice you may require, for a fee suitable to your needs and resources.

Why you, exactly?

Because I am never wrong.

What?

You heard me.

But surely.

But surely indeed.  And yet here we both are.

What…I mean, you’re not saying you’re always right, are you?

No, I am saying I am never wrong.  The distinction is subtle but important.  However, if it furthers your trust in the Leonard Pierce, Qualified Expert experience to believe that I am always right, I am willing to settle for that interpretation of my abilities.

But what about that one time…

Yes.  Even then.

You know which time I’m talking about?

Yes.

And yet you still maintain…

Yes, even then I was right.  No one is more surprised than me.  Indeed, it was that time that convinced me that if I was not wrong under those circumstances — which seemed specifically constructed to make me wrong — then it was entirely possible, perhaps even probable, and from there a mere gavotte across the floor to inevitable, that I am never wrong.

About…

Anything.

So you’re saying that you know everything.

No, I am not saying that.  I have no more access to information than any other jobless oaf with an internet connection. I do not know everything; however, I am never wrong.  If you ask me a question, the answer I give you may not be factually correct, but neither will it be wrong.

I don’t think I fully understand this concept.

It is difficult to completely comprehend until you see it in action.

And I assume that’s going to cost me?

Yes.  But the price may range from a cocktail to several hundred million dollars.  From each according to his abilities and all that.

Who said that, smart guy?

Uh-uh, no freebies.  Hit the sidewalk, freeloader.

All right, fine.  For what sort of questions might I utilize your service?

• The true meaning of life
• How to make a proper Gibson cocktail
• The identity of the greatest athlete in human history
• The correct moral action in any given situation
• The soundtrack one should prepare for a specific activity, from a half-hour masturbation session to one’s betrothal ceremony to a ewe
• Advice to the lovelorn
• The rectitude and applicability of various permutations of foul language
• All correct opinions on art, literature, music, film, philosophy, and culture
• Presenting one’s self to society
• Ending a sentence with a proposition and why it is acceptable
• Employing the word ‘utilize’ instead of ‘use’ and why it is not acceptable
• Etc.

But, listen.  Surely you don’t think that you are genuinely right about everything.

I know that I am.

How?

I believe that I was created by God to be his own oracle on Earth, dispensing the truth to all who know to ask the right questions.

Come on.  You don’t even believe in God.

That’s true.

So how do you know you’re always right?

It just seems like I would be.

So assuming I credit this outrageously ridiculous claim, how might I take advantage of your alleged correctness on all possible topics?

Simply write to me via this website, leonard at ludic live dot com.  Let me know what your subject of inquiry is, in what venue you would like it answered (podcast, tele-vision program, e-mail, secret meeting of sinister cabal, etc.), and what learning the answer to your pressing question might be worth to you.  I guarantee the process will be rewarding, satisfying, and potentially life-altering, up to but not including the point at which those terms become legally actionable.  Write today!  I get not wronger every minute.

Considering the prominence we give it in our society, Americans seem to have a lot of trouble talking about money.

All sorts of odd communicational shorthand has arisen around the rather simple concept of money, to the degree that we have found ourselves voluntarily handicapped when discussing the very thing we have built our entire culture and values system around.  Some of these are merely amusing, such as the curious dramatic trope of writing amounts of money on a piece of paper rather than saying them out loud, just like no one has ever actually done.  Others are ham-handed attempts at workplace dominance disguised as behavioral niceties, such as the bogus stricture that one must never reveal one’s salary to one’s co-workers; money (and class, money’s social signifier) is often invoked as something not to be discussed in polite company along with religion and politics, no doubt accounting for the is-it-raining-where-you-are banality of conversation with strangers.  Lying about money is practically the national pastime of the United States; poor people lie about it to avoid shame and disgrace, rich people lie about it to deflect envy and outrage, and the hilariously named financial services industry lies about it to make more of it.

Part of the problem, of course, lies in definitions.  What we talk about when we talk about money depends on who we’re talking to, and who might be listening.  The late Neil Postman once astutely observed that we are used to thinking of “big words” as being complicated and daunting, when in fact the opposite is true:  polysyllabic mouthfuls like ‘participle’ or ‘centrifugal’ have very specific fixed meanings upon which everyone agrees, while defining seemingly simple words like ‘true’ or ‘good’ leads us into an inescapable rat’s nest of contentious debate.  So, too, is the case whenever we discuss dollars and cents:  the meaning of simple terms becomes frustratingly thorny, often by design.

Take, for example, the notion of ‘debt’.  We have been trained to think of the national debt as resembling a household debt; indeed, there is a popular internet meme, endlessly re-posted by partisans of both the left and the right, that makes this comparison explicit.  But wiser heads have reminded us that in fact, the national debt is nothing at all like a family budget, and to conceive it as such is to make a profound error in understanding our national financial priorities.  The national debt is more an obligation of which we must be mindful than an actual number with the kind of meaning we affix to overdrafts on our checking accounts.  ’Earn’ is another word that’s hard to pin down; conservatives often claim that people receiving social services did not ‘earn’ that money, even if they’ve fallen on hard times after decades of paying money into the system.  But those same conservatives also support things like the extension of intellectual property laws, and the repeal of inheritance taxes; it’s hard to conceive of a person who did less to ‘earn’ their riches than one who was just born into a wealthy family.

Budgets, too, are something we are encouraged to think of in very different ways depending on who is asking us to think about them and to what end.  The financial conservatives, when they are in the mood for belt-tightening, always sell austerity measures in terms of budget expenditures that we as a nation can simply no longer afford.  This rarely applies to military and security spending, however; the vast quantities of cash we shovel into national defense is almost always justified with the claim that they are used to protect our freedoms.  Another prickly word, though, that ‘freedom’:  some folks would argue that there’s little use in protecting one’s freedom when one has no money and the only freedom offered is the freedom to starve.  Even that strain of ultra-conservative fiscal hawk that will allow for cuts to the military budget will not touch such secretive — and staggeringly expensive — allowances as the national security budget and the Pentagon’s so-called ‘black budget’, the literally uncountable billions that go to projects, almost all developed by private industry, the results of which we will never know and the details of which we are not allowed to ask.  Few households could function if one of their members were allowed to set aside gigantic piles of money for secret projects about which no one was ever allowed to inquire.  And, too, any poor family will tell you that the greatest expenditures go towards events that cannot be predicted, and, therefore, cannot be budgeted:  health crises, car repairs, natural disasters, and the like.  Our government, conversely, has begun to to place in the realm of the unbudgeted voluntary boondoggles like the Iraq War, which is best visualized as a huge bonfire into which we continually threw money every single minute for eight years.

Speaking of visualizations, the amounts of money we spend on this or that item are often presented in terms of a stack of bills that reaches to (insert distant object here), as if people were having trouble with the physical size of the money rather than its value.  ”Rich” is another one of those short words that is almost impossible to define, except insofar as almost everyone, rich or poor, defines it as “someone who has more money than I do”; and so the question of how much money constitutes a lot of money becomes a lot more difficult than it needs to be.  Two such disparate characters as Sam Spade and Casper Gutman were once able to agree that a million dollars is a lot of dough, but nowadays, all we hear is how a million dollars isn’t what it used to be.  Loretta Lynn once sang about how her father raised eight kids on miner’s pay (which, for our younger readers, is approximately jack shit thousand dollars per year, adjusted for inflation), and managed to sound pretty cheerful about it; today, there are entire websites dedicated to the morose bitching of people trying to raise one kid on banker’s pay.  So, whenever people talk about money — especially the kind of money that the owners of our country tend to have — I find this to be a useful illustration.

Ever since that glorious day in August of 1927 when the nation’s millionaires officially ceded control of America over to the nation’s billionaires, the G.O.P. has been the party of the very, very rich.  The party as currently constituted may not agree on much, but they do agree on this:  millionaires pay far too much in taxes, and billionaires pay far, far, far too much in taxes.  Official Republican godhead Ronald Reagan literally defined the party as the one that “wants to see an America in which people can still get rich“; more recent developments have subtly altered this to “still get richer”, and later to “still stay richer”.  If the G.O.P. of Grover Norquist, of the Tea Party and the Anti-Tax Pledge, can be said to stand for anything, it is that billionaires should be all but exempt from taxation, and that they should be free to do anything they like with their money short of being asked to help people who haven’t got any.

To appreciate what this really means, it seems necessary to get a grip on exactly how much a billion dollars (or, if you prefer, a thousand ‘doesn’t-go-as-far-as-it-used-to’ million dollars) really is.  Let us say that you are the freshly scrubbed recipient of one billion dollars, which you have gotten through a clever combination of sound investments and emerging from a vagina into which a rich man once shot a load of sperm.  You have already paid your 14% tax rate on the money, just like your chauffer and your maid except a lot less, and you have decided:  ”You know what?  Fuck my stupid kids.  Fuck saving for the future.  Fuck investments and wise financial discipline.  I’m going to take all this money, convert it into cash, and start spending it like the Rapture is coming.  I’m not even going to put a single goddamn dime of it into a shitty low-yield savings account at some swindling mega-bank.  I’m just gonna start pissing it away, to the tune of $25,000 every single day, until the money runs out.”  That’ll show whoever!

So starting on January 1st of the new year, you pay some college intern to take your money and put it into stacks of 250 $100 bills.  They’re too big to put in your pocket so you take the first stack and you pay Shoshanna Lonstein to design you a special money hat.  And you set out on your mission to piss away the rest of the billion dollars, 25 grand at a time.  At first, it’s easy.  You pay off your student loans.  You buy a couple of giant houses, a couple of giant cars, a couple of giant bags of cocaine.  You take a trip to Europe.  You hire a homeless guy to break a bottle against his face.  But then you start to notice:  you’ve already bought yourself every possible material comfort you have ever imagined, and it’s not even April.  That’s when you decide to sit down and do the math: starting with a billion dollars, and spending $25,000 every single day — an amount of money that over 70 million American adults do not make in an entire year — it will take you over 109 years to spend it all.  If you are old enough to read these words, it is basically impossible that, following this course of action, you would live long enough to do anything but leave your children multiple millions of dollars.

Now, of course, not every big Republican donor has a billion dollars.  Many have far more than that.  Swift Boat funder T. Boone Pickens is worth triple that amount; Amway guru Rich DeVos is worth over $4 billion; Christian arch-conservative Philip Anschutz   has about $6.4 billion to his name; and FOX News prince of darkness Rupert Murdoch clocks in at well over $7 billion.  The shadowy Koch Brothers spend huge chunks of cash funding conservative causes and disseminating right-wing propaganda; lucky for them they have $50 billion in cash-chunks.  (Which means that they could spend $1,250,000 a day for over a century without running out.)  And at the very top, the Walton family of exurban retail banditry is worth a combined total of $90 billion, meaning that they could spend our arbitrary $25,000 a day retroactively going back to the beginning of human civilization and still have tens of millions left over.

These people all do two things with their time:  make more money, and lobby to ensure that they have to pay as little money as possible into the system that allowed them to make all the money they already have.  They have so much that I have to invent perverse illustrations like the one above just to render the amount of cash they have to hand fathomable to the human mind, and yet their primary occupations are increasing that amount and ensuring that virtually none of it goes to helping people who have less by orders of magnitude.  It’s just something to think about the next time someone mentions austerity measures, or assures you that the country simply hasn’t got the money to spend on a social safety net any more.

Rather than do the predictable, not to mention timely and sensible, thing and write about the season première of Justified, I thought I’d take a different approach.  Raylan Givens, the quick-triggered U.S. marshal who is the protagonist of the show, is played by Timothy Olyphant, who also played Seth Bullock, the quick-tempered sheriff of Deadwood in the HBO series of the same name, and with Justified now entering its third season — the same length of time Deadwood was on the air — it’s become easier to see how the two characters both reflect and oppose one another.

There are, of course, pretty facile surface similarities beyond the man playing the role.  The cowboy hat, the easy lure of the hand to the gun, and the constant familiarity with violence, though, could be assigned to a hundred characters of the Wild West (and the New South) since The Wild Bunch placed its permanent twist on the moral codes of the lawman and the outlaw.  To really see their similarities and their difference, you have to go beyond the men to their surroundings and circumstances, starting with the places they ply their trades.  Deadwood‘s Seth Bullock was a man who sincerely believed in the weight and authority of the law, in the load-bearing qualities of its letter as well as the moral force of its meaning; the first time we see him, indeed, he single-handedly carries out the execution by hanging of a horse thief rather than let a drunken mob handle the task.  It is this belief in structure and process that is thrown into the environment of the Deadwood camp, a place marked by, if not complete anarchy, at least a resistance to bureaucracy that saturates its very timbers.  Bullock wants to make a life for himself out of the rags and scraps of his dead brother’s family, a desire driven — as we will see — not out of his personal desire, but out of a sense of honor and propriety.  He is a man utterly dedicated not only to doing what is right, but doing it the right way, and Deadwood is a place where people are perversely uninterested in the right way.  (Witness Tom Nuttall’s reaction to being asked to take basic fire prevention measures as a harbinger of the Apocalypse.)  The camp is a place well-suited to Bullock’s desire to make himself a new man by stepping into a dead man’s shoes, and in Sol Star he has a partner who can make him rich, but he couldn’t be more ill-suited to the lawless environment.

While Deadwood is a microcosm of the development of a larger society, though, Raylan Givens’ Harlan County is simply the modern world made small.  The real Harlan is a small town struggling to drag its 19th-century rural-industrial spirit into a 21st-century technocratic reality; the TV Harlan is whatever the writers want it to be, with Rastafarian ministers, smooth-talking hustlers, real estate swindlers and displaced urban gangstas among its backwoods meth-heads and rebel-flaggers.  It’s a Harlan that has moved into the modern world with far less trouble than Deadwood experienced in the process, and while violence is still endemic, it is no longer taken for granted.   Wu’s pigs are nowhere to be found, and Raylan must answer for every killing, no matter how cozily it fits the description of the show’s title.  He is a man who devotedly loves the spirit of justice, because it makes bad men answer for their wrongs, but he is far less concerned with the legal niceties his work entails, largely restricting himself to making sure his ass is covered if he has to put a bullet through someone’s heart.  This is why his supervisor calls him “a good lawman but a bad marshal” — he wants to do the right thing, but he finds himself incapable of caring too much if he does it the right way.

It is in their relationships with their peers and their foes that the differences between Bullock and Givens most reveal themselves.  It’s evident from the first time we see Seth Bullock that he will eventually wear a lawman’s star, and each time he tries to resist, it causes him almost tangible pain, as if he is standing against the tide.  When he eventually pins it on, he does so with a fierce sense of resistance — not to assuming the role of authority, which he was clearly born to, but because of the hand offering it.  His devotion is to law itself, and becoming a lawman at the behest of Al Swearengen seems like an insult too grave to be borne at first.  Bullock is governed by a rectitude and determination that is almost frightening in its intensity, and his all-too-obvious love of violence doesn’t speak to any kind of sociopathy, but to a man who simply isn’t bright enough to solve a lot of problems on his own and resorts to force because he can’t think of anything else.  (This fierceness is expressed by Oyphant in a way that, at first, makes him seem like a rather limited actor; his screwed-up mad-face looks like his only go-to move until you’ve seen his disarming cool in Justified.)

Givens, though, really doesn’t care that much about the job, and if anything, he’s driven by inertia, if such a contradiction is possible.  He’s a lawman because he has a good heart but lacks the skill to do much besides kill people.  He drifts even within the limited paths available to a U.S. marshal, serving wherever he’s sent and contemplating a move out of the field to please his ex-wife.  If Al Swearengen is manipulating Bullock into the sheriff’s role, forcing him to do good despite himself, Art Mullen is keeping Givens in Kentucky as a sort of existential punishment for both of them — Raylan for failing to show any ambition or aptitude, and Art for failing to make him into a good marshal but hoping he’ll at least remain a good man.  Bullock doesn’t particularly want to take on his late brother’s wife and child, but having judged it his duty to do so, he builds them an impressive house on a choice plot of land in a remarkably short period of time; getting his ex-wife back is about the only thing Givens wants, but he can’t even be bothered to move out of a hotel room.  It’s become a common observation that Boyd Crowder is Raylan Givens’ opposite number — the man who he might have become if he’d never made it out of Harlan; the truth may be more dismaying.  If he’d stayed in Harlan, Raylan might have become Bowman Crowder, or Devil, or some other nameless and directionless thug with no skills past the barrel of a gun.

Even in their enemies, Raylan Givens and Seth Bullock are shaped to opposite ends.  Though some of this can be attributed to the nature of the shows in which they appeared, Bullock’s enemies tend to be forces greater than he is capable of addressing, either mentally or physically.  The pathetic wreck Jack McCall poses him no threat; all he fears there is his own sense of right — and its powerful draw towards the end of putting McCall down like a dog — getting in the way of his adherence to the law.  It is when he encounters men beyond the reach of both his fists and his understanding that he is truly given to rage, which always results in blood he didn’t intend to spill:  Otis Russell has him over a barrel and he knows it, and Bullock hands out a brutal but pointless beating before going to the cavalry and asking them to protect Alma’s father against his own short-sightedness.  And he’s flustered by George Hurst at every turn:  the man who truly understands the nature of power — and who holds in contempt both justice and law, the only constants in Bullock’s life — constantly stymies him.  Givens, on the other hand, only seems energized and full of what we might term a Bullockian sensibility in the pilot, when he faces down the drug boss Buckley.  The rest of his opponents tend to be beneath him:  unambitious lowlifes, pushers, and grifters who think they’re smarter than the system, and the occasional Mags Bennett, who, like Raylan himself, can’t tear herself away from the enervating minutiae of the old Harlan enough to realize her true potential and chokes on her own poison, saving him the trouble of another AUSA interview.  The only figure who poses a challenge to Raylan is Boyd Crowder, who may be well on his way to becoming his own personal Al Swearengen.

Deadwood made Seth Bullock a flawed and tragic figure from the get-go, and let both his admirable qualities and his frustrating shortcomings spool themselves out regularly from episode to episode, and even from moment to moment.  Justified had more of an interest in the very beginning in establishing Raylan Givens as a hero, if a flawed one, but events late in the second season, usually filtered through the underappreciated Art Mullen, made it clear that the flaws hinted at in the first season run deeper and darker than we’d come to believe.  While Justified may not deliver the majestic highs of Deadwood, it also won’t likely end on a note of such cruel suspension, and so far at least, it’s given a deceptively good actor in the person of Timothy Olyphant a great deal of stretching room to take a character that could have been played like a descendent of Seth Bullock’s and turn him into the branch of a whole different family tree.

Food-addicted man-hog that I am, I somehow manage to miss key developments in industrial nutrition technology.  I often fail to see the consumption-enhancement forest for the new-flavor-of-Slurpee trees, to put it another way; by way of example, despite its fascinating nature and evocative name, I only just yesterday found out about the “ready-to-use therapeutic food” known as Plumpy Nut.

What’s more, I have managed to live in San Antonio — home to approximately 6.2 kerjillion military personnel — for almost five years without dipping my taste buds into the high-protein swimming pool of MREs, a.k.a. “Meals Ready-to-Eat”, the staple food of our boys overseas.  Although not normally commercially available, the Fort Sam Houston commissary, to which I have access via a nefarious series of market manipulations, offers MREs that have fallen off a truck, available for only $7.50 for those unlucky grunts who got addicted to them while serving in the Middle East and just can’t shake the institutional cuisine monkey off their backs.  If there are three things I am famous for, it is eating garbage, co-opting items normally meant for military use in some disgraceful manner, and mocking my betters, so how could I resist the opportunity to do all three at once?

The history of military rations is actually quite fascinating.  The necessity to feed a mobile force of thousands of people whose lives are already at constant risk has posed any number of compelling challenges, both nutritionally and logistically, and reading about it is a compelling study of human ingenuity.  This post, however, will deal with none of that history and instead focus on the mildly amusing minutiae of my having purchased and consumed an Army MRE claiming to be “Beef Ravioli”.  Because of the nutritional challenge of service in the Middle East, many developments in food technology are represented herein, from its innovative self-heating system (like atheists, microwave ovens are nowhere to be found in your average foxhole) to its high protein content, meant to sustain a supply of concentrated high energy throughout the day.  Of course, it is meant to be eaten by fit, motivated soldiers carrying out a tense military mission in trying climactic conditions and not by fat slobs who spend all day on the couch watching reruns of That ’70s Show, but what would a government resource be if it wasn’t subject to egregious abuse?

These things are designed by high-powered military nutritionists to exactly meet the needs of today’s soldier, but those needs only exist under specific conditions, so don’t make the mistake of thinking that the desperate returning vets who eat these things over the sink after coming back from the Afghan front are doing their health a favor.   The high protein quotient isn’t ideal for civilian life, and the fact that MREs are meant to survive without refrigeration for long periods of time means that they’re absolutely crammed with sodium.  I could feel my blood pressure going up the second I opened up the dreary-looking brown plastic bag, but even through the throbbing pulse in my temples, I couldn’t help but be impressed by the huge amount of food they managed to shove into a small space; it’s the kind of clever package design one usually can’t get without the aid of Chinese slave labor.

First into my gaping maw was the “beef stick snack”, because I can’t resist a good jerky.  Which is why it was such a disappointment that this was a terrible jerky.  Texturally, it was somewhere between a Slim Jim-style quasi-meat tube-stick and an actual tooth-damaging dehydrated beef-leather jerky, but flavor-wise, it was somewhere between a shoe and a piece of cardboard.  There is nothing un-American about seasonings, Department of Defense.

Needing something to wash the non-taste of the beef bar out of my mouth, and deciding that gin was contrary to the spirit of this experiment, I busted out the “carbohydrate electrolyte beverage powder”, which is bureaucratese for “instant Gatorade powder”.  The instructions called for chemically purifying 12 ounces of water, letting it stand for half an hour, pouring it into the oversized pouch, and then drinking it with all the grace of a man sipping fruit punch out of a sandwich bag.  Attempting to maintain a modicum of dignity, I decided instead to just pour the powder into a bottle of Aquafina.  Despite sugar being its primary ingredient, the CEBP wasn’t very sweet, and tasted more or less like Kool-Aid that someone had neglected to sweeten.  But that just meant that it tasted like ordinary bottled water, which was fine with me because I chased it with “vegetable crackers and fortified cheese spread with jalapeños”.  The crackers were meant to survive rumbling around in a Humvee all day without turning into powder, so they’re vacuum-sealed, and when the package is torn open, a satisfying hiss of air is emitted.  The vitamin-packed cheese spread, while unpretty, is actually quite tasty, and the two make a good combination; unfortunately, there are more crackers than there is cheese spread, so eventually you have to face up to the fact that the crackers are so sturdy because they look, and probably taste, like roofing shingles.

After all this foreplay, I figured it was time for the main event.  Beef ravioli time!  It’s far too complicated to describe the magical science wonders of the FRH (the bag that heats your meal), but basically, it’s a plastic pouch you stuff into a box with your food, and then hydrogen happens, somehow, and the result is hot food.  The FRH itself contains lots of helpful advice, such as “do not put hydrogen gas near an open flame”, “do not drink the water you use to heat your food with”, and “be careful placing an activated heater in your pocket”, none of which make me feel especially enthusiastic about the intelligence of our servicemen.  My absolute favorite part of the packaging is an illustration that tells you to prop the box and heater up so that the liquid doesn’t spill out; it has a picture of a boulder on which the whole works are leaning, and it is labeled “ROCK OR SOMETHING”.

I didn’t have a rock, but I still have lots of somethings in the house, so I got busy readying my meal to eat.  Basically, you just jam the food bag into the FRH pouch, pour in a little water, and sure enough, the magic science sticks heat up like a jockstrap filled with Tiger Balm.  Then you slide it back into the box, lean it up against your rock or something, and wait only three to five times as long as you would if your foxhole really did come with a microwave.  The eventual result?  Something that could be, technically, described as a serving of semi-piping hot beef ravioli!  It didn’t taste that bad, but should you ever doubt how important visual presentation is to a meal, imagine this stuff slithering out of its foil pouch, looking like a Horta and eerily conforming to the exact dimensions of the package it came from, and you will know.

After surviving that ordeal, I felt like I had earned a tasty dessert.  Luckily, the MRE came with two:  a big bag of tiny toffee cookies that were far and away the tastiest item in the whole package (and whose unusually large serving size made me wonder about how seriously the Army intends to combat the problem of obesity), and something described as a “frosted brown sugar cinnamon toaster pastry”. Now, it wasn’t awful — it was as good as any other unheated Pop-Tart, which is to say, well, I guess it was awful after all — but it suggested an interesting conundrum.  Since it was obviously meant to be eaten unheated — it could not be prepared in the FRH pouch, and foxholes are as rarely equipped with toasters as they are microwaves — how could it, rationally, be called a toaster pastry?

I don’t drink coffee, so I wasn’t able to enjoy most of the contents of an additional goodie bag, to wit, a tube of Taster’s Choice instant joe, a bag of non-dairy creamer, a packet of Splenda, and a clear plastic bag to prepare them in which looks exactly like the bag that clinics use to collect urine samples.  The goodie bag also contained a folded paper napkin, a refreshing moist towelette (not, alas from Hawthorne Wipes, but from — no joke — Towelettes Etc. of Penacook, New Hampshire), a packet of Tabasco sauce, some salt, a book of matches, and a couple of mint-flavored Chiclets.  I considered thinking of a way to combine these all into a single, fiery experience, but my stomach was starting to cramp, almost certainly from a different meal I’d eaten earlier in the day.  (I did, however, save the best for last:  showing the hand of an evil genius at work, the MRE contained an entire bag of caffeinated after-dinner mints.)

It’s hard to offer an overall analysis of the MRE without invoking Dr. Johnson’s line about female clerics.  But it certainly made me appreciate our men and women in uniform all the more, knowing the great lengths to which technology had come in order to allow them to survive on the kind of diet ordinarily only available to people with regular access to a gas station mini-mart.  So here’s to you, Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines:  may you all come home soon, to better ravioli.

The state of the nation as Baby 2012 makes its squalling entrance is extremely hard to gauge.  The answer to the question of where we are politically, as is often the case, depends entirely on where you are standing, and what sort of filter you are looking through at the world around you.  From one position, the country is more divided than it has ever been, the previous year having been marked by street protests met with police brutality from one coast to the other, for what seems like the first time in ages.  From another, though, it begins as a quiet year, full of triangulations and calculations, and the most important form of political theater takes place not in the parks but in the studios, and the sounds are not screams but polite sniggers at the unpalatable items on the menu being presented by the Loyal Opposition.

It has been over 20 years now since the Democratic Party made its transformation from the oppositional liberal group it was before the Reagan Revolution to the moderate corporatist technocratic organization it is today.  Unfortunately, the changes in the character of the party have not been accompanied by similar changes in the electoral process, and we remain a staunchly two-party system, in which any meaningful opposition to the official Democratic candidate — voting for an unofficial candidate, voting for a third party, or not voting at all — seems destined to count as a win for the Republicans.  And since no one wants that, we find ourselves at an ugly impasse.

To say that Barack Obama has been a disappointment is…well, it’s both an understatement and an overstatement.  He was faced with a nearly impossible situation from the beginning; he came into office at the very beginning of a nearly unprecedented economic collapse which, though largely the fault of his Republican predecessors, came to be laid entirely at his feet.  He encountered an opposition terrifying in its vociferousness, the birth of a somewhat bogus but nonetheless influential populist movement that utterly despised him, and the chronic and lethal pre-existing condition of two unfunded wars.  But, given all that rope, he fashioned not a ladder with which to escape, but a noose with which to hang himself.

He expended a vast amount of political capital in passing a national health care initiative, but he spent more on getting it passed than making sure it was effective; years later, very few of its benefits have come to pass, and a huge number of Americans remain uninsured at a time when affordable health care is more necessary than ever.  The G.O.P. is still trying to kill “Obamacare” any way that they can, and it’s unclear if the Democrats have the power, or even the desire, to stop it from happening.  His support for unions and worker’s rights has been limited to a handful of roaring but toothless speeches, and he couldn’t get his own party to make the sound of a damp firecracker in support of his jobs bill despite crippling unemployment and underemployment.  Regardless of how much of a choice he had in the pathetic and costly bailouts, he hasn’t exactly gone out of his way to keep the banks in line by reminding them of who saved their asses; he’s jumped feet first onto the misguided debt reduction bandwagon; and even his defense of programs like Social Security and Medicare can best be described as passive-aggressive.

Likewise, his defense of freedom of speech — particularly at a time when it was being tested every day on the streets against out-of-control law enforcement — was pretty flimsy, and like his colleagues across the aisle, he seemed to make more statements supporting democracy in the Middle East than he did supporting it here at home.  He eventually got us out of Iraq, but we remain bogged down in Afghanistan, and rumblings that he will soon move against Iran are depressingly plausible; it remains to be seen if it’s a truism that every president must now maintain a belligerent foreign policy, but if it’s not, Obama has done precious little to contest the idea.  And his continuing to play fast and loose with an international or domestic civil right more weighty than being gay in the military has recently moved from mistake to disgrace.  Even given his extremely limiting circumstances and being sidled with the worst Congress since the Civil War, he has not been a very good president.

But a funny thing happens when you make this argument to a lot of Democrats:  you are presented with a variant on the old “he may be a loser, but he’s our loser” routine.  A vote against the President, or no vote at all, you are reminded as if you didn’t know, is a vote for the opposition.  We live, like it or lump it (with “lump it” being the only option on display), in a two-party system, you are reminded as if you cannot count.  The 2000 elections will likely be mentioned, and the specter of Ralph Nader will be invoked, as if it were his fault that Bush ended up president and not that of a shameful betrayal by the Supreme Court.  A litany of horrors to be inflicted on the populace by a theoretical Republican president will be recited, as if that’s what you wanted, as if that’s what you were arguing for by the mere fact of lamenting how Republican the Democrats have become.  You will be reminded of George W. Bush, as if you voted for him.  You will be accused of cutting off your nose to spite your face.  You will be accused of acting like a spoiled whiny baby who cries whenever he doesn’t get everything he wants, as if decaying civil rights, unjustified foreign adventurism, and the wholesale abandonment of the social support network and the liberal consensus are minor policy issues not worth complaining about.  The whole lecture is sure to have a condescending tone, regardless of its particulars, as if you were too stupid to figure out that we are faced with once again pressing the lesser-of-two-evils button.  Of course, nobody will claim to be happy that the President has no progressive credentials, but the risk of seeking another solution is simply too great.

It is this aversion to risk, however, that has landed us in much of our current predicament.  As with everything else, we have learned a poor lesson from our bosses in the boardrooms:  publicize the risk, privatize the gain.  Nothing great is accomplished without risk, but risk has become too much to bear politically:  even a theoretical loss is unthinkable, and it’s better to maintain your party’s position than risk losing it to the opposition by trying anything bold.  There is a name for this:  it’s called being an office-holder.  A timeserver.  A seat-warmer.  A do-nothing.  Every great president we have ever had risked a tremendous amount, and made unpopular decisions.  Sometimes it cost them their position, or even their life, but they moved according to the principles of their souls, not the currents made by triangulating the rudders of public opinion.  Abraham Lincoln plunged the country into a horrific war, but he didn’t just punt the ball forward like Buchanan; and who today do we remember as great, and who do we remember as a failure?  FDR vowed to roll up his sleeves instead of twiddle his thumbs, and today we remember him as a man who won a war and tamed a depression, and we remember Hoover as a man who sat on his hands and let things get worse.  Jimmy Carter made commitments to civil rights, diplomacy, transparent government, conservation, and smart spending. They were risky, unpopular, and cost him his job.  But at least he stood in clear opposition to Reaganism, whose subsequent victories have run the country into the ground.  What would America look like now if Carter had been a tired, calculating centrist who failed to make a clear distinction between himself and his goals and those of his opposition?  Perhaps Michael Dukakis can answer that question.  Our vote has to carry some risk to mean something; if it’s just a hedge against a worse result, it’s a low-yield bet that will never pay off.

If you want to see the future planned for us by centrist technocrats like Obama, you needn’t imagine it; you just have to turn your clocks forward six hours and seem what’s happening in Europe, where bankers and financial experts call the shots.  Greece and Italy, with their vanishing safety nets, disappearing pensions, increasingly irrelevant unions, and drooping wages, are beginning to make southern Europe look a lot like the southern United States.  And with the exception of those like the Icelanders who took a huge risk in deciding they wanted to be the ones to dictate their country’s future instead of handing it over to financiers and credit agencies, the rest of Europe may be following the same path.  And the argument is always the same:  we must do as they do and lower our standards, or some shark of a nation will eat up our jobs.  Never is it suggested that we encourage those nations to adopt our standards; the race to the bottom is the favored sport.  And as economics goes, so goes politics:  instead of demanding more accountability and higher standards from our politicians across the board, we are told — by our fellow liberals! — that we’re better off putting up with increasing incompetence, corruption, and betrayal of our standards from our own party than we are risking the government falling even temporarily into the hands of a worse opposition.

Despite the rhetoric of the economic right, the markets are not a divine force that work independently of human agency;  they are creations of man that function based on the decisions of man.  And so too with our political system.  We made it, and the people who operate within it do so because we put them there.  The system is broken, and it did not break because that is its nature; it broke because it was made to break, and it will be repaired only if we move to repair it.  If the bus we are all traveling in catches a flat, we have a choice; we can listen to the condescending lectures of those who point out how hard it is to change a tire, and how much worse off we would all be if we had to walk everywhere, and how we might be going slow, but we can’t risk the other bus getting there first.  Or we can get out and fix the fucking thing.

Welcome to 2012, Ludic legions!

Whoa, I was channeling Stan Lee for a minute there, he must have gotten bottle service and nodded off.  Anyway, I’d like to take this opportunity to usher in the new year and let you know what’s up for this site and for me in general, because if you’re reading this, you’ve expressed an unexplainable interest in my activities.

First of all, as you may have heard, thanks to our dynamic American economy, I have recently become what is known as a “victim of reduced circumstance”, or, to put it in more Objectivist terms, a poverty-stricken loser.  Thanks to the good fortune of having a Southern family, I’ve avoided homelessness (or, to be precise, houselessness), and things will surely be looking up, but if any of you are inclined to donate to FailureThon 2012, I can be PayPalled via leonard dot pierce at gmail dot com.  As a great political leader once said, “I’ll take any motherfucker’s money if he givin’ it away.”

But, thanks to a series of birth defects and the entirely unsupportable vestiges of a Protestant work ethic, I’d rather earn money than just take it!  I’m happy to say that there will be a number of exciting projects coming your way this year that I hope will pique your interest and earn your dimes.  This blog will be updated at least three times a week in the coming year with the usual vaguely referential pseudo-humor, politely bitchy political opinionizing, and reviews of things you will never read, watch, or listen to, and it will continue to be free as always.  But I have a major endeavor, launching (hopefully) in the spring, that will feature new and original writings — by myself and, eventually, other creative and talented folks — to which you can subscribe or buy a la carte at exceptionally reasonable prices.  It’ll be a micro-pay set-up, with no administrative or production fees built in, and all the money will go directly to the creators.  After a Kickstarter start-up, I hope to get it going as soon as possible, and while I want to keep the details mum until the official announcement, I think it’s something all of you will find compelling and worth your couple-of-bucks.  But you’ll get new fiction each month, delivered in the format of your choice, and a full book at the end of the year of new material.  It’ll be an exciting new experiment that gives you well-written and exciting short and long-form fiction from talented writers, with a large degree of participation from you, the reader.  I’ll give the specifics here once the Kickstarter campaign begins, but if you’re interested, please feel free to e-mail me for details at leonard at ludic live dot com.

There will also be some merchandise for sale, because everyone has merchandise, and why shouldn’t I have merchandise?  There is no reason why not, so within a month or so, you can purchase Ludic Lessons apparel from the already overstuffed pantry of American t-shirtery.  Stay tuned for more on that later this month.  I also hope, by spring or early summer, to have a new print-on-demand book — made from actual flayed tree corpses —  for sale, comprising a collection of my best blog posts from the last decade of internet tomfoolery.  This book, entitled Moods from Marbletown, will feature the ‘greatest hits’ of my previous web-work, as well as some new material just for purchasers of the book — and if you never read it before, it’s all new to you, wot wot.  Of course, my latest released-through-an-actual-publisher book, If You Like The Sopranos, is still available for purchase, and I encourage you to pick up a reasonably priced edition at the outlet of your choosing.  I hope to have another new book out this year or early next, but more on that later.

2011 was a rough year, and there’s no guarantees that 2012 will be better.  But if the job market isn’t going to provide, I’m going to do my best to make my own opportunities by providing you with the chance to support quality fiction and non-fiction writing at low prices, and feel like you’re involving yourself in a creative enterprise that’s filtered only by you, and not by endless layers of editors, publishers, agents and middlemen.  Louis C.K. proved last year that the internet really does offer new and exciting ways of bringing your art directly to your fans and still making money.  I don’t have that level of ambition (or talent, or audience, let’s not fucking kid ourselves), and I don’t know if these projects will succeed or fail.  But I want to test the theory that it’s possible for a single creator, working with a small audience, can still make a living, even in a highly mediated economy, instead of, as another great political leader once said, having to “just put our hand in the next guy’s pocket“.  That’s up to you, up to me, and up to a whole lot of luck.  But I don’t want to spend any more time not trying.  Maybe this is the year the world ends; maybe it’s a new beginning.  But either way, now’s the time for trying things.  I hope you’ll try them with me.

Tomorrow:  back to our regularly scheduled.

1.  EVASIVE:  Do you think you’re a nasty girl?

2.  DEMOCRATIC:  All right, everybody, let’s get a show of hands.  If you think she’s a nasty girl, raise your hand and say ‘aye’.

3.  PSYCHOLOGICAL:  It’s not really important whether or not I think you’re a nasty girl.

4.  SOCIOLOGICAL:  Just because society thinks you’re a nasty girl doesn’t mean that you have to accept that you’re a nasty girl.

5.  FEMINIST:  For God’s sake, you’re not a girl.  You’re a grown woman who can make her own decisions about whether or not she’s nasty.

6.  PRINCE:  I don’t think you’re a nasty girl.  I know you’re a nasty girl.

7.  PSYCHIATRIC:  People who have been diagnosed as being nasty girls have frequently gone on to lead rich, productive lives.

8.  NIETZSCHEAN:  It is not enough merely to think one’s self a nasty girl.  One must become a nasty girl through a terrifying effort of sheer will.

9.  DIPLOMATIC:  Thinking that you’re a nasty girl in no way reflects on other nasty girls and what I might think of them.

10.  POLITE:  I wouldn’t go as far as to say “nasty”.  Slightly naughty, maybe.

11.  PARANOID:  Regardless of whether or not you are a nasty girl, that does little to explain who has been stealing my shoes, and why.

12.  REALISTIC:  Yes.