Stray Shot

Saw the headline on People Magazine in the Google accumulator.  It was on top, asking who could play Steven Slater in a movie.   Well, Steven Slater’s out of work, and, according to all reports, he has a flair for the dramatic.   How much more drama could he generate than by going on the airplane’s radio station to bid passengers a big fuck you farewell, and then grabbing a couple of beers and disappearing down the emergency slide?  Oh, I forgot.  With an army of armed men surrounding his house, he was having sex.

So People asks the question of who can play him in a movie.   First of all they have to shorten Steven to Steve, so the action hero can star as,  ”Steve Slater, Flight Attendant.”  From there the story consultants need to define him.  The cerebral ones can mull over the fact that he’s Puer, and like Peter Pan, flies away when he has to do battle with Captain Hook.  He can be found at home with one of the lost boys, as the Senex extracts him from his hideout and deposits him in jail.

“It wasn’t me!  It was Hook!”

“Sure kid.  It was the one-armed man.”

The more businesslike reject that kind of egghead shit and go for the action.  ”Now, Steve, when the broad tells you to go fuck yourself, you tell her that’s the advantage of being gay, then let the suitcase go … that’s right, say oops or something.   Now, when you realize you’ve killed her …”

“She’s dead?  Because a suitcase fell out of the overhead?”

“It’s a movie, Steve.  Suspend disbelief.   Do you know that Marty Robbins song, El Paso?   You’re stunned by the foul evil deed you’ve done, and then you realize you have to get out of there so you grab two beers and break them over the edge of the cart so you have weapons.”

“It’s in cans.  And why would I need weapons anyway?”

“You have to kill the Air Marshall because he’s between you and the slide, your only avenue of escape.   You have to make it to your car.   After the high speed chase you hole up at your house with your arsenal.   The cops fire tear gas canisters that accidentally set the place on fire.”

“I don’t like where this is going.”

If they do it on the Sundance Channel it will be more character driven and the abuse will be subtle, like, “Here comes the trash lady,” to signify the lack of respect the flyers have for the flight attendants.  Between trips down the aisle, where there is discrimination and abuse, there will be a second story line about him and his lover wanting to walk down the aisle at the Lutheran Church, where they are blocked by a local farmers’ collective.  There will be a catharsis for all when the farmers realize they are socialists, in a sense, and in another sense, capitalists, which suddenly confronts them with their own ambiguity.   They relent, but  Steve realizes he actually wants to be married in jail, for personal reasons.

On Hallmark — well I never actually watched anything on Hallmark — but I’m sure it would be life affirming and heart warming.  There’s an angle with Steve’s mom, who insists she would have done the same thing under the same circumstances.  It’s always good to have a story about a boy and his mother, especially if he has an older brother named Chip who has become a Mexican, and is being tracked through Maricopa County  by Joe Arpaio.

One thing’s for sure:  A scene does not a movie make.  There has to be a series of scenes which have some underlying unifying pattern.  Of course it could be a pornographic movie, “Snakes On A Plane, Two.”  The important thing is to cash in on the fifteen minutes of fame before it slips away, like two beers and a bad day, down the emergency slide.

Quentin Crisp wrote that when Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor were in Rome, the public lavatories had no top on them, and the people were climbing up to look at them pissing.  The solution to this, he said, is not to build higher walls around the latrine.  It is to piss with style.

Our attitude should be existential, he said, which means to swim with the tide, but faster.  If something is going to happen anyway, make yourself over to it immediately. If you can’t hide from the cameras and recorders and computers and monitors, then man up, like Letterman.   “Yes I did.  Deal with it.”

Eventually this will create an egalitarian society, as the walls between public and private fall in the famous and powerful, uniting them with the poor and disreputable.

This continues the process of unification of black and white represented in our President.  We get something that’s not either one.   We get something like Tiger Woods.  What a name that is.  Barrack Hussein’s got nothing on him.

“Tiger, as in tiger tiger burning bright, and wood, as in can we throw wood on the fire sweet sugar mama?”

“I thought it was Woods, as in, we’re lost in the woods.”

The golf club crashes through the window.  ”Let me Sweden that for you.”

The shadow shows up in every play, because when the play begins to drag you bring in a man with a gun.  The audience won’t know why he’s there but they’ll be glad he showed up.

That couple that crashed a state dinner was the man with a gun, and while the debate centers on whether they were or were not invited, there is a dreaming level where they are the trickster element in the play.

There are levels circulating around Obama, the innermost being his bodyguards, then the social secretaries who control access, another layer of security …

It’s hard to move through that layer into the inner circle, and those two people  managed to get in and get photographed with everybody.  They are duplicitous, social climbing, egoists.  That’s a part of the American psyche that had to show up because it has become defining.

Nobody out here on the line can miss it.   We see it all the time and hear it all the time, as the cameras devour those who want to be devoured, and then they learn to hang out on street corners staring at everybody with unblinking eye.  ”Is this you?”

“It does look like me, but …”

There are dire warnings about how information can be used against you.

“Did you write this?”

“Is this you in this picture?”

“We just want to know who sold it to you.”

Who can escape the cameras and recorders and computer console logs?  Your telephone can signal where you are and your credit cards leave  footprints on the highways, at gas stations and restaurants and motels.  If you find a briefcase full of cash there’s a responder in it.  You can run but you can’t hide.

There’s nothing left to do but let all the players come to the party, and own them all.

So whatever your names were, who crashed the party,  good performance.

The shooter was first dead and then he was alive and stable.  There were three shooters and then there was one.  The picture gradually clarified into the face of a Palestinian man who is a member of the Muslim faith whose family tried to dissuade him from going into the army.  They had a bad feeling about it.  ”They call us camel jockeys and sand niggers.”

But he went anyway and got through medical school and became a psychiatrist, and then he wanted out, because the deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan caused him a lot of cognitive dissonance.  If he was the object of disrespect because he’s an Arab, and if he doesn’t want to cut himself off from his mythology as an Arab man … well, you get the idea.   Joseph Campbell said that a culture, or civilization, can survive anything except the loss of its underlying myth.  America can survive anything except Americans who can’t tolerate the loss of their previous underlying myth.

In America we make a deal with people.  In exchange for the primacy of the myths they bring with them from  their old world, we give them a new mythology, which can be found at the barber shop.  You get your hair cut according to when you came in. Now men go to salons and have an appointment so the analogy doesn’t hold up so well, but the traditional barber shop was the secret church of the American dream, and it’s alive everywhere you take your number and wait your turn, same as everyone else.  No cutting to the front of the line, even if you’re the archduke.

And all the time,  we’re trying to keep this alive so that we have something real to trade for these other mythologies.  Freedom is an abstract.  To one person freedom means being armed with enough firepower to take out an aviary, while to another it means accepting a high level of violence and homicide in exchange for the support of the munitions manufacturers and their lobbyists.  Sometimes they’re the same person, like Dick Cheney for example.  But having the right of habeas corpus is real, and so is the right to eat lunch without becoming a two dimensional character in somebody else’s ideological nightmare.

Obviously this Palestinian psychiatrist was smart enough to get through medical school, and he was promoted to Major.  It was expected that he had traded in the old country’s mythology for his American Dream  of a place where there’s not much point in praying five times a day to a god with way too much time on his hands.  ”I’m sorry, an omelet is made with potatoes, not tomatoes.”   A god who’s got it all set in stone has an obvious propensity to turn everything into stone, and if you make spirit solid it isn’t spirit anymore.

If god  becomes one of those old people who use the bank teller as a social life, business comes to a halt and things fall apart.  In America we have potentially elevated the citizen to a level once accessible only to kings, where the man and the god are the same size, and can finally see eye to eye.

With that kind of relationship you can get some practical information, such as, “Never trust a religious psychiatrist,” and, “If an Arab really doesn’t want to go to fight Arabs, don’t send him, especially if he’s a psychiatrist.  Didn’t anybody here read Catch 22?”