Unearthing a life.....

I’ve had my Sunday morning waffle, three cups of caffeine booster and my usual go at the Sunday New York Times … which is totally overwhelming in its sheer size and complexity and accoutrements. I buy this paper at the local Safeway store and when I wrestled it out of the little grocery basket and dropped it on the checkout counter this morning, a thick, slick covered fashion supplement slid out of the paper’s innards and fell separately from the main body of the work. The clerk, who was little known to me, seized upon the item and began to interrogate me as to whether it was, in fact, a part of the paper. It came to me that I was suspect of attempted magazine concealment and theft and so went to some effort to find words on the cover that linked it to the NY Times proper. There wasn’t much, but she accepted my claim to legitimacy when I offered to fetch up another copy and produce the magazine from its innards.

On the drive home I passed this neighbor (a slow moving, stately, attractive and weird Indian woman) who I often drive past when she is giving her dog its morning walk. The dog is large and fuzzy and so old that it barely has been creeping along of late. Today I swung around the corner and there she was pulling a large red Radio Flyer wagon with sideboards … and in the wagon was the large fuzzy dog. Four long country blocks from home, she was giving her dog a ride around his normal walking route. Now -- is that dog love, or another little brush stroke of strangeness?

Two things drew my attention in the Times. An article in the Arts & Leisure section about the film Blue Velvet and an editorial entitled 'A Judicial Green Light for Torture'.

The Blue Velvet article was largely about how Blue Velvet is an anomalous film in that is hasn’t become passé with age and still has the same power to trifle with the viewer’s nervous system that it had at release twenty years ago. Over the years, I’ve watched Blue Velvet on several occasions and have to agree that it still has the power to un-nerve. Dennis Hopper is just manic hell ready to flash into explosion at the slightest wrong move. I always expect to find him later, creeping through my nightmares.

The editorial is about a Mr. Maher Arar (a Canadian) who was taken into custody at Kennedy Airport in 2002 on his way home from a family vacation -- as a person suspected of Al Qaeda connections. We shipped him to a Syrian prison under Bush’s “extraordinary rendition” practice, where he was confined and tortured and then finally released by the Syrians when no link to terrorism could be found. Mr. Arar has attempted to seek redress in our court system, but Judge David Trager of Federal District Court in Brooklyn has tossed the case out on the grounds that it would tend to reveal state secrets and imperil our national security. Moral: Canadians should fly non-stop to Canadian territory when returning home from out-of-country vacations.

And what’s up with this Syrian prison business? I thought the Syrians were our enemies and supporters of terrorism themselves(?). Our torture arrangement with Syria probably IS a state secret. I sincerely hope they aren’t send American citizens there. But…..

Extraordinary rendition might also come in handy for domestic transgressors against the Bush Administration. I.E., former FEMA’s ‘Good job, Brownie’ guy could be ‘renditioned’ until he confessed that the hurricane fiasco was all his fault and his alone. Numerous other gnat whomping Administration scenarios spring to mind. But.....