Blogorrhea Junior

Ferret Legging

I've posted four pictures of my friend Pete, the one who made my green man mask, earning the title "King of the Ferret Leggers." For those of you who know Terry Pratchett's Discworld, this is akin to Nanny Ogg's favorite entertainment of the man who puts a weasel down his pants. Pete is either fearless, or insane, I'm not sure which, but after you've been in Special Forces for 20 years, I imagine a couple of ferrets down your pants is nothing. Anyway, go over to the Family album and take a look.

Being a Hack

That's what I officially am, a hack, now that one of my official tasks is writing the official company newsletter. So I suppose I'm not a blockhead as I was before, at least in Samuel Johnson's estimation. Of the two, however, I much prefer writing for free if it means I don't have to go through the approval process of a corporate entity. That's what I get for volunteering for this job on a one-time basis in the first place. No good deed goes unpunished.

See, I just switched jobs a while ago, from mindless but fairly lucrative work in the publications department (which is a glorified way of saying I did copy editing and layout and word processing) to the marketing department. (BTW, I think the main reason the Word Processing department was renamed "Publications" was because it now consists largely of men. When it was mostly women, it was fine to call it Word Processing. And it's funny because the guys now do less technical editing than we ever did. To be fair, it also now includes the editorial department, too. But that's neither here nor there now that I work for Marketing.) And when I switched jobs, I brought the newsletter with me, because my boss, bless her heart, wants to turn it into a real industry magazine. Some of the upper management have not yet grasped this change and are making more of a fuss about the text than they need to.

It's among the most innocuous, unassuming, unoffensive, uncontroversial, unincendiary homogenized pap I've ever produced. The project manager whom I interviewed seems to think I've made it all up, and keeps telling me to read the project description in the EIS, which helps me not at all, because it's not what I'm writing about. There are no corporate secrets in it, no criticisms of anybody, only slightly sycophantic praise and descriptions of the projects being coordinated. And of course, everybody wants their project mentioned more prominently when what I'm trying to do is give an overview.

It's testing my diplomatic skills. I know when I've done a good job and when I've screwed up. This is one of the former times. It's good writing, well-researched, though the article itself is a puff piece. But then, at this point, all of it's nothing but puff because that's all we can do. We'll have to make a cleaner break from the company if this is going to turn into a true industry magazine. They can publish it, but it can't just be a company mouthpiece.

But this is exactly what I didn't like about writing the newsletter for AIP, either. I don't mind editors at all, and working for Cece there was a joy. But having the corporate types dissect your prose is torture, because it's usually more about their ego than it is about the writing. It's driving me to drink.

Is it worth it? I dunno yet. We'll see what my bonus and raise look like. In the meanwhile, I have my lovely magazine client for whom I edit and copy edit. He thinks I'm a genius. And he pays promptly, too, bless him.

Anyway, I'm going back to my damn novel. It's more fun.

Silence, and When it's not Golden

And before I get any flames from the rabidly patriotic, take a look at mystery writer Sara Paretsky's speech, "Truth, Lies, and Duct Tape." Think about how patriotic your government is in its stripping away of your Constitutionally guaranteed civil rights. What have you looked up on Google tonight that might get you in trouble? Last night, I was looking at "current military rifles" to see if I could identify the ones in the pictures mentioned in my last entry. Think I might hear from the FBI?

Actually, this reminds me of a funny and yet similarly chilling story my friend Laurie told me years ago. At the time, she was teaching drama and coaching speech at a private, Upper East Side girls' school in Manhattan, similar to the one she'd attended herself. Good speeches for students are hard to come by, especially for girls, so Laurie had the idea of calling the White House Press Office and asking for a schedule of Nancy Reagan's speaking engagements. The person on the other end of the phone took her name and address and promised to get back to her.

A few days later, on the weekend at the crack of dawn, someone knocks on Laurie's door. The door to her apartment, which means they've somehow bypassed the outside door and its buzzer. Laurie throws on a T-shirt, looks through the peephole, sees a couple of guys in suits and cracks the door with the chain on—and sees a shiny silver badge that says US Secret Service. They want to know why she was asking about Mrs. Reagan's speech schedule.

Eventually, the Secret Service agents went away satisfied that Laurie's request was both harmless and legitimate, and the information she was looking for duly arrived in the mail sometime later. The funny part about this story is that the T-shirt Laurie came to the door wearing said "Question Authority." In the 80's it was just a funny detail. Today, that might have gotten her arrested.

Just Like Us

My friend Cathy sent me this and four other photos the other day, with the note,

Please pass the pictures on. Sometimes in our everyday lives we tend to forget what's going on elsewhere in the world, and that the brave men and women of the service are just like you and me. They have family and friends back home who love them very much and are praying for their safe return.

The other photos in the suite are of a very young soldier with an assault rifle on his lap, petting a young, small cat; another solider with a wedding ring kissing the envelope holding a letter, presumably, to/from his wife; another soldier in full combat regalia (who looks disturbingly like my friend Pete) teaching a little Iraqi boy to give him five; and a medic in rubber gloves sitting on the ground cradling the bloodstained form of a little Iraqi girl. I'm sure Cathy sent them on because she's one of the most compassionate and forgiving people I know, and she really does feel for the troops, but I can't help but see the photos as propaganda.

I think the subject line in the e-mail, which was a forward already, kind of gives that away: "Pictures you rarely see on the news!!" which is funny, because all but one of them are newswire photos. The caption seems to imply that the news treats the troops unfairly, portraying them as inhuman. These photos are human interest stories, designed to show someone (the Iraqis? The traitorous peaceniks? The unpatriotic liberals?) that, hey, we're not all bad. We pray like you, we're kind to animals, we like goofing with little kids, we love our families and miss our spouses, we care for the sick and injured--even the enemy's. We're just like you. The universal, collective you. Everyman. You know.

I'm just having a hard time seeing the resemblance, and it's that damn gun that gets in the way, every time. Even when you can't see it in the photo itself, when the subject isn't actually holding it, it's somewhere in the background, being held by somebody else, or implied, because soldiers are never without their guns. Their guns make them what they are, and guns have only one function, one result: the injury or death of whatever living thing they're aimed at. They're called assault rifles for a reason.

This is where the resemblance to people "like you and me" falls apart for me. I cannot imagine being taught to use that gun for its intended purpose. I cannot imagine that there is anything I believe in so strongly that it would make me want to kill someone else, especially not an abstract idea like a nation. I can't imagine volunteering to go somewhere and kill people under the pretense of liberating others.

This is not to say I'm not outraged that two or three or four US soldiers are dying each day since the so-called war (which was really an invasion, not a war) in Iraq was declared over. Of all the stupid causes to die for, the overblown egos and greed of a bunch of rich old white men is the worst.

But don't compare me to these people. No amount of sincere prayer erases the fact that they volunteered to kill other people, if asked to do so, and they've been asked. That's something that sets every soldier apart from every civilian who's not a murderer. And my conscience objects to that.

Exhibitionism

Like, literally. I just heard from the curator of Graphic Arts at the Detroit Institute of Arts that our book, Stories From the Ruins is going to be in their exhibit, What's New in Graphic Arts: Prints and Drawings acquired since 2000. Nancy says, "It should open just in time for Thanksgiving weekend and run into early March," unless their gallery renovation schedule changes somehow. So if you're in Detroit, check it out. I might have to take a little trip to see it myself.

Everybody's a Critic

I've been doing a blog for over a year now, but it's only since moving to Typepad (which I've come to adore) that I've had the capacity for comments. Em has ragged me about that in the past (which is why I invited her to co-author), but I have to say I liked my soapbox better without the comments. I wouldn't mind if they were more substantive, but they've been largely nothing but snotty opinions about me, personally, and inaccurate assumptions (i.e., flames), not to mention the sick punster, who is the most interesting of the lot so far, which is (a) not helpful in furthering dialogue, if that's the purpose of comments and (b) boring. I've posted enough fic online in various forums to be used to thoughtful feedback, but these snap judgements about my personality from the trivial amount of text here aren't feedback. Maybe I'm just hopelessly mired in the pre-Internet and somewhat academic mindset about the exchange of ideas, but that was what I was hoping to see in comments. Foolish me, I suppose, living where all the world's a stage for Short Attention Span Theatre. I guess comments like this are the equivalent of flash mobs or guerilla flaming. I should adopt the attitude my dad's always espoused: opinions are like assholes; everybody's got one.

The thing I don't care for is that I feel defensive when I respond to them, and I can't stand not having the last word in my own blog. I've kept journals for too long to let that happen. No hijacking my forum, dammit! It's like having somebody writing rude comments in the margins of your diary, but less of a violation since you're leaving it about in the open for anybody to get hold of.

So what I'm looking for is quality here, people, not snap judgements. Is that too much to hope for?

Enough Already

A hundred times I have thought:
New York is a catastrophe,
and fifty times:
It is a beautiful catastrophe.

-Le Corbusier, incised in the pavement of Battery Park City's esplanade.

What's to say about yet another blow to the heart of the city? At least ten people dead and 30-odd injured, including losing limbs, at this hour in a collision between one of the Staten Island Ferries and a pier at St. George's Terminal. Those poor people: going home on a regular day and all of a sudden you're aboard the Titantic on the deck the iceberg's coming through.

Once again I was lucky that none of my loved ones were injured, though Julian could easily have been on the ferry, and I'm glad it didn't happen during rush hour or it would have been much worse, though I guess the boat was loaded to capacity. Sadly, what will probably come out of this is some massive lawsuits against the city, and the cost of a new ferry, or some major repairs to this one, like we can afford any of that. It's going to make commuting to Staten Island a mess for while, probably, too. When we got the news at work, Betsy, next to me, said "When is this going to stop?" and you can tell we're all still jumpy from the way we react to things like this.

I just got done talking to Kath, who was angsting already, and admitted that I'm a little numb now to the smaller catastrophes like this, but suspect it'll catch up to me later. I also admitted that I've caught myself being more fearful than I was before, meaning I find myself imagining all the things that can go wrong when I step out the door: I could fall down the stairs again, be hit by a truck, pushed onto the subway tracks, collide with a bike messenger. It's not like it's stopping me from going out and living my life, but it's always there, in my awareness, the impermanence of life, or "the bad-luck lottery," as Kath calls it. I don't really like calling it a lottery, though I can't really say why. I guess I don't see life as a gamble, but as a gift. Sometimes gifts get broken.

I must be getting old. I'm worrying more about mine getting broken. But dammit! It's my favorite present, and it's one of a kind and invaluable and irreplaceable except by God's grace. And I guess I wouldn't be 20 and immortal ever again for that reason.

So, shit, riding the freakin' ferry home and ten people will never make that commute again, and a few others will make it minus one of their limbs. There's something to put your rush hour into perspective.

Art Imitates 9/11

And if Joe Yahoo thinks my site is disturbing, he certainly wouldn't get the 9/11 "game" (where you have to choose how/whether/where to jump out of one of the top floors) which has now apparently been taken down. Dr. Emily mentioned it in response to my "Catching Up" post. There's some interesting discussion of it in another blog, regarding its real purpose and the medium in which it appeared. Is it art? Is it a sick joke? Is it truly a game? Is it something else?

How to or even if one should represent a horrific event is always a question in the recent proximity to event. How soon is one of the first questions: when is it okay to start thinking of it as anything but history? I think it was Elie Wiesel who said there should be no poetry after the Holocaust. The first people to process it into art are inevitably roundly condemned because people grieve at different rates and in different ways. No matter what, someone is always going to be offended, either by the actual piece, when it appears, the interpretation, the content, the very idea. First there was the sculpture of the Tumbling Woman at Rockefeller Center that set everybody's teeth on edge. Working out an acceptable memorial at the site is going to be a nightmare.

If I look at this "game" (which I haven't seen and probably won't now, as the site's been taken down) as art, it's a fascinating piece in a kind of exciting new medium. If I interpret it as an actual game, it's just sick, like a variation on a video game that makes it a racist killing spree. As an intellectual exercise, the game makes me queasy, which is probably what it's supposed to do. Writing the poem about it made me queasy too.

But history can't be the only repository for events, otherwise, voices are lost. Em and I have argued before about how absolute and fact-based history is, and I won't start that one again, but I will readily agree that it's not the only way for us to remember or learn about or make sense of the past. Even if art only makes you think about something in a different way, or see it from another point of view without interpreting it for you, that's important. I think that's what the best art does.

I can't say that's the function of Stories From the Ruins. Putting this book together was a way of both grieving and bearing witness for me, and I think probably for Marcia too. I've always felt that once I put a piece of writing into the world, it's no longer just mine anymore. Even my own interpretation changes with time; with some distance, your own subconscious motivations become clearer.

So I'm endlessly interested to see what kind of fine art comes out of 9/11. I make this distinction because I think the mass media is largely hopeless as producers of anything that can make you think. They're the media of titillation, and not much else. Sadly, I think they're going to be the voices preserved for history.

Owning 9/11

Shite in a shoebox, I haven't had this blog up 24 hours before I get a flame (which I've deleted) from some ball-less dimwit (who did not leave a valid e-mail) telling me that my blog has nothing to do with 9/11 and I should be ashamed of myself for just using it to drive traffic to my site. Now, I might be—ashamed, that is—if he/she/it were right, but there's a couple of tricky issues here that were not addressed in said flame.

1. What constitutes 9/11 content; and
2. Who's to decide what constitutes it?

I think it's obvious that Joe@yahoo.com (wow, is that an ironic alias) did not read read down far enough in my last post "Catching up, Redux," which was reposted from Blogorrhea as a kind of bridge, to reach #4: "Thoughts on Ground Zero and Highrise Fires." Or perhaps Yahoo Joe did read down that far and simply didn't feel it lived up to his expectations. Perhaps the whole site failed to live up to his expectations. Perhaps he was expecting a 9/11 Shrine (check out the splash page at Taylor Spence's page; perhaps that will do. Perhaps Joe only read the description under my Blog title and failed to see any connection anywhere else that was immediately obvious. Perhaps he failed also to click on Stories From the Ruins in the sidebar, or was not duly impressed with a handmade book of original poetry about 9/11. Perhaps selling it seemed too crass to him. Obviously, he hasn't been to my site and seen the actual 9/11 journal, which is not for sale, either.

Or maybe not.

Maybe I've just failed some kind of yahoo (small "y") test of reverence for 9/11 in Joe's mind.

I don't know who Joe is, since he neglected to really identify himself, or what his experience of 9/11 was, but I suspect he doesn't even live in New York, which leads me to another question that was not addressed, except obliquely in the previous entry: Do New Yorker's have the right to define 9/11? If so, do people who were in Lower Manhattan, right on the scene, have more of a right than the rest of us in the city? Does proximity confer the right to define and codify experience?

Well, yes, to a certain extent. In the previous entry I talked a little about how my friends in the midwest did not really seem to understand or empathize with what the hell had just happened here, only days after the towers fell. Similarly, there was a story my friend Laurie told me, about a friend of hers who was living near Ground Zero and wasn't able to leave until the power came back on because she was in a cast:

I also spoke with my friend, Nan, the woman who lives downtown. She was stunned when she a came to work today. “I had no idea” she said. “that life was continuing so normally up here. I saw my first fruitstand in a week today. I see cars on the street. Hell, I see people. You must understand. Whatever you see on TV, whatever you think you understand, whatever pictures are embedded in your mind—you cannot even begin to fathom what the reality is. It is nothing like what you are seeing. Nothing at all. Not in the slightest. TV makes it acceptable on small screens.” She lives two blocks away from where everything has been deserted. She speaks of how there is no dark at night because of the power of the search lights. She speaks of noise that continues throughout the night. A very quiet noise.

People who lived in the areas that were shut down and blocked off and without power certainly had a very different experience from people like me, who merely saw it from across the river, or even from someone like Em, who had the ash fall on her in Park Slope. People who lost loved ones had yet another experience. People who had near misses another. I think all of us in the metropolitan area, who could smell it and see it and experience the loss of the towers as a visceral hole in not just the skyline but in our view of the world have a shared experience though. We were here. We didn't just see it as a distant event interpreted by the press and packaged and filmed. It means, I suspect, something a little different to people who live here than to people who don't.

So Joe, if you live here, post a comment and tell me so. You're certainly entitled to your opinion of the content of my site, but unless you live here, keep it to yourself. Better yet, make your own site.

Catching Up, Redux

Hmmm, many things to say; how to organize them? The venerable numbered list:

1. Ahnold wins California. Not much to say about this, except that every time someone like this (Ronald Reagan, Jesse Ventura, Sonny Bono) wins office in this country, I'm disgusted all over again. Clint Eastwood is the exception to this rule, in my mind, because he's actually a pretty smart guy and didn't treat his political position as though it were a way to revive or further his media career. So now California, that strange mix of decandence and conservatism, gets a Nazi-admirer who shameless gropes women. The latter activity's not unknown in the Kennedy clan into which he's married, but the politics couldn't be farther apart. It'll be interesting to see how much of a shambles (or uptight little German mini-state) Arnold makes of California. Glad I'm not living there. And the percentage of people who voted for him because he's a celebrity? What do you think?

2. Mediabinge is Back! Yay! This is good news for me, because not only do I like reading Emily's musings, but she's part of my lifeline to pop culture, since I still don't have a TV. If not for Em and Jen, I would be as clueless as I was when I was a kid and could only watch 1 station on a B&W TV when all my friends had color and cable, or at least better antennae than we did. Doubtless this is the origin of my indifference (mostly) to most mass media but print and music, but I still have this twinge of the adolescent horror of being uncool when someone says "Did you see X?" referring to a movie or TV program which I've ignored. Plus, thanks to the abysmal nature of NYC radio, I'm now so far out of the music loop I can't even find the cool stuff anymore. Em's not much help in this area because we've got very different taste in music, but Jen keeps turning me on to bands I like. Sadly, most of the new music I like I hear in the subway. One thing I'm really looking forward to in moving to the Bronx is finally being able to get a clearer signal on WFUV and possibly on WBGO, too.

3. My Last Friend in Canada. Anita called me last week to tell me that Debra's husband Gary had had a heart attack and died. It was great to hear from her again, despite the circumstances, and I was glad she called to tell me about Gary since the Draper clan seems to have disowned me as completely as I was once embraced by them. As far as I know, only Denise has some reason to be pissed at me, but I haven't heard from either her twin Debra (to whom I was closer) or their older sister Suzanne since Denise and I had a falling out. Anita was Denise's roommate at one point, so she probably knows them as well as I do. I'm still boggled by the fact that Denise and I saw my last visit in two such completely different ways (boy, your focus really does determine your reality, Master!), and I still find it outrageous that she says she liked me better when I was depressed (that's about on par with telling someone at least their cancer chemo took off all that weight), but I can't say I'm harboring any ill-will about it. Why waste the energy? So I wouldn't mind hearing from any of them, but I'll never again make the mistake of thinking I'm part of the clan, no matter what they say. Anita, for all that she's quite a lot younger than I am, still seems like the last voice of reason up there, which comes, I suspect, from being an only child in a fairly normal household--as normal as an household gets, including my own. Here's hoping we keep in touch better than we have.

4. Thoughts on Ground Zero and Highrise Fires. One of the things Anita asked me was if I'd been down to Ground Zero yet, which I haven't. When she asked, I said that it was hard to explain to someone outside New York how raw it still is to many people here, me included. It's true that I've spent the last five weeks researching and writing about the World Trade Center site and the rebuilding plans, but that doesn't entirely explain how I still feel about going down there. Then Marcia sent me an article from the Times about a psychoanalyst, Charles B. Strozier, who watched it from the Village that explained some of what I'd been thinking or feeling lately:

I have studied trauma, and those, such as Christian fundamentalists, who have apocalyptic visions that come close to what I now saw. No event in recent American history has more decisively evoked the apocalypse. This apocalyptic vision was shown on the television, but it was for those who viewed it a very different event. I wondered how the perceptions of viewers who were not there and our perceptions were different.

That pretty much defines me, although I have to say that it was a pretty minor apocalypse, as apocalypses go. Maybe I've read too much apocalyptic fiction, too, not just the Book of Revelation. It wasn't the first thing that came to mind, but the images were portrayed that way on TV, even though, as is pointed out in the article and in an Esquire article called "The Falling Man" (the same image I based "Each Step is a Fall, Arrested" on) the images of people jumping from the towers soon disappeared from the news. I watched very little of the news or the images the news offered. Most of my experience of it was the smell, the black smoke, the stories of my friends who were here and escaped: Adam narrowly escaping being crushed by a falling jet engine, Kelly missing a workout at the Deutsche Bank gym because she'd broken her hand, Eileen late for her job in WTC 7 because of a dentist appointment, George's pregnant wife getting out of one of the towers just in time, along with Lily's son. Strozier says he's noticed a difference between people who were here and people who weren't, and that was pretty obvious even at the time. I remember calling a friend in the midwest a few days afterwards, still shell-shocked and traumatized and freaked-out and being stunned that she wanted to talk about what seemed to me like trivial little problems of everyday life when my city had just had an act of war perpetrated on it fer Christ's sake.

Strozier explains:

Those who viewed the event through the repeated images on television alone became numb. . . . The constant repetition of the image served to cut the disaster from reality. The images on televisions were more disorienting, more confusing and maybe more seductive. I knew from past studies that numbness leads not to anger but to rage, to anti-empathy, to undirected anger. The confusion of rage often pushes people towards violence. Numbing leads to a diminished capacity to feel.

This partially explains my cousin's reaction of immediately wanting to annihilate Afghanistan. As Strozier says,

You cannot underestimate the difference between the experience and the image of the experience. . . . Those who lived in Lower Manhattan breathed in the smell of the dead for weeks, like those at Auschwitz. We all knew what the smell was even if we did not speak about it. The dust settled over huge sections of the city, from Brooklyn to the Upper West Side. The chaos and fear were real to New Yorkers. This made the experience authentic. New Yorkers were much closer to the suffering. It was harder to become numb to it. And while they may have been angry, they were less filled with rage. . . . It was much harder to get those of us who were there to believe in the notion that killing others would somehow make us safer.

And that's the hard thing to explain to people who weren't here. It's why I still don't really want to go down to Ground Zero (a name I still resist for the truly outrageous violence implicit in it, a violence it fell short of). It still feels like an open wound that's just been tidied up; they've taken out the necrotic flesh, but the gaping hole is still there, unhealed.

I had that same frisson of horror Monday down on Union Square. I was on my way to see my acupuncturist after work in the later afternoon, and came up out of the subway to see everyone on the south end of the square looking up and over at the Zeckendorf Towers, where smoke was pouring out of one of the windows and you could see fire in the room. The picture at this link is taken from about where I was standing. The fire was in the tower on the left, at the first setback of the tower itself, just above the base of the building. FDNY arrived as we were all watching and one fireman was leaning out the window in a room right above where the flames were and breaking out the windows with a swinging hammer. Inside, the windows started to burst outward and we all wondered at first whether it was more firemen or someone inside. It turned out to be firemen. The double-glazed windows seemed alarmingly difficult to break, although I don't know where you'd go once you'd broken one anyway. It must have been about the 14th floor of 27. I assume the apartment was empty, but it was hard to tell from where we were standing. Seeing the windows broken out and smoke pouring out and flames growing in one of the rooms was eerie. The crowd of people I was with was very silent.

I've always had a fear of being trapped like that, which is why I was so horrified by the people jumping from the WTC. It was primally horrifying anyway, but it seemed particularly awful to me, even before I saw "The Towering Inferno" as a kid.

I'm starting to feel like it might be a good thing to finally go down to the WTC site, and walk up those stairs at Cortlandt street that used to lead into the shopping mall underneath the towers, the now very truncated stairs that only lead to daylight. I want to go down to the open house this weekend and take pictures of the new Solaire building in Battery Park City, which I'm writing about for the newsletter, so I might wander by the WTC site while I'm down there. We'll see.

5. Neil Gaiman's Sandman. What is it with this? Despite Jen's obsession with all things Sandman, I'm not seeing the brilliance here. Sure, it's not standard comic fare, but I don't understand the fascination. American Gods was brilliant but I wasn't all that impressed with the stories in Endless Nights, or vignettes, really. Not all of them were really stories. I haven't read the other Sandman comics, but from what I've read of the rest of Gaiman's work, he does long fiction better than short. Neverwhere was great too, but Smoke and Mirrors didn't impress me either. Some of the art in the Sandman is certainly interesting, but I don't find the characters all that compelling. Maybe it's just this set of stories though. Oh Je-n-n-n-n! Got a present for you . . .

6. Bush's Iraqmire. I admire George Paine's dogged blogging about Bush and Iraq. I can't do it anymore. The bastards have worn me down. It still sickens me that we're losing at least a soldier a day there, that it's like the bombings in Israel now, expected and common. I can only say that I see signs of hope in the Economist's latest cover headline "Wielders of Mass Deception?" with Bush and minions on the cover. It's still a war, and it's still one of attrition that we're losing, just like Vietnam and for many of the same reasons. Now there's a Terminator in the governor's mansion in California. Thank goodness he can't run for president. That's the only regime I can think of that would be worse than this one.