A Slight Delay

After reading Chris Hedges’ I Don’t Believe in Atheists and Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke (and Kurt Vonnegut’s Armageddon in Retrospect, which I’m reading now and will be taking up later this week), I seem to have pacifism on the brain lately. Something occurred to me: Pacifists, like generals, are always ready to fight the last war. Just the same as those who wage war need a degree of creativity and foresight to be effective, so too must the antiwar movement. It isn’t enough to do something because it worked in ‘68; we’re forty years on now, and the same old things aren’t going to be nearly as effective now as they were then.

Worst of all, it seems that so much of the antiwar movement is reactive rather than proactive. We seem to have waited ’til we were already well on the way to mobilization to try to sound the alarm, rather than realizing that the run-up to war, the war itself, and the means by which it’s conducted are all the product of a particular mindset. It seems to me that the odds of a good result would be higher if we’d address that mindset, rather than trying to change the tide this long after the fact.

Not too many people get all poetic over potato chips. But then, Augusten Burroughs isn’t most people. In Possible Side Effects, there was a passage on crispy spuds that left my mouth watering:

Slow Roasted Lamb and Mint Potato Crisps.
It can’t be, I thought.
But then, it was. And there were other flavors, too. Char-Grilled Steak and Peppercorn Sauce, Oven Roasted Chicken and Thyme.
My God, why aren’t these in America? Why did we ever split with Britain in the first place?

Well, I’ve found Augusten Burroughs’ potato chips, or something pretty darned close, in the Montclair-based London Food Company. They’re made by Walkers, and come in flavors such as Roast Chicken, Beef and Onion (both of which I tried, and both of which tasted true to their names), Prawn Cocktail, and Smoky Bacon. They’re addictive, and they won’t cost you airfare to Heathrow or Gatwick.

This being an election year, we’re reminded constantly that somewhere in the neighborhood of 45 million Americans have no health insurance. An additional 30 million people (give or take a few mil) are temporarily without health insurance in the course of a given year. Mind you, this doesn’t mean that nobody’s getting sick, it just means we can’t afford to.

And how, exactly, are the uninsured going to pay for anything from hospital visits to critical care? You see ads for hospitals from time to time, about how they’re so advanced, about their great strides in neonatal care, cardiac medicine and oncology… it’s like they’re rattling off the features on a car. “Do you have 99 dollars and a job? You may qualify for health care! Try the new 2009 Pinebrook Hospital. Preferred patients get 4.9% financing with only 150 dollars down.” Before you know it, they’ll be offering lease options on artificial hearts. What the hell, once you kick over, someone else’ll get it.

And like everything else that’s financed, they’ll find ways to repo the stuff if you fall behind on your payments. You’ll wake up one morning to two enormous guys holding you down while a third cuts out your corneas. Your female coworkers will come in with their faces saggy and their breasts two cup sizes smaller: “Liz missed two installments on her implants.”

At least there wouldn’t be the long waits for transplants. Just go to the hospital and some guy with a cheap jacket and a combover will tell you about this week’s livers. “This one’s only had two previous owners. The last guy had a bit of a drinking problem, but it still works like a charm.” They’d even make sure it had that new organ smell.

If you’re looking for an interesting new website, or just looking to kill time at work, you could do worse than randomwebsite.com. The site offers no more or less than what its name suggests; click on a link, and you’ll be taken to a totally random website. There are roughly as many hits on Dutch and German-language websites as English ones, but that’s a relatively minor quibble. Also, while they try to vet the sites that are submitted, sites and domains do change hands, so from time to time you’ll either come across a dead link, or something that’s NSFW. Proceed with caution.

When Gary Numan sang, “Here in my car, I feel safest of all,” he probably wasn’t singing about the smartCar. This reeeeeeeeeeeeealy tiny jalopy has been available for years in Europe, and it’s finally getting a full roll-out on these shores.

The $11k-plus car is the result of a partnership between Mercedes and Swatch (seriously). I guess that means that if you can’t find a parking space, you can take a band out of your glove compartment, attach it to the car, and just wear it on your wrist. While the design may be innovative and earth-friendly (both, no doubt, good things), it doesn’t strike me as the safest thing on the road; as was recently pointed out to me, it’s probably not the first thing you’d want to drive down the New Jersey Turnpike among the 18-wheelers. It makes the Mini Cooper look like an Abrams tank; the overall design scheme would seem to have been “coffin with a transmission.”

And you thought the commercialization of the holidays was bad. Now we have more commercials for Mucinex… you know, the company with the Archie Bunker-esque glob of talking phlegm. We’ve also had talking stains (courtesy of Tide) and anthropomorphic toe cheese (thanks to the folks at Lamisil). What’s next? Overall-clad hernias? Hemorrhoids that sound like Dick Cheney? Enough already.