Post-Sokal

(Audio at http://zinnzen.podbean.com/2010/01/29/post-sokal/ )

I don't know if it was Marshall Field, or Totie Fields, or Sally Fields, or "Field of Dreams", but in the field of words sometimes Luther sounds like Lucifer, and you're sure someone must be king, but not of what. And as a child I can remember the King family singing, with Alvino Ray playing Hawaiian guitar, and while you might say that guitar was gently weeping, it certainly wasn't Pablo Picasso. Pablo who himself had never been called an asshole, must have been very close to Castro if they let him call it cubism, although I'm not sure that Larry, Curly, or Moe, or any of the lesser stooges would have approved. But only a prude needs approval in a world where every value has been valorized, or colorized, it's hard tell sometimes, to separate the twonesses from the Dubois. I don't think Dubois ever went to Idaho, maybe never even met Ho Ho Chi Minh, never set eyes on Ed Wynn or Ray Bolger or his scarecrow, but Jim Crow I am sure he met. Jacqueline Bisset or Jacqueline Onassis? I can't even get their Jack Kennedys straight; not that they were queer in theory or in fact or in Biafra or eating Jello with Martha Stewart at her Vineyard and talking behind the backs of Michel Foucault, and Judith Butler, and the Counts of Marquis de Sade and Monte Cristo. It's just a thought, but if Dee Dee Myers married Denis Diderot she would have been Dee Dee Diderot. Can you see them all at lunch --- Pierre Elliot Trudeau, Marcel Marceau, Dario Fo, and Denis and Dee Dee Diderot all eating truffles with Francois Truffaut at some chichi eatery in lower Manhattan just north of Soho. I'm not blaming him but the fact is my life's been all Foucault'd up since Alan Sokal. I was sitting drinking at my local, wearing a spare pair of the new designer genes when I caught Andrea Mitchell wearing Allen Greenspan's jeans and just like mine the designer label said Richard Dawkins Selfish. I might as well have been a kangaroo because I was hopping mad. Her hip hype hypocrisy fed my reserve with resentment. It all resembled some postmodern postmortem which there at my local just meant Alan Sokal which made me post-Sokal, postmodern, postmortem, gone postal. Or perhaps post-postal, because when I went to grab my Kalashnikov, I felt like a person in Goncharov, a man who lost his will; it all was so Oblomovistically mystical. But the world was oblivious to my Oblomovism, lascivious with my solipsism, and mischievous with my solecism. The sole of my solecism was the Costa del Sol where I tanned by moonlight and dined on fillet, where to at least sometimes not split my infinitives I ex-Humed my Berkeley. George, not the University, and not the Barkley butted mound of well rounded rebound, nor even Busby. Guarding against barbarous Berbers in bearskin busbies --- I am on to their hat-tricks --- no more hoofing it from Panmunjom, or Sun Myung Moon, or Warren Harding with a hard-on on the White House lawn. You could be cavorting with assorted watchmakers, all of them blind, or abortive Kevorkians with you losing your mind. The faster you travel the behinder you get until the Tet offensive destroys your Corvette, or your Fiat, the money's the same, the five sided caissons are rolling along, from the JFK funeral, horse drawn, to the vast field of carnage not far from Saigon.
If a helicopter can land on stage it must be possible to Miss my point. Call it a conscience clause for a conscientious resister, but Descartes was a French battleship colonizing Indochina and carrying Jean Paul Sartre's father. Put another way, Descartes was a Sartre-carrying chartership, a Sartre-house of charter, a premeditated Meditation on the continuation of state policy by other means, or if that means a police state with a Maddox in the Tonkin Gulf, so be it, Soviet, so, Vietnam. So why not let bygones be bygones and Saigons by Saigons, forget about annoying Hanoi's, unrepentant Phnoms, piss-pot Pol Pot's and Christmas day bombs? Judas Kiss Kissinger's, My Lai malaise, napalmed Kim Phuc's, assassinated Premiers, erase them from memory like the blood-rouged Khmers. King Kong or Viet Cong … they were both guerillas weren't they?
Vanilla guerillas. Sigourney Weaver living dangerously with Mel Gibson, but Joe Frazier and Muhammed Ali were already gone; just a movie this thrillah in Manila, though supposedly not the Philipines but Indonesia; but it was too dangerous in Indonesia where Suharto had no amnesia about Sukarno ; things were just too hot in Java, it would have meant skating on thin Vanilla Ice. Gorillas, gorillas, everywhere nor any mist to drink; Sumatra to Manila, Java to Rwanda, Bolivia to Guantanamo, Bolivar to Geronimo, Kabila, Aguinaldo, Che Guevara, Uncle Ho.
My sixth sense told me that if the Seven Samurai met the Chicago Eight singing Revolution #9 for the Hollywood Ten at the eleventh hour. that LA and Tokyo would be just like love and happiness: the eternal seven-ten split.