Cheryl, Cliff:

Counting down to a launch here, or so it still seems.  T minus who knows has always been the hard part and summoning up the energy to put another package together, much less the hope that this is the one that finally works (forget hope--assurance to the point of nonchalance is what's called for, to get the tone right so it stands a chance), takes more dredging each time.  There must be some way out of here, though, and my every fiber says that's it (the only door, the others mirrors), so it's always what comes to mind when I'm up against it like this.

I get up at six with Julie and between six-thirty when she starts and seven-thirty when I do, I watch the morning shows.  One day last week I caught Ravi Bakra, the economist who pretty much predicted the crash, I guess, and worse to follow, chatting up his new book, something about surviving the great depression of nineteen ninety.  My first response, strangely enough, was, "whew, there's time, then" but then he placed the blame squarely and solely on the Reagan tax cuts, for exacerbating the obscene imbalance of wealth here in the good old US of Assholes (forgive me--it's been a rough couple of decades), a richricher poorpoorer which he says precedes every depression.  He's anything but a loony or even a moralist, just an economist spotting patterns in the past handy for forecasting the future, so Isaiah and Jeremiah may never have entered his mind but the causality implied by this particular pattern's place in his model of economic systems fairly thunders with sackcloth and ashes.  It's like God told Job: "Yeah, evil holds sway.  You got me there, but it has limits you'll have to take my word for, goes so far and no further--too far too far and it's toast.  Time is an ocean but it ends at the shore so lighten up."

The very next day Marcel Ophuls was on doing the same for his new film, called "Hotel Terminus," I think, about the Klaus Barbie case.  Barbie spent the war as Butcher of Lyon, lording it over everything decent until Hitler went toofartoofar and then, aided and abetted by the homeofthebravemyass, hiding out until the eighties.  Ophuls says its not a holocaust film as such, but since Planet Auschwitz was the main event everything must stand in relationship to it and this does yes, stand closer than most things.  Right on tv this happened (he didn't say "Planet Auschwitz"--I threw that in with a letusnottalkfalselynowthehourisgettinglate frankness--but that's what he meant), between commercials that get more revolting every hour.  This sudden foray to the heart of the matter was just another pitchslot, the film a product, Ophuls making the same round of shows the selfhelp people do.  This exception to the rule of relentless triviality strengthens the case against the medians:  pandering to the yahoos is the crime, taking Morgan Fairchild seriously a forinstance and taking Ophuls identically is proof positive that they don't know any better, haven't a clue, don't know what to think.