You Could Be Done

 

Sunday, back again.  It’s raining out in the backyard.  The deer don’t care, that I can tell.  They stoop over, eating at the grass, their coats sopping wet, surely.  They have no discernable impulse to get out of the rain.  I however would rather stay inside.  I just had a look at the forecast and rain is forecast for the next few hours.  I could suit up in my green, bike riding rain parka, the kind you’ve have had no choice but to throw in and head out under if you were a commuter in 1993 Shanghai.  Scrolling further down on the weather report it suggests sun tomorrow.  Exercise off then, till Monday. 

Reading is my weekend refuge.  I can’t justify extended reading so easily when people are clamoring for things, expecting turn around today, tomorrow.  I finished “Civilization and It’s Discontents” this morning, the final reading in my daughter’s history of psych class, and marveled at his analogy of the imagined archeology of Rome, the Etruscan constructions and the Republican monuments that followed, the Pantheon before it was the Pantheon and if all these constructions were manifest but obscured it might mirror the complexity of the unconscious and our challenge to reference it, navigate it, understand it all at once. 

 

I always seem to do this.  Perhaps you do too?  I read the intro and maybe the first chapter of the next book I intend to read.  Perhaps by then it isn’t much further to reach page fifty or wherever the chapter ends after that.  And now you aren’t really that far from page one hundred, are you?  Somewhere near that imaginary goal there is activity in the kitchen.  Others are up.  Your coffee is cup is long dry and you take a break, but before you do you double check that this book effectively ends around page two-fifty.  You could be done by noon.  And then you’d be done.  And you imagine that, even though it doesn’t really mean much. 

Vincent Bevins is the author of “The Jakarta Incident” which is a thoughtful treatment, primarily of the U.S. involvement in the downfall of Sukarno.  Many things about the leader, that he was a polyglot, that he and JFK liked each other’s company, that he expected call girls when he visited Washington.  Through the device of a young protagonist from that time, he traces the story of what happened in the archipelago nation over to what had occurred in Brazil the year before in 1964.  And then this “Jakarta Method” of rightwing death squad assassinations became popularized as a term, spray painted as he shows, in the hills of Santiago, early in the next decade, during Operation Condor.  Later, when Bevins applies this to illustrate the use of the same techniques in other parts of Latin America the threads thin, and there isn’t time or appetite to handle these incidents with the same depth. Still, it is powerful to consider the clear undersea cable that does tie the activity of the U.S. government in South East Asia to what transpired Chile and Argentina.  The same friend who sent the book sent a link of him being interviewed and it struck me that he is a thoughtful gent, whom I’d enjoy meeting.

Sunday, 03/28/21