If you watch cable news, you've probably heard the talking heads say, "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results."
     This quotation, attributed to various people--some ancient Chinese proverb writer, Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, and much more recently, Rita Mae Brown--must be examined, like all overused statements in news media.  These utterances exist in long drifting clouds over time, sometimes coming from televised mouths for months or years.  "Thrown under the bus," and its variations, "They threw him under the bus," and others, stuck around on cable news as long as the term "train wreck," as in, "It's like a train wreck--it's horrible but you can't look away."
     I am literal-minded sometimes.  I tend to picture what it would take for someone to be thrown under a bus, and why a bus?  Someone of competitive bodybuilder strength could throw a politician under a passing bus, but in big cities like New York, people are more likely to get pushed off a subway platform by a sociopath.  "Boy," the cable news host might remark metaphorically, "they sure pushed Joe Biden off a subway platform."
     I've never seen a train wreck in person, but I've seen freeway and city street car wrecks, and yes, I gawked every time.  There's a song by a band I don't remember called "Casualty Vampires."  When a building's on fire people gather.  Same with a train wreck.  The World Trade Center in its last hour or so was surrounded by casualty vampires who should've gotten the hell out of there, but staring at chaos is human nature.
     On a much less violent, but nevertheless annoying note, cable news people have taken to putting the word so before most of what they say when answering questions.  I'm not sure when this started, but it's one of the long drifting clouds of senseless speech coming from college-educated TV professionals.  A host asks a guest about ISIS and its latest atrocities.  The guest replies, "So, ISIS has a political strategy that needs to be taken into account here..."
     What is the purpose of "So"?  As a two letter word it doesn't provide adequate time for the guest to figure out what to say, as when Perry Mason (Raymond Burr) sometimes takes out a cigarette and lights it before he answers an irritated adversary.  Smoking doesn't happen in TV studios anymore, so I guess the "So" is more of a verbal hiccup, like "like," "um," and "you know what I'm sayin?"
     One could answer the cable host with a musical reference: "So, an album by Peter Gabriel, the ISIS threat is not only an existential one, but an egregious affront to human decency."
     Another meaningless utterance plaguing cable news minds, especially in the past few years, though its lessened quite a bit, is the linking phrase, "At the end of the day..."
     "Chris Christie suffered a loss of popularity in the polls due to Bridgegate, but at the end of the day, he's on a resurgence as he makes a possible bid for the Republican nomination." 
     "At the end of the day" means however.  When women say the meaningless utterance, it can come out singsong, stretching a news discussion segment by two or three seconds, sounding as if authority has been proclaimed on whatever subject.  "In conclusion," would work as well, but that has the smell of a lecture. 
     When I hear "At the end of the day" I sometimes wonder, "Which day?  And do you mean at sundown, by which time the outlaws must be gone from Dodge City?"
     Returning to "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results."  First, this is not the definition of insanity.  What's more, there isn't one definition of insanity.  Anyone looking in a dictionary can see that most English words have more than one meaning.  Here's how The American College Dictionary, published 1958--the dictionary closest to hand, but adequate for this purpose--defines insanity:
     "1. condition of being insane; more or less permanent derangement of one or more psychical functions , due to disease of the mind.  2. Law. such unsoundness of mind as effects legal responsibility or capacity.  3. extreme folly.  Syn.  1. derangement, dementia; lunacy, craziness, madness."
     Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is not necessarily madness.  An aspiring actor going to audition after audition has to expect he'll someday be hired, otherwise, what's the point?  Using the United States military to visit violence on the Middle East over and over again and expecting the situation there to improve may very well be insane.
     One might ask, "Why do you, Vic Neptune, watch cable news if it irritates you so?"
     I don't watch it that much, certainly not more than a half hour to an hour a day, changing channels back and forth.  I don't expect cable news to improve even though I look at it over and over, so, according to cable talking heads, I'm not insane.

                                                                            Vic Neptune 
    
    
    
    
    

     I bought my first comic book in 1971, the first issue of Marvel Feature, with Dr. Strange, Sub-Mariner, and the Hulk.  At twenty-five cents, it gouged my weekly allowance of around forty
cents.  The drugstore half a block from my house had the candy I bought every Saturday when my father would give me coins that purchased so much more in those days.  For forty cents I could get a candy bar, a pack or two of bubblegum with sports cards, licorice, Good and Plenty or other cardboard box candies.  It was wonderful to go home and eat that shit, to smell the lingering gum scent on the cards with their detailed information about the players on the reverse sides. 
     My older brother began buying Marvel comic books at the same corner drugstore earlier that year.  I looked at them, entranced, and I absorbed his statement that an issue with the number 1 was worth having.  He had several such premier issues and was on the lookout.  One day, I saw Marvel Feature number 1 in the rack and I bought it, not without some hesitation.  I knew my brother would be upset that a first issue got past him.  Still, the Hulk on the cover, green fist thrusting forward as if to punch through the cheap colorful paper made it impossible to resist acquiring this item.
     I feel old writing this.  A character as well known now as the Hulk was once new to me.  Since then, a TV series, films, and the idea of someone losing control of his anger to the extreme extent of becoming a monster of violence and rage have made him a well-established archetype in popular culture.  To my young eyes in 1971, though, he and Sub-Mariner and Dr. Strange were fresh, and even bizarre.
     Anyone entering a long-established comic book universe, Marvel, DC, or any other, is likely to get confused.  So much has happened before, characters and their relationships have become so complex, that getting a grip on all of it may be impossible.
     At my young candy-gobbling age, the images attracted me more than the text: Dr. Strange in his ethereal body floating through walls, Sub-Mariner reaching for the Hulk's throat, flamethrowers shooting out of a wall at the Hulk.
     Monomaniacal crazed dialogue, as when a villain, Yandroth, says, "The Omegatron will be automatically activated by my death--the death I planned!  It can protect itself with weapons--with hallucinations--and precisely five hours after it is activated it will explode every nuclear stockpile on Earth!  Every man wants the world to end when he dies--but only I shall fulfill that dream!"
     Does every man want the world to end when he dies?  Probably not, and reading that when I was seven years old didn't make me believe it, but it's a wonderful over the top rant in a genre operating on a plane shifted from our reality.  To a friend I observed, while talking about James Bond films, that "these movies exist in a world of their own."
     It's not easy to craft imaginary worlds that draw people in.  One key value of these worlds, literary, cinematic, comic book, or whatever else, is how they can represent elements in our own lives.  Batman, in comic books and movies, symbolizes a man's shadow side coming forth to battle criminals, usually at night.  He needs to be anonymous.  His methods require a dark persona spreading fear to his adversaries.  He can't battle the Joker wearing a three piece suit; thus, he embraces his darkness because without it he wouldn't be able to commit the violence required to fight chaos and evil. 
     No one in real life is a real life Batman or Hulk, but these characters and the multitude of others in Marvel and DC, in their stylized exaggerated ways and costumes, represent what's in human beings, much as pantheons of gods and goddesses did for ancient civilizations. 
     I bought most of my comic books for a few years into the 1970s, but then I started reading J.R.R. Tolkien.  Imaginative literature took over, but I respect comic books and graphic novels a great deal. 

                                                                            Vic Neptune 

     Happy birthday, Sarah Palin!
     My mother in 1977 was startled when she found out Jimmy Carter is younger than her, the first president to be so.  When I became aware of Governor Palin of Alaska in August 2008, I soon found out she's only three months older than me.  Had we gone to the same high school we would've been in the same class.  I doubt I would've known her except as a possible acquaintance; I knew some cheerleaders and girl jocks, but only as a human boy who crossed their sight lines and who assisted them with frog dissection and other projects.
     Sarah Palin played the guard position in high school basketball.  Contemporary action photographs I've seen show a strong-looking short girl with a big brunette hairdo typical of the early 1980s.  Later, she was Miss Wasilla.  I knew a devout Christian girl who became the Miss of my city.  She was, I daresay, better looking than eighteen year old Sarah, was also a very nice person, but unlike the Alaskan, did not become world famous.
     The day Sarah Palin arrived in collective American consciousness featured a planned event: Senator John McCain's announcement of his running mate.  Governor Palin, elected to that office only in 2006, had the benefit of being unknown.  When she strode into the auditorium packed with Republicans, accompanied by her husband Todd, two daughters and a baby, she looked great.  The beautiful hair, the stylish glasses, the poise in spite of the nation's bafflement as to who the fuck she was. 
     When she spoke, it was the kind of magic Ronald Reagan tricked some people with.  Come across as direct, don't delve into complicated issues, tell the Republicans in the room the poppycock they're expecting.  Her son, Track Palin, was serving a tour of duty in Iraq.  Her daughter Bristol was pregnant by a handsome young man with the Biblical name Levi.  Her youngest, Trig Palin, has Down Syndrome, and the Governor promised parents of special needs children they would have an advocate in the White House. 
     An extraordinary woman?  On the surface, electrifying, as she further proved during her Republican National Convention speech.  I watched that speech, not taken in by her words.  By the time of the Convention she struck me as a bullshitter, yet crowd reaction shots showed Republican eyes almost glazed with fascination for her.  I lip read one woman saying to her companion, "I love her!"
     McCain and Palin lost the election.  Some have blamed McCain's choice of running mate as a key factor in his defeat.  I think, though, the drift of history was against him.  Americans didn't want a Republican following Bush.  Palin, in another time, might've ascended to the vice presidency.  Dan Quayle is living proof that being a bimbo is no hindrance to election to that office, and I think Sarah Palin is smarter than Dan Quayle.
     Palin resigned her job as Governor of Alaska before completing her only term.  She became a Political Personality.  Roger Ailes of Fox News Channel had a studio built in her Wasilla house so she could appear via satellite, acting as an alleged political commentator, but mostly offering Sarah Palinesque opinions about Obamacare, the War on Terror, patriotism, the NRA, and whatever else tickles her gray matter. 
     She and her family had their own reality show on The Learning Channel.  I saw parts of two episodes.  She shot an elk, but watching the Palins do their thing isn't very interesting.  The Kardashians, at least, have been on camera so long they've developed acting skills covering their alleged "real" personalities.  The Palins, however, don't know how to do this.
     Sarah Palin's secret is thus revealed: the glitzy Republican former basketball player/beauty queen who can mesmerize some with her folksy ungrammatical blather is actually as mundane as the rich mother seen on her TLC reality show.  There's nothing wrong with being ordinary.  That's not the aspect of her life I find offensive.  That she continues to be a kind of Republican philosopher, her opinions sought on Fox News, her recent speech in Iowa showing she still has pull with that party's gut-thinkers, shows me Palin isn't retiring soon.  She's one of the genuine American jackasses who's made millions of dollars selling herself as an illusion detached from the real woman.

                                                                              Vic Neptune    

     First, I want to remark on Vice President Biden's recent comment on Russia's aggression in the Ukraine.  He said, "This is a test for America."  I understand his meaning.  Putin has been getting his way in his part of the world, exercising his "manifest destiny" over the former Soviet Union.  He doesn't want the Ukraine to join NATO or become a player in the European Union.  Post-Cold War Russians have been screwing with the Ukraine for two decades, including attempted assassination by poisoning a Ukrainian leader.  Thought of in terms of U.S. shenanigans in "our" hemisphere, this is nothing remarkable.  Guatemala, Cuba, El Salvador, Chile, Nicaragua, have all received the advantages of CIA goodwill.
     Now, as Ukrainian citizens get shelled, do you feel it, Americans?

     Second, I recommend a movie I watched last night on Netflix: Radio Free Albemuth, based on a posthumously published novel by Philip K. Dick.  It's low budget, well-made, and faithful to the novel, which makes it a rarity in films based on Dick's novels and stories.  There's only one other movie I've seen based on his work that captures the full Philip K. Dick essence of humor, paranoia, and intricate plotting: Richard Linklater's A Scanner Darkly. 
     Radio Free Albemuth takes place in an alternate America, run by a dictatorial President Fremont, who maintains his power by whipping up fear over a terror organization that may or may not exist, and anyway is certainly not the kind of threat he's making it out to be.  Nicholas Brady is a record producer who begins to receive visions, from God, or Something Else.  His best friend, Philip K. Dick (who wrote himself into the novel), a science fiction writer, is skeptical about his friend's claims, but becomes more and more convinced something big is going on, happening in a country dedicated to surveillance and control, where organizations like FAP (Friends of the American People) check up on and inform on people regularly. 
    
     Third, Brian Williams of NBC News is in trouble because of a "personal" story he's been telling about his time covering the Iraq War in 2003.  He was in a Chinook helicopter, embedded with some troops, when, he has claimed for over a decade, his ride was hit by a rocket propelled grenade.  The chopper had to land, the experience was harrowing.  There was a Chinook hit by an RPG in the vicinity, but, according to troops in that helicopter, Williams wasn't in it.  He's modified his story to being in a nearby helicopter, that he remembered the details wrong, like how a man who gets shot at doesn't remember that he wasn't actually shot at, but assumes he was, especially when the story is good to tell on late night television.
     This is a minor scandal, but the troops whose Chinook actually got hit have had to hear for many years some bozo from the news media attaching his combat virginity to their real war
experiences.
     Fox News Channel personalities have predictably latched firmly onto this story, among them  Sean Hannity, who, unlike Brian Williams, would never report from a war zone but loves America's war efforts as long as he can sit on his ass watching them from his studio.
     It sounds like a long time ago: 2003.  Williams in a helicopter, not the helicopter, but a military chopper traveling above Iraq.  2003, from the perspective of my memory, is not a long time ago.  I was thirty-eight when that war began.  I remember the seventies pretty well, so 2003 is like several days before yesterday.  From a warfare perspective, though, it's a long time ago.
     Nobody on the news covering the Williams fabrication added, "That was 2003 in Iraq.  We're still there," and that's the most important point, I think, dealing with the futility of America's endless immoral involvement in the Middle East.

                                                                            Vic Neptune