The Religion of Fuck

     The mid-point of 2016 made me wonder, as I drove home from a few errands today, if I like 2016. A band I just discovered and like, Autolux, was playing in the CD player, as I watched the big and small cars, the trucks, moving around and before me.  At a stoplight, a woman in her twenties, wearing a dark mauve dress and pushing a baby carriage used the crosswalk.  She had long, wavy brown hair and a beautiful face.  Her existence, appearing in that traffic space and in that four in the afternoon on a lovely summer day time, seemed to have nothing to do with the pain or chaos so characteristic of Earth as it's currently run by human beings.
     Once home, I heard from TV about a hostage situation in Dakha, Bangladesh.  A bakery was stormed by men armed with guns and swords.  Speculation from the anchorwoman's guest that the Holy Month of Ramadan has inspired acts of killing by Muslim extremists.  I think about how bizarre this is to my idea of living: that some feel religious, therefore they kill people.  If that's the case, then fuck religion, or give me a religion of fuck.
     Later, another terror expert was telling Kate Snow (who I find very attractive and would like to fuck; thus, I was watching her) of MSNBC, that the lack of night vision goggles discernible from footage of Bangladeshi policemen dealing with the crisis in their city on the other side of the world, suggested to him that they're not well-equipped to handle the hostage situation.  He lauded the performance of Istanbul security at the recent airport bombing there, their actions preventing a bad situation from becoming much worse.  I wondered if the terror expert interviewed by the lovely Kate Snow found the Turks more understandable, somehow, because Istanbul is so close to Europe, whereas Bangladesh is part of hot, humid Asia; heavily populated and a source of cheap labor for products imported into America, including men's wear items sporting the name, Trump.
     I made a good spaghetti sauce for dinner tonight, letting the stuff simmer most of the afternoon.  Italian sausage and mushrooms made it lumpy, but it was good.  Last night I watched Phillipe De Broca's funny action comedy from 1965, Up To His Ears, with Jean-Paul Belmondo and Ursula Andress, who actually looked cute.  I've never thought of her as cute before this.  She has a very gracefully sculpted face and splendid body, first made famous in Dr. No, the first Bond film, but cute?  Not really.  Even so, her liveliness in the De Broca film made me think about her differently.  Ever since childhood, when I saw her in The Blue Max, she seemed like an unapproachable statue; remote and frosty, though great to look at.  I read somewhere that her voice was sometimes dubbed in films by other actresses.  Who is Ursula, then?  Some remote personage whose voice we're not allowed to hear?
     There's a constant battle in human life when it comes to embracing or rejecting the other.  The thing we don't understand, don't know, don't want to know.  Trump's xenophobic movement thrives on a shuddering reaction to the other.  Latinos coming to America to take our jobs, to take up space, to take freedom they haven't earned.  It's funny that these Trump-tickled boobs don't realize that being born in the United States, as they have been, isn't an admirable fact by itself.  One doesn't know where one will be born.  It's out of a fetus's hands.  Get born in Ohio, say, to an American citizen mother, and one is automatically American, no tests or papers required from the newborn.  It's a virtueless way of becoming an American.  Coming from somewhere else, however, and going through many trials to citizenship, can be admirable.
     The main thing I don't like about Americans (though I am one), is the tendency they have to be proud, to the point of vainglory, of an "Americanness" they, those born here, neither earned nor have used responsibly towards their fellow world citizens.  Hating people because they're from somewhere else is an old habit.  I remember a girl from Georgia in my fifth grade class.  She dressed really well, but in a kind of old-fashioned manner not in touch with 1974 kid tastes.  She was very polite, tried to make friends, failed, shut down after a while, got made fun of by mostly boys but a girl or two as well.  The teacher finally figured out something abusive was going on and spent half a class period questioning, in front of everyone, each student besides the bullied girl (who also wore glasses, which didn't help) what exactly they'd been saying to her and about her.  It was a very uncomfortable experience.  When my turn came, I just said her accent was strange--several others had said the same.  Others owned up to saying far worse--the teacher was a tough woman.
     Ursula Andress, shocking the movie world when she rose from the waves like Botticelli's Venus in Dr. No, had a voice the moviemakers determined needed to be covered over by someone else.  In that first Bond film, she's a presence.  Her character, in the way of the Bond universe, is called Honey Ryder.  In Goldfinger, Honor Blackman plays Pussy Galore.  Bond, in my view, to even the score, should've been called Dick Thrust.
     I think this cuter version of Ursula Andress whom I saw in the De Broca comedy is closer to the personality of the real woman, rather than the statuesque, stony version, some fantasy of a woman with an outrageous name, who ends up off-screen fucking James Bond at some point, before he moves on to the next assignment.  Strangely, in the way of comedy, the De Broca film's wackiness notwithstanding, Andress's character, Alexandrine, is realistic because warmer than Honey Ryder, thus more alive and believable as a human being.
     Like my fellow mean fifth grade students, I missed Marcelle's (the Georgia girl's) humanity because she didn't seem to be like us.  Back in America, far from Dakha, the terror expert on MSNBC commenting, condescendingly, about brave men of the Bangladeshi police as they waited to confront maniacs with guns and swords in a hostage situation, showed me he was looking at otherness, and finding it lacking.  Yes, we Americans are so good at the War on Terror.  Look, it's only been going on for fourteen years, we still have troops in Afghanistan and in Iraq, terror groups more vicious than al-Qaeda have been born from George W. Bush's decision to attack Iraq in 2003.  In truth, we really suck at this.
     The pain, the reality of this world has been with us, and our ancestors, for countless millennia.  That will never change.  Perceptions in the eyes of poets, of idiots, of arms manufacturers, will form many currents, some clashing, in the oceans of experience.  Some will see her rise from the waves and think about sin, others, the less self-tormented, will see perfection, like the movement of the woman in mauve pushing the baby carriage.

                                                                                Vic Neptune