Day: March 25, 2008

I was working on a painting and it was not going well. This must have been a flashback to art school because I was sitting at a table with other people while I was working. Part of the painting was abstract but I was trying to do this illustrational thing up in one corner. Someone showed me a book of cartoony drawings done in gouache or acrylic that looked like a cross of Robert Williams and David Sandlin. They were really good and just made me frustrated that my own piece wasn't going well. I started heaping paint on my canvas, giant crinkly wads of it, so that it was sliding off the sides and getting all over the table and my hands.

Just then, a college friend of mine walked in and sat down at the table. He was a heavy set individual, and brought with him a breakfast tray groaning with food. Three or four stacks of pancakes, each stack about 8 or 10 pancakes high, giant heaps of bacon strips, everyone at the table was staring in awe at the food, which looked like an art installation (and was certainly more interesting than my painting).

Update: Freudian explanation: my landlord has been varnishing the floor outside my apt. and my downstairs neighbor likes to cook bacon and eggs.

ABC interviewed Dick Cheney, the VP too good to impeach, during his recent Middle East junket.

When asked about the toll multiple deployments have taken on U.S. military members, Cheney sarcastically asked the reporter how she would deal with it. Meaning he didn't know how he should.

A week earlier the same reporter asked Cheney about polls showing that "two-thirds of Americans say the fight in Iraq is not worth it."

Cheney's reply was "So?" The new meme the Administration is putting out is that Lincoln, like Bush, was also unpopular and weighed down heavily by a war. The countermeme is Honest Abe was re-elected in 1864 at the bottom of his popularity. Also an elective war in Iraq isn't the same as a war of national unification where a key issue was slavery.

Cheney's views on the world and politics are roughly at the level of old guys you see sitting on courthouse steps in small towns, whittling and hawking phlegm onto the sidewalk. It's disturbing he's still being given a respectful forum to air them and inflict them on others.

Update: Evidently the Lincoln analogy wasn't going too well so now Cheney's saying the Iraq War is like Ford's pardon of Nixon (i.e., reviled at the time but best for all in the long run). Whatever, Dick.