1868 words (slight disappointment)

SO I didn't finish the chapter. It was a little harder to write than I thought it would be. The second installment involved a conversation with a crazy man who explained the windshield washing dodge and then launched into a rant about crazy things. I didn't get back to the computer until 9:00 pm, and then there were a lot of interruptions. My daughter was boired and restive, my cat was demanding, twenty-nine people called an average of three times each to speak to my son before he got home, and then he got home and informed me he's now sleeping in his (my) car because the campsites are too expensive, and then his buddy Spike showed up who is on vacation from college back East somewhere (Indiana?) and has developed disco hair to go with his shiny pants and shirts unbuttoned lower than you expect. My son then changed into his orange camouflage t shirt and kilt, and the two of them went off to hit the bars. The pirate and the barbarian, I guess.

I'm keeping track of word counts, but that's not really how I'm measuring my progress. Really I'm thinking in terms of story function. I'm getting things done, getting ready for major plot events. So far I've been working for a week, and I have accomplished the following things:
ch 1 -- our guy introduces himself as a predator, and only reveals after two anecdotes that he's not eating the people he preys on, he's manipulating them into wishing for food.
ch 2 -- our guy hangs out with an old man in a park for a few days and learns what remembering is, how to earn money from odd jobs, and why it's scary for rain to fall in July.
ch 3 -- our guy sees the old man's wish granted, and flees the watchers. He takes shelter in a homeless camp, and is beaten by intruding trollbashers, and discovers that there are way too many people making wishes in the emergency room (the emergency room needs to be fleshed out).
ch 4 -- our guy falls in with some farmworkers and gets a job in a tomato field, but he has to flee again because of the wishing intensity.
ch 5 -- our guy gets stuck at a truckstop in the desert, and gets picked up by a randy truck driver, and finds another way to eat without wishes.
ch 6 -- our guy strikes out at finding odd jobs, but succeeds in finding another john: but this time, the fellow wishes that our guy "cared," resulting in an inconvenient, intense, but fortunately brief crush -- it ends because the john wishes our guy would be sensible.
ch 7 -- our guy discovers boredom, reminisces about his first days on the loose, earns about the window dodge, and when I finish the chapter tomorrow he will meet the Boss, who is attracted by his "don't-look" (a spell of inconspicuousness, which is partially deactivated when the wishing things happen).

That should be about a sixth of the total length of the book, or as much as a quarter.

The Boss should be about a quarter to a third of the total length of the book, and then a chapter or two? of transition (involving the superstitious wino, Labor Ready and maybe soup kitchens), and then Candelario and Araceli. Which should be somewhat less than a half of the book, including the showdown, the final wish, and the epilog.

So I've gotten the guy introduced, and gotten his struggles illustrated, and moved him along: he's developed some personality, learned something about how to mimic being human, and learned to care.

I'm going to bed, I guess. I have to remember to wear the splint on my arm tonight: today I swept several inches of dust and leaf litter off the little patio and the paths, and pruned a little more on the apricot and did a little snipping on the pomegranate, even though it is too early for that -- self defense! The pomegranate could take somebody's eye out with its spiky twigs.

Abu Ghraib (297 words)

Slow again because I stayed up too late again because I was following everybody's links around the net reading all these journals.

Everybody else has had their say about the events at Abu Ghraib. My turn. This is what I'm thinking about.

The nice fellow got us a subscription to Time as part of some kid's school fund raiser. It's appalling, usually -- the bias is so bizarrely permeating and repellent (what do they have against California? I don't get it) -- but there was a reasonably impressive special issue on the recent research into the brain development of adolescents and young adults. There's not much news in the implications: young people take more risks, are more distractable in some ways and more focusable in others, have more facility in some kinds of learning and less in other kinds, have sleep problems, etc. etc. Only now they can correlate these things with documented physical changes.

It seems to me that when we form armies we exploit the physiological and developmental particulars of young people. We take our risk-taking folks and require them to take risks. And so on. But it also means -- we have a responsibility here. We put weapons and physical power into the hands of vulnerable people, and it means we should give them what they need to emerge from the experience as civilized, healthy people. Not as criminals.

Clearly, whatever version of events you believe in, these people were not given the things they needed to maintain what we think of as decent behavior for defenders of democracy(it's telling, but not relevant in this paragraph, that at least two of them were prison guards, which means they were already enculturated in the value system of demeaning prisoners -- prison guards union --). They were given instead, encouragement, permission, justification, pressure to behave as criminals. The justification: they are defending democracy, decency, a value system that honors humanity and the rights and dignity of the individual, against evil people who constitutionally hate, vilify, and dehumanize us, who commit horrible crimes in the name of their absolutist beliefs.

There has been the claim that there were no direct orders to do any of the things in the photographs and depositions. I have a hard time believing this: but I don't need to disbelieve it. "Make sure he has a hard night" is clearly understandable. That these young people went beyond the literal instructions is not surprising, since they were praised and encouraged for doing it, since there was such pride in their activities that they photographed them and passed the pictures around.

The thing I'm trying to get at is that while the defense of the administration is that they never told the prison guards to stack naked men, to sic dogs on them, or to rape boys, the fact that more than one incident took place at all implicates their policies.

It's not "human nature." I mean, clearly, it is in human nature to do these things, because people do, but it is just as much human nature to behave in other ways. The leadership staff is supposed to lead: that means they do things which cause a certain culture to arise, and they are modern experts on psychology and behavior and leadership, so they are responsible for the culture that arises. Even if it is true that they didn't order these things done.

And the evidence is that even that is not true. In their defense, the administration hauls out memos demonstrating that they investigated the legalities of putting prisoners "under stress". What this shows is that they were quite eager to figure out how much torture they could get away with. Eager is the word. Ever since 2001, the executive branch of my country's government has been causing hundreds of people to disappear all over the globe, hiding them from their families, any legal counsel, and the Red Cross, and making it clear that they consider the US to be above international law with respect to defendants' rights and the behavior of our soldiers and "intelligence" people (I can't resist the scare quotes, sorry).

It's as if the administration was waiting with sadistic anticipation for a chance to play out the Argentinian scene on a vast scale. As if they read Orwell and identified with the wrong people.

And they've recruited our sons and daughters to do the dirty work.

And now I have to write a lot in the next hour and a half so I won't feel like an idiot.

2047 words

Okay, this is going way too slow. Is it because I've been doing it for eight days straight? I'll try to get back to it tonight.

I think I finished the chapter -- it's at 3008 words for the chapter between yesterday and today. WHat bI want to do tonight is to get a good head start on Chapter 8, in which the Boss examines our guy and figures out what he is and who made him.

I don't want the Boss to look like a cartoon villain. I think he's a bad man, because he's willing to use people -- or in our guy's case, things which are very much like people -- as objects for his use. But he's not cruel or malicious. And Jim I think would be an okay guy if he didn't abdicate his moral decisions to the Boss.

But neither of those things are the point. The point is our guy's experience at the Boss's place.

I'm going to go have a life now.