TOBY PETZOLD

You want in on the ground floor of the next big way to help fat people lose weight? Come up with a way to neutralize their olfactory nerves. I don’t know how it would work —whether it be a surgical or pharmaceutical method— but so much of the pleasure in eating is related to smell and taste that such a measure would surely depress the desire to eat anything more than what sustenance requires.

Of course, the other thing that would be depressed by such a method of weight control would be the person’s spirits. It is extremely discouraging to be unable to smell or taste one’s food and drink. But a doctor could also prescribe happy pills to keep the poor bastard going, so maybe it would work. It’s no less crazy than stomach stapling or lap band surgery.

Oh, well. I don’t guess it would ever really work, anyway. For one thing, it’s dangerous to eat something you can’t smell or taste. Hell, it’s dangerous in general to not be able to depend on those senses. Someone could serve you up some enchiladas con caca and you’d never know the difference until it was too late.

As for me, I’ve got about two or three percent of my smell back —and I really have to work for even that. I find myself daydreaming about what my first smell will be. Will it be pleasant? Yes. Yes, it will.

I’m in there cooking ground beef with peppers and onions and I’ve got my face almost flush to the skillet, inhaling like I’ve never inhaled before and —nothing.

Nothing.

Seriously, I’m so depressed about my lost sense of smell that I will probably cry at the first whiff of anything. A fart! A fart! My kingdom for a whiff of even a fart!

Being sick the last few days —and unable to smell or taste anything— it occurred to me that human being is inextricably linked to those senses and that any robotic futures we might imagine for ourselves would fail to be fully human without them. That is, if you seek immortality and believe it may be had by uploading the contents of your brain into a supercomputer, then what you would be preserving is not human in any meaningful sense, but a soulless, worthless replica.

We are not merely cerebrocortical, but gloriously limbic. Give me my gravity switches and my magnetic alignments and point my pole to true north.

You may keep your robot pussy until that day.

By way of a link from Glenn Reynolds, read this New York Times account of one of my favorite corporate citizens:

In March 2007, Circuit City came up with a plan to confront softening sales and competition from online and offline retailers: fire the most talented, experienced employees.

Of course, those workers were the retail chain’s single most important point of difference from the legion of Internet retailers and general merchandisers, but in a single stroke, Philip J. Schoonover, the chief executive of Circuit City, wiped out that future.

As a pal of mine used to say when I described a particularly boneheaded course of action I had pursued, “How’d that work out for you, buddy?”

For Circuit City, not so great. The “wage management initiative” erased morale, both for employees and the folks who shopped there. Sales sank after the one-time gain from the layoffs. And last week, the company sought bankruptcy protection.

I strongly approve of Circuit City’s imminent journey down the crapper. That company is a lot of thieving bastards. That’s a fact in your Library of Congress. They sold me a cassette adapter for a portable CD player in my old Honda probably a decade ago and —long story short— it completely disabled my car stereo. Did I have any recourse? Fuck no. Did I fantasize about choking me some bitches like Wayne Brady? Yes. Yes, I did.

Retailers who don’t stand behind what they sell are nothing but thieves.

I am pleased to say that I have never since that incident gone into a Circuit City. I shred or toss their mailers as soon as I see them and I immediately flip the channel when one of their ads comes on. They are dead to me and, soon enough, to us all.

I did not participate in the Moment That Was last night because I was being a baby about the whole thing. But, I hasten to add, a preternaturally indifferent baby. Not one for crying and carrying on, but a placid one already resigned to the outcome despite, you know, the Hope.

After it became clear that Pennsylvania had declined to hop on board the Straight Talk Express v.2.0, I lost the ascot, had a nightcap, and remembered some passions.

I should probably be ashamed of myself for turning my back on such a dawn of a new age —especially considering how much love I have for History and for my own exceptionalistic country— but I will get over it. After all, I know what happened. So do you.

The world keeps turning, the Republic will live, and Charity conquers all.

Nietzsche is said to have argued that Christianity was the Jews’ revenge on Imperial Rome. And there is a lot to be said for that: in the space of about three centuries, a religion based on the life, death, and resurrection of a troublemaking minority in a  distant province became, essentially, the creed of the world’s greatest empire. The last thing had now become first, just as the Gospels promise.

These are softly psychotic days of cultish confidence and stop-motion spectacles of diseased accretions upon the body politic. I do not know the nature of the plague of messianism; I would not have guessed a year ago that America would tolerate a man as steeped in racist gall and European socialism as this one, but I was wrong. America is cut out for the new totalitarianism. It does not flinch or fight, but waddles right up to the very idea itself like a dodo nuzzling the outstretched hand of a bemused Portuguese.

Barack Hussein Obama is the Democratic Party’s revenge on the Union, my friends. Yeah, it’s true —even if the analogy falls apart. The party of secession, slavery, segregation, and now socialism has elevated a demagogue to dismantle this Republic and to reshape it into some alien and un-American outpost of welfare statism and of an even more wretched sort of Carterism. I simply did not know that we had sunk so low.

A woman I know sat me down today and explained at length that whatever happens next Tuesday will be God’s will; that God always chooses our leaders. I added that some must have been object lessons or negative examples, to which she agreed. I have known this woman for a dozen years, off and on, but this was one of the more intense explications of God’s will that I have yet heard from her. She is passionately an Obamaton, and I think there was a generous helping of motherly sadism in her performance, but what can we do sometimes but take pleasure in being agreeable?

I won’t say I fear for my country, but the cone of uncertainty for me is wider than before.

Many of us who are opposed to Barack Obama —because of the enormous lies he tells about himself, as well as the extreme Leftism hidden in his story— are too slow to surrender to reality. We cannot yet accept that the America we live in is ready to hand the keys over to a narcissistic socialist in the White House and the most liberal Congress in 35 years. The disconnect may be attributed to a quaint adherence to the old standards of patriotism and, indeed, politics. When else, after all, have we made a cultural interloper of this degree our President? I don’t refer to his racial identity —although that’s certainly there— but to his foreignness. He doesn’t have a claim on this culture that I would recognize as American. Instead, he is a harbinger of the Post-American Man —the Citizen of the World who, on nothing but the power of celebrity and diabolism, went before the German throngs and debased what we are. Yes: debased. He reduced what this Republic is to a mistake that needs to be apologized for. So I do not trust his motives and I do not like his supporters, who strike me as woefully ignorant and emotional little feelers. They do not have any reason to support this man but for their emotional reaction to him. They are taking him on faith. What else do they have, though? Some evidence of his worth such as, you know, an achievement? Ask a hundred of his followers and not two of them together could tell you a single fucking thing he’s achieved that would warrant his elevation to the Presidency.

Anyway, we supporters of McCain and Palin are on our own little fools’ errands in trying to persuade the public of the dangers of this New Socialism. I have —and will have, be sure— no regrets for my own part in criticizing Obama, but it’s still poignant to read the people I depend on for my information trying so hard to break a story or pursue a new line of investigation in these last, though interminable, weeks. They want so much for what they write to matter, but it does not. What Obama draws on now is not the rational considerations of informed voters, but the raucous and fanatic emotionalism of the new idolatry —an anti-Bush and anti-Right movement determined to replace what it despises. You will not reach into those little rodental heads and convince them of anything: The One must be made the Change We Need.

What Obama is —as a man and as a patriot— is somehow irrelevant now. The icon got ahead of his reality. These are the days for dreaming. Not American Dreaming, of course; that would be too provincial. These are the days, rather, for illusions and fantasies and all the thoughts of absolution we will enjoy once we do to ourselves what must be done. Now the abnegating! Now the denigrating!

The knowing comes later. The realization must come, but last.

I’m sure that’s funny to some people I know, but I am utterly in earnest. The extent of the obvious contempt for their country the Democrats have shown by Barack Obama’s nomination is truly shocking to me —and I am ashamed of these people, though some be my friends and family.

I keep my notebooks in such a weird, anachronistic way that they are almost like unscraped palimpsests. Which causes me to have to date dated observations. But why? It’s metanonsense. Unindexed and random gibberish.

But it’s hard to walk away from handwriting. It can’t all be committed to a hard drive as it goes, you know. Writers must still do the manual labor of scribery if they want to be worthy of the definition of their avocations.

No one is doing this to you but yourself. There is simply too much information and too much disinformation and misinformation to be had that requires no more effort than a thought and a moving digit. In order to remain functional, you must become more discriminating. Filters serve more than physical purposes, after all.

Is there any species more aptly named than Homo sapiens sapiens?

Doubt it.