And Where She Stops, Nobody Knows

So it is a great object lesson in never putting off till tomorrow what you might be doing today, as it was my intention three or four times since my last bulletin to write, and I didn't, and since then the world has tilted. The first thing I intended to rail about was the journalist Judith Miller's being sent to jail-- where she has since had to spend her first night sleeping on the floor as there weren't enough beds-- for not revealing her sources when she didn't even write an article. Then I was going to tell anecdotes about Chirac, as I had a call from London just as they won the Olympics, from a PR person there who told me of Chirac's criticism of English food, and of Gordon Ramsay, the self-promoting BadBoy Chef having gone on the radio in London teeling that he had made a lunch for Chirac of lobster salad, and Chirac had pushed aside the wine and drunk a lager. Quel bad gout!
But all these things wax minor, or wane, more accurately, in view of the terror attack on wonderful London, and one wonders where it will all end, and if T.S.Eliot was right that it would be "not with a bang, but a whimper." Doesn't seem likely.
A Human Rights attorney of my recent acquaintance says "they should all be stamped out like cockroaches," which doesn't sound too Human-Rightsy, but then it would seem these people are not a breed of human we can categorize as such. The worst of it, I think, besides the actual violence, is that Blair didn't get a chance to really push through his G8 agenda, and show Bush up for the insensitive and arrogant non-participant in world agonies he is, as this will merely strengthen his It's all about Terrorism stand.
Still, life does go on when it can. So back on the home front there remains the puzzle of why that good woman is in the cooler and bopping around still is the repellent Bob Novak, who outed a CIA undercover agent, abetted by the unknown source in the White House giving him the info, obviously for revenge on her husband, who had dared to criticize Bush's war. If the GRand Jury knows the source, which apparently they do, as Matt Cooper of Time got a waiver from the source to tell, and NOvak must have made a deal, why is she still being persecuted? oh excuse me, I meant to say prosecuted. It feels like the start , or rather, the continuation of a brand new Witch Hunt, and of course burned at the stake will be our freedoms.
And if they know who the source is-- it feels like Karl Rove, though I hoped it would have been Cheney-- why isn't that source actually being charged with a crime? Because it IS a crime to endanger an undercover agent, even if she's not a Republican.
All this will probably be lost, though, in the fuss that will shortly surely surround the selection of the new Supreme Court justice. You don't have to pay any tax in Ireland if you're an artist, but my accountant explained to me you have to give up your American citizenship. I was of course reluctant to even consider such an option, but as time goes by and events unfold..........
Anyway enough of the heavy. I have finished my play, and I hope it is truly funny and good and that the stages will still be there so maybe it can get up on one of them. Jamie, whom you all know I love and respect above all women save perhaps Laura Bush, read it while awaiting jury duty in Beverly Hills along with Farrah Fawcett(there's a picture), sitting in the marbled corridor outside the courtroom, and said she screamed with laughter, that echoed through those hollowed(not a typo) halls. She has pronounced it wonderful, and I have always believed her about nearly everything, so hope it gets to the world and the world shares her opinion. Oh, if only your Fate was in the hands of those who loved you. Jack, moreover, whom most of you will remember as my Jewru, has been trying to teach me since 1975 not to be attached to outcomes, when I told him I was still really attached to outcomes, confessed that he was, too, and said he would pray for me. That was yet another surprise: I didn't know Buddhists prayed; I thought they just meditated.
There was an article in today's NYTimes about a prison in India where they practised Vipassana, the kind of meditation that Jack teaches, and how all the prisoners have calmed down. Simply put, as it was when I first found him in the midst of a Humanistic Psychology Conference in Rocky Mountain National Park, in Colorado, it's Insight meditation. As I remember from the flyer that first drew me to him, "Insight is seeing things the way they are, free from the mind's attachments and expectations." A really tough road to hoe, for those of us whom expectations, like hope, keep alive. But hope, as I learned when I went back to Bryn Mawr in the 80s and studied ancient Greek things with Mabel Lang, in her opinion, was not a good thing, either. When Pandora opened the box and all the ills of the world flew out of it, she slammed the lid and all that was left in the box was Hope, which Mabel said was a bad thing, because Hope kept people from doing what they needed to do to get by.
Oh who wants to just get by, anyway. Let's all hope hope hope and be attached to happy outcomes. Fuck 'em all.