Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

These days, I often get the blues. I get out of sorts, more than I'd like. So I try to hold back, in conversation and in print, wanting not to be a BBC prophet of doom, determined not to puncture all those protective bubbles of well-being that keep others afloat in their personal worlds. Maybe, as in the Psyche myth, it might be better not to shine that bright light on Eros--because once you shine the light and get a really good look, your golden world may fall apart. Knowledge comes at a price.

With respect to Libya, Tom Friedman warns that we need to be cautious about intervening in places that could fall apart in our hands. But isn't everything already falling apart? Robert Gates, Secretary of Defense, concedes that there are no predictable outcomes in Libya. Nobody knows what will happen. Hillary insists there were no desirable options, and Obama himself, off camera, has described the decision to intervene in Libya as a turd sandwich. Dennis Kucinich, Congressional Democrat, wants to impeach him for eating turds without first consulting Congress.

All this hasn't stopped everyone else from having an opinion about what to do. Everyone has his or her own distinctive wiggle on the subject, say, of Libyan intervention. (Devil you do, devil you don't.) I say we should do this, and you say I would rather not have done that. What if Qaddafi doesn't leave? What if he does? Why take action in Libya and not in Syria, or Yemen? Why not somewhere/anywhere else? How on earth will we ever know it when we're done? Why are we even doing this, anyway?

"Obama acts as if leading the free world is an inconvenience" Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham stated recently, as if he would do a much better job of eating turds than the president. ("You try it!" exclaimed my friend Hakuin, when I told her about his comment. "It's the title of the book a teacher-friend of mine is writing," she went on to explain. "An exasperated version of you should try walking a mile in my shoes,)

Obama doesn't want to put America in the driver's seat, or be the ringmaster running the show. He doesn't want to be seen as the enemy of Arabs around the world--an attitude often criticized as if this were a weakness, or a bad thing. Obama's Bad: let's be blunt, he hates the whole idea of American Exceptionalism. (Perhaps the time has come, said the Walrus.) How easy is it, when there are no easy answers, to persist in asking futile questions? How easy is it to insist on knowing a future nobody can predict? More pertinently, in a world where it's become impossible to know anything for sure, why not dip into how much you know better? Rip the confusion. Be "outspoken."

On the bright side, at least Halliburton won't be moving in any time soon to rebuild what we've just destroyed. As for me, I'm ready with one suave stroke to bury the whole musculature of everybody's opinions in the Virginia hills. That includes my own. Here's the simple truth: we rushed to the side of Libyan rebels and in all likelihood prevented a massacre. It's not really a war; it's more like when Eddie Fisher rushed to the side of Elizabeth Taylor, after her husband, Mike Todd, was killed in an accident. "He rushed to her side to comfort her," Taylor's daughter writes in Vanity Fair, "but eventually he made his way around to her front." Maybe we'll get that lucky, too.

I read In the same issue that Truman Capote once owned a mynah bird, which he carried on his shoulder wherever he went. He taught it to squawk "Fuck you!" at frequent intervals, and that sent him into gales of laughter every single time. Maybe we should consider trading in our opinions for mynah birds? As in: put on your pearls, girls, we're about to go bird shopping.

Survivor Guilt

Last spring, it was the unbearable lightness of being induced by watching thousands of gallons of oil gush into the Gulf of Mexico every day. That nightmare scenario dragged on for months, without anyone knowing the end of the story. Would the well ever get capped, and if not, would we all be swept away in a tsunami of oil? That had to have been the most ghastly scenario I had ever experienced in my lifetime. Those deadly weeks of anxious waiting while engineers and scientists applied heat, applied cold, applied anything they could think of, to stop the bleeding.

It seemed to me then that some safety lock had been taken off the world--and that a face-off was occurring between the forces of man-destroying-nature and the forces of nature-destroying-man, destined somehow to end badly for both. A gaping wound had opened in the world, with sirens of alarm sounding that would never go away. Eventually the well got capped, and the pain dissipated--only to return again in other forms.

In rapid succession, floods of biblical dimensions inundated parts of Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Australia; an earthquake struck a major city in New Zealand; maniacal blizzards pounded the US all winter long. Pandora, her hair on fire, leapt out of the box in the Middle East. And then the triple whammy of a monster earthquake in northern Japan, followed by a killer tsunami, and now, radiation leaks from the Kukushima nuclear plant, which grow grow greater every day. And once again, more deadly weeks of anxious waiting. Will they be able to prevent a nuclear meltdown? What will mad Qaddafi do hext? What will Obama do?

"The only thing President Obama seems decisive about is his indecision," declared an editorial in London's Sunday Express this week. Discussions of ineffectual leadership were once again buzzing through the internet. "What should the US do about Libya? What should the US do about the Middle East in general? What about the country's crippling debts? What is the US going to do about Afghanistan, about Iran?" Yeah, what? What, as a matter of fact, would YOU do? When in doubt, bash Obama. That usually works.

Personally I'm finding it a bit difficult to go on about my normal business as if none of this were happening. I continue to stand my lonesome watch as the guilty survivor, trying to process my part of the global pain, fear, and suffering.

"You don't want to become like that woman who has no future because she won't wear perfume," Virgil taunts, having appeared suddenly, like a Bedouin in the night. Today he is offering himself as my guide through hell--he wants, he says, to read me his favorite quote:

"...And when they ran out of rats, they chewed the bark off the mainmast." "Our wound," he continues, "is a genuine quantum phenomenon. Will it destroy us or wake us up? Is it a wave or a particle? I have three jokes for you."

"This is no time for jokes, Virgil. I can't laugh anymore. Or even try to laugh. About anything. Just stick me with a fork. I'm done."

Breaking News: US has launched military strikes inside Libya. Radiation found in Japanese milk, spinach.

It's all going to be A-okay, you just wait and see.

Oyster Mania

Ever since a restaurant called "Lucky" opened up in Roanoke, I find myself having a love affair--with oysters. Flown in fresh from the Rappahannock River a couple of times a week, the oysters get shucked by a bald-headed special-hire, who looks like a kung-fu master, and then immediately brought to the table by an enthusiastic waitress. Eating oysters at Lucky's is like inhaling helium. Maybe it's the high zinc content, in combination with all the other minerals like calcium, iodine, iron, potassium, copper, sodium, phosphorus, manganese, and sulphur, but a good helping of oysters makes the whole world, which these days can seem pretty bleak, look and feel better again. Apres les huitres and a good glass of chilled white wine, my mind stops acting like an engine ready for takeoff.

This past week I have been able to indulge my new passion several times. With the result that I am worrying slightly less about Libyan youths--armed with rocket-propelled grenades they don't know how to use--being mowed down from the air by Quaddafi's mercenaries. An editorial, written by a novelist recently shortlisted for the Booker Prize whose father is a "disappeared" political dissident in Libya, and published in the New York Times today, describes the fighting witnessed firsthand by one of his relatives on the ground there:

" 'Treachery, cousin, treachery,' he said when I asked what he had seen. 'Qaddafi’s army forced the women and children out into the streets and placed snipers on the rooftops. Whenever we tried to approach, they shot at the civilians.'
He went on to describe the horror of seeing a child shot in the head with a 14.5-millimeter round: 'The skull exploded like a pomegranate.' "

Libya may seem far away to us, but a dangerous civil unrest is escalating right here, courtesy of Scott Walker, the Gadaffi-like Republican governor of Wisconsin, who is engaged in dismantling labor unions and stripping public employees of their collective bargaining rights. As of this writing, the originally peaceful protests in Madison have begun to go rogue across the nation and turn violent.

At night, in my dreams, I find myself navigating with difficulty through excited crowds, trying to get across check points in an unidentified place. The last time I was at Lucky's, the oysters had not arrived, but they did serve this special drink with a mystique: key lime martinis. I'd hardly drunk half of it when I happened to look out (through the plate glass windows) and saw a girl dressed in black, bobbing along on stilts. A minute later she was followed by another one, and no, I was not hallucinating. Right after that, a young woman in a white gauze tutu with flashing red lights underneath it, came inside to greet my friends, whom, it turned out, she knew. She turned out to be a performance artist named Beth Deel, and explained that the folks on stilts were practicing for the St. Patrick's Day parade next week.

Oysters can be expensive in places other than where they are harvested. A single oyster at Lucky's now costs $2.25, which is 25 cents more than the $2.00 a day I read is the daily wage that 40% of Egyptians live on. (It's a statistic that causes me to wonder if I should tie my tongue in a bow.) The price doesn't include that requisite glass of French muscadet (Coing de Sevre 2008), a crucial element in the equation of making me feel like a guest at Gatsby's house in late winter.

That night we ended up going for coffee at the girl in the gauzy tutu's cafe, two doors down from Lucky. It's a tiny, raffish place, pertly called "Get" in honor of its special affinity with the restaurant (as in, just add the two together and Get Lucky!). Going to the bathroom, I had to pass through a mini-boutique of vintage clothing (getfreckles.com) while Beth Deel made me a hot chocolate. There were books scattered around the cafe area for casual reading, but no chairs. Just a few stools, and a monograph on Julie Taymor (think "Spiderman," NYC) on one of the narrow counters. With Beth's permission, I made off with one of her books "Toward 2012: Perspectives on the Next Age," a compendium of essays edited by Daniel Pinchbeck and Ken Jordan. In return, I promised to bring her a copy of "Living the Magical Life, on the occasion of my next oyster binge, this coming Saturday.

All in all, it was a super happy evening.

"I don't believe the purpose of life is to just be happy," Andrew Cohen emails in his quote for this week."Why would God take fourteen billion years to produce highly evolved sentient life-forms that would ultimately develop the extraordinary capacity for self-reflective awareness, simply in order for them to be able to experience happiness? It's my conviction that we are here for a reason, that there is a grand and great purpose to our presence in this universe, and that none of us are going to truly find what we are looking for unless we get over our misguided pursuit of personal happiness and connect with that greater sense of purpose—that ultimate reason for being."

Hidden somewhere between skulls exploding like a pomegranates in Libya and me eating oysters in Roanoke sluiced with lime martinis, there must be, as Andrew suggests above, some "grand and great purpose to our presence in this universe." There must be some reasonable explanation for why they are there (in Libya) being shot, and I am here (in Virginia) enjoying myself. I intend to continue looking, with the same passion contenders on "Survivor" search for the hidden immunity idol, until I find it. And. if ever I do find it--that grand and great purpose--I promise you will be the first to know.

Meanwhile, if anyone wants to join me, I am quite willing to share some oysters, just as long as we get there on the right night.

Unfit to Rule: After Me the Deluge

The phrase (attributed to Louis XVth and refering to a flood, storm, or political disorder) is usually interpreted to mean "If you think I was bad, wait until you see what is coming." Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi, known more for bluster and buffoonery than for memorable contributions to society, has definitely been channeling his inner Louis XVth of late.

In the multiple populist uprisings currently ricocheting across the Middle East and North Africa, Libya's scenario has got to be the worst, and the most grotesque. With his universe of ineffable gaudiness now under siege and blood everywhere in the streets, Moammar Qadaffi has offered the Libyan people a deathlike embrace: "I am a warrior. I am not going to leave this land, and I will die here as a martyr."

This is a man who travels everywhere with a luxury tent (which he once pitched on the White House lawn), and whose bodyguards are all women. His normally constant companion and confidante, a Ukranian nurse, has recently fled his side for the safety of her home town, Kiev. In Qaddafi, according to Bobby Ghosh in Time magazine, "the Arab youth revolution faces a foe unafraid to push back brutally--and the watching world sees a ruler immune to reproach or reason." Today Qaddafi is a caged tiger trapped in his own palace, issuing orders to paid militias to shoot at random into protesting crowds, and making incoherent speeches about how much his people love him.

Years ago when I still lived in London, I was friends with the painter Francis Bacon, a man who championed colorful eccentricity and outrageousness. Asked once by an interviewer who, among the world's most famous people, he would choose to spend a night with if he could, Bacon sent shock waves across Britain when he unhesitatingly replied, "Muammar Qaddafi." Remembering this story now, I can only wonder, if Bacon were alive today, whether he would still give the same answer.

Each unhappy country is unhappy in its own way, says Steve Coll (paraphrasing Tolstoy), but surely having a national leader whose long-term derangement has escalated up the ladder to delusional insanity beyond reclaim, must be a source of monstrous horror for the Libyan people. Commentators on the scene have described being reminded of the last mad days of Hitler, hiding out in his bunker. "Can't repeat the past!" he cried incredulously. "Why of course you can!" History has an inbuilt preposterousness and its own self-reflexive arc.

Meanwhile pundits around the world are on edge, chewing over the question of whether or not the Arab world is ready for freedom, concerned that revolutions can result in worse tyrannies than the ones they overthrow. A scarcity of democratic institutions in that part of the world--especially in the case of Libya--and the potential for protracted violence, has elicited fear, skepticism, and exhilaration in equal measure, depending on where you look or who you are listening to. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof (who spent weeks live-blogging from Tahrir Square) tackled the issue head-on in his regular column on Sunday. "Are Arabs too politically immature to handle democracy?" he asked. And then, holding the victory banner high, he gave his answer:

"The common thread of this year's democracy movement from Tunisia to Iran, from Yemen to Libya, has been undaunted courage....I've been humbled by the lionhearted men and women I've seen--defying tear gas or bullets for freedom that we take for granted. How can we say that these people are unready for a democracy that they are prepared to die for?...The record is that after some missteps, countries usually pull through...I'm awed by the courage I see, and it's condescending and foolish to suggest that people dying for democracy aren't ready for it."

Kristof claims that he is feeling more hopeful about the world than at any time since 2001. And he credits "Obamaism"--i.e. its themes of nonviolence, youth-driven social media as engines of change and limiters of autocratic brutality, and the universality of rights as listed in his post-presidential speech in Cairo--for having planted fertile seeds that took root in what is happening now. In June 2009, Obama declared in Cairo: “I do have an unyielding belief that all people yearn for certain things: the ability to speak your mind and have a say in how you are governed; confidence in the rule of law and the equal administration of justice; government that is transparent and doesn’t steal from people; the freedom to live as you choose.”

I've got both fingers and toes crossed that Nik Kristof is right: that young people in the Middle East are going to succeed at overthrowing decades of oppressive autocracy. I'm on an email list that sends inspirational quotes by Andrew Cohen once a week, and this week's quote seems synchronistically relevant:

Breaking through Gravity:
"A human being trying to catalyze the emergence of a higher level of consciousness is like a rocket ship trying to break through the gravity of the Earth's atmosphere. The gravity that we are endeavoring to release ourselves from is the historical weight of our conditioning, both personal and cultural. If we can generate enough vertical momentum to propel us beyond the boundaries of who we have been, we will find ourselves in uncharted territory."

Let's all hope the rocket ship of revolution makes it through the gravity of oppression and fulfills its mission of liberation. A lot is hanging on the outcome.

Twittering Tunisia, Cloning Cairo

I don't think the world has ever seen anything quite like this: whole populations massing and simultaneously rising up against their governments. It seems like every day there's a new "Facebook" revolution somewhere, with chain-reactions that resemble nothing less than the flocking behavior in birds or the schooling behavior in fish. First Tunisia, then Egypt... Bahrain... Iran... Yemen... Sudan... Jordan... Morocco...and now Libya (where, it seems, the regime will do anything to stay in power, including shooting people in cold blood with heavy-caliber weapons). All of it happening at lightning speed--faster than human brains can comfortably process. Nobody can say for sure who is in charge of the program.

Who would have thought that revolutions could self-replicate like computer viruses, leaping from mind to mind, country to country, propagating out of control? Everything now is so hyped up, it's as if the whole world is in an altered state, while long-term systems suddenly diverge into unpredictable thrashing, or simply collapse because they can no longer support themselves.

Is this what the first stage of the "Singularity" looks like, I wonder? The Singularity, by definition, is that moment "when technological change becomes so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history."

I am quoting here from an article by Lev Grossman in the Feb. 21 issue of Time magazine, describing the potential transformation of our species into something no longer recognizable, which supposedly will happen when computers become much more intelligent than humans. (IBM supercomputer "Watson" already proved its superiority by winning the million-dollar prize on the nightly game-show quiz "Jeopardy" last week.) At some future point, according to Ray Kurzweil, a primary guru of the superhuman "intelligence explosion," organic intelligence will have merged with artificial intelligence in ways that usurp what was once the exclusive realm of human creativity. Kurzweil predicts the culmination of civilization as we know it by 2045, 35 years from now.

So how prepared are you to mutate? (I'm not.) The key idea here seems to reside in the fact that human brains are hardwired for linear progress, whereas technology progresses exponentially, which means that as computers increase in speed and power, they will take over their own development and become more autonomous. By contrast, humans will become ever more dependent, unable to function without their symbiotic connection to technology. Not a good equation, when you really think about it.

Eventually, says Kurzweil, we will do really delicious things like scan our consciousnesses into computers and live inside them as software. Things that were once fantasized as science fiction (like the possibility that computers may turn on society and annihilate us) will become absolutely real. "Nae. nae," pleaded the antropologists. "Yeah, yeah," shouted the blonde.

By 2045, Kurzweil estimates that the quantity of artificial intelligence created will be about a billion times the sum of human intelligence that exists today--to the point where Singulatarians "cannot believe you're walking around living your life and watching TV as if the artificial intelligence revolution were not about to erupt and change absolutely everything."

Meanwhile, in case you're worrying about those Facebook and Twitter revolutions convulsing the Middle East, wondering how it will all end, you might want to consider a stint at the three-year-old Singulatarian University, co-founded by Kurzweil and sponsored by NASA and Google, where interdisciplinary courses for graduate students and executives teach you to evaluate the power and speed of computers, and to track the pace of technological progress in the future.

To grasp the way technology affects our perception of reality and even how we think, Joseph Weizenbaum (in his 1976 book "Computer Power and Human Reason") suggests how technologies from the past, like the map and the clock, became part of "the very stuff out of which man builds his world." Once adopted, he argues, technologies tend to become so indispensably integrated with, and mirrored by, neural structures that they can not be abandoned without fatally impairing the whole system, and plunging society into "great confusion and possibly utter chaos."

Blurring the boundary between brains and machines is an "irreversible commitment." Do you know what that means? Once the double doors screech open and cybernetic blurring renders human brains and computers inseparable, we will no longer know for sure who (or what) is doing the programming. By then, however, there will be no going back. The simply and straightforwardly human will have been lost in the confusion. I can only imagine that some people find the prospect of Kurzweil's 2045 a lot more palatable than I do. Luckily, I will be under the sod by then.

The Winged Victory of Cairo

Hosni Mubarak is gone. The citizens of Egypt rose up, rallied, and successfully ousted their dictator. And as at other times in history, it was the moral force of non-violence--not terrorism or mindless killing--that bent the arc of history.

In the end, how will it all turn out? Will the Egyptian people be able to continue what they started and find their way to a fledgling democracy? Will they be able to sustain and build, brick by brick, the necessary institutions for legitimate elections, legislatures, and courts? At this point, nobody knows, not even the Sphinx.

"Perhaps the transformation taking place isn't only for Egypt," writes columnist Kathleen Parker, "but for all mankind. Perhaps we are not doomed after all." I couldn't help but think how recent events in Egypt are a huge vote of confidence for the Desmond Tutu philosophy I struggled with way back in November. "...There is no question at all but that good and laughter and justice will prevail...[and that] the perpetrators of injustice or oppression...will bite the dust," Tutu has stated this unequivocally, and he truly believes it, so it was thrilling to watch an ideational comment seemingly spring to life, right in front of our eyes.

For Parker, hope presented itself in the form of a single vignette: when unarmed protesters, reacting to Mubarak's refusal speech, raced to his palace and stood in front of the tanks. "It was a stark image of the prolonged battle between good and evil that humans apparently have been fated to fight," she writes. This time, evil did not win.

For me, the iconic moment of hope and victory over evil came later, when fleets of ordinary citizens could be seen, via TV cameras, cleaning up the debris in Tahrir Square after eighteen days of harrowing demonstrations. Men, women, and children were all hard at work sweeping the Square with brooms, hauling bulging black garbage bags, and lovingly repaving the bricks and stones that had been dug up earlier to use as weapons against the police. Most especially for me, the sight of some dozen people carrying aloft the carcass of a burned vehicle with their bare hands had to count as an exemplar of the triumphal human spirit worthy of the Louvre's "Winged Victory," Nike of Samothrace, redrawn for modern times.

My fellow blogger, Andrew Sullivan, who was too ill to man his blog, The Daily Dish, during the past month but is now back at his post, says he can't believe he missed out on a whole revolution. "What I will say," he writes, "is that, as I watched these miracles on television, I found my love of freedom and joy for the people of Egypt and Tunisia (as for the people of Iran) overwhelmed for a few days by my worries about such events spiraling out of control. But revolutions differ in their trajectories. Burke famously opposed the French one and backed the American one. What will make the difference is the character of the people, and the prudence of the statesmen and women who emerge in both countries. And others. In the end, we live in an era where hope is battling fear. Suddenly, hope is winning again. Let us not lose our skepticism. But let us not be intimidated by it either."

At the same time, we have the tide of history interpreted in gibberish by right-wing pundit, Ann Coulter. Like an ill-trained Labrador retriever, she yanks us headlong into traffic: "The way things are going, Obama may want to look into becoming the president of Egypt. Nobody would complain about him being a Muslim then," she said to cheers at the recent Republican CPAC meeting.

Good Lord, what would we do without these succulent Republicans mass-marketing insanity? They continue to illuminate a wider area than that which their maker ever intended. It is sad to think that while Egyptians attempt to establish a viable democracy, our own country is in the mind-boggling, self-destructive process of withdrawing vital government services, encouraging increased pollution, permitting its infrastructure to further decay, fomenting a class warfare not unlike Egypt's, and, bit by bit, letting a real democracy slip away.

Not All Revolutions Are Political

During the same weeks that have borne witness to chaos in Cairo--with the shocking and convulsive events in Tahrir Square aimed at ending the 30-year regime of Hosni Mubarak--in New York, the fashion industry was on a roll. I should immediately point out that not all revolutions are political--and having been turned on recently to the current revolution in fashion by a new young friend, Alex Harrington, I happened to notice in, of all places, the Wall Street Journal, a front-page review on the industry's latest extravaganza: clothes made entirely of FOOD. Unhinging events might be happening in the Middle East that are draining stability right off the planet, but I am going to shock myself and everyone else by writing instead about waffle pants, octopus ski hats, and cabbage dresses.

The fact that we now live in a marketing wonderland of totally surreal objects called "clothes," is for me just another parable for life in "end times." That said, however, the kale collars and cherry necklaces featured in Barney's holiday catalogue are undoubtedly more fun to ponder than what is happening in the Middle East. Maybe it all started when MTV gave its Video Music Award to Lady Gaga, who shocked everyone by wearing a dress and shoes made from strips of flank steak. But if you want to check out this latest fashion phenomenon further, Google "Hunger Pains" on the Internet. It's the title of a photo shoot by Ted Sabarese, documenting the young avant-garde designers who make dresses from chocolate or fresh croissants, create astounding shoulder pads with loaves of challah--or, as in the photo here, invent an evening gown fabricated entirely of artichoke leaves (by Wesley Nault).

As for my new friend Alex, he is a young fashionista living in Brooklyn and working as a stylist. I met him recently at the home of his parents in Roanoke, when he was visiting them over the holidays. We bonded over the fact that I took serious note of his spirallng pants, which, it turns out, came from one of the most esoteric clothing boutiques in New York, Comme des Garcons. Alex now considers me the only person in this entire region who has ever heard of Comme des Garcons. So he then introduced me to an avant-garde English fashion magazine called I-D (as in, "what's your big I-Dea for the decade ahead?) in which his work has been featured. Quite honestly, the combination of creativity with revolutionary outrageousness just knocked me flat. I loved it.

I went through the magazine just now to pick out some examples of what I mean. The first thing you notice is that many of the models have deliberately blackened spaces between their teeth. In one case, a model is on crutches, wearing checkered bloomers and bra, with one leg encased in a plastic see-through cast. Two hydrangea blossoms cover her ears like earmuffs. Another wears an unbuttoned checkered shirt tucked in to a plaster cast (complete with scribbled get-well messages) that covers the rest of her torso. One model is stark naked except for thigh-high macho black boots and a hat. (You have to love it when a fashion magazine features models who don't wear clothes.) And one in which a strand of Mikimoto pearls spills out from a turquoise condom across two pages.

I wrote Alex to ask about the clothes in the shoot he was a part of, because the sweaters are thickly padded, and most of the models have a mysterious, stuffed object protruding from their backs. I wanted to know what on earth that was or was supposed to be (if anythng). Alex told me the styling had been "inspired by the lumps and bumps Comme collection from 1993, with a little Botero and Puritan thrown in for good measure." Everything was stuffed with pillow batting, he explained, to give it that kind of bloated proportion. A lot of stylists and fashion kids, he informs me, are doing more interesting/conceptual things and I-D caters to that audience.

Is it too far-fetched and quirky on my part to connect the interactions between reality and the imagination by making a link between a Middle Eastern political rally and a Western fashion show? Because that's what I regularly tend to do here: exercise my "smell all the flowers" attitude in unlikely ways and see what comes of it. Could there be a connection, do you suppose, between food shortages predicted to worsen in Egypt after years of long bread lines, and those croissant dresses and challah shoulder pads?

Because, if there is a connection, says Virgil, we are in dreadful trouble. But we're already in dreadful trouble, I say.