Limited, Inc.

We made it to Barcelona because the Revolution was letting some trains go, whilst stopping others. It was hard to understand the logic, and the committed part of me was longing for the general strike; but the other part of me just wanted the usual comfort bubble, and vacation. So we left, me in the state of a happy bourgeois slug. We hadn’t had such a long getaway since last year in L.A., when we took off two days, stayed in the fanciest hotel in Pasadena, and visited all the neighborhoods in East L.A. we had read about in the books, or that A. knew about from the enormous store of information she had accrued during her time representing French culture at the Consulate. So now we were here, in Montpellier, going on a jaunt, and we took the train casting glances at each other, like we were so smart. The smart couple. This was going to be great! We felt at first it had to be great – that we had to have a great time. This is an infallible formula for having a bad time. Which tinte

These are the times that try one’s sense of “then”. Yes, folks (he said, cartoonishly) then. As in if-then. And you do this and then this happens.  Thenism is an unfashionable ideology to intrude into the Establishment narrative of virtue at home and humanitarianism abroad. In foreign policy in particular, doing something now is a very sweet proposition, especially when it involves dropping a bomb, while the “then” part of the equation doesn’t get any looksee whatsoever. I used to attribute this to the American male's preference for wallowing in the action movie narrative. Don’t even try to give your American male a halfway complicated novel to follow. Middlemarch? Who needs your stinkin' Middlemarch! No, much better to watch cops and super cops and even more super cops catch and kill bad guys, and in the process spindle, mangle and mutilate the poor “then.” In action movies, when a bomb is about to go off in one minute, we know that we will have five minutes of exciti