Bollettino

Here's an item from the NYT.


"Military families, so often the ones to put a cheery face on war, are growing vocal. Since major combat for the 150,000 troops in Iraq was declared over on May 1, more than 60 Americans, including 25 killed in hostile encounters, have died in Iraq, about half the number of deaths in the two months of the initial campaign.

Frustrations became so bad recently at Fort Stewart, Ga., that a colonel, meeting with 800 seething spouses, most of them wives, had to be escorted from the session.

"They were crying, cussing, yelling and screaming for their men to come back," said Lucia Braxton, director of community services at Fort Stewart."

And here is an item from Aristophanes:


LYSISTRATA We will explain our idea.
MAGISTRATE Out with it then; quick, or... (threatening her).
LYSISTRATA (sternly) Listen, and never a movement, please!
MAGISTRATE (in impotent rage)Oh! it is too much for me! I cannot keep my temper!

LEADER OF CHORUS OF WOMEN Then look out for yourself; you have more to fear than we have.
MAGISTRATE Stop your croaking, you old crow! (To LYSISTRATA) Now you, saywhat you have to say.

LYSISTRATA Willingly. All the long time the war has lasted, we have enduredin modest silence all you men did; you never allowed us to open ourlips. We were far from satisfied, for we knew how things were going;often in our homes we would hear you discussing, upside down andinside out, some important turn of affairs. Then with sad hearts,but smiling lips, we would ask you: Well, in today's Assembly did theyvote peace?-But, "Mind your own business!" the husband would growl,"Hold your tongue, please!" And we would say no more.

CLEONICE I would not have held my tongue though, not I!
MAGISTRATEYou would have been reduced to silence by blows then.
LYSISTRATA Well, for my part, I would say no more. But presently I would cometo know you had arrived at some fresh decision more fatally foolish than ever. "Ah! my dear man," I would say, "what madness next!" But he would only look at me askance and say: "Just weave your web, please;else your cheeks will smart for hours. War is men's business!"
MAGISTRATE Bravo! well said indeed!
LYSISTRATA How now, wretched man? not to let us contend against your follies was bad enough! But presently we heard you asking out loud in the open street: "Is there never a man left in Athens?" and, "No,not one, not one," you were assured in reply. Then, then we made upour minds without more delay to make common cause to save Greece. Open your ears to our wise counsels and hold your tongues, and we may yet put things on a better footing.
MAGISTRATE You put things indeed! Oh! this is too much! The insolence ofthe creatures!
LYSISTRATA Be still!
MAGISTRATE May I die a thousand deaths ere I obey one who wears a veil!

Michael Massing examines one of Bush's "expert" appointees in Iraq, a man named James Haveman. Here's his bio, starting from the point at which he was appointed "advisor" to the Health ministry:

"Haveman, 60, was largely unknown among international public health professionals. A social worker by training, he has no medical degree or any formal instruction in public health, and he hasn't been in the military. From 1991 to 2002, he served in the cabinet of John Engler, the Republican governor of Michigan, directing state health programs. Most of Haveman's recent overseas experience had come through International Aid, a Christian relief organization that provides health care and spreads the Gospel in the Third World."

It gets much worse. Haveman's expertise seems to be in closing down health care units in Michigan, under the ever egregious Governor Engler. He's an evangelical pur et dur. International Aid is an organization dedicated to preventing birth control whereever it happens, and bringing the heathen to the Lord. The former might be more than acceptable to Iraq, but the latter is bound to cause trouble. In fact, it is ridiculously bound to cause trouble. Could you appoint a person more likely to burn Iraqi sensibilities if you made a search?

Ah, but Haveman does have one thing going for him. He's a Republican activist.

The US made its position in Vietnam one bad decision at a time. Bush seems determined to make his bad decisions all at once, in big clumps.

Finally, a casualty report from Bloomberg:

"A U.S. soldier was shot and critically wounded in Iraq, bringing to at least 28 the number of U.S. casualties in the country in the past four days. The soldier, from the 352nd Civil Affairs Command, was shot in the head while guarding Baghdad University in the center of the capital, U.S. military spokesman Corporal Todd Pruden said in an interview. The soldier was taken to hospital, Pruden added.

Attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq have become an almost daily occurrence since the beginning of June. At least 26 have died since President George W. Bush declared an end to major combat operations on May 1. Six British soldiers were killed in southern Iraq in June."

We need a Lysistrata.

Bollettino

"A dearth of general information is almost necessary to the thorough-paced coffee-house politician; in the absence of thought, imagination, sentiment, he is attracted immediately to the nearest commonplace, and floats through the chosen regions of noise and empty rumours without difficulty and without distraction. Meet 'any six of these men in buckram,' and they will accost you with the same question and the same answer: they have seen it somewhere in print, or had it from some city oracle, that morning; and the sooner they vent their opinions the better, for they will not keep. Like tickets of admission to the theatre for a particular evening, they must be used immediately, or they will be worth nothing: and the object is to find auditors for the one and customers for the other, neither of which is difficult; since people who have no ideas of their own are glad to hear what any one else has to say, as those who have not free admissions to the play will very obligingly take up with an occasional order. It sometimes gives one a melancholy but mixed sensation to see one of the better sort of this class of politicians, not without talents or learning, absorbed for fifty years together in the all-engrossing topic of the day: mounting on it for exercise and recreation of his faculties, like the great horse at a riding-school, and after his short, improgressive, untired career, dismounting just where he got up; flying abroad in continual consternation on the wings of all the newspapers; waving his arm like a pump-handle in sign of constant change, and spouting out torrents of puddled politics from his mouth; dead to all interests but those of the state; seemingly neither older nor wiser for age; unaccountably enthusiastic, stupidly romantic, and actuated by no other motive than the mechanical operations of the spirit of newsmongering." -- Hazlitt

Swift and Johnson had denounced coffehouse politicians in the eighteenth century, but Hazlitt was, we believe, the first to really paint the species in all the colors of its modernity: that is, connecting the triumph of the "moderns" over the ancients and with the triumph of a new mode of knowledge -- the triumph of the sensationalism of the newspapers (or of the laboratory) over the precepts of authority. Newspaper knowledge was the parody, the sotie, of science. In the latter, all that is ephemeral is true; in the former, all that is true is ephemeral.

There's an obvious cultural contradiction in the mournful theme. Johnson, Swift and Hazlitt both lived as literary journalists. In Hazlitt's case, this contradiction achieved pervasive surface expression -- one of the constants in his essays is his dislike of the role of essayist.

LI is making these Wizard of Oz like literary reflections because we are about to duck into cultural contradiction ourselves. That is, we are about to swell about in full coffehouse politician regalia. So be warned.

The WP reported, this week, that Howard Dean collected 7 million bucks this quarter. This is more than any other candidate, for the quarter. The e WP responded to Dean's sudden pre-eminence by publishing articles heavy with disdain for the man. The WP is as offended by Dean as some Hollywood movie mogul might be by internet movie trading among teens. It just isn't business. The WP beau ideal is beau ideal is a 'centerist' Democrat in the JFK mode. As in the headline, Centrist In Debt To JFK: Living Religion, Honing Ambition The headline was about, of all people, Joseph Lieberman, whose likeness to JFK is well disguised. As is his connection to the accounting industry and his bullying of the SEC in the nineties, when the head of the joint was trying to reign in corporate fraud on the books. About that topic, the WP profile is discretely mum.

Compare and contrast the headline about Dean: Short-Fused Populist, Breathing Fire at Bush. The profile is a hatchet job through and through, picking through Dean's flip flops, and leaving heavy, winking winking signs that here's a man who doesn't have a chance against Bush. They treat Dean more like some slightly disreputable shock-jock than, say, as a 'centrist in debt to JFK.' Here's a sample:

"In recent months he has been called "brusque," "brash," "blunt" and "belligerent"; a few more choice words on his part, and critics will be questioning whether Dean has the diplomatic skills needed to be the leader of the free world.

One story circulating in Washington is about the time he met with the editorial board of Roll Call. Elections analyst Stuart Rothenberg, who writes a column for the Capitol Hill newspaper, asked Dean why, if he was so proud of signing the first same-sex civil union bill in the country, he had done so in a closed-door meeting rather than in a public ceremony, as a Democrat in Vermont had described. Dean, Rothenberg recalled, paused, leaned back in his chair and exclaimed: "That's [expletive]! Nobody from Vermont said that!"

"Sometimes Howard's tongue is faster than his brain," said Peter Freyne, a columnist for Seven Days, a weekly newspaper in Burlington, Vt. It doesn't help matters that Dean speaks off the cuff; out of hundreds of campaign speeches he has delivered, only four were written in advance. The rest were ad-libbed. "He's smart and energetic," Freyne said. "I've been calling him Ho-Ho for years, because he's like the little engine that could."

This is in stark contrast to the mellow tones that aureole Lieberman's moral agons as he ascends to that summit of all things good, the senatorial seat from Connecticut, at the conclusion of which we are given a dose of the true pap:

"All of this bespeaks a man of driving ambition, but it does not answer the question of what lies behind the ambition. What makes Joey run?"

Whether it's self-aggrandizement, selfish ambition or ambition to really do a good job, they all come out looking the same," said Peter Kelly, a Hartford lawyer and veteran of Connecticut and national Democratic politics. "It's really hard to picture Joe Lieberman as somebody who says I'm going to do this because it's going to get me something. That's just not the way the man thinks."

Lacking JFK's Charisma

Lieberman is 61 and, like so many others of his generation, he came of age politically with the 1960 election of Kennedy, the dashing Democrat from neighboring Massachusetts. Since Kennedy's assassination in 1963, all Democratic presidential hopefuls have paid homage to his memory, and none more so than Lieberman.

He describes himself as "still a Kennedy Democrat," almost suggesting that, if JFK were alive today, he, too, would be a member of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council." Etc., etc.

The subhead, Lacking JKF's Charisma would be humorous if the article wasn't so filled with kisses for Lieberman. Other subheadings suggest themselves: Lacks Orrin Hatch's Charisma. Lacks Nixon's Charisma. Lacks Gerald Ford's Charisma. Etc., etc.

But the WP is uneasily aware that, for some reason, Dean seems to be popular among voters. So -- in what will probably be the first of many similar articles -- they lightheartedly profile the antics of Karl Rove, Bush's Svengali, who wants Bush to opposed Dean -- signal to voters, don't get your panties in a wad for this Dean character.

Under the headline, Rove spends the fourth rousing voters for Dean, they portray a prank of Karl Rove's -- getting a bunch of Republicans to cheer for Dean at a parade -- in an attempt to insinuate that Dean is a sure loser. Insinuate might not be the word. Contemptuously state, in so many words is probably closer to it. It the old trick: don't vote for the sucker candidate - vote for the centrist loser.

So what, coffeehouse politicians everywhere wonder, should Dean do?

He should confront this contempt head on. Not in the attack mode of the media is too conservative -- that is silly. Rather he should confront the contempt as unprofessional. This is a line of reasoning that will resonate with the WP. Dean really has nothing to fear from quotes that compare him to the little train that could. But he does have a lot to fear from the press using him for target practice.

Bollettino

LI has been in a long and winding correspondance with an ardent supporter of the Iraq War. We spent a lot of time proposing and dissing each others analogies. Is the occupation of Iraq like the occupation of Germany and Japan, after WWII? Or is it like Vietnam? Etc.

Now, LI has a rule about history: there are no lessons in history. This is a rule we violate, for rhetorical reasons, all of the time. However, in calmer moments, we realize that the lesson metaphor is horribly overdetermined, and structurally suspect. For one thing, it implies a control, both conceptual and organizational, over history that doesn't and can't exist. Or at least it requires a belief in a trans-historical agency that needs to be established first. Such an agency could make history as a form of lesson, although it is unclear what that lesson would be about. A lesson is made around a subject, while history is made as history -- as the synthesis of the variously satisfactory enactments of human intentions with the contingency of natural events or countering intentions. This doesn't sound like lesson-making. For another thing, the metaphor downplays the complexity of the agents and systems at play within history. The lesson implies the class room, the teacher, the student. It follows a definite communicative channel, one determined by the social organization that allocates the teacher and the student positions. The odd thing about the lessons of history metaphor is that the teacher becomes the subject -- history teaches itself. The student of history reads the lessons of history from history itself. The triple relationship -- teacher, subject, student -- is collapsed into a double relationship -- teacher, student. The student's reception of the lesson requires a temporal and spatial location - a certain retirement -- while history, teaching itself, becomes a kind of confession. This is one of the attractions of the metaphor for the politician: such retirement is consonant with an old pattern, within Western culture, of making the values of the ascetic ideal superior to the practical one. It's the ruse of the priest, in a sense, to create the order for which the warrior fights. It's the ruse of the warrior to claim the priest's position -- that key retirement, that key distance. As Weber has remarked, somewhere, the artist and the politician emerge at the same time in the West, both of them signs of a certain form of modernity, both of them related in the peculiar individuality of their endeavors -- both of them throwing off the system of patronage as a sort of constitutive gesture. Which is just a way of saying, to paraphrase Marx, all insights into social science appear twice, once in poetry and once in Weber. Shelley's dictum that poets are the rulers of the world comes to much the same insight as Weber's, except that Shelley is sublime, Weber mundane.
However -- stepping back, here -- if history doesn't teach itself, and if, consequently, there are no students of history, how is one to take any practical action in the world? We do recognize a certain sense in saying that the occupation of Iraq is like that of Japan -- even if we disagree with it.

We're going to discuss this in our next post. In the meantime, we recommend this link to a book on metaphor in science.

As for our own embattled position -- we have now been running on an empty checking account since last Friday. The milk will be gone by the end of the day. We have four dollars, and we are trying to figure out how to spend it most wisely. There's bread and cheese and some cans of soup. There are some eggs too. Alas, no mail tomorrow, so -- if we aren't paid today, we will have to go into next week like this.

Hard times.

Bollettino


CNN has a very confusing report on casualties this morning. Bush's wish for "them" to "bring em on" was granted, to the extent of a number of attacks that wounded 10 American troops. A marine was killed clearing mines, and a soldier died of the wounds received from the attack yesterday that injured six. Or so we presume -- the soldier's death is extremely under-reported.

On another front -- LI wrote a post last week about the suspicious nature of the "accidents" that are killing American soldiers in Iraq. Here's a story from Maine that will get no play in the national press, which goes along, and goes along:

"ANDREWS AIR FORCE BASE -- Sen. Susan Collins says the army has assured her it will conduct a full investigation into the death of First Sergeant Christopher Coffin, a reservist from Kennebunk.

The senator just returned from a tour of Iraq herself and spoke with NewsRadio WMTW's Bob Dyk. In the interview, Collins said, "My heart just goes out to the family. It's gotta be so difficult, and the conflicting stories on how he died need to be cleared up."

Coffin was 51.

The army initially told his family that he died in a vehicle accident, but his family says news reports indicate he may have, in fact, died under enemy fire."

Here's the AP report:

An Army reservist whose retirement request was denied because of Operation Iraqi Freedom became the fifth soldier with Maine ties to be killed in the conflict, possibly when his convoy came under attack.

First Sgt. Christopher Coffin, 51, of Kennebunk, was a member of 352nd Civil Affairs Command assisting convoys traveling between Baghdad and Kuwait when he died Tuesday, his sister-in-law, Candy Barr Heimbach, said Wednesday.

The Army initially told the family Tuesday night that Coffin was driving a vehicle crashed after swerving to avoid an Iraqi civilian vehicle."

The family is not going to let that story go without questioning. Here's another piece in Coffin's story:

"Coffin, who was deployed overseas four months ago, was part of a unit based in Riverdale, Md., that was assisting in rebuilding efforts and was not supposed to be involved in active combat."

Interesting contrast: on the one side, Coffin, an honest guy working at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, did his best for his family, gets not only killed in combat in Iraq, but the Army that sends him there tries to disguise the death for political reasons; on the other side, you have a man who skipped his war in Vietnam, not because he opposed it, but because he could; the son of a rich man who officially acted to pipe poor black and white kids to Vietnam while making sure his own son didn't put his foot in that meat grinder; a boy who rose like a queer dollar from one failure to the next, until he has a job in which his evident limits, mental and personal, will have the maximum deleterious effect.

And so they "bring em on." Every day in every way.

Bollettino


We have to recommend this fascinating article on Qaddafi's daughter, the Libyan "Claudia Shiffer" Aisha al Qaddafi. It asks questions that Middle Eastern journalists are eager to ask, but can't in the press. As, for instance, where does Qaddafi's daughter come up with the dough to afford perpetual stays in elite London Hotels, where the going rate is $2200 a night?

Not surprisingly, as Aisha subsists on ye olde service and the best scotches Claridge's can come up with, she is also a great one for expressing solidarity with the downtrodden. She nearly bleeds -- or at least sweats -- for the Palestinian people, to whom she has recommended jihad. I'm sure they are much obliged.

And now for the Casualty report: here's the insufferable W. rallying the home troops, and incidentally supplying just the rationale that insurgents will use to kill American soldiers:

``There are some who feel like that, you know, the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is bring them on,'' Bush said. ``We got the force necessary to deal with the security situation.'' Bush said he would welcome assistance from other countries willing to send troops to help restore peace. ``Anybody who wants to help, we'll welcome,'' Bush said. ``But we got plenty tough force there right now to make sure the situation is secure."

Bring them on? There's a phrase for a double take. Luckily, the President is in such disconnect from his tongue that we can dismiss the idea that he views grenade attacks on a US army vehicle in the light of a elementary school yard fight. He simply doesn't think.

Reuters is reporting that of the six wounded yesterday, one soldier has died:

"A U.S. soldier hurt in an attack on his convoy a day earlier died of his wounds, bringing to at least 23 the number of American servicemen killed by hostile fire since major combat operations were declared over for the U.S. forces and their British allies on May 1."

Ten have supposedly died from the explosion in Falujah. We are curious about an AP think piece last week, which outlined the dreamy peacefulness of Falujah, contrasting it with the wild hyperboles of violence thrown about by the Western press. We are eager to see AP reporter Mark Fitz's follow up. He will doubtless point to the lack of grafitti in the town, once again. Winning hearts and minds one covered up slogan at a time.

Bollettino

When LI lived in Santa Fe, we attended a number of parties organized by an art dealer. Actually, in Santa Fe, it is almost impossible to avoid parties organized by an art dealer of some type. You will be walking along, innocently enough, and suddenly you will be engulfed by rich Texas couples and amply funded California divorcees clamoring for a "purplish" picture to hang in the solarium. It is that kind of town.

These parties had a debilitating effect on my morale. I had hung with the wealthy before; I'd read Architectural Digest in their bathrooms; I'd talked to their almost always ancient maids, although I can't say I talked to them much. The maids eyed me with justified suspicion. No matter - I liked em. In my experience, wealth had had a gentle, softening effect upon people -- like some purling current of water, gradually brightening and shaping a bed of pebbles.

That was my feeling until I encountered the the crowds that gathered, like some species of vulture even the Audobon Society couldn't love, to drink white wine and eat Southwestern canapes in the rooms of this art dealer. They were a whole other order of philistine.

I was reminded of the type by this story about the Barnes Institute.

The Barnes has always stuck out because it was founded by a wealthy screwball. One of the things about art is that it demands a response. One of the things about money is that it doesn't. It is a contradiction that makes the true artist grit his or her teeth, when encountering the true client.

Not so for the founder of the Barnes, about which the Times article has this rather unhelpful bio:

"The collection was amassed by Albert C. Barnes, a patent-medicine millionaire who installed it in the 1920's on his estate in the Main Line suburb of Merion."

Barnes (unlike the vultures) not only amassed his collection, he formed definite opinions about it. Opinions that were not about its potential exchange value. He wrote pamphlets. He sought out intellectuals who had similar beliefs. And he decided to reveal his collection only to those who were able to see it in the right way -- as if, indeed, he'd done the work himself.

Since Albert's time, the foundation has had a pretty colorful career. LI saw an exhibit of some of the Barnes pieces years ago -- we remember being struck particularly by the Soutines. That exhibit was a rarity. Now the Barnes board is trying to find to build a museum to house the pieces, which means significantly re-structuring Albert's explicit instructions -- Albert was not a man who wanted the hoi polloi to wash up before his pictures. The board contracted for an audit, and it is being published today. The audit says a lot about a former president of the institute, Richard Glanton. Glanton is not amused.

"Mr. Glanton, 56, a former partner at the law firm of Reed Smith Shaw & McClay, was forced off the Barnes board in 1998 and left Philadelphia in May to become a senior vice president at the Exelon Corporation, a utilities conglomerate in Chicago. Under a section titled "Conflicts of Interest," the audit outlined a series of Barnes transactions that it said Mr. Glanton engaged in with outside business partners, without informing the foundation's board. It said he ran up more than $225,000 in travel and entertainment expenses; tried to barter the foundation's banking business for support on the board; and let two women live in Barnes properties under unusual circumstances.

Mr. Glanton dismissed the findings today as "a waste of money" and an act of "vengeance" by his enemies."

The Times is our last Victorian institution. The two women living under "unusual circumstances" -- unusual for what? The implication is that Mr. Glanton is, as well as being a man of the arts, a man of parts -- un homme moyen sensual -- and those parts needed some action from time to time.

"In another episode the audit cited, a woman working for a party and event planner, Cheryl Beck, said Mr. Glanton had arranged for her to move into a vacant Barnes-owned single-family residence in Merion around November 1996. There was no agreement to pay rent or utilities and Ms. Beck, who moved in with a roommate, Theresa Sentel, called the arrangement "like house sitting." Neighbors later complained of parties there."

The art world, man. Wyndham Lewis, who was voted the most perceptive fascist of 1926, was on to its unique seediness in The Art of Being Ruled. Like almost everything by Lewis, it is one of those proofs that genius can go out of its way to be unpleasant -- the reason Lewis never wrote a great novel. There's an old Guardian review of a bio of Lewis's life by David Trotter wonderfully sums up his problems:

"If having sex with Lewis seems to have been a thankless task, then lending him money was about as much fun as amputation. Sometimes the same person was required to fulfil both functions. Ida Vendel, the mistress acquired as a lifestyle accessory in Paris in April 1905, he thought of as his 'German allotment'. Ida's father had been a wealthy merchant, and Lewis was soon, and thereafter almost as a matter of policy, in debt to her. Indeed, the difficulty he found in extricating himself from the relationship had as much to do with its monetary as with its sexual arrangements, and he didn't really feel free of it until his mother had paid Ida what he owed her. Its termination, in the summer of 1907, meant that he now required alternative sources of revenue, as his friends and relations were soon to discover. "He's a cool card with other people's money," Augustus John complained in January 1908: "I don't know how much of mine he's calmly appropriated, without so much as a 'thank you'."

"The one thing even less likely to meet with gratitude than a loan was an outright gift. At the end of 1923, a group of well-wishers established a joint fund to provide Lewis with a stipend of �16 a month for as long as he might remain in need of it. The result was the usual mayhem, as dark suspicions flourished, and lifelong friends fell out. On one occasion, a delay in the dispatch of the monthly cheque elicited an unforgiving response: "WHERE'S THE FUCKING STIPEND? LEWIS." O'Keeffe dismisses this story as apocryphal, but he does not seem in much doubt as to the brutality with which Lewis often treated those who sought to help him. Earlier that year, Lewis had spent some time in France with one of the people who was to contribute generously to the fund, the painter Richard Wyndham. Sitting outside a caf� in Toulon, he told Wyndham that he was a 'Narcissus' and probably a 'bugger'. People, Wyndham remembered him saying, are only friends insofar as they are of use to you. Lewis, it seems, did not so much bite the hand that fed him as mistake it for the main meal."

Lewis -- to resume after that enjoyable hiatus -- had this to say about such as Glanton: "In the millionaire society defined in Part III [of Art of Being Ruled] those fortunate enough to possess the means were shown as enjoying the revolutionary joys of a communist millenium. They are naturally impatient of the slowness of revolution. They consequently decide to forestall the paradise to come, on a small scale, themselves. A painting, writing, acting, cultural paradise ensues, in which everyone is equal (that is, equally a 'genius') and every one is free -- at the expense, naturally, of the great majority, who have to wait for their revolutionary paradise."

LI, the loafs and the fishes

Well, it is day five. LI went and sold fifty dollars worth of books on Thursday. We've been living on it since. We are now down to five dollars. What do you get for five dollars? We went to the grocery store and looked around. The meat was out of the question. What about cheese? Cheese would take up half of the sum. Now, you can nibble on cheese and survive several days, supposedly. Haven't we read that in the journal of some South Pole explorer? But our mouth revolted at the all cheese regime.

Hmm. So we chose two dollars worth of coffee, and a dollar forty loaf of bread. Extravagant, that bread.

Tonight, we are going to face up to the loss of alcohol -- although I can hear our friend David urging the beer. And tomorrow, maybe there will be a check in the mail.
Although at this point, we've rather lost hope.

Our bet -- another notice for electric bill due tomorrow. That will be the killer. This is going to be the worst summer of our life -- hey, and we thought that was LAST summer.