Insomnia for Dummies

It's hard to imagine how the smallest hotel room I've had in the USA could be also 50% more expensive than the next most expensive hotel room I've ever had. Answer: it's downtown New York City.

~~~~~

To my left, HBO is showing the film Face/Off, with John Travolta and Nicholas Cage, or vice versa. They're not showing enough detail during the best parts, the face transplants. As I sit and type, I look up and realize I'm looking into a mirror at just my level, over the desk. An odd sensation. My face seems well enough attached. My mind flashes to my home, where a portrait of another Johan Fredrik Maurer, my great-great grandfather, is hanging over the family computer. Maybe I'll scan it when I get home.

~~~~~

Tarkovsky's film Solaris was a breakthrough science fiction film for several reasons, but one that I particularly appreciate at the moment, in view of Face/Off's boringly gleaming science-fiction technology, was the pervasive shabbiness and deferred maintenance aboard that godforsaken spaceship.

~~~~~

Last night's too-late-night temptation was a Public Broadcasting documentary about Richard Nixon and Watergate. It was the first documentary view of that era that I've ever seen, and, boy, did it bring back memories. During those years I was getting my undergraduate degree at Carleton University in Ottawa. When the famous Saturday Night Massacre occurred, I dropped everything and took a bus to Montreal and a train to Washington, DC, blinking in the morning light outside Union Station and finding my way to the White House fence, where I found others from all over the country who had been drawn by the elemental currents of history to gather at that spot.

The eve of Nixon's resignation, National Arts Center, Ottawa ... Ottawa's own Rich Little performed as part of a four-day engagement (if I remember correctly). Rich Little was well-known for his Nixon impression. He obliged again that evening. I was there for that apparently historic performance—I'm told that the next day he dropped that part of his act.

~~~~~

One fascinating part of the PBS documentary dealt with Nixon's legal team's assertion that the U.S. president is, in a sense, above the law. The president is, to extend the logic, a dictator with term limits. In his testimony before the Senate Watergate Committee, John Ehrlichman seemed to claim that the President's commander-in-chief and national security responsibilities trumped everything else. When his questioners responded appropriately with constitutional principles, he retreated to an equally frightening claim: Regardless of legal ideals, everybody knew that the reality was that in the crunch, those guarantees were violated. Everybody does it. One senator cited the the British legal principle, "A man's home is his castle, and even the king cannot enter without his permission." Ehrlichman responded, "Well, Senator, I believe that principle has eroded in America recently."

Those words from John Ehrlichman have a peculiar new resonance for me now.

~~~~~

In the USA, we claim that everyone is entitled to due process, even the President's "enemies." However imperfectly we carry out this ideal within the United States, we do try. Evidently it is far too inconvenient an ideal for us to conform to it in our treatment of non-citizens, especially those in our first-hand or second-hand custody at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and elsewhere. Our subsidy of apartheid and summary police actions in Israel and Palestine haunt me with almost every dispatch from Israeli human rights activists and international observers, including the events surrounding the recent brief detention of Christian Peacemaker Matt Chandler.

One clipping from my electronic scrapbook, and then it's bedtime for sure. I don't remember where I got this Nat Hentoff story:

Once, when I was in Israel for a symposium, one of the participants was a prominent Israeli philosopher, David Hartman. I had never met him. During a break, he walked toward me in the corridor and, without even saying "Hello," asked, "What has been the most important development in the history of mankind?"I said, "Due process.""Right," he replied, striding on.

Update: I've also seen Morton Kondracke credited with telling this story (in these exact words), but I think Nat Hentoff's experience is earlier. It's nice to think that David Hartman may have quizzed several people this same way, and got the same correct answer more than once.

~~~~~

must ... turn ... off ... television. Cage and Travolta both have guns with them in this church. Can't be a good sign.

~~~~~

The price of staying up too late will be a bizarre diary entry. When I get very tired, my brain might start a sentence, but it forgets its way by the third or fourth word. Funny thing is my hand keeps on going; it's just no longer writing comprehensible words. This evening, I bought my 2006 diary. What happened was this: I walked along Mulberry Street for block after block of the San Gennaro street festival. I turned left on Prince Street and found myself sucked into a bookstore: the McNally Robinson bookstore. Somehow, after having picked up numerous delicious volumes, the only thing I left with was a book for which I will have to supply the words. It was a couple of dollars cheaper than comparably-sized books with other people's words.

~~~~~

Good night.