As in Judo: Apoplexy Justice

When I am reduced to burps and gurgles over some antic by Dick Cheney or by the way torture citations are lightly glossed, tossed, and reseasoned before being plated and served up as homegrown and fresh from the garden...?

And when the subterranean amoral violence that diminishes us as both a nation and a species is explained away by that particular cavernous Talking DeathHead?

When the two are intertwined by the tendrils of justification (national defense, intelligence, terror:terror:terror) then I am simply apopleptic* and can only thrash about, trying to find my voice.

Thank goodness, then, for Buckeye Surgeon and his posts on torture, and his refusal to let Cheney off the hook.

I officially became a fan of the Buckeye Surgeon last May, when he published the post: Baudrillard and the Hyperrealism of the Parathyroidectomy

This is going to be a bizarre post; I'm just warning you.

I've been reading from Jean Baudrillard recently. Baudrillard is a post modernist French thinker/philosopher who writes about the preponderance of images, signs and representations in our technologically-driven, post modern lives. A lot of what he writes is almost deliberately obscure and esoteric. You find yourself re-reading entire chapters two or three times because nothing makes sense and you get pissed off thinking hey I'm not a moron, I have advanced degreees why is this guy being so intentionally obtuse? I sort of hate Baudrillard, actually, for that reason. But he does have some interesting takes on the nature of reality that are rather illuminating.

I believe the exact wording of my thought at the time was... chouette! [True, I had to put aside the whole Forget Foucault (Oublier Foucault) nonsense... which was submitted to Foucault, himself, for publication in Semiotext(e) and to which Foucault, himself, never replied. Which is to say, don't miss Sylvère Lotringer's interview, Forget Baudrillard. In short, what must be acknowledged is the impossibility of participating in a field of study or in its criticism, without complicity.] Buckeye Surgeon plays on the subject/object shenanigans chez Baudrillard, and, oddly enough, chez super-specialized endocrine surgeons, as well. Actually, not odd at all, given consumerism à la Baudrillard. Hyperreality and this consumerism mark the Baudrillard of the 70s, the on-again, off-again marxist "thinker" in evolution as provocateur.

There are precious few medical bloggers who could pull that off, and even fewer that one would want to. I found myself wanting to hear Baudrillard on Abu Ghraib (war porn), among other things, through the filter of this particular midwestern general surgeon.

So recently, when he decided to beg all questions, in To blog or not to be, I was bummed, and responded snarkily.

I know, I know. [Like Frank Drackman -- which is a phrase I never ever thought I'd write -- I have a framed Master's of My Domain upon the office wall...]

I am so happy he continues to blog, even happier to know that he does so with his young daughter in mind.

Who else is going to keep that upstart, Atul Gawande, in check?

* At those moments, I am at such a remove from the inane boggle-headed chirping about how "il faut cultiver notre jardin" that I am, to overestimate myself, dangerous. I nod along with Jean-Luc and pump my cold, purple fist at his "Je me contenterai d'ajouter qu'il y a aussi sans doute un peu de malice chez Voltaire..."


“As in judo, the best answer to an adversary maneuver is not to retreat, but to go along with it, turning it to one’s own advantage, as a resting point for the next phase.”

— Michel Foucault

Pensées or How-the-Mind-Works-First-Thing-in-the-Morning

The cowardly writer's way out: Potpourri! Follow the bouncing thoughts, see if they will cohere.


It is 8:17 am and the temperature inside my mouth is 99.7. I've already had Tylenol, but hardly any vodka.

I woke to find Sam-I-Am neatly curled above my head on a spare pillow, gently snoring, Marmy Girl neatly tucked into the bend of my left arm -- but did not wake fast enough to catch Dobby dozing. He is so quick to peer into my eyes, paws planted on my chest, vocalizing his many plaintes. He has a lot to say, and Fred and I allow him all the time in the world to say it.

In lieu of a lilting "bonjour, t'as passé une bonne nuit?" La Belle Bianca fairly intoned that she had dreamt all night of dead philosophers: Barthes, Derrida, Foucault. Just those three. Of the three, she had met two, and felt she had actually *known* one. She had been in the living presence of them all.

Maybe that is why she did not dream of Abélard, Aquinas, or d'Alembert.

This brought to my mind, unbidden, a poem. I am suddenly terrified, because I do not know if this is a poem written by someone else, or that I wrote myself. It feels very much like me, like mine. This is it:

Il y avait un certain Blaise Pascal.

Yes, I will "google" it, of course. But I am telling you -- even if this is not mine, it is mine. I have never felt so close to a group of words before.

Ah, yes, well. I am glad La Belle Bianca is out ferreting a new supplier of confiture de cerise (We have recently undergone a crisis of confidence in our former source. Yes, I wrote crisis of confidence. No, the reference to Jimmy Carter's fabled 1979 diagnosis of the American soul is hardly oblique. Restoration of faith and confidence -- why, this blog is about nothing less. We will, once more, have superlative confiture de cerise.)

Were she here, Bianca, Ms. Thang, would be hooting in my ear, "Ah, je ris de me voir si belle dans ce miroir..." And she'd be right on every score, for it was Prévert, no less, who wrote:

Les paris stupides:

un certain Blaise Pascal

etc… etc...

Born of Bianca's dream, my desired authorship ends as a pari stupide (a stupid bet). So long as we can escape Pascal's insipid wager, right? I have always thought it the most disheartening of proposals, the kind of thing that only brings a gleam to a clever person's eye.

"You must wager; it is not optional... Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God exists... If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation, that He exists."

All the Christian apologists whom I have known have been blatant, flaming dyspeptics. Imagine if you were dedicated to defending "The Faith" by alleging it to be in happy accord with evidence that is, somewhere, on hand for examination. You'd be burping all over creation, too.

I don't know if anyone made it with me from onset to demise -- I hate to die alone -- but this actually played out quite well. It is an awesome organ, the brain, so supple.

Et la confiture de cerise? Un bon vieux classique dont on ne se lasse jamais...


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In mathematics, computing, linguistics and related disciplines, an algorithm is a sequence of instructions, often used for calculation and data processing. It is formally a type of effective method in which a list of well-defined instructions for completing a task will, when given an initial state, proceed through a well-defined series of successive states, eventually terminating in an end-state. The transition from one state to the next is not necessarily deterministic; some algorithms, known as probabilistic algorithms, incorporate randomness.
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