So: if, as Michael Moore mentioned over the boos at the Oscars, the Pope is against Bush's foreign policy, shouldn't all Catholics fall into line behind the Most Palsied and Infallible One? I imagine Antonin Scalia is feverishly not thinking about this one.

I'm reading David Denby's review of "Dreamcatcher" and he complains that the movie is such a jumble of lousy stuff that "[the critic] feels embedded in junk". Suddenly I have a vision of a gigantic wall that circles the earth, a packed and mottled midden of trash rising so high that the world seemed reduced to the appearance and dimensions of a wall map. But we are embedded in the wall, tucked in with all our junk, limbs and faces poking mournfully out here and there, caught up in that same motion that picked up and packed in all our excreta. And that's my vision of the world for today.

I've inadvertantly embarked on an arts and crafts project in the office: chad sculpure. I'm researching a recent disaster and the amount of paper is unbelievable - it puts the term "ream" to shame. Reams of paper cannot describe the pile of paper slowly accreting on the corner of my desk. I've been hole punching the paper in preparation for binders that have yet to arrive, and I've discovered that the chads (thank you, Florida) take on physical properties in sufficient aggregate. They have a soft texture, and when you move them with your fingers they spread out in patterns like magnified particles of soft charcoal. The multiple resting angles produce different shades of light and dark. My favourite figure so far: The Dead Goose. At first it looked like a Dove of Peace but I frazzled the wings and poked a little hole in the breast. Other favourite figure: Lost Archipelago and the Chain of Mysterious Islands.

I do my best (or perhaps just sleepiest) thinking in that brief space between shutting off my bedside lamp and falling asleep. Last night I was thinking of paragraph #1 up top there, and I wondered if the Doctrine of Papal Infallibility, only introduced in the mid 1800s, operated retroactively. Then I thought: of course, because otherwise it would mean that the previous 1500 years of Papal reign was potentially for shit, and I doubt the Catholic Church would proclaim the Pope's word as infallible as the Lord's and then follow it up with, "But you know, those other Popes, the, uh - the previous ones? Wow, were they ever meshuggenah".

How far can a Pope go nowadays, given the privilege of infallibility and the demands of tradition? A few years ago John Paul II announced that Hell was not really a physical place, but a state of spiritual separation from the Lord. That's that. Twenty centuries of crackling pits extinguished with a word. Could it be that no other Pope has ever referenced Hell as a physical place? I find it unlikely, given the immense rewards that Hell has garnered the Catholic Church. I decided that Catholic doctrine must be like a structure, with each pronouncement, each encyclical, building on the last like a fortress with many towers. Some of the towers lean to one direction and then the builders begin to take a new tack, so that the fortress is full of crazy crooked spires careening to heaven.

It struck me, as my brain began to spark chaotically, that the fortress was a useful symbol of the underlying tensions between societal consensus and the warping effects of history on that consensus. Then I realized that architecture, not just the imaginary architecture in my head, but genuine architecture, is also about consensus on a number of levels. I mean, structures are built certain ways because there are historical schools of taste etcetera etcetera, but there is an agreement in architecture that this form, as opposed to that form, is ideal for housing people and keeping them alive in a more or less optimal fashion. I should read more about architecture and urban design to turn up the heat on this half-baked loaf, but I sense that the shapes of homes and buildings constitute a vast tacit agreement between the various echelons of society on how best to lead their lives.

I'm not suggesting that this agreement is fair or mutually beneficial; indeed, only a few truly believe that the rich deserve their mansions and the poor deserve their projects. This is perhaps why the basic formulation of that agreement, with all its divisions of access and privilege, is not centrally formalized but instead endlessly commented on and elaborated, like a paper that is all marginal doodling and no body text. It's an oral and gestural contract, affirmed in a million small ways each day.

Maybe that's part of the reason why 9/11 struck the States so deeply; it was the biggest, most violent disagreement that anyone has had with the States since the Civil War (although I'd like someone to prove me wrong on this point; please let me know if you have an example). Destruction is always a disagreement, or more precisely, a counter argument, an assertion of a different way of living. The destruction of inner city housing to make way for condos or office towers is a bald assertion that a society has priorities so pressing that they can only be realized by destroying the very incarnation of the past. That is a kind of domestic dispute between the powerful and the powerless in a given culture. The powerful partner usually wins the argument, hires experts to execute its conclusions, and the loser collapses in a cloud of smoke.

Terrorism is an argument from another planet, an alien voice that declares the founding terms of the discussion invalid, fundamentally flawed. When the hijackers flew their jets into the World Trade Center, they were delivering the message that the most basic assumptions of our society were so much junk. The bombing of Baghdad is the rebuttal to 9/11, a work of destruction so thorough that there can be nothing left to say. The US is seeking to destroy the society that they believe antagonizes them by destroying not just Saddam Hussein (along with scores of unlucky Iraqi citizens), but by turning Baghdad into ruins. Palace, mosque, and tenement will be flattened, and the living consensus of Iraqi and Persian culture, with all the tensions and innovations that cultures have, will be blasted into history. Hello Palestine.

I went to an Oscars party last night. For each category correctly guessed, we won prizes. I came away with: a bottle of Windex, a book of ten bus tickets, a plastic tiara with flashing lights at the brow, a $10.00 gift certificate at a local hip pub-restaurant, and a Fellowship of the Rings DVD. I ate perogies and drank Guiness until I fell into a glassy-eyed stupor. I decided that Jack Nicholson won't remove his sunglasses because wrinkly little pig eyes aren't so cool as Ray-Bans.

parode - exode