ON DRIVE TO THE REGIONAL POWER TRANSFER STATION, we talk about pictures and war, famous parlor paintings—prettied-up, teatime paintings—with little fig leaves of meaning plastered over any possibly offensive bits: history as a clear narrative, guided in its course by an author, assured of purpose. Our thesis is that such paintings don't aim to capture the stinking, shrieking scenes, but to polish up the idea of the moment into something placid and picturesque, fit for a fat gilt frame and the kind of comfortable respect that comes with an after-dinner brandy toast.

Napoleon, for instance. Moscow, entered and abandoned. The whole slogging winter retreat, a broken army leaving Russia, its Emperor having already snuck away, back to the paperwork and politics of Paris.

Eddie went to Russia once, on a junior high mission trip, so he has some opinions about the broken kneecap of the landscape, all that blunt injury, hemorrhaging. He goes on about the moans of men with entrails in their cupped hands, bellies burst, their comrades tightening their own tourniquets and trudging on through crusts of frozen, bloodied, shit-stained snow, everything so cold it hurts, cold enough for spit and piss to freeze midstream, midarc, crackling in the air like so much more artillery. Some of the images are borrowed, Eddie admits. He's never been to war, per se, but can imagine the general chaos: horses belching up chunks of their lungs and thomping over into the banks of rock-hard mud, dead; a wobbly line of epaulets spilling its way out of the imperial dream. Even the torching of occasional villages brings no relief from the cold. It's just Russia and more Russia. Russia without end.


I DON'T KNOW IF GOYA DID IT. Goya could have done it good. Goya with his brave monks and lonesome puppies, his levitating, dunce-cap warlocks, his grotesque, cannibal gods. A goring. A tribunal of fanatic judges. Executioner after executioner. Executioners without end. From inquisition to insurgency.

Here are the flayed bodies, draped like garlands from some scraggly tree. Here is the hole where a penis used to go. This is the jagged red end of a neck that lost its head. Raw irrationality. Scenes lacking any sense of moral lesson. A bone sticking out. Rape. Yo li vi. Testimony and fancy dress: Goya did both things well.

Back then, as now, painters were wealthy celebrities who worked at the whim of even richer people, the power establishment, doing palace décor and portraiture work. Take Velasquez, please. Fond of optics and dwarves. Also, fancy dress. Mirrors, meals, a Pope and various pope-like folks. Sleeping dogs, a pudding-faced princess full of cruel thoughts.

For all his commissioned work, at least Goya had his soul, a scrotum with some meat in it.

This is the gist of my lecture as we drive out to perform our anti-terrorist action.


EVERYHTING, AS ALWAYS, IS EDDIE'S PLAN, but since the accident he needs a sidekick, someone to maneuver his wheelchair over the sloping gravel of the access lot down to the chain-link compound, behind which the hulking transformers hum with energy.

We are committing an act of sabotage, Eddie Yoder and I, striking out at the conjoined corporate marketing-entertainment complex. We have big helium Get Well Soon and I Love You balloons, the foil kind, bought at the hospital and wrapped in more foil, tin foil, with little knots and wads of wire worked in, plus bits of metal moored along the side—fish hooks and zipper pulls, bent nails, a salt shaker lid, tweezers, some razor blades.

The wind is just right. The balloons rise, nudge over, drift in to disrupt the system, to silence the thousand smiling conspiracies pumping themselves into the Ohio night, to short-circuit sponsorship spots, systematic spin and fallacies, to shut off sundry titillating morality plays, simulated visions of reality, to put a stop to the network of lies, slant facts and distractions, to bring down a shower of hot sparks, then a blanket of darkness in place of placation.


WHEN THEY CAME BACK ON AIR, all the stations told the same tale. Eddie said, "Of course," and that he finally felt like a cripple. The blackout was blamed on some vast, shadowy organization, and since this entity remained out of reach, with no membership rolls, some Sikh store clerk in Mansfield was beaten to death, and the windows of a community center in Canton got smashed. A home was burned in Wooster. In Akron, an ophthalmologist woke the next morning to find his daughter's terrier smeared across the kitchen window and a note in his mailbox that said AMERICA WILL NOT BE AFRAID.


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