Well, in case anybody is wondering, we made it to Tahiti and Moorea, and we are back home in San Francisco (see previous post). I'm not going to talk about that right now though. We did have an amazing trip down there, and I highly recommend Moorea especially. Tahiti is a fun island to visit, but you don't want to spend your entire vacation on that island only because it is a bigger city and there are no good beaches. There are great offshore waves on one side of the island for you surfers. That's where many of the contests are held because they get the most perfect tubes.

I'm more concerned about other things right now, like the upcoming presidential election. I read a piece in The New Yorker today by Nicholas Lemann entitled "Remember the Alamo: How George W. Bush reinvented himself" that was particularly lucid and, frankly, terrifying, given how close the race is right now. Even before 9/11, Lemann reminds us, "Bush cut taxes to such an extent... that the surplus (of $236.4 billion that Clinton earmarked for Social Security and Medicare) was likely to evaporate (even without the war)." Before 9/11, Bush also "unilaterally withdrew the United States from the Kyoto accords on global warming, and he had signalled a desire to withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the International Criminal Court."

These are just the highlights. Lemann further states, "Bush is already trying to make permanent some early tax cuts that were passed with expiration dates, and that would increase the deficit more." It seems clear that Bush has no problem with running up a huge deficit. During the recent debates, I never once heard him offer any desire to even quell some of the current rampant spending of his administration. He just doesn't seem to care! Not only that, he won't acknowledge that the way he went about "pre-emptively" striking in Iraq was half-cocked and poorly planned.

Anyway, I honestly don't understand how any person of conscience could possibly give "W" their vote. But I'm lecturing, and you don't even know me, so you are probably not being entertained. This relates back to the Jon Stewart appearance on "Crossfire" the other night. Video of it is being played all over the internet right now.

Finally, the philosopher Jacques Derrida died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 74 in Paris on October 9. I had watched the film made about him, called "Derrida," and starring mostly the man himself with his incredible thick white hair, about four or five times on the Sundance Channel not long ago. I was completely mesmerized by his presence on the screen. It wasn't so much what he said, but what he didn't say. He refused to talk about love when the filmmaker tossed him an age-old, obvious question in philosophy about love. Then, when he and his wife were asked to discuss how they first met and fell in love, at first they told the story of going on the same ski trip together, but at a certain point they just stopped talking. Later, reviewing the footage, Derrida says he likes this moment precisely because they did not attempt to explain the unexplainable. I have since acquired several of his books, but delving into them requires very careful reading, and unfortunately my lifestyle has not been conducive at all lately to this kind of thoughtful, sober reading. I will now deliver a quote from Derrida's book "Acts of Literature" edited by Derek Attridge (and I realize there is irony in "quoting" Derrida out of context):

The terribly equivocal word fiction (which is sometimes misused as though it were coextensive with literature) says
something about this situation. Not all literature is of the genre or the type of "fiction," but there is fictionality in all
literature. We should find a word other than "fiction." And it is through this fictionality that we try to thematize the
"essence" or the "truth" of "language."

The more I know about Derrida and his ideas, the more valuable and empowering I think they are. For example, I am writing this blog about my so-called thoughts and even my life, but I haven't told you anything at all truly personal. There are large things in my personal life teeming and gathering strength under the surface somewhere, but I am simply unable to discuss them at this time. So what I have not told you, is, in essence, much more important than anything I have attempted to say.