governator: the early years, and other wonders

"and here's some rue for
you, and some for me." that's all
the shakespeare i know*.



regret is a singularly human sensation. other animals experience things like guilt and shame and anxiety, and i'm certain sorrow (although plenty of eminent scientists and behaviorists would probably debate that one with me), but regret is unique, and uniquely ours. whether it's because only humans are capable of it or because only humans commit the sorts of misdeeds that warrant it, i can't say. it's likely that most animals lack the cognitive skills necessary to trace an outcome back through the series of events leading up to that outcome; when your jack russell terrier eats a nail and has to undergo abdominal exploratory surgery, he doesn't wake up from his anesthesia thinking, "man, if only i hadn't eaten that nail," he wakes up thinking, "pain. i'm in quite a lot of pain." he will associate that pain with the place he's in, not with the thing he did that led him to that place, and so your dog exonerates himself and the nail is forgotten. it's a remarkably zen existence, but not one offering a shot at any functional enlightenment. he'll probably eat another sharp metallic object in no time. you, at that point, will regret your decision to adopt a jack russell terrier, but he will only be distressed because you have brought him back to the palace of pain. i don't think it means you're smarter than him that you feel regret. not eating nails means you're smarter, but regretting your pet selection because your pet is determined to die of an intestinal perforation means you're rational (if a bit self-interested). you'd think, being so rational, we'd figure out which things we were and weren't likely to regret and thereby diminish the frequency of the sensation as we matured. but we don't.

two nights ago i saw the found footage festival at the coolidge corner theatre in brookline. the impeccably ironic turn for our civilization would be for these video clips to survive when everything else has perished, and two thousand years from now some other civilization would judge us according to their content. the verdict? late-twentieth-century americans were base, deranged, and fucking hilarious. if you go to the website you can see a collection of abbreviated clips, but some of the highlights not available for preview are:

• a bizarre intersplicing of footage of a mrs. minnesota pageant, a pimp filleting a live catfish, and a full-frontal tutorial on how to use your newly installed penis pump

• "memorial day 2000," a beer-flooded weekend with a herd of a hundred or so white townie youths, replete with couch-burnings, raw sewage, the chug-vomit-chug-vomit cycle of rebirth, and the introduction of my new favorite compliment, "you're the fucking whipshit of all fucking shitter bongers"

• a short educational film for mcdonald's custodians featuring the vaguely dirty phrase, "i think you're going to see McC!"

i would happily discuss every clip that was shown, as they were dazzling from beginning to end, but i'm going to wrap it up here with the one that really made the evening (actually, the very early morning) for me--carnival with arnold schwarzenegger. this video was made by the brazilian tourism bureau when arnold was still mr. universe, and it proves that none of his egotism or misogyny is secondary to his success in motion pictures. in at most three minutes, everyone's favorite governor gropes at least three women (plainly against their will) after telling a nameless blonde that he loves america but feels more at home in brazil because, while americans focus on tits, the brazilians, like him, understand that the best part of any woman's body is her ass. later he sits down to what begins as an innocent brunch with a pretty young brunette. arnold proceeds to beat the innocence to death with its own shoe by grunting the portuguese word for poon-tang three times in rapid succession and forcing the girl to fellate a carrot stick.

were someone to project this video on a wall while mr. schwarzenegger and his wife were at a restaurant celebrating their wedding anniversary, he might feel embarrassed or anxious, or even ashamed. but i doubt he'd feel regret. i doubt he'd think to himself, "if only i hadn't ground my crotch against that strange girl's hip while she struggled to disentangle my hands from her g-string." there would be, in his mind, a sense of alarm and the desire to remove himself from an unpleasant place. he would want the name of the person who had played the video, and he would want to never go back to that restaurant.

to regret is to understand and accept culpability. that's what we get. that's the power that was supposed to keep everything in check. the problem seems to be that the majority of us don't regret the things we've done wrong, only the things we've been caught doing wrong, and so we haven't properly honed that power. hindsight's great for what it's worth, but it's worth more than we're taking advantage of it for.

anyhow. the found footage festival is touring the country, and you'd better do whatever it takes to catch it if it comes your way. i promise you won't regret it for a second.





* it's not, really, i've memorized a shocking quantity of iambic pentameter over the years. what do you want from me? haiku is hard. it was wrong of me to lie, though, and i shall repent anon.