Conversations with Guy Debord (3)

"Shimmy, why haven't you written much in your blog lately? Are you upset about Karl Rove?"

Rainsoaked musk Gauloise smoke, Guy Debord's red-tassel loafers scuff the hardwood floor. The grassy timber of his voice!

"We'll never know if he's a traitor, " I said. "Or Cheney. Maybe they leaked Valerie Plame's name. Maybe they betrayed the United States during a time of war to settle a political score with Ambassador Joseph Wilson."

"The spectuacular sham struggles of rival forms of separate power are at the same time real in that they translate the unequal and antagonistic development of the system," Debord said. He flicked an ash -- thinner and less round as it fell to the rug.

I swatted my stuffed catnip carrot with a bell on the end of it. It moved. I am surrounded by vulnerable food and dainty clatter.

I said, "When Robert Hanssen hears a key rattle the lock on his cell door, he jumps out of bed and kisses the floor and says, 'Serviam'."

"You know as well as I do, Shimmy. It's the relatively contradictory interests of classes or subdivisions of classes which acknowledge the system and define themselves as participants within its power." He ran his fingers along my spine, stopped and tickled my exceptional tail bone.

"I loved it last summer when the Washington Post apologized for Rove," I said. I stared at the window sill in the bedroom. The sheer curtains, made from saris, flickered in the wind. If I timed it right, I could jump without tangling my legs on them. "He didn't reveal Plame by name, the Post said, but only reported that Joseph Wilson's wife was a CIA operative. As if that somehow was not exactly the same as revealing her name? Oh, please. Someone stop me, Debord, I'm falling asleep in the bathtub!"

"The truth of the uniqueness of Rove, Cheney, Hanssen, and Aldrich Ames resides in the universal system that contains them," Guy Debord said. "The unique movement that makes the planet its field -- capitalism."

"Does Hanssen wear a barbed-wire Cilice around his upper thigh two hours every day in prison?"