Waiting for Blogot

The other day, after reading one of my posts I asked J. what she thought. “It’s great,” she replied “ I just don't understand why you sound so surprised about it.” Ever since then I’ve been thinking about “the voice” of my blog, and while not dissatisfied, I have been pondering ways in which I can make the blog more interesting.

I told J. “I think I need to create some kind of dialogue. You know, break up the imperious voice of indignation with a character that resembles reason. Sort of a Waiting for Godot blog if you will.”

What would that look like? I’ve been pouring over the headlines and found a topic that interested me almost straight away, the Trial of Max Mosley, the FIA Formula One race car president who sued for invasion of privacy after the Sunday tabloid had falsely accused him of taking part in a "sick Nazi orgy".

O.K. So I have my Gogo, but who to play Didi? Hmmmn. Then it struck me. Bill Clinton is my Didi. Why? Because I never understood why an investigation into a fraudulent real estate development got tied to an entirely separate investigation into a political sex scandal and led to the eventual Impeachment of a President. The so-called Starr Paper that should have highlighted the prosecutorial investigation into the real estate debacle, instead hardly made mention of it. Instead it turned out to be a brief on sex and the abuse of power. There is no question that Bill Clinton perjured himself. There is some question whether it was cause enough to impeach a president, and as Chelsea Clinton pointed out to a reporter not long ago, ultimately whether it is any of our business in the first place.

There in lies the rub, so to speak, for poor old Slick Willie. Not that he could have cried "foul!" adn claimed it was no ones business but the truth remains that America has very differing standards when it comes to privacy (defined by a series of differing laws (torts)) while the Europeans have come to understand privacy as a Human Right, so defined in the articles of the European Convention on Human Rights.

So, I’ve got my Brit. and my American, my, Gogo, who is preoccupied with his physical aches and pains, the lash of the whip and the speed of the car and my Vladimir, whose pain is primarily mental anguish, what the lawyers will argue and his cunning bits of logic used to persuade and delude. Now all I need is my dialogue.

Act I
Estragon, sitting on a low mound, is trying to take off his boot. He pulls at it with both hands, panting.
E: (giving up again). Nothing to be done.
V: (advancing with short, stiff strides, legs wide apart). I'm beginning to come round to that opinion. All my life I've tried to put it from me, saying Vladimir, be reasonable, you haven't yet tried everything. A cigar tube, a little oral sex under the desk. And I resumed the struggle. (He broods, musing on the struggle. Turning to Estragon.) So there you are again.
E: Am I?
V: I'm glad to see you back. I thought you were gone forever.
E: Me too.
V: Together again at last! We'll have to celebrate this. But how? (He reflects.) Get up till I embrace you.
E: (irritably). Not now, not now. I don’t swing that way.
V: (hurt, coldly). May one inquire where His Highness spent the night?
E: In a ditch.
V: (admiringly). A ditch! Where?
E: (without gesture). Over there.
V: And they didn't beat you?
E: Beat me? Certainly they beat me.
V: The same lot as usual?
E: The same? I don't know.
V: When I think of it . . . all these years . . . but for me . . . where would you be . . . (Decisively.) You'd be nothing more than a little heap of bones at the present minute, no doubt about it.
E: And what of it?
V: (gloomily). It's too much for one man. All those women, and for Five hours??? (Pause. Cheerfully.) On the other hand what's the good of losing heart now, that's what I say. We should have thought of it a million years ago, in the nineties.
E: Ah stop blathering and help me off with this bloody thing.
V: Hand in hand from the top of the Eiffel Tower, among the first. We were respectable in those days. Now it's too late. They wouldn't even let us up. (Estragon tears at his boot.) What are you doing?
E: Taking off my boot. Did that never happen to you?
V: Boots must be taken off every day, I'm tired telling you that. Why don't you listen to me?
E: (feebly). Help me!
V: It hurts?
E: (angrily). Hurts! He wants to know if it hurts!
V: (angrily). No one ever suffers but you. I don't count. I'd like to hear what you'd say if you had what I have.
E: It hurts?
V: (angrily). Hurts! He wants to know if it hurts!
E: (pointing). You might button it all the same.
V: (stooping). True. (He buttons his fly.) Never neglect the little things of life.