We are living a political event. I would rather have written experiencing the event, but experience precludes being an active witness, but we Americans are cells of a misshapen biological machine that is willed by its own unwillingness to act with justification, the judgment of a community that we are no longer part of, if indeed we ever were. There is a morbidity to reflection, to the lapse of time as events envelop and the subsequent gravity begins to take hold. The political power structure of Iraq will collapse within days. I suggest that Americans begin to think of our actions as the power of the world, not as fist but of heart. I also suggest that we reflect upon our actions preceding this event, this preemptive war, and during to ask ourselves if we actually were intending to do anything but carnival while the military removed the flesh from foreign bones. It is a fragile period of both American and world history, the fragility being the state of imbalance which accompanies transition. We have a responsibility to change our immediate surroundings, not by regime change, e.g. impeachment hearings, but by finding ourselves in our own neighborhood and its surroundings. Consider that strangeness of seeing an old black man, a child that is not afraid of the stranger, a happy cashier etc. We can rally against a government that does not appear to represent our interest, but what is our interest, but to begrudge the actuality of our era. Silliman wrote of the decapitation of girls, he is a knowledge base of facts and has a talent to string this into a poetics, but we rape and murder our own, are not up in arms that we do it to ourselves, but the innocent Iraqis that haven’t yet been mutated by the perversity of rampant self-interest. I do not feel myself part of the anti-war group, specifically the armchair reactionaries that fancy themselves sardonic. I am sympathetic to the outrage at violence, being a child of war, but then also knowledgeable of the use of physical force to achieve an end that may not be seen as a snap shot of the good, but a premonition of the things that may take shape. I imagined that Bruce Andrews would have a say in this matter, thus far, I haven’t but he’s already said it and if we turn to a Ginsberg or a Stipe, we are lost. I watched Andrew’s read shortly after September 11th and was outraged that he had a lackey read his poetry before he spoke about reading. I envy his silence. Try to smile, to look into a stranger’s eyes, bump someone you find attractive. We as a generation now have the ability because of the event to change things, not to become Nike admen or other failed activists become tool artists, professors etal. but to start looking at the wound you give a low whistle to, and begin to mend.

But variables get one benefit people do not

We can see an example of this in our code we've written so far. In each function's block, we declare variables that hold our data. When each function ends, the variables within are disposed of, and the space they were using is given back to the computer to use. The variables live in the blocks of conditionals and loops we write, but they don't cascade into functions we call, because those aren't sub-blocks, but different sections of code entirely. Every variable we've written has a well-defined lifetime of one function.

A variable leads a simple life, full of activity but quite short (measured in nanoseconds, usually). It all begins when the program finds a variable declaration, and a variable is born into the world of the executing program. There are two possible places where the variable might live, but we will venture into that a little later.

These secret identities serve a variety of purposes, and they help us to understand how variables work. In this lesson, we'll be writing a little less code than we've done in previous articles, but we'll be taking a detailed look at how variables live and work.

This back and forth is an important concept to understand in C programming, especially on the Mac's RISC architecture. Almost every variable you work with can be represented in 32 bits of memory: thirty-two 1s and 0s define the data that a simple variable can hold. There are exceptions, like on the new 64-bit G5s and in the 128-bit world of AltiVec