A lunatic in a bar. Four-star manna raining down. Flickering images on a TV; wars that aren't news; points along a line that was once a narrative but now bends obliquely, eschews linearity, cleaves closer to some wayward elliptical truth. They set 'em up for the lunatic, soldierly and alone, and he drinks with a hollow-eyed materialism and a greed that once might have been gusto in the fading light of an airborne division tattoo and some god-given emblems of virulent dispute