Why I Don't Like Christmas Songs

December 28, 2020

Monrovia, California

     For a long time I couldn't quite put my finger on why I dislike Christmas songs so much.  I think it was difficult because it was one of those "let me count the ways" deals.  There are so many reasons.  

     First off, there's the fact that they start playing them over the loudspeakers in stores by no later than Thanksgiving, and more and more, even before that.  Halloween, really, marks the beginning of the Christmas season now, from a commercial standpoint, and one is likely to begin to hear a loop of Christmas songs at just about every store one goes into from November onward.  Occasionally I will ask a clerk whether he or she gets tired of listening to these songs all day long, day after day, and since I ask it in a sort of confidential, friendly, commiserating way, I expect to hear what I want to hear.  I want them to say, "Man, you have no fucking idea how maddening it is to listen to that shit over and over for two solid months."  Instead, more often than not, they'll say, "No, I really sort of like the music," or "It's okay, because it helps me get into the holiday spirit," or "Actually, I kind of tune them out."  That latter one I can understand and admire, especially because I'm not sure I'd be able to do that.  The other reasons are downright puzzling, and although it does occur to me that they might be expressing their appreciation for Christmas music out of a sense of self-preservation (meaning that they're afraid to speak their minds to a customer because I might tell management), I am often afraid that they are telling the truth, and that they really do like the endless Christmas music, which means that they're on a wavelength so different from mine that we might as well be from different species.

    At any rate, I find Christmas music to be depressing, or boring, or ridiculous, or a combination of those things.  First, there are the secular ones, the Johnny Mathis/Andy Williams/Nat King Cole/Mel Torme/Bing Crosby-type songs.  "Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire" is a big offender with the crooner set, along with "I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas."  And of course "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" is right up there, along with "It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas" and "Walking in a Winter Wonderland."  Then there are the children's Christmas songs, like "Frosty the Snowman" and "Jingle Bells" and "Santa Claus is Coming to Town."  All these songs are shallow and maudlin and covered by one singer after another, old and new--from the aforementioned tunemeisters of our parents' generation to Elvis to Bruce Springsteen to Beyonce to Christ knows who else, as if each different person who sings them can somehow infuse them with something new, when they cannot, and just make fools of themselves over essentially foolish songs.  I swear, I wouldn't be surprised if Snoop Dogg did a version of "Here Comes Santa Claus" (and come to think of it, he might have done so).  As pieces of music, whatever initial zing all these songs might have had as, let's say, dance interlude numbers in a Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movie, or Bing Crosby singles, or cartoon soundtracks, has been lost to the ages.  Their initial limited appeal has evaporated like the oomph "Over There" must have had back during World War One, or "John Brown's Body" during the Civil War. 

     So much for the secular songs.  And now maybe you're thinking, Aha! he's a purist--he only likes religious Christmas songs, since Christmas is, or once was, a religious holiday.  No my friends, there you'd be wrong as hell.  I don't like religious Christmas carols either, whether they're sung sanctimoniously by those same people I mentioned in the previous paragraph or by little kids standing in the snow or by hardworking, clean-shaven Norman Rockwell types standing up in a New England church or by, well, anybody.  In fact, I dislike religious Christmas songs even more, because they're supposed to have more meaning than the secular ones.  They're all about how the world was hopelessly fucked up until, lo and behold, a little baby was born in a barn in the Middle East, and ever since then everything's been SO much better.  Oh yeah, big improvement.  How's that working out for you, earthlings? 

     So yeah, the son of God was born, as weirdly idiotic as that sounds.  I guess nothing proves the idea that man created God in his own image more than the utterly anthropomorphic way we describe the doings of the infinitely divine and powerful.  Having a son, sacrificing a son, being a pissed-off dad, being a vengeful and jealous narcissist, etc.  Mind you, the concept of a god impregnating an earth woman and having a child I do understand, because I am an educated person, and since it comes straight out of Greco-Roman mythology, where people and gods were much more interactive with one another, and it most assuredly had antecedents going much farther back than the Greeks and the Romans.  But the operative word there is mythology, isn't it?  Just So Stories.  How the camel got its hump, and all that.  And yet--and yet--and yet, against all reason, at least a couple of billion people on this planet--many dozen times the number of ninnies who voted for Donald Trump last month, and a far greater percentage of humans than has any right to think so--actually professes to believe that the creator of the universe had a kid, just like the average absentee father down the block.  And apparently only one child, at that, which is even more mystifying to me.  What'd he do after that, get a vasectomy?  But, there it is.  Ask the average guy on the street in Cincinnati or Mexico City or Warsaw whether he believes that Zeus came down to Leda in the form of a swan, fucked her, and that she gave birth to Helen of Troy, and he'd probably walk away shaking his head.  But ask the same person if he believes that God came to the Virgin Mary as a dove and knocked her up with Jesus Christ, and he'd say, yeah, sure, of course.  That did happen.  That, my friends, is a real head-scratcher, and that, as the preachers tell us, year in and year out, is the True Meaning of Christmas.

     I think my dislike of Christmas songs might all go back to my own father, who was a Presbyterian minister.  Aha!  You're saying again.  So that's it!  Some sort of father/religious rebellion deal.  Nope, not at all.  My dad was a good minister to his several congregations throughout his career, preaching almost every Sunday, visiting the sick, counseling troubled parishioners, baptizing babies, marrying couples, burying the dead, and comforting their survivors.  All the stuff you'd expect a clergyman to do.  And he did a pretty good job of it, from what I've been told.  He was a traditionalist, in that he observed the two major Christian holidays--Christmas and Easter--and led a good steady bunch of ordinary folks in the obligatory weekly get togethers to, rather formally, praise God and look for ways to be better people.  Being a Presbyterian, he wasn't particularly evangelical, as that term is used today.  Though he did talk about Jesus quite a bit (from the pulpit, not at home), he didn't demand that people be washed in the blood, or personally testify to the presence of the Holy Spirit in their lives, or try to convert their fellow men.  In fact, he looked down on that stuff.  The demands he placed on his congregations, if you can even call them demands, were pretty simple:  come to church regularly, give enough money to keep things going and to do good in the community and the world, participate as lay persons in the workings of the church, and have a good time.  He was a fixture in the community, trying never to alienate anyone with his theological positions.  He liked to hang around town with some of the local merchants, listening to or telling the occasional off-color joke (although his best dirty jokes came from his fellow ministers at their monthly get togethers), steering clear of politics outside our home, and just generally "being there."

     The Presbyterian denomination is a part of the so-called Reformed, or Calvinist, branch of Protestantism.  Some of its ancestors in this country included the French Huguenots, the Dutch Reformed folks who settled New Amsterdam, and, perhaps most prominently, the Puritans, who later morphed into the Congregationalists, now know as the United Church of Christ.  Today the most liberal branches of Calvinism are the aforementioned Congregationalists and to an increasing degree the Presbyterians.  Despite their rather strait-laced ancestors, Presbyterians are likely to condone, and even welcome, gay marriage, strong social consciousness, and other elements of "inclusiveness."  The more conservative branches of Calvinism include the various Reformed Churches--particularly the Christian Reformed Church--and some even more recondite groups like the Netherlands Reformed Church.  These remain fundamentalist in their scriptural teachings, exclusive, and in some cases, downright cult-like.  Needless to say, they decry the way the world is going to hell in a handbasket today, which is code for the fact that they think the Republicans are correct and the Democrats are wrong.

     All Calvinist denominations derive their theological underpinnings, like Protestants generally, from the rejection of the Pope as the head of the church.  In addition, the Calvinists reject the idea of a hierarchical episcopal clergy (in other words, no bishops), and absolutely abhor the idea that the body of Christ is present in the eucharist, or anywhere else outside of heaven.  They do, however, cling to the idea of infant baptism, like their Roman Catholic brethren, which separates them from the many groups that go by the name Baptist.  And the Calvinists theoretically emphasize predestination over free will, although trying to explain that is far beyond the scope of this posting, and frankly more in the realm of speculating on how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.  Furthermore, they don't really seem, in the modern era at least, to give much of a damn about these theological niceties.  

     One thing Presbyterians, or at least my father, cared about when I was growing up, was people being part of the congregation, and not just part-timers.  Oh sure, he was glad to see you even if you came only a few times a year, but he really liked the regulars, and was likely to make jokes at home about the once-a-year types.  I suspect that pretty much all clergymen, of all denominations, feel the same way.  The idea of there being just a couple of Holy Days of Obligation, like Christmas and Easter, when the faithful absolutely had to go to church, was more or less anathema to him, as smacking too much of Catholicism.  Every Sunday was a day of obligation, more like the way the Jews view the sabbath.  It was perhaps for this reason, then, that he regarded both Christmas and Easter as sort of religious amateur hours, although he didn't mind the extra cash that came in the collection plates on these occasions.  Easter, of course, was always on Sunday, and was a good excuse to trot out the annual He Is Risen sermon, and at Christmastime there was The Word Became Flesh and Dwelt Among Us sermon.  But he didn't believe in Christmas Eve services, and unless Christmas happened to fall on a Sunday, he didn't ever have a service on that day either.  Christmas, he said, was a time to stay home with the family.  And once Christmas and Easter were out of the way, it was back to business as usual, which I could always tell made him much more comfortable.  We got our Christmas tree on December 21st, which was my parents' wedding anniversary, put up the usual lights, and did our little comparatively modest Christmas morning thing (unless, God forbid, Christmas was on Sunday, in which case we had to wait until afternoon), and had that tree out of the living room by New Year's Day.

     Which brings me back to Christmas songs.  From about the beginning of December on, my father knew there pretty much had to be a Christmas hymn at every Sunday service ("O Come, O Come, Emmanuel," etc.), but I don't think he was all charged up about it.  And maybe on the Sunday after Christmas there would be "We Three Kings of Orient Are."  And then, BAM.  Christmas's ass was over, baby, and it was back to the standards, which for Presbyterians were mostly Psalms set to music.  But at home?  I don't remember much of anything in the way of Christmas songs.  (Think of it this way.  If your father was an insurance salesman, do you think he'd get a kick out of watching commercials for insurance?  Probably not.)  Maybe on Christmas Eve or Christmas day there would be some selections from Handel's Messiah on the record player, or Mahalia Jackson.  But Johnny Mathis or Perry Como or Der Bingle?  No fucking way.  Chestnuts roasting?  Making a snowman and dressing him up like Parson Brown?  Sheeeeit.  Not only were those songs profane, but also profoundly irrelevant.   To sing an actual, bona fide Christmas carol, about the birth of the Christ child, you had to be an actual, bona fide Christian, which both my parents knew Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra most decidedly were not.

     So today, despite the fact that I am a complete and utter apostate, in the fast lane of the highway to hell, I retain within me what I firmly believe to be my clergyman father's contempt for all secular Christmas songs combined with his impatience about the religious ones.  What it adds up to for me is a rejection of it all.  

     And don't even get me started on Easter.  Oy.    

If I Were President

November 24, 2020

Cathedral City, California

     If I were president, I would not pardon a turkey at Thanksgiving time.  That's just stupid, especially when you're probably going to eat turkey for the Thanksgiving meal.  But even if you're not having turkey for dinner, pardoning an animal that gets raised for slaughter is absurd.

     If I were president, I would promptly commute the death sentence of any person convicted in a federal court.  People's lives are more important than those of turkeys, and if you can't figure that out, you shouldn't even be walking around, much less be the president.

     If I were president, I would not allow Mitch McConnell, or any other mealy-mouthed Republican senator or congressman, to set foot in the White House.  I would arrange for them to meet with my staff in front of a landscaping place next to a porn shop, on the outskirts of Philadelphia.

     If I were president, I would have regular news conferences, but at the news conferences my favorite thing to say would be, "That's got to be one of the stupidest questions I've ever heard.  What are you, the fucking scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz?"

     If I were president, I would not say "so help me God" at the end of my oath of office.   It's not in the constitution, and I don't care if that revered old slave owner George Washington said it.  I wouldn't place my other hand on the bible when taking the oath, either.  I'd put it in my pocket.  Also, I'd never end a speech with "God bless" anything at all.  Fuck that.

     If I were president I'd try to get "under God" removed from the pledge of allegiance, where it was put in the early 1950s during the Red Scare, at the behest of the Knights of Columbus--as if they should have any say in anything we do as a country.  In fact, I'd discourage the use of the pledge of allegiance to the flag altogether.  What's the point?  If you make war against the U.S. or give aid or comfort to our enemies you're committing treason, and can be tried for it.  Isn't that enough?  Why make a kid, or anybody else for that matter, pledge allegiance to a piece of cloth?  What is this, Nazi Germany?

     If I were president, I'd try to ban the playing of the national anthem at sporting events.  What a waste of time.  They say baseball is too slow now.  That would speed things up.  What is this, Nazi Germany?

     If I were president, the next time a vacancy came up on the Supreme Court, I'd nominate a mainline Protestant or a Jew or an atheist.  We have more than enough Catholics there now, and they're systematically fucking things up. 

     If I were president I'd have the Treasury Department try to remove all images of slave owners from our currency.  That means no more George Washington on the dollar bill and the quarter, no more Jefferson on the two-dollar bill and the nickel, and no more Andrew Jackson on the twenty-dollar bill.  I'd replace Washington with Martin Luther King, Jr.  I'd replace Jefferson with Ma Rainey.  Jackson was already supposed to be replaced with Harriet Tubman.  Maybe we'd mix it up every few years--get some new blood on those coins and bills.  

     If I were president I also would try to remove "In God We Trust" from all our currency.  That was the misguided idea of Abraham Lincoln, an otherwise fairly bright and decent guy.   

     If I were president, speaking of money, I'd try to eliminate the penny.  It costs more to make than it's worth.  Retailers accepting cash would have to round everything up to the nearest five cents, which shouldn't break their hearts.  Credit card and bank purchases could still be recorded in odd amounts of cents, though.  They add up.  Didn't you ever watch Office Space?

     If I were president I'd instruct the IRS to revoke the tax-exempt status of any church or other religious organization that ever tried to get anyone to vote for any Republican, ever.  (Political activities are already not allowed to be conducted by tax-exempt 501(c)(3) entities under the Internal Revenue Code, but I would selectively enforce this provision so as to allow Black churches to continue to host politicians, as long as they were Democrats.)

     If I were president I'd have the Attorney General put the FBI on a mission to infiltrate and eradicate all right-wing organizations.

     If I were president I'd propose to the congress that it repeal the second amendment to the constitution.  Also the part of the first amendment that prohibits the government from making laws restricting the free exercise of religion.

     If I were president I'd find a way to have Kid Rock and Ted Nugent locked up in Guantanamo Bay.  

     If I were president I'd issue an executive order making Tom Brady's birthday a national holiday.  It's not that I like Tom Brady that much--actually he's a right-wing dick, as far as I know.  But Tom Brady's birthday is the same as mine, August 3, and so as not to appear immodest I'd put Tom Brady up as the ostensible reason for the holiday.  But then I'd call it President Teeuwissen's Day.

     If I were president I'd deport Elon Musk to whatever country, or planet, he came from.

     

Something

In Memory Of

John Carbaugh, 1951-2020

Loyal Blog Follower

And Good Friend

R.I.P.

November 14, 2020

Cathedral City, California 

     Something really terrible happened in this country last week.  No, not what you’re thinking—you all know me better than that.  What happened was this:  over 72 million people—the second largest number of presidential voters in the history of this country—CHOSE to vote for Donald Trump.  Of their own free will, well over one-third of all the eligible voters in the United States voted for an unapologetically immoral, undemocratic, semi-literate, immature, utterly self-absorbed pathological liar, who foments racial hatred and bizarre conspiracy theories, panders to absurd religious beliefs, and rejects science and normal human progress in a way that would make a shit-covered medieval peasant in a Monty Python movie look like Einstein by comparison.

     In so doing, were these 72 million plus people—more than one in every five humans who inhabit this country—voting to stop a Hitler from becoming president?  Were they voting to prevent the next Stalin, or Kim Jong-Un, or Idi Amin, or Genghis Khan from taking control of our land and ripping our constitution to shreds?  Were they trying to stave off the coming of the Antichrist or the naked evil of Satan himself?  No; quite the opposite.  They were, instead, voting against a man who has ably demonstrated that he is capable of occupying the office, and has never done much worse than to be rather repetitive and hokey, and at times (certainly in my book) a bit too bipartisan.  Oh, and he's had some hair transplants and cosmetic surgery.  They were voting to reject the standard-bearer for a political party whose platform calls for affordable health care, cheaper education, racial justice, fairer taxation of the wealthy, ecological responsibility, international cooperation and leadership, and a well-organized effort to end the worse pandemic to plague the earth in over one hundred years--all ideas that his opponent and his party either explicitly rejected or neglected to carry out.

     Probably not since the days prior to the Civil War has such a large chunk of the American electorate deliberately opted to reject human decency and enshrine the degradation of human life.  And that was at a time when neither African Americans, nor Asians, nor Indians, nor women of any race or color could vote.  Just white men.  You'd think, given that fact, that the onus for the recent display of horrible bad judgment on the part of this very large segment of the American people would fall primarily and directly on the heads of the descendants of those same white males.  And you'd be mostly right, to be sure.  If you took out all the white men who voted for Trump, you'd be left with a much smaller number, and a more lopsided victory for Biden.  But a hell of a lot of white women voted for Trump, too.  And they didn't do it while holding their noses.  No sir.  They did it with the full-throated enthusiasm of drunken Harley mommas.

     The operative word in the analysis in the above paragraph, however, isn't "men," or "women," it's "WHITE."  Already, due to a delay in vote counting and tabulation in several states, the news media are falling all over themselves to come up with new filler in the form of obscure demographic factoids and statistics meant to alarm us and challenge what, for most thinking people, should be a simple application of logic in the light of history.  In part they are doing this in order to cover up for the fact that, for the second straight presidential election, they were substantially wrong in their predictions of the outcomes of the election.  Oh sure, they backed the right horse, but they picked him to win by half a furlong, not by a length.  And that, again, is because they were looking in all the wrong places for the answers--the keys, so to speak, to the situation.   For instance, we're being treated right now to articles about how the Black vote isn't monolithic, and how a "surprisingly" large number of Black men, in particular, voted for Trump.  But when you burrow into the numbers you find that the size of the majority of Black people, male and female, who voted for Biden was enormous--80-90 percent or more--far larger than the percentage of Latins or whites or Asians who voted for him.  And, as John Oliver put it so well in his last show, these Black people weren't doing so in order to give the stamp of approval, a ringing endorsement, to the elderly white guy at the top of the Biden-Harris ticket.  They were doing so for the best of all possible reasons, namely, pragmatism:  given the choice between two old white guys (which, let's face it, is almost always the choice), they voted for the one less likely to deliberately fuck them over.  Same with the Indians.  And same, to a lesser extent, with Latins (about whom more in a later posting).

     But quibbling about whether or not Black men, or Latins, or Asians, voted for Trump more than people might have expected them to is a big waste of time.  And by the same token, quibbling about what might have motivated the overwhelming majority of those 72 million voters to vote for Trump is also a fool's errand, when the answer is so simple.  Economics?  Hell no.  Trump didn't do jack shit for them economically, unless they were Wall Street sharks.  Health and safety?  Are you shitting me?  They're dropping like flies from a disease that loves to eat the old, the fat, and the dissolute.  No.  The reason almost all those people, male and female, voted for Trump is that they are scared shitless of Black people, and angry at their attempts to assert their equality with white people.  Trump voters voted for Trump because he validated their racism, their sense of white entitlement and supremacy, or, if they weren't quite white, their sense of entitlement to something more than Black people have ever had.  

     Assuming the transition of government goes as it should, people will soon be writing books, op-ed pieces, and high-toned magazine articles about what happened, and why.  And they'll be coming up with some weird-ass theories.  This is particularly ironic, because the only people literate enough or interested enough to read such things are the folks who voted for Biden, and they should already know the answer to why people voted for Trump.  HATRED OF BLACK PEOPLE.  Sorry, I don't think I can make it any more explicit.  

     Hillary Clinton put it best a few years ago when she was running for president--the people who favor Trump are a "basket of deplorables."  She caught hell for that, because, folks said, it cost her the election in key states where such deplorables might have been more likely to vote for her if they hadn't been insulted.  Well, first of all I don't believe that.  And second of all, fuck whether they were insulted.  Deplorables are deplorables.  They proved it in 2016 and they proved it in 2020.  For that matter, they proved it in the 1860s, and many other times along the way.  These people are irredeemable.  If you're thinking that we're going to "bind up the nation's wounds," and all that, think again.  We might harass the organized far-right using the FBI.  That would be good.  And we might bring about some tiny measure of police reform.  And we might teach ourselves more nuanced ways to look at the subjects of institutional and individual racism.  That, also, would be good, but it won't reach the people who voted for Trump.  We will never change their minds.  The only end to their beliefs is the grave.

.

Narcissism

August 22, 2020

Pentwater, Michigan

     It's pretty hard to ignore what a doofus our president is.  His limited vocabulary and inarticulate ramblings and repetitions, employing the comparatively few words he does know, strike the reasonable listener each time they hear the guy talk (which for me is as seldom as possible).  But because he's the president and because before that he was in the world of high finance, he is sometimes also credited with a deeper overall knowledge of things than he has.  After all, we think, how could he have made, and lost, all those millions of dollars if he didn't have at least a little sense?
   
     And there's no punch line to follow that rhetorical question.  He does indeed have some sense, some knowledge that others don't have, and the ability to make things happen.  There's a certain grim charisma to the guy.  Whether he's the lackey of the right wing, or its leader, makes almost no difference--he is certainly carrying out the Republican agenda with, for them, admirable alacrity.  For anyone who doesn't already know it, the Republican agenda is, and has been for many years, the following:  to promote the interests of big business at pretty much any cost.  That's it!   But you say, it can't be that simple.  What about racism and white supremacy? what about pandering to the ignorant and superstitious religious people? what about keeping the attention of the country focused on illegal immigrants and slant-eyed foreigners?  Well, duh, as they say.  These things all promote capitalism, which needs to exploit the permanent underclasses and the profoundly ignorant among us in order to survive.  First of all, get us all worshiping and drooling over the doings of the wealthy (like Trump, Bloomberg, Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, etc.), so that we not only expect them to be our saviors but also assume that their morality is superior to ours, and that therefore their ability to lead us is greater.  This isn't anything new in this country, of course.  Despite the "aw shucks" personae of several of our most prominent presidents, it was the patricians of the colonies--Washington and Jefferson, for instance--who led the revolution, and to whom was given the initial power.  Why?  Because they were wealthy, and thus inherently superior to the rest of us. 

     But there's that niggling psychological aspect to Trump's personality, which the left-of-center media keeps harping on, and which they say separates him from the garden variety rapacious and soulless Republican.  He's also a narcissist.  Democrats say so.  His bitter psychologist niece says so.  Various eminent psychiatrists say so.  And even some of his fellow Republicans are saying it, lest they be tainted by the Trump legacy after he's gone.

     So, is Trump a narcissist, in the clinical sense?  In the latest version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the DSM-5, which is the American Psychiatric Association's attempt to create a sort of  Oxford English Dictionary of craziness, "narcissistic personality disorder" is defined to include 9 characteristics, of which a certified narcissist should possess at least 5.  Let's take a look at these criteria as they apply to Donald Trump:

          1.  A grandiose sense of self-importance;  (check)
          2.  A preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love;  (check)
          3.  A belief that he or she is special and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people or institutions;  (definitely the first part, but possibly not the second part, since he surrounds himself with idiots and ass-kissers, and his idea of a high-status person is Jeffrey Epstein and his idea of a high-status institution is a golf course)
          4.  A need for excessive admiration;  (check)
          5.  A sense of entitlement;  (check)
          6.  Interpersonally exploitive behavior;  (check)
          7.  A lack of empathy;  (check)
          8.  Envy of others or a belief that others are envious of him or her;  (check)
          9.  A demonstration of arrogant and haughty behaviors or attitudes.  (check)

So, the guy really aces this test.  He needed a 5, but he got at least an 8 1/2.  So why isn't he bragging about this score, like he bragged about passing his cognitive ability test?

     Why indeed.  Really, it's an easy and cheap shot to call Trump a narcissist and leave it at that, as if he is the only narcissist who treads the polished marble halls of our nation's capital, or who has ever occupied the White House.  So the guy's a narcissist, what of it?  First off, none of his faithful give a shit, because narcissism is a four-syllable word and they don't understand it.  And as for his handlers, the capitalists whom he serves, they couldn't care less either, because he gets things done for them--lowering taxes, deregulating every damned thing he can, and generally, to the best of his ability, making it easier for them to make a buck.

      I realize I'm pretty much preaching to choir.  But here, ladies and gentlemen, is a truth that we might not wish to hear.  Having a president who is a consummate, textbook narcissist just might be the very thing this country deserves.  Just as individuals can have narcissistic personalities, so, I believe, can nations be narcissistic.  As a nation, no matter who the president happens to be, we in the U.S. are convinced that we are the Greatest Country on Earth, and that our president is not only the Leader of the Free World, but the Most Powerful Person in the World.  Maybe that's because of all the nukes we have, but I suspect that it's at least as much from our being utterly convinced that we are, as countries go, the cat's meow.  Outside the warm context of our own feeling of self-worth, all this might sound a little like the pronouncements of the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain, but we repeat these "truths" ad nauseam, even when we're criticizing the president or ourselves as a country, e.g., the United States should know better than to ignore climate change, because we are, after all, the Greatest Country on Earth; our president should be a better person, because he is the Leader of the Free World.  Even when we are forced to face our systemic police brutality and racism, we say, This is No Way for the Greatest Nation in the World to Behave.  And by the way, no matter who the president or would-be president is, "God Bless the United States of America."  Man am I sick of  hearing that benediction.  There was a time, even in my lifetime, when presidents didn't end every speech they made with those seven vapid words--words which, for all their supposed neutrality, scream out that we are God's Chosen People, despite how far off the track we may have strayed.   

     But just to be certain about our national narcissism, let's look at those nine DSM-5 criteria again, and apply them to the good old U. S. of A. as a country:

          1.  A grandiose sense of self-importance.  Well, if you have to think twice about that one, you haven't been paying any attention at all.

          2.  A preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love.    If there's anything we fantasize about, in fact and fiction, it's our success and beauty as a country.                      3.  A belief that he or she (or in this case, it) is special and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people or institutions.  This defines us perfectly as a nation, and we make it a point to ally ourselves most closely with the other countries we deem to be powerful enough and most like ourselves in racial, economic, and imperialistic outlook.  To hell with wasting our time with little weak Third World countries--what would be the percentage in that?
          4.  A need for excessive admiration.  Let's face it, if we don't get our asses kissed by other countries, we're just not happy with them, and are liable to send in a few troops to teach them a lesson. 
          5.  A sense of entitlement.  Ahem, yes, to every damn thing there is, from food, fuel, fortunes, and fun to media, music, medicine, and munitions.
          6.  Interpersonally exploitive behavior.  Hmmm.  Have we ever tried to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries, or tried to rape them of their natural resources? 
          7.  A lack of empathy.  Well, it's pretty hard to be empathetic with other countries when you're The Greatest Country on the Face of the Earth, and in the History of the Universe.  What's to empathize with?
          8.  Envy of others or a belief that others are envious of him or her (or it).  We absolutely know that the rest of the world just wishes it could be us.

          9.  A demonstration of arrogant and haughty behaviors or attitudes.  See all of the above.

     So wow!! For absolute narcissism the United States as a nation scores even higher than our current president does as a person!  And aren't we proud of ourselves and our precious every-man-for-himself, gun-toting-libertarian, pay-as-little-tax-as-we-can "perfect" democracy?  You bet we are.  Just look at all the people who want to get in!  If we were so bad, why would they want to?  Well maybe it's because we are simply less bad than some of our global neighbors.  But that doesn't make us better than all of them.  Unlike many other countries, we don't offer universal health care, free or cheap higher education, decent worker benefits or vacations or leave time.  Nor do we provide safety from guns and brutal police.  We're like that one house on the block where the parents are affluent and don't give a shit what their kids do as long as they do it in the house.  Of course the other kids want to come over, especially if their own parents have lots of rules, even ones that are good for them.  And in the case of the kids whose parents abuse them and don't give them enough to eat, or are constantly fighting, yes, our house might well be the better choice.  But it's not because we're a more responsible house, just a less restricted one.  In the long run, we don't really take care of our guests, we just let them in.  And when it's time for us to kick ass in our house, watch out!  
   
     Let's not ever forget that we weren't founded by real revolutionaries--not ones who wanted to completely transform society or create a utopia to replace a dictatorship.  We were founded by men who were tired of paying taxes--men who didn't mind owning other people, or at least condoning the practice in others, and who certainly didn't mind annihilating the people who were here before we came.  "A more perfect union" my ass.

     But, you might be saying, aren't all countries narcissistic?  Don't they all believe they are the greatest group of people ever assembled by God in one place?  Some are, but not all of them.  The Danish, for example, may love their little peninsula and their way of life, but they know they're not the absolute shit, on a worldwide level.  Togo, I'm pretty sure, has a healthy sense of its own comparative lack of importance on the world stage.  Vietnam wants to run itself and its people and secure its own borders from foreign invasion, but it doesn't want to rule the world.  Even the French, for all their arrogance and general lack of interest in anything non-French, aren't, strictly speaking, narcissistic.  They're very much in love with themselves, to be sure, but they don't give a shit whether the rest of the world loves them, because, after all, the opinions of anyone non-French don't count for much.

     Narcissism in individual human beings, like sociopathy, is incurable and irremediable, except by death.  A leopard can't change its spots, or a zebra its stripes.  Donald Trump will be exactly the way he is until he is no more.  But it's worth bearing in mind that countries can transform themselves, or be transformed by external circumstances, without necessarily dying.  With sufficient changes in leadership, and sometimes after receiving a pretty stiff dose of humiliation, countries can abruptly or gradually change.  Germany is a good example from recent history.  Even our mother country, Great Britain, is coming to understand that it's not the be-all and end-all it once thought it was.  This could happen to us, and in some measure it is beginning to, in a curiously ironic way, even while we're being piloted by the worst narcissist in the history of our national leadership.  After all, under Trump we've pretty much reverted to a kind of pre-20th century isolationism, internal capitalistic rapacity, and brutal social Darwinism.  But what might help us to get over ourselves even faster would be some genuine humility at the top, engendered by the humiliation we have experienced worldwide during the past four years.  We're going to have to bow our heads in order to re-enter the family of nations.  That would be a good thing.

     May it happen soon.

    

   

The Black Death

                                                      

August 11, 2020

Pentwater, Michigan

[I am in the middle of my annual viewing of the five Final Destination movies, and it occurred to me that I already wrote a post about them, back in 2012.  I re-read it this afternoon and decided to republish it, since it seems to resonate even more today than it did then.  If you haven't watched the movies in question, you should.  But in any case, here, with a few minor revisions, is The Black Death.]

     Some time back I mentioned the Final Destination movies.  I’ve just finished watching the most recent of them, Final Destination 5.  Twice, in fact, so I could see some of the most absurdly gruesome splatter scenes again.  This series follows a predictable formula that goes like this: at the beginning of each movie one of the principal characters has a premonition of a disaster in which a number of people die in spectacular ways.  In the first one it was a plane crashing on takeoff; the second featured a ridiculously complicated multi-vehicle freeway accident; in the third a roller coaster malfunctioned; and in the fourth the disaster took place at a stock car race where several cars went flying off the track and into the stands, which fell apart, but not before tires and miscellaneous car parts decapitated, crushed, and impaled people.  In Final Destination 5 we have the collapse of a suspension bridge due to high winds (similar to the real event that happened at the Tacoma Narrows in Washington back in 1940) while a busload of young business types are on their way to a management retreat.

     After having the premonition in each movie, the prescient person “wakes up” just in time to warn others of what lies in their very near future if they don’t leave the airplane, or highway, or roller coaster, or auto race, or bridge.  Of course no one believes that person, who nevertheless bolts from the danger spot.  A few of his or her friends leave, too, just to see what’s wrong with their seemingly crazy companion.  Then in short order the real disaster happens and dozens of people die, leaving only this handful of lucky survivors--the one who had the vision and the ones who went along out of curiosity or concern.  They watch in awe and horror as people get burned, sliced in half, have their heads crushed like cantaloupes, and so on.  Then they retreat, usually to the police station, to regroup and ponder their good fortune while grieving for those who didn’t make it.  The cops in these movies are serious but fairly nice and nonviolent, in an imaginary pre-modern way.  They don't pull their guns, and they don't even automatically suspect the token Black person in each group of survivors.  After some skeptical questioning, they scratch their collective heads, try to figure out if they can arrest anybody, and ultimately let the survivors go. 

     But here’s the thing.  Death has been cheated, and Death is not happy.  Why, I don’t know, since eventually Death gets everybody, right?  Death in these movies seems rather peevish and lacking in the patience that ought to come quite naturally after so many eons of grimly and steadily reaping its harvest.  What’s a few decades of life, more or less, where existential certainty is concerned?  Anyway, Death is angry, we’re told, and it continues to stalk the survivors throughout the movie, taking them out one by one in a series of bizarre and imaginative misfortunes that more often than not require simultaneous failures of multiple mechanical and electrical systems and ask the viewer to forget that the circuit breaker and ground fault interrupter were ever invented.  In several of the movies, Death’s relentless plan, and its insistence on gathering the succession of superficially lucky youngsters to its fold, is explained by a mysterious Black man.  Usually he’s the local coroner, a person who apparently is quite well acquainted with Death in a professional capacity.

     I mention the fact that the coroner is Black because in this movie and in the rest of the series there are few other Black people, but they tend to have a closer connection with Death, or at least a better understanding of the reason things are happening, than the white upper middle class teenagers or twenty-somethings who form the backbone of the cast, and who tend to take solace from the horror of their situation in trips to each other's houses, where they philosophically drink and talk and ultimately decide to live for today.  Cinematically speaking, in general, it seems, when it comes to helping clueless people to understand the deepest of realities, it’s necessary for a person of color to do the explaining.  

     The use of an African American character as the link between the world of insouciant white good fortune and the dark void of the unknown is part of a long tradition in the movies, which have consistently employed those of duskier hue to unite us with the most primitive and basic elements of human existence—fear, lust, privation, and death.  One Black person, skillfully utilized, can do the duty of all of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, including the pale rider.  Call it the economy of tokenism.

     In the 1930s, when cinema made no attempt at subtlety or fairness in racial matters (as if it does now), the Black seer was often the comical minstrel-show Negro whose big eyes glowed white and whose nappy hair stood on end as he saw a ghost, while the more suave Caucasians laughed at him and saw nothing.  Black folks, it was understood, had a greater tendency to believe in the supernatural, in part perhaps because of their more "primitive" roots, and in part because there weren't a whole hell of a lot of earthly delights available to them, comparatively speaking.  Sometimes the person with the enhanced vision of the inherent ignorance of the wealthy and carefree was somebody’s maid or wet nurse, with a bandanna tied over her hair, shaking her heavy head at the foolishness of the white folks and saying, “mmm, mmm, mmm” in a resigned singsong voice.  Half comic relief and half Greek chorus, the darkies would generally tend to be right about the fact that something was wrong.  Later, as we began to strive for cinematic and social "realism," we played on another image, that of the sexual threat inherent in the Black presence--sweaty muscular men and women grinding the night away on the sawdust floors of juke joints, drinking to excess, smoking dope, and gyrating in primitive ways that no decent, respectable W.A.S.P. would countenance.  In any event, the Black folk were always a degree or two closer to the basic truth of things, even if they appeared to be merely shucking and jiving and clowning.  They knew, down in their jungle souls, what was important, and it wasn’t martinis and starched collars and briefcases, believe you me. 

     Lest we think that the age of Buckwheat and Mammy and Mandingo is gone, however, we should take a look at the more recent past, and for that matter, the present.  There is, and has been for some time, a stock character in American drama known as the Magic Negro.  He or she is often a servant (what else?) or sometimes a sidekick or petty criminal, who seems to appear out of nowhere to help the white protagonist out of a jam with a combination of common sense and street smarts, and if all else fails, by laying down his life for the hero. If nothing else, this created jobs for black actors, sad as they might be.  At the TV level, think of Jack Benny’s manservant Rochester, of Starsky and Hutch’s underworld pal Huggy Bear, or of Maude's maid Florida.  In the movies there are too many to list, but you’ll easily recall them.  I’ll let serious students and critics of the genre, like Spike Lee, expound on this phenomenon and will only mention it here.  Then again, often the Black person in a movie is the first to die, or be killed by the alien, or get sucked out of the airplane.  Why?  First, because he’s expendable and frequently has no mate, due to the still-heavily-enforced cinematic anti-miscegenation rule which dictates, in contravention of reality, that a Black man shall not have a white woman, only a Black or Hispanic woman, unless of course that Black man is already a criminal.  (Here I should mention that this rule is not necessarily imposed without the complicity of both races; I once saw a woman on a documentary dedicated to Denzel Washington—an actor who fairly scrupulously adheres to the black-to-black, or at least black-to-brown, rule in his movies—rather pettishly claim him, as an African American, as “ours,” which was particularly odd because the woman who was making the claim was only about one-sixteenth less white than my own mother.)  Another reason Black people die first is that generally the protagonists are all white, and the nonwhites are just there for variety.  I will say, in defense of the Final Destination series, that one of the young upwardly-mobile survivors characters is always Black, and although he doesn’t have a love interest like some of the whites do, he does manage to outlive several of the other hapless characters.  That's progress.  You might say “big deal,” but in a sense it is just that.

   

     And let’s not forget the miscellaneous voodoo priestesses, or the spirit mediums (Whoopi Goldberg in Ghost); or the other persons with the supernatural powers (Scatman Crothers in The Shining and the Black guy who could see ghosts just like the little kid could in Stir of Echoes).  Where there is something going on beyond the pale, so to speak, you can count on a Black person being there to personify it or at least explain it.  It’s scary Mother Africa calling us all back to our pre-civilized roots.

     But in Final Destination the Black man, the scary coroner, is the messenger of Death itself, and he is still there at the end after the kids have all perished horribly, reminding us of our scant mortality.  Also--and this can’t be overstated--the Black character is there to remind us of our Great National Sin, the institution of slavery, for which we all must pay and pay, both now and in the afterlife.  The very subject I’m discussing here would have little meaning outside of that sub-context.  Put a Black man in a Dutch or Swedish movie and people would just say, "Hmm, an African.  Izhn't dat veerd?"  But our national Black guy, our messenger of Death, was there when this country made its original bargain with the Devil, to exist half slave and half free, and he’s here now to help us pay the Faustian price.  He'll be there shaking his head grimly and loading bodies into the back of his van when we’ve all been sliced in half by flying lawnmower blades, beheaded by shards of glass, immolated by carelessly stored chemicals, impaled by malfunctioning airbags and broken pieces of PVC pipe, and fried to a crisp in tanning booths gone haywire.

     Call him the Black Death.  

Well,

July 27, 2020

Pentwater, Michigan

     I started writing this about a month ago, then got sidetracked by...nothing, really, except the everyday rhythms of my isolated existence, which isn't so bad, and not as isolated as all that.  Just safer, and with a mask.  Anyway, it's time to finish.
   
     Well, what's a poor blogger to do?  The shit that's happening, on a purely objective level, beats anything I could say about it.  And that's not even including the social media spins and distortions, the yammering by the all news channels, left and right, and the ostensibly more objective reporting in newspapers, assuming anyone reads those any more.  It's a world turned upside down, and it didn't just happen when the virus started, or when the demonstrations against police brutality started.

     Nobody knows, of course, how it's all going to play out.  The virus has made a surge in the wake of the obviously ill-advised loosening of the social restrictions put in place a couple of months ago, led by no advice or bad advice from the top of the government.  Will individual states finally unite to enforce the wearing of masks in public, probably the simplest, cheapest, and most effective way, along with social distancing, to limit its spread?   Or will right-wingers, bored students, and "fun-seekers" simply ignore its existence and take their chances, putting millions more in danger.  Who the fuck knows?

     One thing I do know is that the demonstrations in the cities have begun to die down and become nothing but background noise and political talking points, all in just a few weeks' time.  That's what always happens, because very little substantive change will come about from them.  Sure, statues will come down and flags will change, which is great, but the disappearance of these painful and ugly symbolic reminders of the past in which we fought a civil war over white supremacy as an avowed national purpose will not erase the reality of ongoing modern white supremacy--politically, economically, and socially.  People always forget these paroxysms of social outrage at the institutionalization of racism, and it rises and falls in waves.  In the words of the Italian political philosopher Antonio Gramsci, "History teaches, but has no pupils."

     We may take a few more timid steps toward improving our system of organized urban police brutality, but ultimately, nothing will be done to improve the lot of African Americans, because they are stuck in a kind of perpetual neutral gear when it comes to progress, and they're stuck at the bottom of the ladder.  Let me repeat that:  Black people (today the word "Black" is capitalized--again--as a weak token of respect) are STUCK AT THE BOTTOM OF THE LADDER.  And when I say Black people, I mean hometown, born in the USA, descendants of enslaved people.  New people come into the country, get discriminated against, work their asses off, and start climbing that ladder.  It usually takes a generation or two or three, but it happens.  Irish, Jews, Central Americans, Asians, East Africans--you name the group, they've always improved their lot after a few years of tough going.  But not the African Americans, no matter how hard they work.  They just stay down on the bottom rung and get stepped over by others.  Every single time.  Right now the LAPD has at least as many Latin cops as white ones, and they're still just as brutal to Blacks as they ever were, and Blacks are still as unrepresented as they ever were.

     This is awfully pessimistic, you might be saying.  Haven't we made some progress since, say, the 1950s?  Well, yes we have, of course.  We got one decent, liberal, socially-committed Black justice on the Supreme Court, in Thurgood Marshall.  That was progress.  Then he died and was replaced by Clarence Thomas (because after all there can't be more than one Black person on the Court), a guy so conservative as to make most of his white fellow-conservatives look like progressives.  And in the 1960s we got Black people on television playing characters other than maids and butlers and buffoons.  We got Bill Cosby as a spy, and Cicely Tyson as a social worker's secretary, and Diahann Carrol as a nurse (still somebody's handmaiden, but what the hell), and a few other decent parts for Black actors.  Then, as their presence became greater and more accepted, there arose another, more obvious role choice for Black actors, namely, being criminals.  Suddenly in the 1970s parts for Black pimps, drug dealers, drug users, prostitutes, thieves, and smooth con artists became plentiful, and continue to be plentiful up to the present day.  Hence, thugs as role models for all you Black boys and girls growing up out there in TV land.  Hollywood said, in effect, "Here, Black people, here are your parts, come and get them," as if scattering dollar bills over a manure pile.  Then, over the next several decades, there were a few Black cops, often bent, and a few Black laborers, and of course there was the Cosby show (with him, ironically, as an obstetrician), and Denzel Washington as a doctor on St. Elsewhere.  But there was also the "reality" show Bad Boys, which featured cops taking down shirtless brothers trying to escape out the back windows.  And there was that absolute gem of a situation comedy, Good Times, where a family of Black people in the Chicago ghetto was headed by a long-suffering, eye-rolling matriarchal mammy and a feckless put-upon semi-bread-winning dad, but whose lead actor was the goofy shucking and jiving son J. J., thus reducing a show ostensibly about the realities of Black folks struggling in a white world into an updated version of Amos and Andy.  Oh, and let's not forget the succession of shows starring Black boy/men with medical conditions that kept them little and cute and harmless, while being adopted by wealthy white people.  And who could forget the Black version of Archie Bunker embodied by George Jefferson?  Sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander, lest we have to suffer with the burden of thinking that only white men are bigots.  All that added up to what white America really wanted to see--white altruism mixed with Black hopelessness, venality, and clownishness.

     Okay, you say, but what about Sesame Street and The Electric Company, two shows aimed at young kids that sought to present Black people as positive instructors and role models.  Yes, you're right, they were good.  But eventually they were replaced by cartoons (among them the notoriously self-abnegating Fat Albert), because, after all, how much positivity about Black people can our culture endure without an offsetting adjustment?

     Fine, you answer, but didn't we finally elect a Black man as president--not once, but twice?  Yes we did.  His skin was brown, sure enough.  However, he was not the descendant of slaves, no sir.  His father was a Nigerian graduate student who eventually went to Harvard then back to Africa, leaving his son to be raised by others, just as we would expect any Black man to do.  His mother, who raised him, was as white as my mother was.  We elected him because, well, it was time to get that issue out of the way, and, more importantly, because he could talk white to the whites, and with a little bit of studied slang, could talk Black to the Blacks.  But would we ever elect a Jesse Jackson or a John Lewis?  Would we elect a take-no-prisoners Stacy Abrams?  Hell, no, not in my lifetime.  Too Black.  And following hard on the Obama years came the horrifying "offsetting adjustment" I mentioned above.  Very soon, mark my words, the Democratic vice presidential candidate will be Kamala Harris, a woman who does indeed look pretty brown.  But she ain't no Maxine Waters, no ma'am.  She's the child of college professors, and she scrambled up from the mean streets of Berkeley, no less.  Her mom is east Indian, for Christ's sake, and her dad is from Jamaica--probably the descendant of slaves, to be sure, but not OUR kind of slaves--you know, the ones who picked cotton for the massa down in Alabama.

     Oh, and let's not forget the movies of the 21st century--the Century of Enlightenment.  Here Hollywood has made some adjustments, agreeing, probably reluctantly, to give the Black folks some movies of their own, that might just teach whitey a thing or two.  Take Selma, about the historic and terrible civil rights march over the Edmund Pettis Bridge, featuring the late John Lewis and Martin Luther King, Jr.  Out of all the American black actors available, and no doubt willing and able to take the part of King, who do they pick?  A god damned Brit--an Afro-English child of the empire named David Oyelowo.  And there are numerous other examples of this, where Africans or British blacks get the parts that should, by rights, go to African Americans.  Coming soon to a theater (or movie channel) near you will be a biopic of Aretha Franklin, starring the lovely-voiced songbird Cynthia Erivo, handpicked by Ms. Franklin to play her.  Is she from Detroit?  Is she from Atlanta or LA?  No, she's from London, and had to learn to talk like an African American, not for this part, mind you, but for the part of Harriet Tubman, which she also played.  Sweet Jesus.  Because, after all, there are no African American women out there who can sing and who need work in the movies.  Hell no.

     Are you beginning to get the picture?  No matter how fucking hard American Blacks try, they will always lose out to someone else.  In education, in employment, in stature as political representatives.  Only in basketball and football and music do we allow them to exist, for our amusement.  When whites eventually become a numerical minority in this country, probably in this century, it will not be African Americans who are in the majority.  In all likelihood there will be no outright majority of any one group, but Latins and Asians will, if they choose to coalesce politically, be the dominant force.    And African Americans will be right where they are today, taking shit, shoveling shit, eating shit.  Do you think the Latins or Asians are going to treat them any better than the whites have just because the whites aren't in the majority?   Will they give a shit about them, any more than the Cubans or Puerto Ricans care about their Black citizens, or the Latin cops of LA care about the Black folks there, except as convenient moving targets?  And consider this: when this tipping of the ethnic balance happens, which group--the Asians, the Latins, or the whites--do you think will (still) have most of the money and the real power? 

     I've cherry-picked the evidence I've used here, but I challenge you to contradict it with anything  hopeful to the contrary.  There's a new book out by Frank B. Wilderson III, an autobiography called Afropessimism, in which he articulates this view, only on a worldwide basis, and with lots of personal information and suffering I'm not competent to convey.  I'm going to read it, and if I need to modify this post, I will do so.

     Until then, folks, don't get your hopes up,.

Dignity

May 17, 2020

Pentwater, Michigan

     For a number of years I have observed a phenomenon for which, at this point, I can think of no clever descriptive name.  It often occurs on highway signs dedicating particular stretches of roadway to the memory of some person--sometimes a public official like a mayor, or equally often a fallen police officer.  Another place it happens, even more often, is in newspaper obituaries.  What is this phenomenon? you ask.  It's when a person's nickname is put in parentheses or quotation marks after his name, for instance, "William (Bill) Anderson," or "The Officer Gerald 'Jerry' Bevilaqua Memorial Interchange."  These aren't real names I've seen, but you get the idea.  Occasionally in obituaries the nickname is of an affectionate grandfatherly or grandmotherly type, e.g., "Miriam (Nana) Feldman," but usually it's just the regular nickname for that person's first name.

     You might be asking, "Well, what's wrong with that?"  If so, I'm glad you asked, and I'll tell you.  First of all, what is so difficult about figuring out that a person we all called Bill might really be named William?  Is that so counter-intuitive that you have to put "Bill" after the name William?  I think not.  Some people call me Pete, and some call me Peter, and some probably call me other things, but when my obituary is published I require only one first name to be used, namely, the one I was given when I was born.  Those who knew me as Pete will figure it out with no problem at all.  Now, if your name is Prajeet Singh, but the people who came into your 7-Eleven all knew you as Bobby, I can understand using the nickname in the obit.  But not Michael "Mike" Sullivan, or Edward "Eddie" Lopez, or Arthur "Art" Johnson.  That's just silly.  But look at your local newspaper obituaries and I guarantee you'll see it every day.  I do look at the obituaries daily, in part to be sure my own name doesn't appear there, in some Twilight Zone-ish way, and also to be sure that most people in the listings are still older than me.

     Not using nicknames needlessly is a matter of dignity, as far as I'm concerned, at both ends.  How stupid do people think we are if we can't recognize a person's obituary when their full name is spelled out, without having to have their nickname added for good measure?  Aren't pretty much all Jimmys, Bobs, and Maggies really Jameses, Roberts, and Margarets?  And if we knew Elizabeth as Betty, it should come as no surprise to us that her full given name is used in her death notice.  What good does it do anyone to put nicknames in an obituary or on a memorial road sign?   Does it make the person less dead, somehow, or more human?  Does it warm the now-cold corpse?  Nicknames and diminutives are friendly familiar things people call one another among themselves, when they're living, whether on the playground, or playing pool or watching the game or maybe even for that person's entire life, but they are not the person's full name, usually, and everybody knows or should know that.  They don't convey the full dignity of your name, or the full seriousness of your death.  When it comes time to put your name on a highway sign honoring you for your greatness, or sacrifice, or on a notice observing your passing, let the full gravitas of your given name, or at least the name you have chosen for yourself, be the means by which you are designated.  (If you're Kirk Douglas, you might want to be known as Kirk Douglas, not as Issur Danielovich, for instance.)

     God help you if you were given a stupid name out of the gate, like Moon Unit or Dweezil or Rumer or Scout.  That was just smirking self-centeredness on your parents' part.  I can't help you there, and I can only hope they didn't humiliate you in other ways in an attempt to show how clever they thought they were.  Your dignity was stolen at birth.  There are parts of the country where diminutives are given names, particularly down south.  Billy Bob Thornton, who's from Arkansas, was apparently born William Robert Thornton, and chooses to be called Billy Bob.  Okay, good for him.  But many people in the rural parts of the country are given names like Billy Bob and Johnny and Scooter and Jimmy by their mamas and daddies.  This is due to what I like to call the phenomenon of diminished expectations.  Some people are born so low and to such ignorant people that from their very births they are expected to grow up to be just Aw Shucks good old boys.  In fact the operative word there is "boys."  For many people nicknames, as common as they are, fade away in adulthood as people become more mature, or remain strictly within families or among friends.  But in some parts of the country people are expected to be, and to behave like, boys throughout their lives.  With respect to African Americans, it's more of an order than a suggestion or expectation.  There the imposition of diminutive nicknames from birth has a more sinister side than the mere lack of ambition for the child on the part of the parent: it has been a way of keeping the man a boy for life.  If your given name is Willie, who will be surprised if you fail to soar to great heights, and instead remain somebody's boy--their janitor, their bellhop, their servant?  Louis Daniel Armstrong, the immortal cornet player and jazz singer, referred to himself as Louis (pronounced Lewis), not Louie, I think for very good and obvious reasons.  However, practically no one else did.  He once said, "All white folks call me Louie."  Armstrong was a man who valued his dignity, and who struggled every day of his life with the question he asked in one of his own songs, "What did I do to be so black and blue?"  If your given name bespeaks some measure of dignity or elevation--Charles, Lamont, Marcellus--or even if it's sort of made up, like LeBron, or Draymond, or Kentavious, then the world may take you seriously, even if you weren't born a Winthorp, with a silver spoon in your mouth. 

     Dignity.  It's okay to stand up at the funeral and say, "You know, Jimmy was always there for me," but for Christ's sake put the name James on the man's tombstone.  That was one of the few things I didn't care for about Jimmy Carter, the president.  He wanted to be inaugurated as "Jimmy," even though his given name was James Earl Carter, Jr.  (I'm pretty sure they didn't let that happen.)  Why would he want such a thing?  Because it would make him look more humble and folksy than a Georgia farmer already is?  All this desire did was to start him off behind the eight ball of executive dignity, and it went pretty much downhill from there.  See, you can give away your dignity, in large pieces or small ones, but when you do it's very difficult to reclaim it.  After the patrician George Herbert Walker Bush projectile vomited at the dinner table in Japan, a piece of his dignity stayed on the floor with the puke, never to be reclaimed.  Every time Gerald Ford stumbled getting off his plane, a little bit of dignity remained on the tarmac.  The current president had squandered whatever dignity he ever had many years before he became the cross between Mussolini and a windup monkey that he is today.

     Dignity.  Sometimes it's all you have left when life is over.  Keep it intact.     

Random Thoughts

April 24, 2020

Cathedral City, California

     First, let me get this out and off my chest.  I'm sick and tired of Elon Musk and his car company and his silly space ideas and his big proposed bullshit solutions to big problems, solutions that never materialize.  Most of all, I'm tired of seeing his weird face plastered all over the news.  He looks like he's from another planet, so maybe he should just go back home, already.  Those of you who don't live in California probably don't see as much of him as I do, because he's based out here and he and his Tesla company are the darlings of local industry.  But I'm reasonably sure you see more of him than is warranted by anything he actually does.  I mean, come on!  Electric cars?  They were around before the internal combustion engine caught on.  Nothing new by way of technology there, folks.    Well, I'm glad we had this little talk.  Now on to some other more important things.

     Like many of you, I've been cautiously venturing out to the grocery store on occasion, to lay in provisions, like they used to say in the cowboy TV shows.  "Where's your paw, Mark?"  "He went into town to get provisions."  This would be a once-a-month kind of thing, with the Rifleman, or Hoss Cartwright, or whoever, going to the mercantile store and buying a wagon load of flour, some sorghum (whatever the hell that is), hard tack biscuits, bacon, and lard.  You know, the stuff you need for everyday eating.  Well, like the pioneers of old, I foray every two weeks or so into my local mercantile, namely Walmart, to get a shitload of stuff.  On each successive trip I notice new virus-prevention safety measures in place, making me wonder why many of them weren't in place a month or more ago.  Yesterday I went, and for the first time I didn't see a single person without a mask.  Great.  Some people wore them sulkily, as if they were children who were only following the rules because they HAD to, but most wore them dutifully and with some hope that they'd do some good.  There are also now, in theory at least, one-way aisles, to reduce the amount of passing too closely with carts.  The signage in this regard is rather subtle, even wimpy, with little one-foot squares on the floor at the beginning of each aisle indicating whether you should not enter, in red, or "walk this way" green signs with arrows.  (These latter got me to singing "Walk This Way" by Aerosmith over and over in my head as I strolled the aisles.)  The thing is, people who grocery shop are not looking at the floor all that much, because, let's face it, the groceries are not on the floor.  The more observant and better-informed-in-advance among us did notice the directional signs, but many--perhaps a third or more--did not, and simply wandered up and down the aisles irrespective of whether they were going the right way or not.  Once a woman in front of me chewed somebody out for this, but for the most part the failure to observe the directional signs went unnoticed, or at least only silently noticed, as we all concentrated on our tasks at hand, and some of us on keeping the hell away from other people.  Even the staff didn't try to enforce the directional signs.  In fact, our friendly Walmart customer service crew seemed to be the least observant of any of the rules; though they all wore masks, they continued to gather together closely in little tete-a-tetes as if the mere fact of wearing masks made them invulnerable and immune.  Or maybe they're just being fatalistic, considering the inherent danger of their low-paid, no future jobs.  Like coal miners of old.  But talk about setting bad examples for the shopping public, particularly because where I shop is under what you might call a triple edict:  a local Palm Springs municipal order to wear masks and keep at least 6 feet away from anyone else; a Riverside County fiat to do the same; and a social distancing order of a similar nature from the California state governor, suggesting masks but not ordering them. 

     These trips to the store have been, as I say, an adventure on a par with Chuck Connors taking the wagon into town through Indian territory.  (This latter comment is not completely a joke, since a good portion of the land in the City of Palm Springs, perhaps half of it, is in fact owned by the Agua Caliente band of Cahuilla Indians, and rented to the local white man, including possibly the land on which Walmart is situated.)  As an observer of the human condition, I have been noticing, for several shopping trips during the virus crisis, that grocery shoppers are a singularly preoccupied lot.  I've only noticed this because I'm on alert, otherwise I'd be just as preoccupied.  Shoppers are on a mission, hunting and gathering, and tend to get lost in thought or mystified while looking for something high on a shelf.  For many, if not most, shoppers, this general approach to shopping has not abated much at all.  It's as if most people are incapable of the potentially life-saving multi-tasking required of them in these times.  One of course wants to buy groceries, as always.  But one also ought to want to be mindful of others, and to steer clear of them.  Not so, at least for the majority of folks.  They just get lost in their little worlds, as they always have done when grocery shopping.  Think about it: when was the last time anybody at a grocery store gave a shit about anybody else except in the most perfunctory way?  Sure, you try not to run into anybody or kick any children, but otherwise, it's every shopper for him- or herself. and the devil take the hindmost.  Today we're in a unique situation where we are being asked to take not only our own health and safety into consideration, but simultaneously the health and safety of others.  It's as if someone asked us to make sure the people driving next to us had their seat belts fastened.  Absurd, right?  Who gives a shit about the person next to you on the road, as long as they don't hit you.

     Now we're being asked to stay away from each other not just to make sure we don't get sick, but to make sure they don't get sick from us, unbeknownst to us.  This latter half of the equation has proved to be too much for many--Republicans in particular, who by definition are not good at empathizing with or caring about anyone else, otherwise they wouldn't be Republicans.  In fact, this characteristic of Republicans (by which of course I mean Trump supporters) has been their hallmark lately, as they hide behind a perverted interpretation of the First Amendment to protest stay-at-home orders and get out and go back to doing what they feel like doing.   Well shit, we'd all like to get back to doing what we feel like doing--going to restaurants, walking closely beside others, not wearing masks.  But some of us, who appreciate the concept of the common good, have decided to subordinate our immediate desires to that good.  Right wingers, led by the example set by their leader, are not only heedless and ignorant of the concept of the public good, but also apparently incapable of thinking of anyone but themselves.  Government of the selfish, by the selfish, and for the selfish is their credo as they careen down the highway of destiny.  Can you imagine anyone during the middle ages parading down the streets proclaiming their RIGHT to get the bubonic plague, or to give it to someone else?  People would have thought they were crazy.  They barely understood the disease, or the germ theory of disease, in anything like the way we understand it today, but one thing everyone knew was that they sure as fuck didn't want to get it, and if they could help it, they didn't want to give it to anyone else.

     Well, that's Republicans for you.  As someone once said, you can't argue with stupid. 

       

Finding It

April 15, 2020

Cathedral City, California

     The other day my daughter Katie said, "During this time, instead of losing it ... I think I'll find it."

     She may have meant this as a joke, or perhaps as a bit of self-reassurance.  Or maybe both.  But the statement carries with it the seeds of inspiration.  It would be pretty easy to lose it, as they say, during this period of forced self-isolation.  The initial chaos of sudden confinement settles into routine, and routines give way to monotony, and monotony begins to fray nerves and to magnify the tiny bumps of daily life, so that like the Princess and the Pea we become conscious of ordinarily imperceptible irritants.  In this regard I feel fortunate.  I've put my pickiness on hold out of necessity.  And I am particularly lucky that I get along with my wife quite well, and that she's put her pickiness on hold too.

     I am not by nature either a Princess or a Polyanna.  I think I'm what you might call very cautiously optimistic.  It seems to be the best overall approach to the world, for me at least.  For some it might not be enough positivity.  For others it might be silly, given the grim realities of life, especially now, but really, any time.  After all, life ends in death for all of us, but we spend those lives either ignoring that fact or postponing thinking about it, or making up fairy tales about an afterlife.

     With regard to the current virus crisis, I try to keep a balance between full awareness of the knowledge of the harsh likelihoods of the immediate future and the rather intriguing and encouraging pieces of information that daily make themselves known--things like medical device manufacturing, drug testing, statistical analysis of trends including the prediction of the rising and flattening of the curves of the disease.  There are also the uncountable instances of human kindness and bravery--indispensable public servants staying on the job, health care workers overextending themselves for the sake of others, grocery store employees continuing to work what in the very best of times must be pretty shitty jobs.  And then there are those who exemplify human stupidity and shortsightedness--people congregating outside shoulder to shoulder, certain types of stores staying open for no good reason, preachers holding live church services, people thinking that because they feel pretty good they should be able to act as if nothing's going on.  And that's not even counting the almost supernatural ignorance, selfishness, and mendacity of the man who is supposed to be leading the country.

     Finding it, so to speak, has become a pastime with me during my isolation.  I'd already been using the usual streaming services for movies and other television entertainment, as well as online versions of magazines and local and national newspapers.  But I've found some really interesting statistical websites for use in tracking the virus throughout the world, thanks mostly to my wife.  For some, these detailed statistics might be too much information about an unpleasant situation.  For others, who are not accustomed to using the internet for research or verification purposes, but only for exchanging vapid social pleasantries and believing everything they're told, such real statistical information might be inaccessible, given their limited outlooks and imaginations.  For me, it's a sort of tonic that, if taken in moderation, helps me to understand things as they change.  Italy's curve is beginning to flatten, slowly, for example.  They had the lowest daily death count today since a month ago.  China is doing pretty damned well, too.  The U.S. now accounts for almost 40% of all active cases of the virus worldwide.  Bulgaria, for some reason, is doing pretty well, probably because nobody gives a shit about it and they don't go there.  Closer to home, the Coachella Valley death count has been pretty stable, and pretty low, for a couple of weeks.  Maybe that will change, and maybe not.  Tune in tomorrow.  All of these things provide me with grist for the mill in my mind that tries to make rational sense of the situation without getting too optimistic or too pessimistic.

     The people for whom I condescend to feel most sorry these days are not those who get their "news" from Facebook (God help them), but those who rely on, and keep their television sets tuned to, 24-hour TV news services for their information, even the more "liberal" ones like CNN and MSNBC, because as watchers they must live with the constant "breaking news" harangues from the talking heads who really have very little to talk about on the busiest days, and must stretch it out into endless hours of palaver.  The same thing happens when you read the newspapers, with their meaningless "human interest" stories about "one town's struggle," and all that horseshit, but at least you can just turn the page of a newspaper.  But that's not the worst part:  all of these TV news services put the ugly face of the president in front of us on a daily basis, often for long stretches at a time.  Sure, it's often to criticize him afterwards, but the truth is that he gets so much free publicity from the news that after a while people get used to seeing him.  That's the worst part--getting used to seeing him.  It's like turning on the History Channel and seeing Hitler and Nazis all the time.  That simply isn't healthy for the human mind, even if the shows end with their demise and that of the Third Reich.  It regularizes evil, and dulls us to images of evil.  The same goes with pictures of Trump.  If you hate the guy, seeing him too often will make you get used to him, and you shouldn't get used to someone or something you hate--it's just not healthy, because eventually you'll lose your perspective and start relying on the regular consumption of the images of the person or thing you hate.  That's why churches don't put pictures of Satan up everywhere, for crying out loud.  It doesn't make sense.  Sure, everyone knows about Satan, but they don't have to see pictures of him all the time to understand that he's evil.  If they put images or stained glass windows of him everywhere, pretty soon people would start worshiping him, because, let's face it, he's a lot more interesting-looking than Jesus is, even in his nude homoerotic agony on the cross.  The same thing has happened in reverse to viewers of Fox News with respect to Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, the socialist congresswoman from New York City.  They hate her so much that they publish stories about her almost every day, whereas the Democrats and their followers have adopted a ho-hum attitude toward her.  Yeah, they say, let her be the voice of the left wing of the party, but after all, she's a freshman with practically no power, and not even old enough to run for president, so just let her talk.  Meanwhile, I guarantee you, if you want to know anything about AOC, as she's known, you have to go to Fox News, where they love to hate her so much that she's developed almost a cult revulsion following.  It doesn't hurt that she's easy on the eyes (just imagine if Trump were that attractive what a mess we'd be in), because one thing Fox News knows better than any other network is that cute women attract viewers, which is why the average Fox News person on air is an attractive blonde.  I will bet you dollars to donuts that the die-hard Fox News male watchers are sitting in their recliners jacking off to AOC just as much as they are to any of the rest of them.

     But aside from the news, with the help of friends I've found such things as a website containing tens of thousands of books whose copyrights are expired, just ready for easy streaming onto my laptop.  And of course if one wishes to pay money, there are endless more recent books as well.  Since I am a devotee of 19th century British and American fiction I am in hog heaven, reading Conan Doyle, Balzac, Dreiser, and others.  Once you scrunch the pages down to the width of a book page, they're pretty easy to read. 

     Another thing I've found is an increased need to communicate with my friends and an excuse to do so.  Also, I have found an interest in my extended family that is more than abstract.  For some this might have been the way of things before this crisis, but for me, as a person naturally prone to isolate, it was not.  Somehow enforced isolation brings with it more of a tendency to reach out than the regular shutting out of the world did before. 

     And to put a final point on all this, I have found small pleasures in small things, like birdsong and flowering bushes and small animals and various types of weather, that somehow never made much difference to me before.  "Glory be to God for dappled things" as Gerard Manley Hopkins said.

     All of this might emanate from a kind of semi-mad stir craziness that will fade away when the virus does.  That remains to be seen.  I hope not, because I've found some pretty good things.   

Home, For Now

March 29, 2020

Cathedral City, California

     The RV park where we're staying is pretty nice, as these things go.  Last year we stayed at a place that was much more redolent of trailer park than RV park, if you know what I mean.  There were permanent residents, as there are here, but many of them had converted their small pull-behind trailers into tiny houses, complete with little plastic picket fences, lawn trolls, and Japanese lanterns.  These were, for the most part, people who couldn't afford to live anywhere else and who would have decorated their lawns like that even if they lived in regular houses, replete with year-round Christmas lights.  From the open screen doors of their dwellings came the jagged coughs of elderly smokers and the rough baritones of whiskey-voiced women.  Life had ridden most of those folks hard and put them away wet, and what they had to show for it was a trailer and a few square yards of crappy living space.  To be sure, there were a number of spaces there for transient vacationers such as ourselves, but the atmosphere was, shall we say, mixed.

     This year's dwelling place is a cut or two above that.  As I said, there are a few year-rounders, but all of them, and the majority of the rest of the occupants, have large nearly-new class A motor homes or spacious fifth wheels of the sleek variety, often exceeding 40 feet in length, with three or four sliders.  Having attended several annual RV shows at the Pomona Fairplex in LA County, I know that the class A's of that size often cost over $250,000 new, and the fifth wheels about half that.  Our modest 2006 32-foot class A looks perfectly respectable, but somewhat small and doughty, by comparison.  And we bought it when it was 11 years old, so it cost less than one of the overpowered four-door pickup trucks that seem to be the vehicle of choice for pulling a fifth wheel.

     Perhaps half the denizens of this park hail from Canada, and mostly from British Columbia.  A fair number of the park dwellers, and the Canadians, are male gay couples.  However, in light of the acceleration of the coronavirus epidemic, most of the Canadians cleared out at least a week ago, heading for an uncertain border crossing and what they assume will be a 14-day quarantine once they get home.  The mass migration of the Canadians, like that of the painted lady butterflies hereabouts or the monarchs over in the California central coast, was to be expected anyway, but not for another month or so.  Entomologists might say, "Well, the Canadians are a little early this year."  These Canadians are restricted to no more than 182 days (I think) per year in the U.S., and if they overstay their welcome here in the land of the free, they risk being prohibited from re-entering for up to five years.  And worse yet, from their point of view, if they stay for a half year or more they will be subject to U.S. and, I presume, California income taxes.  Despite their unfettered leisure time and apparent affluence, which permits them, despite the comparative weakness of the Canadian dollar, to spend their time in quarter-million-dollar RVs, and travel back and forth to California (not to mention for some of them the Mexican Pacific resort areas), they seem to regard the whole subject of the virus and forced social distancing (which they don't observe very well, considering that most of them are in a vulnerable demographic group), as something of a joke, and really, more of an annoyance than anything else.  Perhaps it's in their national character to act mildly annoyed and bemused by just about everything, as a sort of antidote to what they may justly regard as the U.S. tendency toward shrill hysteria.  I don't know. 

     Fortunately for most of them, the weather in the Vancouver area, where they are principally from, is comparatively mild in April.  There is a couple from Ontario still here, and they're not going anywhere just yet, for obvious reasons.  That leaves a smattering of U.S. folks, mostly from places like Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and South Dakota, from whence, like us, they've come to miss out on winter.  And the year-rounders I mentioned.  It's rare to see a motor home from east of the Mississippi, or from south of the Mason-Dixon line.  Folks out there go to Florida or just stay where they are. 

     And speaking of staying where you are, we are doing just that.  The virus situation is unfolding and unforgiving and changing so rapidly that it's not even worth going into detail about it here.  You can read the newspapers or the online stuff, and anything I say now will be at least partly obsolete tomorrow.  We're staying in and taking walks around the sparsely populated park and doing lots of reading and some TV streaming, which in truth is what we were doing anyway, except that now there's no going out for sushi and Thai and Mexican and to the movies.  I go out every ten days or so to the grocery store and take all the precautions I can short of wearing a hazmat suit.  This is life for most of us around the world, so I'm not telling you anything.  And if it's not life for you, then you're a fucking fool, and a dangerous one at that, unless you have the misfortune of being a healthcare worker, grocery store employee, or cop or firefighter, in which case I wish you the best and urge you, in the case of the cops, not to shoot anybody.