Depression, Anyone?

Monday, September 17, 2012

Monrovia, California

Okay, nostalgia in politics, as promised. 

One of the most useful rules in political and social analysis, or in life itself for that matter, is always to question the underlying assumption upon which any argument is based.  That includes, for instance, the so-called “birther” question regarding Barack Obama, which proceeds from the premise that if he wasn’t born in the U.S., he can’t be president.  Not true, as I’ve shown in an earlier posting.

Another assumption that underpins the very foundation of our national identity, on which both parties agree fulsomely, is that the United States is “the Greatest Country in the World.”  There are, I’ll wager, at least a hundred other extant countries that would seriously question that one, yet we persist in it.   We are the noisiest, maybe, but not necessarily the greatest, somewhat like Muhammad Ali in his later boxing years.  But after all, such a claim is more bravado than reality, based on military superiority, at least in terms of the ability to obliterate the earth with nuclear weapons and send warships just about anywhere in no time.  In terms of offering social justice, legal stability, and economic protection to our citizens, as opposed to just the ability to make money hand over fist, we don’t measure up to some of our European friends, not to mention our neighbor to the north.  But then, what country doesn’t like to think its own shit is comparatively odorless? It seems to be inherent in the nature of nationhood.

Yet another assumption, just picking them at random, is that we as a country “must maintain a Strong National Defense.”  This one goes back to the days when we were actually in danger of being attacked and occupied by another country, which was a long time ago.  To be exact, the last time our continental borders were penetrated (unless you count Pancho Villa’s brief foray into a southern New Mexico town in 1916) was two centuries ago, during the War of 1812.  Today, beyond having the technology for the assured destruction of most mammalian life and a world-class arsenal of military and naval hardware in order to slap around those who dare to insult us anywhere in the world, what other national defense do we need, exactly?  Do we have serious military rivals, and if we do, what do we have to fear from them?  Does anyone believe soldiers are going to march over here and kill the goose that lays the worldwide golden egg?  Even those who hark back to the Big One, WWII, must know that it wasn’t so much for ourselves we fought as for a stable world order in the areas beyond our own shores.  Does anyone think the Japanese wanted to hobble our navy at Pearl Harbor so they could rule us?  I rather think they wished to control Asia and the Pacific Ocean—their own back yard, in other words—no small ambition, but not exactly tantamount to making the people of Washington speak Nipponese and wear sashes and samurai swords.  More to the point, eleven years ago, when a cadre of suicide hijackers wreaked real and symbolic havoc on the nation in the course of a sunny September morning, were they out to put us all to the sword of Islam and make us pray to Mecca five times a day, or to make a point about U.S. cultural imperialism and show their own fanatical seriousness and insecurity?

I wonder how much a “Strong National Defense” helped us, either before or after 9/11?  Better intelligence gathering might have been useful, but after over a decade of protracted military adventure and bloodshed abroad, in which many tens of thousands of people have been killed in direct or indirect retaliation for this act, it turns out that the best defense against a repeat of the fiasco of 9/11 lies in the analysis of the event itself, not in some far-off Kissingerian global military strategy.  We are safer from suicide bombings today more than anything else—far more, in fact—because of two fairly simple things.  The first is those pain-in-the-ass TSA people who scrutinize our luggage and our bodies at the airport, and about whom we love to complain.  The second is the universal realization, as suddenly and unfortunately as it came upon us, that hijackers will not necessarily take you to the tarmac in Cuba for a couple of hours and then let you go home.  In light of this knowledge and what’s been done in response to it, it’s pretty likely that anyone who attempts to hijack a plane these days will be either shot or pummeled, and that they won’t make it into the cockpit in any event.  The result of these two things is that the number of hijackings in the U.S. since September 11, 2001 has been reduced to exactly zero.  Not bad compared to any other eleven-year period since the dawn of commercial aviation.  Hijacking attempts, even elsewhere in the world, have been scarce.  And precious little of this improvement can be attributed to the dubious activities of “Our Brave Fighting Men and Women, On the Ground, in Harm’s Way, PROTECTING OUR FREEDOM,” etc.  Protecting our freedom?  Seriously???  What freedom is that, our freedom to kick ass in the Middle East and west Asia?

It seems that the right, which is fonder of pointing out our nearly divine greatness as a nation than the left is, paradoxically likes to keep us in fear by assuring us constantly not of our might but of our vulnerability and weakness from a defensive point of view.  Anything unseemly that happens in the world is deemed a threat to our national security, as if such security could be so easily threatened.  That seems like paranoia, which as I understand it is a characteristic not of strength but of an inherent weakness of mind.

Shifting gears, here’s another national assumption, bandied about freely by both political parties.  It is said we are in the grip of “the Worst Economic Crisis Since the Great Depression.”  Pretty much all of us have accepted this one without questioning it.  Just looking at the unemployment numbers does seem to sort of bear it out at first blush.  In 1933, after four years of the government of Herbert Hoover allowing capitalism to repair its own mess, unemployment peaked in the U.S. at about 24%.  Throughout the remainder of the decade of the 1930s it never went below about 17%, and in 1938 it was back up to 19%, only beginning to break, like a long fever, by 1940 as the government began putting people to work manufacturing war materiel for the Allies.  In 2009 and 2010 nationwide unemployment flirted with 10% for the first and only time since the early 1980s.  That’s a far cry from the situation in the 1930s.  (Note, however, that all these numbers are somewhat suspect, since the way of calculating unemployment during the past 70 years has changed almost as frequently as presidential administrations have.) 

Still, an economic crisis is a Crisis, or will become a Crisis, when people tell us long enough and often enough that it is, by God, a Crisis.  People have become so fond of using the phrase “in this economy” that it has lost its meaning, if it ever had one, except as a catchphrase employed by hucksters.  To be sure, many people did lose their shirts, or at least their retirement golf shirts, because of the increasing reliance on the stock market as the ultimate touchstone of our economy, and because of the market-linked privatization of both public and private pensions over the years since Reagan, cheered on by the Republicans and their Wall Street masters.  The crisis, folks, wasn’t so much due to the mini-crash of 2008 (no greater than the crash of 2000 or a handful of others between 1929 and now), but to the kind of unregulated crap large brokerage houses were selling and pension funds were investing in, and because ordinary people had been lured by unscrupulous bankers (is that repetitious?) into accepting credit they didn’t deserve in the first place and couldn’t have afforded to pay back even if there had been no crisis. 

So are we in the midst of the Worst Economic Crisis Since the Great Depression?  And what does that mean, in context?  One thing about this idea is that it makes us somehow feel as if what’s happening now is nearly as bad as the Great Depression was, when it’s simply not.  In reality, it’s more like saying, “I just broke my toe, and that’s the worst injury I’ve had since I broke both my legs at once.”  True enough, perhaps, and painful enough, but ….  Let’s look at the country at the beginning of the Great Depression and compare life then, in 1929, to ours.  No unemployment compensation, no Social Security, no Medicare, no Medicaid, no legal aid, no student aid.  No civil rights, no women’s rights, no Miranda rights, no worker’s rights.  No interstate highways, no civil aviation, no rural electrification, no refrigeration.  No antibiotics, no open heart surgery, no DNA testing, no effective treatments for cancer.  No TV, no cell phones, no internet, no cheap fast food.  In fact, very few of the things we take for granted today, even when we’re laid off and laid up. 

Most of the protections we take for granted—government-based pensions and government-enforced protections, in particular—were the result of progressivism fostered by the political left, and not because of trickle-down market-based economics.  What few people ever bother to point out is that after eight years—two full terms—Franklin Roosevelt hadn’t brought down unemployment by more than a few points from that 24% high.  Shit was still bad, and people didn’t have any money.  In part that was because FDR faced, as Obama does, an obstructionist Congress and a Republican-dominated Supreme Court, both of which fought him.  But he still managed to secure for us rudimentary government pensions and a few other things, like legal collective bargaining (that one, sadly, has fallen by the wayside a bit).  Part of the lack of economic progress was because problems which are slow to develop are often slow to be remediated.  This is not something people like to hear.  We want instant gratification, and if we don’t get it, we’re willing to turn things over to the other party and see what happens, even if that other party was primarily responsible for creating the problem.  Fortunately for this country and for all of us today, we did not give ourselves back to the Republicans in 1936.

The claim about this being the Worst Economic Crisis Since the Great Depression does serve to make the president’s job look really tough, but that cuts both ways.  On the one hand, if he doesn’t make much headway against the relentless forces of capitalism, he gets to talk about how nearly impossible his job is and to beg for four more years.  But the other side gets to blame him for not turning things around quickly enough, and if they get into office they’ll take credit for the inevitable upturn things will eventually take.

This is the life we have chosen by hitching our wagon to the star of free enterprise, or a market economy, or whatever euphemism you wish to use for capitalism.  By its nature it is not nice, nor does it care about your job or your welfare or your medical care or your future.  You are simply a commodity whose usefulness will one day come to an end and when that happens, capitalism does not care what becomes of you.  Our national schizophrenia is based on our belief that this essentially heartless economic system can somehow be made kinder and gentler.  Both parties are wrong about this.  With the Republicans it will be unleashed to roam the streets and devour whatever it can.  With the Democrats it will get brought in the house and whipped once in a while but still be allowed outside most of the time.

What does all this have to do with nostalgia?  Nostalgia is the sentimental longing for the past.  When we say we’re the Greatest Country in the World, we long for the three or four years after World War II when we imposed the Pax Americana on much of the world and no one seriously challenged us.  When we say we need a Strong National Defense, we long for the half dozen years of glory that came two centuries ago after we finally rid the British of the notion that they could reclaim us as a colony.  When we invoke the Great Depression we aren’t wishing for the return of its wretched poverty caused by twelve years of runaway Republicanism, but for one of the only two decades in living memory, together with the 1960s, when the government was actively dedicated to using its power to improve the lot of its citizens rather than merely to allow the wealthy to become more so.

The combination of the adjective “Great” with the word “Depression” isn’t really meant to convey the magnitude of the economic crisis, in the sense that “great” means large; it is to suggest that two rather good things took place during that period, in spite of the undeniable privations so many endured.  First, we had a duly elected leader that the majority of people loved and trusted and even revered, in a way we haven’t felt about a president since.  And the guy came through for us in a number of ways.  Second, during this time we acted, out of desperation or good sense or both, in a collective manner as a people, and not as greedy, bitching self-serving individuals.  In spite of the relentless propaganda to the contrary from the right, this country has always has been at its best when we have acted together for our common welfare and for the betterment of those less fortunate than most of us are--when we are under the influence, as Lincoln said, of "the better angels of our nature."   What we may be secretly hoping for is that we’re in the midst of the Best Economic Crisis Since the Great Depression, not the worst.  It will not be, however.  And that’s a little depressing.     

Dobie

Wednesday, September 12, 2012

Monrovia, California

Television, like life, is a fast-moving target, and only the young really have the mental flexibility to move along with it without balking a little and wishing, like Lot’s wife, to take a peek backwards.  (Some shows, like Lucy, are lauded for their durability and near-universality when the truth is that, like the clock on the old town hall, they’ve simply never stopped running long enough for anyone to decide whether or not they should be replaced.)  I haven’t yet completely digested the idea of the “reality” show, and the concept is already twenty years old or more, and in its third or fourth avatar, having picked up, since the days of the lost-on-a-desert-island concept, things as disparate as dysfunctional Hollywood families, deep-sea fishing, auctioning the contents of storage units, dealing with deeply neurotic hoarders, and creating elegant meals out of a variety of absurd ingredients.  Every time I turn around they’re riffing on this idea in a new way.  I’m convinced that it will come full circle, turning around on itself until the subject of a reality show is a bunch of people engaged in the creation of a fictional one, after which the creative process will drop from view and only the show will air.  Voila.   

On the subject of television, I read in the local paper a week or two ago an obituary for a guy named Steve Franken, the actor who played Chatsworth Osborne, Jr. on the Dobie Gillis show back in the late 50s and early 60s.  I must pay my respects to him, as much because of the show as because of his part in it.

One of the advantages of living in this area is that the Los Angeles Times has a tendency to feature the obituaries of such comparatively minor TV and movie actors as Steve Franken in detail, partly because out here entertainment is the major local industry.  I’ve mentioned this before, but I’m sure the half page on the guy who played Chatsworth Osborne, Jr. and supporting characters in a bunch of other schlock movies and TV shows is somewhat akin to the kind of coverage the Detroit Free Press might give to the dying of a lesser light in the automotive industry.  Maybe, anyway, if anyone in Detroit cares about that.  And for all I know the Cleveland Plain Dealer gave old Steve Franken a big write-up, too.  I use the term “old” advisedly, as one of my favorite professors at U of M used to say, since Steve Franken had attained the age of 80, something to give all of us pause when we remember how short a time ago it was that we were school kids sitting on the floor in front of our TV sets watching the likes of Dobie and Chatsworth and the bearded Maynard G. Krebs.  It’s a little bit of a comfort to remember that they were using actors in their twenties and thirties to play high school students in that and other programs, as they still often do (I mean, look at the photo of the guy--he's already going bald), and that Tuesday Weld, the teenage dish in that show, was indeed only 16 during the single season she was on it.

The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, as it was officially titled, was probably my favorite TV show of all time until Seinfeld appeared years later.   It ran for four seasons, from 1959 to 1963, and then no doubt in reruns.  I say it was my favorite knowing it’s in competition, for me, with Leave It To Beaver, The Beverly Hillbillies, 77 Sunset Strip, and several others.  But no other show brought me so regularly to the set as did the Dobie Gillis show, or intrigued me so much.  Part of that was the good writing of its creator, Max Schulman, and the dependable characters in it, silly sometimes, but not possessing the complete buffoonery of many of the stars in the sitcom galaxy.  They were writ rather large, but weren’t completely absurd, and were, most importantly, never downright stupid.  It was a completely dialogue-driven show, lacking for the most part the signature physical comedic touches of, say, Lucille Ball or Jackie Gleason, or the situational twists and turns that beset poor Beaver Cleaver and his pals.  The central theme was always the same—Dobie was in love with some girl he couldn’t quite obtain, and was pursuing her.  The lines were almost always delivered, by whichever character, in a sort of rapid-fire rote way, emphasizing the prettiness of the words rather than of the people themselves.

These characters included Dobie, a lovesick high school swain played by Dwayne Hickman; Maynard G. Krebs, his beatnik friend, played by Bob Denver (a better and wittier character than Gilligan by far); Dobie’s harried and exasperated grocer father Herbert T. Gillis, portrayed by the veteran B movie actor Frank Faylen; and several others, including Dobie’s longsuffering mom Winnie (Florida Friebus); his schoolmate and pursuer Zelda Gilroy (Sheila James); and Dobie’s femme fatale Thalia Menninger, always slightly beyond his reach because she was the original material girl, played as a cross between Marilyn Monroe and Lolita by Tuesday Weld.  Dobie’s nemesis was this rich, polo-playing cad named Chatsworth Osborne, Jr., who was always winning Thalia and other girls away from him by virtue of his wealthy insouciance.  That was the late Steve Franken, who replaced, after the first few episodes, another rich guy character named Milton Armitage, played by none other than Warren Beatty, who decided he could do better than TV, and indeed did.  Beatty’s departure from the show was a blessing in disguise for the Dobie Gillis people, since as between him and Steve Franken, the latter was by far the better choice to play a completely vapid spoiled millionaire, whose mother (whom he called “Mumsy”), a busty, dignified matron, was fond of frequently saying of her son that he was “a nasty boy,” just like his father, the late Chatsworth, Sr.

In asserting the quality of these characters compared to some of their dopey comedic successors and predecessors, I do not mean to say they were necessarily more realistic or entertaining to the majority of viewers.  Rather, they were endowed by their creator with a certain literateness singularly lacking in such personages as Jethro Bodine or Darren Stevens or Archie Bunker.  This was due largely to the writing, but also reflected the times, when television was coming out of a period during which it had to some extent been envisioned as the successor to the movies, and many of its writers—Rod Serling and Dobie’s own Max Schulman, for instance—came from a James Jones and Nelson Algren-influenced era when hard biting social commentary was prized, and when comedy was thought to be better when it contained a little witty repartee, rather than just slapstick.  That was before it became overwhelmingly obvious that as a medium television’s dramatic and comedic scope, like its screen, was to be much smaller.  Max Schulman as a writer/creator was sort of slumming here, and was later superseded by the somewhat more hacky but durable likes of Sidney Sheldon and Sol Saks, and later (unfortunately) Norman Lear, none of whom had Schulman’s flair for writing.

At any rate, I became a devotee of Dobie Gillis and his friends, family, and many loves.  To this day I have a two-foot bronze-colored plaster version of Auguste Rodin’s Thinker, which isn’t in homage to the great French sculptor but rather to the replica of that work in the fictional park where, under its shadow, Dobie began and ended each episode with a little monologue directed at the camera and the viewers.  (This bit of self-conscious narration was, arguably, the predecessor of the voiceover breaking-of-character line, “Now, I know what you’re thinking,” employed frequently some years later by Tom Selleck’s character in Magnum P.I.)  It was also from watching Dobie Gillis that I learned the word “propinquity,” which Zelda Gilroy said was the reason she and Dobie were destined to be together, since her last name followed his alphabetically, and thus ensured that they would always sit near each other in school.  Now you tell me, did you ever learn a word like that from another situation comedy?

But I wish to take pains to assure the reader that I’m not wallowing in nostalgia here, like some Republican, pining for the good old days of television.  Back then, as now, there were lots of repetitious cop and doctor shows, as well as “professional” wrestling.  In addition, there were endless cowboy programs and absurd variety shows featuring people juggling Indian clubs and balancing multiple pie plates on the ends of multiple bamboo sticks.  Not to mention Topo Gigio, the puppet mouse, which for some reason (maybe a secret deal with the Vatican?) Ed Sullivan featured practically every other week.  Scratch the surface of any diatribe against modernity and what you’ll invariably find is that the golden age of whatever is being inveighed against was when the inveigher was about 12 years old, which tells you not that things were better then, but simply that the person wishes to be 12 again.  And that’s about the age I was when The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis aired.  And I’m aware that if I were to watch the show today I might be disappointed—that its greatness is in my head somewhere, not on the celluloid.

Which brings us to nostalgia as it applies to politics.  But that’s for another posting.

Going Full Retard

Friday, August 24, 2012

Monrovia, California

Today’s posting is really just a place holder, to let you know I’m still alive and watching the inevitable unfold, as you are.  Weird things will happen, stupid things will be said, and the media will cover it all as if it were a made-for-TV drama, which of course it is.  In the end Barack Obama will win.

But first, the latest from the Republican camp.  The person I was suggesting as an ideal vice presidential running mate for Mitt Romney, Marco Rubio, didn’t make the cut.  Good news, however, since the guy who is the apparent choice is an even bigger and more conservative nut bar than anyone could have hoped for.  He’s Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, a fellow who will make life easy for both cartoonists and pundits, since he already looks and behaves like a caricature of himself.  Wow.  I saw a photo of Romney and Ryan together, and the bubble above Romney, who bore a brave grimace, could easily have read “What the hell was I thinking?”  In fact, it reminded me of the pasted-on smile poor old John McCain bore for the two months after they gave him his running mate.

Paul Ryan has to be Barack Obama’s dream come true, or his second one, if you count Romney as the first.  Just wind them up and let them do the damage to themselves.  In the past Ryan has been an advocate of privatizing Social Security and Medicare, and giving vouchers to the elderly.  Vouchers for what, I’m not sure, maybe for discounts at Walmart.  Let them eat generic cheese puffs.  Evidently the folks who are running the Romney campaign have decided they need to capture the votes they already have anyway.  I mean, what are all the anti-gay, pro-gun, anti-immigrant, pro-life people going to do, vote for Obama?  Not likely.  Nor would they stay home in droves and let their party’s chances sink even lower.  They really have no choice but to go with Romney and whoever runs with him—Hitler, Pope Pius XII, Chiang Kai-shek.  The alternative is to let that rug-headed crypto-Muslim pinko one-worlder back in the front door of the White House to scare the wealthy for four more years.  Face it people, the president is just not a job-creator.  You have to be a proven job-destroyer before you can qualify as a job-creator according to the Republican way of thinking.  It’s all part of the intricate yin and yang of jobs, apparently.  How can you help the domestic economy if you’ve never been personally involved in hurting it?

The simple fact is that the Republicans have ignored the sage admonition Robert Downey, Jr.’s character delivered to Ben Stiller’s in Tropic Thunder: they’ve gone Full Retard.  And everybody knows you never go Full Retard.  One retard on the ticket, okay.  Dan Quayle, retarded; George H.W. Bush, not retarded.  George W. Bush, retarded; Dick Cheney, homicidal but not retarded.  John McCain, not retarded; Sarah Palin, well Duh.  

When it relinquished its bigoted southern white half to the Republicans, starting during the civil rights movement in the 60s, the Democratic Party quite fortunately also lost its need to placate and pander to that most mean-spirited element of the American electorate.  The result was a smaller party, numerically, but also a slightly purer one.  For that reason the Democrats have also eliminated the need for ticket balancing through the selection of a vice presidential candidate, though the pretense of it, for purely atavistic old-time politicky reasons, continues.  But in truth both Democratic candidates could be from the same state, or for that matter the same city, and it wouldn’t signify much.  Joe Biden certainly wasn’t important from a vote-getting perspective, except for the fact that he was white.  After all, he’s from Delaware, a state that means next to nothing in either popular or electoral votes, or in any other way.  Democrats are Democrats, and mostly these days they’re from the comparatively intelligent urban, or at least urbane, areas of the country, where people grasp, however imperfectly, the idea of social justice.

On the rare occasion when a southern state goes Democratic these days, it’s probably because the black voter turnout is higher than normal and they combine with the white urban and suburban moderates (i.e., the limp-wristed folks who oppose lynching as a tool of public order) to push the state to the left (formerly known as the center).  North Carolina was a case in point in 2008.    But don’t expect lightning to strike twice there, even if the state has been rewarded with the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte this year.  The party conventions are merely for grabbing the media’s attention for a few days anyway, and mean nothing else.  “Mr. Chairman, the people of the Great State of South Dakota, home of the Corn Palace and the world’s largest annual rally of degenerate motorcyclists, proudly cast all of their votes for the next president of the United States….”  Ho hum.  Wake me when it’s over.

Born In The USA

July 20, 2012

Anaconda, Montana

Monrovia, California

Where’s the boy been? you might wonder.    

Back up in Big Sky country.  Climbed the “A hill," where the kids from Anaconda High School have constructed a fifty-foot letter "A" out of whitewashed rocks on the steep hillside a thousand feet above the city.  Each year next to the “A” they put temporary numerals, made of old tires painted white on one side, for the year of the class.  This I presume they do in the spring some time.  Then, probably during a night of revelry, the next year’s class rolls the tires back down from the “A” to the woods below.  So that explains the numerous half-white tires littering the hillside below the big letter.  I asked a local how they managed to re-whitewash the thousands of cubic-foot-sized rocks in the "A" each year, given the treacherous steepness of the climb from the last place where you can park a vehicle up to the letter itself.  His answer neatly combined logic and simplicity: “They make the freshmen and sophomores do it.”

Anaconda is a former copper mining and smelting town, a little over a mile above sea level.  Dashiell Hammett set his first novel, Red Harvest, there (his wife was an Anacondan and he spent a little time there himself).  He called it Personville, and the locals in his book called it Poisonville, an apt nickname given the toxic emissions from the smelting plant, which contained arsenic and other aromatic substances.  By 1929, when the novel appeared, Anaconda had gone through its heyday of radical union-led politics (during which the I.W.W. was strong and the Socialist Part of America actually briefly controlled the mayor’s office, the courts, and part of the city council), and the Anaconda Copper Company was once again firmly in control of things, thanks to Pinkerton thugs and other lowlife hired help, assisted by a lynching or two.  Hammett himself worked for the Pinkerton agency as a detective off and on during the teens and 20s, but probably not as an out-and-out union buster.  As a dapper guy of about 6 feet 2 who suffered from tuberculosis throughout his adult life and rarely weighed as much as 140, he was hardly thug material.  In any case, in later in life he atoned for his Pinkerton association by becoming a staunch left-winger who went to jail during the McCarthy era.  Nevertheless his years as a detective provided him with the material for his hard-boiled fiction.

Real-life old timers say that in the days when the smelter was running, trees wouldn’t grow in town because of the toxicity of the air.  You might say they were on permanent strike.  There is, or was, a bar on every corner and each evening streetcars let out the mostly Irish, Italian, and Eastern European miners and smelter workers to rehydrate themselves on every block of the narrow city set along the Pintler Range some ten miles west of Butte.  Since 1980 there’s been nothing left of the smelting operation but an unused 585 foot smokestack at the east end of town, half-hidden behind a mile-long miniature mountain of pure black slag from which all vegetation maintains a perpetual boycott.  But many of the bars remain—far above the average per capita number of watering holes—and Anaconda continues to host an annual regional dart contest as well as an adult softball tournament, both of which activities require plenty of booze to be conducted properly.  What was a working-class community of perhaps 40,000 is now a small town of fewer than 10,000, whose current lifeblood, if you can call it that, is a handful of seedy little casinos offering video poker and keno.  Even with its low population and moribund industrial base, Anaconda ranks as the ninth-largest city in the state of Montana, which should tell you something.  Oh, and in addition to the spectacular surrounding mountain scenery, a river runs through it.  (See my blog entry from about a year ago, called "Copper," for more about Anaconda.)

Then a side trip last week for two days to Yellowstone, about three hours from Anaconda.  From my one previous trip through, twenty years ago, I remembered the bison lumbering down the road, stopping traffic, and of course Old Faithful, but not a great deal else.  This time there were plenty of buffalo causing plenty of traffic jams (to the point where you found yourself saying, “Jesus, not another buffalo”), but also, and perhaps most magnificent, were the chance sightings of two rainbows, one on top of the other, over Yellowstone Lake after a rainstorm back at the big geyser.  They lasted forever, in the most vivid colors.  From there we went up to the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone River, with its waterfalls and crazy multicolored steep rock sides.

My journey across the country, which caused most of you to start reading this blog in the first place, is really officially over, as far as the serious walking is concerned.  That is, I have no present plans to take any more long walks.  I really have reached my destination, in Monrovia, where I now live.    

Now to shift gears.  I want to assure everyone that I was born in the United States, and am therefore eligible to be president.  Unless, of course, someone can prove (1) that my birth certificate from Oakland County, Michigan was forged; (2) that my mother, a tenth or twelfth generation American born and reared in the U.S., with ancestry going back to the pre-U.S. colonial era on the eastern seaboard (remarkably similar to the pedigree of Barack Obama’s mother, the anthropologist Ann Dunham), was not what I just said she was and instead carried me on her back across the dry Rio Grande one starless night; (3) that my father was also an alien; and (4) that I was born in Timbuktu or Borio-Boola-Gha or somewhere else outside the good old U.S.A.  Oh, and of course I would have to be a Democrat trying to effect some extremely modest lessening of the stranglehold Wall Street and other business interests have had on the nation since the days of Ronald Reagan, whom I like to refer to as The Great Satan.

If  I get over these hurdles and am elected (or perhaps elected under false pretenses due to an intensive left-wing conspiracy), under my government there would be some serious ‘splainin’ to do by a lot of people for their uncharitable behavior toward our current president.  In fact, I think I might just issue an executive order to have then lined up against the wall and shot.  Not the democratic way, I admit, but then I’ve never really been of the “malice toward none” school.

As with most legal issues that are completely misunderstood by the public at large, the answer to whether Barack Obama is eligible to be president is not as simple as it is being made out to be by those who currently exploit it.  A bogus intellectual shell game has been created by building the argument on a false premise.  The false premise on which the “birthers” base their fanatical search for flaws or forgeries or outright lies in the story of the origins of Barack Obama is that Obama had to have been born within the confines of the United States or its territories in order to qualify for the presidency.  Not true. The Constitution states that the president must be a “natural born citizen” of the United States and nothing more, except that he or she must have resided within the U.S. for a period of at least fourteen years and be at least 35 years old.  Both Obama and I qualify.

The phrase “natural born citizen” as it applies to a would-be president has never been interpreted by the Supreme Court, and would be what they call a case of first impression if it ever came before that august body.  Most of the historical jurisprudence on citizenship has revolved around the issue of whether freed slaves and other African Americans, as well as Asians, were entitled to be citizens.  (These questions, I am happy to report, have long since been laid to rest in favor of the nonwhite litigants.)  Of course back when the Constitution was written no president could really claim to have been born a U.S. citizen, since the U.S. didn’t exist officially until 1776, and the first chief executive to have been born after that date was Martin Van Buren, the ninth president.  It wasn’t until about the time of Abraham Lincoln that presidents started having parents who were also born after 1776.  So in those days the phrase “natural born citizen” of this country was, as they say in the law, a “term of art,” measured not so much by actual citizenry as by place of birth, i.e., within what ultimately became part of the country.

But for sticklers for the “intent of the framers,” it should be noted that the Naturalization Act of 1790 provided that a person born outside the United States of at least one parent who was a U.S. citizen was a “natural born citizen” of the country.  You’d think that would pretty much end the birther debate, wouldn’t you?  But to complicate things a little, that statute was superseded in 1795 by one that was more comprehensive, but omitted the precise term “natural born citizen.” 

Neither the Constitution, the Supreme Court, nor any laws dealing with citizenship require that a person must have been born in this country in order to be a citizen (unless both parents were aliens), and nothing anywhere states that the president must have been born in this country.  Indeed, no one questioned whether Mitt Romney’s dad George, who was born in Mexico of U.S. parentage (a peg on which Willard likes to hang his sombrero whenever he’s talking to persons of Latin American heritage), was eligible to become president when he made a weak stab at the nomination back in the ‘60s.  Likewise, no one sought to turn that quadrennial GOP dark horse Lowell Weicker away from the nominational feeding trough just because he’d been born in Paris, France while his father was working as an executive for the Squibb Pharmaceutical Company.  How quickly the Republicans forget.     

A law from the 20^th century, still in effect, provides that a person born abroad to only one U.S. citizen parent is a citizen at birth and need not be “naturalized,” in the sense of having to become a citizen by virtue of anything but his or her parentage at birth.  The one qualifier there, which Barack Obama most definitely meets, is that the U.S. citizen parent of such a person born during the period that covers the year of his birth (1961) must have lived within the U.S. for at least fifteen years total, including five years after they were fourteen years old.  Mrs. Obama, or Dr. Stanley Ann Dunham Soetoro as she later became known, most definitely met that requirement.  The real deal then, the one that even the Supreme Court as it is presently composed couldn’t mess up, is that the term “natural born citizen” as used in the Constitution should properly be seen in opposition to “naturalized citizen,” meaning one who has had to become a citizen through some means other than parentage.  Both the fact that Obama’s father was not a citizen and the supposition that Obama was born outside the country are really irrelevant.  His mother’s U.S. citizenship coupled with the fact that she didn’t leave the country until she was in her 20s, should trump everything else.

But the birthers continue to rail.  The joke is that by the time the issue ever comes before the high court, if it does, Obama will be well into his second term.  De facto will have overshadowed de jure.  Short of prevailing on Mr. Peabody to instruct his boy Sherman to set the Wayback Machine for 2008, there’d be little the right wing could do.  But from a lifetime habit of looking to the cartoonish past rather than the present or future, I’m sure there are Republicans who fancy that it could be done.  

Continuity

                                                                 Howdy, Buckaroos

Thursday, June 21, 2012

Monrovia, California

Another reason I watched Final Destination 5 twice was to study it for continuity.  I make this statement knowing it might seem pretentious, but one of my pet peeves with movies is how they so often fall down in terms of their consistency with respect to the small but noticeable things, like how much has been drunk from a cup or smoked from a cigarette from one scene to the next.  When a movie, especially one I assume is an expensive and well-organized production, gets those things wrong it drives me nuts.  I often wonder whether there’s even such thing as a “continuity editor,” or if maybe some other functionary has that job.  I’ve been told that at least there used to be people like that.  But sometimes I think the millions have all been spent on explosives and the salaries of the principal actors.  

In the case of Final Destination 5 I was pleasantly surprised.  The continuity I was inspecting in this movie was that of what you might call near-term historical accuracy, since at the end it was revealed that the movie, for reasons that are clear to someone who watched the first four in the series, had taken place in May of 2000. I don’t suppose there’s a whole lot of difference between now and then in terms of how we live our lives.  Hair is about the same, suits styles are about the same, but a few things, like vehicles and cell phones, have changed.  Sure enough, on my second look at the movie, I saw that the characters had been using “old fashioned” Y2K-era flip phones rather than modern smart iPhones, something that hadn’t even registered in my technologically antiquated mind the first time through.  And the cars were from the right time, too.  But I also saw a couple of inconsistencies I had missed before.  One was the styles of eyeglasses of the characters who wore them; they were from now, not then, and I only realized that because I’d been to purchase a new pair of glasses the afternoon before.  As it happened, glasses turned out to be an important aspect of the movie for one unfortunate young woman.  Another lack of continuity was with beard growth.  In one scene one of the characters had about two days’ more beard than he’d had a few minutes before.  Those were pretty minor considering the comparatively low budget this movie must have had.  I have this idea that such things are far less forgivable when hundreds of millions of dollars are involved.  But in fact, it may be that low-budget movies are better in terms of consistency because the scenes are more likely to be shot in sequence and without lots of extra takes.

Lack of continuity of the type I’m referring to is nothing new.  For as long as I can remember I’ve noticed the little inconsistencies in movies, and I’ll bet most of you have, too.  Lauren Bacall lights a cigarette as she argues with Kirk Douglas in Young Man With a Horn, say, and they cut to Kirk’s face, filled with that mixture of puzzlement and incipient instability that only Kirk could convey.  When they cut back to Lauren two seconds later, eyes heavy-lidded and smoldering like her cigarette, the damn thing is already half smoked.  Then they go to Kirk again, and when they come back to Lauren the cigarette has just been lit again.  I always find myself thinking “Wasn’t anybody in charge of making sure this kind of thing didn’t happen?  Do they really think so little of the audience that they assume we won’t notice?” How sloppy should we allow these gaffes to be?  I’ve seen some big ones in some big movies.  Watch the climactic scene from A Few Good Men, after Jack Nicholson has seethed his signature line, “You can’t handle the truth!” and is being arrested and carried off for having ordered the code red.  He’s struggling with the military police.  One second his tie is askew, and a second later it’s tight and trig against his throat, and a second later it’s loose and crooked again.  Or maybe the other way around.  A splicing of two different takes, obviously, but who was in charge?  No one, evidently. 

With old movies I palliate my irritation somewhat with the knowledge that they were churning them out in the studios at the rate of dozens per year, and maybe they just didn’t have time for the little niceties, and that after all, I’ve watched them all on TV for free.  But then I think two things.  One is that they’re still churning out dozens of movies a year—far too many.  The other is that, really, aren’t the little niceties—the details of dress and how much is in the glass and how much of the cigarette has been smoked and whether the tie is tight against the neck or loosened—just as important to the movies as anything else?  We make the guy wear the same suit, and the woman the same dress from one minute to the next, so why not polish up the rest of the details?   

It’s in the cutting of the film—from one camera angle to another and back again—that the movies seem to lose their continuity.  It’s as if there’s a war going on between those who string together the little snippets of a scene—the shots back and forth between two people who are talking, for instance—and those who are shooting the movie, using multiple takes to get a scene “just right.”  Here I suspect that the idea of the director as auteur rears its ugly head.  One more take.  Just one more take.  Okay, just one more, as if there were some perfection to be obtained.  I’m oversimplifying the situation, no doubt.  But here’s the basic truth—to this day, big money notwithstanding, movies fail in little matters of continuity at a regular rate, and it’s the rare one that doesn’t.

The beard growth thing, for example, is something that’s been irritating me for quite a while.  At some point in the not-too-distant past it became fashionable for men to shave less often than they did for most of the mid-20^th century.  Fine, no problem.  Several decades back, the choices were beard or no beard, pretty much.  If you were unshaven for a few days or weeks then you were in the process of growing a beard.  Then, I think in the 1980s, the pretty boys of the entertainment industry—people like Don Johnson in Miami Vice and the singer George Michael, for instance—started letting their beards go for a few days at a time, and that became a la mode.  Later all actors who had a sufficient amount of facial hair began to do the same, and you’d see the darker ones, like, say, Russell Crowe and John Travolta, in various stages of beardedness throughout the movie.  In the 30s and 40s, they didn’t worry about that because all men were pretty much clean shaven all the time, or expected to be.  If the part called for a beard they’d glue something to the guy’s face.  If a character was unshaven back then, it was because he’d been on a bender or was in battle, or perhaps had been washed up on a desert island.  Or because he was Gabby Hayes. 

A hundred years ago, before the invention of the safety razor, men didn’t shave every day unless they were bankers or lawyers.  In days of yore, you went to the barber to be shaved, and few could afford to do that every day.  Today, even though razor technology is at its all-time peak, people once again don’t shave every day.  Lawyers go into court, detectives work on cases, doctors operate on patients, spies spy on people, all with a few days of hair on their face.  First it was the movies that told us this was so, then it became reality. 

The upshot of it is that someone like Russell Crowe has a week’s beard growth in one scene, then in the next, ostensibly later that day, it’s three days’ worth.  And over the course of a month, in movie time, never once is he clean shaven, as if his beard had the ability to grow for a few days and stop.  If you saw the guy struggling through several weeks of movie action you’d expect him to have shaved once in a while, wouldn’t you?  Nobody has a permanent four-day beard.  From that lack of verisimilitude further problems emanate.  Russell is having a drink with someone, his manly barbitude at the length of, say, two millimeters.  Then an hour later he shows up at the scene of the crime with a millimeter less beard.  What has happened?  The obvious and most reasonable solution to this problem would be to have all actors either have a full beard or shave every day unless there was a really good reason not to.  What laws of reality would that violate?  Something approaching continuity would be achieved, and film editors wouldn’t have a thing to worry about (not that they seem to worry anyway).  The alternative would be for someone who gave a damn to be the continuity editor.  I’d be happy do this for a fraction of what they probably pay the people who make the explosions happen.  In fact, I’d do it as a volunteer.  It sounds like fun. 

The big problem, I’m sure, is money, and by that I don’t mean the comparative pittance they might be willing to pay a continuity editor.  It’s the salaries of the leading actors.  Imagine someone calling a guy who’s getting ten million plus a percentage of the gross and telling him, “Al, we need you to come in and reshoot scene 10 on Thursday morning.  But don’t shave after Monday.”  It could certainly be done, with much less technological precision than what is put into creating car crashes and exploding buildings and dangling people off of cliffs.  But it doesn’t seem to be done, probably because Al’s contract would call for an extra ten thousand a day over and above for him to get off his ass and reshoot the scene.  Still, I wonder why the marquee actors don’t insist more on the continuity themselves.  After all, it’s their mugs the public is paying to look at.

It’s odd that such a thing as continuity of this type should matter, but it does.  We willingly suspend our disbelief when it comes to science fiction, or fantasy, or ridiculous plot devices in murder mysteries, or silly serendipitous romantic meetings atop the Empire State Building.  Those departures from reality come easily.  But we (at least some of us) can’t stand it when the guy in the midst of all this absurdity isn’t wearing his shirt the same way from one scene to another.  For someone to change his name, or for the locale to suddenly shift to another city, would be both wrong and inexcusable, even in a silly and contrived story.  Let whatever absurdity might be happening go on, and that’s fine, as long as it happens in a way our minds can process and get accustomed to without being bothered by beards and liquor glasses and half-smoked cigarettes.  What’s going on here?  The idea of Darth Vader we can accept; but once he exists, his helmet has to have the same number of breathing holes throughout the movie.  Apparently, Long Ago in a Galaxy Far Away the little details had to have been consistent, even if the idea of the far-away galaxy is utterly silly.  But there it is.

We demand continuity in the midst of absurdity, what might be termed “consistent absurdity,” in the movies and in fiction in much the way we accept it in other areas of our lives.  Politics, for example.  Almost any idea, once it is hatched and developed, will catch on with the public, and from then on certain consistencies are expected.  As dopey and unbelievable as they might be, a group of Republican candidates who face one another in a series of orderly debates aren’t nearly as odd-seeming as would be a single candidate who refused to take part in the process, or one who insisted on always telling the truth as he saw it and when he didn’t know the answer to a question simply said so.  Imagine a candidate who didn’t promise to transform the country—to create uncreatable jobs, to protect unprotectable foreign governments, to right unrightable wrongs?  Envision a candidate who shows up at a debate dressed as Bozo and declares, “Everyone here, including me, is a clown, but I’m the only one willing to admit it.”  People would shake their heads.  It would get one day’s coverage on the AOL home page. “Watch:  Strange man disrupts debate before being hauled off by police.”  But put a half dozen guys in identical dark blue pinstriped suits and red neckties behind podiums and ask them to promise, within the context of an intractably corrupt and greedy economic system, help for the sick, hope for the poor, and economic security for the majority, and no one blinks in amazement.  Instead, they say “Yes!”

The central theme of the Final Destination pictures is that in death, as in politics, continuity and predictability are the most important things.  If you mess with Death’s orderly plan, however arbitrary and cruel it might seem—if you attempt to thwart Death—it will come at you with a wrath that would put even the shrieking Fox News pundits to shame.  The politician who proposes to tell the truth about things—in particular about the unfixability of the country within its present economic system—comes to a sad state, just like the kids in the movies who temporarily cheat death.  Maybe he doesn’t get sliced and diced by flying pieces of metal from an exploding barbecue grill, but he most certainly enters into oblivion, the Final Destination.  

The Black Death

Sunday, June 17, 2012

Monrovia, California

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 collapsed, 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 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 to be 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 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 insistence on gathering the succession of superficially lucky youngsters to its fold is explained by a mysterious black person.  In the latest movie (and maybe in one or more of the others, I forget) 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 members of the cast, 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 (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 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 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 cannot have a white woman, only a black or Hispanic woman, unless of course that black man is 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 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 Final Destination 5, that one of the main young upwardly-mobile survivor characters is black, and although he doesn’t have a love interest like some of the whites do, he does manage to survive almost until the end of the movie.  That's progress.  You might say “big deal,” but in a sense it is just that.

And let’s not forget the miscellaneous voodoo priestess, 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 5 the black man 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 underestimated, 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 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 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.  

Twilight Of The Undead

                                                                         Kinda scary

                                                                     Not so scary

                                                            Only scary on Oprah's couch 

                                                                      Are you kidding?

                                                                          Next in line

Monrovia, California

Thursday, May 31, 2012

More will be revealed, they say.  So far the title of my last blog posting hasn’t elicited any particular response.  Other than those who visit the blog regularly to read whatever happens to be here, there’s been not a single person who has been lured to it by Googling the words “i am bored” or any variant thereof.  I went all the way to page 12 on the Google display and didn’t see a reference to my blog.  I could have gone further, but, well, I got bored.  Obviously if it’s not on page one it’s not worth the trouble for anyone. 

My Franco-American cousine Anonymous S [may I use the term Franco-American?—here in the US, for some obscure reason, it’s a brand of canned spaghetti owned by the Campbell soup company, most famous these days for Spaghetti-Os, that staple of all young American children], a loyal reader and frequently helpful commenter, suggested I might use the title “free downloads.”  She also suggested I might use something very immediately topical, such as a reference to the recent eclipse.  The latter idea occurred to me, but I’m looking for something with more staying power—something that might cause internet surfers to stumble on the blog for months or years to come, like I thought the Naked Book Guy title would.

Having contemplated all that, I just discovered, way at the bottom of a list on my “stats” feature on Blogger.com (which I confess I’m still getting to know after all this time), a list of the top keywords used to access the blog.  Mostly it’s been my name, or my name plus the word “blog,” or the name of the blog itself.  In other words, people have been looking for my blog specifically, because they know it already exists or they know I already exist.  The only other thing that got people’s attention enough to make it onto the all-time top ten key words list was my use of the Facebook symbol at the beginning of the posting called “A Thousand Of My Closest Friends.” The use of that symbol probably constitutes some sort of trademark infringement—so sue me, you greedy tax-avoiding billionaire dweebs.

“The Naked Book Guy” isn’t even on the list of all-time most-used key words, although it does show up as having been used three times during the past week or two, perhaps in response to the most recent blog.  And just a few days ago the key words “Paul Winer full frontal nude” were used by someone to find the blog.  (Was that you, Billie Bob, you savage?)

So I’m confused, and confess that I know little about the workings of the internet, only that I’m probably looking in vain for an easy way to broaden my base.  But hope springs eternal.  Here’s something interesting, though.  On the all-time most-used key words list, appearing at number 8, with 9 hits, is the phrase “Trini and Carmen’s botulism.”  This came not as part of what I’d written in any particular blog, but as a result of a small colloquy in the comments after a posting written as I walked through Yazoo City, Mississippi.  I mentioned that I’d eaten at a Mexican restaurant in town there and  made a general reference to the place in Pontiac where there had been a botulism outbreak due to some improperly home-made salsa, or hot sauce.  A reader—Jim Willing’s sister Mary Lou, I think—invoked the name of Trini and Carmen’s Restaurant, which was where the aforementioned food poisoning event took place, back in 1977.  For that it gets a spot in my blog archives.  Elsewhere on Google under the words “trini and carmen’s,” a bit above the reference to my blog, the restaurant makes it onto a list of the all-time worst food-borne illness outbreaks in recent US history.  According to the web site, 59 people were poisoned with botulism, which was the worst single case of that illness in this country up to that date.  It was reportedly due to some peppers that had been canned at home by “a former employee.”  To think that it took place in the city of my birth!  And believe it or not, Trini and Carmen’s is still around, advertising “Over 40 Years of Metro-Detroit’s Finest Mexican Cuisine.”  More or less.  At least no one who ate at Trini and Carmen’s died, which is more than you can say for Jack In The Box, another survivor. 

Equally mystifying, from my perspective, is the fact that the next item down on the all-time list of phrases used to hit my blog is “mother mary was pro-life,” specifically in quotation marks, which produces a link to a posting I made when I was walking through Houma, Louisiana.  I saw it on a billboard.  I checked that out on Google, too, and was happy to see that I’m not the only one who made fun of the slogan, which tends to show up on signs in front of Catholic churches.  Just imagine the trouble the world would have been spared these past two millennia if the Virgin Mary had utilized the Judean equivalent of Planned Parenthood.  Of course my dad, uncle, and grandfather would have been in different lines of work, but that’s okay.  Cigar making was good enough for Grandpa when he first got to this country.  Then again, would the Europeans even have come here and discovered tobacco if there had been no Christianity to help precipitate the long list of events that culminated in their earliest sorties across the Atlantic?  Well, probably so.  The Goths and Visigoths and Huns moved inexorably west from somewhere, and there’s no reason to think people wouldn’t have continued their migration even without the cross of Jesus going on before.  When the Vikings came over to North America five hundred years before Columbus, they may already have been Christianized, but I doubt if they cared much about spreading the word.  But it was certainly religion, inextricably bound up with exploration and conquest, which gave their Catholic Majesties Ferdinand and Isabella the incentive to finance Columbus’s trip.  Somebody out there should get busy and write a story, or a screen play, along the lines of Ricky Gervais’s “The Invention of Lying,” about the history of Europe during the past two thousand years minus the insidious worship of Jesus Christ.  That’s the kind of imaginative fiction and entertainment we need today, rather than all the drab demonic possession and vampire crap that never seems to end.  (By the way, did you ever wonder why only Roman Catholics seem to have the ability to combat the devil?  You never see a Presbyterian minister shouting “The Power Of Christ Compels You!” at a little girl tied to her bed with her head spinning around and spewing green projectile emesis.  And seldom, if ever, does a Baptist preacher lead a group of trembling folks into a crypt to drive a stake through someone’s heart.  Could it be because only the Roman Catholic Church really knows what evil is?)

Don’t get me wrong about the vampire stuff.  I rather liked the original Dracula, by Bram Stoker.  Reading the novel, with its epistolary narrative through the letters and diary entries of the principals, it was pretty gripping to watch the reality of the utter unreality of the situation slowly dawn on a handful of prim, hitherto secure and well-off Brits.  Stoker simply took a few of Anthony Trollope’s characters and put them in the middle of something unbelievably craven and unholy, and that is the power of the story.  That was in 1897, and things have been going downhill ever since.  Following the 1922 German silent movie Nosferatu, which tried to convey the horror of the subject matter, most of the subsequent cinematic versions of the Dracula story were increasingly corny, verging on campy, gradually turning the Count into a kind of Fred Astaire with large canines, instead of what he was in Stoker’s book--the personification of alien and untrustworthy Continental evil.  To the late Victorian reader it seems to have been meant as a cautionary tale, not so much about flirting with the devil (after all, what self-respecting Englishman really believes in all that piffle?), but about the danger of letting foreigners into the country.

Where things went terribly wrong and permanently around the bend in the world of Dracula stories was when the likes of Ann Rice and Stephenie Meyer started telling the story from the point of view of the vampires themselves.  “Poor us, we’re the undead, condemned to the endless boredom of bloodsucking—loveless, forlorn, set upon.”  These revisionists morphed the villain into the romantic victim, which I admit is not a new idea in literature, particularly not in the increasingly sociopathic worldview of popular fiction.  But it's becoming more strained and laughable with each repackaging.  The evil is practically gone now, and the vampires have become louche teenagers or twenty-somethings who, like Cyndi Lauper’s girls, just wanna have fu-un.  This (along with the recent spate of Marvel comic book-based movies) teaches us one thing above all else, namely, that modern American cinema panders to a more immature demographic than at any time in its history.  Maybe that's what Dracula really was referring to when he said, "Listen to them. Children of the night."  

Nothing new or profound there, if you've been paying attention.  So here’s a thought.  Maybe if I call today’s blog something evocative of vampirism I’ll snag a few more readers.  It’s worth a shot, anyway.  Use a sucker to catch a sucker.  We'll see.    

i am bored

Monrovia, California

Friday, May 18, 2012

I have no idea what this blog will be about.  It will be an article about the internet that you report on the internet.  That's actually the title of something from “Shouts and Murmurs” in a recent issue of the New Yorker.  I should be so lucky as to write something of that caliber, much less to have it published there.

Outside it’s a rare overcast day in SoCal, as they have an irritating tendency to call it (sounds like an oil company, and in fact at one time this area was pretty much just that), with temperatures expected to rise into the 80s after a cool and comfortable night.  No humidity, to speak of, except in my car when it gets hot outside.  Other than the clouds, the forecast for the next six months is more of the same with gradually rising daytime temperatures.  You could really skip weather reports.  The big events that happen here from time to time, namely earthquakes, are unpredictable in the short term.  In the long run they are inevitable, but that doesn't give the weather people anything to talk about each evening.  Even they seem to have the sense to know this. 

I've mentioned before that there's a web site called Blogger.com which allows me to maintain my blog (free by the way for any of you would-be bloggers).  On it is a feature called “Stats,” which gives information about who accesses the blog.  It's not personal identifying info, so don’t worry about your anonymity.  Just an array of statistics about frequency and location.  To remind you, there are several options—one is called “overview,” which gives the number of times the blog has been viewed, and depending on which box I click I can see how many times the blog has been viewed on that day, during the past week or month, or all-time.  It further breaks down the viewings by number into the top ten blog postings viewed.  Some days and weeks fewer than ten blog postings are visited, but it gives up to ten.  There are other statistics, too, such as the URLs (whatever they are) from which the blog has been accessed. Then there’s another statistical analysis that names the countries from which the blog has been visited, up to the top ten.  I’ve discussed that one before.  I’m pretty sure the majority of the hits from third world and eastern European countries are random, by people trying to sell me something.  People named Dmitri or Jamsheed.  Or Peggy.  Occasionally I’ve used the translator feature to render these comments into English.  It's more like transliteration than translation, and sometimes it's quite bizarre and comical.  Blogger.com seems to have a bias against comments in other languages and segregates them into the spam comment file, where, it turns out, they always belong.  The ones in Polish and languages with Cyrillic alphabets are trying to sell me something or other—sometimes I can’t figure out what because the translation is so convoluted and silly.  Often they're entertaining, taking on the cadences of dadaist poetry.  But in the end they're like spam everywhere—come-ons for pharmaceutical products and pornography, real estate deals, and who knows what else, along with the occasional bit of advice about how to improve the blog by adding something or other for a fee.

My number one blog effort is called “The Naked Book Guy,” about a fellow named Paul Winer in Arizona.  Nary a week goes by that I don't get at least one visit to that posting.  I figure it gets more hits than any other because the man enjoys some modest celebrity in Arizona and especially in the city of Quartzsite, where he owns a bookstore he often tends while wearing no clothes except for a thong.  He is retired from a career of playing boogie-woogie piano and singing while naked, I think under the name Sweetie Pie.  I do not know whether he wore a thong while performing.  When you Google “naked book guy” you get a dozen or so articles about him, and a link to my posting is at the top of the list.

On the day I visited the Naked Book Guy's store it was chilly, for Arizona, and he was wearing sweatpants and a sweater, but since it’s not cold in Quartzsite very much of the time, I imagine he’s usually naked, or nearly so.  He’s a wiry guy approaching 70 years old, weighing no more than 130 pounds, fit but not muscular.  From the photos I've seen, Mr. Winer wears his nudity well.

If you want more details about the Naked Book Guy you can consult the blog posting itself, done on January 12, 2011.  The reason I mention him is that I have been musing about why this posting gets so many hits.  I always figured they were accidental hits from people Googling such topics as “naked guys,” looking for all-male porn sites.  I don’t mind at all that people accidentally stumble on my blog.  The more the merrier.  But when I Googled just “naked guys” I didn’t find any reference to my blog posting, only lots of gay porn.  So people are finding my blog about the Naked Book Guy because they’re looking for information about the man himself.  Of course he’s famous in part because the word “naked” appears in his name, but the mere mention of nakedness doesn’t seem to result directly in the discovery of either Paul Winer or my blog.  It’s all tied in with interest in Paul Winer, the Naked Book Guy himself.  And more power to him.

I should mention that one of my readers has informed me that he met Mr. Winer at his shop in Quartzsite and directed him to my blog about him, of which he wasn’t aware.  (He's a book guy, not a computer guy.) At first he was pleased to see that he’d been featured on the internet, then when he finished reading my blog he wasn’t very happy.  As you might recall, I sort of panned his sold-out evening performance at the Quartzsite civic center.  I’m sorry I made him feel bad.  I just figured he must have known he wasn’t exactly another Ray Charles or Jerry Lee Lewis, given the fact that he’d had to resort to performing naked to get gigs for most of his life, and even at that ended up playing small-time New England dives and far-flung outposts like Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan.  I liked him, overall, and he certainly can play the piano better than I can.  Without a doubt, based on his photos, he looks better naked than I do.  He just isn’t an extremely good singer or songwriter.  But he does have a neat little bookstore, and evidently a following of sorts. In some ways I might be a bit like an even more minor version of the Naked Book Guy himself—popular among a small number of people and just about at the limits of his ability to garner fame.  In any case, I had no idea I'd still be getting regular blog hits for that posting a year and a half later.

All of this has me thinking, ruminating, vaguely planning my blogging future.  I’d really like to expand my readership.  My blog isn’t attracting much attention.  That may be first and foremost because it isn’t all that good, and only people who know and like me already are willing to read it.  For that matter, lots of people who know and like me don’t read the blog at all, or do so very seldom.  So, okay, you can trust me that I’m grounded in reality on this point.  Still, I’ve wondered if using more alluring titles for some of my posts might bring in a wider superficial readership, and by accidental extension, some additional regular or occasional readers.  There’s no question that my choice of the title “The Naked Book Guy” has worked to get me extra exposure, so to speak.  The number of times that post has been accessed, about 320 times, is only 1.7% of the total number of over 18,000—but it’s the most, and twice as many as the next most visited one, called “Enter Rest Pray.”  The next three in order of popularity are titled “An Orderly Lynching,” “Nixon Gratia Nixon,” and “Signs.”  It could be that each one contains a buzzword—naked, pray, lynching, Nixon, signs—that might have caused the unsuspecting Googler, searching for nudity or communion with God or information about mob violence or a glimpse into history, to notice the blog and pay a visit.

Mulling over this idea, I thought maybe a provocative title for today’s post might get me more attention.  At first I considered calling it “Naked Coeds Gone Wild.”  Surely that would show up pretty often on Google searches, and would have the potential of greatly increasing at least my straight male audience.  Then I thought better of it, realizing I would doubtless disappoint more people than I’d attract, once they clicked on the site and realized there were no photos of naked coeds, gone wild or otherwise, and that it was all a ruse to get them to read something.  Besides, a title like that might bring with it some unwelcome attention, including an even greater number of spam comments, and perhaps even let some viruses into my computer.

I considered narrowing the focus a bit, and calling today’s post simply “Naked Guys.”  That seemed a more compelling idea.  Not far from “The Naked Book Guy,” but more inclusive.  And inclusiveness is what we're working for these days, isn't it?  The demographic I’d be targeting with a title like "Naked Guys" would be fairly reliably liberal in their political views, and more literate than average, unless statistics lie.  Who knows?  I might develop a bit of a rainbow following, which would be great.  But then I'd be neglecting the lesbians. And there’s that porn connection, with its attendant risks.

Continuing the idea of getting people’s attention through Google, I considered other possibilities for a title, including "Eleven Year Old Gives Birth," "Get Rich Without Working," "Jesus Christ," "Aliens," "Viagra," "Facebook.com," and "Kardashian."  Surely one of these would grab me some extra readers. 

In the end I fell back on what became the actual name of today’s post, a more modest but better reasoned choice, I think.  While checking on Google for the most searched keywords I came across something that suggested this title.  Others were "qwerty" and "asdf."  Look at your keyboard.  But I especially liked the one I chose, because it was far simpler and more direct than I could ever have imagined, more universal, and very unlikely to become yesterday's news.  Also, it tells you more about internet users than anything else could.  So let’s consider today an experiment.  I’ll have to tell you what happens, and whether I get the extra surge of visitors.

I realize also that while a title by itself is important, the occurrence of words within the text might also help attract attention.  So let me leave you with these parting thoughts:  Naked Naked Naked.  Nude Nude Nude. All Nude. Obama.  Romney.  America's Got Talent.