Well And Truly Fooled

Monrovia, California

Friday, October 14, 2011

I’ve been reading The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales, by neurologist Oliver Sacks. I’m sure many of you have read it, or at least heard of it. It’s one of those books I’ve been meaning to get to for a long time, and that time has finally come. (Crime and Punishment is another, but that’s a subject for a separate posting.)

Oliver Sacks is a neurologist, and this is a collection of short case studies dealing with various intriguing and not-so-common neurological problems he encountered in the 70s and 80s in his practice. Most of them, like the one that afflicts the title character, are perceptual deficits, disorders that touch on some of the most fundamental aspects of what it means to be human and to see ourselves and others as parts of our essential surroundings. In fact, Sacks himself suffers from an inability to recognize faces, a condition called “prosopagnosia,” which I’m sure is part of the reason he undertook this area of study in the first place.

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat is elegantly written, filled with quotes from great thinkers and philosophers as well as frequent references to the work of his eminent colleagues and forbears in the study of neurology. Without affectation, Sacks makes constant use of dazzling polysyllabic words that showcase his own complex working vocabulary and reflect the perplexing nature of the subject matter. Some of the terms are reminiscent of the way the German language tends to spin out long words to express specific ideas. (Recall Fahrvergnugen, used in the Volkswagen ads of the last century, which conveyed, in a single word, the idea of the pleasure of driving an automobile.)

Sacks’s patients do not experience intellectual existential crises along the lines of Who am I and what’s it all about?; rather, they literally do not know who or what they are as physical beings. They have medical conditions caused more often than not by tumors and other pressures on the brain; but precisely because they are disorders of the body’s nerve and thought center they go to the crux of what it means to be a person. Some of these problems fall within the ambit of something called “proprioception,” the sense of knowing that our bodies, or parts of them, belong to us, a sense so taken for granted by most of us that we can scarcely imagine what it must be like, for example, not to recognize that one of our own legs, or even our entire body, belongs to us. In other cases the patients he describes have forms of amnesia familiar to those who have seen the movie "Memento," with Guy Pearce, where the protagonist was prevented from creating new memories.

Nestled in the midst of this intriguing and challenging book, almost hidden, is a little piece entitled "The President’s Speech." It’s about the reactions of certain patients in a facility where Sacks was working in the early 1980s to a televised speech by the President of the United States. Sacks does not name the chief executive in question, but in referring to him as "the old Charmer, the Actor," he makes sure we know he’s talking about Ronald Reagan. It seems that he and other staff members noticed a group of patients laughing at the TV one night, and went to investigate. He found that they were watching Reagan give a speech. The thing most of these patients had in common was a condition known as severe receptive or global aphasia, rendering them incapable of understanding words as such. Nevertheless, since the mind tries to find ways around the roadblocks it encounters, they often could understand what was being said to them on the basis, as Sacks puts it, of "extra-verbal clues—tone of voice, intonation, suggestive emphasis or inflection, as well as all visual clues (one’s expressions, one’s gestures, one’s entire, largely unconscious, personal repertoire and posture). . . ." These aphasiacs had developed the power of understanding, without words, what was being said to them.

The reason the patients were laughing was that they knew from all of his nonverbal clues that the President was lying and generally putting on an act. The words, otherwise incomprehensible to them, when delivered by the speaker himself, rang false, and they were thus able to understand an essential truth about both the man and the message.

This clinical observation would have been powerful enough, but Sacks takes it a step further by turning it inside out, as it were. It happens that certain people are afflicted with a different perceptual problem, called tonal agnosia, in which they understand words themselves but are unable to add meaning to them with any nonverbal clues of hearing, such as intonation and phrasing. For them, all words come out flat, as if they were written, and the way they discern true meaning from a speech is by watching the posture and movement of the speaker. One such patient with tonal agnosia, after also watching the President’s speech, had conclusions of her own: "'He is not cogent,' she said. 'He does not speak good prose. His word-use is improper. Either he is brain-damaged, or he has something to conceal.'" The observations of this woman and the others, taken together, don’t present a very flattering picture of the man the media has consistently called The Great Communicator.

So, what of the rest of us, supposedly not afflicted with any processing difficulties? Why did we elect and re-elect this man? Sacks concludes that we "normal" people, "aided, doubtless, by our wish to be fooled, were indeed well and truly fooled."

I had already read this piece and most of the rest of the book when, a day or two ago, I happened to see a photo in the newspaper of yet another of the interminable series of Republican candidate debates. In this one, a gigantic photo of Ronald Reagan was projected on a screen behind the debaters, making me think of Big Brother in Orwell’s 1984 and also making it crystal clear that the man whose "vision" for America the debaters most cherished was Ronald Reagan. What the photo said, wordlessly, as Mitt Romney or Rick Perry or someone stood at his podium in the foreground, was that the face in the gigantic photo stood for everything the American people, or at least the Republican people, think is great about America.

That photographic image, and that idea, helps me understand the true nature of the division in what might be termed our "national proprioception," that is, our sense of what it means to be Americans in this country--of what makes up our national identity. For many people, the old liar Reagan symbolized, and continues to symbolize, the greatness of America. Reagan, like Hitler with his German volk, cast his spell by telling Americans what he knew most of them wanted to hear, by spinning tales of a mythic past and by evoking the specter of evil, both from within and without the borders of the nation. As Oliver Sacks’s piece points out by the simplest of devices, Reagan told lies, lies, and more lies. Had he been Pinocchio, his nose would have stretched from sea to shining sea.

Why did a guy like that, whom a group of mental defectives could laugh at and spot for the bullshitter he was, get away with so much for so long? And more to the point, why does the Republican Party still hold him up as the apotheosis of the greatness of this country? Well, perception—or proprioception—is everything, isn’t it? The Republicans of today and their sympathizers, like the people who listened to Reagan before them, need to think that what makes this country worthwhile is its power, whether that takes the form of military strength, immense and enviable wealth, a carefully selected mishmash of unassailable religious "values" carrying the full force of God Almighty, or a larger-than-life mythic past filled with striving and taming and achieving and winning. Reagan seemed in control. He seemed powerful. He seemed to be running this great and perpetually victorious operation we thought of as America. He therefore represented greatness, real or imagined. That’s what was important and remains important today to many Americans. And these are the ones who, in a strictly neurological sense anyway, are considered “normal.”

Sometimes I'm amazed at how far out of the mainstream I feel. I must have a sort of aphasia or agnosia when it comes to our national rhetoric and vocabulary. The singing of patriotic songs, the display of flags, the pledging of allegiance, the constant repetition of the cheap buzzwords of the politicians, the incessant and meaningless "God Bless America"--they all make me suspicious, like Sacks's patients, of what I sense to be their pretension and falsehood. The only things I trust about this country are the Constitution and the rule of law, and the fact that we try, sometimes in spite of ourselves, to tolerate anyone who wishes to partake of them, regardless of how they come across our borders. The rest is laughable.

The Victors

Monrovia, California

Friday, October 7, 2011

There’s nothing like sports to get the comments flowing again. And lacking much other serious grist for the blog mill, I’ll take what I can get.

First I must acknowledge the Yankees’ loss of the American League Division Series to Detroit last night. I hope the Tigers go on to win the World Series, for old times’ sake and the sake of the readers who support them. My team lost and theirs won. Congratulations to the victors.

When most teams take on the New York Yankees it is tempting to cast the conflict as a "David versus Goliath" fight. Goliath of course being the Yanks, and all the other teams (including the high payroll Boston Red Sox) thinking of themselves as the young future king of Israel, winning by cleverness and pluck and divine right. In the case of the Tigers, however, David is not the most precise analogue. True, Detroit’s payroll is only a little more than half of New York’s, but it is tenth overall, and greater than that of two-thirds of all the clubs in Major League baseball. Perhaps it would be more accurate to cast Detroit as Goliath’s little brother Darryl, only eight feet tall rather than nine-and-a-half. Tampa Bay, with the second-lowest payroll of the thirty teams in baseball, is much more of a David in that respect. And I guarantee that every one of those “small market” teams, if it could ask Santa Claus for anything at all for Christmas, would not ask if it could have Bill James (or Jonah Hill) on its payroll, or be filled with scrappy players with bullshit working-class tenacity, but instead would hop up on the lap of Jolly Old St. Nick and simply request lots more money.

Another word or two about the ALDS between Detroit and New York. I said I wish the Tigers well, and I do. But I don’t really believe they’ll win through. They’re good, but not good enough. You always like to think the team that just beat you is better, or else why would they have won? But the Yankees lost that series as much as the Tigers won it. Tuesday night New York made the same relievers who were last night’s heroes look pretty bad. Both Yankees victories were lopsided, whereas the Yanks pretty well stayed in contention in the three they lost, failing to get the clutch hits they needed. Everybody talks about how Curtis Granderson “saved” the Yankees on Tuesday with those two great catches of his, but really? They won 10 to 1, for God’s sake. If he’d missed both balls, would that have cinched it for the Tigers?

What happened last night that cost the Yankees the game (aside from big whiffs from our biggest player) was timidity on the base paths. The failure of runners on first to make it to third on base hits to right field cost them at least one run and probably two. One time I think it was Jeter and the next time it was ARod, and both times it was with less than two outs that they were held at second and the inning ended with the bases "loaded with Yankees" as Ernie Harwell would have said. The manager and coaches have to share some of the blame there, I think. I must say here that for such a great player, nobody looks as awkward and unsure of himself on the base paths as Alex Rodriguez does. Guess he's only comfortable when he's going into his home run trot. Well, as diehard fans everywhere say, there’s always next year. But before I leave baseball, a tip of the hat to Jorge Posada, probably on his way out for good. He was a sturdy journeyman during the past 15 years, and acquitted himself well during the series.

Let's switch gears. The blog creation site I use divides the comments into regular input and what it calls “spam.” Until this week I’d received nothing the site considered to be in the latter category. I think I mentioned that occasionally I’ll get a comment on an old posting, perhaps something someone found at random or by using a key word or phrase on Google or another search tool, such as the name of a town through which I passed on my walk. I was notified on Wednesday, for the first time, that I’d received two spam comments. One was rather general; something to the effect of how great the Internet is, in that it can help a person promote ideas or products. The other appeared to be in Russian, or at least a language written in the Cyrillic alphabet. It was under blog posting number 163, entitled “Chiriaco,” which I wrote on January 20 of this year. At first I was going to say that if there’s anyone out there who reads Russian I’d be grateful for a translation of the comment. Then I realized I could highlight it and ask the computer for a translation (as another person astounded by the modern technology of his day once said, “What hath God wrought?”). So here’s the translation, as rendered by the computer:

“Was surprised and decided to share with you, I found an incredible offer to Ukraine! It was as follows – prowling in NETE housing and shew obraruzhil 2 bedroom flat in Kiev [/ url] with pictures. I was very surprised by the cost of the ads + became generally interested in your opinion about this accommodation.”

So it was spam after all (and remains isolated—quarantined—in that category, and therefore not part of the comments following posting number 163). Still, it’s neat to know that someone in Eastern Europe is reading the blog, however randomly and with whatever weird agenda. Wonder if I’m now infected with some Ukrainian computer virus that will steal my identity? It might be fun to have a new identity. Maybe a Ukrainian one, covered with tattoos acquired in the gulag archipelago. I could call myself Victor. Victor Obraruzhil.

And speaking of victors, there’s still Michigan football. Tomorrow it’s Northwestern, so that should be a win. Then they’ll have to prove they can play the decent teams. Boy does that Rich Rod seem like a quickly fading bad dream.

Lastly, how about those Lions? Off to a fairly impressive start, too, though it’s early. I’ve never been much of an NFL watcher, but I could be persuaded to pay more attention if, for the first time in my adult life, Detroit is actually good. So those of you who worry about such things can see that I still have some sentiments in favor of something out of southeastern Michigan, despite having abandoned the Tigers, never to return. I do have a cousin named Calvin Johnson, so maybe that's a subtle influence....

Which leads to the question, how do we really come by our sports allegiances? Is it primarily geography and parental influence? If so, does making a decision to change a sports team in adulthood show maturity and independence, or Freudian contrariness? Are we all supposed to live in the same house forever, like the Waltons, or wander the world in search of better things? And speaking of influences, what about the many seemingly more trivial things that inform our choices? The color of a uniform, the personality of a manager, the look of a letter on a jersey, the look of the jersey on a player. I know I'd have trouble backing a team that wore red uniforms (or socks) even if they only did it on their home field. And I couldn't ever take seriously a college football team whose capital "M" looks like an upside down "W." Or who wear gold helmets. And I don't do well with orange or purple as prominent team colors, either. I also struggle with green, but under certain circumstances I can stomach it. But hey, that's just me.

God and Baseball

Monrovia, California

Friday, September 30, 2011

First, a housekeeping matter. I’ve been informed by one of my loyal readers that there’s been some trouble posting comments lately. Even I have been having difficulty replying to comments, so the existence of some kind of glitch didn’t take me by surprise. I should say here that I haven’t necessarily been expecting comments on the rather thin content of the blog over the past two weeks, but the absence of even one was a little surprising. So thanks, Billie Bob, for letting me know.

I’ve just ventured into the bowels of the blog-creation site and have attempted to make a couple of changes, so I think commenting might be possible now. If it still isn’t, please let me know at my email address, papateeu@aol.com. Also, please know that I appreciate everyone’s presence out there in the ether. Some (in fact most) of you are close friends and relatives, and it’s as good a way to stay in touch as any, even if it’s mostly one-way communication from this direction. I understood very early on in the walk that the thing keeping me going wasn’t really the project; it was the fact that I was sharing it with others. Thanks for reading. And thanks also to the random commenters, the ones who maybe pick up on the fact that I’ve sat on the tombstone of one of their relatives or visited their home town, or maybe just pissed them off with my opinions. I’m happy to have perhaps made your day, either because you like what you’ve read or have disliked it and had a chance to tell me so.

Tonight the baseball playoffs begin. As almost everyone knows I’m a fan of the New York Yankees, the greatest and most successful franchise in the history of Major League Baseball, by far, if statistics mean anything. Baseball is a game of statistics, but for many statistics do not mean all that much. Some people identify strongly and emotionally with their local team, and don’t care about success, except on the rare occasions when it does visit their teams. Boston Red Sox fans come to mind, and indeed who can ignore them in that regard? What an amazing collapse they had this month, confirming once again the basic Boston attitude, which extends well beyond baseball or even sports, that the city is simultaneously blessed and hated by God above all other cities. They inveterately commit the sin of pride coupled with the sin of pride in reverse--both sides of the same coin. I believe the attitude of Boston partisans is informed most strongly by its historical domination by the Irish, a group who can’t help feeling that their perpetual disfavor in the eyes of the Almighty makes them special, when in truth they just might not be as wonderfully unique as they think they are.

I grew up rooting for the Detroit Tigers, to whom God was largely indifferent, and we were taught that hating the Yankees was a badge of pride, too. I remember rooting for the Pittsburgh Pirates against the Yanks in the 1960 World Series, the first one where I was fully aware of what was going on. The thing that makes someone side with the other league against a team from their own is a special kind of prejudice, a variation on the familiar maxim that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Nothing new, certainly, in either sports or international diplomacy. But why do people hate the Yankees so much? Or do they? I’ve been to two games this season in Anaheim where the Yankees have played the Angels, and in truth there were many New York partisans in the stands. But there’s that root-for-the-underdog thing at work, too, and compared to the New York Yankees all other teams are indeed underdogs, going all the way only once every generation or so, or, in the case of the hapless Red Sox, once every century. The Red Sox take it as a personal comment from their merciless God; the Yankees, on the other hand, don't need to either invoke or involve the Deity in what they do.

While living in Connecticut I had occasion to see both the Yankees and Red Sox in action quite often—in fact, every game of both teams was carried on the local cable franchise. As the great success of the Tigers in 1984 and again in 1985 began to fade from memory, my love of baseball inevitably drove me toward one of the local teams. (The Mets were never an option, both because they were a National League team and also because their fans are mostly from Queens and eastern Long Island. You have to have lived out there to completely understand what I’m getting at, but think Joey Buttafuco and Billy Joel and you’ll begin to get the picture.) I gravitated toward the Yankees because the Red Sox just never seemed like a viable option. I figured, why set yourself up for heartbreak year after year?

The Yankees have been in existence, depending on how you figure it, either since 1903 or since 1913 (when they changed their name from the Highlanders to the Yankees). They played in Manhattan, at Hilltop Park and the Polo Grounds, until moving to the Bronx in 1923. Their playing hasn’t been too shabby. It took them until 1921 to win a pennant and get into the World Series, and since then they’ve won an additional 39 pennants and 27 World Series. No other team has half that many titles, including National League teams that have been around since the 1880s. To put it into perspective, think of it this way: since they began as a New York team, on average they’ve finished the season at the top of the American League more often than once every three years, and have won the series once every four years. And that includes their first 20 years, in which they did neither.

Call me crazy, but I don’t see anything wrong with a sports team winning year in and year out. As a Tigers fan I would have been delighted to be backing a team with such a high rate of success. It had been a mere accident of birth and my dad's occupation that brought me to the Detroit area in the first place. No one in my family was from that part of Michigan. The closest anyone came to that was my paternal grandfather, who emigrated from the Netherlands to Grand Rapids, on the other side of the state, and soon moved to Chicago, and my grandmother, who hailed from Reed City. Neither of those Michigan locales considers Detroit to be much more than a remote den of iniquity. Still, the need to match up one’s fandom to one’s heritage is strong, so I focused instead on my mother’s side of the family. It turns out that in the first half of the 1600s some of them came from Holland and France and England to Manhattan, and others settled in what is now Brooklyn, after being forced out of Boston for nonconformity with the Puritan religion. They were among the original Yankees. So there you have it. The New York Yankees were, for me, the logical choice.

In a few hours the Yankees will go up against the Detroit Tigers in the American League Division Series, the first round of the playoffs. Based on the way the Yankees have been playing so far this week, the outcome of the series is very far from a given for the Bronx Bombers. Some of that I attribute to the clumsy and questionable managing style of Joe Girardi, who’s been resting Derek Jeter and others far too much in my opinion, and using players from the expanded roster a bit too often—probably a throwback to Girardi's days as a catcher, where it was a given that someone at his position needed all the rest he could get starting around the middle of August. Take Jeter out of the lineup and you are doing more than resting your shortstop—you’re making your captain sit out a game--not a good strategy in my opinion. And I guarantee that Jeter doesn’t like it, though he’s too much of a team guy to bitch about it.

As for the way they played Tampa Bay earlier this week, if I were a Red Sox fan (unthinkable, except in the most abstract of ways), I’d swear the Yankees threw that series just to keep Boston out of the wild card. Or maybe it was just God, telling the Beantowners once again, “I hate you guys.”

The Purple Better Ones

Monrovia, California

Friday, September 23, 2011

I was just rereading something I remembered from William Burroughs, a piece set at the time of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968, called “The Coming of the Purple Better One.” What put me in mind of that was a photo I saw of one of the many recent Republican candidate debates. These GOPers have hit on the best publicity possible—debating each other seemingly every other day, bringing their lapdogs from CNN and Fox along and forcing the other networks and the print media to trail after. Here’s where the Democrats are at a real disadvantage. There’s only one of them running for president in 2012, at least so far. The Republicans, on the other hand, have cloned themselves into a half dozen or more ever weirder versions of one another, and are now engaging in an elaborate series of sophistic exercises whereby they get to trot out their most outrageous ideas, see if they fly, and eliminate or refine them one at a time. I imagine the thinking goes that eventually they’ll hit on a few ideas that “resonate” with the American public, and whichever candidate proves to be the least embarrassing in the long run will take those ideas on the hustings. In the meantime, they get lots and lots of air and print time, gratis.

With the Democrats, on the other hand, even though the presidency is sometimes referred to as the Bully Pulpit, there’s only that one pulpit, and one sorry little preacher to do all the evangelizing, all the heavy lifting for his party. He can’t be the whacked-out born-again shoot-to-kill give-everybody-the-needle Texan Obama debating the serious grey-at-the-temples faux-moderate Mormon Obama, looking across the podium at the certifiably insane and geographically challenged female Obama, while the chubby professorial Obama chimes in once in a while.

It reminds me of that movie “Multiplicity,” where Michael Keaton has himself cloned so he can get more work done and have more free time. The first clone is an aggressive workaholic, just the ticket. Then he goes for a second one, who embodies his gentler, more nurturing side. Between the two of them they make up a complete person. Then the two clones for reasons of their own decide to make yet another, who, as they explain, being a “copy of a copy, isn’t as sharp as the original.” The Republicans have all that going on and more (minus the sharp writing of Harold Ramis). There’s the tough take no prisoners candidate, the reasonable candidate, the other Mormon candidate, the avuncular intellectual candidate, the Dr. Strangelove pure libertarian candidate, the mentally challenged candidate. Actually there are several of those last ones at this point, but I’m confident they’ll whittle it down to just one or two.

They are, collectively and individually, the distinguished senator and former Justice of the Supreme Court, Homer Mandrill, known to his friends as the Purple Better One. Homer was, you may recall, a purple-assed mandrill baboon, running for president. Back in ’68 when it appeared in Esquire that was cutting-edge hallucinatory satire from old Burroughs, although he always knew that his version of reality was, well, more real than what most people thought was the real thing. Today, when it comes to the Republicans, we should all be so lucky as to have a choice between the people currently running for president and an artificially animated mandrill baboon. I know which one I’d vote for, without hesitation, if I were ever to venture into a Republican primary. What a difference a generation or two makes. Yesterday’s drug-fueled crazy metaphor becomes today’s Great Simian Hope for America.

I think we all know pretty much how this is going to play out. We’re in the middle of another bad television drama, where we know that by the end of the hour something definitive has to happen that will let people get to sleep. I’ll go out on a limb here, and you can check me as time goes on, but here’s my fearless prediction. Rick Perry will fall away. His brown makeup will accidentally chip off on TV and people will see that underneath he’s a putrid green scaly alien. Adios, amigo. Michele Bachmann will find the intellectual weight of sharing the stage with all the rest of those brilliant bastards too much to bear, and will shrivel up, leaving only her pointy shoes like one of the bad witches from the Land of Oz. Ron Paul? Forget about it. He’s a placeholder. The guy has fifteen supporters nationwide and they all look like Charlton Heston as Moses in “The Ten Commandments” and live in compounds up in the mountains. They have more bullets than votes. He’s the far right’s answer to Ralph Nader and Dennis Kucinich. Newt Gingrich? Excuse me, but that toad is more last century than disco. Then there’s the other Mormon governor dude, Huntsman (which you must admit is a great name for a Republican, right?). He might just hang in there for a while, but eventually people will have to choose which of the two secret underwear-wearing guys they’re going to fall in with, and my guess is it will be the one who’s already done his missionary work out in Massachusetts.

I know I’m skipping a few, but it’s like talking about the NFL—you can only devote so much air time to Kansas City and Seattle. As with football, it’s early in the season, but not too early to make predictions.

Here's one more: maybe the insect masters who hold the strings will pull all of these bozos out at the last minute and stick Dick Cheney in there, which I think is what they really would like to do anyway.

The Final Destination

Southern California

Wednesday, September 14, 2011

In traveling 3,339.6 miles, I have walked, literally and figuratively, in the footsteps of many thousands of people, and I have walked millions of steps. Since coming back to California I’ve tried to make observations about the state of things out here as much in the vein of the original blog as I could. In most respects Californians look at life exactly the way people elsewhere around the country do. But there are subtle differences.

Perhaps one of the characteristics of Californians that sets them apart is that they tend to accept whatever comes their way with something like equanimity. People who visit call this a “laid back” attitude, but I think there’s more to it than that. The key, in my opinion, is that people who are out here (or up from south of the border) are determined to make this as much of a paradise as they can because, really, there’s nowhere else to go. Maybe they could go to Hawaii, but that’s an expensive and rather unrealistic proposition for most people. California is pretty much it, within the United States. If you arrived in heaven and found that the streets were dirty, what would you do—move to hell, or look around for a broom? Okay, sure, some celebrities go off to ranches in Montana and Wyoming and Utah as a way of getting clear of the congestion of the southern part of the state, which, let’s face it, is packed. But most Californians can’t afford that; they’re where they’re going to be for the duration. When they plan for retirement, it’s not to some far-off place. It’s maybe out to Sun City or down to Palm Springs, where they can shake and bake and prep for the only slightly higher temperatures of hell.

One way to think about California is that almost everyone considers it a final destination. In the east, folks have always talked about going somewhere else to live, usually somewhere warmer like Florida or Arizona, which is understandable, or somewhere perceived to be filled with opportunities, like southern California. “Hell with all this snow and ice, this dusty rocky soil, these filthy factories, I’m going to …. (fill in the blank).” Hope springs eternal, and all that. So when you’ve actually arrived at the far edge of the continent you’d damned well better learn to make the best of it, even though it’s seldom what you imagined it would be. Either that or start swimming.

My favorite cheap horror movie series is the “Final Destination” films. There have been five, though I haven’t yet seen the most recent one, which just came out this summer. In all of them, dating back to the first in 2000, one of the young core of main characters (high school kids or twenty-somethings) has a premonition of a horrible accident in which many people are killed, including him and all his friends. In the first movie it was a senior trip plane that crashed on takeoff, in the second there was a massive auto wreck on the freeway, in the third a major malfunction at an amusement park, then a crash at a stock car race, and the latest one features, I believe, the collapse of a bridge. In each case the person with the premonition acts on it and saves himself and his friends. But of course they have only delayed the inevitable, and Death stalks them throughout the movie, taking them one by one in ever more gruesome and imaginative ways—beheadings, falling objects, flying lawnmower blades, weird impalements, etc. The fun of watching the movies is anticipating when and how each person’s death will occur, and whether Death will perhaps spare one of them until the next movie. Sometimes characters will have the false hope or hubris to imagine they have escaped—that Death has decided to skip them. Wrong, of course.

Though Death is not personified in the movies, there’s usually a character who functions as a sort of seer or commentator, like a one-man chorus in a Greek tragedy. This person is always black, which is Hollywood’s way of killing two birds with one stone—first by creating a part for an African American actor in an otherwise pretty much all-white movie, and second by reconfirming in us our stereotypical supposition that nonwhites are more in touch with the supernatural because they are, let’s face it, closer to death on a regular basis, and also more in touch with their primitive pre-modern roots than are the well-off and well-meaning coeds and slackers who make up the rest of the cast of characters.

I freely admit this is all cheesy B-movie fare, but even a gourmet (which I’m not, in any case) has his secret junk food cravings. It's unlikely that you'll catch David Denby or Anthony Lane reviewing a Final Destination film in The New Yorker. Nevertheless these movies carry the crucial and unavoidable message that death, in whatever form, comes to all of us (sparing us the stentorian cornball voice-over of “Citizen Kane”), that it’s our Final Destination. But if that were the only point to be made the series wouldn’t have become a minor franchise. It’s the gruesomeness of the deaths that compels and repels its viewers. And as terrible as the original deaths might have been in the premonitory opening scenes, the actual ones that follow are even more so. The lesson isn’t simply that death is inevitable. Hell, a child could tell you that. It is that narrowly escaping one fate launches a person into uncharted territory fraught with even more uncertainty and perhaps more dire consequences than having incurred the original one. It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature.

So many people have come here to southern California to escape things—the harsh weather of the east, the violent criminal and political turmoil of other countries, the maddening sameness of life in a small town in the middle of nowhere--in fact, the whole painful litany of which Hamlet complained:

…the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely
The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes…

All the bad stuff, in other words. I wonder sometimes, with the arrival at the end of this rainbow, in many ways so full of energy and sunshine, if there isn’t a sort of perpetual forgetting of the crucial thing Hamlet lost sight of, namely, that the choice of whether “to be or not to be” was never his to make in the first place. In any case, among California’s many sterling statistical superlatives is the fact that Rose Hill Cemetery in Whittier is the largest graveyard in the whole damned country.

Well, this is verging on serious, and I don’t want to do that. Leave such things to the philosophers and poets. I'm not trying to make a big deal out of the basic facts of life and death. But there is something out here that seems to invite people to try to turn back the hands of time, or at least arrest them, sometimes with ugly Dorian Gray-like consequences. Plastic surgery comes immediately to mind, but there are so many other forms of self-delusion. California is a place, after all, where dreams of all kinds have been for sale for the better part of two centuries, from the promise of land and gold and silver to the promises displayed on the silver screen. And here, indeed, if you stick around, the ultimate promise is always fulfilled.

History

Southern California

Wednesday, September 7, 2011

Random and not necessarily coherent thoughts:

I dwell on history. Someone famous once said something like, "I don't read history any more because I pretty much know what happened." But that isn't what it's all about. It's about why it happened and what people were thinking when it did and how they processed it afterwards. The changes in the things they emphasize in the study of U.S. history just during my lifetime tell me that history isn't a collection of facts, any more than philosophy is a collection of ideas about existence. It's facts laid over a system of thinking. Or maybe it's a system of thinking formed to fit a set of facts. Sometimes, as with religions and political ideals, the system overshadows the facts so much that the basic occurrences are either ignored, denied, or entirely misshapen, all to fit the religion or politics. Once something has happened it's no longer the event that matters much, but the way people think about it. There is no way to predict what people will think even about a purely objective natural fact, such as a hurricane. They might see it as a manifestation of the wrath of God or a failure of the government to be there to fix it--the same God they praise for his loving kindness and the same government they resent for its intrusion into their lives. Apart from being the study of "what happened," in any absolute sense, history is the study of what people decide those happenings mean. Usually historians are the scriveners of the dominant elements of a society but sometimes, when those dominant elements are feeling guilty about being dominant, the scriveners put on hair shirts and take the side of those they dominated. So it is, for example, that the story of the "taming of the West" can become, inside of a generation, the story of the shameful displacement and extermination of the noble original occupants of the West.

My understanding of the present tells me that people rarely think about history as it is being made, and only in hindsight are they able to put together a coherent narrative of history. And the very act of making a coherent historical narrative goes contrary to the inherent chaos and randomness of things. Historians understand this, no doubt, while the rest of us tend to want to make sense of things in a broader context. The most reliable history might seem at first blush to be the basic fact of what happened, but that isn't what anyone cares about to any great extent. On November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas, Texas. Except to the most freaked-out conspiracy theorist, that is an indisputable fact. But of course that's not what people spend most of their time talking about. They want to know who killed him, with how many bullets, from which direction or directions, at whose behest, and all that. Books are written, movies made, and an entire industry rises up around these peripheral questions. Indeed all murder stories focus on these elements: the death itself is rarely worth spending much time on, even though it is the one event of the drama without which nothing else can happen. Despite our urge to turn all of history into a series of mysteries, ultimately solvable, and despite the best efforts of conspiracy theorists to put the event into a more compelling narrative, the facts of the JFK assassination have ultimately proven to be pretty pedestrian and straightforward: a guy got a rifle, sat at an open window, and fired several shots. Actually, the more our technology in reconstructing the events improves, the more likely it becomes that that is exactly what happened. But even if all the many ideas of all the conspiracy theorists are correct, virtually none of them have had any effect on the event itself or on its predictable and ordinary aftermath. A family lost a husband and father. The vice president was sworn in as president, just as had happened on the seven previous occasions when a president died in office. The nation mourned and there was a big funeral. The U.S. government, to whose ongoing existence John Kennedy had dedicated and subordinated himself, went on without him.

Now let's look at a more recent major event, the bombings of the World Trade Towers and the Pentagon, which happened by means of individuals crashing jet airplanes loaded with fuel and people into those buildings. This took place on September 11, 2001. Four planes were hijacked by a total of nineteen men. Three of them hit targets, and the fourth crashed in a field. All the passengers, crew, hijackers, and many people in the buildings were killed. The World Trade Towers were completely destroyed. The Pentagon was repaired and restored. Can anyone seriously dispute these facts as I have just related them?

In this case, as with the Kennedy assassination, conspiracy theories swirl around the quite well-known facts. The attacks on September 11, 2001 were the result of a conspiracy, and a well-executed one at that. But that still doesn't satisfy anyone. In the JFK assassination people looked for a conspiracy, thinking that would lead somewhere, and after several decades they began to give up the search. The event became emblematic, correctly or not, of the deeply sinister and unknown and unknowable power of people to do things we can't control until it's too late. People want to make sense, in some larger context, of an event such as an assassination, but in the end it often just means that obscure people can kill famous people if they wish to, at pretty much any time. Famous people continue to be assassinated regularly. We're comfortable with the idea that individuals or small groups of individuals can make a difference in the world, except when it comes to bad things like assassinations and suicide bombings. And what makes us most uncomfortable is that we have no way of knowing when something bad will happen again.

Except to the families of the dead, the aftermath of 9/11 turned out to be far more important than the event itself, just the same as with the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination. The victory has been entirely on the side of the original perpetrators of the events and their fellow conspirators. In one efficient, well-coordinated morning's work a small group brought an entire country to its knees and plunged it into a multi-billion dollar decade-long punitive war against Arabs everywhere in which several times as many U.S. citizens have died as died on the day of the original attacks, and the country has been reduced to bragging about its use of torture and the suspension of habeas corpus, not to mention its slaughter of nearly a million Iraqis and Afghanis. What cadre wouldn't gladly sacrifice nineteen soldiers to create such havoc?

I have a fearless prediction, one that you may have already thought of yourself. Given the fact that organized labor counts for practically nothing in this country any more, and also given the fact that we're approaching the 10th anniversary of the events of September 11, 2001, Labor Day will soon morph into a 9/11 Memorial or Remembrance Day, dedicated not to working men and women but rather to OURSELVES generally as a country. In that way we can feel solemnly sorry for ourselves and victimized all over again each year, most likely forgetting or ignoring several key things:
(1) the western economic imperialism that fostered the hatred that led to the event;
(2) the religious fundamentalism that fueled it and which we have answered in kind with the growth of our own religious fundamentalism; and
(3) the incredible strategic economy with which a self-deluded few can bring down the self-deluded many.
Fiscal economy at the national and state levels will preclude an extra holiday in September, so we'll continue to use the first Monday in September for this purpose. Could it be that congressmen from NY or the hinterlands have already suggested this holiday shift?

Someone else famous said something like, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." By this measure we are all perpetually condemned, in large part because we rarely remember the past the same way from day to day, let alone from year to year or generation to generation. Perhaps a more useful if less aphoristic way to think about it is that we should be careful which version of the past we choose, because that is probably the one we are condemned to repeat.

Strangers In A Strange Land

Southern California

Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Since coming back from visiting kids and grandkids I have begun to settle in a bit for fall. It's hot as hell here, so fall is only a vague designation, not even on the calendar but in people's minds. End of summer vacation and all that.

Went back to the gym for the first time in several weeks. I have to tell you about this health club I belong to. Perhaps it's not much different from where you go, but it has some distinct differences from the one I went to in Rockford, Michigan. The equipment is pretty much the same, to be sure. Weights and resistance machines and aerobic machines and big TV screens for people to watch while they're endeavoring to shed the pounds. You can see sports shows, talk shows, and also watch people cooking and eating ridiculously rich and complicated dishes. What's wrong with that last picture? I ask myself, when it hits me that many of the women who are laboring on the treadmills--the modern-day middle class equivalent of the sweatshops and shirtwaist factories of yore--will have to go home and cook meals for their families. So while they're striving to become more svelte, the cooking channel gives them yet another something to strive for (and probably fall short of)--the perfectly rendered nouvelle cuisine offerings of Bobby Flay and other noted competitive chefs. Those huge plates with the drizzled layers of glistening sauce and the little something piled up high in the middle and garnished with, well, something. "For dessert I've made a reduction of the juices from the squid tentacles and added some honey and creme fraiche and finely chopped scallions with just a bit of the bacon fat, then frozen it into a gelato." To which the querulous judge says, shaking his head, "Squid ice cream again? I was looking for something more original."

I did prefer the option I had at the place in Rockford to watch, on the little screens they had on the elliptical trainers in addition to the big ones out on the floor, old episodes of Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie, shows that never even pretended to operate within the realm of reality. But that's not available here.

The principal difference between the Michigan gym and here, however, is not what's on television during the workout. It's the ethnic mix in the populace. I mind my own business for the most part when I'm working up a sweat and grunting at the weight devices, but I have more leisure to look around when I go into the watery realms of the club, on the other side of the locker rooms, where there's a lap pool, a whirlpool, a steam room, and a sauna. The Rockford crowd was pretty much white and native-born. Here, at least in Arcadia where this club is located, I'd estimate the overall ethnic breakdown to be about 50% Asian, 25% Hispanic, and the rest a mix of Anglos, European immigrants, and African Americans. Out here it's not so much a matter of what color you are as what language you speak when you're with your family. Of course by the second or third generation in this country every kid--Latin, Asian, European--despite his or her parents, has become just a plain American young person, wearing the same styles of clothing advertising brand names as everyone else and speaking the same slangy parody of English kids speak everywhere. But the elders are a different story.

Most of the Asians are Japanese, and they seem to take their leisure quite seriously. Their faces betray no sense of the relaxation that soaking in steam and hot water are intended to bring. Between themselves they occasionally talk and even laugh, but for the most part they look as if they're on a mission of some sort. In the steam room in Rockford (which, unlike here, was for men only--I assume there was one for the women, too) the guys would sit hunched forward, grunting and exhaling loudly with a combination of relief and acknowledgment of the heat, and grumbling to one another about sports, the weather, or current events. There was a sense that everyone was on the same page, as it were, even though I sometimes felt that assumption to be unfounded, especially in the realms of politics and religion. Here, in part because of language barriers and profound cultural differences and in part I think out of politeness, people tend to speak little and observe a kind of informal segregation based on ethnicity. The Japanese often stand and wave their arms and exercise their major joints in absolute silence, gazing stoically straight ahead as they gesticulate, as if responding to instructions delivered out of ether in the middle distance. The Spanish-speaking people are a bit more loquatious and jocular in general, seeming to enjoy themselves in a way that is more familiar to me. Some people are lost in the inner worlds of their iPods, allowing only vague tinny whisps of rhythm to escape from their ear buds. All of us, confined a dozen at a time within a ten foot square room full of hot vapor, know that our main job is to sweat, and we stay focused on that, but some do it with less intensity than others.

Most of this I find both amusing and relaxing in and of itself, food for thought, though as I sit and observe I often hope and yet hesitate to strike up casual conversations. But I give practically everyone the benefit of the doubt, imagining they are perhaps uncomfortable with us Anglos in this vast new country we rule. It is only certain European immigrants whose silence I take for general scorn and unfriendliness. They seem to be from the eastern end of that continent. Their faces, and on some of the men their torsos, elaborately tattooed with cryptic jailhouse runes and symbols, seem to say "Don't fuck with me, I've been fucked with enough already."

One particularly dour old couple, probably Armenian, and bearing no tattoos, are there most days I go. The man is wasted, the hair standing up several inches all over his hunched and narrow back and shoulders as he sits on the edge of the water, letting his feet get wet. His pinched features suggest a life of pain and disgruntlement. America is perhaps his last stop on a long and disappointing journey. This country is going to the dogs, he might be thinking. The old country is going to the dogs. Kids today are going to the dogs. He is dying. Who knows? A woman I assume is his wife sits in the whirlpool or wades, squatting duck-style, up and down the lap pool, eyeing each new arrival to the aquatic area with knowing suspicion and disdain. She wears a quirky combination of clothing, including a pinkish t-shirt and blue shorts under a full-skirted bathing suit and a clear plastic bathing cap over her gray hair. Once when I came out of the locker room she admonished me to take a shower before entering the whirlpool. There's a rinsing shower right next to it. It turns out I had showered already in the locker room, but I felt somehow that my explanation didn't satisfy her. She left soon after I waded in. It made me wonder how much chlorine it would take to kill the particular demons that possess her.

Since they're always present when I am, I assume these two go there every day, to while away the afternoon and perhaps soak away some of their pain. I wonder if their misery reflects a lifetime of sorrow or simply their contempt for one another. I doubt if either of them has smiled since some time during the first half of the 20th century, and I find myself, devoid of knowledge other than my observation of their mute demeanors, feeling sorry for any children or grandchildren they may have. Their faces say to all comers, "Who in the hell do you think you are, coming here, being here, looking at me?" And yet I've taken this couple on, as a project. My quest is to figure them out. My handicap in this is the same as everyone else's, though, in that I will ask no questions and say nothing unless spoken to. My own face probably betrays no more of me than do those of my fellow travelers on this weird voyage back in the hydrotherapy section of the club. I wonder if they think they know me the way I think I know them. We're probably all wrong.

What the hell, maybe I'll smile next time, just to confuse them.

Letters, We Get Letters

Burnsville, Minnesota

Sunday, August 21, 2011

I admit I know little, even after two years, about running a blog. It wasn't until a few weeks ago that I was noodling around on the Blogger site I use to create and manage the thing and hit a tab that allowed me to read all the comments that have ever been made to the blog in the chronological order in which the comments were posted, starting from the most recent one. Generally I just look at the number of comments that have been made to the most immediate one or two entries, and if I see that the number has increased, I check them out. They are most often from the usual suspects. You know who you are--the Few, the Proud, the Regulars.

What I discovered under this "Comments" tab was that occasionally someone will comment on a very old blog entry, written perhaps a year or more ago. I guess people must find them, through a key word or phrase, on Google. I can't figure out how, otherwise, someone would happen to be perusing an old posting on my blog. I have received messages from at least half a dozen people whose ancestors' graves I have seen, or perhaps rested on. Those are great, because they remind me of why I love to wander through cemeteries, and that it does other people some good, too. Someone recently wrote to lament the fact that I didn't seem to like the food at a New Mexico diner her sister had recently taken over. Things like that. If I'm not looking for the comments under the Comments tab, I won't see them at all, since it's too complicated and time-consuming to go back and look for them under the individual entries.

One such comment I recently discovered had been made on March 5 of this year, at the end of a post I put up on April 10, 2010, when I was walking from Merkel to Sweetwater, in West Texas. The post was about nothing in particular--shoes wearing out, listening to "Key to the Highway" on the iPod, smelling the bluebonnets in the ditches, watching the wind turbines up on the hills and mesas. So the comment, placed where it was and containing the information it did, struck me as a bit off-the-wall. As a manifesto of sorts, it bears reprinting in full, especially since most of you probably wouldn't see it otherwise:

Anonymous said...
I am not the Fourth Reich.

Pitch Jesus to Jew elders as revenge for Temple? They didn't know about the god's intent for xtianity to spread to Europe, ruining cultures throughout the continent, enabling revenge known as the Holocaust.

Abortion is part of the decay inflicted by the gods in the latter half of the 20th century as we approach the Apocalypse::::
- Free sex
- Explosion in gay sex
- Abortion
- Legalized greed/immorality
- The internet. Whereas TV was a phenominally destructive new temptation on the landscape it doesn't hold a candle to the internet. Some people will waste their whole lives. And its timing was deliberate.

"It's too late to pray." Sign of Woodbridge Church Kansas. And it may be true. Examine pimps who prostitute 10 year old girls in the ghetto.
Of course, if you want even a shred of a chance to save yourself, on that rare occassion the Buffalo Bills did experience the Fourth Reich and realized a comeback.
I am failing. But it is because of the god's defense tactics. Fuck absolute power. I hate losing.

Budget problems. Cut the military. Bring them home and end the wars. Let these countries experience self-determination and decide their own future. Didn't we learn this lesson in Vietnam???
Unfortunnately, the gods use the United States as one of their tools, and using the spread of capitalism under the guide of democracy to level the playing field and prepare the planet for a global event.

So many people don't care about global warming. They don't care about the Federal deficit/debt (outside of partisanship) and they don't care earning $400k for an $80,000/year job will eventually bankrupt the country. They have awarded themselves $400k pay and retirement packages, loading up their friends on the payroll during the boom 90s through the real estate bust while all services which the program were intended to fund now get cut to pay for it.
These people are often common public university labor. Not Ivy League, not private university.
This labor isn't good enough to command the salaries they are earning. And they understood this when they applied to the public university they settled on.
You can't expect a top-tier salary with a second-rate education.
They think they are going sometime during/at the end of this life, and disregard the poor souls who are left behind.
These are the people who will be here in the United States when bankruptcy is declared and society deteriorates into chaos. And they will deserve the anarchy which ensues.

Continuing the push for privatization, reinforced and supported recently with enormous public sector salaries and retirement packages.
Once achieved the gods will utilize the corruptive predisposition of the private sector economy, as seen with the sub-prime/bailout fiasco, to initiate economic catastrophy and initiate the bankruptcy proceedings of the United States.
Whether the cure for cancer/diseases or the permanant resolution of economic misery, before the gods remove these motivations to pray we will experience an inordinate deluge of each element, with economic misery being perhaps the dissallusion of the united States with bankruptcy.

The gods used the Italians to ruin life in the 20th century.
The gods used the Italians to ruin life in A.D. with The Church.
The Church controlled Western Civilization. As the largest land owner in Europe they controlled the monarchies. They were responsbile for slavery, revenge for African invasion and rape of Italy. They created religious discontent, ultimately leading to the disfavored dumping ground known as the United States.

ONE THING. Deliver ONE THING you promised.
All these people did everything you told them for DECADES. You have strung them all along.
The gods are liars, and you're all going to be CHEATED.

It is as if I am little more than an indentured servant.

Well, ahem.... What to make of this? There are parts of it with which I disagree, but even more with which I agree. The whole thing has that intelligent but disorganized flavor you get with mild paranoid schizophrenia, like the fine tang of faintly scented urine on Leopold Bloom's palate from his grilled mutton kidneys. The Fourth Reich reference, I've found, has some currency in modern global conspiracy chatter, but this writer is quick to disavow that. It also has wisps of the heavy duty Christian fundamentalist stuff, like that of the Westboro Baptist Church, except that the writer seems to place himself deliberately apart from that bunch, too. Besides it refers to "the gods" rather than to God, a sure tell. The somewhat cryptic reference to the Buffalo Bills and harping about Italians suggests a New York state of mind. The conservative stuff--about abortion and gays and the bitching about public sector salaries (you won't catch me ever doing that)--almost undercuts the more progressive sentiments elsewhere. I certainly can't argue with the idea that the gods used the Italians to ruin life in A.D. with the Church. An interesting mind is at work here. I'm almost afraid to know anything else but that. Dated March 5, 2011, it did come pretty soon after my encounter with the End of the World dude on Oscar Night, but it's not quite his style, unless of course he regrouped and drastically revamped his theological outlook in anticipation of all his missed deadlines.

On the off chance this comment was posted by someone I know, or who I've mentioned in the blog, maybe you'd care to identify yourself, along with the illegal substances you habitually use and the other medications you're supposed to be taking.

Homage to DJ

Northern Michigan

Friday, August 12, 2011

A week ago I was holed up in a motel in Kalamazoo, the hometown of Derek Jeter, the best shortstop in the game of baseball today, with very few rivals in history. I'm not forgetting Ozzie Smith for defense, Honus Wagner for offense, and some may have had better range, some better power. But for all around play, including batting average (.312 lifetime), hits (over 3,000 so far), and fielding percentage (.976 lifetime), he is the most strongly balanced, statistically. And he doesn't take a lot of time off. In the fifteen full seasons he has played prior to this year he has been in an average of 152 games per season out of 162 total, not quite Cal Ripken/Lou Gehrig iron man status, but pretty damned good. As of this evening he has 3032 hits, making him 23rd on the all-time list. By the end of the season he should be 20th, with a bullet. At 37, Derek is showing his age just a bit now, his average dipping below .300, but if he has just three more average years he should finish among the top five or ten hitters of all time.

But that's not what I really like about Derek Jeter. For me, it's the less statistically tangible things that make the man. His commitment to the game isn't necessarily anything unique. You've got to want to play baseball to play it well. The fact that he's been a one-team guy, while that's less common today than in days of yore, isn't the thing either. And, truth to tell, he might dance his last waltz with someone other than the one he arrived with. When the Yankees can't use him any more, he's out of there, and he's not DH material. (Even the Tiger great Ty Cobb, with a list of records as long as your arm, some of which still stand, had to spend his last two ignominious seasons with the Philadelphia Athletics.) It's not the fact that Jeter's number will be promptly retired the moment he does or that he's a lock for the Hall of Fame. Or that he plays over 95% of the time and wants to play the rest. Or that he makes fewer errors in two seasons than most shortstops make in one. The technonerds of baseball, the Bill Jameses, might tell you that his proven defensive range, somewhat limited and getting more so, means that he makes fewer errors than others might, the theory being that if you don't reach, you can't miss. But no fielder has more error opportunities than a shortstop, and when you've played all season and have a single-digit error number by the middle of August, that's better than good.

It's not even the fact that he's good-looking and unassuming and keeps his temper
in check and keeps his personal life absolutely out of the press. No. It's a thing called humility. How a guy as talented and as wealthy as he is can remain so damned humble, in the best way possible, is nearly unfathomable. No rants and rages, no showboating, very little behavior that would embarrass his mother or father or the team.

One wonders just what kind of human this guy is, and yet he is human. And humane and philanthropic, as well he should be considering that his salary equals the GDP of the average third world country. And speaking of salaries, there are some fans who decry the ridiculous amounts of money baseball players make, but never stop to wonder into whose pockets that very money would be going (and used to go) if the players were not getting it. Does anyone really think the owners would be giving away beer and selling bleacher seats for $3.50 if they were still paying players the kind of chump change they got before free agency?

But back to Derek Jeter, the man. I recently watched a documentary they did on him to commemorate his having reached the 3,000 hit mark, called "Derek Jeter 3K" or something like that. I found myself marveling not at his greatness but at his almost boring sense of discomfort at being the subject of a show about him. For him it's about the game, not the fame. If he hits well but the team doesn't win his own accomplishments mean little to him. Off the field he lives well, for sure, and like any other jock is most interested in the jostling physicality and camaraderie that accompanies his profession. He's not particularly deep, nor is he shallow. He is, instead, just what he should be. A pure baseball player, as pure as they come, a knight of the round table of the game, a leader among equals, tending more toward Sir Galahad than toward Sir Lancelot, and always dedicated to the quest. The occasional few who snipe at him or spread unseemly rumors reveal biases of their own rather than anything really negative about him.

It's impossible to say for sure, but I can't see him becoming a color commentator, mostly because he isn't really that colorful. Never one of those opinionated veterans of the game like Al Kaline, who let their conservative personal politics infect the play-by-play. Not sure how good a manager he'd be, either. The best players do not make the best managers, probably because they can't relate well enough to those who aren't as good as they are and never will be. Ted Williams comes to mind in that context. At any rate, few Hall of Famers have been managers, unless they were player-managers, which is a kind of specialized uber-management.

Overarching everything else about Derek Jeter is a sort of gentleness and unflappability and generosity of spirit. Far more than Brutus, about whom Shakespeare had Marc Antony say it originally in an epitaph, one could justly say about the living Jeter, that "his life is gentle, and the elements so mixed in him that nature might stand up and say to all the world, This is a man."

Copper

Anaconda, Montana

Wednesday, July 27, 2011

On TV here in Big Sky Country, as elsewhere in this land, the meat puppets are engaged in a frenzy of speculation on what might be called Debtmageddon. Just when you thought you were safe here on earth, another horrible deadline looms, one after which the world as we know it will cease to exist, they say.

One of the more risible lines I hear often is how, if the budget impasse isn't solved somehow, consumer credit interest rates are going to skyrocket. That makes me rethink my naive preconceptions, because I figured interest rates were in the stratosphere already. Silly me, assuming that 19.99% per annum, with ceilings of 30% or more, was already enough to make even a Shylock blush. Apparently, if Obama and the Teapartiers can't get their heads together by August 2, your interest will go up even higher. What those heights might be, God only knows. Maybe 10% per week, collected in person by a guy named Vinnie. Meanwhile the poor beleaguered banks, to make up for the extra expense of having to hire all those goombahs to collect their vigorish, will have to lower the amount they pay on savings accounts from the current rate of practically nothing to, well, nothing.

Somebody in a speech (I think President Obama) harked back to the Eisenhower administration recently for purposes of putting our financial situation into context, and my memory carried me to the days when the local bank on Dixie Highway actually paid little old me something like 4% interest on my tiny savings account. I have no idea what the credit card rates were then, since such things barely existed, but I'm betting they were in the single digits--still enough for banks to make a handsome profit and to ensure that the bank president would be the richest guy in town, but not quite enough to make him, as is now the case, richer and more powerful than God.

The other thing that amuses me as I hear it repeated by the Barbie and Ken dolls who give us our news is the fictitious idea that the American people are now demanding that their elected officials act like adults and compromise for the good of the country. Of course if people hear this kind of nonsense often enough, they come to believe it, and indeed to think they came up with the idea themselves, this being the essential nature of propaganda. But the notion that we want our two political parties to agree on things is not and never has been the case. What the American people want now, and what they've wanted since the dawn of partisan politics (some time during Washington's second administration in the 1790s), is for the elected officials they don't like to grow up and start acting like the ones they do like.

With all this in mind, I suggest that everyone quit worrying and above all quit watching the news, and let the folks in Foggy Bottom do what they're going to do anyway. If we voted for assholes (and in 2010 boy did we ever) then we should expect to be governed by assholes. In other words, relax, just as we did when they were predicting the end of the world in May. If the worst happens, we're all screwed anyway. If it doesn't, we'll never notice the difference.

And one more thing. I'm tired of all this talk about trillions of dollars. Forget trillions. I'm waiting for the first quadrillion dollar deficit. Bring that bad boy on. (Just like I'm skipping the 4G network, whatever the hell that means, and waiting for 5G, or 6G.)

Back to Montana. When I was a kid in music class in elementary school, we had a book full of songs that practically nobody sings any more. In some cases that's absolutely a good thing. Songs like "Old Black Joe" and "Camptown Races" are mercifully laid to rest. But one of my favorite songs from that book started,

I'm Captain Jinx of the horse marines
I feed my horse on corn and beans.
I like young ladies in their teens
'Cause I'm the pride of the army.

I always enjoyed that one because I felt then, as I do now, that it captured the essence of what it means to be a military officer. Or a Mormon or a U.S. Congressman for that matter. But another ditty that's come to mind recently is about the very wild west in the grip of which I find myself at this moment. Maybe some of you will remember this one:

My home's in Montana, I wear a bandanna,
My spurs are of silver, my pony is grey.
When riding the ranges my luck never changes,
With foot in the stirrup I'll gallop away. (Etc.)

Anaconda, Montana is, or was, a copper mining town. They mined it and above all they smelted it. The process of smelting copper ore created--as solid, liquid, and/or gaseous byproducts--things like sulphur dioxide, mercury and other heavy metals, and arsenic, the fumes of which wafted through the air like the smell of money, at least for the Anaconda Copper Mining Company, which owned the town. Anaconda Copper's history reads like a who's who of notorious capitalists, as the company passed through or was pawed by the sticky fingers of folks with names like Hearst, Rothschild, and Rockefeller. Although the grass and trees refused to grow to any extent in Anaconda, and people routinely died of cancer, the money grew and the mining and smelting processes created lots of jobs for Irish, Italian, and Welsh immigrants. When the smelter closed in the 1980s, many jobs were lost. On the other hand, as I see it, many lives were saved.

As a means of subsisting, I'm not sure having a job is necessarily all it's cracked up to be. For centuries the English and European aristocracies have lived quite comfortably without having any jobs at all. And behold the fowls of the air, for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns, as the Good Book says. We should start seriously questioning the politicians who promise to create jobs for America. They could be trying to kill us. Perhaps they're the real subversives.

Well, I digress again. On a cool sunny day in Anaconda, I decided to climb what's known as the "A Hill," the slightly vulgar name for one of the now quite grassy peaks overlooking the city from the south. It's called that because along the side about three-quarters of the way up there's a large white letter "A," perhaps fifty feet high, made of boulders painted white. It signifies Anaconda, and especially Anaconda High School. There's also a "C" hill next to it, for another school, which I think is Catholic Central. I'm told the high school kids go up each year to repaint the "A" and no doubt also to drink and carouse. I took a steep one-lane road about halfway up the hill, then began pulling myself up a very steep and perilous incline of stones about the size of trap rock, hanging on to aspen saplings and a stout walking stick for support. I think only someone at least half drunk and embued with the sense of immortality that the very young have would be foolhardy enough to try to carry paint while climbing up there. From right next to it, the "A" doesn't even look like a letter, just a large collection of white rocks about a foot in diameter shaped and held in place at the appropriate places by railroad ties anchored by heavy rebar. Up beyond the "A" another few hundred feet is the top of the hill, which affords a spectacular view of the surrounding mountains, some still snow-covered, as well as the town sprawling at its feet looking tiny and the smokestack of the defunct smelter that once spewed out the toxic lifeblood of the city.

The Anaconda of today is only a remnant of its former self, with the typical half-empty downtown of the typical American industrial skeleton. A low mountain of inert jet-black tailings, the slag that remains when all the copper has been gleaned from the stripped rock by whatever means, runs for the better part of a mile along Montana Route 1 on the way into and out of town, defying vegetation to even consider rooting in it. The tailings look like pebbles of anthracite coal. The closed Anaconda smelter and its environs today are a gigantic superfund site, an inherited liability for the oil giants ARCO and its parent BP, who bought it just a few years before the operation closed down.

The sky in this part of Montana is clear and sweet and the rivers run reasonably clean, all things considered, and the mountains and valleys are beautiful. The miners and smelter workers are gone. Elsewhere in Montana, and throughout the Rocky Mountain states, copper is still being mined and smelted, as it must be, as it has been for 10,000 years or more. Also, quite extensively, down in the Andean countries of South America, where Anaconda Copper has long been doing its capitalist magic for the benefit of the Indians and mestizos of that area. Copper for electric wiring, for roofs and plumbing. Copper for brass and jewelry. But not here in Anaconda, where even the slot machines in the city's dozens of small low-stakes casinos rarely accept the copper coin of the realm any more. I don't know if the machines take only paper money or if they accept Social Security checks as well. That wouldn't be a bad idea. Maybe they've already thought of it somewhere else.

If Debtmageddon comes and those government checks stop, it'll be another nail in the coffin of Anaconda. But not a copper nail. No more copper here.

The Sublime

Southern California

Wednesday, July 13, 2011

We recently had an opportunity to visit Zion National Park in southern Utah. Beautiful red rock formations and mountains abound. The journey to there from greater LA was a bit like going from the sublime to the ridiculous and back out the other side to the sublime again. That's if you're not a gambler.

Interstate 15 is the artery that carries the eastbound traveler out of the suburban congestion of the metropolitan area and into the desert north of Barstow. There the brown hills and salt flats of the Mojave are a reminder that this whole place was pretty much desolate and scrubby a century ago, when San Francisco was the Golden State's center of wealth and finance and culture (such as it ever was). Back when someone could put this line into a clever song:

She hates California, it's cold and it's damp,
That's why the lady is a tramp.

I puzzled on that for a while when I first heard it until I remembered that the center of gravity, as it were, of this state didn't really begin to move south down the Pacific coast until the 1920s, when the movie industry hit its stride. So when Lorenz Hart wrote those words in the 30s, it was a holdover from the days when eastern women of quality would go only to the northern part of the state if they came out here at all. And some remnants of that dichotomy exist to the present day. Money is certainly to be made hand over fist in the southern part of the state, but it's still to a great extent considered the fruits of ostentation and poor taste, comparatively speaking. In northern California (which, like northern Michigan, comprises a good two-thirds of the land mass of the state) the money has always seemed to smell a little better, as if scraping it raw from the ground made it cleaner: gold, silver, and silicon, as opposed to Goldwyn, the silver screen, and silicone.

Well, back to the trip. Out across the windy flat desert heading northeast to Nevada, mountains pushed back miles from the roadway, the towns become little oases, few and far between. In fact, the city of Baker is about it, amid signs with happy-go-lucky names promising death and damnation, visions of dried bleached bones dancing in the shimmering distance. Baker boasts the Mad Greek Restaurant and the Bun Boy Motel on its strip, reminiscent of the lonesome ports along I-10 in the New Mexico and Arizona desert, like Lordsburg and Quartzsite. Then, just when the arid desolation is becoming beautiful in its own right, Joshua trees and cacti and sagebrush thickening the gray-brown earth, the Nevada state line comes into view, and it's as if someone slapped up a third-rate theme park in the middle of absolutely nowhere. This town, bearing the unlikely name of Primm, has exactly one thing going for it. It welcomes you to a state where gambling is legal everywhere. To celebrate this crossing of the invisible line from massive San Bernardino County--where the powers that be unreasonably refuse to let you flush your money down an assortment of thousands of twinkling tinkling shitholes leading to the coffers of the Mafia--into Clark County, Nevada, they put up a few places for folks who can't wait another half hour to get to Las Vegas. I imagine that back before Indian casinos this spot on the state line was a Big Deal, being the first legal gambling venue the poor casino-starved Californians saw, and some of them stopped to dump their money right at the state line. Why wait?

Why wait indeed, unless of course you came to see Las Vegas. Lenny Bruce said that Miami is where neon goes to die. If so, then Las Vegas is where it goes when the boatman has taken it across the River Styx--the entertainment capital of the afterlife. Englebert Humperdinck, Wayne Newton, the Blue Men, Penn and Teller, Siegfried and ...ooops. And the New Mr. Vegas, comedian George Wallace. The good stuff. And if you can hold on to your wallet, it's a fast freeway drive on up the 15 from the state line. But if you're not interested in seeing a city where the streets are paved with Elvis impersonators and little Latin American conscripts handing out ads for call girls--if it's pure, unadulterated odds-stacked-against-you gambling you crave, then you might as well stop at Primm, or for that matter at any 7-Eleven along the highway throughout the great state of Nevada.

One of the little delights awaiting the traveler, after the long urban expanse of greater Las Vegas and an hour of desert on the other side, is the 25-mile chunk of I-15 that cuts through northwest Arizona on the way up to Utah, winding through the steep Virgin Mountains. This is excellent preparation for the beauties that lie ahead, because Utah is a beautiful state. I confess that my prejudices against the Mormons have kept me largely ignorant of the Beehive State until relatively recently. Contempt prior to investigation is never a good thing. So what if Brigham Young and his band of merry pranksters got here first? And small wonder that they liked what they saw. For mountain majesty there's no place like Utah, as far as your humble narrator can tell. Colorado is great, but east of Denver it tapers off so quickly into rolling prairie nothingness that you have to keep looking over your shoulder to make sure you didn't imagine what you were marveling at just hours earlier. Utah, on the other hand, is pretty much all mountains.

I'll let the photos speak for themselves, and for me, since when it comes to gigantic natural phenomena I'm generally left speechless. So far I haven't become bored with mountains of any sort, whether made of bare red sandstone or whatever it is, or covered with trees and shrubs. So much time as a comparative flatlander has made me easily impressed with these geological dimples. I can only imagine what I'd think of Katmandu.

One of the things that helps make the pristine beauty of the steep rocks and canyons in a place like Zion appear even greater by comparison is the cramming together of people from all over the country and the world who have come to gape. Japanese with their maniacal photographing of everything. Germans with their inveterate hearty love of hiking. Serious families of east Indians, the men walking ahead, the women young and old showing bits of brown back and midriff beneath drapes of cotton print material. And of course the rest of us, dressed as if we were getting ready to clean the garage or work on the car, wearing ball caps indoors and out, even while we dine, like the utter boors we've all become. Mixtures of man alive, as Captain Beefheart said, packed into buses chugging through gorges and canyons cut over millions of years by a nature vastly superior and utterly indifferent to the sights and smells and silliness of all its puny transient species, especially to this swarm of beings that glorifies itself to the point where it imagines it can make more than a brief miniscule difference to anything at all on this planet.

The sublime, the ridiculous, the sublime.

The Last Duchess

The Southland

Sunday, July 10, 2011

There's a guy out here on one of the public TV outlets named Huell Howser. Locals will know and understand immediately the full implications of that statement. He's a tall and very affable fellow in his mid-sixties with a full head of white hair, which he keeps clipped to something just a bit longer than a crewcut. He looks and sounds like what he is--a news reporter gone slightly stocky and more than a bit batty. Though he still has his east Tennessee twang, he's been here in the Southland, as they call southern California, for many years, and appears Monday through Friday at 7:30 in the evening for a half hour dedicated to visits to slightly less-known areas and points of interest throughout California.

With Huell Howser, you just love him or hate him. It's hard to be indifferent. You either think he's a complete moron or you groove on his goofy ebullience. I am in the latter camp. I'm trying to think of people to compare him to. He's a beefier Marlon Perkins on lots of caffeine without (necessarily) the animals. Or a skinnier George Pierrot, showing up in person and just loving the countryside and the food and the ambiance and the people. He fairly explodes with wide-eyed innocence and enthusiasm over things that for the average jaded viewer and but for his nearly giggly excitement would be only mildly interesting. To paraphrase slightly the words of Robert Browning from My Last Duchess, "He has a heart--how shall I say?--too soon made glad, too easily impressed; he likes whate'er he looks on, and his looks go everywhere."

Huell's been everywhere in California, from the redwood forests to the Mexican border, over a twenty-year-plus career at public TV station KCET that followed stints as a regular news reporter in Nashville, then New York and LA. After his arrival on the coast his infectious enthusiasm and insouciant love of regular everyday stuff and people combined with his new-found love of California, and he created a program called "California's Gold," where he visits scenic locales, fairs, small and large towns, and, well, just about every damn place and thing in the state. And when he gets there, dressed in shorts or slacks topped with solid-colored straight-cut tropical shirts, he just enjoys himself, whether he's sitting on a pile of old tires, visiting a store that sells hundreds of brands of soda, or looking out over a spectacular vista. There's no other way to put it. They guy just has a good time. He's famous all over the state. Matt Groening's regard for Huell Howser has even resulted in several references to him on "The Simpsons."

I recently saw an episode of "California's Gold" where he was visiting the Point Bonita Lighthouse at the Golden Gate in San Francisco. It stands out on the ocean at the mouth of the Golden Gate, which isn't the bridge but the rocky strait between the San Francisco and Marin Peninsulas leading in from the Pacific to the Bay. The iconic bridge spans the inner edge of the Golden Gate, hence its name. Anyway there's an old lighthouse out there on the ocean side, and Huell and his intrepid cameraman are following a park ranger out to it, across a small pedestrian bridge. Along the way he keeps repeating, in the tone and cadences a kindergarten teacher might use, "So, when you say Golden Gate, you're not talking about that"--pointing behind him eastward to the big orange suspension bridge in the distance--"but THIS body of water, which is also the Golden Gate." The ranger affirms the fact, and Huell Howser shakes his head in genuine amazement and disbelief, as if he's just been told there's a race of twelve-fingered trolls living deep under the bridge on which he's standing. Then he says, "Wow. That's a-MAZ-ing"--his trademark phrase--"so wait. So this little foot bridge we're crossing now to get to the lighthouse is the original Golden Gate Bridge then, isn't it?" As he glances at the camera, eyes twinkling and a good-natured smile playing on his lips, you know that he's not at all amused by his own cleverness but is simply bowled over by the uncanny banal serendipity of it all. No child over the age of four could be this ingenuous, this wide-eyed, this utterly impressed by the mundane and the beautiful in felicitous juxtaposition to one another. And somehow, even as you're laughing at him, you're infected by his enthusiasm.

Of course my attraction to him is based in large measure on the fact that he's a kindred spirit. As I write about Irwindale or Lucky Baldwin or the End of the World Dude in Hollywood I imagine that old Huell's been there ahead of me, enthusing away on the very same subjects, and there's a pretty good chance he has. I approach Huell Howser with a fascination that I imagine to be akin to his own feeling of wonder about all that surrounds him. A diminished sense of excitement, or God forbid a tinge of cynicism, would be disrespectful.

Like some of the great television personalities of my own past and perhaps yours--people such as master Detroit home improvement huckster Mr. Belvedere or the great Ron Popeil touting the Showtime Rotisserie--you tend to watch Huell Howser not so much for what he's showcasing as for how he does it. You get the feeling he could become thrilled by an empty box and that after you were done making fun of him you'd have a respect for brown corrugated cardboard you never had before. That's AMAZING, you'd say to yourself, as you gazed reverentially at the container, shaking your head in almost stupefied awe. You mean to tell me this box is empty, and that it's made of cardboard?!? Wow!

That's amazing.