It wasn’t until I’d heard Andy Williams sing “Happy Holidays” for perhaps the 1,829th time in my life, earlier this month, that I finally realized he wasn’t singing “happy holidays” at all, but, rather, “Happy Holiday.” Singular! Which actually makes perfect sense, given that in the 1960s, when Williams recorded the song, nobody in Christian America gave two hoots about cutting Jews in on the action. Kwanzaa was still a newborn, and other religions and cultures barely registered in the national consciousness.
This just-concluding holiday season also was the one in which I finally reached the breaking point with Jimmy Durante’s menacing rendition of “Frosty the Snowman,” dating from the shoddily animated 1969 TV special. Durante’s take always had sounded dark to me, like a come-on from an old drunk with bad intent who was trying to lure kids onto his lap. But this particular December I was singularly struck by the way Durante bit off the word “village” in the line “Down to the village with a broomstick in his hand”—as if the village really was a circle of hell, and the singer’s pants were what was down.
OK, OK, so Jimmy Durante wasn’t much of a singer, he was croaking out the words as best he could, and, at any rate, he’s long dead and in no position to defend himself against my charges of prurience and vulgarity. But my point is, when you listen to as much Christmas music as I do every December, you end up noticing certain things and forming some pretty strong opinions.
In the DC area, the radio station WASH-FM switches, around Thanksgiving, from an adult contemporary format to all Christmas music, all the time, through December 25th. While I almost never listen to the station the rest of the year, I tend to tune it in pretty frequently during the Christmas season, especially when I’m in the car.
I’m not exactly sure why. Nearly every song is either hideously sentimental or profoundly pious, and the change in format sadly does not correspond to any alteration in corporate radio’s genre-neutral commitment to play the same handful of songs into the ground. Add to that the fact that, as a commercial radio station, WASH-FM is washed clean of any music at all for huge chunks of time during its frequent advertising blocs, and you’d think all of it would be more than enough to send an aging secular snob like me scurrying to the safety of my local NPR station, the classic rock outlet, or the indie-music CDs in my collection that make me feel like I’m not totally the stereotypical Bethesda baby boomer who shuns everything but public radio, all-news WTOP-FM and the music of his youth.
But damn if Christmas music doesn’t just make me feel good. (Generally speaking, that is—when it’s not evoking child molestation.) “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” makes me feel like doing just that, however many times I hear it. When Burl Ives urges me to have “A Holly Jolly Christmas,” I’m frankly pretty inclined to oblige. I’m right there with Elvis when he despairs of his “blue, blue, blue, blue Christmas.” Many’s the time I’ve sat at a traffic light “a-rum-bum-bum-bum”ing along with “The Little Drummer Boy.” When Ol’ Blue Eyes croons “Santa Claus is Coming to Town,” I nearly scan the neighborhood for signs of the fat man.
Talk about the music of my youth! Much of Christmas music’s appeal obviously is nostalgia, as many if not most of the songs date back to my childhood or even before it. Bing Crosby’s version of “White Christmas” had been a staple of the suburban hi-fi, after all, for at least a decade before I was even born. When my family gathered at my maternal grandparents’ tidy brick house on Long Island in the 1960s, the same Harry Simeon Chorale version of “The Little Drummer Boy” that still gets most of the Yuletide airplay was as much a part of our holiday as were the German-made crèche on the mantle, the scent of roast chicken and red cabbage in the kitchen, and my grandmother’s lebkuchen on the dessert tray. Every time I hear Elvis’s version of “Here Comes Santa Claus,” I’m reminded of happy December hours spent playing pool at a North Carolina bar I frequented in my 20s that featured an awesome jukebox of holiday tunes.
(A quick aside here. It’s always struck me as odd that Santa Claus would live on Santa Claus Lane. Doesn’t that seem more than a little self-aggrandizing for such a seemingly modest old toymaker? Why, I doubt even Oprah, who plasters her own mug on the cover of every issue of her eponymous O Magazine and in two days will debut the Oprah Winfrey Network on cable television, has named the street in front of her home Oprah Winfrey Lane. The other thing I find weird about “Here Comes Santa Claus” is its bizarre blend of secular and religious. I mean, sure, Santa Claus, that modern-day symbol of conspicuous consumption, started out as Saint Nicholas. But by 1957, when Elvis Presley was singing about him, Santa was fully emblematic of the crass, spiritually empty commercialization of Christmas that Charlie Brown would bemoan less than a decade later in an animated classic about the true meaning of the holiday. Consider the song’s closing lines: “So let’s give thanks to the Lord above/That Santa Claus comes tonight.” Isn’t that sort of like singing, “O little town of Bethlehem/The hopes and fears of all the years are dispelled by midnight madness at Best Buy”?)
Then, too, there’s a delightful innocence and unreality to Christmas music that can be so, so welcome at this depressing hour in our globe’s life. “Silent night, holy night” beats the bejesus (if you’ll pardon the expression) out of “mortar fire, holy sh*t!”, doesn’t it? Is it not better that a snowman should come to life, rather than some frankenfood that ultimately will kill us? “Let It Snow” indeed, as the beleaguered Earth continues warming and the polar ice caps keep melting.
Not that happy and hopeful Christmas songs are the only ones I like. It’s just that those are ones most likely to receive radio play. (Along with a few mixed-message tunes like The Kinks’ “Father Christmas”—a tale of thuggery that’s also an appeal to conscience.) In December, the boom box in our house and the CD player in my car are well-stocked with a variety of rock, country and pop Christmas music that runs a gamut of moods and emotions.
Perhaps my favorite Christmas CD of all time, compiled some years ago by friends of ours, features everything from Clarence Carter’s marvelously lewd “Back Door Santa,” to Buck Owens’ comically bereft “Blue Christmas Lights,” to John Prine’s near-bitter divorce saga “All the Best,” to the Pogues’ glorious “A Fairytale of New York.” That last song begins, in a world-weary croak , “It was Christmas eve, babe, in the drunk tank.”
Christmas Day itself isn’t that big a deal to me, and its passage isn’t particularly saddening. Christ’s birthday, arbitrarily assigned or not, hasn’t a ton of significance to an agnostic. I appreciate but certainly don’t need the presents. I do like giving gifts, but my choices are seldom so inspired that the presentations freeze in time as Hallmark moments.
But man, come December 26th, I do miss the music. I know I could keep playing the CDs anyway, and that, strictly speaking, songs like “Let It Snow” and “Winter Wonderland” conjure a season that’s scarcely begun. But the bottom line is, when WASH-FM resumes its usual programming, Andy Williams disappears from the airwaves, the Christmas tree we might once have rocked around is awaiting trash pickup at the curb, and the statute of limitations again has expired on jailing the late Jimmy Durante, it’s all over. Until the next happy holiday.
Thursday, December 30, 2010
Saturday, December 18, 2010
Thoughts At 30
December 8 was the 30th anniversary of John Lennon’s death. You no doubt read, heard or saw the tributes and commentaries on TV, online or in the newspapers earlier this month, but felt something was missing because I hadn’t yet weighed in.
Right?
Hello?
Well, you can chill out now.
I read an incredibly sappy piece in the Washington Post on December 7 of this month that was written by someone with a “special to” byline, which in these days of print-media freefall tends to denote a freelancer who has a passionate viewpoint, a low price tag and good timing. This guy, the former editor of a Beatles “fanzine,” had interviewed fellow Lennon acolytes in this country and in England about the day Lennon was shot to death in front of his New York City apartment building. The story’s second line was, “We”—meaning every Beatles fan in existence –“all know where we were and what we were doing when we found out.”
That statement struck me as vastly overstated, in keeping with the article’s consistently hyperbolic tone. I do think Lennon was an exceptional artist and an admirable man, whose passion and acerbic wit served the peace movement well. But I don’t see his assassination as a body blow to humanity on a par with those of MLK and JFK, as some people do. Nor am I even convinced that Lennon’s outsized role as moral authority and pain in the establishment’s ass was ultimately as effective in his day as is, in our day, Bono’s oft-criticized sleeping-with-the-enemy activism on behalf of the world’s poor. That written, however, I was and am a huge Beatles fan, and I do well remember where I was and how I reacted when (per Lennon’s “A Day in the Life”) I heard the news, oh boy.
In December 1980 I was a 22-year old reporter at The High Point Enterprise, an afternoon daily in North Carolina. The newswires’ accounts of Lennon’s shooting and death popped up on our comically primitive monster-sized computers, simultaneously stunning, saddening and energizing those of us in the newsroom. It energized us because it had happened on “our cycle,” in the lexicon of that time and place. Meaning, it had occurred too late in the day for morning newspapers like the hated (and of course much more successful) Greensboro News & Record to do anything but play mop-up the next day. This scoop would appear first in our paper, when it rolled off the presses before dinnertime.
Never mind that in the blue-collar, insular High Point of 1980, the death of John Lennon was apt to be of less interest to our readers than would any news out of NASCAR. We young reporters—many of us, including me, were barely out of college—were thrilled to envision such a major story running on our front page just hours after the shooting had occurred. It wasn’t merely a big story, but one of national and even international importance. This wasn’t just some pronouncement from city hall or morning wreck on a local stretch of I-85.
The newspaper’s editor at the time—who I won’t name here because he’s retired, infirm, and probably still fancies himself to have had great news judgment—emerged from his office to ask what all the fuss was about. When we told him, he was equally adamant about the story’s importance. Only, he was firmly of the belief that it in no way was front-page stuff.
I can’t remember exactly what he said, but the gist was that, big deal, some aging-hippie musician had died. Too bad he’d gotten shot, but Jesus Christ, hadn’t the Beatles broken up a long time ago? (He may have looked at us for confirmation on that, not being by age or ear a rock ‘n’ roll fan.) “Let’s play this one inside,” he said, meaning let’s publish the Lennon story on an inside page, alongside the jumps from those more-important city hall and I-85-crash stories.
He was the editor, so I’m sure our pleadings were a bit more analytical and less hysterical than this, but in my memory we were all but shouting, “Are you f*cking crazy? What’s ‘news’ to you, you sorry-ass block of dead wood? Maybe if the Percy Faith Orchestra were coming to the High Point Theatre for a show, you’d think that would a front-page story?!”
I seem to remember the city editor was on our side. John Lennon didn’t have any personal meaning for him, either, but his news instincts were good and he didn’t like seeing us kids all riled up. Anyway, the editor ultimately relented, and the Lennon story indeed made the front page of our December 8, 1980 edition, 30 years ago earlier this month. Albeit “below the fold.” Topped by which stories, I’ve no recollection. But I imagine city hall had issued a big press release about trash collection or something that day. We couldn’t very well let Greensboro scoop us on that, even if only in some tiny blurb they’d run on their back page the next morning.
I have two other thoughts about the 30th anniversary of John Lennon’s death. One is kind of bitter, the other more reflective.
The bitter one relates to a column that Tony Norman, a consistently outstanding opinion writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, published on December 10 headlined “Lennon’s Legacy Lost Among Gun Passions.” Norman, who’d been a college student when Lennon was murdered, recounted the “visceral disgust at guns”—their easy availability and deadly abuse in America—that had followed both the Lennon shooting and the attempted assassination the following spring of President Reagan. The five-shot, short-barrel .38 that Mark David Chapman had used to kill John Lennon, Norman noted, had been purchased legally, in cash, at a Honolulu gun shop. “On the mainland,” he added, “the borderline psychotic was supplied the hollow-point expanding bullets he would fire into John Lennon’s back by a friend who later became a sheriff’s deputy.”
In those days before what Norman described as “the unbreakable chokehold the NRA now has on the US Congress,” real hope existed that meaningful gun control laws might soon be passed to slow, if not stop, the madness. But now, three decades later, Norman wrote, “Holiday dinners are no longer ruined by arguments about what constitutes sane gun control. These days, we argue about whether citizens have the constitutional right to pack heat at Sunday church services, in national parks and in bars. President Barack Obama doesn’t even mention gun control in passing.”
The reason for that, Norman hadn't needed to mention because it was so obvious, was that the one-time Mister Hope and Change would be politically crucified for doing so, and might hand the presidential 2012 election to the Republicans.
“If John Lennon were alive today,” Norman opined, “he’d write a caustic song about [the NRA’s power]. The world would sing along, only to forget what the song meant by the time it got to the chorus.” Kind of the way those of us who remain interested in global harmony still can only imagine what it would be like were all the people in the world to someday live as one.
Finally, this. One of John Lennon’s most quoted lines, from the song “Beautiful Boy” on his and Yoko Ono’s Double Fantasy LP (released after Lennon’s death), is “Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans.” It’s not the most profound thought in the world, nor does it even, per a little Internet research I conducted earlier this week, necessarily originate with Lennon. But these are, I think, good words on which to reflect.
We all implicitly know that life is messy, and that if we want to make God or the Universe laugh, we’ll regard it as a chronological series of events and achievements that will and must happen in apple-pie order because we’ve put a lot of thought into it and have carefully placed all our ducks in a row. (Damn, couldn’t I have fit another cliché into that sentence?) But how good are we, really, at dealing the curves we’re thrown? How accepting are we of the unanticipated? How adept are we at truly acknowledging and enjoying the life we’re in, as opposed to the one we may unrealistically envision?
All I’m saying is that these are good questions for any sentient being to contemplate, take to heart and, ideally, seek to meaningfully address. Myself included. As John Lennon would’ve told us as late as early December 1980, we really should try to get the most out of our limited time on this planet, before it’s too late.
Is that a hopeful thought with which to end what’s likely my final pre-Christmas post? I mean it to be. At any rate, here's wishing you the joys of the season.
Right?
Hello?
Well, you can chill out now.
I read an incredibly sappy piece in the Washington Post on December 7 of this month that was written by someone with a “special to” byline, which in these days of print-media freefall tends to denote a freelancer who has a passionate viewpoint, a low price tag and good timing. This guy, the former editor of a Beatles “fanzine,” had interviewed fellow Lennon acolytes in this country and in England about the day Lennon was shot to death in front of his New York City apartment building. The story’s second line was, “We”—meaning every Beatles fan in existence –“all know where we were and what we were doing when we found out.”
That statement struck me as vastly overstated, in keeping with the article’s consistently hyperbolic tone. I do think Lennon was an exceptional artist and an admirable man, whose passion and acerbic wit served the peace movement well. But I don’t see his assassination as a body blow to humanity on a par with those of MLK and JFK, as some people do. Nor am I even convinced that Lennon’s outsized role as moral authority and pain in the establishment’s ass was ultimately as effective in his day as is, in our day, Bono’s oft-criticized sleeping-with-the-enemy activism on behalf of the world’s poor. That written, however, I was and am a huge Beatles fan, and I do well remember where I was and how I reacted when (per Lennon’s “A Day in the Life”) I heard the news, oh boy.
In December 1980 I was a 22-year old reporter at The High Point Enterprise, an afternoon daily in North Carolina. The newswires’ accounts of Lennon’s shooting and death popped up on our comically primitive monster-sized computers, simultaneously stunning, saddening and energizing those of us in the newsroom. It energized us because it had happened on “our cycle,” in the lexicon of that time and place. Meaning, it had occurred too late in the day for morning newspapers like the hated (and of course much more successful) Greensboro News & Record to do anything but play mop-up the next day. This scoop would appear first in our paper, when it rolled off the presses before dinnertime.
Never mind that in the blue-collar, insular High Point of 1980, the death of John Lennon was apt to be of less interest to our readers than would any news out of NASCAR. We young reporters—many of us, including me, were barely out of college—were thrilled to envision such a major story running on our front page just hours after the shooting had occurred. It wasn’t merely a big story, but one of national and even international importance. This wasn’t just some pronouncement from city hall or morning wreck on a local stretch of I-85.
The newspaper’s editor at the time—who I won’t name here because he’s retired, infirm, and probably still fancies himself to have had great news judgment—emerged from his office to ask what all the fuss was about. When we told him, he was equally adamant about the story’s importance. Only, he was firmly of the belief that it in no way was front-page stuff.
I can’t remember exactly what he said, but the gist was that, big deal, some aging-hippie musician had died. Too bad he’d gotten shot, but Jesus Christ, hadn’t the Beatles broken up a long time ago? (He may have looked at us for confirmation on that, not being by age or ear a rock ‘n’ roll fan.) “Let’s play this one inside,” he said, meaning let’s publish the Lennon story on an inside page, alongside the jumps from those more-important city hall and I-85-crash stories.
He was the editor, so I’m sure our pleadings were a bit more analytical and less hysterical than this, but in my memory we were all but shouting, “Are you f*cking crazy? What’s ‘news’ to you, you sorry-ass block of dead wood? Maybe if the Percy Faith Orchestra were coming to the High Point Theatre for a show, you’d think that would a front-page story?!”
I seem to remember the city editor was on our side. John Lennon didn’t have any personal meaning for him, either, but his news instincts were good and he didn’t like seeing us kids all riled up. Anyway, the editor ultimately relented, and the Lennon story indeed made the front page of our December 8, 1980 edition, 30 years ago earlier this month. Albeit “below the fold.” Topped by which stories, I’ve no recollection. But I imagine city hall had issued a big press release about trash collection or something that day. We couldn’t very well let Greensboro scoop us on that, even if only in some tiny blurb they’d run on their back page the next morning.
I have two other thoughts about the 30th anniversary of John Lennon’s death. One is kind of bitter, the other more reflective.
The bitter one relates to a column that Tony Norman, a consistently outstanding opinion writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, published on December 10 headlined “Lennon’s Legacy Lost Among Gun Passions.” Norman, who’d been a college student when Lennon was murdered, recounted the “visceral disgust at guns”—their easy availability and deadly abuse in America—that had followed both the Lennon shooting and the attempted assassination the following spring of President Reagan. The five-shot, short-barrel .38 that Mark David Chapman had used to kill John Lennon, Norman noted, had been purchased legally, in cash, at a Honolulu gun shop. “On the mainland,” he added, “the borderline psychotic was supplied the hollow-point expanding bullets he would fire into John Lennon’s back by a friend who later became a sheriff’s deputy.”
In those days before what Norman described as “the unbreakable chokehold the NRA now has on the US Congress,” real hope existed that meaningful gun control laws might soon be passed to slow, if not stop, the madness. But now, three decades later, Norman wrote, “Holiday dinners are no longer ruined by arguments about what constitutes sane gun control. These days, we argue about whether citizens have the constitutional right to pack heat at Sunday church services, in national parks and in bars. President Barack Obama doesn’t even mention gun control in passing.”
The reason for that, Norman hadn't needed to mention because it was so obvious, was that the one-time Mister Hope and Change would be politically crucified for doing so, and might hand the presidential 2012 election to the Republicans.
“If John Lennon were alive today,” Norman opined, “he’d write a caustic song about [the NRA’s power]. The world would sing along, only to forget what the song meant by the time it got to the chorus.” Kind of the way those of us who remain interested in global harmony still can only imagine what it would be like were all the people in the world to someday live as one.
Finally, this. One of John Lennon’s most quoted lines, from the song “Beautiful Boy” on his and Yoko Ono’s Double Fantasy LP (released after Lennon’s death), is “Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans.” It’s not the most profound thought in the world, nor does it even, per a little Internet research I conducted earlier this week, necessarily originate with Lennon. But these are, I think, good words on which to reflect.
We all implicitly know that life is messy, and that if we want to make God or the Universe laugh, we’ll regard it as a chronological series of events and achievements that will and must happen in apple-pie order because we’ve put a lot of thought into it and have carefully placed all our ducks in a row. (Damn, couldn’t I have fit another cliché into that sentence?) But how good are we, really, at dealing the curves we’re thrown? How accepting are we of the unanticipated? How adept are we at truly acknowledging and enjoying the life we’re in, as opposed to the one we may unrealistically envision?
All I’m saying is that these are good questions for any sentient being to contemplate, take to heart and, ideally, seek to meaningfully address. Myself included. As John Lennon would’ve told us as late as early December 1980, we really should try to get the most out of our limited time on this planet, before it’s too late.
Is that a hopeful thought with which to end what’s likely my final pre-Christmas post? I mean it to be. At any rate, here's wishing you the joys of the season.
Wednesday, December 8, 2010
Heavens Help Us
“Bailout” never has been a dirtier word that it is right now, thanks to Wall Street, deficit hawks and political demagogues. But I’ve come to the reluctant conclusion that the last, best hope for our beleaguered planet is a bailout of massive proportions. By space aliens.
Hear me out. I’ll concede that there are two gigantic, mutant flies in the cosmic ointment when it comes to the idea of rescue by an advanced civilization from beyond our galaxy. There are the not-insignificant matters of existence and intent. For one thing, however likely it would appear that humankind has at least some company in the vast universe, definitive proof has yet to emerge. For another thing, should such evidence ever surface, TV and the movies have taught us to be extremely wary of interstellar travelers bearing gifts.
I mean, let’s say the flying saucers arrive tomorrow, populated by life forms seemingly eager to prove their goodwill by showering us with cancer cures, ozone patches and chill pills to ice our warring nature—other-wordly versions of the benevolent uncle who quiets a whining kid by producing a pocket-full of candy. Anybody who’s ever seen the “To Serve Mankind” episode of the old Twilight Zone series or has watched the current series V knows that if the bounty of alien amity seem too good to be true, it may indeed be just that. So, there you are, feeling sated by a magic pill that provides a year’s worth of nutritional sustenance in one swallow and promises to end world hunger, only to realize too late that it simply has fattened you up to become a bulbous-headed ET’s entree. Or, maybe you’re having out-of-this-world sex with a sultry chick from Alpha Centauri, but then she Frenches you with a forked tongue, sprouts a lizard tail and coos that what she finds orgasmic is consuming her mate.
But never mind all that. Maybe that’s just so much ironic scriptwriting by Rod Serling and his legions of imitators. Who’s to say that our Visitors, if and when they finally arrive at the third rock from our puny sun, won’t be sufficiently evolved in benevolence, too, to lean more toward the Dalai Lama school of community than the Darth Vader variety? Maybe they’ll want nothing more than to lend us a bony or possibly ooze-covered hand. It might be that, having observed from afar our appalling behavior toward each other and Mother Earth, our Brothers and Sisters From Another Planet will determine that we’re suffering from collective PTSD that has turned us impulsive, mean and not our true selves, and that all we really need is love. And perhaps a ray gun that turns brussels sprouts into chocolate.
Anyway, we can start seriously worrying about intent when the guys at SETI are awakened some night from deep-space silence by an encoded voice asking if 10 pm would be too late to drop by, and by the way, do they have any beer? In the meantime, there’s some good news for those of us who pray that a deus ex machina will save us from ourselves. Citing a variety of recent revelations and developments, Carl Pilcher, director of NASA’s Astrobiology Institute, stated this week that evidence of life elsewhere in the universe is "just getting stronger and stronger.” In fact, he declared, “I think anybody looking at this evidence is going to say, ‘There’s got to be life out there.’”
“This evidence” comprises a variety of things, according to the Associated Press science article that featured Pilcher’s quotes. “In the past several days,” the story noted, “scientists have reported there are three times as many stars as they previously thought." The article continued, "Another group of researchers discovered a microbe can live on arsenic, expanding our understanding of how life can thrive under the harshest environments. And earlier this year, astronomers for the first time said they'd found a potentially habitable planet.”
According to the AP story, the latest estimate of the number of stars out there, calculated by a Yale University astronomer, is 300 sextillion. That’s a one followed by 21 zeros. (Thanks, Google.) Last week’s news of a lake bacterium scientists can train to thrive on arsenic instead of phosphorous has altered and broadened the very definition of life. Furthermore, number-crunchers at NASA have come to the conclusion that life may exist on planets orbiting red dwarf stars—not just planets orbiting stars like our own sun. That conclusion, according to the AP, “didn’t just open up billions of new worlds” to the possibility of sustainable life, but “many, many times that.”
“Then, the question is,” the article continued, “how many of those planets are in the so-called ‘Goldilocks zone’—not too hot, not too cold? The discovery of such a planet was announced in April.”
The upshot of these findings is that 10 scientists interviewed by the AP agreed that “the probability of alien life is higher than ever before.”
Now, of course there’s “life,” and then there’s “intelligent life.” (No political jokes, please.) While the sheer numbers suggest we’re far from the only inhabited planet in the universe, other planets’ inhabitants might be nothing more than microbes incapable of lighting a cigarette, let alone traveling light years to reach us. But let’s say for the sake of argument that some ETs are at least as “advanced” as we are. The thing is, if that’s as good as it gets across the galaxy, those populations, like us, might be expending all their resources on environmental degradation and warfare. (This seems as good a place as any to note that we Earthlings haven’t so much as returned to our friendly neighborhood moon since 1972.)
So, I’m not saying it’s likely that benevolent space aliens with kickin’ technology will arrive in time to prevent our self-imposed apocalypse—which, it seems to me, edges closer every day. I recognize that the advanced civilizations we’ve come to imagine through science fiction may exist only in that genre. And I know there’s no guarantee, at any rate, that other-wordly brainiacs would deem us more than booty, of one type or another.
Still, when I read that chances of extraterrestrial life are looking better than ever, I have to feel at least a little encouraged. Because if space aliens aren’t ultimately going to bail us out, who or what is?
Best-case scenario? We step back from the brink, learn from our alien mentors and, eons down the road, peaceably depart aged-out Earth for some hospitable new planet.
Worse-case scenario? We’re vaporized. But wouldn’t that be better than the slow, ugly death already well underway?
Hear me out. I’ll concede that there are two gigantic, mutant flies in the cosmic ointment when it comes to the idea of rescue by an advanced civilization from beyond our galaxy. There are the not-insignificant matters of existence and intent. For one thing, however likely it would appear that humankind has at least some company in the vast universe, definitive proof has yet to emerge. For another thing, should such evidence ever surface, TV and the movies have taught us to be extremely wary of interstellar travelers bearing gifts.
I mean, let’s say the flying saucers arrive tomorrow, populated by life forms seemingly eager to prove their goodwill by showering us with cancer cures, ozone patches and chill pills to ice our warring nature—other-wordly versions of the benevolent uncle who quiets a whining kid by producing a pocket-full of candy. Anybody who’s ever seen the “To Serve Mankind” episode of the old Twilight Zone series or has watched the current series V knows that if the bounty of alien amity seem too good to be true, it may indeed be just that. So, there you are, feeling sated by a magic pill that provides a year’s worth of nutritional sustenance in one swallow and promises to end world hunger, only to realize too late that it simply has fattened you up to become a bulbous-headed ET’s entree. Or, maybe you’re having out-of-this-world sex with a sultry chick from Alpha Centauri, but then she Frenches you with a forked tongue, sprouts a lizard tail and coos that what she finds orgasmic is consuming her mate.
But never mind all that. Maybe that’s just so much ironic scriptwriting by Rod Serling and his legions of imitators. Who’s to say that our Visitors, if and when they finally arrive at the third rock from our puny sun, won’t be sufficiently evolved in benevolence, too, to lean more toward the Dalai Lama school of community than the Darth Vader variety? Maybe they’ll want nothing more than to lend us a bony or possibly ooze-covered hand. It might be that, having observed from afar our appalling behavior toward each other and Mother Earth, our Brothers and Sisters From Another Planet will determine that we’re suffering from collective PTSD that has turned us impulsive, mean and not our true selves, and that all we really need is love. And perhaps a ray gun that turns brussels sprouts into chocolate.
Anyway, we can start seriously worrying about intent when the guys at SETI are awakened some night from deep-space silence by an encoded voice asking if 10 pm would be too late to drop by, and by the way, do they have any beer? In the meantime, there’s some good news for those of us who pray that a deus ex machina will save us from ourselves. Citing a variety of recent revelations and developments, Carl Pilcher, director of NASA’s Astrobiology Institute, stated this week that evidence of life elsewhere in the universe is "just getting stronger and stronger.” In fact, he declared, “I think anybody looking at this evidence is going to say, ‘There’s got to be life out there.’”
“This evidence” comprises a variety of things, according to the Associated Press science article that featured Pilcher’s quotes. “In the past several days,” the story noted, “scientists have reported there are three times as many stars as they previously thought." The article continued, "Another group of researchers discovered a microbe can live on arsenic, expanding our understanding of how life can thrive under the harshest environments. And earlier this year, astronomers for the first time said they'd found a potentially habitable planet.”
According to the AP story, the latest estimate of the number of stars out there, calculated by a Yale University astronomer, is 300 sextillion. That’s a one followed by 21 zeros. (Thanks, Google.) Last week’s news of a lake bacterium scientists can train to thrive on arsenic instead of phosphorous has altered and broadened the very definition of life. Furthermore, number-crunchers at NASA have come to the conclusion that life may exist on planets orbiting red dwarf stars—not just planets orbiting stars like our own sun. That conclusion, according to the AP, “didn’t just open up billions of new worlds” to the possibility of sustainable life, but “many, many times that.”
“Then, the question is,” the article continued, “how many of those planets are in the so-called ‘Goldilocks zone’—not too hot, not too cold? The discovery of such a planet was announced in April.”
The upshot of these findings is that 10 scientists interviewed by the AP agreed that “the probability of alien life is higher than ever before.”
Now, of course there’s “life,” and then there’s “intelligent life.” (No political jokes, please.) While the sheer numbers suggest we’re far from the only inhabited planet in the universe, other planets’ inhabitants might be nothing more than microbes incapable of lighting a cigarette, let alone traveling light years to reach us. But let’s say for the sake of argument that some ETs are at least as “advanced” as we are. The thing is, if that’s as good as it gets across the galaxy, those populations, like us, might be expending all their resources on environmental degradation and warfare. (This seems as good a place as any to note that we Earthlings haven’t so much as returned to our friendly neighborhood moon since 1972.)
So, I’m not saying it’s likely that benevolent space aliens with kickin’ technology will arrive in time to prevent our self-imposed apocalypse—which, it seems to me, edges closer every day. I recognize that the advanced civilizations we’ve come to imagine through science fiction may exist only in that genre. And I know there’s no guarantee, at any rate, that other-wordly brainiacs would deem us more than booty, of one type or another.
Still, when I read that chances of extraterrestrial life are looking better than ever, I have to feel at least a little encouraged. Because if space aliens aren’t ultimately going to bail us out, who or what is?
Best-case scenario? We step back from the brink, learn from our alien mentors and, eons down the road, peaceably depart aged-out Earth for some hospitable new planet.
Worse-case scenario? We’re vaporized. But wouldn’t that be better than the slow, ugly death already well underway?
Friday, December 3, 2010
Truth in Advertising
We’ve finally got a dog.
I don’t so much mean that we’ve at long last found a successor to Ellie, as I mean we’ve finally got—in a real if not literal sense—our first dog.
Technically, Ellie was a dog. But in most ways people think of dogs, she wasn’t. Man’s Best Friend? That greyhound was Humankind’s Most Indifferent Acquaintance, as I detailed in my August 26 post. She was beautiful and gentle and the easiest pet imaginable, but she was as affectionate and spirited as the Venus de Milo—and yes, I mean the exquisite stone sculpture, not the Roman goddess it depicts. It wasn’t for nothing that Lynn sometimes described Ellie as our pet rock. Her very name was hugely ironic. After an extensive search we’d settled on Elska—“playful” in Icelandic. The ice part was right, the rest not so much.
I’m a cat guy and would’ve been fine if our dog flirtation had ended with Ellie. But I knew Lynn’s itch to experience dog ownership hadn’t sufficiently been scratched by the Ellie years. In her mind, dogs are to Ellie as a charming rogue is to a sober-minded accountant. Life may be more peaceful with the latter but it promises to be considerably more vivid with the former.
Well, be careful what you wish for. Enter Bean.
Bean is year-or-so-old hound mix who looks much like an oversized beagle. He’d been abandoned by his family outside Raleigh, NC, who moved away and left him tied up in the backyard. (Which Circle of Hell should be reserved for such people? Discuss.) When a neighbor found him, he got loose and promptly ran into traffic. His left rear leg was amputated at NC State University’s veterinary hospital, but he found a foster mom there in Lynn’s friend and former co-worker, vet tech Jen Craver. Jen’s e-mail appeal seeking a permanent home for Bean attracted Lynn’s attention—not just from a humanitarian standpoint but from a let’s-get-Eric-onboard standpoint. She’d remembered a comment I’d once made about how hilarious I imagined it would be were we to adopt a three-legged dog—creating a “one-handed-man-walks-three-legged pooch” scenario that surely would stop pedestrians (if not traffic) and possibly attract circus interest. Long story short, what began as a fanciful sight gag is now reality. We brought Bean home with us last weekend.
Essentially a big, spazzy, unsocialized puppy with major separation anxiety issues and no training other than potty (but thank God for that), Bean is everything Ellie was not. He’s sloppily affectionate and destructively needy, having already chewed to pieces his harness and bedding when Lynn has crated him as part of his training. He’s barked more in six days than Ellie did in the five years we had her. Oh, and his white fur already is all over the place, carpeting whatever space in our house that isn’t already cover in cat hair. (Short-haired Ellie contributed little to that pile.)
In case you’re wondering, why “Bean”? He first was called “Pinto” by the hospital staff because he’s white with dark splotches, like a pinto pony. Jen didn’t like that name, but apparently did like its suggestion of legume. We liked “Bean” immediately, and its endearing quality was emphatically confirmed when my decidedly un-whimsical mom crabbily asked over the phone what the hell kind of name that was for a dog.
Lynn, as both the One Who Wanted a Dog and the vet tech and armchair animal psychologist of the two of us—she reads dog-training books and articles with a zeal I tend to reserve for hot-stove baseball news at this time of year—is in charge of the integration of Bean into polite society, as it were. While my role will expand into dog-walking and other duties as Dr Abbott’s behavioral training yields results, for the time being my contribution to Project Dog is limited to Not Getting in the Way of any incremental progress.
For example, I’m off today, but Lynn is out in the world, working for a few hours. My instructions upon returning from my morning run were to ignore the crated Bean’s frantic whining and thrashing until he calmed down, and only then to let him out. Then, I again was to disregard his manic attempts to celebrate me as his companion and liberator. My orders were to acknowledge him only after he’d stopped jumping around like Richard Simmons at a fat camp. In fact, just a few minutes ago, Lynn called home to see how things had gone. I told her it hadn’t been easy, being cruel to be kind (in the right measure), but that I’d stayed strong. She closed the conversation by exclaiming “Good boy!” It clearly was meant for both Bean and me.
Given his missing limb, Bean’s probably never going to be much of a Frisbee catcher. But our hopes remain high that he’ll one day be the kind of dog we can leave uncrated in our sunroom while we’re gone without his destroying whatever of our possessions the cats haven’t already ruined. We optimistically envision taking him with us on vacation without fearing bad behavior toward people, other dogs or hotel accommodations. (The mere prospect of riding in a car made Ellie shake like a boozehound on a bender.) We foresee being able to walk him at 7 a.m. without bracing for neighborhood-waking barks. He’s young yet, and, we, like all new parents, are working toward milestones with him. They likely will come in time.
Not that we won’t love him in any excesses, just as we loved Ellie in all her limitations. We’re already charmed by his goofy friendliness and his physical adorableness. We’re thrilled that he has no aggression toward the cats, and we already like how he can zonk out in front of the TV at night just as blankly and pulselessly as the rest of us in this house.
There will be fits and starts, advances and setbacks along the way, I know. Lynn’s patience and stamina repeatedly will be tested. But I know my animal behavioralist well, and I’ve no doubt at all that she’s up to the challenge and will savor the results—any results. We’ve finally got a dog, and nothing can trump that.
I don’t so much mean that we’ve at long last found a successor to Ellie, as I mean we’ve finally got—in a real if not literal sense—our first dog.
Technically, Ellie was a dog. But in most ways people think of dogs, she wasn’t. Man’s Best Friend? That greyhound was Humankind’s Most Indifferent Acquaintance, as I detailed in my August 26 post. She was beautiful and gentle and the easiest pet imaginable, but she was as affectionate and spirited as the Venus de Milo—and yes, I mean the exquisite stone sculpture, not the Roman goddess it depicts. It wasn’t for nothing that Lynn sometimes described Ellie as our pet rock. Her very name was hugely ironic. After an extensive search we’d settled on Elska—“playful” in Icelandic. The ice part was right, the rest not so much.
I’m a cat guy and would’ve been fine if our dog flirtation had ended with Ellie. But I knew Lynn’s itch to experience dog ownership hadn’t sufficiently been scratched by the Ellie years. In her mind, dogs are to Ellie as a charming rogue is to a sober-minded accountant. Life may be more peaceful with the latter but it promises to be considerably more vivid with the former.
Well, be careful what you wish for. Enter Bean.
Bean is year-or-so-old hound mix who looks much like an oversized beagle. He’d been abandoned by his family outside Raleigh, NC, who moved away and left him tied up in the backyard. (Which Circle of Hell should be reserved for such people? Discuss.) When a neighbor found him, he got loose and promptly ran into traffic. His left rear leg was amputated at NC State University’s veterinary hospital, but he found a foster mom there in Lynn’s friend and former co-worker, vet tech Jen Craver. Jen’s e-mail appeal seeking a permanent home for Bean attracted Lynn’s attention—not just from a humanitarian standpoint but from a let’s-get-Eric-onboard standpoint. She’d remembered a comment I’d once made about how hilarious I imagined it would be were we to adopt a three-legged dog—creating a “one-handed-man-walks-three-legged pooch” scenario that surely would stop pedestrians (if not traffic) and possibly attract circus interest. Long story short, what began as a fanciful sight gag is now reality. We brought Bean home with us last weekend.
Essentially a big, spazzy, unsocialized puppy with major separation anxiety issues and no training other than potty (but thank God for that), Bean is everything Ellie was not. He’s sloppily affectionate and destructively needy, having already chewed to pieces his harness and bedding when Lynn has crated him as part of his training. He’s barked more in six days than Ellie did in the five years we had her. Oh, and his white fur already is all over the place, carpeting whatever space in our house that isn’t already cover in cat hair. (Short-haired Ellie contributed little to that pile.)
In case you’re wondering, why “Bean”? He first was called “Pinto” by the hospital staff because he’s white with dark splotches, like a pinto pony. Jen didn’t like that name, but apparently did like its suggestion of legume. We liked “Bean” immediately, and its endearing quality was emphatically confirmed when my decidedly un-whimsical mom crabbily asked over the phone what the hell kind of name that was for a dog.
Lynn, as both the One Who Wanted a Dog and the vet tech and armchair animal psychologist of the two of us—she reads dog-training books and articles with a zeal I tend to reserve for hot-stove baseball news at this time of year—is in charge of the integration of Bean into polite society, as it were. While my role will expand into dog-walking and other duties as Dr Abbott’s behavioral training yields results, for the time being my contribution to Project Dog is limited to Not Getting in the Way of any incremental progress.
For example, I’m off today, but Lynn is out in the world, working for a few hours. My instructions upon returning from my morning run were to ignore the crated Bean’s frantic whining and thrashing until he calmed down, and only then to let him out. Then, I again was to disregard his manic attempts to celebrate me as his companion and liberator. My orders were to acknowledge him only after he’d stopped jumping around like Richard Simmons at a fat camp. In fact, just a few minutes ago, Lynn called home to see how things had gone. I told her it hadn’t been easy, being cruel to be kind (in the right measure), but that I’d stayed strong. She closed the conversation by exclaiming “Good boy!” It clearly was meant for both Bean and me.
Given his missing limb, Bean’s probably never going to be much of a Frisbee catcher. But our hopes remain high that he’ll one day be the kind of dog we can leave uncrated in our sunroom while we’re gone without his destroying whatever of our possessions the cats haven’t already ruined. We optimistically envision taking him with us on vacation without fearing bad behavior toward people, other dogs or hotel accommodations. (The mere prospect of riding in a car made Ellie shake like a boozehound on a bender.) We foresee being able to walk him at 7 a.m. without bracing for neighborhood-waking barks. He’s young yet, and, we, like all new parents, are working toward milestones with him. They likely will come in time.
Not that we won’t love him in any excesses, just as we loved Ellie in all her limitations. We’re already charmed by his goofy friendliness and his physical adorableness. We’re thrilled that he has no aggression toward the cats, and we already like how he can zonk out in front of the TV at night just as blankly and pulselessly as the rest of us in this house.
There will be fits and starts, advances and setbacks along the way, I know. Lynn’s patience and stamina repeatedly will be tested. But I know my animal behavioralist well, and I’ve no doubt at all that she’s up to the challenge and will savor the results—any results. We’ve finally got a dog, and nothing can trump that.
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
Taking Exception
Tomorrow is Thanksgiving Day, an appropriate time to take stock of one’s blessings. But were I to say grace at the Thanksgiving table, one shout-out I would not issue would be a big hosanna to the Lord God, thanking Him for making the United States the greatest country on Earth, and praying to Him that other countries might recognize and accept our moral superiority, and emulate us in everything they do.
OK, first, I’ll concede that it’s difficult for me to envision any scenario in which I’d be leading a group of diners in prayer, unless the invocation were to be something vague, light and rhyming—like, say, “Rub-a-dub-dub, thanks for the grub!” I’m an agnostic at best who thinks the Creator of the Universe, if there is one, likely isn’t so closely engaged in our lives that He/She/It is monitoring our dinnertime patter (let alone willing our various sports teams to victory). I might as well note, too, that Lynn and I will be joining friends tomorrow for a meatless, dairy-free Tofurky Day feast, and that your typical lefty-vegan gathering isn’t, frankly, a big Jesus fest.
But be all that as it may, what I mean to say here is something I touched on in my November 5 post about Lynn’s and my recent vacation trip to Toronto and what makes Canada, to my mind, a very different country from the United States—despite many Americans’ tendency to view it, if they think of it at all, as little more than a colder, sparser variation on America. I cited then a number of differences between the two countries, ranging from the substantive to the silly. My wide net pulled in everything from Canada’s national health care system and strict gun laws to the fact that I’d never heard so many Guess Who and Rush B-sides on “classic rock” radio. My focus today, however, is this passage from my earlier post about what makes Canada “foreign”: “the self-denigration and national inferiority complex that turns America’s belief in its own exceptionalism on its head.”
Now, I’m not here to psychoanalyze Canada and determine why I returned there after many years absence to find that national defensiveness and insecurity still seem to reign supreme. But it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that when you share thousands of miles of border with a swaggering world power that’s constantly waving its cajones in your face, you’re either going to unzip your national pants and try to fight balls with balls or, noting that America’s about a zillion times more populous and brash and relentless, shrink back and meekly protest that you never wanted to play in the stupid bully’s league, anyway.
Let’s stop here for a second and define “exceptionalism.” TheFreeDictionary.com calls it “an attitude toward other countries, cultures, etc, based on the idea [that one’s own country is] quite distinct from, and often superior to, them in vital ways.” More than an attitude, it has become a political philosophy for a certain subset of Americans who hold that America, as only they define and envision it, is the Way, the Truth and Light. That philosophy consigns fault-finding with this vision to that despicable group that the most Exceptional of politicians, Sarah Palin, would call the “haters.”
There was a great op-ed piece on this subject recently in the Washington Post, written by Matt Miller, a senior fellow at the (hater-funded and -backed) Center for American Progress. Headlined “Ohhh America, You’re So Strong,” it led by asking, “Does anyone else think there’s something a little insecure about a country that requires its politicians to constantly declare how exceptional it is?” He added, “A populace in need of this much reassurance may be the surest sign of looming national decline.”
“American exceptionalism,” Miller observed, “is now the central theme of Sarah Palin’s speeches. The supposedly insufficient Democratic commitment to this idea will be a core Republican complaint in 2012. Conservatives assail Barack Obama for his alleged indifference to it. It’s part of their broader indictment of Obama's fishy cosmopolitanism, his overseas ‘apology tours,’ his didn’t-wear-the-flag-lapel-pin-until-he-had-to peevishness. Not to mention the whole anti-colonial Kenyan resentment thing the president’s got going.”
While emphasizing that he loves his country and the ideals on which it was founded, Miller noted, quite reasonably, it seems to me, that the United States is hardly without faults, and that it is, rather, continually and endlessly evolving toward that “more perfect union” described in the Preamble to the US Constitution.
“You can tell a lot about a country by what it requires its politicians to do to win,” Miller pointed out. “In Switzerland, do candidates have to proclaim that ‘Switzerland is the greatest nation ever created in human history’? In Brazil, do ambitious pols insist that 'Brazil is the most special country ever to grace the world’? Isn't ‘great’ or ‘really, really great’ enough?”
“Not in America, dammit,” he answered his own question. Miller quoted from the recent victory speech of Republican US Senator-elect Marco Rubio of Florida, a Tea Party darling who some political handicappers already are adding to the short list for GOP presidential nominee in 2012. Savoring his big win, Rubio declared that “Americans believe with all their heart that United States of America is simply the single greatest nation in all of human history, a place without equal in the history of all of mankind.” He described his Senate race as “a referendum on our identity” that “forces us to answer a very simple question: Do we want our country to continue to be exceptional, or are we prepared for it to become just like everyone else?”
Wait a minute! According to my birth certificate, I’m an American. But, while I appreciate the American democracy’s pivotal place in world history and global thought, and while I do think we deserve some credit for having tried much harder than have many other countries to Do the Right Thing, domestically and internationally, throughout our existence as a nation, let’s face it, there’s a lot about America that is far less than exemplary. I doubt we’re even the greatest nation of the year 2010, let alone through the history of all of mankind, though I’m too ill-traveled and not well-read enough to assert with complete confidence which nation or nations I’d deem more deserving of the title.
I mean, c’mon! Just look at our unemployment levels, income gulf, crime rate, gun use and abuse, historically unjust health care system (no matter what Mitch McConnell says), environmental irresponsibility … you name it. Not to mention our vastly inconsistent and contradictory foreign policies that often result in everything from needless tragedy to well-meaning but poorly executed actions that contribute to our pariah standing in much of the world. Anybody who thinks America doesn’t have problems is refusing to pay attention.
Miller has a theory about what’s going on here. “The conservative use of American exceptionalism as a political sword today is perversely revealing,” he wrote in his recent op-ed piece. “There’s something off when the first generation of Americans that is less educated than its parents feels a deep need to be told how unique it is. Or when a generation that’s handing off epic debts and a chronically dysfunctional political process (among other woes) demands that its leaders keep toasting its fabulousness. Especially when other nations now offer more upward mobility, and a better blend of growth with equity, than we do—arguably the best measures of America's once-exceptional national performance.”
It’s Miller’s conviction that what America needs, rather than to have its ego constantly stroked by pandering, self-serving politicians who have no constructive blueprint for improving the national performance (hence the “Ohhh, America, You’re So Strong” headline), is some “real answers” from its lawmakers and self-styled Big Thinkers. “Wouldn’t we be better off striving to be exceptional at solving our common problems?” Miller asks.
I have to think we would. I have to think, furthermore, that if we’re to make any progress addressing, let alone solving, the many challenges we face as a nation, we’d do well to stop questioning the loyalty and patriotism of those who suggest we can do better, to avoid getting so wrapped up in the flag that we restrict our ability to respond to real problems, and to focus not on some exalted, static sense of greatness but, rather, to strive for the future that the "angels of our better nature" (per Lincoln) envision.
I’m as thankful as is any Tea Partier to live in a stable democracy with a high standard of living. But I guess I would hope that anyone who feels tempted to thank God for America’s exceptionalism at the Thanksgiving table instead would consider the many definitions of the word “grace.” They include “a disposition to be generous” and “a sense of fitness or propriety.” What could be more fitting for a global role model than to learn from its mistakes and share that wisdom with the world?
**********************************************************************
A follow-up to my November 12 post, “She Done Him Wrong”: I was surprised that the DC jury found Ingmar Guandique guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of first-degree murder in the 2001 death of Chandra Levy, given the complete lack of direct evidence. I was not surprised, however, by the post-verdict comments of Bert Fields, ex-Congressman Gary Condit’s lawyer.
“At least Gary Condit can [now] find some measure of closure to this nightmare,” said Fields, whose boss was mum on the subject—presumably so as not to steal thunder from his forthcoming book about how Levy's disappearance in effect ruined his life. “[The verdict] is a complete vindication, but it comes a little late," Fields sighed. "Who gives [Condit] his career back?”
Not to rehash everything I’ve already written, but, again: Whose nightmare, exactly, was this horrific slaying? What caused the career implosion—the rush to judgment by the police and news media, or the immensely unsympathetic public persona Condit presented? Finally, does “vindication” mean Gary Condit never was, and isn’t now, a self-centered ass?
Yes, the career is gone. But the Passion of the Christ continues.
OK, first, I’ll concede that it’s difficult for me to envision any scenario in which I’d be leading a group of diners in prayer, unless the invocation were to be something vague, light and rhyming—like, say, “Rub-a-dub-dub, thanks for the grub!” I’m an agnostic at best who thinks the Creator of the Universe, if there is one, likely isn’t so closely engaged in our lives that He/She/It is monitoring our dinnertime patter (let alone willing our various sports teams to victory). I might as well note, too, that Lynn and I will be joining friends tomorrow for a meatless, dairy-free Tofurky Day feast, and that your typical lefty-vegan gathering isn’t, frankly, a big Jesus fest.
But be all that as it may, what I mean to say here is something I touched on in my November 5 post about Lynn’s and my recent vacation trip to Toronto and what makes Canada, to my mind, a very different country from the United States—despite many Americans’ tendency to view it, if they think of it at all, as little more than a colder, sparser variation on America. I cited then a number of differences between the two countries, ranging from the substantive to the silly. My wide net pulled in everything from Canada’s national health care system and strict gun laws to the fact that I’d never heard so many Guess Who and Rush B-sides on “classic rock” radio. My focus today, however, is this passage from my earlier post about what makes Canada “foreign”: “the self-denigration and national inferiority complex that turns America’s belief in its own exceptionalism on its head.”
Now, I’m not here to psychoanalyze Canada and determine why I returned there after many years absence to find that national defensiveness and insecurity still seem to reign supreme. But it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that when you share thousands of miles of border with a swaggering world power that’s constantly waving its cajones in your face, you’re either going to unzip your national pants and try to fight balls with balls or, noting that America’s about a zillion times more populous and brash and relentless, shrink back and meekly protest that you never wanted to play in the stupid bully’s league, anyway.
Let’s stop here for a second and define “exceptionalism.” TheFreeDictionary.com calls it “an attitude toward other countries, cultures, etc, based on the idea [that one’s own country is] quite distinct from, and often superior to, them in vital ways.” More than an attitude, it has become a political philosophy for a certain subset of Americans who hold that America, as only they define and envision it, is the Way, the Truth and Light. That philosophy consigns fault-finding with this vision to that despicable group that the most Exceptional of politicians, Sarah Palin, would call the “haters.”
There was a great op-ed piece on this subject recently in the Washington Post, written by Matt Miller, a senior fellow at the (hater-funded and -backed) Center for American Progress. Headlined “Ohhh America, You’re So Strong,” it led by asking, “Does anyone else think there’s something a little insecure about a country that requires its politicians to constantly declare how exceptional it is?” He added, “A populace in need of this much reassurance may be the surest sign of looming national decline.”
“American exceptionalism,” Miller observed, “is now the central theme of Sarah Palin’s speeches. The supposedly insufficient Democratic commitment to this idea will be a core Republican complaint in 2012. Conservatives assail Barack Obama for his alleged indifference to it. It’s part of their broader indictment of Obama's fishy cosmopolitanism, his overseas ‘apology tours,’ his didn’t-wear-the-flag-lapel-pin-until-he-had-to peevishness. Not to mention the whole anti-colonial Kenyan resentment thing the president’s got going.”
While emphasizing that he loves his country and the ideals on which it was founded, Miller noted, quite reasonably, it seems to me, that the United States is hardly without faults, and that it is, rather, continually and endlessly evolving toward that “more perfect union” described in the Preamble to the US Constitution.
“You can tell a lot about a country by what it requires its politicians to do to win,” Miller pointed out. “In Switzerland, do candidates have to proclaim that ‘Switzerland is the greatest nation ever created in human history’? In Brazil, do ambitious pols insist that 'Brazil is the most special country ever to grace the world’? Isn't ‘great’ or ‘really, really great’ enough?”
“Not in America, dammit,” he answered his own question. Miller quoted from the recent victory speech of Republican US Senator-elect Marco Rubio of Florida, a Tea Party darling who some political handicappers already are adding to the short list for GOP presidential nominee in 2012. Savoring his big win, Rubio declared that “Americans believe with all their heart that United States of America is simply the single greatest nation in all of human history, a place without equal in the history of all of mankind.” He described his Senate race as “a referendum on our identity” that “forces us to answer a very simple question: Do we want our country to continue to be exceptional, or are we prepared for it to become just like everyone else?”
Wait a minute! According to my birth certificate, I’m an American. But, while I appreciate the American democracy’s pivotal place in world history and global thought, and while I do think we deserve some credit for having tried much harder than have many other countries to Do the Right Thing, domestically and internationally, throughout our existence as a nation, let’s face it, there’s a lot about America that is far less than exemplary. I doubt we’re even the greatest nation of the year 2010, let alone through the history of all of mankind, though I’m too ill-traveled and not well-read enough to assert with complete confidence which nation or nations I’d deem more deserving of the title.
I mean, c’mon! Just look at our unemployment levels, income gulf, crime rate, gun use and abuse, historically unjust health care system (no matter what Mitch McConnell says), environmental irresponsibility … you name it. Not to mention our vastly inconsistent and contradictory foreign policies that often result in everything from needless tragedy to well-meaning but poorly executed actions that contribute to our pariah standing in much of the world. Anybody who thinks America doesn’t have problems is refusing to pay attention.
Miller has a theory about what’s going on here. “The conservative use of American exceptionalism as a political sword today is perversely revealing,” he wrote in his recent op-ed piece. “There’s something off when the first generation of Americans that is less educated than its parents feels a deep need to be told how unique it is. Or when a generation that’s handing off epic debts and a chronically dysfunctional political process (among other woes) demands that its leaders keep toasting its fabulousness. Especially when other nations now offer more upward mobility, and a better blend of growth with equity, than we do—arguably the best measures of America's once-exceptional national performance.”
It’s Miller’s conviction that what America needs, rather than to have its ego constantly stroked by pandering, self-serving politicians who have no constructive blueprint for improving the national performance (hence the “Ohhh, America, You’re So Strong” headline), is some “real answers” from its lawmakers and self-styled Big Thinkers. “Wouldn’t we be better off striving to be exceptional at solving our common problems?” Miller asks.
I have to think we would. I have to think, furthermore, that if we’re to make any progress addressing, let alone solving, the many challenges we face as a nation, we’d do well to stop questioning the loyalty and patriotism of those who suggest we can do better, to avoid getting so wrapped up in the flag that we restrict our ability to respond to real problems, and to focus not on some exalted, static sense of greatness but, rather, to strive for the future that the "angels of our better nature" (per Lincoln) envision.
I’m as thankful as is any Tea Partier to live in a stable democracy with a high standard of living. But I guess I would hope that anyone who feels tempted to thank God for America’s exceptionalism at the Thanksgiving table instead would consider the many definitions of the word “grace.” They include “a disposition to be generous” and “a sense of fitness or propriety.” What could be more fitting for a global role model than to learn from its mistakes and share that wisdom with the world?
**********************************************************************
A follow-up to my November 12 post, “She Done Him Wrong”: I was surprised that the DC jury found Ingmar Guandique guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of first-degree murder in the 2001 death of Chandra Levy, given the complete lack of direct evidence. I was not surprised, however, by the post-verdict comments of Bert Fields, ex-Congressman Gary Condit’s lawyer.
“At least Gary Condit can [now] find some measure of closure to this nightmare,” said Fields, whose boss was mum on the subject—presumably so as not to steal thunder from his forthcoming book about how Levy's disappearance in effect ruined his life. “[The verdict] is a complete vindication, but it comes a little late," Fields sighed. "Who gives [Condit] his career back?”
Not to rehash everything I’ve already written, but, again: Whose nightmare, exactly, was this horrific slaying? What caused the career implosion—the rush to judgment by the police and news media, or the immensely unsympathetic public persona Condit presented? Finally, does “vindication” mean Gary Condit never was, and isn’t now, a self-centered ass?
Yes, the career is gone. But the Passion of the Christ continues.
Friday, November 12, 2010
She Done Him Wrong
With the trial of Ingmar Guandique for the 2001 slaying of Chandra Levy well underway here in DC, former California Congressman Gary Condit has been back in the news. This past week we learned two things: that the FBI found his semen on a pair of Levy’s panties following her disappearance, and that Condit is working on a book about what his son calls the “bad deal” his father got from the police and the press in the months before 9/11 swept the scandal from the national headlines.
I’m struck by the juxtaposition of those two pieces of information.
The broad outlines of the case are well known: Attractive Washington intern goes missing. It then turns out that her home district’s (married) “man in Washington” was in fact servicing his much younger constituent. Washington, DC, police focus almost exclusively on Condit as the suspect in the intern's disappearance rather than the young Salvadoran with the criminal record who’d assaulted other women in the park that is the primary search area. The congressman is hounded by police, vilified in the press and ultimately booted from office by his constituents.
On Good Morning America the other day, Chad Condit lamented to host George Stephanopoulos that his father “didn’t deserve what happened,” and complained that the Condit family has been “dealing with [this] for 10 years.” When Stephanopoulos asked whether the former lawmaker perhaps had contributed to his woes by consistently declining to speak publicly about Levy, Chad Condit said no. His father had cooperated fully with police, the son said, but had felt the details of his relationship with Levy were irrelevant to the criminal investigation and need not be shared with the public.
“We hope people will understand that in this country you are entitled to certain level of privacy,” the younger Condit said. “If we lose that, we’re going to lose the very essence of what we are as a country.” Well, it seems to me that what the Condit boys would do well to understand is that, had the congressman in 2001 shown a fraction of the concern for and interest in Chandra Levy’s fate that he’d shown for his own reputation and hide, he might today be seen as a sympathetic figure, rather than as just another disgraced politician who’s now out to make a buck from his infamy. Condit’s philandering still might have gotten him kicked out of Congress, but his name might not now be synonymous with “self-centered ass” by those of us who remember the angry vehemence with which he sought to distant himself from the missing and presumed-dead young woman with whom he’d been amorously linked.
I followed the story closely in the local news in 2001, and what I saw in Gary Condit then was a righteous indignation so consuming that he scarcely could bring himself to concede he’d known Levy, let alone slept with her. Though the police consistently described the relationship as sexual, Condit never would publicly confirm that. He clearly hated being asked about Levy, or even mentioning her name. At one point, as I recall, he managed a perfunctory, lip-service expression of concern for her fate and sympathy for her parents. But when the Levys—not knowing what to think, and having been egged on by the bungling DC cops—themselves began questioning Condit’s innocence, the rage in his face implied that he now hated them nearly as much as he seemed to hate their daughter for having ruined his life by disappearing in the first place.
What both Gary and Chad Condit still don’t seem to get—although to his credit, the son expressed more genuine sympathy for the Levy family’s grief in five minutes this week than his father has in the past nine-plus years—is that, while a rush to judgment on the parts of the police and the press unquestionably made Condit’s life miserable for a while, he never was the real victim in the Chandra Levy affair. It was Chandra Levy who was murdered in Rock Creek Park, after all. And it was she who was slandered in a way by Condit, whose stonewalling about the relationship only solidified her public image as simply another foolish young woman who’d bought into a married man’s promise of divorce. What I truly despise Gary Condit for—and I suspect I’m not the only one—isn’t so much the abuse of power that facilitated the affair as the utter lack of any tenderness, any grief, any acknowledgement on his part that this tragedy was about Chandra Levy, not Gary Condit. Had she meant anything at all to him, other than the obvious? It’s there that his silence was, and still is, deafening.
Now that his renegade semen has been cited in official court testimony, Condit presumably will at last cut the crap in his book. If he’s smart, he’ll say some nice things about Chandra Levy, portraying her as a real flesh-and-blood woman who had feelings and attributes—as more than simply a quick you-know-what. But it will be up to readers to parse how much of that is heartfelt and how much is belated damage control. Regardless, Condit’s history suggests that Levy still will be little more than a bit player in the bigger story of how a stellar lawmaker was grievously and outrageously, if you'll pardon the expression, screwed.
I’m struck by the juxtaposition of those two pieces of information.
The broad outlines of the case are well known: Attractive Washington intern goes missing. It then turns out that her home district’s (married) “man in Washington” was in fact servicing his much younger constituent. Washington, DC, police focus almost exclusively on Condit as the suspect in the intern's disappearance rather than the young Salvadoran with the criminal record who’d assaulted other women in the park that is the primary search area. The congressman is hounded by police, vilified in the press and ultimately booted from office by his constituents.
On Good Morning America the other day, Chad Condit lamented to host George Stephanopoulos that his father “didn’t deserve what happened,” and complained that the Condit family has been “dealing with [this] for 10 years.” When Stephanopoulos asked whether the former lawmaker perhaps had contributed to his woes by consistently declining to speak publicly about Levy, Chad Condit said no. His father had cooperated fully with police, the son said, but had felt the details of his relationship with Levy were irrelevant to the criminal investigation and need not be shared with the public.
“We hope people will understand that in this country you are entitled to certain level of privacy,” the younger Condit said. “If we lose that, we’re going to lose the very essence of what we are as a country.” Well, it seems to me that what the Condit boys would do well to understand is that, had the congressman in 2001 shown a fraction of the concern for and interest in Chandra Levy’s fate that he’d shown for his own reputation and hide, he might today be seen as a sympathetic figure, rather than as just another disgraced politician who’s now out to make a buck from his infamy. Condit’s philandering still might have gotten him kicked out of Congress, but his name might not now be synonymous with “self-centered ass” by those of us who remember the angry vehemence with which he sought to distant himself from the missing and presumed-dead young woman with whom he’d been amorously linked.
I followed the story closely in the local news in 2001, and what I saw in Gary Condit then was a righteous indignation so consuming that he scarcely could bring himself to concede he’d known Levy, let alone slept with her. Though the police consistently described the relationship as sexual, Condit never would publicly confirm that. He clearly hated being asked about Levy, or even mentioning her name. At one point, as I recall, he managed a perfunctory, lip-service expression of concern for her fate and sympathy for her parents. But when the Levys—not knowing what to think, and having been egged on by the bungling DC cops—themselves began questioning Condit’s innocence, the rage in his face implied that he now hated them nearly as much as he seemed to hate their daughter for having ruined his life by disappearing in the first place.
What both Gary and Chad Condit still don’t seem to get—although to his credit, the son expressed more genuine sympathy for the Levy family’s grief in five minutes this week than his father has in the past nine-plus years—is that, while a rush to judgment on the parts of the police and the press unquestionably made Condit’s life miserable for a while, he never was the real victim in the Chandra Levy affair. It was Chandra Levy who was murdered in Rock Creek Park, after all. And it was she who was slandered in a way by Condit, whose stonewalling about the relationship only solidified her public image as simply another foolish young woman who’d bought into a married man’s promise of divorce. What I truly despise Gary Condit for—and I suspect I’m not the only one—isn’t so much the abuse of power that facilitated the affair as the utter lack of any tenderness, any grief, any acknowledgement on his part that this tragedy was about Chandra Levy, not Gary Condit. Had she meant anything at all to him, other than the obvious? It’s there that his silence was, and still is, deafening.
Now that his renegade semen has been cited in official court testimony, Condit presumably will at last cut the crap in his book. If he’s smart, he’ll say some nice things about Chandra Levy, portraying her as a real flesh-and-blood woman who had feelings and attributes—as more than simply a quick you-know-what. But it will be up to readers to parse how much of that is heartfelt and how much is belated damage control. Regardless, Condit’s history suggests that Levy still will be little more than a bit player in the bigger story of how a stellar lawmaker was grievously and outrageously, if you'll pardon the expression, screwed.
Friday, November 5, 2010
Foreign Concepts
My fascination with Canada predates even the Dave Thomas-Rick Moranis “Great White North Skits” on SCTV decades ago, during which the home-grown comedians spoofed their native land as a nation of flannel-clad, tuque-topped, beer-swigging, hockey-playing “hosers” who end every other sentence with the word “eh.”
I’d first ventured north of the border, if just barely, on a family vacation to Niagara Falls when I was maybe 8 or 9. I don’t remember much about that visit except the magnificence of the water—especially Horseshoe Falls on the Canadian side—and the vague sense that I’d left the United States and set foot in a new place that closely mirrored my own country, but wasn’t. There were Maple Leaf flags all over the place. The coins and paper currency were different. The accents were flatter, and some people spoke French. I may or may not have noticed then that various written words featured an extra “u” or a transposed e-r, as in “centre.” Regardless, I clearly wasn’t in America anymore. There was a skewed familiarity to everything that made Canada different without being scary to my young, provincial self.
Now I’m 52 and have been back to Canada several times—most recently in late October, which I’ll get to shortly. Because our neighbor to the north is chilly and under-populated—two qualities Lynn and I prize in vacation destinations—we’ve been to the Canadian Rockies and Vancouver on one trip and to Newfoundland, Labrador and the Maritime provinces on another. To me, there’s so much to love about Canada: the natural beauty, the vastness of the land, the lack of bluster and self-importance compared to what I see every day in this country, the national health care system and tough gun laws.
I was impressed, too, when Canada approved gay marriage nationwide a few years ago. But I think it was really the security measures enacted after 9/11 that iced the cake for me. Now Americans need a passport to cross the border, which is extremely important to someone like me who’s still seen little of the world. The passport requirement means, to me, that I’ve now officially been to three foreign countries—Iceland, Japan and Canada. Before, when Americans could gain access to Canada simply by producing their driver’s license and assuring the border guard there were no explosive devices in the trunk, Canada’s legitimacy as a sovereign nation for travel-resume purposes seemed vaguely questionable. Sure, Canada had different laws and other political and social quirks, but so did, say, Utah and Texas—US states that also weren’t quite like mine. The passport lent Canada an extra layer of exoticism.
It was with even greater anticipation than on previous visits, then, that I prepared to cross the border this time. Lynn and I were bound for Toronto, where neither of us ever had been, and it would be our first border crossing since enactment of the passport requirement. On the morning of Monday, October 25, with great pride in my worldliness, I handed over our proof of US citizenship to the Canadian official on that country’s side of the Rainbow Bridge in Niagara Falls, Ontario. That he turned out to be kind of a hard ass who chastised me for failing to heed some stop sign neither Lynn nor I could recollect having even seen took nothing away from my excitement as we proceeded by car into the land of metric highway signs and throwback Esso gas stations.
We would spend most of that day and two full ones in Toronto, Canada’s largest city, before returning to the US on Friday the 29th. During our stay we had a fantastic time walking the city from our centrally located hotel—some highlights included the top of the CN Tower, the Royal Ontario Museum, much gluten-free vegan fine dining (emphatically not an oxymoron in Toronto, Lynn delightedly discovered) and a couple of hours at the Hockey Fall of Fame (OK, maybe more a highlight for me than for Lynn). But what I’d really like to share with you in this post are three specific ways in which, I observed during this trip, Canada is so not the US, should any readers still need convincing—the passport thing notwithstanding.
· I was struck almost immediately by the complete and utter lack of bumper stickers. In fact, it got to the point that I was thrilled we’d valet-parked our car upon arrival at the hotel and only reclaimed it when we left town. My rear bumper area features not one, not two, but four stickers—promoting the Human Right Campaign (the “equal” sign), Amnesty International, vegetarianism (“Veg”) and the greatness of cats (“Meow”). Here in this country, I like displaying them, because I feel they project to the driving public that I’m a fan of social justice who’s comfortable with his feminine side. In Ontario, though, the bumper stickers made me feel garish and loud. They seemed the visual equivalents of screaming my opinions in Canadian ears, thus finding yet another way to be the Ugly American foreigners love to hate. What was this utter dearth of sticker mania? Was it a manifestation of Canadians’ stereotypical politeness, not wanting to offend those with opposing viewpoints and allegiances? Was it the pointlessness of “I’m the NRA, and I Vote” belligerence in a country with no gun lobby? Might it be welcome modesty about their honor-student kids? Was it the problematic distance to long weekends at “OBX”? Whatever. Once you zero in on it, as I did, you know this ain’t America.
· Being the technological caveman I am, I’d brought an old-school transistor radio with me so I could listen to music while in the shower, as I am wont to do. I found a Toronto classic rock station, which I then listened to for a total of maybe 45 minutes over those few days. I was stunned and overjoyed not to hear a single song by Boston during that time. Instead, the gaps between the standard Stones, Clapton and Tom Petty tunes were filled by unfamiliar offerings that turned out to be lesser hits by the likes of Canada’s own Rush and the Guess Who. I was completely flummoxed by the DJ’s mention at one point of the Jeff Healey Band. Playing a hunch, I Wikipedia’d the group on our laptop computer. This was the first sentence: Norman Jeffrey “Jeff” Healey (March 25, 1966 - March 2, 2008) was a blind Canadian jazz and blues-rock vocalistist and guitarist who attained musical and personal popularity, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s. Not in the US, he didn’t. Now, that’s what I call foreign classic rock.
· Canada’s Election Day had just been held when we arrived in Toronto. Toronto had elected as its new mayor a city council member named Rob Ford. His relatively easy victory had been deemed surprising—not only because Ford is a member of the Conservative Party in a Liberal-leaning city, but also because he’s fat and undiplomatic. Many Torontans were concerned that his protruding gut and blunt, take-charge attitude—qualities that characterize many a successful US politician—would ill-represent their cosmopolitan and polished city. The Toronto Sun quoted a local dietician as advising that Ford, whose unintentionally ironic campaign slogan decrying profligate government spending had been “The gravy train stops here!”, had “better have waist management on his agenda.”
There’s a lot more about Canada that’s “foreign,” of course—from the “loonie” dollar coin and those wacky Celcius temperatures, to the self-denigration and national inferiority complex that turn America’s belief in its own exceptionalism on it head, to the mistaken belief (per Lynn) that tights and leggings look good on all women regardless of body type, to a military policy that favors peacekeeping over war-making, to an endearing lawfulness that seems to preclude pedestrians crossing against a traffic light even during lengthy windows of opportunity, to the iconic status of “Hockey Night in Canada” as not only a television broadcast but as a national description of Saturday evenings everywhere from St John’s in the East to Yellowknife in the West.
Still, it seems to me there’s no better definition of "foreign country" by American standards than one in which one might never know a motorist would “Rather Be Golfing,” might never hear “More Than a Feeling” or “Peace of Mind” on the radio, and might seldom see and hear a lawmaker with a piehole as huge as his belly.
I already can’t wait to go back. I'd better keep my passport current.
I’d first ventured north of the border, if just barely, on a family vacation to Niagara Falls when I was maybe 8 or 9. I don’t remember much about that visit except the magnificence of the water—especially Horseshoe Falls on the Canadian side—and the vague sense that I’d left the United States and set foot in a new place that closely mirrored my own country, but wasn’t. There were Maple Leaf flags all over the place. The coins and paper currency were different. The accents were flatter, and some people spoke French. I may or may not have noticed then that various written words featured an extra “u” or a transposed e-r, as in “centre.” Regardless, I clearly wasn’t in America anymore. There was a skewed familiarity to everything that made Canada different without being scary to my young, provincial self.
Now I’m 52 and have been back to Canada several times—most recently in late October, which I’ll get to shortly. Because our neighbor to the north is chilly and under-populated—two qualities Lynn and I prize in vacation destinations—we’ve been to the Canadian Rockies and Vancouver on one trip and to Newfoundland, Labrador and the Maritime provinces on another. To me, there’s so much to love about Canada: the natural beauty, the vastness of the land, the lack of bluster and self-importance compared to what I see every day in this country, the national health care system and tough gun laws.
I was impressed, too, when Canada approved gay marriage nationwide a few years ago. But I think it was really the security measures enacted after 9/11 that iced the cake for me. Now Americans need a passport to cross the border, which is extremely important to someone like me who’s still seen little of the world. The passport requirement means, to me, that I’ve now officially been to three foreign countries—Iceland, Japan and Canada. Before, when Americans could gain access to Canada simply by producing their driver’s license and assuring the border guard there were no explosive devices in the trunk, Canada’s legitimacy as a sovereign nation for travel-resume purposes seemed vaguely questionable. Sure, Canada had different laws and other political and social quirks, but so did, say, Utah and Texas—US states that also weren’t quite like mine. The passport lent Canada an extra layer of exoticism.
It was with even greater anticipation than on previous visits, then, that I prepared to cross the border this time. Lynn and I were bound for Toronto, where neither of us ever had been, and it would be our first border crossing since enactment of the passport requirement. On the morning of Monday, October 25, with great pride in my worldliness, I handed over our proof of US citizenship to the Canadian official on that country’s side of the Rainbow Bridge in Niagara Falls, Ontario. That he turned out to be kind of a hard ass who chastised me for failing to heed some stop sign neither Lynn nor I could recollect having even seen took nothing away from my excitement as we proceeded by car into the land of metric highway signs and throwback Esso gas stations.
We would spend most of that day and two full ones in Toronto, Canada’s largest city, before returning to the US on Friday the 29th. During our stay we had a fantastic time walking the city from our centrally located hotel—some highlights included the top of the CN Tower, the Royal Ontario Museum, much gluten-free vegan fine dining (emphatically not an oxymoron in Toronto, Lynn delightedly discovered) and a couple of hours at the Hockey Fall of Fame (OK, maybe more a highlight for me than for Lynn). But what I’d really like to share with you in this post are three specific ways in which, I observed during this trip, Canada is so not the US, should any readers still need convincing—the passport thing notwithstanding.
· I was struck almost immediately by the complete and utter lack of bumper stickers. In fact, it got to the point that I was thrilled we’d valet-parked our car upon arrival at the hotel and only reclaimed it when we left town. My rear bumper area features not one, not two, but four stickers—promoting the Human Right Campaign (the “equal” sign), Amnesty International, vegetarianism (“Veg”) and the greatness of cats (“Meow”). Here in this country, I like displaying them, because I feel they project to the driving public that I’m a fan of social justice who’s comfortable with his feminine side. In Ontario, though, the bumper stickers made me feel garish and loud. They seemed the visual equivalents of screaming my opinions in Canadian ears, thus finding yet another way to be the Ugly American foreigners love to hate. What was this utter dearth of sticker mania? Was it a manifestation of Canadians’ stereotypical politeness, not wanting to offend those with opposing viewpoints and allegiances? Was it the pointlessness of “I’m the NRA, and I Vote” belligerence in a country with no gun lobby? Might it be welcome modesty about their honor-student kids? Was it the problematic distance to long weekends at “OBX”? Whatever. Once you zero in on it, as I did, you know this ain’t America.
· Being the technological caveman I am, I’d brought an old-school transistor radio with me so I could listen to music while in the shower, as I am wont to do. I found a Toronto classic rock station, which I then listened to for a total of maybe 45 minutes over those few days. I was stunned and overjoyed not to hear a single song by Boston during that time. Instead, the gaps between the standard Stones, Clapton and Tom Petty tunes were filled by unfamiliar offerings that turned out to be lesser hits by the likes of Canada’s own Rush and the Guess Who. I was completely flummoxed by the DJ’s mention at one point of the Jeff Healey Band. Playing a hunch, I Wikipedia’d the group on our laptop computer. This was the first sentence: Norman Jeffrey “Jeff” Healey (March 25, 1966 - March 2, 2008) was a blind Canadian jazz and blues-rock vocalistist and guitarist who attained musical and personal popularity, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s. Not in the US, he didn’t. Now, that’s what I call foreign classic rock.
· Canada’s Election Day had just been held when we arrived in Toronto. Toronto had elected as its new mayor a city council member named Rob Ford. His relatively easy victory had been deemed surprising—not only because Ford is a member of the Conservative Party in a Liberal-leaning city, but also because he’s fat and undiplomatic. Many Torontans were concerned that his protruding gut and blunt, take-charge attitude—qualities that characterize many a successful US politician—would ill-represent their cosmopolitan and polished city. The Toronto Sun quoted a local dietician as advising that Ford, whose unintentionally ironic campaign slogan decrying profligate government spending had been “The gravy train stops here!”, had “better have waist management on his agenda.”
There’s a lot more about Canada that’s “foreign,” of course—from the “loonie” dollar coin and those wacky Celcius temperatures, to the self-denigration and national inferiority complex that turn America’s belief in its own exceptionalism on it head, to the mistaken belief (per Lynn) that tights and leggings look good on all women regardless of body type, to a military policy that favors peacekeeping over war-making, to an endearing lawfulness that seems to preclude pedestrians crossing against a traffic light even during lengthy windows of opportunity, to the iconic status of “Hockey Night in Canada” as not only a television broadcast but as a national description of Saturday evenings everywhere from St John’s in the East to Yellowknife in the West.
Still, it seems to me there’s no better definition of "foreign country" by American standards than one in which one might never know a motorist would “Rather Be Golfing,” might never hear “More Than a Feeling” or “Peace of Mind” on the radio, and might seldom see and hear a lawmaker with a piehole as huge as his belly.
I already can’t wait to go back. I'd better keep my passport current.
Wednesday, November 3, 2010
Creepshow
Usually I carve a pumpkin for Halloween, and it’s glowing through a window of our darkened house when trick-or-treaters walk up our driveway and front steps to the screened-in front porch. Typically we drag down from the attic every plastic skull and paper skeleton we can find, and prop or hang them forebodingly on the porch swing, a pedestal table and other available surfaces.
Traditionally our front porch has lent itself well to the occasion, since—with its cobwebs, dead bugs, withered flowers, filthy plastic chairs, chipped paint and other indicators of manifest neglect—it has more closely resembled the entryway to the Munsters’ place at 1313 Mockingbird Lane than anything a suburban kid might expect to encounter in our pricey Bethesda zip code.
This year, however, we’d been on a vacation trip until the day before Halloween, and a social engagement that afternoon that had kept us away from the house until about 5 pm. Also, a month or two earlier we’d had the front porch painted, after about a decade’s worth of increasing shame over its appearance. The floor was so badly chipped by that point that the few times I vacuumed it each year, the bag quickly would fill with floor fragments. It had seemed only a matter of time until some barefoot neighbor kid soliciting funds for a school project would splinter his or her way to a huge lawsuit filed against us by litigious parents. Frankly, if we hadn’t cleared and tidied the porch for painting when we did, we might just as well have moved a rusty refrigerator and assorted hubcaps out there and hired a banjo player to complete the picture of utter indifference and dilapidation.
What I mean to say is, while our porch at last was fit for the eyes of polite society by this past Sunday night, it was considerably less ideal as a gateway to Halloween than it had been in past years. There not only was no glowing pumpkin in the window this time, but no cobwebs, no insect carcasses, no pealing porch swing perfect for the Crypt Keeper and a date. We’d hung a wreath of skulls on the front door and set a line of three wooden Jack-o-Lanterns on a low table, but that was about it. It isn’t like we get a ton of trick-or-treaters—generally between 30 and 50, most within a 90-minute window—but I felt like I was letting down those youngsters who are familiar enough with our house of planned and inadvertent horrors to have expected more from us. When the first group of kids arrived at around 6:45 and I opened the front door, I could see and hear in the distance eerie flashing lights and disturbing shrieks coming from a house on Wagner Lane. It made me feel rather like a wallflower at the Monster Mash.
At least we had good candy, and plenty of it, I consoled myself as I sat at the kitchen table. It overlooks the driveway, and I had the TV on AMC (American Movie Classics), which was showing the 1996 roadhouse-of-the-undead flick From Dusk Till Dawn. Before our vacation, Lynn had stocked up on multiple bags of Snickers, Reese’s, Milky Ways and Butterfingers. The kids who arrived periodically in groups of three or five over the first hour or so seemed pleased enough with the ambiance when I produced the candy basket and told them to take “a couple” of pieces. Which more often than not meant three or four, not that I balked.
But even the kids’ apparent satisfaction with their haul and the between-knocks distraction of the rampant gore and pixilated nudity on the TV screen (damn basic cable!) couldn’t keep me from feeling a bit like the Grinch who’d unduly sanitized Halloween. Until, that was, about 8 o’clock, when I opened the door to a trio of boys who were maybe eight or 10 years old. One was dressed as a pirate, another as a ninja and the third as Batman.
Each took several candy bars from my basket—I no longer was issuing instructions, as surplus inventory was assured at that point. They muttered their thanks and were turning to leave when Batman suddenly paused and squinted his eyes in my direction. At that point I’d returned the candy basket to its perch on the radiator beside the door, leaving my truncated-since-birth right arm entirely exposed, since I was wearing a short-sleeved T-shirt. The transfixed Caped Crusader nudged Jack Sparrow and Ninja Man, then, pointing at me, said with a mixture of fear and disbelief, “It looks like your arm’s cut off!”
In retrospect, what I should have done at that moment was malevolently cackle, and perhaps order them to accompany me to the kitchen for similar amputations courtesy of my butcher’s knife. But in truth I was momentarily taken aback by the fright I now saw in all three kids’ faces, as they realized this wasn’t a gag and I really had no right hand. I managed to muster a disarming smile (OK, pun intended) and cajolingly assured them, “It’s a birth defect. No big deal.”
But Batman was not mollified. With his friends already hightailing it down the front steps, he left me with the parting exclamation “Eww!” before turning to join them.
I closed the door and returned to my post at the kitchen table, feeling a bit shaken as I numbly watched George Clooney and Juliette Lewis on the TV, subduing grotesque vampires with rifles and stakes fashioned from chair legs. But then, a few minutes later, I suddenly appreciated the true legacy and import of my doorway encounter. At that precise moment the undead were vaporizing before my eyes, as Clooney’s bullets brought vampire-killing daylight streaming into the seedy Mexican bar—deadly dusk having given way to sweet dawn.
I smiled, having at last realized that, far from having failed Halloween in some way, I’d actually succeeded in making it more terrifying, at least for one group of young boys. I’ve since made a mental note to keep a rubber knife by the door next year. By then, too, our housekeeping record suggests the porch will again look pretty damn scary.
Traditionally our front porch has lent itself well to the occasion, since—with its cobwebs, dead bugs, withered flowers, filthy plastic chairs, chipped paint and other indicators of manifest neglect—it has more closely resembled the entryway to the Munsters’ place at 1313 Mockingbird Lane than anything a suburban kid might expect to encounter in our pricey Bethesda zip code.
This year, however, we’d been on a vacation trip until the day before Halloween, and a social engagement that afternoon that had kept us away from the house until about 5 pm. Also, a month or two earlier we’d had the front porch painted, after about a decade’s worth of increasing shame over its appearance. The floor was so badly chipped by that point that the few times I vacuumed it each year, the bag quickly would fill with floor fragments. It had seemed only a matter of time until some barefoot neighbor kid soliciting funds for a school project would splinter his or her way to a huge lawsuit filed against us by litigious parents. Frankly, if we hadn’t cleared and tidied the porch for painting when we did, we might just as well have moved a rusty refrigerator and assorted hubcaps out there and hired a banjo player to complete the picture of utter indifference and dilapidation.
What I mean to say is, while our porch at last was fit for the eyes of polite society by this past Sunday night, it was considerably less ideal as a gateway to Halloween than it had been in past years. There not only was no glowing pumpkin in the window this time, but no cobwebs, no insect carcasses, no pealing porch swing perfect for the Crypt Keeper and a date. We’d hung a wreath of skulls on the front door and set a line of three wooden Jack-o-Lanterns on a low table, but that was about it. It isn’t like we get a ton of trick-or-treaters—generally between 30 and 50, most within a 90-minute window—but I felt like I was letting down those youngsters who are familiar enough with our house of planned and inadvertent horrors to have expected more from us. When the first group of kids arrived at around 6:45 and I opened the front door, I could see and hear in the distance eerie flashing lights and disturbing shrieks coming from a house on Wagner Lane. It made me feel rather like a wallflower at the Monster Mash.
At least we had good candy, and plenty of it, I consoled myself as I sat at the kitchen table. It overlooks the driveway, and I had the TV on AMC (American Movie Classics), which was showing the 1996 roadhouse-of-the-undead flick From Dusk Till Dawn. Before our vacation, Lynn had stocked up on multiple bags of Snickers, Reese’s, Milky Ways and Butterfingers. The kids who arrived periodically in groups of three or five over the first hour or so seemed pleased enough with the ambiance when I produced the candy basket and told them to take “a couple” of pieces. Which more often than not meant three or four, not that I balked.
But even the kids’ apparent satisfaction with their haul and the between-knocks distraction of the rampant gore and pixilated nudity on the TV screen (damn basic cable!) couldn’t keep me from feeling a bit like the Grinch who’d unduly sanitized Halloween. Until, that was, about 8 o’clock, when I opened the door to a trio of boys who were maybe eight or 10 years old. One was dressed as a pirate, another as a ninja and the third as Batman.
Each took several candy bars from my basket—I no longer was issuing instructions, as surplus inventory was assured at that point. They muttered their thanks and were turning to leave when Batman suddenly paused and squinted his eyes in my direction. At that point I’d returned the candy basket to its perch on the radiator beside the door, leaving my truncated-since-birth right arm entirely exposed, since I was wearing a short-sleeved T-shirt. The transfixed Caped Crusader nudged Jack Sparrow and Ninja Man, then, pointing at me, said with a mixture of fear and disbelief, “It looks like your arm’s cut off!”
In retrospect, what I should have done at that moment was malevolently cackle, and perhaps order them to accompany me to the kitchen for similar amputations courtesy of my butcher’s knife. But in truth I was momentarily taken aback by the fright I now saw in all three kids’ faces, as they realized this wasn’t a gag and I really had no right hand. I managed to muster a disarming smile (OK, pun intended) and cajolingly assured them, “It’s a birth defect. No big deal.”
But Batman was not mollified. With his friends already hightailing it down the front steps, he left me with the parting exclamation “Eww!” before turning to join them.
I closed the door and returned to my post at the kitchen table, feeling a bit shaken as I numbly watched George Clooney and Juliette Lewis on the TV, subduing grotesque vampires with rifles and stakes fashioned from chair legs. But then, a few minutes later, I suddenly appreciated the true legacy and import of my doorway encounter. At that precise moment the undead were vaporizing before my eyes, as Clooney’s bullets brought vampire-killing daylight streaming into the seedy Mexican bar—deadly dusk having given way to sweet dawn.
I smiled, having at last realized that, far from having failed Halloween in some way, I’d actually succeeded in making it more terrifying, at least for one group of young boys. I’ve since made a mental note to keep a rubber knife by the door next year. By then, too, our housekeeping record suggests the porch will again look pretty damn scary.
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
Reflection
At 11 pm this past Sunday, I exited DC’s 9:30 Club fairly deaf, slightly blinded, totally hoarse, extremely parched and mostly happy. I’d just seen one of my favorite bands, The New Pornographers, play a spirited show to a packed house.
I was feeling pretty cool, frankly, as I strode toward the U Street Metro station in my dark shirt, black jeans and boots. My hair was looking rebel-long in these shaved-head times. While I’d forgotten to wear my favorite clunky, retro glasses, the round Lennon-esque ones had sufficed quite nicely, it seemed to me.
Except, then I caught my reflection in the window of a bustling bar. I saw in front of me a diverse array of young hipsters, both al fresco on the patio and seated behind the glass. But there on the pane, I was not looking particularly fresh and happening. In fact, I was looking like I’d happened quite some time ago. If then. I was looking like what happens with age.
The truth, of course, was that none of those relative kids at the show I’d just left had exactly mistaken me for one of their own. While I haven’t yet succumbed to middle-age spread and against all odds have kept my hair, wrinkle lines and graying temples abundantly tell my chronological tale. Though I always hope twenty- and thirtysomethings will size me up and significantly lowball my age, I find they’re damnably accurate whenever I foolishly press the issue with acquaintances in that demographic. In fact, my only dependably affirming audience in this respect is the ancient-senior set with whom I socialize as a weekly volunteer at an assisted living facility. But those ladies tend to equate easy mobility with youth, and they consider my successful use of the TV remote to be the high-tech wizardry of a wunderkind.
I had, in fact, spotted at least a few peers in the 9:30 Club crowd. An older bald guy here, an older fat guy there. I’d stacked up pretty well, I thought. And anyway, didn’t I deserve some credit for even knowing who The New Pornographers are, let alone developing a genuine love for their intricate power pop stylings? Hadn’t I been an early evangelist of this suggestively named Canadian octet, now beloved by rock critics as an indie-music powerhouse? Hadn’t I voluntarily come out to play on a work night and secured a plum spot near the stage by arriving early and staying right where I was? Why, I’d foregone even a single beer so as not to risk displacement after a bathroom break. Shouldn’t all of that count for something?
Well, honestly? No, I answered myself as I passed through the subway turnstile. I mean, had my ability to mouth the lyrics to “Sing Me Spanish Techno,” “Mass Romantic” and “Sweet Talk, Sweet Talk” at that evening’s show established my street cred, somehow? Had my screams and applause been evidence of youthful vitality? Had my stoicism before the show and during breaks bespoken my timeless sense of hip?
To the contrary, I’d felt stupid mouthing the lyrics, but I’d wanted all the (zero) people who’d been watching me to see that I really knew the songs. I’d been stoic only for lack of company, as well as my crotchety distaste for cell phones and their social networking options. I’d screamed at the band mainly to reassure myself that I could make audible sounds after all that silence. And my clapping had made me self-conscious, as it always does. Had I raised my arms above my head, concert style, I’d have had that weird hand-stump disparity thing going on for all to see. So, I’d clapped with my arms in front of me. But my clap doesn’t and can’t match the volume of hand-on-hand applause. It’s always struck me as a little sad.
Not that I regretted the trip to the 9:30 Club. As I rode the Green Line train to my transfer point at Gallery Place, I felt good about having heard and seen a few hours of great music up close. I liked the fact that I’d made the effort on a Sunday night. And it wasn’t as if I was wiped out, either. I’d stayed through the final encore and felt considerably more wired than tired.
Riding the Red line train back to my car at Tenleytown, I sort of regretted that I hadn’t bought myself a New Pornographers T-shirt at the club. But then I again saw my reflection in the glass. I had to wonder if such a garment, arguably hip and quirky on a younger man, might simply encourage mothers to hold their small children closer as I passed by.
I got home at midnight. Lynn was asleep upstairs. I stayed up until almost 1:30 working on the New York Times Magazine crossword puzzle. By that time the cats’ initial enthusiasm for my surprise appearance had long since waned, and they, too, were dozing. I was finally ready to turn in myself. My ears no longer were ringing, and my throat had been soothed by a glass of water. It would be time to get up for work in just a few hours. There, I’d tell my office buddies about my big night out.
“Kind of cool,” I thought, turning out the light.
I was feeling pretty cool, frankly, as I strode toward the U Street Metro station in my dark shirt, black jeans and boots. My hair was looking rebel-long in these shaved-head times. While I’d forgotten to wear my favorite clunky, retro glasses, the round Lennon-esque ones had sufficed quite nicely, it seemed to me.
Except, then I caught my reflection in the window of a bustling bar. I saw in front of me a diverse array of young hipsters, both al fresco on the patio and seated behind the glass. But there on the pane, I was not looking particularly fresh and happening. In fact, I was looking like I’d happened quite some time ago. If then. I was looking like what happens with age.
The truth, of course, was that none of those relative kids at the show I’d just left had exactly mistaken me for one of their own. While I haven’t yet succumbed to middle-age spread and against all odds have kept my hair, wrinkle lines and graying temples abundantly tell my chronological tale. Though I always hope twenty- and thirtysomethings will size me up and significantly lowball my age, I find they’re damnably accurate whenever I foolishly press the issue with acquaintances in that demographic. In fact, my only dependably affirming audience in this respect is the ancient-senior set with whom I socialize as a weekly volunteer at an assisted living facility. But those ladies tend to equate easy mobility with youth, and they consider my successful use of the TV remote to be the high-tech wizardry of a wunderkind.
I had, in fact, spotted at least a few peers in the 9:30 Club crowd. An older bald guy here, an older fat guy there. I’d stacked up pretty well, I thought. And anyway, didn’t I deserve some credit for even knowing who The New Pornographers are, let alone developing a genuine love for their intricate power pop stylings? Hadn’t I been an early evangelist of this suggestively named Canadian octet, now beloved by rock critics as an indie-music powerhouse? Hadn’t I voluntarily come out to play on a work night and secured a plum spot near the stage by arriving early and staying right where I was? Why, I’d foregone even a single beer so as not to risk displacement after a bathroom break. Shouldn’t all of that count for something?
Well, honestly? No, I answered myself as I passed through the subway turnstile. I mean, had my ability to mouth the lyrics to “Sing Me Spanish Techno,” “Mass Romantic” and “Sweet Talk, Sweet Talk” at that evening’s show established my street cred, somehow? Had my screams and applause been evidence of youthful vitality? Had my stoicism before the show and during breaks bespoken my timeless sense of hip?
To the contrary, I’d felt stupid mouthing the lyrics, but I’d wanted all the (zero) people who’d been watching me to see that I really knew the songs. I’d been stoic only for lack of company, as well as my crotchety distaste for cell phones and their social networking options. I’d screamed at the band mainly to reassure myself that I could make audible sounds after all that silence. And my clapping had made me self-conscious, as it always does. Had I raised my arms above my head, concert style, I’d have had that weird hand-stump disparity thing going on for all to see. So, I’d clapped with my arms in front of me. But my clap doesn’t and can’t match the volume of hand-on-hand applause. It’s always struck me as a little sad.
Not that I regretted the trip to the 9:30 Club. As I rode the Green Line train to my transfer point at Gallery Place, I felt good about having heard and seen a few hours of great music up close. I liked the fact that I’d made the effort on a Sunday night. And it wasn’t as if I was wiped out, either. I’d stayed through the final encore and felt considerably more wired than tired.
Riding the Red line train back to my car at Tenleytown, I sort of regretted that I hadn’t bought myself a New Pornographers T-shirt at the club. But then I again saw my reflection in the glass. I had to wonder if such a garment, arguably hip and quirky on a younger man, might simply encourage mothers to hold their small children closer as I passed by.
I got home at midnight. Lynn was asleep upstairs. I stayed up until almost 1:30 working on the New York Times Magazine crossword puzzle. By that time the cats’ initial enthusiasm for my surprise appearance had long since waned, and they, too, were dozing. I was finally ready to turn in myself. My ears no longer were ringing, and my throat had been soothed by a glass of water. It would be time to get up for work in just a few hours. There, I’d tell my office buddies about my big night out.
“Kind of cool,” I thought, turning out the light.
Friday, October 15, 2010
The Measure of Her Worth
I’ve never accessed porn on my office computer. (It’s blocked, OK?) But I do have a Web secret I hope my bosses never discover. It’s embarrassing. And, yes, stripping is involved.
Every weekday morning, without fail, I check in on Mary Worth.
Mary Worth?! you’re exclaiming if you’re a comics reader of a certain age. Is that moth-eaten serial still around?!
Mary Worth?! you’re exclaiming if you’re a Millennial or even a Gen Xer. (And by the way, how’d you find me?) You’re asking, “What’s Mary Worth? Is there an app for it?”
Well, Mary Worth, if you don’t already know, is an antique comic strip—dating back to 1940—about a widow of indeterminate elder age whose self-appointed role in the world is to nose around in other people’s business, solve their problems to her own satisfaction, then wrap things up by dispensing rosy platitudes while birds sing and the sun beams. It’s a throwback to an earlier era that Washington Post readers voted years ago to throw off the print pages. (The newspaper still links to it online.)
But I personally find Mary Worth to be so bad that it’s great. (Unlike such so-bad-they’re-insufferable comics as The Family Circus, which I’ll get to shortly.) Mary Worth—with her tight ‘do, matronly duds and presumably cold-showering boyfriend, Dr Jeff Cory—strikes me as being a Norman Rockwell character sprung to hideous life. Think, for instance, of that iconic Rockwell man who’s checking his watch, tapping his foot and impatiently waiting for his girlfriend to arrive at the Bijou. Sure, that illustration’s details look dated now, but the situation is timeless: Somebody’s always late, somebody’s always waiting.
Now, what would happen if, after the woman showed up, and after her beau quickly forgave her because she was pretty and smelled nice, a dowdily attired older lady were to step out of the drawing’s shadows and forcefully offer the startled pair her unsolicited counsel that tardiness is rude, that the young woman should apologize immediately, and that young man should show himself a little more respect?
In real life, the couple would tell the wrinkled buttinski to mind her own damn business. If this scene were happening in her comic strip, however, Mary Worth would beam as the grateful guy ‘n’ gal rode her sagacity train all the way to a much greater understanding of each other’s needs.
In a recent Mary Worth storyline, the eponymous biddy succeeded in getting a young couple together by 1) bullying the man into reconciling with his estranged father, thus resolving his longstanding commitment issues, and 2) cowing the woman into patiently waiting for the guy to straighten himself out. Also, 3) the dad conveniently corked off roughly a nanosecond after the reconciliation, leaving the marriage-bound couple free of any financial burden for the aging, sickly older man. It was classic Mary Worth—the melodrama, the setup for Mary’s deus ex machina intercession, the speed of resolution (father-son reconciliation and paternal demise within maybe a week), and the spotless tidiness of it all (matching the doubtless order of Mary’s closet and dresser drawers).
Such enthralling nonsense makes Mary Worth ripe for parody, of course. Wikipedia obliges with a compendium of examples from over the years, ranging from a 1950s lampoon by Mary’s late cartoon neighbor L’il Abner in the 1950s, through a Carol Burnett Show TV sketch in the 1970s titled “Mary Worthless,” to a Family Guy bit in which son Chris flattened the strip, Silly Putty-style, on his obese dad Peter’s belly and boasted, “Look what I can do to Mary Worth’s smug sense of self-satisfaction.”
So, clearly, I’m hardly the first or last reader to delight in the strip’s heavy-handed moralizing and anachronistic stylings and dialogue—not to mention the odd color scheme, in which every other character seems to have blue hair. Still, I’m not chagrined that so many other people are in on the inadvertent joke. To the contrary, I’m quite happy to continue, every workday morning, clicking in on this jihadist Miss Manners’ never-ending crusade to shape the populace of fictitious Santa Royale, California, to her exacting image of how the world should be—nay, must be.
Presumably the same reader polls that excised Mary Worth from the print edition of the Washington Post have kept The Family Circus on those same pages. Which is hard to figure on its face, because where Mary Worth can be campy fun, The Family Circus is unfailingly cloying, precious and vomit-inducing. But when you think about it, it’s really no mystery who comprises the seemingly inexplicable fan base of Bil, Thelma, Billy, Dolly, Jeffy, PJ, Kittycat and Barfy (the revealingly named dog). Who’s giving the love to The Family Circus? Senior citizens are.
In fact, there may be no firmer proof of the ossification of print-subscriber bases than the continuing publication of The Family Circus in well over a thousand newspapers. In many senses it’s a perfect fit for children of the Depression. Like that demographic, the cartoon is frugal—in The Family Circus’s case, as regards originality, imagination, cleverness, even number of panels (just one). Like many a septuagenarian, it’s traditional in its God-and-family sensibilities. And like many a grandpa, the comic’s “humor” breadbasket— Kids Say the Darnedest Things—is pull-my-finger corny. Never mind that most of the darned things uttered by Family Circus kids sound like outtakes rejected from Art Linkletter’s 1960s show for sounding too coached and artificially saccharine.
Other cartoonists have amusingly parodied cartoonist Bil Keane’s Family Circus characters and groan-inducing gimmicks, such as the circuitous dotted-line routes the kids take to get places, the dead grandfather who occasionally hovers benevolently over the proceedings, and the mischievous characters “Ida Know” and “Not Me”—ghostly embodiments of the children’s excuse-making when they bust a vase or sock a baseball through a window. Family Circus characters have been drawn into funny sequences in such comic strips as Pearls Before Swine, Dilbert and Zippy the Pinhead. And just this week came word that Twentieth Century Fox plans to make a live-action Family Circus movie.
Hopefully the movie, too, will be a parody, because 90 minutes of Family Circus characters played straight would induce insulin shock. (And who’d shell out the money to watch an earnest Family Circus movie? My mom, who’s 79, predictably adores the cartoon, but she and my dad probably last paid full price at the cinema when The Sting debuted.)
I can only hope the Family Circus movie will be made in collaboration with the satirists at The Onion. That’s where I first read the news, under the headline “Single-panel comic strip to become single-joke film franchise.” That piece praised the strip as “brilliantly deconstructionist” because it “subverts the notion that comic strips should exist in strip form or be inherently comic.” The article described The Family Circus as “the misadventures of four hydrocephalic children whose abnormal accumulation of cranial fluid causes them to interpret everything an adult says incredibly literally, then repeat their misunderstandings, to the laughter of a cruel world.”
The Onion, too, questioned any film treatment’s potential for box-office success, given that “we’re fairly certain most Family Circus fans exist solely as grim-faced specters hovering over their grandchildren in the clouds, waging silent war for their souls against the itinerant demons Ida Know and Not Me.”
Given its comparative obscurity at this stage of its cartoon life, I can’t see Mary Worth similarly being turned into a movie, even as a parody. Which is just as well, from many standpoints. Not the least of which is the inevitability that any film version made in the next few years would star the dreadfully overexposed Betty White, doing her “sassy senior” thing.
Do I want to see a randy Mary Worth exchanging her sensible dress and pearls for a bustier, intent on rocking Dr Jeff Cory’s world? No thanks! I’d rather just keep visiting my favorite goody-two-shoes in the (online) funny papers.
Every weekday morning, without fail, I check in on Mary Worth.
Mary Worth?! you’re exclaiming if you’re a comics reader of a certain age. Is that moth-eaten serial still around?!
Mary Worth?! you’re exclaiming if you’re a Millennial or even a Gen Xer. (And by the way, how’d you find me?) You’re asking, “What’s Mary Worth? Is there an app for it?”
Well, Mary Worth, if you don’t already know, is an antique comic strip—dating back to 1940—about a widow of indeterminate elder age whose self-appointed role in the world is to nose around in other people’s business, solve their problems to her own satisfaction, then wrap things up by dispensing rosy platitudes while birds sing and the sun beams. It’s a throwback to an earlier era that Washington Post readers voted years ago to throw off the print pages. (The newspaper still links to it online.)
But I personally find Mary Worth to be so bad that it’s great. (Unlike such so-bad-they’re-insufferable comics as The Family Circus, which I’ll get to shortly.) Mary Worth—with her tight ‘do, matronly duds and presumably cold-showering boyfriend, Dr Jeff Cory—strikes me as being a Norman Rockwell character sprung to hideous life. Think, for instance, of that iconic Rockwell man who’s checking his watch, tapping his foot and impatiently waiting for his girlfriend to arrive at the Bijou. Sure, that illustration’s details look dated now, but the situation is timeless: Somebody’s always late, somebody’s always waiting.
Now, what would happen if, after the woman showed up, and after her beau quickly forgave her because she was pretty and smelled nice, a dowdily attired older lady were to step out of the drawing’s shadows and forcefully offer the startled pair her unsolicited counsel that tardiness is rude, that the young woman should apologize immediately, and that young man should show himself a little more respect?
In real life, the couple would tell the wrinkled buttinski to mind her own damn business. If this scene were happening in her comic strip, however, Mary Worth would beam as the grateful guy ‘n’ gal rode her sagacity train all the way to a much greater understanding of each other’s needs.
In a recent Mary Worth storyline, the eponymous biddy succeeded in getting a young couple together by 1) bullying the man into reconciling with his estranged father, thus resolving his longstanding commitment issues, and 2) cowing the woman into patiently waiting for the guy to straighten himself out. Also, 3) the dad conveniently corked off roughly a nanosecond after the reconciliation, leaving the marriage-bound couple free of any financial burden for the aging, sickly older man. It was classic Mary Worth—the melodrama, the setup for Mary’s deus ex machina intercession, the speed of resolution (father-son reconciliation and paternal demise within maybe a week), and the spotless tidiness of it all (matching the doubtless order of Mary’s closet and dresser drawers).
Such enthralling nonsense makes Mary Worth ripe for parody, of course. Wikipedia obliges with a compendium of examples from over the years, ranging from a 1950s lampoon by Mary’s late cartoon neighbor L’il Abner in the 1950s, through a Carol Burnett Show TV sketch in the 1970s titled “Mary Worthless,” to a Family Guy bit in which son Chris flattened the strip, Silly Putty-style, on his obese dad Peter’s belly and boasted, “Look what I can do to Mary Worth’s smug sense of self-satisfaction.”
So, clearly, I’m hardly the first or last reader to delight in the strip’s heavy-handed moralizing and anachronistic stylings and dialogue—not to mention the odd color scheme, in which every other character seems to have blue hair. Still, I’m not chagrined that so many other people are in on the inadvertent joke. To the contrary, I’m quite happy to continue, every workday morning, clicking in on this jihadist Miss Manners’ never-ending crusade to shape the populace of fictitious Santa Royale, California, to her exacting image of how the world should be—nay, must be.
Presumably the same reader polls that excised Mary Worth from the print edition of the Washington Post have kept The Family Circus on those same pages. Which is hard to figure on its face, because where Mary Worth can be campy fun, The Family Circus is unfailingly cloying, precious and vomit-inducing. But when you think about it, it’s really no mystery who comprises the seemingly inexplicable fan base of Bil, Thelma, Billy, Dolly, Jeffy, PJ, Kittycat and Barfy (the revealingly named dog). Who’s giving the love to The Family Circus? Senior citizens are.
In fact, there may be no firmer proof of the ossification of print-subscriber bases than the continuing publication of The Family Circus in well over a thousand newspapers. In many senses it’s a perfect fit for children of the Depression. Like that demographic, the cartoon is frugal—in The Family Circus’s case, as regards originality, imagination, cleverness, even number of panels (just one). Like many a septuagenarian, it’s traditional in its God-and-family sensibilities. And like many a grandpa, the comic’s “humor” breadbasket— Kids Say the Darnedest Things—is pull-my-finger corny. Never mind that most of the darned things uttered by Family Circus kids sound like outtakes rejected from Art Linkletter’s 1960s show for sounding too coached and artificially saccharine.
Other cartoonists have amusingly parodied cartoonist Bil Keane’s Family Circus characters and groan-inducing gimmicks, such as the circuitous dotted-line routes the kids take to get places, the dead grandfather who occasionally hovers benevolently over the proceedings, and the mischievous characters “Ida Know” and “Not Me”—ghostly embodiments of the children’s excuse-making when they bust a vase or sock a baseball through a window. Family Circus characters have been drawn into funny sequences in such comic strips as Pearls Before Swine, Dilbert and Zippy the Pinhead. And just this week came word that Twentieth Century Fox plans to make a live-action Family Circus movie.
Hopefully the movie, too, will be a parody, because 90 minutes of Family Circus characters played straight would induce insulin shock. (And who’d shell out the money to watch an earnest Family Circus movie? My mom, who’s 79, predictably adores the cartoon, but she and my dad probably last paid full price at the cinema when The Sting debuted.)
I can only hope the Family Circus movie will be made in collaboration with the satirists at The Onion. That’s where I first read the news, under the headline “Single-panel comic strip to become single-joke film franchise.” That piece praised the strip as “brilliantly deconstructionist” because it “subverts the notion that comic strips should exist in strip form or be inherently comic.” The article described The Family Circus as “the misadventures of four hydrocephalic children whose abnormal accumulation of cranial fluid causes them to interpret everything an adult says incredibly literally, then repeat their misunderstandings, to the laughter of a cruel world.”
The Onion, too, questioned any film treatment’s potential for box-office success, given that “we’re fairly certain most Family Circus fans exist solely as grim-faced specters hovering over their grandchildren in the clouds, waging silent war for their souls against the itinerant demons Ida Know and Not Me.”
Given its comparative obscurity at this stage of its cartoon life, I can’t see Mary Worth similarly being turned into a movie, even as a parody. Which is just as well, from many standpoints. Not the least of which is the inevitability that any film version made in the next few years would star the dreadfully overexposed Betty White, doing her “sassy senior” thing.
Do I want to see a randy Mary Worth exchanging her sensible dress and pearls for a bustier, intent on rocking Dr Jeff Cory’s world? No thanks! I’d rather just keep visiting my favorite goody-two-shoes in the (online) funny papers.
Saturday, October 2, 2010
That Certain Smile
I turned 18 in 1976, America’s bicentennial year. I did not celebrate by donning breeches and a tricorn hat. Nor did I have anywhere near the hedonistic fun later depicted in the film Dazed and Confused, which celebrated the debauchery of a certain party-centric Class of ’76. (If I’d lived that particular high school experience, I might’ve donned the breeches and tricorn hat but now have no recollection of it.) What I did do in 1976 was vote in my first presidential election.
That was the contest that pitted the Republican incumbent, Gerald Ford, against Democratic challenger Jimmy Carter. Ford was and still is the nation’s only un-elected chief executive, having ascended to the post upon Richard Nixon’s resignation two years earlier. Carter was a former governor of Georgia who came out of nowhere to secure the Democratic nomination. It was a great year to come out of nowhere, because in the wake of the Nixon stench Americans were in much the same throw-the-bums-out, anti-Washington-insider mood that prevails in this year’s bi-elections. For the same reason, it was not a good year to have given Richard Nixon a full presidential pardon, as Ford, his successor, had done.
The race between the un-flashy longtime Michigan congressman—inaccurately but rather endearingly caricatured by Chevy Chase on Saturday Night Live as a bumbling klutz based on one real-life tumble and an incident on a golf course—and the intriguingly obscure Southerner promised to be close. And indeed it would prove to be. But for me the choice was pretty easy.
I was a freshman in college that year, and most of the students in my coed dorm, unsurprisingly, were primed to vote for any candidate who hadn’t pardoned Tricky Dick. But I’d been sufficiently influenced by my parents’ conservatism to have registered as a Republican, and there was a dull earnestness about Ford that I liked. Also, then as now, I had a wide contrarian streak and was drawn to the idea of bucking the dorm’s tide. Mostly, though, Jimmy Carter’s smile drove me nuts. (No peanut-farmer pun intended.)
It was fitting that one of the more prominent campaign buttons that year was dominated by a cartoon depiction of Carter’s gleaming choppers, because they were his dominating physical feature. Every time you saw him on TV—in those days, the only visual option other than a live campaign appearance—he displayed that full-bore smile that made it look as if he’d picked up extra teeth along with convention delegates during the spring primaries. But the thing was, Carter's smile, to my mind, was not one of friendship and goodwill but one of deep self-satisfaction and know-it-all-ism. His populist catch-phrase that fall was something like, “My name is Jimmy Carter and I’d like to be your president.” The smile said, “My name is Jimmy Carter, I have all the answers, and if you don’t vote for me you are at best ill-informed and at worst a moron.”
The truth was, I was a registered Republican in 1976 only in the sense that a virgin is a spokesperson for abstinence. On paper, yes, but frankly I just hadn’t gotten out much. Even at that point in my life I was philosophically liberal enough to probably have voted for Carter, who actually straddled a centrist line slightly to the left, while Ford stood slightly to the right. But I just could not get past the shit-eating smile that scolded me for even thinking of voting for Ford.
As it happened, of course, Carter narrowly won the election, my ballot notwithstanding. But that was the first and last time I voted for a Republican presidential candidate. And given how far to the right the GOP has shifted in the years since, it’s hard for me to imagine a scenario in which I’ll see a Republican as a viable candidate in 2012 or any foreseeable presidential-election year.
I bring all this up because of a couple of recent instances of former President Carter, now 86, being in the news. The widespread view of Carter by Democrats and Republicans alike—save perhaps those who take issue with his frequent harsh criticisms of Israel—is that he was an ineffectual president but has been a dynamite ex-president. We’ve all seen him pounding nails for Habitat for Humanity, helping monitor elections in countries where ballot-stuffing and voter intimidation are government sports, and doing more than his part to Make the World a Better Place through the conflict-resolution work of the Carter Center. Maybe he was too prickly and rigid and holier-than thou to get anything done in the Oval Office, the line goes, but in the years since, Private Citizen Carter has kicked some serious do-gooding ass.
And you know, I don’t dispute any of that. To a large extent, his actions and legacies speak for themselves. The problem is, Jimmy Carter won’t let his accomplishments stand as mute testimony to his intelligence, hard work and strong moral core. He has to talk about them. And when he does, his 2010 words mirror his 1976 smile in impatient sanctimoniousness.
Discussing his post-presidential work recently with NBC News anchor Brian Williams, Carter skipped right over the humble “I do what I can” and the reasonable “I think I’ve accomplished a lot” in favor of the immodest but revealing, “My role as a former president is probably superior to that of other presidents.” (Perhaps he thought the “probably” was qualifier enough.) In the same interview Carter added, “I feel I have an advantage over many former presidents in being involved in daily affairs that have shaped the policies of our nation and the world.”
I’ve always hated the word “hubris” because it’s So Washington and I’ve never been sure exactly what it means, but it immediately springs to mind when I read quotes like those ones from Jimmy Carter. Hubris always has seemed, in context, to be an inside-the-Beltway synonym for “smug” or “self-satisfied” or “about 10 sizes too big for his or her bicentennial breeches.”
But Carter didn’t stop there. It’s not enough for him to be recognized as the ex-president who was out saving the world while his historical peer group was golfing or giving lectures or dying shortly after leaving office. No, he feels compelled to burnish his presidential credentials, too. And to do so at the expense of a beloved pol who’s too dead to defend himself.
On 60 Minutes a few weeks ago, Carter stated that all of today’s angst and acrimony over health care reform would’ve been rendered unnecessary if only Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy—who coincidentally had challenged Carter for the Democratic presidential nomination—hadn’t royally screwed him over back in the late 1970s.
“The fact is,” Carter said, “we would have had comprehensive health care now, had it not been for Ted Kennedy’s deliberately blocking the legislation that I proposed. It was his fault. Ted Kennedy killed the bill. … He did not want to see me have a major success in that realm of life.”
Hubris, hubris, hubris, hubris! So, if not for Ted Kennedy, Carter would have accomplished decades ago what has eluded scores of skillful and accomplished lawmakers ever since? And the same Ted Kennedy who made health care reform his life’s work scuttled Carter’s brilliant plan simply out of spite, and not perhaps because, just maybe, he deemed it flawed?
See, this is the Jimmy Carter for whom I didn’t vote: The guy who not only teaches Sunday school but sees himself as, if not a messiah, at least a very, very Wise Man. The guy whose heart is often in the right place but whose head tends to be up his ass when it comes to humility, generosity and self-awareness.
Jimmy, Jimmy, Jimmy. The world is a better place for everything you’ve done. And whatever my views of your presidency, maybe America needed Jerry Ford to go down in 1976 in order to hasten the post-Watergate healing process. But you know what? I’ve never regretted my ballot choice 34 years ago. In fact, lately I’ve been feeling better about it than ever.
That was the contest that pitted the Republican incumbent, Gerald Ford, against Democratic challenger Jimmy Carter. Ford was and still is the nation’s only un-elected chief executive, having ascended to the post upon Richard Nixon’s resignation two years earlier. Carter was a former governor of Georgia who came out of nowhere to secure the Democratic nomination. It was a great year to come out of nowhere, because in the wake of the Nixon stench Americans were in much the same throw-the-bums-out, anti-Washington-insider mood that prevails in this year’s bi-elections. For the same reason, it was not a good year to have given Richard Nixon a full presidential pardon, as Ford, his successor, had done.
The race between the un-flashy longtime Michigan congressman—inaccurately but rather endearingly caricatured by Chevy Chase on Saturday Night Live as a bumbling klutz based on one real-life tumble and an incident on a golf course—and the intriguingly obscure Southerner promised to be close. And indeed it would prove to be. But for me the choice was pretty easy.
I was a freshman in college that year, and most of the students in my coed dorm, unsurprisingly, were primed to vote for any candidate who hadn’t pardoned Tricky Dick. But I’d been sufficiently influenced by my parents’ conservatism to have registered as a Republican, and there was a dull earnestness about Ford that I liked. Also, then as now, I had a wide contrarian streak and was drawn to the idea of bucking the dorm’s tide. Mostly, though, Jimmy Carter’s smile drove me nuts. (No peanut-farmer pun intended.)
It was fitting that one of the more prominent campaign buttons that year was dominated by a cartoon depiction of Carter’s gleaming choppers, because they were his dominating physical feature. Every time you saw him on TV—in those days, the only visual option other than a live campaign appearance—he displayed that full-bore smile that made it look as if he’d picked up extra teeth along with convention delegates during the spring primaries. But the thing was, Carter's smile, to my mind, was not one of friendship and goodwill but one of deep self-satisfaction and know-it-all-ism. His populist catch-phrase that fall was something like, “My name is Jimmy Carter and I’d like to be your president.” The smile said, “My name is Jimmy Carter, I have all the answers, and if you don’t vote for me you are at best ill-informed and at worst a moron.”
The truth was, I was a registered Republican in 1976 only in the sense that a virgin is a spokesperson for abstinence. On paper, yes, but frankly I just hadn’t gotten out much. Even at that point in my life I was philosophically liberal enough to probably have voted for Carter, who actually straddled a centrist line slightly to the left, while Ford stood slightly to the right. But I just could not get past the shit-eating smile that scolded me for even thinking of voting for Ford.
As it happened, of course, Carter narrowly won the election, my ballot notwithstanding. But that was the first and last time I voted for a Republican presidential candidate. And given how far to the right the GOP has shifted in the years since, it’s hard for me to imagine a scenario in which I’ll see a Republican as a viable candidate in 2012 or any foreseeable presidential-election year.
I bring all this up because of a couple of recent instances of former President Carter, now 86, being in the news. The widespread view of Carter by Democrats and Republicans alike—save perhaps those who take issue with his frequent harsh criticisms of Israel—is that he was an ineffectual president but has been a dynamite ex-president. We’ve all seen him pounding nails for Habitat for Humanity, helping monitor elections in countries where ballot-stuffing and voter intimidation are government sports, and doing more than his part to Make the World a Better Place through the conflict-resolution work of the Carter Center. Maybe he was too prickly and rigid and holier-than thou to get anything done in the Oval Office, the line goes, but in the years since, Private Citizen Carter has kicked some serious do-gooding ass.
And you know, I don’t dispute any of that. To a large extent, his actions and legacies speak for themselves. The problem is, Jimmy Carter won’t let his accomplishments stand as mute testimony to his intelligence, hard work and strong moral core. He has to talk about them. And when he does, his 2010 words mirror his 1976 smile in impatient sanctimoniousness.
Discussing his post-presidential work recently with NBC News anchor Brian Williams, Carter skipped right over the humble “I do what I can” and the reasonable “I think I’ve accomplished a lot” in favor of the immodest but revealing, “My role as a former president is probably superior to that of other presidents.” (Perhaps he thought the “probably” was qualifier enough.) In the same interview Carter added, “I feel I have an advantage over many former presidents in being involved in daily affairs that have shaped the policies of our nation and the world.”
I’ve always hated the word “hubris” because it’s So Washington and I’ve never been sure exactly what it means, but it immediately springs to mind when I read quotes like those ones from Jimmy Carter. Hubris always has seemed, in context, to be an inside-the-Beltway synonym for “smug” or “self-satisfied” or “about 10 sizes too big for his or her bicentennial breeches.”
But Carter didn’t stop there. It’s not enough for him to be recognized as the ex-president who was out saving the world while his historical peer group was golfing or giving lectures or dying shortly after leaving office. No, he feels compelled to burnish his presidential credentials, too. And to do so at the expense of a beloved pol who’s too dead to defend himself.
On 60 Minutes a few weeks ago, Carter stated that all of today’s angst and acrimony over health care reform would’ve been rendered unnecessary if only Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy—who coincidentally had challenged Carter for the Democratic presidential nomination—hadn’t royally screwed him over back in the late 1970s.
“The fact is,” Carter said, “we would have had comprehensive health care now, had it not been for Ted Kennedy’s deliberately blocking the legislation that I proposed. It was his fault. Ted Kennedy killed the bill. … He did not want to see me have a major success in that realm of life.”
Hubris, hubris, hubris, hubris! So, if not for Ted Kennedy, Carter would have accomplished decades ago what has eluded scores of skillful and accomplished lawmakers ever since? And the same Ted Kennedy who made health care reform his life’s work scuttled Carter’s brilliant plan simply out of spite, and not perhaps because, just maybe, he deemed it flawed?
See, this is the Jimmy Carter for whom I didn’t vote: The guy who not only teaches Sunday school but sees himself as, if not a messiah, at least a very, very Wise Man. The guy whose heart is often in the right place but whose head tends to be up his ass when it comes to humility, generosity and self-awareness.
Jimmy, Jimmy, Jimmy. The world is a better place for everything you’ve done. And whatever my views of your presidency, maybe America needed Jerry Ford to go down in 1976 in order to hasten the post-Watergate healing process. But you know what? I’ve never regretted my ballot choice 34 years ago. In fact, lately I’ve been feeling better about it than ever.
Friday, October 1, 2010
Bridge of Sighs
We used to drive over the George Washington Memorial Bridge on our way to Lynn’s mom’s house in Rhode Island, but the traffic always was awful, and the gritty urban vistas in no way compensated for the pace. That’s why we were zipping across the nearby Tappan Zee Bridge in the New York City suburbs on September 22 while, that same day, things were turning uglier than usual over on the GW.
Having posted a Facebook status update that read, simply, “jumping off gw bridge sorry,” 18-year-old Tyler Clementi proceeded to do just that. His roommate had posted on the Internet video of Clementi engaged in sexual activity with another man. The Rutgers University freshman’s reaction had gone well beyond mortification, all the way to suicide.
As coincidence would have it, authorities retrieved Clementi’s body from the Hudson River on September 29, the same day we re-crossed the Tappan Zee on our way home. By that evening, news of the death and the circumstances surrounding it were all over the digital and old-school media.
The story stirred a variety of thoughts and emotions in me. Most viscerally, I felt tempted to renounce my opposition to the death penalty—just as I'd reacted more than a decade earlier, when thugs in Wyoming had strung up Matthew Shepard. The 21-year-old, who’d told two men at a bar he was gay, was pistol-whipped, tortured, tied to a fencepost and left by the duo to die. His tormenters now are serving life sentences. While Clementi endured no physical violence at the hands of Dharan Ravi and Ravi’s childhood friend, Molly Wei, their merciless contempt for his privacy arguably killed him no less surely than Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson had murdered Matthew Shepard.
The Associated Press has identified at least 12 cases in the US since 2003 in which children and young adults between 11 and 18 killed themselves after “falling victim to some form of ‘cyberbullying’—teasing, harassing or intimidating with words or pictures distributed online or via text message.” The best-known case involved a 13-year-old Missouri girl, Megan Meier, who hanged herself after she was cruelly dumped on MySpace by hoaxers posing as a teenage boy she'd worshipped. An adult was found guilty of participation in the plot, but her conviction was overturned.
Again, my gut reaction to Tyler Clementi’s suicide was that execution is too good for people who taunt or embarrass other people to death, regardless of the perpetrators’ age or understanding of the potential scope and depth of their actions. My secondary reaction, surely of no surprise to readers of this blog, was that we live in an absurdly, sadly, maddeningly over-sharing and insufficiently reflective and caring world of instantaneous communication that casts a dark shadow over all the wonders 21st-century technology is constantly delivering. When news like that of Tyler Clementi’s suicide reaches me—generally through such quaint media as the newspaper, radio or TV—I feel not only unashamed but downright smart to live largely off the social-media map, this electronic version of a spiral-bound notebook you’re reading now being my closest proximity to a Facebook page or Twitter account.
What I’ve been ruminating about at the greatest length for the past few days, however, is my third, and most deeply personal, reaction to the unthinking cruelty highlighted by the Clementi story. And that’s the call to personal responsibility and the reminder that words and actions can deeply wound, even if they rarely kill. As much as I preach kindness and rail against yielding to the temptations of mass communication and groupthink, I’m only too aware of the times in my life when I’ve willingly compromised my personal ethics while traveling a path of least resistance.
Tyler Clementi’s story transported me back to the seventh grade, when I was a dorky, pudgy, shy kid with a prosthesis instead of a right hand. I wasn’t by any stretch popular, but neither did I endure the ridicule that one girl in my class did for an oddly misshapen visage that was considerably flatter on one side than the other. Junior-high wit being what it is, she miserably endured the nickname “Pancake Face.” Seeing me, the school’s “Captain Hook,” as a likely ally, she started chatting me up and waiting for me at my locker. Ordinarily I’d have been stunned and thrilled by the attention from a member of the opposite sex, but her social toxicity was such that her attentions initially made me uneasy, and eventually hostile. I sensed that our association quickly was downgrading me in my classmates' eye from “barely tolerated” to “increasingly tarred,” so I did what cowards of all ages always have done in disadvantageous social situations: I contributed to my would-be friend's humiliation. One day, in a crowded hallway for maximum public impact, I, for the first and only time, called her not Patty but Pancake Face, and essentially told her to get lost. Tears welled in her eyes, and she fled. I don’t think we ever spoke again.
It strikes me now that this was a form of bullying. And as much as I’d love to claim otherwise, there were subsequent stains on my record. There was the time in my 20s, for instance, when I spinelessly turned against a co-worker no one else liked simply because it made my work life easier to do so. I like to think I’ve matured in the decades since, and that in many ways I've become a better person. But the truth is that the aging process and our personal circumstances tend to do a lot of that work for us. We get more comfortable in our own skins as we get older, and consequentially care less how others perceive us. Also, cocooned by our families and/or coteries of longtime friends, we tend to feel more generous toward the marginalized.
Yes, I’m shocked and appalled by stories like that of Tyler Clementi, and feel that those who drove him to suicide must be held responsible for their actions. But it’s my greater hope that the aggregate media attention being paid to such cases is serving, over time, to encourage introspection and change behaviors—especially in younger people who’ve known only the Internet age and its limitless range of scaleable peaks and slippery slopes. The observation "just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should" is a piece of timeless wisdom. And the advice “count to 10 before you act” seems more important now than ever, given the devastation precipitous actions can wreak almost instantaneously. In fact, in cyberspace, let's count out 10 minutes. Ten days, if possible, better yet.
This week I’ve been reflecting on the kid and young adult I once was and asking myself how access to today’s technologies might have broadened or narrowed, loosened or hardened, facilitated or stunted my moral and ethical growth. What I’ve concluded is that I’m just as happy, frankly, not to know.
Having posted a Facebook status update that read, simply, “jumping off gw bridge sorry,” 18-year-old Tyler Clementi proceeded to do just that. His roommate had posted on the Internet video of Clementi engaged in sexual activity with another man. The Rutgers University freshman’s reaction had gone well beyond mortification, all the way to suicide.
As coincidence would have it, authorities retrieved Clementi’s body from the Hudson River on September 29, the same day we re-crossed the Tappan Zee on our way home. By that evening, news of the death and the circumstances surrounding it were all over the digital and old-school media.
The story stirred a variety of thoughts and emotions in me. Most viscerally, I felt tempted to renounce my opposition to the death penalty—just as I'd reacted more than a decade earlier, when thugs in Wyoming had strung up Matthew Shepard. The 21-year-old, who’d told two men at a bar he was gay, was pistol-whipped, tortured, tied to a fencepost and left by the duo to die. His tormenters now are serving life sentences. While Clementi endured no physical violence at the hands of Dharan Ravi and Ravi’s childhood friend, Molly Wei, their merciless contempt for his privacy arguably killed him no less surely than Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson had murdered Matthew Shepard.
The Associated Press has identified at least 12 cases in the US since 2003 in which children and young adults between 11 and 18 killed themselves after “falling victim to some form of ‘cyberbullying’—teasing, harassing or intimidating with words or pictures distributed online or via text message.” The best-known case involved a 13-year-old Missouri girl, Megan Meier, who hanged herself after she was cruelly dumped on MySpace by hoaxers posing as a teenage boy she'd worshipped. An adult was found guilty of participation in the plot, but her conviction was overturned.
Again, my gut reaction to Tyler Clementi’s suicide was that execution is too good for people who taunt or embarrass other people to death, regardless of the perpetrators’ age or understanding of the potential scope and depth of their actions. My secondary reaction, surely of no surprise to readers of this blog, was that we live in an absurdly, sadly, maddeningly over-sharing and insufficiently reflective and caring world of instantaneous communication that casts a dark shadow over all the wonders 21st-century technology is constantly delivering. When news like that of Tyler Clementi’s suicide reaches me—generally through such quaint media as the newspaper, radio or TV—I feel not only unashamed but downright smart to live largely off the social-media map, this electronic version of a spiral-bound notebook you’re reading now being my closest proximity to a Facebook page or Twitter account.
What I’ve been ruminating about at the greatest length for the past few days, however, is my third, and most deeply personal, reaction to the unthinking cruelty highlighted by the Clementi story. And that’s the call to personal responsibility and the reminder that words and actions can deeply wound, even if they rarely kill. As much as I preach kindness and rail against yielding to the temptations of mass communication and groupthink, I’m only too aware of the times in my life when I’ve willingly compromised my personal ethics while traveling a path of least resistance.
Tyler Clementi’s story transported me back to the seventh grade, when I was a dorky, pudgy, shy kid with a prosthesis instead of a right hand. I wasn’t by any stretch popular, but neither did I endure the ridicule that one girl in my class did for an oddly misshapen visage that was considerably flatter on one side than the other. Junior-high wit being what it is, she miserably endured the nickname “Pancake Face.” Seeing me, the school’s “Captain Hook,” as a likely ally, she started chatting me up and waiting for me at my locker. Ordinarily I’d have been stunned and thrilled by the attention from a member of the opposite sex, but her social toxicity was such that her attentions initially made me uneasy, and eventually hostile. I sensed that our association quickly was downgrading me in my classmates' eye from “barely tolerated” to “increasingly tarred,” so I did what cowards of all ages always have done in disadvantageous social situations: I contributed to my would-be friend's humiliation. One day, in a crowded hallway for maximum public impact, I, for the first and only time, called her not Patty but Pancake Face, and essentially told her to get lost. Tears welled in her eyes, and she fled. I don’t think we ever spoke again.
It strikes me now that this was a form of bullying. And as much as I’d love to claim otherwise, there were subsequent stains on my record. There was the time in my 20s, for instance, when I spinelessly turned against a co-worker no one else liked simply because it made my work life easier to do so. I like to think I’ve matured in the decades since, and that in many ways I've become a better person. But the truth is that the aging process and our personal circumstances tend to do a lot of that work for us. We get more comfortable in our own skins as we get older, and consequentially care less how others perceive us. Also, cocooned by our families and/or coteries of longtime friends, we tend to feel more generous toward the marginalized.
Yes, I’m shocked and appalled by stories like that of Tyler Clementi, and feel that those who drove him to suicide must be held responsible for their actions. But it’s my greater hope that the aggregate media attention being paid to such cases is serving, over time, to encourage introspection and change behaviors—especially in younger people who’ve known only the Internet age and its limitless range of scaleable peaks and slippery slopes. The observation "just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should" is a piece of timeless wisdom. And the advice “count to 10 before you act” seems more important now than ever, given the devastation precipitous actions can wreak almost instantaneously. In fact, in cyberspace, let's count out 10 minutes. Ten days, if possible, better yet.
This week I’ve been reflecting on the kid and young adult I once was and asking myself how access to today’s technologies might have broadened or narrowed, loosened or hardened, facilitated or stunted my moral and ethical growth. What I’ve concluded is that I’m just as happy, frankly, not to know.
Sunday, September 19, 2010
Unhand Me!
I’m not sure which recent news item boggles my mind more—the fact that that one in seven Americans now are living below the poverty line or last week’s evidence that enough people care what Sarah Palin thinks to vote for the loons she endorses for political office. I would suspect the two things are related—desperate people do crazy things—except that the Tea Partiers tend to be impoverished mainly in empathy and reasoning. From what I can gather, their primary money problem is that the Muslim socialist in the White House wants them to share their ducats for the common good, through outlandish schemes such as affordable health care for all.
The big local story last week was the defeat in the Democratic primary of Washington, DC Mayor Adrian Fenty, whose debatable success at improving city services and an abysmal school system was trumped by his unarguable brilliance at being an arrogant prick. So, goodbye Fenty and, it seems certain, his distaff twin in bedside manner, schools chief Michelle Rhee. Hello, incoming mayor Vince Gray, the weird-haired city council chair who’s about 30 years older, perhaps no wiser, but about 95% more amiable than the man he’s replacing.
But, enough of all that. Any idiot with a blog feels compelled to pontificate about the Major Issues of the Day, and I’m no less an idiot than anyone else with an electronic soapbox, so now I’ve duly weighed in. But what I’d really like to write about today is urinal etiquette.
I spotted this headline recently in the Baltimore Sun: “‘Hand-Washing Police’ Find More of Us Are Washing Up After Bathroom Use; Men Still Dirtier.” These were my initial thoughts:
· Law enforcement certainly is specializing these days!
· Really? and,
· Duh!”
What I mean is, I wondered, respectively, if:
· The NYPD now has an affirmative action program for applicants with OCD,
· The words “more of us are washing up” are supposed to jibe with the parade of guys I see walking directly from whiz basin to hot dog stand at any given sports stadium, and
· That headline writer seriously thought we needed to be told that men are grosser than women.
Anyway, this was how the article written by an Associated Press “medical writer,” started:
Researchers who secretly spy on people using public restrooms say that Americans seem to be washing their hands more often.
Checks during August in Chicago, Atlanta, New York and San Francisco found 85 percent of people washed their hands, up from only 77 percent in 2007.
It’s the best rate since these periodic surveys began in 1996.
One thing hasn’t changed. Men are still dirtier. About 23 percent of men failed to wash up, compared to only 7 percent of women.
First of all, where does one apply for such “research” spying? Who leads these studies—George Michael? Second of all, so, it’s really about a quarter of men who are exiting the loo with urine (or, um, worse) on their hands? Now, those are the guys I know.
What is it about men that makes them think it’s OK to whip out, zip up and walk away? I mean, full disclosure here, I don’t spend a fortnight at the sink vigorously soaping and rubbing together my hands (hand and stump), the way health officials advise. But I do think it’s important to at least wash off the basic residue of one’s bathroom visit and to be in position to assure any subsequent new acquaintance, upon shaking his or her hand, “‘That? Just water.”
Some subsequent Web searching netted further details about “the latest observational study sponsored by the American Society for Microbiology” (George Michael, chairman) “and the American Cleaning Institute” (that guy who spied on Erin Andrews, president). Not surprisingly, a lying 96% of adults contacted for a separate telephone survey said they always washing their hands in public restrooms. (The other 4% conceded, “OK, it’s not water.”)
And then I came upon this supremely unsurprising tidbit: The Atlanta site where the “researchers” had amused themselves watching fellas shake their weiners dry was Turner Field, and it was that venue that “by far fielded the worst percentage for the guys—barely two-thirds (65%)” washed their hands at the ballpark after going to the bathroom. Aha!
So, what can we cull from all of this, other than the depressing fact that the United States presumably is hygienically advanced compared to many countries, yet we (and I mean the male half of our population) are gross?
Well, all I can say is, if you’re sitting in a sports stadium and the guy sitting next to you has just returned from the baby changing station with his little son or daughter, whatever you do, do not high-five him when the home team scores a key run or a touchdown. Because only 80% of guys with kids who were contacted for that phone survey said they always wash their hands after changing a diaper. And God only knows how much lower the real percentage is.
The big local story last week was the defeat in the Democratic primary of Washington, DC Mayor Adrian Fenty, whose debatable success at improving city services and an abysmal school system was trumped by his unarguable brilliance at being an arrogant prick. So, goodbye Fenty and, it seems certain, his distaff twin in bedside manner, schools chief Michelle Rhee. Hello, incoming mayor Vince Gray, the weird-haired city council chair who’s about 30 years older, perhaps no wiser, but about 95% more amiable than the man he’s replacing.
But, enough of all that. Any idiot with a blog feels compelled to pontificate about the Major Issues of the Day, and I’m no less an idiot than anyone else with an electronic soapbox, so now I’ve duly weighed in. But what I’d really like to write about today is urinal etiquette.
I spotted this headline recently in the Baltimore Sun: “‘Hand-Washing Police’ Find More of Us Are Washing Up After Bathroom Use; Men Still Dirtier.” These were my initial thoughts:
· Law enforcement certainly is specializing these days!
· Really? and,
· Duh!”
What I mean is, I wondered, respectively, if:
· The NYPD now has an affirmative action program for applicants with OCD,
· The words “more of us are washing up” are supposed to jibe with the parade of guys I see walking directly from whiz basin to hot dog stand at any given sports stadium, and
· That headline writer seriously thought we needed to be told that men are grosser than women.
Anyway, this was how the article written by an Associated Press “medical writer,” started:
Researchers who secretly spy on people using public restrooms say that Americans seem to be washing their hands more often.
Checks during August in Chicago, Atlanta, New York and San Francisco found 85 percent of people washed their hands, up from only 77 percent in 2007.
It’s the best rate since these periodic surveys began in 1996.
One thing hasn’t changed. Men are still dirtier. About 23 percent of men failed to wash up, compared to only 7 percent of women.
First of all, where does one apply for such “research” spying? Who leads these studies—George Michael? Second of all, so, it’s really about a quarter of men who are exiting the loo with urine (or, um, worse) on their hands? Now, those are the guys I know.
What is it about men that makes them think it’s OK to whip out, zip up and walk away? I mean, full disclosure here, I don’t spend a fortnight at the sink vigorously soaping and rubbing together my hands (hand and stump), the way health officials advise. But I do think it’s important to at least wash off the basic residue of one’s bathroom visit and to be in position to assure any subsequent new acquaintance, upon shaking his or her hand, “‘That? Just water.”
Some subsequent Web searching netted further details about “the latest observational study sponsored by the American Society for Microbiology” (George Michael, chairman) “and the American Cleaning Institute” (that guy who spied on Erin Andrews, president). Not surprisingly, a lying 96% of adults contacted for a separate telephone survey said they always washing their hands in public restrooms. (The other 4% conceded, “OK, it’s not water.”)
And then I came upon this supremely unsurprising tidbit: The Atlanta site where the “researchers” had amused themselves watching fellas shake their weiners dry was Turner Field, and it was that venue that “by far fielded the worst percentage for the guys—barely two-thirds (65%)” washed their hands at the ballpark after going to the bathroom. Aha!
So, what can we cull from all of this, other than the depressing fact that the United States presumably is hygienically advanced compared to many countries, yet we (and I mean the male half of our population) are gross?
Well, all I can say is, if you’re sitting in a sports stadium and the guy sitting next to you has just returned from the baby changing station with his little son or daughter, whatever you do, do not high-five him when the home team scores a key run or a touchdown. Because only 80% of guys with kids who were contacted for that phone survey said they always wash their hands after changing a diaper. And God only knows how much lower the real percentage is.
Friday, September 10, 2010
The Dynamic Doppelganger
There’s an old bit from Woody Allen’s standup act in which he recalls once having coped with a life-threatening situation by drifting into happy memories of his idyllic youth. He languorously ticks off the images that had filled his mind—“swimmin’ in the swimmin’ hole,” “buyin’ a piece of gingham for Emmylou,” “fryin’ up a mess o’ catfish.” There’s a pause that serves as a sighing tribute to those gauzy days of yore. Then he abruptly exclaims, “Suddenly I realize it’s not my life! I’m about to die, and the wrong life is flashing before my eyes!”
That ‘s sort of how I felt when I Googled myself the other day. I typed “Eric Ries” into the search engine and quickly discovered that Eric Ries is not, after all, “The Ungooglable Man”—the guy of no technological smarts and zero social-networking presence—with whom I’m so well acquainted.
Quite to the contrary, it develops that Eric Ries just about owns the Internet. He’s a hotshot entrepreneur and digital savant in California’s Silicon Valley whose how-to blog about technology startups, Lessons Learned, boasts nearly 60,000 subscribers and is quoted or cited seemingly a billion times across the Web. He has founded or co-founded at least three tech firms—included something called IMVU that Wikipedia describes as a “a 11 + 3D graphical instant messaging client” that hosts 90 million-plus users. He is credited with popularizing for Web applications something called the Minimum Viable Product, or MVP. That’s described by Wikipedia as a strategy used in product development “for fast and quantitative testing of a product or product feature.” He’s written books with names like The Black Art of Java Game Programming. Needless to say, he’s got a Twitter account that no doubt is breathlessly followed by hundreds if not thousands of acolytes. He has given talks all over the world, many of which can be viewed on YouTube.
I could go on, but, frankly, in typing the preceding paragraph I strained my jargon limit and nearly bored myself to death. Suffice it to say, the Eric Ries whose words you’re reading right now scarcely could have less in common with the Eric Ries who BusinessWeek named one its “Best Young Entrepreneurs of Tech” in 2007.
As if his professional history isn’t enough to distinguish us as polar opposites, consider the very first line of California Eric’s debut blog post, from October 4, 2008: “I’m one of those people who’s been programming since they can remember. I got my start programming on an old IBM XT: It was thanks to MUDs that I first discovered the Internet.”
OK, just one question from me. That question would be: WTF?!
The only part of the italicized lines above to which I can relate is the lifelong relationship to programming. Except that in my case, it would TV programming. I can’t really remember an age when I wasn’t glued to the set, starting with black-and-white fare in the early 1960s. In my case, it was thanks to muds that I first discovered the back of my mom’s hand—I’d tracked some into the house from the backyard.
Sure, with a little more searching I could have gotten the skinny on the “old IBM XT.” (Which I’m guessing is nevertheless newer than some of my underwear. And yes, I really do need to hit Sears soon.) And I know that the mystery of the acronym “MUD,” similarly, lies just a few mouse clicks away. But the point is, there’s a reason California Eric's (let's call him Cal-E henceforth, like he’s from Krypton) blog is called Lessons Learned and explores innovation, proactivity and profit margins, while my blog is called Lassitude Come Home and more often than not is about how I wish things would slow the hell down and people like the Cal-E would stop hastening the death of newspapers, CDs, land-line phones, commercial radio, and all sorts of other staples I hold dear.
In case you’re wondering, I did watch and hear Cal-E in action in some of those YouTube clips. I would’ve attached a photo of him to this post, or the link to a video clip, except that I honestly don't now how to do either thing and am not much interested in learning. Which kind of hammers home the fact that the other Eric and I are very far indeed from being identical twins.
To that point, physically we’re both white, male, bespectacled and fairly lean, but he’s got short black hair, a somewhat more prominent nose than I, and a confident air that perfectly suits his PowerPoint presentations. As you might have guessed, of the two of us, he’s the one with a right hand to match his left. His voice is a little nerdy but otherwise unremarkable. And of course he’s considerably younger than me. How much so, I don’t know, but those BusinessWeek awards go to entrepreneurs who are under 25. Which means he’s 27, tops. I’ve got a quarter-century on him.
I might have shared with you here some of Cal-E’s key business ideas and theories, but I couldn’t watch more than a minute or two of any of the video clips. They all involve techie stuff (go figure) and are deathly dull to my ears. Standup without the comedy.
What would genuinely have interested me would’ve been some personal data on my namesake—the city he lives in, whether he’s married and/or has kids, if he pursues any hobbies that don’t involve high-tech gadgetry. (I somehow imagine he skydives or rappels, in keeping with the I’m-like-a-shark-and-must-always-move-forward stereotype I have of his ilk.) But search as I might, I found no such tidbits. Being Cal-E’s East-Coast, lassitudinous opposite, I lacked the skills and doggedness to ferret out all available databases until I found the answers I was seeking. In short—and notably unlike the Cal-E of my imagining—I conceded defeat and gave up.
Per my use of the word in the above paragraph, I freely concede that I’m completely stereotyping Cal-E, based on my preconceptions, prejudices, preferences and, above all, my desire to justify through humor and irony my own non-striving, lazy-ass existence. Cal-E may, in fact, be a great guy who in countless ways is making the world a better place. This seemingly doomed planet of ours surely needs innovation and know-how of the type Cal-E presumably can deliver much more than it does my offerings of humor and irony, which seem vastly unlikely to birth the great green technologies of the future. I assume Cal-E has plenty of family members and friends who love him, and have many compelling reasons for doing so.
Don’t get me wrong—I really do take a certain pride in being The Ungooglable Man. In my own crotchety way, the designation bespeaks refusal to engage in a bunch of (dad-gum) nonsense. Still, it was a little deflating the other day to scroll through screen after screen of “Eric Ries” listings on Google before finally encountering myself—way, way down at link 359. There, I appeared in an index of articles that had been published in my then-employer’s magazine in 1999. And even that mention proved isolated. I hadn’t reappeared through search result 400, when I ceased looking.
I know, I know: I can’t very well have it both ways. It’s unreasonable to both revel in and be annoyed by one’s electronic anonymity. Yet I suffer this duality. Well, I’m not so much upset about my own virtual nonexistence on the Web as I am steamed at Cal-E for so completely hogging our name. It smacks of market domination to me.
Which, come to think of it, probably is one of the strategic goals Eric the Tech Wiz regularly teaches and blogs about. Damn.
That ‘s sort of how I felt when I Googled myself the other day. I typed “Eric Ries” into the search engine and quickly discovered that Eric Ries is not, after all, “The Ungooglable Man”—the guy of no technological smarts and zero social-networking presence—with whom I’m so well acquainted.
Quite to the contrary, it develops that Eric Ries just about owns the Internet. He’s a hotshot entrepreneur and digital savant in California’s Silicon Valley whose how-to blog about technology startups, Lessons Learned, boasts nearly 60,000 subscribers and is quoted or cited seemingly a billion times across the Web. He has founded or co-founded at least three tech firms—included something called IMVU that Wikipedia describes as a “a 11 + 3D graphical instant messaging client” that hosts 90 million-plus users. He is credited with popularizing for Web applications something called the Minimum Viable Product, or MVP. That’s described by Wikipedia as a strategy used in product development “for fast and quantitative testing of a product or product feature.” He’s written books with names like The Black Art of Java Game Programming. Needless to say, he’s got a Twitter account that no doubt is breathlessly followed by hundreds if not thousands of acolytes. He has given talks all over the world, many of which can be viewed on YouTube.
I could go on, but, frankly, in typing the preceding paragraph I strained my jargon limit and nearly bored myself to death. Suffice it to say, the Eric Ries whose words you’re reading right now scarcely could have less in common with the Eric Ries who BusinessWeek named one its “Best Young Entrepreneurs of Tech” in 2007.
As if his professional history isn’t enough to distinguish us as polar opposites, consider the very first line of California Eric’s debut blog post, from October 4, 2008: “I’m one of those people who’s been programming since they can remember. I got my start programming on an old IBM XT: It was thanks to MUDs that I first discovered the Internet.”
OK, just one question from me. That question would be: WTF?!
The only part of the italicized lines above to which I can relate is the lifelong relationship to programming. Except that in my case, it would TV programming. I can’t really remember an age when I wasn’t glued to the set, starting with black-and-white fare in the early 1960s. In my case, it was thanks to muds that I first discovered the back of my mom’s hand—I’d tracked some into the house from the backyard.
Sure, with a little more searching I could have gotten the skinny on the “old IBM XT.” (Which I’m guessing is nevertheless newer than some of my underwear. And yes, I really do need to hit Sears soon.) And I know that the mystery of the acronym “MUD,” similarly, lies just a few mouse clicks away. But the point is, there’s a reason California Eric's (let's call him Cal-E henceforth, like he’s from Krypton) blog is called Lessons Learned and explores innovation, proactivity and profit margins, while my blog is called Lassitude Come Home and more often than not is about how I wish things would slow the hell down and people like the Cal-E would stop hastening the death of newspapers, CDs, land-line phones, commercial radio, and all sorts of other staples I hold dear.
In case you’re wondering, I did watch and hear Cal-E in action in some of those YouTube clips. I would’ve attached a photo of him to this post, or the link to a video clip, except that I honestly don't now how to do either thing and am not much interested in learning. Which kind of hammers home the fact that the other Eric and I are very far indeed from being identical twins.
To that point, physically we’re both white, male, bespectacled and fairly lean, but he’s got short black hair, a somewhat more prominent nose than I, and a confident air that perfectly suits his PowerPoint presentations. As you might have guessed, of the two of us, he’s the one with a right hand to match his left. His voice is a little nerdy but otherwise unremarkable. And of course he’s considerably younger than me. How much so, I don’t know, but those BusinessWeek awards go to entrepreneurs who are under 25. Which means he’s 27, tops. I’ve got a quarter-century on him.
I might have shared with you here some of Cal-E’s key business ideas and theories, but I couldn’t watch more than a minute or two of any of the video clips. They all involve techie stuff (go figure) and are deathly dull to my ears. Standup without the comedy.
What would genuinely have interested me would’ve been some personal data on my namesake—the city he lives in, whether he’s married and/or has kids, if he pursues any hobbies that don’t involve high-tech gadgetry. (I somehow imagine he skydives or rappels, in keeping with the I’m-like-a-shark-and-must-always-move-forward stereotype I have of his ilk.) But search as I might, I found no such tidbits. Being Cal-E’s East-Coast, lassitudinous opposite, I lacked the skills and doggedness to ferret out all available databases until I found the answers I was seeking. In short—and notably unlike the Cal-E of my imagining—I conceded defeat and gave up.
Per my use of the word in the above paragraph, I freely concede that I’m completely stereotyping Cal-E, based on my preconceptions, prejudices, preferences and, above all, my desire to justify through humor and irony my own non-striving, lazy-ass existence. Cal-E may, in fact, be a great guy who in countless ways is making the world a better place. This seemingly doomed planet of ours surely needs innovation and know-how of the type Cal-E presumably can deliver much more than it does my offerings of humor and irony, which seem vastly unlikely to birth the great green technologies of the future. I assume Cal-E has plenty of family members and friends who love him, and have many compelling reasons for doing so.
Don’t get me wrong—I really do take a certain pride in being The Ungooglable Man. In my own crotchety way, the designation bespeaks refusal to engage in a bunch of (dad-gum) nonsense. Still, it was a little deflating the other day to scroll through screen after screen of “Eric Ries” listings on Google before finally encountering myself—way, way down at link 359. There, I appeared in an index of articles that had been published in my then-employer’s magazine in 1999. And even that mention proved isolated. I hadn’t reappeared through search result 400, when I ceased looking.
I know, I know: I can’t very well have it both ways. It’s unreasonable to both revel in and be annoyed by one’s electronic anonymity. Yet I suffer this duality. Well, I’m not so much upset about my own virtual nonexistence on the Web as I am steamed at Cal-E for so completely hogging our name. It smacks of market domination to me.
Which, come to think of it, probably is one of the strategic goals Eric the Tech Wiz regularly teaches and blogs about. Damn.
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