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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)