Three words: “Dean,” “Martin”
and “cats.”
As I begin this first post
since all the chickens have come home to roost—except that’s a lousy analogy,
because Donald Trump has, in the past five or so weeks, appointed so many bloodthirsty
foxes to guard the social network and environmental henhouses that the fowl already
are as good as dead—I’m thinking of recent exchanges with a couple of friends of
mine.
In an email shortly after my “Night
of the Living Dread” post, a similarly distraught Betsy told me she was getting
an early start on immersing herself in Christmas music to try to at least
somewhat anesthetize herself against the immediate horror of the words “President-elect
Trump” and the inevitable nightmare of the next four (at least) years. I
endorsed her move in the way that I support anyone stepping away from the ledge
and choosing hope over the alternative. But I doubted seriously that I could follow
suit, even though I love Christmas music and typically make WASH-FM—DC’s “Christmas
music station” from Thanksgiving through December 25—one of my seasonal
defaults.
The reason I so strongly doubted
it was concisely stated by Alison, aka “NY Friend,” who responded to my
November 9 post exactly a month afterward and—enumerating such causes for
despair as Trump’s conflicts of interest, cabinet picks, continued fact-denying
and childish gloating, and suggested contributions to planetary collapse (such
as reneging on American participation in the Paris agreement on battling climate
change)—declared “It’s worse than I thought” and ended her postmortem with this:
“Disaster. No one with a spine to stand up to him. We are so screwed.”
I agree with every word she
wrote. Everything Trump has done, said and tweeted in the weeks since his
election has further degraded the office of the president, called into deeper question
the survival of democracy in this country, and boggled the mind at the inevitability
of things getting that much worse once the man actually places his hand on the
Bible (cheered on by the likes of Jerry Falwell Jr, whose soul now is in Lucifer’s
proud possession) and takes hold of the nuclear codes.
And yet, I’m no longer so profoundly
depressed that my stomach constantly is playing a cacophonous Charles Ives
symphony and it’s hard just to face the day, as was the case in those first
weeks after November 8. Part of the reason is that, a few days after
Thanksgiving, I decided, without much expectation of results, to at least give
Christmas music—like the peace that Yule promotes—a chance. The even bigger
reason for my improved mood was the entry of two new cats into Lynn’s and my
life. More on them later.
I’ve written before in this
space about my fondness for Christmas music, which is somewhat counterintuitive
in that I’m neither at all religious nor particularly nostalgic about my youth
or our family traditions surrounding the holidays. I’m not quite sure what it
is. There is nostalgia in all of it,
for certain: not so much for my own youth, as for a literally whitewashed past
in which a homogeneous America had nothing worse to worry about than whether it
could drink enough spiked egg nog to last until the sugar-hyped kids returned
to school and whether it could sweet-talk that dreamy dame into staying inside
and snuggling rather than venturing out into the snowy cold.
There’s also the loopy
weirdness of the mishmash of songs we’ve culturally anointed to soundtrack the
holiday. This is perhaps best captured in “Here Comes Santa Claus,” in which the
sacred and secular mix in the line “Let’s give thanks to the Lord above ’cause
Santa Clause comes tonight.” (It gets even stranger in the hands-down best
rendition of the song, when that line is sung by Elvis Presley, whose own piety
was counterbalanced by the secular excesses that killed him.)
What happened this Christmas
season is that I fell utterly in love with a tune that previously had been
only on the periphery of my holiday consciousness: Dean Martin’s 1959 iteration
of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”
You’ve surely heard it, just as I
had before this year—whether or not you’re technically Christian, because even
a cloistered Buddhist monk can’t completely escape Christmas music in December
in the United States of America. But you may not have paid insufficient
attention, as I hadn’t until recently, to the careless drunken joy of Martin’s iteration
of this holiday classic, in which the famously oft-soused crooner shorthands
the title mammal’s name as “Rudy,” at
one point describes him as “red-beaked,” and, most incoherently, lapses into pidgin
German to ask, “Rudolph mit your nose
so bright, won’t you guide mein
sleigh tonight?”
Now, don’t get me wrong. I
know alcoholism is a horrible disease, and no laughing matter. Dean Martin’s
Wikipedia page notes that he died at age 78 of lung cancer caused by his heavy
smoking, but I can’t imagine that cirrhosis of his beleaguered liver would’ve
been too far behind. So, kids, Don’t Try This At Home, even if you grow up to
be a professional singer and record a holiday album that might stand to benefit
from literal holiday spirits. But oh, man,
is Martin’s “Rudolph” ever awesome!
Everything about it screams He
Just Does Not Care, and He Is Making Shit Up. Is it possible he wasn’t flat-out
wasted when he recorded the song? Sure. Anything’s possible. I couldn’t readily
turn up any juicy recording session backstory on the Internet. Maybe Dino was
just in a soberly silly mood when the “record” light went on that day. But it
sure as hell seems likelier that he was spilling hard liquor and ice all over
the g-d studio floor as he leered at some skirt delivering a memo to an
engineer in the booth and tried—not that hard, with uneven success—to remember
the actual lyrics to the ridiculous kiddies’ tune he was being paid a fistful
of greenbacks to sing.
One thing I did find in my
five-minute Dean Martin/”Rudolph” research was a similar appreciation written
four years ago by a guy on the website of the Portland Oregonian. He called it “the Drunk Dean Martin” version of the song,
with an asterisk by the word “drunk” that he explained thusly: “I assume all
Dean Martin songs are Drunk Dean Martin songs. And I refuse to believe
otherwise. It’s better this way.”
It is better, somehow, to believe that Martin was utterly blitzed and cozily sloppy when he extolled the virtues of a crimson-beaked airborne deer on that
particular day 58 years ago. It’s good
to be reminded, at a point in history when everything is serious, and seriously awful—from starvation and annihilation in Aleppo to cynical anti-democratic power
grabs in North Carolina to Christmas market terrorism in Berlin—that there’s still
some fun to be had out there, whether at the bottom of a bottle or the turn of
a radio dial. No, such fun won’t ultimately solve anything, but it sure as hell
will make the slide toward Armageddon a little less terrifying.
I haven’t even gotten to the
cats yet. And I won’t go into great detail here, because although I’m crazy
about our cats in particular and felines in general, I’m all too aware that
cats have become the universal-to-the-point-of-lame feel-good animal of his viral-video
age. In that sense, I’m a little embarrassed to admit that our two rescue cats,
Moz and Ike—who we brought home with us exactly a month ago today, on November 20—make
me so damn happy. But they totally do.
They’re only about a year old
and are totally kitten-ish. They’re also temporary confined to our small
basement level while Bean, our three-legged hound dog, shakes the last vestiges
of ringworm upstairs, so the boys not only are wild, but they’re also bored. As a
result, they mostly are a crazily entertaining and often destructive whirlwind—chasing
toys, wrestling madly with each other, severing my razor cord and toppling my
radio from its window-sill perch, D batteries splattering across the floor. The
rest of the time they are comatose—sleeping intertwined, often on my or Lynn’s
lap, while we read on the sofa and marvel at how anything that devilish can look
so deceptively angelic in repose.
To say that we are smitten is
putting it mildly. To say that we are concurrently excited and really nervous to envision their
extended reign of terror upstairs next month is 100% accurate. To say that it
helps us more than we possibly could have predicted to have our years to come with
them to look forward to, in counter-pose to the looming Trump years, is equally, thankfully,
true.
So, yes, we’re no doubt
screwed as a nation. We might live through the next four or—shudder—eight years—and
come out on the other side still standing, or we might not. We might all die
before that from a Trump-Kim Jong-un confrontation, or we might just wish
to die when our free press ceases to exist. I’m not going to sugar-coat anything.
But at the same time, many
simple pleasures in my life—from my marriage, to our dog, to my friends, to summer
baseball, and now, most certainly, to our cats—give me a degree of joy and comfort, and the residual strength I'll need to fight the prevailing evils when, and as best, I can.
It’s worth noting, too, that
alcohol remains an option. Ideally in moderation, but every once in a while,
perhaps, in excess. Here’s looking at you, Dino the Red-Beaked Crooner.
