Like most Americans who aren’t idiots (more about Rick Perry shortly), I was appalled and saddened but hardly shocked when video recently emerged of four US Marines urinating on the bodies of several dead Taliban fighters in Afghanistan. Or, as I prefer to de-sanitize this morally indefensible desecration, pissing on corpses.
The reaction among US military and civilian officials was swift and appropriate. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta immediately condemned the Marines’ actions, and the military promised an inquiry. Clinton called the incident “absolutely inconsistent with American values.”
But was it? As several commentaries I’ve read in the days since have pointed out, American values, particularly in the realm of war, don’t seem quite what they used to be. In cased you missed it, I’d like to quote a few paragraphs from an op-ed piece published in yesterday’s Washington Post that summarized better than I ever could have the disconnect between our collective outrage and the messages we’ve been imbuing in our fighting forces. The following words were written by Sebastian Junger, an author whose best-selling 2010 book War chronicled a year he’d spent embedded with US soldiers in the Korengal Valley of eastern Afghanistan, and a director whose film Restropo, released the same year, also focused on that conflict. The ensuing was excerpted from an essay to which the Post affixed the headline “We’re All Guilty of Dehumanizing the Enemy.”
“There is a context for this act in which we are all responsible, all guilty. A 19-year-old Marine has a very hard time reconciling the fact that it’s okay to waterboard a live Taliban fighter but not okay to urinate on a dead one.
“When the war on terror started, the Marines in that video were probably 9 or 10 years old. As children they heard adults—and political leaders—talk about our enemies in the most inhuman terms. The Internet and the news media are filled with self-important men and women referring to our enemies as animals that deserve little legal or moral consideration. We have sent enemy fighters to countries like Syria and Libya to be tortured by the very regimes that we have recently condemned for engaging in war crimes and torture. They have been tortured into confessing their crimes and then locked up indefinitely without trial because their confessions—achieved through torture—will not stand up in court.
“For the past 10 years, American children have absorbed these moral contradictions, and now they are fighting our wars. The video doesn’t surprise me, but it makes me incredibly sad—not just for them, but also for us. We may prosecute these men for desecrating the dead while maintaining that it is okay to torture the living.”
That doesn’t by any stretch absolve the responsible parties. But I do think it’s important and instructive to contextualize their actions, as Junger so concisely and powerfully did in the preceding paragraphs. I feel obliged, too, to add that I readily concede that it’s easy for me, never having served in the military, to say that even the hell of war would never compell me to unzip my pants and splash yellow contempt on a lifeless adversary. As Junger pointed out elsewhere in his essay, our soldiers in various ways are encouraged to regard the enemy in dehumanized terms, because “otherwise they would have to face the enormous guilt and anguish of killing other human beings.” Is it such a leap to go from satisfaction in a job well done, in that context, to taking a sort of sick pleasure in it?
But I do think “sick” is the key word there. I was ruminating on all this in the shower yesterday when the name of a movie I’d nervously but eagerly rented from a video store many years ago popped into my head. In those pre-Internet days the title alone had earned the film considerable infamy: I Spit on Your Grave. Released in 1978, it's a revenge fantasy in which a young female novelist seeking a quiet place to write in rural New York state is savagely raped by a group of young men and then proceeds to murder them in increasingly brutal fashion: hanging one, leaving another to bleed to death in a tub after slicing off his penis, dismembering yet another with the blades of a speedboat.
I still remember that I was as self-conscious about renting it as I would’ve been had I placed on the counter a porn flick. But then, of course, I Spit on Your Grave was simply a different kind of porn. I’d rented it for all the reasons adolescent and arrested-adolescent guys (I’d have been in my 20s then) did and still do a lot of things: for the promise of exposed breasts, the expectation of lots of blood and the titallation of glimpses at the forbidden.
The movie delivered on all those counts. It was very graphic for its time and fully merited its word-of-mouth infamy. But it also had an effect on me I hadn’t at all expected: It ultimately grossed me out and really made me think.
Most of all, it made me think about the cancer of retribution and vengeance, even when it’s arguably merited and is dispensed in response to the worst sorts of atrocities. For a low-budget movie that was populated with no-name actors portraying prototypes more than recognizable people, the film did an excellent job of pressing my buttons. Having squirmed through the brutalizations of the victim, I initially delighted in the unconflicted sadism with which she turned avenging heroine and Got Even. But then a funny thing happened. Regret and shame gradually overtook me, to the point that when I unceremoniously dumped the video in the store’s overnight slot early the next morning, I felt sullied by the entire experience and mad for having allowed myself to be so thoroughly manipulated.
What I thought about as I stood in the shower yesterday were the similarities between the cinematic I Spit on Your Grave and the military I Piss on Your Corpse. Sure, one could argue—as the drunk-with-revenge Marines in that now-infamous video surely did—that those murdered Taliban fighters Had It Coming. That they, or their cronies, had killed American soldiers. That, given a Taliban culture in which beheadings and all other manner of brutality toward one’s perceived enemies are not uncommon, the deceased, had they survived, might well have lifted their robes in a similar situation and Done the Same Thing to Us. But does that make it right? Does that make it moral?
Here’s where Texas Gov Rick Perry comes in. Rather than condemning the uniformed urinators, he reserved his umbrage for the Obama administration—accusing it of “over-the-top rhetoric” and “disdain for the military.” While being careful not to outright praise the soldiers for a Texas-sized arrogance one sensed he admired—Perry does still have a terminal but not yet dead presidential campaign to consider, after all—he took a break from the stump yesterday to tell CNN that the corpse desecration had been, in fact, nothing more than a “stupid mistake” made by a quartet of guys who are, after all, “just kids.” There certainly was nothing criminal about their actions, Perry added—the Geneva Conventions be damned.
Just as I wasn’t surprised that some US soldiers would take pride in relieving themselves on dead men, I wasn’t surprised that Rick Perry felt compelled to defend such behavior. In fact, given that he has vigorously defended waterboarding during the Republican presidential debates, his comments about the Marines’ actions are more or less what I might have scripted him to say. But I will add this: His words make me want to spit in his eye.
Unlike Rick Perry, however, I would stop there.
Monday, January 16, 2012
Friday, January 6, 2012
Milestone for a Star of Science
The history of my time with Stephen Hawking was brief indeed.
I’d been sucked in (black hole allusion unintended but fortuitous) by all the hoopla surrounding the famed physicist’s best-selling book, A Brief History of Time. It had come out in 1988 and was an immediate sensation, promising readers an accessible and even entertaining guide to unlocking the universe’s mysteries. Having fulfilled my minimal science requirement in college only by writing a science fiction short story for extra credit (bless you, Dr Danforth, for taking pity on liberal arts majors), I was excited by the prospect of becoming a starry-eyed smartypants without having to expend much effort.
So, at some point I cracked open somebody’s copy of the book. I was crestfallen, however, to discover that the wheelchair-bound scientist’s purportedly breezy roll down Cosmos Lane was unadorned by the cartoon drawings and elementary captions I’d hopefully envisioned. What Hawking surely had deemed a significant dumbing-down of the material still left it several levels above my comprehension. But then I hit upon another possible path to meteoric expansion of my astronomical knowledge: I’d buy the audio book and listen in the car! Some upcoming weekend, I’d depart Savannah, Georgia, where I was living at the time, an interstellar ignoramus but would arrive several hours later at my parents’ home in Greensboro, North Carolina, a newly minted Big Bang brainiac.
In retrospect, I’m not sure why I felt I’d easily comprehend and feel enlivened by the audio version of a book that had vexed and bored the hell out of me in the 10 minutes I’d devoted to the print version. Perhaps I thought it would be abridged to within 30 pages of its life, and/or alluringly voiced by a hot Hollywood actress. Possibly, having had no experience to that point with audio books, I thought the spoken version would be the true Idiot’s Guide I’d sought in the first place—in sort of the same way that marketers earlier had transformed the genius of Einstein into a T-shirt on which he goofily sticks out his tongue.
As you might have guessed, my brilliant plan didn’t work out too well. If the audiocassette version of A Brief History of Time had been abridged at all, it certain hadn’t been purged of all the multi-syllabic science words and allegedly thought-provoking concepts that merely had provoked me to seek aspirin for an early-onset headache. And the reader certainly wasn’t some sultry actress who made deep space sound titillatingly like Deep Throat, or who lent relativity the ring of an after-party romp. I can’t remember who the narrator was, except that he was male and was not the author—whose computer-synthesized voice might at least have intrigued me for a time. As it was, by 20 minutes in I was violently banging my leg against the car door, trying desperately to keep myself awake and alert in highway traffic. About 10 minutes after that, half-asleep at the wheel and seeing the wrong kind of stars, I nearly drove off a bridge on I-95. It was at that point that I elected not to contribute my body to eternity in a failed attempt to better understand timelessness. Out popped A Brief History of Time, replaced by a music CD—probably something as cerebral as the Ramones—as I turned the page on my failed foray into cosmology.
The reason Stephen Hawking is on my mind this week is because I read yesterday that he’ll turn 70 this Sunday. Which is startling when you consider that the guy first started showing signs of Lou Gehrig’s Disease 50 years ago, when he was at university at Cambridge. (Although Hawking doesn’t call it Lou Gehrig’s Disease, just as we Yanks don’t call scoliosis David Beckham Syndrome, even though it leaves people bent. The physicist sometimes calls his condition by its widely familiar medical name, ALS—amyotrophic lateral sclerosis—but more often refers to it as “motor neurone disease.”)
I’m not proud of myself for this, but frankly, most times I’ve given Hawking any thought at all in the years since his book almost caused my death, it’s been not to ponder his work or to admire his amazing productivity in the face of his physical limitations, but to ask, either to myself or out loud, “Shouldn’t that guy be dead by now?” The news story about his pending 70th birthday reinforced my feeling that Hawking’s biggest accomplishment might simply be his continued existence. I mean, Lou Gehrig himself was dead within a few years of giving his tear-jerking “luckiest man on the face of the Earth” farewell speech at Yankee Stadium, and many of us, myself included, have at least peripherally known of people who’ve contracted ALS later in life and have died rather quickly and horrifyingly, becoming completely paralyzed and ultimately losing even their ability to breath. So, how is it possible that Hawking has lived long enough to become such an icon that he’s been featured in a skit on Conan O’Brien’s show and has appeared in animated form on The Simpsons?
I’ve done a little reading on this subject in the past 24 hours, and the answer is that nobody—including smartest-guy-in-the-room Hawking himself—really knows why he’s still around. Apparently if you’re fated to get ALS, it’s better to do so at a younger age, as he did, because survival periods tend to be longer. And certainly the fame and wealth that Hawking’s fully functional brain has brought him has bankrolled the very best care possible. At this point in the disease’s progression, he has around-the-clock aid. Virginia Lee, a brain disease expert at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, was quoted as saying, in one article I read, “The disease can sometimes stabilize, and then the kind of care delivered may be a factor in survival.” Remaining mentally alert, she added, “also is extremely important, and [Hawking] clearly has done that.” Still, only about 10 percent of people with ALS live longer than a decade. Most succumb to the disease within two to five years. I also read that Hawking’s DNA is being analyzed for possible clues to his longevity—yet another way in which he may yet contribute to science.
I found on Hawking’s Web site an essay he wrote, or dictated, titled, “Professor Stephen Hawking’s Disability Advice.” This is the opening paragraph:
“I am quite often asked, ‘What do you think about having ALS?’ The answer is, not a lot. I try to lead as normal a life as possible, and not to think about my condition, or regret the things it prevents me from doing. Which are not that many.”
Toward the end of the essay, Hawking notes that ALS “has not prevented me from having a very attractive family and being successful in my work.” Indeed, he’s been married twice and has three children, including a daughter with whom he’s written several children’s books on physics. He’s earned a shelf-full of science awards, been named a Commander of the British Empire and has been honored with this country’s Presidential Medal of Freedom. And he hasn’t been spending his senior years contentedly resting on his laurels, either. After years of coyly speaking of God in a vague metaphorical sense, the cosmologist threw diplomacy to the winds in 2010, telling The Guardian newspaper that he believes there is “no heaven or afterlife.” He called such a notion “a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.”
Clearly Stephen Hawking doesn’t fear the dark, and hasn’t for the extraordinary length and breadth of his surprising and inspiring life and career. He might have done his damnedest to kill me 20 years ago, but I nevertheless must salute the guy, wish him a happy birthday, and hope he makes it through another year—rather than assuming he won’t.
I’d been sucked in (black hole allusion unintended but fortuitous) by all the hoopla surrounding the famed physicist’s best-selling book, A Brief History of Time. It had come out in 1988 and was an immediate sensation, promising readers an accessible and even entertaining guide to unlocking the universe’s mysteries. Having fulfilled my minimal science requirement in college only by writing a science fiction short story for extra credit (bless you, Dr Danforth, for taking pity on liberal arts majors), I was excited by the prospect of becoming a starry-eyed smartypants without having to expend much effort.
So, at some point I cracked open somebody’s copy of the book. I was crestfallen, however, to discover that the wheelchair-bound scientist’s purportedly breezy roll down Cosmos Lane was unadorned by the cartoon drawings and elementary captions I’d hopefully envisioned. What Hawking surely had deemed a significant dumbing-down of the material still left it several levels above my comprehension. But then I hit upon another possible path to meteoric expansion of my astronomical knowledge: I’d buy the audio book and listen in the car! Some upcoming weekend, I’d depart Savannah, Georgia, where I was living at the time, an interstellar ignoramus but would arrive several hours later at my parents’ home in Greensboro, North Carolina, a newly minted Big Bang brainiac.
In retrospect, I’m not sure why I felt I’d easily comprehend and feel enlivened by the audio version of a book that had vexed and bored the hell out of me in the 10 minutes I’d devoted to the print version. Perhaps I thought it would be abridged to within 30 pages of its life, and/or alluringly voiced by a hot Hollywood actress. Possibly, having had no experience to that point with audio books, I thought the spoken version would be the true Idiot’s Guide I’d sought in the first place—in sort of the same way that marketers earlier had transformed the genius of Einstein into a T-shirt on which he goofily sticks out his tongue.
As you might have guessed, my brilliant plan didn’t work out too well. If the audiocassette version of A Brief History of Time had been abridged at all, it certain hadn’t been purged of all the multi-syllabic science words and allegedly thought-provoking concepts that merely had provoked me to seek aspirin for an early-onset headache. And the reader certainly wasn’t some sultry actress who made deep space sound titillatingly like Deep Throat, or who lent relativity the ring of an after-party romp. I can’t remember who the narrator was, except that he was male and was not the author—whose computer-synthesized voice might at least have intrigued me for a time. As it was, by 20 minutes in I was violently banging my leg against the car door, trying desperately to keep myself awake and alert in highway traffic. About 10 minutes after that, half-asleep at the wheel and seeing the wrong kind of stars, I nearly drove off a bridge on I-95. It was at that point that I elected not to contribute my body to eternity in a failed attempt to better understand timelessness. Out popped A Brief History of Time, replaced by a music CD—probably something as cerebral as the Ramones—as I turned the page on my failed foray into cosmology.
The reason Stephen Hawking is on my mind this week is because I read yesterday that he’ll turn 70 this Sunday. Which is startling when you consider that the guy first started showing signs of Lou Gehrig’s Disease 50 years ago, when he was at university at Cambridge. (Although Hawking doesn’t call it Lou Gehrig’s Disease, just as we Yanks don’t call scoliosis David Beckham Syndrome, even though it leaves people bent. The physicist sometimes calls his condition by its widely familiar medical name, ALS—amyotrophic lateral sclerosis—but more often refers to it as “motor neurone disease.”)
I’m not proud of myself for this, but frankly, most times I’ve given Hawking any thought at all in the years since his book almost caused my death, it’s been not to ponder his work or to admire his amazing productivity in the face of his physical limitations, but to ask, either to myself or out loud, “Shouldn’t that guy be dead by now?” The news story about his pending 70th birthday reinforced my feeling that Hawking’s biggest accomplishment might simply be his continued existence. I mean, Lou Gehrig himself was dead within a few years of giving his tear-jerking “luckiest man on the face of the Earth” farewell speech at Yankee Stadium, and many of us, myself included, have at least peripherally known of people who’ve contracted ALS later in life and have died rather quickly and horrifyingly, becoming completely paralyzed and ultimately losing even their ability to breath. So, how is it possible that Hawking has lived long enough to become such an icon that he’s been featured in a skit on Conan O’Brien’s show and has appeared in animated form on The Simpsons?
I’ve done a little reading on this subject in the past 24 hours, and the answer is that nobody—including smartest-guy-in-the-room Hawking himself—really knows why he’s still around. Apparently if you’re fated to get ALS, it’s better to do so at a younger age, as he did, because survival periods tend to be longer. And certainly the fame and wealth that Hawking’s fully functional brain has brought him has bankrolled the very best care possible. At this point in the disease’s progression, he has around-the-clock aid. Virginia Lee, a brain disease expert at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, was quoted as saying, in one article I read, “The disease can sometimes stabilize, and then the kind of care delivered may be a factor in survival.” Remaining mentally alert, she added, “also is extremely important, and [Hawking] clearly has done that.” Still, only about 10 percent of people with ALS live longer than a decade. Most succumb to the disease within two to five years. I also read that Hawking’s DNA is being analyzed for possible clues to his longevity—yet another way in which he may yet contribute to science.
I found on Hawking’s Web site an essay he wrote, or dictated, titled, “Professor Stephen Hawking’s Disability Advice.” This is the opening paragraph:
“I am quite often asked, ‘What do you think about having ALS?’ The answer is, not a lot. I try to lead as normal a life as possible, and not to think about my condition, or regret the things it prevents me from doing. Which are not that many.”
Toward the end of the essay, Hawking notes that ALS “has not prevented me from having a very attractive family and being successful in my work.” Indeed, he’s been married twice and has three children, including a daughter with whom he’s written several children’s books on physics. He’s earned a shelf-full of science awards, been named a Commander of the British Empire and has been honored with this country’s Presidential Medal of Freedom. And he hasn’t been spending his senior years contentedly resting on his laurels, either. After years of coyly speaking of God in a vague metaphorical sense, the cosmologist threw diplomacy to the winds in 2010, telling The Guardian newspaper that he believes there is “no heaven or afterlife.” He called such a notion “a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.”
Clearly Stephen Hawking doesn’t fear the dark, and hasn’t for the extraordinary length and breadth of his surprising and inspiring life and career. He might have done his damnedest to kill me 20 years ago, but I nevertheless must salute the guy, wish him a happy birthday, and hope he makes it through another year—rather than assuming he won’t.
Thursday, December 29, 2011
Death of a Swinger
This is an excerpt from an obituary in yesterday’s New York Times:
“In the Tarzan film series, whose golden age spanned 1932 to 1948, Cheetah was said to have appeared in the films made between 1932 and 1934, as a comic and sympathetic animal sidekick whose intelligence sometimes seemed to rival that of his human co-stars, Johnny Weissmuller (who played the titular jungle lord) and Maureen O’Sullivan (who portrayed his civilized love interest, Jane).”
When I was a kid growing up in New Jersey, one of the New York television stations regularly aired old Tarzan movies on weekend afternoons—as well as Bowery Boys flicks and an array of Three Stooges shorts. Having spent many an hour utterly absorbed in this intellectual wasteland, my only quibble with the New York Times’ tribute to the chimpanzee who died of kidney failure last Saturday at a Florida primate sanctuary is its employment of the qualifier “sometimes.”
While I loved Weissmuller as Tarzan, it was clear to me even as a little kid that he’d been tapped for the role for his rugged good looks and athleticism—he’d won five Olympic gold medals in swimming in the 1920s—rather than his acting ability. When Weissmuller said things like “Tarzan hungry,” one suspected he merely was subbing his screen name into a declaration he might just as easily have made at the studio commissary. Tarzan of the Apes may have swung on vines across what then was Rhodesia, but that didn’t make the guy playing him a Rhodes scholar.
Maureen O’Sullivan was a beauty who convincingly employed many more syllables than did Weissmuller, but she wasn’t exactly the Dame Judi Dench of her day, either. She had this way of making life in the jungle sound like one big tea party, and seemed as likely to thrive in the wild as might such current-day survivalists as Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan.
So let’s recap: Here I was, spending copious weekend hours watching B actors in various mid-century screen roles flee elephant stampedes, utter lines even Damon Runyon wouldn’t have touched and gouge out each other’s eyes. Cheetah the chimp, meanwhile, stood proud (if not tall) in the jungle, commanding the screen while making figurative monkeys out of every bloodthirsty crocodile, rapacious European and pissed-off tribesman he encountered. So, of course Cheetah riveted my attention. (So much so, in fact, that I never once asked myself why an ambling chimp went by the name of a speedy cat.)
Cheetah had presence. He always was the smartest primate in the forest, and not just given the scant competition. He was a leader and a problem solver who suffered fools gladly only in the sense that he showed many teeth while loudly mocking them and doing back-flips at their expense. Man, I loved that chimp. Of course, back then I didn’t think about the ethics or morality of people using animals for human entertainment. (This youthful lack of conscience also came in handy while I was delighting in the TV antics of Mr Ed and Arnold Ziffel.) All I knew was that Cheetah seemed to be a higher evolution of primate than were the schoolyard bullies who spent the 1960s calling me Captain Hook, or the adolescent girls who uniformly deemed me manifestly un-dreamy.
But until this week I’d assumed that Cheetah had shuffled—or perhaps swung—off this mortal coil decades ago. He’d starred in films made decades before I was born, after all, and I’m not exactly young myself. Why, even Tarzan—Weissmuller—had died way back in 1984, several months shy of the 80th birthday that Cheetah is thought to have reached before he finally passed away on Christmas Eve.
Eighty! I’m no primatologist, but that struck me at first reading as a stunningly long lifespan for a chimp. Indeed, what I’ve been reading in the past 24 hours is that chimpanzees typically live 35 to 45 years in captivity, where they’re protected from tropical diseases and predators if not the danger of being bored to death. I can’t claim to know what Cheetah’s life really was like or what he thought about it, but Debbie Cobb, outreach director at the Suncoast Primate Sanctuary in Palm Harbor, where he’d lived since “around 1960,” made it sound like his long retirement had at least been as entertaining, active and sustaining as are those of his shuffleboard-playing, Early Bird Special-flocking human counterparts.
Cheetah enjoyed finger-painting and football, Cobb told the Times, leaving ambiguous whether he used a brush or his actual finger, or whether he liked to tackle opposing players on the gridiron or just watch the games on TV. I personally like to think Cheetah had kept himself mentally young by retaining some of the impish, chimp-ish aggression he’d shown on movie sets. My favorite anecdote comes from actress Mia Farrow, daughter of the late Maureen O’Sullivan. Farrow tweeted yesterday, according to the Times, that her mother invariable referred to Cheetah as “that bastard” because he “bit her at every opportunity.”
But perhaps Cheetah had mellowed in his decades away from the cutthroat movie business. Debbie Cobb characterized the senior chimp she knew as having been “very compassionate” and “in tune to human feelings.” She told the Times that he “always was trying to get me to laugh if he thought I was having a bad day.” Supposedly Cheetah had been “soothed by Christian music,” so it could be that he absorbed those messages and even prayed for the souls of those who had pocketed his residuals and omitted his name from marquees while hyping a dimwitted ex-jock.
It’s all anthropomorphizing, of course. But “primate sanctuary” makes it sound like Cheetah at least got to spend quality time around his own species. Presumably he wasn’t caged and had room to ramble. Florida’s climate would seem to be to a chimp’s liking. His human caretakers’ hearts undoubtedly were in the right place. He might indeed have taken a shine to Cobb and others. He may genuinely have adopted finger-painting and football with the same zeal that you and I might have devoted to ass-scratching and feces-throwing had the tables been turned.
I'm reminded of that old saw about how a monkey, given a typewriter and enough time, might produce Shakespeare. Not likely. But chimps are apes, and as such they’re smarter than the average monkey. Cheetah was wily enough to parlay an impressive film career into a long and seemingly cushy retirement. I like to think he enjoyed his life. At any rate, I feel compelled to thank him for having enriched mine. If there’s an afterlife for any of us primates, I hope he’s finally received his SAG card and is grabbing a bite with his old pal Weissmuller. Either that or taking a bite out of Maureen O’Sullivan.
“In the Tarzan film series, whose golden age spanned 1932 to 1948, Cheetah was said to have appeared in the films made between 1932 and 1934, as a comic and sympathetic animal sidekick whose intelligence sometimes seemed to rival that of his human co-stars, Johnny Weissmuller (who played the titular jungle lord) and Maureen O’Sullivan (who portrayed his civilized love interest, Jane).”
When I was a kid growing up in New Jersey, one of the New York television stations regularly aired old Tarzan movies on weekend afternoons—as well as Bowery Boys flicks and an array of Three Stooges shorts. Having spent many an hour utterly absorbed in this intellectual wasteland, my only quibble with the New York Times’ tribute to the chimpanzee who died of kidney failure last Saturday at a Florida primate sanctuary is its employment of the qualifier “sometimes.”
While I loved Weissmuller as Tarzan, it was clear to me even as a little kid that he’d been tapped for the role for his rugged good looks and athleticism—he’d won five Olympic gold medals in swimming in the 1920s—rather than his acting ability. When Weissmuller said things like “Tarzan hungry,” one suspected he merely was subbing his screen name into a declaration he might just as easily have made at the studio commissary. Tarzan of the Apes may have swung on vines across what then was Rhodesia, but that didn’t make the guy playing him a Rhodes scholar.
Maureen O’Sullivan was a beauty who convincingly employed many more syllables than did Weissmuller, but she wasn’t exactly the Dame Judi Dench of her day, either. She had this way of making life in the jungle sound like one big tea party, and seemed as likely to thrive in the wild as might such current-day survivalists as Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan.
So let’s recap: Here I was, spending copious weekend hours watching B actors in various mid-century screen roles flee elephant stampedes, utter lines even Damon Runyon wouldn’t have touched and gouge out each other’s eyes. Cheetah the chimp, meanwhile, stood proud (if not tall) in the jungle, commanding the screen while making figurative monkeys out of every bloodthirsty crocodile, rapacious European and pissed-off tribesman he encountered. So, of course Cheetah riveted my attention. (So much so, in fact, that I never once asked myself why an ambling chimp went by the name of a speedy cat.)
Cheetah had presence. He always was the smartest primate in the forest, and not just given the scant competition. He was a leader and a problem solver who suffered fools gladly only in the sense that he showed many teeth while loudly mocking them and doing back-flips at their expense. Man, I loved that chimp. Of course, back then I didn’t think about the ethics or morality of people using animals for human entertainment. (This youthful lack of conscience also came in handy while I was delighting in the TV antics of Mr Ed and Arnold Ziffel.) All I knew was that Cheetah seemed to be a higher evolution of primate than were the schoolyard bullies who spent the 1960s calling me Captain Hook, or the adolescent girls who uniformly deemed me manifestly un-dreamy.
But until this week I’d assumed that Cheetah had shuffled—or perhaps swung—off this mortal coil decades ago. He’d starred in films made decades before I was born, after all, and I’m not exactly young myself. Why, even Tarzan—Weissmuller—had died way back in 1984, several months shy of the 80th birthday that Cheetah is thought to have reached before he finally passed away on Christmas Eve.
Eighty! I’m no primatologist, but that struck me at first reading as a stunningly long lifespan for a chimp. Indeed, what I’ve been reading in the past 24 hours is that chimpanzees typically live 35 to 45 years in captivity, where they’re protected from tropical diseases and predators if not the danger of being bored to death. I can’t claim to know what Cheetah’s life really was like or what he thought about it, but Debbie Cobb, outreach director at the Suncoast Primate Sanctuary in Palm Harbor, where he’d lived since “around 1960,” made it sound like his long retirement had at least been as entertaining, active and sustaining as are those of his shuffleboard-playing, Early Bird Special-flocking human counterparts.
Cheetah enjoyed finger-painting and football, Cobb told the Times, leaving ambiguous whether he used a brush or his actual finger, or whether he liked to tackle opposing players on the gridiron or just watch the games on TV. I personally like to think Cheetah had kept himself mentally young by retaining some of the impish, chimp-ish aggression he’d shown on movie sets. My favorite anecdote comes from actress Mia Farrow, daughter of the late Maureen O’Sullivan. Farrow tweeted yesterday, according to the Times, that her mother invariable referred to Cheetah as “that bastard” because he “bit her at every opportunity.”
But perhaps Cheetah had mellowed in his decades away from the cutthroat movie business. Debbie Cobb characterized the senior chimp she knew as having been “very compassionate” and “in tune to human feelings.” She told the Times that he “always was trying to get me to laugh if he thought I was having a bad day.” Supposedly Cheetah had been “soothed by Christian music,” so it could be that he absorbed those messages and even prayed for the souls of those who had pocketed his residuals and omitted his name from marquees while hyping a dimwitted ex-jock.
It’s all anthropomorphizing, of course. But “primate sanctuary” makes it sound like Cheetah at least got to spend quality time around his own species. Presumably he wasn’t caged and had room to ramble. Florida’s climate would seem to be to a chimp’s liking. His human caretakers’ hearts undoubtedly were in the right place. He might indeed have taken a shine to Cobb and others. He may genuinely have adopted finger-painting and football with the same zeal that you and I might have devoted to ass-scratching and feces-throwing had the tables been turned.
I'm reminded of that old saw about how a monkey, given a typewriter and enough time, might produce Shakespeare. Not likely. But chimps are apes, and as such they’re smarter than the average monkey. Cheetah was wily enough to parlay an impressive film career into a long and seemingly cushy retirement. I like to think he enjoyed his life. At any rate, I feel compelled to thank him for having enriched mine. If there’s an afterlife for any of us primates, I hope he’s finally received his SAG card and is grabbing a bite with his old pal Weissmuller. Either that or taking a bite out of Maureen O’Sullivan.
Wednesday, December 21, 2011
Hitchens, Havel, Holidays
Did you miss me? Hello?
Today, a grab-bag of thoughts as Chanukah continues, Christmas looms and the new year stands poised to make this one history.
Update. Remember how, back in January, I wrote about how I was going to read 20 books in 2011—and how, even though my retention stinks and I might not at this point be able to give you complete synopses of each book, I’d at least be able to list every title, because I’d be writing them all down?
Not even close. I read less than half of that number of books. And I can’t be more precise because I forgot to record most of the titles. Early in the year I read an interesting biography of Frances Perkins, FDR’s Secretary of Labor. During the summer I read Mary Roach’s Packing for Mars, about what happens to the human body in zero gravity. (I’ll pass on space tourism.) I could swear I read a few other books, possibly even some fiction. But I can’t prove it.
I got to thinking about this earlier in the month, when Christopher Hitchens died. His obituary in the Washington Post was packed with great quotes that made me think I ought to buy everything he ever wrote. All of which would be new to me, because I’m not sure I’ve read so much as a single essay of his. I’ve long known of him by reputation, of course—as a dissolute but brilliant contrarian, and an atheist only too happy to publicly debate believers, including his own brother. I like how he called Henry Kissinger a war criminal, took the decidedly minority view that sainted Mother Teresa had been a “fanatic, fundamentalist and fraud,” and expressed gratitude that strangers would pray for his recovery from cancer, but also disgust at the notion that he might undergo a death-bed conversion.
In fact, this was the final paragraph of the Post article: “‘I sympathize afresh with the mighty Voltaire,’ Mr Hitchens wrote in Vanity Fair in October 2010, ‘who, when badgered on his deathbed and urged to renounce the devil, murmured that this was no time to be making enemies.’”
It probably goes without saying that I’ve never read a word of Voltaire, either. Or of the magazine output of Alexander Cockburn, a one-time colleague of Hitchens’ at The Nation who once trashed his former co-worker as “lying, self-serving, fat-assed, chain-smoking, drunken, opportunistic and cynical.” Somehow all of that attracts me to Hitchens even more. I’d like to think I’ll get around to reading him posthumously in 2012. History and the literal stacks of tantalizing but unread books already at home make the prospect unlikely, however.
Jane and me. I’ve made no secret of my love-hate relationship with technology—meaning that I love such old-school pleasures as electricity and indoor plumbing and hate pretty much all forms of social networking save that so-last-century “innovation” known as e-mail. I seem to have very few allies on this front who are younger than 80. You can imagine my excitement several weeks ago, then, when the celebrated, world-famous primatologist Jane Goodall, who’s merely 78, was quoted as saying this when asked if she “keeps up” with technology:
I definitely do e-mails. I take my laptop. I do my writing on it. I will not have a BlackBerry.
I have a cell phone, but I don’t know the number. I use it simply to call somebody if I need to. The cell phone is never on. The cell phone is not part of my life. Someone does a blog for me. I don’t tweet and Twitter. When people ask me to join their Facebook, I delete it.
Jane, my BFF! If I had a cell phone, it, too, would never be on! I don’t tweet or Twitter, either! (But if I might tweak you a bit, my chimp-loving gal pal, I’m pretty sure they’re the same thing.) I’ve got a laptop! When people ask me to “friend” me on Facebook,” I delete the requests, too! (Neither am I LinkedIn. You, Jane?) So, OK, I do write my own blog. But not with any frequency, Girlfriend! And my readership is miniscule!
Sure, Jane might argue that she’s too busy trying to save species and promote global environmentalism to spend time gabbing on the cell, sending gossipy texts or posting boozy photos on Facebook from her occasional pub crawls across Nairobi. But hey, my plate’s pretty full, too. I’ve got all these books to consider reading, for one thing.
Dead heads of state. I feel compelled to write something about the near-concurrent recent deaths of former Czech president Vaclav Havel and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il. Some essayist somewhere commented about how the two men’s leadership styles couldn’t have been more different. I’ll say! Havel was a dissident playwright and poet turned politician who was criticized for being too dreamy and impractical. Kim, meanwhile, claimed power as his birthright and wasn’t exactly known for his light touch. Yet if news footage is to be believed, whose death is it that’s really cranking up the waterworks among the local populace? But to Havel’s credit, he, unlike Kim, never starved and brainwashed his people into thinking he was All That.
This is going to shock you, but I’ve never read any of Havel’s plays or poetry. While I admire his creativity and courage as a thorn in the regime’s side in the years before the collapse of the Soviet Union and its patron governments, I’ve always heard Havel’s writings referred to as “experimental” and “avant-garde.” I have enough trouble understanding stuff that’s relatively straightforward. It’s not lost on me that one of Havel’s best buddies was Frank Zappa, whose music and comedy carry the same descriptions as Havel’s oeuvre, and whose insightfulness and alleged brilliance always escaped me.
I was reminded the other day, via the Onion’s AV Club arts and entertainment Web site, that Kim’s death seems certain to influence future scripts of the NBC sitcom 30 Rock. When last season ended, Avery Jessup (Elizabeth Banks) the cable news-host wife of Alec Baldwin’s studio-exec character Jack Donaghy, had been kidnapped by Kim Jong Il. (This prompted dim diva Jenna Maroney, played by Jane Krakowski, to ask, “Kim Jong Il? Who’s she?”) So, what’s next? Will Avery be implicated in Kim’s death? Or, might the suddenly fatherless Kim Jong Un—the so-called “Great Successor”—seek solace in the arms of the shanghaied (wrong country, I know) American?
I love 30 Rock. I also recall that one bit had Kim Jong Il paired in a cop buddy movie with Tracy Jordan, the idiot man-child played by Tracy Morgan who’s famous for saying things like, “A book hasn’t given me this much trouble since Waldo went to that barber pole factory” and “I love this cornbread so much, I want to take it behind a middle school and get it pregnant.” The brilliance of the buddy-film gag is that the real Kim Jong Il by all accounts was a Hollywood movie nut who—who knows?—might have skipped the entire tyrant gig in Pyongyang for one shot at action-film stardom. It’s one of those “If only people had bought Hitler’s paintings” kinds of thing.
Makes you think, right? OK, not really. But still.
You are where you eat/shop. David Wasserman, the US House editor of the Cook Political Report, recently wrote: “In 2008, candidate Barack Obama carried 81 percent of counties with a Whole Foods and just 36 percent of counties with a Cracker Barrel—a record 45-point gap. In 2000, Vice President Al Gore won 58 percent of counties now containing a Whole Foods and 26 percent of those now boasting a Cracker Barrel, a 32-point difference. And in 1992, Gov Bill Clinton won 60 percent of Whole Foods counties and 40 percent of Cracker Barrel counties — a mere 20-point margin. This growing divide signals shifts in the electorate.”
The idea is that Cracker Barrel, the home-style restaurant chain that trades on comfort food and nostalgia, is synonymous with Republicans and conservatism, while Whole Foods, the high-end organic grocery stores, bespeak liberal Democrats who’ve got the money to spend on fancypants grub. There’s much to all that, but I personally am not crazy about either chain, even though politically I should be in the tank for Whole Foods.
What I most dislike about Cracker Barrel is its history of discrimination against gays. But also, the food’s not very good. And it’s the kind of place where people bring their noisy kids and then smack them in public. I’m sure concealed handguns are quietly welcomed there, too. Put it this way: I’d think twice before publicly backing “Obamacare” in that place.
But Whole Foods, too, gives me a pain in the ass. Everything’s expensive, and try finding a box of Lucky Charms or a selection of celebrity-gossip magazines. The place is always crowded, and every one of its theoretically carbon-neutral shoppers seems to have a huge, honking SUV parked in the frighteningly jammed parking lot. Everybody is glued a cell phone, and would rather run you down with their cart than pay any attention to where they’re going.
I don’t suppose I’m contributing to electoral analysis of the Cracker Barrel-Whole Foods divide by simply griping about both establishments. But I enjoyed that.
Christmas music. As I noted at around this time last year, between Thanksgiving and Christmas I listen to a ton of holiday music, on the radio and CDs. My car dial often is tuned to WASH-FM, which switches to an all-Christmas-music-all-the-time format during this period. Among my favorite CDs this season is one of country artists doing Christmas songs. It includes “The Christmas Guest,” a schmaltzy and wonderful recitation by the late great Johnny Cash about an elderly widower who fruitlessly awaits God’s promised visit on Christmas day while instead taking in three forlorn wayfarers who show up at his humble door. Spoiler alert: It turns out that God had disguised Himself as those wayfarers! So, he really did show up, and the old guy passed the hospitality test with flying colors. (Never mind that you’d think the Almighty might lighten up a little on the fealty thing on December 25. It’s a holiday, for His sake!)
Anyway, as often happens when I hear various versions of the same songs about 20,000 times in a compressed period, I’m stuck by certain peculiarities in the lyrics.
Perhaps no Christmas song is more peculiar than “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus,” in which a child is privy to his mother’s seemingly adulterous cuckolding of his father with the fat bearded man in the red suit. If you listen to the words, mommy doesn’t just kiss Santa, she tickles him under his beard, too. And that’s just what the kid sees in a fleeting glance! Where else is mommy kissing him? And why is all this foreplay presented as innocent fun? The song’s last line is “What a laugh it would have been/If daddy had only seen/Mommy kissing Santa Claus last night.” A “laugh”? Do you think it’d really have been a laugh? This is America! If daddy sees that, I see him pulling out a handgun and wasting the bitch and the home-wrecking old elf, Christmas cheer be damned! You know what I see? Sing it with me: "I See Junior with PTSD."
Then there’s “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” which begins by assuming everyone knows the names of eight members of Santa’s sleigh-pulling team, but, after naming them, asks, “Do you recall the most famous reindeer of all?” Isn’t that entirely ass-backwards? To the contrary, Rudolph's is the name everybody already knows—the acknowledged “most famous reindeer of all.” Wouldn’t it be more accurate to ask, “Do you recall how there are a bunch of other reindeer whose names escape us at the moment? One’s Donner, right—like the party?” But then, I suppose the song would lack something as “Rudolph’s Posse, the Eight Anonymous Reindeer.”
Finally, what are we to make of the notation, in “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” that “There’ll be scary ghost stories and tales of the glories of Christmases long, long ago”? Who the hell associates Christmas with scary ghost stories?! I mean, name one, other than A Christmas Carol. And even that tale isn’t particularly scary unless you’re Ebenezer Scrooge. Or maybe unless you, like me, felt a little spooked as a kid when that bony skeleton hand pointed at Mr Magoo’s grave in the old animated version.
So, that’s it. I hope you’ve enjoyed this little pre-holiday potpourri. Happy holidays! Drive safely. Maybe bring a book on your travels. And don’t listen too closely to those Christmas song lyrics. They’ll drive you crazy.
Today, a grab-bag of thoughts as Chanukah continues, Christmas looms and the new year stands poised to make this one history.
Update. Remember how, back in January, I wrote about how I was going to read 20 books in 2011—and how, even though my retention stinks and I might not at this point be able to give you complete synopses of each book, I’d at least be able to list every title, because I’d be writing them all down?
Not even close. I read less than half of that number of books. And I can’t be more precise because I forgot to record most of the titles. Early in the year I read an interesting biography of Frances Perkins, FDR’s Secretary of Labor. During the summer I read Mary Roach’s Packing for Mars, about what happens to the human body in zero gravity. (I’ll pass on space tourism.) I could swear I read a few other books, possibly even some fiction. But I can’t prove it.
I got to thinking about this earlier in the month, when Christopher Hitchens died. His obituary in the Washington Post was packed with great quotes that made me think I ought to buy everything he ever wrote. All of which would be new to me, because I’m not sure I’ve read so much as a single essay of his. I’ve long known of him by reputation, of course—as a dissolute but brilliant contrarian, and an atheist only too happy to publicly debate believers, including his own brother. I like how he called Henry Kissinger a war criminal, took the decidedly minority view that sainted Mother Teresa had been a “fanatic, fundamentalist and fraud,” and expressed gratitude that strangers would pray for his recovery from cancer, but also disgust at the notion that he might undergo a death-bed conversion.
In fact, this was the final paragraph of the Post article: “‘I sympathize afresh with the mighty Voltaire,’ Mr Hitchens wrote in Vanity Fair in October 2010, ‘who, when badgered on his deathbed and urged to renounce the devil, murmured that this was no time to be making enemies.’”
It probably goes without saying that I’ve never read a word of Voltaire, either. Or of the magazine output of Alexander Cockburn, a one-time colleague of Hitchens’ at The Nation who once trashed his former co-worker as “lying, self-serving, fat-assed, chain-smoking, drunken, opportunistic and cynical.” Somehow all of that attracts me to Hitchens even more. I’d like to think I’ll get around to reading him posthumously in 2012. History and the literal stacks of tantalizing but unread books already at home make the prospect unlikely, however.
Jane and me. I’ve made no secret of my love-hate relationship with technology—meaning that I love such old-school pleasures as electricity and indoor plumbing and hate pretty much all forms of social networking save that so-last-century “innovation” known as e-mail. I seem to have very few allies on this front who are younger than 80. You can imagine my excitement several weeks ago, then, when the celebrated, world-famous primatologist Jane Goodall, who’s merely 78, was quoted as saying this when asked if she “keeps up” with technology:
I definitely do e-mails. I take my laptop. I do my writing on it. I will not have a BlackBerry.
I have a cell phone, but I don’t know the number. I use it simply to call somebody if I need to. The cell phone is never on. The cell phone is not part of my life. Someone does a blog for me. I don’t tweet and Twitter. When people ask me to join their Facebook, I delete it.
Jane, my BFF! If I had a cell phone, it, too, would never be on! I don’t tweet or Twitter, either! (But if I might tweak you a bit, my chimp-loving gal pal, I’m pretty sure they’re the same thing.) I’ve got a laptop! When people ask me to “friend” me on Facebook,” I delete the requests, too! (Neither am I LinkedIn. You, Jane?) So, OK, I do write my own blog. But not with any frequency, Girlfriend! And my readership is miniscule!
Sure, Jane might argue that she’s too busy trying to save species and promote global environmentalism to spend time gabbing on the cell, sending gossipy texts or posting boozy photos on Facebook from her occasional pub crawls across Nairobi. But hey, my plate’s pretty full, too. I’ve got all these books to consider reading, for one thing.
Dead heads of state. I feel compelled to write something about the near-concurrent recent deaths of former Czech president Vaclav Havel and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il. Some essayist somewhere commented about how the two men’s leadership styles couldn’t have been more different. I’ll say! Havel was a dissident playwright and poet turned politician who was criticized for being too dreamy and impractical. Kim, meanwhile, claimed power as his birthright and wasn’t exactly known for his light touch. Yet if news footage is to be believed, whose death is it that’s really cranking up the waterworks among the local populace? But to Havel’s credit, he, unlike Kim, never starved and brainwashed his people into thinking he was All That.
This is going to shock you, but I’ve never read any of Havel’s plays or poetry. While I admire his creativity and courage as a thorn in the regime’s side in the years before the collapse of the Soviet Union and its patron governments, I’ve always heard Havel’s writings referred to as “experimental” and “avant-garde.” I have enough trouble understanding stuff that’s relatively straightforward. It’s not lost on me that one of Havel’s best buddies was Frank Zappa, whose music and comedy carry the same descriptions as Havel’s oeuvre, and whose insightfulness and alleged brilliance always escaped me.
I was reminded the other day, via the Onion’s AV Club arts and entertainment Web site, that Kim’s death seems certain to influence future scripts of the NBC sitcom 30 Rock. When last season ended, Avery Jessup (Elizabeth Banks) the cable news-host wife of Alec Baldwin’s studio-exec character Jack Donaghy, had been kidnapped by Kim Jong Il. (This prompted dim diva Jenna Maroney, played by Jane Krakowski, to ask, “Kim Jong Il? Who’s she?”) So, what’s next? Will Avery be implicated in Kim’s death? Or, might the suddenly fatherless Kim Jong Un—the so-called “Great Successor”—seek solace in the arms of the shanghaied (wrong country, I know) American?
I love 30 Rock. I also recall that one bit had Kim Jong Il paired in a cop buddy movie with Tracy Jordan, the idiot man-child played by Tracy Morgan who’s famous for saying things like, “A book hasn’t given me this much trouble since Waldo went to that barber pole factory” and “I love this cornbread so much, I want to take it behind a middle school and get it pregnant.” The brilliance of the buddy-film gag is that the real Kim Jong Il by all accounts was a Hollywood movie nut who—who knows?—might have skipped the entire tyrant gig in Pyongyang for one shot at action-film stardom. It’s one of those “If only people had bought Hitler’s paintings” kinds of thing.
Makes you think, right? OK, not really. But still.
You are where you eat/shop. David Wasserman, the US House editor of the Cook Political Report, recently wrote: “In 2008, candidate Barack Obama carried 81 percent of counties with a Whole Foods and just 36 percent of counties with a Cracker Barrel—a record 45-point gap. In 2000, Vice President Al Gore won 58 percent of counties now containing a Whole Foods and 26 percent of those now boasting a Cracker Barrel, a 32-point difference. And in 1992, Gov Bill Clinton won 60 percent of Whole Foods counties and 40 percent of Cracker Barrel counties — a mere 20-point margin. This growing divide signals shifts in the electorate.”
The idea is that Cracker Barrel, the home-style restaurant chain that trades on comfort food and nostalgia, is synonymous with Republicans and conservatism, while Whole Foods, the high-end organic grocery stores, bespeak liberal Democrats who’ve got the money to spend on fancypants grub. There’s much to all that, but I personally am not crazy about either chain, even though politically I should be in the tank for Whole Foods.
What I most dislike about Cracker Barrel is its history of discrimination against gays. But also, the food’s not very good. And it’s the kind of place where people bring their noisy kids and then smack them in public. I’m sure concealed handguns are quietly welcomed there, too. Put it this way: I’d think twice before publicly backing “Obamacare” in that place.
But Whole Foods, too, gives me a pain in the ass. Everything’s expensive, and try finding a box of Lucky Charms or a selection of celebrity-gossip magazines. The place is always crowded, and every one of its theoretically carbon-neutral shoppers seems to have a huge, honking SUV parked in the frighteningly jammed parking lot. Everybody is glued a cell phone, and would rather run you down with their cart than pay any attention to where they’re going.
I don’t suppose I’m contributing to electoral analysis of the Cracker Barrel-Whole Foods divide by simply griping about both establishments. But I enjoyed that.
Christmas music. As I noted at around this time last year, between Thanksgiving and Christmas I listen to a ton of holiday music, on the radio and CDs. My car dial often is tuned to WASH-FM, which switches to an all-Christmas-music-all-the-time format during this period. Among my favorite CDs this season is one of country artists doing Christmas songs. It includes “The Christmas Guest,” a schmaltzy and wonderful recitation by the late great Johnny Cash about an elderly widower who fruitlessly awaits God’s promised visit on Christmas day while instead taking in three forlorn wayfarers who show up at his humble door. Spoiler alert: It turns out that God had disguised Himself as those wayfarers! So, he really did show up, and the old guy passed the hospitality test with flying colors. (Never mind that you’d think the Almighty might lighten up a little on the fealty thing on December 25. It’s a holiday, for His sake!)
Anyway, as often happens when I hear various versions of the same songs about 20,000 times in a compressed period, I’m stuck by certain peculiarities in the lyrics.
Perhaps no Christmas song is more peculiar than “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus,” in which a child is privy to his mother’s seemingly adulterous cuckolding of his father with the fat bearded man in the red suit. If you listen to the words, mommy doesn’t just kiss Santa, she tickles him under his beard, too. And that’s just what the kid sees in a fleeting glance! Where else is mommy kissing him? And why is all this foreplay presented as innocent fun? The song’s last line is “What a laugh it would have been/If daddy had only seen/Mommy kissing Santa Claus last night.” A “laugh”? Do you think it’d really have been a laugh? This is America! If daddy sees that, I see him pulling out a handgun and wasting the bitch and the home-wrecking old elf, Christmas cheer be damned! You know what I see? Sing it with me: "I See Junior with PTSD."
Then there’s “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” which begins by assuming everyone knows the names of eight members of Santa’s sleigh-pulling team, but, after naming them, asks, “Do you recall the most famous reindeer of all?” Isn’t that entirely ass-backwards? To the contrary, Rudolph's is the name everybody already knows—the acknowledged “most famous reindeer of all.” Wouldn’t it be more accurate to ask, “Do you recall how there are a bunch of other reindeer whose names escape us at the moment? One’s Donner, right—like the party?” But then, I suppose the song would lack something as “Rudolph’s Posse, the Eight Anonymous Reindeer.”
Finally, what are we to make of the notation, in “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” that “There’ll be scary ghost stories and tales of the glories of Christmases long, long ago”? Who the hell associates Christmas with scary ghost stories?! I mean, name one, other than A Christmas Carol. And even that tale isn’t particularly scary unless you’re Ebenezer Scrooge. Or maybe unless you, like me, felt a little spooked as a kid when that bony skeleton hand pointed at Mr Magoo’s grave in the old animated version.
So, that’s it. I hope you’ve enjoyed this little pre-holiday potpourri. Happy holidays! Drive safely. Maybe bring a book on your travels. And don’t listen too closely to those Christmas song lyrics. They’ll drive you crazy.
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