04/20/2024
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Donald Trump

907 Words: Burning for the Cause

The term for it is self-immolation. That particular phrasing doesn’t begin to convey the horror of setting one’s self on fire, burning to death in a public space, to demonstrate opposition to tyranny, oppression, any number of -isms, or simply, people’s urge to to crush others.

When I was a little kid, I read about a man who set himself on fire on a street in Saigon (now called Ho Chi Minh City). A Buddhist monk named Thích Quảng Đức, was part of a procession of 350 fellow monks originating at a nearby pagoda in June, 1963. Đức, in a car with two others, led the marchers to the intersection of Phan Đình Phùng Boulevard and Lê Văn Duyệt Street where they stopped. Đức emerged from the car and calmly walked to a spot in the middle of the street. One of his car-mates placed a seat cushion on the pavement, upon which Đức sat, assuming the traditional lotus position. The other car-mate doused Đức with the contents of a five-gallon can of gasoline.

Đức then lit a match and set himself on fire. Here’s New York Times reporter David Halberstam’s account of the scene:

Flames were coming from a human being; his body was slowly withering and shriveling up., his head blackening and charring. In the air was the smell of burning human flesh; human beings burn surprisingly quickly. Behind me, I could hear the sobbing of the Vietnamese who were now gathering…. As he burned he never moved a muscle, never uttered a sound, his outward composure in sharp contrast to the wailing people around him.

An Associated Press photographer named Malcolm Browne snapped images of the burning monk. I saw one of the pictures on the front page of the Chicago Sun-Times. I was transfixed. Why, I wondered, would anybody kill himself in such a horrifying way? President John F. Kennedy saw the photos as well. He reportedly remarked, “No news picture in history has generated so much emotion around the world as that one.”

Later I would learn that Đức killed himself to protest the treatment of South Vietnam’s majority Buddhists by the corrupt regime of President Ngô Đình Diệm. A Roman Catholic, Diệm harbored a particular hatred for Buddhists. Catholic priests hoping to curry favor with Diệm ran private armies to suppress the Buddhist majority in the country. South Vietnam’s Buddhists suffered forced conversions and resettlements. Their property was looted, their pagodas destroyed. Kennedy was appalled by Diệm’s persecution of them.

The US president allegedly directed the CIA to stage a coup to oust Diệm. He was toppled by a military junta five months after Đức’s suicide. The coup, of course, failed to make South Vietnam any kind of a beacon of democracy or even basic decency. South Vietnam would fall 12 years later despite the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians and soldiers in the Vietnam War. In an irony that would be laughable if it weren’t so blood-drenched, the now-communist nation of Vietnam is an American ally, an important trade partner, and cooperates with the US in resisting Chinese expansionism. Among all the remaining communist populations on Earth, Vietnam’s people today view the United States most favorably. I had a guest on Big Talk some years back, a clothing designer from Vietnam who’d moved to this country as a little girl with her family. Vietnamese people, she told me, actually like Americans.

I wonder what Thích Quảng Đức would think about all this, were he still alive.

In any case, self-immolation as protest seems to be the last resort of a person attempting to speak for a desperate people. A Time magazine article dated February 26, 2024 quotes Temple University history professor Ralph Young: “It’s an act of despair. You feel that there’s nothing that you can do, or that people are willing to do, so this is the ultimate sacrifice — yourself.”

Đức was viewed as a martyr, a hero in a sense, for his selfless demonstration against inhumanity. Only something as dreadful as a tyrannical government’s oppression of a people would drive a normally rational person to such an act.

Now comes word that a man set himself on fire yesterday outside the Manhattan courthouse where former President Donald Trump is on trial for several criminal actions surrounding his payoff to a porn star to keep his affair with her under wraps. The man traveled to New York City from St Augustine, Florida and had lingered outside the courthouse for much of the past week. He was a conspiracy theorist, apparently, who posted this declaration online some time before his act: “I have set myself on fire outside the Trump trial.”

As of yet, it is unclear what tyranny, oppression, -isms, or inhumanity drove the man to set himself on fire. He died yesterday night in a Manhattan hospital.

Of course, not every suicide is politically driven. In fact, very few are. That’s why self-immolation as a protest is such a dramatic, history-altering act. Suicide can be caused by any number of things, including:

  • Mental health problems
  • Bullying, prejudice or stigma related to race, gender, disability or sexual identity
  • Domestic, sexual, or physical abuse
  • Bereavement or grief
  • The end of a relationship
  • Chronic pain or illness
  • Retirement
  • Money problems
  • Housing problems
  • Isolation or loneliness
  • Being in prison
  • Addiction or substance abuse
  • Pregnancy, childbirth or postnatal depression
  • Confusion about sexual or gender identity
  • Forced marriage

Do we now add Demonstrating devotion to Donald Trump?

04/09/2024
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Literature

442 Words: The Pen Is Mighty

I’m gonna put this out there with little comment. The other day I got to thinking about the most influential American books. That is, those books that defined us or changed us. Those books that, should visitors from another planet drop in, would give them a pretty good idea of who we are, who we’ve been, who we think we are or pretend to be, and what it’s been like reconciling all the realities, aspirations, and myths contained therein. Note: The books don’t have to be written by an American or in Americe. Okay? Here goes, in no particular order:

  • The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America (sic), proclamation by Thomas Jefferson and the Committee of Five, with editing by the Second Continental Congress, 1776
  • Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, by Herman Melville, 1851
  • The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair, 1906
  • Peyton Place, by Grace Metalious, 1956
  • Unsafe at Any Speed; The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile, by Ralph Nader, 1965
  • Ball Four: My Life and Hard Times Throwing the Knuckleball in the Big Leagues, by Jim Bouton, edited by Leonard Schecter, 1970
  • Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, by J.K. Rowling, 1997
  • The Bible, anthology in several languages by multiple authors plus compiled oral lore, from c. 500 BCE to 1st century CE
  • Valley of the Dolls, by Jacqueline Susann, 1966
  • The Feminine Mystique, by Betty Friedan, 1963
  • To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee, 1960
  • Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain, 1885
  • The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck, 1939
  • Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison, 1952
  • Common Sense, pamphlet by Thomas Paine, 1775-1776
  • Democracy in America, (De la démocratie en Amérique), by Alexis de Tocqueville, 1935 and 1840
  • Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself, 1845
  • An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith, 1776
  • Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly, by Harriet Beecher Stowe, 1852
  • Beloved, by Tone Morrison, 1987
  • Walden; or, life in the Woods, by Henry David Thoreau, 1854
  • Native Son, by Richard Wright, 1954
  • Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson, 1962
  • All the King’s Men, by Robert Penn Warren, 1946
  • All the President’s Men, by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, 1974
  • The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925
  • Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, by Anita Loos, 1952
  • A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, by Betty Smith, 1943
  • The Color Purple, by Alice Walker, 1982
  • The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood, 1985
  • The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams, 1979
  • Catch-22, by Jeseph Heller, 1961
  • Tales of the City, by Armistead Maupin, 1978
  • My Ántonia, by Willa Cather, 1918

As an added bonus, I offer you my choice as the greatest American novel ever written: Little Big Man, by Thomas Berger, 1964.

Feel free to let me know how wrong I am about any of this.

03/28/2024
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Narcissism

784 Words: Me!

The 1970s were known as the “Me Decade.” Author Tom Wolfe coined the term in an August 23, 1976 essay in New York magazine.

Wolfe was a practitioner of what became known as the “New Journalism,” a subjective form of reporting and writing that revolutionized the field. Wolfe actually coined that term, New Journalism, too. The genesis story of both terms is a perfect meta-illustration of both. Wolfe included within the club of New Journalists star scribes Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, Hunter S. Thompson, Truman Capote, Terry Southern, and others. Their works, very long-form and immersive, appeared in Esquire, Harper’s, The Atlantic Monthly, Rolling Stone, New Yorker, Playboy, and more. New Journalism pieces were as much about the writers as they were about the writers’ subjects.

For his part, Wolfe penned a number of nonfiction books, among them The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, The Painted Word, The Right Stuff, and From Bauhaus to Our House. He wrote five novels including The Bonfire of the Vanities. His byline appeared over countless magazine articles. He became famous, in addition to his keyboard output, for dressing foppishly, in a signature style. In a post-mortem article in Esquire (Wolfe died in 2018), Jonathan Evans wrote:

Just hearing his name conjures up images of an immaculately put-together man with bright eyes, a boyish face, and a suit—almost certainly bespoke, and almost certainly a rich shade of cream.

Wolfe was essential to the story, as were Thompson, Mailer, and the rest. Over the next four or so decades, not only writers but their readers were swallowed up in New-ness and Me-ness. It has become a Me World.

Let me put it another way: the story didn’t exist without Thompson, Capote, Mailer, et al. This book, this magazine article, they were saying, isn’t so much about the presidential campaign of 1972, the gory murder of a family in Kansas, or the execution of Gary Gilmore as it is about Me.

Americans not only celebrated Me-ness, they came to worship it. The 1960s might be viewed as a sort of Kumbaya Decade, when we all held hands and worked like hell for civil rights and against the Vietnam War (even though that view is mostly mythical). Our fuzzy memories of the ’60s produce images of the community ascendant, so much so actual communes became big things — that is, until one commune produced a psychotic, drug-addled, spectacularly murderous clan, the Manson Family. Next thing anybody knew after Charlie and his acolytes became known to America, togetherness was not only out but dangerous. That pushed us along to becoming more Me-ish, too.

Books and magazine articles came out by the score starting in the early 1970s and continuing to this day telling us how to be true to ourselves, how to find the real Me, that Me was OK, that you can’t love anybody until you love Me, that Me, Me, Me, Me, Me, Me, is the center of the known universe.  I’ve even found an essay on LinkedIn, of all places, titled, “Focus On Yourself and Everything You Want Will Fall Into Place.” Someone named Rhonda Byrne became a jillionaire in 2006 after her book, The Secret, was published. Its basic premise was if you think it, it will be.

The universe, if all these spiels are to be believed, exists within your own cranium. “What is life?” George Harrison asked in 1970; the answer, repeated ceaselessly over the next half-century-plus, is Me.

Truth eventually became secondary to Feelings. By the turn of the century, arguments could be short-circuited by one side or the other declaring, “Well, that’s my truth.” Do angels exist? Does god answer prayers? Can Uri Geller bend spoons? Can we contact the dead? Forget evidence. Forget proof. All that counts is My Truth.

An aside: Larry David tackles the idea of prayer — for my dough, the ultimate Me exercise — in an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm. “Let me put myself in god’s shoes for a second,” he begins. Well, just watch…

Anyway, the history of this holy land now is dependent on tens of millions of voters’ Personal Truths. Crime is rampant, a lot of them say despite the fact that crime statistics show otherwise. Global warming, institutionalized racism, gun violence, all bacteria are bad, one human year is equivalent to seven dog years, people use only 10 percent of their brains — all are argued over by people citing that infallible authority, My Truth.

An entire major political party in America now is steered by an insupportable charge, that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. Again it doesn’t matter a bit that there’s no evidence it happened. People believe it.

It’s Their Truth. My Truth. Me.

That’s all that counts.

03/22/2024
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Cancel Culture, John Hinkley

689 Words: Cancelled!

Cancel culture. Do you buy it? I mean, when you hear the term do you think, Aw, they’re full of shit, or do you gnash your teeth and curse the Woke Mob?

The latest complainant to shriek he’s a victim of the dreaded CC is — wait for it! — one John  Warnock Hinkley, Jr., the noted Jodie Foster fetishist and gunslinger who used President Ronald Reagan as a moving target on March 30, 1981.

Yep. Hinkley, who’s now a free man after being declared no longer deranged by shrinks and a federal judge in 2016, has been trying to break into the music biz as a folk singer/songwriter. Hinkley’s YouTube channel boasts some 36,000 subscribers. He’s also been booked to play at several small venues and therein lies his grievance.

The New York Post on Wednesday reported that Hinkley’s bent out of shape because his gig at a Connecticut hotel had been scrubbed. That concert, coincidentally or not, was to occur on the 43rd anniversary of his attempt to kill the President of the United States. “I’m a victim of cancel culture. It keeps happening over and over again,” Hinkley told a Post reporter.

Imagine that! This cancel culture stuff has gotten out of hand when a would-be assassin can’t make an honest living anymore.

Hinkley first was blacklisted in 2022 when his scheduled show at Market Hotel in Brooklyn was…, y’know, canceled. Since then, he claims, he’s been slated to appear at a total of a dozen venues. “They book me and then the show gets announced and then the venue starts getting backlash. The owners always cave; they cancel,” he told the Post.

The question arises: Do the bookers know, when they schedule John Hinkley to perform at their places, who he is? Or was? Are there folks unaware that he’s far more notable for that horrible moment in time than for his ability to croon the tune, “You and I Are Free”? Yeah, that’s the title of one of his ditties. Fitting, I guess.

Or, do they book him mainly because he pumped lead into Reagan, press secretary James Brady, Secret Service agent Timothy McCarthy, and DC cop Thomas Delahanty. Such a notorious figure ought to pack the house, no?

Reagan, of course, swiftly became mythologized in the aftermath of the shooting. Whereas other presidents might have been such snowflakes that they died after being shot up, old Dutch took a bullet to the chest — and lived! USA! USA! USA!

Hinkley was tried and found not guilty by reason of insanity. He wrote an undelivered sentencing speech saying the shooting was “the greatest love offering in the history of the world.” He also compared Foster and himself to Romeo and Juliet and Napoleon and Josephine.

Hinkley was released from a mental institution, having been diagnosed sane 35 years after pulling the trigger. He immediately set about to establishing himself as a professional musician. Only cancel culture thus far has quashed his dream. So he says.

Hidden in plain sight within the two words, cancel culture, is the nightmarish hallucination of a seething mass of bullies silencing all who dare to dissent, be that dissent from the Left or from the Right. Although it seems those on the Right wail and wring their hands the most while crying cancel culture. And then there are people who make the whole idea a farce. Like John Warnock Hinkley, Jr.

People have indeed been silenced, from Milo Yiannopoulos to Al Franken. Some of them regain their voices. Some never do. This may shock you, but I was made awfully uncomfortable by the then-Twitter kicking Donald Trump off its platform. Edit his distortions, misrepresentations, smears, and outright lies? Sure. Silence him? Uh-uh. Of course, weeding the deceits out of his rhetoric would leave his speech sparse. That’s his problem, not mine.

But cancel him? Nah. As for Hinkley, well, there are scads of folk singer/songwriters we can listen to. Refusing to provide a venue for one who happens to be the attempted murderer of a world leader and three other innocent souls and is now technically rehabilitated isn’t a terribly disturbing violation of the principle of free speech..

03/19/2024
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2024 Total Solar Eclipse

1000 Words: There Goes the Sun

Chatting with a couple friends at my back office HQ, Hopscotch, this AM about the eclipse due April 8th. Both are lettered academics; one’s a researcher in a hard science field and the other a professor in a history/culture/social discipline. I learned that Indiana University is shutting down for the day of the eclipse.

Some 300,000 visitors are expected to flood into Bloomington that day to see the big sky show so getting around town will likely be nigh impossible. And, I suppose, it’s nice that the U’s students, teachers, and janitors will be able to stand outside that mid-afternoon and see something they might never have seen before and probably never will again. Hell, eclipses have changed history, for pity’s sake.

Herodotus wrote in 430 BCE of a lengthy war between the Lydians and the Medes in modern-day Turkey that only concluded after a total solar eclipse scared the bejesus out of both sides. In 1504  Christopher Columbus convinced the people of modern-day Jamaica not to brain his savage, marauding crews by accurately predicting a lunar eclipse. The islanders thought him in cahoots with some divine power and so they spared his hoodlums.

There’ve been, of course, countless critter myths explaining eclipses, both solar and lunar. The ancient Vietnamese in the wake of one solar eclipse believed a giant frog had devoured the Sun and only the intervention of its master, the lord of Hahn, persuaded the amphibian to spit it back out. The ancient Chinese opted for either a dragon or a dog, depending on the era, as the greedy critter snacking on our star. The Norse blamed that old trickster Loki for unleashing starving wolves on the Sun. Then there’s the old German myth that the Sun is a bride and the Moon a husband and the two normally keep to their respective days and nights except occasionally, the husband gets a little hot to trot and attempts to do his thing with the wife in broad daylight — until, that is, she throws him out of her boudoir.

The Navajos had a more practical view of solar eclipses. They insisted people stay inside their hogans during totality, mainly because looking up at the Sun in an attempt to figure out what in the hell was going on was harmful. They were right, of course.

Even in our so-called enlightened age, many myths persist about eclipses. The NASA website lays out a few of them. They include:

  • Pregnant women risk harming their fetuses by viewing an eclipse
  • Any food prepared during an eclipse will be toxic
  • Eclipses are omens of bad luck
  • If an eclipse occurs on your birthday, bad health will ensue

And so on.

That professor I mentioned earlier told me she dreads the coming eclipse because it’ll cause her to have a migraine. I tilted my head like a puzzled dog upon hearing this. What, I wondered, could be the connection between a celestial event and a vascular headache? The exchange got me googling and eventually led to writing this.

I was all ready to believe my prof friend was batty, or at least credulous. Turns out she’s on to something. The first thing I found, speaking of googling, is during the lead-up to any total solar eclipse, Google itself  is flooded with inquiries about headaches. “According to Google Trends,” a Mashable reporter wrote in 2017, “right now most of America is worried they have eclipse headaches.” Dig this Google Trends graph tracking searches for “seeing spots”:

Seeing spots is one of the top symptomatic auras preceding migraines. The graph covers the two days before and the day of the last American total solar eclipse on August 21, 2017.

An article published about the same time in Bustle reported “…you might experience everything from headaches and fatigue to vivid dreams, sleepwalking, flu-like symptoms, and sensitivity to electronic devices” in the immediate aftermath of the 2017 eclipse.

After allowing for the usual psychogenic statistical noise, these post-eclipse maladies are largely real. People’s normal behavior changes during an eclipse. We rarely look directly at the Sun or even anywhere near it as it’s too uncomfortable to do so. But it’s almost irresistible to pull a Trump and gaze at the Sun as the Moon’s disc passes before it.

Trump Looking At The 2017 Eclipse.

By the way, approximately half the American voting populace still wants this man to be Leader of the Free World. Go figure.

Anyway, even the flitting, fleeting glances we turn toward the Sun during an eclipse can, honestly and truly, trigger real physical symptoms. The Sun, after all, is a thermonuclear fireball more than 860,000 miles in diameter, the emanations of which are bound to be a tad disagreeable at times.

I feel bad for doubting, if ever so briefly, my professor friend. Then again, this is the YouTube age and misinformation, myth, nonsense, regressive fables, and all other sorts of blather are ascendant. It’s almost a fallback position for me to cast shade on people’s self-diagnoses and/or descriptions of their pathologies.

What cannot be argued is the 2024 total solar eclipse is already an omen of bad luck. This town that under normal circumstances strains to meet the needs of 80,000 people during the school year will be experiencing the food, water, waste, personal space, and traffic demands of a place four times its size on April 8. It’ll be as if Bloomington suddenly is transformed into Tampa or New Orleans while its police and fire forces, its garbage trucks, its sewers, its tap water delivery, and its grocery stores all remain relatively small-townish. Yikes.

Still, I wouldn’t wish the eclipse away. It’s a once in a lifetime thing, even though it’ll be my second such total solar eclipse in the last seven years. It’s my most passionate hope that this second rarity in my experience is not a harbinger of another improbable repeat as embodied by the guy staring into the Sun, above.

03/15/2024
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Conspiracy Theory

1000 Words: You Can’t Fool Me!

A few years ago, some star National Basketball Association players made headlines stating they don’t believe the Earth is a globe and that they reject the idea of gravity. The moon landings, some said, was faked. During the pandemic, the great National Football League quarterback Aaron Rogers told the world he’d been “immunized” against COVID-19 after being asked if he’d gotten the vaccine. It turned out Rodgers had dabbled in some woo-woo alternative treatments; lo and behold, he was stricken with the coronavirus in 2021. And then, a few weeks ago, some college football player told reporters he didn’t believe in space or the other planets.

Sports. I’ve ranted about a few of these loons now and again on this global communications colossus. My point being, mainly, that we ought to stop paying attention to these rambling ejaculations by high-profile pro athletes or any other celebrities for that matter. We worship celebrity in this Holy Land and scads of us hang on their every word. Just stop it is generally my advice.

Before Thursday, I’d figured I’d plumbed the depths of the sportsworld nuttiness. Then, along came an article in a conservative website called The Bulwark alerting me to the existence of a very popular and hotly argued conspiracy theory that Wilt Chamberlain’s famous 100-point game never happened, that it was a false flag op concocted by the NBA to goose interest in the game.

Wilt the Stilt’s big game is one of the touchstones of league history. It’s the highest point total ever scored by an individual player. It ranks with Franco Harris’s “Immaculate Reception,” Carlton Fisk’s World Series game winning home run, and the USA hockey team’s upset of the USSR in the 1980 Winter Olympics as a cherished, spectacular moment in American sports history.

But, no, it didn’t happen. So say countless smart guys on X, YouTube, Reddit, Quora, and all the other usually suspect social media. It’s one thing for there to be a segment of the population that thinks 9/11 was an inside job, JFK was killed on orders of LBJ, or that the Queen of England put out a hit on Princess Diana. All of those were Earth-shaking happenings and social scientists and skull jockeys have long held that we humans have a tough time accepting simple explanation for enormous events, especially if those explanations come from those in governments.

Funny thing is, I’ve long held that the American public loves being lied to. Craves it. Demands it, for chrissakes. The very first sentence of our founding document, the Declaration of Independence, proclaims all men to be created equal. This even as the fledging United States’s economy was based in large part on the ownership of one set of “inferior” human beings while our westward settlers and our army went about the business of exterminating another set. The wish to be lied to is in our blood.

Naturally, those who eat up political hogwash are convinced only they are privy to the Real Story. Internet entrepreneurs have made billions catering to the credulity of the American public, tens of millions of whom know in their bones everybody else has been bamboozled.

This trend now has descended to trivial things, like an NBA basketball game played 62 years ago this month. I suppose all the other really important events and phenomena have been run through the conspiracy wringer. All that’s left now, probably, is McDonald’s has been bankrolled by cardiologists or thirst is a fraud the water industry wants us to believe in. I’d bet plenty of people are working on those theories as we speak.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be too hard on Americans. After all, the people of every country on Earth believe their homeland is the greatest, the happiest, the freest (yep, it’s a word) and the apotheosis of human civilization. This is demonstrably false, as pro athletes can attest: there can only be one champion. Then again, maybe they’re wrong. Maybe no country is the greatest, happiest, freest. Maybe we’re all tied for last place.

Sifting through the sports record books for evidence that The Man has once again tried to pull a fast one seems a laughable hobby. Yet it illuminates the sickness that has pervaded our culture, thanks to the internet. You know what? I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if social media tycoons invent half to three quarters of the bullshit oozing throughout their sites.

Now there’s a conspiracy theory I can get behind.

(That was only 741 words; so I lied.)

03/09/2024
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Peter LoPilato

1000 Words: So Young

My mother, in the last thirty or so years of her life, would turn to the obituaries first thing every day when she got the newspaper. I was in my late 20s when she started doing this and it never failed to irk me.

“Ma,” I’d half shout in that impatient way kids confront their parents, “that’s creepy!”

“Don’t say that,” she’d rejoin in that barely patient way parents respond to their kids. “Someone I know  might be in here.” And she’d go right back to running her finger down the alphabetical list of the recently deceased.

This exchange did nothing to clear things up. Why in the hell would anyone want to go looking for news about dead people? At one point, I played armchair shrink and concluded she was succumbing to some deep depression similar to the one daddy-o had tumbled into toward the end of his time on this planet.

Every once in a while she’d come across a familiar name. So-and-so died, she’d announce, as if the news meant anything to me. “He was only 60 — so young!”

So young? Sixty years old? He was a dinosaur!

There’s a progression in how people view the years, a sort of time dilation. When I was nine years old, I thought kids who were 12 and 13 were grownups. One night when I was 21 and out dancing at a punk nightclub, I spotted a couple hanging around the periphery. They must have been thirty or so. I was mortified. What were such weird old fossils doing around here?

When Ma got to a certain age, any time someone who was a day younger than she was died she’d lament, again, “She was so young!” Ma said this every time even as she hit 90 and the dead person was 88 or 89.

I’m now at the age Ma was when she was already regularly scanning the obituaries.

My contemporaries are keeling over left and right.  Celebrities born the year I was are collapsing seemingly every day. It makes me think of the first rock ‘n’ roll era star I can recall who died naturally. Bill Haley, who, with his band the Comets, kick started white acceptance of R’n’R back in 1954 with their single “Rock Around the Clock.” That was two years before I was born and by the time I became a transistor radio geek at the age of eight, Bill Haley was as passé as Rudy Vallée. When Haley croaked in 1981 at the age of 55, I figured, hell, he’s an old man, what’s everybody so surprised about?

Of course, it isn’t just the years that appear to shrink or contract as we age. The four or so weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas seemed to be an eternity when I was a fifth-grader. Summer vacation was endless. For four years I dreamed, almost wetly, of the day I could get my drivers license and start wheelie-ing around the neighborhood in Dad’s car. That span of time from age 12 through 16, as I experienced it, was as lengthy as the Paleozoic Era. When I was grounded for a week or two, as I was more times than I could count, I may as well have been sentenced to life imprisonment.

Now, as any who’s reached my age knows, the seasons are as weeks and weeks are snaps of my fingers. This is a phenomenon impossible to convey to anyone still callow.

I figure if I’m lucky I might have a good 25 years left hereabouts. That is, if everything goes well, I avoid getting hit by a truck, cancer doesn’t come back, my deformed heart doesn’t start fluttering madly, and the nations of the world don’t start lobbing nuclear-tipped missiles at each other. That quarter century, I’m guessing, would be the maximum I have left. My earthly stint likely will end sometime before the year 2049.

But I like to think optimistically so twenty five years it is. That’s as big a chunk of time as the span since I was hanging out with the Lampreys in the East Pilsen artists’ enclave on the near south side of Chicago. Yeah, those were great days. Such fun. Such creativity. Such scintillating friends. Such a wide world and a big city to explore. Stories to write. Galleries to browse. Parties to attend. Grants to apply for. Life to gobble up. Another world, another lifetime ago.

But, oh god, that was 1999! All of us are gray-haired, thicker around the waist, our faces creased, our steps so much slower. Some even dead.

My new life, my new world, is in Bloomington, Indiana. New work. New friends. New challenges. Yet 1999 seems like last summer. But within even that snap of my fingers I’ve met people and had to say goodbye. People like Peter LoPilato. He was the editor and publisher of The Ryder magazine, the first publication I wrote for after I arrived in this town. He and I shared a love of baseball and every time we’d meet we’d regale each other with memories and statistics and predictions about this team or that player. He was a New Yorker, originally; I a Chicagoan. We didn’t let that come between us.

Peter played softball in a league up until a very few short years ago. I wished I could have joined him but I was crippled by arthritis in my hips. I have two new titanium and plastic hip joints now but I’ll never be able to play catch with Peter LoPilato because he died this week. He was about 72, by my math.

Damn. He was so young!

03/01/2024
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Celebrity

1000 Words: Don’t Ask!

In celebrity-obsessed America the most respected people speaking on the subjects of world events, social justice, human relations, economics, politics, and even hard science are Hollywood actors and pro athletes.

I mean, honestly, a man whom Matt Groenig and Co. characterized back in 2000 as a joke future president actually became the President of the United States, largely because he was a TV actor in a reality show. The American electorate voted him into the White House in 2016 almost solely because he’d become famous saying “You’re fired” countless times in NBC-TV’s “The Apprentice.” He’d never been a legislator or a diplomat or a student of global affairs or prepped any other way to become Leader of the Free World. People knew him because he came into their living rooms every Wednesday or Thursday night and that was plenty enough for them to say, “We’ll follow you.”

No movement, no idea, no cause gains traction if it doesn’t have Glenn Close (mental health), Angelina Jolie (refugees), Seth Rogen (Alzheimer’s), Gary Sinise (veterans), or, way back, Jenny McCarthy (antivaxx) stumping for it. In an April 2020 New York Times piece on celebrity activism headlined When Did We Start Taking Famous People Seriously? reporter Jessica Grose wrote that Al Jolson was the first celebrity political endorser, throwing his weight behind then-presidential candidate Warren G. Harding in 1920. Celebrity activisim has only grown in leaps and bounds since that time.

Donald Trump shilled for himself, natch, bringing the phenomenon to its current nadir.

An item I caught in Deadspin this AM got me to thinking about all this, for the umpteenth time. Deadspin is a gotcha-type daily sports news roundup that I read mainly for giggles. Today, reporter Cale Clinton broke the earthshaking news that NFL prospect Tyler Owens, late of Texas Tech University and soon to become a wealthy young lad after April’s pro football draft, has expounded on the nature of the cosmos. The cornerback/safety, Clinton reports, was quoted as saying, “I don’t believe in space.” Journalists furiously scribbled his pronouncements this week during the annual NFL Scouting Combine in Indianapolis where erstwhile college jocks show off their biceps and cartilages for the league’s general managers and head coaches. Owens was asked about his beliefs because he ran the fastest 40-yard dash among the hopeful pros gathered in Lucas Oil Stadium.

Well, golly, I too want to know what such a speedy defensive back thinks about the universe!

Owens explained: “I’m real religious so I think we’re in a dome right now. I don’t think there’s, like, other planets and stuff like that.” He went on to say he’d caught some flat-earth chat on YouTube, causing him to come to his conclusions. Other news sources report he actually said “…I think we’re alone right now,” rather than “in a dome.” No matter. His meaning is crystal clear either way, and it has nothing at all to do with space, planets, loneliness, or geometric structural forms.

The NFL decision makers at the Combine regularly assess the hopeful players in batteries of physical and intellectual tests designed to establish who the top greyhounds, acrobats, tightrope walkers, strongmen, throwers, rushers, tacklers, and field strategists are in each year’s crop of exiting college football players.

Yep, each and every participant in the 2024 NFL Scouting Combine is a college man, Owens among them. You know college, right? That place where the smartest scientists, researchers, philosophers, and professors prepare your teenager for the rigors of modern life, imparting the latest information about the nature of everything and anything.

Young Tyler Owens, presumably, having been thusly prepared by the faculty at Texas Tech, is now ready to take his place among the leaders of today and tomorrow.

“I thought I used to believe in the heliocentric thing where we used to revolve around the sun and stuff,” Owens continued. “But then I started seeing flat earth stuff and I was like, this is kind of interesting. They started bringing up valid points….”

I caution you not to dismiss young Tyler Owens for his utterances. Well, not too much, at least. He’s 22 years old, for pity’s sake. Do you want to be defined and/or condemned for the goofy stuff you did, said, or believed when you were 22? I think I was 18 when, one time, I told my mother I was a communist. Poor Ma. She gasped and wrung her hands. Which, now that I look back on it, was the main reason I said it. Many people believe a 22-year-old should be a tad more circumspect than an 18-year-old, but a guy devoting his life to the goal of becoming a pro football player can be excused for developing a bit more slowly in the realm of existential thought, especially one capable of running the fastest 40 yard dash at an annual NFL Scouting Combine.

For all we know, when he hits the age of 40 or 50 Tyler Owens may look back on his words and cringe.

If you care to rail against anybody, it should be whoever the reporter was who put a microphone in Tyler’s face and prompted him to tell the world about the cosmos.

It shouldn’t matter to anybody with a clear conscious and a rational sense of priorities what even the best cornerback/safety in the NFL today thinks about anything other than the nuances of playing cornerback/safety. We don’t quiz plumbers or bus drivers or McDonald’s managers or IT geeks on their views concerning the solar system and other such things. So why does anybody care what a potential NFL player thinks about it?

Or an actor? Or a rock star? Or the star and producer of a reality TV show?

Of course, I’m bashing my head against a brick wall because the vast majority of us are dying to know what the likes of Beyoncé and Harry Styles think about the Israel/Hamas War, global warming, AI, and substance abuse. Hell, Beyoncé might even become president one day.

In that case, I wonder what her thoughts about space and the planets are.

02/19/2024
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Israel-Hamas War, Polarization, Tribalism

1000 Words: Wanna Fight?

Long ago, a martial arts teacher told me the first and most important lesson he wanted to impart to his students was, Do everything you can to avoid conflict.

I’d expressed concern to him that the martial arts craze that began sweeping the nation back in the 1970s was encouraging boys and young men to violence. And, believe me, boys and young men don’t need any extra encouragement in that matter. I’ve long held that were I to be named King of the World, I’d ship all males aged 18-24 on rocket ships to the Moon, where the XY-chromosomed could reside until they passed out of those feral ages. Living for many adult years in neighborhoods reigned by gangbangers hardened that wish within me. Then, after moving to Bloomington and witnessing the drunken, preening, strutting, brawling, sexual predating deportment of so-called educated lads, I realized Male Assholiness is a universal condition, not limited to those in poor neighborhoods with bad schools and scads of street drugs.

Don’t get me wrong: I would have been among the first rocket-load of temporary exiles. In fact, I should have been shipped off the moment I reached the age of 13. I could have safely returned to Earth when I was 18. My schoolteachers always told me I was advanced for my age.

That martial arts teacher, I’m sure, would have been aghast at the notion of all those Stand Your Ground laws benighted states began enacting a number of years ago. The sensei said his students’ first response to someone snarling, staring, menacing, or threatening is to turn and walk away. His students were to do so again and again. So long as the putative bully didn’t have you cornered or up against the wall, it was your responsibility to defuse the situation. Only a very strong, confident person, this teacher said, could maintain peace.

Then, there was the Trayvon Martin case in Florida (where else?) In February of 2012 Martin, a Black kid, was walking through a predominantly white neighborhood where he was confronted by George Zimmerman, a self-appointed neighborhood protector. Zimmerman demanded to know what Martin was doing there. Martin told him to go fuck himself and tried to go on his way. One thing led to another and Martin ended up getting shot and killed. Zimmerman was eventually brought up on a second-degree murder charge. He was acquitted under Florida’s Stand Your Ground law.

Zimmerman already had called the cops before coming out of his house to face down Martin. They were only moments away when the shot was fired. Zimmerman had stood before Martin and when Martin tried to push his way past, a fistfight ensued and Martin wound up pounding the hell out of him.

All Zimmerman had to do was get out of Martin’s way. He’d already done what he considered his civic duty. He’d dropped a dime on the stranger in his midst and let him know he was under observation. Instead, Zimmerman stood his ground, with the result being a dead teenager.

BTW: we’re not even taking into account the fact that Zimmerman was spooked by the presence of a Black kid on his block, a detail that would turn him into a Right Wing media darling. For pity’s sake, if we start letting Black kids walk down white neighborhood streets, what’ll be next? A Black family living next door? A Black president? (Too late, by the time of the incident, Barack Obama already was nearing the tail-end of his first term — another reason the likes of Zimmerman became such a Fox News/YouTube celebrity. Someone’s gotta hold back the tide!)

Anyway, the Martin killing cemented the idea that there are only two kinds of people in this holy land: Us and Them.

Now, news channels, social media, and all other forms of public discourse are nothing more than arenas for the armchair gladiators among us. I’m always right; you’re always wrong. That’s why I have chosen the sensei’s path in regard to online dialogue. I try like hell to avoid chiming in on tête-à-têtes on that old people’s home called Facebook. No matter which stance I take, I run the risk of being called a Nazi, a commie, an idiot, a pedant, or a mansplainer. One guy once ridiculed me by saying I was using big words in a Facebook argument.

Not terribly long ago, I posted my reaction to Donald Trump taking the Fifth in a legal deposition. I remarked that he was the first ex-president in US history ever to take advantage of the protection against self-incrimination. That’s all. One guy, an old elementary school chum, sprang up almost instantly, railing against me. My only response? “Let’s just say we disagree on this point.” Funny thing is, I don’t even know what we were disagreeing on.

I haven’t really posted anything political since then — and that’s just fine by me.

Right now, there are only two sides to the Israel-Hamas War. Mine and yours. If I disagree with one iota of your position, I am either a bloodthirsty, savage terrorist lover or a bloodthirsty, colonialist despot lover.

The contretemps over Palestinian artist Samia Halaby’s cancelled exhibition at Indiana University’s Eskanazi Museum is the latest case in point. It reflects the larger Israel-Palestine fray. In this college town, Israel is, and always has been, an oppressive, colonial power and the Palestinians are plucky, resilient victims. There’s lot of truth in both statements. Just as it’s true that Israel can defend itself and Hamas wanted to ignite a bloody war.

The week after Hamas carried out its brutal attack on Israeli civilians in October, I said on this global communications colossus that I’m taking no sides, as both are full of shit. Events since then have proven me out: Israel’s response is over the top, bordering on deranged.

I won’t go on social media to say October 7th was an evil act, nor will I assert the incursion into Gaza is barbaric. Even though I believe both things.

Like the sensei advised, I’m avoiding the conflict. On social media, at least.

 

02/01/2024
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Books, Racism, TV/Movies

1000 Words: Black on Black (and other screen screeds)

Perhaps the most unrecognized figure from the civil rights era, Bayard Rustin, is the subject a a biopic running on Netflix these days. Rustin was directed by a black person, George C. Wolfe. It was co-written by a black person, Julian Breece. It was produced by a black company, Michelle and Barack Obama’s Higher Ground Productions. And, of course, it stars a galaxy of black actors including Chris Rock as Roy Wilkins and Jeffrey Wright as Adam Clayton Powell.

Rustin.

I plan to watch the movie by the end of this coming weekend. It’ll be a breath of fresh air after spending two weeks almost continually flat on my back thanks to either the mother of all flus or this year’s COVID variation. I took a COVID test and it read negative but, I understand, these home tests often read negative if you do them too late and, to be sure, I swabbed my nose about a week and a half after experiencing the first symptoms. So maybe I had COVID and maybe I didn’t.

In any case, I spent most of that down time, while awake, watching the entire run of The Sopranos. Eighty-six episodes. I wouldn’t have done such a thing had I not been unable to do any other damned thing. The experience hardened within me a philosophy I’ve held dearly for years. No serial TV program should last more than three years. After thirty or forty episodes, the scriptwriters become desperate, concocting weird, preposterous new situations to challenge the characters and continue to suck viewers further into a rabbit hole. You’ve heard of, natch, the concept of jumping the shark, where the fabulously popular sitcom Happy Days in its fifth season brought Fonzie, in full leather jacket, to some body of water where, to prove his manhood or bravery or what the hell ever, he leaped over a man-eating shark while water skiing. Here’s Wikipedia defining jumping the shark:

…a pejorative that is used to argue that a creative work or entity has reached a point in which it has exhausted its core intent and is introducing new ideas that are discordant with, or an extreme exaggeration of, its original purpose.

In other words, the Happy Days brain trust had run out of good ideas. Ideas that made sense. Jumping the shark became a cultural touchstone, describing precisely what I urge: once a program completes its third year, quit it. Do something else. Come up with another story. Don’t put Henry Winkler in baggy swim trunks and a leather jacket.

Same thing with The Sopranos. Tony Soprano kills Chris Moltisanti by pinching his nostrils together after a car wreck. Carmella Soprano gets jilted by her son’s high school guidance counselor. Tony gulps magic mushrooms. Paulie Walnuts sees a vision of the Virgin Mary. Huh?

All this after several seasons of riveting, dramatic conflict, with credible story lines and compelling character relationships. But, TV  being TV, producers and networks are driven, almost molecularly, to squeeze every last dime out of a property.

I recall another serial I got into when I was sick a few years ago, Ricky Gervais’s After Life. It’s the story of a curmudgeonly widower who decides to punish the world after his wife dies of cancer. The first season ran six episodes, detailing his pain, his backlash, his psychological realizations, and, in the final episode, his surrender to the reality that he must move beyond his agony and begin anew. He meets a woman in a park, they hit it off, and you know he’s on the road to recovery. He’s a normal human again. It’s a sweet, endearing moment. And it should have been the end of the series. But it wasn’t. Two more seasons followed. I didn’t watch any of the rest of it. After that Season 1 finale, it would become a soap opera.

Which is what a lot of premium TV dramas become. Breaking Bad. Mad Men. The Sopranos. Who’s sleeping with whom. Whose heart is broken. Who’s a cad. Who’s a slut.

I just don’t care.

Anyway, Rustin. Another bugbear of mine has been the avalanche of books on American racism that nearly buried us in the wake of Black Lives Matter. Many of the titles were written by white people shaking their fingers at other white people for the shitty deal Black people have gotten in this holy land for 400 years. When I was working at the bookstore, people in droves would come in to get the latest detention slip of a book, some customers carrying armfuls of them to the checkout counter. Make no mistake, there were important, required titles published in that time, including The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander and Between the World and Me, by Ta-nehisi Coates. You may hate on me for this, but I could never shake the feeling that so many of these book purchasers were virtue signaling. And, yeah, there is such a thing as virtue signaling, even though the loons on the Right embraced the term years ago and turned it into an insult.

Watching Rustin will be refreshing because it was done mainly by Black people. Of course, Bayard Rustin was a homosexual so he faced crushing discrimination on two fronts, not the least from his own skin-color brethren and sisteren. Keep in mind that it wasn’t until Barack Obama had become president that he finally publicly embraced same-sex marriage, so jittery was he over alienating millions of church-going Black voters who viewed homosexuality with visceral abhorrence.

For too long, Spike Lee was the only black film director the average person could name. He was famously snubbed by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences time and again at Oscar™ time. Thankfully things have changed in very recent years. Now, Ava DuVernay, Jordan Peele, Julie Dash, Barry Jenkins, Dee Rees, and many others of color are bankable, recognizable figures in Hollywood.

It’s been more than sixty years since Bayard Rustin helped organize the March on Washington. I wonder if he would have been surprised it took this long for Black people to be recognized in one of America’s signature industries.

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