Spillenger's Commonplace Book

Reach Out in the Darkness

Last night my guitar teacher emailed me to cancel today's lesson.  He said he'd been meaning to "reach out to me" regarding this cancellation. 

For some reason I felt like a snitch in NYPD Blue.   And he was David Caruso.  And he was reaching out to me.  Lieutenant: Reach out to your snitches.  David Caruso: I’ll reach out to my snitches.  And away you go.

Now my teacher wasn’t reaching out to tell me he’d decided I didn’t have enough talent for him to waste his time on.  He wasn’t reaching out to tell me the guitar I’d left at his studio had been trampled by a herd of bison and that he’d had to use it for firewood.  He was just “reaching out” to tell me he had to cancel.

Yeah, yeah, language changes, like every other damn thing.  Believe me, I know.  And I know (like Hesiod knew) that words know how to deceive.  I'm even willing to entertain the notion that ALL language is deception.  I’ve had the notion myself.

But sometimes an utterance just goes too far.  Too far in the direction of what you might call shameless and artless crapola.  It's like listening to George Bush when he talked about ... well, about anything.  Not only was he lying, but he was lying so egregiously and so transparently that you couldn't help feeling he didn't care if you knew he was lying or not.

That's what new words and phrases do sometimes.  Case in point: "concern."  At some point, we didn't want to admit we were worried or pissed off or really hated something.  It was, perhaps, too raw an emotional statement.  So when we really hate what someone has said or done, we tell them it “concerns” us.  Reminds me of Philip Seymour Hoffman in "The Big Lebowski": "This is our concern, Dude ..."  It feels safer, softer.  It feels ... inoffensive.

Anyway, back to "reach out."  Why do we need this?  What does this do for us that phone, email, contact, write don't do for us?

Obviously, it adds two things.  First, it adds the veneer of philanthropy.  Reaching out is a good, noble and compassionate thing to do.  It may even be affectionate.  We learned this from Cliff Robertson in the AT&T ads: Reach out and touch someone.  To reach out is clearly nicer than not to reach out.  No one ever screams at his wife over his morning toaster waffle, "Okay, okay!  I'll reach out to the asshole!" and throws the phone book across the room where it hits the wall and drops not 18 inches from Baby Ferdinand in his crib.  No, if you reach out, you are serene, you are Mother Teresa, you betray no inner turmoil.  When people are “concerned,” by the way, they “reach out.”  Get with the program, will ya?

Second, to reach out is to make an effort.  A significant effort.  It's no big deal to make a phone call, but if you “reach out” to someone, you are marshaling the Seven Armies of the Twelve Kingdoms in order to do this.  It suggests that you may, like David Caruso, have to call in all sorts of secret favors, meet in dark, moist alleyways, cast your net far and wide before this person responds to your reaching out.  And when he does, you don’t necessarily get right to the point.  Maybe you buy your snitch a cup of coffee and a cherry pie in a greasy diner; maybe you talk about the weather or the Mets or his methadone jones before you start in with 20 questions.  Get him comfortable first.  Get him receptive. That’s reaching out.

Suddenly, then, if we reach out, we are two things: we are a very, very nice person and an astoundingly hard worker.   And where are these qualities both highly esteemed?  In the corporation, of course.  Corporations like it when you seem to be working really hard.  And they like people who keep their emotions to themselves and present a pleasant, placid and infinitely competent face to the world.  This is the kind of person who "reaches out," when others might phone, write, or even shout out loud like Huey Long.

And so, my friends, this is why we say it.  And this is why I despise it.  Because some linguistic change, if you don't despise it, you're just a tool.

2044

Can you remember how different the world "felt" in 1980 from the way it feels now?  In 1980, one might have set a futuristic story in 2012.  But we don't live in a Jetsons world or even a Blade Runner world.

In what ways would a 1980 person consider the reality of 2012 "futuristic"?  I'm not talking about deep philosophical differences, but things you could see on the street, in people's homes, in the workplace.  How has the texture of life changed in 32 years?  Would a 1980 person be surprised at how little the world has changed, how much it seems like 1980?

Think Rip Van Winkle.  You go to sleep in 1980 and wake up in 2012.  What is the same?  What is different?  Does anything freak you out?  Do people seem different?  Are clothing and car styles notably different?  Are public spaces different?

Now consider 2044.  Thirty-two years in the future.  Ask yourself all the same questions you did of the difference between 1980 and 2012, except apply them to 2012 and 2044.  What will the world be like in 32 years.

Extra credit for especially imaginative prognostications.  Start now.

The Family That Plays Together ...

Nadine Unmixed

I feel sure I've uploaded this track before, but I can't find it anywhere online.  It's a song my son and I did two years ago, and I still like to listen to it.  It really is unmixed -- just a few levels, and almost no EQ or effects.  It's primitive, but as Chris Kenner says, I like it like it that.

I've since gotten rid of the recording software I was using at the time -- it was too much.  Cubase is just too big and strong for a little rock and roll baby like me.  I've switched over to Presonus Studio One, is "just right."

Personnel: Franz Spillenger: piano and killer, wet-your-pants organ solo; Me: rhythm acoustic guitar, Seafoam Green Stratocaster solo, bass, drum machine, percussion, vocals.

If you've heard it before, don't get all excited; it wouldn't kill you to listen a second time.

Student loans

So I get an email on Sunday from one of the various lefty organizations that are always bugging me to save the goddamn world.

I brought it on myself, I know.  Each one of the gaping, insatiable maws that regularly duns me for sudden and selfless acts of conscience knows about me only because I signed some petition, gave some money, marched down some street in the rain with a smeared and illegible posterboard sign, and variously attempted in my feeble, futile, pathetic little way to do some good -- albeit in a form entirely free of risk, cost, and the necessity of actually spending time with other such like "folks" and talking about the "issues," which is probably on the list of the top five things I really hate to do, a list that includes looking at Dick Cheney's ugly ass face for longer than a nanosecond and scraping an almost unbelievable amount of shit off my demented father's naked body in a public bathroom thoughtfully provided by a car rental place at LAX.

And so as Dantesque punishment for my pusillanimous gestures, the sole purpose of which has been to prop up my sagging sense of identity, I am set upon at regular intervals by these hordes of well-meaning Tweedledums who are practically frothing at the mouth like insurance salesmen to tell me just what an exciting opportunity they have for me, or what a disgusting and heinous thing the Republicans have done now, or how deep is the suffering I simply must drop everything to help alleviate.

For this reason, I am neither surprised nor outraged when I receive an email from MoveOn.org absolutely giddy with righteous zeal over the latest movement we simply must support.  And what is this new movement?  It is a movement to forgive all student loans.  Move On bills this cause as an economic stimulus package, presumably because without a student loan payment to make each month, the average American won't be feeling the pinch of our in-the-toilet economy quite so deeply.

Let me admit at the start that my first reaction was not favorable.  Nor was it low key.  No, my first reaction was: What. The. Fuck.  My generation, those without trust funds or oil wells or sugar mamas, was able to fund our higher education at least in part with student loans.  I happen to have been pretty lucky in that I got a lot of free money in the form of grants and fellowships, but I still ended up with an albatross of around $17,000.  And for years and years down the many dreary years of time, I had to make those monthly payments.  I had to find the little coupon book every month, I had to find my checkbook, I had to grit my teeth and mail the check.  And these were often lean times, I can tell you. And I am not the sort of person to know where his coupon book and checkbook are at any given moment.  And I am not the sort of person to remember when my payment is due.  I wasn't then, and I'm not now.

Yet somehow I did it.  Yes, I got hit with late fees all the time, and once the State of New York sued me because I'd missed some payments.  Sued me!  And I would have had to actually take a Greyhound to Albany and hire a lawyer to defend myself from what was evidently an imprisonable offense if my brother hadn't been a lawyer who could speak that lawyer gibberish and talk the authorities into a more reasonable course of action.

Now I am 55 years old.  I went to college and graduate school.  I finally paid off my student loans about five years ago.  It took a while, but I survived.

So, no, my initial reaction was Bugger Off.  You spoiled, entitled, illiterate, politically apathetic, musically vacuous, arrogant little generation, you.  What do you need loan forgiveness for?  It's not like you've opted to sacrifice material comfort for the sake of art, true love or a noble cause.  You're all becoming fucking assistant vice presidents and corporate tools!  Fuck Off, I say!  I paid my damn loans, and you will too.  Life sucks, it does (said with a Cockney accent), and we should all be getting educated for free, but this is not that world, and there are a lot of things like that, and why should you get a free ride?  What makes you so special?

Then I calmed down.  I took several deep breaths.  I considered a more compassionate approach.  I asked myself, What would the Buddha do?  Would he be so mean-spirited and bitter that just because he felt ripped-off by life's suffering, he would ask the next generation to suffer as he had?  I contemplated this for a good long time, and my heart began to soften.

But thankfully, I came to my senses.  There is no way on earth I'm going to sign a petition demanding student loan forgiveness.  It’s a bullshit movement, and it only solidifies liberals’ reputation as whingers deluxe.  But I do thank God, Allah and the truly innumerable Nubian deities that this generation is going to have to confront the destruction of the planet, the melting of the ice caps, the disappearance of clean air and water, the exhaustion of petroleum resources, and all the calamities that will reach their full potential at just about the time I plan to slip off this mortal coil.  Because they're going to need a cause, a job, a disaster – something to pull them away from their X-Boxes and iPhones and stomach-turning self-absorption.  Something to distract them from the agony of having to pay back their student loans.  

And I think the threat of extinction will just about do the job.

 

 

And What With the Blunders

This afternoon, in a brief respite from my job writing about Weddell Seals, thermoclines and the Least Weasel, I dallied with my wife Leslie for a minute or two in an epigrammatic exchange via Skype.  These days she's slaving away at National Geographic and I at Discovery.  She is making a film about transgendered people.  I am doing the North American version of "Frozen Planet," a series on the Arctic and the Antarctic that is supposed to be the follow-up to "Life."  My wife and I therefore have much to talk about at night, since our subject matter overlaps in so many ways.

Anyway, I was supposed to be up and at my computer at 8 this morning, but what with my back problems and the powerful meds I have to take to make life run more smoothly, I overslept.  I wish I could say I leapt out of bed at 9:15, but the truth is I don't do much leaping these days.  I do slow rolls and lazy scampers, followed when necessary by a graceless swing to the vertical, usually accompanied by a grunt and wheeze.  The grunt and wheeze are not an aesthetic choice; they erupt from me involuntarily, as a consequence of the sharp pain that always accompanies my smallest shift of position these days. 

But I digress.

Because I was in a rush, I decided I would only make one cup's worth of coffee in my Chemex pot.  Normally, I make enough for three cups, which is my euphemism for three mugs, in reality about six cups.  I do this because as of about a year ago my wife started drinking coffee again, after years of drinking Fortnum and Mason's Fortmason blend.  As you might expect, this has had concussive effects on the morning ritual that I'd been doing the same way for 10 years.  I eventually adjusted, however, and these days I make "3 cups" so I can have one, Leslie can have one, and there's a little left over if someone wants more -- or, in warm weather, if I have a hankering for an iced coffee with a few drops of vanilla extract, one of the true pleasures in life.

But this is not, as I've already mentioned, the way I did things this morning.  In a mild panic, or in as much of a panic as you can be in with a milligram of dilaudid hitting your system, I made an executive decision: there was no time to make coffee for anyone else.  And that is what I did.

About three hours later, at about noon, I finished revising my script and recording the scratch narration for the revised lines, and I sent off both to my editor.  It was only at this point that I realized I was the only one in the house.  Leslie was not in her office, she was not in the bedroom where she sometimes works, and the car was not in its spot in the driveway.  Clearly she had left.  And I soon began to wonder if perhaps she had been just a little peeved not to have found any coffee in the Chemex pot when she came downstairs.  It wasn't like her to leave without saying goodbye.  I started to fear the worst.  I thought I might be in trouble.

Then I saw that she was "online" in my list of Skype contacts, so I sent her a message: Where did you go?  Her reply was terse: "Where's my coffee?"  I replied with a kind of abbreviated and far more lame version of the story I told above.  At which point she typed: "This is very sad for me."

I agreed.  It was sad.  So I replied, in my best impression of Percy Bysshe Shelley, "O Sadness!"  And she: "Sadnesses!"

I now knew that I was not in trouble, or at least not in much trouble.  And so I wrote, "There are so many little sadnesses that it doesn't matter which of them is sadness."

Now, I wish I could say that Leslie caught my playful allusion to a Kenneth Patchen poem.  She's been writing poetry lately, taking poetry classes and submitting poems to journals.  She is, shall we say, gung ho about it.  So I thought maybe she'd run across this terrific poet and had read this poem which seems to be called "And What With the Blunders."

But instead she wrote, "I expected you to eat the meatloaf."  This was a reference to something I'd said the previous evening about having the slice of leftover meatloaf for lunch the next day.

So I knew what she meant.  Still, it felt like a non sequitur and suggested she didn't know the poem after all.

Soon after this our Skype conversation ended as they almost always do, with her telling me she has to go.  It used to bother me that she was always the one to say this and I never was.  I even took to saying it randomly and completely untruthfully just to keep things even.  Eventually, though, the pettiness of this became distasteful to me, and I let it go.  Mostly.

Anyway, I thought it might be nice to send Leslie a copy of the poem I'd unsuccessfully alluded to.  Maybe she'd like it.  Maybe she'd admire my clever appropriation of its most famous line.  Maybe that would balance out the mild pique she felt at my not having made her any coffee this morning.

So I did a Google search, but astonishingly, after 10 minutes (which is a long time to Google search) I'd come up empty.  Plenty of web sites quoted that final line of the poem, often incorrectly.  Usually they were web sites dedicated to discussions of death and suicide, which I thought was odd.  But the text of "And What With the Blunders" was nowhere to be found.  Nonetheless, I persevered.  I was stubborn.  I would not accept that nowhere on the whole World Wide Web could one find the text of one of the really good poems of a really good writer.  In my travels I found the poem Ferlinghetti wrote in memory of Patchen when he died.  I found some guy who had set the poem to music, sort of -- but only that last line!  I found discussion groups where high school girls debated the merits of individual vs. group suicide via a vigorous and often rancorous debate over this one line.  But though I searched for another fifteen minutes, I failed to find the poem itself.

As it happens, my dog Ollie likes to stay in the basement with me during the warm months -- and we have had a few warm days recently, so he's here.  In fact, he's here now as I write.  But earlier today as I contemplated my misfortune, I turned around to see him staring at me happily and wagging his tail.  Once he had my attention, he got up and walked over to a bookcase and stood there staring and wagging.  And then suddenly it hit me: I actually owned several books of Patchen's poems, and there they were, on the bookshelf. 

Now, I'm not insane.  I know Ollie wasn't saying to me, "Hey moron, you just wasted half an hour looking for something online that's sitting right in front of you in actual physical form."  I also know that the back door is right next to the bookcase -- the same back door I often use to take him for a walk.  He was probably angling for a promenade.  Still, it set me back a bit to realize that my first move hadn't been to look for the book.

Okay, so this could easily degenerate into a kvetch-fest (something I've been known to indulge in from time to time) about modern technology and analog vs. digital and blah blah blah.  I could talk about the fact that I finally went and bought an iPad (and love it) and have been trying to figure out a way to write on it -- an app that synchs automatically with my desktop.  I could get into the whole debate over whether the iPad is just for content consumption or if it can be used for content creation.  Perhaps I could spend a sentence or two talking about this disturbing word "content," which you hear a lot more these days than "art," "poetry," and the like.  I could do all this and more, and you might even find some of what I say provocative or interesting.  Far more likely you would be bored to tears and words like "tiresome" and "garrulous" and "prattle" would spring to mind.  Worse yet, I would bore myself into a state of blithering.

So let me just say I think there's a moral in this story somewhere.  I don't quite know what it is, but maybe you do.

In the meantime, here is the poem in question, read by the poet himself.  I hope you like it.

 

And What with the Blunders

 

Back to the Woodshed

Up here at the Shackteau in St. Rose, I get all the time I want to play my banjo and to work on our “relationship.”  And believe me, our relationship needs constant attention.

As a perfectionist (aka obsessive-compulsive), I am always driven to find “the right way” to do something.  I’m not sure I always know what the right way is, or even how to determine what it is, but it usually involves “received knowledge” of some kind – in other words, I do what other people tell me to do.  I let them define “the right way” for me.

As a banjo player, this emotional imperative has not been entirely counter-productive.  It’s led me to listen to lots of bluegrass music, practice a lot, collect a bunch of tablature and instructional materials, which I’ve devoured.  I thought doing these things would be a part of doing banjo “right,” so I did them.  Of course, I’m not a total robot; I did have lots of fun in the process, I learned a lot of technique and loved getting to know the bluegrass tradition.  But this emotional imperative has had an unfortunate effect on me as a musician.

You can’t really be a musician if you care too deeply or single-mindedly about “getting it right.”  The difference between a dabbler and a musician is that the musician surrenders himself to the void, the uncertainty of what lies ahead.  The dabbler learns how to parrot what others have done, which he tells himself is the right way to do it.  It is safer and ultimately more superficial and limiting.

To be a musician, you have to honor your instrument, take it seriously, practice hard and smart.  But you also have to trust your own instincts, and let your authentic self (as incomprehensible and unpleasant as it may be) express itself in your playing.  You have to be willing to walk away from what you think is the right way.  If you are a perfectionist, you have to train yourself to not care so much.

It’s not easy to walk away from this mind set.  In fact, it can be the most difficult kind of spiritual test.  Those not plagued by a rigid compulsion to get things “right” are lucky in some ways, but they don’t have the opportunity to fight this particular fight, and by fighting grow.  Their battles take other forms.

Any practice is an opportunity to know yourself through the process of doing.  A crucial part of any ritual activity is simple repetition, nothing more lofty than that – coming back again and again to something trains your mind and body, or better, cultivates a mutually beneficial relationship between being and doing.  That forces you to let go of your compulsive thinking.  In other words, any practice is meditation.

Last night, after a few days of rainy grey weather, my solar batteries got low.  So I shut off everything – computer, internet antenna, etc. – and sat down with my banjo.  I played without accompaniment or tablature.  My dog was snoozing to my left.  The only light was from an oil lamp a few feet away.

I started simply noodling.  Noodling for no real reason, no rationale.  Noodling for 3 hours.  Sometimes I wondered whether I was playing something like JD Crowe played it.  Sometimes I wondered if I should position my hands differently.  But mainly I ignored that stuff and just interacted with my banjo.  I experimented with different sounds, different rolls, different times.  I resisted the impulse to get out my metronome, or my tuner.  I used my own ears to tune the thing, to keep in tempo.

I’ve never played better.  You know it when you’re hot.  You know when you’re in the pocket.  And I was.  My fingers started to dance with the strings and frets and notes, but with precision too and with soul.  I listened in my head for tunes whose melody I knew – shortnin’ bread, fisher’s hornpipe, on top of old smokey, blackberry blossom, blowing in the wind, clinch mountain backstep … one after the other they came out of me, and I played with them, tried out different things, picked out the melodies and tried to fit them into roll patterns or melodic phrases.  There was no “right way” but the way I was playing something.  As a result, when I put the banjo down I felt I knew the neck, knew what sounds would emerge from different places on the instrument better than I ever had before.  It was cool, as Butt-head might say.

So two pieces of advice, for myself and for people who are engaged in making music and who might be blocked for some of the same reasons I’ve described.  With a few adjustments, these might have some relevance to other arts as well, who knows.

First, make time to noodle, to fool around, to work your craft with the least number of additional items and equipment possible.  Pare it down to the minimum.  No computer, no books, no sheet music, no capo, no tuner.  Just play, play what comes to you; encounter questions and answer them; work out technical problems by playing, not by consulting forums on the web; find your own way of doing things.  This isn’t to say that others don’t have things to teach you or that it isn’t worthwhile to work at something that at first doesn’t feel natural.  It’s just that for those of us who already spend too much time being OCD, it’s important to just let go and play – on a regular basis.  Every day would be good.

The second piece of advice is to really listen, to have melodies in your head as you play and to follow that melody – respect the melody.  This means choosing songs to play that you really know from listening to them.  If you know the melody really well, you can figure out how to play it, and not only that you will be able to improvise on it.  Improvisations based solely on chord progressions are often not as strong as those rooted somewhat in the melody.  But you can’t do that if you aren’t completely familiar with the melody in your head.  If you can’t hum it silently to yourself.  It’s important to become the melody; that is, to really embody it.

All these things, as we now know, affect the structure of the brain.  The more we listen, the more developed the neural centers connected to listening become.  The more we play, the more our brains change to become good at playing.  And play is at the heart of musical improvisation.

This is what I think of when I hear the word “woodshedding.”  To woodshed is really to just spend lots of time over an extended period bonding with your instrument.  Infants bond with their mothers, puppies bond with their humans, and banjos bond with their players.  Banjos are like anyone else: they want above all to be known.  And they’ll repay the effort you make by knowing you back.  And what could be sweeter than that?

 

Zombie Me

I get an email from Facebook telling me I have two friends with birthdays on July 3^rd.

One will be 57, the other 37.  They come from such completely different periods in my life that thinking about them together makes my head gong like a brass bell.

The last time I saw Mr. 57, Mr. 37 had yet to be born.  Conceived, even.  Maybe his parents hadn’t even met.

I wonder whether Messers 37 and 57 would get along.

I don’t know either of these “friends” particularly well, but now I know they share a birthday.

And for the next little while I will be tormented by questions arising from this.

Facebook is like bringing someone back to life, like in Pet Sematary.  There’s something demonic about the resurrected person.  Something missing.

Friendship is a word like intelligence, love, poetry.  Like them, it is an important word for us, because like them it reflects some deep need in the species: the need to understand, or connect, or create.  But these word/ideas also grow from the desire to categorize: to find essential points of commonality among disparate events and thereby create a category.  Put enough trees together, and you’ll eventually start to feel comfortable with the category of tree.  Then you define tree to explain why you believe all these different entities belong in a single category.  Branches, photosynthesis, bark, leaves, birds like to hang out in them, etc.  What a life we would have if we had to consider every tree its own individual self!  It would be time-consuming.  Better to have the category.  But once we have the category, we argue about it, specifically what gets to go into it.  We like to argue.

Same with intelligence.  Is she “smart”?  “He’s not very smart.”  Psychologists have their measures of intelligence, zen masters theirs, biologists and political activists theirs, dancers theirs.  I suppose even George W. Bush has his.  Sometimes, when we observe that someone is not “smart,” we begin to suspect that there is some other kind of intelligence they may have in spades.  For example, there is analytical intelligence – the capacity to take things apart and understand the relation of part to whole.  But there is also associational intelligence: a talent for seeing the relations among things, seeing patterns and shapes, analogies and metaphors.  Some people seem to be strong in one area, and not so strong in another.  Are they intelligent?  How many other kinds of intelligence are there?  How many kinds are we perhaps not even aware of?  How many before we begin to feel the word itself is not as precise as we thought?  Before we realize the word exists partly to exclude and reject? -- We are at least as interested in the lack of intelligence as we are in its presence.  Perhaps we will evolve to the point where rather than refining the category to explain why such evidently different things are in it, we start to lose our taste for categorizing altogether.  We may become so “intelligent” that “intelligence” is no longer meaningful and every individual moment remains unencumbered by word.

If we can lump prose-poems, lyric, epic, dramatic poetry, satirical poetry, and haiku into a single category called Poetry, then the definition must be very supple indeed – so supple that maybe it is meaningless?  How do you like this poem?  I think it is not a poem at all.  Okay fine, how do you like that poem?  I think it is a poem but not a very good poem.  And your gauge of poemness?  Invariably one gets a lot of blah blah blah in response to this question.  And that is probably as it should be, because history is messy and people just come along and call something a poem, or call something intelligence, and everyone sort of goes along, but they’re not worried about the fate of the category or whether this item will play nicely with all the other members of the set.  They’re just doing their thing, living in their own time.  But maybe then they write a book, and they call it Intro to Poetry.  This is the problem.  This is one reason why it’s so hard to say what something is – because we’ve put so many things into the category that it becomes impossible to put our finger on that essential common feature.

Love – well, it’s hard to know whether to say nothing about this or to say a lot.  I’m going to opt for nothing.  Apply what I’ve said about poetry and intelligence to love, and you’ll get the general idea.

So, we come to the category of friendship.  I value friendship, but I don’t have many friends.  I may not have any at all, really.  So maybe I’m not the right person to have an opinion, but I’m going to go out on a limb anyway and say what I think is the single most important quality of a friend:

You spend time with them. 

I don’t know how much, but some fairly regular time.  In person, not via electronic media.  Which means you have to live in the same place, at the same time. And you probably need to not be so caught up in your vastly over-rated job and your vastly over-rated children that you never hang out with friends. 

Now I know of course that this Facebook thing has brought lots of people together who maybe used to be friends a while back but have fallen out of touch.  And many people will say that they have rediscovered an old friend, and are friends with them now again.  But that’s not really true.  You are in touch with them, yes; and they used to be a friend, maybe; but now they’re just a person you are in touch with who used to be your friend.  That’s what I mean about the Pet Sematary aspect of Facebook: You’ve brought them back from the dead, but it’s not really the same.  Either they’re not the same, or you’re not the same, or you both aren’t (which is not such a big surprise), or you just don’t have the context anymore for being friends.  More important, you live a thousand miles apart.  Most of the things that make friendship possible are only possible in person.

How many times have you connected up on Facebook with someone you remember fondly from the old days, only to find that you run out of things to say after a couple of exchanges and feel this profound sense of disappointment and maybe even a little embarrassment?  How do you hold on to your pleasant little memories now?  More important still: How do you get rid of this person?  It’s happened to me more than once.  They are literally the same person, but put together the fact that you haven’t been in touch for so long with the fact that your relationship has no external social or cultural context, no real reason for being (e.g., a place, a job, a school), and it withers and dies pretty quick.  Oh maybe you hold out for a while, sustained by memories and old stories, but sooner or later – it just feels bad.

And this is because you are trying to be friends with a zombie.  It feels bad to be friends with a zombie.  It is unrewarding.  And make no mistake (as Obama says), you are both zombies to each other – you are undead.   A zombie does some of the things a real person does, like walk and make noise.  But whatever's human in them is gone.  Same with you.  You have done a Dr. Frankenstein on your past, and you know how that story ended.

I think there shouldn’t be Facebook friends; there should be Facebook zombies.  There should be a button you can press on someone’s page to “zombie” them.  And then they can accept your zombie request.  And you can proceed to have an exquisitely unfulfilling relationship until one of you eats the other.

Friendships are never formed in a vacuum; they are rooted in place and time.  It’s funny how we’ve forgotten that.  When that time and place are gone, the friendship is dead and if you try to bring it back to life, you’d better get used to staggering down ravaged streets to chase down the few remaining humans so you can gnaw on their faces.

Because that’s about as good as it’s going to get.

 

Why I Am Not a Liberal (with apologies to Frank O'Hara)

A friend of mine recently turned me on to an interesting article about Paul Krugman, written by Benjamin Wallace-Wells for New York Magazine.  It was entitled “What’s Left of the Left.”  I recommend it, but I’m not going to discuss its main points here.  I have another agenda.

As I read, what struck me as odd from the get-go was the apparent failure of both the writer and Krugman himself to distinguish between “the left” and liberalism.  To me these have always seemed different things and worth keeping distinct.

While I do consider myself a lefty, it’s always been impossible for me to identify as a “liberal.”  It gives me the willies just to try it on for size.

Now, I’m aware of the long and storied history of liberalism in political philosophy.  I value the classic liberalism of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries with its emphasis on personal freedom, equality, limited government intrusion on individuals’ lives, and the obligation of the haves to help out the have-nots by paying a significant tithe on their income (aka the welfare state).

But that’s not what I’m talking about.  If most of the liberals I know about even have a political philosophy, it’s just a pale echo of something that once was.  (By the way, that trick is called “synaesthesia.”)

In any case, I’m interested in knowing why I think about things so differently from your garden-variety liberal and Republican.  Why I don’t fit into either of these camps.  Why I don’t think either has much to offer the Republic.  If I’m going to continue to be this way, there has to be a reason.

Liberals usually seem a little pathetic and fuzzy-headed to me.  They won’t fight the good fight to make sure we don’t invade Iraq, but then they whine about it when it’s very difficult to get out quickly.  They’re always a day late and a dollar short.  Any thinking person knew the war in Vietnam was hopeless and wrong in 1963.  Socialists like A.J. Muste knew it.  The Catholic Workers knew it.  But liberals didn’t do anything until 1968 or 1969 (Fulbright being a notable exception), when the rising flood of body bags started making the ostrich strategy untenable.  Liberals talk to me about banning “hate speech” because it hurts people’s feelings.  Liberals tell me I have to say “African-American” instead of “black.”  Liberals want everyone to be free, but they don’t want “them” moving in next door.  Liberals are hand-wringers.  One typical liberal, also an Ivy League history professor, told me when we were in the thick of the first Gulf war, “One simply doesn’t know what to do!”  Right.

Liberals buy into the system and stake out a position contrary to the that of the conservatives.  They are reactive.  They oppose things about which nothing is likely to be done – within the system, anyway.  They take positions that are easy and unlikely to cost them much.  They tend not to get arrested for chaining themselves to the gate.  They throw really boring wine and cheese parties.

Are there any liberals in national politics?  If so, they let George W. get elected twice.  They let the health care public option be scuttled.  They let our young people continue to die in Iraq and Afghanistan.  They let our planet get pillaged by robber barons.  They let all this happen and feel okay about it because they were against it.  Maybe.  But being against it isn’t enough.

Okay, I’m exaggerating.  Maybe I’m using too broad a brush.  But this is what I think every time I listen to a liberal acquaintance talk about an issue and every time I hear a liberal politician on the boob tube.  They accept the system we’ve got and tell themselves they’ve got to work within the system, which means very little changes.  Obama is a liberal.  Pelosi is a liberal.  They say you have to “govern from the center.”  Bullshit.  You have to figure out what’s right and just and fair and work your ass off to make that happen.  You have to lay it on the line.  Otherwise you’re just full of hot air and no better than the scumbag on the other side of the aisle.  Worse.

The “Left” is something different, at least in my world view.  The fact that we don’t distinguish between the two is depressing, and telling.  We get the term from the way the legislature seating was arranged around the time of the French Revolution.  The people on the left side of the room were radicals.  They thought the revolution was pretty much a good thing.  They didn’t accept the system; they wanted a new one.  The Marxist “Old Left” was definitely aiming for a revolution in which the workers would reshape society and do away with class.  The basic ideology of the “New Left” in the 1960s was also revolutionary in its own way, though its more coherent exponents like C. Wright Mills and Herbert Marcuse weren’t exactly old-school Marxists.  They thought that the radical student movements of the day held more promise.

I didn’t get involved in this world until 1969, when I was in high school.  But it was all around me even before then.  My parents both explicitly identified themselves as anarchists, and one of my 8^th-grade papers, I recall, was on Mikhail Bakunin.  In high school, I wrote another on Prince Kropotkin.  In the summer of 1968, I was at St. Mark’s Church at a Joan Baez concert when she suddenly announced, in tears, that tanks were rolling into Prague.  Politics was all around me, and dissent.

By the time I was in 9^th grade, I was deeply involved with the Fifth Avenue Vietnam Peace Parade Committee, the Moratorium Committee and the War Resisters League.  My parents had taken me to many antiwar demonstrations when I was a kid, including the October 1967 event where the Yippies tried to levitate the Pentagon.  (We didn’t have much success.)  I remember Dr. Spock spoke.  I was 11.  By 1969, I was spending a lot of time at meetings in smelly lofts, where discussions got quite lively.  I was named a “marshall” of the Moratorium march on Washington in November where, among other things, I manned a donation bin and got my picture on the cover of the Guardian, a lefty paper.  I also got tear-gassed, which, if you haven’t had the pleasure, was pretty awful.

In 1970, I phoned in a bomb scare to my high school from a supermarket around the corner.  It was part of a loosely organized (and I’m being generous) plan to mobilize student activism and shut down New York high schools.  Within 10 minutes, hundreds of kids and teachers and secretaries poured out the front doors, which was quite a sight to behold.  I was very pleased.  Once the building was emptied, and the cops had started their search for the bomb, crowds of us were hanging out on 15^th Street drinking Yago Sangria and singing songs.  At a certain point, cops with riot gear were stationed at the front doors – as though this drunken, stoned, disorganized throng could do anything dangerous.  Fun-loving as we were, a few of us went up to talk to the guards, and with no warning at all they charged.  We ran away, they gave chase, and the crowd totally panicked.  Not very fleet of foot even then, I got caught and smacked on the thigh by a cop’s rubber truncheon, the pain of which I will never forget.  He ran past me after other escaping 14-year-olds, and I lay on the ground with hot pain tears in my eyes, feeling angry but proud.

This is the way it was.  It was a time in our history, and I was a teenager looking for meaning, a sense of belonging, the chance to be a hero, which is something a lot of us want, especially when we’re young.  No value judgment here, but we weren’t liberals.  We had nothing to lose – no families of our own, no money, no houses, no cars, no careers.  But we had been radicalized, some of us anyway.  And we had a cause.  It was fun, lots of girls, plenty of weed, a sense of common purpose.  Some were more serious and committed than others.  But I was a believer.

After high school, my involvement waned.  I refuse to register for the draft, which was going on because of the war in Cambodia.  I finally caved in when counselors at the War Resisters League told me the FBI would arrest me soon, and it wasn’t worth it because the war would be over in a few months anyway.  Later I saw my FBI file through FOIA, and it is amazing how much time and money they spent watching me, even at a time when my political activism was dwindling.  In college I was part of a few demonstrations and sit-ins, but not many.  Then, long afterwards, when I was a graduate student instructor at Columbia, I was involved in some things having to do with making the university divest itself of interest in companies that did business in South Africa (that was where I met and sang with Pete Seeger).  I did a few other things, but my commitment was waning.  I still felt the pull, but my life began to be about my work and my family.  It happens to all of us, I guess.

Still, it’s in my DNA.  It’s part of how I view the world.  To this day, I am convinced that most politicians, especially on the national level, are corrupt.  They have to be, that’s the system.  I am convinced that they will say anything to get elected and then we just forget, and the news media help us forget.  And on it goes.

I am also convinced that to be a Republican you have to be either stupid, ignorant or profiting mightily from Republican policies that favor the wealthy (i.e., corrupt).  No one with half a brain can believe some of the things that come out of their mouths.  I have never, and I mean never, heard a Republican policy that I agree with or that I think isn’t about getting re-elected, greasing the major donors, or feeding the fat cats at the expense of the rest of us.  They are a party of hate and division.  Their environmental policy is disgusting and short-sighted (and by the way, what is it?).  Imagine a party that has for all this time denied the reality of global warming!  Their tax policy is unspeakably unjust.  Their stances on social issues are, as a whole, ignorant of what life is like for most people in this country, fueled by the need to appeal to their constituency’s worst fears and hatreds, and intellectually barren.  They are the running dogs of the economic elite, the major multinational corporations and the powerful trade lobbies and will say and do anything to keep doing that job.

More than this, I believe that the two-party system of representative democracy we have in this country doesn’t work for the good of the many, at least at the highest levels of government.  Sensible policies like investment in green sources of energy are shot down year after year.  Anyone with a brain in their skull knows that petroleum is getting more expensive to produce every year and that we will run out soon enough.  That coal is not a viable option if we want to survive.  Decisions are being made again and again that say, in effect, “I don’t give a shit about my children’s generation and my grandchildren’s generation.  They’re just going to have to fend for themselves.  I’ve got mine, and that’s what I care about.”  This is not what a civilized society does.

So, for me modern-day liberals and Republicans are two sides of the same coin.  Which is why I remain, at heart, a lefty.  I can’t call myself a radical, as I once did, because I don’t do as much as I should to foment radical change.  I am lazy, greedy and somewhat confused about what I can contribute.  But here’s some of what I believe:

• I believe that individuals should be allowed to say anything they damn well please, whenever they please, no exceptions.  The movement to ban “hate speech” is appalling to me, because what you want in these situations is more speech, not less.  Give hate-mongers a forum, so everyone will know what they stand for.  Don’t make it go underground, where it will get stronger.
• I believe that having an abortion is a spiritually corrosive act, especially if it’s used as a form of birth control; but I believe the individual has to make that ethical decision for herself, not the government.
• I believe that rich people and corporations should be taxed and taxed and taxed until there are better opportunities in this country for everyone.  I don’t care what any supply-side asshole says; no one needs to net more than a million dollars a year.
• I believe that a presidential and congressional election system that privileges those with the money to buy votes by offering only two candidates and making sure that only they get to talk to the electorate is a rigged system.  Do we really believe that of all the smart, informed, experienced, courageous and committed people in this country, George W. Bush was the best we could do?  For two terms?  That, my friends, is a fucked-up system.

An oft-quoted (unfortunately mainly by militias these days) passage from a 1787 letter by Thomas Jefferson to William Smith:

God forbid we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, & always well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions it is a lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. We have had 13. states independent 11. years. There has been one rebellion. That comes to one rebellion in a century & a half for each state. What country before ever existed a century & a half without a rebellion? & what country can preserve it's liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon & pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. It is it's natural manure.

I am not arguing for a violent overthrow of the U.S. government.  Our third President is.  I love the line “The part which is wrong will be discontented in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive.”  Sounds a lot like Teabaggers.

I think it’s worthwhile from time to time to remember that one of our founding fathers was worried about the complacency of the citizenry.  That the policies we abhor, and the impotence we may feel, grow at least in part from “lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty.”

And the fact that this rings so true and seems so relevant to our present dilemma may be one of the reasons why I am not a liberal.

When Will the Sparrow Get Pissed Off?

"Instead of resorting to tired old class warfare rhetoric, pitting one working American against another, the president and the Democratic leadership should start working with us this week to ensure a fair and open debate to pass legislation to cut spending and freeze tax rates without any further delay.”  -- John Boehner

"We will not compromise our economy to accommodate the class warfare rhetoric of this administration." -- Mike Pence (R-Ind.)

"I don't think Americans should be pitting Americans against each other.  Americans agree with President Kennedy's formulation that a rising tide lifts all boats.... We all aspire to be in the very top groups of whatever we're talking about. And because of the kind of country we have, we have that opportunity and people do move from one income tax bracket up to the next one for example, as we increase our incomes.” – Jon Kyl

In 2009, the last year for which we have accurate figures, the income gap between the very-rich and the poor ballooned to an all-time high in this country.  The top 20% (those making $100,000 a year or more) got almost 50% of all income generated in this country, while those below the poverty line (about 6.3% of the population) received 3.4%.  The U.S. income disparity between rich and poor is the highest among all Western industrialized nations.  There is now greater income concentrated in the ends of the wealthy few than at any time since 1928.  You may recall what happened in 1929.

The not-exactly-progressive Wall Street Journal reported that in 2008 the richest .01% of the population had 22.2% of the wealth.  That’s 14,000 American families.  The bottom 90%, or about 130 million families, had just 4%.

Now the Republicans want to extend the Bush tax cuts for everyone – including the super-rich.  The Democrats say no way – extend them maybe, but only for the lower and middle classes.  The Republicans say that when the super-rich have low taxes, that translates into more jobs.  The Democrats say no way: There’s no evidence that Reagan’s massive tax cuts and Bush’s comparatively modest ones did much to create jobs or grow the economy.  They point to the significant growth of jobs and the GDP as a result of Clinton’s tax hikes.  The Republicans say that what’s good for General Motors is good for America and that our economy depends on making the corporate moguls happy – and richer.  The Democrats say that with these guys a few million simoleons isn’t going to make a big difference in their wealth, happiness or the good of the Republic.  And on and on and on it goes.

I’m not an economist, and I confess my eyes glaze over when I try to make sense of all the detailed statistics that are bandied about as Democrats and Republicans chase each other around the room.  I’ve read a little Keynes, a little Galbraith, and a smattering of Marx.  I keep my eye on Krugman.  But I’m like a monkey in the operating room: You wouldn’t want to hand me the scalpel.  Still,  that doesn’t mean I don’t have a few thoughts on the matter.

It makes me angry, I admit at the start, that discussions on topics that affect large numbers of real people, with real (more or less) lives, so quickly reach a point where no one can understand them.  Which, I suppose, is where most politicians probably prefer that they stay.  We, the citizenry, are flummoxed and befuddled by the most basic issues affecting us.  We can’t help but feel we’re missing something.  So, unable to come up with a reasoned opinion based on “the facts,” we do what we hope is the next best thing: We take a position.

But positions, unless they’re being described in an illustrated edition of the Kama Sutra, are not really the next best thing.  They fall into the category of what Plato would call doxa – in other words, a rough guess based on appearances and prejudices and emotions.  For Plato – and he’s not a bad guy to be reminded of from time to time – the only road to the truth was reason.  (Well, there was the divine madness of the poets, but that’s another blog post.)

But who among us is free enough of his prejudices to heal his ignorance with the pristine balm of reason?  Not many, I can tell you.  So, if reason won’t help us figure out an opinion on this question, where oh where can we turn?  I say we won’t go too far off-track if we trust our instincts.

Now, I realize that with us humans there’s a fine line between instinct and prejudice.  When I gaze slack-jawed at the Neanderthal chest-beating of the Tea Partiers, for example, I feel sure that they’re going with their gut.  Maybe Jim Jones was going with his gut.  For all I know, so was Genghis Khan.  So, let’s add some qualifications.

If you are not insane or psychotic; if you’ve had some education (even if it’s in the school of hard knocks) and actually try to think about things critically and independently of all the horseshit that you hear on the tube; if you have some passing familiarity with some of the major events in human history; and if you are self-aware enough to be leery of your own knee-jerk reactions to things, then I think it’s not a bad idea to trust your instincts.  Instinct tempered by a modest amount of good judgment.

This is important, because it means you don’t always have to know all the gory details; you don’t have to listen to every last pundit and read every last web article and carefully weigh the details and nuances of every argument to know where the truth lies.  In a world that bombards us with so much data, opinion and sheer verbiage, we can cut through it all and come to a point of view based on an intuitive grasp of right and wrong, truth and bullshit.  In other words, we don’t have to be deer caught in the headlights of the modern information machine.

And so I come to the debate about extending the Bush tax cuts, armed only with a brain (such as it is) and my instincts.

Extending the Bush tax cuts for the super-rich is supposed to be good for us all.  If the super-rich get to keep more of their profits, they will use it to create jobs and buy more expensive shit (whatever it is that rich people feel they still need to buy).  They will open up more factories and retail stores and laboratories and massage parlors with all this extra cash, and we will all be the beneficiaries.  The economy itself is an engine fueled by the energy, innovation and investment of the private corporate sector.  Take away these massive incentives to be energetic, innovative and investment-happy, and the princes of corporate America will feel the wind go out of their sails, the lead go out of their pencils.  They will become grumpy and morose.  They will start to gaze wistfully out the window.  They will settle for just “pretty good” and not strive for “excellence.”  And all this corporate ennui will trickle down to the rest of the economy, the rest of the nation.

Further, to question the right of the mega-rich to hold onto every nickel is to plunge a stake into the heart of the American Dream (see the quotation from the ever-entertaining Jon “Stop Making Fun of Me” Kyl above).  The American Dream, or so I am told, is that anyone, armed with nothing but effort and ability, can rise to the highest echelons of social and economic success.  This is of course a very enticing idea.  So enticing that it deludes millions of Americans every year into voting for the party of the oligarchs even though the oligarchs have been screwing them every which way till Sunday for ... well, for a really long time.

"It's called the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it."  -- George Carlin

You may have asked yourself every now and then why Mr. Double Wide with the raggy-assed mullet has been voting Republican every chance he gets and helping carry bubble-heads like George W. Bush into the White House for two terms, when he is the direct and incontrovertible victim of Republican domestic and foreign policy agendas since time immemorial.  It’s partly because he dreams, in his dreamy chucklehead way, that he will some day enjoy the fruits of the American Dream.  For Mr. Double Wide, it’s not that the system is rigged so that he’ll be still trying to take out a second mortgage on “Ol’ Southern Cross” when he’s 92; it’s that he just hasn’t quite gotten there yet.  The check is the mail.  It’s only a matter of time.

And this is why we’re hearing so much lately by these Republican con artists about “class warfare.”  The Democrats are trying to stir up class warfare.  They don’t realize that this is a nation founded on the ideal of total class freedom and radical vertical mobility!  They are striking at the very heart of this great nation!  In fact, they are starting to sound positively Marxist!

Well, I won’t be the first to point out that class warfare is here, and it wasn’t the teeming masses that started it.  When you have a small group of people with all the money and they won’t let anyone else have any, that’s class warfare.  Well, it is if the victims of this massive theft are smarter than rocks and more courageous than sheep.

We’ve seen it time and again.  Royalty and aristocracy accustomed to getting all the dough, middle classes who want a little more, and poorer classes who want something anything.  A system of the kind we have in place, with tax breaks so transparently unfair that General Electric can pay NO TAXES, and lobbyists and PACs in place to make sure that that politicians know which side their bread is buttered on, can only tend to piss off the people who are getting the shaft.  And rightfully so.

One does tend to wonder why we who do not belong to the super-rich class have put up with this for so long – and why some otherwise intelligent-sounding people actually seem to support low tax rates for the wealthy.

“No one in this world has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.”  -- H.L. Mencken

So, if in fact the super-rich can be said to be waging class war on the lower classes (and if you’ve been paying attention, you’ll know that’s exactly what I’m saying), then maybe their stooges in Congress can just stop making it seem like someone in the White House is whipping the Third Estate into a frenzy.

Now we come to the question of whether extending the Bush tax cuts will help the economy.

It’s been pretty well established, I think, that when they get a little extra dough, rich people do different things with it than your average person.  While you and I may use it to pay down our credit debt or get current with our bills or patch a leaky roof, rich people just tend to put it with the rest of their diamonds and rubies.  They’ve pretty much already got all the toys any human could possibly use.  Their purchasing does not increase.  Moreover, the notion that the moguls will somehow use the money they save by not having to pay their fair share will be put into higher salaries for their workers, better working conditions, improved environmental safeguards, or even more jobs (in this country, at least) is ludicrous.  I was searching for a better word, but ludicrous will have to do.  Okay, how about breathtakingly stupid?  If the Wall Street bailout taught us anything, it’s that there is no selfishness too shameful for a corporate executive – why these immense bonuses continue to be paid in the face of new revelations every day about how the country was ripped off by these Armani-clad snakes is incomprehensible.  No, Virginia, corporations and their executives will not take a pay cut, forego a bonus, pay fair wages, be responsible stewards of the environment, do the right thing in any of the many ways they could, just because they are nice guys.  (And by the way, they’re not.)

Which brings me to the horse and the sparrow.  Trickle-down economics, it turns out, we have always had with us.  Wherever there are a bunch of rich people who want to keep every last cent of the money that rolls into their coffers, there is some greasy rationalization put forth arguing that all this greed is really benevolence in disguise.  They are only doing what’s best for the country, and it truly pains them to have to make all this money and pay so small a tithe.  Trickle-down, supply side, Reaganomics.  It has many names.  In the late 19^th century, it was called the horse and sparrow theory.  The idea is that the food you feed your horse eventually comes out the other end as something the sparrows can eat.  You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the shit falls.

But others have seen this “theory” for what it really is.  John Kenneth Galbraith called it a cover for paying off wealthy campaign contributors, and said it had contributed to a late 19^th century depression in this country.  Even David Stockman, a reliable cheerleader for supply side economics during his years with Reagan, has repudiated the idea.

Many smart people have pointed out that if you want to increase consumer spending, maybe you should leave the average consumer with more money to spend.  Maybe we should be talking more about trickle-up economics.  Shouldn’t we be saying that if the great mass of people are doing well, then the corporations do well, not the other way round?

And here is where instinct comes in.  People with fancy suits and fancy degrees can appear on TV and tell you that sparing the wealthy their fair share of responsibility for funding our national work is really the best thing to do.  And smug pundits can assure you that if you just understood a little better how economics works, you’d get why this is the right way to go.  And CNN anchors can continue to pummel us with he said / she said stories that basically say, “Who the fuck knows?”  But deep down in your heart, you know the truth.  You don’t need any more information than you already have.  You know that to tax someone who makes $300 million a year at a higher rate than someone who makes $80,000 is the intuitively right thing to do.  They have gotten the benefit of living in this country in ways they probably don’t even recognize.  They’ve lived with relatively clean air and drinking water; they’ve been educated; they’ve had utilities that mostly work; they’ve been kept safe from warfare (except maybe the class kind) on our shores.  They owe this country a tithe. 

They owe it because we are, or should be, a people, and not just a collection of individual persons.  Because we have the resources in this country to take care of our wounded, sick, broken, starving and impoverished.  We just don’t do it because we prefer to put it into people’s private treasuries.  So now we have a choice.  Either we decide we’re going to try to lower the deficit on the backs of the people who need our help the most.  Or we decide to take just a little more from the people who need it the least.

So here’s my gut opinion: No one needs more than $50 million a year.  Not while people are starving and living in shitholes, when there’s no money for real education reform, no money to clean up our air and water, no money to fast-track research into alternate energy sources, no money to finally cure AIDS and cancer and make affordable health care available to everyone.  It’s obscene.  If we are a nation, we should be able to make sure that all segments of our country have a shot at life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. 

Otherwise, who knows?  A little class warfare could be right around the corner.  At this point, I’m thinking that might not be such a bad idea.

 

Chiaroscuro

So I'm checking out of the Washington Square Hotel, where I've been staying for most of the last month while I worked on a series in Soho.  As Marcus Tullius might say, I pass over in silence how strange it is to be living in a hotel in my native city.  But as I say, this morning I am checking out and decide to kill some time with a couple of poached eggs in the hotel restaurant.  As you will fully appreciate, I don't want to schlep my two suitcases into the restaurant, so I think: Why not have the hotel hold onto them for an hour?  You see, I am a real traveler, with a sophisticated sense of what one does in hotels.

After the eggs, I return to the hotel lobby.  I ask the lady behind the desk if I can pick up my bags, whereupon she pulls out a large and battered walkie-talkie that clashes fetchingly with her sequined chartreuse minidress.  "Storage," she says, with some authority.

About five minutes later, a truly massive black man in maintenance coveralls and thick glasses walks out into the lobby.  At least 6-5, and pushing 300 pounds.

Him: Storage?

Me: Yep.

You have to understand that there is no smiling whatsoever as we exchange these words.  Neither of us is taking the situation lightly.  He has his job to do; I have my bags to retrieve.  This is not something to smile about.

Him: What color are they?

I see what he's getting at, and I appreciate his professionalism.  Of course there were tickets attached to the suitcases when I checked them.  They had numbers on them, and I have just handed him my tickets, which have the same numbers on them.  This is part of the tradition when it comes to checking bags.  But I may be witnessing an evolution in the tradition, where people dealing with the whole storage thing are realizing it's far more efficient simply to have the bags described in language.  In the not-too distant future, I suspect numbers will fall off the tickets like an obsolete appendage, and soon after that the tickets themselves will vanish altogether.  It's an exciting time.

Honoring the moment for what it is, I ask myself: What color are my bags?  This is a question I seldom ask myself, and honestly I'm not asked it very often by others.  This will require some concentration.

Me: Black ...

Him: Black...?

Me: and ...

Him: Yeah?

Me: and ... black.

Him: Two bags, right?

Me: Right.

Him: One is black, and the other is black.

Me: Exactly.

A pause while he, still looking at me in the most unironic way imaginable, assesses the situation. Then:

Him: I want to thank you for differentiating between those bags so precisely.

Me: Don't mention it.

As he leaves, he throws me a ponderous nod, and I feel that somehow we have bonded, as men, as men of different colors but similar world views.  That there is a certain respect that has passed between us that perhaps can only experienced in the lobby of a boutique hotel.

Only then do I allow myself a barely discernible smile.

What Happened to You?

Diego

Late last year, during my 15 pseudo-minutes of quasi-fame, I was interviewed by my grade school's alumni newsletter.  This was followed by an invitation to tell a story -- semi-Moth-style, I was told -- at an alumni get-together in January.  I was torn.  I like telling stories, but I don't like alumni events.  I almost never go.  I am terrified of a single question: What Happened to You?

This is a question I have no answer to.  Even if no one asked it, I would wonder myself what happened to me.  I wonder every day what happened to me.  I have spent money on therapy to discover what happened to me.  I have meditated to find out.  I have discussed the matter with my spouse (of all my bad ideas, this was the worst).  In short, I so don't know what happened to me that I would prefer not to be asked anymore.  It just rubs it in.

But I do like telling stories, and I do like performing.  I am neurotic and afraid, but I have always been drawn to performance:  teaching is performing, playing music in a working band is performing.  Long ago I did a bit of acting, and I liked it.

Then there's that part of me that is old, stodgy and rigid.  Every year I am more this way.  I cling.  I cling to opinions and ways of seeing things and doing things.  Every year I expend more energy trying to keep things out, things that make me uncomfortable or freak me out or do not jibe with my world view.  Perhaps this is what happened to me.  I got brittle.  Who knows?  Anyway, I like to fuck with my rigidity.  It pleases me to take the old Jewish man out into the alley and kick his ass.  Somehow, don't ask me how, it helps me that occasionally I step out of my comfort zone and do something wild and crazy.

Okay, so you may say: Bungee jumping is wild and crazy.  Spending the night at the Ramrod Cafe is wild and crazy.  Attempting a serious debate with a libertarian is.  Not telling a story to a bunch of people in a room.  That's greasy kid stuff.  Well, to me it is wild and crazy.  I am something of a hermit.  Possibly a misanthrope.  I often like to be with people, but often I want to run away from idiots and posers.  It's not easy for me to get up on stage and do something I've never done before.

Anyway, I went and told my story.  I invited many people I knew to come watch me humiliate myself.  Only two old Jews came.  The rest -- and there were about 75 or 80 in attendance -- seemed mostly WASPy with a few Catholics thrown in just to be nice.  I was the last one on the program.  They said they expected me to "bring the house down."  I felt like Brother Theodore.  They said I was the "show-stopper" -- only, I assured them, in the sense that I was the last one on the program.

I told my story.  It was about a parrot.  People usually laugh at parrots, or so I'm told.  I preferred laughing to crying, or screaming.  So a parrot it was.  I won't tell you anything else because it's all in the recording (above).  But I had fun.  Actual fun.

So, the event is over and I'm schmoozing with the organizer.  One by one, people come up to me, people I don't know.  Many people.  They are smiling and chuckling.  They want to know if I'm a stand-up comic by trade, they want to tell me how funny the story was.  No one asks me: What happened to you?  I think that's because this is the first time they've met me.  They think I've always been like this.  Whatever this is.  My story is a success.  People want my card.  I don't know why, do they want me to tell the story at their child's Confirmation party?  I've only got the one story.  But I give out cards, and I bask in the positive glow of not having completely embarrassed myself.  Then I go out in the rain with the other two old Jews, and we drink Bass Ale and Dark & Stormies on St. Mark's Place and order pizza from across the street.  They don't seem too impressed with me.  But I'm okay with that.

No one can really understand what's happened to them.  How they ended up being who they seem to be now.  They may like it or not, or they may like it sometimes, but usually they are a little uncomprehending of the situation they find themselves in.  And this is probably as it should be.  Show me someone who understands precisely the path that led to this moment, and I'll -- well, I don't know what, but I don't think I'd buy it.  We're not really supposed to be able to answer that question.  We can try, but it's pointless, because we don't really have the equipment to discover who we were, who we are, and all the intermediate shit.  It's just one of those questions that should have an answer, that people say has an answer, and that we really want to have an answer, but it just doesn't.

Sorry.