Over at Arlee Bird's Tossing It Out, there's some talk about Columbus Day and the modern efforts to downplay his accomplishments in the interests of establishing a replacement Indigenous Peoples Day. As we all know, Christopher Columbus accidentally discovered the New World (it's erroneous, however, to believe people in 1492, much less Columbus himself, thought the world was flat or just plain ended somewhere). Yeah, and sure, Viking and Chinese explorers got there first, but with far less publicity. And the whole history of a continent changed forever.
The thing is, it's a bit strange for Americans to complain about what Columbus did. It's strange, because if he, or someone else, hadn't done it, there wouldn't be any Americans to complain about it. Everyone you know, unless you're reading this on a reservation (generally speaking), is directly descended from the efforts begun with Columbus. That's just a fact of life.
I despise what white settlers did to tribes living on their own land, across the whole history of exploration into the Americas, not so much the settlers themselves, but everyone who made it so easy for them to take and take and take, and in the meantime make it seem like the people they were taking all this land from were the bad guys. Because no, they weren't. I despise that not only did we take and take and take, but we tried our very best to eradicate, or merely severely marginalize, these tribes, right up to the current day. As I indicated in a previous post, no one argues Red Lives Matter, and that's because they don't live in the all-important cities where everything of note happens, at least as far as the media is concerned. Shailene Woodley, the Divergent series actress, was recently arrested protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline. This is merely the most recent in a long series of cultural battles that have nothing to do with buzz topics like gun control or terrorism, but have nonetheless been at the forefront of American life for centuries.
And yet, none of it means anything, and still we have people who otherwise claim Columbus Day should be a thing of the past. Listen, I think every sports team with a Native American theme should rename itself. Lately I've been referring to the team that just beat the Red Sox in the playoffs as Francona's Cleveland because I don't want to call them anything else. These were all teams that were named early in the last century, when we'd finally "won the war" against the tribes that had the nerve to exist and demand any modicum of rights and dignity.
It's really about American self-esteem, American self-loathing, our collective inability to face the ugly truths about our past, not to mention our present. So we invent distractions and allow ourselves to be fooled by straw arguments, when any idiot who gave any of it more than a second's thought could see how ridiculous it all is. We can't even have Thanksgiving without people saying it can't possibly represent even the suggestion that anyone could get along back then, much less now. It makes me far more ashamed to be an America to think of this than how terrible this election season has been. But it's all related; we've never tried to work it out, just bury it.
Except, the past is prologue. We always seem to forget that, don't we?
Showing posts with label rantings. Show all posts
Showing posts with label rantings. Show all posts
Wednesday, October 12, 2016
Friday, September 16, 2016
We need to talk about slavery...
When you're able to paint people who are against illegal immigration as the bad guys, you know something's wrong.
And something is very, very wrong. Democrats have been patting themselves on the back, believing they thoroughly occupy the high ground, every time they ridicule Donald Trump for his ideas about curbing illegal immigration. But you've got to ask yourself, what are they really saying? Nothing good, I'd say.
At its heart, you do have to admit it's evil to tell people desperately fleeing terrible situations that they can't find a new home, especially one that seems to be the polar opposite of what they're leaving behind. America is a land of immigrants. I get that. (I also get that although we've kind of had a tepid show of solidarity with the Standing Rock Sioux over the Dakota Access Pipeline, I think you'd have to stretch the truth considerably to find anyone to have argued Red Lives Matter quite as much as an actual slogan I'm sure you can name.) The problem is, what they'll find here is only marginally better. What they're really getting is the promise of a better future, and likely for the next generation.
Listen, because of my own job history, I've actually worked alongside illegal immigrants. I know the tenuousness of their situation. I've even seen plenty of evidence that they struggle a lot more than we think. (I worked in a shoe department where boxes were always ending up empty, or filled with highly inadequate replacements, so to say.) You can't make a blanket statement like calling them hard-working and expect that to summarize them perfectly. The bottom line is, for every illegal immigrant who will get to benefit from businesses willing to turn a blind eye to their status, there's another who will only get exploited in far less appealing ways. These are the lowest-earning members of our society. They round out the bottom line, a line that keeps shrinking because businesses are always eager to ship their bottom lines to another country, so they can pay even less to get the work done.
What Democrats are arguing is actually pretty hateful. To put it in perspective, the Civil War happened because it would have been terrible for the Southern economy to lose its free black labor. Which is to say, slavery was absolutely essential, from that mindset. We tend to think bigotry came first. No, it was money. It's always money. And that's what Democrats are rallying for. Whether they admit it or not.
Anytime you have a situation that exploits the helpless in society, there's really no other way to describe it other than forced servitude. Slavery.
There are better ways to handle immigration. For one thing, that's why legal immigration exists. That's what documentation is about. If we somehow don't have enough immigration agents, I would certainly be proposing that kind of immigration reform rather than loudly criticizing the other guy's ideas, personally. Because the end result is the same: lessened illegal immigration.
Immigration is always about desperation. Someone doesn't decide to do something like that just on a lark, because they're bored. They know it's going to be difficult. They know they're risking their lives. And they probably know what's waiting for them. It may be a thousand times better than what they had before, but I kind of think we know better than they do what they're actually accepting. We tend to have this absurd notion that it's the American way to claw your way to the top. But I also think we all know not every American has to. I think we know plenty of Americans who never had to struggle a day in their life. Why would we possibly say that's the best of all possible worlds, one where such disparity exists? Is that the American way?
Because it's convenient. Like slavery. Illegal immigration is nothing better than slavery. It is slavery. We know this. It's the same as Black Lives Matter, the biggest hoodwink you'll find in the media, besides all the blind support for Hillary Clinton. Listen, we all know black people have had it rough. We know this. The thing is, why does the media report the deaths of black people by police, when they ignore the conditions that lead to such tragedies? This is the kind of moral outrage that is itself outrageous, and criminally misleading. None of these victims have anything on Emmett Till. Not to make light of any of their deaths, but none of them died as horribly as Emmett Till, and they've all died for very different reasons. If you have no idea who Emmett Till is, and how he died, maybe you should have a look at history, and find some perspective.
We have absolutely no perspective today. We lost perspective sometime, I think, in the '60s, when the counterculture began to bleed into the culture, become it, and suddenly all our moral rage was turned on permanently. The fight for equality is a good thing. It will always be a good thing. But the lack of perspective is very, very bad.
This isn't about how my life has turned out, or anyone else's. The problem is that we fight for change without knowing what needs to change. Illegal immigration needs to change. Slavery needs to end. In all its forms. We can't keep supporting those who terrorize us in our own society, by our own rules, by our own implicit support.
I don't care how much of an idiot Donald Trump is. I don't care how many trumped up (heh) allusions you can make to Hitler. The truth is, before Americans entered WWII, we weren't falling all over ourselves saying how terrible Hitler was. It's not that we didn't see what he was doing. In a lot of ways, we wholeheartedly supported his ideas. Even refusing to enter the war for as long as we did, we supported him. That's the bottom line. Until we chose to fight, we were on Hitler's side. Sins of omission are still sins. They say Trump's nationalist, isolationist ideas are what amounts to his Hitler tendencies. Well let me tell you something, Americans have been arguing for nationalism and isolationism from the very start. If you don't know that, you don't know history at all.
In a lot of ways, supporting illegal immigration is a lot like supporting Hitler. Hitler was all about the supremacy of pure Germans. Democrats like to say the only people who will knowingly support Trump are white Americans. Except we all know there's no such things as pure Americans, just as there was never such a thing as pure Germans. It's a lunatic association. Hitler wanted a strong Germany, one that was far better than the wreck that emerged from the disastrous policies that ended WWI. Trump does want a strong America. So does Clinton. She believes it already exists. Sure, and Ryan Lochte is still technically an Olympic champion. They took away a legitimate Olympic hero's medals for far less stupid mistakes. Just look up Jim Thorpe. (He was Native American, naturally.) Clinton's America is one that supports a global community, which in itself is a noble thing. So were Wilson's negotiations to end WWI. But those negotiations did create Hitler. You can't destroy a car and expect to sell it new again. That's about as clear as the economics here can be explained.
I would never call someone Hitler just to get a cheap pop from my audience. Hitler was a legitimate maniac, with no redeeming qualities whatsoever. He achieved nothing great (unlike past conquerors he can't even be called a military genius; he had people for that, which is kind of the mindset we've been using ever since, propping up one-trick ponies), and all his thoughts were hateful. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that now. But Charles Lindberg, for instance, didn't. (Philip Roth wrote a whole book of alternate history about that: The Plot Against America.) Lindbergh continues to be celebrated as a great aviation hero. It's always tricky to balance the achievements with the person behind them, but history seems to ignore the bad in favor of the good. Wilson, by the way, loved the original Birth of a Nation. You see how irony litters history?
No, Trump isn't Hitler, and neither is Clinton. But I'd much rather give my support to someone looking to find solutions to the moral abattoir we've created for ourselves than the other person who'd like us to pretend it doesn't exist, because one is inherently hateful and the other isn't. I think you can tell which one I think is hateful.
I'm not against illegal immigration. But I'd certainly like for there to be a better outcome. I think we can all agree on that, if we only stop to think about it. Do you really want to be the person arguing for slavery in 2016?
And something is very, very wrong. Democrats have been patting themselves on the back, believing they thoroughly occupy the high ground, every time they ridicule Donald Trump for his ideas about curbing illegal immigration. But you've got to ask yourself, what are they really saying? Nothing good, I'd say.
At its heart, you do have to admit it's evil to tell people desperately fleeing terrible situations that they can't find a new home, especially one that seems to be the polar opposite of what they're leaving behind. America is a land of immigrants. I get that. (I also get that although we've kind of had a tepid show of solidarity with the Standing Rock Sioux over the Dakota Access Pipeline, I think you'd have to stretch the truth considerably to find anyone to have argued Red Lives Matter quite as much as an actual slogan I'm sure you can name.) The problem is, what they'll find here is only marginally better. What they're really getting is the promise of a better future, and likely for the next generation.
Listen, because of my own job history, I've actually worked alongside illegal immigrants. I know the tenuousness of their situation. I've even seen plenty of evidence that they struggle a lot more than we think. (I worked in a shoe department where boxes were always ending up empty, or filled with highly inadequate replacements, so to say.) You can't make a blanket statement like calling them hard-working and expect that to summarize them perfectly. The bottom line is, for every illegal immigrant who will get to benefit from businesses willing to turn a blind eye to their status, there's another who will only get exploited in far less appealing ways. These are the lowest-earning members of our society. They round out the bottom line, a line that keeps shrinking because businesses are always eager to ship their bottom lines to another country, so they can pay even less to get the work done.
What Democrats are arguing is actually pretty hateful. To put it in perspective, the Civil War happened because it would have been terrible for the Southern economy to lose its free black labor. Which is to say, slavery was absolutely essential, from that mindset. We tend to think bigotry came first. No, it was money. It's always money. And that's what Democrats are rallying for. Whether they admit it or not.
Anytime you have a situation that exploits the helpless in society, there's really no other way to describe it other than forced servitude. Slavery.
There are better ways to handle immigration. For one thing, that's why legal immigration exists. That's what documentation is about. If we somehow don't have enough immigration agents, I would certainly be proposing that kind of immigration reform rather than loudly criticizing the other guy's ideas, personally. Because the end result is the same: lessened illegal immigration.
Immigration is always about desperation. Someone doesn't decide to do something like that just on a lark, because they're bored. They know it's going to be difficult. They know they're risking their lives. And they probably know what's waiting for them. It may be a thousand times better than what they had before, but I kind of think we know better than they do what they're actually accepting. We tend to have this absurd notion that it's the American way to claw your way to the top. But I also think we all know not every American has to. I think we know plenty of Americans who never had to struggle a day in their life. Why would we possibly say that's the best of all possible worlds, one where such disparity exists? Is that the American way?
Because it's convenient. Like slavery. Illegal immigration is nothing better than slavery. It is slavery. We know this. It's the same as Black Lives Matter, the biggest hoodwink you'll find in the media, besides all the blind support for Hillary Clinton. Listen, we all know black people have had it rough. We know this. The thing is, why does the media report the deaths of black people by police, when they ignore the conditions that lead to such tragedies? This is the kind of moral outrage that is itself outrageous, and criminally misleading. None of these victims have anything on Emmett Till. Not to make light of any of their deaths, but none of them died as horribly as Emmett Till, and they've all died for very different reasons. If you have no idea who Emmett Till is, and how he died, maybe you should have a look at history, and find some perspective.
We have absolutely no perspective today. We lost perspective sometime, I think, in the '60s, when the counterculture began to bleed into the culture, become it, and suddenly all our moral rage was turned on permanently. The fight for equality is a good thing. It will always be a good thing. But the lack of perspective is very, very bad.
This isn't about how my life has turned out, or anyone else's. The problem is that we fight for change without knowing what needs to change. Illegal immigration needs to change. Slavery needs to end. In all its forms. We can't keep supporting those who terrorize us in our own society, by our own rules, by our own implicit support.
I don't care how much of an idiot Donald Trump is. I don't care how many trumped up (heh) allusions you can make to Hitler. The truth is, before Americans entered WWII, we weren't falling all over ourselves saying how terrible Hitler was. It's not that we didn't see what he was doing. In a lot of ways, we wholeheartedly supported his ideas. Even refusing to enter the war for as long as we did, we supported him. That's the bottom line. Until we chose to fight, we were on Hitler's side. Sins of omission are still sins. They say Trump's nationalist, isolationist ideas are what amounts to his Hitler tendencies. Well let me tell you something, Americans have been arguing for nationalism and isolationism from the very start. If you don't know that, you don't know history at all.
In a lot of ways, supporting illegal immigration is a lot like supporting Hitler. Hitler was all about the supremacy of pure Germans. Democrats like to say the only people who will knowingly support Trump are white Americans. Except we all know there's no such things as pure Americans, just as there was never such a thing as pure Germans. It's a lunatic association. Hitler wanted a strong Germany, one that was far better than the wreck that emerged from the disastrous policies that ended WWI. Trump does want a strong America. So does Clinton. She believes it already exists. Sure, and Ryan Lochte is still technically an Olympic champion. They took away a legitimate Olympic hero's medals for far less stupid mistakes. Just look up Jim Thorpe. (He was Native American, naturally.) Clinton's America is one that supports a global community, which in itself is a noble thing. So were Wilson's negotiations to end WWI. But those negotiations did create Hitler. You can't destroy a car and expect to sell it new again. That's about as clear as the economics here can be explained.
I would never call someone Hitler just to get a cheap pop from my audience. Hitler was a legitimate maniac, with no redeeming qualities whatsoever. He achieved nothing great (unlike past conquerors he can't even be called a military genius; he had people for that, which is kind of the mindset we've been using ever since, propping up one-trick ponies), and all his thoughts were hateful. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that now. But Charles Lindberg, for instance, didn't. (Philip Roth wrote a whole book of alternate history about that: The Plot Against America.) Lindbergh continues to be celebrated as a great aviation hero. It's always tricky to balance the achievements with the person behind them, but history seems to ignore the bad in favor of the good. Wilson, by the way, loved the original Birth of a Nation. You see how irony litters history?
No, Trump isn't Hitler, and neither is Clinton. But I'd much rather give my support to someone looking to find solutions to the moral abattoir we've created for ourselves than the other person who'd like us to pretend it doesn't exist, because one is inherently hateful and the other isn't. I think you can tell which one I think is hateful.
I'm not against illegal immigration. But I'd certainly like for there to be a better outcome. I think we can all agree on that, if we only stop to think about it. Do you really want to be the person arguing for slavery in 2016?
Wednesday, July 20, 2016
873. In hopes for a better world...
Things have been worse. With so many alarming topics to talk about today, there are people who have chosen to believe we have somehow ended up in the worst of all possible worlds. We haven't, but if we're not careful, we might. Isn't that the way it always is? This is not a perfect world. If it were, everything would be different. But it isn't, and so it is what it is, and as always, we have a choice, to let our fears get the best of us, or to somehow master them, because our first thoughts are always exaggerated ones, ones if we rethought would reveal themselves for what they really are. I think the problem is, with so many options to talk about our thoughts, we have somehow diminished the need to think about our thoughts, and all we do is react. Reaction is good. It's how we know what we feel. But this is not a world where feeling alone defines reality. Humans are uniquely capable of setting aside feelings (it can be difficult, I know), and giving our reactions a proper consideration. Somehow, I think we've forgotten that. We've forgotten that we have the ability to analyze things. By that, I don't mean to compartmentalize, fit into a predetermined set of conclusions. We've unfortunately allowed ourselves to fall into the mindset where phrases like "survival of the fittest" and "those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it," meaningful and yet unproductive concepts that when put to the test don't mean what they seem to, define how we think. "Survival of the fittest" is intended to explain why nature works the way it does. And yet humans don't fit that model, and any attempt to explain otherwise ignores what we would otherwise understand, if we gave it half the thought it deserves: The phrase, in human context, would read, "Survival of advantage."
Everyone has advantages, which is to say skills. The problem is that some skills are easier to identify, and easier for others to understand, easier to exploit in whatever model the person in question is attempting to enter. Skills alone don't determine worth. Skills are rarely even the qualification we use to make decisions. More often than not, we make decisions based on social conclusions. "Survival of social skills," maybe.
History is a funny thing. It's easy to see parallels in history, and it takes a clever person to see them, admittedly, but no two situations are ever exactly alike, and it takes an even more clever person to see that. "Those who don't see the distinctions history makes are doomed to continue making mistakes," perhaps. But that seems too clumsy, so it's probably easier to default to the original statement, no matter how flawed. How about, "Those who make mistakes make history." Well, that's just obvious. Because history is really a history of mistakes, no matter how much we like to claim otherwise. Still, it's not very inspiring, is it? "Those who strive for success make history." Good, but not enough of a moral. "Those who understand they're fallible will make the best history." Too pat. "Those who don't learn history are doomed for limited perspectives." I kinda like that one.
These are tiny examples. This is what considering things beyond the most basic level looks like. Most of the time, you'll hear people argue for trying to see it from a variety of perspectives, but in doing so you run the risk of losing perspective. At a certain point, judgment comes into the equation. You have to decide where you stand. What people so often forget is that you don't have to choose between extremes. You really can fall somewhere in the middle. Somehow, this became a thought crime. In school, the students who are merely average don't count for anything, and somehow this mindset is taken to generalize that you must be at an extreme to matter. This is absurd.
Yet this is a polarized world, at the moment. That's exactly how people are thinking. Each side is so convinced they're right, they're not even willing to give the other side any credit. That's lazy and clumsy thinking. It's about picking sides, and nothing else. Hey, picking sides like that leads to worse things, not better. Is that what we really want? I hope not. I like to believe people really aren't that bad. But they can be misled.
So I guess what I'm saying is, if you're feeling as if we've somehow entered a doomsday scenario, remember that you have a choice. You can choose to look beyond the rhetoric, on whatever alarming topic you've chosen to fixate, and look for a better way. Because there's always a better one, and things really have been worse. We have a chance to make things better. But it starts by acknowledging our complicity in making things look worse, at least at the moment. In this uniquely hypersocial environment, in this unique moment in history, we can do better. We just have to try.
Everyone has advantages, which is to say skills. The problem is that some skills are easier to identify, and easier for others to understand, easier to exploit in whatever model the person in question is attempting to enter. Skills alone don't determine worth. Skills are rarely even the qualification we use to make decisions. More often than not, we make decisions based on social conclusions. "Survival of social skills," maybe.
History is a funny thing. It's easy to see parallels in history, and it takes a clever person to see them, admittedly, but no two situations are ever exactly alike, and it takes an even more clever person to see that. "Those who don't see the distinctions history makes are doomed to continue making mistakes," perhaps. But that seems too clumsy, so it's probably easier to default to the original statement, no matter how flawed. How about, "Those who make mistakes make history." Well, that's just obvious. Because history is really a history of mistakes, no matter how much we like to claim otherwise. Still, it's not very inspiring, is it? "Those who strive for success make history." Good, but not enough of a moral. "Those who understand they're fallible will make the best history." Too pat. "Those who don't learn history are doomed for limited perspectives." I kinda like that one.
These are tiny examples. This is what considering things beyond the most basic level looks like. Most of the time, you'll hear people argue for trying to see it from a variety of perspectives, but in doing so you run the risk of losing perspective. At a certain point, judgment comes into the equation. You have to decide where you stand. What people so often forget is that you don't have to choose between extremes. You really can fall somewhere in the middle. Somehow, this became a thought crime. In school, the students who are merely average don't count for anything, and somehow this mindset is taken to generalize that you must be at an extreme to matter. This is absurd.
Yet this is a polarized world, at the moment. That's exactly how people are thinking. Each side is so convinced they're right, they're not even willing to give the other side any credit. That's lazy and clumsy thinking. It's about picking sides, and nothing else. Hey, picking sides like that leads to worse things, not better. Is that what we really want? I hope not. I like to believe people really aren't that bad. But they can be misled.
So I guess what I'm saying is, if you're feeling as if we've somehow entered a doomsday scenario, remember that you have a choice. You can choose to look beyond the rhetoric, on whatever alarming topic you've chosen to fixate, and look for a better way. Because there's always a better one, and things really have been worse. We have a chance to make things better. But it starts by acknowledging our complicity in making things look worse, at least at the moment. In this uniquely hypersocial environment, in this unique moment in history, we can do better. We just have to try.
Thursday, July 07, 2016
871. Some personal reflections
So I caught some of American History X on TV yesterday, and it got me thinking. No, I've never been in the situation Edward Norton's character finds himself in, but I wonder how much intolerance really does seep in. Now, I am generally a pretty tolerant guy, but like anyone else I find myself forming opinions when I hear what the news is reporting. Last year this blog imploded in part because I attempted to mount a defense of Bill Cosby. I happen to be someone who thinks everyone is redeemable, given the chance, but I also believe that rushing to judgment is wrong, regardless of what circumstances may suggest. I talked about how I thought Cosby might have been targeted due to his opinions from a decade earlier, in which he voiced the black community's lack of accountability. This was a conclusion I'd reached in part because I was skeptical about all the defenses people were formulating around the series of police shootings of black males, which has become a regular feature in the news over the past few years.
American History X made me think about what I was really advocating. While I believe that circumstances sometimes dictate unfortunate situations, which has been the case for African Americans, for American Indians, for everyone who has ever come to this country, in fact, I found myself thinking the victim was worth blaming. That's the bottom line. I have to own that. The victim is never worth blaming. In attempting to come to a full understanding of what was happening, I found myself thinking along lines that were the opposite of what I believe. I say I'm a tolerant guy. I was raised Catholic. Catholics have some pretty strict ideas about certain things. Some of those ideas I agree with, and some I don't. It's never okay to say someone isn't allowed to do or be something because of who they are. We're all individuals just trying to fit in. The more we work together, the better. Coming from someone who definitely has had problems fitting in, that means something to me, maybe not the same way it means to a black man, or a gay man, or any other version of the basic human model you can think of, but it connects me, it means I belong in the same quagmire, and that I have no right muddling things just because I don't understand something.
A blog I used to follow, which isn't particularly active now, was part of the implosion, in part because it was increasingly advocating certain things without following my particular criteria, which when I say it like that it sounds ridiculous. The problem became, I felt isolated from an experience I had previously been a part of. And hey, that happens. As much as we struggle to fit in, we have to also realize that the irony is, nothing lasts forever. The thing we try so desperately to be a part of is the same thing we will eventually leave behind. Things change.
The UK exit from the European Union happened, and at first I didn't get why it was such a bad thing. But again, it's the separation effect. Trump as the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, I just didn't get why people loathed the idea so much. But advocating walls around the country? Listen, I rationalized that he says whatever he thinks people want to hear. I say to myself, this is what happens when the Democrats spend years isolating Republicans. The truth is, Trump isn't presidential material. And maybe I've been too hard on the Clintons. They just finished announcing more ways in which a Clinton has failed on a human level, but the truth of the Clintons is the same today as it was twenty-five years ago: these are politicians through and through, and they are, despite themselves, very human, too. There's a Clinton in contention again for a reason, because they know how to play the game. Everything else is divisiveness. I talked recently about how the Democrats have played that game this millennium, because the Republicans played it before them, etc. But the truth is, regardless of what a Clinton does, I think we're at a point where we're going to emerge from all this nonsense. This whole campaign season has proven that we've all pushed too far.
And really, that's what it's all about. My working life has been pretty mediocre. At one point, I worked alongside immigrants who were more likely than not completely illegal, and I was the one who felt isolated. It made me feel uncomfortable, but then, I'm generally uncomfortable with the concept of other people in general, not because of who they are, but because of me, because I've never gotten the handle of other people. I'm an introvert. Hear me roar.
I can never reset to how things were before last year, and in truth, it was probably inevitable, this exodus. I once had an idea that I could overcome my clumsiness around others, but the truth is, and I'm not bemoaning my fate, I can't dictate how others view me, regardless of whether it's positive or negative. All I can do is try and be fair toward others. This began because I suggested we needed to talk about Bill Cosby, when the real subject was something else entirely. We're once again at a cultural crossroads. We've recognized that society hasn't made as much progress in tolerance, in fairness, as we've sometimes led ourselves to believe. There are those who are rallying to the defense of victims, of those struggling to find their footing, and generally they're absolutely right, and it's generally wrong to say otherwise.
I just thought I should acknowledge that.
American History X made me think about what I was really advocating. While I believe that circumstances sometimes dictate unfortunate situations, which has been the case for African Americans, for American Indians, for everyone who has ever come to this country, in fact, I found myself thinking the victim was worth blaming. That's the bottom line. I have to own that. The victim is never worth blaming. In attempting to come to a full understanding of what was happening, I found myself thinking along lines that were the opposite of what I believe. I say I'm a tolerant guy. I was raised Catholic. Catholics have some pretty strict ideas about certain things. Some of those ideas I agree with, and some I don't. It's never okay to say someone isn't allowed to do or be something because of who they are. We're all individuals just trying to fit in. The more we work together, the better. Coming from someone who definitely has had problems fitting in, that means something to me, maybe not the same way it means to a black man, or a gay man, or any other version of the basic human model you can think of, but it connects me, it means I belong in the same quagmire, and that I have no right muddling things just because I don't understand something.
A blog I used to follow, which isn't particularly active now, was part of the implosion, in part because it was increasingly advocating certain things without following my particular criteria, which when I say it like that it sounds ridiculous. The problem became, I felt isolated from an experience I had previously been a part of. And hey, that happens. As much as we struggle to fit in, we have to also realize that the irony is, nothing lasts forever. The thing we try so desperately to be a part of is the same thing we will eventually leave behind. Things change.
The UK exit from the European Union happened, and at first I didn't get why it was such a bad thing. But again, it's the separation effect. Trump as the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, I just didn't get why people loathed the idea so much. But advocating walls around the country? Listen, I rationalized that he says whatever he thinks people want to hear. I say to myself, this is what happens when the Democrats spend years isolating Republicans. The truth is, Trump isn't presidential material. And maybe I've been too hard on the Clintons. They just finished announcing more ways in which a Clinton has failed on a human level, but the truth of the Clintons is the same today as it was twenty-five years ago: these are politicians through and through, and they are, despite themselves, very human, too. There's a Clinton in contention again for a reason, because they know how to play the game. Everything else is divisiveness. I talked recently about how the Democrats have played that game this millennium, because the Republicans played it before them, etc. But the truth is, regardless of what a Clinton does, I think we're at a point where we're going to emerge from all this nonsense. This whole campaign season has proven that we've all pushed too far.
And really, that's what it's all about. My working life has been pretty mediocre. At one point, I worked alongside immigrants who were more likely than not completely illegal, and I was the one who felt isolated. It made me feel uncomfortable, but then, I'm generally uncomfortable with the concept of other people in general, not because of who they are, but because of me, because I've never gotten the handle of other people. I'm an introvert. Hear me roar.
I can never reset to how things were before last year, and in truth, it was probably inevitable, this exodus. I once had an idea that I could overcome my clumsiness around others, but the truth is, and I'm not bemoaning my fate, I can't dictate how others view me, regardless of whether it's positive or negative. All I can do is try and be fair toward others. This began because I suggested we needed to talk about Bill Cosby, when the real subject was something else entirely. We're once again at a cultural crossroads. We've recognized that society hasn't made as much progress in tolerance, in fairness, as we've sometimes led ourselves to believe. There are those who are rallying to the defense of victims, of those struggling to find their footing, and generally they're absolutely right, and it's generally wrong to say otherwise.
I just thought I should acknowledge that.
Monday, June 13, 2016
867. The End of Anicetti, the 155th of Big Bethel
I'm not going to talk too much, but I felt it was important to mark the retirement of Frank Anicetti, who for years continued his family's (a hundred years' worth) legacy at the Kennebec Fruit Co. in Lisbon, ME. Frank's the one who helped initiate Lisbon's annual Moxie Festival, and he was featured in Stephen King's 11/22/63. Earlier this year he started toying with the idea, and now it seems he made it official. He's a true icon in that town, and I hope this year's celebration of Moxie remembers that.
Somewhat conversely, I was a part of a different kind of history on Saturday, when the 155th anniversary of the Battle of Big Bethel was commemorated in my backyard. I've been living in Hampton, VA, for about half a year now, and it's been interesting to observe the plaques and memorials so close to home. I imagination it should always be interesting to have history near you like that. It's not the first time, and it probably won't be the last. This time, it just happens to include the present conditions of a battlefield that's dubbed the first planned land engagement of the Civil War. Hampton is already very near the "Historic Triangle" in Virginia (Williamsburg, Yorktown, and Jamestown). Anyway, there was a ceremony, and I stopped by to hear some of what was said. The speaker compared the battle to Bunker Hill, which was certainly an interesting thought. (When I took the historic trip of Boston my freshman year of college, I visited Bunker Hill.)
Somewhat conversely, I was a part of a different kind of history on Saturday, when the 155th anniversary of the Battle of Big Bethel was commemorated in my backyard. I've been living in Hampton, VA, for about half a year now, and it's been interesting to observe the plaques and memorials so close to home. I imagination it should always be interesting to have history near you like that. It's not the first time, and it probably won't be the last. This time, it just happens to include the present conditions of a battlefield that's dubbed the first planned land engagement of the Civil War. Hampton is already very near the "Historic Triangle" in Virginia (Williamsburg, Yorktown, and Jamestown). Anyway, there was a ceremony, and I stopped by to hear some of what was said. The speaker compared the battle to Bunker Hill, which was certainly an interesting thought. (When I took the historic trip of Boston my freshman year of college, I visited Bunker Hill.)
Tuesday, March 15, 2016
858. The Circus of American Politics, 2016 Edition
A long time ago, a guy named John Kennedy was shot. And I'm pretty sure American politics is still struggling to recover from that.
Kennedy's Vice President, Lyndon Johnson, succeeded him, was officially elected himself the next campaign season, did everything he could to build on the New Frontier in his Great Society, and then chose not to run for a second time. This brought us Richard Nixon into the White House, the man Kennedy had successfully defeated for the office a decade earlier, finally humiliated out of public office, or so it seemed at the time. Then Nixon resigned the Presidency in the wake of the Watergate scandal, Ford pardoned him, Carter left office amid the Iranian hostage crisis, and Reagan dominated the '80s, could claim victory in the Cold War, and his Vice President, George H.W. Bush, took office, and after a single term Bill Clinton did his very best to be the new Kennedy, then George W. Bush, and then Barack Obama.
Now, I've always maintained a neutral voting status even though I tend to think Republicans are generally more honest in what they think than Democrats. Democrats, I think, are as hung up on Kennedy as anyone else. Clinton and Obama both fervently courted his persona of cultural popularity while maintaining their status as direct answers to what Democrats at the time were thinking about Republicans.
Reagan made Democrats particularly mad because he was on the whole one of the more successful Presidents in history, whether or not you choose to believe he more or less singlehandedly finally ended the Cold War nearly five decades after it began in the wake of WWII. The only President to rival his popularity in the twentieth century would be the Democrat Franklin Roosevelt, who was successfully elected to four terms as President and has the distinction of ending the quagmire of the Great Depression. Democrats since his time have been following in Roosevelt's footsteps in all their policies, just as they've desperately sought the mystique of Kennedy.
Kennedy's legacy otherwise is hard to quantify. Since he was in office only a thousand days, and was known for epic blunders as much as anything else, and Johnson or Nixon got to hit all the big marks he'd set out to accomplish, some historians tend to downplay his impact. Yet his is the template, as much as Roosevelt's, that Democrats have courted ever since, without ever really considering that it was more than just popularity that created his Presidency.
Yet there you have it. Clinton undermined the first Bush's chances at reelection in part because he was a born campaigner. Part of his early legacy was the book Primary Colors, which amply demonstrates exactly what helped drive Clinton to the White House. There are few people, besides perhaps his wife Hillary, with as much political ambition as Bill, who savors the idea of being great without really knowing how to achieve it.
So Republicans really had a field day during his whole time in office, culminating in a nominal impeachment over his sexual indiscretions. A lot of people thought he was a pretty great President, though, all told, because otherwise things seemed to go great and he stayed out of international trouble, for the most part.
Then his Vice President, Al Gore, attempted to succeed him, and Democrats started to show just how petty they really are, painting his rival, the second Bush, as an idiot, because that's the best they could do. They trotted out States Rights in the disputed election results (because historically, States Rights is a brilliant American legacy) that followed, and decided it was okay to quickly divide the nation in the wake of 9/11, returning to their story that Bush simply wasn't worth supporting, which was in direct retaliation for how Clinton was treated, which was in direct retaliation for how popular Reagan was, which was in strict opposition to everything the Democrats hoped to have achieved with the legacy of Kennedy...
So then Obama became President, and we've become so bitterly divided as a nation that the primary candidates to replace him all seem equally unlikely to unite the country around them, all for different reasons. Hillary Clinton, because she's what everyone thought was actually the worst about her husband (despite seemingly garnering massive amounts of sympathy in the wake of his impeachment hearings). Sanders because of the socialism line. And Trump? Because he's what results when the Republicans do what Clinton and Obama did before him, shouting very loudly against everything his opponents have been failing to do.
Even if you don't agree with all my characterizations or conclusions, the fact is, we have an election season that has a lot of unappealing options. I've got Ted Cruz in my pocket in that he once did an epic filibuster, and I wrote about that here, the same way I wrote about Obama years before he became President. (Like Clinton's legacy, Cruz could at least claim to know how to be a politician.) It just seemed like a moment signaling the future. Maybe Cruz doesn't have a shot at getting the nomination, because the Republicans are really all over the place on whether they'll let Trump go all the way, and Cruz looks like the last man standing in his way.
The problem with Cruz, and with Trump, and with Clinton, and with Sanders, is that none of them are interested in saying how ridiculous partisan politics have become. That's maybe not what you do when a candidate hasn't even been decided yet, but I think a lot of people would start feeling a lot more comfortable if there were someone out there who put political differences aside for the moment, and just tried to do right by the country. I don't particularly like Democrats, because traditionally they've been the first ones to badmouth the competition. I just think that's bad form. The big Republican names from the '90s, like Newt Gingrich, never had a shot at winning the big office. I think that's telling. And yet now we have Trump, who's playing very much the Democrat game precisely because it's been so, so successful for them, in a way that, say, the Tea Party wasn't for Republicans. Trump is an extreme Reaganite. Without Reagan, there would be no Trump. As far as I know, no one has made that connection. But it shouldn't surprise you to hear something like that.
Trump gets to say the insane things he says because Obama has spent so much time dodging the big questions, building a legacy that isn't even particularly from the Democratic Party. I mean, I have firsthand experience with Mitt Romney's version of Obamacare while I was living in Massachusetts. But Republicans can't admit that anymore than Democrats can, because this is the circus of American politics, circa 2016. Trump exists, is still surging in the polls, because he's sure of what he says, rather than the extreme caution Obama has consistently exhibited through his two terms in office. The obstructionism he's experienced is the same obstructionism that Bush experienced before him, which I assume is what Clinton experienced, too, or so Democrats certainly thought.
It's insane. So we've got an insane election season. Because, or so I'd like to argue, a guy named John Kennedy was shot. We'll never know what he could have achieved had he lived. But we do know he was unpopular, too, in his time, for exactly the same ideological reasons as we experience today, which have existed for as long as we've been electing people in this country. Jefferson and Adams died as friends, but lived as bitter enemies. Kennedy became more popular in death than he ever could have been in life. The same thing happened to Lincoln, and to a certain extent Washington, who was dead in the water as a general during the Revolutionary War. Like Grant after him, victory meant people loved him regardless of his personal attributes or fitness for the highest office. History doesn't particularly care about the facts. Memory certainly doesn't. And the present absolutely doesn't. We're a people who believe what we want to believe. That's literally what it means to be an American. It's what makes it so interesting, and so frustrating, to be one, and why someone like Donald Trump looks like he has a real shot at becoming President. As with all the best scare tactics of modern life, his detractors claim Trump would turn out to be Hitler, if elected. Which is utter nonsense. Kennedy, and everyone after him, helped prove the limits of power in the United States.
For better or worse. It's not what you say, but what you do. And we have excellent ways of curtailing what presidents do here. Because on the whole we hate them all, until they're just a memory. And then we sometimes reconsider. Try to keep that in mind.
Kennedy's Vice President, Lyndon Johnson, succeeded him, was officially elected himself the next campaign season, did everything he could to build on the New Frontier in his Great Society, and then chose not to run for a second time. This brought us Richard Nixon into the White House, the man Kennedy had successfully defeated for the office a decade earlier, finally humiliated out of public office, or so it seemed at the time. Then Nixon resigned the Presidency in the wake of the Watergate scandal, Ford pardoned him, Carter left office amid the Iranian hostage crisis, and Reagan dominated the '80s, could claim victory in the Cold War, and his Vice President, George H.W. Bush, took office, and after a single term Bill Clinton did his very best to be the new Kennedy, then George W. Bush, and then Barack Obama.
Now, I've always maintained a neutral voting status even though I tend to think Republicans are generally more honest in what they think than Democrats. Democrats, I think, are as hung up on Kennedy as anyone else. Clinton and Obama both fervently courted his persona of cultural popularity while maintaining their status as direct answers to what Democrats at the time were thinking about Republicans.
Reagan made Democrats particularly mad because he was on the whole one of the more successful Presidents in history, whether or not you choose to believe he more or less singlehandedly finally ended the Cold War nearly five decades after it began in the wake of WWII. The only President to rival his popularity in the twentieth century would be the Democrat Franklin Roosevelt, who was successfully elected to four terms as President and has the distinction of ending the quagmire of the Great Depression. Democrats since his time have been following in Roosevelt's footsteps in all their policies, just as they've desperately sought the mystique of Kennedy.
Kennedy's legacy otherwise is hard to quantify. Since he was in office only a thousand days, and was known for epic blunders as much as anything else, and Johnson or Nixon got to hit all the big marks he'd set out to accomplish, some historians tend to downplay his impact. Yet his is the template, as much as Roosevelt's, that Democrats have courted ever since, without ever really considering that it was more than just popularity that created his Presidency.
Yet there you have it. Clinton undermined the first Bush's chances at reelection in part because he was a born campaigner. Part of his early legacy was the book Primary Colors, which amply demonstrates exactly what helped drive Clinton to the White House. There are few people, besides perhaps his wife Hillary, with as much political ambition as Bill, who savors the idea of being great without really knowing how to achieve it.
So Republicans really had a field day during his whole time in office, culminating in a nominal impeachment over his sexual indiscretions. A lot of people thought he was a pretty great President, though, all told, because otherwise things seemed to go great and he stayed out of international trouble, for the most part.
Then his Vice President, Al Gore, attempted to succeed him, and Democrats started to show just how petty they really are, painting his rival, the second Bush, as an idiot, because that's the best they could do. They trotted out States Rights in the disputed election results (because historically, States Rights is a brilliant American legacy) that followed, and decided it was okay to quickly divide the nation in the wake of 9/11, returning to their story that Bush simply wasn't worth supporting, which was in direct retaliation for how Clinton was treated, which was in direct retaliation for how popular Reagan was, which was in strict opposition to everything the Democrats hoped to have achieved with the legacy of Kennedy...
So then Obama became President, and we've become so bitterly divided as a nation that the primary candidates to replace him all seem equally unlikely to unite the country around them, all for different reasons. Hillary Clinton, because she's what everyone thought was actually the worst about her husband (despite seemingly garnering massive amounts of sympathy in the wake of his impeachment hearings). Sanders because of the socialism line. And Trump? Because he's what results when the Republicans do what Clinton and Obama did before him, shouting very loudly against everything his opponents have been failing to do.
Even if you don't agree with all my characterizations or conclusions, the fact is, we have an election season that has a lot of unappealing options. I've got Ted Cruz in my pocket in that he once did an epic filibuster, and I wrote about that here, the same way I wrote about Obama years before he became President. (Like Clinton's legacy, Cruz could at least claim to know how to be a politician.) It just seemed like a moment signaling the future. Maybe Cruz doesn't have a shot at getting the nomination, because the Republicans are really all over the place on whether they'll let Trump go all the way, and Cruz looks like the last man standing in his way.
The problem with Cruz, and with Trump, and with Clinton, and with Sanders, is that none of them are interested in saying how ridiculous partisan politics have become. That's maybe not what you do when a candidate hasn't even been decided yet, but I think a lot of people would start feeling a lot more comfortable if there were someone out there who put political differences aside for the moment, and just tried to do right by the country. I don't particularly like Democrats, because traditionally they've been the first ones to badmouth the competition. I just think that's bad form. The big Republican names from the '90s, like Newt Gingrich, never had a shot at winning the big office. I think that's telling. And yet now we have Trump, who's playing very much the Democrat game precisely because it's been so, so successful for them, in a way that, say, the Tea Party wasn't for Republicans. Trump is an extreme Reaganite. Without Reagan, there would be no Trump. As far as I know, no one has made that connection. But it shouldn't surprise you to hear something like that.
Trump gets to say the insane things he says because Obama has spent so much time dodging the big questions, building a legacy that isn't even particularly from the Democratic Party. I mean, I have firsthand experience with Mitt Romney's version of Obamacare while I was living in Massachusetts. But Republicans can't admit that anymore than Democrats can, because this is the circus of American politics, circa 2016. Trump exists, is still surging in the polls, because he's sure of what he says, rather than the extreme caution Obama has consistently exhibited through his two terms in office. The obstructionism he's experienced is the same obstructionism that Bush experienced before him, which I assume is what Clinton experienced, too, or so Democrats certainly thought.
It's insane. So we've got an insane election season. Because, or so I'd like to argue, a guy named John Kennedy was shot. We'll never know what he could have achieved had he lived. But we do know he was unpopular, too, in his time, for exactly the same ideological reasons as we experience today, which have existed for as long as we've been electing people in this country. Jefferson and Adams died as friends, but lived as bitter enemies. Kennedy became more popular in death than he ever could have been in life. The same thing happened to Lincoln, and to a certain extent Washington, who was dead in the water as a general during the Revolutionary War. Like Grant after him, victory meant people loved him regardless of his personal attributes or fitness for the highest office. History doesn't particularly care about the facts. Memory certainly doesn't. And the present absolutely doesn't. We're a people who believe what we want to believe. That's literally what it means to be an American. It's what makes it so interesting, and so frustrating, to be one, and why someone like Donald Trump looks like he has a real shot at becoming President. As with all the best scare tactics of modern life, his detractors claim Trump would turn out to be Hitler, if elected. Which is utter nonsense. Kennedy, and everyone after him, helped prove the limits of power in the United States.
For better or worse. It's not what you say, but what you do. And we have excellent ways of curtailing what presidents do here. Because on the whole we hate them all, until they're just a memory. And then we sometimes reconsider. Try to keep that in mind.
Monday, July 27, 2015
841. We need to talk about Bill Cosby
We need to talk about Bill Cosby.
No, not in the simplistic sense that we've been talking about him. And listen, I have every reason to take the allegations against him seriously, because I've been affected by this sort of thing personally. It is never acceptable to take advantage of someone else that way. But it's also never acceptable to gloss over the facts. And there are certain facts about Bill Cosby that are being lost in the narrative being constructed around him today.
Remember the last time people talked about Cosby? I bet you don't. The thing is, he had finally become a social crusader. After decades of Hollywood entertainment, being known for a succession of television series and as a stand-up comedian, Bill Cosby stood up in a different way, and attempted to address the problems facing the black community. Not as they stood in the 1960s, the last time there was serious discussion in that regard, in the realm of civil rights, which was necessary in a different way. This time, Cosby was addressing the problems in the black community itself. This is an article about that.
He even released a book about it. And this was years before the series of sensational police confrontations that drew national attention to race relations all over again. Curiously, I've seen very little about any of this in the blogging community, at least the tiny corner where I happen to reside. That's exactly how these things happen. We actually like boxing ourselves into tiny little corners, isolating ourselves from the greater world, pretending that these things don't affect us. But this is a national conversation, and it behooves us to participate. We fear alienating each other, but that's exactly the problem, because we live in a culture that thrives on alienation, because there's very little connection between these segments of the population, these millions of segments that exist within the millions of inhabitants within the United States. We have, in many ways, fragmented to a far greater extent than ever before in our history, which by the way is riddled with fragmentation. You may or may not recall that even at its founding, during the Revolutionary War, there were those who were fighting, and those who called themselves Loyalists, who supported the British cause. Which is to say nothing about the Native American population, never members of the official population, much less the slaves who belonged even to some of the Founders.
The transition from slavery to the population at large was a long and difficult one for black Americans, and for years we patted ourselves on the back because we had finally established what seemed like true social equality. I don't know about you, but I never stopped hearing grumbles about Equal Opportunity. Cosby existed, it seemed, completely outside of this whole conversation, much the way Willie Mays did in the Jackie Robinson era. Mays was criticized then. Cosby didn't seem relevant at all. He starred in one of the most successful sitcoms of all time, and represented as a result what the culture thought as one of the greatest triumphs of the further integration of the black population into everyday American life.
If only. And this is strange, too, because Cosby didn't start out his life on the national scene with The Cosby Show. His first brush with fame was the mid-60s adventure series I Spy, where he starred opposite Robert Culp, and nothing was made of this interracial dynamic. He next focused on Fat Albert, arguably his most famous creation. The Cosby Show lasted for nearly a decade and at that point, when he had reached middle age, that was the end, more or less, of his popular career. Ghost Dad was an abysmal failure at making him a movie star. He continued landing TV projects, but the culture had moved on, somewhat reluctantly, from him.
So he changed his focus. It's worth remembering how Cosby began life before we move on with this discussion. His father was absent during Cosby's formative years, living a military life during WWII. At this point, we ask ourselves, how much of an impact did that have on the young Cosby? Because when we look at the legacy of The Cosby Show and his later message about the crucial importance of personal accountability in the black community, the further question must be, Was Cosby affected for the worse or the better by this absence?
The answer, I would argue, is more complicated than the current narrative would suggest, even as it neglects to look at the man beyond the current controversy. His reputation and his accomplishments, indeed his entire voice is being threatened with total erasure. I think this is wrong. What he did was wrong, too, but needs further examining. Desperately.
What Cosby himself was saying in later years, in effect, was that children need fathers. Without fathers they lose direction. For most of his life, Cosby seemed like nothing at all had gone wrong with his life because of his absent father. But when you look at the importance of fatherhood in The Cosby Show, you may come to a different conclusion, too. This was perhaps the last great sitcom to celebrate the notion of fatherhood, which at that time was coming under fire by the evolving popular culture. Married...with Children and later, Family Guy, began sending a different message. The Cosby Show was the last time fatherhood was presented as a paragon of virtue in the household.
And yet what do we say about The Cosby Show now? That it was a Bill Cosby vehicle. And in fact it was, his last great platform to say something substantial to the culture around him. Because the next time he spoke, nobody listened. And, I would argue, he angered the black population he was seeking to help. Because the very thing he sought to champion, personal accountability, has completely left the conversation in the current climate. There has been no one arguing what he argued, just a few years ago, when Cosby's last days of popularity vanished in an instant. Once he stopped being funny, nobody cared what Cosby had to say anymore.
All along, while taking the allegations seriously, I questioned the timing of bringing them up again. Look around you and you'll find race relations charged as they haven't been in decades. There have been no leaders, however, to emerge to try and make sense of it. We live in a culture where everyone has a voice, but most of us feel like saying the same thing, and we don't much think about what we repeat. And that's a shame and that needs to change. When we have conversations at all, they're more argument than anything, ignoring and vilifying the other side. There's very little intelligence in any of it.
What I'm saying is, someone became interested in silencing Cosby. Whether in retaliation, because in a lot of ways he was one of the pillars of the black community and was easy to take down because of unrelated issues, or because he would have been voicing things in this climate that were not a part of the emerging message. Yes, Black Lives Matter, but as Cosby had argued, they're as subject to accountability as anyone else's.
The other side of Bill Cosby worth talking about, which has been and needs to be addressed, is what he was doing to women for decades. But also, what women were doing to themselves. Yes, he was wrong, but those women should never have put themselves in those predicaments to begin with. Their fathers failed them. This is not me arguing, blame the victim. But this was a man who had been famous for decades. That's the other point of reminding you about I Spy. Because while everyone remembers The Cosby Show these days, it seems everyone's forgotten that he was famous well before it. What does prolonged fame do to someone? It affects them, naturally. Cosby wasn't just famous for one thing, but for at least four career successes, three TV shows and his stand-up. He was married through all of it, by the way.
And yet, for whatever reason, woman after woman, because of that fame, kept presenting themselves to him. Not to submit themselves to some wicked appetite, but ultimately, it was a temptation Cosby couldn't turn away from. The thing is, these women were drawn to a famous figure. Regardless of their motivations, this becomes, at least in part, a cautionary tale about fame. Not just about what Bill Cosby did, but what led to it to begin with.
There have been various comments made that the Hollywood community knew, more or less, what was going on, and other comments that of course Hollywood knew, because that's what Hollywood does. But is it really a Hollywood thing, or a cultural phenomenon? This is what fame attracts. Any time a male music act attracts crazed admiration from young women, that's what's happening. It's completely irrational otherwise. When you remember the reaction Elvis Presley provoked, or the Beatles, or One Direction, you should hopefully understand Bill Cosby a little better.
The problem is, figuring out how to equate, in your mind, Bill Cosby with Harry Styles. There just seems to be too vast a disconnect. But there it is, all the same. Harry Styles didn't do what Bill Cosby did, but he's in exactly the same situation. And that's what Cosby was trying to talk about concerning the black population, too, this issue of accountability. The father figure of The Cosby Show doesn't seem capable of what Bill Cosby did anymore than you can envision Styles taking advantage of one of his fans, drugged or otherwise. The Bill Cosby who was a comedian doesn't seem to have had any problems you might have associated with an absentee father. He seemed far too well-adjusted, too successful. But the successful Bill Cosby didn't emerge right away. He was someone before he was a comedian, before he was famous, decades before The Cosby Show. Yet at the height of his fame, he chose to address fatherhood, its incredible responsibility, as the important subject he viewed it to be. Because he knew firsthand what happened when the father isn't there. It negatively impacts a life.
He saw the black population losing its accountability, spiraling out of control, losing all its cultural momentum, the more fathers disappeared from the black community. Cosby would have been the voice saying that it wasn't the police but the victims who should have been examined in all these shootings, questioning why they were in that position to begin with, not blaming them but asking why that scenario happened at all, not blaming white cops and ingrained racial problems, but looking further. Questioning.
He knew this because he saw the flaws in his own life. If you were to ask Bill Cosby today, instead of accusing and condemning him, he would be repeating that same message. He tried to do what he could when he could. This despite his own flaws. What I'm asking now is, Are we going to lose his message because of the man behind it? Or learn from it, and continue to learn from Cosby himself, because this seems like the last opportunity we'll ever have. Because we seem poised to stricken Bill Cosby from the record.
And that would be a mistake. That's why we need to talk about Bill Cosby.
No, not in the simplistic sense that we've been talking about him. And listen, I have every reason to take the allegations against him seriously, because I've been affected by this sort of thing personally. It is never acceptable to take advantage of someone else that way. But it's also never acceptable to gloss over the facts. And there are certain facts about Bill Cosby that are being lost in the narrative being constructed around him today.
Remember the last time people talked about Cosby? I bet you don't. The thing is, he had finally become a social crusader. After decades of Hollywood entertainment, being known for a succession of television series and as a stand-up comedian, Bill Cosby stood up in a different way, and attempted to address the problems facing the black community. Not as they stood in the 1960s, the last time there was serious discussion in that regard, in the realm of civil rights, which was necessary in a different way. This time, Cosby was addressing the problems in the black community itself. This is an article about that.
He even released a book about it. And this was years before the series of sensational police confrontations that drew national attention to race relations all over again. Curiously, I've seen very little about any of this in the blogging community, at least the tiny corner where I happen to reside. That's exactly how these things happen. We actually like boxing ourselves into tiny little corners, isolating ourselves from the greater world, pretending that these things don't affect us. But this is a national conversation, and it behooves us to participate. We fear alienating each other, but that's exactly the problem, because we live in a culture that thrives on alienation, because there's very little connection between these segments of the population, these millions of segments that exist within the millions of inhabitants within the United States. We have, in many ways, fragmented to a far greater extent than ever before in our history, which by the way is riddled with fragmentation. You may or may not recall that even at its founding, during the Revolutionary War, there were those who were fighting, and those who called themselves Loyalists, who supported the British cause. Which is to say nothing about the Native American population, never members of the official population, much less the slaves who belonged even to some of the Founders.
The transition from slavery to the population at large was a long and difficult one for black Americans, and for years we patted ourselves on the back because we had finally established what seemed like true social equality. I don't know about you, but I never stopped hearing grumbles about Equal Opportunity. Cosby existed, it seemed, completely outside of this whole conversation, much the way Willie Mays did in the Jackie Robinson era. Mays was criticized then. Cosby didn't seem relevant at all. He starred in one of the most successful sitcoms of all time, and represented as a result what the culture thought as one of the greatest triumphs of the further integration of the black population into everyday American life.
If only. And this is strange, too, because Cosby didn't start out his life on the national scene with The Cosby Show. His first brush with fame was the mid-60s adventure series I Spy, where he starred opposite Robert Culp, and nothing was made of this interracial dynamic. He next focused on Fat Albert, arguably his most famous creation. The Cosby Show lasted for nearly a decade and at that point, when he had reached middle age, that was the end, more or less, of his popular career. Ghost Dad was an abysmal failure at making him a movie star. He continued landing TV projects, but the culture had moved on, somewhat reluctantly, from him.
So he changed his focus. It's worth remembering how Cosby began life before we move on with this discussion. His father was absent during Cosby's formative years, living a military life during WWII. At this point, we ask ourselves, how much of an impact did that have on the young Cosby? Because when we look at the legacy of The Cosby Show and his later message about the crucial importance of personal accountability in the black community, the further question must be, Was Cosby affected for the worse or the better by this absence?
The answer, I would argue, is more complicated than the current narrative would suggest, even as it neglects to look at the man beyond the current controversy. His reputation and his accomplishments, indeed his entire voice is being threatened with total erasure. I think this is wrong. What he did was wrong, too, but needs further examining. Desperately.
What Cosby himself was saying in later years, in effect, was that children need fathers. Without fathers they lose direction. For most of his life, Cosby seemed like nothing at all had gone wrong with his life because of his absent father. But when you look at the importance of fatherhood in The Cosby Show, you may come to a different conclusion, too. This was perhaps the last great sitcom to celebrate the notion of fatherhood, which at that time was coming under fire by the evolving popular culture. Married...with Children and later, Family Guy, began sending a different message. The Cosby Show was the last time fatherhood was presented as a paragon of virtue in the household.
And yet what do we say about The Cosby Show now? That it was a Bill Cosby vehicle. And in fact it was, his last great platform to say something substantial to the culture around him. Because the next time he spoke, nobody listened. And, I would argue, he angered the black population he was seeking to help. Because the very thing he sought to champion, personal accountability, has completely left the conversation in the current climate. There has been no one arguing what he argued, just a few years ago, when Cosby's last days of popularity vanished in an instant. Once he stopped being funny, nobody cared what Cosby had to say anymore.
All along, while taking the allegations seriously, I questioned the timing of bringing them up again. Look around you and you'll find race relations charged as they haven't been in decades. There have been no leaders, however, to emerge to try and make sense of it. We live in a culture where everyone has a voice, but most of us feel like saying the same thing, and we don't much think about what we repeat. And that's a shame and that needs to change. When we have conversations at all, they're more argument than anything, ignoring and vilifying the other side. There's very little intelligence in any of it.
What I'm saying is, someone became interested in silencing Cosby. Whether in retaliation, because in a lot of ways he was one of the pillars of the black community and was easy to take down because of unrelated issues, or because he would have been voicing things in this climate that were not a part of the emerging message. Yes, Black Lives Matter, but as Cosby had argued, they're as subject to accountability as anyone else's.
The other side of Bill Cosby worth talking about, which has been and needs to be addressed, is what he was doing to women for decades. But also, what women were doing to themselves. Yes, he was wrong, but those women should never have put themselves in those predicaments to begin with. Their fathers failed them. This is not me arguing, blame the victim. But this was a man who had been famous for decades. That's the other point of reminding you about I Spy. Because while everyone remembers The Cosby Show these days, it seems everyone's forgotten that he was famous well before it. What does prolonged fame do to someone? It affects them, naturally. Cosby wasn't just famous for one thing, but for at least four career successes, three TV shows and his stand-up. He was married through all of it, by the way.
And yet, for whatever reason, woman after woman, because of that fame, kept presenting themselves to him. Not to submit themselves to some wicked appetite, but ultimately, it was a temptation Cosby couldn't turn away from. The thing is, these women were drawn to a famous figure. Regardless of their motivations, this becomes, at least in part, a cautionary tale about fame. Not just about what Bill Cosby did, but what led to it to begin with.
There have been various comments made that the Hollywood community knew, more or less, what was going on, and other comments that of course Hollywood knew, because that's what Hollywood does. But is it really a Hollywood thing, or a cultural phenomenon? This is what fame attracts. Any time a male music act attracts crazed admiration from young women, that's what's happening. It's completely irrational otherwise. When you remember the reaction Elvis Presley provoked, or the Beatles, or One Direction, you should hopefully understand Bill Cosby a little better.
The problem is, figuring out how to equate, in your mind, Bill Cosby with Harry Styles. There just seems to be too vast a disconnect. But there it is, all the same. Harry Styles didn't do what Bill Cosby did, but he's in exactly the same situation. And that's what Cosby was trying to talk about concerning the black population, too, this issue of accountability. The father figure of The Cosby Show doesn't seem capable of what Bill Cosby did anymore than you can envision Styles taking advantage of one of his fans, drugged or otherwise. The Bill Cosby who was a comedian doesn't seem to have had any problems you might have associated with an absentee father. He seemed far too well-adjusted, too successful. But the successful Bill Cosby didn't emerge right away. He was someone before he was a comedian, before he was famous, decades before The Cosby Show. Yet at the height of his fame, he chose to address fatherhood, its incredible responsibility, as the important subject he viewed it to be. Because he knew firsthand what happened when the father isn't there. It negatively impacts a life.
He saw the black population losing its accountability, spiraling out of control, losing all its cultural momentum, the more fathers disappeared from the black community. Cosby would have been the voice saying that it wasn't the police but the victims who should have been examined in all these shootings, questioning why they were in that position to begin with, not blaming them but asking why that scenario happened at all, not blaming white cops and ingrained racial problems, but looking further. Questioning.
He knew this because he saw the flaws in his own life. If you were to ask Bill Cosby today, instead of accusing and condemning him, he would be repeating that same message. He tried to do what he could when he could. This despite his own flaws. What I'm asking now is, Are we going to lose his message because of the man behind it? Or learn from it, and continue to learn from Cosby himself, because this seems like the last opportunity we'll ever have. Because we seem poised to stricken Bill Cosby from the record.
And that would be a mistake. That's why we need to talk about Bill Cosby.
Sunday, November 02, 2014
#775. Rolling Stone 1217
Last month I read Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, etc.), which among other things got me thinking about investigative journalism. At work recently I saw a copy of Rolling Stone with Robin Williams on the cover, referencing of course his death last August, and so I had a look at the magazine, a complete issue, for the first time in ages. Back in high school (would this have been the last time Rolling Stone was actually cool, or just the last time I myself was paying attention?) I read it all the time. Rolling Stone, in case you've never read much less heard of it, is a rock 'n' roll magazine that's also known for Peter Travers' movie reviews, music reviews, and yes, investigative journalism. Mostly, it's a magazine that took rock pretty seriously about taking an alternative approach to life, not so much what we consider alternative today (because the thing the '80s did to alternative music and alternative everything else was, apparently, irrevocably split it so that it's increasingly uncommon for any one person to experience all or most of what there is out there; sucks culturally to be so splintered and isolated, but at least there's a lot of diversity!).
The Williams story is itself pretty interesting, since his own history in Rolling Stone is probably indicative of the arc his life took. There's reference to the three other cover stories he merited, and they came from 1979 (circa Mork & Mindy), 1988 (Good Morning, Vietnam), and 1991 (Awakenings). Post-1991, you could say, Williams went a little too mainstream, which is that odd period of public life after you've become famous (Mork & Mindy) and you somehow stay there institutionally for a little too long (the '90s seemed to be unforgivable success for Williams, including the sonic id of Aladdin, Mrs. Doubtfire, and even Good Will Hunting; it seems strange, since given his track record with the magazine and how The Birdcage was ahead of the road-to-LGBT-community-culturally-accepted era, you might actually have expected that to have rated a cover, too; although even his early '00s stretch of dark roles, including One Hour Photo but for me, more significantly, Insomnia with Al Pacino and Christopher Nolan, didn't merit much more than an oh-that's-interesting reaction).
Williams was undoubtedly uniquely talented, but he definitely fell victim to our increasingly fragmented society, which is also why most of the movies that are wildly popular these days are event movies and movie stars are the people who manage to be cast in lots of them (which is actually good news for Tom Hardy but also a major reason Samuel L. Jackson is among the top-earning stars despite pretty much never starring in his own movies). Used to be, movie stars were defined by their ability to make any of their releases the latest event movie. Williams was one of the early victims, critics suddenly finding it very easy to completely overlook whatever he was doing. I remember Man of the Year in particular, in which he basically plays Jon Stewart running for president, and the only thing anyone said about that was how Williams was far too mainstream to pull off Jon Stewart. That would have been an absurd statement at the height of the Rolling Stone covers era (which was ironically right before Rolling Stone stopped caring).
The rest of the issue has compelling material, too, which is why I decided to write about it here, getting back to Larsson's ideas in his trilogy Larsson himself was Swedish, so everything he had to say about investigative journalism should be understood to reflect Sweden directly, but crusading journalists were huge news in the United States at one time, thanks to Watergate. I still don't quite understand the Watergate scandal. I mean, I get that Nixon was officially exposed as, I don't know, incredibly paranoid. I guess he was also exposed, I don't know, as a politician working on getting reelected? (Oh no! They stole campaign secrets! It reminds me of the "scandal" I keep hearing on sports radio about the Patriots being "exposed" for stealing play calls during their incredible championship run in the early '00s. I mean, who doesn't? All this is really about is trying to bring down a team or a president you don't like. Well, congratulations.)
The last time there was serious investigative journalism in the US was during the Clinton presidency. I don't know if you remember, but that wasn't just a time where we joked about inhaling or what the dude was doing with personal assistants and getting impeached for it or even Primary Colors, but there was huge paranoid right wing talk about all the people the administration was eliminating behind the scenes. That was the whole reason the Democrats officially declared war on the Republicans, why they hated Bush even before he officially became president (when is it ever acceptable to make fun of someone because they have a penchant for misspeaking? but that's all you heard for years about the guy, until people made it official to declare Iraq the new Vietnam, which is to say even before the war began), and how Obama (it's true) became president (because he declared most smoothly that, basically, he wasn't Bush, something he began uttering, and if you click the "politics" label you'll see I even remarked on that at the time, in 2004).
But you don't hear anything of that concerning Clinton's legacy these days. The latest smear journalism we've gotten was the Chris Christie Crisis. I don't mean to turn this whole blog into a political quagmire (which is why I don't generally talk politics), or declare one party to be better than the other (the truth is, they're pretty much equal, except on the issues they zealously defend without really thinking about them, and are as such convenient smokescreens for their constituents more than anything). No, instead we're headed toward Hillary officially being president (it kind of seems inevitable at this point, although I guess we'll see in two years), right after the last time anyone heard from her was how she probably wouldn't run because, you know, health scare.
The irony of all that is that one of the stories I want to talk about is exactly about the ridiculousness of US politics, and how the platform you're reading from is bound to try and gear its perspective, come hell or high water (but enough about Chris Christie!) based on its political bent. It's Tim Dickinson's feature entitled "Biggest Tax Scam Ever," which if you can believe it exposes big corporations of being incredibly greedy. Shocking, I know! I'm of the mind where we're basically at the point where we need a modern equivalent of the trust-busting, monopoly (but not the game Monopoly) era that saw the end of the big businessmen of a different age (Rockefeller, names like that). You'd think the Great Recession and everything everyone knows that led to it would have already led to this, but I guess not. The problem is, except for a few names, most of the big businessmen of this era are completely anonymous. You know geeky Bill Gates, but there are so many others you just don't. Anyway, Dickinson explains how corporations exploit tax loopholes that allow them to hide the vast sums of their fortunes on foreign land. He even goes so far as to detail how these practices began (in the Clinton era), but goes on to blame Bush for the bulk of it (because, Republicans!), and tries to paint Obama in a sympathetic light ("we're working on that!") even though the problem has only gotten worse under him.
Nice work, Dickinson. But I don't think Sweden will sweat your work. I don't think anyone will. Maybe things really do work differently in Sweden, but I think Woodward and Bernstein were the last time anyone worried about journalists in the US. I find that to be a problem. Where's the worth of public accountability if everyone who works so hard to screw everyone else (oh wait, I think I just identified the problem...) can so consistently get away with it?
There's also an article about LGBT teens who end up homeless because their parents threw them out. This is a legitimately sad one and perhaps the only real piece of journalism in the magazine. Curiously, as I noted early, we're in an era where society has acknowledged more than ever before (at least in modern times; curiously the whole reason Oliver Stone's brilliant Alexander landed to such popular opposition was because it featured the title Great one in a time when people were openly bisexual) that LGBTs exist, so I don't know why there isn't greater support for these outcasts. I mean, why are they even outcasts at all? You would think a country that successfully (although it seems less and less so sometimes, after public outcries over Trayvon Martin and Ferguson) learned from the Civil Rights era would be more culturally accepting, but then, we still have a huge problem with immigration even though we're a whole country of immigrants. (Seriously, my hometown newspaper, the Sun Journal, for some reason had a whole article about immigrants who for one reason or another chose not to apply for citizenship; I understand that newspapers, like magazines, face greater opposition than physical books and therefore will try anything to try and reclaim readers, which Sun Journal has clearly been trying to do in recent months, but they need to make a little more sense than that article did, considering it chose for examples people other than anyone who was actually relevant to these particular immigration times, which for instance in Maine in particular is Somali-heavy.)
...I didn't really mean to deviate greatly from what this blog is usually about (although I think I've done enough of this kind of talk where it isn't completely unusual), but. Larsson. Blame Stieg Larsson. Which is okay, although also hugely unfortunate, because he's dead.
To lighten the post up a little, the issue also has a ridiculous interview with Ariana Grande, who apparently has seen demons Or something. When I first heard "Problem," I thought it was kind of dumb. But it's not so bad. So, "Problem":
There's also a really positive review for the latest Maroon 5 album, plus recommendations for fall movie releases, plus my favorite article, detailing the imminent release of Bob Dylan and the Band's complete Basement Tapes sessions from 1967, an apparently fruitful, mythic, and nearly lost slice of Dylanalia.
I don't if any of this makes you want to read Rolling Stone (also, Almost Famous and the career of Cameron Crowe, which is oddly reflected in a tribute to Charles M. Young), but I figured it was worth writing about.
The Williams story is itself pretty interesting, since his own history in Rolling Stone is probably indicative of the arc his life took. There's reference to the three other cover stories he merited, and they came from 1979 (circa Mork & Mindy), 1988 (Good Morning, Vietnam), and 1991 (Awakenings). Post-1991, you could say, Williams went a little too mainstream, which is that odd period of public life after you've become famous (Mork & Mindy) and you somehow stay there institutionally for a little too long (the '90s seemed to be unforgivable success for Williams, including the sonic id of Aladdin, Mrs. Doubtfire, and even Good Will Hunting; it seems strange, since given his track record with the magazine and how The Birdcage was ahead of the road-to-LGBT-community-culturally-accepted era, you might actually have expected that to have rated a cover, too; although even his early '00s stretch of dark roles, including One Hour Photo but for me, more significantly, Insomnia with Al Pacino and Christopher Nolan, didn't merit much more than an oh-that's-interesting reaction).
Williams was undoubtedly uniquely talented, but he definitely fell victim to our increasingly fragmented society, which is also why most of the movies that are wildly popular these days are event movies and movie stars are the people who manage to be cast in lots of them (which is actually good news for Tom Hardy but also a major reason Samuel L. Jackson is among the top-earning stars despite pretty much never starring in his own movies). Used to be, movie stars were defined by their ability to make any of their releases the latest event movie. Williams was one of the early victims, critics suddenly finding it very easy to completely overlook whatever he was doing. I remember Man of the Year in particular, in which he basically plays Jon Stewart running for president, and the only thing anyone said about that was how Williams was far too mainstream to pull off Jon Stewart. That would have been an absurd statement at the height of the Rolling Stone covers era (which was ironically right before Rolling Stone stopped caring).
The rest of the issue has compelling material, too, which is why I decided to write about it here, getting back to Larsson's ideas in his trilogy Larsson himself was Swedish, so everything he had to say about investigative journalism should be understood to reflect Sweden directly, but crusading journalists were huge news in the United States at one time, thanks to Watergate. I still don't quite understand the Watergate scandal. I mean, I get that Nixon was officially exposed as, I don't know, incredibly paranoid. I guess he was also exposed, I don't know, as a politician working on getting reelected? (Oh no! They stole campaign secrets! It reminds me of the "scandal" I keep hearing on sports radio about the Patriots being "exposed" for stealing play calls during their incredible championship run in the early '00s. I mean, who doesn't? All this is really about is trying to bring down a team or a president you don't like. Well, congratulations.)
The last time there was serious investigative journalism in the US was during the Clinton presidency. I don't know if you remember, but that wasn't just a time where we joked about inhaling or what the dude was doing with personal assistants and getting impeached for it or even Primary Colors, but there was huge paranoid right wing talk about all the people the administration was eliminating behind the scenes. That was the whole reason the Democrats officially declared war on the Republicans, why they hated Bush even before he officially became president (when is it ever acceptable to make fun of someone because they have a penchant for misspeaking? but that's all you heard for years about the guy, until people made it official to declare Iraq the new Vietnam, which is to say even before the war began), and how Obama (it's true) became president (because he declared most smoothly that, basically, he wasn't Bush, something he began uttering, and if you click the "politics" label you'll see I even remarked on that at the time, in 2004).
But you don't hear anything of that concerning Clinton's legacy these days. The latest smear journalism we've gotten was the Chris Christie Crisis. I don't mean to turn this whole blog into a political quagmire (which is why I don't generally talk politics), or declare one party to be better than the other (the truth is, they're pretty much equal, except on the issues they zealously defend without really thinking about them, and are as such convenient smokescreens for their constituents more than anything). No, instead we're headed toward Hillary officially being president (it kind of seems inevitable at this point, although I guess we'll see in two years), right after the last time anyone heard from her was how she probably wouldn't run because, you know, health scare.
The irony of all that is that one of the stories I want to talk about is exactly about the ridiculousness of US politics, and how the platform you're reading from is bound to try and gear its perspective, come hell or high water (but enough about Chris Christie!) based on its political bent. It's Tim Dickinson's feature entitled "Biggest Tax Scam Ever," which if you can believe it exposes big corporations of being incredibly greedy. Shocking, I know! I'm of the mind where we're basically at the point where we need a modern equivalent of the trust-busting, monopoly (but not the game Monopoly) era that saw the end of the big businessmen of a different age (Rockefeller, names like that). You'd think the Great Recession and everything everyone knows that led to it would have already led to this, but I guess not. The problem is, except for a few names, most of the big businessmen of this era are completely anonymous. You know geeky Bill Gates, but there are so many others you just don't. Anyway, Dickinson explains how corporations exploit tax loopholes that allow them to hide the vast sums of their fortunes on foreign land. He even goes so far as to detail how these practices began (in the Clinton era), but goes on to blame Bush for the bulk of it (because, Republicans!), and tries to paint Obama in a sympathetic light ("we're working on that!") even though the problem has only gotten worse under him.
Nice work, Dickinson. But I don't think Sweden will sweat your work. I don't think anyone will. Maybe things really do work differently in Sweden, but I think Woodward and Bernstein were the last time anyone worried about journalists in the US. I find that to be a problem. Where's the worth of public accountability if everyone who works so hard to screw everyone else (oh wait, I think I just identified the problem...) can so consistently get away with it?
There's also an article about LGBT teens who end up homeless because their parents threw them out. This is a legitimately sad one and perhaps the only real piece of journalism in the magazine. Curiously, as I noted early, we're in an era where society has acknowledged more than ever before (at least in modern times; curiously the whole reason Oliver Stone's brilliant Alexander landed to such popular opposition was because it featured the title Great one in a time when people were openly bisexual) that LGBTs exist, so I don't know why there isn't greater support for these outcasts. I mean, why are they even outcasts at all? You would think a country that successfully (although it seems less and less so sometimes, after public outcries over Trayvon Martin and Ferguson) learned from the Civil Rights era would be more culturally accepting, but then, we still have a huge problem with immigration even though we're a whole country of immigrants. (Seriously, my hometown newspaper, the Sun Journal, for some reason had a whole article about immigrants who for one reason or another chose not to apply for citizenship; I understand that newspapers, like magazines, face greater opposition than physical books and therefore will try anything to try and reclaim readers, which Sun Journal has clearly been trying to do in recent months, but they need to make a little more sense than that article did, considering it chose for examples people other than anyone who was actually relevant to these particular immigration times, which for instance in Maine in particular is Somali-heavy.)
...I didn't really mean to deviate greatly from what this blog is usually about (although I think I've done enough of this kind of talk where it isn't completely unusual), but. Larsson. Blame Stieg Larsson. Which is okay, although also hugely unfortunate, because he's dead.
To lighten the post up a little, the issue also has a ridiculous interview with Ariana Grande, who apparently has seen demons Or something. When I first heard "Problem," I thought it was kind of dumb. But it's not so bad. So, "Problem":
There's also a really positive review for the latest Maroon 5 album, plus recommendations for fall movie releases, plus my favorite article, detailing the imminent release of Bob Dylan and the Band's complete Basement Tapes sessions from 1967, an apparently fruitful, mythic, and nearly lost slice of Dylanalia.
I don't if any of this makes you want to read Rolling Stone (also, Almost Famous and the career of Cameron Crowe, which is oddly reflected in a tribute to Charles M. Young), but I figured it was worth writing about.
Saturday, October 05, 2013
#612. Superpolitics, or It's Great to Be a Politician When Your'e Doing What Politicians Do Best
I'm not going to get into the politics of the government shutdown, but I figured it would still be fun to talk about.
The crux of it seems to be that President Obama is desperately trying to ensure the Affordable Care Act (or "Obamacare") remains intact, because he sees it as his lasting legacy, just as Republicans are using this to maneuver themselves for 2016. It sucks about all the economic fallout that's resulting from all this, but then, we haven't exactly been in the best possible shape for a good number of years now.
What excites me is that aside from the economic frownie face, this is politics as you read about it in the history books. JFK wrote the whole of Profiles in Courage about this. (If you've never read it, consider it your 11/22/63 anniversary duty.) Who doesn't vaguely remember the one dude who beat the other dude right on the senate floor, and how batshit insane that was even for that time?
No, this is politicians doing what they do best. Voters naively believe that politicians are elected to perform a civic duty. No, politicians are elected so that they can make impressive speeches in front of each other. The same principals they espouse during their campaigns are the same things they talk about upholding while shaping new laws and whatnot. And they're so busy doing that, trying in vain to convince each other, that nothing ever gets done.
Every once and a while, all this grandiose posturing makes an impression on people other than politicians. Ted Cruz made a 21 hour filibuster to kick off the shutdown. Now, granted, his filibuster was probably not nearly as awesome as Patton Oswalt's. Nothing will ever be that awesome. In evidence:
But still, Cruz had the real world equivalent, and that's something to celebrate, even if you couldn't possibly sit through all 21 hours of it awake, or agree with everything he said.
And that's the sort of thing that's been going on ever since. Great time to care about politicians being politicians. Because this is what they love the most. Aren't you happy to see them so happy?
The crux of it seems to be that President Obama is desperately trying to ensure the Affordable Care Act (or "Obamacare") remains intact, because he sees it as his lasting legacy, just as Republicans are using this to maneuver themselves for 2016. It sucks about all the economic fallout that's resulting from all this, but then, we haven't exactly been in the best possible shape for a good number of years now.
What excites me is that aside from the economic frownie face, this is politics as you read about it in the history books. JFK wrote the whole of Profiles in Courage about this. (If you've never read it, consider it your 11/22/63 anniversary duty.) Who doesn't vaguely remember the one dude who beat the other dude right on the senate floor, and how batshit insane that was even for that time?
No, this is politicians doing what they do best. Voters naively believe that politicians are elected to perform a civic duty. No, politicians are elected so that they can make impressive speeches in front of each other. The same principals they espouse during their campaigns are the same things they talk about upholding while shaping new laws and whatnot. And they're so busy doing that, trying in vain to convince each other, that nothing ever gets done.
Every once and a while, all this grandiose posturing makes an impression on people other than politicians. Ted Cruz made a 21 hour filibuster to kick off the shutdown. Now, granted, his filibuster was probably not nearly as awesome as Patton Oswalt's. Nothing will ever be that awesome. In evidence:
But still, Cruz had the real world equivalent, and that's something to celebrate, even if you couldn't possibly sit through all 21 hours of it awake, or agree with everything he said.
And that's the sort of thing that's been going on ever since. Great time to care about politicians being politicians. Because this is what they love the most. Aren't you happy to see them so happy?
Tuesday, September 24, 2013
#608. The 2013 PWI 500
Pro Wrestling Illustrated, as the title suggests, is the Sports Illustrated of professional wrestling magazines. Since 1991, it has annually compiled a list of the top 500 competitors in the world, so that makes this year's edition the 23rd ranking.
And for most of the past decade, I've been providing a commentary on the results. Normally I haven't been too happy. Sometimes PWI makes baffling decisions for the number one slot. The whole point of lists like this is to spark debate, but sometimes it's seemed as if the magazine has taken a perverse pleasure in selecting the least likely candidate for the slot. I've found myself thinking that there was a far more obvious prospect.
PWI is an independent entity. It exists outside the auspices of WWE or any other wrestling promotion. Still, the top slot often seems to go with whoever WWE has most heavily promoted in the last year, or failing that whoever else has most impressed its editors. The grading period is roughly midpoint of the year to midpoint of the year. Since WWE's WrestleMania takes place in the second half of this grading period, most of my frustrations have tended to stem from the fact that anyone who had at least as good or better a first half of this grading period as the star who shined in the second can never seem to overcome this handicap. They didn't do their best work in the period PWI most values.
Now, PWI is objective to a point. Famously, it presents the majority of its material from a kayfabe perspective. "Kayfabe" is when you take professional wrestling at face value. You believe the competition is real and accept that the way promoters book their talent is basically the only way to evaluate them. In that sense, the success of a given wrestler's year is based on how they were booked. PWI most notably breaks kayfabe when its analyzes a wrestler's specific performance, how they present themselves regardless of how they're booked, or in other words what they do with what they're given.
The problem with the PWI 500 is that it has always been driven by kayfabe. In rare (and some of the key baffling ones) exceptions, the top slot went to someone based on PWI's ability to look beyond kayfabe. However, since I'm focusing primarily on this year's ranking, I won't reiterate too explicitly on past grievances.
All of this is to say that I've been conflicted over this year's winner of the top slot, John Cena. Cena had the WrestleMania push. He won the Royal Rumble and defeated The Rock in the main event of WrestleMania 29, and as of the end of the grading period (but not what has developed since) reigned as WWE champion. That's action from the second half of the grading period. In the first half, he had perhaps one of the worst periods of his entire main event career. He did win a Money in the Bank contract, but became the first person ever to fail in capturing a title after cashing it in. He also lost time while he rested from injuries. In the second half of 2012, Cena was not the man. It was the necessary second act from his heroic efforts in the first part of that year to rebound from losing to The Rock at the previous WrestleMania.
Certainly this year was a triumphant comeback. But that's only been half the year, and half the grading period. No, the man who arguably deserved the top spot in ranking came in at the second slot. He won the top slot last year. I'm talking about CM Punk.
Punk held the WWE championship for 434 consecutive days, a reign that ended at the start of the second half of the grading period. It's the longest reign with the title in decades. True, he did lose two matches to The Rock, and then lost again at WrestleMania to the Undertaker, after which he took some time off, making his second half not nearly as impressive as Cena's, and if anything comparable to Cena's first half, but it's a more than fair argument that Punk's first half was better than Cena's second. Punk's momentum was better in defeat than Cena's was toward triumph.
By the rules of kayfabe, Cena probably deserves that top slot. The rematch with The Rock was excellent, and it did more than their first match to put Cena in the same league as The Rock. It's been weird for me to have to argue that Cena deserves to be in consideration for the title of WWE legend, because I was among his earliest supporters. I long ago saw that this was a possibility, and the improvements he needed to make he did. And yet here we are now in 2013 and I'm wondering if PWI should have made that unprecedented move. Sitting atop this year's ranking gives Cena three such wins in the history of the PWI 500. This distances him from Bret Hart, Steve Austin, and Triple H, who were also two-time top slot winners. True, he's been in a position to be a more consistent main event talent for WWE than those guys, but isn't it weird to think he might be considered better than Austin, much less The Rock, who never had such an honor even once to begin with?
Yes, I'm taking all of this pretty seriously. I'm buying into the kayfabe. Had Punk gotten the honor, he would have joined Cena and the others among the PWI 500 elite. And PWI itself would have been more than happy in a lot of other years to have done exactly that.
Does it matter? I'm asking myself that, on top of a lot of other things I've been asking myself lately. I've been at a crossroads in my life for what sometimes seems all my life, only moreso lately. It's fair to say I've been in crisis mode at least for the past two years, reaping what I've sown, learning the results of all my failures to accomplish what anyone else might have taken for granted years ago. And I look at something like the PWI 500 and debating with myself yet again whether Wrestler A should have been placed above Wrestler B, much less where other familiar and favorite names fell in the ranking, and I wonder if I've been throwing my life away on trivialities.
I wonder, because my whole life I've been working on interests that in a lot of ways have dovetailed very beautifully with each other. I'm happiest with what I've done with my life when I think about how it has affected the writing I do. And yet I'm conflicted because even with all the happiness I have with my writing, I've struggled in every other aspect of my life. I am deep in the heart of the 99%. Financially, I've always been a kind of mess, but now I'm in a whole heap of trouble, especially considering what I've been mired in for the last few years.
I'm not complaining for sympathy. A lot of my troubles stem from the natural kind of alienation I bring on myself. I'm talking about wrestling again even though I know none of my readers particularly cares about it. In efforts to attract more interest to my blogging, I only alienate myself more. I can never be the happy little soldier. In a lot of ways, I isolate myself at least as much by the culmination and expression of my interests as by the instinct to set myself apart, to focus on what makes me different rather than what makes me a part of the community.
I'm a snob. It seems as if my whole being points in that direction. I rate myself on my own merits as much as how I compare myself to others. I'm angry and jealous at the success of others. What comes easy to them is a constant struggle for me. And through all of this I know that life doesn't work that way. Success is arbitrary.
People most appreciate people who don't alienate them. They gravitate toward those who make them feel good. In PWI speak, it's easier to root for Cena, who acts the part of the good guy, than for Punk, who spent the whole grading period as a villain. Am I a villain? Am I selfish and condescending?
I guess and hope that next time I talk about this, I will have an answer.
And for most of the past decade, I've been providing a commentary on the results. Normally I haven't been too happy. Sometimes PWI makes baffling decisions for the number one slot. The whole point of lists like this is to spark debate, but sometimes it's seemed as if the magazine has taken a perverse pleasure in selecting the least likely candidate for the slot. I've found myself thinking that there was a far more obvious prospect.
PWI is an independent entity. It exists outside the auspices of WWE or any other wrestling promotion. Still, the top slot often seems to go with whoever WWE has most heavily promoted in the last year, or failing that whoever else has most impressed its editors. The grading period is roughly midpoint of the year to midpoint of the year. Since WWE's WrestleMania takes place in the second half of this grading period, most of my frustrations have tended to stem from the fact that anyone who had at least as good or better a first half of this grading period as the star who shined in the second can never seem to overcome this handicap. They didn't do their best work in the period PWI most values.
Now, PWI is objective to a point. Famously, it presents the majority of its material from a kayfabe perspective. "Kayfabe" is when you take professional wrestling at face value. You believe the competition is real and accept that the way promoters book their talent is basically the only way to evaluate them. In that sense, the success of a given wrestler's year is based on how they were booked. PWI most notably breaks kayfabe when its analyzes a wrestler's specific performance, how they present themselves regardless of how they're booked, or in other words what they do with what they're given.
The problem with the PWI 500 is that it has always been driven by kayfabe. In rare (and some of the key baffling ones) exceptions, the top slot went to someone based on PWI's ability to look beyond kayfabe. However, since I'm focusing primarily on this year's ranking, I won't reiterate too explicitly on past grievances.
All of this is to say that I've been conflicted over this year's winner of the top slot, John Cena. Cena had the WrestleMania push. He won the Royal Rumble and defeated The Rock in the main event of WrestleMania 29, and as of the end of the grading period (but not what has developed since) reigned as WWE champion. That's action from the second half of the grading period. In the first half, he had perhaps one of the worst periods of his entire main event career. He did win a Money in the Bank contract, but became the first person ever to fail in capturing a title after cashing it in. He also lost time while he rested from injuries. In the second half of 2012, Cena was not the man. It was the necessary second act from his heroic efforts in the first part of that year to rebound from losing to The Rock at the previous WrestleMania.
Certainly this year was a triumphant comeback. But that's only been half the year, and half the grading period. No, the man who arguably deserved the top spot in ranking came in at the second slot. He won the top slot last year. I'm talking about CM Punk.
Punk held the WWE championship for 434 consecutive days, a reign that ended at the start of the second half of the grading period. It's the longest reign with the title in decades. True, he did lose two matches to The Rock, and then lost again at WrestleMania to the Undertaker, after which he took some time off, making his second half not nearly as impressive as Cena's, and if anything comparable to Cena's first half, but it's a more than fair argument that Punk's first half was better than Cena's second. Punk's momentum was better in defeat than Cena's was toward triumph.
By the rules of kayfabe, Cena probably deserves that top slot. The rematch with The Rock was excellent, and it did more than their first match to put Cena in the same league as The Rock. It's been weird for me to have to argue that Cena deserves to be in consideration for the title of WWE legend, because I was among his earliest supporters. I long ago saw that this was a possibility, and the improvements he needed to make he did. And yet here we are now in 2013 and I'm wondering if PWI should have made that unprecedented move. Sitting atop this year's ranking gives Cena three such wins in the history of the PWI 500. This distances him from Bret Hart, Steve Austin, and Triple H, who were also two-time top slot winners. True, he's been in a position to be a more consistent main event talent for WWE than those guys, but isn't it weird to think he might be considered better than Austin, much less The Rock, who never had such an honor even once to begin with?
Yes, I'm taking all of this pretty seriously. I'm buying into the kayfabe. Had Punk gotten the honor, he would have joined Cena and the others among the PWI 500 elite. And PWI itself would have been more than happy in a lot of other years to have done exactly that.
Does it matter? I'm asking myself that, on top of a lot of other things I've been asking myself lately. I've been at a crossroads in my life for what sometimes seems all my life, only moreso lately. It's fair to say I've been in crisis mode at least for the past two years, reaping what I've sown, learning the results of all my failures to accomplish what anyone else might have taken for granted years ago. And I look at something like the PWI 500 and debating with myself yet again whether Wrestler A should have been placed above Wrestler B, much less where other familiar and favorite names fell in the ranking, and I wonder if I've been throwing my life away on trivialities.
I wonder, because my whole life I've been working on interests that in a lot of ways have dovetailed very beautifully with each other. I'm happiest with what I've done with my life when I think about how it has affected the writing I do. And yet I'm conflicted because even with all the happiness I have with my writing, I've struggled in every other aspect of my life. I am deep in the heart of the 99%. Financially, I've always been a kind of mess, but now I'm in a whole heap of trouble, especially considering what I've been mired in for the last few years.
I'm not complaining for sympathy. A lot of my troubles stem from the natural kind of alienation I bring on myself. I'm talking about wrestling again even though I know none of my readers particularly cares about it. In efforts to attract more interest to my blogging, I only alienate myself more. I can never be the happy little soldier. In a lot of ways, I isolate myself at least as much by the culmination and expression of my interests as by the instinct to set myself apart, to focus on what makes me different rather than what makes me a part of the community.
I'm a snob. It seems as if my whole being points in that direction. I rate myself on my own merits as much as how I compare myself to others. I'm angry and jealous at the success of others. What comes easy to them is a constant struggle for me. And through all of this I know that life doesn't work that way. Success is arbitrary.
People most appreciate people who don't alienate them. They gravitate toward those who make them feel good. In PWI speak, it's easier to root for Cena, who acts the part of the good guy, than for Punk, who spent the whole grading period as a villain. Am I a villain? Am I selfish and condescending?
I guess and hope that next time I talk about this, I will have an answer.
Friday, July 05, 2013
#595. Well...
One of the things I've always dreaded as a writer is finding a blank audience, or alienating it. And I think I continue to do both here at Scouring Monk. That's part of what led to the dramatic pullback of a little more than a month ago of all my previous blogging activity.
I always expect big things from what I do. I can't help it. But the big things don't seem to materialize. At some point I have to acknowledge that this is my own doing. As I said at the start, I think I'm best at alienating myself. Sometimes I'm self-deprecating about that. A few posts ago I referenced a Green Lantern character, who was famously introduced in an Alan Moore story, the whole point of which was to explain the phrase, "Mogo doesn't socialize."
Thing is, Mogo is an entire planet. That's why he doesn't socialize. Throughout my life I've come across stumbling block after stumbling block in my efforts to be social. I think that plays a big part in my rate of success (such as it is).
But I think I also ask far too much from people. I keep writing huge chunks of words on this blog. In fact, the whole A-to-Z fiasco as I grew to interpret it stemmed not as much from the Challenge itself but from the Liebster post. I've read enough Liebster posts from other bloggers to know that they don't typically drone on for nearly as long as I did.
My wordy diarrhea is an acknowledged need for acceptance, to impress, to seek approval.
And that's why this note will be as brief as I can make it, because at some point we all realize where we make our biggest mistakes. We all do, we really do. Most of the time we simply don't see when those around us have experienced it.
I keep approaching this blogging thing the same way. When I started out in 2002, I was short and pithy. Not that I was a massive success, mind you (more like mired in obscurity). But maybe that's what I should do again. I know that when I come across a blog that has an incredibly long entry, I'm less likely to make the commitment to read it.
Anyway, this is just to say the milk's run out and I've gone to the store to replace it.
I always expect big things from what I do. I can't help it. But the big things don't seem to materialize. At some point I have to acknowledge that this is my own doing. As I said at the start, I think I'm best at alienating myself. Sometimes I'm self-deprecating about that. A few posts ago I referenced a Green Lantern character, who was famously introduced in an Alan Moore story, the whole point of which was to explain the phrase, "Mogo doesn't socialize."
Thing is, Mogo is an entire planet. That's why he doesn't socialize. Throughout my life I've come across stumbling block after stumbling block in my efforts to be social. I think that plays a big part in my rate of success (such as it is).
But I think I also ask far too much from people. I keep writing huge chunks of words on this blog. In fact, the whole A-to-Z fiasco as I grew to interpret it stemmed not as much from the Challenge itself but from the Liebster post. I've read enough Liebster posts from other bloggers to know that they don't typically drone on for nearly as long as I did.
My wordy diarrhea is an acknowledged need for acceptance, to impress, to seek approval.
And that's why this note will be as brief as I can make it, because at some point we all realize where we make our biggest mistakes. We all do, we really do. Most of the time we simply don't see when those around us have experienced it.
I keep approaching this blogging thing the same way. When I started out in 2002, I was short and pithy. Not that I was a massive success, mind you (more like mired in obscurity). But maybe that's what I should do again. I know that when I come across a blog that has an incredibly long entry, I'm less likely to make the commitment to read it.
Anyway, this is just to say the milk's run out and I've gone to the store to replace it.
Wednesday, July 03, 2013
#594. I'm No Superman
In conjunction with the title of this post (borrowed from the Scrubs theme), here are links to my Man of Steel thoughts posted at Examiner (y'know, in case you were burning to know):
I thought the movie was pretty brilliant. The reason I wrote two pieces on it was because of the big giant controversy surrounding Superman's execution of General Zod at the end. As far as the reviews I've read go, whether or not you're overly bothered by this affects your whole opinion of the movie. And since I don't have near the problem (explained in different ways if you read both pieces) most people seem to have had with it, I guess I had that much easier a time enjoying (and still enjoying, because comic book writer Mark Waid has confessed that while watching he kept thinking "Awesome!" right up to that moment, at which point he actually vocally expressed his displeasure in the theater) the whole product.
I have some confessions to make. I generally like DC products (comics and movies and TV shows) while find those linked to Marvel flawed (there are always exceptions). This didn't change last summer, when The Avengers became a massive hit that made history all over the place. I liked that movie, but I certainly wasn't impressed. I will also briefly note that it wasn't Christopher Nolan alone whose presence swayed my interest in Man of Steel. In fact, I've debated for years how much I enjoyed Batman Begins dating back to its 2005 release. I was already a big fan of Nolan thanks to Memento, big enough to add his first film, Following, into my treasured movie experiences. I loved most of Begins, but the ending left me cold in the same way Steel's has for 2013 audiences (though not really a confusion, I will nonetheless clarify that I have not just referenced the 1997 Shaq movie, though I enjoyed that, too). The big action finale just felt out of place with the rest of it. To that point I was enamored of Nolan's skills on a more intimate scale. The Dark Knight more than ably demonstrated his mastery over other techniques.
Anyway, I didn't originally set out to write about Man of Steel. My last post was the book club entry, and I enjoyed the lively exchange that went on in the comments that followed, including Cephalopod Coffeehouse founder Armchair Squid. Owing to my new computer limitations, I wasn't able to respond to his last note, which reads like this:
Last Monday I attended a writing group meeting in downtown Colorado Springs. At some point conversation boiled down to a version of the classic guideposts of storytelling, what every writer must consider as they prepare to put their words into form. I just don't abide such nonsense. If you're writing a story at all, anyone can without much effort extrapolate the beats you will have heard in class or workshop. The question isn't really if they exist so much as how the author used them and if they were successful. Wideman, for instance, was not as successful as Melville, as I've said, while Dr. Seuss did a much more interesting version of the classic reading primer in The Cat in the Hat (with only 50 words!), but that's exactly what he did, as simple a story as can be.
For the generations that grew up in the wake of the 20th century movie boom, I think a lot of our thoughts and ambitions have been warped. For instance, I don't believe a story should be written if it can be done better as a film, but if a story is later made into a film, the unique benefits of both mediums can be appreciated better (and with greater critical nuance) than we normally admit. I despise with the appropriate passive aggression stories and writers who view their task as so much empty air. If you have a story to tell you'd better well have the voice to tell it, and for the majority of writers that's simply not the case. Storytelling is an art. It's not just stringing words along to fit a mold. A thousand monkeys writing a thousand words every day can easily come up with the right combination to create Shakespeare. Except that's never happened except in the case of Shakespeare himself. Know what I mean?
The art of writing a story is to write what inspires you, both in the material you want to read and the material that you've experienced. Only naive individuals believe that there are new stories to tell. Civilization has been here for a long time folks. There are only new ways to tell them. I'm not talking about experimentation. In the case of Wideman that can easily turn into a crapshoot, and it's not about limited appeal. The only appeal any fiction should have is that it has words and that it uses them extraordinarily. I cannot abide the idea of reading for the sake of reading. If you can tell me the benefit of that, please amuse me. If the story does not expand your mind, if it only confirms what you have always believed, if it does not make you think, then it's worthless.
I see every story as the potential to change the world. Maybe that's where I'm naive. A thousand strips of Dilbert never caused corporate culture to blink. A thousand episodes of Law & Order never caused crime to go away. If storytelling is alone a thought exercise, then even that's okay with me. A population that thinks is better than one that doesn't. But we must never forget that it's our responsibility whether civilization succeeds or not. You think it's just about words. But words are, after all, mightier than the sword.
If a story leads you to dead ends, if it leads nowhere at all, then the author has led you astray. If it leads you on labyrinthine journeys of discovery, then surely it will have already proven its worth? Profit is not in the realm of money. That's a fool's game. You benefit by improving your mind. We're all better off when we identity our limitations, and seek to overcome them.
Getting back to Scrubs, and that theme, it plays over the opening credits. My sister's an x-ray tech, and the only thing she's ever told me about any of that is that the x-ray Dr. Dorian holds is all wrong. She says the medical community is never impressed with these medical shows. Accuracy is fantastic. I'm all for accuracy. But my primary concern is the authenticity of the human experience on display. Scrubs always had that, even though it was one of the goofiest TV series ever. It always played like an updated M*A*S*H to me, with everyone transformed into the cantankerous "Hawkeye" Pierce. Maybe no one, even Perry Cox, was perfect in that show, but I never stopped believing that they were making every effort to try. Yes, even The Todd.
That's a little of what I'd love to see. Complaints are fine. You can disagree. You can call Man of Steel an abomination, or think Moby-Dick was as much a failure as I consider Fanon to be (no matter how fascinating). We can talk about that. But me, as much fun as talking is, I've always had better luck with thinking. That's the form my writing takes. That's what I think writing is all about. You can't make a digression in thought, because that's the only way it works. In stories, you're always headed in the same direction no matter what route you take.
I thought the movie was pretty brilliant. The reason I wrote two pieces on it was because of the big giant controversy surrounding Superman's execution of General Zod at the end. As far as the reviews I've read go, whether or not you're overly bothered by this affects your whole opinion of the movie. And since I don't have near the problem (explained in different ways if you read both pieces) most people seem to have had with it, I guess I had that much easier a time enjoying (and still enjoying, because comic book writer Mark Waid has confessed that while watching he kept thinking "Awesome!" right up to that moment, at which point he actually vocally expressed his displeasure in the theater) the whole product.
I have some confessions to make. I generally like DC products (comics and movies and TV shows) while find those linked to Marvel flawed (there are always exceptions). This didn't change last summer, when The Avengers became a massive hit that made history all over the place. I liked that movie, but I certainly wasn't impressed. I will also briefly note that it wasn't Christopher Nolan alone whose presence swayed my interest in Man of Steel. In fact, I've debated for years how much I enjoyed Batman Begins dating back to its 2005 release. I was already a big fan of Nolan thanks to Memento, big enough to add his first film, Following, into my treasured movie experiences. I loved most of Begins, but the ending left me cold in the same way Steel's has for 2013 audiences (though not really a confusion, I will nonetheless clarify that I have not just referenced the 1997 Shaq movie, though I enjoyed that, too). The big action finale just felt out of place with the rest of it. To that point I was enamored of Nolan's skills on a more intimate scale. The Dark Knight more than ably demonstrated his mastery over other techniques.
Anyway, I didn't originally set out to write about Man of Steel. My last post was the book club entry, and I enjoyed the lively exchange that went on in the comments that followed, including Cephalopod Coffeehouse founder Armchair Squid. Owing to my new computer limitations, I wasn't able to respond to his last note, which reads like this:
"But does all of the material serve the story meaningfully? If so, great. If not, I think there's potential for problems."I say yes. I say this as someone who made it through Melville's Moby-Dick with great enthusiasm. Melville famously wrote about things not specifically relating to the plot in the book, including facts about whales and whaling. I just completed Fanon, the Wideman literary study that didn't focus on the subject so much as the observer's thoughts, which often didn't feature so much as reflect on the subject. Fanon is no Moby-Dick, but these are two books that easily contradict what Squid is suggesting, that there is some necessary guideline to fiction.
Last Monday I attended a writing group meeting in downtown Colorado Springs. At some point conversation boiled down to a version of the classic guideposts of storytelling, what every writer must consider as they prepare to put their words into form. I just don't abide such nonsense. If you're writing a story at all, anyone can without much effort extrapolate the beats you will have heard in class or workshop. The question isn't really if they exist so much as how the author used them and if they were successful. Wideman, for instance, was not as successful as Melville, as I've said, while Dr. Seuss did a much more interesting version of the classic reading primer in The Cat in the Hat (with only 50 words!), but that's exactly what he did, as simple a story as can be.
For the generations that grew up in the wake of the 20th century movie boom, I think a lot of our thoughts and ambitions have been warped. For instance, I don't believe a story should be written if it can be done better as a film, but if a story is later made into a film, the unique benefits of both mediums can be appreciated better (and with greater critical nuance) than we normally admit. I despise with the appropriate passive aggression stories and writers who view their task as so much empty air. If you have a story to tell you'd better well have the voice to tell it, and for the majority of writers that's simply not the case. Storytelling is an art. It's not just stringing words along to fit a mold. A thousand monkeys writing a thousand words every day can easily come up with the right combination to create Shakespeare. Except that's never happened except in the case of Shakespeare himself. Know what I mean?
The art of writing a story is to write what inspires you, both in the material you want to read and the material that you've experienced. Only naive individuals believe that there are new stories to tell. Civilization has been here for a long time folks. There are only new ways to tell them. I'm not talking about experimentation. In the case of Wideman that can easily turn into a crapshoot, and it's not about limited appeal. The only appeal any fiction should have is that it has words and that it uses them extraordinarily. I cannot abide the idea of reading for the sake of reading. If you can tell me the benefit of that, please amuse me. If the story does not expand your mind, if it only confirms what you have always believed, if it does not make you think, then it's worthless.
I see every story as the potential to change the world. Maybe that's where I'm naive. A thousand strips of Dilbert never caused corporate culture to blink. A thousand episodes of Law & Order never caused crime to go away. If storytelling is alone a thought exercise, then even that's okay with me. A population that thinks is better than one that doesn't. But we must never forget that it's our responsibility whether civilization succeeds or not. You think it's just about words. But words are, after all, mightier than the sword.
If a story leads you to dead ends, if it leads nowhere at all, then the author has led you astray. If it leads you on labyrinthine journeys of discovery, then surely it will have already proven its worth? Profit is not in the realm of money. That's a fool's game. You benefit by improving your mind. We're all better off when we identity our limitations, and seek to overcome them.
Getting back to Scrubs, and that theme, it plays over the opening credits. My sister's an x-ray tech, and the only thing she's ever told me about any of that is that the x-ray Dr. Dorian holds is all wrong. She says the medical community is never impressed with these medical shows. Accuracy is fantastic. I'm all for accuracy. But my primary concern is the authenticity of the human experience on display. Scrubs always had that, even though it was one of the goofiest TV series ever. It always played like an updated M*A*S*H to me, with everyone transformed into the cantankerous "Hawkeye" Pierce. Maybe no one, even Perry Cox, was perfect in that show, but I never stopped believing that they were making every effort to try. Yes, even The Todd.
That's a little of what I'd love to see. Complaints are fine. You can disagree. You can call Man of Steel an abomination, or think Moby-Dick was as much a failure as I consider Fanon to be (no matter how fascinating). We can talk about that. But me, as much fun as talking is, I've always had better luck with thinking. That's the form my writing takes. That's what I think writing is all about. You can't make a digression in thought, because that's the only way it works. In stories, you're always headed in the same direction no matter what route you take.
Friday, June 21, 2013
#592. Monk in Exile
Well, if you haven't realized by now that I've virtually quit blogging, I don't know what to do with you.
There's a lot of reason why this happened, but truthfully, the most honest one was that my laptop's battery finally crapped out on me. The battery has been an issue for a while. It stopped holding a good charge a few years ago. Recently it wouldn't even reliably hold a charge while actually plugged in. People less technologically pathetic than me probably would have been able to cope with these developments better. Me, when the battery started becoming an issue, I actually went to the store where I originally bought the computer. Maybe it's just that their associates suck (which is always possible), but they more or less told me to go away, and so I did, and came to no conclusion.
Like computers users of my kind in general, I've had constant issues with these devices. I've owned a desktop since 2000, bought right before I started my sophomore year at the University of Maine in Orono (which was actually my first year there; I was a freshman at Mercyhurst in Erie, PA). I got the laptop in the late fall of 2007, when I originally moved to Colorado Springs, mostly because the desktop (along with everything else I owned) took weeks to catch up with me. (Seriously, moving companies? You suck. Even my brother is facing a lag time with his stuff as he prepares to relocate from Massachusetts to Louisiana. Then again, maybe it's just moving companies based in Massachusetts.)
The desktop has had its issues, and we've managed to survive them. My laptop and me have survived numerous crises as well, and it's my hope that we can overcome this one, too.
In the meantime not so much with the blogging. I started blogging in 2002, coincidentally while attending UMaine. College for most people is a time for expanding horizons. I did plenty of that, and part of that was establishing an online presence. I did a lot of that at a more-or-less-presently-defunct Star Trek message board that was much-beloved in its heyday. We were a tight community. I developed most of what has become my writing craft there, both in fiction and otherwise.
I've been here at Monk with very little readership for most of this time. The most I ever independently provoked actual comments was with the brilliant but short-lived Ted Danson sitcom Help Me Help You. I spent a lot of time in the years that followed my blogging debut not actually blogging.
And then in 2010, I started expanding. You can still see all the expansion efforts. I started blogging a lot. And I stumbled into a community.
Now, I've never been one to be social. I'm like the Green Lantern planet, Mogo. And it always backfires on me. Persistence equals success? In your dreams, Dorothy.
The timing with the latest crisis and my decision to consciously back away was something that just sort of worked out for me. I'd been stressed about blogging since the end of the A-to-Z Challenge. I was still having fun, but it was becoming a chore, and as I said, persistence doesn't equal success. I developed a small and loyal following, which I still appreciate, but ego comes to all of us. We can't deny it. I'm no Buddhist. If you think you can live without it, then chances are you're not too keen on living itself. And that's no way to live.
But this is to say that I haven't totally given up. On the right is an updated linky for the book club the Armchair Squid started up. Next Friday is our second meeting.
Join me. Or not.
There's a lot of reason why this happened, but truthfully, the most honest one was that my laptop's battery finally crapped out on me. The battery has been an issue for a while. It stopped holding a good charge a few years ago. Recently it wouldn't even reliably hold a charge while actually plugged in. People less technologically pathetic than me probably would have been able to cope with these developments better. Me, when the battery started becoming an issue, I actually went to the store where I originally bought the computer. Maybe it's just that their associates suck (which is always possible), but they more or less told me to go away, and so I did, and came to no conclusion.
Like computers users of my kind in general, I've had constant issues with these devices. I've owned a desktop since 2000, bought right before I started my sophomore year at the University of Maine in Orono (which was actually my first year there; I was a freshman at Mercyhurst in Erie, PA). I got the laptop in the late fall of 2007, when I originally moved to Colorado Springs, mostly because the desktop (along with everything else I owned) took weeks to catch up with me. (Seriously, moving companies? You suck. Even my brother is facing a lag time with his stuff as he prepares to relocate from Massachusetts to Louisiana. Then again, maybe it's just moving companies based in Massachusetts.)
The desktop has had its issues, and we've managed to survive them. My laptop and me have survived numerous crises as well, and it's my hope that we can overcome this one, too.
In the meantime not so much with the blogging. I started blogging in 2002, coincidentally while attending UMaine. College for most people is a time for expanding horizons. I did plenty of that, and part of that was establishing an online presence. I did a lot of that at a more-or-less-presently-defunct Star Trek message board that was much-beloved in its heyday. We were a tight community. I developed most of what has become my writing craft there, both in fiction and otherwise.
I've been here at Monk with very little readership for most of this time. The most I ever independently provoked actual comments was with the brilliant but short-lived Ted Danson sitcom Help Me Help You. I spent a lot of time in the years that followed my blogging debut not actually blogging.
And then in 2010, I started expanding. You can still see all the expansion efforts. I started blogging a lot. And I stumbled into a community.
Now, I've never been one to be social. I'm like the Green Lantern planet, Mogo. And it always backfires on me. Persistence equals success? In your dreams, Dorothy.
The timing with the latest crisis and my decision to consciously back away was something that just sort of worked out for me. I'd been stressed about blogging since the end of the A-to-Z Challenge. I was still having fun, but it was becoming a chore, and as I said, persistence doesn't equal success. I developed a small and loyal following, which I still appreciate, but ego comes to all of us. We can't deny it. I'm no Buddhist. If you think you can live without it, then chances are you're not too keen on living itself. And that's no way to live.
But this is to say that I haven't totally given up. On the right is an updated linky for the book club the Armchair Squid started up. Next Friday is our second meeting.
Join me. Or not.
Friday, June 07, 2013
#591. JFK blown way what else do I have to say?
Now, just assume for a moment that it's a given that JFK's assassination was a matter of conspiracy, that Lee Harvey Oswald was not after all a lone gunman.
As Brad Meltzer writes in Identity Crisis, who benefits? This will not be an in-depth discussion, because I don't have the patience for something like that. Like most of what I write, it'll be a meditation.
I have a peculiar sympathy for men like Oswald, even Jeffrey Dahmer, the cannibal serial killer caught when I was in middle school. He had such a placid look on his face. Clearly a fucked up individual. I don't have sympathy because I want to be them, but because I can identify with them as someone who hasn't had the best luck integrating myself into the rest of society. Aside from what Dahmer did, what else can you say about him? I've never subscribed to the belief that monsters are anything else than the casual everyday variety who affect lives more blatantly and subtly than Dahmer or Oswald ever could. Think whatever you want to about Dahmer, or Oswald. Oswald had a terrible upbringing, and it stunted his emotional development. Yeah he probably had a lot to do with the assassination. But who benefits?
In the 1990s it became increasingly likely that the media would report and feed on the emerging cult of personality, the fifteen minutes of fame at any cost that Andy Warhol told us about, Warhol another eccentric who could just as easily as Chuck Barris have been moonlighting as a CIA assassin. I mean, if you believe they put a man on the moon, right? We question everything these days. I was reading conspiracy theories about the Boston bombings within days of the marathon.
With Kennedy taken out the picture, who benefits? The whole goddam world, if you'll pardon my language, but mostly two countries full of cold warriors. Is it really so much of a stretch that two governments exchanged ideas about how to proceed after the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis? So much of what the Soviet Union did was a giant bluff, but in those days, when they were beating Americans in the Space Race, who the hell was going to believe that the nuclear clock wasn't ticking? Alan Moore wrote a whole comic book at the very end of the cold war, Watchmen, that dealt with the nuclear clock as if it still mattered. Probably because of all those nuclear reactors that were having all those problems at the time. But that was it, really, wasn't it? In Star Trek, the Soviet parallels in the Klingon Empire were revealed to be at the end of their rope, too, in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. In the end, one half of the whole conflict simply couldn't be sustained.
And so that leaves the guy who was willing to go punch for punch, bravado for bravado, who just so happened to be taken out just before Vietnam, a war that went nowhere and was the only fighting that ever really broke out. If this were 1812, the English would have been fighting the Americans as well as the French. But after WWII, that was never going to happen again. After Hiroshima, never again.
But the governments wanted to make sure. It's not so hard to imagine. We take our hothead off the table, you take yours. Khrushchev was removed from power not so long after 11/22/63. I'm not following any specific conspiracy theories, here. Who benefits? The whole goddam world. That's what someone decided, and then agreements would have been met. Kennedy was one of the best pure politicians anyone ever saw. His father made sure of it. He became one because he couldn't help it, like a regular Manchurian candidate. Clinton repeated this mold, out of sheer force of will, decades later. Read all about it in Primary Colors. Everything else he copied from Kennedy, he didn't have the actual ability. He certainly didn't have Bobby. Hillary, I know Bobby Kennedy, and you're no Bobby Kennedy.
Kennedy's legacy eventually boiled down to two elements: the assassination and Camelot, which was eventually exposed, and continues to be exposed, by all the affairs he carried on while he was in office. And yet this is all a smokescreen. He was the best damn president this country could have ever hoped for. He pushed for the space program not out of personal conviction, but out of canny necessity. That's what you need to remember. He faced down two of the biggest crises of the twentieth century without military incident. How many other presidents do you know who did that?
And yet everyone feared that he would do the unthinkable and unleash the bomb, just because he might be forced into it, back up his words.
In my experience, it's not the good guys who do that sort of thing. In my experience, it's the bad guys trying to prevent the good guys from doing it. It wasn't Roosevelt who dropped the bombs, it was Truman, who considered it a tactical necessity. Truman was a soldier. So was Kennedy. But what do people remember about Kennedy's service? Oh yeah, going out of his way to save lives, not take them. What did he do as president? Go out of his way to save lives. He was a Berliner, remember? He talked better than anyone else, but he wasn't just talk, and he wasn't someone who would talk himself into a corner. He'd talk himself out of it. Hell would freeze over before John F. Kennedy failed his country, or the world.
Yet there were plenty of people who convinced themselves otherwise. He simply wasn't as popular as you might sometimes be led to believe. He was elected against Nixon, and it's said television made the difference. Not his big ideas or idealism, but his good looks. Well, bully on that. Nixon came back a decade later and became president after all, and then won a landslide reelection. It was Vietnam that was the legacy of the years that followed Kennedy's assassination, and what dogged even Nixon. No one was safe. Johnson carried out all of Kennedy's programs, and we reached the moon.
And we stopped talking about the Soviets. Really, go and look. In fact, after Vietnam we all started worrying about the Middle East. I mean, immediately after! And it was another quagmire, not right away. Even Vietnam wasn't a quagmire initially. That was something the French and Eisenhower worried about well before Kennedy. And yet the quagmire of Vietnam didn't start until after the assassination.
I'm saying the whole world benefited because we were all allowed to forget about the nuclear clock. We didn't even notice when it stopped being relevant. In Moore's Watchmen, Nixon is still president. Nixon became a pariah. In fact, everything became a pariah after Kennedy's assassination. If you believe the record, Kennedy himself became a pariah. Just as he was all along, for some people.
I'm not saying any of this is true, that a conspiracy in fact did exist, two countries deciding to take their troublesome chiefs off the table in whatever form such a move ended up taking (there's just some much monkeying around in the Kennedy affair, that if Oswald didn't have help before his death he certainly did after it, if only to apparently obscure and possibly cover up what perhaps only didn't happen but was considered...see how complicated all of this is?). What I'm saying is...Kennedy's assassination had one lasting effect, and it was that from that point onward, we started seeing shadows everywhere, and not just saw but created them. Woodward and Bernstein are still considered heroes for helping take down Nixon, that dastardly plotter (and Watergate was all about...stealing campaign secrets). Vietnam was a terrible awful thing, but it was also not nearly as bad as the reaction it provoked at home. Iraq and Afghanistan, the same but thankfully not as bad. We're still working on the level of our collective idiocy. (By the way, we put Saddam there. And then we took him out. The real problem is and always has been Muslim insecurity.) Clinton is hailed as a hero despite being a perfectly miserable typical politician. Gore is hailed as a martyr even though it's plain to see he never wanted to be president in the first place. (Figure it out.) And Bush is, well, a pariah. We use the smokescreen of oil to justify our hatred of him. And of course everyone who makes that complaint still drives their vehicles each and every day. Never mind the hypocrisy behind the curtain, Dorothy.
Oswald considered Cuba to be the model of utopia. He really did. He thought Castro was a great man. Me, I'll always side with another fallen hero, Che. And why not? Oswald defected to the Soviet Union, and then came back when he realized Marxism and communism were not the same thing. Today we talk about capitalism and socialists, but it's the same thing, always the same thing. I tell you, Billy Joel had it right. We didn't start the fire. Jefferson was elected president on the grounds that he wasn't John Adams. And Jackson was elected on the grounds that he wasn't Quincy. I tell you, these things don't always work out the way we think they will. Without Jackson, I'm convinced civil war might have been ultimately averted. Maybe even without Jefferson. I wonder how much the Louisiana Purchase affected the course toward 1812. Who's to say how these things work? Menelaus lost Helen, and Agamemnon declared war on Ilium. Then again, he might have been preparing to do that anyway.
All I'm really asking is that maybe we let cooler heads prevail every now and again. Stop discussing events with histrionics. That's the kind of thought that would actually convince someone that Kennedy was a bad president. He wasn't. He was the last of the greats. And we've all been trying to argue ever since that one party or another has been his successor. Funny thing is, Lincoln was a Republican. Kennedy was a Democrat. And yet they were after the same goals. The entire Union was scared shitless during the whole Civil War. If it hadn't won, we'd consider Lincoln a regular Kennedy today. And yet that's my point. Kennedy was a regular Lincoln, and Lincoln was a regular Kennedy. You need to look beyond the rhetoric. That's what damned Kennedy. And that's what's been damning us ever since.
As Brad Meltzer writes in Identity Crisis, who benefits? This will not be an in-depth discussion, because I don't have the patience for something like that. Like most of what I write, it'll be a meditation.
I have a peculiar sympathy for men like Oswald, even Jeffrey Dahmer, the cannibal serial killer caught when I was in middle school. He had such a placid look on his face. Clearly a fucked up individual. I don't have sympathy because I want to be them, but because I can identify with them as someone who hasn't had the best luck integrating myself into the rest of society. Aside from what Dahmer did, what else can you say about him? I've never subscribed to the belief that monsters are anything else than the casual everyday variety who affect lives more blatantly and subtly than Dahmer or Oswald ever could. Think whatever you want to about Dahmer, or Oswald. Oswald had a terrible upbringing, and it stunted his emotional development. Yeah he probably had a lot to do with the assassination. But who benefits?
In the 1990s it became increasingly likely that the media would report and feed on the emerging cult of personality, the fifteen minutes of fame at any cost that Andy Warhol told us about, Warhol another eccentric who could just as easily as Chuck Barris have been moonlighting as a CIA assassin. I mean, if you believe they put a man on the moon, right? We question everything these days. I was reading conspiracy theories about the Boston bombings within days of the marathon.
With Kennedy taken out the picture, who benefits? The whole goddam world, if you'll pardon my language, but mostly two countries full of cold warriors. Is it really so much of a stretch that two governments exchanged ideas about how to proceed after the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis? So much of what the Soviet Union did was a giant bluff, but in those days, when they were beating Americans in the Space Race, who the hell was going to believe that the nuclear clock wasn't ticking? Alan Moore wrote a whole comic book at the very end of the cold war, Watchmen, that dealt with the nuclear clock as if it still mattered. Probably because of all those nuclear reactors that were having all those problems at the time. But that was it, really, wasn't it? In Star Trek, the Soviet parallels in the Klingon Empire were revealed to be at the end of their rope, too, in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. In the end, one half of the whole conflict simply couldn't be sustained.
And so that leaves the guy who was willing to go punch for punch, bravado for bravado, who just so happened to be taken out just before Vietnam, a war that went nowhere and was the only fighting that ever really broke out. If this were 1812, the English would have been fighting the Americans as well as the French. But after WWII, that was never going to happen again. After Hiroshima, never again.
But the governments wanted to make sure. It's not so hard to imagine. We take our hothead off the table, you take yours. Khrushchev was removed from power not so long after 11/22/63. I'm not following any specific conspiracy theories, here. Who benefits? The whole goddam world. That's what someone decided, and then agreements would have been met. Kennedy was one of the best pure politicians anyone ever saw. His father made sure of it. He became one because he couldn't help it, like a regular Manchurian candidate. Clinton repeated this mold, out of sheer force of will, decades later. Read all about it in Primary Colors. Everything else he copied from Kennedy, he didn't have the actual ability. He certainly didn't have Bobby. Hillary, I know Bobby Kennedy, and you're no Bobby Kennedy.
Kennedy's legacy eventually boiled down to two elements: the assassination and Camelot, which was eventually exposed, and continues to be exposed, by all the affairs he carried on while he was in office. And yet this is all a smokescreen. He was the best damn president this country could have ever hoped for. He pushed for the space program not out of personal conviction, but out of canny necessity. That's what you need to remember. He faced down two of the biggest crises of the twentieth century without military incident. How many other presidents do you know who did that?
And yet everyone feared that he would do the unthinkable and unleash the bomb, just because he might be forced into it, back up his words.
In my experience, it's not the good guys who do that sort of thing. In my experience, it's the bad guys trying to prevent the good guys from doing it. It wasn't Roosevelt who dropped the bombs, it was Truman, who considered it a tactical necessity. Truman was a soldier. So was Kennedy. But what do people remember about Kennedy's service? Oh yeah, going out of his way to save lives, not take them. What did he do as president? Go out of his way to save lives. He was a Berliner, remember? He talked better than anyone else, but he wasn't just talk, and he wasn't someone who would talk himself into a corner. He'd talk himself out of it. Hell would freeze over before John F. Kennedy failed his country, or the world.
Yet there were plenty of people who convinced themselves otherwise. He simply wasn't as popular as you might sometimes be led to believe. He was elected against Nixon, and it's said television made the difference. Not his big ideas or idealism, but his good looks. Well, bully on that. Nixon came back a decade later and became president after all, and then won a landslide reelection. It was Vietnam that was the legacy of the years that followed Kennedy's assassination, and what dogged even Nixon. No one was safe. Johnson carried out all of Kennedy's programs, and we reached the moon.
And we stopped talking about the Soviets. Really, go and look. In fact, after Vietnam we all started worrying about the Middle East. I mean, immediately after! And it was another quagmire, not right away. Even Vietnam wasn't a quagmire initially. That was something the French and Eisenhower worried about well before Kennedy. And yet the quagmire of Vietnam didn't start until after the assassination.
I'm saying the whole world benefited because we were all allowed to forget about the nuclear clock. We didn't even notice when it stopped being relevant. In Moore's Watchmen, Nixon is still president. Nixon became a pariah. In fact, everything became a pariah after Kennedy's assassination. If you believe the record, Kennedy himself became a pariah. Just as he was all along, for some people.
I'm not saying any of this is true, that a conspiracy in fact did exist, two countries deciding to take their troublesome chiefs off the table in whatever form such a move ended up taking (there's just some much monkeying around in the Kennedy affair, that if Oswald didn't have help before his death he certainly did after it, if only to apparently obscure and possibly cover up what perhaps only didn't happen but was considered...see how complicated all of this is?). What I'm saying is...Kennedy's assassination had one lasting effect, and it was that from that point onward, we started seeing shadows everywhere, and not just saw but created them. Woodward and Bernstein are still considered heroes for helping take down Nixon, that dastardly plotter (and Watergate was all about...stealing campaign secrets). Vietnam was a terrible awful thing, but it was also not nearly as bad as the reaction it provoked at home. Iraq and Afghanistan, the same but thankfully not as bad. We're still working on the level of our collective idiocy. (By the way, we put Saddam there. And then we took him out. The real problem is and always has been Muslim insecurity.) Clinton is hailed as a hero despite being a perfectly miserable typical politician. Gore is hailed as a martyr even though it's plain to see he never wanted to be president in the first place. (Figure it out.) And Bush is, well, a pariah. We use the smokescreen of oil to justify our hatred of him. And of course everyone who makes that complaint still drives their vehicles each and every day. Never mind the hypocrisy behind the curtain, Dorothy.
Oswald considered Cuba to be the model of utopia. He really did. He thought Castro was a great man. Me, I'll always side with another fallen hero, Che. And why not? Oswald defected to the Soviet Union, and then came back when he realized Marxism and communism were not the same thing. Today we talk about capitalism and socialists, but it's the same thing, always the same thing. I tell you, Billy Joel had it right. We didn't start the fire. Jefferson was elected president on the grounds that he wasn't John Adams. And Jackson was elected on the grounds that he wasn't Quincy. I tell you, these things don't always work out the way we think they will. Without Jackson, I'm convinced civil war might have been ultimately averted. Maybe even without Jefferson. I wonder how much the Louisiana Purchase affected the course toward 1812. Who's to say how these things work? Menelaus lost Helen, and Agamemnon declared war on Ilium. Then again, he might have been preparing to do that anyway.
All I'm really asking is that maybe we let cooler heads prevail every now and again. Stop discussing events with histrionics. That's the kind of thought that would actually convince someone that Kennedy was a bad president. He wasn't. He was the last of the greats. And we've all been trying to argue ever since that one party or another has been his successor. Funny thing is, Lincoln was a Republican. Kennedy was a Democrat. And yet they were after the same goals. The entire Union was scared shitless during the whole Civil War. If it hadn't won, we'd consider Lincoln a regular Kennedy today. And yet that's my point. Kennedy was a regular Lincoln, and Lincoln was a regular Kennedy. You need to look beyond the rhetoric. That's what damned Kennedy. And that's what's been damning us ever since.
Friday, May 03, 2013
#573. Direct Current Friday: A-to-Z Reflections
- Somehow I survived the 2013 Challenge. I know I survived because I distinctly remember going insane at the end of it. I lost it. Thanks for being discreet. Thanks for stopping by!
- It was a combination of things, really. I finished writing a commentary series examining The Annotated Sandman over at Comics Reader about a week before the end of the Challenge, and I think I was more emotionally invested in that than the Challenge. Twenty issues of Neil Gaiman's Sandman, writing notes about the stories and notes about Leslie Klinger's notes (and managing to muscle past my one regular reader's criticism about this). I've long been interested in reading Sandman, but have only had sporadic experience with it. There's still plenty for me to read, but it was interesting to see that I really did get wrapped up in it. I know Gaiman far better from American Gods and Good Omens, but it's impossible not to know about his Sandman if you know much about comic books. Like when I finally read Jeff Smith's complete Bone, it's a rite of passage.
- The end of the Challenge happened to coincide with ones of my many existential crises. I don't think readers like to read about that sort of thing, which is why I don't tend to write about it. Unfortunately I was writing on a daily basis.
- The Boston Marathon explosions hit me pretty hard, too, and I was genuinely upset that it didn't seem to affect pretty much anyone else. Earlier in the month Roger Ebert died, and people cared about that. They didn't care about Margaret Thatcher's death, which I guess is either apathy or politics. But to gloss over the explosions and whatever they might signify was a little much. Anyone ought to know that the blogosphere itself exploded over the idea of gun rights recently. I get that the blogosphere tends to be pretty liberal. Writers in general seem to be pretty liberal. I'm an atypical middle-of-the-road-leaning-toward-conservative (officially listed as an Independent for American voting purposes) writer. I'm pretty sure that bugs anyone who thinks about it, even if they don't realize they're thinking about it. One of the prominent bloggers in my own little circle earned my rare Black Mark of Doom. I won't visit them again because of their emotional and popular but not very critical opinions (even if they seem critical). I won't name them here. But I get that people will or won't visit or comment on a blog if they decide they don't like the opinions being expressed. I didn't expect that during an event that's all about being as accessible as possible I would come across something that would do the exact opposite.
- Last year was the first time I participated in the Challenge. I picked up actual readers, and I found a number of blogs that I still enjoy reading to this day. Some of them didn't participate this year. I found that I was disappointed about that. I tried finding new blogs this year, too, and I'm not completely certain how many I found because I sought them out during the Challenge or because I'd recently found them outside of it. There were a few. But the most frustrating thing for me was that one of the things I thought could be improved from the last time that was actually undertaken this time by the hosts was in the sign-up process. People were encouraged to categorize their themes. Most of them didn't. What. the. hell. I visited the first five hundred blogs on the sign-up after an initial attempt to visit based on the categories, only to see that most people didn't do the categories. There were nearly two thousand blogs signed up. That's far too many for any one person (even a ninja clone like Alex Cavanaugh) to visit during a month. And the subsequent 500 blog survey turned up...Well, maybe a saint can come up with positive things to say and like about all those blogs. I can't. Most of them simply didn't interest me. Yes, there was always a good bet that most of any number that big won't register well. But when "most" is in the 90% range, there's a problem. So I didn't try to visit the remaining ones.
- (Yes, I'm still yammering.)
- I found that some of the blogs I really enjoyed reading early on I couldn't muster myself to keep the same enthusiasm for later on. The topic was fascinating, but not fascinating to read for an entire month, day after day. I'm assuming even my most dedicated readers eventually thought the same about my material. It only figures, and that's another thing that wore on me. I never thought my stuff would be trivial. But that's why most people only talk about things other people might already have a chance to know. That's how you get comments, anyway. Most people are only really interested in talking about their own thoughts, or offering basic encouragement. That's the extent of their reaction. They don't generally tend to care about reacting to someone else's thoughts more directly.
- It's very hard to tell the difference between genuine interest and general encouragement. In something like this, most people are simply trying to visit and write as much as they can.
- I'll also come out and say this: the blogging community still bothers me in that it seems to be based on a system of reciprocity. As in, you follow me I follow you. You give me a comment I give you a comment. There's no such concept of altruism. It just seems as if most people won't bother to invest their time unless they see a benefit to it. The benefit to me is whether you derive anything personally from an experience (i.e. enjoyment). The gain is what you take away.
- Yeah, so I was a hypocritical idiot, because I went in at least half my own part of the Challenge expecting people to care about books I'm in the middle of releasing. I've since realized that for me, that's no reason to blog. If a blogger "cares" about my book because they can also get me to share their book, that's advertising. There are plenty of blogs like that. I'm not one of them, and I've got plenty of blogs, including a reading blog, and I don't write about the blogging buddy books there because I read plenty of other books, and there are other websites to do that sort of thing (such as this or this). I want to be as positive as I can about blogger buddy books. On my reading blog I tend to be critical even of books that have been around for centuries. Blogger buddy books can't function like that. The whole idea is to be as positive as possible, because anything else can potentially get you a new enemy. (Repeat Blogger Buddy Rule No. 1.) So that's why I don't do that on my blogs.
- Oh! Speaking of my reading blog, the linky list that's on the right is for a new reading club. Visit the Armchair Squid's blog to find out more about the Cephalopod Coffeehouse. I'll be participating here at Scouring Monk, but anyone interested, can read more about my reading habits at Hub City (or those other links).
- Of course, that assumes I haven't succeeded in pissing everyone off, alienating myself. Although I've bitched about blogging before and survived.
- I've also been watching a lot of TV-on-DVD recently. I enjoyed Day Watch and Defying Gravity and Flashforward again. I loved these short-lived shows the first time. I love them more now. I watched Firefly (and Serenity) again. Everyone loves Joss Whedon right now. Yet I've never quite gotten around to loving him. Appreciate him, yes. But he speaks a different language, the way most people would approach, say, Grant Morrison. Firefly has always seemed to me a little disturbing. It's a pastiche on the Civil War and clearly sides with the Confederacy. In one of the special features from the Serenity DVD, he says it's less to do with sympathy for the so-called Lost Cause so much as the classic underdog conceit. And yet it's such a clear parallel...Anyway, it got me thinking about being a native of a region where there was a regime that was later determined by popular record to be on the wrong side of a conflict (or ideology or whatever). Whedon is a native of New York, but I would have assumed that he came from a Southern state. Why then such apparent sympathy with Johnny Reb? He says there's a great wealth of American literature from this vein. I'm thinking Jesse James? Even Star Wars to an extent. Apparently I would need to study that a little more. Anyway, I've determined to write some Browncoats fiction to explore this for myself.
- I also just finished watching Spin City, some of Michael J. Fox's favorite episodes. This was a great show.
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