Gloomy Sunday / Holiday

To close out the year, we offer Pál Kalmár with the original 1935 recording of the notorious Szomorú vasárnap (Gloomy Sunday), with music by Rezső Seress and lyrics by László Jávor:

The narrative of Ilona Péterné Koncz's video tells a fanciful, fast and loose version of the song's story* which is already quite a doozy (Here is another version of it; yet another is here):

Having dropped out of school as a young man, Rezső Seress one day came across a traveling circus. He applied to Mr. Bruno, the circus director, saying that he wanted to be an artist.  He broke into the public consciousness with the song "Another Night" composed in 1925. It sold sixteen thousand copies.

In 1935, László Jávor, a reporter for the evening journal "8 O'Clock", approached him with a poem he had written entitled "Sad Sunday", and asked if he would put it to music. Seress took the job but had a very hard time getting it done even though the poet continually pestered him. He finally debuted the song one night at the Forum Café, having paid a student from the Academy of Music 5 Pengő [roughly $16.25 in today's dollars] to transcribe musically what he whistled to him since Seress didn't know how to score music but composed his songs just by whistling them.  Jávor published the sheet music to no response from the public.  Seress was bitter about the failure and would have forgotten about Sad Sunday but for the appearance of newspaper accounts of a maid  who had committed suicide and left the lyrics of Sad Sunday to be found as her suicide note.  A week later, a ministerial apprentice shot himself in the backseat of a taxi and next to his farewell letter lay the sheet music of Sad Sunday!

On November 7, 1935, the journal "8 O'Clock" referred to the song as a Killer hit, and it could not have gotten a bigger response.  The following week it would be written up in Swiss, Italian, American, German and French newspapers as the Anthem of Suicides. It was sung on stage that fall at the [Berlin?] Olympics, and in 1936 it became a hit in America for Paul Robeson, Louis Armstrong and Frank Sinatra among others.

Meanwhile,  in Hungary because he was Jewish and could perform in fewer and fewer places, the composer's situation had become miserable.  At the outbreak of the war in 1941, he was marched to  a labor camp, in conditions that caused his kidneys to deteriorate, but - as he himself later recounted - his life was saved by an SS officer who knew his songs!

After the war, he played the piano at the Kispipa bar on Acacia Street in Budapest still living in abject misery while he was rumored to have $370,000 in royalties waiting for him in an American bank that could not be transferred until Hungary paid reparations for its role in the war.  His act was a must-see, but [in isolated, postwar Hungary at the uncomfortable and obscure Kispipa], he struggled for success.  As was said about attendance at his performances: There was always room on the plane.  He could have performed at Carnegie Hall, where even Oscar Peterson would have had to bow down to recognition by audiences of Seress as the most famous Hungarian songwriter; but he would remain in Hungary even in '56 when the borders opened. He continued to play at Kispipa, where he was seen by celebrities such as the Prince of Wales, the Shah of Iran, Spencer Tracy, Benjamino Gigli, Arturo Toscanini, and Otto Klemperer who called Seress "not just a musician - but a genius".

However, his songs were officially banned after 1949. He lived like a beggar in his Dob Street apartment, where he listened to recordings of Sad Sunday every day, in English, French, Chinese, Danish and all sorts of exotic African languages. At the age of 69, he was fed up with everything, and as if struck by the doom of his most famous global hit, the old suicide anthem,  he jumped off the balcony of his apartment. Though he survived the fall, he must have been very anxious to die because while recovering at the hospital he succeeded in strangling himself with the wire by which his plastered leg had been raised.

By other accounts, Seress, a communist by philosophy, had originally written his own lyrics for the tune which he had called Vége a világnak (The world is ending) in response to the precarious political situation brewing in Europe at the time (1933), and it was Jávor who was tasked to tone it down with a more upbeat suicide theme.

Jávor's lyrics in Hungarian (Note: Not all lyrics are heard in the video.  The song is truncated before the end of the second verse and the truncated clip is then repeated twice):

Szomorú vasárnap száz fehér virággal
Vártalak kedvesem, templomi imával
Álmokat kergető vasárnap délelőtt
Bánatom hintaja nélküled visszajött.
Azóta szomorú mindig a vasárnap
Könny csak az italom, kenyerem a bánat.
Szomorú vasárnap.
Utolsó vasárnap, kedvesem, gyere el
Pap is lesz, koporsó, ravatal, gyászlepel
Akkor is virág vár, virág és koporsó
Virágos fák alatt utam az utolsó
Nyitva lesz szemem, hogy még egyszer lássalak
Ne félj a szememtől, holtan is áldalak.
Utolsó vasárnap.
Ősz van, és peregnek a sárgult levelek
Meghalt a földön az emberi szeretet
Bánatos könnyekkel zokog az őszi szél
Szívem már új tavaszt nem vár, és nem remél
Hiába sírok, és hiába szenvedek,
Szívtelen rosszak és kapzsik az emberek.
Meghalt a szeretet.
Vége a…

The above in English: 

Sad Sunday with a hundred white flowers

I was waiting for you, my dearest, with temple prayer

Dreaming of a Sunday morning

My sorrow has returned without you.

Since then, Sunday has always been sad

It's just my drink, my bread is grief.

Gloomy Sunday.

This last Sunday, my dearest, come to me

There will also be a priest, a coffin, a funeral home, a mourning cloth

You can also expect flowers, flowers and coffins

My journey under flowering trees is my last

My eyes will be open to see you again

Don't be afraid of my eyes; they will bless you from death.

Final Sunday.

It is autumn and the yellowed leaves are wilting

Human love has died on earth

The autumn wind is sobbing with sad tears

My heart is no longer waiting for a new spring and is not hoping

I cry in vain, and I suffer in vain,

People are heartless bad and greedy.

Love is dead.

Finally…

And it's got a beat you can dance to!  As alluded to in the video, on the global spread of rumors of the song's potency, it made appearances in languages the world over.†   Two American versions debuted in 1936-- a more faithful translation of Jávor's lyrics by Desmond Carter, recorded first by Paul Robeson, and a less strictly literal version (with an "it was all a dream" bridge to provide some relent from the gloom) by Sam M. Lewis, made famous later by Billie Holiday's utterly enthralling 1941 recording of it in particular.

Sunday is gloomy my hours are slumberless
Dearest the shadows I live with are numberless
Little white flowers will never awaken you
Not where the black coach of sorrow has taken you
Angels have no thought of ever returning you
Would they be angry if I thought of joining you?
Gloomy Sunday
Gloomy is Sunday with shadows I spend it all
My heart and I have decided to end it all
Soon there'll be candles and prayers that are sad I know
Let them not weep let them know that I'm glad to go
Death is no dream for in death I'm caressing you
With the last breath of my soul I'll be blessing you
Gloomy Sunday
Dreaming, I was only dreaming
I wake and I find you asleep in the deep of my heart dear
Darling I hope that my dream never haunted you
My heart is telling you how much I wanted you
Gloomy Sunday

If you need a lift or a reason to live after the above (and who wouldn't?), how about Confidence Man's Holiday?:

Zest for living supplement:

~~~~~

* Please note, unspeakable (as heck) does not endorse the video's version of the song's story.  The translation is provided for the curious. 

† Certain types of Hungarians (you know the type because they're everywhere in every culture) will tell you, as if they could somehow know, that you can only understand Gloomy Sunday in Hungarian which they think is a way of saying that there is something extraordinary and exclusive about how their own Hungarian brain interacts with Hungarian lyrics-- a way of claiming glory for themselves for someone else's work-- glory that you as a non-Hungarian cannot ever be privy to.  It's a Hungarian thing!  You wouldn't understand!  But what they are really saying, in order for that to be true, is that Hungarian poetry is provincial.  Not universal.  Limited in scope and application. Which would be pretty pathetic if true, but having some experience with Hungarian lyrics and poetry and literature, I can assure you as you suspected all along, that's pure horse shit!

A world of difference

Imagine what life would be like in a best case scenario.

I spend so much time being unhappy with the way things are and the way they appear to be going that I usually forget to visualize an alternative.  Any impulse that I have on my own to dream about a better future usually times out on the question of how to get there.  It has finally dawned on me that it doesn't always have to matter.  Suppose the pathology of capitalist neoliberalism has been exposed and died in the sunlight. Suppose the problem of billionaires and the tyranny of elites is solved.  Suppose in the weakening of the walls of our current prison, revolution breaks out and the good guys drop their numerous petty differences, combine forces and prevail as one powered purely by a mighty and righteous fury.  Maybe Marxist socialism is the outcome; maybe anarcho-syndicalism; maybe government of by and for the people.  These are but trivial details in the best case.

I have some ideas about how things could be different.

For starters, no one profits from someone else's disadvantage.  That is considered a wrong.  Never mind how in this new world the attitude that most people have always had that people ought to be decent to each other has become the one subscribed to-- just rest assured that in the best case scenario, the edge seekers, the thieves of the commons, the billionaire free-loaders on the backs of others are not given oxygen to survive.  One gigantic headache and eyesore on the cultural landscape vanished-- poof!

As for material comforts, we are motivated not by want but by need.  This is how we are all fed, clothed and sheltered.  It is how children, the old and those who can't care for themselves are cared for and how sickness is cured.  This is how we start to heal our planet. The details aren't important.  This is my fantasy and I have the luxury to declare that. What matters is that we work hard enough to ensure we all have what we need and then the rest of the time we are free to lead enriching lives pursuing what we want-- and what we want is not limited to what we can buy.  Work is the least interesting part of the best case scenario, but it happens because we must work to fulfill needs.  There are no bosses. Work is done when work is done (as much as possible by human guided machinery).  Most time is spent living.

Our representatives want for us what we want for ourselves.  This is because they are selected from the entire population at random by lottery to serve single, relatively short terms at every level of whatever "government" there is, including the executive and the judiciary.  They are us.  For that matter, sortition might be useful for any number of critical functions -- we could all benefit from having a truly randomly selected periodically purged and replenished constabulary, emergency response force and defense, for instance.  

People still make mistakes in this new world.  Mistakes are more naturally forgiven and forgotten.  People still disagree and annoy each other, but in the absence of competition for basic needs, the stakes of everything are scaled back to their appropriate proportions.  Maybe opinions are less tailored to antagonize.

Wrongs still occur-- at worst, isolated outbursts of civilizational recidivism are attempted periodically for instance and have to be dispatched with a decisive communal rejection-- but the day-to-day transgressions of one party against another are not punished, they are to whatever extent possible forgiven,  and if they are unforgiveable, they are righted.  Eventually, the impulse to conquer  is seen for what it is: a sickness that in its most pathological, incurable state nevertheless requires the patient to be cared for in well tended sanitariums that keep us safe from them and them safe from themselves.

This leaves time for us to be as deep, as curious, as creative, as passionate, as industrious, as empty of thought, as transgressive, as energetic, as hedonistic, as individual, as ridiculous, as wise or as stupid as the occasion calls for.  And no one is going to harsh the occasion with intrusive presumptuous cultural shaming nonsense.  My best case may vary from yours but the two of them can and do co-exist.  And it's beautiful.

Dreaming of better ways is vital.  And for the moment, it's still legal and it's still free.

A Tangerine By Any Other Name

Did you ever wonder whatever happened to tangerines?  I did.   Tangerines were one of my favorite fruits as a child from way back even before Vietnam was a dominant part of the American consciousness.  I lived in an eternal present, so if there was a cycle to their abundance it escaped me.  It seemed to be a perpetual choice.  They seemed to be part of my regular consumption, the final course of a bag lunch-- the reward for toughing it through a liverwurst sandwich, say-- throughout my formative years.  Their fading from my diet was gradual, so much so that I can't say with any certainty when they dropped from the menu for me, but certainly by the time I was married in the 80's, when I ever thought to look for them, they were nowhere.  When my daughter was young, we never seemed to find them at the supermarket either, and when I’d lament about it, the tangerines that my wife would bring home from her excursions in an attempt to assuage me were not the same.  They were basically oranges.  They recalled to my mind the fruit with the portmanteau sounding name of tangelo that seemed to have at some point usurped the tangerine in my bag lunches of the 70s-- an unsolicited, unwelcome and poor substitution.  If those still exist, who cares?  What happened to tangerines?   

What I remember were small fruit, easy to peel, almost seedless.  Sure every year around the winter solstice, my daughter had clementines from Spain which were similarly small and easily peelable, but those were clementines.  Now there are Halos, which we’ve started buying regularly. Eating those I started to think, “Hmm, these seem a lot like the lost fruit of my youth called a tangerine.”  But the bag they come in calls them mandarins.  

When I spoke out loud about this to my wife, her memory from childhood in the same era as mine but in a different region of the country, was of the orange-y like “tangerines” that were hard to peel and pulpy and nothing like the tangerines of my childhood.  She got annoyed with me for carping about it.  But the more I experienced Halos, the more convinced I was that they were a close cousin of the tangerine if not exactly the same thing.  And really, how could something so yummy and satisfying disappear from the face of the earth with no fanfare at all?

So I googled it and sure enough, the term tangerine is nearly interchangeable with both mandarin oranges and clementines.  Some sites-- wikipedia for instance-- refer to a tangerine as a kind of mandarin.  Others refer to a mandarin as a kind of tangerine.  Thank goodness we have the internet to clear it up for us.  

I still don’t know why as children we called them tangerines but today they’re called clementines or mandarins-- marketing must somehow be involved-- but at least that mystery is solved to my satisfaction.  You’re welcome! 

Hurry Up & Wait

I frequently wonder if I am living in the same universe as everyone else.  Is the world going to hell in a hand basket or is it me?  Is everything meaningless now or is it me?  Is nothing sacred;  is there nothing to hope for;  does the arc of history not really bend toward justice or is it just me?  I hope it's just me, but my hope is thin.

Having plenty to do to occupy my mind and, as often as possible, to amuse myself to excess, I can usually ignore the decrepit state of my universe, but Twitter has a way of snapping me to.  This is never more true I find than when some current event reminds people of the deep conflict between those who thought that the greatest evil in the presidential election of 2016 was Donald Trump and those who thought the greatest evil was voting for either of the 2 likely winners.  Those who didn't vote at all (41% of the eligible adult population) can generally hold their peace and don't seem to be blamed (much) (nor should they be) by either side of that eternal debate.  It's the much smaller but more disproportionately visible online cohort of Jill Stein stalwarts who are blamed by and who blame the anti-Trump left when some blameworthy event happens.*

In general the sky did not fall because Donald Trump won in 2016.  He used executive power mainly to undo the modest environmental and diplomatic accomplishments of his predecessor as well as to intimidate the vulnerable with threats of eviction, but his exposure of the froth at the heart of our power structure was arguably a service.  For all of his bluster and show and the real pleasure he gave and took in owning his haters, real action was too real to be part of his agenda.  As clownish as Trump's response to COVID was, Joe Biden's lackluster performance for the duration of his turn at the helm of the crisis so far has betrayed the reality that matters of public health and apocalypse may have a life of their own that politics-as-usual can barely touch.  Certainly Trump's graceless reluctant exit aside, if there are two areas in which he caused real damage, they were his gift of the treasury to his class in the form of massive tax cuts at the end of his first year, and the murdering of any hope of reversal of conservative precedents or protection of human rights on the part of the federal judiciary with the selection of 3 young reactionary Supreme Court justices and 28% of all currently sitting Federal judges-- a success rate in his 4 years well above average compared to his 3 most recent predecessors over each of their 8 years.

Each milestone in the progress of Trump's domination of the Supreme Court  has reliably caused the conflict between anti-Trump and pro-Stein partisans to flare.  The latest has been the long expected imminent dismantling, nearly 50 years after Roe v Wade was decided, of the scant remaining Federal protection of a woman's right to abort an unplanned, dangerous or unwanted pregnancy.  The end of this protection will immediately mean that in half of the united states, caregivers who perform abortions, and the women who seek them will be subject to prosecution,  imprisonment, and-- who knows really-- perhaps worse. Of course the poorest most marginalized women will be impacted the most, but it's foolhardy to think that even a more well-off citizen of an anti-choice jurisdiction who travels to terminate a pregnancy in a state where it's still allowed (for the moment) will not ultimately be vulnerable to the whims of any ambitious two-bit DA with the power to prosecute her. None of this would have been possible without a Senate in which, thanks to a constitutional requirement that each state regardless of its population have equal representation, 50 percent of the body represents less than 40% of the population.  Never mind what the majority of Americans actually want; minoritarian meanness has been enshrined.†

So assuming you think this is a tragedy for the left (let alone for women,  for America, for democracy, for freedom), are Jill Stein 2016 supporters culpable in the erosion of civil liberties by letting Trump happen, or were Hillary Clinton voters responsible by virtue of their complicity in Hillary Clinton's failed campaign to forestall a Trump victory?  

While my views about all of this have mellowed a bit since peak-irascibility in the earlier part of the previous administration, I continue to find myself preoccupied with the implications of this rift when it comes to prospects for meaningful change that we want.    I have come to see the 2 sides as exemplary of 2 dispositions toward the progress of leftist ideals in replacing the status quo which both agree has got to go.  The Jill Stein side (and others who were perhaps actively indifferent to either likely outcome of 2016) could be viewed as being disposed to "accelerationism"-- letting the capitalist system implode on its own and presumably leaving an opening for the building of a socialist future.  Those who voted unsuccessfully to prevent a Trump win might be termed to have a more "incrementalist" disposition-- a strategy of working within the system to effect -- eventually-- socialist change.  Although the "incrementalist" strategy did not prevail in 2016, neither did the "accelerationist" outcome result in socialism.  2020 was in some ways a replaying of this dynamic, with a different outcome, but still no socialism.  

The rightist intellectual underpinnings of accelerationism as a political philosophy help explain the openness of that contingent of the left to forming alliances on the right in contrast to their contemptuous attitude toward aligning with the incrementalist left.  The antipathy is mutual.  But while left "accelerationism vs. incrementalism" is the rift that keeps on rifting, I seriously doubt there are a great number of intellectual adherents of either strategy on the left.  I don't doubt that they exist, but my suspicion is that for most of us, it is not a philosophical commitment but rather a matter of temperament, personality, personal history, taste, capacity to hope, supply of patience, even whimsy that determines which side a person is going to be on at any moment. 

Let me be clear, it's not that I believe in incrementalism, or that I prefer a leisurely stroll to a revolved society.  I simply don't trust that a societal breakdown would resolve to an improved state.  If I were a gambler, my money would be on repressive fascism as the victor of that contest.  To think otherwise takes a faith that I do not have, or at best a lack of concern about the outcome that I cannot muster.  For change that materially benefits people's lives to happen, the prison of my sense of prudence dictates that the surest direct route to it is through systemic change which experience shows happens relatively incrementally-- in fads, fashions, cultural breezes, laws-- when it happens at all.  A lifetime of disappointment has taught me that the forces that power our current system's endurance in spite of its decrepitude should never be underestimated-- incrementalism demonstrably staves off incremental rightist regress as often as it advances leftist progress.   It could be argued that incrementalism takes a bit of faith as well, but speaking as an accidental incrementalist, I can attest that it's not faith but merely compulsion, and at best a faint hope that given natural attrition and changes in circumstances (it's happened before-- March 2020 for instance), sands could shift under the power structure enough that government for the people could make some reappearances-- although no doubt success most often takes the form these days of full throttle dystopian fascism being mitigated one more day.

It sounds so lame when I say it out loud, but ultimately that is my point. My obsession with this topic of late does not stem from any desire to persuade to my point of view. § My only point of view is that we need change.  I think I agree with the accelerationists (of the left; not of the right) on what that change should be like.  Neither of us knows how to get there-- nothing has worked yet-- but may we please take stock in the numbers of us who will do anything to make it happen. 

~~~~~

* By the anti-Trump left I of course do not mean those who to any degree blame Clinton's general election loss to Trump on Bernie Sanders’ remarkably successful primary challenge.  Those are the Clinton true believers.  I'm talking about the Clinton-voting nose holders, most of whom had been Bernie Sanders supporters.  This is a distinction the Jill Stein partisans do not always make.

† It's encouraging that there is a contingent of activists openly expressing their intention to educate about modern means of flouting anti-choice legislation by the use of abortifacient medications.  Protection is not guaranteed, but the fostering of a spirit of active contempt of a Law of the Land that is increasingly contemptible is to be applauded.

§ And by the way, to anyone who can explain why incrementalism is an obstruction to getting people to what they want in a way that accelerationism isn't, don't antagonize me.  Convince me!  

Heavy

And now, ladies and gentlemen, by special request, direct from Budapest, Hungary and 2014, here are BIN-JIP with "Heavy".

 The video is by Levente Szabó.

The Forest for the Trees

Diane Arbus

The story of the brave escape of the 13 Turpin children of Perris, California on January 14, 2018 after nearly 30 years altogether of oppressive confinement, starvation, abusive neglect and deprivation on the part of their parents was packaged up for us recently by Diane Sawyer on ABC's 20/20.  The Turpin children at the time of their escape ranged in age from two to 29 years, although all except the youngest were physically stunted from malnutrition and even the six adult children reportedly all looked younger than 18.  On their rescue, the 29 year old weighed 82 pounds (37 kg).  

After originally pleading not guilty to all charges, in February 2019 the parents, David and Louise, pleaded guilty "to one count of torture, three counts of willful child cruelty, four counts of false imprisonment, and six counts of cruelty to an adult dependent."  Asked by Sawyer to conjecture about an explanation for the Turpin case, Mark Hestrin, Riverside County DA said of the Turpin parents' motivation that sane people do bad things sometimes.  An investigator for the DA's office likewise suggested that from his vantage of expertise, there was "no why" that he could fathom for this case.   The children themselves naturally had the opposite problem: for them there were too many whys to ponder.    

In retrospect, of course members of the Riverside County DA's office did not see a reason for the abuse.  Through prosecutorial eyes, everything that can be prosecuted looks like criminal behavior chosen by legally sane people for no reason.

I'm no psychologist, but it looks to me based on the little that is known about the elder Turpins that part of the "why" has to do with a combination of childhood trauma of their own (Louise had been sexually abused as a girl by a family member), an incredible immaturity on the part of both who married very young, and a worldview-- they had been adherents of the Quiverfull movement-- that encouraged the regular popping out of children in spite of an absence of tools or motivation to deal with parenthood.  (Their beliefs did not prohibit them apparently from experimenting with extramarital "swinging.") Having no imagination and a singular goal of selfishness, no parenting skills beyond brutal control and confinement of the brood they could only continue to increase,  and a pass from a culture that prefers to give some of its members the benefit of the doubt in how they see to the welfare of their young behind closed doors, they succeeded in stunting the development of all thirteen of their children. 

The parents each received 25 years for their convictions, but as an official from the DA's office tearfully alleged, for some of the children at least, abuse and neglect continued.  The ABC report concluded with  an investigative crew aggressively confronting county social services officials in a cliched display of getting to the bottom of the allegations of the county's bureaucratic revictimization of  many of the Turpin children following their parents' arrest.  At least one child was reportedly placed into a home where abuse was subsequently discovered to have been perpetrated on several foster children including allegedly one of the Turpins.  The hundreds of thousands of dollars contributed by concerned strangers across the country and held in trust were reportedly being withheld for the most part from the children despite several requests including for tuition and transportation.  Jordan, the then 17 year old who had escaped the house and called for police that January morning when she learned that an inactivated smart phone she found in the house could be used to make emergency calls, reported that after months of basic neglect in a group home, she was suddenly released with no address, no job, no means of support or any training on how to manage day to day living as an adult.

It's a formula for compelling TV, no doubt, but thanks very much to years of public policy deprivations promoted by the Riverside County DA’s political party and  overlooked when not outright championed and rationalized away by the media of which 20/20 is very much representative, it should surprise no one that our tattered safety net is incapable of supplying any measure of what these children had been deprived of from their parents.  But it's a bit conveniently advantageous for ABC to grandstand when the story is such an egregious outlier.  Where are the cameras for the estimated 13 million American children living with food insecurity every day?  While on the decline from its all time high of 1000 inmates per 100,000 Americans, the per capita prison rate of the US at 639 per 100,000 remains the highest in the world and is more than 13% higher than the second in rank, El Salvador.  Are Americans especially criminal, or is America, like David and Louise Turpin just especially punitive?  What does it take to get ABC News to show up for you?  The answer of course, can be summed up in one word: sensation.  It is not news that too many are imprisoned or that children are starving everyday.  You either have to be murdered on video by excessive force in the false suspicion of a crime or be the children of Caucasian freaks to get some attention in this town.  Go through the right kind of hell and you just might hit the jackpot with a prime time special devoted to your plight. Meanwhile who is advocating for the rescue of the rest of us?

Poverty by circumstance was not a factor in the Turpin case.  On the contrary, David Turpin was a successful engineer for Lockheed Martin and Northrup Grummond.  Rather, the poverty was inflicted on the children by parents who preferred to lavish their household income on themselves.  There is an undeniable extra fascination in learning that the Turpin parents, who both came from the humblest roots in West Virginia were in many respects exponents of the American dream, a fantasy never more cloyingly idealized and romanticized than in the films and theme parks of Walt Disney.  ABC, a child company of Disney made no mention in their blockbuster exclusive report of the fanaticism of both Turpin parents for all things Disney, as exclaimed on their vanity license plates which read "DLand" and "DL4EVER".  It's more than just interesting trivia that in all those years of forcible sequestering of their children from sight, the exception that the Turpins made for allowing their children in public in a semblance of all-American swellness was Disneyland. 

For 30 years, from the outside, everything looked normal.  On the inside, in some respects, it was.

Entitlement

Having once been entreated by a former employer to improve my position by taking a course in management-- by which I learned that I could never be that kind of person-- I have always wanted to write about the disgusting irony of the way in which the managerial class, when they think no one can overhear them, disparages the sense of "entitlement" of those they manage-- to more money or more choice in the workplace for less time-sucking, less soul-sucking, and less general sucking from their jobs.  I don't know how managerials behave in the wild, but this was what I witnessed in the classroom.  But this is not what I am referring to today by entitlement.  Instead, I'd like to talk about how to name a band, and more to the point how not to name a band.

I was inspired to write about this by hearing reference in one of my recent internet wanderings to the band named Animal Collective.  I've admired this band since I first heard about them apparently almost 2 decades ago, and though I don't know that I've ever heard a note of their music, I continue to think fondly of them, solely on the basis of their name.  Two words that distill the essence of music made for the young: the Animal part reflecting the emulation of the untamed; the aforementioned momentarily harnessed for politico-entertainment purposes into a Collective.  It's so good, I'd prefer not to taint the purity of what it evokes in me with whatever the reality of their oeuvre is.

In my experience, Animal Collective is bucking the trend toward more and more insipid band names.  Remember we're not talking about the music of any of these bands (most of which I am unlikely to be familiar with), but only about the handles by which fans may latch onto them. A few examples of the problem follow:

• Panic! at the Disco - The words in that combination are actually acceptable if you don't think too hard about it.  The punctuation, by calling attention to it, undermines and deflates it.
• fun. - We're not just a band named "Fun". We're "fun period".  
• Punctuation seems to be the death knell for a band name: cf. Against Me! The Wonder Who? Wham! 
• Death Cab for Cutie - Like the other epically horrible band name of the 90s, Toad the Wet Sprocket (itself a Monty Python reference), this one is a reference to classic British comedy, specifically a song written by another badly named band, The Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band that was featured in the Magical Mystery Tour, a vehicle for another badly named band, The Beatles.*
• Smashing Pumpkins - When you get down to it it's a pun.  It's not as bad a pun as the Beatles, but that's pretty much all it is.  Good looking gourds.  It's the rock equivalent of Curl Up and Dye for a hair salon.  Other bad pun names: Japandroids, The Dandy Warhols, Wevie Stonder.
• Mumford & Sons - All the excitement of an Econoline van.  The "& Sons" part is lame enough, but Mumford?  (See also Dave Matthews Band; Hootie and the Blowfish.)
• In the Doesn't-Require-Elaboration Department: Imagine Dragons; Cage the Elephant; Arctic Monkeys; Foo Fighters; Greta Van Fleet; Bring Me The Horizon.  
• Childish Gambino - I am familiar with Donald Glover's work and I approve of it.  I am also aware that he purposely forwent the struggle of naming his act, opting instead to let an internet band name generator do his thinking for him.  There's artistic merit in letting the horribleness of an internet generated band name speak for itself-- not to mention legitimate credibility to be had in not giving a shit what name the internet picks for you.  Then again, we all have to live with that name.  And it is a terrible name.
• Speaking of Band Name Generators, here are some actual names generated online for the purposes of this topic: Jugs for the Policeman; Rancid Hippos of Canada; McRock; Two Inch Ladies; Puddle of Fishing Rod; Devon Revival

You would do well to ask yourself, what does this random blogger on the internet know about band names? And you would have a point if only because you do not realize that the only reason I'm just some random blogger on the internet and not a name on the liner notes of a tenth of your record collection is that my standard for a band name for myself was too high.

So what are some good band names and how do you tell a good name from a bad one?  To summarize, a good name is forever; a bad name shoots its wad the first time you hear it. Sticking mostly to bands I may be less familiar with, some of the qualities to consider:

• Some names are pleasing in their own right:  Soundgarden; Earth, Wind and Fire; Funkadelic; Art of Noise, Black Flag; Arcade Fire; Roxy Music; The Fuggs
• A well-chosen, evocative, or aesthetically pleasing reference works every time: Veruca Salt; Gang of Four; Spandau Ballet; Heaven 17; Steely Dan;  The Velvet Underground; Dead Kennedys (I realized only today that this is a pun on Ted Kennedy, which I should reject on principle, but taken at face value, it's one of the toughest names around)
• Aptness: The Supremes; The Temptations; The Miracles; The Messengers
• If you're lucky, your name corners a very unique market: Fit; Crime; Television; Felt; Hole; The Revolution; The Time; The Fall; L.A. Witch; Doll Hospital
• In fairness, here are some of the better than average names generated by the random band name generator: King Pink; Blue Syndicate; Cool Cool Cool

My twin brother thirteen has a special flare for naming bands.  His chef d'oeuvre is my favorite of all time, and I will tell you what it is if you promise not to use it.  (And if you can't promise, you have to attribute it to my brother thirteen when you get famous with it): Diet of Worms.

~~~~~~

* The Beetles would have been good.

If Lewis Powell told you to jump off the Empire State Building . . .

I've finally come to the understanding that there really is no such thing as an American left.  It's not my own idea; it's just that after spending a great deal of time reading and listening to discussions about the state of the left in this country from those whom I have come to trust on these matters, it has finally sunk in that while leftist sentiment and thought is alive and well and manifold in its forms and manifestations, and is embodied in a proliferation of leftists, The Left as a relevant sector of American society is not so much a specter as a phantom.  The key ingredient that is missing is labor-- at the moment a defeated and divided plurality (although the past year has seen promising stirrings).  Those who claim the mantle of the left tend to be clever, academic, disconnected voices (not unlike a certain numerically nomenclatured blogger I could name) who paradoxically proclaim their leftness while connected.  Hence the predominance of conflict and cancellation as the mode of online leftist discourse, and more importantly, the rarity of actual tangible political victories that could be claimed by the left-- not so much because leftists do not participate in the process, as that their campaigns, despite the demonstrable popularity of their platforms, rarely make it beyond the pupal stage since their entrees into electoral politics are for the most part successfully squelched by the superiorly funded and organized efforts of democratic party operatives and their donors who have a knack for destroying the field when it comes to primaries but a decided cluelessness about winning general elections.

Speaking of Virginia...I saw a Lewis Powell quote the other day on one of these leftist videos.

...one should not postpone more direct political action, while awaiting the gradual change in public opinion to be effected through education and information. Business must learn the lesson, long ago learned by labor and other self-interest groups... that political power is necessary; that such power must be [assiduously] cultivated; and that when necessary, it must be used aggressively and with determination — without embarrassment and without the reluctance which has been so characteristic of American business.

 In Richmond, Virginia, late summer 1971,  US Chamber of Commerce president Eugene Sydnor reached across the back yard fence to his neighbor, Richmond attorney and soon-to-be Nixon Supreme Court appointee Lewis Powell to request a "secret memorandum" concerning what to Sydnor, head and chief stockholder of a chain of department stores was a disturbing trend -- namely the capturing of the public discussion by decidedly anti-free enterprise and anti-establishment voices.  Herbert Marcuse and other exponents of the Frankfurt school diaspora, for instance, were selling books and capturing the imagination of military draft age college youths and others of their cohort, inspiring campus unrest, causing widespread skepticism among youth of the American "establishment", and seducing them away from service in what had become a very unpopular war in Southeast Asia. DC policy wonk and attorney Ralph Nader had written a best seller- Unsafe at any Speed--  about the epidemic of highway deaths that were avoidable but for the recalcitrance of the US Auto industry in making safer automotive designs, raising awareness and widespread support for an overdue and, as it turned out brief, era of government regulation of American businesses.  Concomitant with these, a growing planetary consciousness inspired by humanity's civic forays into space inspired an environmental awareness that had seized the public, engendering a clamoring for accountability from the businesses whose profligate way with waste in the pursuit of greater and greater profits had visibly taken a toll on the natural beauty of the country and was threatening the future of the Earth.  So it's not like there wasn't cause for the owning class to worry.  In response, Lewis drafted up the confidential memo whose main point was "business and the enterprise system are in deep trouble, and the hour is late."  The memo called for an aggressive response to growing fed-up-ness with American Enterprise-- a greater presence on campuses, aggressive pursuit of legislation, relentless counterattacks to criticism of business with editorials, advertisements and media of their own.

There was something to it.  I don't know that the Powell memo was ever delivered publicly, and yet, it's not at all hard to imagine the receptive audience for Powell's remarks being the paunchy, horn-rimmed, white haired set, commerce bank patrons, fat cats and glad-handers setting down their white napkins dabbed with béarnaise sauce from the corners of their mouths to applaud the pep talk from one of their better boys.  The beauty of Powell's vision was that it was purposely co-opted from the enemy.  It would inspire a wildfire of aggrievement on the right as a counterpart to the call on the left for justice-- fire fighting fire. 

The memorandum was leaked to Washington Post columnist Jack Anderson who made much of the clandestine plan to combat public distrust in American Business with propaganda, legislation, jurisprudence, and stealth commandeering of the discourse through media, print and academic infiltration.  The outing from a feared journalist did nothing to dampen the rallying of the well-heeled troops. On the contrary, fifty years later, here we are.

The question I have to ask is, so Lewis Powell said power was essential and that it had to be used.  Did it necessarily follow that the right would dig in to power and exert it?  What motivated the men who already had everything? More to the point, what would those on the ostensible left be able and prepared to do with a counterpart document?

Devo Appreciation

Let us now appreciate Devo.

Beautiful World

Satisfaction

Uncontrollable Urge 

Nutra Theme / Jerkin' Back And Forth

Jocko Homo (In The Beginning Was The End)

Bracing for Re-entry

My COVID cocoon is ending soon.  Soon I will be rising earlier than usual (some of the time) and bathing with more regularity and heading to the subway station for the first time in nearly 20 months (I hope my card still works) to commute to my office.  It's not like I want to, and not that I need to, but rather that I am obliged to.  Capitalism impels me.  The prospect of this momentous transition has not only made me sick to my stomach, it's somehow put me in a pensive frame of mind.  I'm not seeking them but I keep coming across opportunities to cogitate.

For instance, I  recently had a philosophical discussion during a phone visit with an older relative, a nonagenarian, about what the new normal will mean for her.  She's a social person by nature still living independently (with assistance from neighbors and nearby family) but she has forgone in-person visitation willingly since the start of the epidemic in the interest of safety.  She's fully vaccinated and even boostered as are her friends, one of whom is encouraging her to consider an in-person indoor visit while both are still healthy enough for it.  Her instinct was to demur.  I share a bit of her skepticism about the objectivity with respect to risk factors exhibited by those who are desperate to forge ahead with the return to normality.  But as I listened to her, I wondered if she had considered the impact of a future without human contact, even at her stage of life.  

After having myself lived through several months with the risk of covid reduced thanks to widespread adherence to proper public preventions and precautions, it seemed to me that with a long winter coming, there might come a day when she would crave the company of one of her many friends, and that given the brevity of life, and the reduced risk of infection with full vaccination, especially in conjunction with the wearing of masks indoors, she might find herself wondering why an indoor socially distanced visit with the right masked person on a cold winter day wouldn't be worth the risk, and I wanted her to know that if she decided it was, I wouldn't protest.  She thought for a minute. She hadn't considered it.  The most insistent friend she thought was maybe too reckless to be trusted even fully vaccinated, but she imagined she could entertain the possibility of relaxing her standards enough to give it a try if she thought the situation was worth it someday.  

I'm not sure why I took that tack with her.  I don't think I'd have any trouble swearing off the company of other humans* if circumstances warranted it (or gave me plausible deniability for it).  But I have an aversion to commitment, and an aversion to standing on principle, so the thought of someone committing to a behavioral stance, such as abstention from having guests, on the basis of a principle, such as a notion that nothing is worth the risk of contracting COVID, is probably bound to be viewed by me with a jaded eye.  Is it really true that nothing is worth the risk of COVID?  Probably not.

I've had other excuses to wax philosophical occasioned by this new phase of the COVID era.  Recently, a call-in podcast I listen to had a series of callers who wanted to debate the host on the premise that it is  immoral to have children, not just because of COVID  but also in response to the unprecedented uncertainties of the future due to global warming and to the hostility, particularly toward the young, of stubbornly persistent neoliberalism especially as it is coupled with frantic end-times capitalism.  The solution to the problems we are facing they say is for humanity to actively give up and for the righteous among us to work toward a future that is voluntarily emptier of humans.  Many of these callers would like to see some sort of tax disincentive if not outright legislation to prevent at least the most poorly reasoned births, something that many of these folks feel is something of an epidemic given the world that children are born into.  How could planning to bring a child into this world ever be a good thing, they wonder.   No one is talking out loud about culling babies, but why go public with this proclivity if you're not willing to get serious about it?  

To me it seems a paradox: if you're clever enough to realize that when having a child is a choice it could well be an increasingly immoral one, we need more of you, not fewer.  What we don't need is a world more full of people who think the purpose of life is to populate the earth with their kind-- though with clever people abstaining from procreation, that is exactly the kind of world you get; and in light of that it may not be a coincidence that it's a hellish place in which to bring forth a child.  But my view is that the choice to have children should be just that-- in a sense it can be nothing other than that-- a choice, made possible with fullest advantage of tools for realizing the desire.  In my view it's better to focus on the tools for responsible choice -- birth control for those who choose not to reproduce; health care and child care, an amplitude of resources and a healthy, well-tended environment for those who choose (or merely happen) to have children.  

Unfortunately, the climate in this country, political as well as geological, is just not hospitable in these times to either choice.

~~~~~~

* Don't act like you'd care if I did!

Love Poems to Things

Suburban House -  Sidewalk, lamppost, driveway, stoop. What appeals to me, walking by the curb?  It is you, suburban house.  Set amid your landscape monopoly, behind portico and bay window obscured by drapes, the mystery of how you fill your square footage beckons.  Locus of homemaking, shared address, proletarian palace, how could freedom be any freer than it is behind your façade?  Where goes your stone path?  What patio skirts you; what shed or outbuilding attends you; what yard art adorns your shrubbery?  Twilight falls.  Exterior yearnings yield to interior hermitage. What nourishing smells assault the senses from the cauldrons heated by your appliances, what fragrant artifacts line your cupboards, closets and cabinets? What mundane transpirings does your inner golden glow illuminate?  A robot could design you; only a primate troop could animate you.   

Roadside Pine Grove on a Curve - It's such a long way to the sea, that I wonder why I ever go.  When I get there I know, but the way back is so long and the road so dark that I wonder why I ever leave.  And then, when I have counted down the miles and the byway at last rounds down to the highway that will lead after a while to home, don't think that I don't see you in my excessive haste, roadside grove on the outside curve.  Your elegant array just beyond the shoulder, your members at road's edge like sentinels daunting entry to your forest, your unpeopled collectiveness receding into the enchanted blackness of night-- anomalous orderly wilderness.  I only see you in a blur when I am readiest to be home, but for that moment you remind me why I ache to wander.   

Saturday Afternoon - To the left of you is the week before. To the right of you is the week to come. Only you, deep mid Saturday afternoon endure in unactualized completeness.  While I accede to the chore I chose to spend you on, dreaming of the undetermined treat to come that I have in mind to give myself for not just lolling in you in my dreamy sloth, you seem to fleet forever.

Decay - Spring returns and green encroaches everywhere without relent.  Life burgeons like an alien invasion from every corner except yours, decaying structure.  Life abounds, expands, fills and conquers yet you wither, lifeless, neglected, defeated architecture.  Caving in on yourself in slow motion, you are the sister of the moth who came to its end trapped in a web beside your door, who once shook and strove, saying, "This too is life!" until in tatters it shakes no more except in bursts of wind.  Life insists, but you dead brown house, resist.  Your  deliberate return to nothingness--visible, beautiful, passively defiant-- is a relief.

Pegboard - Someone needed a room in the garage that they couldn't afford, so they nailed you, Pegboard, to some pine beams, and called you a wall.  Then they hinged a section of you, bolted a $2.50 cabinet handle to you and called you a door.  Hiding and seeking one day in youth, you called out to me and I popped you out of your latch, slipped through you into the dappled windowless darkness that you enclosed and pulled you quietly shut.  Then I sat amid the storage, waiting in the pinholes of light to be sought.

Everything is Obvious: A review

William of Ockham

I saw an article not long ago on the Americans with Disabilities act that said that the older you get, the more disabled you become.  I hadn’t known that, until I started aging and becoming increasingly disabled.  Then it was obvious.  

Which reminds me of the book my niece got me for Christmas a few years ago - Everything is Obvious*: *Once you know the answer, by sociologist Duncan Watts, on the pitfalls of common sense, which I had been enjoying and absorbing until it disappeared one day, which happened to be the same day that my wife had hired a maid service to come clean our house before the visit of a friend from out of town.  Having a few moments for reading that evening, I searched the house for it with no luck. How disappointing! It's not a big house.  It had been on the surface of things just that morning.  Where could it be?  I racked my brain; retraced my steps until a notion bubbled up from the depths.

My theory was that the book had been resting on the lip of the waste basket in the bathroom. Some new bric a brac in the bath-chamber had made the customary place for books in progress, the toilet tank lid, off limits and for want of a better idea, the waste basket rim had become the de facto (and piss poor I might add) substitute for it.  Anyway, I was thinking I or a maid had maybe inadvertently tipped the book into the trash can, and the maid, perhaps not being a book person, had not the tools to recognize a book in a trash can as anything other than trash, so had dumped it along with the other trash in a receptacle where, evading discovery, it was left on the curb the next day and removed for good by employees of the public works department in their usual efficient manner.  While I was disappointed at the turn of events I was very pleased with my powers of deduction for having figured that out.  

My daughter protested that it was classist and maybe even racist to think a maid wouldn’t know what to do with a book.  I countered that it wasn’t racist; it was a fact of life that some people, people of all walks of life, are not book people and for them a book is not an object to be totemized and venerated but an object that in a trash can is indistinguishable from other objects whose original identities and purposes have been superseded by that of “rubbish”.  I cast no blame; on the contrary, I was pleased that with my powers of reasoning and a mind open to the world views of a stranger who happened to be engaged in a cleaning activity in my house, I had been able without prejudice to understand where the book had gotten to.  

Oh sure, the coffee cup that I suspected a maid must have broken without telling us that same day showed up a day later on the bookcase in the bedroom where I’d left it, as did the bag of dog food that I was afraid might have tempted one of the maids (whether for her dog or her family or herself I did not care to judge or to speculate) when I couldn't find it right away.  So of the 3 missing items, 2 turned up within a day, but not the third, and somehow my confidence in my powers of deduction remained bolstered by the stories I’d concocted for the 2 missing items, even when they were proven wrong.  I mean the stories were good.  But as I say the book remained gone and I kept feeling that pang of knowing a tragedy that maybe could have been prevented had occurred in spite of a premonition I seemed to remember having that day.  

You probably can see where this is going-- last week, my wife was digging around behind the computer for something and found, right where I’d left it a month before, the book.  Of course it was behind the computer!  That’s where I put it to avoid any mishaps with the maids.  The end.

Cattle Call

Kicking off the lonesome Hallowe'en season, here from 1956 is Eddy Arnold with Tex Owens' Cattle Call, an adaptation of Pawel Walc (St Paul's Waltz) first recorded by Bruno Radzinski in Poland in 1928.  Owens wrote the song one snowy winter night in Kansas City and recorded it in 1936, but Eddy Arnold made it his own.

 

 

Forty years later, Arnold teamed up with another formidable yodeler, Leann Rimes, for some harmony:

And speaking of yodeling:

Numbers

According to Rolling Stone Magazine, The Eagles' Hotel California is the 311th best song of all time.  That makes it almost but not quite as good as Bill Withers' Ain't No Sunshine (#309) but 2 better than Smokey Robinson and the Miracles' Tears of a Clown (#313).  

Rolling Stone has updated their list of the 500 best songs.  You might think the definitive music magazine would have a pretty good handle on the best music ever.  But the last time Rolling Stone compiled the list in 2004, Hotel California was Number 49.  Had 5 million more plays on Classic Rock radio made the editorial staff come to their senses this time around?   As testament to advances in taste since the first list was compiled, Tears of a Clown didn't even make the 2004 cut.  Can we at least agree that Bill Withers' 1971 classic is objectively better than Bob Dylan's Visions of Johanna, which rose from 404th place in 2004 to only 317th in 2021?  Let's not be hasty.  Ain't No Sunshine had fallen 29 spaces in the intervening years, from 280th place in the earlier ranking.

The top 10 alone reveals the loose nature of what is great according to the magazine.  Hey Jude was 8th on the list in 2004.  In 2021, at number 89, it's not even in the top 3 Beatles' songs.  Two songs in the 2021 top 10 (Missy Elliott's Get Ur Freak On from 2001 and Fleetwood Mac's Dreams from 1977) existed in 2004 but appeared nowhere on the earlier list.  In all, 49 slots in the new list were assumed by songs that were released after the original list was published; 207 songs from the original list were replaced by songs that already existed but were passed over the first time around.  Both lists reinforce the prejudice of the elderly that the quite distant past is top heavy with greatness.  While the newer list is slightly more relaxed about more recent songs, two decades later, the epicenter of greatness has shifted forward from 1971 only to 1977.  Songs appear twice on both lists (e.g., both Bob Dylan and the Byrds' versions of Mr Tambourine Man appear on both the 2004 and the 2021 list) so it’s clear that the category the magazine is ranking is not actually composition but production. 

Given the flux of the rankings, it's worth a ponder: are there 500 songs that belong on any list?   Five hundred of anything is a lot; and a look at some of the titles that made one or the other of the lists (Tiny Dancer, Tears in Heaven, Kelly Clarkson's Since U Been Gone, a song called Springsteen by someone named Eric Church) strongly supports a notion that standards may have been overextended to pad things out.   But looking for songs that didn't make the cut in either year (Nat King Cole's Route 66, Parliament's Knee Deep, Laurie Anderson's O Superman, Beethoven's Ode to Joy, the B-52's Give Me Back My Man) you quickly come to the realization that if you are going to take the idea seriously, there aren't enough places on a 500 place list for the greatest songs of all time.   

Granting that the nature of the task is arbitrary, Rolling Stone has taken a canonical approach, updating their criteria to reflect tastes and advancements (and regressions) in the culture, taking care to pander to a variety of sensibilities while ensuring an appropriate diversity in representation of the artists and genres selected.  The cumulative effect is one that could be expected from so prominent an institution: the cultivation of a conventional taste.  

Number 1 this year is Aretha Franklin's Respect-- rising with a bullet from Number 4 in 2004.   I've liked Respect and Aretha Franklin since I first heard the latter belting the former the very year that Rolling Stone was born.  But I find myself bristling at the notion that the Number 1 Best Song of All Time is an actual thing.  What makes a song the best?  Surely it can't just be the one most people like or the one that has made the most money.  Should it be the most technically and musically complex?  Or should it be devastatingly simple?  Should the lyrics be challenging, persuasive, poetic, novel or  should they be immediate, already in your head?  In my experience 'best' is an attribute that has no relevance to the impact a piece of music has in in my life.  As a dabbler in song-making myself on occasion, the best of mine have a strong accidental element to their construction.  If in some parallel universe one of my personal favorites were selected for the Rolling Stone list I don't know whether I'd  recognize it as a personal artistic achievement or as something more akin to winning a lottery.

This summer, I confess I was wrapped up for a bit in the controversy over Sarah Brand's Red Dress.  While most of the discussion around it centered around whether Brand, a Californian working on a Masters of Science in Sociology at Oxford was offering the unconventional tune sincerely or as bait in a cruel and twisted experiment, I was easily won over by the confident originality of it.  I enjoyed the challenge of the listen and found Brand's microtonal performance hitting my ears like honey.  More than once it has infected my brain and inspired me to cogitate on its theme of society's resistance to irrepressible outsiderhood.  It defies ranking, certainly by the likes of Rolling Stone.  Is it a great song?  In my book, maybe.  

Pandering to conventional taste, performatively diversifying while remaining true to the soft rock core on which the institution was built, Rolling Stone presents the list for discussion, in the process padding their content and most importantly generating clicks and selling magazines.  While the list abounds in examples of excellence and includes many of my favorites,  I would say exclusion from it gains a deserving song extra cachet.  

Creeping Solipsism

I realized today re-reading a couple of emails that I seem to have developed severe OCD of the mouth when it comes to business communications.  My sentences seem to end with the assumption that the reader has already forgotten how they started, so I keep repeating words—I shun pronouns and substitutions.   This is a bit extreme but it’s something like this:  Instead of saying “Skippy asked me to bring the book I borrowed from him when I come to visit.”  I say something like  “Skippy asked me to bring the book that I borrowed from Skippy in the past which is currently at my house, so that  when I next come to visit the house that Skippy asked me to visit I also bring Skippy’s book to it, it being the house that belongs to Skippy also that he asked me to visit and I said yes to, i.e., to the visiting question, and I also said yes to the bringing of Skippy’s book when I come to visit question as well.  Thank you.”   

This is yet another example of my dwindling faith in and growing questioning of the givens of social interaction (along with my increasing uncertainty about a growing list of many other previously assumed pillars of reality: the weather, politics, entertainment,  science).  The manifestation of the corrosion of my faith in sacreds and standards is not necessarily always going to be conscious, but on the contrary is more likely these days to be an unconscious organic outgrowth of a crumbled foundation.  To take spelling for instance: once upon a time I was a paragon of the art.  Now I find my writing is prone with errors.  I make mistakes of speed and carelessness like everybody, but more and more it's an excess of care and attention that's the culprit.  It's not that I don't know how to spell a word, but that I find myself second-guessing, and third and fourth and even fifth guessing, and all too frequently as I discover only in retrospect coming down on the wrong side again and again.

It's not as if I'm wrong about the arbitrary nature of orthography and grammar.  In the absence of an authority in whom to place your trust, how do you decide what's right?  I blame authority for my crumbling trust in authority.

By the way, in case I didn't make clear, in my example above, the "he" in the second sentence refers to Skippy.  Not to Truman Capote.

Word of the Day

I've developed a habit of watching a daily youtube vlog in which the proprietor solves the day's New York Times crossword puzzle.  Puzzles debut, courtesy of the app that provides them on my phone, the eve of the day they are dated, so I have done them by the time I watch the vlog.  For me it's painless therapy in a way to watch someone else struggle with a theme or with the idiosyncrasies of a puzzle constructor's clues when my struggle is behind me.  Sometimes it's akin to group therapy for post traumatic stress disorder. The host of the vlog is a slightly faster solver than I am, especially considering he is talking his way through each clue and publicly exposing his strengths and weaknesses to a variously indifferent group of strangers.  He's a much younger fellow, an expatriate who lives in London and I've observed that he has expertise in areas that I lack and vice versa.  Popular culture references that I require every cross for fly off his fingers.  On the other hand, he was flummoxed recently by how a "Latin American spread" could be a "HACIENDA."   He had heard of a hacienda, but "spread" to his way of thinking had nothing at all to do with it; and I admit when he passed up "_ACIENDA" for the 5th time refusing to throw down an H  in the blank until he was sure it could be nothing else,  I was yelling at my screen.  It wasn't until the next day, when he shared a youtube comment someone had posted on the prior day's video explaining the sense that the constructor intended for "spread"-- a sprawling farm or estate-- that he half-heartedly accepted the legitimacy of the clue, although he insisted the usage was in his experience expiring.  This was news to me.

Cogitating a bit on the difference in our perceptions of this sense of "spread", I developed a theory about why the word might have struck a millennial as out-of-date.  Could it have anything to do with the way that student debt has meant that many of his generation are not purchasing homes until much later if at all?  For my generation, by the time we were his age (I assume he's in his early to mid 30's), many more of us were homeowners*.  Many of us had probably ironically referred to our dwellings as "spreads" taking a post modern cue from our parents for whom the concept was familiar from the formerly more ubiquitous genre of the Western, and from whom we'd already overheard the joke when we were youngsters.  Had his generation not been paying attention at their parents' boring get togethers with other parents or, had they, simply by having no opportunity to wield it, let the usage atrophy?

Hours later, I myself encountered a word I'd never heard in a passage from Naomi Klein's 2007 paradigm changer, The Shock Doctrine:

Ajay Kapur, the former head of Citigroup Smith Barney’s global equity strategy group in New York, encourages his clients to invest in his "Plutonomy basket" of stocks, featuring companies like Bulgari, Porsche, Four Seasons and Sotheby’s. "If plutonomy continues, which we think it will, if income inequality is allowed to persist and widen, the plutonomy basket should continue to do very well."

Kapur and colleagues revived an obscure word coined in the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century, 'plutonomy', for use in a number of bullish reports for upmarket investors circa 2005, highlighting the novelty of the weird effects of unfettered growth in wealth at the very top in contrast to the very bound and constricting prevailing conventions of economy so familiar to the rest of us down here in the trickle down gutter.  One massive financial meltdown later-- that as usual came out of the hides of everyone but the culprits whose amoral greed made it happen-- and the word fell out of favor.  Those papers have been disappeared from the web, but not before they could be recapped by John Sidor at Leadership Thoughts Blog.  The Shock Doctrine for those who may be unfamiliar tells the story of how this lopsided distribution of the planet's wealth wound up in one very small corner of the population-- it was essentially through years of violent application of a particularly religious ideology, the fundamentalist sect of neoliberalism whose pope was Milton Friedman.  Folks of my generation may remember the kindly old elf of capitalism from his Nobel Prize in Economics (the annual vanity prize that economists award to themselves to try to persist the notion that they are actually contributing something valuable to human knowledge) which seemed to entitle him to a best selling book and PBS series, Free to Choose,  in which he pimped the free market to an America as yet reverberating ever more faintly with the more equitable Keynesian effects of FDR's New Deal.  They may not recall how he cut his teeth advising Chile's General Augusto Pinochet on how to combine the brutality of a regime wrested in a violent coup (with the participation of the CIA at the formerly secret urging of Henry "Dr. Kissinger" Kissinger on behalf of Richard Nixon) from the popular and popularly elected socialist Salvador Allende in 1973 with a particularly brutal austerity that ravaged what had been a democratizing Chile for nearly 2 decades.  For Chileans who had wanted Allende and not a Generalissimo, it was hell; for Friedman it was an experiment, and to his mind, a successful one.

Closer to home, Friedman fucked with the rest of us thanks to the aggressive ascension of true believers and useful idiots of both parties, from Reagan, through Clinton, the Bushes and beyond.   With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the painful implementation of neoliberal capitalism  across the globe including in the last remaining communist superpower China, and the defeat of organized labor in the US,  free market capitalism was declared the victor, and history was declared to be over. After 50 solid years of living under this theocracy, I've decided that caring that people get what they need even if they are poor† is for chumps.  Also that I'm a chump. 

Wish I knew who to credit.  Wish I'd thought of it.

~~~~~

* Mentally put scare quotes around the "owner" portion of that word.

† As an undergraduate in a large university at the dawn of the Reagan era, I knew an older fellow, a regular presence in the circle that revolved around a roommate who was vastly more social than me.  Andrew was a bachelor and perpetual auditor of classes who made his living playing piano for the recitals and auditions of instrumentalists in the music school.  While most of us were destined for other places (even though some of us like myself didn't know what we were doing and would never figure it out) he had been there for years and you could be certain would be there years longer, surely drifting in and out of whatever circle of cool people he found himself invited into.  I'll never forget and have long wanted to work into a post a comment he uttered in frustration one day discussing his latest tribulations with some creditor or bureaucracy interrupting his pursuit of a well lived life to grub for money or to place a financial obstacle in front of a modest ambition.  "They won't let you be poor," he said.  He was right.  They won't let you be poor.  To be happily poor in this wretched age is the most beautiful and insane and doomed ambition.

Good Faith, Bad Faith

When some random stranger decides not to get vaccinated against COVID for less than rock solid reasons,  any response that strikes your fancy seems appropriate (even those that are provoked out of less than rock solid motivations).  When the person is not random or a stranger, the question of what is appropriate has to be taken more seriously.  I had occasion to ponder the appropriateness of a response recently when I found myself conversing at an outdoor gathering with the daughter of family friends whom I hadn't seen in a while.  A lot had happened to her since our last conversation-- pregnancy, marriage, conversion to a particularly fiery brand of Christianity.  She first entered our lives fresh from a Russian orphanage when she and her brother were adopted as young children by our friends a few years after the fall of the Soviet Union.  Though she was raised in a very East Coast American urban secular way, the way she spoke about her relationship with Jesus was very reminiscent of the memories I have of my most ancient immigrant female relatives from childhood.  I wanted to ascribe her evangelism to genes, but I remind myself that she and her brother were not infants when they were adopted, so her full throttle embrace of Christianity could well be a rediscovery of what could have been for a very small child who finds herself in a Russian orphanage a necessary wellspring of strength.  Facing the challenges of special circumstances, let alone of young adulthood at the end of history, it was certainly that for her now. 

Always a bit of an unfiltered open book (bless her heart), she brought it up.  She had probed me first, to see if by any luck I was a brother in Christ, and when that turned out not to be the case, to be sure I wasn't too in the pocket of Satan.  Satisfied that I was benign at worst, she confessed to being unvaccinated and explained that it was her decision to trust in Jesus above the vaccine.  She admitted that she was equally afraid of taking the vaccine, given her pregnancy and her distrust of the medical establishment based on some bad experiences with it, and of not taking it.  To her mind, both were equally dangerous propositions, likely to give her and her unborn daughter lethal cases of COVID.  Even so she was determined to forgo the vaccine and let Jesus handle it (she pointed to the sky as she said this).  This was causing her agony as she was getting grief for it from the vaccine friendly world of her parents (my world) as well as from the Jesus centric world of her husband for entertaining doubt about the power of Jesus.

My first instinct when a grown up person is talking to me directly is to outwardly respect their viewpoint  regardless of what's going on with me inwardly.  If I have a relationship or history with the person, especially if it's a younger person, I'm inclined to accept their agency in their own life.  But for some reason it occurred to me that since there was an opening for being reasoned with about the vaccine-- which her obstetrician after all was urging her to take-- I could at least voice support for the safeguard of getting it.  As I debated the wisdom of this, I thought to myself, "what if your words make the difference?"

I wanted to remind her (for she had surely heard everything) that millions of people had taken the vaccine by now, and that it has had demonstrable results in preventing the spread and in diminishing the effects of the virus for those who have contracted the Delta variant of it.  I said, why not get the vaccine and put an end to your agony over it?  She countered that as a person with some rheumatoid arthritis she would have to get periodic booster shots.  What's more there would be other variants-- the spiral of vaccination was potentially never ending.   Better to let Jesus inoculate you for good.   But the Delta variant is much more contagious.  Wasn't she afraid of being around so many unvaccinated people?  Everyone she knew was vaccinated, she said, even her husband who was opposed to it on religious grounds but whose workplace required it.  By her being out on a limb with it, her circle had created a bubble of immunity around her.  But what about those outside her circle in her church?  Weren't they potential sources of the disease that her lack of immunity would make her vulnerable to? She preferred to put her faith in Jesus rather than the vaccine.  Having gone down the road I had to say it: Was that not an unfair burden being placed on Jesus? What if in spite of her faith, she got COVID because she didn't get vaccinated.  She could pass it on to others including those she loved.  I could not bring myself to say out loud the implications-- would it mean Jesus failed?  Or would it mean that she had failed to get Jesus's protection?  Was there not some religious obligation to not put Jesus in that position?  But of course the ability to ask the question is a demonstration of one's lack of understanding of faith.  Still, it was clear from her response that she was in agony over the possibility.

In the end,  as it turned out, I had not pushed her over the line on vaccination.  But it was also certainly true that I would not be the last person to proffer an opinion on her choice, and her heart was far from at ease on the question.

Her posture is very familiar to me.  You make a decision-- to keep smoking; to quit school or a job; to get back with someone no one thinks is good for you; to associate with bad elements-- for possibly less than stellar reasons -- fear; stubbornness; weak but compelling issues of character or principle or desire for belief; simple willfulness; to be blunt, bad faith and rationalizations-- and the tenuousness of it guarantees that it remains unsettled and that you'll have to explain yourself perpetually to every schmo who wants a crack at knocking sense into you.  The truth is, the decision is made.  It may be an objectively bad decision, but there will be no going back on it, because it has been decided.  If it is wrong and you pay for it and live, it will be a lesson.  But what if, by luck or by some miracle it turns out as you hope and pray it will, to be right? 

What could I do but wish her the best?