Dan Riley's Blog, page 11

My Girlz n the Hood

John Singleton, 1968-2019John Singleton, who died yesterday of a stroke at age 51, had his landmark movie Boyz n the Hood released in 1991. That was just as I had started to homeschool my youngest daughter Gillian. As happens, the movie made its way into our homeschooling curriculum, as I later documented in my book, The Dan Riley School for a Girl: An Adventure in Homeschooling. Here's the excerpt:

Gillian’s libertarian leanings led her to the American Civil Liberty Union’s side in opposing the City of LA’s ban on gang gatherings in city parks. This was a freedom of assembly issue she argued in a paper I asked her to write on the issue. I passed up the opportunity to simply reinforce that enlightened view. I asked her to consider the feelings of the residents of the neighborhoods surrounding these parks, who had paid for the parks with their taxes and were now unable to use them for fear of gang violence. I was encouraged by her consideration of that argument, but as a subsequent paper she wrote on the subject revealed, she was unpersuaded by it.             Persuasion, of course, hadn’t been the goal. The goal had been to make her see the complexity and relevance to her life of the freedom of assembly issue -- and furthermore to make her deal with the issue of gangs intellectually, to consider them in an historical and Constitutional context.            In that miserable seventh grade year of hers, she’d dealt with the subject differently. She’d demonstrated a passing fascination with gangs, sending a real shudder down my spine by occasionally assuming gang walk, dress, and attitude on her way out the door. It was all pretend, of course; her world was far too insulated from the real thing for her to learn any of that lifestyle firsthand. It was also quite natural, according to my recollections of college anthropology and adolescent psychology. Adolescents crave group identity, and whether it be the code and colors of a cheerleading squad or a street gang, such identification is critical to their development. Gillian, of course, was not a cheerleader (although she could’ve been captain at The Dan Riley School for a Girl if she’d wanted), so she had to take her group identity where she found it.              For someone who perceived the home school, subconsciously at least, as a sort of hideout from the cruel world, I could have done a better job at keeping the demons at bay. I could have filled Gillian's days with music from Mozart, passages from Shelley and Keats, day trips to the Norton Simon and J. Paul Getty museums, and nights gazing at the heavens through a telescope. Wonder and beauty...wonder and beauty...wonder and beauty. Certainly there was enough of both still extant in the world to occupy our time and energies for nine school months while Gillian got a breather from the harsher realities and some kind of appreciation for the finer things. But my instincts as a teacher stood up to my fears as a father, and we pressed on with the business of learning, wherever it would lead us.            One Thursday afternoon in late September it led us to Boyz N the Hood. Gillian had been campaigning for us to take  in the film as part of a class field trip. I finally overcame my fear of being shot in a theater lobby, as news headlines about the film had suggested might happen, and overcame my even greater fear of listening to a soundtrack heavily laden with rap -- a musical form which can almost arouse in someone as civilized as myself an uncontrollable urge to open fire on folks standing in line for popcorn.             As it turned out, Gillian and I had one of LA’s finest theaters all to ourselves for a matinee performance of the film and settled in for a movie going experience that was considerably different from any I could recall from my own childhood ventures to movies with my own father.             There we were, sitting all alone in a movie theater together -- father and daughter from the white suburbs -- while 20-foot tall, young black men on the screen in front of us talked dirt about whores, bitches, motherfuckers, and pussy. It was not language with which I was unfamiliar, nor was it, sadly, language with which Gillian was unfamiliar. Our mutual discomfort was palpable at first, despite our separate, but equal acquaintance with the language. Although it is quite impossible for me to imagine a film with such language in it when I was growing up in the 50s, it is not impossible for me to imagine my father taking me by the hand and leading me out of a theater where such a film might have been playing. But such are the times we live in, such is the course of human progress, such is the accepted openness of our society, and such is my commitment as a parent to raise children who use ideas and language judiciously themselves while not shrinking from the ideas and language of others that I made no such gesture to Gillian. We stayed and watched Boyz N the Hood.                        Our steadfastness was rewarded. The film impressed me as an affirmation of strong, active parenting, especially fathering. The hero who saves the life of Trey, a black youth trying to grow up amidst the dangers and degradations of modern urban America is Furious Styles, the boy’s father, armed only with a sense of what’s right and wrong. Furious, like Otto Frank before him, essentially announces to the world: I  have taken responsibility for my child. No matter how awesome the task may be. I accept ultimate responsibility for loving, protecting, and making my child better than the world he was born into.
Watch for a revised paperback edition later this year with
an update on the marvelous turns the life of the girl
in the title has taken since the book first appeared.

Bernie and the Nyets

Hey kids, shake it loose together
The spotlight's hitting something
That's been known to change the weather
We'll kill the fatted calf tonight
So stick around
When I read in the Mueller Report (page 23) that Russian interference in the 2016 election favored Bernie Sanders as well as Donald Trump, I found it more clarifying than stunning. All during that campaign my email and social media feeds were filled with vicious anti-Hillary incursions from the far left rather than the far right. Much of it was couched in clunky text that was almost Boris and Natasha level satire of Soviet-speak. I do not hold Bernie Sanders responsible for taking aid and comfort from Russia in the 2016 campaign. After all, the man had all he could handle trying to find his tax returns and control the misogynists working on his campaign. Still, one wonders how much that Russian support of Sanders is connected to what he shared in a press conference after he visited the Soviet Union in 1988 on the eve of its total collapse...
Full video here
Bernie’s supporters point to his consistency as one of his most attractive qualities, and surely this video clip illustrates that Bernie has long held a pretty rosy view on the speed and ease of conducting revolutions.Personally I have never experienced as sharp a 180 degree turn on a politician as I have with Bernie. Up until his 2016 presidential campaign, he was easily my favorite public official. Now I find myself filled with dread at the prospect of finding that he may be my only alternative to Trump in 2020 (and to be clear, he will get my vote in that circumstance). Although I was an early advocate of the Democrats’ non-aggression pact, I feel compelled to do what I can now to give myself and millions of others a better choice in 2020. Fortunately, it's not too hard. Dems already have at least one far better option than Bernie in 2020. Allow me to show rather than tell. In the following videos, watch Bernie and Elizabeth Warren respond to the same question from Chris Hayes.
That pretty much sums it up right there. He has grand, sweeping pronouncements, the fulfillment of which will be predicated on his mere ascendancy to the presidency...an uncomfortable echo of the current occupant of the White House. She is specific, systematic and devoid of narcissistic presumption.     
Ask her about impeaching Trump, taxing the very rich, financing a tuition free college plan and you get straight, clearly articulated, well-reasoned answers, spelled out in detail on her web site. Ask him anything, and he comes back to his socialist talking points and tired applause lines: 
Free college!
Down with millionaires and billionaires!
Get rid of [fill in corporate demon of the moment] (insurance, big pharma, energy, banking)!
No more wars!

It's sheer demagoguery. He is a prisoner of his self-styled socialism. Here’s more from his interview with Chris Hayes, who's about as Bernie-friendly a host as there is on cable TV. Because I’ve viewed this a number of times and readers may only have time to view it once, allow me to provide a few bullet points as guidance for viewing:
Watch how simple he makes achieving economic justice seem by pointing to “all the wealth around us” as if it's just there for the taking without any reference as to how he’s going to harness or redirect or perhaps confiscate the wealth of others to provide justice for all; it's like talking about all the solar energy around us without mentioning solar panels, manufacturing them, selling them, installing them, taxing them    Watch as he tries to slip out of Hayes’ question about how his socialism differs from a mixed economy by invoking FDR, who was not only a very rich man, but a Democrat in good standing…not someone trying to legitimatize his socialism by temporarily taking on the trappings of the Democratic PartyWatch after that attempt at diversion, how he tries to reinforce his socialist view by circling back to reference the very mixed economies Hayes’ challenged him on in the first place Watch how he just outright dodges the question on Venezuela without even bothering to throw out one of his patented vague generalizations.  

Bernie is also a prisoner of his supporters. Key people in his inner circle, such as Nina Turner, David Sirota and Briahna Joy Gray have open, ongoing contempt for the Democratic Party, whose presidential nomination they want. In words and deeds they are obviously trying to use the Democratic Party as a host for a third party parasite. This strategy is reflected in their leader who appropriates the Democratic Party apparatus when it suits his ambitions rather than expend the energy to create a new party to suit his vision. And it's reflected in his cult following which flatters itself into believing it's too good for the two-party system. Twenty-six percent of Sanders supporters recently told pollsters they would vote for Trump rather than Warren if she were the Democratic nominee.
No other data point illustrates how destabilizing (and unstable!) Sanders’ base is to Democratic chances of voting Trump out of office in 2020. His followers respond to his Medicare-for all rhetoric the way Trump’s supporters respond to a wall that Mexico is going to pay for…blind to the obstacles, details, negotiations involved in accomplishing such a thing. They believe that merely electing the loudest, angriest, finger-pointing man on the block is going to make all their political fantasies come true.
It would almost be understandable if he were the only progressive choice available. But he’s not. Elizabeth Warren is running right there beside him, only with a better record of accomplishment, a better grasp of the complexities, a better ability to face issues head on, and better people skills. Her deft embrace of progressive capitalism means she's not going to have to try and sell socialism to a fundamentally capitalist county nor answer for every socialist screw-up everywhere else in the world.
On top of all this, Warren is a woman in a party that lives or dies with female support, and she's significantly younger than he is. Only one of these two candidates is going to survive the New Hampshire primary in their own backyard in less than a year. She’s certainly going to have some issues to overcome in the general election, but a certifiable progressive hero like Elizabeth Warren--unafraid to take the lead on impeaching Trump--shouldn’t have to struggle against a one-note, faux Democrat like Bernie Sanders for  her  party’s nomination.

What this Easter Means to Me

I’m not much of a golf fan so I didn’t read a whole lot on Tiger Woods' miraculous comeback to win the Masters last Sunday, but knowing a thing or two about metaphor I’ll bet more than a couple of writers latched onto resurrection or rebirth as themes to describe what happened. I am, on the other hand, a huge fan of Game of Thrones, where resurrections may not be as ubiquitous as beheadings, but are definitely a thing. Without getting into all the symbolic deaths and rebirths, the one-eyed Beric Dondarrion comes back from the dead often enough to turn it into a parlor trick, and the resurrection of Jon Snow--a savior figure if there ever was one--is the pivotal event in the series.
In the past I’ve blogged about my fondness for resurrection stories, such as in the novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and the movie Cool Hand Luke. As a matter of cold, hard historical fact, the resurrection myth predates Jesus Christ. There are variations on the theme in the Western myths of Prometheus and Dionysus, in the Egyptian myth of Osiris, and elsewhere. True believers block out these stories in order to preserve the exceptionalism of their personal savior. Non-believers taunt true believers with these historical details in order to debunk that exceptionalism. They both miss the overriding metaphysical reality that the enduring and pervasive existence of this myth proves that it serves a human need and desire to believe in comebacks…second chances…second comings. We’ve embedded that belief into our cultural DNA, and no amount of scientific or literal deconstruction is likely to expel it.
If there was in fact an Invisible Hand constantly writing this motif into the human story, this past week we might rightly accuse it of being a little heavy handed. Nonetheless…taking last weekend’s resurrection on the golf course and the return of rebirth-laden Game of Thrones to TV, and then adding the mid-week burning of the Notre Dame de Paris with its prized relics from the crown of thorns and cross of Jesus appear as pretty clear signs of how Somebody somewhere thinks we should be viewing the crucifixion of our democracy as we head into Easter weekend.
It may take a da Vinci-sized canvas (or 400-page investigative report), but surely we can compare the election of Donald Trump as much a mortal wound to American democracy as was the blade that cut through Jon Snow. And surely we can read Robert Mueller’s declaration that he could neither indict nor exonerate Trump as an echo of Pontius Pilate’s decision to wash his hands of the entire Jesus matter. And surely Pilate asking the rabble if it wanted to free Jesus or free Barabbas was but a harbinger of Mueller implicitly asking Congress if it wanted to neglect or fulfill its duties.  
The Democrats in Congress have made clear that they’ve been waiting for Mueller to deliver his report before they take necessary action to protect the country. Most probably…and most consistent with the resurrection myth…they were probably waiting for Mueller to do the work for them…to be their savior and hero. But peeled away from its mythic moorings, the story really doesn’t work that way. If I may quote myself, it really goes like this: 

The redeemer knows that he can’t keep doing this forever and alone. Pretty soon the followers must get the message that they have to start redeeming themselves. But that’s about the point where it starts to get uncomfortable for them.  Then they turn on him or idly stand by while he gets sacrificed. This weekend we celebrate the enduring power of the redemption story. We can do so by insisting that it’s a one and done story frozen just so in 2000-year old amber, or we can celebrate it by realizing that we are each the second coming.    

Nancy Pelosi and Jerry Nadler, this means you and your Congressional cohort. If you push this on to the electorate to do your duty for you in the 2020 election, you will have hammered the nails into Lady Liberty's palms yourselves. Impeach Now! 

Of Reporters & Friends

In our house, we turned off cable news the day Attorney General William Barr released his suspiciously quick and dirty 4-page summary of the meticulously built, 2-year, 400-page Mueller Report. What prompted me to turn the news back on just this past Wednesday was Barr’s appearance before a US House of Representatives committee hearing during which he gave all his gravitas--or what’s left of it--to the previously and officially debunked conspiracy theory that the Mueller investigation was launched as a result of a deep state "spying” operation into Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. 
I was keenly interested in what the reaction to this was going to be on MSNBC’s Deadline White House with Nicolle Wallace. As a dedicated viewer of the show, I had been lulled into a false sense of confidence in Barr’s integrity by what Nicolle calls “some of our favorite reporters and friends”, who on an almost daily basis assured Nicolle’s audience that Barr was above all an “institutionalist”. These insiders and experts could offer no higher praise. Because he was an institutionalist, they insisted to a man…and woman, Barr would treat the Mueller investigation with all the gravity the law and the historical moment demanded. 
Barr proceeding to make a mockery of that faith within hours of receiving the Mueller Report left me feeling unusually…and most uncomfortably…like a Fox News viewer duped into believing that caravans of dispossessed and frightened Guatemalan families were on the march against the United States of America. Upon learning that Barr doubled down on the mockery with his Congressional testimony about spying prompted me to immediately send the following tweet to Nicolle Wallace:

Now, imagine my reaction when I turned on Deadline White House a few hours later and watched this exchange in the opening block:

It was as if I had become the show’s producer! 
Whether Nicolle Wallace was responding directly to my tweet or was just savvy enough to know that she had to address her show’s history of fluffing up of Barr is immaterial (and, honesty, I think she was just savvy enough). The immediate effect on me personally was to feel much less like a Fox News-watching chump. Accountability is not a Fox News hallmark. It is, on the other hand, very much a Nicolle Wallace hallmark. She landed at the so-called liberal cable news outlet—MSNBC--after a career carrying water for George W. Bush, John McCain, and finally and near fatally Sarah Palin. She not only has been consistent, open, and accountable in owning her past political missteps, but she has often drawn out and shared valuable lessons from those experiences, adding considerable credibility to her insights.
In this regard, she is worlds apart from two other “journalists” recently much in the news…Rupert Murdoch and Julian Assange. In Part I of an exhaustive and illuminating 3-part series on Murdoch, the New York Times describes his “imperial reach”:

His newspapers and television networks had been instrumental in amplifying the nativist revolt that was reshaping governments not just in the United States but also across the planet. His 24-hour news-and-opinion network, the Fox News Channel, had by then fused with President Trump and his base of hard-core supporters, giving Murdoch an unparalleled degree of influence over the world’s most powerful democracy. In Britain, his London-based tabloid, The Sun, had recently led the historic Brexit crusade to drive the country out of the European Union — and, in the chaos that ensued, helped deliver Theresa May to 10 Downing Street. In Australia, where Murdoch’s power is most undiluted, his outlets had led an effort to repeal the country’s carbon tax — a first for any nation — and pushed out a series of prime ministers whose agenda didn’t comport with his own. 

Assange’s arrest in Great Britain on Thursday based on a US indictment sent American journalists--most particularly, liberal journalists—into a tizzy. They twisted themselves into pretzel logic trying to defend the principle of press freedom suddenly embodied in the odious Assange. Here’s Good Man Charlie Pierce on the subject:

Let us all stipulate for the record that even egomaniacal messianic nihilists have rights, too…Assange and his merry band did incalculable harm to the United States through whatever assistance they gave to the current criminal organization presently running the Executive Branch. In fact, the arrest and extradition of Assange is an act of towering—if typical—ingratitude on the part of the president* Assange so readily helped. But I have no confidence that, in the legal proceedings that will flow from this arrest, profound damage will not be done to the institutions of a free press. Julian Assange is not the only egomaniacal messianic nihilist involved in this case.

That disclaimer about egomaniacal messianic nihilists at the outset is fairly typical of most of the liberal defenses of Assange. The occasion seems ripe for every writer of conscience to channel his inner Voltaire or, rather, Evelyn Beatrice Hall. I suggest that all those disclaimers about what a creep Assange is should carry more weight than the part where we declare that nonetheless we defend his right to publish freely as a matter of principle. Assange is far more of an egomaniacal messianic nihilist than he is a journalist…and in this he is little more than a poor man’s Murdoch. They both pervert a great, indispensable Enlightenment principle to the selfish needs of their own ids. I don't see why decent, conscientious journalists should feel compelled to demean their own profession by finding common cause with uncommon scoundrels. Press freedom will not end...nor be adversely altered by whatever verdict American justice renders on Julian Assange (unless the other egomaniacal nihilist fully succeeds in subverting democracy at which point all bets are off). Here we have that famous slippery slope on jet skies. I submit that this is a First Amendment version of the Second Amendment defenders’ argument that if you allow the government to ban assault rifles, you open the door for government to ban all arms. Principle is being exploited in both cases to protect bad practices. 
Back to Nicolle Wallace. In reflecting on the daily inculcation her panels did on selling me on the honor of Bill Barr, I am less humiliated and angry about it now than I was when I snapped off my TV on March 24. That’s because I realize that for the most part Nicolle’s reporters and friends were making a good faith effort to inform me about their experiences and understanding, however limited, of William Barr. They weren’t out to bamboozle me or scare me or insult my intelligence. They were doing the work of good reporters and friends…trying as best they could to make sense out of a chaotic world. This is most unlike Rupert Murdoch and Julian Assange, who sew chaos for personal aggrandizement and ego gratification and only deserve to be damned for it. 

From Mongo to Westeros

I’m currently having one of those circle of life experiences. TCM is running the 1940 serial Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe at the same time that HBO is about to bring down the curtain on its magnificent Game of Thrones (GOT) series. One marked the dawn of my pop culture engagement…the other its sunset. 
As technically clunky as Flash Gordon is, its impact on the Star Wars generation of what some call space operas is undeniable. George Lucas failed to get the rights to remake Flash, but its clear that he drew upon it heavily when he moved on to Star Wars. From the opening prologue scrolling up into infinity...
to the exotic casts of characters (Clay People and Tree People to Wookies and  Ewoks), to sexy princesses, futuristic costume designs, and the classic battle between good and evil. 
Star Wars Stormtroopers Flash Gordon Annihalatons





The parallels between Flash and GOT are not as direct…or as they say in Hollywood “on the nose”. Although in the most recent installment I watched, Emperor Ming the Merciless, in an uncharacteristic show of charity, decides to warn his daughter, Princess Aura, now married to his enemy Prince Barin of Arborio, that he’s about to destroy Arborio (and thus, perhaps, deprive Earth of all future risotto). He sends a raven with his message of warning. One of the running jokes for fans of GOT is how fast and efficient ravens are as a means of communication. They seem to transmit battlefield results and palace intrigues better than WiFi. Even better, the raven messengers in Flash Gordon appear capable of interplanetary travel. 
More significantly, Flash Gordon, Star Wars, and Game of Thrones all are based on that fundamental human myth that existence in its broadest strokes is an ongoing battle between good and evil. And like rust, evil never sleeps--there will always be Lannisters...there will always be Trumps. Contrary, then, to the near religiously held belief of secular minds law is never settled, rights are never secure, progress is never inevitable. Those prizes are not entitlements, but precious things to be defended and fought for over and over again.  Campbell's monomyth
Joseph Campbell--who documented the universal pull of this eternal, organzing myth in what he called the monomyth--always made clear that even at its “end stage”, returning home with the prize, the struggle was not over:

Art, literature, myth and cult, philosophy, and ascetic disciplines are instruments to help the individual past his limiting horizons into spheres of ever expanding realization. As he crosses threshold after threshold, conquering dragon after dragon, the stature of the divinity that he summons to his highest wish increases until it subsumes the cosmos. Finally the mind breaks the bounding sphere of the cosmos to a realization transcending all experience of form—all symbolizations, all divinities: a realization of the ineluctable void.  

What sets GOT apart from most previous versions of the myth is not the dragons, the nudity, the incest, orgies or blood…though there’s all of that. What distinguishes GOT is that almost all the good, like almost all the bad, arises out of individual character. Whereas in most past primitive or juvenile story tellings, good and bad are clearly delineated and embodied in entities…tribes, states, planets…in GOT it’s all person bound. Almost every character…and there are hundreds of them…acts out of sharp, personal motivation. The creators have taken time to provide each of them…even the worst of them…with method to their madness. Because they have so well planted the idea that human discontent, discord and dysfunction lie at the heart of each individual before becoming manifest in the group, they've cut against the cherished, childish illusion that there is a flag to be captured, a holy grail to be found, a mountain to be conquered that will finally and permanently return humankind to some lost paradise. Having not read the Game of Thrones books and not yet seen the final episodes of the series, I still feel confident in predicting that whoever ends up as ruler of the Seven Kingdoms is going to experience the Iron Throne more as a Throne of Irony. After all the blood and betrayal, the prevailing mood will not be one of ultimate triumph, but of ambivalence, uncertainty, impermanence.

Other than messenger ravens, there’s another corresponding detail linking Flash Gordon to GOT. In his last words to Flash, Ming the Merciless declares, "I am the universe!" But after Flash kills Ming, Dr. Zarkov offers this amendment, "Flash Gordon has conquered the universe". In GOT, Arya Stark spends a long, tortuous time under the tutelage of Jaqen trying to lose her identity. When she masters it and is able to kill her nemesis, Jaqen anoints her with his highest praise, declaring that she has become No One. “A girl is Arya Stark of Winterfell,” she says, correcting him, “And I’m going home.”
In both instances it's the assertion of the ego--the clinical ego, not the conventional ego. But there's a very big difference. Flash Gordon’s ego will soon once again be subsumed by the cosmos…he will go back in service of Planet Earth to fight for truth, justice and the American Way. Arya, on other hand, has crossed Campbell’s bounding sphere of the cosmos. As he writes in Hero with a Thousand Faces:"...Where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay outselves; where we thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence; where we thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world." 

After leaving Jaqen, we witness Arya sliding in and out of identities and we realize that Arya Stark is now just another mask for her to put on. She has realized the "ineluctable void”, which probably makes her the best suited to sit on the Iron Throne, but also the least likely. Once you become No One, you really don't have any desire to rule over Any One. 

One of Those Crazy Old Nights

Linda, me, and the band...Hollywood
It was one of those nights. I had just optioned my first screenplay for The Virgin Missile Crisis to Hollywood, and everyone was calling me the new kid in town. My agent called and told me to show up at this studio on Sunset where there was to be a photo shoot with Linda Ronstadt, Jackson Browne and The Eagles. "Wow!" I declared, "But how do I fit in? I'm no musician." My agent said Linda wanted me there. "Baby Jesus on a flour tortilla!" I exclaimed. I didn't know her, but I loved her.
So I went and watched quietly in a corner. Then she asked me to pose with them for a last shot. When the shoot was over, they invited me back to The Hotel California, where the boys headed straight for the stage in the bar and kicked into Life in the Fast Lane. I was feeling pretty much like a prisoner in disguise sitting alone at a table with Linda. She looked at me and softly said, "Desperado?" Then she touched my hand and beckoned me to follow. As we got into the elevator, she stared humming Someone to Lay Down Beside Me. As we got out of the elevator, I couldn't get Willin', out of my head...but I didn't dare sing it because I can’t sing. 
She led me to her room, and once inside laid out a spread of nachos and sangria across her big brass bed. The window to the balcony was open overlooking the ocean, shining silver blue in the moonlight, and Lyin’ Eyes wafted in from the bar. She closed the window and told me about Jerry. I told her about Lorna. Then she coaxed me into harmonizing on Ooh, Baby, Baby. She giggled like a schoolgirl at my attempt to channel Smokey Robinson. And in embarrassment, I quickly turned on Pandora, which was playing her singing It Doesn't Matter Anymore. She said, "Hey, Mister, that’s me up on that jukebox." So, I took the hint and turned it off. She pulled me…a simple man, simple dream…closer and breathily spoke low in Spanish, the loving tongue:Cuando brille la lunaYo séque no dormirásNi túNi yoYa ha llegado el triste pesarDebemos siempre separarnos
Hours later, with another tequila sunrise in the East, the band burst into her room with a raucous version of Take it Easy. Crazy Joe Walsh jumped up on the bed and started bouncing up and down. Linda and I, laughing hysterically, ducked under the covers to hide from it all. Under the covers, she looked into my eyes and cooed,  "Love is a rose." Then she reached out, grabbed one of the roses in the vase by her bedside and handed it to me. I pulled it to my nose to smell it, but Walsh’s antics threw off my aim and I jammed a pricker into my nose. I howled. 
The music suddenly stopped. Walsh got off the bed. By the time Linda and I got out from under the covers and put our clothes back on, the band was already gone. Linda gave me just one look and panicked. I was bleeding profusely. She said she was going down to the concierge for some silver threads and golden needles and would be right back. I waited..and waited...for a long, long time. 
Then I heard a commotion outside and stepped out on the balcony to watch as Linda and the band piled into an ol' 55 with Jerry Brown behind the wheel. They hastened down the wind, leaving me standing there to gaze out on freeways, cars and trucks while pressing a half sheet of toilet paper to my bloody nose. I wanted to take it to the limit and raise my broken voice in a brave, bold rendition of poor, poor pitiful me. But suddenly I heard a lovely, pure voice coming from the hallway. It sounded just like Linda, but how could it be? I ran to the door and threw it open. It was Lorna! She stood there in all her glorious beauty, doing her best Linda, as only she could:Well I guess I'm standing in the hall of broken dreamsThat's the way it sometimes goesWhenever a new love never turns out like it seemsI guess the feeling comes and goesFaithless love like a river flows
Like raindrops falling on a bloody noseDown in some valley where nobody goesFaithless love has found meThrown its chilly arms around me Faithless love  like a river flows
I ran into her arms and we kissed the kiss of a lifetime of love. No more songs. No Spanish. No Superstars. Just us. Together again.* 
Probably not the funniest April Fool’s joke ever, but muy caliente, si?

* I know that Emmylou Harris link doesn't really fit with the overall conceit of this post, but I stumbled upon it while hunting down the other links and watched it with mouth agape. Easily one of the goofiest music videos I've ever seen, compounded by the fact that it was created for one of the classiest acts in all of music. I watched it thinking that if they ever did a musical version of Aliens (and don't bet against it), this would be the staging and the song for the scene where Ripley goes tiptoeing through the nest of baby monsters.  

It's Our Story and We're Sticking to It!

Pivoting off Yuval Noah Harari’s book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind and drawing from the blog’s guru Norman O. Brown (Nobby), last week’s post advanced the theory that it’s myths, the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, that shape and bind human cultures. All men are created equal is the organizing myth of American culture, even though it would be impossible to get a resolution through Congress today reaffirming it as our nation’s guiding principle. The challenges would begin with the word men, which would likely not get past the women in Congress. It would immediately be changed to people, so: All people are created equal. But then would come the problem with the word created, with many arguing from a scientific point of view that it should be changed to evolved: All people evolved equally. That would no doubt result in a bloody battle that would spill out of Congress and onto cable TV and social media and into living rooms all across America. That could be the end of it right there...before we even get to what “equal” means. Politicians anxious to avoid divisiveness, falling poll numbers, and unpleasant cocktail party encounters would just abandon this reaffirmation effort and let the sentiment spider crawl its way into the future as is.  
Our myths--though often long lasting--are remarkably fragile and cannot withstand too much scrutiny or testing before falling apart. So how do they ever endure as long as they do? They endure because they're built like a spider’s web--intricate and efficient in design with remarkable tensile strength and elasticity. Myths get woven into all aspects of a human society...its politics, education, economics, law, art and entertainment. In this way they are seamlessly passed down from generation to generation because everyone in the culture has bought into the ideal they represent even if blatantly hypocritical acts undermine it. Lip service is often enough to sustain an operational myth. When it’s not, enforcement may be in necessary, as it was with the American Civil War. At that critical moment in the nation’s history we had to put our money...and our blood...where our mouths were to uphold the ideal that all men are created equal. 
It’s no small matter that the president who made the decision to go to war over that principle remains the most highly regarded of all the nation’s leaders. And not just because he committed an army to defend the principle but because he also committed stirring poetry to its story:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live.

Arms alone are not enough enough to sustain a cultural story...a nation's self idealization. There was nothing lacking in Hitler's military might. But the myth of Aryan superiority led to elite disillusionment, national alienation, widespread hardship...and ultimately the prophet and very personification of that alleged superiority was revealed to be a complete military blunderer. 
The myth requires true believers and capable conduits. When subsequent presidents…Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, each to varying degrees...marshaled the might of the US government to integrate respectively our army, schools, and society at large they were passing on the torch from Lincoln. Whatever work each of them left to be done…and that was considerable across the board…the fact remains that they used their authority to advance equality for all rather than entrench superiority for the majority.
Our current political moment is so terribly roiled because we now have a president backed by a party that is openly and brazenly trying to destroy the myth of equality for all and supplant it with the myth of superiority—racial, ethnic, religious, economic. It is as serious a turning point as was the Civil War. If we fail to re-dedicate ourselves to the proposition that all men are created equal, then it will die. If that happens, from this time forward the new proposition will be that some people are more equal than others…that some people are above the law.

Our dear Madame Speaker Pelosi may really believe that she merely has a political calculation to make about how hard to go after the white supremacist sitting in the Oval Office, but it’s considerably more profound than that. Nancy may not think the man is worth it, but the principle sure is. Her leadership is now faced with another historic test as to whether [this] nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. 

Crystal Balling

"The truly unique feature of our language is…its ability to transmit information about things that do not exist."                                                                           --Yuval Noah Harari  
To illustrate this point in his book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, and its broader ramifications, Harari observes that you could not talk a bunch of monkeys into sacrificing their lives on the promise of receiving 72 bananas in the afterlife. I’m liking Harari’s book on human evolution because it pays proper attention to the role of myth in that evolution. It’s not all about adaptation and genetics; it’s quite a lot about imagination and storytelling. This, as loyal readers know, gets to the heart of the Nobby Works. Norman O. Brown, the blog’s inspiration and guru, was all about the stories that emerge from human experience and shape human history. Like Brown, Harari doesn’t just consider myth in a religious context, but in a secular one as well. To show how far Harari’s willing to go in this regard is when he compares and contrasts Hammurabi’s Code from 1754 BC Babylonia with the Declaration of Independence of 1776 AD newly-born United States of America. Both, he writes, are attempts to bring order to their respective societies, both draw their authority from divinity (multiple gods or one God), and both are elaborate attempts to codify, institute, and perpetuate imagined things as objective truth. In the case of Hammurabi’s Code, it is the imagined order of a strictly delineated hierarchy. Just look at these few items from the code:

If a man put out the eye of another man, his eye shall be put out. If he break another man’s bone, his bone shall be broken. If he put out the eye of a man’s slave, or break the bone of a man’s slave, he shall pay one-half of its value. If a man knock out the teeth of his equal, his teeth shall be knocked out. [A tooth for a tooth ] If he knock out the teeth of a freed man, he shall pay one-third of a gold mina. If any one strike the body of a man higher in rank than he, he shall receive sixty blows with an ox-whip in public. If a free-born man strike the body of another free-born man or equal rank, he shall pay one gold mina. If a man strike a free-born woman so that she lose her unborn child, he shall pay ten shekels for her loss. If the woman die, his daughter shall be put to death. If a woman of the free class lose her child by a blow, he shall pay five shekels in money. If he strike the maid-servant of a man, and she lose her child, he shall pay two shekels in money. 

Now look at this:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. 

The desired order of each could not be more diametrically opposed. One enumerates in hundreds of laws how men are not equal; the other declares flatly that men are created equal.  The thing about both is that they are based on nothing more than imaginings and yet both held..or hold...sway over millions. A society based on the imagined order that a supreme being created all people as equals is no more reality-based than one founded on the idea that some people are better than others and worthy of special consideration. They’re both stories individual cultures tell themselves about their ideal self-image. There’s nothing more innate, self-evident, or unalienable about equality than there is about a system that differentiates between the value of a free woman’s child and a maid-servant’s child. To put it bluntly, it’s all bullshit. That’s not to say that it’s worthless. In fact these mythical self-conceptions are probably the most valuable things we own in human evolution. They determine how we structure our societies. It is the nexus of religion and secularism…where our free will…not anything predetermined by an omniscient spirit in the sky…but a determination by our collective identity in deciding if we want to be a good society…or at least a better one than those that went before us…or if we want to be a bad society…as bad or worse than those that went before us. This has less to do with genetic evolution than it has to do with what Harari calls imagined order. What order do we want for ourselves and our children?We decide this question when we choose which stories to follow. When the United States was founded it formally decided it wanted to follow the equality story…and committed that story to a vote and documentation. And despite all the contrary objective evidence of how the country failed to entirely abide by that story through slavery, the displacement of Native Americans, and mistreatment of immigrants…the country has stood by this organizing myth and has sought to actualize it through laws and policies that counterbalance the hypocrisies. It has engaged, at least through most of our history, in a dialectic between our better and worse selves.Recently, however, our worse self has gotten the upper hand. It’s that dark part of the American soul that has always maintained that some people are better than other people and that nobody should ever have to care for anybody and that e pluribus unum is a suckers’ game. It’s come to dominate our society because it’s become a stronger story, albeit one based on fear, hatred and self-loathing.   The better storytellers are the ones who win our elections and set our mythic agenda. Most unfortunately in the last, most pivotal election in the nation's history, the better candidate was not the better storyteller. You cannot win on policy or resume. You win on telling a better story, be it “compassionate conservatism”, "hope and change”, or “making America great again”. Policy is secondary…and the underlying fraudulence of the story is immaterial. If it rings true and is opportune, it will carry the day. So forget the policy stances, the purity tests, and what candidate X did or said 30 years ago, the 2020 election is going to be won by the candidate who best tells the story the electorate wants to hear about itself.  
  

The Man in the Mirror

You can't close your, your mind!
(Then you close your, mind!)
That man, that man, that man, that man
With the man in the mirror
(Man in the mirror, oh yeah!)
That man, that man, that man,
I'm asking him to change his ways
(Better change!)
You know, that man
First, full disclosure: I was never what you would call a Michael Jackson fan. I enjoyed some of his music as it made its way into our home via our daughters in the 80s; I was duly dazzled by his showmanship and moved by his undertaking a role as good global citizen. On the other hand, I found the physical makeover downright hideous and his denials about the self-evident truth of it bewildering. As to the accusations of child molestation, I was just not engaged enough in his career to follow them beyond the bottom-line court findings. 
It is with this background that I set about watching the new HBO documentary Leaving Neverland featuring extensive, granular interviews with two men who say Jackson molested them from their very pre-teen years forward. Upon originally hearing about the documentary I had little interest in watching it…old scandalous news about a dead man when we have so much scandalous news about a very much alive and dangerous man to digest. But compelling reviews led Lorna and I to commit to watching a half hour of it at least. At that we were hooked and at the end of its four-hour running time, plus an hour Oprah Winfrey discussion following, we both came away convinced that we had just seen one of the most important documentary films ever made (and we have seen most of the great ones…from Shoah to Man on Wire). What I want to do in this post is not so much a review of Leaving Neverland, but address some of the issues it raised in my mind. The first is one that is very much in the news lately with the Congressional testimony of convicted liar Michael Cohen. Like Cohen, the two men in Leaving Neverland, Wade Robson and Jimmy Safechuck, are self admitted liars. Like Cohen, the lies they now confess to they told in public under intense scrutiny. Unlike Cohen, they were both children at the time…and as the documentary makes crystal clear they were emotionally blackmailed children. The question of their credibility, then, is fundamental to the documentary. The Jackson estate and a worldwide legion of fans have taken to the barricades to defend Jackson by discrediting his accusers as liars. But as in Cohen’s case, who lied to protect Donald Trump, the lies the men now recant were made to protect Michael Jackson when they both appeared before a court to deny, respectively, that in all the many times he took them alone to bed with him (undisputed by Jackson's family) that he ever molested them. Though the Jackson family maintains that Michael was found not guilty of the child molestation charges in 2005, they ignore the fact that the verdict was largely due to the now admitted perjured testimony of Wade Robson. The second defense the Jackson forces have mounted against the documentary is that it has all been staged to bilk millions from the estate. Let’s face it, the in-it-for-the-money defense is the go-to gambit for every lawyer in such cases. The fact is that outside of criminal proceedings leading to jail time, the options for any victim to collect on real damages done to them in a civil case is pretty much limited to a financial payout. Although it’s fair to ask if money is the motivation for anyone who brings a lawsuit, it’s equally fair to consider that money is often the only compensation available for damage done…legs lost, lungs destroyed, emotions scarred for life. The trickier part of this defense is the suggestion that the documentary is whole fiction…a staged event to garner fame and fortune. With this the Jackson defenders take on the burden of proof. It’s not an impossible burden. They could find copies of edited scripts for the documentary, outtakes from the making of it, witnesses to its fraudulent production. There are numerous possibilities for them to gather material evidence to expose the documentary as a hoax. They are probably going to have to do that if they ever hope to counter the devastating impact the documentary is going to have on the Jackson financial empire. It is hard to imagine a generation of mothers who screamed in adoration for Michael at concerts and at his death continuing to support his brand financially and emotionally after watching this documentary. It’s not just that the two young men who have come forward to tell their story in painful detail are so believable, it’s everybody who appears on camera exudes verisimilitude, including the boys’ moms who are unsparingly portrayed as Michael Jackson’s accomplices in his seductions of their children. The two men, their wives, their mothers, a grandmother, a sister and a brother all appear to make an impression of frankness as distinctive as a fingerprint and beyond the contrivance of any film director or screenwriter.   I’ve written about my own experience as a victim of childhood molestation here. I thought of it throughout Oprah Winfrey’s follow up discussion with Wade and Jimmy before an audience of victims, and I realized once again why I was not traumatized by what happened to me: I told my father what happened immediately, he reported immediately to the authorities, and the authorities acted promptly. No one ever doubted my word or made me feel ashamed. Thus the event just receded into my memory to take a place among my other memories of growing up…rather than something to fester, haunt and dominate my memories as a grown up. It really did take this documentary for me to fully understand the deep, dark web of exploitation, deceit, and perversion of love that child sexual abuse entails. It’s a small thing, I know (and I’m glad for that), but after the doc and in preparation for this post, I watched the Michael Jackson video for Man in the Mirror. There was a time when that video would’ve pushed so many of my emotional buttons that I hardly could’ve gotten through it without a tear. But this time I watched it full of contempt for the blatant way the man in the mirror used it to exploit and ultimately cheapen the many images of humanity to mask his own inhumanity. I can only imagine what a horror it was for Wade and Jimmy to finally pull that mask off. 

Hey, Jimi, Where You Goin' with that Song Credit in your Hand?

If you haven't been following me all around the Internet for the past 10 years you may not have noticed that I'm an "All Along the Watchtower" Truther. Every time I see somebody refer to Jimi Hendrix's "All Along the Watchtower", I pounce: It's a goddamn Bob Dylan song, people! (And yes I know Bob said Jimi's version was better than his, but Bob doesn't always know what he's talking about. There, I said it). It's especially aggravating when you consider Watchtower Bob's second greatest composition as I do. Anyway, I've come to accept this as my life's burden. Then I watched the new HBO movie O.G. And as the closing credits began to roll, screen captioning announced that what I was listening to was Pendleton Praise Team’s cover version of Jimi Henrdix’s Hey Joe". What in the hell? I knew "Hey Joe" was not Jimi Hendrix’s even though he made a masterful recording of it. He was not the songwriter, the copyright holder nor the first to record it. So how in the hell did it become his (of the 1800 other versions that exist!) to be covered?  It would be as if some local community theater group decided to cover “Olivier’s Hamlet”.  As distinctive as Hendrix may have been as an artist…he was mostly an interpretive artist…like Linda Ronstadt. Would anyone dare to say someone covered Ronstadt’s “It’s so Easy” or Ronstadt’s “Ooh Baby, Baby”?Admittedly certain artists put their indelible mark on certain works and end up having ownership of those works bestowed upon them by overenthusiastic fans and lazy critics. But for every musical genius who accrues credit where credit is not due, there’s a musical creator who remains ignored, overlooked or anonymous. Sinatra’s "My Way" is actually Paul Anka’s "My Way"…and more to the point Claude Francois and Jacques Revaux’s who wrote the original melody before Anka customized the lyrics for Sinatra.Dylan of course never has to worry about getting his due…especially with vigilant fans like me around to set the record straight. But Billy Roberts isn’t so fortunate. Roberts is acknowledged as the writer and copyright holder of "Hey Joe", although he, too, may have drawn inspiration from un-credited others. To Hendrix’s credit, he was the first to give Roberts credit for the song on his album Are You Experienced. Until then, authorship of the song was almost as disputed as who wrote Shakespeare’s plays…

While claimed by singer Tim Rose to be a traditional song,[8] or often erroneously attributed to the pen of American musician Dino Valenti (who also went by the names Chester or Chet Powers, and Jesse Farrow), "Hey Joe" was registered for copyright in the U.S. in 1962 by Billy Roberts.[5] Scottish folk singer Len Partridge has claimed that he helped write the song with Roberts when they both performed in clubs in Edinburgh in 1956.[5] Other sources (including singer Pat Craig) claim that Roberts assigned the rights to the song to his friend Valenti while Valenti was in jail, in order to give him some income upon release.[9]

My 1966 Byrds' version lists C. [Chet] Powers as the songwriter…the same year that Hendrix recorded his more famous version…which led, decades later, to urban legend ownership of it being assigned to him, not Billy Roberts. Of all the rock stars that died tragically early, Hendrix may be the luckiest…with "Hey Joe", "All Along the Watchtower" and "Purple Haze" (excuse me while I kiss the sky)--none of which he wrote--in death he achieved songwriting status he never reached in life. Thank you for allowing me to vent…now I have a ballgame to watch. Before the first pitch, I'm guessing they’ll be playing the Marine Corps Marching Band’s cover of Hendrix’s "Star Spangled Banner".