Dan Riley's Blog, page 17

Laugh, Laugh...

Laugh, Laugh, I thought I'd dieIt seemed so funny to meLaugh, Laugh, you met a guyWho taught you how it feels to beLonely, oh so lonely
The thing about Laugh, Laugh by the Beau Brummels is that it’s not a funny song …unless you find unintentional humor in lines likeDon't be so smug or elseYou'll find you can't get any boy at allYou'll wind up an old lady sitting on the shelf
Still, the song has particular resonance for me on both a personal and more global level. In the broader view the song is an amalgam of early Dylan’s so-called “finger pointing” songs and early Beatles musical fashion. On a personal level, at the height of their brief popularity the Beau Brummels came to Lorna’s high school to perform. One of her more enterprising co-ed classmates landed the task of arranging a party for the band after the concert. After a day of frenzied anticipation of her date with the drummer of the band, Lorna watched in horror as her father greeted the band’s manager at the door and informed him Lorna would not be joining them on their limo ride from Connecticut to New York City. Lonely, oh so lonely
I thank Bill Woodsum for that intervention, otherwise who knows? Lorna might be struggling to live off the royalties of Laugh, Laugh today, and I’d end up an old man on a shelf.
This is all by way of protracted introduction to the nub of this Nob, which is a rundown of my favorite intentionally funny pop songs…songs that still amuse me years after they were popular on the radio. (And that’s an important qualifier here…to make this list these songs must have spent some time in the Top 40 and not just be gems hidden away on albums, otherwise Randy Newman would own it.)
Mambo Italiano I was too young to hear Dean Martin’s version played on radio, but by the time Rosemary Clooney made her version in 1954, it was an unavoidable hit, especially in our Italian-American neighborhood. This pozzo mishmash of words, foods, and names…mostly Italian…is the epitome of melting pot culture. As with all the songs on this list, the humor lies in the delivery as well as the lyrics. Listen to Dean Martin’s version for instance compared to Rosemary Clooney’s version linked above…where he’s happy to just glide over the humor, she jumps in and joyously rolls around in it.
Love Potion#9 The Clovers had another amusing hit with Poison Ivy, but Love Potion’s details (“you know that gypsy with the gold capped tooth”) and lines (“when I kissed a cop at 34thand Vine”) still manage to crack me up more than a half century after I first heard it.
If You Wanna Be Happy Say man! Hey baby! I saw your wife the other day! Yeah? Yeah, an' she's ugly! Yeah, she's ugly, but she sure can cook, baby!The question raised by this Jimmy Soul 1963 hit is: Was it before its time for taking a stand against body shaming or behind the times for reinforcing the idea that a woman’s place was in the kitchen? I did not realize at the time that some stations banned it for the slurring use of the term ugly women. That would not have been on radio stations I listened to nor on the many movie soundtracks that have used the song over the decades since.
Wooly Bully The humor in this 1965 Sam the Sham and the Pharoahs hit is almost entirely in the performance since the lyrics range from the nonsensical to the obscure* and would not be funny at all if not for the hysterical warnings to watch it now, watch it:Hatty told Matty, let's don't take no chanceLet's not be L-7, come and learn this danceWooly Bully, Wooly BullyWooly Bully, Wooly Bully, Wooly BullyWatch it now, watch it, watch it, watch it
Rainy Day Women #12& 35
It seems ridiculous to say that Bob Dylan is at all underrated after a career full of accolades including a Nobel Prize, an Oscar, and multiple Grammy awards. But all that glory tends to overshadow Dylan’s comedic gifts. Of his thousands of great songs, even the most serious often allow for humorous details, even if they’re in the darkly humorous vein. There’s nothing dark or hidden about this 1966 hit. Dylan and his back-up band are laughing most of the way through it. 
They stone when you listen to Blonde on BlondeThey’ll stone you when you’re watching Jimmy BondThey’ll stone you when read The Nobby WorksAnd then they’ll stone you and call your family jerks. But I would not feel so all alone.Everybody must get stoned.No, that verse is not part of the song…but it could be, which is what makes Rainy Day Women the 10 Bottles of Beer on the Wall of all pop and the funniest DIY song of all time.
Skinny Legs and All As I say, the songs on this list are not just funny in and of themselves, but the delivery is crucial to selling the humor. Watch Joe Tex deliver this hit of his from 1967…it’s like watching a great stand-up comic. Tom Robbins, America’s foremost comic novelist, would later lift the title for one of his books. Now, who'll take the woman with the skinny legs?C'mon somebody please take the lady with the skinny legsNow, you all know the lady with the skinny legs got to have somebody too, nowWill somebody please take the lady with the skinny legs, please?

Yellow Submarine The good cheer of this Beatles 1969 hit is so infectious that it still makes me smile after all my hundreds of listens. Its light, melodious sense of camaraderie makes it a cheekier La Marseillaise. One can easily imagine it being used to shut up a café full of Nazis.Captain…Captain!
A Boy Named Sue This Johnny Cash 1969 classic, written by comedy wiz Shel Silverstein, may have more than comic value now with anti-bullying messages being all the rage. The idea that parents bear some responsibility for raising children who can fight back against a sometimes hostile world seems lost in most modern child-rearing advice, which may be too serious an observation to make about an ultimately funny song.Yeah he said, "Now you just fought one hell of a fightAnd I know you hate me, and you got the rightTo kill me now, and I wouldn't blame you if you doBut ya ought to thank me, before I dieFor the gravel in ya guts and the spit in ya eye'Cause I'm the son-of-a-bitch that named you "Sue"Yeah what could I do, what could I do Short People Randy Newman is just flat out the best ever at lacing popular song lyrics with comic touches that range from the sublime to the ridiculous…and in Short People he does both at once. Hard to imagine this one getting the airplay today under the regime of political correctness that it got in 1977 when it was a hit on both radio and MTV. Newman does not make music for lazy listening, so it might be a challenge for vigilante ideologues to grasp the subtleties of his music…Short People in particular. His anti-short people bigotry is so over the top that as it descends lower and lower, the mockery of bigotry itself becomes transcendent:They got little carsThat got beep, beep, beepThey got little voicesGoin' peep, peep, peepThey got grubby little fingersAnd dirty little mindsThey're gonna get you every timeWell, I don't want no short peopleDon't want no short peopleDon't want no short people'Round here The Snake Yes, The Snakewould’ve made this list even if it hadn’t come back for a second life as a source for the immigration policy of the current President of the United States. Not hard to imagine how this silly sexual innuendo pop tune from 1969 wormed its way into the dirty little mind of the short-fingered fraud. The song probably captured all Trump ever knew about Sigmund Freud, so he committed it to his nasty little memory…and now decades later seriously recycles it as an almost Biblical warning against showing compassion for the meek of this earth. Without any sense of shame or irony, he’s tried to turn this funny little ditty into an argument against The Sermon on the Mount. Let's hope that compassion, The Sermon on the Mount, and The Snake all survive this passing perversity.

Closing note: This list ends in the late 70s since that's when I pretty much stopped listening to radio. New music from that point on generally came via my daughters, in the 80s through MTV...which can be grist for another Nob. Quite a lot of funny music videos from those days, especially from Talking Heads, David Lee Roth, Tom Petty, and irrepressible Cyndi Lauper.  

* L7 was a hand gesture, which was code for a "square", as in:

No, I didn't know it either.

23 & Eggplant

23 & Me?  Are you talking to 23 & me?
One of my all-time favorite movie scenes is the one below from True Romance. It features virtuoso character actors Christopher Walken and Dennis Hopper delivering some of Quentin Tarantino’s most scintillating dialog. I’ll happily pause here to allow readers time to view it for pure entertainment’s sake.  



For those who couldn’t afford 4 minutes to watch, let me quickly summarize for the sake of this post. Although facing imminent death at the hands of Walken’s Vincenzo Coccotti, Hopper’s Clifford Worley takes time to lecture Walken on his ancestral Sicilian roots. “Your great, great, great, great grandmother fucked a nigger,” Worley tells Ciccotti  This is why, Worley says, Coccotti is “an eggplant”. 
Having read enough Sicilian history, I recognized the barb as more than mere so’s your mother street provocation. Tarantino says he first heard this bit of Sicilian history from a black family friend, and like all oral history it is biased more toward drama than accuracy. But it’s also based on more than a grain of truth. North Africans once dominated Sicily, and signs of that domination are present in the DNA of current, living Sicilian descendents, such as your faithful blogger. Check out this ancestral timeline, included in my recent 23 & Me DNA report:

Note that 23 & Me is not setting the African impact on my family DNA back at the beginning of human history. So it cannot be easily dismissed as “We’re all African” fancy. The date of my most recent genetically-proven African ancestor is 1800, which pretty much makes me and most of my Sicilian goombahs eggplants as well. Further examination reveals that I’m the product of a frothy melting pot of other ethnicities, which brings home this observation from Denis Mack Smith’s landmark A History of Sicily: 

The island has…been both a gateway and a crossroads, on the one hand dividing the eastern and western Mediterranean, on the other linking Europe and Africa as a stepping-stone.This halfway position, in both location and scale, fixed the leitmotifs of Sicilian history. Sicily could not long live undisturbed, except in those periods when she was securely in the possession of a strong external power. The list of migrants and invaders in the course of ancient, medieval and modern history is considerable: unnamed prehistoric peoples, then Sicans, Phoenicians, Elymians, Sicels, Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans and others from Italy, mercenaries and slaves from the whole Mediterranean basin, Jews, Vandals, Saracens, Normans, Spaniards and a sprinkling of others. A few, like the Vandals, merely swept through and left no trace behind. Most stayed, however, for long periods or for all time, contributing in different ways to a continuous process of biological and cultural fusion.

Looking at that lineup of foreign influences on the timeline of my maternal DNA, it nearly parallels Smith’s table of contents for his book:
Chapter 6 Byzantium and the ArabsChapter 7 The NormansChapter 8 Hohenstaufen and AngevinsChapter 9 Rule by AragonChapter 10 Spanish Administration, 1500-1600
Tarantino’s dialog is so brilliant because while it revels in this trait of Sicilian history it reveals Worley and Coccotti’s characters. Worley is fearless in the face of death; Coccotti is murderous in the face of his own genealogy. After pulling the trigger, he admits he hasn’t killed anyone himself “since 1984”, exposing what a direct hit Worley scored on his sense of identity. 
So it is with too many of us…the truths revealed to us about ourselves by science, art and history are sometimes so unexpected…so shocking…that they can drive us to denial or outrage or violence. Before I rhapsodize about the joys of living in a united Benetton world of colors, a few opposing painful truths are in order. First off, all this racial and ethnic mixing does not come without severe costs…often brutal and harsh. Much of it is due to invading armies, which are as inclined to rape as romance the women of conquered lands. This has been the case since at least the Old Testament when Moses ordered his soldiers to rape all the virgins in conquered Mid'ian (Numbers, 31). It also includes such exceptional societies as our own, with our record of Yank soldiers immodestly imposing their genes on a full spectrum of vanquished peoples from the tribal lands of the US to Western Europe to Japan, Southeast Asia and elsewhere. (In a lovely bit of irony, my Uncle Eddie was part of the US invading/liberating army in Sicily in World War II, and when he paid a visit to the ancestral town, Naro, the natives immediately and aggressively tried to match him up with one of the local girls...probably a cousin if I know my 23 & me.)
It is also a nasty fact that many people who get their DNA analyzed will not experience the delight of being linked with so many other cultures, as I did. Instead they may very well come into possession of a relatively homogenized genetic profile, which will encourage them to cling even more fiercely to some misguided notion of racial or ethnic purity. 
There are other dark aspects to submitting DNA to labs for analysis, including loss of privacy, invasion of privacy, unpleasant health or family revelations, etc. I’m guessing, however, that not only is personal genomics here to say, but will expand with iPhone-like proliferation as capability and accessibility improve, prices come down, and more amazing stories are told like the one I will share in my next Nob post on this subject. 
I can’t speak for Quentin Tarantino, but when I refer to the eggplant in all of us, I’m not just drawing from the liberal, smartypants playbook. I’m not looking to score cheap, meaningless points about “emerging majority minorities”. Cultural development all over the globe and over all time prove that human problems are never just solved through demographics…and that intra-racial and intra-ethnic differences and hostilities are as likely and debilitating as inter-racial and inter-ethnic ones. When I write with passion as I often do about the need for us to both embrace our diversity and accept our commonality, I’m trying to point the way to escape from our downward spiral into immutable fragmentation.  

How Armed Teachers Would've Change Hollywood

More fun with gun owners herehereherehereherehereand here

Tears Have No Color

Chris Rock...comedy as assault weapon

Chris Rock won’t be the first person I’ve long admired who’s gotten me up on my high horse to deliver a dose of moral rectitude. Knowing me and the times we live in, he won’t be the last. We’ve turned Andy Warhol’s “everyone will be famous for 15 minutes” dictum on its tufty white head--every famous person will act like an ass for 15 minutes and will be called on it.
I was looking forward to Chris Rock’s new comedy special ever since he sampled it on Jerry Seinfeld’s Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. He told Jerry he was developing a bit about how bullies are actually good for us…and society in general…in preparing us for the toughness of life. Having had my own experience with bullies I pretty much agree with that. I also agree with Rock’s observation that in going so far to protect ourselves from bullies, we actually made the US vulnerable to being taken over by a bully. But as happened, we turned on Tamborine, Rock’s new comedy performance for Netflix, on the day of the latest high school shooting which took 17 lives in Parkland, Florida. As I wrote in an earlier post, sensitivity to political incorrectness can sometimes be a matter of context and timing. Thus, I will allow that it’s possible that on a different day had I watched Rock try to make jokes out of the inequality in young black deaths to young white deaths and black mothers’ tears to white mothers’ tears there is an off chance I would not have reacted as strongly as I have. For the sake of my own humanity, though, I hope that’s not true. I hope my conscience didn’t need context to recoil at a comedian trying to get laughs with lines like: “I wanna live in a world where an equal amount of white kids are shot every month” or “I wanna see white mothers on TV crying…’we need justice for Chad.’” I hope I didn’t need a day watching a tragic parade of mostly white parents grieve beyond torture at the loss of their white children to a white gunman. Hopefully, regardless of my support for the #blacklivesmatter movement, I would never be so comfortable with a racialized view of murdered children that I would think it decent or acceptable to make jokes about such horror. 
In another Comedians in Cars episode, Bill Burr lamented to Jerry Seinfeld about the state of doing live stand-up comedy in these PC days. 

“Just because you took what I said seriously doesn’t mean I now meant it. Like you don’t get to decide that. ‘What?’ You’re in my head and you know my intent? …The amount of time they’ve shown clips…they’ll be like ‘Controversy at the Laugh Factory’ and they show the bit and the crowd laughed. One person got pissed and wrote a blog. It’s a lazy journal story. Right? And the next thing you know and you’re sitting there talking to a [bleeping] blogger.”

I realize that with this post, I’m putting myself at risk of being that bleeping blogger. But I guess my childhood experience with bullies is what gives me the gumption to go up against politically incorrect comedians as well as the PC police if it's warranted. In this case, it’s definitely warranted. That bleeping blogger Burr disdains could be like the boy who points out that the emperor has no clothes—even if an entire concert hall is oohing and ahhing at how dazzling the emperor is. Bill Burr is implying the absurd proposition that comedians are above criticism, which is just one of my issues with political correctness…it conflates aesthetic critique with political agenda. More over, because PC is so often employed as a weapon to advance ideology, it undermines and corrupts any reasonable calls for common decency...which is what I’m attempting here.
I know what Chris Rock’s intent was with this bit about racial inequality in the murder of children. He was trying to promote an understanding of the Black Lives Matter movement by pointing out the racial disparity in the number of black kids killed by cops vis-à-visthe number of white kids. Bill Burr might argue that I’m doing exactly what he expects from a bleeping blogger by taking Rock’s intent to comment on police shootings and fitting it into my agenda on mass shootings. I would argue that if you’re trying to draw a distinction between police killings of black youth and indiscriminate killings of a mass of diverse youth, you’re drawing a distinction without a damned bit of difference. A murdered child is a murdered child is a murdered child. Maintaining that one death means more than another because it was funded by taxpayer dollars to police rather than Congressional indifference to loners with assault rifles is to create a hierarchy of grief that is just bullshit and cruel. Turning grief into a competition in this way would be the darkest sign yet that we’ve sold our national soul to the ethos of capitalism, where being #1 matters most, even in matters of suffering.  
If ever there was a proper moment to declare All Lives Matter--without it being taken as a racist dismissal of black parents’ pain--this is that moment. Many of the faces most prominently on display in the current student protests against assault weapons are white. Still, those kids have been the subject of smears and attacks by the NRA, its bought Republican politicians, and the rocking chair right sitting in front of Fox News. This isUS against Them…and us doesn’t stand a chance if we continue to fragment ourselves into the same fucking little tribes over and over again.
Chris Rock’s mockery aside, we do need justice for “Chad” ...or let's call him Nicholas for Nicholas Dworet...and for Martin Duque Anguiano…as well as Tamir Rice…all our murdered kids regardless of how they were murdered deserve justice. Bill Burr says he hates it when comedians are made to apologize whenever somebody accuses them of stepping over the line. But it doesn’t have to be an apology. It just has to be an acknowledgement and self-correction of a grievous wrong. After all, that’s all we ask of the NRA and the Republicans. If Chris Rock is the bold and thoughtful guy I take him to be, asking him to rethink a bad comedy bit is not a case of PC police brutality; it’s a call for him to be as decent a human being as he can be.    

For Chris Rock...is this enough equality for you?

Update: Dana Loesch, NRA spokeswoman, at CPAC, 2/22/18, "Crying white women are ratings gold for the legacy media." Yep, you can work this shit from both sides of the political spectrum.) 

Darling

As loyal readers of The Nob know, to fill the void in my viewing schedule after swearing off cable news following the fateful presidential election of 2016, I turned to reruns of The Simpsons and reruns of old movies on Turner Classic. I’ve chronicled how impactful The Simpsons have been in previous posts (and just last week The New York Timesanalyzed how this mere cartoon show has managed to be so remarkably prescient about the state of our nation). However, I haven’t had much to say about what a safe place TCM has been in these mournful days of our American putrescence. That’s an oversight I’m about to correct because just hours ago TCM saved me from writing another masochistic post about Trump. The particular subject was supposed to be the monumental hypocrisy on display in his phony performance before the National Prayer Breakfast, but I just couldn’t do it to myself…not on the day before Valentine's. So I switched attention--as we all must now and then to preserve our sanity--and decided to make of this post a reflection on some of the recent films we’ve watched during TCM’s 30 Days of Oscar. And so without further ado: 2001: A Space Odyssey : Well, I’ve actually already written about this one and proclaimed to have seen it more than 100 times. Some might think me crazy for that, and even crazier for watching it yet again. But I did, even though I have a DVD copy in my personal library. TCM was screening it in HD, and I just had to see what a difference that made. It was spectacular…easily one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever watched (or heard) on a home television. Lorna, who has seen it almost as many times as I have due to the fact that we worked at Cinerama together during its long run, settled in to join me. We were mesmerized. It’s one of those transcendental works of art that makes me feel sorry for those without the patience to stay with it. When it was over, we decided not to delete it just in case we want to watch it again. A Room with a View : It features a line-up of British actors that’s the cinematic equivalent of the 1927 Yankees…Helena Bonham Carter, Maggie Smith, Judy Dench, Denholm Elliot, Julian Sands, Simon Callow, Rosemary Leach, a very young Rupert Graves…and batting ninth a bizarrely cast Daniel Day-Lewis--bizarre only because of where his subsequent career would take him. While watching him eat scenery as the ultimate effete snob Cecil Vyse it’s impossible to anticipate his Last of the Mohicans, Lincoln, Christy Brown or Bill the Butcher portrayals. A second viewing, unfortunately, exposes the plot as an utter trifle elevated by the casting…and of course the room with that view, opening our eyes to an Italy Cleopatra, Ben Hur, and Spartacus never took us to.  
Sideways : Virginia Madsen lost out for the best supporting actress Oscar in 2005, up against the likes of Cate Blanchett, Laura Linney, Natalie Portman. What’s a girl to do? Well, what she did, I believe, was save Sideways. In re-watching it, I was struck by how very unlikeable are the two main characters played by Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church. Giamatti perfectly personifies the persnickety Pinot grape that he describes in the film’s key bit of monolog. And screenwriter and director Alexander Payne said he was attracted to the project by the characters’ very unlikeability. But it seems it would’ve been asking an awful lot of your typical Dan and Lorna audience to care about those tiresome buddies for two hours without the leavening effect of Virginia Madsen’s Maya, who gives Giamatti’s Miles the extraordinary nurturing he tells us the Pinot requires. Madsen’s non-Oscar winning performance seems flawless, while Payne’s Oscar-winning screenplay is not, the brilliant Pinot monolog notwithstanding. Having studied, written and trafficked in screenplays at a time when I was chasing that Oscar myself, I know perhaps a bit too much about structure, plot points, character arc for my own movie watching enjoyment. I can hardly ever watch a film without being aware of the scaffolding. At 30 minutes in…tra-la…behold our first plot turn...like clockwork. (The fact that I’m never conscious of these mechanics when viewing 2001 is one of the reasons I can watch it so many times.) Miles’s arc is supposed to take him from prickly, self-pitying loser to mature, loving, responsible man…and there are nice touches at the end that convey that growth. Upon re-watching, however, a grievous loose end is apparent. At the beginning of the film, Miles robs his nurturing mom, whom he treats abominably. The film ends with Miles, as far as we know, unrepentant about that theft…and his mother without recompense for it. That is a character arc in a nosedive.    That Hamilton Woman : With the Brangelina of their day, Laurence Olivier playing Horatio Nelson and Vivian Leigh (still channeling Scarlett O’ Hara) as Lady Emma Hamilton, it is a love epic set against the Napoleonic Wars. As often happens after watching one of these historical dramas, Lorna and I do a little research to see how much the filmmakers have screwed up the history. Surprisingly, in this case, they really seem to have undersold the intriguing character of Emma Hamilton…and the global impact of her and Nelson’s adulterous affair. It will be shocking to me if sometime before I pass on to the great movie lobby in the sky Hollywood hasn’t mounted another, more ambitious treatment of this amazing woman and her grand love story. (While I wait, TCM just offered up The Divine Lady, a 1929 silent version of the same story.)    Darling :  One of the more enlightening things about watching old movies is to be reassured occasionally that whatever unhappiness is kicking around in our own time was probably kicking around in some earlier time...and still the world turns. The opening credits of Darling play over a scene of a man replacing a billboard displaying a plea to fight world hunger with a large, glamorized picture of Diana Scott (Julie Christie), the Honeyglow Girl. Before a word of dialog has been spoken, the film has deftly communicated one of its messages that the hard responsibility of global citizenship gets papered over by celebrity, confection, and commercialism. Shortly thereafter, reporter Robert Gold (Dirk Bogard) is seen asking men on the London streets their opinions on the state of the nation. Their responses in this 1965 film could be right off the streets of Britain's great Brexit debate of 2016 or the USA in 2018:


Social symmetry aside, it’s Julie Christie in her complex Academy Award-winning performance in the title role who looms over all…including her pervasion of my innermost fantasy life. If you were a young man of a certain age in the 1960s you were susceptible to the “British invasion” on three fronts: The Beatles, the Bond films, and Julie Christie. I listened to the Beatles, watched 007, and hung a poster of Julie Christie over my bed. It was that picture of her as Honeyglowing Diana Scott. Crazy thing is that a year later, I met and became engaged to Lorna. I didn’t need a 70-foot Julie Christie smiling down at me from a movie screen to sell me on falling in love with Lorna. That was all Lorna’s doing. But the similarity between the two of them, captured in the photos above, symbolizes how much movies have bonded us for together for more than 50 years…from our Friday nights in the projection booth at the University Film Series, to our days working at Cinerama as usher and candy girl respectively, to exclusive showings at the Director’s Guild in LA, to drive-in movies with the kids, to the at-home joys of VCR, laserdiscs and DVDs, and to Netflix and beyond. It has been one of the supreme pleasures of my life to spend so many thousands of hours of it watching movies with Lorna.

Valentine's night feature: Wings of Desire .  

Happy Valentine's Day, Darling.   

Say Hello to My Little Friend

Allow me to immodestly begin this post by quoting myself from an earlier Nob, entitled A Few of My Favorite Things.

iPad. This is my first year with my iPad, and I’m still transitioning from my deeply satisfying love affair with my laptop to this technological marvel that comes in the shape and heft of a menu for an unpretentious restaurant. It allows me to search for $10 bottles of wine, play my Pandora stations, watch sexy French films, maintain my solitude and sanity simultaneously…take pictures, save pictures, send pictures, read books, follow my teams, rant about politics, map my most confounding thoughts, and find my way home. If I wanted to, I guess, I’d be able to download an app that would provide me with: Girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes/Snowflakes that stay on my nose and eyelashes/Silver white winters that melt into springs…in short, all of my favorite things. 

That’s critical background to understand the full gravity of the story I’m about to tell here. Lorna and I were making our way home from a glorious holiday season with Daughter Gillian and family. The first leg of the trip was a shorty from Savannah to DC (yes, like so much else in this increasingly upside down America, we’ve become accustomed to flying south to north to reach west…Columbus really did leave his mark on us). As is my custom upon squeezing into my seat and strapping myself in…ho-ho…for safety, I took out my precious iPad and prepared to finish the book I had recently downloaded to Kindle (Lincoln in the Bardo, if you must know). But just before I got started, my eye was caught by my Christmas gift from Lorna of Rolling Stone’s special edition dedicated to retrospective reviews of every Bob Dylan album ever made. Since it was a short flight, I decided to dip into that and save my novel for the long haul from DC to San Diego. It was a fateful decision. Opening the Rolling Stone was like opening a bag of Hawaiian kettle style sweet Maui onion potato chips…I couldn’t stop reading and got totally caught up in a debate I didn’t know existed: Was Dylan’s Christian music period underrated? Before I knew it, we landed at Dulles International…and before I go further, a word or two about one of the two major points of entry for visitors flying in from all over the world to visit our nation’s capital…it’s a dump. It’s dark, inefficient, and…and…get this: when we landed we had to stand on the tarmac in 10° weather waiting for our luggage to unload. It is without doubt the worst airport experience of my life…and that includes landing in Loreto, Mexico, after a hurricane knocked out the power--so no lights or AC…and it includes being escorted by an unpleasant guard armed with AK47 in Zimbabwe who led me to a shack to interrogate me about a knife they’d found in my suitcase. (Yes, you’d think a knife in a suitcase in Zimbabwe would be as common as a toothbrush, wouldn’t you…but noooo). With a government shamefully negligent in maintaining our nation's infrastructure, I don't see Dulles getting better than airports in Mexico or Zimbabwe any time soon. (Let's have a parade!)  But my real travel pain was self-inflicted. By the time we finished racing to the gate for our connecting flight, I realized I had left my iPad in the pouch of my seat on the previous flight. (If you can’t imagine how distressed I was, I invite you to reread my opener above…one of my favorite things…in the world…EVER!) When we arrived in San Diego, I went straight to the United Airlines baggage lost & found where a very sympathetic clerk advised me where to go online to register my loss. The fact that this was a United flight is also central to the story. Like many Americans I was outraged by the report from just about a year ago of United dragging a passenger off an overbooked flight. And like many Americans vowed I would never fly United again. As happened though, we were United Mileage Plus cardholders, and before I could ever exercise my rage by not taking another United flight, the CEO sent out an apology to all its members. There’s a delicate art to these corporate apologies. When I wrote my book on Lean, I read quite a lot of criticism of how Toyota handled its apology over safety issues. There’s a fine line between showing genuine contrition and appearing too defensive. For me, the United letter succeeded in threading the needle. Moreover, staying with United was more consistent with a basic tenet of my consumer philosophy, which, if I may be so bold to quote myself again, is encapsulated here:  

Perhaps there are other voters who, like me, take a bit of perverse comfort in the serial investigations of Hillary Clinton. For instance, I actually prefer to fly on airlines after they've been involved in a crash on the belief that all those maintenance and flight crews are more focused after a disaster strikes close to home. Then once in a grocery store line with a Swanson's chicken pot pie I remembered that Swanson's had just been busted by the FDA for having unapproved levels of rat hairs and feces. So I left the line and went back to the freezer and swapped my Swanson's chicken pot pie for a Bird's Eye. But then when I got back in line, I realized that the wake of a contamination scandal was probably the best time to buy a brand. What other company would be more conscientious about rat hairs and feces than Swanson's? 

That view has been borne out by our subsequent experiences with United. The airline has clearly upped its game in terms of customer consideration, no doubt as a result of the backlash against it. You can sense it when you call to make reservations, check in your baggage, change flights or seats at the gate. For the time being, United seems to be on its best behavior. That became abundantly apparent with my lost iPad. Frankly, I viewed filing my lost item report as sending off a note in a bottle. From the outset, however, United let me know they were taking the loss almost as seriously as I was (almost). They sent me emails once a week updating me on the progress of the search...here are two of them:











Get that: Fingers crossed! It’s such a small touch, but what an easy way to counter the image of corporate indifference.  In one email early on, United informed me that it would keep up the search for my iPad for a month, giving me complete clarity and transparency for what I could expect. Then! Almost a month to the day after filing my report, United emailed me to cheerfully announce it had found my iPad. An agent at its Dallas office then emailed me to say she had my iPad in hand and would be sending it out as soon as I told her how I wanted it shipped.
How I wanted it shipped? Overnight, of course. $21…cheap to be re-United with one of my favorite things.

So Tired of All That Winning

The New England Patriots are back in the Super Bowl, so it’s time to ask again if we’re tired yet of all that winning. The question is mostly a punchline until it’s applied to the Patriots when it becomes dead serious and reasonable people who believe it would be preposterous to ever complain about winning suddenly find themselves asking, “Yeah, why is this team always winning and isn’t there something we should be doing about it?”
Was there such grousing about success when I was growing up and the New York Yankees were winning in similarly routine fashion, smothering the expectations for every American League pennant race in the birds’ nests of spring? Perhaps if social media had existed at the time much more attention would’ve been paid to the Yankees suspicious relationship with the Kansas City A’s, and miserable fans of other teams (me included) would’ve taken to calling them the "New York Cheatees", or something equally juvenile.
Do people carp about Wall-Mart’s position at the top of the Fortune 500, which mostly parallels the Patriots run at the top of the NFL, except for being far more dominant? Well, surely the Bernie Sanders Revolution would like to do something about that and force Wal-Mart to provide better wages, healthcare and working conditions for its employees, but for the most part Americans accept that we live in a capitalist system. That often doesn’t look so pretty, TV commercials aside, but surely Wal-Mart’s long running reign at the top proves Americans value cheap prices over aesthetics.  
And how about the USA where “We’re #1” is practically our national motto (take that, E Pluribus Unum)? We shout about it loud and proud, even when it’s manifestly untrue (HEALTHCARE!). As a nation we’ve really never shown a hint of fatigue from winning, real or imaginary. So the promise of our Con Man-in-Chief to deliver a Springsteen concert presidency in which we’re all begging him at the end to stop making us so happy and fulfilled is as empty and ludicrous as most everything else to emit from his mouth.
Yet, sports media this past week leading up to the Super Bowl has been filled with serious discussions as whether all this Patriots winning is good for us…not just football fans, but America in general. I must say, having followed some of these discussions, they’ve been remarkably thoughtful for football talk…and highly refreshing in contrast to past lead-ups to the Super Bowls featuring New England, which feverishly examined the nefarious means the Patriots used to make their way to the top. (For the record, I’ve already taken a cynical eye to address the mischaracterization of “the Cheatriots” in an earlier post. There I point out, among other things, that tsk…tsk…tsking a football team trying to get an edge on its opponent is high hilarity and utter hypocrisy in a nation built on stealing land from Indians, spying on both friend and foe, and delighting in popular cultural entertainments that mythologize deception.)
It’s been a welcome change this year to see and hear football analysts actually discuss the Patriots’ winning culture…and what makes it so (and not so for others); there’s been rare but plentiful praise for the sheer aesthetics of doing a job well and consistently, with particular attention to the fact that the Patriots’ sustained excellence occurs in a sport created pretty much designed along a Bernie Sanders socialist model, where parity is enforced by rules that are specifically implemented to level the playing field. 
I’ve recently had my complaints about the Patriots too, but they’ve been confined to off-field issues. On the field they have been a marvel of teamwork of near Swiss watch level precision. I’ve come to genuinely feeling sorry for those who’ve become so jaded and jealous that the resulting resentment, bitterness, and hatred have blinded them to the uplifting pleasure of seeing a difficult job well done. It’s like turning your back on the wonders of evolution because it conflicts with your notion of God.  
Is that zap of hyperbole warranted? If this were just about football, the Super Bowl and the New England Patriots it probably would be. But I detect something at work with far broader implications. I detect an insidious bias against winning…against success…that has a larger cultural impact. Shortly after the Super Bowl, we’ll move on to the Academy Awards at the next table of America’s all-you-can-eat buffet of amusements. It’s been a quarter century since the Oscars banned the expression “And the winner is” from its ceremony (with one failed attempt to resurrect it in 2010). On the first occasion of its banishment in 2001, Oscar host Steve Martin quipped, “You’ll notice they changed ‘the winner is’ to ‘and the Oscar goes to’ because God forbid anyone should think of this as a competition.” The line was not enough to embarrass the Academy of Arts and Sciences from abandoning what is essentially an elementary school policy entitling every child to a cupcake and being named student of the month. Worse, the change…the new policy…was not enough to save Hollywood from remaining a culture where the work of women and racial minorities would continue to be marginalized and its screen depictions of heroism, triumph and success would get progressively cartoonish and preposterous so as to totally obliterate the very real hard work, patience, skill and sacrifice that actually go into high achievement. So much for another cheap and easy political correctness "win". 
There’s an exhilarating exchange between comedians Chris Rock and Jerry Seinfeld during one of Seinfeld’s Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee episodes. It’s exhilarating because both guys are emblematic of allegedly liberal Hollywood (Jerry’s "But I’m a New Yorker" demur aside). And Rock is born of a race constantly discredited by racists as dependent on affirmative action to succeed. The punchline to the exchange is when Rock--sounding very much like Bill “Do Your Job” Belichick--answered his daughter’s complaint about being relegated to the bench on her school basketball team this way: "Hey, honey, there's a way too get in the game. I'm just saying. There is a way. Some kids actually got in the game." (If taunting the opposition weren't so verboten to the Patriot Way, I'd say Tom Brady could lift that line next time he's asked how much more winning he plans on doing in his life.) The 1-minute+ exchange between Seinfeld and Rock is highly relevant to this discussion and worth viewing here.
I don’t think it’s at all hyperbolic to point out that our society’s war on winning has already had a profoundly negative effect on our national mental health. The liberal inclination to dismiss, deflate, and denigrate genuine excellence and high achievement has laid the nation open to be fooled by faux excellence and achievement.  Shrinking from acknowledging, rewarding, and extolling success allows gold-plated frauds to step forward and claim the mantel of winner for themselves. Turning the word winning into a shameful “W-word” gives the demagogue free reign to define winners and losers and divide the nation according to his warped, unchallenged vision. As a nation, we’re spiraling out of control now not just because we can’t tell fake news from real news any longer, but we can’t tell fake winners from the real thing.   
The Patriots are the real thing...Pats 27 Eagles 17. 

 

I Wanna Grow Up to be a Politician

Barack Obama takes a dive
The short-lived presidential campaign I launched here on The Nob was the closest I ever got to pursuing my youthful ambition to be President of the United States. It may seem as fanciful an ambition as wanting to grow up and be a cowboy or astronaut (though it should be noted that kids actually do grow up to be those things). Yet it was an ambition not at all un-tethered to the reality of my life at the time. First, like all American kids, I was raised on the fundamental belief that we could all grow up to be president (and kudos to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for ignoring the unspoken racial and gender qualifiers that always seemed to dispel that belief). Then, like many Baby Boomers, I was buoyed in my belief by the presidency of John F. Kennedy who—all his father’s millions aside, but notably not his religion—seemed to affirm the belief. Finally there were the early contours of my personal biography...parents who actively participated in politics, eagerly discussed politics and actually believed in politics as a solution to problems. All of which led me to throw myself into student politics at a very young age with considerable success. I ran for numerous offices from high school through college and won every time…except the last time.  
That loss may have ruined my appetite for politics forever…not for the sting of the defeat as the bitterness of how it came about. It was a race for my re-election as editor of the student paper at the University of Hartford, and it unfolded with a House of Cards season of betrayals, villains, and disillusionment. When it was over, I vowed never to have anything to do with the electoral process again…at least not from a candidate’s standpoint.  
I was reminded of this turning point in my life when I came across the photo above on Facebook recently. I did not watch Donald Trump’s inaugural address (in truth, I have watched none of his excremental addresses, speeches, or press conferences), so it never occurred to me that there may have been a moment (maybe even two!) when Barack Obama felt compelled by political duty to stand up and applaud Trump. Barack Obama--about as honorable a politician as recent history has had to offer--standing to applaud an utterance from the mouth of a transparent fraud who lies, cons, smears, and bullies with most every word he speaks…and spews outright ignorance with every other word. I stared at the picture long and hard, wondering to myself: Could I have done that? Could I have showed that much magnanimity to the scoundrel who launched his path to this inaugural stage by questioning my birth…my legitimacy…and claimed loud and long that he had the evidence to back up his smear but never produced it? 
I concluded that I could not have done it…and realized as I did that such an inability to swallow pride, forgive trespasses, and turn the other cheek probably would have made my path to the White House very difficult. Not that I’m an overly prideful person or an unforgiving one, but I am a discriminating one. If I am going to rise above moral indignation for the sake of comity, the person on the receiving end of my beau geste damn well better be worthy of it.  
In that picture above, I think Barack Obama completely overvalued Trump. I would’ve just sat there…unless the words coming out of Trump’s mouth were something along the lines of, “Jesus, how did a grand fraud like me end up here?” But Obama followed his ambition all the way to the White House…being black no less…so what do I know? I know there are a whole lot of things he had to do along the way before he even reached the great indignity caught in that picture. They all do…those most contemptible creatures among us...all those Chucks and Nancies: our politicians. They have to endlessly beg and plead for contributions, constantly barter away their integrity for support, painfully suppress their true thoughts and feelings for consensus, ruthlessly betray their ideals and constituencies for deals, smile at people they despise, listen to people they don’t respect, abide people who hold them in contempt. 
Politicians are commonly derided as whores, though that seems unfair to prostitutes who generally deliver what they promise and do so with far more efficiency. But given the round-the-clock, all-consuming self-debasement, it is little wonder that politicians are held in such low regard. And it’s not as if we can blame their lowly station on the ravages of social media and cable news, politicians have been drawing rage reviews since at least the 4th century, BC:

“Look at the orators in our republics; as long as they are poor, both state and people can only praise their uprightness; but once they are fattened on the public funds, they conceive a hatred for justice, plan intrigues against the people and attack the democracy.” ― Aristophanes, Plutus

But the truth is--when it comes to politicians--though we may hate living with them, we really can’t live without them. Someone needs to do the dirty work of conducting the public’s often tedious business. Someone has to be willing to assume a range of unpleasant or impossible tasks…from taking phone calls from cranks about chlorine levels in the drinking water to providing drinking water for millions…from settling disputes over backyard hedges to solving centuries-old disputes about national borders…from raising taxes to fund a metal detector at the elementary school after a mass shooting to curbing access to assault rifles, biological weapons, and rogue nukes.
It’s not as easy or as enviable as it often appears from the outside. We can blame that distortion on our perspective of the past through the “great men of history” lens. Too often historians present us with politicians as profiles in courage rather than the profiles in compromise they really are at their most instinctual. The image portrayed of Abraham Lincoln in Steven Spielberg’s invaluable film portrait, Lincoln, is far from the sad yet saintly figure of our school days. Spielberg’s Lincoln is calculating, cunning and committed in cause of the greater good. It is a shame it is such a rare, under-appreciated examination of the politician’s calling.  If we had a greater understanding of how our politics works, those of us who are just voters and those who become elected officials would be much better off, and the state of our leadership wouldn't be so shockingly juvenile. 
By the way, I suspect that Lincoln, like Obama, would’ve stood and applauded for Trump. And that, I guess, is why I never grew up to be president. 

All the Views Unfit to Print

The New York Times waves white flag to Trump voters
These have not been good days for The New York Times. For a long time it’s been a punching bag for the American Right that views it as a mouthpiece for liberal elitists. But lately, especially since the reign of Trump, it has come under increasing attack from the Left. The Nobby even took a swipe at it a few posts ago even though, as this post will reveal, I’m somewhat sympathetic with the paper’s mission to understand Trump voters.
The hard reality we must face after Trump is finally driven from office is that we will still be left with a calcified 30% or so of the electorate that remains loyal to him (Nixon had 24% when his criminal activity finally ended his presidency, but Nixon didn’t have the benefit of Fox News to buoy his numbers whatever his offenses against the US). I think getting at the bottom of how so many of our fellow citizens can continue to support such a transparent con man is not only a newsworthy story, but an important one for the nation going forward after Trump. So I have no more of a problem with The Timessending waves of reporters into Trump country to find out what makes his voters tick than I ever had with The Times or any other news outlet sending reporters into Muslim enclaves to get a better handle on what’s behind Islamic terrorism directed at the West. I see Trump voters and Islamic radicals as equal threats against liberal democracy, and I for one would like to know all I can about who's behind that threat.
On January 18, 2018, The Times went even further in trying to profile the identity of Trump voters by turning over its entire op-ed section to their letters explaining their preference for Trump. I read the letters in spite of myself. Like many liberals, I have been inclined to believe that I already know all I need to know about these people. As I stated in a comment on Facebook last week, “they like liars, gauche rich guys, pussy grabbers and racists. Oh, yeah, and feeling sorry for themselves.”         
Yet none of my characterizations are borne out in any of the letters published by The Times. Here’s what my fairly objective and charitable summary of those letters is. Overall these Trump voters are pleased with his:judicial appointments and deregulation orderssuccess in bolstering the economy and degrading ISISfresh, albeit brash, new governing style The first cannot be denied. With the immeasurable help of pirate Mitch McConnell, Trump not only bagged a Supreme Court seat for the Right that was not rightfully theirs, but he has effectively been filling lower court vacancies with conservatives that will give them sway over government long after Trump and the Republican revanchists in Congress are gone.
The second point can not only be denied but easily refuted by abundant and easily accessible evidence that the economy had been steadily growing and ISIS had been steadily declining over the last years of the Obama Administration. As with his birth millions, Trump again has been blessed by inheritance. But in this Trump voters are really not much different from hyper-partisans of the past, who cast credit or blame on previous administrations with aplomb. 
The third point is pure eye-of-the-beholder stuff…or to quote one of my favorite Paul Simon lines: One man’s ceiling is another man’s floor. Where so many see a shameless vulgarian, these Trump voters see Jesus in the temple, overturning tables and disconnecting cables to shock Washington to its senses.
In this self-portrait, these letter writers have helped The New York Times in its mission to normalize Trump voters and bring them into civil discourse on the pages of a paper that proudly accepts the appellation of Gray Lady. The Times yearns to serve tea and crumpets to all its readers in the upstairs parlor where they can sit upright and discuss all the news that’s fit to print. “Fit to print.” That Times motto exudes pure Violet Crawley, Dowager Countess of Grantham, sense of decorum to the very tip of Maggie Smith’s downward-pointed nose.
But something hits my nose not quite right…and not just my nose. One of the letters from a Trump voter begins like this: “To the editor: Before I respond to your questions, I have a question of my own: Did you run similar surveys for Obama voters? Or, for that matter, Eisenhower voters? Trump voters are not circus freaks to be displayed or singled out.” Ironically that’s the same line of attack aimed at The Times from the Left. Why didn’t The Times ever devote as much time trying to understand Obama voters? Or, more poignantly perhaps, understanding the feelings of Hillary voters who actually voted in greater numbers for her than Trump’s voters voted for him, only to be deprived of the presidency by that third nipple of the US Constitution, the Electoral College?
The answer of course to both the Right and the Left--though The Times would be too obsessively well-mannered to say so--is that Trump’s voters actually are the circus freaks of American democracy. What else to conclude about people who luxuriate in the shower of Trump's testosterone while remaining utterly indifferent to the plight of the millions he willfully hurts? How else to describe people who exalt in Trump's knack for shaking things up and ignore the cost in international prestige and standing with the vast majority of the country? What other can you say about people who extoll his ignorance and inarticulation about fundamental governance and policy as "telling it like it is"? This self-evident freakishness is precisely why The Times has spent so much of its resources attempting to decrypt these voters. 

It is also why this latest attempt to do that by allowing them to put into their own words their thoughts about Trump is not only a failure, but makes the decoding job doubly hard by throwing another layer of bullshit over who Trump voters are and what motivates them. Anyone who has--as I have--encountered Trump voters anywhere on social media immediately recognizes how at variance those voices are with these Times letter writers. Not only is the level of literacy and coherency expressed in The Times letters far above that found in social media postings by Trump voters, but no where to be found in any of these letters…at least not explicitly…is a trace of the xenophobia, nativism, racism, and resentment that are the true hallmarks of Trumpism. Perhaps Times readers are a self-selecting group of thoughtful, literate, concerned citizens, regardless of politics…and these letters are a true reflection of Times readership generally. But it’s hard to imagine that The Times solicitation for feedback from Trump voters did not yield at least a few that reflected their triumphant glee at Trump's ruthlessness in putting down minority groups, our free press, and any politician with an inkling of compassion. It’s hard to imagine that in a week of revelations about "shithole" countries, payoffs to porn stars, and an ever-tightening independent investigation, none of that echoed through into the letters of The Times selection of Trump voters.

It may not be fair to accuse The Times of sanitizing the letters it chose to present on its op-ed pages, but it also seems fair to say that in order to keep the Gray Lady’s hands clean, The Times continues to refuse to do the dirty work necessary to uphold its status as our paper of record.   

Trump voters meet The New York Times--
the movie

The Unfriending

Beyond the pale I am about to “unfriend” someone on Facebook, and it’s a pretty big deal for me. Though I’ve been the target of un-friending myself multiple times--mostly over politics—I’ve only exercised my power to “unfriend” once since joining Facebook 10 years ago. It was a little over a year into my Facebook tenure, and the victim of my unfriending was not someone close to me…just a typically remote acquaintance from out of the past. Every day she was posting things on my timeline about how Jesus loved me, and how I had to come to Jesus, and how I had to show my love for Jesus by sharing her posts with others (like I needed that). It was like waking up to a Jehovah’s Witness at your door every damn morning. As Facebook offenses go, it was pretty benign. If I knew how to block her from posting on my timeline, I would’ve done that rather than terminating her with such extreme prejudice. After that, I made a conscious decision not to unfriend anyone because I really don’t like the whole idea of breaking off a friendship with just a click. It’s a little too much like a drone attack…and like a drone attack, once you do it, the damage is done. In our normal, non-Facebook relationships we have a variety of tools and strategies available to us to convey to all concerned that a relationship is over…or at least in trouble…while leaving the door open for recovery.
In this current case, there is no room for recovery…no desire for it on my part even though I know that the person I’m about to unfriend places a high value on our relationship (which really isn’t a friendship at all except in the loosest, most amorphous Facebook meaning of the word). And it really is just happenstance that I came upon the post that has driven me to this extraordinary action. My customary Facebook experience is to check my timeline a few times a day for notifications from friends, then to scroll down the “home” page to see what various contacts have posted. It doesn’t allow a deep dive into everyone’s Facebook doings, but it does give me a random, cursory view. When one of these postings provokes a positive or negative reaction in me, I generally indicate such with a “like” or a comment. I try to remain respectful of people’s timelines no matter what. As far as I’m concerned, a timeline is like someone’s room, and everyone’s entitled to deck it out however they want without engendering a This Property is Condemnedposting. 

But what if?
What if you visit someone’s room and find it festooned with Nazi or Ku Klux Klan regalia…or child porn? As I write that sentence, I realize that question doesn’t have such an obvious answer any more because white supremacy and child predation have become so politicized…so normalized...as to be championed by the President of the United States. A major political party has so embraced the most aberrant civic and social behaviors that they are now flaunted on social media alongside pictures of the grandchildren; reports on fabulous lunches in exotic places; and, yes, praise for Jesus. So not everyone is going to find outrage in the same places.
But allow me, please, to explain why the outrage I found in the video I came across posted on Facebook and represented in the photo above is transcendent outrage. Let us dispense first with the ordinary outrages conveyed in that picture/video. There’s the illiteracy of course: “Trumps is making me look like a total Incompetent, useless *sshole.” Is it all the Trumps? Then it should be Trumps are. And Incompetent is capitalized, why? This is shooting fish in a barrel, so let’s move on to the partisanship. Obama’s being attacked because he’s a Democrat. That’s mid-level outrage…the Internet is full of liberal attacks on Trump because of his politics, so no tears for Barack Obama here. But, stop...wait...how about the outrage of racism? Is Obama being attacked because he’s black? Maybe so, but it’s no more than implied here, which mutes the outrage on that score.
Now let’s get to the heart of the matter, which is the original appearance by Obama to speak on gun violence in America after the Newtown shooting upon which this ad for the Coalition for Trump Superstore is based. That may be one of the most unique moments in US presidential history…surely in Barack Obama’s presidency—a president actually weeping over the state of the union. No agenda. No spin. No self-promotion. Just a raw display of human emotion—emotion beyond party, race, or gender. There are two displays of emotion that are universal—laughter and tears. Both can and have been perverted…canned laughter, crocodile tears. But the real thing—a real smile; a real tear--is precious and profound with power to touch the hearts of masses and bond us together no matter our differences. We cannot help but look at this video of a national leader struggling to express our collective grief and bewilderment at the cold-blooded slaughter of 20 six- and seven-year olds and six adults and not feel like a grieving family.
And yet we live in a time when "these people" walk among us who do not feel part of that family, that grief…indeed, who are contemptuous of it. So contemptuous are they that they would take such a sacred human experience--Obama surrounded by the families of shooting victims--and turn it into an advertisement for Trump hats.
I just spent a glorious holiday with daughter Gillian’s family in Georgia. As always when Gillian and I get together the talk gets around to Us v. Them. Gillian believes that I’ve spent so much time in California’s blue heaven that I see the world too much in those terms. She often makes the case for the basic decency of those she daily encounters in her adopted red state home. I love Gillian’s passion for bridge-building…it’s what led her to join the Peace Corps out of college and has underpinned her career and relationships ever since. And I pride myself on thinking much of that derives from our time together in homeschooling. I think I’m more understanding and tolerant of “Them” than she gives me credit for. I’ve certainly had strong, warm relationships with people I disagreed with politically. And though I find such conversations increasingly difficult in this sharply sundered era, I’m not only willing and able to discuss differences over race, immigration, taxation, guns, environment, education and the myriad other issues that tear us apart, but I believe I have a good sense of where Them is coming from on most issues.   
But this! This Trump Superstore ad…this mockery of compassion and shared pain…this mortal sin against human community tests the outer limits of understanding and forgiveness. This is hard for me because I really do believe that part of our humanity actually encompasses bad behavior of our own and others. It is foundational to Love’s Body, the guiding philosophy of The Nobby Works, that until we accept that we are all capable of acting heinously given the right (or wrong) circumstances, we will be forever broken into Us & Them. But as I told Gillian in our last encounter on this subject, there are times when I just cannot join in a chorus of Come Together:I am he as you are he as you are me
And we are all together
There are times when the behavior of others is so deplorable that no matter how reflective it may be of a kindred weakness, we must do as Oedipus did when his eyes were open to his own crimes—he ripped them out. Less dramatically, I will be unfriending the person who posted the Trump Super Store ad in 24 hours to allow sufficient time for it to sink in that I never want to look into the darkness of such a soul again.