Dan Riley's Blog, page 19

It's Never Gone with the Wind...

Please take the following as an addendum to my post from three years ago called The Goddam Movies. I said pretty much all I wanted to say there on the subject of film’s adverse effect on our culture, especially in regards to racial attitudes. But two things happened this past week that prompt me to go back to the subject. The first was that I re-watched one of my Personal Top 100 Favorites (blog post to come)—His Girl Friday—for perhaps the 6thor 7th time. Delightful as ever…with a few sobering notes. One is that Earl Williams the convicted man whose hanging Cary Grant’s Walter wants Rosalind Russell’s Hildy to cover was accused of killing a “colored” cop. Use of the word “colored” for blacks was pretty standard at the time, so nothing surprising there. It was a little ironic however given our current climate that a white man would be hanged for killing a black cop. And the backstory to that is interesting in itself. It seems the mayor is running for re-election and is pushing for the white guy’s execution to assure he gets the black vote. It’s like a bizarro version of 21st century America. But what really pricked my ears was hearing a throwaway line about a “colored” woman giving birth to “a pickaninny” in the back of a cab. For all the times I’d seen the film, that line had clearly passed under my awareness, though I knew instantly this time that if used in a contemporary film it would unleash a world of controversy. Student for life that I am, I immediately researched the word. It is derived from the Portuguese word pequeno for “little”. Derivations of it apply worldwide (probably wherever Portuguese explorers/colonists roamed) to babies and children, particularly those of color. How, where, and when it became a racial slur seems a little unclear, though it is clearly regarded as one today (but as we’ve seen, those things can change).
Anyway the day after re-watching His Girl Friday with my racial antenna still turned on, I came upon an article entitled How Movie Theaters, TV Networks, and Classrooms Are Changing the Way They Show Gone With the Wind: After almost 80 years, America is finally rethinking how it screens its favorite movie. I’m usually up on such things, so I was taken by surprise at the news that America was rethinking how it watches Gone with the Wind. With so very much on its mind these days, I would have thought rethinking an 80-year old movie would’ve been among the nation’s lowest priorities. And then I saw what the hook was…the deadly pro-Confederate march in Charlottesville last August and the subsequent controversy to remove monuments to the treasonous Confederacy throughout the country (including the baby state of Montana, admitted to the Union almost 40 years after the Civil War but not long enough after it seems not to throw up a monument to Dixie treason).  Writer Aisha Harris set off to find out how this classic of American cinema was faring under the klieg lights of historical reexamination, as she put it:

How are cinemas, TV networks, and classrooms rethinking how they present this historical epic and all-time box office king? And could it go the way of Hollywood’s original historical epic and first megablockbuster, 1915’s The Birth of a Nation, leaving it shown very rarely and almost exclusively in academic settings?

I feel somewhat an authority on Gone with the Wind. As I mention in I my Goddam Movies post, I worked as an usher in a reserved seat Cinerama theater when Gone with the Wind emerged for its 70mm re-incarnation in 1967. Because it was the 60s and I was a very left leaning college student, I hated the film on first sight for all the right political reasons. But in that job I ended up watching it in whole or in big chunks approximately 125 times. By the end of its near year-long run before my eyes I developed a grudging respect for it. Since the 60s, I’ve watched it at least once a decade without being paid to do so. Despite my appreciation for its aesthetic qualities and storytelling powers, I get all the cultural/political objections to it. They begin with the film’s infamous prolog, which portrays the antebellum South as some kind of American Camelot with references to knights and gallantry and fair maidens. It’s as treacly a description of a slave culture as you’re ever likely to find. To Author Margaret Mitchell’s credit, she does describe that culture as being gone with the wind, so we can’t blame her for the persistence of her fellow Southerners ever since in continuing to push for its restoration.
Between that prolog and Scarlett’s closing observation that “Tomorrow is another day”, there are plenty of other scenes to earn GWTW a spot on The Political Correctness Watch List (or don’t watch, as it were): a union soldier tries to rape Scarlett; a Tara family slave joins the Confederacy to fight against the Union; the rapacious Tara overseer teams up with a black Carpetbagger to exploit the defeated South; and black womanhood is caricatured in the portrayals of Mammy and Prissy.
Those scenes weigh so heavily on the historical sensitivity scale, that they obscure some mitigating elements of the film. First off, as to the attempted rape, the slave enlistment in the Confederate cause, and Carperbagger exploitation, all are historically accurate to the degree that we accept that the rape of women by occupying armies is fairly common in all wars. Second, the two main male characters, Rhett Butler and Ashley Wilkes, both deliver monologs that express fairly deep skepticism about the Southern Cause, so the film is not a full-throated endorsement of the Dixie treason. Third, and most importantly, I think much, if not most, of the lasting popularity of GWTW is due to the charisma of its main character, Scarlett O'Hara. Here’s a passage I just came across, championing the 2017 film Wonder Woman:

Film historians might look back on 2017 and note that this was the year in which certain previously untouchable Hollywood moguls found themselves publicly excoriated, leading to a change in attitudes towards the treatment of women by men in positions of power. What better way to honour that profound societal shift than to celebrate a totem of strong feminity, a superhero who refuses to be kept in the box that society has placed her in; who is comfortable with her own strength but avoids the puffed-up boastfulness of her male counterparts?

That description could very well apply to Scarlett O’Hara…surely she was right up there with Hollywood characters of the time portrayed by Katherine Hepburn and Barbara Stanwyck in busting out of society’s box and projecting her own strength. GWTW does far more to advance female empowerment than it does to enshrine slavery and treason. At every turn, Scarlett has to dig down into her own resourcefulness to survive and thrive, and always against the men standing in her way. What drives her, as she famously says, is the will to “never be hungry again”. It should also be noted here, that although Hattie McDaniel expressed regret over her portrayal of Mammy, her character is the only one in the entire film to ever successfully stand up to Scarlett…so the female empowerment was biracial. 
The pressing issue these days is whether GWTW should be treated like public displays of Confederate flags, statuary, and sundry memorials. It should not. Those are tax-supported testaments to slavery and treason either directly or in the public lands they occupy. GWTW is both a private enterprise and a creative enterprise. We can pull down Confederate statues in full confidence that no reasonable society should be forced to honor those who conducted a deadly, bloody rebellion against its very being. But a fictional exploration of that rebellion must be granted the creative license and freedom of expression that so many have fought and died for in all our wars.
In her essay, Aisha Harris wonders if perhaps GWTW could experience the same fate as that other controversial film of the Civil War era, Birth of a Nation. That would mean, in her words, “shown very rarely and almost exclusively in academic settings”. One of the most interesting revelations in my long-standing obsession with the city of Pompeii is the way that the Italian government ordered all the many X-rated murals, statuary, jewelry and chotchkes that survived the eruption of Vesusius more than 2000 years ago locked behind closed door in what the Italians call gabinetto segreto, the secret cabinet. Off and on until just about 18 years ago, the secret cabinet was only open to the wealthy and well-connected. It would seem that reserving screenings of GWTW for privileged audiences takes us very close to instituting a gabinetto segreto in our proud open society. I get very anxious when the zeal to stamp out racism amps up, and I can see my beloved Adventures of Huckleberry Finn falling once again  in the crosshairs...and that zeal devolves into garden variety book burning. 

GWTW, like Huck Finn, should be used as a teaching tool for all. The idea that hiding it away will save us from racism is preposterous. As JD Salinger wrote in The Catcher in the Rye,

I went down by a different staircase, and I saw another “Fuck you” on the wall. I tried to rub it off with my hand again, but this one was scratched on, with a knife or something. It wouldn’t come off. It’s hopeless anyway. If you had a million years to do it, you couldn’t rub off even half the “Fuck you” signs in the world. It’s impossible.

Same goes for racism...which is less an argument for letting it pass than a plea to fight it with education rather than censorship.

  

Birthday of An American Girl

Hillary Clinton, b. October 26, 1947


An Original American Girl

Hark, Conservative Voices

It is a conceit of liberalism that it is the natural home of the creativity. It is a conceit I’ve given into myself when I’m either not thinking or too politically embroiled and overlook the numerous conservative artists…especially writers…I’ve encountered and enjoyed myself: TS Eliot, Mark Halperin (the novelist, not the hapless political pundit), J.D Salinger to name just a few. By conservative I don’t mean how they voted--great artists should never let their politics dictate their art. I mean how they view the subject of social change in their work. Were they advocates for change or critics of it? Salinger, for instance, for all the uproar he caused by his radical use of the word fuck in The Catcher in the Rye at a time when the word was still pretty much reserved for private, even whispered communication, built his entire career writing about the awfulness of growing up…the most inevitable change of all. The Catcher in the Rye is literally about catching children before they fall into adulthood. 
Currently I’m reading A Gentleman of Moscow, the most meticulous and committed conservative novel I’ve ever read, and I find myself savoring pages…paragraphs…individual words of it (more on these words in another post).  My enjoyment should not be at all surprising because I’m well into that stage of my life where conservatism is supposed to be replacing my youthful liberalism the way a titanium hip is designed to replace the one I danced and played on through a younger life. This is supposed to be the stage where you cannot move the goalposts back any further on what age people become untrustworthy. ”Don’t trust anyone over 70!” comes out as “You kids, get off my lawn!” So, before I get into some of the detail of what I love about A Gentleman in Moscow, I will stipulate that my love of the book and its main character’s worldview can very well be that I so relate to his bemusement at a world in metamorphosis. 
Count Alexander Rostov is the gentleman of the book’s title. It is through his eyes that readers observe the changes brought about by the Russian Revolution of 1917. We watch as the enormous changes to the society at large have their impact on him personally, albeit incrementally. First he is removed from his luxury suite at the grand Hotel Metropol and forced to move into a small, one-room apartment on one of its upper, derelict floors. Then the staff, which has come to know him well…and decently…over the years, is told to no longer address him by his title, and he is told not to expect them to do so. Eventually the decline reduces him to waiting tables at the fine restaurant where he once reigned as an elite guest. (And wouldn't our “Fight for 15” protestors love to see our entire class of 1%ers having to toss burgers one day?)
 One evening while he’s dining in the hotel’s piazza, he notices at a nearby table a young man painfully trying to impress a young woman. After struggling to hit upon an affordable yet notable entrée, he successfully hits upon the Latvian stew. But then a dotard of a waiter suggests a wine that the Count from his experience and vantage point realizes is all wrong for the stew and too expensive for the now cornered young man. So the Count leans over and suggests a more affordable wine that he says will match perfectly with the stew. Later in the evening, the Count is greatly satisfied when the young couple raise their glasses in a toast to him.
Some time later, as his spiral downward continues, though not quite to its lowest depth, he finds that the same dotard waiter has been promoted to the hotel’s finest dining establishment by virtue of his Party fervor rather than merit. This becomes an issue when the Count orders a bottle of Barolo wine, and the waiter asks, “Will that be red or white?”.  When the Count patiently explains what a Barolo is, the waiter asks again, “Will that be red or white?” At that--with his patience as pinched as his new living quarters--the Count asks to speak to the maître d'. The sympathetic maître d' takes the Count down to the wine cellar, where the Count-- like Scarlett O’Hara stumbling through the war-ravaged streets of Atlanta--takes in the full cost of the noblest of causes. All the wine bottles have been stripped of their labels. All wine, the maître d' explains to the Count, are henceforth to be sold as “white” or “red” and at the same price. Any path to asserting expertise, taste or privilege by ordering wine has been blocked by the Revolution. Piled in the corner like so many discarded graduate degrees, certificates of excellence, blue ribbons and badges of honor are all the wine labels, ripped off the bottles by a cadre of party workers in a feverish display of revolutionary zeal.  
The sight does not enrage the Count as much as adds to his understanding of how fast and furiously his world is changing all around him. Before leaving the wine cellar he remembers something…makes his way to a particular row of denuded bottles, reaches down for one, picks it up and rubs his fingers over the bottom until he finds a logo that has been embossed onto the glass. It is the wine he drank upon the death of his dearly beloved sister, so he takes the bottle out of the cellar to commemorate the upcoming 10th anniversary of that sorrowful event. Thus he’s able to counter revolution’s most niggling manifestation with his well-bred resourcefulness.
As more and more traditional conservatives have taken up arms beside liberals, moderates, and pragmatists to fight in common cause against Trumpism, conservative thinker and writer Andrew Sullivan took it upon himself to delineate the differences between reactionaries and conservatives. He writes:

Reactionism is not the same thing as conservatism. It’s far more potent a brew. Reactionary thought begins, usually, with acute despair at the present moment and a memory of a previous golden age. It then posits a moment in the past when everything went to hell and proposes to turn things back to what they once were. It is not simply a conservative preference for things as they are, with a few nudges back, but a passionate loathing of the status quo and a desire to return to the past in one emotionally cathartic revolt. If conservatives are pessimistic, reactionaries are apocalyptic. If conservatives value elites, reactionaries seethe with contempt for them. If conservatives believe in institutions, reactionaries want to blow them up. If conservatives tend to resist too radical a change, reactionaries want a revolution. Though it took some time to reveal itself, today’s Republican Party — from Newt Gingrich’s Republican Revolution to today’s Age of Trump — is not a conservative party. It is a reactionary party that is now at the peak of its political power. 

That is Andrew Sullivan on behalf of conservatives everywhere, shuffling through the darkened wine cellar looking for the lost vintage to commemorate the death of their beloved ideology. 

Effin' Democrats

Trying to figure out his ass from his elbow
When a few posts ago the Nob started out exploring Logical Fallacies --those flights of argument that generally crash and burn the moment they get too close to the sun for scrutiny’s sake--I promised that I would make it non-discriminatory and try not to focus too much on the fallacies of any one particular group. After all, logical fallacies are part of the human condition, afflicting, alas, even the humans in my political tribe, which prides itself on being reality based and well-versed in nuance. 
Democrats…liberals…progressives…what have you…not only partake in well-established logical fallacies, but being creative sorts in general succeed in creating new logical fallacies, as they did this week in the treatment of Senator Bob Corker’s interview with The New York Times in which he said Donald Trump is running the White House like “a reality show”, that it should “concern anyone who cares about the nation,” and most alarmingly, that Trump has put us “on the path to World War III”. This is Bob Corker talking here…a Conservative Republican from Tennessee, not some screaming liberal from California or Massachusetts. But the reaction to Coker’s amble down the road to Damascus from the political left was the adult equivalent of “Oooooh. He’s got cooties!”
You couldn’t find a pundit on the left who didn’t report, blog, or tweet on Corker’s interview without couching it in layers of feverishly Googled facts documenting Corker’s past sins. Those sins most often cited: Coker had been an early supporter of the very person who turned the White House into a reality show and put us on a path to World War IIICorker voted 88% of the time to support a person he earlier termed unstableBack home in Tennessee Corker ran a racist ad against his black opponent and lied to scare Volkswagen workers to vote against unionizationLet’s stipulate right here and now that those are pretty damning sins, both individually and collectively. But here’s the thing, because of those very sins Corker comes forth as a credible witness against Trump for a sizable portion of the electorate. Because of the things he has done in the service of Trump specifically and the overall conservative agenda, he cannot be dismissed as a partisan, a member of the fake media, or a Trump hater. But instead of capitalizing on that credibility and echoing Corker’s harsh takedown of Trump, establishment Dems have largely been silent on it and left-leaning pundits have been working overtime to discredit Corker. In a court of law, this is called impeaching your own witness. It’s as if the lawyer for one of Harvey Weinstein’s victims called her to the witness stand and introduced her to the jury by presenting a semi-nude photo spread she did for Glamour magazine.
In a legal proceeding of course such hanging your witness out to dry is usually strategic. You want to own the Glamour spread, control how its presented, and deprive opposing counsel the shock value of introducing it. But what is the benefit in this political context of tearing Corker down and thereby blunting the considerable weapon he’s provided with his words against Trump? In terms of the logical fallacy known as Poisoning the Well, you introduce toxic information when you’re trying to ruin your opponent’s argument, not when you agree with the core argument (in this case Trump's unfitness for office). In the more capable hands of Republicans, who--if nothing else--know how to fight, they would've adopted a Dem who spoke out as Corker did against a Democratic President as their party mascot (see Miller, Zell). 
The perversity of this peculiar logic took another twist of the pretzel today when Punditry demanded to know--mockingly--where the voice of "Man of Courageous Principle Bob Corker" was on the new Trump attack on health care for millions. Thus Corker’s reputation was further tarnished by his sins of ommission as well as commission. And to what end? What is the strategic thinking behind this?
Well, there is none of course. This is all about ego. This is about people showing off their superior knowledge, higher moral standards, and Odyssean resistance to the siren call of bipartisanship, compromise, and moderation. Big picture be damned. Wrap it up and put a bow on it, and it’s a thing I have christened the logical fallacy of Liberal Vanity….and its endemic to my political tribe. This is not just about the treatment of Bob Corker. In my own political evolution it goes as far back as Bobby Kennedy when his valued opposition to the anti-Vietnam War movement was constantly undercut by references to his past service as an aid to red hunter Joe McCarthy and to his father’s dalliances with bootleggers, showgirls and Nazis. Lefties can be very unforgiving when it doesn’t suit their tastes…and downright vengeful even if it does.

This prideful blame-fixing is abundantly evident in the chaos that is now the Democratic Party. Single-payer health insurance for all is savaged by Dems who see Bernie taint; advancing women and racial minority rights is dismissed as Hillary taint. Everyone’s purity is in question...daily. Democratic hopes for re-taking Congress in 2018 are jeopardized by its fractious holier-than-thou war. Even more dire is the nation's chance of surviving the mortal threat to its being emanating from the White House if we insist on kicking strange bedfellows to the floor. If spite trumps strategy, Trump trumps everything, and we are truly doomed. 

Another Good Guy with a Gun

➽ When the NRA-owned Republican Party comes calling on your state legislature looking for a gift-wrapped Open Carry law, keep in mind that's to give the Stephen Paddocks of the world the right to roam through your shopping malls, gallerias, and fairgrounds with their arsenals on full display.

➽ Every time you donate to the NRA-owned GOP, you are contributing to more bloodshed and mayhem and taking away from your right to be safe in public places and enjoy life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

➽ If you endorse an unregulated, extremist view of the Second Amendment, then it holds you endorse an unregulated, extremist view of the First Amendment's right to free speech, meaning that the teachers at, say, Sandy Hook Elementary School should have the right to call their students "little motherfuckers."

Logical Fallacies in the News 2

Asshole or son of a bitch? You make the call. 

Let us continue with our discussion of how logical fallacies corrupt our national dialog, shall we?
Special Pleading …sometimes called Moving the Goal Posts , which is more appropriate in this example because it involves Robert Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots and a frequent target of The Nobby Works. As the name suggests, the Moving the Goal Posts fallacy involves extending or altering the distance someone must go to settle an argument. In this instance, it was Kraft’s statement in support of NFL players’ right to protest: “I am deeply disappointed by the tone of the comments made by the President on Friday. I am proud to be associated with so many players who make such tremendous contributions in positively impacting our communities.” I have not been the only one criticizing Kraft--owner in an industry with majority black employment--for his unseemly relationship with a proven white supremacist. However it seems I was among the few who were willing to take his words at face value. On Twitter he was lit up, as they say in the NFL, by a slew of grand inquisitors who objected to his focus on Trump's “tone” rather than content, who demanded that Kraft take back the million dollars he donated to Trump’s inaugural, who charged that Kraft and all his rich buddies in the NFL ownership fraternity were only acting out of expediency. Since these attacks were mostly coming from the political left, I should note that moving the goal posts is a frequent maneuver on the left, which seems to suffer from innate inability to accept wins when they come their way, consolidate them, and move forward. It's the political corollary of nagging: “Okay, so you’re sorry for not picking up my dry cleaning, but what about all those times you left the toilet seat up?” The fact is, given Kraft’s stated emotional reasons for his friendship with Trump, he probably had to cover more ground to get to his statement than did most others who hate Trump instinctively. It was a real Saul to Paul moment (though Kraft, a devout Jew, may not approve the comparison). Moving the goal posts on him wasn’t fair…and it is never a productive move in argumentation.
Composition/division is the logical fallacy where one assumes that if something is true about part of a whole, it must be true of the whole itself. And let’s keep with the football theme on this one. After this Sunday’s rather profound show of solidarity by the players, who either took a knee or locked arms during the National Anthem, Odell Beckham Jr. proceeded to make an absolute ass of himself…or to put it in more Trumpian terms acted like a son of a bitch as illustrated in the photo above. After a touchdown he got down on all fours, pawed around the ground like a dog and then lifted his hind leg to mimic taking a pee. What he did of course was nothing less than piss on the solemnity of the protests that went on before and handed an easy weapon to those who opposed the protesters. Within hours I saw the picture above posted on Facebook with commentary damning all NFL players as overpaid “dickheads”. This is the flipside of the exact same coin that paints all cops as racist killers after one cop has been caught on camera being an actual racist killer. These broad brush smear jobs of entire professions, races, genders, religions based on the aberrant behavior of a few are destroying national comity and making it impossible for us to progress towards being a more perfect UNION! Logical fallacies are not some arcane subject to be confined to a rhetoric class in college…our inability to understand their insidious nature and control them in our dialogs are killing us as a society.     
Sticking with the NFL Players protest, let’s dive into the logical fallacy known as the Loaded Question where the intent of a question is to wound or embarrass rather than elicit information. The person asking wants to suggest something incriminating and force you into an embarrassing answer…often called the “Gotcha question.” The NFL players could not have been more clear and consistent in holding that their protests are about the excessive shooting of young black men by police throughout the country. Yet they keep getting hit by a barrage of loaded questions: Why do you hate the country? Why can’t you honor the military like all good Americans do? What about all those black-on-black shootings in Chicago? The players constantly have to stop and answer these questions: We don’t hate the country; we’re trying to make it better. Our protests have nothing to do with the military; we’re taking a knee to bring attention to a domestic/civil problem. Black-on-black shootings in Chicago are another issue, like missing children, domestic abuse, and opioid addiction. As important as they are, they are not this issue…and by suggesting that our protest should incorporate black issues all across the board you are revealing a subtle form of racism that undergirds the issue we’re talking about. Now let’s not end this particular installment of Logical Fallacies in the News without an example from Donald Trump, who is a walking, talking compendium of logical fallacies. Indeed, you might say logical fallacies are his mother tongue. There’s one called Appeal to Nature, which is an argument based on the naturalness of something. This week when asked why his administration's relief efforts in Puerto Rico were going so poorly, Trump answered: "This is a thing called the Atlantic Ocean, this is tough stuff.”
Alas. This is a thing called humanity. This is tough stuff. 

Logical Fallacies in the News, Part 1

No one laments the decline in critical thinking more than I do. But my appreciation of critical thinking forces me to examine that very sentence. Is it certifiably true that “no one” laments the decline “more than I do”? How can I possibly know that? Has a poll been taken…a study made? Is there a way of measuring my dismay vis-à-vis the dismay of others? Furthermore, has it been empirically proven, or is the decline in critical thinking merely conventional wisdom?
Those are all questions the truly critical mind should ask, but many among us don’t because so much of our communication is casual and spontaneous, and there’s simply no time to analyze everything we want to say in such “critical” detail because the conversation will simple pass us by. We can intellectually condemn the diminishment of critical thinking in our daily social intercourse, but the truth is--as much as we all want a lover with a slow hand--such intercourse is of the slam-bam-thank-you-ma’m kind by habit and necessity.  
As a result, logical fallacies, the alleged enemies of critical thought have now become the norm for how we think and communicate. Websites and books abound with aids to help us with our critical thinking, but what we really need is to be attuned to the enormous role logical fallacies play in all our lives, regardless of gender, race, religion and especially politics. As promised in a too-long-ago post, the Nob means to do all it can to lift our cultural awareness of logical fallacies, regardless of partisanship.
And with that, let’s begin with the lowest hanging fruit in the logical fallacy tree: the Ad Hominem attack. It's not only the lowest hanging fruit, but it's fresh as the morning headlines because we are being treated to the spectacle of two (ahem) world leaders directing ad hominem attacks at each other over the most serious issue ever to face mankind—total nuclear annihilation. But seriousness has never been an obstacle for North Korea’s Kim Jong-un or the US of A’s Donald Trump (roll over Abe Lincoln and give George Washington the blues). It started with Trump calling Kim Jong-un "Rocket Man" first in a tweet (natch) and then (hold onto your Peace Prize, Kofi Annan) in a major speech before the United Nations. In certain circumstances "Rocket Man" would not register as an insult. After all it comes from a worshipful Elton John song about astronauts; furthermore ace major league pitcher Roger Clemens was renowned as The Rocket. So, as always, context is everything. And in this case the context was Trump--as is his style (i.e., Crooked Hillary, Little Marco)--trying to demean an opponent. It was not intended to open serious negotiations about a dangerous global issue; it was intended to provoke an unstable immature man with awesome powers. So far--and lucky for the world--Kim Jong-un is so much like Trump that he responded in kind…not with a missile launch but with an ad hominem attack of his own. He called Trump a dotard. 
Such childish attacks are not limited to world leaders of course. Internet discourse is rampant with such attacks…right-wingers routinely dismiss lefties as “Libtards”; the lefty rejoinder of choice these days seems to be “Nazi”, which isn’t really an ad hominem attack on those who self-identify as Nazis, but is so for those who claim to merely be making a “free speech” case for racial supremacy, unaccountable law enforcement, and eliminating health care for millions of Americans.
Which brings us to the infamous and always dangerous (rhetorically dangerous anyway) Slippery Slope …the logical fallacy wherein it is argued that if one desirable thing does or does not happen it will lead to many related things that are undesirable. The example du jour is this one from Senator Lindsay Graham, Republican of South Carolina advancing his new health care bill, which will in fact eliminate health care for millions of Americans. Graham is is taking a wild ride down the slippery slope in defending his bill: "Here's the choice for America: socialism or federalism," Graham said. He warned that his ObamaCare repeal bill is "the only process available to stop a march toward socialism."
Anti-government Republicans have invoked the scare tactic of imminent socialism for decades. They used it when Social Security was introduced. They used it when Medicare was introduced. They’ve used it throughout their 8-year feckless war against Obamacare. How does the fallacy maintain any credibility after such policy initiatives have become such key threads of our social fabric? You’d have to ask the very stupid woman (ad hominem alert) who famously warned Democrats during the Obamacare debate to keep the government’s hands off her Medicare. Much of the success of logical fallacies relies on the gullibility or sheer ignorance of the target audience.
Oh, wait, add emotion and/or sentimentality to gullibility and ignorance as we consider the logical fallacy known as  Appeal to Emotion . Tom Price who, as a Georgia Congressman, lectured Washington loud and long about its wasteful ways has recently been caught in a scandal where he's been caught running up a $300,000 tab for taxpayers by flying in private planes since he was named Secretary of Health and Human Services. (That includes $25,000 for a flight from Washington DC to Philadelphia, a 2 ½ hour card ride). In his defense, Price’s office said these costs were necessary for him to stay in touch with “real Americans”. There are some “real Americans”, of course, who will buy such blatant bullshit even if they never stepped foot on a private plane themselves or attended the Aspen Ideals Festival with Price and a horde of elites. If they didn’t exist in vast numbers, we wouldn’t have had millions of them buy into the emotional appeal to Make America Great Again even though the appeal came from a certified Con Man and self admitted fraud. 

There is increasing evidence that a good part of our electorate and Facebook "friends" were bamboozled by an all-out assault by Russian agents seeking to interfere with and influence our politics. So it seems incumbent upon us to alert ourselves to the insidious impact of logical fallacies as it once was for us to duck and cover to protect ourselves from the impact of  nuclear attack. With that as a civic duty, The Nobby Works will be delving into the range of logical fallacies in posts to come. Bring the kids.

Dates with Death

I’m always on the lookout for songs, or art, or TV and movies that will help illustrate or enhance one’s understanding of Norman O. Brown’s Love’s Body , the bible of this blog. Last night we watched one of the best...right up my alley…The Brand New Testament, a Belgium/French production…so, yes, subtitles. But for the effort of reading them, you’ll be richly rewarded by, among other things, a half eaten fish singing La Mer to a dying transgender boy, an assassin who falls in love with one of his targets, and the still gorgeous Catherine Deneuve having sex with a gorilla. More to the point of this blog post, you’ll have your imagination stirred when God’s rebellious daughter Ea breaks into His computer and releases the dates of death to everyone on earth.

That gets to one of the central tenets of Love’s Body: Nobby’s belief that we realize paradise in the here and now…not in some imagined hereafter. Brown writes that acceptance of our mortality is the first, critical step to our achieving genuine happiness in our lifetime…and overcoming our biggest sense of stress: death.

To eat and to be eaten. The grain must be ground, the wine pressed; the bread must be broken. The true body is a body broken. [QuotingYeats] “Nothing can be sole or whole/That has not been rent.” To be is to be vulnerable. The defense mechanisms, the character-armour, is to protect from life. Frailty alone is human; a broken, a ground up (contrite) heart.

The Brand New Testament is full of contrite hearts…the assassin, the sex maniac, the drone…all liberated by Ea when she informs them not just of their mortality, but the actual day and time of their deaths. Her 8 apostles ultimately embrace their frailty, and in so doing are able to change the course of human existence. As the old Jackie DeShannon song put it, “And the world will be a better place.” That’s this world…not some imaginary wish-for world in the sky. The Brand New Testament does a lot of clever and amusing things. The thing it does the best, though, is comically expose what a pernicious farce heaven is. Where we're taught to see it as a paradisiacal reunion place with departed loved ones, it's really the ultimate put-off-today-until-tomorrow excuse. Heaven is for procrastinators  

The Brand New Testament helps create a myth about making heaven on earth. It's a brand new myth about not putting that important but difficult task off until we’re dead, when it's too late. That's a poignant message at a time when our planet is howling in pain at the hurt we've done to it. No matter what the holy men who are invested in a heaven tell us (like land speculators invested in Florida real estate), heaven is a distraction from the Biblical injunction that we take care of the earth...of our here and now. 

Small Kraft Warning!

Okay, I admit it…Bob Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots, has somewhat become my personal whipping boy. I use him as a proxy for all the Trump supporters in my life...family, friends, neighbors...who are too near or dear to be direct targets of my growing contempt for the most contemptible American who ever lived (all ye, all ye in free, Benedict Arnold, John Wayne Gacy and Dick Cheney). Because Kraft actually delivered the Patriots as an absolute, ongoing delight into my life, I've always held him in affectionate regard. So I take his support of Trump personally...and his dispensing of MAGA hats in his team locker room made him Patient Zero in the pustulate epidemic that would sweep the country. But since Kraft neatly fits the profile of the bête noireof our time--the rich, powerful, white man—I can attack him with impunity.  Since we will probably never meet, he’s an easier target than some benighted cousin or politically illiterate high school classmate on Facebook.
I thought I'd let up on him after enlisting his sainted, late wife Myra to shame him into shape in a previous post, but lots has happened since…that does not bode well for the soul of Robert Kraft. Shortly after the unforced error of bestowing one of the rings he bought for his Super Bowl winning team on Trump, Kraft watched as this certified scam artist immediately set about making a mockery of the Patriots’ “do your job” ethos. He tap danced around denouncing Nazis, Confederate traitors and Klansmen; then he moonwalked back the denunciation while embracing their warped idea of "our historical heritage". Marty Walsh, the mayor of Kraft’s home city, on the other (better!) hand, told the treason brigade they were not welcome there and was echoed by a mass protest of Kraft’s fellow Bostonians. 
Then the Con Man in Chief pardoned dirty Arizona cop Joe Arpaio before he ever spent a day of his 5-year sentence in jail, even though Trump had once taken out full-page newspapers ads demanding the death penalty for the Central Park Five (five black boys, natch) and later insisted they were guilty even after the courts had cleared them of the crime. He then pulled his response to the North Korean nuclear threat completely out of his ass without any input from experts; he did his typical peacock strut through hurricane ravaged Houston; and within the last few hours treated his bully base to a chum toss by throwing the fate of 80,000 dreamer kids overboard--most of them more honestly invested in this country than any of the fraudulent Trump family.
Add to all that the erosion of his support and the tightening prosecutorial net around his felonious mug--it makes for bad times for those on Team Trump. Perhaps that’s why Bob Kraft gave the Boston Globe an interview recently that was wide ranging, save one subject. No Trump questions, Kraft insisted. Could it be a sign that Kraft is finally realizing how toxic Trump is--not only for himself but for his team's brand? One would hope. But Kraft is a renowned squish, and refusing to talk about Trump may have less to do with well-earned shame and more like some Pollyanna-ish ploy to tamp down the outrage until it’s safe to invite his notorious BFF to his private box at Gillette stadium again.   
I can’t say with absolute certainty, but I would be willing to place a Vegas bet that if he succumbed to such naivety, those Boston folks who protested against the Nazis, Confederate traitors and Klansmen would gather up many of their friends for a march down Rt 1 in Foxboro that would not only stop traffic but give the Patriots an unscheduled bye-week.
In discussing Trump’s travails recently, veteran newsman Dan Rather said he didn’t know for sure how it will all come out, but he felt certain that--like Hurricane Harvey (and now Irma for the spike)--there was a storm gathering historic force off shore that would soon make landfall and wash Trumpism away.
That could be Bob Kraft's fate as well and all the others who boarded the Make America Great Again garbage scow--thinking it was a Carnival cruise--and now finding themselves stuck on the shoals of Trump.    Yeah, you read that right: Fox!


If Robert Kraft invites Donald Trump to Gillette, will you support an effort to stop traffic on Rt 1 on game day?

The Summer of My Discombobulation

Any summer in which your mom dies is not going to be a good one, but this one came with added misery. Two weeks before she died, I came down with a bad case of the hives. Poignant that. Up until my mid-20s I was a chronic hive sufferer. My mother suffered from them most all of her life and was so suffering when I told her about my first outbreak in about 50 years. She apologized for saddling me with the discomfort…such a mom thing to do…as if it was her fault. Which I actually began to wonder about when the cause of the outbreak--after such a long dormancy--remained a mystery. Not so much her fault, really, but I did wonder if mine was a psychosomatic condition my mind had developed out of sympathy with what clearly looked like my mom’s last stand against kidney failure.
My dermatologist at first thought it was scabies, but when I answered in the negative his question about the groin area, we moved on from that line of inquiry. Then he suggested that I keep a daily food journal to try and pinpoint the cause of the almost nightly outbreak. That regime led me to a few quite usual suspects, but nothing conclusive. In exasperation I took the problem to my GP, who sent me for a blood panel. Between the blood taking and getting the lab's results, mom passed. That necessitated a trip home to New England…with a carry-on full of anti-itch powders, cremes and Benedryl. When I returned home after four days of mourning, I was dealing with a rich mucus-heavy cough that came on each morning and each evening. In her last 10 days, mom had been rushed to the hospital three times with heavy liquid build-up in her lungs that had to be medically removed. Again, hyper rational person that I am, I still couldn’t help but think that somehow my body was mimicking hers.
Who the hell am I?Three days later my doctor called with results of the blood panel, which showed that I had a sensitivity to egg whites and cow’s milk. I told him I have a cappuccino every morning and an egg twice a week. He said, “Well, you might be able to get away with that, but I wouldn't try to eat any quiche.” That would be easy…I hate quiche, and not just because I'm a real man...I just hate it. But a day later I decided to push the envelope and ate an egg sandwich for breakfast. The next morning I woke up looking as I do here: 
 Not only did it look scary but it felt even scarier. I could feel my cheeks closing in on my tongue and air pipe and went into a Zen state to stop myself from a panic brought on by the thought of my own body turning on me (the dark side of Love’s Body!). I gave myself a few hours to monitor the situation before getting in the car and driving 20 minutes to the emergency room. In about an hour-and-a-half, the swelling started to recede, and 24 hours later my face returned to normal. But it was just enough of a scare to make me change my diet instantly…cold turkey…no more grilled cheeses, 4-cheese ravioli, wine and cheese…and my cappuccinos would be served strictly with coconut milk. People asked how could I turn on a dime like that. Well, that picture of my face helped of course…as did growing up Catholic. Say what you will about it, but learning to give up goodies once a year for Lent helps build discipline for such things.
Anyway, weeks rolled into months…and despite my abstinence from most things dairy, I continued to not only be plagued by nightly attacks of the hives, but the cough as well.  It was reaching the point where I was beginning to wonder if these would be permanent aspects of the rest of my life. Exasperation drove me to measures that were, for me, extreme…a cleanse and a fast. I will spare the ugly details, except to say that the immediate results appeared promising. A day after was my best day in months…the day after that was even better, and by the subsequent Saturday I felt like a brand new me. On Sunday I took that brand new me out for a day of trouble-free yard work. By dinnertime, however, I was abloom with hives again and the cough--which I was now convinced was directly related--came back deeper and nastier than ever. Further reading on the subject revealed that eggs or milk could not have been the source because they would have been cleared out of my system weeks ago. So I swam my regular laps in the pool on Monday virtually adrift on a sea of doubt and confusion. 
Then from my vantage point in the pool, I looked up and saw two swallows nests hanging under the eaves of our house (an almost identical version of them from the previous summer is featured in the video below). I quickly recalled that on Sunday I had lifted both an extension cord and a stepladder that had been covered in bird shit, and I suddenly wondered if there might be a less than usual suspect to consider.
I dried myself off, ran up to my computer and began Googling the hell out of bird mites. Interestingly enough, the first thing I read was that bird mites are most commonly the cause of scabies…which was my dermatologist’s first guess. But these clearly weren’t scabies. My symptoms, however, did align with the dirty work of another bird mite species. Lorna then called a local bird mite specialist who told her he usually gets three calls a summer to eradicate bird mites, but this summer he had already received 25 calls. He said he’d come and treat our house for $650. Even though he said he couldn’t guarantee that the mites were the source of my problem, my growing insanity made $650 sound like a devil's bargain.
Before he arrived, per his instruction, I knocked down three swallows nests hanging from our house, each hosting dozens of swallows. I told the exterminator how we had not only been overcome with birds this season as a result of the heavy winter rains, but how their behavior had been downright bizarre. It had begun with one robin constantly rap…rap…rapping at our chamber door, but soon included doves, woodpeckers, hummingbirds, finches et al. tapping at all our windows. He told us that there was a chemical farmers used that caused birds to hallucinate, and that’s what this sounded like since we have plenty of nearby farms. With that, we went away for the day and left him to do his job of saturating our house with chemicals and hoping for the best.
The next day, my hives and cough vanished as if by magic wand, and I was back to having my cappuccino with cow's milk. All this has put a dark twist on our romance about living in our very own wildlife preserve...and I’ll surely never listen to this song quite the same again. And speaking of songs…apologies to Neil Young. I created the video below as a joint homage to Alfred Hitchcock and David Lynch two years ago. Little did I know that the ominous, creepy tone would be totally appropriate for the hell to follow.