Dan Riley's Blog, page 22

Let it Breathe, Part II

Let it be…Beatles…feminine/passive…Catholic/earnest…faith/submission…And when the broken-hearted people
Living in the world agree There will be an answer, let it be For though they may be parted  There is still a chance that they will see There will be an answer, let it be
And when the night is cloudy
There is still a light that shines on me Shine on until tomorrow, let it be I wake up to the sound of music Mother Mary comes to me
Speaking words of wisdom, let it be

Let it bleed…Stones…masculine/aggressive…nihilistic/mocking…sex/violence…I was dreaming of a steel guitar engagement
When you drunk my health in scented jasmine teaBut you knifed me in my dirty filthy basementWith that jaded, faded, junky nurse oh what pleasant company, ha!...Take my arm, take my legOh baby don't you take my headHoo
Yeah, we all need someone we can bleed on
In the 1960s, traditional classroom debates spilled over into the popular culture. You didn’t need to have your head buried in Augustine/Locke or Hobbes/Nietzsche to take part in conversations on the nature of human existence. All you had to do was have the right record albums in your collection in order to turn your turntable into a roundtable. Listening to Lennon/McCartney, Jagger/Richards alone could stimulate bull sessions about the clash between Eros and Thanatos…the Greek construction of life force vs. death force. 
Without benefit of any electric guitar engagements, Norman O. Brown was a major participant in that conversation for me and many others throughout the 60s, 70s, and 80s. On the one hand, Brown sounds utterly Beatleistic with his advice that we “Admit the void; accept loss forever…Wisdom is mourning; blessed are they that mourn.” On the other hand, he is positively Rolling Stonian when he writes:

Killing is always inside the family (Oedipal). In the wisdom of primitive war, enemy blood is kindred blood; blood becomes kindred blood when shed. Whatever is killed becomes the father. Head hunting. An enemy must be killed for a boy to grow up; a head must fall.”

Unrestrained by the need to craft catchy, 3-minute songs, Brown was free to explore into the way beyond…and so he did. In his works, like Love’s Body, Brown took the pop Let it Be-Let it Bleed dialectic to challenging, rarified heights. Let it Breathe, Part 1  touched on just one aspect of this: What mythology, psychoanalyses and poetry reveal is that men--men broken hearted at separation from the mother--often struggle enormously at letting that separation just be. They strike out and back--out to prove their independence, back to prove their manhood. They live in a constant state of tension, torn between longing to be back at mother’s breast and the impulse to punish mom for what they perceive as her rejection. 
This tension then manifests itself in human social structure. This expanding man who rules a society is hardly ever at peace with himself--his identity or status. His insecurity and uncertainty about who he is puts him in constant need of proving himself and acquiring affirmation from others. Imagined feats of manhood followed by public adoration are the two beats of his life. He dances to those beats until he dies. Love’s Bodyagain:

Political society articulates itself and produces a representative; and then is ready for history; tragedy; even as the chorus, the dance group, articulates itself and produces a hero, the dying god. The chorus has a leader to the dance…the young men of the war dance have a Leading Man. More and more they differentiate him from themselves, make him their vicar…More and more they become spectators of his action. Theatrically speaking, they become an audience; religiously speaking, they become worshippers; he becomes a god. Gradually they lose a sense that the god is themselves. …The chorus identifies with the hero... in his actions they take vicarious pleasure. The hero is 'created to perform deeds which the community would like to perform but which are forbidden to it'…Vicarious satisfaction: the deed is both theirs and not theirs. On this self-contradiction, this hypocrisy, this illusion, representative institutions are based.

Think this is so much academic mumbo jumbo…so much esoteric bullshit? Think again. Think on the financial and emotional rapture that greets each periodic retelling of our national myth about a deeply troubled rich man who dresses up as a bat and goes about in darkness dispensing vigilante justice to the silent acquiescence of a self-emasculated citizenry. In the Wall Street Journal, Andrew Klavan wrote that the Batman film The Dark Knight was “a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war. … Like W, Batman sometimes has to push the boundaries of civil rights to deal with an emergency....”
Now think on the electoral and media fascination with a deeply troubled rich man who arouses crowds to a worshipful frenzy by publicly expressing politically incorrect thoughts and words they don’t dare; who boasts he could sexually assault women or shoot men in plain sight without suffering consequences; who says he can give classified information to the enemy simply because of who he is, the sole arbiter of what is right and wrong. He can do whatever he wants because he is not just the expanding man; he is the man in full…full of himself as we wish we could be. 
While the Beatles and the Stones were debating Let it Be vs. Let it Bleed, Bob Dylan, as usual, was doing them one better. He declared, “He not busy being born is busy dying.” In that one, pithy phrase he pretty much summed up much of what Brown was getting at it in his multi-layered opus Love’s Body. What it all means for us in practical terms is that when we blame the chaos, confusion...the despair and desperation of our world on such shiny, transitory things as media bias, corporate greed, political chicanery, institutional racism, systemic misogyny we are blaming the symptoms not the causes of our great, deep discontent. These sociopathies predate our current news cycle by eons and are embedded in our collective psyche. Through them we are lashing out at our inability to accept and embrace the reality of our existence…that we are here essentially to both be and bleed. Until we come to terms with that reality, we are doomed to act crazy. 

Let it Breathe, Part 1

 Woman as nurturing mother...
the late Myra Kraft helping to feed women in need. 

When I find myself in times of trouble Brother Nobby comes to me Speaking words of wisdom Let it breathe…
Indeed. As I have done often throughout my life, when I find myself waking up to disruption and chaos, I turn to the blog’s namesake and sage, Norman O. Brown. Nobby studied the world of human dreams as they manifest themselves in mythology, poetry and psychoanalysis. His reach was deep and complex, thus he would have no place in our world of pundits and talking heads. He wasn’t at all interested in whatever was passing for “breaking news” on any given day. He was only interested in the stories of our collective subconscious…or unconscious…those stories that actually create the veil we call breaking news. So whenever things get crazy as they are, I go back to Nobby to reassure myself that the craziness didn’t just come about on November 8, 2016. It has ancient roots in our species. If I have one major, overriding frustration with my friends on the political left, it is their obsession with making all things literal, thus dismissing the power of metaphor and myth to explain things that predate by eons the wit of Charles Pierce, the wisdom of Bill Moyers, the wonkiness of Nate Silver. Readers should take this as sort of a surgeon general’s warning that reading this blog for the next two weeks could be harmful to your comfort and comprehension level if you’re unwilling to accept that things can and do happen beneath the surface of our day-to-day existence. So let it breathe…
In the chapter "Nature", in Love’s Body, Nobby writes:

Who is my real mother? It is a political question…The fraternity is itself the mother. “The journey of initiation is ended. It goes from the mothers to the mothers. Although in reality the young man is henceforth to be separated from the mother, symbolically he is brought back to her…The young man is put into a hole and reborn--this time under the auspices of his male mothers.” Male mothers; or vaginal fathers: when the initiating elders tell the boys” we two are friends”, they show them their subincised penis, artificial vagina, or “penis womb.” The fathers telling the sons, “leave your mother and love us, because we too, have a vagina.” Dionysius, the god of eternal youth, and of secret societies was the twice born: Zeus destroyed his earthly mother by fire, caught the baby to his thigh, saying: “Come enter this my male womb.”…Male mothers; "shield bearing nurses", the political authorities...From the mothers to the mothers. The transition from matriarchy to patriarchy is always with us, and gets us nowhere.

Okay, I admit, that’s a load…a mother lode as it were. Let me try to ground it in some of that surface reality of ours.
First off, in 2014 Josh Miller, a member of the Arkansas Legislature, captured unwanted attention when he helped lead the drive against Medicaid expansion for his state. The fact that he was a Republican made this unremarkable; what made it remarkable was that he was confined to a wheelchair since a car accident involving alcohol left him paralyzed…and because he was uninsured it fell to Medicare and Medicaid to pay more than $1 million for his rebab.  
Second, as the Republican House of Representatives recently cobbled together a health bill that would get A Win! for their frat house rather than improve the nation’s health, one of the nastier pieces of their package was a limitation on maternity coverage. Charles Krauthammer, a leading intellectual of the American Right, made the case thusly:

Even more significant would be stripping out the heavy-handed Obamacare coverage mandate that dictates what specific medical benefits must be included in every insurance policy in the country, regardless of the purchaser’s desires or needs. Best to mandate nothing. Let the customer decide. A 60-year-old couple doesn’t need maternity coverage. Why should they be forced to pay for it? And I don’t know about you, but I don’t need lactation services.

Jonathan Chait, writing in New York Magazine, showed no intellectual mercy in going after Krauthammer who, like Miller, is also confined to a wheelchair:

It is callous enough that Republicans apply their every-man-for-himself logic to health care, and land on the belief that those fortunate enough to be blessed with good health should not be burdened with the cost of paying for the medical needs of others. But when the advocate of this argument himself has expensive medical needs, the callousness rises to a level of solipsistic barbarism. A paraplegic man resents having to pay for women who need help breastfeeding their babies. Why should those women have to buy insurance that covers wheelchairs?

It is completely understandable if someone wants to dismiss the actions of Miller and Krauthammer as garden-variety hypocrisy...and given Krauthammer’s gratuitous swipe at lactation perhaps a charge of misogyny is due as well. But I didn’t drag Norman O. Brown into this discussion simply to make an observation even Joe Scarborough could make. I think there’s something more at work here. In the closing days of the 2016 Presidential Campaign when the apparent misogyny reached what Freud might have termed hysterical levels, I started to wonder if what we were witnessing was less base hatred of women, and rather more complex fear of female elements. There seemed to be a growing fear of such feminine characteristics as empathy and nurturing becoming manifest in the nation's identity, perhaps trickling down on the children and robbing the country of its manliness. 
In short, I think there may be a direct line between contemporary partisan obsessions with creation of “a nanny state" and transgender bathrooms and the ancient pull of fraternity. Men, like Miller and Krauthammer, strike out against compassion because they perceive it as a woman thing. Having been rendered forever vulnerable by fate, they need to prove their manhood every day to the fraternity. Though not cursed to pass an initiation rite as often, those not physically disabled, nonetheless, have to prove themselves worthy of the fraternity regularly by denouncing, demeaning, and denying the essential feminine side of human existence.
Take for example, Robert Kraft, owner of The New England Patriots, long-time friend and notable supporter of Donald Trump. In a recent interview, Bloomberg Newsasked Kraft to describe his relationship with Trump and here’s part of how he answered:

… when my wife, bless her memory, died of ovarian cancer [Trump] flew up to the funeral with Melania. They came to my home. And he called me once a week for a year and invited me to things. That was the darkest period of my life. And I’m a pretty strong person. But my kids thought I was going to die. There were five or six people who were great to me. He was one of them.Loyalty and friendship and relationships trump politics for me…I really believe that he wants to make this country better. And he’s grown in the job. I’ve seen it, too. For me, it’s like having a high school buddy or a fraternity brother become president. It’s weird in a way, but it’s cool.

Kraft, here, is like Norman O. Brown’s initiate emerging from the hole ("the darkest period of my life") into the waiting arms of Trump...the fraternity. It’s cool! 
But here’s the cost that is totally lost on Kraft and so many like him. To be cool (as opposed to warm and loving), it means turning your back on mother…on wife…on daughter, sister, grandma…those nurturing influences on our lives and our culture. Kraft’s wife Myra was renowned as a nurturing, socially conscious public figure. We could fairly well assume she would have been appalled by a national health bill that went out of its way to punish women (not to mention policies that demonized immigrants). What men like Robert Kraft who claim “loyalty and friendship and relationships trump politics” are really saying is this: “Who is my real mother? It is a political question…The fraternity is itself my mother.” 
  

The Dishwasher: A Parable

Some many blog posts back, I told the story of how in the early days of our marriage and teaching careers, Lorna had a student teacher under her supervision who did not show much promise as a future teacher. Lorna would come home almost every day and tell me of another instance in which the young woman had failed to do her job properly or grasp essential lessons of teaching. It wasn’t until about three weeks into the training period that I met Lorna’s student teacher face-to-face and found out that she was black. Her race never entered into Lorna’s criticism of her, so that became another time when I knew I had married the right person…someone with sense enough to stick to the merits of a situation and not try to prejudice it or emotionalize it with reference to facts that had little to nothing to do with the matter at hand. The girl’s race was not her problem; her lack of attention to detail…a flaw that cuts across race, gender, religion, etc…was her problem. 
I often think of this episode whenever someone starts a story with “this black guy this” or “this old woman that” or the like. My critical faculties go on immediate alert…how important are these personal characteristic to the story I’m about to hear and will my understanding of the story be prejudiced in any way by such incidental details. This is all prelude to the story I’m about to tell. Not including myself, the characters involved are two married white guys, one Hispanic guy, and a black woman. I will not sort out who was who in the telling of this story, so as not to get in the way of the objective facts of it.
Our new GE dishwasher broke down a mere four months after we bought it. It had been doing a lousy job from the get-go anyway, but then it just stopped finishing its wash cycle and draining. I called the local appliance store where we bought it and asked to have someone come out to service it, but was told that only GE authorized technicians could work on it or we’d avoid our warranty. So I called GE's 800 number, and GE sent out a technician. He examined the washer and announced that it had been installed improperly, but GE would not allow him to reinstall it because that fell under the purview of the seller not the manufacturer. He left and I called the appliance store again and told them what the technician had said. The service guy from the appliance store was astonished. He said he had installed hundreds of those very machines and never had an issue with installation and didn’t believe for a minute that the installation was the problem. Nonetheless, he immediately came out to the house to examine the machine for himself. He looked under it and declared nothing wrong with the installation; then he fiddled with the door and discovered that the latch was broken. He expressed disbelief that the authorized technician didn’t even look at the door, but went straight for the improper installation explanation. He said we could call GE back and get a replacement latch under warranty or that he could order a new latch but either he or we would have to eat the cost. Since the GE technician had left no more than two hours prior, I called and reported the new development, but was told that our file had been closed and I would have to call GE customer service again to open a new one. 
So I called GE and explained what happened. I had pictures of the broken latch which I offered to send, but was told that would be impossible. The GE customer service person, however, made a point of identifying the exact part so that the technician would have it in hand upon return. That return turned out to be a full week later. When the technician showed up…not only no new latch, but it was a new tech. I asked what had happened to my specific request that the new latch be part of the next service visit and was told the only specific instruction on the call was that a new technician be sent…a request I never made or implied. There followed another examination of the dishwasher, which confirmed the broken latch, but also determined that the machine was not installed correctly, that it was too close to the ground thus causing the door to open, abort the wash cycle, and prevent proper drainage. The second technician said he would order the new latch and install it, but if we didn’t get the washer reinstalled correctly, the next latch would probably soon break again from our efforts to keep the door closed.
I called the appliance store again, and the service guy came out again, and he expressed strong doubts again about the theory of improper installation. But he reinstalled the machine at a higher level, and asked that I keep him informed of how things turned out. A few days later I did, and my first report was to inform him that even before the broken latch had been replaced the dishwasher started functioning right through its full cycle with good drainage. He accepted this news not only as a lesson learned but with good grace. 
Throughout the entire ordeal, meta-issues were playing out in the background: local business vs. giant corporation; foreign-made goods vs. American…and as I mentioned in the set up: the personal profile of the players involved. The local service guy was, as I learned over the course of his multiple visits, religious and married with children, who were home schooled by his wife. The first GE tech was Hispanic, quite curt and all business. The second GE tech was Anglo and married, personable yet professional. The customer service person was a black woman. Had race, religion, or gender been a factor in any of their behaviors through this entire episode? It is probably inescapable that they were to one degree or another, but none determinatively so.
There were far more meaningful factors at play, beginning with an anomaly that the space we had in our kitchen for a dishwasher was unique and no matter how many dishwashers our local service guy had installed prior, he really wasn’t prepared for this one. To his credit, rather than let his ego get in the way he recognized this and learned from it.
Then there was the expertise of GE’s two authorized techs. Though the first one missed the broken latch, he was right in assessing the root problem…the install position of the washer, which caused the door to keep opening, forcing us to keep closing it, resulting in the latch breaking.
The customer service rep didn’t actually overlook ordering the new latch. She did in fact, but it was not something a tech could just pick up at a warehouse. Per GE, it had to be sent directly to us, and it took 2 weeks for it arrive. Plus she was being pro active in sending out a new tech, sensing from my call that I was unhappy with the service of the first tech.
Finally, GE could’ve made us pay for replacing the new latch because our warranty clearly states that problems caused by improper installation are not covered, but it didn’t.

As maddening as the whole experience was, it could’ve been made much worse if bias, bigotry, ego, ignorance, indifference and "winning" at all costs had been involved. As maddening as it was, today on the day that House Republicans passed their cruel and cockamamie health bill, I’d settle for a country in which this was the norm.  

A Mystery Wrapped in an Enigma Smothered in Lies

March 3, 2017, when I first noticed the Russians were coming,
the Russians were coming to The Nobby Works
It was America’s old boom companion Winston Churchill who once observed that, “Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” Curiously enough I’ve been dealing with my own Russian mystery here at the Nob for much of the year, as illustrated in the graphic above. That is a screen grab for the readership of The Nobby Works. I’ve always taken mild satisfaction that The Nob draws readers from around the world, regardless of how minimal. The notion that a kangaroo wrangler in Australia or an urban sophisticate in Kraków is reading something I wrote in Vista, California, makes me tingle to be a tangible part of the global village. But the sudden burst of numbers from Russia turns my tingle into a bit of chill. Why the sudden appearance of Russians in such inordinate numbers? Italy I could understand given how much time the blog dotes on my ancestral land, but the most attention I ever paid to Russia was here, for fictional purposes a very long time ago.   


The occurrence of this odd data caused me to undertake some actual journalism. I began with the not so crazy theory that this was some kind of fallout from the elusive Trump/Russia connection. Since I came back on the grid after my post-election shutdown, I have been writing pretty much nonstop about Trump…avoidance of which was why I wanted off the grid in the first place. I knew that public reality was going to be dominated by this King of Fools, making it impossible to write about most anything without constant, painful reference to he who started the joke that set the whole world crying. On a cursory review of the Google analytics, the out-of-nowhere Russian interest in The Nob seemed to correspond to the blog's references to Trump. So, like a good scientist or competent journalist (though ever so rare blogger), I decided to test my theory. I would write totally Trump-free blog posts interspersed with Trump-centric ones. Thus, if you look over the history of The Nob for the past few months, you’ll see a post on House Hunters International followed by two on Trump’s taxes followed by one on UCONN Women’s basketball coach Geno Auriemma. Below are readership data over that time period.  
Two days after this post about the shock of Trump's electoral win:
March 10 March 11
























After the House Hunters International post:



March 22

The day of the Geno Auriemma post, but just days after this post on Trump's taxes:

April 6



After the Geno's Smile post:
April 10
Now, am I going to claim that this is part of Russia's hacking of the US election, and that The Nobby Works, as a pro-Hillary site, is in Putin's crosshairs as he goes about cleaning up unfinished business? Well, not exactly. Though my science on this is not as thorough and complete as I would like, I think there are a few safe assumptions we can make. One is that Russia, like the US (China, Great Britain and Jamaica for all we know) has an intense, irresistible interest in what's going on in other countries and will employ every cyber means at its disposal  to satisfy that interest. Two is that Russia--like the US, etc.--probably has a long list of hot button words and phrases that through global scanning instantly attract various hackers, spooks, and national security drones...chief among those words is Trump. Three is that most of the visitations to myriad worldwide websites have all the diligence and endurance of a hummingbird flitting through a flower garden. Google analytics tells me, for instance, that many of these pageviews last no more than 3 seconds, hardly enough time to build an incriminating dossier against me or anyone else. 
All this contextualizing, however, does not diminish the distinct and disturbing possibility that the Russians played a significant role in deciding the election of 2016 in Donald Trump's favor. His most recent refusal to cooperate with Congress in its investigation into his former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn's Russian connections is only one more sign (along with his hidden tax returns, praise of Putin, and shady past Russian deals) that he is pulling something over on most of the American people. 
Whether those in Congress charged with protecting the American people from having their democracy hijacked by a hostile foreign power remains--unbelievably--to be seen. Part of this is due to the partisan cord Congress has tied around its neck in a bizarre act of Constitutional autoerotic asphyxiation. Part is due to Trump's loyal (if lunatic) legions, ready, as he predicted, to stand with him whether he shoots someone in broad daylight on 5th Avenue or sells the country out to its enemies. This is perhaps the severest...and probably the last...test we'll face as a nation of whether we move fitfully forward as a free people or succumb to the corrupt, ignorant, narcissistic charm of a two-bit authoritarian. 
Did you get that, Russia? 

   

Man Against Nature

A couple of nights ago I was awakened at 3 a.m. by a spider bite smack between my shoulder blades. I knew it was a spider bite because I’ve had plenty of them before and had to endure their sharp itch sometimes for weeks. Every time it happens, I tell myself this is the price I pay for living in paradise where the wild things definitely are…in creepy abundance…spiders, lizards, snakes. Having grown up in a Connecticut suburb my experience with wildlife was limited to squirrels, and oftentimes they carried themselves with such insouciance you’d think they owned the place. 
Nonetheless my transfiguration into Mother Nature’s Son has not been without some howling moments. A lizard crawling across my body while I’m napping on the pergola is always certain to get a rise out of me. And then there are days like the few most recent that have me checking out the cost of high rises in LA (although it should be noted that it's still the only major city in the US where mountain lions are not uncommon). The spider encounter came the night after I ran into the reptilian monster pictured above on my way to put out the garbage. This is the fourth rattler I’ve run into in putting out the garbage, which means I've now met as many snakes as neighbors during trash pick up. As I’ve written before,  I have a non-aggression pact with rattlesnakes. So despite having a sharp, long-handled tool in my hand at the time, I opted for recording the snake on my iPhone as it made its way across the driveway from one half of Lorna’s succulent garden to the other half. (Concerned husband that I am, I made a note to warn her about it when I got back to the house so she would be on alert next time she knelt down to weed.)
Anyway, then I got bit in the wee hours by a wee terrorist, and in my consequent near delirium I had a dream that someone very near and dear to me had been brutally murdered. The rest of the dream consisted of my panicky, fruitless hunt to find the killer until the itching of the bite sent me running to the medicine cabinet for relief. The dark theme for the hours to follow, however, had been set.
Later that morning I set about replacing the bamboo shade that we often lower to protect our lunchtimes from the midday sun. The last time we used it, it jammed and would no longer go up and down, so I had to tie it up in place, creating a bamboo tunnel for unwary creatures. Tragically when I went to take it down, a birds’ nest fell out. One of the four eggs in it fell to the concrete and smashed. The other three balanced precariously on a thin length of bamboo. I managed to get two of them back in the nest, and tucked the nest into what I believed to be a safe place. The first egg I touched, however, splattered between my indelicate fingers, and I quickly washed the yuk away...which was a good thing because when I looked down at the one that hit the concrete it wasn’t just egg yoke lying there, but a tiny, flattened bird fetus. It was a pretty sobering sight…so sobering that it immediately got me thinking about abortions. I thought about the effort of anti-abortion activists to force women to look at pictures of fetuses before they have an abortion. It’s another bad one on us and our hopelessly partisan divide since allowing a woman to willingly look at such pictures in a wholly medical atmosphere without moral or political terror tactics would seem a normal part of being a fully informed patient. That sobering thought notwithstanding, I would still not back a Constitutional amendment to ban bird hunting...or omelets.   
The morning got more sobering when the mother bird returned to find her home and her babies gone. I was just sitting there reading the directions for the new shade when I saw her flitting about in a panic. She perched here. She perched there. She looked around and down. She tweeted, shook her head, flapped her wings. Her behavior put me in mind of a Syrian mom coming home to her bombed-out home looking about desperately for her children. Soon she was joined by the male…the communication between them could not have been clearer with subtitles. Yet, I could not communicate to them where to find their relocated nested eggs, so I watched helplessly as they both flew around and about the pergola and deck above as madly and hopelessly as I had searched for that killer in my dream.
At mid-afternoon I was taking the box for the new shade down to the garbage and who…or what…should I come upon but the rattler from the previous day. (How can I be sure it was the same snake? Look at it in the video and you tell me…it’s part python! Please note: the sound of the rattle in the video was made when the snake was in its defensive posture. Because I did not get good video of it, I added it to a portion where the snake is merely crawling.) 
Well I wanted to honor my non-aggression pact but now the snake was two-thirds of the way up our very long driveway and heading toward the house. Still, I’m curious about its intentions, so I take out my iPhone again and start recording until it starts heading toward our front door. Suddenly, I’m not feeling so benign. It’s one thing to be all live and let live while the thing is slithering around bush and succulents, but our front door is is what the national security folks call the homeland and I sense a serious call to defend it. So I get a long pool pole with a long brush on the end to redirect the snake without harming it. As I’m doing this, I’m starting to wonder on a grand philosophical level why I’m so averse to killing it? It’s certainly not religious belief. Last summer I trapped and killed 30 mice…almost one a day...without a tear or second thought. Why can I kill rodents but not reptiles? Can it be, as I’ve written, that I so accept the rattler as the muse for my play Spinelli that I'm forever linked to it? Yes, it can. 
Anyway, non-lethal brush or not, this snake was not at all happy to have me push it around. It went into its defensive curl and started rattling like a crazy man. That got the two of us into a Mexican stand-off for almost an hour. I didn’t want to leave until I saw it heading back down the hill where it belonged; it was not going to stop rattling and go home until I backed off with my pool pole. By 7 p.m., Lorna was calling me in to watch Better Call Saul. With no such distractions in its life, the rattlesnake won the standoff. 

But as Man the Creator, I determined to make something of the day’s terror, blood, and murder. Once gain I appropriated the rattler as my muse and set out to write about it. As I often do before I write, I took my thoughts and recollections out on the surrounding hill trails in order to fashion them into a scintillating blog post that might cast new light on the relationship between Man and Nature. I was half way on my walk and deep in thought about snakes and things when just like that…that simultaneous sound and motion--like a lawn sprinkler whipping into furious action. It was a totally other rattler warning me off the trail. I turned quickly and tripped over my feet and fell to the ground. This was the third time an encounter with a rattlesnake had caused me to fall on my ass. I scrambled far enough away to safely pull out my iPhone and yes, record yet again. As I did, I thanked God for the grand idea of cursing snakes to crawl on the ground. If snakes had legs, I’d have been lunch long ago.  
However, I did not escape without injury. In the fall I pulled a muscle, which caused me to limp home with serious trepidation. Every fallen twig or branch...every rounded rock...every patch of high grass held the potential for coming to life with a terrifying rattle. When I finally got home, saturated with the sweat of fear, I sat down at the pergola and stared up at the deck. There stood the male bird who had lost his offspring in the great bamboo shade catastrophe. Moments later, the female arrived bearing a large twig, clearly for the building of a new nest. The male tried to mount her, but she shook him off and they flew away together, leaving me with a new surge of guilt, a limp, and a painful itch between my shoulder blades. In this skirmish in the ongoing battle between man and nature, the score stood Nature 3, Man 0. But I take anthropocentric pride in the fact that we have a President in the White House who is out to even the score...who is out to put nature in its place...who is going to grab Mother Nature by her pussy and show her who's boss. 
Unless we stop him. 

Resurrection

On the inside looking out...once upon a time.

Through dumb luck or inordinate cunning, the bird pictured above made its way into our house back in October, 2016, and made itself at home until I opened all the doors and shooed it out. Since then, the bird has been--as you can see in the video below-- beating its head against the window to get back in. If there is an ornithologist in the readership who wants to conduct forensics to prove that the bird in the picture and the one in video are not the same bird, be my guest. But I’m claiming this bird for metaphorical purposes, so if you can prove it’s not one and the same bird, I’ll invoke my poetic license and overrule your science. 
The bird is my metaphor for Democrats, liberals, progressives…even political moderates…any and all of those who were once comfortably on the inside looking out until November 9, 2016, never realizing that the day would come when they would have to fight all over again for basic things they’d come to take for granted--namely the fair and orderly functioning of their government and the sane and civil conduct of their society. With the election of Donald J. Trump as president, all that has been thrown into history’s dumpster. The thin veil of orderly government was shred entirely when the Republican majority bullied its way to holding up for almost a year a legitimate Obama nominee for the Supreme Court under blatantly false pretenses until they could ram through their own man. The rapidly deteriorating civility of our society collapsed definitively before our eyes on board a United Airlines flight out of Chicago when company thugs--not unlike those who beat up striking union workers in the 1930s--brutalized a paying customer; then a complicit media rushed in to pile on the victim with sordid details from his past. The nation has been building to this state of Manifest Insanity for years, but still those with any sense of patriotism and civic responsibility look on in horror.  
If you cannot see the connection between Trump’s ascendency and this final dissolution of our country, you are a person who is unbothered by his boast that women like to have him grab their pussies; his promise that he would release his tax returns if he ran for president; his lies about the size of his crowds, his standings in the polls, and myriad other petty matters; his 3 a.m. PRESIDENTIAL tweeting about TV ratings, celebrity behavior, and slights to his ego; his routine betrayals of his campaign promises; his outsourcing of foreign policy to his clothing designer daughter and her hedge fund manager husband; and his stunning, constant displays of ignorance…like recalling the cake he was eating when he told China’s president he was bombing a foreign country, but could not remember the name of the country. If this is you--unbothered, unfazed, unconcerned over the behavior of this very unstable, unfit man…you are that very person he had in mind when he claimed he could shoot someone on 5thAvenue and you’d remain loyal. You are a sucker and an enabler of the damage he’s doing on an almost hourly basis.  
If on the other (better) hand, you are aware of how dire our straits are, you best be in for the long, tough fight. Do not be sitting back wishing and hoping that someone is going to fight the fight for you (or, just as bad, giving purity tests to those who want to be your ally in the fight). Such entitled thinking is what got us into this mess. On April 15, I will be participating in my second protest march against Trump since he became president. If I was protesting his broken promise not to play golf because he would be too busy "making America great again", this would be my 17th march because that’s how many times he’s played golf rather than tending to "the mess" he maintains he inherited (Good, God, even if we get rid of him, cleaning up the bullshit he is leaving behind will take an EPA clean-up Superfund in the billions).
Protest marches are not the be-all and end-all of political action. I don’t think anyone who will be marching this weekend believes that taking to the streets will force Trump, at long last, to release his tax returns. All it can do is demonstrate that a mass of people does care about the issue so that politicians and the media do not let it go.  Of course, sometimes they hit the ignore button anyway, as they did during the grossly under-reported Iraq War protests at great human and financial cost to the nation. Sometimes they ignore the polls, the phone calls to Congress, the letters to the editors. It’s never been easier or more rewarding to ignore public opinion than it is now, as demonstrated by the heist of the Obama appointment to the Supreme Court in broad daylight. It can have the wearying, frustrating effect of making protestors feel like that bird in the video above…crashing our heads in a vain attempt to enter a room we may never know again.
But there’s another metaphor for the protestors, one apropos of the season and more uplifting. It’s the metaphor of the man who was as dead and buried as our democracy now seems, but on the third day he rolled away the rock to his tomb and re-ascended to the perch where he belonged.  We should make no mistake about it--resurrecting our country is going to take as much faith as hard work.     


H/T to Kim Casey for the link to the
ever-good John Fugelsang 

Geno's Smile

Geno Auriemma with his Italian immigrant family..no smiles!
A Nobby post about Geno Auriemma, coach of the University of Connecticut women's basketball team, had been in the works for weeks, ever since Geno flashed his family picture (shown above) in the middle of HBO's excellent documentary series on his team, March to Madness. I laughed at the moment Geno showed the picture and explained, "This would be a typical Italian picture, Okay? Mostly dark clothes. Anybody caught smiling gets shot on sight. So there's no Cheese. None of that. They took a picture and you smiled, 'That's it. We're taking it over again. All right. Look like you're miserable.'"

Some of the Reale family from Naro, ItalyI laughed because I so recognize that aversion to smiling from my own Italian background, as witness in this similar picture, one of hundreds in the family archive wherein smiles are as rare as tow-heads. It's hard to tell what the root of this darkness is, especially when you consider that all these dour faces come from a land often referred to as "sunny Italy" and that the English and Germans have flocked there for centuries to escape their native gloom. 

Given it's long, complicated history there are probably some intriguing explanations of how Italians...certainly southern Italians...came to parcel their smiles out like precious truffles. In her memoir about how she came to adopt Sicily as her home, American Mary Taylor Simeti describes her first trip there alone, on a college graduation gift from her mother. Onboard the train that would take her from the mainland to deep into the island was a dark, mysterious man in sunglasses who not only didn't smile, but extended neither word nor gesture of comfort throughout the over long trip, which got her to her final destination in the dead of night and too late for local transport. Seeing her all alone, the man offered to drive her the great distance to her accommodations...after he informed his mother, he said. That last bit helped her overcome her anxiety about accepting a ride from a stranger. Twenty years later, when she wrote the introduction to her book, Persephone's Island, she said of this man: "the nameless Sicilian whose chivalrous gesture was my introduction to the strong, impulsive soul of Sicily, a soul that reaches across and beyond all that is distressing here and, like the island sun, warms and illumines even as it creates dark shadows." 

Anyway, this was going to be a post about smiles...the use and abuse of smiles--the commercial smile to sell, the phony smile to deceive, the forced smile to overcome humiliation. It was going to be a rumination on the rule that says we must smile whenever we look into a camera, which seems to undermine the camera's original intent to capture us in real moments of our lives rather than poses for pretense and exhibition. 

And then Geno's team stunningly lost its Final Four game at the buzzer in overtime to a Mississippi State team that it had beaten by 60 points the last time they met. Not only did it turn the college basketball world on its head, but it provided me a golden opportunity to link the subjects of sport and smile. 

Here's how The Hartford Courant's began its coverage of the upset:  

He smiled. When one of the greatest winning streaks in the history of sports and one of the greatest games in the history of women's basketball had ended, Geno Auriemma smiled. 

And here's how The Courant's story ended: 

So the team with no All-Americans shocked all of America by jamming the great machine, the beautiful machine. And then Itty Bitty rose up to slay the giant. Geno could only smile.

Geno's smile was the story. And it wasn't the story just because this was a guy raised in a culture where smiles were discouraged. It wasn't just a story because it belied the image of him as a gruff, hard-driving martinet of impressionable young women. It was a story because it was a sunny rejection of the worst pathologies in American society--that winning is the only thing and greed is good. Geno didn't smile because he was "tired of so much winning". He smiled because he knew winning isn't everything...and the most important thing it is not is the invaluable lesson that loss is inevitable. 
Geno reflecting on the loss at the close of HBO's March to Madness

April Fools

A slightly different approach to The Nob this week because the issue at hand is elemental to the current state of the union, and I don't want to muck up explication of it with a lot of my own verbiage when there's so much already available from others that clearly explains things if we simply connect the links. So allow me to provide the links:

Aside from the 40-year tradition of Presidential candidates voluntarily releasing their tax returns, did Trump ever say he would release his?  Yes, in fact he said he would "love to" release his returns.Did Trump ever say in public before millions that he would be "smart" not to pay taxes and then deny he said that? Yes, and his denial came within an hour of his public boast. Do people care about Trump's tax returns? Despite his claim that only reporters care, most Americans do care.  Should Americans care about Trump's tax returns? Yes, Yes and HELL YES!What is Congress doing about serving the will of the people? Nothing.What can the people do about it? March!*

* Marches to demand Trump tax returns taking place nationwide on tax day April 15. If we have to show him ours, he has to show us his. 

Revenge of the Rubes

Bamboozlement is as old as recorded history. In one of the earliest works in Western literature from the 8th century BC, The Iliadincludes the story of the Trojan horse in which gullible citizens of ancient Troy accepted the gift of a large wooden horse left outside their city gate by what they believed to be their retreating Greek enemies. They did this despite the warnings of fellow citizen and prophetess Cassandra who had been cursed by the gods to never have her prophecies believed. Of course as every educated person knew back in the day when education covered such classics, the horse was the hiding place for a division of Greek soldiers who snuck out at night after the Trojans had partied themselves into a drunken stupor and opened the gates for their comrades to march into the city and slaughter the Trojans.
Make the city gates stand in for a wall along the southern border of the US; make Cassandra stand in for experts in science, national security, and public policy (including an unnamed former Presidential candidate whose ashes at the stake are all that remain); make the Trojans stand in for yahoos in Make America Great Again hats; and the hidden Greeks stand in for any number of threats to the nation…from Ebola to Putin and kleptocracy to authoritarianism…and you have the perfect metaphor for our time.
Con artists are practically stock figures in our culture…often villainous as depicted in the TV series American Greed; sometimes just dangerous rascals like Mark Twain’s King and Duke in Huckleberry Finn; occasionally lovable rascals who actually end up delivering the goods despite their fraudulence, such as The Wizard of Oz, The Music Man, and Burt Lancaster’s glorious Starbuck in The Rainmaker. Rarely does our art, entertainment or journalism focus on the crucial second leading actor in any con—"the mark". No matter how good the con artist, the success of the con is always dependent upon the willingness of the mark. Not only must the mark be a willing participant, but a wishful one as well…the mark must want the con artist to succeed because the mark has bought the promise of the con before investing a dime (or a vote) in the fraud to come.
Bob Dylan’s Ballad of the Thin Man is one of those rare cultural works that takes the mark to task for his own bamboozlement.   Well, the sword swallower, he comes up to youAnd then he kneelsHe crosses himselfAnd then he clicks his high heelsAnd without further noticeHe asks you how it feelsAnd he says, “Here is your throat backThanks for the loan”
You swallowed the act. The con artist never has to do the real work; he just has to play on the mark’s credulousness and the mark will do the rest of the work for him. In 2011 Donald Trump essentially launched his bid for The White House by attacking Barack Obama’s legitimacy to be President by demanding to see his birth certificate. Trump claimed to have sent private investigators to Hawaii to dig in to Obama’s birth and went on TV to engage in the following exchange with Meredith Vieira: DONALD TRUMP:Well, I have people that actually have been studying it and they cannot believe what they’re talking.MEREDITH VIEIRA: You have people now out there searching– I mean, in Hawaii? DONALD TRUMP:Absolutely. And they cannot believe what they’re finding. And I’m serious—
It was a con from the start, ultimately proven a transparent one when Trump never revealed an iota of his so called unbelievable information. In Trump's typical scatter gun style, he then started demanding that Obama release his college records to reveal whether he had gotten special treatment in his advancement through some of America’s top schools. Meanwhile, Trump's own university was being investigated by journalists and state prosecutors and exposed through witness testimony as a scam operation.  
When it came time for him, like all presidential candidates stretching back 40 years, to release his tax returns for public examination, he claimed he couldn’t because he was being audited. IRS officials said there was nothing about an audit that prevented him from releasing the returns, but the con was on. On April 15, every American wage-earning adult will be required to show Donald Trump their tax returns, yet this mountebank who serves at their pleasure reserves the right to keep his returns secret amidst strong suggestions that they contain evidence of fraud, tax evasion, and collusion with our foreign enemies.
It is all part of a piece. It is the act of the boldest con man who ever walked across the world stage…who had the audacity to announce that he could shoot somebody on 5th Avenue and his followers would still stay loyal to him. And then he ran a campaign for President that went right up to the edge of calling for murder and got away with it all the way to The White House.
There are signs that the con is finally unraveling, here:

Seventy-three percent of voters said Trump and his administration made statements without supporting evidence "very often" or "somewhat often."Voters also showed increasing doubt in Trump's honesty and leadership. Sixty percent of respondents thought Trump was dishonest, compared with 55% in the March 7 poll, and 57% thought he didn't care about average Americans.

And here:

According to Quinnipiac’s nationwide survey conducted March 16–21, some 60 percent of Americans think the president is not honest and does not share their values; 66 percent believe he is not level-headed; and 57 percent say President Trump does not share their values.

Too late, of course. The vengeful Greeks are running wild within the walls of the city; the delirious Trojans who toasted victory before it was secure are helpless and hopeless; and the Cassandra who was right to warn about Trump’s manifest unfitness for high office and was wrongly rendered unbelievable by the gods in the media has been silenced. 

There has been a lot of discussion since November 9, 2016, about how a free people could do this to themselves…elevate a transparent con man to the highest position of leadership. The most charitable explanations have revolved around how his most loyal supporters were the victims of hard, uncertain times and were desperate for a savior. There have been harsher charges of bigotry, misogyny, and nativism run amuck. There are elements of truth in both, I guess. But in the end I think it gets back to the oldest of human inclinations—in our never-ending lust for simple answers, we’re always willing to play the fool. Some of us anyway…the rest of us end up paying the price for their foolishness.  

White Privilege International

"Our" beach on exquisite Loreto Bay

Whenever it looks like the country is going south, we tend to start looking south for an escape…south, west, maybe even east, but never north (sorry, Canada, cannot take the cold). These days our attention is more focused than in the past because the “going” south has pretty much become the “gone” south. Anyway, Lorna and I do our window-shopping of countries to escape to through House Hunters International, the HGTV show about people, usually Americans, moving to a new country. It is no mere coincidence that we first started watching the show with purpose during the financial crisis of 2008. After all, my logic went, if you’re going to have to live in a country that’s broke better to live in one that has experience at being broke. That’s why we took some serious notes on the episode about a family from nearby Carlsbad who were seeking refuge from the tightening squeeze around their finances in Loreto, a fishing village in Baja, Mexico. (Watch a 3-minute synopsis of their journey here.)   
We did our most intent watching of shows featuring the move of US ex-pats to Mexico because of the proximity, the weather, and because the reduced cost of living was a critical part of any reasonable Plan B. Although we personally weathered the economic crash, from that point on we put House Hunters International in our DVR queue and have watched it pretty regularly over much of the decade since. I’ve come away with a few observations, which I’m happy to share here.
The first is that although cost of living in regards to food, utilities, transportation, entertainment etc. in many of these foreign locations may be lower than the US, housing is not. Without doing any hard research on the matter, it seems that retirement funds, especially from US Boomers, has driven up prices everywhere that’s even remotely desirable. I can honestly say that after watching at least 300 of these shows, we have yet to find one that offers a better home value than the one we have in San Diego County...where there are no bargains either.
The second observation is that over time the show nicely reveals the best and worst of Americans. The best are those people who want to make the move to expose their kids or themselves to a different culture. The worst are those who want to impose American culture on the place they’re moving to---the ones who whine that the kitchens, the bathrooms and bedrooms aren’t as big as the ones they’re accustomed to in the US…that the beach is a 5-minute walk rather than right outside their door…that the breathtaking view from a prospective mountaintop home comes at the cost of a longer drive to the golf course. I’m loath to use the expression “white privilege”, but sometimes it seems the show could easily be renamed White Privilege International.     
The third observation is that despite the mewling from too many Americans that they are not finding homes that perfectly replicate their American experience (and thus raises the question of why they are moving in the first place), it is interesting…or depressing, depending on your point of view…to see how far foreign developers go to appeal to American tastes. As you tour through more and more luxury apartments in the Far East, the Middle East, and South America you can clearly see the impact of globalization going out from the US rather than coming in, as homogenization to an American standard becomes the norm. You watch people with dreams of experiencing a new culture walk into homes that look like Carlsbad, California, and not only do you wonder, “why bother”…but where will it end? Is this a more insidious form of colonialism than we’ve ever seen before that will eventually conform all cultures to ours…and make even more of a joke of those Americans who fret about their country being taken over by foreigners?
Speaking of Carlsbad…years after watching that first show about the Carlsbad family moving to Loreto, Lorna and I took an anniversary trip down there to check it out first hand because it was still high on the list as a potential destination if we ever found ourselves in the position of refugees. A hurricane had blown through just two days before we arrived, which accounted for the electricity being out at the airport and our hotel. But the hurricane had only added to the misery of The Villages at Loreto Bay, the development where the Carlsbad family had moved to and featured in the video linked above. As we learned, the developers had bailed on the project as soon as the finances had turned against them, and their dream of 900 units in a self-sustaining, pedestrian-only paradise had gone…well, had gone south. 
Not so exquisite The Villages at Loreto Bay development Environmentalists had been outraged that since the proposed plan had done nothing to address garbage disposal, it put the marine-rich Loreto Bay at great risk. As we toured the grounds, we were able to walk through a few model homes that still showed off the appeal that attracted that Carlsbad family…and us. But all around small isles of habitable spaces were the remnants of an ill-laid plan—proposed parks, pharmacies, cafes, and grocery stores reduced to rubble by abandonment. At the time of our visit, Mexico was holding a fire sale to try and off-load the catastrophe to a developer who would finish the job. Because they had no electricity or water in their new homes, residents there were driving 30 minutes into town to eat at the restaurant of the hotel where we were staying, which was serving open fire-grilled food only. On their way back to The Villages at Loreto Bay they would have to stop at long gas lines that vividly recalled the 1974 oil crisis.
Not after a war or act of God; after rich guys failBut here’s the thing…that trip remains one of the best trips Lorna and I ever took. We were able to take a fishing boat out to a pristine,  sandy beach island that we had all to ourselves and enjoy what Jacques Cousteau once called the best snorkeling waters in the world.  We were lucky in many ways…circumstances had not led us to make a bad investment there…had not made us born there to be rendered victims of greedy, shortsighted developers and incompetent, corrupt government. We were tourists, not refugees running for our lives. After three days, we could hop back on a plane and return to our deal of a home in San Diego.

I really do not like the term white privilege. I find it not only racist in the way that "black crime" or "Asian cunning" is racist, but it’s counterproductive. It is more likely to confuse or anger people or put them on the defensive rather than enlighten them and motivate them toward something better. Other than being made aware of it, there’s not much anyone can do about white privilege…it's an accident of birth and you surely can’t give it away, or legislate it away. But being aware of it might be just enough to curb it. In the cause of building that awareness, I highly recommend adding House Hunters International to your viewing queue. It is a gentle yet highly instructive expose of white privilege in living color.