Dan Riley's Blog, page 27

This Time it's Primal

Id
In my rock ‘n roll teacher days I always dedicated one class to the Doors' Oedipal epic, The End… The killer awoke before dawn, he put his boots onHe took a face from the ancient galleryAnd he walked on down the hallHe went into the room where his sister lived, and...then hePaid a visit to his brother, and then heHe walked on down the hall, andAnd he came to a door...and he looked insideFather?
Yes son…
I want to kill youMother...I want to…OOOOO-AHHHH-OOOO-you*
That’s just the kind of teaching that the Texas State Board of Education would love to put an end to…the kind that supposedly does not reaffirm and reconvey our values from one generation to another, but disrupts the value system and introduces corruption and chaos into young minds. I must admit that each time I taught that class I got the distinct impression that my students were confronting corruption and chaos for the first time…at least for the first time not alone under their own sheets at night. After passing out Jim Morrison’s lyrics so they could follow along with the song, the students’ attitudes toward the discussion of Freud’s Oedipal Complex that followed ranged from tentative to outright rejection. Many of them were quite firm in their insistence that they had no desire to kill their fathers and have sex with their mothers. I did not try to convince them otherwise, nor did I believe otherwise…not in a strict, literal sense anyway. No need. Years later, most of them would grow up to become fans of Star Wars and Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones and be so enthralled by the literal or figurative acts of patricide that drive those narratives that their squeamishness in my classroom would be but a misty prelude.
I’m not a psychoanalyst and my understanding of Freud is no greater than that of your typical liberal arts major. But I love the myths and metaphors Freud provides us with for understanding human nature as much as I love the myths and metaphors that come down from the Bible…or from the Ancient Greeks. And because I put such great stock in viewing human history through our myths and metaphors, I could argue with the Texas State Board of Education that when Jim Morrison sings about killing his father, he’s echoing the human longing…at least the male human longing…to challenge the authority of the father-figure that goes back to Prometheus with the Greeks and Adam in the Bible and extends up to present day Texas and its near-psychotic yearning to secede from the Union…to kill, in a sense, the father-figure that is Uncle Sam.
Not having much of a scientific mind, I can’t really take my Freud straight up, which is why I rely on the blog’s godfather, Norman O. Brown--as much poet as scientist--to interpret the great Sigmund for me. In Life Against Death, Brown wrote:  

The ego to be sure must always mediate between external reality and the id; but the human ego, not strong enough to accept the reality of death, can perform this mediating function only on condition of developing a certain opacity protecting the organism from reality. The way the human organism protects itself from reality of living and dying is, ironically, by initiating a more active form of dying and this more active form of denying is negation. The primal act of the human ego is a negative one—not to accept reality, specifically the separation of the child’s body from the mother’s body…this negative posture blossoms into negation of the self (repression) and negation of the environment (aggression). But negation…is a dialectical or ambivalent phenomenon, containing always a distorted image of what is officially denied.

In its simplest manifestation, Brown tells us that the child sucking its thumb is the child’s attempt to maintain connection to the mother’s breast…with later substitutions of cigars and lollypops and various body parts. In its most graphic manifestation it is the substitution of money for excrement…a human’s first discovery of buried treasure…an infantile act of job creation. And then there’s the penis…always the penis. Brown calls the manner in which it lords over so much of our symbolism "genital tyranny". This from Brown’s Love’s Body:

Participation is identification with a part, the all-important part, the penis; a part isolated, abstracted, cut off, castrated…Partial participation is to steal (to be) the penis of another; but only partially not really: [quoting Freud] “She turns herself in phantasy into a man, without herself becoming active in a masculine way…” The penis still belongs to another; even as our super-ego still belongs to Daddy. The super-ego is borrowed strength; or a stolen trophy; a head cut off, a monument erected high in our house. To idealize is to idolize; to make an idol; to translate into a fixed image for contemplation; to turn into stone.

Think of it…that passage can easily serve as a summary of this election’s most heated issues--defunding Planned Parenthood; outlawing transgender bathrooms; castrating...I mean, breaking up big banks; beheadings in the desert. We can discuss this entire erection…sorry for the slip again…I mean, election in Freudian terms. In fact I’d go so far as to suggest that the primary season's most revealing moment was the infamous Trump-Rubio exchange:Trump: Little Marco!Rubio: Trump has small hands.Trump: There’s nothing wrong with my penis…behold my trophy wife…a stunning symbol and constant reminder of my phallic prowess.
It is art and religion that do the heavy lifting in reining in the id by disguising the scary reality of our existence. It is war and politics that tear away the veil. It is the height of unintended comedy that Trump quoted the salacious Al Wilson hit The Snakeduring a campaign stop. The song about a woman who takes in a forlorn snake she finds by the side of the road only to be mortally bitten by him is a thinly-veiled sexual allegory. Trump used it to warn against taking in Syrian refugees, but the story and its key line is really all about the rise of Donald Trump: Oh, shut up, silly woman, said the reptile with a grinYou knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in.
And speaking of snakes, Trump’s opponent in the election will be Hillary Clinton, descendent of Eve, first woman to fall victim to the snake’s seductions…and like Eve’s mythic forebear, Pandora, the scapegoat for all the evils that have come to befall humankind from Sodom and Gomorrah to Goldman Sachs. Over at Face the Nation and The Situation Room they will be analyzing this election as a contest between Republican and Democrat, between ultimate outsider and ultimate insider, perhaps even between Male and Female…though it’s unlikely to ever get as explicit as Freud’s most controversial duality…a face-off between Castration Complex and Penis Envy (there will be that protective veil again). Be that as it may, let’s make no mistake about it. This election will be felt by millions--at a subconscious level at least—as the ages old battle between our species id and ego…between our infantile, unrestrained lust for doing and saying whatever feels good at the moment and our adult need to impose a reality check on our most self-destructive impulses for long-term survival. 

This time it's primal. 

#thistimeitsprimal



*If you Google the lyrics today, you see that the last line reads Mother I want to fuck you, but back in the day that was not allowed so on the record Jim Morrison approximates the act with some orgiastic caterwauling which I’ve tried to duplicate here. 

The Id Stays in the Picture

Id
In my rock ‘n roll teacher days I always dedicated one class to the Doors' Oedipal epic, The End… The killer awoke before dawn, he put his boots onHe took a face from the ancient galleryAnd he walked on down the hallHe went into the room where his sister lived, and...then hePaid a visit to his brother, and then heHe walked on down the hall, andAnd he came to a door...and he looked insideFather, yes son, I want to kill youMother...I want to...AHHHH-OOOO-Fa-Fa-Fa you*
That’s just the kind of teaching that the Texas State Board of Education would love to put an end to…the kind that supposedly does not reaffirm and reconvey our values from one generation to another, but disrupts the value system and introduces corruption and chaos into young minds. I must admit that each time I taught that class I got the distinct impression that my students were confronting corruption and chaos for the first time…at least for the first time not alone under their own sheets at night. After passing out Jim Morrison’s lyrics so they could follow along with the song, the students’ attitudes toward the discussion of Freud’s Oedipal Complex that followed ranged from tentative to outright rejection. Many of them were quite firm in their insistence that they had no desire to kill their fathers and have sex with their mothers. I did not try to convince them otherwise, nor did I believe otherwise…not in a strict, literal sense anyway. No need. Years later, most of them would grow up to become fans of Star Wars and Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones and be so enthralled by the literal or figurative acts of patricide that drive those narratives that their squeamishness in my classroom would be but a misty prelude.
I’m not a psychoanalyst and my understanding of Freud is no greater than that of your typical liberal arts major. But I love the myths and metaphors Freud provides us with for understanding human nature as much as I love the myths and metaphors that come down from the Bible…or from the Ancient Greeks. And because I put such great stock in viewing human history through our myths and metaphors, I could argue with the Texas State Board of Education that when Jim Morrison sings about killing his father, he’s echoing the human longing…at least the male human longing…to challenge the authority of the father-figure that goes back to Prometheus with the Greeks and Adam in the Bible and extends up to present day Texas and its near-psychotic yearning to secede from the Union…to kill, in a sense, the father-figure that is Uncle Sam.
Not having much of a scientific mind, I can’t really take my Freud straight up, which is why I rely on the blog’s godfather, Norman O. Brown--as much poet as scientist--to interpret the great Sigmund for me. In Life Against Death, Brown wrote:  

The ego to be sure must always mediate between external reality and the id; but the human ego, not strong enough to accept the reality of death, can perform this mediating function only on condition of developing a certain opacity protecting the organism from reality. The way the human organism protects itself from reality of living and dying is, ironically, by initiating a more active form of dying and this more active form of denying is negation. The primal act of the human ego is a negative one—not to accept reality, specifically the separation of the child’s body from the mother’s body…this negative posture blossoms into negation of the self (repression) and negation of the environment (aggression). But negation…is a dialectical or ambivalent phenomenon, containing always a distorted image of what is officially denied.

In its simplest manifestation, Brown tells us that the child sucking its thumb is the child’s attempt to maintain connection to the mother’s breast…with later substitutions of cigars and lollypops and various body parts. In its most graphic manifestation it is the substitution of money for excrement…a human’s first discovery of buried treasure…an infantile act of job creation. And then there’s the penis…always the penis. Brown calls the manner in which it lords over so much of our symbolism "genital tyranny". This from Brown’s Love’s Body:

Participation is identification with a part, the all-important part, the penis; a part isolated, abstracted, cut off, castrated…Partial participation is to steal (to be) the penis of another; but only partially not really: [quoting Freud] “She turns herself in phantasy into a man, without herself becoming active in a masculine way…” The penis still belongs to another; even as our super-ego still belongs to Daddy. The super-ego is borrowed strength; or a stolen trophy; a head cut off, a monument erected high in our house. To idealize is to idolize; to make an idol; to translate into a fixed image for contemplation; to turn into stone.

Think of it…that passage can easily serve as a summary of this election’s most heated issues--defunding Planned Parenthood; outlawing transgender bathrooms; castrating...I mean, breaking up big banks; beheadings in the desert. We can discuss this entire erection…sorry for the slip again…I mean election in Freudian terms. In fact I’d go so far as to suggest that the primary season's most revealing moment was the infamous Trump-Rubio exchange:Trump: Little Marco!Rubio: Trump has small hands.Trump: There’s nothing wrong with my penis…behold my trophy wife…a stunning symbol and constant reminder of my phallic prowess.
It is art and religion that do the heavy lifting in reining in the id by disguising the scary reality of our existence. It is war and politics that tear away the veil. It is the height of unintended comedy that Trump quoted the salacious Al Wilson hit The Snakeduring a campaign stop. The song about a woman who takes in a forlorn snake she finds by the side of the road only to be mortally bitten by him is a thinly-veiled sexual allegory. Trump used it to warn against taking in Syrian refugees, but the story and its key line is really all about the rise of Donald Trump: Oh, shut up, silly woman, said the reptile with a grinYou knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in.
And speaking of snakes, Trump’s opponent in the election will be Hillary Clinton, descendent of Eve, first woman to fall victim to the snake’s seducations…and like Eve’s mythic forebear, Pandora, the scapegoat for all the evils that have come to befall humankind from Sodom and Gomorrah to Goldman Sachs. Over at Face the Nation and The Situation Room they will be analyzing this election as a contest between Republican and Democrat, between ultimate outsider and ultimate insider, perhaps even between Male and Female…though it’s unlikely to ever get as explicit as Freud’s most controversial duality…a face-off between Castration Complex and Penis Envy. There will be that protective veil again. Be that as it may, let’s make no mistake about it. This election will be felt by millions--at a subconscious level at least—as the ages old battle between our species id and ego…between our infantile, unrestrained lust for doing and saying whatever feels good at the moment and our adult need to impose a reality check on our most self-destructive impulses for long-term survival. 

This time it's primal. 

#thistimeitsprimal



*If you Google the lyrics today, you see that the last line reads Mother I want to fuck you, but back in the day that was not allowed so on the record Jim Morrison approximates the act with some orgiastic caterwauling which I’ve tried to duplicate here. 

Pasta con Sarde

Buon Pasta con Sarde made by Lorraine for Dan & Erin
It’s wild fennel season around here again. Though it doesn’t get top billing, fennel is the main ingredient of the traditional Sicilian dish pasta con sarde (pasta with sardines). It is an admittedly exotic dish (recipe below), and had I not grown up in a largely Italian-Catholic home where it was a constant in Mom’s rotating no-meat-on-Fridays repertoire it probably never would’ve crossed my lips. I’d have been the lesser for it because not only is it so damn Mediterranean delicious, but when I eat it I get a real emotional connection with one of my ancestral homes (also, unlike less fortunate members of my lapsed Catholic cohort, it gives me a positive link to my religious roots…along with the music and art of course).
In my adult years—away from mom’s kitchen--I was reduced to eating pasta con sarde out of a can, bought at whatever Italian deli was about. That would be the Italian equivalent of Dinty Moore’s beef stew. Then one day my Italian-born friend and neighbor Nino Cupaiuolo and his lovely, near-Italian wife Susan introduced us to the fresh wild fennel growing around us, and…fantastico! Suddenly my pasta con sarde achieved levels of delectability that would surpass not only my dear mama’s, but servings I’d enjoyed in Sicily itself. This weekend I passed the recipe on to my sister-in-law Lorraine who made it for her son Dan and daughter-in-law Erin to their great acclaim. Not a tincture of Italian blood among them, and yet there they were gloriously feasting on a dish native to a culture which would’ve been totally alien to them if not for America’s legendary melting pot of ethnic groups.
Modern descendents of Italian immigrants should be quite proud of how deep and well characteristic aspects of our native culture have transplanted themselves in the US. The great Italian migration to the US at the beginning of the 20th century has left a laudable imprint on America’s taste in food, design, art, fashion, movies…lots of fun things (even the dark stuff, the Mafia, has been turned into a regular source of entertainment). Alas, lost in all this la dolce vita, however, is the immigrant struggle. I was reminded of that when I re-watched PBS’s 4-part series, The Italian Americans. Episode 2, entitled Becoming American (1914–1930), registered with me on a couple of levels…the first is that it focuses on the generation of Italian immigrants that included my mother’s family from Sicily. The second-- and really more compelling level--is how much that Italian immigrant experience speaks to the present.
The mass of that wave of immigrants was from Southern Italy and their darker skin—as darker skin tends to do--immediately made them objects of suspicion, derision, and bigotry. Writer Gay Talese speaks to being a grade school child at the time and being ashamed of the homemade Italian bread he had to eat for lunch (imagine such a thing from this vantage point where the chic set claw each other for fresh Italian bread in every yuppie enclave from Bar Harbor to Newport Beach!). The darkness of their skin…their overall otherness…made the Southern Italians prime candidates for jobs people of preferred pigmentation either didn’t want…or wanted under more favorable conditions, meaning that when more native and lighter skinned workers went on strike, it was the Italians who were the replacement workers…or to put it pejoratively became scabs. 

When the State of Massachusetts passed a law reducing the legal work week from 56 to 54 hours, mill owners throughout the state responded by cutting the workers’ pay. At first Italians found dubious employment in the wake of the strikes that followed, but there were limits to how low even their desperation would allow them to stoop. Whether they had access to fresh fennel for pasta con sarde, I do not know, but their abject poverty left them with meatless Fridays and most other days too. The mortality rate for the children of factory families was 50% before age six and almost 40% of adult factory workers were dead by the time they were 39. Women had been forced to give birth on the factory floor so as not to lose their jobs. Italians thus became the prime movers in the momentous Lawrence Textile Strike of 1912. When the multi-ethnic strike looked ready to collapse, labor leader and Italian immigrant Arturo Giovannitti gave a rousing speech he called Sermon on the Common --modeled after Christ’s Sermon on the Mount--and it stirred the workers to hold fast in their demands. Giovannitti was later framed for a murder that took place three miles from another of his speaking venues. A mass outpouring of support from Italian immigrants throughout the country raised money for his successful defense. Italian lives matter, one might have said.
The PBS episode also shows how in New York City the dominant class of immigrant Catholics, the Irish (from my other ancestral home), lorded it over the Italians. They wouldn’t allow display of Italian saints and icons in their churches and forced them to take their worship of them into the church basements. The religious-themed street carnivals and festivals so distinctive to Italian neighborhoods throughout the US today are the legacy of those Italian immigrants who literally rose up from the underground to take their beliefs out into the open air.
I cannot help in watching this history see how it resonates with the struggles we see unfolding before our eyes today—the struggles of Mexican immigrants…Muslim worshippers…the labor struggles of the Fight for 15 fast food workers. It is all of a piece. That’s why whenever I find a post on Facebook that promotes xenophobia or hear an echo of Donald Trump's anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim rhetoric and the source of that post or that rhetoric is of Italian heritage (hell, any ethnic heritage), I can only think, Shame on you.
Shame on you for betraying the struggles of your ancestors.
Shame on you for failing to learn the lessons of your family history.
Shame on you for denying America the chance to continue living up to the dreams and visions of those who went before you.

Shame on you for wanting to treat newcomers to this country no better than the Trumps of an earlier time treated your people.
Shame on you.
Mangia...

Pasta Con Sarde

Pound of spaghetti…fettuccini2 cups shredded fennel (leaf, not bulb)White onion Cousin Dee and I clean freshly harvested fennel
Pine nuts...8 oz bagHalf-cup golden raisins6 small tomatoes2 tins of Oscar sardines (accept no other brand)1/3 cup white wine
Wash fennel…remove big stems…smaller ones will be taken care of in food processorBoil fennel for about 10 minsThen run cooked, drained fennel through food processor to make edible shred (save fennel water for cooking spaghetti)
In large skillet (could be the same used for breadcrumbs to get essence of garlic, but not necessary):Sautée onion in oilAdd tomatoesAdd sardines (chop)Add nuts and raisins....wineThen fennel Nicely turn all ingredients into each other until fully blended, then cover and let simmer while pasta is cooking (give it at least 20 minutes)
Spaghetti into serving dish, combine with sardine mix…the bread crumbs get sprinkled over the pasta in individual dishes.

Alternative: substitute sausage for sardines
Bread crumbs:•                ⅓ cup extra-virgin olive oil, more as needed

•                12 anchovies, chopped•                6 garlic cloves, minced•                ¼ teaspoon red pepper flakes•                1 cup good dried bread crumbsBlack pepper and salt, as neededIn a medium skillet over medium-high heat, warm oil. Add anchovies, garlic and red pepper flakes; cook until fragrant, 1 minute. Stir in breadcrumbs and cook until golden brown and crunchy. Season liberally with black pepper.

Revolution in the Air

Another irony for you…or rather for me (connoisseur of ironies that I am), I just realized that last Friday--April 15--the very day I was posting my support for Hillary The Incrementalist over Bernie The Revolutionary was the 49thanniversary of my participation in the Spring Mobilization against the Vietnam War. As we marched from Central Park to the UN, my particular group raised our voices in singing the then-popular refrain from the hot play of the day, Marat/Sade :Marat we're poor
And the poor stay poor
Marat don't make us wait any more
We want our rights and we don't care how
We want a revolution
Now


It was a little incongruous because the march was against a military venture rather than economic exploitation, but it had the word revolution in it and revolution was in the air, so we went with it. As history would have it, the song is actually more au courant with Bernie Sanders’ “revolution,” with lines such as these:
Down with all of the ruling class

Throw all the generals out on their ass

Why do they have the gold?
Why do they have the power? Why, why, why, why, why?
Do they have the friends at the top? 

Why do they have the jobs at the top?


So why am I less willing to take up the mantle of revolution now? Have I become a predictably reactionary Tory in the material comfort of my later years? Perhaps. Though in the considerable time I’ve put into thinking on the question, I’ve come to a different conclusion, which is that revolution...political revolution for sure...is not something to be taken lightly. No matter how much Madison Avenue tries to sell it as something good and fun and easy (revolution as marketing ploy), revolution is by definition jarring, uprooting, difficult and often very bloody. Even the nonpolitical revolutions…industrial, technological, cultural…do not transpire without having a considerable disorienting impact on society. Revolutions strike with a brutal suddenness, which is one of the characteristics that so differentiates revolutionary change from incremental change. With that suddenness, the Industrial Revolution attracted mass migrations from rural America and created dense urban centers with concomitant health and welfare problems. As I write, the tech revolution is displacing masses of workers, replacing armies with robots, and entirely reshaping how we relate to one another socially. The youth revolution of the 60s--the one revolution of which I can honestly claim to have been on the barricades--not only created a multi-billion dollar segment of the economy built on the cultural tastes of the nation’s youth, but created a bias in favor of youth that permeates our entire society for both good and ill.
The cost of political revolution generally comes in lives lost, which is why I take an increasingly sober view of political revolution. We look at our American Revolution…and even the far bloodier French Revolution--and romanticize them because we can bask in their far-reaching positive outcomes. But the Russian Revolution turned out to be the trade of one tyranny for another, and the various revolutions of the recent Arab Spring have thus far yielded disappointing if not horrific results.
Paradoxically our revolutionary forefathers--notably from the establishment class--left us with a system designed for incremental change. For whatever revolutionary fervor gripped Thomas Jefferson when he uttered his famous dictum that the tree of liberty must occasionally be watered with the blood of tyrants, he also was among those responsible for bequeathing us a Constitution of checks and balances and balance of powers--practically revolutionary-proof.
As a teacher and father I early on arrived at a truth about disciplining the young, which was never bluff...never make a threat or a promise you are not willing to follow through on. At the risk of being too much the literalist, I believe that if you are going to call for political revolution, implicit in that call must be a willingness to take up arms to bring it about. The Marat/Sade song pulls no punches on this score: We want our rights and we don't care how. It’s the real threat of violent action that distinguishes the political revolutionary from the political reformer.
I can see the discontents of our current political landscape incrementally changed by reforms:A Constitutional amendment to obviate the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decisionAn end to state gerrymandering of congressional districtsAutomatic voter registration for everyone at age 18A reinstatement of the Voting Rights ActA tax code that rewards companies for investing at home and makes them pay a premium for taking jobs elsewhereA campaign finance law that places spending caps on all state and federal elections 
I can go on, of course, and include the three pillars of the Bernie Sanders Revolution--free college, single-payer health care, break up of the big banks—but to accomplish any of them would require the same very un-revolutionary steps of introducing legislation, holding hearings, lobbying for votes, etc. Alas, nine years later, Guantánamo prison remains open despite the promises and best intentions of our last revolutionary candidate for president.
As angry as we may all be at the behavior of the big banks is anyone really going to take up arms to punish them? (Don’t answer that. We know that there are dangerous numbers of our fellow citizens who are well-armed and take this revolution business far more seriously than most of us and seem quite intent on bringing down something big, be it the banks or the government itself). It may be worth reflecting on China, Eastern Europe, and Cuba. In my lifetime…since the day I marched against that war in New York at least…no places on earth were riper for revolution than those places. And yet in that same timeframe, through non-revolutionary means—through patience and evolutionary change—all of them have progressed from one degree to another toward being better societies without massive upheaval and untold loss of life.
A favorite Dylan verse comes to mind:I lived with them on Montague StreetIn a basement down the stairsThere was music in the cafes at nightAnd revolution in the airThen he started into dealing with slavesAnd something inside of him diedShe had to sell everything she ownedAnd froze up insideAnd when finally the bottom fell outI became withdrawnThe only thing I knew how to doWas to keep on keepin' onLike a bird that flewTangled up in blue
I love the verse not only because it so vividly captures a particular time in my life, but because it provides me with a more comfortable explanation for what happened to my revolutionary ardor. It’s not that I’ve become a Tory, but because like so many of us I got tangled up in blue.

Debate Bait

The first political debate I ever saw was the granddaddy of them all—Nixon-Kennedy. I was so gung-ho for JFK at the time, that Nixon’s infamous 5’oclock shadow and sweaty upper lip passed unnoticed before my starry eyes. Eager young citizen that I was, the debate question over what to do about Quemoy and Matsu had me running off to the library the next day to search for my own answers. Thus, the birth of a political junkie. 
I have seen many but not all the debates since, though I’m familiar with the defining moments of most: “There you go again”…“I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you are no Jack Kennedy”…”You’re likeable enough, Hillary.” One wonders how many votes any of those iconic moments actually produced. It’s for sure that any journalist who gets called to participate in a national political debate wants to be the one who asks the game-changing question…or at least the question that is perceived as the game-changer. The reputed benchmark in this regard is Bernard Shaw’s question to Michael Dukakis about how Dukakis, an opponent to the death penalty, would react if his wife had been raped and murdered. Hypothetical questions are nasty in and of themselves, but this one was so grim, so dark, and so unseemly personal it’s a wonder any professional journalist found it fit for asking. But the Dukakis campaign had many bad moments, so it’s hard to believe his “dispassionate” response to the question was what did him in. It certainly couldn’t have done him as much harm as the Bush campaign questioning his patriotism and accusing him of setting convicted felon Willie Horton free to rape and murder.
Anyway, as with baseball games--another passion of mine from my youth--I watch fewer debates in real time now. My appetite for predictability and spin is not what it used to be, so I DVR the debates and watch with a firm finger on the fast forward button. But as I occasionally still fantasize about being general manager of the Red Sox, I also fantasize about getting to sit on the panel and ask questions of the candidates. I believe tonight’s debate between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton might be their last, so it will be the last time I’ll get to watch and see if any of the questions I would have asked them get asked. My questions would follow a few key guidelines: don’t cue things up so candidates can just quote their stump speeches; don’t ask questions you already know the answer to; don’t ask questions driven by the latest “buzz” (in other words don’t ask Hillary about de Blasio’s CP joke and don’t ask Bernie about the speaker at his New York event calling Hillary a corporate whore); don’t ask “gotcha” questions unless they’re designed to get the candidate on record specific to their campaign (in other words, no questions about the state of things in Quemoy and Matsu); and most importantly don’t ask questions designed to draw attention to yourself.  
So, without further ado...Senator Sanders and Secretary Clinton, if you are ready, the first question, determined by flip of a coin, goes to Senator Sanders:
Senator Sanders : On the campaign trail you have flatly declared No more wars. But in previous debates you have assured the American people that you would use military force if necessary by pointing to your vote to support US intervention in Bosnia. Which of these positions would influence your behavior when you enter the White House as President and presumably find the US already engaged in an undeclared war with ISIS?
Secretary Clinton : You have admirably apologized for a number of your past actions, notably your vote for the Iraq War, moving your email server to your home, and using the term "super predator." As noble as these apologies are, is there a point where they reach critical mass and a politician’s apologies rightfully call into question a politician’s judgment?
Senator Sanders : Assuming you get the Democratic nomination and find yourself in a difficult general election campaign where every dollar counts and a media campaign in a swing state such as Ohio or Florida can win the election for you, would you accept help from a Super Pac put together by millionaires and billionaires to win in November?
Secretary Clinton : Much was made of President Obama’s selection of you as Secretary of State as a modern day example of what historian Doris Kearns Goodwin called Lincoln’s Team of Rivals. Would you imagine such a team of rivals in your administration, and if so specifically what areas would you most want your own views challenged by such rivals?      
Senator Sanders : If you are President and national security agents come to you with information on a pending domestic terrorist attack which you know they secured through illicit means, would you act to punish the agents responsible for the illegality or act on the information to prevent the attack or both?
Secretary Clinton : What three things would you specifically do as President to motivate American corporations to help rebuild the middle class?
Senator Sanders : If you are President and the Democratic leadership in Congress comes to you and says that it can help you pass free college tuition for all, single payer health insurance for all, or an amendment overturning Citizens United but not all three, which would you choose and why?
Secretary Clinton : On the campaign trail when asked about your lack of support from young voters, you’ve answered by saying that even if they’re not there for you, you’ll be there for them which is a nice, nurturing response but doesn’t take into account that young voters are as diverse as older voters, encompassing Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, Trump supporters, militia men, the men’s right movement, Fight for 15, and many more disparate and unhappy groups. What do you make of such widespread youthful discontent and is there anything your administration could or would do to address it? 
UPDATEAfter watching the Brooklyn debate between Bernie and Hillary, a few observations: 
Although Hillary invoked Barack Obama's name and actual legacy, Bernie channeled Obama's Hope and Change, and dare I say, immense egoism. My major critique of the Obama presidency was this transcendent belief of his that by the strength of his own words and personality he was going to get sharply opposing sides to--in the words of John Lennon--"come together over me." Obama wasted the first three years of his presidency chasing the magic unicorn of bipartisanship. And last night we had Bernie Sanders echoing this cock-eyed optimism, telling us that he was going to get gun owners and gun reformers together for consensus action; he was going to get the individual states--where they don't even want innocent immigrant children walking their streets--to release prisoners on work furlough programs. (Too long in front of adoring crowds has blinded the Senator to the reality of dealing with the state of  Texas, among others). 
The Incrementalist vs. the Revolutionary continued to be the most compelling theme of the campaign, which was put in sharp relief in an exchange that has not gotten nearly the attention it should. It started with Hillary explaining her advocacy of global fracking as a bridge for moving away from fossil fuels:CLINTON: So I have big, bold goals, but I know in order to get from where we are, where the world is still burning way too much coal, where the world is still too intimidated by countries and providers like Russia, we have got to make a very firm but decisive move in the direction of clean energy.LOUIS: Thank you, Secretary. All right, Senator?SANDERS: All right, here is -- here is a real difference. This is a difference between understanding that we have a crisis of historical consequence here, and incrementalism and those little steps are not enough.LOUIS: -- jobs are one thing, but with less than 6 percent of all U.S. energy coming from solar, wind and geothermal, and 20 percent of U.S. power coming from nuclear, if you phase out all of that, how do you make up...SANDERS: Well, you don't phase...LOUIS: -- that difference?SANDERS: -- it all out tomorrow. And you certainly don't phase nuclear out tomorrow. 
SNAP! And in less than a New York minute, the Revolutionary becomes an Incrementalist.
Finally, the issue of Hillary's speech transcripts…8 months in and she still hasn't come up with a definitive answer to the nagging issue. So, gratis, I provide her with one…

CLINTON:  This call for my speech transcripts is what they call in a court of law a fishing expedition. Senator Sanders campaign set this trap months ago and I give them credit for the maneuver because it got the media to play along with them. What they want is to pore over those transcripts to find something…anything…to use against me in this campaign. In other words they want me to do their work for them, and if I refuse to take the bait, then I have to face the question throughout the rest of the campaign about what I’m allegedly hiding. Here’s what I say to Senator Sanders on this subject: I am probably the most fully investigated candidate who has ever run for President…from the bogus Whitewater investigation to the outrageous Vince Foster investigation to the partisan Benghazi investigation to the current email investigation, which has made public 55,000 pages of my communications, and if Senator Sanders can’t find anything substantial in all that to run against me, that’s his problem. You can bet if he gets these transcripts, next he’ll demand my shopping lists, and if he finds that I bought GE light bulbs the next thing you know he’ll tell the world that I’m in the pocket of GE. I’m not playing.

You're welcome, Hillary. 

Happy Endings

A soul in kudzu (photo by Mike McCuen)
When I was a child, happy endings were guaranteed because there was a God overseeing all human activity, and I knew that He would one day reward the good and punish the bad in the great beyond. So it was a matter of faith with me that eventually all the bad guys…from the neighborhood bully to Charles Starkweather (whose murderous rampage throughout the Midwest still scared me awake in my Connecticut bedroom) to Nikita Khrushchev (who vowed to bury us all)…would end up paying the price for their ill deeds in hell. As one evolves away from religion, one not only loses the comforting thought that there is a happy everlasting life in heaven, but one can no longer count on a God to deliver a final comeuppance to bad guys, however free they may have skated in this life. Once you remove the absolute authority of a Supreme Being from the equation, a relativist view of existence takes root and grows like kudzu over the soul.
This past week I found myself all tangled up in my own relativizing kudzu as I contemplated a series of endings in my TV viewing on successive days. It was frustrating knowing I could no longer easily identify happy endings in any of them.
First there was the ending to The Big Short about the guys who not only survived the financial crash of 2008, but thrived on it. Was I supposed to be happy for these rogue investors for outsmarting a corrupt and/or stupid establishment? Or was I supposed to be mad because they failed through indifference or inadequacy to do anything to prevent the collapse? Or was I supposed to feel sad for the victims of the collapse…but only for some of them--for the working-class families that lost their primary homes, but not for those who lost second homes? For the “lower” middle-class families who lost their portfolios, but not for “upper” middle-class families who lost theirs? For the clerks and secretaries who lost their jobs but not mid-level managers and sales people? The moviemakers did their best to sell a sober ending. But former Congressman Barney Frank took exception to the film’s final impression that Congress did nothing. His view is that the Dodd-Frank bill (which bears his name) was a significant if imperfect piece of legislation that came out of the crisis so it was a salutary ending, if not exactly a happy one.
As the luck of the TMC schedule would have it, next up on my viewing schedule was the Frank Capra film classic You Can’t Take It with You . In it Jimmy Stewart is Tony Kirby, the son of a munitions mogul, in love with Alice Sycamore, one of the office secretaries, played by Jean Arthur. Not only is her family of creative eccentrics the antithesis of Tony's snobbish super rich parents, but her grandfather owns a house right in the middle of the mogul’s expansion plans for a larger arms manufacturing plant and refuses to sell out. There’s much ado about all this leading to both families being arrested and thrown behind bars where the wise grandfather gives the uptight mogul a harmonica, which ultimately leads to a harmonious convergence between the two on a duet of "Polly Wolly Doodle." It’s the kind of popular social fantasy we came to describe as Capraesque, practically being a synonym for happy ending. Yet there I sat consumed in relativism again. The script by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart has an alarming amount of freshness to it. Though written in the mid-1930s there are sharp critiques of humankind’s abuse of the environment and love of guns, and a rebuke of taxes straight out of the Tea Party…the new Tea Party not the original. And then there’s this piece of dialog that if said on Meet the Press this Sunday would no doubt be the most insightful opinion expressed on the show…maybe ever:

Alice Sycamore: You ought to hear Grandpa on that subject. You know he says most people nowadays are run by fear. Fear of what they eat, fear of what they drink, fear of their jobs, their future, fear of their health. They're scared to save money, and they're scared to spend it. You know what his pet aversion is? The people who commercialize on fear. You know, they scare you to death so they can sell you something you don't need.

Seventy years ago and that passage rings truer today than the happy ending of mythic class harmony, which was what the movie…and America...was supposed to be about.
Then I stumbled into watching a segment of MSNBC's truly bizarre Lock-up series, when it followed one of their non-stop political junkie marathons and I couldn’t find my remote fast enough to change the station. The story was about a woman, a former prison-guard herself, who murdered her husband and had tried to make it look like suicide. I was immediately taken by the woman’s forthright honesty about herself. She said her background in law enforcement made her think she knew enough to get away with the crime, which she committed on a Saturday and was busted for on the next Monday. She also said she not only deserved her punishment, but was getting off easy by not being executed because her husband was a good man who didn’t deserve his fate. She confessed to having no use for religion until she got to prison, but now she found solace in singing in the prison choir and trusting in Jesus. The final scene of the segment was bucolic…her sitting in a circle on a lawn with a bunch of other inmates on a spring day. She said she’d found a supportive sisterhood among these other women who had also killed their husbands. As an avowed believer in forgiveness and redemption, I should have found that a somewhat happy ending, but then I thought: Could her husband's children be as sanguine about it? And what about the families of all those other "black widows" in her group? And is there something about murder that demands that only an eye for an eye can make for a happy ending? 
Finally, I then struggled through an episode of The People vs. OJSimpson: An American Crime Story…struggling because I believe the case marked one of the lowest points in America in my lifetime…an ugly concurrence (and now reocurrence) of so many of our society’s worst features…celebrity privilege, media sensationalism, police incompetence, legal manipulation and exploitation, white and black racism, and everyday ignorance. (Oh, how I want a happy ending from all this for my country, even if only my great, great grandchildren are around to enjoy it.) All that awfulness springing from the narcissism of the unrepentant OJ Simpson, one of the most odious, irredeemable people alive. Does the Simpson saga have a happy ending because he got thrown out of his country club, lost the Goldman family's civil suit against him, and now serves jail time for another crime? Or will such happiness be punctured if he gets paroled from his 33-year jail sentence and our final images of him are with Nicole’s children and perhaps grandchildren as they speed around Miami on a luxury cruiser?

These nagging, convoluted questions sometimes make me long for the God of my youth who had the power to leap tall buildings at a single bound and guarantee unambiguously happy endings.

Good Sport

Forest Park, Longmeadow, MA, where I saw my first ballgame.
A Sport and a Pastime, a novel that’s pretty much a cult favorite from the 1960s, takes its title, believe it or not, from the Koran. James Salter, the author, introduces his love story with this brief passage from Islam’s holiest book: “Remember that the life of this world is but a sport and a pastime.” I mean, really. Who these days thinks of Islam in terms of “sport and pastime”? And what a wonderful world it would be, would it not, if Muslims the world over took life a little more sporting? Hell, what if we all did?
There are folks who would take offense at that notion…folks who believe that sport is an unhealthy distraction from the serious business of life. I had a friend who expressed his deep disdain of sport this way, “Ball games are the human equivalent of dogs chasing cars.” I suspect that sport looks to the non-sports fan much the way religion looks to the non-believer and one could say that, “Worship is the human equivalent of howling at the moon.”  Both observations may be Oscar Wilde-level put-downs, but they miss the essential point that both sport and religion are as natural to humankind as chasing rolling wheels and howling at big yellow orbs in the sky are to canines.
Johan Huizinga may be the greatest sportswriter of all time even though he never wrote a word about baseball, basketball or football…and even as a European may never have seen a soccer match. But Huzinga, as I’ve mentioned before, wrote the definitive work on the role of play…sport…in the development of human culture. In Homo Ludens (trans: Man at Play), his big picture study of the critical role of play in civilization, Huizinga wrote: “Play cannot be denied. You can deny, if you like, nearly all abstractions: justice, beauty, truth, goodness, mind, God. You can deny seriousness, but not play.” 
Play entered my life as it does with most humans at infancy…suck those toes…wrestle those fingers. Sport, on the other hand, took a little longer. As is pretty typical, it was my father and uncles who introduced me to sport. The first two sports they introduced me to were boxing and hockey. My Uncle Johnny Riley was a pretty fair semi-pro boxer and my Uncle Butch Bouthiette (of French Canadian stock naturally) knew his way around a hockey puck. My father took me to watch them both in action and then into their respective locker rooms afterwards where the sight of blood and smell of vomit became a more lasting memory than the competitions themselves. Nonetheless, I did don boxing gloves that outweighed me considerably on Wednesday boxing nights at the local boys’ club. And throughout my sweet New England years there always seemed to be a body of water nearby to ice over for pick-up hockey games until the snow cover.
Yet the sport that emerged as the love of my life was baseball. That was Uncle Eddie Reale’s game. (And just a note on the glorious melting pot aspects of America’s immigrant tradition…Dad’s brother Pete from the family Irish side coached Italian-sider Eddie’s softball team; and Uncle Jerry from the Italian side managed the boxing career of Johnny from the Irish side. And a further note along these same tribal lines…one time they got word that another boxer named Riley was on the undercard in Hartford. So a carload of them made the unusual trip to the capitol city--a then daunting 40 miles away--in hopes of perhaps connecting with a long-lost kinsman. However, this boxer Riley turned out to be a black man…or in the parlance of the day “colored". They told that joke on themselves ever after.) Eddie gave me my first ball, glove and bat. The ball was losing its stitching; the glove was flat as a pancake and just as useful; and I could barely lift the bat, let alone swing it. But at 10-years old these were the first artifacts of my new passion. Uncle Eddie
At about the same time my father brought home a picture of Ted Williams, which he’d gotten the man himself to autograph. It immediately went up on the wall over my bed alongside my picture of Jesus (not autographed), and thus the course of this boy’s life was set. (As irony would have it, it took me longer to outgrow the superstitions of sport than those of religion.)
When I think of my first efforts at playing ball, I believe I was much like a newborn colt…all awkward, wobbly legs. But I wanted to be good at baseball more than I wanted anything else in my life to that point. So my brother Tim and I went out every single summer day for him to hit fly balls to me hours on end. I was as blissful as an Irish setter with a Model A Ford in its sights.
At this stage of my life, I realize that the two experiences that have been most transcendent for me were writing and baseball. What I mean by transcendent is allowing me to rise above time and place--writing for extended periods; baseball in bursts. Aside from writing something good, nothing gives me a greater thrill than catching a ball on the run. I’ve worried in recent years that one of those thrills was fading far behind me. You get slower, and fly balls hit your way get rarer. But I’ve made a wonderful realization playing over-the-line-softball recently…that covering 30 feet of ground to catch a ball is every bit as thrilling as covering 90 feet. The thrill has nothing to do with the overall distance; the thrill is in closing the gap between you and the ball, whatever that gap may be. And that is true for a lot of things we want to do in life.
At this stage there are also valuable lessons about being a fan of sport as well as a player of sport. As a fan, I’ve had the good fortune to go from rooting for perennial losers to rooting for perennial winners (ahem…New England Patriots…UCONN girls' basketball). I fully understand the resentment that grows out of the former and the sense of entitlement that comes with the latter. And I see how these same feelings and attitudes translate into other aspects of life…business, politics, lifestyle. Everyone wants to be a winner at least some of the time...and no one should ever take winning as a prerogative. 
But what to do about it…how do we level the playing field? Are all little boys entitled to perfectly shaped baseball mitts? Are all little girls entitled to field hockey camp? Does every boy get an uncle who nurtures his love of the game? Does every girl get a coach who draws more out of her talent than any other coach? Are all God’s children endowed by their creator with an inalienable right for a spot in the starting lineup?
More over, Huzinga tells us that what some would call cheating and some would just call “getting an edge” has been part of the game since sport was invented. So what is a "good sport" exactly? Is it one who exploits the rulebook to take advantage of the other team's weakness? Is it one who scuffs or deflates a ball or sharpens his skates or hockey stick? Is it someone who gets into the training room earlier than anyone else and leaves the practice field later? Is it one who calls on divine intervention to help smite an opponent?

If the life of this world is, as the Koran tells Muslims, but a sport and a pastime, that may be a more complex message than it appears at first glance. And as we see sport reflected in other aspects of all our societies--for Muslims and non-Muslims alike--the message also seems more onerous and prescient.  
Postscript : I watched The Big Short two days after publishing this post…had I seen it before the film (about the guys who saw the financial collapse of 2008 coming and managed to profit off it), it would have played a role in making my case of how sport reflects other aspects of society. Comparing Wall Street investing to playing the table at Las Vegas has become such a cliche by now, but this film vividly shows how true that is in modeling the psychology that went into creating the financial bubble…and then it shows how an elite few with smarts, focus and luck (like some of our more successful sports teams) take advantage of the foolishness, laziness and incompetence of others (I'm looking at you New York Jets) to take their lunch money. 

You're So Vain...

Susan Sarandon's character in Atlantic City worked the clam bar and had to come home
each evening and wash the stink off with lemons. Susan. Need. More. Lemons.

It was more than a little dismaying last night to watch one of my all-time favorite actresses, Susan Sarandon, mouth proto-Leninist nonsense about how if her man Bernie Sanders lost the Democratic nomination she'd rather Trump than Hillary in November because a Trump win would accelerate a progressive revolution. Interviewer Chris Hayes was visibly stunned by such a witless claim coming from someone seemingly so bright. His next guest, Dan Savage, immediately jumped on her comment. Rightly identifying himself as a staunch Bernie supporter (he had dinged Hillary quite seriously when she made her comments about Nancy Reagan starting a national conversation about AIDS), Savage still said if it comes down to Hillary vs. Trump in November he's voting for Hillary because even a choice of lesser evils results in less evil. He also called Sarandon on the dubious historical support for her claim that voting in a megalomaniacal strongman ever is a good thing for progressive politics. 
I have family and friends I love and respect who are ardent Bernie supporters…and, hell, if he defies gravity and beats Hillary in big primary states to come by the margins he's beating her in small caucus states, I may end up voting for him myself in June. I'm also confident that Bernie Sanders, an honorable man, will do everything in his power to deliver those 74% of his voters who tell exit pollsters that they will support Hillary if she's the nominee. But every cause has its dead-enders, and last night Susan Sarandon, most unfortunately, chose to make her very pretty puss the face of the Sanders dead-enders...so this one's for her. 

You walk into the Party like you’ve been a Dem since just a totYour rage strategically dipped below TrumpismYour scorn it was still quite hotYou had one eye on Hillary’s neck as you schemed to garrotteAnd all the Dems dreamed that you'd be their partnerYou’d be their partner, and...
You're so vain, you probably think this election’s about youYou're so vain, I'll bet you think this election’s about youDon't you? Don't You?
You had me several years ago when I was still quite naiveYou said we’d make history with Ralph NaderAnd that we would never grieveBut we gave away votes that mattered and got George Bush insteadI had some dreams, they were clouds in my coffeeClouds in my coffee, and...
You're so vain, you probably think this election’s about youYou're so vain, I'll bet you think this election’s about youDon't you? Don't You?
Well I hear you went up to the caucus states and your man naturally wonThen you drove your Prius to Burlington, VermontTo see the Bernie eclipse of the sunWell you're where you should be all the timeExcept in NovemberWhen you’re on sleaze Cruz or you’re with Trump & his wall Trump and his wall, and…
You're so vain, you probably think this election’s about youYou're so vain, I'll bet you think this election’s about youDon't you? Don't You?
You're so vain, you probably think this song is about youYou're so vain, I'll bet you think this song is about you
Don't you? Don't You?

On Board the Soul Train

I’ve known Patricia (née Rodowik) Heller since we sat together in homeroom in 1960, and though we have not seen each other in the flesh in 40 years, we still maintain what I view as a dear friendship, partially through her precious allegiance to snail mail and partially through Al Gore’s gift to mankind, the Internet. Allowing for such friendships to endure almost compensates for the Internet as a pirated vessel for the transport of hatred, lies, and mischief. (Just this week the Internet brought me more baldly false news about Hillary Clinton--that she was fired from the Nixon Watergate committee in 1972 for unethical behavior, that she lied to the families of the Benghazi victims, that she threatened Bernie Sanders' family so he wouldn't challenge her acts of voter suppression, that she's the mother of ISIS--all leading me to conclude that this pernicious, poisonous portraiture of her as a soulless bitch is directly linked to the desperate, last dying days of our pathological patriarchy…and is very much related to the state of our national soul as alluded to below.) 
Patricia just wrote me about my recent blog posts on atheism and said they put her in mind of Walt Whitman’s famously public struggles between his physical self and spiritual self. Whitman is no stranger to The Nobby Works. As I’ve said, he is the blog’s Poet Laureate. As it so happens, tomorrow-- Saturday, March 26--marks the 124th anniversary of his death. Don’t I just love it when this happens: I write about atheism; Patricia writes me about Whitman, and before you know it we have a convergence with Whitman’s passing…the transition (maybe) of the body he freely extolled in rhythm to the soul he freely examined in rhyme. 
Whitman is renown as the defining poet of American democracy…his embrace of all aspects, levels, and manifestations of our national life came without partisanship, patronization or pessimism. That’s because he was wise enough to understand that America was an idea in perpetual progress, not the finished product of the Constitutional Convention. It is hard to imagine a poet today holding as prominent a place in our society as Whitman held in his day...and beyond. We had a school in our small Connecticut town named after him, and I wrote a parody of his “Captain, My Captain” for the student paper and everybody…from the Advanced Placement whizzes to the Vo-Ag kids…understood the source. (I’d reprint my parody here, but best to let Walt enjoy his eternal rest without disturbance.)
Poetry still seemed momentous in the 1950s. Parents openly feared that the Beat poets would lead their children to drugs and delinquency. And before the Kennedys ever dazzled the world with Camelot, they augured it with Robert Frost’s recitation of his poem "The Gift Outright" at the inaugural:

Such as we were we gave ourselves outright 
(The deed of gift was many deeds of war) 
To the land vaguely realizing westward, 
But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced, 
 Such as she was, such as she will become.
(Alas, if Donald Trump ever let a line of poetry cross his pustular lips, it would be to misuse Frost’s “Good fences make good neighbors” just as surely as his groupie Sarah Palin once did)

So, where have all the poets gone, long time passing? They’re still among us toiling in relative obscurity…except for Common, who got invited to the White House by President Obama, thus unleashing a dozen Fox News interns to pore over his works to fuel the Fox outrage machine. And our greatest living poet is known more as musician than poet. The artifices of poetry…metaphor, simile, onomatopoeia and the like…employed to reveal truth in opacity lose their place in a national dialog given over to snark and sophistry. Simplicity rules…or should I say, simpleness. We are the “Coke is it” culture, not “Coke is a like a bubbling brown brook of effervescent refreshment.”
Whether nations have souls is as open a question as whether individuals do. The soul of a nation like the soul of a person is a wholly nebulous thing…it’s a sense, like happiness or sadness, so proving it or disproving it must rely on how it manifests itself in behaviors and attitudes. I recently heard a report that much of the anger now consuming our political landscape has more to do with personal alienation than policy. And I actually know people who would take it as the highest of compliments if someone (especially a black someone) told them they “got soul,” but would mock anyone who claimed to have a soul. I submit that it will be the most ironic moment in human history if and when our remarkable human intelligence is able to locate, quantify, analyze and adjust that part of the brain that is responsible for our concept of soul. Ironic in that it will free us from the delusion of soul while depriving us of its comfort. 
Until that day, Walt Whitman invites us to think of the soul...not a bad idea this weekend amidst the chocolate bunnies and colored eggs...  
Think of the Soulby Walt Whitman
I swear to you that body of yours gives proportions to your Soul somehow to live in other spheres; I do not know how, but I know it is so.
Think of loving and being loved;I swear to you, whoever you are, you can interfuse yourself with such things that everybody that sees you shall look longingly upon you.  Think of the past;I warn you that in a little while others will find their past in you and your times.
The race is never separated—nor man nor woman escapes;All is inextricable—things, spirits, Nature, nations, you too—from precedents you come.
Recall the ever-welcome defiers, (The mothers precede them;)Recall the sages, poets, saviors, inventors, lawgivers of the earth;Recall Christ, brother of rejected persons—brother of slaves, felons, idiots, and of insane and diseas’d persons.
Think of the time when you were not yet born;Think of times you stood at the side of the dying;Think of the time when your own body will be dying.
Think of spiritual results,Sure as the earth swims through the heavens, does every one of its objects pass into spiritual results.
Think of manhood, and you to be a man;Do you count manhood, and the sweet of manhood, nothing?
Think of womanhood, and you to be a woman;The creation is womanhood;Have I not said that womanhood involves all?
Thank you, Walt.
Thank you, Patricia
Happy Easter, one and all…because everybody deserves a chance to be reborn.

Expanding Man

Like many of a certain generation, I built much of my vinyl collection through Columbia House Record Club—taking advantage of the offer to get 11 records for 1 penny in exchange for a promise to buy five more over the course of a year at greater than full price…all carefully calibrated of course so that the record company still made a nice profit. In what I guess would be a forerunner to music pirating, one would soon renege on the promise to buy those additional records and a hot potato back and forth would then ensue where record seller would send a “Selection of the Month” album that the record buyer had not ordered and the record buyer would return it and then the record seller would bill the buyer anyway and then nasty exchanges back and forth would follow until both sides let the dust settle just enough time for Columbia House to make another offer of another 11 records for a penny and the whole thing would start all over again. Invariably in that skirmishing unwanted records would end up in one’s collection. Notably in my case it was Aja by Steely Dan, which I left wrapped in cellophane for about 3 months before giving it a play one day and quickly rejecting it half way through the first cut.
Shortly thereafter the family ventured to California to sample the West Coast. We packed all that was reasonable into our Fiat (yes, a Fiat), which to my dismay did not include any of my mass vinyl collection. After a month in Van Nuys living at the mercy of Rick Dees on A.M. radio, I called brother Cliff back home in New England and asked if he’d pack up some of my records and send them West. I specifically requested Dylan and The Beatles of course, and warned him not to send Aja. When the package arrived, Aja was on top. Punk’d! 
Under the influence one night, I played the damn thing again. And not only did I fall in love with it and become a Steely Dan fan, but "Deacon Blues" has remained one of my all-time favorite songs….just call me an expanding man. I’ve been waking up with that song in my head a lot these days, and although I can’t put my finger on exactly why I do believe it has something to do with the times we live in where there’s much talk of losing and losers in the air. I’m here to say there’s a significant difference between the two. As one who has lost and has written about the importance of learning to accept loss, I’ve never considered myself a loser. I’ve lost friends, jobs, dreams…I grew up rooting for a baseball team that prior to the 21stcentury lost most of the time…but unlike the narrator of "Deacon Blues" I’ve never felt the need “for a name when I lose.” "Deacon Blues" is virtually an ode to loserdom:
This is the day of the expanding manThat shape is my shadeThere where I used to standIt seems like only yesterdayI gazed through the glassAt ramblers, wild gamblersThat's all in the past
You call me a foolYou say it's a crazy schemeThis one's for realI already bought the dreamSo useless to ask me whyThrow a kiss and say goodbyeI'll make it this timeI'm ready to cross that fine line
[Chorus]I'll learn to work the saxophoneI play just what I feelDrink Scotch whiskey all night longAnd die behind the wheelThey got a name for the winners in the worldAnd I want a name when I loseThey call Alabama the Crimson TideCall me Deacon Blues
My back to the wallA victim of laughing chanceThis is for meThe essence of true romanceSharing the things we know and loveWith those of my kindLibationsSensationsThat stagger the mind
I crawl like a viperThrough these suburban streetsMake love to these womenLanguid and bittersweetI'll rise when the sun goes downCover every game in townA world of my ownI'll make it my home sweet home
[Chorus]
This is the night of the expanding manI take one last dragAs I approach the standI cried when I wrote this songSue me if I play too longThis brother is freeI'll be what I want to be
There is so little there for me to relate to…unlike the singer of the song I’m rarely inclined to philander my way through the neighborhood, drink all night long, or drive suicidally. And I’m definitely a morning person, so rising when the sun goes down just does not happen. Yet I find this song terribly evocative and intoxicating.
Right now it evokes the current presidential primary scene. From one soapbox, there’s this loud, angry message that as a nation we’re losing all the time and we have no one to blame but “the losers” among us. From another soapbox, there’s a loud, angry message that we’re being beaten all the time…by Wall Street, the 1%, the media, the DNC, the Establishment,  anyone who seems to win all the time...metaphorically speaking, the Crimson Tide.  
My back to the wallA victim of laughing chanceThis is for meThe essence of true romanceSharing the things we know and loveWith those of my kindLibationsSensationsThat stagger the mind
That’s about as poetic a summation of the current political divide as we’re ever likely to get. Aesthetically pleasing as I find it, I’ll be the first to admit that poetry doesn’t resolve the problem…neither the anger nor resentment…and certainly not on the mass level the situation seems to demand. Lucky me, I guess, in that I can take losing without ever feeling like a loser, and in this one aspect I can clearly relate to the narrator of "Deacon Blues," at least in that glorious, liberating last verse:
This is the night of the expanding manI take one last dragAs I approach the standI cried when I wrote this songSue me if I play too longThis brother is freeI'll be what I want to be
Well, I’m up at the dawn for my expanding man, and I’m more like to take a swallow of wine than a drag on a cigarette. But, yeah, as I approach this blog sometimes I do cry and sometimes maybe I do go a bit too long...but believe me, folks, when I say, this brother is free and is exactly who he wants to be.