Dan Riley's Blog, page 33

My Favorite American

Mark Twain house in Hartford with statue borrowed from Monrovia, California, through the magic of Photoshop.
(Sorry, Bob…)
Mark Twain died 105 years ago today…as he famously predicted he would when he said, “I came in with Halley’s Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don't go out with Halley's Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: 'Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together'".
My love affair with Twain began in 8th grade when Miss Bennett, our English teacher, took us on a field trip to Twain’s house in Before we made the trip to visit his house, Miss Bennett, like a good teacher, had us read Twain’s work. The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County I guess was the go-to Twain piece for junior high teachers looking to introduce students to Twain. For me, though, it was not just an amusing story (and it’s all of that), but it was an epiphany. After more than a dozen years of cultural immersion in front of TV, movies, radio, and books, I suddenly realized that there was a human intelligence behind all that entertainment…an actual creator of the magic. Even Walt Disney, the foremost creative force in the lives of American children at the time, was seen more as a corporate spokesman than an artist. When I read Twain, it was the first time it occurred to me, “I can do this. I can write. I can create.”
The tour of the house only served to heighten the ambition. Imagine…not only can you write down words that might make people laugh, but you might write down enough words and make enough people laugh so that one day you might wind up living in a house so magnificent, with its unique architectural touches designed to invoke a Mississippi steam boat.
Later came my encounters with the adult Twain…the blasphemous Letters from the Earth, the scathing War Prayer, the edgy Innocents Abroad, and of course that most precious of all American novels, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I taught that book in an American novel class for high school juniors and seniors for seven years, and feel very protective of it. I declare its use of irony to be among the most sublime in all literature…which, unfortunately, is why it's drawn the ire in recent decades from the hopelessly literal minded. My passionate and persistent attacks on political correctness in this blog can be more accurately viewed as counterattacks against the efforts by what Twain called the “Mrs. Grundys” to ban the book due to Twain’s use of the word “nigger". As I’ve written before, to emasculate the book by injecting the abjectly awful n-word contraption in its place would be a literary crime of the highest order, and wailing “What about the children?” is no more valid in this instance than it is in any other where adults use children to do their dirty work for them. Per one of those key song lyrics cited in an earlier blog post, when those who light their torches at the bonfire of political correctness surround him, Twain sinks beneath their wisdom like a stone. 
We are often forced to excuse bad behavior by otherwise admirable human beings by saying they were products of their times (see Jefferson, Thomas and slavery). There’s some truth to that line of thinking, but not whole truth because we can always find examples of people from any given period who got the moral issues right despite the climate of opinion that dominated their time. Twain is such a person. His writing not only helped shape my personal views against imperialism, racism, religious hypocrisy, and greed, but in his voluminous words he put down a marker that declared to the whole world that though we as a nation may have indulged in all those vices, one among us stood for something better, and there’s redemption to be found in his writing. As Lewis Lapham said of him: 

No other writer of his generation had seen as much of the young nation’s early sorrow, or become as familiar with its commonplace scenes of human depravity and squalor. As a boy on the Missouri frontier in the 1830s he attended the flogging and lynching of fugitive slaves; in the California gold fields in the 1860s he kept company with underage murderers and overage whores; in New York City in the 1870s he supped at the Gilded Age banquets of financial swindle and political fraud, learning from his travels that “the hard and sordid things of life are too hard and too sordid and too cruel for us to know and touch them year after year without some mitigating influence.” Twain bottled the influence under whatever label drummed up a crowd -- as comedy, burlesque, satire, parody, sarcasm, ridicule, wit -- any or all of it presented as “the solid nonpareil,” guaranteed to fortify the blood and restore the spirit. Humor for Twain was the hero with a thousand faces.

Twain influenced not only my attitude toward the boogeymen I would encounter in life, but my position on death as well. Even as a young man with my whole life stretching out before me, I was quite taken with that comment Twain made about going out with Halley’s Comet. I liked it from a practical standpoint…the thought of dying at 75 seemed a reasonable, ripe old age, and I fixed on it for a very long while as the ideal age for moving on. (Now that 75 is about a car lease term away, I’m not so sure…maybe 85...) More than that, though, what I loved about the line was the matter-of-factness of it. Twain makes the statement with the air of the distant observer that he used so effectively in his writing to make it sound as if he was a god…though not your typical god…but rather a god who was on to himself:

Every man is in his own person the whole human race, with not a detail lacking. I am the whole human race without a detail lacking; I have studied the human race with diligence and strong interest all these years in my own person; in myself I find in big or little proportion every quality and every defect that is findable in the mass of the race...What a coward every man is! and how surely he will find it out if he will just let other people alone and sit down and examine himself. The human race is a race of cowards; and I am not only marching in that procession but carrying a banner.

As he revealed throughout his writing again and again, Twain was as hard on himself as he was on others. In doing so, he taught me another valuable lesson-- don’t kid yourself.  

I Am Running for President

Four Horsemen of the American Apocalypse 
(with apologies to Chris Riddell)Why, you may well ask. Very good question. After all, I’m now actively leading that life one of the gurus from my seminary days, Joseph Campbell, described as following my bliss.  I literally wake up every day and do pretty much as I please. Do I really want to give that up to hit the snowy campaign trail in New Hampshire (eek, SNOW!), schmooze with voters over corndogs in Iowa, cold call Fat Cats for campaign contributions, and sit through tedious, repetitive, trivial interviews on Meet the Press? Hell, no. I do not, and I don’t intend to do any of that stuff. My run for the presidency in fact will be more of a lope…or a stroll…or one of those front porch campaigns made famous by such giants of the American presidency as James Garfield, Benjamin Harrison, and William McKinley. Front porch with my iPad…that’s the ticket!  
When I was a very young man, I wanted to be president. And when I consider the success two of my baby boomer peers-- Bill Clinton and George W. Bush--had in achieving the office with neither my character (in the first case) nor my intelligence (in the second), I think maybe I should’ve given it a go. But, alas, I chose the writer’s life, believing then, as I do now, that the writer seeks to find truths within to share with others, while the politician seeks to find illusions without to share with others. There was a time, of course—before mass illusion--when you could be both a writer and a politician. Jefferson was a writer; Lincoln was a damn good writer. So with this launch, not only do I endeavor to embody the campaigning energy of McKinley et al., but the profound introspection of Jefferson and Lincoln.
This follow your bliss campaign of mine will not be entirely self-centered. I’m not just doing this to check-off some youthful bucket list item. I’m also doing it for Hillary. I’ve been reading for months now how Mrs. Clinton needs someone to challenge her for the Democratic nomination to both push her further to the left and toughen her up for a brutal general election against a Republican opponent. First of all, I find it laughable that anyone thinks at this stage in her career Hillary Clinton--the real deal Clair Underwood--needs to be toughened up. Secondly, politicians tack left or right as the winds of a campaign dictate. Those winds are usually stirred by external events, self-inflicted wounds, scandals, media coverage, declining poll numbers. A summer breeze like Lincoln Chafee or even the estimable Bernie Sanders are unlikely to nudge such an electoral colossus as this off course.
So this follow my bliss campaign will not attempt to move Hillary to “the left”…wherever that is. What I would like to do, however, is help focus Hillary on a landscape she may not have noticed. I think she’s been in the foxhole so long--first with Bill, then with Barack--that she’s only got a gopher’s eye glimpse of things and may not realize that the wide open field where she first dug in is now home to a vast, gonzoid flea market of odorous, moldy, crusty propositions dragged down from the stuffy attic and up from the damp cellar. The traditional distinction between Democrats as the party of big government and Republicans as the party of limited government has significantly changed. The Democrats have increasingly become the party of incompetent government, and the Republicans the party of no government…or, to put it another way, the Party of I Got Mine Government.
From coast to coast, wherever Republicans have taken over governance on a Federal, state or local level they've made it their unified mission to roll back the protections, services, and responsibilities our government has to its people (although they remain steadfast for the most invasive intrusions into the personal aspects of peoples' lives). They deregulate industries across the board, subjecting ordinary citizens to toxic drinking water, dangerous working conditions, financial shenanigans. They cut the social safety net to shreds, willfully…vengefully…leaving the most vulnerable…children, single mothers, the elderly and disabled…to the mercy of fate. They advocate for rightwing militias to guard our borders; mercenaries to fight our wars; vigilantes to stand their own ground in place of tax-supported, citizen-controlled law enforcement. They enable the richest amongst us to have the most influence over our elections while throwing as many obstacles to voting against the most common of us. They refuse out of cowardice to act on an article of war against ISIS and obstruct out of craven political calculation a treaty for peace with Iran. They resist funding government at every turn, and shut it down when they don’t get their way.  Worst of all, they rekindle the treasonous embers of the Old Confederacy—states’ rights, nullification, secession, and institutional racism. Theirs is a nightmarish vision for the country resurrected from the darkest period of our nation’s past. And they work to rewrite our history bookswherever they command boards of education so that, Soviet style, they can bury any facts that conflict with the illusion of America they’re trying to cobble together out of disparate Bible passages and Ayn Rand pathologies. 
As for the Democrats’ incompetence, it can be clearly illustrated in such sorry episodes as the Obamacare launch and the abysmal administration of the Veteran’s Administration. But nowhere is it on more graphic display than in the way they’ve allowed Republicans with their demonstrable hatred of government to take over governing at almost every level. Since Hillary’s husband gave Democratic cover to this systematic emasculation of government with his “era of big government is over” pander to the Right, she has a special obligation to begin to undo the damage. Over the months ahead she’s going to face countless questions on immigration, ISIS, income inequality and whatnot. Every answer will be an opportunity for her to hammer home the message that the opposition’s essential position is not to offer solutions on any of these issues, but to dismantle the one and only institution we as a people have to deal with them…a functioning government of, by, and for the people. 

The era of rigged government is over. Saying that loud and proud is as far left as Hillary has to go. I'll be doing my best here in the campaign ahead to help get her there.  

(In the coming months look for the Follow My Bliss Campaign to put forth a number of position papers on the most compelling issues of the 2016 campaign. No donations necessary…just “likes”.)    

Bundy vs. Brown

Cliven "Don't Tread on Me" Bundy                                        Michael 2 Brown


Cliven “Don’t Tread on Me” Bundy TALE OF THE TAPE
Michael 2 Brown
Stood down Bureau of Land Management 
Claim to Fame
Shot down by local cop
Owed US Government $1,000,000 in unpaid grazing fees and fines                    Allegations 
Stole $48.99 worth of cigars and walked down middle of the road
20 years Time Span of Crime

20 minutes
Summoned heavily armed militia to help resist When Confronted with Authority
Wrestled with arresting officer
Retreated Authority Response
Shot to kill
“I don't recognize the United States government as even existing." Quote
“You're too much of a fucking pussy to shoot me."
FOX News Hero Media Treatment
FOX News Villain
Threatened Federal officers; verbally and physically intimidated media, politicians, and fellow citizens on public roads and at church; killed two Las Vegas policemen and an innocent bystander in shootout Sympathizers 
Marched in protest, looted, vandalized; killed two New York City policemen


No Grand Jury convened Grand Jury Indictments 
None
Zero (DHS report on home-grown rightwing terrorists suppressed for six years) Federal Reports Issued
Two
"Bundy hit a trifecta of sorts: He violated the laws Congress made, ignored the judicial branch’s orders, and defied the executive branch’s efforts to enforce those laws and orders ... In the end, Bundy isn’t the victor; anarchy is. The rule of law, and society as a whole, lost."--The Las Vegas Sun Lessons Learned
Unfazed by video, eye witnesses, & public outrage, epidemic of police shootings of young, unarmed blacks (Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, John Crawford…just days ago Walter Scott!) continues to spread like Ebola 
Civil War when rebellious American South defied Federal government in the cause of secession, nullification and state sovereignty Historical Roots

American Original Sin from advent of slavery (1619) to passage of Civil Rights bill (1964) when blacks were, both by law and custom, treated as property, subhuman, and second class citizens
Continues, unpunished, to break law with impunity Current Status

Dead & buried
If you approve, you condone individuals refusing to obey the law and taking up arms against law enforcement Litmus Test
If you approve, you condone law enforcement acting as judge, jury, and executioner of unarmed individuals who refuse to obey the law
Instant idolization of old cowboy scofflaw allies super patriot conservative media and politicians with racist, seditious, armed and dangerous rightwing extremists bent on bringing down America Further Proof that Spinelli is God
Cop killing of punkish young cigar thief reveals deep, institutional racism in Ferguson, MO and focuses national attention on police use of excessive force throughout America
Lasting Impressions L) Bundy militiaman takes up sniper position against government officers. R) Michael Brown during the four hours he lay dead in the street after allegedly raising empty arms at government officer.

Lyrics in the Key of Life, Part II

Picking up from Lyrics in the Key of Life, Part I
Still, a man [or woman] hears what he [or she] wants to hear/And disregards the rest. I find myself going to this line from Paul Simon’s The Boxer with increasing frequency now that I spend so much time on the Internet. Read through any online thread on any given day and you're sure to come upon thousands of examples of people talking right past each other. And it's not just about politics and religion, I once came upon a nasty exchange on which New England state had the best lobster rolls. Below is one of a gazillion (ho-ho) dialogs that make my case. First, some background: the original post Black girls' sexual burden: Why Mo'ne Davis was really called a "slut" was about how the twitter incident in which Mo'ne Davis was called a slut was indicative of what black women have always had to endure. Two women, who should be allies, respond....

White woman: This bias everyone is speaking of is GENDER bias, race is not why men sexualize girls and women. Curt Schilling's daughter was the target of this kind of bias, and anyone remember Martina Navratilova?  Men use sexist rhetoric to diminish the accomplishments of girls and women. This is a world wide problem, and all girls and women are subject to this mistreatment. The two things that are most harmful to women are gender and economic disparity. Women must stand together, all races and ethnicities, as there is power in numbers. Let's focus on our common ground and put an end to all biases.

Black woman: It is most definitely a racial issue in addition to being one related to gender. Here's a term you need to look up: intersectionality. I'm amazed you haven't heard of it yet. I'm sure you would not deny that either sexism or racism are problems, yet racist sexism targeted specifically at black women and girls is apparently beyond you. Ms. Cooper is using this incident with Mo'ne as the catalyst and basis for her discussion, but it goes much deeper than that. You should do your research before you talk. You are speaking for and over black women, and you are doing it in order to contradict a *black woman.* Does that really make sense to you?

White Woman: Direct your anger at someone else. I am not here to hurt or silence anybody.

Black Woman: Why so many white women don't understand anything about black women? You think you and I are exactly the same in our experiences as women and I'm just, what? Lying about how different I know my experience to be from yours? You think I would lie? You think all black women are lying? And for that matter, many other women of color? You think you can force your narrative down my throat, force me to agree that you and I are exactly equal in both our privileges and our struggles? Does that seem like solidarity to you? You think you and I are on the same page, and yet look, here we are, not on the same page. Amazing.

White woman: you don't sound like you are interested in a discussion, you sound angry. Amazing indeed.

1 day ago

He sank beneath your wisdom like a stone—from Leonard Cohen’s sublime Suzanne.  Whenever I find myself in a "dialog" like the one above, I close it by saying (to myself at least): "I've sunk beneath your wisdom like a stone." I know it sounds a touch smug and condescending, but I think it beats the alternatives--a rude and crude "Fuck you" or the uber passive-aggressive "You just don't get it". 

When you’re lost in the rain in Juarez/And it’s Eastertime too/And your gravity fails/And negativity don’t pull you through—This is the other Dylan line that I reach for most often. It's a more poetic treatment of How does it feel/ to be on your own/like a rolling stone, but basically the same idea—loss is an essential and unavoidable part of life. You can put on airs, call in the doctor, find fortune and fame, but somewhere along the line you’re going to have to make do without props. If you’re ever standing behind me in Starbucks and hear me singing this line to myself, I'm not trying to strike up a conversation about physics, self esteem or race relations, I'm merely trying to find my way through my wit’s end.  
It’s a sad man, my friend, who’s livin’ in his own skin and can’t stand the company--Back to the beginning...the lyric that set me off on this self-examination. It's from Springsteen's Better Days, and speaks rather succinctly to the whole Norman O. Brown Love’s Body thing, which is the touchstone of this blog. With his more lyrical Love’s Body and more literal Life Against Death, Brown put forth his thesis that most of the world's troubles spring from humankind's discomfort with itself—its sense of dismemberment and loss. When Brown says that homicide is a case of suicide through mistaken identity, we need look no further for a graphic example than Andreas Lubitz crashing a plane into a mountainside with 149 men, women and children onboard who did not share his psychosis. Brown redirects us to think of murder in particular, and crime in general, not as supernatural evil, but as desperate attacks on that which we hate or fear in ourselves. Interviews with sex offenders undergoing chemical castration reveal how relieved they are to achieve some level of comfort in their own skin:

"These pills have actually given me the chance to take a step back and think, 'Hang on, you don't want to go down that road again.' I can watch a TV programme simply for what it is, without hoping the presenter would part her legs so I could see up her skirt." He still has "the odd slip" but is functionally impotent now. "I get the stirrings, but nothing else." His entire relationship with the world has changed. "Because my head isn't full of sex all the time, I'm able to speak to people. How I used to manage even the mundane things – walk, talk, sleep – I don't know."

Having empathy for those who suffer demons of the mind does not mean condoning what they do; it means understanding that what they do is part of the total human experience. It's not some alien evil beyond our comprehension. Comprehending what drives some to such madness that they'll kill masses in an airline crash or behead a lone unarmed person in the desert should not be beyond us as long as we keep in mind that at the root of most human badness is human suffering.  

Lyrics in the Key of Life, Part I

In last week’s post I had cause to quote my favorite Springsteen line again: "But it’s a sad man, my friend, who’s livin’ in his own skin and can’t stand the company". I realized that there are a number of pop song lyrics that I’ve referred to over and over again through my life, just as a believer will fall back upon, say, favorite verses from the Bible…or the Koran…or Kahlil Gibran. And I wondered, are these lines that stick in my mind and come readily to my tongue because they’re so catchy, or is it because they speak to my personal worldview. And my wondering led to this rundown…
What key? What key?—The title of this post comes from Stevie Wonder’s magnificent Songs in the Key of Life, and as rich as that collection of songs is, this particular line comes from Fingertips Part 2 , the first hit by the then Little Stevie Wonder. The line is not even part of the official song lyric…Stevie didn’t write “What key? What key?” During the recording someone (with a deeper voice than 12-year old Stevie) shouts it out about three quarters through. It’s stuck with me for so long, first, because it was Lorna who pointed it out to me, making it an early bonding moment between us. But for its impact on my worldview, which is what this is all about, consider how in the playing of the song something as essential as the key can be momentarily misplaced, but regained. Soon enough, Stevie and his band get back in the same key and drive the song home to its glorious conclusion. That not only captures what happens in the oft-times chaotic creative process, but What key?…what key? can serve as a handy “safe word” to get couples through an array of domestic crises: The guests have arrived early and the dinner’s not ready yet--what key?…what key? The GPS has you driving around in circles and there’s no hard copy map in the car--what key?…what key? One partner wants missionary sex; the other wants doggy style--what key?…what key?  As opposed to yelling, “Asshole, you’ve ruined everything!”, What key?…what key? is a way more better way to ask for help while reminding your partner that you’re both involved in a cooperative effort.
"C'est la vie", say the old folks, it goes to show you never can tell—I probably would’ve found "C'est la vie” a pretty good statement on human existence even if Chuck Berry hadn’t written it into his song You Never Can Tell. But once he added the old folks and his own translation of the phrase into the mix, he took it to a Ben Franklin level of wisdom for the ages. The old folks have seen it all, and yet the one sure thing age and its experiences have taught them is that you never can tell—once happy marriages may break up…once good children may get into trouble…once dear dogs will die…money and hopes get lost. In the end the only one true thing you can say about it all is, C’est la vie.The more old folks I get, the more I have occasion to say it.
Take a sad song and make it better…The truly awful Ted Cruz was in the news this week exhibiting more of his mental problems. At one point he claimed that he turned away from classic rock to country and western music because he didn’t like the way classic rock responded to 9/11. The utter stupidity of the remark has been addressed by many others, so I won’t get into it here except to say that if the Beatles had been a C & W group, that line would’ve been, Take a sad song and play it over and over and over again. Classic rock ‘n roll is actually optimistic, full as it is with romance, bravado, idealism. Even rock songs about heartbreak are addressed to a world that seemingly cares. Take a sad song and make it better does not deny that there are sad songs, and expresses a determination for improvement. It’s an earlier American notion from when we were a more pragmatic nation, not possessed by ideologies that demand our loyalty above all else. So my political worldview--Take a sad song and…don't deny it...make it better.
There are many here among us who believe that life is but a joke—I could do a post like this based on a hundred different Dylan lines that have helped shape my worldview, but I’ll limit myself to two. This one, for better and worse, probably comes closest to nailing my personal belief system if I'm allowed to stretch the word joke to include humor, comedy, and irony. It sometimes costs me comradeship with my more sincere, earnest, sentimental, and righteous brothers and sisters, but it’s a price worth paying to maintain an ironic distance from those things that drive so many others mad with frustration, resentment, and hate.  We live and we die, like the mayfly, the alligator and every other creature on earth. The joke is that our superior intelligence makes us the only species to find this tragic rather than natural.
Lyrics in the Key of Life, Part II to come. 

A Whiter Shade of White, Part II

Larry Coburn and Hugh Thompson, two members of three-man helicopter crew who received
medals for rescuing Vietnamese civilians and reporting US Army atrocities at Mai Lai.
 (Glenn Andreotta, third crew member, awarded posthumously) 
I once had a college professor who on the day the news broke about the Mai Lai massacre stood before our class and told us how much he hated his "pink skin".  As it became clear through the rest of the class, that was his way of taking racial ownership of the atrocity American soldiers had committed in their wholesale slaughter of Vietnamese civilians.  It was my first experience with self-loathing of any kind, though my higher education would soon introduce me to a broad display of the behavior--famously self-loathing Jews who anglicized their names; blacks who invested in skin lighteners and  hair straighteners; closeted gays who made a flamboyant display of their homophobia. I once worked with a woman of quite obvious Mexican descent who would tell everyone upon their first meeting that her family was from Spain. So, again, my favorite Springsteen line comes to mind: "But it's a sad man, my friend, who's livin' in his own skin and can't stand the company." 

There is a powerful scene in the grossly under-appreciated 2014 film Belle, where the mulatto offspring of a slave and a white man of privilege sits in front of her mirror tearing at her own skin. Following the deaths of her mother and father, Belle is raised by her father's wealthy relatives. They are mostly accepting, kind, and loving towards her, but as prisoners of the British class system in the 18th century they can't allow her to join them at the dinner table whenever they have guests--because it's just not done. Early on in her development, Belle blames this discrimination on her skin color rather than the perverse class system. Such imprinting of self-loathing on young, innocent minds, I believe, is the worst outcome of biological prejudice aimed at both race and gender. Like many of my sex and race--through fortune beyond my making--I've never been much in danger of suffering from it, for which I'm grateful. I don't believe my old college professor suffered from it either. My assessment of his avowed self-loathing from all these decades away is that it was an intellectual exercise...more an act of liberal vanity than a cry of psychic pain. And truth be told, there's as much white privilege involved in identifying with the plight of the racially oppressed as being indifferent to it because in the end most white folks usually have the option of walking away.

It's not that white self-loathing cannot be genuine. We know that there are white boys and girls raised in black or hispanic neighborhoods who develop the same inferiority complexes generally associated with minority youth vis-à-vis their relationships with whites…shame of their skin...their hair…their speech…their background and culture. All of which only goes to underscore how much self-loathing is a socialization process, both for those who foist it on others and those who suffer from it. 

In A Whiter Shade of White, Part I, I wrote about what I call a "new, entitled strain of bigotry". Sadly most bigotry is handed down from generation to generation. Some bigotry, however, grows fresh out of sudden traumatizing incidents or slow simmering resentments. The new entitled bigotry is a product of that simmering process. There's a touch of the old "mad as hell, not gonna take it any more" vibe to it. It's practiced by folks of varying races--even white--and aimed at the white race because somewhat of a consensus has formed that the entire white race has had too fee and easy a ride for too long as regards being on the dirty end of the racial discrimination stick. As the Asian-American told Joan Walsh (see Part 1) in explaining why he was excluding whites from a "do-gooder" group he was forming: "We’ve been excluded for so long — they should know how it feels.”


I fully admit to being baffled by this from both a practical and moral standpoint. As I've said before, the enormous, never-ending fight for social justice would seem to call for as vast an alliance as possible (and sometimes allies come from the most unexpected places). Marginalizing or (as is now the vogue) demonizing would-be allies is a loser's strategy. What's more, it's completely at odds with the ultimate goal--how can you work toward a cooperative and interdependent society if to get there your marching orders are to expel everyone not as pure in thought, word, and deed as you are? As to the immoral component of this exclusionary strategy, there's more than a bit of bullying and guilt by association involved. As with Joan Walsh's Asian-American associate, the "they" he believes who deserve a lesson in how it feels are clearly not those who have asserted white privilege to keep others down and out. They're the ones already sensitive enough to enlist in the fight against discrimination, but because they share some kind of biological distinction with some who have discriminated, they're deemed too tainted for the cause. Abusing your friends and refusing to discriminate between them and your real enemies screams of impotency.
Throughout March 2015--which I've come to call White Hysteria Month for the raft of blanket condemnations of the white race as a whole, without perspective or fairness--I've read more than a few expressions of white liberal guilt. From the manufactured outrage over the "too white" Academy Awards to the deeply troubling evidence of institutional racism in Ferguson, Missouri, there's been a reverberating echo of my old college professor's lament, "I hate my pink skin." There's not just an expectation but a demand that every white person acknowledge complicity in every act of race-based nastiness. We're all Cliven Bundy, they say…we're all George Zimmerman…we're all SAE frat boys and their house mother. The racism implied in that expectation is lost in the righteous fervor of those who hold it. To say all Muslims must "own" beheadings in the desert, or all African-Americans must own black-on-black gang killings in the cities, or all whites must own gross racial injustice in Missouri is bigotry plain and simple. It's the bigotry of those uncomfortable in their own skin and out to make everyone else uncomfortable in theirs. 

And to take shame and blame for various bad acts because they were committed by people of the same skin color is nonsensical and offensive. As it would have been for my old professor on the day Hugh Thompson and Larry Coburn received their medals for heroism at Mai Lai if he had been inspired to declare his love for his pink skin. A racial crime is a crime against basic human decency; a racial triumph is a human triumph. Allegiance to bad or good is not a matter of biological distinction, it's a matter of moral distinction. 

A Whiter Shade of White, Part I

Hard times for whiteness. First, there's all that snow. Then this year's Oscars, accompanied by the drumbeat that too many of the nominees were white. Add an organized  campaign by allegedly literate people to enlist readers in a boycott of books by white men for a year in order to give more time to reading books by women, people of color, and LGBT. And then there's the full-court press coming from the liberal end of the political spectrum to prove that not only can't white men jump, they can't emote, evolve, engage, empathize, emancipate, or get the eff out of the way. Numerous times a week reputedly progressive websites, like Salon, will run articles with titles like Let's Hope the Boston Marathon Bomber is White or Detangling Racism: White Women's Fixation with Black Women's Hair. One cannot begin to imagine the uproar from liberals if that first article expressed hope that the bomber was black or the second article accused black women of being fixated on white women's hair. This broad brush application of white, white, white to an array of real and imagined social injustices appears to be part of some incoherent strategy to fight racism with racism of a different color. Joan Walsh, author of a book that neatly fits this bizarre zeitgeist with its title What's the Matter with White People?, offers tortured witness to her struggle with what she calls her self-loathing whiteness. After her black lover broke up with her (for her whiteness, she believes), she writes:

After my wake-up call, finally resigned to being white, I started speaking out against the casual, mindless anti-white racism I had always ignored. We’re not talking Klan violence here. The vast majority of the people I worked with weren’t racist. But there was a fairly common, reflexive use of white as an epithet — white politician, white funder, white teacher — without modifier or qualifier. White had become shorthand for “arrogant, ignorant, out of touch.” I began to say a polite “Excuse me?” when I heard these casual slights, the way my black friends did at white insensitivity...Early in my awakening I quarreled with an Asian-American colleague who formed a “people of color caucus” inside a do-gooder group that was white-led, but mainly comprising minorities. Why do that, I asked him — cautiously, nervously — why exclude white colleagues and allies, especially when they were the minority? Was there a program goal? He was silent for a moment, then angry. “We’ve been excluded for so long — they should know how it feels.”

"They should know how it feels." All us whiteys, I guess. I don't pretend to know what it's like to walk in the shoes of the un-white, un-male...though I have tried often and openly enough to empathize. Below is a copy of a letter I wrote to the LA Times in 1991. It's more than a little embarrassing to have to dig out evidence that you're basically a good guy, but that's where this blanket condemnation of whites in general and white men in particular is heading. 






















Since I've had some experience with this new, entitled strain of bigotry, I know exactly what the reaction would be if I tried to offer my letter as credential to get on what Korean-American playwright Young Jean Lee calls "the good person list". The reaction I would get would be, "So you wrote a nice letter to the LA Times and now you want a medal for doing the right thing?" (that is almost verbatim what I got when I once tried to establish my credibility on the issue of equality for women). Young Jean Lee, author of the play Straight White Men, knows whereof I speak. She says, in speaking about herself:   

"Because now there's this Asian female playwright who can be a role model for other artists of color, and I'm helping with diversity. And so I can do whatever I want and sort of get on the good-person list. And it occurred to me as I was doing the show, and listening to people talk about straight white men — straight white men don't really have that option."

DoingStraight White Men has been a profound learning experience for Lee, as she describes in an article about creating the play:

"I asked a roomful of women, queer people and minorities, 'What do you want straight men to do? And what do you want them to be like?' " she recalls. Lee wrote down all of the answers. It boiled down to this: They wanted the straight white male character to sit down and shut up. "When you hear that around the table, you just feel yourself sinking slowly into the chair," remembers James Stanley, who plays the character created from the list. The character, named Matt, is a sort of idealized straight white male. He works for a not-for-profit and is guided by a sense of trying not to — in his words — "make things worse." Lee and Stanley workshopped the character in front of the students. Who hated him. "Hated him," Lee said, clearly still surprised. "And I realized that the reason why they hated him was — despite all their commitment to social justice — what they believed in most was not being a loser. [Matt] is exhibiting behavior that gets attributed to people of color, not being assertive, not standing up for himself, always being in a service position."

With my oft-stated affection for irony, I cannot resist the whole conceit of Lee's play. But  then Lee says,  “My nightmare interpretation of the play would be, like ‘Oh everyone just suffers the same … straight white men are the victims.’ Because they’re not. Because as a straight white man, all you have to do to make the problem go away is to not give a shit.”
What I like about that statement is that it echoes what I essentially said in my letter to the LA Times. As a straight white guy I could more easily afford to keep looking for a job than the black woman who got the job instead of me. That is a fact, and as I said in my letter any man who denies it is either dumb or dishonest. On the other hand, for Ms. Lee to suggest that any straight white man can make his problems go away by simply not giving a shit undercuts the wisdom inherent in her play. My father, for just one example from the world of straight white men, could not make the problem of helping to provide for a family of six in the face of chronic joblessness go away just by not giving a shit (I think my dad would've rather been called a "dirty Mick" than privileged…it certainly would've made more sense to him). There are long-term unemployed men all over this country today whose problems cannot be alleviated for all the straightness and whiteness at their command. To claim otherwise…to claim all white men are "privileged"... is no less stupid or false than it is to claim that minorities are not disadvantaged by prejudice. Progressives, once renowned for their sense of nuance, now have difficulty seeing that those two truths are not mutually exclusive. They have bought in to the idea that those two truths are incompatible. In doing so, liberals are willfully becoming part of the problem rather than the solution.

You Feelin' Me?

I have a rule that I’ve been pretty good at following, and that rule is not to deem a creative work as great until I’ve subjected it to multiple viewings…or readings…or listenings…whatever. I’ve been breaking that rule with wild abandon for the past 10 years as I’ve gone about the decade declaring The Wire as the greatest show in the history of TV even though I had only seen it once. But now I’ve just completed a second viewing, and I’m here to reaffirm my earlier declaration of its greatness.
First, a little background on my initial Wire experience: When the show originally aired on HBO in 2002, my friend Peter Johnston alerted me to it. Lorna and I watched the first episode and were unimpressed, so we stopped watching. Five years later, as the show was winding down its run, Peter came to me again with a Netflix disc of the first season, imploring me to give it another try. “Just watch the first three episodes,” he pleaded. Because Peter has steered me to so many winners over the years (e.g., Cave of Forgotten Dreams), I agreed to give it another go…and sure enough three episodes in on the second try, Lorna and I were both hooked on The Wire.
Flash forward to 2014, we give the complete DVD set as a Christmas present to brother Tim and wife Hayden with the proviso that they watch at least the first three episodes. They do, and then proceed to blow through all five seasons in semi-marathon style. Then comes our turn again.
As with all such great film or TV, it begins with the writing:
Judge Phelan: McNulty, I hold you in contempt.McNulty: Who doesn't?
Burrell: What makes you think they'll promote the wrong man?Daniels: We do it all the time.
Slim Charles: Don't matter who did what to who at this point. Fact is, we went to war and now there ain't no goin' back. I mean, shit, it's what war is, you know? Once you in it, you in it. If it's a lie, then we fight on that lie. But we gotta fight. (Bonus Iraq War commentary right in the midst of the damned thing.)
Serge: Family cannot be helped.Prop Joe: Who you tellin'? I got motherfuckin' nephews and in-laws fucking all my shit up all the time and it ain't like I can pop a cap in their ass and not hear about it Thanksgivin' time. For real, I'm livin' life with some burdensome niggers.

I can go on all day, but The Wire is not just one-liners, bon mots, and pithy truths. Nor, as you can see, is it burdened by politically correct bullshit. The Wireis mercifully fee of meddling from the PC police. In watching it, one realizes how badly it would’ve been neutered if back when it first arrived on the scene it had been subject to Twitter attacks from special interest groups, academic pedants, and 20-year old co-eds high on their first snort of empowerment. Indeed, one can imagine half the world’s great art being lost if the scourge of PC had reared its ugly little head over Western Culture earlier. The political right, as is its talent, has effectively hung the donkey ears of PC on the political left (I swear, if American politics were The Godfather, the rightwing would be Sollozzo and the left would be Luca Brasi, swimming with the fishes un-avenged until Michael Corleone comes along and shows how to play the game). But let’s be clear, political correctness is an American trait…from the decorous (“erectile dysfunction” to describe a limp dick) to the perverse (“friendly fire” to describe the killing of one’s own troops). And while the right taunts Obama with charges of political correctness for his refusal to use the term “radical Islam,” they engage in the boldest, most pernicious act of political correctness ever by trying to replace the word slavery in our history books with "Atlantic triangular trade"! The Wire works because it does not aim to placate either delicate or duplicitous sensibilities. 
Not only does The Wire use words--especially racially tinged words—freely, honestly, and most creatively, but no where in American culture has the reality of our race relations been treated more forthrightly. Every character…from the lowliest "hopper" on the street to the biggest shots in the mayor’s office--knows and acknowledges the burdensome role race plays in virtually everything they do. John Roberts, Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court with a Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah view on American race relations, would be sorrier than a fish out of water in the Baltimore of The Wire…he would be a severely ridiculed fish.    
In a scene prefiguring by a decade the recent embarrassments of Brian Williams and Bill O’Reilly, an angry war vet marches into a newspaper office and demands a retraction for a story that exaggerated his role in a military action…more to the aggrandizement of the reporter who "got" the story than the soldier who became a prop in it. The vet tells the reporter he did not earn the right to falsify his story like that. “A lie ain't a side of the story," the Vet proclaims, "It's just a lie.” In those two simple sentences he sums up an odious political strategy that’s become far too common these days.
Creator David Simon and his stable of top-notch writers weave intricate dramas around a Shakespearean cast of characters drawn from the headlines of our times--The War on Drugs, the death of American unionism, the pervasive corruption of politics, the impossibility of public education, the desperate and subsequently hysterical state of the media. Over all of it is the banal oppressiveness of bureaucratic ineptitude and inflexibility. A hundred years from now, scholars wanting to know what the United States was all about at the beginning of the 21st century could not do better than watch The Wire.

The show was built for resonance because, like Shakespeare, it delves deep into the human condition. Most all of the show’s many flawed characters (over 100 of them!) have moments of very human truth. Good cops battle personal demons to get their jobs done. Stone cold killers care for their families and fear the unknown. Kids with no reason to hope get up each day and try to make something out of nothing. Women hopefully invest in their men…and wait...or move on. Old folks struggle to live in dignity as their world crumbles around them. McNulty, the ostensible hero, is brought down by his own hubris like a classic figure in ancient Greek tragedy; Bubbles, the meek who seems unlikely to ever inherit the earth, finally finds redemption and ascends to the light as foretold in Christian myth; and Omar, the dark, scarred shadow of every modern day comic book superhero, shows what Batman's life would be like if he’d been born poor, black, and gay. Omar: It ain't what you takin', it's who you takin' it from.

Take it from me, kind readers…if you haven’t ever seen The Wire, do so (at least promise yourself to watch the first three episodes). And if you have seen it, see it again….it's even better the second time. You feelin’ me?

Freedom Fighter Heavyweight Champion of the World

Edward “Sneaky” Snowden                        Tale of the Tape
Chris “Killer” Kyle
WhistleblowerClaim to Fame
Sniper
Over 1 million secret government documents released                                          Notches on Belt
160 Iraqis killed from long range
US, Great Britain, Russia, China, Ecuador, Germany, France, Brazil…just for starters                             Governments Shaken
Zero
“Citizenfour”
Movie About
“American Sniper”
$2,861,943                           Worldwide Box Office
$431,394,342
Oscar, Best Documentary
Awards
Oscar, Best Sound Editing
2013 Global Thinker of the Year, Foreign Policy magazine; 2013 Winner, Sam Adams Award for “courage, persistence, devotion to truth;” 2014 Ridenhour Truth Telling Prize
                Honors                                     
Two Silver Stars; five Bronze Stars; memorial service at Cowboys Stadium; Senate Bill 162, also known as the "Chris Kyle Bill", to recognize military training in the issuance of occupational licenses

Quotes
“I don’t want to hide on this or skulk around. I think it’s more powerful to come out and say, ‘I’m not afraid.’ And I don’t think other people should be either. Look, I was sitting right next to them in an office last week. We all have a stake in this. This is our country. The balance of power right now between the citizenry and government is becoming that of the rulers and the ruled rather than the electorate and the elected.” Democracy “They were protesting the wrong people. We didn’t vote in Congress; we didn’t vote to go to war. I signed up to protect this country. I do not choose the wars.”
"The conversation occurring today will determine the amount of trust we can place both in the technology that surrounds us and the government that regulates it. Together we can find a better balance, end mass surveillance, and remind the government that if it really wants to know how we feel, asking is always cheaper than spying.”
Delusion
“We showed we were the force to be reckoned with. That’s where the so-called Great Awakening came. It wasn’t from kissing up to the Iraqis. It was from kicking butt. The tribal leaders saw that we were bad-asses, and they’d better get their act together, work together, and stop accommodating the insurgents. Force moved that battle. We killed the bad guys and brought the leaders to the peace table. That is how the world works.”
“All I can say right now is the US Government is not going to be able to cover this up by jailing or murdering me. Truth is coming, and it cannot be stopped.”
Destiny
“I believe the fact that I’ve accepted Jesus as my savior will be my salvation. But in that backroom or whatever it is when God confronts me with my sins, I do not believe any of the kills I had during the war will be among them. Everyone I shot was evil. I had good cause on every shot. They all deserved to die.”
Exiled
Current Status
Dead
Blows whistle on unrestrained US government spying on its citizens, ends up living in Russia.
Spinelli!
Fully-armed “good guy with a gun” shot dead by doofus with a gun at shooting range.

Massimo

As a young boy, once I started daydreaming about my future I took quiet satisfaction in the fact that I didn’t have to share my birthday--February 19-- with anyone enormously famous. No easy feat given my parents’ proclivity for producing babies on auspicious dates…my brother Tim has to share his birthday with JFK; brother Cliff shares his with Jesus...as does wife Lorna and her twin sister Lorraine! How can you even begin to think of being a president or Messiah with such lofty figures as those already dominating the calendar? My dear old friend John Douglas--born February 12, exactly one week before me--has had to share his birthday with Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin. Although that dynamic birthday duo shows that two great figures can indeed occupy the same date on the calendar, I personally would’ve found it too humbling for aspiration’s sake to be born then and may have just quit on my dreams. But with February 19 free and clear, I always felt the date was open for me to put my mark on it.
Massimo Troisi was also born on February 19. Already I can hear the head scratching his name invokes echoing through the Intertubes, thus reassuring me that the date is still mine to patent. Massimo was the star of Il Postino, one (if not THE one) of my all-time favorite movies. Massimo plays Mario, the meek son of a fisherman on an island full of fishermen and fishermen’s wives. When we’re first introduced to Mario he’s in his room dreamily fondling a postcard from relatives in America. As he later fights off his father’s urging to get a job with weak excuses, it’s easy to perceive Mario as lazy. Lazy, that is, unless you’re a fellow dreamer, and then you know that it’s not work that Mario seeks to avoid, but the surrender of dreams to work. My bond with Massimo/Mario begins right there since I had a father of my own, a weaver in the local carpet mill, who sometimes grew impatient with how dedicated I was to just weaving dreams in my room. At 16 I made a life-long promise to myself to avoid any job that came between me and my passions and dreams--a promise I rather skillfully managed to keep through most of my working life. Mario seems to follow my path. He takes an undemanding job as a part-time postman despite its meager wages just to satisfy his father’s demand that he find work.
Because the job does not force foreclosure on his compulsive woolgathering, Mario is open and available at the transformative moment of his life…his meeting with Pablo Neruda, the great Chilean poet in exile who has come to Mario’s obscure Italian island to wait out his government’s indictment of him. Neruda, a rare man of arts in Mario’s world, exposes the barely literate postman up to the power of words. Mario, early on in their relationship, responds to Neruda’s famous line, “It so happens/I’m tired of being a man” by confiding that he, too, is sometimes tired of being a man. The poem that is home to that line, Walking Around , easily reveals why it speaks so clearly to Mario:

I don’t want to go on being just a root in the shadows,
 vacillating, extended, shivering with dream,
 down in the damp bowels of earth,
 absorbing it, thinking it, eating it every day./I don’t want to be so much misfortune,
 I don’t want to go on as a root or a tomb,
 a subterranean tunnel, just a cellar of death, 
frozen, dying in pain./This is why, Monday, the day, is burning like petrol,
 when it sees me arrive with my prison features, 
and it screeches going by like a scorched tire 
and its footsteps tread hot with blood towards night.

Soon Mario is attempting to use metaphors himself--as taught to him by Neruda--to woo Beatrice, the tavern girl and niece of the tavern keeper, Donna Rosa.

Donna Rosa: What did he say to you?
Beatrice: Metaphors.
Donna Rosa: I never heard such big words from you. What metaphors did he do to you?
Beatrice: He didn’t do them to me; he said them. Metaphors are words.
Donna Rosa: Words are the worst thing ever. I'd prefer a drunkard at the bar touching your bum to someone who says your smile flies like a butterfly.
Beatrice: Spreadslike a butterfly. 

Il Postino begs to be a companion feature for a classroom or film series on communication with Sofia Coppola’s exquisite Lost in Translation. Whereas Coppola’s little masterpiece examines the many ways we fail to communicate (preserving the one clarifying act of communication for a final exchange…whispered and out of audience hearing), Il Postino shows the many ways human communication can illuminate our existence.
Oddly when I saw Il Postino in a movie theater, quite the opposite of illumination happened. Il Postino introduces Mario’s boss at the post office as a communist (like Neruda himself), and the guy watching from the row in front of me stood up and yelled at the screen, “Fucking communists!” He then grabbed his shocked date by the arm, pulled her up out of her seat and angrily led her out of the theater. It's a jarring and incongruous memory to hold for such an irrepressibly gentle movie…ironic, too, in that the movie that beat out Il Postino for best picture in 1995 was Braveheart, which glorified violent action by the collective against the "One Percent" of the time, but elicited no such outbursts among its many millions of viewers as far as I know. Words, perhaps, are mightier than swords.
There's further irony in that the climatic suffering of Braveheart’s William Wallace--as played to masochistic excess by Mel Gibson--is such over-the-top movie-making hokum, while Massimo, suffering in real life with a fatal heart condition, turned in the truly heroic performance as Mario. There are many things that make Il Postino a beautiful film—smooth direction; enchanting Mediterranean scenery; a lovely, Oscar-winning soundtrack; a bright, intelligent screenplay (co-witten by Massimo) full of sweet comic moments and rich human insights; and a charming supporting cast...not least of whom is Maria Grazia Cucinotta as Beatrice, poetry in motion personified (and not reed-thin haiku, but grand, voluptuous Whitmanesque poetry). Above all, however, is Massimo, who undertook the role with a deep understanding that it would probably cost him his life…and it did. The fragility of his health permeates and elevates his performance, and sadly placed him among a handful of actors (Spencer Tracy, Peter Finch, James Dean, for three) to be nominated for a best actor Oscar after his death. 
One can never know these things for sure, but I’m guessing that if Massimo, like Mario, hadn’t been following his passion…his dreams…it is unlikely he would’ve risked his life for any other job.  Allora…on further reflection maybe there was a great man born on February 19. Happy birthday to us, Massimo/Mario, por favor.