Dan Riley's Blog, page 34

My Top Secret Valentine's Day

My Valentine

This Valentine's Day will mark the 47th one Lorna and I have been together…though technically we're not together for this one…first time ever. She's in South Carolina; I'm home in California. (But before you take out your hankies for us, Argentina, you should know that she'll be there in Charleston on all-love day cooing over Daughter Gillian's baby filled belly…which is so way better than a box of chocolates and a long stemmed rose….)

Before she left on her trip, she noticed her grand succulent project was in need of weeding, and she asked if I'd help her with it when she returned. I dutifully said yes, but as soon as I knew her plane was safely across the Mississippi I broke out my Osh-by-Gosh jeans and garden hoe and headed down to start the weeding. Reason being--Lorna frowns upon the use of garden tools when it comes to weeding. Having been in California so long now, she doesn't believe that real field work can be done standing upright. If you're not down on your hands and knees, says Lorna, you're not serious. I have not been  big on getting down on my hands and knees since my one week working the tobacco fields of Connecticut when I was 14 (and did I mention the snakes?). So my cheating heart planned to do the gardening my way in hopes that when she returned and surveyed her domain she would declare, "I guess the weeds aren't as bad as I thought." And I'd be safely home for another six months.

So I diligently set about my task and was making great progress when what to my wondering eyes should appear, but….?!?!!? Well, I didn't know what the hell. It was like something truly sci-fi…a little Invasion of the Body Snatchers crossed with Aliens 1, 2 & 3. Some gruesome growth…a most wicked weed…a most vile vine...had thoroughly consumed six of Lorna's prized plants. It was absolutely horrifying. I wanted to get James Cameron on the line and pitch him his next project--3-D! Get Sigourney Weaver back in her skivvies…Jackie Bisset in her wet white T (Control yourself, Danny Boy! Remember, we're talking Valentine's Day here.) It was hard to comprehend how effete, limp-wristed and flowered vines could overcome such massive, well-armed succulents. It was like nature's own version of rock, paper, scissors. I started hacking away, but my terror only grew as I realized the tentacles of vines not only spread over the landscape like snakes on a plane, but had formed a vast underground network of roots. Damn the hearts and flowers. It was time to kill…kill…kill…hack…chop…slaughter…terminate, exterminate, annihilate…whack…thwack!

It was my very own St. Valentine's Day massacre, and it was all for the love of my girl.

Before rescue by brave and loving husband; after rescue by same.

How the NFL Can Save America

US Supreme Court--gone to the dogs
Everyone has a theory as to what’s wrong with the country these days—too many guns, too few guns; too much God, too little god; too much American “exceptionalism”, not enough American “exceptionalism”.
Me? It’s money, plain and simple…money and the mortally corrosive impact it has on our democracy. Money rules our elected representatives, and through them and the laws they pass in its name it rules us. That rule has gotten tighter and more onerous through the recent Citizens United case where the court gave corporations standing as people for the purposes of making unlimited donations to political campaigns.  It is the most perverse Supreme Court ruling since the Dredd Scott case where the Court decided that slaves and all their descendants were not and never could be US citizens. Our exalted Supreme Court’s track record on defining who is and who is not a citizen is grotesque, but if things continue as they are it won’t matter because soon US citizenship won’t be worth a snowball’s chance in Texas.
Elected officials now spend huge portions of their terms in office raising money to pay off the bills from their last campaign or raising funds for their next one. In between time they’re busily servicing the needs of their biggest donors. Nothing gets done at any level of government unless there’s an explicit or implicit exchange of money…and the public good goes begging unless it somehow gets attached to some profit-making scheme. Efforts at reforming the system get stonewalled, watered down, sabotaged by the Court, or belittled by regrettably un-tarred and feathered Tories like George Will (who whines endlessly against elites in academia, but has no trouble at all with elites in business and finance running the entire country).  
So what’s any of this have to do with The National Football League you may be asking at this point. Good question. The NFL--unbeknownst to many of its most rabid followers--is in a remarkable way the most socialistic organization in our capitalist paradise. All 32 teams in the NFL operate under a salary cap.  At the beginning of every season, each team has the exact same amount of money to spend on player talent. Teams are free to distribute that money any way they choose. They can stupidly spend half their share on two egomaniacal superstars if they like or shrewdly spread the wealth around to a larger group of good (though not great) players to maximize the bang for their buck. Under the salary cap, no one team…especially rich in television revenue, merchandising, and fan base…has a competitive advantage over any of the other teams. Under the salary cap, an ownership of modest resources like the publicly owned Green Bay Packers can consistently outperform the deep pockets ownership of, say, the Washington Redskins through better management, talent development, and vision. 
NFL fans, notorious whiners about every single thing that does not go their own team’s way, never ever complain about the salary cap. They universally accept this fundamental socialistic underpinning of their favorite game because research shows that most humans--even testosterone-fueled football fans--have a Sesame Street-like faith in the benefit of a level playing field for everyone. Given such broad and enthusiastic support for the salary cap--and its stunning success in making the NFL the most popular and profitable sport in the land--one might wonder, where else in our dysfunctional society might such a spending cap prove salutary? And if one were me, one might answer, “Why in campaign finance reform, of course."
Rather than focusing on the murky zone of campaign contributions, the institution of a spending cap in elections would put the focus on the more transparent and manageable zone of campaign expenditures.  In my Founding Father fantasy, it would work this way: Each candidate would be allowed to spend X number of dollars per registered voter eligible to vote for the office being contested. So, let’s say there are 750,000 registered voters in a congressional district and the number X = $1…therefore none of the candidates running for that office can spend more than $750,000. All or most of the money can come from one big fat sugar daddy…or it can come from lots of little people. It doesn’t matter. But once the last dollar is gone…no more, meaning fewer 30-second TV attack ads, fewer unsightly yard signs, fewer last minute scurrilous brochures and deceptive polling place flyers. Candidates would also have to spend less time dialing for dollars and less energy servicing the few over the many. What’s more—no more voter suppression because the amount every candidate gets to spend is tied to the number of total voters registered, not purged. 
Thank you…thank you…. 
But before anointing me The New Sage of Monitcello (or Flametree Road as it were), I must confess that the idea is not totally original with me. Astonishingly, our Congress--in its near but not so useless past--passed a campaign finance bill that actually tried to rein in  campaign spending. Alas, the bill was undone by…surprise...the US Supreme Court! (Motto: Dropping turds into democracy’s punch bowl for more than 200 years.) Between Citizens United and Buckley v.Valeo (where it found that limiting campaign expenditures was an infringement on free speech), it is clear that the highest court in the land is stuck on the curious notion that money equals speech. The countervailing notion that if such is the case, then those with more money ipso facto get to have more speech than anyone seems as lost on the Court as was Dredd Scott's right to be a human being. It’s one thing to say that in a commercial, purely capitalistic sphere Hooters shouldn’t be limited in its advertising expenditures to be fair to my local taco stand. But capitalist rules should not apply to a democratic process if we want to keep the democratic process alive (sorry, ACLU). As they say, the Constitution is not a suicide pact. When election laws allow the rich to have greater say than everyone else, that’s an abridgment of everyone else's free speech. 
The Court’s idée fixe on money as speech dooms any chance of real campaign finance reform. Without reform, our democracy is doomed. The only way to shake the Court free of its plutocratic sympathies and save the country for the rest of us is by amending the Constitution. In keeping with the football theme, it's called an end around. And so I don my powdered wig and submit the following as the next amendment to the US Constitution:

In protecting the individual citizen’s right to free speech, Congress shall prohibit any law that entitles one citizen due to wealth more free speech in the electoral process than any other citizen.

Surely a legislative body that once thought it was a good idea to pass a very un-NFL-like Constitutional amendment banning alcoholic beverages throughout the land can get behind something as NFL-lite and Jeffersonian as that. Time to write your Congress people, people. (Or Tweet this to your elected Rep…it's free and easy.)

Witless for the Persecution

Gisele vs. The Mad Haters' Kangaroo Court
In my last Nob post, I expressed the hope that some august body would eventually take the media to task for its feeding frenzy over so-called deflategate. But in case The Columbia Journalism Review is too busy with Fox's wholly manufactured "No Go Zone"story, let me try to shine a little light on some of those most responsible for turning recent journalism into an embarrassing exercise in tittle-tattling. Where to begin? How about with the usual suspects…
The Reliable SourcesThey are as critical to reporters as informants are to law enforcement…and a good reporter is going to cultivate reliable sources over a career. But let’s understand that a reliable source has an agenda that is not usually to help the reporter do a better job. Reliable sources have their own biases and agendas. The leaks provided to the various NFL insiders covering this story had a distinct pattern of being just ambiguous enough to raise questions obvious to anyone with even a Perry Mason grasp of the law, but damning enough to totally impugn the reputation of the New England’s Patriots. The conduits of the leaks—Chris Mortesnsen, Mike Florio, Peter King, Jay Glazer—didn’t bother to question or even qualify whether the information they were passing on was possibly tainted or materially misleading. Peter King, as is his wont, expressed almost childlike faith in the reliability of his sources. And Jay Glazer seemed to willfully edit the info he got for dramatic effect when he used the expression “person of interest” to report that a Patriots’ locker room attendant was under scrutiny after being observed carrying a bag of game balls from one part of Gillette Stadium to another. Other media outlets used their own highly charged words to describe the anonymous locker room attendant—“lone wolf” and “rogue” being but two. The term person of interest is particularly creepy given that it’s been a cheap way for law enforcement to cast suspicion on someone it hasn’t been able to get the goods on. Richard Jewell, wrongly accused of the 1996 Olympic bombing is just one notable example. For that language to be thrown around in a trifle like deflategate, especially in regards to a low-level, easily exposed employee was shameful. It may be that it was Glazer’s source that used the term first and Glazer was just quoting him, but if so he should’ve used the same care he would’ve used if his source had used a racial slur so we could better understand the character of the source.

The Dilettantes Sports is often referred to as the toy department of news. During deflategate gleeful “adult” journalists broke into the toy store and immediately started tossing around the lawn darts and giggling and drooling over the balls. The sophomoric play on the word balls…wet balls, deflated balls, soft balls, rubbed-up balls, Brady’s balls…was damn near orgiastic. NPR’s Mike Pesca, one of the few members of the media to treat the entire incident with maturity  observed that it may very well be the irresistible opportunity for the straight news world to talk naughty that gave the story much of its air…”like the [Anthony] Weiner story,” he said. Here’s a tip for news ombudsmen everywhere: if your organization is still making up jokes about weiners and balls two days into a story, it’s time to drop the story. Interspersed with silly ball puns were solemn condemnations of public figures who had as yet to be found guilty of anything. Yet “Brady’s balls” and “Brady’s a liar” mixed as free and easy as Jello shots and 8-balls at a frat party. News organizations, which do little investigative reporting as it is, eagerly built entire “news” segments or even “news” hours around whatever utterly unchallenged scraps of rancid red meat their producers and interns gleaned from the Internet. The HuffingtonPost, the first word in sports if your sport is sighting celebrity nipples, engaged in some heavy inflation and deflation itself. Anything that made the Patriots look bad was given the top quarter of its front page with bold colorful fonts. Anything that was remotely exculpatory of the Pats got buried down along with latest Miley Cyrus stunt. News organizations that rightly saw the injustice in bringing up Tayvon Martin’s Facebook page or Michael Brown’s behavior in a convenience store minutes before he was shot to death, abandoned that journalistic standard when it came to deflategate. A spurious report (that was debunked within days) that the Patriots used the deflated ball gambit not only to improve their passing but to avoid fumbling immediately gained wide currency in the straight news world without anyone questioning the motives, competence or reliability of the source. Chris Hayes at MSNBC went all in on "ballghazi" after a spending much of a year taunting Fox for going all in on Benghazi. He repeated the long-ago discredited story that the Patriots had taped the practice of the St. Louis Rams before their 2002 Super Bowl. When I directly called him on that in a tweet, he replied that he “misspoke” (a Nixonian construction no self-regarding liberal should ever use without air quotes). Giving life to bogus and half-baked stories in such a frenzied atmosphere fueled the Internet madness where Patriot haters deaf, dumb and blindly insist that the team is guilty of “serial” rule infractions even though they are only guilty of one. If every NFL franchise with one infraction on its rap sheet was indelibly labeled a cheater, they might as well call it the National Flimflam League.
The Hatchet JobsSo there was vaguely sourced reporting, and there was silly and unprofessional reporting, and then there was just downright malicious reporting—hatchet jobs in the parlance of the news world. Bill Plaschke of the LA Times and Roxanne Jones of CNN called for the Pats to be banned from the Super Bowl…this would be mere days into the investigation of the crime they were charged with. If such hanging journalists had their way, our penal system would never have to deal with pesky things like witnesses or defense exhibits A, B, & C. Michael Rosenberg of Sports Illustrated took home the Pravda Prize. Not content like most everyone else of his ilk to simply run wild with the real and imagined facts of deflategate, Rosenberg took the opportunity to gather together every rumor, innuendo, and piece of gossip the world had to offer as regards the possible nefarious behavior of the Patriots. In order to expose the underhanded ways of the Patriots, this passage captures how low a road Rosenberg was willing to travel:

Does [Patriots owner] Kraft secure preferable game times for his Patriots? Let’s just say it wouldn’t be hard to do. Kraft is a close confidant and protector of commissioner Roger Goodell; in September, when the Ray Rice punch video leaked, and Goodell went into public relations overdrive, Kraft defended him on national television … on CBS, naturally. Cross Belichick and you cross Kraft. Cross Kraft and you risk the wrath of Goodell.

Does [Patriots owner] Kraft secure preferable game times for his Patriots? Let’s just say it wouldn’t be hard to do. How about proving it, Rosenberg? Would that be hard to do? Then do it and not throw it up against the wall like a turd and see if it sticks.  It's called reporting.  “Cross Kraft and you cross (NFL Commissioner] Goodell?” Really? Is that why two days after this scurrilous piece appeared, Kraft went before the cameras and called out the NFL and in effect Goodell for their handling of the scandal?
“Maybe some of this is overstated. But the perception is real!!!” Well, if Mike Rosenberg has anything to do with it the perception is real all right. Could he have ended on a lower note? Why yes he could…how about smearing Tom Brady? Rosenberg writes, “Are the Patriots favored sons? When defensive players get flagged for a helmet-to-knee hit on Tom Brady, Brady has been known to remind them: 'They made that ----ing rule for me!'” Unless Mike Rosenberg actually suited up for a game and was there on the field to hear Tom Brady utter something that so blatantly attempts to paint him as a spoiled brat, his only possible attribution for that quote is a "reliable source", and he doesn't even go to that shallow well. And Rosenberg wasn’t the only one to take that dark rat alley to attack. When Brady answered that he tried to calm down family and friends who were concerned about how he was weathering the storm by reminding them that it wasn’t ISIS, no one was dying, the New York Post slammed him for being "tasteless" and making a strange attempt to deflect attention away from the scandal. NBC football insider Mike Florio tweeted, “Tom Brady really went ISIS? ‘Go ahead and cheat, fellas. As long as no one loses a head, we’re good.’” How damned malicious do you have to be to put that kind of a spin on what Brady actually said?

Lucky for Belichick and Brady they have the support of a billionaire boss. If they had been running their own pre-school, they’d be out of business already and sitting in court while kids on a witness stand pointed out on puppets where on their bodies they’d touched them.

Feeling Deflated

I’m OK. Things are fine. This isn’t ISIS. No one’s dying-- Tom Brady, "deflategate" press conference, January 22, 2015Last year at this time I was seriously considering giving up the NFL. As I wrote then it would all depend upon Patriots’ Intergalactic Superstar tight end Rob Gronkowski’s return from a possibly career-ending injury. Through the combined efforts of medical science, Gronkowski’s diligent rehab, and my steady stream of novenas, Gronk came back, lugging me on his big strong shoulders to my couch for the 2014 season. It was an utterly glorious turn for both of us. He had an all-pro season, and I saw my team win its way to a sixth Super Bowl.
And then pffft! Deflategate, and the air went right out of the season. The Pats were accused of illegally tampering with the weight of the ball during the game they won to get to the Super Bowl and the howl went up throughout the land of “Cheatriots!”  
I grew up rooting against one of the most hated teams in the annals of sports—the New York Yankees. It’s been a bit odd here at the other end of my life to now be rooting for one of the most hated teams in the annals of sports—the New England Patriots. Maybe this is what they mean by the golden years. I have rather enjoyed it…and, true, it has given me that wisdom that comes with age in understanding how and why all those friends and acquaintances of mine over the years who were Yankee fans were such smug, arrogant bastards. It comes with the winning, and you understand that most of the animosity directed at your team comes from its success, and the more successful it is the more it’s hated. There’s a perverse pleasure in that, and if I had three wishes I’d wish that everyone everywhere could experience that pleasure just once in their lives. 
Truth be told, however, not everyone who hates the Patriots hates them for their winning ways. Some really do hate them on moral grounds, and all that righteous anger was stirred anew with the deflated ball allegations of the past 10 days. It has been pretty surreal watching the breadth and intensity of the news coverage…not just sports news, mind you…but Walter Cronkite/Edward R. Murrow NEWS. Millions of Seymour Hersh wannabe’s on cable and online were launched into the Oh-no Zone feverishly poring over curiously selective leaks looking for clues as to where the (ho-ho) private investigation was going. Shreds of details in a vacuum fed hours of chatter, speculation and outright idiocy…until another shred came along…and then: Squirrel! Even if the NFL comes down on the Patriots for deflating footballs, one can only hope that the Columbia Journalism Review, at least, comes down on the media for its sickening rush to judgment.   
Nonetheless, by the time of Tom Brady’s forced press conference to address the deflated ball controversy last Thursday I was quite prepared for our star QB to come before the TV cameras as a humble penitent, throwing himself on the mercy of public opinion. My one anxiety was that he would show up with the usual props for such outings--wife standing stoically by his side, kids clutching his hands, lawyer glowering in the background. Just play it straight, I begged him, though he could not hear. Give the nation a badly needed lesson in contrition.
But he didn’t. He scrambled his way through a broken field of unremarkable questions from a room full of tackling dummies. Midway through, my wife Lorna came into watch and asked me how it was going. I told her I was disappointed not to have Tom answer my catholic boy fantasy by confessing and apologizing. Instead, he said, “It isn’t ISIS. No one is dying.” Which was literally true, but figuratively Tommy was gasping for air.
As I’ve chronicled here and here, Lorna is the most detached member of our household when it comes to the Patriots. So when she looked at the TV and declared that #12 wasn’t lying I perked up. “Where are the telltale signs of lying?” she asked. “Look at his body language. Look at his eyes. No excessive blinking.”
No excessive blinking indeed. In fact many of the critics of his press conference said that Brady looked like a deer caught in the headlights. And not to go all metaphor police here, but that deer in the headlights look is supposed to mean “caught off-guard”, not caught lying. The deer is not trying to put something over on the car crashing down on it.

Anyway, not for the first time has Lorna been there to get me through a dark night of the soul. And not for the first time have I had my dewy-eyed faith in a hero shaken. As an adult, I wake up each day expecting something or someone I’ve invested in to fail in some way—for my country to do something shamefully hideous in a far-off land; for my 401K to help fund some kind of greedy, exploitive capitalist rip-off of the underclass; for my political party to sell out another principle or constituency to bag a few more big donor dollars. It’s quite a compromised life we all have to live.
Go Pats...

The Best Ism: Tribadism

PornAfter my grueling, extensive research into the most consequential Red Man v. White Man war of all time and two deep dive posts into how the complex and perplexing subject of tribalism has a far-reaching impact on a range of modern controversies, my dear friend Samantha Dubon sent me an email that read, in part, "By the way, if you're playing scrabble, you could change just one letter and get a whole new word, tribadism, and make out like a bandit points-wise…anyway."

Ba-da-boom. 

And once again it all comes back to sex. And once again, I couldn't get my mind free of it once Samantha, temptress of my in-box, had planted the seed. It seemed as if I couldn't think of anything else but tribadism for days after. Fortunately it's not as complex or perplexing a subject as tribalism. It's rather straight forward really--two women "scissor" their legs over each other, press their genitals against each other, and grind. Men watch and enjoy. Other women watch and enjoy. (Children, of course should not watch; children should only get enjoyment from watching people and things blow up. That's the rule.)

Pornhub, the Microsoft of the porn industry (because it is as much into data as it is into sex), released its statistics-heavy year-end review of worldwide porn use which showed a 156% increase for "lesbians scissoring" as a search term--that's third in their ranking behind "lesbian seduces straight girl" at 328 % and "shemale fucks girl" at 191%. Do I detect a testosterone-lite pattern here? Indeed, I do. 

Most everyone agrees that the recent change in the national attitude toward same sex marriage has happened with breathtaking speed. In trying to explain how, more than a few "experts" have pointed to the popularity of such gay-friendly TV shows as Will & Grace, Glee, Modern Family. I may not be the first on this, but let me at least add my voice to whatever little chorus exists out there and suggest that the explosion in free-access porn may also have something to do with it. I'm speculating…going strictly on instinct here…that guys who wouldn't be caught dead watching Glee could watch Tanya Tribs Tiffany for hours and come away with...let's call it...softened views on same sex sex.   

Pornhub certainly wouldn't shy away from taking credit for having such a positive social impact…it seems to have its fingers in everything. The company has in the past few years launched a "Give America Wood" campaign to plant trees for every 100 of its videos viewed, and it sponsored a "Boob Bus" to travel around New York City to raise awareness about breast cancer and offer free breast exams. The company also raised $75,000 through its porn channels to help fight breast cancer, but when it tried to make its donation, The Susan G. Komen Foundation, put off by the taint, refused it. (The Susan B. Komen Foundation, of course, is renowned for its fastidiousness in fighting breast cancer having cut off funding for Planned Parenthood to give poor women mammograms because they didn't like Planned Parenthood's stance on…what? Oh, yeah, parenthood!) 

In 2013 Pornhub attempted to buy a 20-second commercial during Super Bowl. The ad featured nothing more salacious than a fully-clothed older couple sitting on a park bench, but CBS refused to run it for fear of bringing the Federal Communications Commission down on it…with nasty repercussions not seen since Janet Jackson's nipple went rogue during the 2002 Super Bowl. 

But enough. I'm not posting here to pimp for Pornhub. I just want to once again express my appreciation for the sheer pleasure of tribadism. And I know that it's sheer pleasure even though I can never really experience it myself because it just looks so damn pleasing…more so than any other human-to-human contact…more than a handshake…more than a high-five…more than a hug…more than a kiss even, because it's a kiss of the deepest, darkest, most deviant kind. And the best thing of all about tribadism? You can't lose your head doing it. 


Not porn

The Baddest Ism: Tribalism, II

In The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origin of American Identity, the book that provides most of the ballast for this week’s and last week’s post, author Jill Lepore writes:

Out of the chaos of war, English colonists constructed a language that proclaimed themselves to be neither cruel colonizers like the Spaniards nor savage natives like the Indians. Later on, after nearly a century of repetition on successive American frontiers this triangulated conception of identity would form the basis of American nationalism as it emerged in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth centuries. But by that time, the British had come to replace the Spanish as the third element of the new triangle.” 

If I may, I'd like to riff on the estimable Ms. Lepore's theory a bit. Over the course of US history various minorities took their turns replacing Indians in that triangulation…Irish, Italians, freed urbanized blacks, Mexican immigrants; and the British as “the cruel” successors of the Spanish in that triangulation were followed by a long menacing parade-- Germans, Japanese, Russians, Cubans, Vietnamese, and…du jour…Islamic radicals. But the purpose remains the same--to help shape and reinforce national-identity. It’s a rather neurotic mass compulsion to convince ourselves that, “We’re not like them; we’re better in so many ways”(and only in certain circumstances is race one of those ways). 
Lepore reports that King Phillip was increasingly wary of having his people assimilated by the colonials, especially their religion; and the colonials were worried about becoming “Indianized”. The fears on both sides were not without basis in fact. In the case of the colonists, they already knew what had happened when some of their countrymen tried to settle in Ireland and ended up “going native". The English went so far as to outlaw the Irish from wearing English style clothes so they could tell them apart. As for King Philip, not only had his own name, Metacom, been Anglicized, but “praying towns” of Indians converted to Christianity dotted the once wholly native landscape. As Stonewall John--one of the converted who joined the Indian side in the war--said when refusing a colonial invitation to negotiate a peace, “We are forced to live upon you." Today, though no race need fear of being physically turned into another race, the fear of having your culture overrun by an alien culture persists…evident in such innocuous trends as the hip hop invasion of white suburbs, sales of hair straighteners in black urban neighborhoods, and bilingualism.  
On a more pernicious level, the English had to justify their savage execution of the war against the Indians that had cast them in the Spanish mold they abhorred. Again, they drew from the example of the English in Ireland when during the Irish Rebellion of 1641 they felt compelled to meet savagery with savagery. Rationalizing betrayal of their idealized self-image was a twofold strategy. The first was to dehumanize their enemy. The second was to dig and twist deep enough into the Bible to enlist God on their side, not unlike White House lawyers in our own time rooting around the Constitution to justify torture. Back then, they differentiated between what was deemed a “just war” and what was deemed a “holy war.” The first was fought within certain rules; the second meant anything goes because you were fighting not for king and country but for God. Demonizing the enemy was relatively easy. For instance, the colonists made a big deal of the fact that the Indians were what they called “skulkers”—hiding in the bush, behind tress, crawling around on their bellies, rather than fighting upright and out in the open like manly Englishmen. (A hundred years later, of course, the colonials themselves would employ the very same tactic against the British in the American Revolution.)
The demonizing also included a media campaign to highlight Indian atrocities. The Indians committed their fair share of them, and their atrocities received YouTube-like coverage for the day, while colonial atrocities were handled with CIA-like discretion. An Indian display of severed body parts was intended to scare the enemy off; a colonial display, like King Philip's head on a stake, was intended to hearten the home team. When Indians buried settlers alive it was taken as evidence of their innate evil, yet from the Indian side the act wasn’t as irrational as evil would require: "You English since you came into this Countrey” the Indians declared upon one such burial, “have grown exceedingly above the Ground, let us now see how you grow planted below the Ground." We know from abundant evidence that Islamic extremists make similar moral equivalence between our bombings and their beheadings. That doesn't excuse the beheadings, but it does render their actions more perversely logical than purely evil. 
Therein lay another key difference that mortally separated the English-speaking colonial tribe from the Algonquin-speaking Indian tribe—they were both limited in their ability to see things from the other’s point of view. The Indians burned their material possessions both as a spiritual offering and to lighten their load for their next seasonal migration. The colonials read this as a sign that they didn’t care enough about their possessions to hold on to them, therefore leaving them up for grabs. The colonials anticipated alliances not only among all the various local tribes, but with African slave rebels in Barbados whose existence was unknown to the Indians. Contemporary paranoia about Muslims comes from viewing Islam as a massive monolithic threat, rather than a collection of tribes within Islam--some threatening, many not. Likewise, the Indians, whose wars traditionally were waged for specific cause only at those who had crossed them and lasted only until the matter had been rectified, could not comprehend why colonials from outside the town of Plimouth (sic), the source of their grievances, chose to join the battle. Both sides measured the other’s behavior strictly according to their own rules and standards rather than how the behavior grew out of the other's unique needs and perspective.
Much as they presented Christianity to the Indians as an instrument of civilization and then exploited whatever trust the Indians put in it to abuse them, they did the same with their vaunted legal system. In a precursor to "stop and frisk", King Philip and his closest allies were summoned so often before colonial authorities to account for themselves that even the local representative of the Crown viewed it as harassment that would lead to no good. When John Sassamon, an Indian convert to Christianity, informed the Plimouth council of Metacom's plan for war, he wasn’t believed because he was an Indian. After Sassomon was found dead and three of Metacom’s men were brought to trial for the crime, witnesses for the defendants were discounted because they were Indian! The colonists demeaned Indians as savages for their lack of hierarchical organization and land holding, yet when the colonists wanted to strike deals or treaties they always managed to find someone they could invest with enough authority to make it legal (and thus Manhattan sold for a handful of beads and has been a heap big laugh on the Indians ever since).
As I mentioned in Part I, racism was an element of this tribalism; it did not stand above it or equal to it. The colonials slowly worked skin color in as evidence that the natives were lesser people than they were, and thus deserving of exploitation. Lepore found in their writings that about at this time period they increasingly saw themselves in the image of God. Those who did not look like them, therefore, were of the lower animals. Whether this outbreak of vanity in the colonies was tied to the English discovery of the Venetian technique for making mirrors, Lepore doesn’t say. But trade records tell us that one of the most popular luxury items imported into the colonies from England were mirrors. This emerging racism led the colonists to intern even their Christian converts during the war, and after it to issue medallions of identity to save converted Indians from being swept up in the slave trade.  

Turning now to my own looking glass, I was launched into this topic by the recollection that my high school, like the much-vilified Washington Redskins, has appropriated identity from early Native Americans. I cannot speak for Daniel Snyder, the owner of the Redskins who refuses to change his team’s name despite ongoing protest. The available evidence suggests that the roots of his transgression here has less to do with racism and more to do with that colonial attitude toward ownership that so pissed off the Indians—“If I own something, I can do with it anything I damn well please." This is no mere semantic distinction. Too often today we loosely throw around the inflammatory accusation of  racism when the problem is really the far more complex issue of tribalism. We'd probably be a lot closer to curing ourselves of both if we could tell the difference.
As regards my school’s team name, this research has led me to this conclusion: A hundred years from now when tribal lands throughout the nation have been given over to casinos and pay day loan rip-off joints, a local high school team called the Green Raiders may be the only reminder we have that once upon a time a great people roamed the land and they were warriors.

The Baddest Ism: Tribalism I

On the occasion of my 50th high school class reunion last year, I was reminded that my school's teams were called The Green Raiders and our icon was the head of an Indian warrior. School use of such Native American names and images is quite under fire these days. There is currently a bill before the California legislature to ban them outright, adding momentum to a nationwide trend toward eliminating allegedly racist Indian references from scholastic athletic programs.
There has been no such to-do about my high school's team name and logo, and it wasn't a discernible issue at the reunion where the Indian imagery was evident on various commemorative materials. Still, the notion that I attended a school where we rooted for Green Raiders and waved banners with Indian heads on them got me wondering what was the historical background to this working class mill town of mine in the Connecticut River Valley adapting Indian paraphernalia as if we were...what? Oklahoma?
The question led me to Jill Lepore’s excellent book King Philip’s War (called so after the colonial’s name for Metacom, the Wampanoag sachem who led it) raged between June 1675 and November 1676. The death count wasn't just enormous for both Indians and colonials, but the viciousness of the fighting included mutual beheadings, torture, kidnappings, severing of limbs, burning at the stake, and desecration of the dead. It ended with Metacom being drawn and quartered; his head impaled on a pole for public viewing for decades; his severed hand preserved in rum as an amusement piece; and his 9-year old son, along with other survivors of the tribe, sent into slavery in the West Indies.
Toto, (aka The Windsor Indian)When I was in high school, King Phillip’s Stockade, a woodsy little area with picnic tables, was a favorite parking spot for teenage couples to go for some heavy necking and petting. We had no idea that it had provided the launching site for King Philip's attack on Springfield (where I was born and where my dear mom still lives). Metacom burned Springfield to the ground (and in a story rich in ironies, Springfield will soon become the site of a grand new casino as gambling and payday loan rip-offs increasingly become the lasting Native American legacy). We young lovers had no idea that the statue of the Indian looking out over our steamy car windows was that of Toto, a Christian convert, who had warned the colonists of the coming attack. I’m not sure if the Indian head that led our sports teams into athletic battle was meant to be Metacom, the warrior, or Toto, the informer. I’m guessing Metacom since that's the way these things usually work. When choosing a face for your team, you choose the one that strikes fear and awe in your opponents. No one wants their team represented by an object of disdain or contempt. This human custom predates organized sports at both the amateur and professional level by a few millennia...and it’s not just in sports. The famous picture above shows American paratroopers getting themselves up as Mohawk warriors for the D-Day invasion of Normandy. That is a sight that may have been less surprising to colonial Americans than it is to contemporary Americans, whose politically correct sensibilities might frame such acts of racial dress-up with the use of black face in vaudeville and film. Early Americans were more in tune with the primal need to assume a fierce disguise before going into battle, which is why they dressed up as Indians before the Boston Tea Party…not to frame Indians for the deed, but to borrow their power.
The reasons for King Philip’s War are as muddled as the reasons for World War I. As with World War I and the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, there was an immediate cause—the colonials’ execution of three of Metacom’s men. But, also like World War I, there was a convergence of issues that made those executions merely the match that finally lit the fire. The meticulous details Jill Lepore has assembled for her book suggest that the overriding cause was tribalism, a persistent and knotty problem among cultures for eons, but which nowadays is eclipsed by racism as a root cause of ethnic conflicts. That shouldn’t be the case because racism is but an outgrowth of tribalism rather than a ruling factor in and of itself. If racism were the chief motivating factor in human conflict that we assume it is today, all of our wars---not just some of them—would be neatly divided along racial lines. But just looking at the time period of King Philip’s War, we can see that such black and white distinctions (no pun intended) were not enough to delineate battle lines. If so, the English would not have been enemies of the French; the French would not have been allies of the Iroquois; and the Iroquois would not have been enemies of the Algonquin.  The same holds true today…if it were all about race, Pakistan and India would not be mortal enemies; and Africa, once freed of white colonial rule, would have become a harmony of nations rather than a swirling cauldron of ongoing, vicious wars.
The tribalism at play in 17th century colonial America was most evident in the white/red divide on the subject of property. The colonists, having recently emerged from a long dark period of feudalism, put a very high premium on property ownership as a mark of freedom, individuality, and personal sovereignty. The Indians, having had the mostly unfettered run of a vast wilderness, had no concept of personal property…and just a vaguely defined concept of tribal territory. It was inevitable then as colonial populations started to expand further into Indian territory that Indian populations would suddenly begin to feel squeezed. This profound cultural divide led the colonists to take often foolhardy risks to defend their property and the Indians to go to savage extremes to destroy it. Lepore reports that the Indians viewed cows as so symptomatic of settler encroachment that they made a spectacle of slaughtering them before the eyes of their owners before killing the owners themselves.
In that helpful way of history, The Baddest Ism: Tribalism, II will explore how the issues surrounding King Philip’s War serve as a precursor to a raft of issues facing us this very day…from controversy over The Washington Redskins name to terrorist killings on the streets of Paris. 

Song of My Selfie

Portrait of a Poem Paralyzed by Privilege. In ink, 2014

“This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown, or to any man or number of men—go freely with powerful uneducated persons, and with the young, and with the mothers of families—re-examine all you have been told in school or church or in any book, and dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem, and have the richest fluency, not only in its words, but in the silent lines of its lips and face, and between the lashes of your eyes, and in every motion and joint of your body. The poet shall not spend his time in unneeded work. He shall know that the ground is already plow’d and manured; others may not know it, but he shall. He shall go directly to the creation. His trust shall master the trust of everything he touches—and shall master all attachment,” – Walt Whitman, Preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass.

I came upon this exhilarating passage from Whitman months ago and put it aside to serve as my end of the year blog post. After all, Whitman is the poet laureate of The Nobby Works…and for those struggling for the time or patience to navigate through Love's Body, "I Sing the Body Electric" provides a pretty sweet shortcut:

O my body! I dare not desert the likes of you in other men and women, nor the likes of the parts of you,
I believe the likes of you are to stand or fall with the likes of the soul, (and that they are the soul,)
I believe the likes of you shall stand or fall with my poems, and that they are my poems…
O I say these are not the parts and poems of the body only, but of the soul, O I say now these are the soul!

But just before it came time for me to post up what I believed to be Whitman's all-purpose New Year's resolution for anyone of us for this or any other year, I found myself immersed in Lars Von Trier's 5-hour sexual extravaganza, Nymphomaniac Vols. 1 & 2 (The Director's Cut). This was the third installment in Von Trier's (no kidding) "Depressive Trilogy" (preceded by Antichrist and Melancholia), and it is the story of Joe, a woman cursed with an insatiable sexual appetite for which she refuses to apologize. In fact, Joe is so contemptuous of what she sees as the prime human quality of hypocrisy that she goes to utterly uncomfortable extremes to avoid it. Better a nymphomaniac than a hypocrite is Joe's story in a nutshell.  
When I was done watching it, I was reminded of how much I despise hypocrisy myself and how much very hard work is involved if you want to avoid this most insidious of all human failings. It is practically inescapable. Unlike Joe, I am not a compulsive-obsessive about hypocrisy. I down on it like Joe--and like Jesus, who condemns it as much as any sin and far more than most that get far more attention these days. But I also allow for it as part of the human condition. 
Still, unlike Joe who wantonly engages in her nymphomania, I don't care to wantonly engage in my own hypocrisy if I can help it. And I can help it here. As much as that Whitman passage moves my heart, my head resists. My critical mind tells me that if I send this forth as my New Year's message for one and all, then I'm being a hypocrite because I really don't believe all of it to the letter. I like the spirit of it…the intent...and I would like to get it out there at this reflective time of the year as a guide for those going into what we hope will be a better future with me. So, though my more noble and generous readers are welcome to follow Whitman's advice as written, I offer below for my own good this annotated, modified vision:

“This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals (I will do all that though I reserve the right to curse the clay beneath my shovel when Lorna asks me to dig more garden, to block out the sun when spots appear on my skin, and to eat meatballs now and again without guilt or shame), despise riches (yes, excessive 1% level greed I'm on board, but a winning lottery ticket or bestselling book would always be welcome), give alms to everyone that asks (everyone is an awful lot of people and includes a lot of awful people so I believe I'll continue to take this on a case-by-case basis), stand up for the stupid and crazy (whoa, Sean Hannity AND Ted Cruz …a bridge too far, Walt…a Brooklyn Bridge too damn far), devote your income and labor to others (yes, I can do better), hate tyrants (ah, but one man's tyrant is another's duly elected President, but I take the point and will do my best to watch any movie Kim Jung Un doesn't want me to), argue not concerning God (good one, but it's a fine and wobbly line between argument and debate, and The Nob could not exist without the debate), have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown, or to any man or number of men (a big democratic Amen to all that)—go freely with powerful uneducated persons (the cops?), and with the young (sure, kids, but no texting at the dinner table and can we just deep six those precious little gestures you came up with during Occupy Wall Street to replace, like, five centuries of rather more effective parliamentary procedure?), and with the mothers of families (except on airplanes)—re-examine all you have been told in school or church or in any book, and dismiss whatever insults your own soul (sorry, but this sounds a bit much like the mission statement of the Texas State School Board); and your very flesh shall be a great poem (with a lilting iambic pentameter bulge in the middle), and have the richest fluency, not only in its words, but in the silent lines of its lips and face, and between the lashes of your eyes, and in every motion and joint of your body (and back we go to Love's Body). The poet shall not spend his time in unneeded work (can I get a witness?). He shall know that the ground is already plow’d and manured (note to Lorna); others may not know it, but he shall. He shall go directly to the creation. His trust shall master the trust of everything he touches—and shall master all attachment (no further comment required)”

A happy and hypocrisy-free New Year everyone!


  

My Polar Bare Club

The year of 2014 is now in the record books as the year I jumped in the pool for 12 months straight. Better than that, I was in the pool—sometimes 2-3 times a day—for every day of the year, except for 23 days of travel and 5 days of heavy rains. I know what you’re saying, “Dan, you live in frickin’ Southern California! Aren't you people required by law to be in your pools every day?” 
Actually I’m surrounded by Southern Californians who won’t go near a swimming pool if the temp dips below the low 80s (I live with such a person in fact). And some folks won’t go in a pool regardless of temp if anyone is watching. In both regards, I am fearless. I started diving in bare naked last January when the temps were sub 70 under the watchful eyes of surveillance choppers from nearby Camp Pendleton and the ever-vigilant INS, not to mention various and sundry neighbors equipped with high powered telescopes positioned on their balconies for (ho-ho) bird watching. ("You like it? Good…You like it? Good…You like it? Good?" That’s an inside joke. Many, many years ago we bought a VINYL recording of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and over time it developed a skip where Elizabeth Taylor’s Martha delivers that line. So around our house whenever we want to respond to an expression of appreciation, we do Liz: "You like it? Good…You like it? Good…You like it? Good." But I digress.)
I’m not claiming to be as hearty as those folks who in the dead of winter jump into the freezing Hudson River…or those who wade into the Black Sea. But I am here to say that jumping into sub-70’s water does not come without risk, especially in regards to serious shrinkage. Yet I’ve found the overall experience particularly exhilarating and life affirming. So much so that I’m set to take on the extreme elements of San Diego for another year of reckless abandon in my pool. But I don’t want this to be all about me in 2015. I want loyal Nob readers to reap some benefits of my fool heartiness, even if it is just vicariously. With that in mind I’m announcing the formation of The Nobby Works Polar Bare Club. Here’s how it works, for everyone who signs on to be a follower of the Nobby (known as a Nobbit), between now and midnight December 31, 2014, I pledge a nickel to charity for each day I plunge into the pool. To clarify, the Nob currently has 25 Nobbits, all of whom are automatically enrolled in the Polar Bare Club. If there were no more Nobbits going into 2015, that means every day I jump into the pool would be worth $1.25 to charity, which may sound laughable, but given that I was in the pool 337 days in 2014, that comes out to $421.25. If we double the Nobbits, that would make it $842.50…and if we get 100 new Nobbits…well, then we’re talking some pretty serious coin and you should understand why the baseline is only a nickel.
Anyway, that’s the deal. The designated charity is Doctors Without Borders. So if you want to contribute to the good works of some of the noblest people on the planet, all you have to do is sign up to be a Nobbit before the New Year, and then leave the rest to me, your bold and beautiful bare-assed boy.

You like it? Good. So now click "Like" below and become a Nobbit. 

"The Goddam Movies"

Unlike J.D. Salinger, one of my literary heroes, I do not "hate the movies like poison." Quite the opposite in fact. My love for the movies goes back as far as I can remember… even before TV and radio came into my life. I can remember my mother taking me by the hand to our local theater to see Chaplin mock Hitler in The Great Dictator. I can remember Saturday matinees watching John Wayne kill Indians or Japanese and racing home from the theater to retrieve "my rifle" (usually an old broomstick) to reenact all the killing in my backyard. When I got to college I took a job as an usher in a movie theater, where I worked with Lorna, the candy girl, 5 nights a week...on one of the other two nights I worked as a projectionist for the college film series and on the seventh day Lorna and I took advantage of the free passes we earned working in one theater to go see movies playing in other theaters. Since the advent of the home theater era in the early 80s, I’d conservatively estimate that the former usher and candy girl watch movies 80% of our nights together. (True story: when we got a VCR, the first film we went to rent was one of our favorites, the Albert Finney classic Tom Jones. In those days videos were boxed in black plastic with plain wrap labels--no studio marketing--which explains how the first thing that got played on our VCR was not the 18thcentury amorous adventures of a randy young man named Tom Jones, but a quite other Tom Jones in a tight sharkskin suit singing “It’s Not Unusual.”)
It’s not unusual for me to devote much of my holiday movie watching to oldies from the 30s and 40s (thank you, Turner Classic). Since Thanksgiving I’ve been through a spate of them (with those evergreens, A Christmas Carol and A Wonderful Life cued up for the next couple of nights). Revisiting films from the American past, however, doesn’t always elicit the reaction, “Now that’s entertainment!” In fact, it’s sometimes quite the opposite. Take these nuggets from my most recent visit to the archives…
Trader Horn is a 1931 jungle adventure starring Harry Carey. In it Trader Horn is on a mission to rescue a missionary’s daughter kidnapped by natives. When he and his protégé, Peru, come upon the first tribe in their journey, Peru exclaims, “Why, they’re not savages, Trader, they're just ignorant children.”

Northwest Passage, a 1940 film set during the French and Indian War, stars Spencer Tracy as Maj. Robert Rogers. Leading his Rangers on a mission of vengeance, Rogers addresses them before their attack on a sleeping village, “Now we're under orders to wipe out this town, so see that you kill every fighting Indian - kill 'em quick and kill 'em dead, and for Heaven's sake, don't kill any of our own Indians and don't kill any of the white captives. Our own Indians will have white crosses on their backs, so keep your eyes open. Don't make any mistakes.”  You don’t have to be a fan of political correctness (and this blog is no fan of political correctness) to find those pieces of dialog risible. And they aren’t isolated bits of dialog. Throughout Trader Horn, our hero liberally uses terms like “black apes” to refer to Africans, and Maj. Rogers calls Indians “red hellions.” Deeper still, in both films a beautiful blonde woman who has developed empathy for the natives while in captivity has to be forced to abandon them “for her own good.” As Peru tells the missionary’s daughter, who has grown up to be a goddess among her kidnappers and is reluctant to leave them, “Don’t you understand? White people must help each other.” (Ironic note: the actor who plays Peru and delivers that line, Duncan Renaldo, was an illegal immigrant.) White male fear of losing “his” women to The Other is palpable.
Moreover the overt racism in both films is not at all particular to them, and is repeated ad nauseam in the films of that period, from the juvenile Tarzan series to the highly esteemed Gone With the Wind. So, no, thankfully in certain ways, they don’t make movies like they used to. But they did, and the impact has been profound. No one film alone could have left much of a lasting impression on a culture. But to argue against the accumulated effect of many such films over many years selling the idea of white supremacy is to argue against the proven and profitable psychological foundations of advertising and propaganda.
When there is much ado about the movies as there has been in recent weeks over The Interview, the default posture of Hollywood is to modestly shuffle feet and demur, “Aw shucks, we’re just entertainers.” Ironically, it’s then left to despots like North Korea’s Kim Jung Un, religious fanatics like the Taliban or Family Research Council, or mob outfits like the NRA to point out that Hollywood--if not the Great Satan itself--has a bit of the devil in it. Hollywood, as the greatest purveyor of myth in modern times, can and does shape culture. Authoritarians and fundamentalists have good reason to fear the movies because movies can crack holes in the fortress of their beliefs. Get an audience to laugh at your exalted leader and contemplate his mortality and suddenly he doesn't seem so exalted or immortal any more. And it doesn’t take a Steven Spielberg to puncture that wall…a Seth Rogen will do if the time is right and the message is repeated often enough.
But as my recent film watching reveals, those of us with a progressive philosophical and political bent can be rightly (and righteously) discomfited by the movies as well. Not only can a case be made that Hollywood has played a significant role in reinforcing the sense of white supremacy that has dogged our society for centuries, but--at the risk of allying myself with the scourge that is the NRA—an equally strong case can be made that Hollywood has had a major hand in making us a gun crazy culture. Since the late 60s and early 70s deluge of vigilante Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson films, Hollywood has persistently promoted the gun as the solution to our most difficult social, criminal and geo-political problems. 

To acknowledge the seemingly obvious connection between our romanticizing guns in our films and the pervasiveness of guns in our streets is not to call for censorship or chill free expression. It is a plea, however, for Hollywood to be a little less disingenuous on the role it plays in shaping our culture…and at least as conscientious about its use of gratuitous violence as it would be about dialog containing inflammatory expressions like black apes and red hellions.