Dan Riley's Blog, page 36

Forgive Us Our Trespasses

Christopher Columbus comes calling at David Geffen's house

There are a number of lines from Love's Body that I find myself going back to again and again, none more so--especially recently--than this one: The erection of a boundary does not alter the fact that there is, in reality, no boundary. It is an observation with application for a barbecue of hot issues--Ebola threatening international borders, ISIS redrawing Middle East borders, Russians ignoring Ukrainian borders, Central American children crossing American borders.
In Malibu music mogul David Geffen fights a lonely--though well-financed battle--against beachcombers crossing the borders of his property to gain beach access. Geffen, a liberal sugar daddy who’s donated generously to help Democrats fight against the One Percent that does not include him, was the subject of Joni Mitchell’s sublime Free Man in Paris but hasn’t been feeling so “unfettered and alive” since the California Coastal Commission declared that he must grant the public access to the beach in front of his property. He’s been feeling so fettered in fact that he took the rather preposterous step of throwing up a faux garage door on his property to fool bathers into thinking there was no access there. The Coastal Commission called him on his ruse, and he had to take down his Potemkin Village garage. I suspect his next move will be to call upon his buddies at Dreamworks to create, perhaps, a CGI tsunami to scare off the common folk. He’s got the money, the power, and the will to do it.   
And that’s really what this border thing is all about, isn’t it? Because in truth, Nobby is right, boundaries are illusions. They are temporary, fluid, wishful, and often unenforceable. In a metaphysical sense the planet does belong to all of us, and the imposition of private property is, as they say in the graphics world, FPO--For Position Only. Deeds and landmarks and such are mere reflections of impermanent organization of power relationships. We can make interesting historical observations about how the Romans once ruled the world from the Tiber in Italy to Hadrian’s Wall In Great Britain but now just barely rule their own city. We can make a rhetorical argument that Native-Americans actually occupied an entire continent before Europeans claimed to “discover” it. And we can make political points about how the British drew the map of the Middle East to suit the designs of their empire and we've all been paying the price ever since. But we really can’t make a moral case out of much of this because it is such an extension of our basic human nature…we’re just naturally an exploring, expanding, envelope-pushing species. And no matter how many outrages we can tie to this boundary-busting behavior, we cannot deny that most people all over the world have done it when conditions or greed motivated them to move beyond their own borders and push into places where other people live or would like to live. In fact, as un-PC as it is to suggest, the terms Native, Indigenous or Aborigine peoples are technically inaccurate since we all originated in a corner of Africa where we’d be to this day if our ancestors had not chosen to roam. More-native-than-thou might be the more accurate nomenclature.
“…There is, in reality, no boundary” acknowledges the truth of our existence, yet it is a truth that we constantly test and deny and fight over. In addition to the toilets, another thing that charmed me during a 2013 trip to Switzerland was its law that decreed open access for hikers trekking through farm country. So comfortable are Swiss farmers with the tradition of allowing strangers to march over their private property that many of them provide food and beverages to wayfarers…for a price, of course. Would David Geffen ever do that? Indeed, would the luxury spa that is my neighbor do that? The spa owns approximately 400 acres surrounding our house, much of it given over to some of the finest hiking trails I’ve ever seen…or walked upon. And I walk upon them often, though without the spa’s permission. The spa’s general manager once told me that its insurer wouldn’t permit non-paying guests to use the trails…a policy which would freeze the insurer out of business in Switzerland. Because the spa tries to cultivate a European experience, I believe that by trespassing on their grounds I’m helping them to achieve their end.
As readers of The Nob know, however, I try to own up to my own hypocrisies. And in this regard I share more in common with Comrade Geffen than the purity of my heart can stand. In my time in this paradise I call home, the sanctity of it has been disturbed on occasion by teenagers roaring over our private property on ATVs. As with teen invaders of faculty lunchrooms, I’ve gone after them with a vengeance. (Even the accommodating Swiss do not allow noisy, foul-smelling machines to ruin their idyllic countryside.) As irony would have it, a few years ago the George H.W. Bush family reserved some time at the neighboring spa, and in preparation for their arrival the Secret Service did a sweep of the area, rounding up the ATV rough riders and introducing the kids to some serious boundaries. I lustily applauded my tax dollars at work.  (And, yes, the Secret Service, seemingly helpless in keeping trespassers off the current President’s White House lawn , effectively got the damn kids off “my lawn” for the benefit of a very ex-President. And now I owe the Bushes! Make that a triple helping of irony, Spinelli.)    
This notion of no boundaries is not just a fanciful creation of Norman O. Brown’s proto-hippie mind. There is a nagging legal tradition that goes back to ancient Rome called terra nullius , which means “land belonging to no one,” and over two millennia has been used to justify claims on land either not actively occupied or occupied but unincorporated, leaving open the question of sovereignty. Terra nullius has been a major factor in decisions the Australian courts have made regarding Aborigine claims on lands unjustly taken from them. And it is a specter hanging over the efforts of more-native-than-thou North American tribes as they seek restitution for lands lost to US aggrandizement.

They got a wall in China
/It’s a thousand miles long
/To keep out the foreigners
/They made it strong

Given all we know now, should our fine-feathered brothers and sisters of pre-Colombian America have taken a page from the Chinese playbook and erected a wall to keep out the foreigners? It’s more than a good dorm room debate topic. I think it can help clarify our many diverse stances on a number of current issues---from the Palestine-Israel dispute to the Middle East chaos to Mexican border crossings to travel restrictions on West Africans. For instance, if you believe a wall to keep out the Spaniards would have been justified, then ipso facto you must accept a wall to keep out Mexicans, si? 

The question of a Plymouth Rock "No Sail Zone" could be helpful next year about this time when we have our annual debate over the rightness of Columbus Day. Putting the moccasin on the other foot might be a good values clarification exercise for one and all. What would the world…or at least the New World…have been like if the more-native-than-thou populations had successfully restricted access to it? Would Seminoles be doing battle on the football field against Fighting Irish flown in from Dublin this weekend? Or would they be engaged on an actual battlefield against Upper Creeks or Choctaws or Shawnee who were pushing into their territory because of swelling populations or dwindling resources? 
As for Columbus, that most renowned trespasser, no one is as enamored of Italians and their culture as I am. But the Italians entertain no delusions about a “puritan” past. The happy hunting grounds of Caligula, the Borgias, the Mafia and the Bunga-Bunga President long ago reconciled itself to the beastial side of its nature…the founders of Rome, after all, were suckled by a she-wolf. So I wouldn’t expect Italian-Americans to give up their holiday over Christopher Columbus’s sins any time soon. And though those sins were many, heinous, and verifiable, trespassing wasn’t one of them. Humans of every stripe have been trespassing all over the planet since the time we learned to walk upright. It’s how we roll.  

Do Wah Diddy

Class President caught in compromising position…
refuses to budge.The paradox of high school reunions is that they are celebrations of what conventional wisdom tells us is the most excruciating time of our lives. Despite what screen writers, song writers and people like me might express in the popular arts, high school reunions continue to exert an irresistible pull on many who barely endured the indignities of high school. It’s as if JFK’s “best and brightest” or Enron’s “smartest guys in the room” decided to get together every five years to commemorate their collective catastrophe.
Why is that? Instead of running away from this totally optional encounter with our painful past, generations run into it…fie, fly into it, sometimes from great distances and at great expense and inconvenience to their current lives. I had to give a good deal of thought to this recently on the occasion of my graduating class’s 50th reunion. My conclusion is that we go back for the simplest and most primal of reasons…to reconnect with our tribe (and thus my school’s Indian chief “mascot” takes on double meaning…neither of them racist).
What struck me most during this reconnection were the obviously new layers of my former classmates’ lives…layers added by marriages, careers, and general fortunes gone both good or bad. I remarked to one of my oldest and dearest friends how superficial it all made our high school days together seem. She replied that it wasn’t so much a case of superficiality, as it was a case of us all being then in the early process of becoming ourselves (which makes Joanne not just one of my oldest and dearest friends but one of the wisest as well).  She was absolutely right of course…we were merely the dim, if not blank, slates our futures would be written upon. There’s profound meaning in the expression “coming of age.” The teenage years really are a time of dramatic physical and emotional change, and it’s a rare 16-year old who’s totally in charge of those changes. So we distract ourselves with as much superficiality as possible—high school gossip, fashion, ranking, dubious achievements...like being voted most popular. In high school such an election seems perfectly normal…50 years later it would be absurd.
The joke going around about me back in high school was this one: Have you heard about the Dan Riley doll? You wind it up and it runs for office. As high school cruelties go, that’s pretty weak tea. I point it out because I haven’t run in an election in more than 40 years, so like the nerd who’s now a tattooed weight lifter and the (ho-ho) “student body” who no longer looks like Jessica Rabbit, I’ve changed too since high school. Though a bitter electoral defeat in college dissuaded me from an active political career, a more traumatizing editorial experience in high school did not deter me from a career as a writer. As a result, two of my more memorable exchanges at the recent reunion involved my writing. In the first, a former classmate told me she reads this blog, but can’t understand it and doesn’t know anyone who does. (Will Stephen King have to put up with such trash talk at his 50th next year? I doubt it). In the second, a former classmate who I hardly had contact with back then and had had none until the reunion, told me that he’s followed my writing through the years and has enjoyed it immensely. Those two exchanges pretty much sum up the writing life that, fortunately, I reconciled myself to long ago.
It’s tempting for writers to try and place various generations in some grand, sweeping historical context (e.g., the "Lost Generation", the "Beat Generation"). And I’ve fallen into the trap myself a few times, which is easy to do as a "Baby Boomer" since it may be the most caricatured generation of all. Lately, though, I’ve been on a bit of a crusade to counter the tendency. Generations, I believe, are primarily defined by the accumulated twists and turns of personal lives, which occur beyond anyone’s volition. No generation starts out to be "The Greatest Generation!" It may in fact start out to avoid being great. In Ken Burns’ recent PBS series The Roosevelts, it’s somewhat ironic to see how deeply opposed most Americans--especially draft age Americans and their families-- were to US involvement in the war against Hitler. Yet FDR eventually cajoled and deceived them into taking part, which led them a couple of decades later to come up with the not-so-great idea of a war in Vietnam.
Ronnie Goulet, the first member of our class of 1964 to die, lost his life as a Green Beret in Vietnam. Our "Golden Anniversary Yearbook" was dedicated to him. My recent return to the tribe reminded me of my first encounter with Ronnie. Our neighborhood had just won a baseball game over his neighborhood and on the way home three of us from my team found ourselves surrounded by all nine from his team. At the instigation of a loudmouth, all of them--save Ronnie--engaged in that kind of bullying behavior boys of a certain are prone to…putting us in choke holds, pushing us, tripping us, uttering threats and warnings. Not only didn’t Ronnie take part, he implored his mates to stop and eventually prevailed upon them to do so. And that would be my lasting impression of him through our high school years together…a quiet and unusually kind kid. In a few short years, however, Ronnie and I would be on opposite sides of the argument over the Vietnam War and some years later that loudmouth instigator of the gang attack and I would actually become friends. We remain so to this day.
Coming of age is all so very complicated and much beyond the ability of adults, let alone teenagers, to fully comprehend. That’s why I admit without embarrassment that I'm a fan of those immortal words of Paul McCartney:

You'd think that people would have had enough of silly love songs/But I look around me and I see it isn't so/Some people wanna fill the world with silly love songs/And what's wrong with that? 

What’s wrong with that indeed? Sometimes we like and need to lose ourselves in the superficialities…in the silliness. It's a refuge from a world just too damn grim for anyone’s good…which is why at our recent tribal gathering I induced my classmates to engage in one of the silliest love songs of all time. So take it away, kids...  

The Enfield High School graduating class of 1964 confronts the nearly indestructible "Do Wah Diddy". You make the call.

October 4, 2014

On the occasion of the 50th reunion of the Enfield High School Class of 1964, The Nob makes a claim of personal privilege to post the letter I wrote to commemorate the occasion for the book memorializing the event...
Dear Classmates:
It’s now been half a century since graduation night. Fifty years is a pretty big helping of life, so in that regard those of us who gather together tonight to reconnect and reminisce are lucky. Some have suggested that as the first wave in the generation known as The Baby Boomers we’ve been a little too lucky.
Maybe so if you just go by the early media attention that was showered upon us. Before we turned 25, Timemagazine had named our generation its “Man of the Year.” But the road to that recognition was not lined with four-leaf clovers. We grew up under the specter of the childhood killer polio. We served in the Duck and Cover Brigade as the youngest recruits in the Cold War, and then we all nearly got vaporized in our junior year during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The news of the President’s assassination came to us over our school intercom in sixth period.
And that was all before graduation. After, Vietnam waited for most of us in one way or another...and the history that followed seemed to lurch from crisis to crisis...Civil Rights to Watergate to gas lines; hostage takings and impeachment; economic downturns, mirages, and crashes. September 11.
So, no, our time hasn't been entirely a day at Misquamicut. But it hasn't been all bad news either. Polio was cured. The Cold War ended. The country survived multiple assassinations, Vietnam, and all the rest. More than just surviving, we enjoyed events of genuine transcendence. We got to hear Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. We got to see a moon landing. We got to feel the rapture of the first Red Sox World Championship in 86 years (okay, maybe that wasn’t rapture for everybody).
The technological advances alone have made it a dazzling time to be alive. As we sit around our tables tonight, we can hold in our hands power unimagined in high school. Not only can we show off pictures of our grandchildren, we can show home movies, send instant messages to friends who couldn’t make the reunion, and record a rousing version of “Do Wah Diddy Diddy” to post on You Tube tonight for the whole world to watch tomorrow. (Seriously, as your president, I insist we make this happen. Executive order!)
And if an argument should break out at the bar tonight, say, over who was Enfield’ First Selectman in 1964, we have more reference material at our fingertips than we had in all our town libraries combined, plus Springfield.
With so much sweetness and sorrow, it’s been a compelling time to be alive. In that, we have been sort of lucky--lucky to be born when and where we were, lucky to have lived long enough to come together and celebrate tonight, lucky to have had so many who helped us along the way…parents, teachers, mentors, lovers, friends…children finally.
And lucky, too, to have classmates, like those on our reunion committee, dedicated to our collective memory to put in the time and energy necessary so that we can share this special opportunity for looking back on our exhilarating era together.   
Thanks to one and all…and here’s to us, the Enfield High Class of 1964…now and forever. On to the 75th!
Best wishes,Dan Riley,
Class President
10/4/14

Emasculation Proclamation

I blogged some time ago about the first time I was given official responsibility to serve and protect as a street crossing monitor in fifth grade. As I grew up, I was cast in subsequent positions of authority which went no better. 

One was in what we'll call an urban school where I served a hair-raising year as a substitute teacher. Because it was so difficult to attract sub teachers to this particular school, it was routine to get as much mileage out of the ones who did show up as possible. This meant that if a sub teacher had a (ho-ho) free period scheduled, the vice principal would hunt you down and make you fill in for a class where they couldn't get a sub. It took me two instances of being shanghaied like that for me to to make other plans for myself, which meant becoming a moving target so the vice principal could never find me. On one such escapade, I came upon two students fighting on a stairwell landing. One had the other pinned down and was slapping him about the face. What I most wanted to do at that moment was turn around and head back where I came from as if I didn't see anything, but I knew the path back would take me right into the vice principal. So I ended up taking the Spike Lee approach and attempted to do the right thing. I asked the kids to break it up. They ignored me. I demanded that they break it up, and they ignored me still. Finally I reached over and grabbed the one on top and pulled him off the other kid. As I attempted to get between top dog and underdog...the victim (!) jumped me from behind, pulled me down on the stairs, and the two of them ran off together.
A few years later in a semi rural school (and for those unfamiliar with the code, the first school was overwhelmingly black; this one white), two students of mine strolled into the faculty lounge as if they owned the place and tried to use the vending machine. Another teacher in the room with me turned and said, "They don't belong in here." Accepting the undeniable truth of that, I said, "Guys, you don't belong in here." They fairly well whined that they had just finished playing basketball and needed sodas. I insisted that they were out of bounds. As one continued to plead, the other dropped change in the machine for a soda. I moved toward them, and they started to play keep-away with the can. I intercepted it, slammed it on a table, grabbed them both by the arms and escorted them out. I put them up against the wall in the hall and got up in their faces, and warned them never to embarrass me like that again. Embarrass was the word and embarrassment was the feeling. 
During the height of the angry reaction over the cop shooting of an unarmed black teenager in Ferguson, Missouri, this past summer an article appeared in The Washington Post that generated a great deal of Internet discussion. It was titled, "I’m a cop. If you don’t want to get hurt, don’t challenge me." It was written by an ex-cop and he had one sentence in particular that raised eyebrows in circles where, it should be noted, eyebrows are easily raised.  The sentence read as follows:


Working the street, I can't even count how many times I withstood curses, screaming tantrums, aggressive and menacing encroachments on my safety zone, and outright challenges to my authority.

Many people, especially among my comrades on the left, were quite put off by that sentence because in the context of the events in Ferguson it seemed that the ex-cop who wrote it was making an excuse for the shooting. The concept of “an outright challenge to authority” can seem incomprehensible to people who have rarely if ever had to exercise authority. That can easily happen because it is quite possible to get through life and avoid being put in any positions of authority. I could not avoid that position, starting as a grade schooler, but continuing as a teacher and a parent and for a while as an office department manager. But about 15 years ago I found myself happily out of any circumstance in which I had to exercise authority. So I haven’t had to suffer the distinct displeasure of having my authority challenged in a comfortably long time. Yet I can still relate to what this ex-cop is saying…and I’d like to take a crack at helping others understand the sentence by placing it in a broader context with a few edits, as such:
Working the hospital ward, I can't even count how many times I withstood curses, screaming tantrums, aggressive and menacing encroachments on my safety zone, and outright challenges to my authority.
Working at the DMV, I can't even count how many times I withstood curses, screaming tantrums, aggressive and menacing encroachments on my safety zone, and outright challenges to my authority.
Working an NFL game, I can't even count how many times I withstood curses, screaming tantrums, aggressive and menacing encroachments on my safety zone, and outright challenges to my authority.
Working a classroom, I can't even count how many times I withstood curses, screaming tantrums, aggressive and menacing encroachments on my safety zone, and outright challenges to my authority.
A “challenge to my authority” is not the small matter that folks who don’t ever need to exercise authority in their daily lives think it is. Delinking the notion of “an outright challenge to my authority” from a cop with a gun, I think, makes the sentence more reasonable and thus comprehensible. But it does not take the cop with the gun off the hook…quite the opposite. The fact that there are many people in other walks of life who commonly have to confront challenges to their authority and do so unarmed underscores how outrageous it is that cops all across America resort to guns as often as they do. It is one thing to accept that cops very often need to assert authority; it is quite another to claim that a challenge to that authority is a crime punishable by death.
It is no more reasonable to assert that a cop can use a gun against a kid who refuses his order to get out of the street than it would be reasonable to assert that a teacher can use a gun against a kid who tries to use the faculty vending machine. Yet there are borderline morons in this country who would like to arm teachers so that absurd scenario becomes inevitable. It’s the gun that’s the problem because the gun is no mere tool of the job when it becomes an extension of one’s manhood. The cop’s identity is so tied to his gun that when his authority is challenged, his manhood is challenged…and he’s no longer serving and protecting the public, he’s serving and protecting his masculinity.
I think I can reliably speak for most men when I say the hottest button we own is the one connected to our masculinity (one might go so far as to call it an insidious curse of maleness without fear of provoking the sisterhood). But I don't think we as a gender, nor we as a society, fully appreciate how much the threat of emasculation contributes to a broad swath of social problems from spousal abuse to excessive police force; from campus rape to workplace sexual inequality…and on to foreign military adventurism. Led by the examples of law enforcement and our military, the gun has become our first line of defense against emasculation.
Gun control advocates are sometimes inclined to mock or demean gun advocates by suggesting that their fetish for such weaponry grows out of feelings of sexual inadequacy. Whether it's a sense of inadequacy or prowess, I'd say, is a matter for each individual's therapist to help decide. But let's give Dr. Freud his due for articulating the link between the penis and what he would identify as phallic symbols. I don't believe there can be much argument that weaponry down through the ages...from spears and swords to arrows, six-shooters, rifles, bazookas and rocket launchers are all modeled on and symbolic of the male sex organ. If our manly parts had been orb shaped, no doubt, we would be marching off to war wielding frying pans and bowling balls. But guns it is...and it's guns, alas, by which we primarily assert our manhood...at home and abroad. And it's guns that we frequently turn to as the remedy of first resort when our manhood is threatened and emasculation looms.
The historical evidence suggests that in the wake of the turmoil that roiled Missouri (and now, no doubt, to be repeated in Ohio), we'll see a make-good effort in various municipalities to introduce sensitivity training for their police forces. Community leaders will be invited to speak to cops. Cops will be encouraged to go on charm offenses by walking the streets and chatting it up with folks in the neighborhood. A great deal of emphasis will be placed on understanding and appreciating American diversity. It will then all pass--some of it leaving incremental good behind, but most of it to little effect. That will be so because it will be handled as a racial matter...or an economic matter...or a cultural matter. The root cause: How a man with authority over people exercises that authority without allowing defiance of it to be so emasculating as to justify assertion of his manhood through the barrel of a gun. That's a primal issue...trans-racial and trans-class. 
To address it properly, we should probably start early in training and should make the training universal for all males regardless of ethnicity. As an old educator, I'd suggest we start in junior high when the testosterone is just beginning to go out of control...and we help young boys answer questions about what's happening to their bodies...and how to meet the challenges of the changes to come. We introduce them to the meaning of emasculation, and connect it to their experience with bullies…or as bullies. We talk openly and frankly about the concept of manhood through history and throughout the globe…and by frankly I do mean we include the all-important penis in the conversation. We teach them that although in primitive societies it was...and still is in some places...traditional for boys to prove their manhood by spilling blood, in more civilized cultures, we aspire to demonstrate our manhood in more evolved ways. And we help them explore those ways...we instruct them in conflict resolution, strategic retreat, jujitsu politics, professionalism, building alliances and coalitions, negotiation, isolation, contemplation. Charm and humor. We educate and advocate for every kind of tool imaginable for making your way in the world....save one: the gun. We put the gun in a lock box and we don't introduce it until the very end of their education. And then we tell them, "Here it is--this is your last resort...this is what you turn to when you've failed at everything else."

Gwyneth Paltrow's Head

Final scene from Se7en
I’m not much of a horror movie fan. You can have your Nightmare on Elm Street and all of its many grisly derivatives. My threshold for being creeped out is so low that to this day just the thought of Gwyneth Paltrow’s severed head in that box in Se7en is more than enough to turn my blood to frappaccino. That of course was back in the day when Gwyneth’s adorableness was at its zenith--her Emma and Shakespeare in Love stage--before she said and did enough silly things to help the Heathers of the Internet turn her into the Marie Antoinette of celebrities—“Let them eat gluten free!” 
I did not need to actually see Kevin Spacey’s character behead her character in Se7en…and the movie didn’t need to show that gruesome scene in order to succeed as art rather than cheap thrill. My imagination is lively enough so subtlety still works for me. Not so for everyone, I realize. Surely not so for the powers of the National Football League who claimed that they couldn’t fully achieve an appropriate state of horror at the beating star player Ray Rice administered to “his woman” until they actually saw the blow that rendered her unconscious. Then, they say, they got it.
Many in the media properly called out the NFL on this bit of brain-damaged special pleading, pointedly asking, “What the hell did the NFL think happened on that elevator to so flatten a woman to the floor that 'her man' could then drag her seemingly lifeless body around like a rolled carpet?” 
As I say, the question is all together proper, but it’s also elitist, asked as it is by people, like me, who don’t always need to have a picture drawn for them. As is the fate of elitists, we’re a minority in that we can imagine how she got there, as we can imagine how Gwyneth Paltrow’s head got into that box.  But this world is not ours to rule. This world belongs to the picture-is-worth-a-thousand-words crowd. They respond more readily and viscerally to graphic depictions of violence, thus it is and ever has been since the days of primitive paintings of the hunt on the walls of our forefathers’ caves. So it’s really not as unbelievable as some suggest that there are people who require that someone literally paint them a picture of a woman being crushed by a blow to the face to get what brought that woman down.
By the same token, it’s also not that unbelievable that our Congress--which has spent six years playing chicken with our economy, ignoring our crumbling infrastructure, rubbing the faces of our most vulnerable in the grit of their misfortune, and generally conducting the nation’s business like kids on a grade school playground—suddenly rises as one to grant the president a rare unified front to combat the threat of ISIS in Iraq and Syria. It’s the beheadings, stupid. Can there be any doubt that the public airing of “Jihadi John” cutting off the heads of two captive Americans is directly responsible for Congress’s unusual show of bipartisanship?
The beheadings alone, though, would not have been enough. Producing them as a graphic video was the key to baiting the US into yet another Mideast misadventure…and credit ISIS’s director of caliphate communications for knowing just how to push our national buttons. Without the visual aids, the beheadings would’ve blended right into our historical accommodation to willful decapitation. Neither ISIS specifically nor Islam generally have exclusive claim on beheadings for the dual purposes of punishing and terrorizing. In the Bible, John the Baptist is beheaded by Herod, who makes a gift of the severed head to Salome. In ancient Rome, alleged criminals against the state were eager to prove their citizenship so as to be spared the indignity of crucifixion for the far more honorable penalty of beheading. That renown Renaissance man Henry VIII had two of his wives beheaded with such detachment as to make Ray Rice seem like an absolute prince by comparison. Queen Elizabeth I, who gave her name to one of the most glorious periods in English history, ordered the beheading of her cousin and rival Mary Queen of Scots (and thus in their no vote on independence this week, the Scots once again failed to have Mary’s back). Elizabeth in our time, rather than being portrayed as an evil butcher, has been memorialized on screen by an array of movie queens from Bette Davis to Cate Blanchett to Judi Dench (who, in Shakespeare in Love, has the good grace not to have Gwyneth Paltrow beheaded for the crime of being a girl playing a boy playing a girl on the English stage). Japanese beheading of an Australian POW
during World War II
The French Revolution was built on the severed heads of aristocrats; Germans were beheading spies in 1935; and as the picture at left shows, the Japanese—purveyors of our electronic devices and hybrid cars—were beheading “good guys” as recently as 1943. With this history, it is not impossible to imagine a future in which “Jihadi John”, the executioner of James Foley and Steven Sotloff, might one day be portrayed in the movies by some up-and-coming Charles Laughton or Richard Burton. But that’s the lesser issue. 
The greater issue is that we’ve entered a distinct and disturbing period of policy by video…not only for private enterprises such as the NFL but for ostensibly public ones like the US Congress as well. For 50 years of Cold War, the Soviets expanded their territorial reach, persecuted their citizens and the citizens of other countries, and aimed certifiable weapons of mass destruction at our major population centers, but only a mad man would’ve suggested that we put “boots on the ground” in Russia to fix things. At any moment, the continent of Africa is teeming with as many dangers, cruelties and butchers with bloody blades as the Middle East, yet Senator Lindsay Graham of South Carolina, quaking under his bed over ISIS, loses not a wink of sleep over that.  

It seems quite likely that we have now entered a stage where foreign policy, jurisprudence, corporate behavior and common decency will be governed by the presence or absence of video. Human witness, intelligence, and intuition will no longer matter in the halls of Congress, jury rooms, boardrooms, and bedrooms as much as what’s visually available. Seeing is believing will be less a cliché and more an article of faith and a cause for action. If there is no visual evidence of the smackdown in the elevator, that’s a call for leniency; if there is visual evidence of the enemy’s brutality, that’s a call for war. There is no reason to trust in any of our other senses, including our common sense. The eyes have it.    

Manu

Heeding dire warnings about the heartbreak of empty nest syndrome in the mid 1990s, Lorna and I decided to volunteer to become a host family for a foreign exchange student. We filled out the necessary forms and then waited for our little But three years passed, and we heard nothing from the student exchange agency. So we adjusted to the empty nest, which was no where near as traumatic as advertised and settled into a comfortable life as a couple again. Then one day in late August of 2000, the agency called in a panic. The host family of one of the students they were expecting imminently was military and as would happen with more depressing frequency in the years to come suddenly found themselves packing their bags for the Middle East. With two weeks to go before school, a 17-year old Italian girl from Genoa was without a destination after a year of planning and anticipation. The agency wanted to know if we would take her, which wasn’t simply a matter of providing her with a spare room but finding a school for her to attend at the last possible moment. Based on the application they quickly faxed to us, we said yes to taking in one unknown Manuela Parodi. ("I have an open and sincere relationship with my parents," she had written, "and I hope to find the same friendship with my host family.")  There followed a hair-raising week trying to place her in a local school. We were told that the most obvious choices were maxed out…not a spare desk to be had at either of Vista's high schools. But a school administrator, who took sympathy with the plight of this foreign girl, suggested we try a continuation school the district had just opened in a storefront downtown.  The principal there took one look at Manu’s straight-A transcript from her Italian high school and thought his school would be hard pressed to challenge her educationally, but we all agreed that the cultural experience might be good for her and her fellow students to be.
Then came the expectant parents scene outside the boarding gate at Lindbergh Field. Pre-9/11 of course, so one still had that exquisite thrill of watching new arrivals as they disembarked from their flight.  It was the first time I experienced any second thoughts about our decision as I watched a motely crew of kids in Manu’s demographic emerge from the gate sporting the full spectrum of teenage calling cards from sullen expressions to spiked hair to neon footwear, baggy bottoms and tops inscribed with hostile messages for all the world to see. “What if one of these is ours?” I fretfully asked Lorna. (What a long hard year this could be, I thought to myself).
And then she stepped out. She was on the arm of an elderly American lady who marched her right over to us and said, “You are very lucky people. You are about to know the most beautiful person I ever met. Please take good care of her.” That lady may very well have been one of those good witches we occasionally read about, handing over a lost princess child to a humble peasant couple…a wood cutter, perhaps, and his wife the milk maid. For truly the future that unfolded for us with Manu from that day forward was nothing less than magical.
She arrived with visions of Beverly Hills 90210 in her heart, but never expressed a sign of resentment or disappointment that she would be spending most of her American year attending a makeshift school in a downtown retail space in a city known more for its abundance of bail bondsmen and migrant workers than Hollywood stars. She made friends with any of the local kids who could be intrigued rather than bewildered by the existence of a place called Italy. She excelled in her classes and threw herself into the high school drama group--and despite four years of drama training back home and an overwhelming desire to succeed as an actress, she enthusiastically accepted a part in the chorus of Pirates of Penzance. And...not least...on the occasion of her first birthday on American soil she celebrated with grace and good humor a Twinkie with a candle stuck in it.
Over the subsequent years, she and her parents, Renzo and Rosalba, became our loving guides through Italy, from their home in Genoa to the islands of Sardinia and Sicily, through Tuscany and Marche, over the ruins of Rome and Pompeii and under the smoking threat of Vesuvius. Through it all, Manu kept her girlish dream of becoming an actress alive, chasing after auditions, bit parts, contacts, leads, encouragement...supporting herself through waitressing and babysitting and translating until that big break finally happened. Best of all, she met Ricky, who we have also come to know and love. And this weekend, she will become Mrs. Riccardo Vianello shortly before arriving on our doorstep once again to begin a month-long honeymoon in the US.
On such a romantic occasion it may seem out of place to mention that during the Second World War, Renzo’s father was a member of Mussolini’s army...not as a fascist but just as a young recruit, like too many young recruits the world over and throughout time, caught up in the brutality and indifference of state politics. He was captured by the US Army and sent to Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, where he served out the duration of the war as a POW. That curious twist of Parodi family history caused me to wonder if some time in the not too distant future, the young, wide-eyed descendant of one of our Guantanamo prisoners might come to the US full of wonder and ambition and be taken in by an American family whose lives will be forever changed for the better by her arrival. There is that eternal struggle between Eros and Thantos, as the Greeks called it—love and death. Death always seems to have the upper hand, but love has a way of surprising.   And when Manu hits your eyes like a big pizza pie, that’s amoré! 

R.I.P.

Dan and Lorna at an unnamed cemetery in Connecticut, 1966.
No offense intended; no offense taken.
That abbreviation for rest in peace…or to put it old (and dead) school requiescat in pace…has been showing up on Facebook with as much frequency as LOL and STFU lately. There seems to have been a spate of recent deaths that have gained an unusual amount of public attention for various reasons—James Garner, beloved actor; Michael Brown, victim of police shooting; Robin Williams, suicidal comic genius; James Foley and Steven Sotloff, grisly casualties of 12th century barbarism and 21stcentury geopolitics; Joan Rivers, both female pioneer and prisoner of that most insidious female curse--vanity.
I’ve noticed on Facebook at least that R.I.P. has been used as the common send-off on these passings over the full spectrum of my relatives, friends, and acquaintances from the most religious to the irreligious. And that’s remarkable given how increasingly divided we are about most every other thing in our culture. Unlike “God Bless” or “Happy Holiday”, R.I.P. doesn’t appear to provoke the outrage we’ve come to expect from ordinary human communication.
This is good, and as it should be. After all, wishing the departed to rest in peace seems like the least judgmental thing we can do. This should be true regardless of race, creed or land of one's birth, and whether someone has had the good fortune of a Garner or Rivers to live long and successful lives or the misfortune of Brown or Foley or Sotloff to have their lives cut down early by armed brutes operating out of fear and hatred .
We all have our demons. Indeed, the patron saint here at the Nob, Norman O. Brown, suggested that every homicide was an act of suicide by mistaken identity. So even the executioner who hides behind a mask as he butchers bound men in the desert and the executioner who hides behind a badge as he kills an unarmed boy in small town America have their troubles. When they die, no doubt, they too will have loved ones who will wish them R.I.P. I, for one, will not begrudge them that because I would really like to believe that there is a place in the great beyond that isn’t as murderous as this one.
That place, however, would not be heaven. I find it a silly fabrication and don’t believe in it as even a remote possibility. After Joan Rivers’ death, a number of well-meaning folks posted on Facebook an old picture of her and Robin Williams together with the comment that heaven just got funnier. God (and I use the term loosely), I hope not. Because if Joan and Robin are really up there making the angels laugh, then that would mean Joan’s still relapsing into plastic surgery and Robin’s still relapsing into drug use…those demons that shaped their talent would still be there with them. (And allowing for the equally silly construct of hell, I’ll stipulate that "Jihadi John" won’t be there, but the same is not so certain of Officer Wilson. After all, a jury of his peers may find him “Not Guilty” of any earthly crime, and an all-loving, merciful God is sure to wave him through that great gated community in the sky. So if Joan Rivers and Robin Williams are there to make us laugh, would not Officer Wilson be there to serve and protect us from unarmed black teenagers as he did on the streets of Ferguson, MO?)  If we really wish the departed to rest in peace, that means relieving them of all the stresses they experienced in this life, no?
That makes Nobby’s description of the “afterlife” more in keeping with R.I.P. and certainly more appealing, for me at least, as what eternity might look like. In Love’s Body Brown writes (quoting the Buddha):

On the other side of the veil is nothing; utopia; the kingdom not of this world. The utopia of nihilism, the negation of the negation; the world annihilated. “Verily, there is a realm, where there is neither the solid nor the fluid, neither heat nor motion, neither this world nor any other world, neither sun nor moon…There is, O monks, an Unborn, Unoriginated, Uncreated, Unformed. If there were not this Unborn, this Unoriginated, this Uncreated, this Unformed, escape from the world of the born, the originated, the created, the formed would not be possible.”

American Ebola

With much more than a little help from our friends, The Nobby Works presents this exclusive report on the viruses currently ravaging two continents…Ebola in Africa…guns in North America (except for Canada where they've built a wall of sanity to keep the virulent US strain out). 


When did the Ebola outbreak first occur? The first outbreak of Ebola was in 1976; it has ebbed and flowed as a danger since then.


When did the US gun virus outbreak first occur? The first outbreak of the US gun virus was in 1776, a benign strain that contributed to the founding of the nation and became codified in its Constitution. In time, however, through Civil War, slaughter of its native populations, settling of its wild west "the viral genome [became] incorporated by genetic recombination into a specific place in the host's chromosome…[and] whenever the host divides, the viral genome is also replicated." Thus:  Where is the current Ebola outbreak? Ebola is both rare and very deadly — it starts off with flu-like symptoms and often ends with horrific hemorrhaging — as of July 23 it had infected 1,201 people in Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Liberia, and killed an estimated 672 since this winter, according to the numbers from the World Health Organization.


Where is the current US gun virus outbreak? The gun virus is not so rare and very deadly. The virus starts off with animal-like territorial symptoms--to ward off home invaders, to protect the hood, to defend the self while walking to a local shopping mall for an ice cream, but it ends with horrific hemorrhaging of common sense and outright paranoia leading to fevered visions of people you don't like moving into your neighborhood, taking over your government and your wife, and coming for your guns and manhood.  


What factors have contributed to the Ebola outbreak? There are social and political factors contributing to the current disaster. Because this is the first major Ebola outbreak in West Africa, many of the region's health workers didn't have experience or training in how to protect themselves or care for patients with this disease. What's more, people in these countries tend to travel more than those in Central Africa (where outbreaks usually occur). That may have helped the virus disperse geographically, and it made it difficult to track down people who might be infected.

What factors have contributed to the US gun virus outbreak? There are social and political factors contributing to the current disaster. Because this isn't the first major gun outbreak in the US, many of the nation's politicians have learned to live in fear of what the NRA can do to their careers and thus are too weak to stand up for themselves or protect their constituents from this disease. What's more, people in the US tend to shut bad news out about themselves and their country more than people in other countries (where disasters usually occur due to natural causes rather than human). This may have helped the virus disperse geographically, and has made it difficult to run background checks on people who might be infected.


What obstacles exist to effectively combating the Ebola virus? As an editorial in the medical journal lancet noted, social stigmas and a lack of awareness may lead people to not seek medical care (or even avoid it). Another often-cited problem is that some people have had direct contact with victims' dead bodies during funerals and preparations for burial, which can spread the disease. A World Health Organization assessment in Liberia noted problems with tracing patients' contacts with other people, "persisting denial and resistance in the community," and issues with "inadequate" measures used to prevent and control infections, weak data management, and "weak leadership and coordination…."
A view of gloves and boots used by medical staff, drying in the sun, at a center for victims of the Ebola virus in Guinea AFP/Getty Images

What obstacles exist to effectively combating the US gun virus? Social stigmas and a lack of awareness may lead gun owners in the US to not seek gun control (or even condemn it). Another often-cited problem is that some people have had direct contact with victims' dead bodies during funerals and preparations for burial, yet remain totally unmoved by the devastation the gun does not just to the body of the victim, but the victim's family, neighborhood, and the fabric of the entire country. Any assessment of the gun virus in the US would note problems with tracing weapons hoarder contact with other weapons hoarders, persistent denial and resistance to the notion that the spread of military style weapons presents a clear and present danger to the community at large, and issues with "inadequate" measures used to prevent and control infections, weak data management, and weak leadership and coordination in confronting the NRA, the primary carrier of the virus. What are the chances of Ebola spreading to the US? The Ebola viruses known today don't spread from person-to-person well enough to have much risk of causing a wide pandemic across several continents. The risk of Ebola coming to the US is very low.

What are the chances of the gun virus spreading outside the US? The US today is the biggest purveyor of gun violence in the world both through its sale of weaponry to fuel global regional conflicts and its Hollywood entertainment, which glorifies gun violence as a solution to all personal and political problems. However, as the first chart above makes reassuringly clear, thus far the rest of the world has remained remarkably immune to our sickness. 

One Thing Leads to Another...

Judy Collins sings Liverpool Lullaby
Barry Friedman, the heart and soul of Tulsa, conducts a regular Friday 10 best (or worst) list on his Facebook page, which I generally dodge because invariably one minute after making my list public, I remember something or someone I should’ve included and I end up feeling like a dope. But I couldn’t resist the bait on Barry's most recent hook to submit 10 favorite first lines of popular songs. There are at least 10 songs whose first lines I've been singing to myself (and unwilling others) pretty regularly for decades, so I knew making my list was unlikely to leave me in one of those gobsmacking "I couldda had a V8" moments.  
After completing my list, I realized that three of the songs I cited appeared on one album (excuse me, CD)--Judy Collins's "In My Life"-- if not one of the 10 most essential pop albums of the 20th century, at least in the top 100. My three first lines came from:Dylan's Tom Thumb's Blues—“When you're lost in the rain in Juarez and it's Easter time too…"Leonard Cohen's Suzanne—“Suzanne takes you down to a place near the river…"Lennon & McCartney's In My Life--"There are places I remember all my life though some have changed…”With those three songs dominating more than usual the musical playlist of my mind, it was inevitable that I would end up playing the entire Collins album come Sunday morning...a time reserved in our home for the weekly worship of music. When I say "In My Life" is among the essential LP's of the 20th century (whether essential 10 or 100 I leave open to debate), what makes it so is the selection of songwriters Judy and her exquisitely tasteful producer Joshua Rifkin chose to feature. The writers' collective weight is really what elevates the album far above the ordinary. Not only are Dylan, Cohen, Lennon & McCartney included, but Brecht & Weill, Jacques Brel, and Randy Newman as well. Richard Farina and Donovan get pulled along for the ride. Neither is in the same songwriting league as the others, but their contributions nicely complement the overall tapestry of the album.
Then there's Stan Kelly.

And this is where you’ll have to pardon me while I embarrass myself. Over this past weekend with my most recent listen to this album--which I’ve owned since bell bottoms were in fashion and Lyndon Baines Johnson was President--I realized that I didn’t know who the writer was on one of the album’s many highlights—Liverpool Lullaby. I have no defense for this gross oversight. If I’d learned that the song was a collaboration of Dylan, Cohen and the ghost of Bertolt Brecht, I easily could’ve believed it…it’s thatgood. I learned instead that it was the creation of a guy named Stan Kelly, and here’s what Stan Kelly’s talent wrought:
Oh you are a mucky kidDirty as a dustbin lidWhen he hears the things that you didYou’ll get a belt from yer dad
Oh, you have your father’s noseSo crimson in the dark it glowsIf you’re not asleep when the boozers closeYou’ll get a belt from yer dad
You look so scruffy lying thereStrawberry jam tufts in your hairIn all the world you haven’t a careAnd I have got so many
It’s quite a struggle every dayLivin’ on yer father’s payThe buggar drinks it all awayAnd leaves me without any
Although you have no silver spoonBetter days are coming soonOur Nelly’s working at the loomAnd she gets paid on Friday
Perhaps one day we’ll have a splashWhen Littlewoods provide the cashWe’ll get a house in Knotty AshAnd buy your dad a brewery
Oh you are a mucky kidDirty as a dustbin lidWhen he hears the things that you didYou’ll get a belt from yer dad
Oh you have your father’s faceYou’re growing up a real hard caseBut there’s no one can take your placeGo fast asleep for your mammy
It’s just a small gem of a song lyric—a hummable Angela’s Ashes--tippy-toeing down that very fine artistic line between the sentimental and the ironic. I also learned that Stan Kelly died earlier this year, that he was sometimes known as Stan Bootle, and he was no ordinary guy. He was among the first in the world to earn an advanced degree in computer sciences, was a football (soccer) agent, and an historian of his beloved Liverpool home. This, from one of his obituaries:

Stan Kelly-Bootle, who as a freelance operator could maintain an interest in all three of his worlds: computers, music and football. Moving to San Francisco in the late 70s, Stan was among the first Britons to make his presence felt in Silicon Valley, California, as a technical consultant, prolific columnist and writer of books, including the highly successful Computer Contradictionary.

This unusual Nobby Work's post at a week's start rather than its end is my small penance for overlooking this remarkable guy for so long.  Another obit makes clear why Stan belongs in The Nobby Works pantheon even if it did take me 50 frickin’ years to “discover” him: 

“And above all, he was a realist who lived for the here and now, despite his poor health of later years…His own self-penned epitaph was revealed by his son David on the day of his death: 'Stan died. No flowers or tears.'"

I’d like to say that this one thing that started with Barry’s Friday list and serendipitously led to me filling in a rather large hole in my cultural knowledge ends here. But one thing really does lead to another and then another…and this one, alas, leads to this: It happens that singer Cilla Black, a one-hit wonderin the US, has had a rather long and substantial career in Great Britain, due in no small measure to her making Kelly’s Liverpool Lullaby  (ahem) “her own.” On a 2013 television special, she sang the song for about the giga-thousandth time, but in this version she decided to change a line. “You’ll get a belt from yer dad” became “You’ll get told off by your dad.” As The Daily Mail reported:

The star’s agent and manager, her son Robert Willis, last night defended the new version, which he said was about ensuring the show stayed ‘family-friendly’.
He said: ‘Cilla loves the song and she thought it was an evocative and appropriate ending for the show. We changed the line about belting because we thought it was important to bring the lyrics up to date.
A spokesman for ITV last night said the star and the broadcaster had agreed to amend the song.
‘Cilla felt some of the sentiment could have been made more relevant for today,’ he said. ‘She discussed it with everyone and there was a feeling it was the right way to go.’

And thus this magical mystery tour Barry Friedman’s fun Friday listmaking launched me on leads me once again face-to-face with my ofttime nemesis Political Correctness. So thank you, Cilla Black, for paving just a wee bit o’ the road to hell with your damned good intentions.  

The World's a Soundstage

You never know where this blogging business will take you. I spent three days earnestly struggling over a piece on the killing of Mike Brown that might resonate when...bang, bang, bang! Just like that I was off the case. (The folks on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, hold high expectations for a conviction; a civil rights attorney said conviction of a cop charged with a shooting while on duty was extremely rare; so that “breaking news” story may be around for a long time). It was an email, a press conference, and an old movie that pulled me away from cops with guns and kids without and inspired me to do this post about more metaphysical stuff. 

The email came from a friend who reported on the sudden death of a female relative who had been battling cancer for five years. On the day the woman was celebrating with friends and relatives the news from her doctor that she was clear of her illness, she suffered a massive heart attack and died in front of her loved ones. The friend who shared the story told me that the event fueled her anger and cynicism about what a godless universe we live in.
The press conference was the one held at Emory Hospital upon the release of Kent Brantly, the American doctor who had contracted the deadly Ebola virus while doing missionary work in West Africa. In a statement on what he called his “miraculous day,” Dr. Brantly invoked God in general, Jesus in particular, and prayer several times. His experience quite evidently fed the opposite of anger and cynicism and affirmed his faith in a god-blessed universe.
Was the difference in attitudes due to the difference in outcomes?  My friend’s relative died, while Dr. Brantly survived. Yet Dr. Brantly could not help but be aware of the 1,300 others who have died across West Africa because they did not benefit from the best hospital care in the world as he did. Dr. Brantly knows well about those who have already died from Ebola, all those who are facing death from it, and all those who are fighting an uphill battle against it, as he had been before being struck. But Brantly, as many of the faithful are inclined to do, saw a glass half-full and gave thanks to a merciful god, who, he claimed, had singled him out for suffering in order to pave the way to a cure.
At this point my atheist friends can be heard pulling out their hair and screaming, “If God was going to make you the instrument of a cure, why the hell didn’t he just cut out the middleman and not make so many sick in the first place?”
Good question, but I leave it to my atheist friends to pursue. I have what they call other fish to fry….
First, the small fish: Unlike my atheist friends, I believe that Christianity in its purest form holds beliefs that can and should advance a liberal society. So, I’m all about encouraging the better angels in it. Dr. Brantly strikes me as a top-of-the-line angel. I’d go so far as to say that if he can avoid polluting his Christianity with the unholy waters of fundamentalist politics, he could be the best thing to happen to American religion since Martin Luther King, Jr. successfully linked biblical teaching to civil rights 60 years ago. The man clearly walks the walk. He brought his invaluable medical skills to one of the most wretched regions of the earth to give true witness to the biblical exhortation that we all be good Samaritans. At a time when the perverse strain of Christianity that dominates our culture is dedicated to making money, careers, and nasty public policy at the expense of the meek, it is heartening to see a man take the Sermon on the Mount so seriously. (And bonus points to the good doctor for breaking ranks with the know-nothings of modern American Christianity and allowing doctors and researchers to share some of the credit with the prayerful in creating his miracle: "Through the care of the Samaritan's Purse and SIM missionary team in Liberia, the use of an experimental drug, and the expertise and resources of the health care team at Emory University Hospital, God saved my life.")
Now the bigger fish: the movie that I happened to watch during this personally transformational 36 hours was Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories, perhaps his most underrated film.* As it begins, Woody’s character, famed movie director Sandy Bates, is also coping with the death of a friend. Sandy is sitting on a train full of grim, lonely, unhappy people while across the platform a train heading in the opposite direction is full of beautiful, glamorous partying people. Sandy tries in vain to explain to the conductor that his ticket is for the other train, but ends up arriving at the sad train’s destination with his fellow passengers: a garbage heap.
It’s supposed to be a scene from Sandy’s new movie, but his producers hate it. As the movie unfolds, we see that Sandy is in a creative crisis between making more of the funny movies that built his reputation and making serious movies that speak to his heart and mind. As Stardust Memories moves toward its end, Sandy Bates seems to have reconciled his conflict by making a movie that claims that he’s found the meaning of life in a well-appointed room with a beautiful woman stretched out before him reading a good book and listening to the music he loves. As the curtain closes on this scene, a critic stands up from the preview audience and condemns Sandy’s movie as sentimental. Woody (not Sandy), as the director of Stardust Memories, piles on the condemnation by having his actors break from character as they leave the theater and engage in petty, pretentious, and snarky commentary on his film and his filmmaking.  
In the final scene, the director--be he Woody or Sandy--is in the theater alone staring up at the blank screen. He knows the choice was his to be funny or serious, sentimental or cold…in another context: cynical or faithful. The artist knows…or believes at least…that the universe is all just happening around him. He chooses where to point his camera, how to frame his shots, what story to tell. If he wants to tell a story about a cruel universe that snatches a woman away at the moment of her triumph over illness, he can. If he wants to tell a story about a benevolent god who makes a good doctor suffer so he can survive to relieve the suffering of others, he can. The artist can do that. 

Everyone else just finds the story that suits them and plays the part.



* It seems almost impossible to view a Woody Allen film without thinking about the scandal that has cast a shadow over his personal life. As I re-watch some of his older films that predate his affair and subsequent marriage to Mia Farrow's adopted daughter, Soon-Yi Previn, by years, if not decades, it is remarkable how many references there are to his fascination with very young women. In Stardust Memories there is a scene between Sandy Bates and the love of his life Dorrie, where they're returning from a social event in the midst of a fight because she has caught him ogling her 15-year old niece. Hard to tell if Allen in these instances is the artist making creative choices…or just like everyone else and playing a part that suits him.