Dan Riley's Blog, page 38

Their Bodies, Their Selves

This is my 225th blog post. I’d say that in writing more than half of them I didn’t know how they would end, which breaks one of the cardinal rules of writing. Still, it’s been fun and made blogging far more exhilarating than I ever thought it would be. My uncertainty about where this post will lead, however, fills me with a bit of trepidation. It’s generally good practice to be somewhat tentative when it comes to writing about groups of people whose life experiences are distinct from yours. For the average white guy that would include blacks, gays, Muslims, and women. Especially women, because even if you have as many of them in your life as I do—a mom, a wife, two daughters, numerous women friends—you are constantly reminded of how little you understand of them and how the world feels to them.  With the Internet, there are now fierce guardians of the feminine mystique to punish any man for getting womanhood wrong. 
But ever since the rampage at UC Santa Barbara by avowed misogynist Elliot Rodger, there’s been momentum building in the domain of my brain for me to address--if not the big Freudian question: What do women want?--at least the Dylan question: How does it feel to be out on your own like a rolling stone?  Not that I have an answer, but I do have some observations. The first one is the most inflammatory, so let me get it out of the way quick. Despite some of what was written after the dangerously lonely Rodger boy tried to wreck vengeance on all the women who had rejected him, the threat women face by being out on their own is not exclusively from privileged white guys. Feminists in a rush to make Rodger the proxy for all the privileged white guys who have caused them personal grief do so at the risk of letting nonwhite, non-privileged males who harm women globally off the hook. There are Muslim women suffering under the cruelties of the Taliban. There are Hindu women struggling to get police in India to take the crime of rape seriously. In Juarez, Mexico, a prolonged era of unsolved kidnappings and brutal killings of hundreds of young women has led to a bizarre debate over whether it's fair to call what's happened there femicide. And a generation of angry young black men have created an art form out of misogyny, helping to perpetuate a culture where women are routinely used, abused and abandoned. So when it comes to mistreatment of women, privileged white guys do not, as they normally do, monopolize the situation.
This is because the most basic dichotomy of maleness and femaleness transcends race, status, ethnicity, religion, geography, etc. The primal circumstance of being female is to be as alluring as possible to the opposite sex for the sake of species survival. Yet that very attractiveness, which includes a certain softness, is what makes females vulnerable to some quite heinous male behaviors. So how does that feel…and how should women react after eons of learning to put up with it?
In Aristophanes's ancient Greek classic, Lysistrata, the women literally used their bodies as their weapons in combating male aggression by withholding sex from their men until they stopped fighting. There have been two recurrences of this strategy in Togo in this century. But more often, nowadays, we’re seeing increasing evidence from around the world of women resorting to the male inclination to take up arms of one kind or another to fight back. In the US of course the go-to weapon of choice for women as well as men is the gun. The NRA and gun dealers incessantly promote fear among women to increase sales of guns to women…to protect themselves from men with guns. In India, women faced with official indifference to their victimization by rapists have taken to training with long sticks for warding off attackers.  Though the Ukrainian women shown protesting in the picture above have chosen a to use their bodies as weapons, many other Ukrainian women have taken to traditional arms, as Anna Nemstova writes in Foreign Policy magazine:

….Natalya Zabolotna, a Kiev museum director, is worried about the lives of her friends, the artists Pavel Yurov and Denis Grishuk, who have been held hostage in a rebel prison in Sloviansk for over a month. She reached out to the Moscow Orthodox Church. "The priests told me they couldn't help, because the violence and anger of war have flooded people's mind and souls," Zabolotna said. "Something is seriously wrong. The world has let the genie out of the bottle. Even women have taken weapons and formed militia troops in despair and fear." I can't help thinking, though, that most women in Ukraine are waiting for the guns to melt like chocolate so that they can once again open up those chests filled with family heirlooms and dance the hopak.

I’m guessing that if a guy had written that last line about heirlooms and hopak, his chocolate would be burned to a crisp by the feminist twitter guard. But since a woman wrote it, I feel I have enough cover to ask: Is it true? Are women being forced to take up arms against their own nature because they have no other choice in a world dominated by male aggression? Must they now choose between being warriors or homemakers? Will the nurturing disposition of women give way to the warlike tendencies of men? (Might we one day see Florida women prescriptively using the "Stand Your Ground" law to protect themselves against sexual predators…and might that give male legislators pause?)
One always has to be careful in turning to Hollywood for the answer to such questions. The recent vogue in our entertainment for women as badasses is like the arms industry’s fashion in pink guns. It has less to do with empowering women than with selling product. (After all, how empowering can it be for one gender to abandon its deep instinct for cultivation for another gender’s abiding instinct for destruction?) But I can’t resist reference to a scene in the TV series, The Americans, where the main female character confronts the brute who anally raped her and has him totally at her mercy. But before she exacts her revenge, she turns him over to her husband for dispatching. I suspect we’ll need generations raised on The Hunger Games before that scene stops making sense.
It won’t take nearly that long for George Will to stop making sense. Like me, he seemed compelled recently to chime in on the subject of male aggression against women. In a controversial column he took issue with the attempt by government and colleges to take measures to combat an arguable epidemic of sexual assault on campuses. "When they [colleges] make victimhood a coveted status that confers privileges," he wrote, cutting to a favorite hobbyhorse of his, "victims proliferate." I’m going to give Will the benefit of the doubt here…something he never grants women, minorities or liberals. I’m going to assume his firsthand experience with real, honest-to-God victimhood is more limited than mine (Happy Father's Day, Dad). 

Every time I see a rape committed on screen what goes through my mind is this: How does anyone maintain an erection through all that? I cannot conceive of anything more deflating to male sexual arousal than a woman’s verbal pleading or physical struggling to be free of him. But obviously not all males are built alike. The evidence is abundant and overwhelming that too many males are still linked to the primal instinct where females are prey to be overpowered and subjugated. And not just sexually, but politically, culturally and socially as well. That’s to our everlasting embarrassment as males...at least those of us with a sense of shame.
Women’s problem is how to deal with it: To use their bodies as weapons or (like men) to turn to weapons as weapons? It’s not my choice to make, but I definitely have a preference.

Curse of The Boomers, Part 2

P.J. O’Rourke has been robbing the rubes for years, posing as the spokesman of the Boomer generation. The pose alone should be an immediate tipoff to what a fraud he is because any self-respecting Boomer would know enough not to attempt to speak for what is obviously a diverse, unwieldy mass population of 75 million, which defies any rational attempt at pigeonholing. Yet O’Rouke has persisted in this charade for his entire adult life because there’s very good money in it for him. His most recent book, in fact, is entitled, The Baby Boom: How It Got That Way . . . And It Wasn’t My Fault . . . And I’ll Never Do It Again.When he first started off, there was a receptive audience of older folks willing and eager to pay him good money to confirm…and enhance…their worst impressions of a generation they resented. Now in his 60s, his audience is primarily those members of the Boomer generation who, like O’Rourke, react with glee that their generation didn’t live up to its ideals because it justifies all the time they spent watching from the sidelines as their bolder brethren tried to change a society sorely in need of change. They are the self-loathing Boomers.
Like that other jughead of our generation, Rush Limbaugh, O’Rourke positions himself as an entertainer. That’s always provided a nice dodge for Limbaugh because every time he steps over the line of common decency he can claim that he was only making a joke, and say, “What’s the matter with you, can’t you take a joke?” O’Rourke can hide behind the greasepaint of funny man with more credibility because the bulk of his work is an attempt at humor, no matter how bilious, whereas Limbaugh trades straight-up in unfiltered bile.
If O’Rourke continues to get away with his act, the Boomer generation ends up being indelibly defined by this smart-ass in the stead of any serious thinker. And it wouldn’t take all that serious a mind to poke major holes in the myths about Boomers that O’Rourke keeps peddling. His favorite seems to be that we are a generation that lacks a sense of responsibility. Leaving aside the Boomer war dead and wounded from Vietnam…and leaving aside the mighty struggle mounted against that misbegotten war by those who opposed it in stark contrast to the recent generation that blithely marched off to the wrong target in Iraq to avenge 9/11 and ferret out phantom WMD…leaving all that aside, just what in the hell is O’Rourke talking about when he writes about generational responsibility thusly:

Baby boomers aren't power hungry. Power comes with that kicker, responsibility. We're greedy for love, happiness, experience, sensation, thrills, praise, fame, adulation, inner peace, and, as it turns out, money. Health and fitness too. But we're not greedy for power.

Granted, O’Rouke is no scholar, so no one should expect him to try to separate what would seem to be pretty typical human desires for love, happiness, inner peace etc. from an alleged Boomer greed for such things. Such facile observations are the clown’s stock and trade. Whether the Founding Fathers’ inclusion of a “pursuit of happiness” in one of the nation’s most sacred documents had as much to do with our lust for the good life as the accident of our birth year should probably be left for more serious thinkers. But O’Rourke wants it both ways. He wants to influence a serious appraisal of his generation but he doesn't want to put much thinking into it. Thus he makes the absurd claim that Boomers avoid power because they have an aversion to responsibility. How can anyone paying even casual attention to the politics of the Boomer era get away with such utter nonsense? Do those ur-Boomers Bill and Hilary Clinton shrink from power? Did George W. Bush, that most feckless of Boomers, show insufficient ambition in his crusade to spread democracy throughout the Arab world? And all that damn money we spend on elections in increasingly escalating, hideous amounts? If you're blind to the Boomer appetite for power and deaf to our nation’s intense intra-generational quarreling between opposing views of government, yet insist on marching forth  as an authority on Boomers, you're a fool.    
O’Rourke, however, clueless to his severe limitations, sets a serious task for himself when he writes of Boomers:

Still, it's an appropriate moment for us to weigh what we've wrought and tally what we've added to and subtracted from existence. We've reached the age of accountability. The world is our fault. We are the generation that has an excuse for everything—one of our greatest contributions to modern life—but the world is still our fault.

First off, let’s note that O’Rourke’s speaking fees, book sales and TV appearances go up when he (ho-ho) steps up to accept blame for his generation. This is the one trick he’s been playing since Nixon. But I’ll play along.  Allow me to do a bit of accounting for my generation. First off, it’s dismaying that the willingness to question materialism during the Sixties did not save the country from having capitalism subsume democracy as it has in the 21st century. Second, it’s painful to see that despite the Sixties mantra of “Give peace a chance,” we now live in a nation of guns gone wild. And thirdly, it is but a cruel irony that where once upon a time in the Sixties we had a Free Speech Movement, we now have politically correct speech codes, NSA wiretapping and a so-called Patriot Act, which forfeits First Amendment rights to such a degree that if the Second Amendment was assaulted as grossly, all that firepower our nation's paranoids have been stockpiling would have been unleashed on the Pentagon by now.It dismays me that all this happened while my generation was in ascendancy, and though O’Rourke tries to pre-empt any excuses by accusing Boomers of inventing excuses, the truth is this world as it exists is not our fault. The world turns, as it were. Historical forces, random events and certain realities overwhelm the best of intentions…the most idealistic visions. Birth control, which liberated sexual behavior, came down to us. Liberalized divorce laws, which led to more broken families, were bequeathed to us. Those Social Security and Medicare programs we're supposedly breaking were gifts from a generation which experienced first hand what life could be like without such safety nets. The GI Bill, which made it easier for our parents to create the greatest middle class the world has ever known, did not come with a proviso that its benefits were off limits to the children of vets.
And speaking of tours of battle, one might argue that Baby Boomers were the first and youngest recruits in the Cold War, serving in the sorely undecorated Duck and Cover Battalion, where as grade schoolers we served on the front lines of the most insidious battle ground in human history.
Profit only partially explains O’Rourke’s promiscuous Boomer bashing. The other part is revealed in this excerpt from an interview he did promoting his new book:

…I think we’ve learned a basic lesson about a government promising too much and interfering too much in the lives and responsibilities of its individual citizens, and we’ll come out the other end of this with painful trimmings to these social programs and, I’m hoping, with a better sense of what the Catholic Church calls “subsidiarity.” That good should be done by the first proximate people. If someone needs help, the first people should be family, and then immediate community─ neighbors, and then local government, then state government, thenfederal government ─ only as a very last resort. 

If the Sixties were revolutionary, as some inside and outside the Boomer generation have claimed, it was a revolution for more equality and less militarism in American life. It was also a revolution for more individual freedom. How successful a revolution it was remains to be seen, just as it’s taken more than 200 years to gauge the true success of the first American Revolution. In any case, O’Rourke is to his contemporaries’ revolution what he would’ve been to the Founding Fathers’ revolution—a Tory. His Boomer bashing is a veiled attempt to reestablish the old order, relocate the dispossessed to their place, and advance the fiction that "every man for himself" is really just a call for individual responsibility.
His continued attacks on Boomer irresponsibility, coated in so much fluff about sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll, is really a rear-guard action against the progress the US has made toward creating a fairer, more just society from passage of Social Security through the GI Bill to Civil Rights, Medicare, and beyond to the Affordable Care Act and regulation of greenhouse gases. This Tory view holds that if you’re unemployed, without health insurance, need a home or college loan, or are disenfranchised by your local polling commission, those are matters you should bring up with your family, your church, or your town councilor, but if you go to the Federal government for relief it will come at the cost of your individual freedom. On the other hand, if you’re sufficiently afraid of Russians, Vietnamese, and Muslims, give the Feds all the blood and treasure they ask for and keep your mouth shut. 
None of this would be so awfully bad if P.J. O’Rourke were a genuinely funny fellow, but the next time I find something he’s written or said that brings even a smile to my face it will be the first time. P.J. O'Rourke may not be the curse of the Boomers, but he is a curse. 

Curse of The Boomers, Part 1

Someone’s got it in for meThey’re planting stories in the pressWhoever it is they better cut it out quickWhen they will I can only guess.They say I shot a man named GrayAnd took his wife to ItalyShe inherited a million bucksAnd when she died, it came to me…I can't help it if I'm lucky                                                         --Idiot Wind, Bob Dylan


Mad Men creator Matt Weiner recently sat down with Stephen Colbert where he expressed this opinion about the Boomer generation:

They think they invented sex, drugs and, you know, they have a view of it that is a child’s view of it….What really happened was there was a generation that was asked very little. They got education, they got a lot of entertainment, they got a lot of spending money, they became the focus of the economy, of entertainment, of everything. There was a war going on, which they were supposed to fight. Some of them didn’t. But the generation before them, all of them fought.

There is so much shallowness packed into that statement that it probably would've gotten Weiner fired at Sterling-Cooper, his fictional ad agency. As a huge fan of Mad Men I can only conclude that this is one of those cases where the creation is smarter than its creator. Ironically, I’ve never seen Mad Men as the rebuke of the 60s generation that Weiner suggests it is, but rather as a bold and brilliant dramatization of the French existentialism that so influenced the politics of the Boomers. Don Draper could be a character right out of Sartre. In an early episode, one of Draper's many lovers asks him what matters to him, and he answers, "Only this matters." Only this meaning that sex at that moment. One of the greatest of Mad Men episodes, "The Suitcase," unfolds like Sartre’s existentialist play No Exit with Don and Peggy stuck in their office building for the night, seemingly with no way out and resigned to that as their fate. Living in the moment with few illusions about salvation is pretty much the philosophical underpinning of the most culturally obvious aspects of Boomerism.
But rather than acknowledge this influence on his own work, Weiner traffics in the most superficial pap in describing the Boomer generation. His blanket statement that “they think they invented sex, [and] drugs” is just the rankest of generalizations. Perhaps some of the Boomers that he encounters in the affluent Southern California world where he was born and works believe they invented sex and drugs, but being a Boomer myself and having grown up with Boomers and lived amongst them on two coasts for all my life, I’ve never run into one who ever seriously said anything close to, “Hey, look at us! We invented sex and drugs.”
As to all these indulgences that were dropped at our precious feet…education, entertainment, an economy that we can bend to our will…not even the true greed heads of our generation, like Donald Trump, came bursting out of the womb with a list of demands. Those National Defense Loans that floated our schooling? Those Disney and Beach Blanket Bingo movies? That famous Crocker Bank advertising campaign, "We’ve only Just Begun"?  They were all aimed specifically at us by the previous generation. Like sex and drugs, we didn’t invent those things either.  And when Time magazine named the Boomer generation its “Man of the Year" before we had been on the planet 25 years, most of us could barely afford a subscription to Time, let alone dictate its editorial choices.
Once we came of age and started to produce our own view of things, only an obtuse cultural observer would argue that “a child’s view” predominates in Boomer culture. The quintessential Baby Boomer film… The Big Chill …is seeped far more in self-reproach than self-regard. As it opens at the funeral of a friend the characters consider the best of them, we learn that he committed suicide and the Rolling Stones' "You Can’t Always Get What You Want" is on the soundtrack, not because it has a good beat and you can dance to it, but because it underscores the hard lesson this generation, like others before it, has learned.
As for not paying our generational dues by fighting in Vietnam, 40% of eligible Boomer males were drafted and Boomers comprised most of the 50,000 casualties…not to mention the untold numbers of the physically and emotionally wounded. Though Matt Weiner may not approve of the price the Boomer generation paid for the so-called Greatest Generation’s colossal foreign policy blunder in Southeast Asia, he should thank his lucky stars that by being born in 1965, one year after the Boomers, he got to grow up in an unusually halcyon period in recent American history between Vietnam and Iraq, when kids weren’t confronted with adult choices about war and peace…duty and conscience. 

Because Weiner is not a Boomer, his slander of my generation is nowhere near as reprehensible as is that of those who are part of it. There was Bill Keller, for instance, former editor-in-chief of The New York Times, who The Nob went after in a previous post for portraying Boomers as an “entitled” generation. But Keller’s betrayal of his generation (not to mention betrayal of his own intellectual integrity) is a misdemeanor compared to the felonious career of one P.J. O’Rourke. Next week, The Nobby Works examines how O’Rourke has managed to make his insufferably self-satisfied puss the face of a generation he accuses of being insufferably self-satisfied.  

Happy Bobday

The Nob concludes its 2014 Seven Days of Bob Name the Dylan Lyric Contest by matching my Grandma Moses primitive Photoshop art with the song lyrics that inspired them (note: License to Kill was not Photoshopped, unfortunately. That's an actual photo of a father poisoning his child's mind, and so it seems that cycle will not be broken). Clicking on the title links will take you to great recorded versions of all these songs (except for She Belongs to Me, which kicks things off above); clicking on links in the lyrics will take you to the lyrics in full.




She Belongs to Me She wears an Egyptian ring That sparkles before she speaksShe wears an Egyptian ringThat sparkles before she speaksShe’s a hypnotist collectorYou are a walking antique
Bow down to her on SundaySalute her when her birthday comesBow down to her on Sunday
Salute her when her birthday comes
For Halloween give her a trumpetAnd for Christmas, buy her a drum

Señor (Tales of Yankee Power)
Señor, señor, I can see that painted wagon
I can smell the tail of the dragon
Can’t stand the suspense anymore
Can you tell me who to contact here, señor?









It's All Over Now, Baby Blue
All your seasick sailors, they are rowing home   
All your reindeer armies, are all going home
The lover who just walked out your door
Has taken all his blankets from the floor
The carpet, too, is moving under you
And it’s all over now, Baby Blue












High Water (For Charley Patton)


Well, George Lewis told the Englishman, the Italian and the Jew“You can’t open your mind, boysTo every conceivable point of view”They got Charles Darwin trapped out there on Highway FiveJudge says to the High Sheriff,“I want him dead or aliveEither one, I don’t care”High water everywhere




Visions of Johanna
Inside the museums, Infinity goes up on trial
Voices echo this is what salvation must be like after a while











License to Kill Now, he’s hell-bent for destruction, he’s afraid and confusedAnd his brain has been mismanaged with great skillAll he believes are his eyes
And his eyes, they just tell him lies
But there’s a woman on my blockSitting there in a cold chill
She say, "Who gonna take away his license to kill?"

Seven Curses
Old Riley stole a stallion
But they caught him and brought him backAnd they laid him down on the jailhouse groundWith an iron chain around his neckOld Riley’s daughter got a messageThat her father was goin’ to hangShe rode by night and came by morningWith gold and silver in her handWhen the judge he saw Riley’s daughterHis old eyes deepened in his headSayin’, “Gold will never free your fatherThe price, my dear, is you instead”

Seven Days of Bob, Day 7

The Nobby Works' exciting, first ever Name that Dylan Lyric Contest is heading into the final turn. For the past six days leading up to Bob's birthday on May 24, The Nob has posted a graphic like the one above providing clues to a Dylan song. Readers have been invited to make their guesses each day in the comments section. On May 24, we'll link all the graphics to the songs that inspired them. Those who succeed in matching them all will win FREE Nobby Works for a year. 

Seven Days of Bob, Day 6

The Nobby Works is excited to announce its first ever Name that Dylan Lyric Contest. For the next seven days leading up to Bob's birthday on May 24, The Nob will post a graphic like the one above providing clues to a Dylan song. Readers are invited to make their guesses each day in the comments section. On May 24, we'll link all the graphics to the songs that inspired them. Match them all and win FREE Nobby Works for a year. 

Seven Days of Bob, Day 5

The Nobby Works is excited to announce its first ever Name that Dylan Lyric Contest. For the next seven days leading up to Bob's birthday on May 24, The Nob will post a graphic like the one above providing clues to a Dylan song. Readers are invited to make their guesses each day in the comments section. On May 24, we'll link all the graphics to the songs that inspired them. Match them all and win FREE Nobby Works for a year. 

Seven Days of Bob, Day 4

The Nobby Works is excited to announce its first ever Name that Dylan Lyric Contest. For the next seven days leading up to Bob's birthday on May 24, The Nob will post a graphic like the one above providing clues to a Dylan song. Readers are invited to make their guesses each day in the comments section. On May 24, we'll link all the graphics to the songs that inspired them. Match them all and win FREE Nobby Works for a year. 

Seven Days of Bob, Day 3

The Nobby Works is excited to announce its first ever Name that Dylan Lyric Contest. For the next seven days leading up to Bob's birthday on May 24, The Nob will post a graphic like the one above providing clues to a Dylan song. Readers are invited to make their guesses each day in the comments section. On May 24, we'll link all the graphics to the songs that inspired them. Match them all and win FREE Nobby Works for a year. 

Seven Days of Bob, Day 2

The Nobby Works is excited to announce its first ever Name that Dylan Lyric Contest. For the next seven days leading up to Bob's birthday on May 24, The Nob will post a graphic like the one above providing clues to a Dylan song. Readers are invited to make their guesses each day in the comments section. On May 24, we'll link all the graphics to the songs that inspired them. Match them all and win FREE Nobby Works for a year.