Dan Riley's Blog, page 40

For the children...

Pass it on to all the uninsured kids you know, folks…
https://www.healthcare.gov

My First Gun Show

Sign at Crossroads Gun Show, Del Mar Fairgrounds, March 8, 2014…translation: Do as they say…not as they do.
There are some writers who choose their subjects to maximize their pleasures in life. Who can blame them? I think I'll be a travel writer and go to the most beautiful places on earth. Or, I think I'll be a food critic and eat my way through Europe. Or, movies. Yeah, let me write about movies and the celebrities who make them so I can go to their houses or meet them at the poshest cafés so we can set tongues a-wagging together.
Me? I pretty much go where my muse leads me. How else to explain the time I've spent writing about such painful subjects as the Red Sox (pre-04 Red Sox) and lean manufacturing? And now guns…dammit. I didn’t ask for this, but here I am, thrust into my next big non-blog project. And here to say that happiness is not a warm gun…nor a cold one even.  Guns and happiness do not a match…sorry, John Lennon. So I drove down to the Del Mar Fairgrounds for my first gun show in a state of mind more heightened by anxiety than a trip to the dentist for root canal.
I am sufficiently sick of America’s gun culture, though it is a culture I was raised in. Saturday mornings of my childhood did not begin until I had gotten a full serving of cowboys…Lone Ranger, Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Hopalong Cassidy, Wild Bill Hickock. I could not lay my eyes on a stick without reimagining it as a rifle. Hell, my hometown was Enfield, Connecticut…if not exactly home to the Enfield Rifle…close enough…as was nearby Powder Hollow, which provided much of the fire power for the Union army during the Civil War.
I’ll admit mine wasn’t exactly the gun culture I encountered when I moved to Lebanon, N.H., where the first day of hunting season was an unofficial holiday for every kid in the school. (Check that…for every boy kid in the school.) The view from the top of the school system down was that this was the one time of the year the boys got to bond with their dads…rite of passage and all that.  And as I’ve written about previously, it’s where I first encountered students who weren’t in my American novel class actually trying to steal the novel we were reading— Deliverance .
Nonetheless, there was no nostalgia on my way to the San Diego gun show, and to lift the pall that was present, I decided to drive down along the coast. The sun was glistening off the surf as it most often is around here, and the weather had brought out March beachgoers in droves. Surfers, joggers, bikers, strollers…but as I looked on them all in their colorful garb and great-to-be-alive aura, I couldn’t help but think of the gun show I was heading to and how many in the crowd I was about to be rubbing shoulders with who might take it in their heads one day to drive by such a seaside idyll and spray it with bullets. Not a far-fetched notion these days. After Newtown and Aurora and Tucson, why should a picture postcard day at the ocean be saved from a gunman’s madness? After all, who knows what goes on in an ill mind? Surely not blood-soaked Wayne LaPierre and his deranged National Rifle Association. Turning to them for advice on how to handle the country’s epidemic of gun violence is like turning to Hannibal Lechter for advice on hunting down a cannibalistic serial killer (and though Silence of the Lambs suggests that strategy actually worked, we must remember that it was fiction…and Hannibal Lechter, unlike Wayne LaPierre, is a creature of some refinement).
As soon as I got to the fair grounds, I was asked to sign a petition for loosening California’s gun restrictions. I pointedly passed on the opportunity…and then I promptly passed a booth trying to enlist me in fighting jihadists and socialists, featuring three large posters of Barack Obama sporting a Hitler mustache. All bases covered there.
After I paid my admission and headed for the entrance to the ba-ba-ba-doo Bing Crosby Building, I was immediately struck by the signage in the picture above. Yes, "check and clear your guns here"…and "NO loaded guns beyond this point." Let a college, a shopping mall, or a church try to put up signs like those and they’ll have NRA goons marching on them like Brownshirts on a meth bender. Good and sane Americans must find something terribly, fundamentally, morally perverse about those who will torture logic by preventing gun violence from breaking out in their world, but promote it in ours. Good and sane Americans must find something terribly, fundamentally, morally perverse about those who recklessly fight for the right to arm their children against our children. Good and sane Americans must find something terribly, fundamentally, morally perverse about living in a society where kids must be of age to drive a car, buy liquor and lottery tickets, or watch pornography but can buy guns on frickin' Facebook. 
Please tell me we, not the lunatic guns fringe, are still in charge. Tell me that sooner rather than later we are going to arrest this gun virus that has our entire nation in its murderous grip. This scourge of guns has become the AIDS of political diseases…dark, depressing, and deadly.
As I say, I’m off to begin my big project to combat this national sickness…my latest Don Quixote adventure. This was my first gun show, but it will not be my last. In the meantime I will put my trust (and some of my money) in these good people and these and these to get the country moving in the right direction before the N.R. A. brings on our next regularly scheduled woe-is-us-they're-gunning-down-our-children-and-we're-helpless-to-do-ANYTHING-about-it tear fest. You should help. 

This Damn Thing

Same as it ever was...I was driving through my new town of Vista, California, last week after having just posted about my old town of Canaan, New Hampshire, when I came upon an accident. A Honda SUV had broadsided a Toyota pick-up with such force that it knocked it over on its side. Just a few feet up to my left I could see that the participants in the accident and those who had stopped to help were a mix of black folks and brown folks. Ahead in the lane to my right was a white Mustang with Wisconsin plates and a Confederate flag decal prominently displayed on the left bumper. The driver had his window rolled down and his white hand out holding a cigarette. Hard to tell if the flag decal would've pushed my hot button had I not just an hour before finished writing about an ugly racial incident that happened in Canaan at a delicate time in US history...but there I was on a Saturday morning blithely heading for the farmers' market when suddenly I found myself in a fit of rage.
I should clarify here…the red the Confederate flag makes me see has less to do with race or slavery than it has to do with treason. If I see that flag filtered through the prism of racism, I must borrow outrage from those most directly affected by slavery. That places a degree of separation between me and that flag. But when I see it through purely American eyes, I see it as a symbol of treason against my country and an attack upon the US Constitution, and my contempt is my own…unfiltered through someone else's experience. The Confederate flag is to my eyes, I guess, what the crescent moon flag is to certain others who conveniently forget that the Confederacy caused approximately 375 times as many American deaths as al-qaeda ever did. Yet, in the most perverse act of patriotism imaginable, the yahoos stick this damn thing on their cars and trucks and drive around flaunting its blatant betrayal of our country.
That was my mindset as I was sitting there stuck in traffic looking at the rear end of that white Mustang. I started to contemplate taking advantage of that open window if I got up alongside him to roll down my own window and yell, "Traitor!"
The traffic finally loosened up herky-jerky as is often the case at these scenes and about a mile later I found myself at a light in the right lane, and I could see the white Mustang approaching on my left. The Good Lord was about to grant me another opportunity to vent my righteousness. The car pulled up alongside me. I put on my best Old Testament God face and turned to my left. Seated there in the passenger seat was a laughing young black woman. She did not look at all oppressed. They looked, in fact, like one of the typical military couples from the nearby Marine base. I quickly calculated that his poor ass was most likely on its way to some foreign hellhole...maybe both their asses...so yelling traitor out the window was probably not in order...and I sure couldn't be calling him racist.
So I drove off to the farmers' market, my rage somewhat mollified, and I began to ruminate on the lessons of this experience. In doing so, my mind harkened back to a similar incident two years earlier involving a big black Mercedes. It had missed the two left turn lanes designated for Costco shoppers and had decided to carve out an exclusive left turn lane of its own from one of the middle lanes. This, I should note, was on the busiest, most dangerous thoroughfare in the area. Cars not planning on making that left turn at Costco are traveling down the three right lanes at high speeds. At the moment of this incident, which I was watching in jaw-dropping amazement from the light at the cross street, cars were furiously braking and jumping lanes to avoid crashing into the back of the Mercedes. It looked for all the world like an accident was about to happen, though I was able to cross the intersection unharmed and take my place in the gas line at Costco
Lo and behold, what did I see as I got out to pump my gas? The Mercedes with heavily tinted windows pulled up in the adjoining gas line. I was still angry enough about the dangers I had just watched this person create for so many others that I determined to give the driver a very good piece of my mind. When the driver stepped out of the car, I saw it was not a he as I had imagined, but a she...and not an ordinary she, but a she in a burka. Suddenly I was in conflict with myself: if this was some rich old fart or some rich young punk, I would have been all over him with my wrath. But, now, did her sex and religion mitigate against that? Not if I had any integrity, I concluded. And I had a full tank of integrity, so I yelled at her, "Do you know how many lives you just put at risk?

She hardly acknowledged me. "I don't know what you're talking about," she said.

"All you had to do was go up a quarter of a mile to the next light and make a u-turn instead of stopping in the middle of the road like you own it," I countered.

She stared back at me like she did own the road...and me, and the gas, and the whole damn world.

Before I knew it, another customer jumped in (probably a goddamn liberal like me), and he shouts at me, "Hey, leave that woman alone."

Me. Now a bigot.

So, the first lesson: Road rage is for suckers.
The second lesson? Kids do the damnedest things. Driving away from the encounter with the white Mustang brought back another, much older recollection. In college I actually had a large Confederate flag beach towel of my own hanging in my room...a souvenir from my first trip to the American South. I believe I thought of it in the same way World War II vets thought about the Nazi paraphernalia they brought back and would proudly display in their homes after the war...proof that they had ventured into enemy territory. It's a primitive behavior...by possessing a piece of the enemy we believe we possess the enemy. The Nob's patron saint, Norman O. Brown, writes about it thusly:

Head hunting. An enemy must be killed for a boy to grow up; a head must fall. The boy kills his father in the person of the enemy. And then the slain enemy becomes his guardian spirit…The pile of skulls that represents the chiefs mana [power] are those of enemies...

Irony, ubiquitous as ever, also applies. I hang the Confederate flag in my room to show my disdain for it. After all, look at the purity in my heart. So, too, perhaps the young fellow driving the white Mustang put the flag decal on his car to declare himself a rebel. After all, look at the smiling black girl by his side. 

History Just Bit Me in the Ass

“Destruction of Noyes Academy,” a 1999 painting by Mikel Wells


Stephen Colbert announced on last night’s show that he would be dedicating the rest of the month to black history…it was a joke of course since it was his last show of the month. This is my last post of the month, and I, too, will be dedicating it to black history, but this is no joke. It’s not that I set out to squeeze mention of black history into the closing hours of the month. I did have some compelling non black issues to post about this month--the Super Bowl, the 50th anniversary of the Beatles arrival in the US…my own glorious birthday. So giving short shrift to black history was not at all racially motivated.
Nonetheless, in the closing hours of this month designated to celebrate the long-buried contributions of black men and women to America, black history roared up and took a quite sizable bite of my delicate white ass. Yesterday Daughter Meagan sent me this link, and asked me if I knew about the destruction of Noyes Academy that’s pictured in the painting above and if the building portrayed on the right in the painting is the hotel that once stood on the land where our old house in Canaan, New Hampshire, now stands. The answer to her first question is a very shameful no; I did not know the story of Noyes Academy. The answer to the second question is yes; that is the Grand Hotel, which burned down about a hundred years ago and was replaced by the house we lived in on Canaan Street for a decade.
Noyes Academy was a school established in Canaan by abolitionists for the expressed purpose of racially integrating American schooling. It would be only the second school in the entire country where white and black students would be taught together. But on August 10, 1835, a crowd of 500 angry residents gathered at the schoolhouse and... 

Protected from the law by a vote passed at an official town meeting a few days before, the men hooked 95 yokes of cattle to the building, slid skids underneath and ripped the school from the ground, dragging it about a mile down Canaan Street and leaving a shattered shell on the lawn of the town meeting house.

The town meeting house adjoins our old house, which means if our house had been standing there rather than the Grand Hotel in 1835, the collateral damage of Noyes Academy would virtually have been sitting on our front lawn. I cannot convey how embarrassing it is to me that I had no previous knowledge of this incident. I like to pride myself on being historically literate. But it’s not just the hole this exposes in my knowledge that bothers me; it’s also the disorienting impact it has on my perception of a place I once lovingly called home. Canaan Street is certifiably historic, populated with homes dating back to the Revolutionary War era. It sits on a pristine lake, and on crisp fall days a stroll down the street can seem like a walk back in time to a period when a lot of good men (and women) were diligently doing good. One of the stations in the Underground Railroad that helped runaway slaves escape was located on Canaan Street (and still stands as a private residence today). 
So to have this truly ugly incident brought home to me now is eye opening, though not in the good way. Not only do I have to re-process my memories of Canaan Street to now account for this brutish display of civic intolerance, but I also have to re-examine one of my own current prejudices. As happened, Noyes Academy was a project of what would’ve been at the time Canaan’s 1%, with considerable support from Dartmouth College (which has had its own bouts with institutional racism since). Those folks uprooting that school and carting it off to history’s dustbin were what we would today call the 99%.
What we learn (again, it seems) is that history is not black and white (no pun intended). And what I’ve learned personally is that there’s a very good reason to have a black history month because even for a smarty-pants like me, there’s always something you didn't know.
Finally, there’s this. There’s an ongoing debate as to which mountain of history mankind is climbing.  Is it Martin Luther King’s mountain where we all reach the top together and enlightened one day? Or is it Sisyphus’s where the rock we’ve pushed up it rolls down the other side every time we get near the top? The story of Noyes Academy, as depressing as I find it, also gives me hope.  Today’s bigots, given the fallout over Arizona’s recent attempt to codify discrimination, seem more inclined to exercise their intolerance through legislation. We seem mercifully beyond the time when trashing schoolhouses and holding public lynchings are acceptable behavior. So how about a hearty hooray for us?

The Birthday Paradox

Don Quixote bears down on a windmill in the distance. (Gift by Lorna, art by Ricardo Breceda, photo by Andy McRory)Wife Lorna outdid herself this year for my birthday. She gave me a life-sized metalwork of Don Quixote sitting high astride his faithful steed Rocinante. And that’s saying something, because Lorna's pretty much been outdoing herself for the 45 years of our marriage. But this one…this gift… could not have been better timed.  Miquel Cervantes, Don Quixote's creator, is most famous--even among the casually literate--for introducing the expression tilting at windmills into the lexicon. It’s a derogatory expression usually aimed at someone who is engaged in a futile task or someone who imagines dangers where there are none.

Just then they came in sight of thirty or forty windmills that rise from that plain. And no sooner did Don Quixote see them that he said to his squire, "Fortune is guiding our affairs better than we ourselves could have wished. Do you see over yonder, friend Sancho, thirty or forty hulking giants? I intend to do battle with them and slay them. With their spoils we shall begin to be rich for this is a righteous war and the removal of so foul a brood from off the face of the earth is a service God will bless."
"What giants?" asked Sancho Panza.
"Those you see over there," replied his master, "with their long arms. Some of them have arms well nigh two leagues in length."

I’ve occasionally been accused of tilting at windmills myself…as recently as this past year in fact. I rode into my retirement jousting over the removal of so foul a brood from off the face of the earth. This gift of mine is not only a marvel of time, but of space. As it happens, our Quixote stands on a slope overlooking our neighbor’s windmill.Nonetheless, it could be that like Don Quixote himself my adventures are now in my rearview mirror, and like Quixote in his retirement I must reassess my life mission. Will I, like Quixote, end up renouncing the main influencers on my life? On his death bed Quixote forswears  the tales of chivalry that inspired him to venture off imagining himself a knight-errant committed to saving the world. He so completely denies his prior existence--dismissing it as the product of an insane mind--that he tells his beloved niece and heir that if she even reads one book of chivalry, she will forfeit her inheritance.

The instant Don Quixote saw them he exclaimed, “Good news for you, good sirs, that I am no longer Don Quixote of LaMancha…odious to me now are all the profane stories of knight-errantry; now I perceive my folly, and the peril into which reading them brought me; now, by God’s mercy schooled into my right senses, I loathe them.”

Might it come to that for me? Might I rewrite my last will and testament with a warning to my heirs that if they ever want what’s coming to them they’re never to read Norman O. Brown? The irony is that in the last chapter of his masterpiece, Cervantes has Don Quixote doing exactly what Norman O. Brown says must ultimately be done…he drops the persona…the mask that he wore through life. In Love’s Body, Nobby writes:

In the Last Judgment the apocalyptic fire will burn up all the masks, and the theater, leaving not a rack behind. Freud came to give the show away; the outcome of psychoanalysis is not “ego-psychology” but the doctrine of “anatta” or no-self: the ego is a “me-fabrication”…a piece of illusion (Maya), which disintegrates at the moment of illumination: “the self has been completely understood, and so ceases to be.” And with the doctrine of no-self goes the doctrine of non-action: action is proper only to an ignorant person, and doing nothing is, if rightly understood, the supreme action.

Here's where the birthday paradox comes in (and boy do I ever love paradoxes). I'm quite prepared...intellectually at least...to reach the point Don Quixote reaches at the end where I see nothing but madness in those things that inspired and shaped my past actions...my books, my music, my movies, my politics, my science, my religion, all my me-fabrications. I can already sense inklings of a strange new distancing from these things rising up inside of me. But I see this possibility only because of Love's Body...because all along...through my 40 years of study and advocacy of Norman O. Brown...I've been constantly re-educated and reminded of what an illusion life is...most particularly my view of it. It may one day become apparent to me that every fierce giant I ever laid eyes on and did battle against was nothing more than a windmill. I'm braced and ready for that truth to be revealed to me. That's my acquired wisdom...my birthday gift to myself. 

Of Beatles and Mania

Capitol Records, acting as a corporate Catcher in the Rye, wouldn't distribute this cover in the US. Worn and tattered, it remains one of my most prized pieces of memorabilia…with great music to boot.

All right, folks, I can tell you right off this is going to be a mystery tour of the black magical kind.
It all started last Sunday when I received an email from my intrepid friend Judy Clay reminding me that it was the 50th anniversary of the Beatles appearance on the Sullivan show and wanting to know my recollection of the night. As it happened, I had a most indelible memory of it. It was winter break of my senior year and my social studies teacher was taking me on a tour of colleges south of the Mason-Dixon Line. He was a proud graduate of the University of Alabama and was forever warning me against falling under the spell of Northeastern liberal educators. And because I was so liberal, I went along for the ride.
The Sunday before the road trip, I read about the imminent arrival of the Beatles in Parade Magazine. A few days later I heard them for the first time over the car radio as we drove through Maryland. Yeah, yeah, yeah all right. If I'd heard the song more than once, maybe that's what I would've been whistling when we walked into our first restaurant in Alabama. Instead, I whistled We Shall Overcome. Like I said, I was liberal...and a bit if a provocateur, I guess. I surely provoked Mr. Blair into marching us right out of the restaurant. I laughed at what a scaredy cat he was, but probably wouldn't have been so bold...or reckless...had we made the trip six months later after they pulled the murdered bodies of three young Civil Rights workers out of the Mississippi delta.
The day of the Beatles' Sullivan appearance, we arrived in Bradenton, Florida, at the RV park where my teacher's 70-year old parents lived. They invited some of their 70-year old neighbors over to join us for dinner. Not realizing I would be writing this a week before my 68th birthday (!), I squeezed my alienated self in among the oldies at the dining room table, stared down at my spinach and Jell-O, and pondered how I would ask if we could turn on the Sullivan Show. I may as well have been taking my SATs for all the tension I was feeling. Finally, summoning some of the boldness that led me to try and get up a Pete Seeger sing-a-long in Alabama, I asked, “Does anyone want to watch Ed Sullivan?” The question cut through the talk of oranges groves and golf like a cold north wind, but Mr. Blair, who had been listening to me chatter on about the coming of the Beatles since She Loves You three days earlier and watched in mounting impatience as I tried to recapture the magic on radio stations down through the heart of Dixie, kindly jumped in and explained that I had been looking forward to the show…and would they mind. His kindness was matched by their kindness, and soon I was transfixed to their little black and white Philco, watching the Mop Tops for the first time with their trademark head bobs into the mike…ooooh,  All My Loving.  At the end of the performance, one of my hosts turned to me and said, “You like these boys?” It was asked in much the same tone, I imagine, they would've used had I been there the day they recovered the bodies of those slain Civil Rights workers. 
Anyway, that was then. Before I could write it all down in an email response to my friend, I received a call from someone from my softball crew informing me of the death of another one of our players. I knew him as Joe, as a Yankees fan, and as a hitter with a tendency for flaring the ball foul to right. I also knew that he was involved in a protracted child molestation trial. He was wrongly accused, he repeatedly told us, his fellow players. Did we believe him? Well, we let him continue to play, so I guess we believed he was innocent until proven guilty. And so he was, for which he was facing a prison sentence of 75 to 150 years. So he chose to shoot himself instead.
All the ramifications of that were much on my mind throughout most of the rest of the day, so I was oblivious to the Beatles anniversary special that was featured on TV that night. Instead I settled in with a documentary on J.D. Salinger, one of my literary heroes. As I’ve often said, I learned what a writer’s voice is by reading Salinger. That’s probably one of the hardest lessons for any writer to learn, but for me Catcher in the Rye made it easy.
Suspicions about Salinger and very young girls followed him throughout most of his life. Ironically, it all started innocently enough when he fell hopelessly in love with Oona O’Neill when she was 16 and he was 21. That was only a mildly eyebrow-raising age gap at the time. And when, at 18, Oona dropped Salinger while he was away fighting World War II to marry Charlie Chaplin, 36 years her senior, it seemed the one with aberrant affections was her not J.D. (This may be an occasion for quoting Fitzgerald about how the rich “are different from you and me,” but on this subject certain precincts in the Appalachians must be heard from first.) Nonetheless, Salinger’s serial infatuations with girls far younger than himself have been well documented, and of course his writing is filled with young girls that he dotes over …most notably Holden Caulfield’s little sister Phoebe from Cather in the Rye.  
I don’t mean to defame my hero Salinger by comparing him to my former softball mate, Joe. I really don’t know the critical details of Joe’s crime. But I am always fascinated by the way similar compulsions can lead to dramatically different ends…creative ends and destructive ends. J.D. and Joe sexually obsessed by youngsters…one chooses to write about it, the other chooses to act criminally on it. Or consider The Man on the Wire, the French aerialist Phillipe Petit, and Osama bin Laden…both obsessed with The Twin Towers. One chooses to act on his compulsion creatively by walking on a high wire strung between the two buildings; the other chooses to bring them down.
Coincidentally the end of the Salinger documentary brought me back to the Beatles.   It was the segment on how Mark David Chapman was inspired by Catcher in the Rye to kill John Lennon. Chapman thought he was doing Holden Caulfield’s bidding by ridding the world of another phony. There are a few ironies buried in this. The first is that Lennon, of all celebrities, may have been most self-consciously at war with his own phoniness; he was not phony to a fault, I’d say. Second, Lennon wrote Strawberry Fields Forever, which is practically a pop musical version of Catcher in the Rye:

Living is easy with eyes closed/ Misunderstanding all you see/ It’s getting hard to be someone but it all works out/ It doesn’t matter much to me/ Let me take you down,/ ‘Cause I’m going to Strawberry Fields

And finally there’s this: while Catcher in the Rye helped me find my creative voice, it led Mark David Chapman to silence one of the most creative voices of a generation.   

Not Ready for Some Football

Rob Gronkowski goes down for the year with torn ACL & MCL
Call me genius, if you insist, for choosing this year to be the first in the last 30 where I chose to skip the Super Bowl. It was by all accounts one of the worst Super Bowls ever, but prescience had nothing to do with my decision to honor Super Sunday in other ways. Though I should note that my decision wasn’t an easy one—surely not as easy as it is for those folks who yearly make a big ado out of proclaiming their indifference to the game even though they were never fans in the first place (a bit like atheists giving the old “Bah humbug” to Christmas…no one really expects you to care, folks). The match-up looked like a beauty on paper, “one for the ages” according to  Huffington Post headline writers...and who should know better than those canny connoisseurs of celebrity nipples. In addition to a nice competitive balance between Seahawks and Broncos, it also had that essential ingredient of any game that didn’t feature my team--it had a team for me to root against.
As I’ve previously demonstrated in this space, I really care about football. I think it’s a great game. It’s where the primitive meets the ultra-modern, the physical meets the cerebral, the brutish meets the elegant. It’s where strategy, teamwork, and physical skill converge and must be maximized to the fullest for ultimate success. In that way, it’s like the military…and like the military, too, in that it’s as much a meritocracy as any ego-driven human enterprise can be. I also like its socialistic element, though that’s little appreciated by the mass of NFL fans. Each team in the league has a set dollar amount it can spend on talent…a cap. So success is not due to which team has the most money to spend, but which spends its money the wisest.
But NFL culture has some pretty odious aspects, and throughout 2013 the rising stench of it all really started to get to me.
To begin with, of course, there’s the physical mayhem. It’s not just the accumulating evidence of brain damage from concussions…though I don’t deny for a moment the seriousness of that particular issue. But concussions, like black lung disease, are not enough to kill a powerful industry. Young men who see few opportunities for themselves outside of coal mines or off football fields are going to make choices in favor of those jobs regardless of threats to their personal safety…always have, always will. (Oh, who am I kidding? It's not always an economic imperative with these kids…some of them really like the risk. What I don't get is how folks who are risk averse themselves don't understand that there are others in the species who aren't wired like them at all…how else would they have bridges to cross. By the same token, there are those in the species who are just selfish and don't get that there are others who really care for the well being of others. Alas, a topic for another post…)

We can pass worker protection laws; they can join unions. What we shouldn’t do is turn this into one of those hypocritical moral imperatives Americans are prone to, where parents, coaches, team owners and players themselves are alternately damned and shamed for taking part in football. Coal miners are generally spared such self-righteous attacks, as are folks who go into other high-risk occupations…the military, oil rigs, Cirque du Soleil. On this particular Super Bowl Sunday, the great actor Phillip Seymour Hoffman died of a drug overdose, joining a legion of entertainers who’ve died early and gruesomely (or managed to screw their lives up in other ways). Yet the preaching that arose from the purveyors of public opinion was all about a new heroin epidemic. Not a discouraging word was heard sternly warning parents about the dangers of letting their kids to go into theater, music, or film.
Nonetheless, injury is a real plague on the NFL, affecting all body parts at all times, not just the brain. And it really just gets plain depressing to watch talented young men in the prime of their lives going down with hideous breaks, tears and bruises week after week. You would think that after watching football for as long as I have, I would’ve become accustomed to the brutality by now, but not so. As the 2013 season progressed, I found myself more often than not sitting and watching in dread rather than enjoyment, knowing that literally any minute some physically imposing specimen could go down with a crippling injury. It’s possible that I had this change in perspective because I watched almost the entire season in a cast from a torn Achilles tendon (a typically damaging NFL injury).
If so, I’d like to wish an Achilles tear on all NFL fans…or at least a hamstring pull. They are without doubt the most ignorant and cold-blooded fans in all sports…and I don’t even want to hear about soccer hooligans, who at least have the excuse of alcohol to explain their loutishness. I probably spend more time reading fan comments on sports blogs than I should, surely more than I will in the future. Sitting in front of their computers in the comfort of their homes, they are uninhibited in calling out players for being soft or calling them--in that misnomer supreme--injury prone.Imagine, players putting themselves at risk for your televised entertainment having the temerity…and dare I say…delicacy to be injury prone! What’s more, there’s the fans collective brazenness in calling for the player’s head after an injury. One day the fan base is lusting for their team to draft or sign a stud player, and a broken bone later they can’t wait to cut him and save on the cap space (demanding it, as if the guy’s salary is coming out of their bank account).
The fan base is served by a media that is equally deplorable. I don’t know what’s worse about football coverage—the willingness to cover up important stories over a long period of time (like the danger of concussions) or their saturation of totally inane stories in any week between games. Football writers have way too much time on their hands, which is the only way to explain their obsession over recent years with the career of a bona fide third-string quarterback, the wisdom of time-outs to freeze the kicker, the appropriateness of touchdown celebrations, or any one call in any week of games decided by hundreds if not thousands of calls with possible ramifications weeks down the line.
As if the paid football media aren’t bad enough, there are always the dilettantes who wander in from outside media--usually at playoff time--to stick their noses in a sport they know little about. For instance, leading up to the match-ups that would determine the Super Bowl contender, a regular MSNBC political (ho-ho) contributor by the lone name Touré, positively observed that at least one of the Super Bowl quarterbacks would be black. Of course, the Super Bowl has featured more black quarterbacks than it has black punters or black field goal kickers, but not only would such a fact sink below the Touré football IQ, it fails to rise to his outrage threshold. If some blonde bimbo on Fox had observed that at least there would be one white quarterback in the Super Bowl, the moral indignation would scorch The Meadowlands in dead winter.
And there's another thing--the manufactured racism that seems to adhere to the NFL like loose turf on cleats on a semi-regular basis. It’s an unfortunate reality that the recruiting and drafting of NFL players bears an unseemly similarity to a slave auction. I dare you to watch the underwear parade in this documentary, and not have uncomfortable thoughts of 12 Years a Slave. Yet, the NFL is arguably one of the most color-blind institutions in America. The racial stuff is usually introduced by outsiders like Rush Limbaugh. Even the most recent racial explosion over Seattle player Richard Sherman’s post-game rant was all ginned up by outsiders with political axes to grind. If Sherman had screamed that Michael Crabtree was a faggot, no one on the political right would’ve been accusing him of being a thug, and surely no one on the political left would’ve been defending him by waving around his college transcripts from Stanford. In fact, it’s safe to say that if Richard Sherman had slurred Michael Crabtree in just that way, the entire national dialog would’ve been completely flipped.
It’s fairer to say that the NFL is far more prone to these faux racial scandals than its players are prone to injury. Whereas players cannot avoid getting injured by doing their jobs, the NFL can do a much better job avoiding accusations of racism by advancing racial equality as fervently as it advances militarism during half-time shows.
Anyway, that’s the lowdown on why I chose to tune out the big game and watch Gone with the Wind instead ( D’oh! ) Whether I can maintain the boycott through next season remains to be seen. Probably depends on Gronk coming back.

What was God Thinking?

You probably know this story…or rather, you probably should know this story. It's the story of Marlise Muñoz who in November of 2013 collapsed in the middle of the night from an apparent blood clot in her lungs while getting milk for her infant. When her husband Erick came home from work and found her, she was barely alive. She was rushed to the hospital where she was soon declared brain dead. Her family, including her husband and her mother, wanted her taken off life support per her stated wishes (influenced by the experience she shared with her husband as a paramedic). But because she was pregnant, Texas law against pulling the plug on a pregnant woman to protect the unborn forced the hospital to keep her alive. That invited a lawsuit from the family and an even worse nightmare for the family. Said Erick:

“When I bend down to kiss her forehead, her usual scent is gone, replaced instead with what I can only describe as the smell of death. As a paramedic, I am very familiar with this smell, and I now recognize it when I kiss my wife. In addition, Marlise’s hands no longer naturally grip mine for an embrace. Her limbs have become so stiff and rigid due to her deteriorating condition that now, when I move her hands, her bones crack, and her legs are nothing more than dead weight.”

Because The Nobby Works is ostensibly a religious blog, I can't help but ponder God's role in all this. Cursed with a God-given intelligence, I cannot help but ask, what the hell in all His omniscience was He thinking in letting this grim tale unfold as it did. (And before I go any further--at the risk of being called sexist--He is definitely a He and not a She because if He were a She this whole bloody business never would have happened. Period. End of that particular bit of feminist nonsense…unless the ladies insist on arguing otherwise.) To divine what The Most Divine Mr. G had in mind, of course, is not a walk in the garden. Smarter folks…biblical scholars in fact…have shied away from the entire discussion by telling us that God works in mysterious ways…and the Existence for Dummies book tells us that should be enough. We shouldn't be worrying our silly little heads any further on such business. It's just the way God planned it. But I have a graduate degree from a legitimate theological school, and by God I think therefore I'm going to use it to try and figure this one out.

To begin, it's important to remember that God, like the humans He created, is a complex figure. Sometimes up; sometimes down. Sometimes cruel; sometimes a clown. If humanity is capable of generating a Sybil with multiple personalities, it stands to reason that God Himself must be capable of multiple personalities. And if we're to believe even half of what's been written about Him, those personalities number in the thousands. But for the purposes of this discussion, let's limit ourselves to a human handful and try to understand what each of them might have had in mind on the night He decided to strike Mrs. Muñoz.

First, we have God as Nietzchean Super Man, major spokesperson…or spokesGod…for free will. This is one of God's primo personalities…in fact we are often told that His entire rationale for creating our species was to allow us to exert our free will. So what could a beneficent God possibly have had in mind by putting Mrs. Muñoz  down on her kitchen floor like that? Here's a thought: maybe we humans have free will to lift ourselves up from something that horrific, and we don't even know it yet. Maybe every time God afflicts a pregnant woman with a blood clot or a child with a brain tumor, He's trying to lead us to a place deep inside ourselves where we really have the power to will ourselves up and at 'em. Perhaps the meaning of our lives is to become such Norman Vincent Peale positive thinkers that nothing can ever keep us down.    

Second, we have God the Partisan. And let's not be fooled by those Negro spirituals proclaiming us all to be God's children. Maybe we are, but like all parents, God has favorites and has clearly demonstrated that. For example:

14 Thou shalt be blessed above all people: there shall not be male or female barren among you, or among your cattle.15 And the Lord will take away from thee all sickness, and will put none of the evil diseases of Egypt, which thou knowest, upon thee; but will lay them upon all them that hate thee.16 And thou shalt consume all the people which the Lord thy God shall deliver thee; thine eye shall have no pity upon them: neither shalt thou serve their gods; for that will be a snare unto thee.17 If thou shalt say in thine heart, These nations are more than I; how can I dispossess them?18 Thou shalt not be afraid of them: but shalt well remember what the Lord thy God did unto Pharaoh, and unto all Egypt;19 The great temptations which thine eyes saw, and the signs, and the wonders, and the mighty hand, and the stretched out arm, whereby the Lord thy God brought thee out: so shall the Lord thy God do unto all the people of whom thou art afraid.20 Moreover the Lord thy God will send the hornet among them, until they that are left, and hide themselves from thee, be destroyed.21 Thou shalt not be affrighted at them: for the Lord thy God is among you, a mighty God and terrible.22 And the Lord thy God will put out those nations before thee by little and little: thou mayest not consume them at once, lest the beasts of the field increase upon thee.23 But the Lord thy God shall deliver them unto thee, and shall destroy them with a mighty destruction, until they be destroyed.24 And he shall deliver their kings into thine hand, and thou shalt destroy their name from under heaven: there shall no man be able to stand before thee, until thou have destroyed them.25 The graven images of their gods shall ye burn with fire: thou shalt not desire the silver or gold that is on them, nor take it unto thee, lest thou be snared therin: for it is an abomination to the Lord thy God.26 Neither shalt thou bring an abomination into thine house, lest thou be a cursed thing like it: but thou shalt utterly detest it, and thou shalt utterly abhor it; for it is a cursed thing. 

Perhaps pulling the carpet out from under Mrs. Muñoz like that was God's wink and nod to the Texas State Legislature, signaling his approval of what they were doing to protect the life of His weakest little links. Perhaps He's thinking, "If I can set them up to look good going all out to save a fetus, maybe that will encourage them to enact legislation to protect the beasts of the forests, the fish of the seas, and their own school children from guns. Maybe all's they need is a little positive reinforcement."

Okay, then we have my favorite side of God...God the Creator. The Marlise Muñoz story has all the elements of a David Lynch movie…ghoulishness lurking below banality; perverted men wielding power in sick and mysterious fashion; sex leading to punishment; the tyranny of a baby. In the end, bafflement…roll the closing credits on humanity and cue the Roy Orbison. 

Speaking of bafflement, let's not forget God as Black Slab, the sic-fi God. Maybe the meaning of the Marlise Muñoz story, like the monolith in 2001, always lies just beyond our grasp, but it keeps drawing us on in hopes that one day we get it…we finally get God. Maybe that's all He wants…needs…to play the vamp…to tease and seduce us. Maybe the fate of being the supremest but loneliest being in the universe is to use the likes of Mrs. Muñoz for amusement...to break up the boredom and lift the cosmic ennui off His poor shoulders.

A week ago, a humble human judge ordered the hospital to declare Marlise Muñoz dead and pull the plug. I guess if we're going to follow the logic of all this we can thank God for finally getting His head together. 

White Lies, Black Lies, and 50 Shades of Gray Lies, Part III

Hank and Marie watch Walter's confession (Thanks to Walter White's Lies) 
Ahh, now for those juicy black lies…
Well not immediately now…first, a word about Immanuel Kant. If Manny were somehow to come back from the dead, his head would explode at reading this blog’s multi-part series, White Lies, Black Lies, and 50 Shades of Gray Lies. That’s because Manny did not cotton to all this relativizing subcategorizing on the subject of lying. Kant was the secular philosopher most famous for taking the absolutist position that all lies were equally bad. For Kant, a lie, no matter how small or warranted, must be resisted because even if it doesn’t harm a particular person, it harms mankind as “it vitiates the source of law itself.” To Kant, the source of the law is the truth. (When ruminating philosophically, there’s always the urge to run down rabbit holes, as I am sorely tempted to do here in pursuit of this notion that truth is the source of law…but I’ll resist and leave that particular discussion to a writer more experienced in rabbit holes than I:

At this moment the King, who had been for some time busily writing in his notebook, cackled out, `Silence!' and read out from his book, `Rule Forty-two. All persons more than a mile high to leave the court. 'Everybody looked at Alice. `I'm not a mile high,' said Alice.`You are,' said the King.`Nearly two miles high,' added the Queen. `Well, I shan't go, at any rate,' said Alice: `besides, that's not a regular rule: you invented it just now.' `It's the oldest rule in the book,' said the King.`Then it ought to be Number One,'  said Alice. The King turned pale, and shut his notebook hastily. `Consider your verdict,' he said to the jury, in a low, trembling voice.)

Kant was so adamant on this subject that he even took the extremist position on that favorite Philosophy 110 debate: Can you lie to a murderer who asks where his intended victim is hiding? Like Pastor Trocme´ who believed you shouldn’t even lie to Nazis to protect your own son from them, Kant maintained that the best-intentioned lie held potential for unintended bad consequences. He wrote:

“…if by telling a lie you have prevented a murder, you have made yourself legally responsible for all the consequences…if you had lied and said [the intended victim] was not home when he had really gone out without your knowing it, and if the murderer had then met him…and murdered him, you might justly be accused as the cause of his death. For if you had told the truth as far as you knew it, perhaps the murderer might have been apprehended…while he searched the house and thus the deed might have been prevented. Therefore, whoever tells a lie, however well intentioned he might be, must answer for the consequences, however unforeseeable they were… To be truthful in all declarations…is a sacred and absolutely commanding decree of reason, limited by no expediency.”

I suspect that a sounding of my contemporaries on Kant’s decree would find it quaint. It’s not because us moderns are less upright moral than they were in Kant’s 18thcentury; it’s because we’re savvier about the human condition, thanks to advanced studies of nature, psychology, and neuroscience. I don’t think we’re as idealistic about the human capacity to willcertain behaviors.
Quaint or not, Kant’s logic is behind what lawyers call the slippery slope argument. Sissela Bok, author of one of the definitive books on lying, writes: “Imagine a society no matter how ideal in other respects where word and gesture could never be counted upon. Questions asked, answers given, information exchanged—all would be worthless. Were all statements randomly truthful or deceptive, action and choice would be undermined from the outset.”
In other words, once you announce that the bridge is closed for a traffic study and there really was no traffic study, the next time you warn people about the bridge--whether for a traffic study or because it's collapsing--people are less likely to believe you and more likely to put themselves at real risk. We might call it the governor who cried wolf syndrome.
It’s a fair point, but it really doesn’t account for the fact that human beings are fundamentally incapable of living in a totally pure-truth environment. Deception is as key to our survival as it is to the beasts of the forest, the fish of the sea, and the plant kingdom. We’re better off training our young to deal with dishonesty—to recognize it, understand it, and account for it in their own behavior. Rather than feeding them pablum, like George Washington never told a lie (through his falseteeth), perhaps we’d do better to instruct our children that Washington doesn’t win the war for American independence without deception. Without deception, he doesn’t get to oversee the transition of the federal government to Philadelphia without having his Virginia slaves freed by Pennsylvania state law. 
Students schooled in the variety and nuance of deception would not only be better able to cope with its appearance in their personal, professional and political lives, but they may be better prepared to face a black lie when it hits them…or better prepared to resist telling one when temptation strikes. The black lie is totally in service of aggrandizement for the teller, the harm of the hearer, and is indefensible on its face. We need only turn to our culture’s most recently perfect embodiment of badness, Walter White from Breaking Bad, for the most vivid and frightening example of a black lie. When Walter makes a taped confession in which he accuses his brother-in-law Hank of all the bad behavior committed by Walter himself, he creates a black lie masterpiece. Not only does he accuse upright Hank of all his crimes, but he portrays himself as much a victim of those crimes, and he gets his wife Sky to participate in the making and distribution of this most treacherous case ever of bearing false witness.

Actually the trajectory of Walter White’s life somewhat makes the case for Immanuel Kant’s view. Walter starts out telling little white lies, which we in the audience can easily dismiss. Then he graduates to gray lies that we in the audience can excuse or tolerate because cancer and medical bills and family responsibilities are mitigating circumstances we can all understand. Finally come the black lies, swarms of black lies flying out of his mouth every time he opens it to swirl around everyone he comes near. That renders those of us in the audience too dumb to forgive or even comprehend. We’re standing there with Hank and Marie in front of their big screen watching the taped confession and feeling wholly alien from the creature making it. That’s what makes the black lie different than other lies; makes the black liar different than the rest of us. It separates us because, unlike all the other kinds of lies, the black lie doesn’t bond us through our shared weakness. It divides us into two kinds of people…those with conscience and those without. 

12 Years a Deep Fry Cook

First, apologies to loyal readers: At the end of last week’s White Lies, Black Lies. and Fifty Shades of Gray Lies, I promised to delve into those wicked bad black lies in the illuminating conclusion of The Nob’s three-part series on the lies that define human existence. But alas, I started my day off as I start most days off with a double dose of goodness—a double cappuccino and a viewing of the previous night’s Colbert Report . (Pro tip: If I manage to get through senility with my sanity still in tack, you can put this down as my winning formula.) Among the Colbert Report’s many strengths is that its guest list is so outside the box that the unwary viewer might come away startled to learn that people other than actors with movies to pimp and blabbermouths with political axes to grind are actually allowed on television. Colbert hosts writers (poets, even!), scientists, philosophers…and in this particular case…a fast food worker.
Naquasia LeGrand  is a 22-year old New Yorker who has become one of the most public faces of the new movement Fast Food Forward, which has been instrumental in the recent national strikes by low-wage workers. Listening to her speak eloquently on the plight of the workingpoor, one is reminded of the eloquence of that once-upon-a-time “no red states/no blue states” young fella, except for the “no red states/no blue states” bullshit part. Naquasia speaks to the very real haves and have not’s divide in America. She works at two different KFCs in order to get enough hours to help pay for the food and rent for an extended family that includes an aunt, grandmother and cousin, living in one of the most expensive cities in the country (and here, America’s conservative choir sings: Move to a more affordable place, girl…like Charleston, West Virginia maybe). She can’t get more than 30 hours from either one of her original recipe bosses because they don’t want to have to pay for her medical insurance.
My favorite part of the Naquasia story…aside from the evident empowerment of a young person once relegated to the economic fringe of society…was the pinballing she had to do between her anti-union grandmother and Ben Zucker, the community organizer who tried to recruit her. As reported in an LA Times profile:

Grandmother and granddaughter argued in their two-bedroom apartment in an aging brick housing project in south Brooklyn. LeGrand knew the family needed her salary to help pay the $1,300-a-month rent, so she ignored Zucker's calls and tried to forget the talk about raising the minimum wage. 

She had a lot to lose by attending a union-organizing meeting. In fast-food work, shifts are determined by managers. If she got involved, she could be labeled a troublemaker and given fewer shifts. Besides, who had time to go to weekly meetings to talk about doubling salaries — something that seemed highly unlikely? 

But Zucker was persistent. 

He got on speaker phone with LeGrand and her grandmother, a stern woman with long dreadlocks who has spent decades caring for children and grandchildren. They talked for an hour about what Zucker was trying to accomplish. He assured LeGrand that the union wasn't some scam, and as she thought about it on the buses and trains she rode to work, she found herself trusting him more.

Zucker’s persistence paid off not only in adding another warm body to the cause, but in converting someone who had previously been disengaged from activism to a passionate, articulate recruiter of others. He did it by aiming at the nexus in Nasquasia’s life between where she was and where she knew she needed to be to make her life better.
I am so struck by that because I have friends in liberalism who take to the fainting couch whenever they run into an Uncle Archie Bunker over the holidays and have to listen to another ill-informed rant against the incipient socialism of Obamacare. (Poor dears…having to share their Thanksgiving feast with folks different from them…didn’t we take care of that problem by banishing the Indians to the reservations?) My bright, privileged liberal friends trudge away from these festivities in dismay, muttering, “What’s the matter with Kansas?” That’s liberal code for too many dummies voting against their own self-interest because they don’t read as much or as well as I do. 
This all reminds me of two other incidents when the-sky-is-falling wing on the left got it completely wrong.  The first was when Second Most Toxic Man in America, Rush Limbaugh, entertained non-drug fueled fantasies of owning an NFL team (Go, Pats!). On their comedy show, PTI, Tony Kornheiser, who wears his liberalism on his sleeve, and Michael Wilbon, who wears his blackness on his face, predicted that Limbaugh, who wears his racism deep in his heart, would actually succeed in buying his way into ownership of a neo-plantation full of black linebackers, wide receivers, and DB’s.  Their logic was that the only color the NFL recognizes is green. But black NFL players, whose pulse Wilbon thinks he has, made their dominant disapproving voices heard immediately and Limbaugh’s attempt was nipped in its ugly little bud. The second such incident occurred during the presidential election of 2012 when transparently racist voter suppression efforts were underway to limit minority support for the Democratic candidate. Again, the left’s sky-is-falling wing took flight, caw-caw-cawing its way to the upper reaches of the skies, so better to begin a death spiral for fear that these Republican machinations would prevail. The black vote would be minimized and chances for His White Breadness, Mitt, would be maximized. And, again, people who liberals make a big show of championing showed they don’t need no stinking patronization. They got themselves out to the polls in record numbers, and followed up with an even more remarkable showing in the off elections of 2013 when there was no Barack Obama on any ballot to lure them.
I lump these two stories together with Naquasia’s because they show that people with a cultural instinct for dealing with takers won’t roll over as easily as their enemies…or their friends…think they will. They don’t need a Hollywood movie to remind them of the awful way it was.
On second thought, maybe I should retract the apology. This post seems more about lying than I originally thought. Maybe not all black lies, but lies nonetheless. And Naquasia’s story puts these lies into sharp relief:
There’s the lie of America as the land of opportunity…with a permanent lower class, a vanishing middle class, and an entrenched upper class, opportunity appears to be more of a mirage, and not just for high school dropouts, but college grads as well.There’s the lie of the US being a nation of makers and takers…the so-called job creators make their profits the same way capitalists have made their fortunes forever…by taking advantage of others.There’s the lie of the Second Amendment festishists who will brook not the slightest infringement on the right to bear arms, but would eagerly throw the First Amendment into the nearest harbor if eliminating the right to free assembly will facilitate the lie of "right to work."And then there’s the lie of free choice. Fast food workers peddle sugar and fat to a grossly overweight populace, thus adding to a national health crisis. If we judge their labor through the same moral prism as we judge, say, nuclear power plant workers, or coal miners, or pharmaceutical researchers, or munitions manufacturers, we would find them greatly wanting. But free choice when it comes to jobs is mostly illusory…another word for lie. People take the jobs that are available to them, not because they’re indifferent or hostile to the environment, children, or the moral fabric of society, but because they need work, they need to make money, they need to have food and shelter.
But the biggest lie is that people will put up with absolutely any indignity for money. Sooner or later, people…like Naquasia…say enough.