Dan Riley's Blog, page 7

Hips Don't Lie

Given that I’ve long been under the spell of Norman O. Brown who famously (and rather convincingly) threaded together the teachings of Jesus, Marx and Freud, it shouldn’t be all that surprising that I’m somewhat inclined to making such audacious connections myself. And so here I am about to make a fool of myself connecting the dots between Badass Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, psycho killer Aaron Hernandez, and the woman whose hips don’t lie, Shakira. It all began with the Super Bowl halftime show that Shakira put on last Sunday with sister in arms, legs, and butts, J-Lo. It was a fully entertaining event, but much more than that it was a joyous declaration, not of resistance to the current oppressive state of American affairs, but a declaration of liberation from it. Before the largest national audience our divisiveness will allow, one subversively sensual Latina and her army of carnal insurgents announced that in the face of the lies, the corruption, the bigotry and the repression, the show will go on. It was an epic show of musical, hip-grinding, gloriously sexual humanism…dancing in the streets will result, babies will result, and a new world will be born. It was a celebration ripped out of the pages of Norman O. Brown:

Knowledge is carnal knowledge. A subterranean passage between mind and body underlies all analogy; no word is metaphysical without first being physical; and the body that is the measure of all things is sexual.

After a full Washington week of intellectual gymnastics, constitutional contortions, and legalistic limbo (both meanings of the word: a state of neglect or oblivion; a dance in which the dancer bends backward to pass under a horizontal bar that is progressively lowered), it was answered by a full frontal assault of Shakira’s Miami heat…a triumph of body fucking over mind fucking.As I’ve written before, unserious students of Nobby have tried to pigeonhole him as the father of "anything goes" sexuality. Serious students know better, one of those being Richard A. Koenigsberg:

Brown did not focus upon the genitals and orgasm—rather on the pursuit of pleasure through the activity of “any and all organs of the human body.” Brown’s advocacy of “polymorphous perversity” is an important source of the world in which we live today, where each individual believes he or she is entitled to his or her “sexual preference;” where it is considered offensive to morally judge an individual’s sexual “life style,” however eccentric it may seem. The power of Brown’s advocacy derived from his ability to build upon the idea of Freud and Reich that sexual repression constitutes the source of illness or mental disorder.

Now allow me to make a leap. When Nancy Pelosi literally ripped to pieces Donald Trump’s State of the Union speech after months of politically calculated pronouncements, she was letting her body talk…rips don’t lie. It is significant that when she was asked later if she had any regrets about her action she said she felt very liberated by it. Orgasms notwithstanding, that’s precisely what Norman O. Brown was getting at.A few days later on the floor of the US Senate Mitt Romney made major news by being the first Senator to vote against a president of his own party in an impeachment trial. The most significant moment of a truly powerful speech, given the circumstances, is when he choked up upon referencing his faith in God as guiding him to his bold decision. Through that verklempt episode, Romney’s physicality was asserting itself over his intellectuality. It was in essence what Nobby puts forth in his works, especially Love’s Body—the body is the great truth teller. Coincidentally in this week when Shakira was shaking it up and Nancy Pelosi was ripping it up and Mitt Romney was tearing it up, I was also watching the Netflix documentary on former New England Patriots star tight end Aaron Hernandez who after being convicted of murder hung himself in his prison cell. Hernandez’s life seemed to be a perfect storm of factors that could drive a man (and usually it is a man) to violence—bad parenting, the wrong crowd, a simultaneously indulgent and dangerous profession that extols masculinity while exposing its participants to traumatic brain injury. It’s hard to single out any one of those as the main cause, but the documentary advanced another cause for the killer within which makes Hernandez the poster boy for a book Norman O. Brown did not write, Hate’s Body. The documentary makes a credible case that Hernandez was a deeply closeted homosexual filled with fear and self-loathing…and through violence, both on the field and off, he was striking out against something in himself he hated. As Brown wrote:

Murder is misdirected suicide, to destroy part of oneself; murder is suicide with mistaken identity. And suicide is also a case of mistaken identity, an attack on the (introjected) other.  

During the week I also read a news report on a Trump rally in Iowa that focused on the fun the rally goers were all having. They show up early and tailgate outside the venue like football fans. Then they pile inside high on testosterone and the smell of victory, dressed in colorful Trump gear, eager to laugh at the insults, cheer the lies, boo all the “others” called out by name for their collective contempt. That upbeat spirit may invite comparisons with the joy Shakira and crew created at the Super Bowl, but the contrasts between the two couldn’t be more telling. Brown again:

It is the erotic sense of reality that discovers the inadequacy of fraternity, or brotherhood [read: tribalism]. It is not adequate as a form for the unification of the human race: we must be either far more deeply unified, or not at all. This true form of unification—which can be found either in psychoanalysis or in Christianity, in Freud or Pope John, or Karl Marx—is "we're all members of one body.” 

While Trump rallies are a celebration of walls and cages and us against them, Shakira and J-Lo enlisted their erotic power for liberation. If it’s true (and I believe it is) that rock 'n roll brought down the Soviet Union as much if not more than any nuclear stockpile, it’s probably true too that Shakira’s hips will do more to get us through this sick era than any stockpile of subpoenas.   
Housekeeping Note:I have opened a Nobby Works dedicated page on Facebook in order to resolve ongoing issues with Google's comment function for this blog. Google seems so busy taking over the world that it has no time to address a simple problem that effects all the bloggers who use its platform. I hope that the new Facebook page provides an easy commenting option for those who've been frustrated in the past by an inability to share feedback. It's been frustrating on my end as well. I know this contradicts last week's blog where I announced I was quitting Facebook. I have in fact deleted my personal page and will run this new one strictly as an adjunct to the blog. (Besides, as a humanist, I long ago learned to embrace my contradictions.) So if you have something to say about this or any future posts I reluctantly invite you to follow this link to Facebook and leave your comments there (and "like" the page while you're at it!). Hopefully a dialog will ensue. 

Different Drum

Yes, and I ain't saying [it] ain't prettyAll I'm saying is I'm not readyFor any person, place, or thingTo try and pull the reins in on me
I’ve now been on Facebook longer than any job I’ve ever had…and it’s beginning to feel like a job. Every day it becomes more and more of a struggle to go in. Much of the difficulty comes from Facebook’s recidivist bad behavior of course.  This!
And this!
It beggars belief to hear people say that Facebook is not for politics when we have documented evidence that Facebook played a large and corrosive role in the 2016 election and seems wittingly or unwittingly on course for doing the same in the election of 2020. In addition to the  writ large political rats’ nest Facebook has become, it is also an almost daily source of personal disagreements, disappointments, and disillusionments…which as a humanist I’m generally inclined to embrace and fold into my worldview that existence is a human comedy. But every once in a while the comedy takes a tragic turn and it’s a little difficult to laugh it off. And so it was on December 8, 2019, when I posted the following news item on the Linda Ronstadt Collective, a Facebook page dedicated to Linda. 
I had been more than a passive member for many years, having contributed a few of my Ronstadt themed blog posts to general acclaim. The reactions to my Variety news item posting were also largely positive…at first. Within minutes I had received Facebook alerts that many people were reacting to it with a heady mix of “likes” and “loves”. Sometime after posting I went back to the page to read some of the commentary the post had attracted. By and large, it was of the "You go, girl” variety…the girl of course being Linda Ronstadt. Somewhere down thread, however, there was the inevitable dissenting voice, which echoed the outrage directed at the Dixie Chicks that they shut up and sing. I then left Facebook for most of the rest of the day to live Dan in Real Life. When  I came back at day’s end to check in to see how things were going on Facebook, I found that my original post and all accompanying reactions had been deleted. There was a related post where someone had asked what had happened to my earlier post. Reading through the thread that followed that comment, I learned that in my blissful absence the page had erupted into what used to be called a flame war between those who approved of what Linda Ronstadt had said to Mike Pompeo about Donald Trump and those who either disapproved of what she said or disapproved of having the peace and tranquility of the Linda Ronstadt Collective disrupted by nasty politics. I wanted to add my two cents to that discussion, but found that the administrators had locked comments on the subject. So I turned my two cents into a new post in which I argued reasonably (you’ll have to take my word for this since the post no longer exists) that:Linda Ronstadt was more than a collection of songs and pictures and object of fan adoration…she was a fully evolved human being with multiple aspects to her personhoodGiven her medical condition and the circumstances surrounding her comment, if she chose to use what few words she had left to her in that venue to make that statement, it was obviously important to her and should be valuable news to those who admire herIf anyone disapproved of the politics of her statement that disapproval should be directed at Linda herself and not at those who merely approved of what she said The next morning I awoke to find that I had been thrown out of the Linda Ronstadt Collective. This was not the first time I had been thrown out of a social media site over politics*, but though I was able to laugh off the earlier instance, this one stung. It stung because over the years I had derived great pleasure from a page dedicated to a person I truly adore. It stung because it arose out the same myopic view of politics that spawned the Good Germans I had blogged about passionately. And it stung because the ban came without warning and was, I believe, totally unfair. Fairness is a greatly under-appreciated human value. Upon reflection, I realized that the administrators of the Linda Ronstadt Collective didn’t value fairness as much as they valued power. In this they are much like those who run Facebook…they have the power over the lives of others, but they are powerless to be fair. So with that I am announcing my imminent departure from Facebook. 




* My previous expulsion:

Puzzling

In getting a head start on spring cleaning, I happened upon a closet with a shelf full of jigsaw puzzles from back in a time when we were in the grip of puzzle mania…sometime shortly after Risk mania and well before Netflix mania. One of the puzzles was still wrapped...unopened, indicating it’s probably the last one we bought before the high wire excitement of puzzle making exhausted itself in our lives. For old time’s sake…and, yes, to carve out some escape from the agonizing death watch of democracy on our TV…Lorna and I decided to break open this box of chopped Picasso and fit it together. It was an altogether pleasant experience, but coming back to it like this after so many years made me more aware of some of the more salient features of puzzling, to wit:Organization is vital…starting with the basic of turning over each and every pieceFurther organization, say separating out the colors, would also be helpful, but might delay getting started with the serious business of putting pieces together, thus causing energy and enthusiasm for the project to flagIt’s important to view all elements of each puzzle piece—shape, size, shades of coloring. Too much focus on any one element in searching for a missing piece can cause you to miss it even if it’s right under your nose. Identifying piece types is indispensable. Putting names to recurring shapes...rabbit ears, spades, biracial noses, crucifixes...is as important as red, blue, yellow The impact of bringing fresh eyes to the task is considerable, so it’s important not to dwell too much on one portion of the puzzle. After a dry spell of perhaps 20 minutes, it helps to move on to another area…even to get up and walk away from the puzzle for an hour or two and have a drink There can be no better fresh eyes than someone else’s, so it helps to do the puzzle with someone and trade off areas of focus.Dry spells are unavoidable, however. Even with help, there inevitably comes a point where you become convinced that quality control at the manufacturer failed (or it was done in China!) and the puzzle was boxed with a piece missing or a piece dropped onto the floor and was kicked under a rug and the housecleaner lifted the rug and vacuumed it upConversely there reaches a point in any long puzzle session of an hour or so when pieces seem to quite magically fit together…just about jumping into your hand and leading it to the right place. This doesn’t last for long, but while it does it’s exhilarating and fills you with the hope that you’ll be done with the puzzle in mere minutes. Keep in mind this is a fun but false hope. There’s always a point no-return. You can declare a puzzle too difficult or boring or time consuming in perhaps the first early stage, but beyond that you realize you’ve invested too much in completing it and cannot put it back in the box unit it’s done. Finishing a puzzle is its own reward. Don’t expect it to save democracy.If you take this as metaphor for what’s transpiring on your TV screens this week, you’re welcome. 

Thomas Jefferson & Mary Old

What Thomas Jefferson could've learned from Mary Old 
I’ll admit it. I’ve always had a blind spot for Thomas Jefferson’s moral failing on the issue of slavery. Since boyhood I have been enamored of the man’s status as philosopher of democratic vistas, connoisseur of civilized tastes, intellectual polymath. I place such a high value on all that I find it hard—though evidence to the contrary is abundant—that such men in full can also harbor such baseness as to not only tolerate the sin of slavery, but to practice it. With this bias I’ve been able to accept as defense of Jefferson and his fellow slaveholding founding fathers that they were mere men of their times…and that the good they did in enshrining democracy as replacement for the malignancy of monarchy balanced the scales of their virtues and flaws. 
Jefferson’s long, intimate relationship with Sally Hemings, his slave and mother of six of his children, may mitigate against him being labeled a bigot, but the fact that he could accept blacks as both family and chattel at one and the same time displays either a nuanced intellect in extremis or a moral obtuseness of the highest order. It is difficult to give the man a pass because he was so very concerned with the freedom and equality of all mankind when the enslavement of just a small segment of humanity was going on right under his own roof…and under his direct authority. 
It becomes even more condemnable when one realizes that a woman named Mary Old, a contemporary of Jefferson’s and a “fellow” Virginian, was not so much a prisoner of the times that she could not see the innate immorality of slavery and act accordingly. True, she wasn’t busy writing the Declaration of Independence, but then she wasn’t so busy inventing the dumbwaiter that she ignored the dignity of living, breathing sentient waiters around her. 
Google data feedback informs me that most of the Nob’s readers are in and our of here in about a minute and a half, so I’m going to cut this one short to allow readers to view the 2-minute video below. It’s well worth the time…but bring a hanky.  
In a recent episode of Finding Your RootsHenry Louis Gates and Queen Latifah find an extraordinary act of humanism. 

I, Humanist

Photo by LornaAs I’m most inclined to do, I went looking for a song to hook this blog post to. Even if I don’t use the song directly in the post itself, I always like to have it playing in my head as sort of the soundtrack for my writing. I quite surprised myself when with intent to write about humanism, my mental jukebox fell upon this Sinatra classic:I've been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate
A poet, a pawn and a kingI've been up and down and over and outAnd I know one thingEach time I find myself flat on my faceI pick myself up and get back in the race
That’s kind of nice pop song version of Whitman’s great summation of humanism: I contain multitudes. It got me thinking about my own various identities—Catholic boy, Red Sox fan, provocateur, husband,  father, son, Boomer, Dylan freak, political junkie, amateur theologian, writer, film nut, etc. etc. etc. Humanism is more than a noisy CV of course. True humanism requires an embrace of humanity in all its glory and gore. It is acceptance (not approval) of the reality that human beings are capable of acts of great love and great hate, and as a fellow human I can comprehend the best and worst possibilities in me as reflected in the acts of others. This is a demand for empathetic behavior at least a degree of difficulty greater than the Christian dictum to love thy neighbors and enemies. Since religions proceed from a position of power grounded in belief in the ultimate righteousness of the religion, there is an air of patronization in love thy neighbors and enemies. That air becomes more pungent with righteousness in the post-Biblical reconstruction: Love the sinner; hate the sin, which Bible scholar Adam Hamilton dismisses this way:

I think Jesus knew that if he commanded his disciples to ‘love the sinner,’ they would begin looking at other people more as sinners than neighbors. And that, inevitably, would lead to judgment. If I love you more as a sinner than as my neighbor, then I am bound to focus more on your sin. I will start looking for all the things that are wrong with you. And perhaps, without intending it, I will begin thinking about our relationship like this: “You are a sinner, but I graciously choose to love you anyway.” If that sounds a little puffed up, self-righteous, and even prideful to you, then you have perceived accurately.

The severe challenge of true humanism is that it doesn’t allow judgment and pegging people in categories, such as sinners or neighbors or enemies. With humanism it’s all us…all on us. Badness in others—as with goodness—is particular to us as species and only incidental to us as individuals. We always have to ask ourselves, how much sheer luck and circumstance separate us from others…even others we find deplorable. This makes existence for humanists excruciatingly complex because as much as it allows us to derive vicarious pleasure from the exquisite accomplishments of others, it also burdens us with the shame of their iniquities. We don’t get to insulate ourselves by invoking superficial differences of race, religion, or politics.  I, as humanist, have found that maintaining this equanimous view of existence especially onerous in these our times. I cannot turn on my TV or computer any hour of any day without being confronted by the voice, the visage, the vanity and venom of a creature I find so hard to accept as part of the same species as me, let alone the same race, gender, and nationality. A turn away from media to go out for a blissful bike ride to the sparkling sea can, as happened recently, be disrupted in an instant by a pick-up truck in front of me sporting this bumper: I am cast down into despair wondering how a fellow human can make a boast of such unbridled arrogance and ignorance. Does our shared humanity mean that one day, I, too, might go out of my way to obtain such a nasty advertisement for myself and stick it on my car to drive about town insulting anonymous strangers as I pass?I turn to the comfort and safety of my precious Nobby Works where I make a weekly attempt to exercise reason and thoughtfulness, and see that I have comments on a post I wrote. Excited at the chance for reasonable exchange, I open to reveal the following:

Is this person part of my human family? Is this someone whose behavior differs from mine by a mere few degrees of separation? There, but fortune, could I be that blatantly hate-filled?As a humanist, there are no days to run or hide from these questions…these ugly comparisons. They are wholly days of obligation. As a humanist, I realize that we’ve made both God and Satan in our own image. It’s a paradoxical existence that sometimes yields glimpses of paradise…Henry Louis Gates and Jon Batiste discuss the sale of a 3-year old boy for $200
Each time I find myself flat on my faceI pick myself up and get back in the race

The Patriot in Winter

I’ve never gone into a blog post with such trepidation before. The warning signs against it are everywhere.To dwell on the end of Tom Brady’s career now, they say, is a distraction from the playoff game he will be playing on Saturday Night.To dwell on the end of Tom Brady’s career now, they say, is typical New England sports fans inclination to see the glass half emptyTo dwell on the end of Tom Brady’s career now, they say, is to wave the white flag on this season before it’s overAll true…but still this fool chooses to rush in because Saturday night could be Tom Brady’s last night as a Patriot…or even as a pro football player. If anyone knew back then that the Candlestick Park concert might be the Beatles last, would anything else have even mattered? Not how many #1 hits they had...not what their next studio album would be. None of it. Tom Brady has played more than a month’s worth of playoff games, but Tom Brady has never played his last game. So if this is it, it’s a big frickin’ deal…for a New England boy like me it’s on the order of Ted Williams last at bat…which stirred John Updike to elegiac literary heights. I’m not going to try to outdo Updike here. I’m just going to try and do an appreciation for an athlete who's kept me in a near perpetual state of awe since he first stepped on the biggest stage in America sports. As I’ve written before: 

When I went to bed after Tom Brady, aged 24, had taken the New England Patriots on a 53-yard drive to win Super Bowl XXVI, I was 55-years old. When I woke up the next morning I was 12.

So that’s the first thing Brady did…made me feel like a kid again. After decades of rooting for teams that mired their fans in wouldda, couldda, shouldda disappointment, Brady came along and really did it. In a single, surgical two-minute drive he made every football loving New England kid’s dream come true.  As he began to steadily, almost relentlessly, build on that magical moment and show fans that his reign was not just a wisp of fleeting glory but a legitimate dynasty, I developed curiously parental feelings about him. Lorna and I would only half jokingly describe him as “the son we never had”. There was an early 60 Minutes interview where he so reminded us of our nephew Dan Houseman, an athlete turned doctor who possessed a unique combination of skill, character, and humility. 

That projected familial connection over the years would lead me to take slights on Brady personally and jump to his defense at the off-field attacks aimed at him. His appearance at George W. Bush’s first State of the Union address, for instance, in 2002 got him pegged as a Republican (an outright smear in many of my circles). Bush at the time was still largely viewed as a unifying figure following 9/11 with a near 90% approval rating. Appearing at that address would’ve been seen as a civic responsibility for most any good citizen, let alone a 24-year old newly thrust into the national spotlight. More than a decade later he would step into a political mess of his own making by witlessly endorsing Donald Trump for president because, as he said, Trump would put a golf course on the White House lawn. Joshing past Trump’s blatant racism and bigotry got Brady tainted with that ugliness. Like a disappointed father, I addressed it in a letter I sent to Brady and his boss Bob Kraft who had given Brady his first MAGA hat (unlike me, an errant father giving his son his first taste of porn). As my letter shows, if Tom Brady had been my son, he’d have gotten a heavy dose of tough love: 

In that numerous women have come forward to tell us that Trump acted on his disgusting words, it beggars common sense and common decency that [you] would allow Trump anywhere near [your] wife and daughter.

Speaking of his wife, Gisele, let’s extend our full appreciation to her for Brady’s subtle but sure attempts to distance himself from Trump. Tom is more political naïf than neo-Nazi, but as a woman and immigrant, Gisele is more attuned to the danger that is Trump and clearly impressed that danger on her jock-first of a husband.  Is all this attention to politics really necessary? Well, yes, because from my own casual research it appears that appreciation of Brady’s athletic feats is often viewed through blatant political bias. You can hardly enter an online discussion of his latest game without some partisan spearing him as a Trumpist even though he described Trump as “divisive” over the Colin Kaepernick protests...or, more preposterously, calling him racist despite the esteem black teammates and opponents have openly expressed for him. And oh, yeah, this >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>Brady’s very real and significant on-field accomplishments are also often denigrated by charges of cheating. I’ve dedicated substantial blog space to that charge here,  here, and  here and have nothing more to say about what was the sports equivalent of Barack Obama being stopped for doing 65 in a 55 mph speed zone in Alabama (and btw, fellow lefties, it's a better bet that Brady skipped his visit to Obama's White House in 2015 to escape the glare of "deflategate" than any policy disagreements).   
Okay, enough of all that. As the man says: Are you ready for some football? Fans of the Brady-led Patriots luxuriate in an abundance of exhilarating, triumphant moments. But even some of their most painful losses underscore Brady’s overall brilliance. In the daring, notorious 4th and two play against the Colts in 2006, Brady’s pass was on the money, and only a brief juggle on the receiving end prevented it from adding to TB12 lore. The final desperation, long pass to Randy Moss in the last seconds of the historic Super Bowl loss to the Giants ending the Pats' bid for an undefeated season…and then the toss-up ball for a hobbled Rob Gronkowski in the Super Bowl XX loss to the Giants…both were launched with the high hopes and confidence that Brady had engendered in himself and his fans. Any brain surgeon would be happy to work each day within the margin between perfect Tom Brady and imperfect Tom Brady.And then there was THE game…a third quarter 28-3 deficit against the Falcons in Super Bowl LI. I’ve watched replays of that game at least a dozen times and still can’t believe my eyes, so I will not embarrass myself by trying to recreate it in my own words. It would be, in the memorable phrase of John Sebastian, like trying to tell a stranger about rock and roll. But maybe Updike can help with his description of Ted Williams's last at bat:

Understand that we were a crowd of rational people. We knew that a home run cannot be produced at will; the right pitch must be perfectly met and luck must ride with the ball. Three innings before, we had seen a brave effort fail. The air was soggy; the season was exhausted. Nevertheless, there will always lurk, around a corner in a pocket of our knowledge of the odds, an indefensible hope, and this was one of the times, which you now and then find in sports, when a density of expectation hangs in the air and plucks an event out of the future.

All that: the comeback defied rationality…touchdowns no matter how loud coaches yell cannot be produced at will…an earlier onside kick had failed…the season seemed exhausted as Gostkowski missed a vital PAT. 

But... 

But also a density of expectation hung in the air among those millions of us rooting for Brady...and the millions more rooting against him...and as he had done so many times before, he plucked that event out of the future. There was a debate after that (literally!) incredible overtime victory whether the MVP should be the heroic running back James White or Brady…and of course with all things Patriots dynasty there's the great, never-ending barroom debate over who’s more responsible for it: Brady or Coach Belichick. But that game right there closed those debates…and any future debates going forward as to who is the greatest of all time. No quarterback living or dead could’ve done what Brady did that night (and I’m looking at you, kids--Lamar and Mahomes and DeShaun). It was the most perfect drop-the-mic moment any athlete ever had…and much to my personal chagrin Brady passed on it only to come back and play in two more Super Bowls in his 40s. As much as I would like him to walk away from it all after this season…win or lose…for the sake of his health and his legacy, I will not be surprised if he returns again and again to win yet again and again. Tom Brady's marching to the sound of his own drum…and as Updike said, “Gods do not answer letters” (or blog posts).
  

The Nob's Greatest Hits, Vol. 2

In Love’s Body the body is not just a vessel for carrying the spirit to its final release at death. The body is where the spirit is forged and is ultimately manifest. Patti Davis Goes Nude AgainThe saving feature of Unenlightenment is that you are teachable…you are able and willing to learn from your mistakes…or misperceptions. Enlighten Men...and WomenAmong those black kids who rode the buses north to work in the Connecticut tobacco fields was none other than Martin Luther King, Jr. Tobacco Road N.Nothing else quite explains the inexplicable use of Hallelujahas a spirit-lifting anthem in times of trouble. It’s a song that lyrically is about seduction, sex, betrayal, anger, and vengeance, with a chorus dripping in irony. It's Got a Good Beat and You Can Weep to ItWitnesses would come forth over time to claim that the youngest and least virginal of US Presidents needed not just sex, but sex with a multitude of women to help deal with a multitude of maladies from a bad back to a nagging fatalism about life itself. But in that most critical October in mankind’s history, with the fate of the world entirely in his hands, JFK had no choice but to look for solace and support in the harder sex. The Virgin Missile Crisis, Excerpt 2The truth is that ordinary people have always relied on redeemers like McMurphy and Luke and Jesus to come along to save their sorry asses, only to reject the message that salvation is a DIY thing. One Flew Over the CrucifixNot to speak ill of the dead, but Keats was wrong about his name merely being writ in water. It was writ in words with the endurance of those stones that exist to tell all of us who follow that there were people here before us who thought it important enough to leave their steppingstones behind. The World is My GraveyardIn any case, as much as all us children hate to do this, it might be healthy this year to remember mom at least once as her own sexual agent and not just the depository of our virgin fantasies. How Your Mother Made YouDear Diary, they’re starting to talk Second Coming around here again, and I’m getting a headache just thinking about my first coming. My side still hurts every time I laugh, and when the wind whistles through these holes in my hands and feet I sound like an ocarina. Excerpts from the Diary of Jesus H. Christ, III appreciate that belief in heaven is a matter of faith (indeed, it cannot be otherwise). I understand how it can bring comfort to those who have a struggle in this earthy existence. Yet I cannot help but feel that all those millions upon millions of believers in the great beyond--that mythical heaven--are missing out on the sublime sweetness, preciousness, and most of all uniqueness of this life. The Road to NowhereGod has already blessed America--by giving the Founding Fathers the wisdom to separate Church from State. In that most divine stroke of Irony, He made us a nation of secular humanists in spite of ourselves. My God--Irony!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. One Thing Leads to AnotherTelling someone they don’t get it is the end of understanding, not the beginning. You Don't Get ItI can only think, Shame on you. Pasta Con SardeI am sorry. A Straight White Man's Mea CulpaShe’s certainly going to have some issues to overcome in the general election, but a certifiable progressive hero like Elizabeth Warren--unafraid to take the lead on impeaching Trump--shouldn’t have to struggle against a one-note, faux Democrat like Bernie Sanders for  her  party’s nomination. Bernie and the NyetsWhether they march with tiki torches against better police treatment of black citizens or with guns against control of assault weapons, they are always afforded the benefit of the doubt…there are always sympathetic ears for their pathologies in the editorial boards and halls of Congress.  Are You Talkin' to Me?      Most people often just get drawn into cults and are full-fledged members before they know it. Am I a Cult Member Self AssessmentIt is also a nasty fact that many people who get their DNA analyzed will not experience the delight of being linked with so many other cultures, as I did. Instead they may very well come into possession of a relatively homogenized genetic profile, which will encourage them to cling even more fiercely to some misguided notion of racial or ethnic purity. 23 & EggplantWe are often forced to excuse bad behavior by otherwise admirable human beings by saying they were products of their times (see Jefferson, Thomas and slavery). There’s some truth to that line of thinking, but not whole truth because we can always find examples of people from any given period who got the moral issues right despite the climate of opinion that dominated their time. Twain is such a person. My Favorite American ...and Jean Donovan, who was raised in my wife’s upper-middle class town on the Connecticut Gold Coast, worked as a management consultant for Arthur Andersen, and held onto a Catholic child’s ideal far enough into adulthood to die a true martyr’s death. Body TalkContrary to the neo-secessionists now overrunning the red states, Franklin did not see “Don’t tread on me” as a motto of States' Rights. He saw it as a motto of union, as illustrated in his famous woodcut. RattledSo there you have it. Who are you? Who is my audience? Random Russians, loyal old friends, passing strangers, the hip, the thoughtful, the patient and passionate, my wife and me. Pass it on. We're here every week. Who Are You?BARRON: Sad case Eric. It’s a good thing Medicare for All provides for mental health coverage, otherwise I’m afraid he would’ve ended up living out of garbage cans on Fifth Avenue...and no one would care. The Barron Trump Interview“Boy, that Lindbergh,” Nixon said, barreling through. “Crossing the Jews. First rule of American politics: Don’t cross the kikes. He could’ve been president, but now they’d never let him.”   Now Playing Black Panther, Excerpt 2Born of an Irish father and Italian mother
Life electrified by seeing Elvis on TV
Painful music lessons
The carpet company leaves and hollows out the hometown
Sent on multiple missions to pull dad out of the local bars
Mom in her red lipstick--a constant source of hope and encouragement
I swear, watching the very splendid Springsteen on Broadwaywas like looking in the mirror of my own life...except for the rock 'n roll superstar part. If I had this blog post to do over again, I'd swap out Paul Simon's My Little Townfor Springsteen's My Hometown. It's not at all too close for comfort. My Little Town


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The Nob's Greatest Hits, Vol. 1

On November 6 of this disappearing year, I received this reminder of a comment to one of my posts from my dear, sweet, sadly departed friend Patricia Heller. There are a couple of notable things about it. The first is that it captures a brief moment in Pat's life when she was engaged in my life and it sounds so fresh and...dare I say...death defying. The second is that it's a reminder of one of the better features of social media, which is that as much as Pat and I corresponded via US mail, the post office would never be able to send me a notice that 7 years ago Pat said this to me. Third, it refreshed my uneasiness about a particular post, called Kisses for my Presidents. 
Over the years and more than 500 posts, none has caused me as many second thoughts (not to mention backlash from readers) as that one. Was I too hard on Jimmy Carter? Was I too easy on Ronald Reagan? What happens to my assessment of George W. Bush as "worst president ever" in the light...or rather the darkness...of of Donald Trump? Literally speaking only one can be the worst, right? Anyway, this very problematic post got me thinking that I should review my past posts and compile a list of my greatest misses. But then I realized this is the holiday season, which calls for good cheer. So my naughty list can wait. Instead I offer this nice list...cuts from some of my better posts in a special two-volume set of the Nob's Greatest Hits:
GOD: I am my brother's straight man, Miss Hepburn. Mankind mocks me with its worship. A man pilots a plane into the side of a building with prayer on his lips, "Allah...Allah." A woman crawls out from under the rubble with prayer on her lips, "Praise be to God." Millions gather over the victims' graves, singing me their hosannas. They can't thank me enough for making them part of my plan. My plan? Do they think it's my plan to hide little nuggets of divine goodness in mass human suffering?  Do they think it's my plan to put a Mercedes Benz in this one's garage and make that one live under a turnpike in a cardboard box? Do they think it's my plan to put gourmet meats on this one's table, and flies in the eyes of that one? Do they think it's my plan to let cancer devour this child's insides and let that child skateboard through life? What do they take me for? My plan, such as it was, ended in the Garden of Eden. It's all been one long night at the Improv ever since. Spinelli (8)  And speaking of tours of duty, 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. Curse of the Boomers, Part 2It's clear that MacDonald’s incident has traumatized him so terribly much more than mine ever traumatized me. And when I ask why that is, I get only one simple answer. In my case the adults acted like adults and defended me. I Was a Child“Heaven! I’m a goddamned non-believer. What the hell am I doing in Heaven?” Hitchens in Heaven--A DispatchIt would be a prayer where the one percent doctrine leads to humility rather than certainty, and it would go like this: I believe that at least one percent of the people I distrust act from the best of intentions. And I believe that at least one percent of my intentions cannot be trusted. I believe that at least one percent of everything I hear each day is wrong. And I believe that at least one percent of everything I say each day is wrong. I believe that at least one percent of everything I do each day should not be done. And I believe that at least one percent of everything I believe is wrong. A Prayer for Dick Cheney (What are They Thinking? Part IIThese are people driven to a tolerance for fascism because the cashiers at their local department store say “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas”; because they don’t get to see as many white faces or hear as many white voices as they used to in their daily lives; because they consume Fox News every day, which is not only the nation’s chief propagator of fascism, but has been shown to actually turn people into dummies. Fascism for DummiesGWTW does far more to advance female empowerment than it does to enshrine slavery and treason. It's Never Gone With the WindLefties can be very unforgiving when it doesn’t suit their tastes…and downright vengeful even if it does. Effin' Democrats  I actually accept all three of those tenets, which brings me damn close to being a card-carrying atheist. But I also accept that heaven, God, and moral consequence have been animating tenets of human existence and--spirituality aside--should not be dismissed if one has any intellectual curiosity about who and how we are as a species. Why I am Not an Atheist, Part 2  If I can be so bold, Coates is sad because he can’t relate to the concepts of hope, forgiveness, redemption…all those ideals that make living bearable as generations pass on from one injustice to the other...  Reading Ta-Nehisi Coates in South Africa, Part 3Due to my heritage, I guess, I have a wide circle of friends and relatives of both Irish and Italian descent. I must repeat that it fills me with shame and embarrassment when I see so many of them jump on the redneck bandwagon to condemn black protestors, be they Black Lives Matter or not. Those of us descended from Italians and Irish… people who took to the streets both peacefully and violently to fight oppression…should empathize better than most that the struggle is often neither easy nor orderly Anarchy in the USAThe First Amendment--no, seriously it is a source of happiness; it protects the books I like to read, the movies I like to watch, the music I like to listen to, the things I like to write...  What Makes You HappyAs a straight white guy I could more easily afford to keep looking for a job than the black woman who got the job instead of me. That is a fact, and as I said in my letter any man who denies it is either dumb or dishonest. A Whiter Shade of White, Part 1The body is the truth teller and holds the trump impulses. So when sensuality comes up against ideology, the smart bet is on sensuality. What that means for men and women when the night gets in their veins is to realize that if it doesn’t feel good and alright to both of them, then it’s not. Fifty Shades of Nuance

Pompeii Red

I recently saw a TV ad for a new car in “Pompeii red” and was so mesmerized by that color description that I completely missed what model car it was. As I wrote in a recent blog, I’ve just finished Mary Beard’s Fires of Vesuvius and I’ve become a little dangerous with my newfound knowledge about that doomed ancient city. Just in time for the holidays, I’m now armed with cocktail party level knowledge on everything from Pompeii’s whorehouses to its consumption of garum (fish sauce made from rotted, fermented sea stuff), from its public toilets and smelly streets to its legendary and distinctive red paint…known since the city’s unearthing in the 18thcentury as Pompeii red. As the sensational news of the buried city made its way through Europe after its discovery, one of its initial, albeit superficial, impacts was to make Pompeii red the high fashion color of choice for interior décor among the very rich, as it had been in Pompeii itself. Over time, the color, like much else about Pompeii, revealed itself to be more complex than first impressions would allow. In 2011 a study released by Italian scientists showed that there were multiple variations of red in Pompeii. The most common was actually yellow that was turned red by the fires of Vesuvius. The rarer, more valuable red was a mixture dependent for its richness upon the highly toxic cinnabar, which was not indigenous to the area around Pompeii. It had to be imported from Spain. The Romans, who valued it as highly, originally mined it in Italy, but after it revealed itself to be deadly to both environment and people they outsourced the dirty work to foreigners. The cost of mining and importing it added to its low supply and high demand and forced the Pompeian government do the unusual—enact a price control on how much it could sell for. In her book Mary Beard delights in any details that upend long-standing assumptions about Pompeii. As she says in summarizing her theme, “Pompeii was not the time capsule we sometimes imagine it to be.”  Often she relies on new research to question early conclusions about Pompeii as an ancient city captured in time on one fateful day. Almost as often she relies on her considerable powers of critical thinking to debunk past notions about Pompeii. In discussing, for instance, the remnants of a woman found in a gladiators’ barracks she questions the long-held belief that the woman was a prostitute to suggest she may just as well have been a desperate woman who sought refuge there while fleeing the volcano. She applies this distinctively modern feminist perspective to challenge the conventional view of Pompeii as an Italian Sodom and Gomorrah…a stereotype not unreasonably based on the profusion of penis icons throughout the city, its bounty of sexually explicit art* once hidden away by the church in the Museum of Naples' Gabinetto Segreto, and by its glut of whorehouses.  Some historians and archeologists have maintained that there were as many as 35 whorehouses in Pompeii, which would mean one for every 75 adult males in the city. In questioning if any city that size could support 35 whorehouses, Beard suggests that many of the places designated as whorehouses because of graffiti or signage around them listing women’s names and prices were nothing more than bars with an ancient variation of the sexist scribblings common to modern mens' room walls. Beard doesn’t so much disprove the case for 35 whorehouses (or the prostitute in the gladiator barracks), as she brings a modern sensibility and critical mindset to assess both the life of Pompeii and the findings of those who came to study it centuries later. Although she haughtily dismisses many of the findings of those who came before her, her haughtiness is endearingly reminiscent of Maggie Smith’s Downtown Abbey character, Dowager Countess of Grantham. It’s a steely charm matched to a steely intellect that makes for a great marriage and guide to the past. And this was a week (banging my head against our own mad time capsule) when I badly needed to take refuge in such qualities…which is the very good reason for this post. Btw, although I could not find the make of the car that appeared in the recent ad I saw on TV, my search for it revealed that 2019 is not the first time someone put out a car in Pompeii Red: 1962 Cadillac in Pompeii Red
* Thousands of pieces of erotic art work...and still counting

The Barron Trump Interview

A One Act Play
At center stage a woman and man face each other over a small kitchen table. The woman (the INTERVIEWER) can be of any age, race, or religion. The man (BARRON) is in his early 50s, but appears older and worn and is dressed in an oversized flannel plaid shirt, sweatpants, and white sneakers. There is a carpet rolled up at his feet.The room is a quite low-end studio apartment complete with single bed, kitchen sink, stove, and a beaten old sound system standing against a dingy wall brightened only by a portrait of Barack Obama hanging on it.INTERVIEWER: Thank you for agreeing to speak with us. I know that you rarely do this.BARRON: Never. I never do this.INTERVIEWER: Yes, well thank you. I’d like to begin with what may have been the most scarring episode of your young life when a college professor made a joke about you in a publicly broadcast Congressional hearing into the impeachment of your father.BARRON: What was the joke?INTERVIEWER: You don’t recall?BARON: I’ve tried to block out those days.INTERVIEWER: Hmm. Really? Well, she said your father could name you Barron but not make you a baron.BARON: What’s the punch line?INTERVIEWER: Well, you were only 13. There was considerable outrage that you were being dragged into your father’s political problems. BARON: Ha! Well, there’s the punch line. He dragged us into his political problems the day he decided to take his sleazy behavior into public service.  INTERVIEWER: So you weren’t hurt by the professor’s attack?BARON: You know my father referred to me as “her son”, don’t you? Once you’ve assimilated that bit of alienation into your life everything else is pretty much de nada.INTERVIEWER: Okay. Speaking of your mother. Once you came of age, you took her maiden name as yours and became Barron Knauss. Why was that?BARON: In a word: Shame. INTERVIEWER: Care to elaborate?BARRON: The name Trump was thoroughly trashed. He had turned it into a joke and universal synonym for fraud, incompetence and buffoonery. I may as well have gone through life with the name Asshole.INTERVIEWER: Did you ever visit him in prison before he died?BARRON: Oh, please.(BARRON breaks into a gagging COUGH)INTERVIEWER: You've been in poor health?BARRON: For a long time. I started vaping when I was 13, and my parents did nothing to stop it. Surprise. INTERVIEWER: I couldn't help but notice that you have a picture of Barack Obama hanging over there. Why is that?BARRON: He was very good to me. Kind and funny. We used to make Dreams of My Father/ Nightmare of My Father jokes.INTERVIEWER: How did you two come together?BARON: I reached out to him when I was 16. It was a typical teenager’s rebellion against a parent….like a kid who develops a love for music or art because his father hates them. My father hated Obama with the bottomless darkness of a thousand black holes. You could hear him late at night locked in his bathroom screaming into the mirror, “You think you’re better than me, Obama? You’re not better than me! You’re black. Worse. You’re half black. Your white mother fucked black cock. It’s a terrible thing she did. Terrible. You'll never be better than me!”INTERVIEWER: How were you able to get together with Obama without your father knowing about it?BARRON: Are you kidding? Everyone around him was acting secretly. It was easy once you realized he only had eyes for himself.INTERVIEWER: What about his friends and allies? Surely the fact that he had so many willing to publicly debase themselves out of fealty to him speaks to some degree of how he could inspire loyalty?BARRON: That's probably the worst use of the phrase inspire loyalty I ever heard. What did their loyalty get them...or to put it Biblically: For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul? Mitch McConnell had a stroke that left him a drooling cretin after his wife helped the Feds uncover their corrupt financial holdings. Brett Kavanaugh drank himself to death. All of the Freedom Caucus suffered from genital herpes; Kevin McCarthy choked to death on his own swollen, black tongue. And Lindsay...poor Lindsay. After his operation went bad he was left with what they called "weeping vagina" and couldn’t appear in public without looking as if he'd wet his dress. And you know of course that he petitioned the government to allow him conjugal visitation rights with my father. Even my old man, demented sex addict that he was, had enough sense left to just say no to that. INTERVIEWER Can we talk about the rest of your family?BARRON: Shoot...And with that I should probably start with oily brother Don Jr., caught en flagrant delecto with the wife of some mad MAGA hatter armed with an assault rifle. You can put that one down to Shakespeare level poetic justice.INTERVIEWER: So you didn’t like him?BARRON: Let’s say our relationship was very Cain and Abelish.INTERVIEWER: And Eric?BARRON: Sad case Eric. It’s a good thing Medicare for All provides for mental health coverage, otherwise I’m afraid he would’ve ended up living out of garbage cans on Fifth Avenue...and no one would care.INTERVIEWER: Tiffany?BARRON: Who?INTERVIEWER: Your sister…half-sister.BARRON: Sorry. I don’t remember a Tiffany.INTERVIEWER: But you remember Ivanka, don’t you?BARRON: How can I not? She’s made such a public spectacle of herself going door-to-door trying to reunite the children our father who art in hell separated from their families and getting doors slammed in her face from California to the New York Island, from the Redwood forest to the gulf stream waters. This guilt was made for she and he. After Jared’s suicide she had to bear it alone of course. Sorry, sister. INTERVIEWER: Can we talk about your mother?  BARRON: Now we can. I couldn’t for many years. It was too painful.INTERVIEWER: How did you take her remarriage to that Russian oligarch?BARRON: Well that was predictable. But when she gossiped about Putin at a Moscow cocktail party and he had them both poisoned, that really hurt. She was my mother after all, and the only one in the family I ever felt connected to.  (Suddenly the interview is interrupted by a prayerful song emitting from the speakers:)

Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar!Ashhadu an la ilaha illa Allah. Ashhadu an la ilaha illa Allah.Ashadu anna Muhammadan Rasool Allah. Ashadu anna Muhammadan Rasool Allah.Hayya 'ala-s-Salah. Hayya 'ala-s-Salah.Hayya 'ala-l-Falah. Hayya 'ala-l-Falah.Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar!La ilaha illa Allah.

INTERVIEWER (visibly baffled): What’s that?BARRON (rising): Excuse me.  That is my call to prayer. INTERVIEWER: You’re Muslim? BARRON (picking up the carpet at his feet and unrolling it at the foot of the stage) Yes, the kind couple that rents this apartment to me is Muslim. They converted me.

(BARRON, facing Mecca, kneels down on the carpet and bows his head in prayer.)CURTAIN.