Patriotism, Flags, and Scoundrels

Recently, Donald Trump crowed about being a Nationalist. To be clear, that word’s connotations fall on a political scale somewhere between being salute-the-flag patriotic to espousing jackboot totalitarianism.  Trump’s understanding of the word, in my view, tilts dangerously to the severe right. This is what Trump said in Houston at a political rally.  "You know, they have a word – it’s sort of became old-fashioned – it’s called a nationalist.  And I say, really, we’re not supposed to use that word.  You know what I am?  I’m a nationalist, okay? I’m a nationalist.  Nationalist.  Nothing wrong.  Use that word.  Use that word."

Okay, let’s use that word.  So Trump is a Nationalist.  Francisco Franco was a Nationalist.  Benito Mussolini was a Nationalist.  Kim Jong-un is a Nationalist, as were his father and grandfather.  And of course, Adolf Hitler avowed himself to be a Nationalist.  Historically, nationalists have opposed multiculturalism and ethnic diversity and are inherently divisive because they place their group (nation, religion, political values, ethnicity, or what have you) at the front of the line ahead of those who are not included in their group.  So just how far into the muck can the Orange Man drag us?  Aside from the fact that Trump uses mind-numbing repetition in most of his spoken addresses (the mark of a dimwitted thinker with a deficient vocabulary), Trump does convey to his supporters the notion that, above all, America goes to the head of the line, America First.  He wants, it appears, our country to be as self-centered as he is.  He wants, certainly, for America to reflect the narcissistic nature that defines his character.  The remainder of the nations in the world can eat goose turds.  Really, should we care about other countries?  Trump has even categorized several other countries (all with dark skinned populations) as “shithole countries.”  In short, we will comport ourselves according to self-interest.  Hip-hip-hooray.  Bravo for us. Let’s all chant: “We’re number one! USA!  USA!  USA!”

If we follow Trump’s cheerleading cues, we become what he is: obnoxious, objects of ridicule because we shamelessly love ourselves, cheerleaders chanting vapid praises about ourselves, and bullying others as we display racial and cultural superiority to the “losers” (his word) of the world.  Apparently, Trump judges people by skin color and wealth, the darker and poorer folks are the bigger the losers they are.  Tough nuggets, you stone cold losers!  Get to the back of the line.

An assessment that is supported by history, especially the last two World Wars, comes from Charles De Gaulle when he said, “Patriotism is when love of your own people comes first; nationalism, when hate for people other than your own comes first.”  

Pretty sure that Big Orange likes his country all right because he has been feeding at the public trough most of his adult life. Pretty sure that he has shorted America yearly by finding loopholes in tax law and fudging on deductions. Pretty sure he avoided military service by claiming he had bone spurs, and so doing added cowardness to mendaciousness because our country indulges the rich and privileged.  Pretty sure he enjoys cheating on wives and associates with impunity (ain’t America great) because he has fixers who can smooth over the rough spots for him.  Pretty sure he is all for America because a sucker is born every minute, and he is nothing if not a con artist.

In many ways, Trump is the reincarnation of Mussolini.  Take, for instance these two pronouncements from El Duce, the man who dismantled the framework of democracy in Italy and subsequently became the leader of the fascist movement.  He said, “We do not argue with those who disagree with us, we destroy them.”  And more, “Italian journalism is free because it serves one cause and one purpose…mine!”  Sound familiar?    

Death of Coherence

Death of Coherence

Just now as I strained to concentrate on an online news article about the rise in anti-Semitism in Europe, I was struck by the distractions surrounding, embedded, and frequently popping up smack-dab in front of the text.  Hard to concentrate on a passage of prose while a monkey dances on your head.

        --This is the SUV you’ve been waiting to test drive--

 Trying to absorb a well-developed story from the internet is like trying to dash across an eight-lane freeway without getting hit by a speeding sixteen wheeler.  What’s going on?

       --Do Reverse mortgages really work? –

 That’s what I’d like to know.  If I click on a local news app, I know what to expect.  Ads border the article and sometimes insinuate themselves into the text, often a half dozen of those hectoring adverts bounce and shudder across your screen.  Look at this shit now!  Now! Look at it!  Frequently, videos you click on require viewing 30-second advertisements before the requested material you want to see and hear is provided.  No free lunch, you know.  Tough luck.  This is the way we make money.  The longer your eyes linger on this annoying screen, the better it is for our bottom line. Stay there, chump, watch and listen to this while we queue up your requested content, which may or may not run no longer than the commercial you must endure.

       --America,our gut doctor says throw out this                                    vegetable immediately—

 Eat this, Sucker!  And now try this!  Why did we just watch a 30-second spot from IBM so we could enjoy a video, just a minute long, showing a dog run an obedience course?  We know the drill: nothing is free.  If we want information, we must shut up and hang there while the man pitches a product.  Just sit there and take it like a martyr for the free enterprise system.  This is the way the system works.  Don’t whine about reality.  What?  You’ve never been to a timeshare pitch?  Take it or leave it!  On second thought, take it but don’t leave it.

       --Mystery of Oak Island finally solved—

 Who knew?  Popups block the screen demanding that we invoke this or that.  And along the way as we try to read to the end of an article, a blaring audio message insinuates itself right into our heads.  Hopeless.  Vile.  Shameless.  All sorts of commercial pursuits demand attention, and, by God, we will heed their call or else!

       --25 movies released on Netflix this month—

 Really?  Not only that, but other headlines wheedle themselves right in the stream of the story we attempt to follow.  In the midst of the story we read about bobcats in urban areas, three bulleted headlines interrupt—an earthquake in Peru, a rediscovered fish thought extinct 80 years ago, and an outbreak of measles in Vancouver, Washington.  To make matters worse, almost every day a story we want to read is blocked by a pay-to-continue-reading barrier—a pay wall.  What do you want, something for nothing?  Or, worse, one is not allowed to read anything at all unless the reader switches to another site altogether.

       -15 Epic Life Hacks that will make you happy--

 Holy cow!  What’s that about the medium is the message?  The message is: never be bored.  Look at this.  Look at this. No, look at this-and-this-and-this-and-this-and-this.  Ever try to drive the speed limit with a tarp draped over the windshield?

       --Pay 0 interest for 18 months with this credit card—

 Gimme that card right now!  Lots of distractions.  Derailment.  Chaos. Don’t slouch on the couch.  How can you when a television commercial flips through 75 screen shots in twelve seconds.  Take that.  And that. Many television ads present hundreds of images per minute, the screen flashing from one image to another, sometimes so quickly one’s head spins.  One could have a seizure (and some people do) trying to keep up with what streaks and flashes on the screen. This is done, obviously, to capture one’s attention and keep one bedazzled.  Slack jawed and in a semi-trance, we duped shmoos absorb the commercial pitches like sponges left in a clogged, dirty sink.

      --Ranking the best, and worst—airlines in America--

 Got to see that!  Even our print media fall victim to distracting clutter.  When the newspapers arrive each morning, we have to shake out all the fall-away ads and uncover the slipcover commercials that drape each section.  In order to get to the news, one must first pull away and discard the trash.  The point of a hardcopy newspaper is not the news, you know.  The point is ad money.  Sell. Sell.  Sell.  Donate. Donate.  Donate.

        --How to save 20% on your mortgage payments-- 

 In all cases, whether on a screen or in hard copy, the thesis is often lost.  All the visual and auditory stimulus makes it impossible to focus.  “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.”  That line from Yeats applies perfectly to our helter-skelter age of information.

  --If you owe the IRS, we save you big bucks--

 More, we must have noticed that many of the pictures associated with a story (say, Google News, for instance) do not have much to do with the news article itself.  For instance, a picture of a sandy beach beside a news article about priests accused of sexual improprieties.  What?  A Brexit piece alongside of a picture of Westminster Abbey, the article itself making no mention of the World Heritage Site.  Or how about a young woman wearing a tight sweater beside a story about the decline in attendance at Major League baseball games?  No rational connections necessary, Bud.  But, dang, that woman sure is a distraction.

       --Three genius ways to get controls of your finances--

 Of course, most of the commercial intermissions come from shameless greed.  According to some media watchdogs, we may be subjected to as many as 5000 ads each day as we view screens, read newspapers, drive by billboards, listen to the radio, and make our way in the world.

       --Blunder #10: Mismanaging Retirement Accounts-- 

 An assault on senses.  You’ve seen the clickbait nonsense: “If you can answer these ten questions, you have the IQ of a genius.”  “You can be a millionaire without ever leaving your home.”  Many online sites get paid every time you click on this crap.  How about the old list ruse?  “These are the top five restaurants in Idaho.”  Well, now, I just may go to Idaho sometime, so, what the hell, let me see that list.

       --The real reason your dog follows you everywhere—

 Like unwanted noise, information systems deliver clamor and unapologetic pleading for your money, your attention, and your personal data.  Could we escape a few weeks each year to simply unplug, to get away from all hectoring advertisements, to carry no smart phone, to read no newspaper or magazine, to remain uncorrupted by the commercial world?  Imagine that.

 Just imagine.

America's Existential Crisis

Years ago, I stood on a street corner in Oxford, England, a Broad Street juncture, watching people pile flowers smack dab in the middle of an intersection, which meant the street was closed to vehicle traffic.  If memory serves me correctly, I’d say there were several hundred bouquets stacked to a hip-level height.  “What’s going on?” I asked a passerby.  “That’s the spot where the three martyrs were burned at the stake,” was the reply.  “When did that happen?” I asked, confessing my ignorance of English history.  “Coming up on 500 years ago, this day October 16th, 1555,” was the reply.  I remember thinking that it was about time for the locals to get over it, move on, forgive and forget.  While forgiveness is always possible, I suppose, the memory of some injuries imprints an indelible stain.

 Such is the case with the Oxford martyrs put to death for apostasy by the Catholic hegemony.  Hugh Latimer, a British clergyman, Bishop of Worcester, a Protestant, before he was burned at the stake, turned to his fellow bishop, Nicholas Ridley, and reportedly said: “Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man; we shall this day light such a candle by God’s grace in England as shall never be put out.”  Before being set ablaze, Ridley reportedly prayed, "Oh, heavenly Father, I give unto thee most hearty thanks that thou hast called me to be a professor of thee, even unto death. I beseech thee, Lord God, have mercy on this realm of England, and deliver it from all her enemies."  The remaining months of my stay in England, I learned just how deeply sectarian bigotry and hatred had divided that society, wounds that to this day refuse to fully heal. Of course, the rupture between Protestants and Catholics is one small example of uncompromising divisions throughout history and worldwide, sectarian violence being a major theme of humanity since Neanderthals tussled with Homo sapiens over jurisdiction of sacred hunting grounds.

 Come on, you must have noticed the embittered ideological schism our country has undergone since Trump strutted onto the presidential stage.  If you don’t recognize the sharp differences among our political voices, our religious leaders, our community leaders, and our media (especially social media) mavens, then you are a victim bumping through the world with a knife sticking between your shoulder blades, unaware that you are bleeding to death.

 Perhaps that exsanguination image is too dire. Perhaps not.  Certainly, we have had left leaners vs. right leaners in America since the inception of our republic.  What’s more certain, however, is that Americans have not had such sharp destructive differences since, I don’t know, the Vietnam War?  Perhaps all the way back to the Civil War?

 What is happening to us has been described as an existential crisis by some pundits and theorists.  The crevasse that was always there opened a gap larger than our ability to negotiate over or around it.  One portion of America expresses itself as wanting lower taxes, fewer immigrants, and fewer government regulations over their lives.  Another large segment wants better social programs, protections for disenfranchised people, and suitable medical coverage for all citizens.  And yet other fragments of our people advocate for every slot on the political spectrum.  So how do we keep our republic healthy and robust?  How do we embrace each other in the breach between conservatives and liberals?  Is democracy itself being tested?  Is the soul of America being tested?  Yep, it sure is.  Have our values shifted?  Down deep, probably not, but the present tense has produced a squabble that threatens our ability to tolerate one another.  We can no longer find common ground, a safe zone in which to discuss our differences.  We use vile and profane language to characterize our opponents.  To many, the sight of a MAGA baseball cap is enough to arouse thoughts of assault and battery.  To many others, an Obama bumper sticker elicits an immediate urge to perform a vulgar hand gesture. 

 It is not simply Democrat vs. Republican, either. It is something more ominous. Yes, it is tribal.  It is a divide similar to what Catholics vs. Protestants felt after the reformation in Europe.  It is the Bloods vs. the Crips at the height of the LA gang wars.  It is the global war of Shia vs. Sunni.  It is not easy to reconcile, but there it festers in the middle of the American experience, just as it infects most other places in our broken world.

 “Forgive him/her/them, Father.  For he/she/they knows not what he/she/they does.”

“Forgive them, Father.  For the liberals (or the conservatives) know not what they do.”

“Forgive me, Father, and allow me to do the right thing each day and purge all the hatred in my heart.”

 Simple answer solving a far too complicated problem?

 Yep.  Way too simple.

 Forgiveness, easier said than done.  Start a new day without the burdens of hatred.  Like letting out a deep breath, just expel the hatred.  Take bouquets and give them to the ones whom you formerly hated.  Say, “Here, these are for you.”  And walk away lighter than ever before.

 Okay, I agree, it is not realistic for the Hatfields and McCoys to meet in the church basement an attitude adjustment over a Jell-O salad.  In order to break the patterns of hatred and division, more is needed than an arranged hug and a coffee date to talk over differences.  Kindness is welcome, but it is not enough.  Singing “Kumbaya” is not enough, never was.  But, let’s face it, whatever we have been doing over the millennia will only invite self-destruction.  By that I mean the weapons we now employ are capable of such monstrous annihilation that everything, people, critters, plants, and the world on which they live, will melt away in a few exchanges of doomsday salvos. Oh, it probably will take a few years, especially in the Southern Hemisphere, after the missile exchange before everything (including cockroaches) is dead—a barren planet on which no birds sing.

 Really.

 Last I heard, the Doomsday Clock read two minutes to midnight.  Two minutes! In a world of Trumps, Putins, Jinpings, Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Sauds, Kim Jong-uns, and that madman running the Philippines (the guy who claimed God is “stupid.”) what possible outcome is likely?

 It is down to this: either we give peace and forgiveness a chance or….  Or else! Sorry, I know that sounds trite and mawkish, but, folks, we are tied to a stack of kindling and the above-mentioned Bozos are dancing around us with a lit torch. 

What we Teach, We Learn

 Think of pedagogy and education theory the same way you would consider the potential within a box of LEGO bricks.  Kids love building things with those stick-together shapes. Along with their children, many parents, I assume, enjoy fitting LEGO bricks together as well.  It is almost ordained that our purpose in being alive is to put stuff together.  That is simply what we do throughout our lives.  Pour the contents of a LEGO kit onto the kitchen table after dinner and children’s imaginations take over.  Whatever is in the kit is what a child has with which to work.  The more pieces available, the greater the possibilities. If given a dozen blocks of LEGO, a child has limited options.  If given a thousand pieces, the opportunities are well-nigh endless.  The conclusion is apparent: more promise presents itself when more building blocks are available.

As you doubtless know, LEGO sets come in hundreds of configurations.  A few sets designed for adults have over 5000 pieces.  But most assortments for children have far fewer pieces and are designed to make just one or two small objects.  With enough pieces, one can construct the Eiffel Tower or the Taj Mahal. Or just about any palpable object one’s imagination can bring forward.  But the most accessible sets allow for far less ambitious projects and are prescriptive in that all the pieces are meant to make, say, a truck or a small house.

 I shouldn’t get too carried away with this LEGO analogy, but it applies neatly to the building blocks available in education, especially higher education.  Doesn’t everyone have an idea about what constitutes a proper education?  Probably because we all have had life-changing experiences with schooling, we naturally have strong opinions about what works or what doesn’t.  In the past, college students would pick their classes like patrons at a smorgasbord feast, a little of this and a little of that to make a toothsome meal.  That free choice method does not work so well anymore because more often than not students are given the plat du jourmenus to fulfill their majors.  They are given a LEGO set, if you will, and told exactly how to put it together. Here you go, kiddo, follow these instructions and you will have a replica of the Lunar Rover Vehicle.  All good if one wants to build another LRV, but what if one’s dream is to create something for which no instruction sheet exists? What about the student whose dreams reach beyond the ordained grid?

Education kit makers are making generous cuts in college catalogues.  Pressures from business interests and politicians to scrub away programs that do not promise immediate career prospects triggered recent actions among higher education administrators and trustees to eliminate liberal arts courses in favor of occupational programs.  One sees a global climate change in curricula across the nation’s colleges and universities. The University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, in fact, is in the process of eliminating majors in philosophy and political science. And that is just a start.  All traditional liberal arts and humanities — including history, English, German, French, Spanish, and sociology, along with art, art history, and music history— presently will be axed.  Mr. Gradgrind (a character in Dickens’s novel Hard Times) and his kind are steering curricula to favor, shortsightedly, what they consider pragmatic and profitable enterprises. In doing so, they set aside the educational fulfillment of the individual student in favor of collective materialistic needs.  These decision-makers see education as the engine of economy rather than the driver of human potential.  They also politicize their choices, believing, I suppose, that those decisions are for the common good.  The humanities and all its cousins are, for the moment, left waiting outside the figurative walls of school.

Certainly, the decline of liberal arts offerings may be overstated, for data-driven STEM educational programs have proven compatible if not enhanced by their counterpart programs in the arts.  We need balance in our educational structures. Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic—foundational building blocks have always been where we start in a child’s education.  No handwringing need take place over an academic drift, for the powers that make curricula decisions come and go like flu seasons, and the value of the humanities will always support Pope’s pronouncement, “The proper study of Mankind is Man,” even if now we find our Man (or Woman) tapping at a cell phone while surfing the Web.

Preparing students for careers as engineers, software designers, computer systems analysts, business security analysts, and related positions that require heavy emphasis on math and science is both a practical and necessary goal of higher education.  That, however, does not mean that humanities offerings should be removed from college catalogues or devalued when advisors assist students in planning their academic schedules.  Those subjects that prepare students to explore and understand human experience, to solve problems not math related, to learn about the values of different cultures, to recognize the influences of history and politics, and to empathize with the human condition—these matters must be part of a balanced education system or we risk further dysfunctions of government as well as the crumbling of the pillars of our civilization.

In some ways, educators face conflicting interests in designing well-rounded programs for students.  The “cookbook” approach to education limits choice but delivers consistency and evidence-based results.  The opposite approach emphasizes discovery and experimentation beyond prescribed formularies. Students should have choices.  Faculty should have choices.  Administrators should have choices.  But too often politicians, community policy-makers, and powerful business interests, people who have not been in a classroom in years, make the consequential curricular decisions.

Talk to ten people, and you will get ten different views on what students should learn in college.  The danger here comes when we only listen to one view, only empower one choice.

Which brings me to a memory I cannot shake. Years ago, I visited The Art Institute of Chicago while attending a national convention for English composition teachers.  Somehow, I managed to find myself listening to a talk given by an art historian. I’ve forgotten most of what was said that afternoon, but I recall vividly what he proposed: mandatory art history and art appreciation classes for all K-12 students.  Never happen, I thought then, and I know now more than ever such a requirement would meet with derisory titters and immediate rejection. But I also know that students deserve a well-rounded education, which ought to include the study of aesthetics.

If we believe, as I think we do, that scientific investigation sharpens a student’s quantitative understanding of the properties of the world, then shouldn’t we also expose students to aesthetic appreciation that highlights a student’s qualitative understanding of the world?  Critical thinking is central to all useful teaching and learning.

When dealing with images and notions, philosophies and histories, students need lots of choices.  They need a full kit, all shapes and sizes of bits and pieces with which to construct their world.

Chatterbots and Artificial People

When I picked up the receiver, I heard dead air, well, not quite dead.  There was an indistinct shuffling sound.  I said “Hello,” for the second time.  Then the voice that came on the line sounded abrupt and not in-the-moment.

“Hello, my name is Richard.  How are you today?”

I said, “I am fine.  Are you a real person?  Or am I talking to a computer-generated voice machine?”

Programed artificial laughter came next, as if answering my question without having to answer my question.

“No, no,” the voice finally said after a too-long pause, “we are calling today to offer you….”

I hung up.

This kind of thing happens almost daily at my house. Just the other morning MultiCare called to schedule a medical appointment for me.

You guessed it, a robot call.  “Press 1 if you want to schedule now.”

“You called me,” I complained to the mechanical device.

“Apparently, you, Ms. Robot, believe that I need an appointment, but you are not giving me details.  I was not aware that I wanted an appointment.”

I pressed 1.  And waited.  And waited.

Soon I was switched to yet another machine voice that instructed me to hold the line and an operator would soon be available. So, they (MultiCare) called me and then had the chutzpah to plop me in a waiting queue to talk to a person.  And that person, when he or she finally connected, asked me to hold some more because my call needed to be transferred to another line.  But, of course, due to the high volume of calls….  Oh, and by the way, this call may be recorded for quality control.

“You called me,” I said again.”  All along I am thinking that I am being manipulated by a programed machine that will record me, ask me to press buttons, and finally put me on hold for God knows how long.  “You called me,” I said a touch too loudly.

Here’s the deal: virtual assistants are here now and will soon be part of most telephonic transactions.  Whether you are making an appointment or calling for credit card information, outbound interactive voice response programs are a fixture in our lives.  They chuckle, they cajole, they lie, they say “Hmm-mmm,” and they are becoming difficult to detect until the back-and-forth lasts a while.

Perhaps the crafters of robo calls will perfect a program that will be so convincing that we will never know if we are talking to a robot or a real person?  Is it possible that transactions of all sorts can be realized without people whatsoever?

I recall a cartoon penned years ago: a college lecture hall, a tape recorder propped upon a podium, a tiered roomful of empty seats, and each chair served as a platform for yet another tape recorder. The voice from the professor’s recorder on the podium begins with: “It has come to my attention that many of you are not attending class….”

I am thinking of getting a virtual assistant to answer all those calls from other virtual assistants.  Take the human element out of communication and frustration levels will plummet, for me at least.  Of course, not much actual communication will happen, but the result ought to be a hoot.

Let’s demonstrate how an exchange might transpire:

Inbound Robot Voice: “Hello.  How are you today?”

Outbound Robot Voice: “Hello.  How are you today?”

[pause followed by a rustling sound]

IRV: “We are conducting a brief marketing survey in your area and would appreciate your help.  The survey will only take a few minutes and, afterwards, you may be selected to win a free cruise from a major vacation tour company.  Are you ready to begin?”

ORV: “Hello.  How may I help you?”

IRV: “Good.  Are you ready to begin?”

ORV: “Hmm-mmm.”

IRV: “Using a scale of one to ten, ten being best and one being lowest, how do you rate….”

ORV: “Hello.  How are you today?”

At some point one or both artificial gizmos will end the call, but what fun tracking their exchange as they try to make sense of one another.

No laughing matter, though, when artificial voices are manipulated by advanced AI systems.  I imagine a time when I might insult the voice calling me, and as punishment the electricity and water are shut off to my house, and a drone is sent to hover over my roof just to keep an eye on me.

Future Shock

In 1970 Alvin Toffler wrote the best seller Future Shock.  His work stressed the influence of, among other things, information overload.  And he warned of new technologies and increasing military evolvements that could overpower our ability to halt our own destruction.  Though he may have overstated the harm that future shock may inflict, much of what he predicted is eerily accurate.

You might think of future shock this way. Imagine we are aboard a runaway train on a steep downhill grade.  As we pick up speed and look out the windows, we see the landscape as a blur.  Too fast, unsustainable speed.  The rails will not hold our weight and velocity.

Of course, predictions and scenarios of the future come in many flavors, some of which will be toothsome while others will be bitter.  But viewing the rapid changes over the last few decades, it becomes difficult to debunk the notion that challenges arise as we try to adjust to the don’t-blink-or-you’ll-miss-it world.  As an anecdotal example, revisit that episode of “I Love Lucy” when Ethel and Lucy attempt to wrap each piece of candy funneling down a conveyor belt at a chocolate factory. You get the picture.  Lots of laughs as entertainment, not so much when applied to the anxiety and speedy pace of change everyone faces during the twenty-first century.  

Exponential acceleration in technology and information, worldwide population, and ecological degradation seem obvious.  As we thrive, we try to juggle just one more ball, just one more flaming sword.  Consider the brief interval (a little over one hundred years) since the first flight. Now the skies are peppered with commercial and military flights day and night.  Consider too the domination of mobile phones and tablet devices that allows seamless communication among those owning those technologies (the first mobile phone communication happened on April 3rd, 1973, not fifty years ago).  Now it is hard to make eye contact with anyone on the street because all eyes are focused on little screens.  Consider also the rapid change in social and cultural acceptance of the LGBTQ communities along with the gradual but certain rise in gender and racial equality. Would our great-grandparents have an easy time countenancing and understanding these long-awaited changes? Hardly.  What about changes that are less welcome?  For instance, the self-imposed and incontestable degradation of our environment (not sure how long it has been since the ruining began, but I am reasonably certain the last century has taken us near the pale, probably beyond it). Change happens, of course, and will until the whole shebang comes to an end (“not with a bang but with a whimper”), but now change comes at us with mind-blowing rapidity.  We play Whack-a-Mole, but as we raise our mallets the game moves so quickly that we are left pounding holes.  Too fast! Too much!  We find ourselves right there alongside of Lucy and Ethel trying to keep up.  

Anxiety results.  Gaa!

Admittedly, change is not theunwelcome element in this story: it is the acceleration of change, its velocity, its overburden on our ability to absorb it, and our unlikely aptitude to adjust to radical innovation.  For those of us who remember rotary dial desk phones, we may remember party lines.  That is, several households would use the same connection for making calls.  If you picked up the receiver to make a call, you might hear the conversation of someone else, perhaps a neighbor, or someone who lived miles away (such a temptation to listen in as my mother sometimes did).  You would know to answer the phone by the number of short rings.  All right, next came private lines, followed by an any number of gizmos that allow us to call from a fishing boat in the North Sea to a friend sitting in a coffee shop in the Bronx without so much as being amazed by it all.  Heck, riders in the International Space Station can call home whenever they desire. How many phone numbers are now assigned to me?  Three? Four?  Coming soon, I’m sure, will be communication devices that will allow us to interact telepathically.  “I was just thinking about you.”  So, during my lifetime, we have gone from switchboard operators to phone booths to mobile phones that send signals to satellites and get them back again.  What is more amazing is that many of us are trying to keep pace with all the change and doing a reasonably good job of it.

Commercial radio messages increasingly feature an annoyance that employs a fast-talker, a voice that zips along as fast an auctioneer trying to run up the bid.  Usually, I suppose, the pause between words is edited out in these radio spots.  The fast-talker does this for two reasons: to provide legal disclaimers (the equivalent of small print) and to save money when buying blocks of air time.  The listeners hear the opposite of white noise, whatever that is.  We can scarcely understand a word.  And are not meant to.  That’s the way of the world just now.  Try to keep up, Bucko.

Trouble is, our ability to adapt to change does not always keep pace with the tempo of change itself.  It is all too much! 

Too fast.  No brakes.

Think of Lucy and Ethel on their first day on the job at the chocolate factory.  Get ready, girls.  The conveyor belt just jumped to a faster gear.

This broken world will soon support ten billion people.

The seas will rise four to nine feet in some places.

We are plaining a military space force.

I just got 630 million hits on a Google inquiry.

Consider another illustration to show future shock in the present tense.  You are playing baseball, and it is your turn to bat.  The guy on the pitcher’s mound is winding up and about to throw you a fastball, some high heat, some nasty unhittable stuff.  You are not good at playing baseball, but the manager asks you to make solid contact.

Yeah, right!

The Worst Ever

       Trump.  Who else? A terrible president and even a worse person, he has no equal in ineptitude.  I have never met Trump and would not answer the front door if he stood there knocking, but how can one avoid knowing his loathsome flaws that are broadcast daily by the fourth estate.  So much has been reported about him that some days it seems impossible to find a story that is not Trump-centric.  It follows that most people cannot stop gawking at a train wreck.  And, of course, it is impossible to ignore a pile of poo on top of the kitchen table.  Only natural to focus on such things before being overcome by a strong urge to scurry to the toilet and throw up.  Or laugh. Or cry.  One would need to sidestep all news outlets in order to avoid seeing, hearing, or reading about Trump.  Ugh.  He is a toothache that won’t go away, an all-consuming throbbing that, for the moment, guarantees nothing but pain for the whole world.  And to think—he enjoys being reviled.  As long as everyone looks at him, listens to him, focuses on him, his masochistic need, an insatiable capacity to be the center of attention, is fulfilled.  He is a modern-day Richard III with a measure of Falstaff and a touch of Iago, not to mention a skoosh of Lucio the fop.  In other words, he is power-hungry, comical, evil, and driven by lies and foolishness.

       Is he really the worst ever?  Yup, well, probably not, but perhaps so.  I have met tens of thousands of folks over my lifetime.  But only two people I judge to be less worthy to serve as leader of the free world, I mean less worthy than Donald Trump.  One was a mouth-breather, a middle-aged, uneducable man whose I.Q. could not have been much higher than a portabella mushroom.  The other was a prisoner at McNeil Island penitentiary, a chronic criminal who had more tattoos than words in his vocabulary.  Come to think, either of those two may well surpass Trump in the role as president if given a keen support staff, something Trump lacks.  Perhaps Trump has a few intellectual advantages over subject #1 and a wider vocabulary over subject #2, but there are other important attributes when considering the make-up of a leader.

       Shall we consider the salient features of Trump’s character?

       He is an angry man as well as a racist (well documented).  He is arrogant (one needs no documentation to observe his Mussolini-esque pomposity and condescending smirk).  He is a misogynist, a braggart, and a liar (he prefers to grab women by their private parts and then brag about it before denying any such thing).  He is vengeful and avaricious (ask anyone at all).  He is emotionally unstable (he said of himself, “I think [I] qualify as not smart, but genius....and a very stable genius at that!”).  He is immoral (think of the seven deadly sins).  He is not a reader; in fact, he is semi-literate (he claims to be a TV guy). His writing is burdened with spelling, punctuation, and grammar errors (check his daily tweets).  He is a narcissist (boy, is he ever).  He loves grandiosity (observe his bad taste in most of his over-the-top properties).  He has no ethical balance (no ethics at all, in fact).  He is unkind (witness how he treats people).  He is impulsive (one never knows what he will do next).  He is cruel (separating parents from their children probably qualifies as cruelty).  He is undiplomatic (“He’s a nutcase….”).  He is dishonest (even the most honest sources he deems to be ‘fake’).  He stiffs people who do jobs for him (long history on this account).

       On the other side of the ledger (might be seen as positive), we find the following.

       He knows how to use wealth and influence to persuade people and generate a subservient following.  He does what all good tub-thumpers do: rile up hoi polloi.  This dubious skill has worked brilliantly and continues to hold promise.  Also, his bloated ego affords him a shameless following among those who have little or no self-regard, those who will gladly follow the piper down the center of main street as they all march toward the swamp. Ironically, his larger-than-life dreadfulness attracts people in the same way that public executions used to summon forth all the townspeople.

       It still puzzles me how we got to this moment in American history.  But here we are devolving, most of us slightly sick as we breathe the air downwind of the dump.  I mean Trump.  

Essay on Essays

       The other day I took a mid-day walk around nearby Waughop Lake with a couple of former colleagues.  Since my retirement from college teaching, I have enjoyed shedding the responsibility of reading stacks of academic essays each week.  Also, I no longer need to confront student plagiarism, nor fight the daily in-class battle against clichés, incoherent sentences and disjointed essays devoid of even a remote scent of freshness.  Mind you, after 38 years of teaching literature and composition, I never became jaded, perhaps a little weary at times, but keen to get to work on Monday mornings.  I remained hopeful and full of purpose to the end of my career.  But I finally felt the relief of leaving the frontlines to the new recruits, those filled with youthful zeal and pleased to be riding on secure tenure track rails.

      However, what I learned on my walk around the lake made be grateful that I no longer work as a frontline sapper in the war against ignorance.  “You must be kidding!” I said when told that a contingent of the new hires fresh out of graduate school advocated a rewrite of the course outline for English 101, the composition course that is universally taught at most colleges and universities across the English-speaking world. “Really?” I said.  “What do they suggest students write if not essays?” Though I did not get a straight answer to that question, I inferred that newbies promoted journaling, blog posts, reflective and informal prose, writing that gives the finger to the five-paragraph essay and to academic writing in general.  Now I too am not a big proponent of the five-paragraph essay, but I am an advocate of essay writing in general as a way to organize thought and refine ideas.  Writing is a foundation skill of a well-rounded education, and essay writing helps a student advance logical, organized, and coherent expression, more formal than talking or improvisational responses.

      Come to think, isn’t that the curse of the world just now?  People tweet judgements rather than develop ideas.  People text bits of information because even writing an e-mail takes too long and requires concentrated thought.  People summon Google rather than study the long and wide view found in proper research.  Yahoos no longer want to enjoy the ride; they want to cut to the chase.  Do it to it.  NOW. Heck, folks do not even use words anymore.  Why use language when with one click an emoji is available as a shortcut through complexity and ambiguity?  Death to deep thought.  Splat! Out with analytical thinking.  Here is a frowny face, my totally heedless response to you and anyone else.  Do you think I care?  Take this smiley face as an answer.  To hell with tight organization.  LOL.

      Another retired professor told me an even more galling account of what was happening at her former university English department.  There, too, the freshly hired faculty were proposing new course outlines and seeking the removal of old courses.  Change is good, right?  Who doesn’t appreciate Hegel’s dialectic theory?  That is a model for progress, isn’t it?  Well, maybe not.  The newbies made a case for purging most of the literature courses covering periods before World War I because these weathered courses, the new faculty purportedly claimed, were not relevant to the 21st century student.  In short, out with Chaucer, bench Shakespeare, push aside period survey courses, and so on, all the seminal writers of our language. Chuck ‘em.  Apparently, the Great Books of the Western World were not so great after all.  Perhaps they were the Pretty Good Books of the Western World?  Set those aside.  The stale and moot writers of past generations, according to the New Wave, should be replaced with ethnic voices, literature from other cultures, LGBTQ voices, and Manga.  Okay, let’s compromise.  Include those fresh elements in literature offerings.  They belong and are worthy, but do not place all the oldies but goodies in the attic where only intrepid seekers may appreciate their beauty and usefulness.

      College enrollments and economics may have something to do with the devolution of English department course offerings.  In some cases, such as in The University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point, proposals were made to drop programs in humanities and social sciences beginning in June of 2020 — including English, philosophy, history, sociology and Spanish — while adding programs with “clear career pathways.”  The death of a liberal arts education hangs in the balance if colleges and universities across the nation adopt similar rearward policies.

      I realize my generation of educators must pass the baton to succeeding, eager academics, but the retired and retiring professionals are being told on the way out the door that what we taught, what we believe valuable, what we stood for is now rot and must be thrown out with the trash.  That’s how it feels, anyway.

      Among all the other scuffles that face higher education, now comes the threat to all liberal arts.  For decades higher education administrators have been paring music and art programs, but now comes a dystopian future for the liberal arts.  Big money kingpins (Gates and Musk, among others) want to fashion education to prepare students for the work force.  All well and good.  I am all for it.  A liberal arts education is still, I assert, the best preparation for lifting people toward a productive and meaningful life.  The big money buttinskies have a narrow view of education’s purpose: job training. Having a wheelbarrow loaded with money does not make one an expert in education theory, nor should it allow the ultra-rich carte blanche to suggest social engineering according to their business interests.

      The point here is simple: a good education is not solely job training.

      Someone should write an essay about that.

Comic Book Culture

Comic books mirror much of our recent pop culture, a salient piece of American life.  Superhero movies dominate the box offices.  Comic-con gatherings overrun convention halls, often attended by over 100,000 fans during a weekend (numbers approached a quarter of a million at a recent New York event).  What’s going on here?  The influence of comics, superheroes and science fiction offerings such as Star-Trekand Star Warsreveals societal and moral substructures of our culture. Also, devotees of comics and the Star-Trek/Star Warsexperiences find consolation as they escape into worlds where justice, fairness and adventure prevail.  Let’s face it: we live in a broken world in which justice and fairness are as rare as five-leaf clovers.  And most of us find little adventure during our daily same-old, same-old routines.  So, isn’t it nice to imagine worlds in which good triumphs over evil, where justice wins the day, and where human figures do extraordinary things?  

       Enhanced human figures, demigods if you will, have long made appearances in literature, but since mid-twentieth century the audience for American superheroes has grown each decade.  Accordingly, science fiction offerings have also found large and obsessively committed audiences, people who dress up like aliens or costume themselves as archetypical heroes who fly into space to carry on the cause of humanity, if that is what they are doing.  Who knows? For reasons hard to understand people glue on Spock ears or show up at exhibition halls wearing a Darth Vader suit.  Are they simply modeling the outrageous to get attention, or are they satisfying a wish fulfillment?  

       What is certain: people daydream about having augmented power, of exploring terra incognita, of doing noble acts, and of defending the cause of good versus evil.  As an escape from the mundane and oppressive real world, people may find great joy in entering the world of Ant-Man.  And, hey, look up in the sky.  Is it a plane or what?  Yes, who wouldn’t want to fly like Superman, or scale skyscrapers like Spider-Man? Who wouldn’t want to ride shotgun in the Batmobile en route to put Clayface in his rightful place?  Good versus Evil, that age-old battle, is the attraction to most of us.  Us versus the Other (humans against objectionable life forms) also plays into central conflicts in most science fiction.  Prototypical make-believe, part of childhood development does not halt when one reaches adult status.  

       Mythical and mystical, comic books have compelling attractions, and for most of the last one hundred years have indeed reflected our wide-ranging culture. Though often hopeful, comics also represent a retreat from confronting our broken world, leading us toward a place that is safe because it is fantastical.  It certainly feels good to see extreme justice done on the page or screen when it rarely reaches such verdicts in our real courts and on our streets.  Most of us would rather go see Spiderman defeat evil on the screen than work for justice on the mean streets of America. Why?

       Because it is harder to live the dream than dream the dream.  That’s why.

Art

“It is in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough—it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our heart sing.”

–Steve Jobs, in introducing the iPad 2 in 2011

Historically, the arts have been a major custodian of culture.  That assumption may reflect my prejudice, but I stand by it even though language, religion, economic systems, cuisine, social rituals, and so on encompass large shares of what constitutes culture.  But, surely, art with a capital ‘A’ tops the list when most of us think about a defining element that showcases a civilization's culture.  Because of my old school education, the first thoughts that come to mind when considering ancient Greece’s culture, for instance, are The Iliadand the Odyssey, scenes painted on vases and terracotta sculptures, and the Parthenon of Athens.  We think of the things that they made, artful things, which become the touchstones of much of what we know about a culture in question.

So, what do we think about when we reflect on America’s ethos?  After considering all the moving parts of our malleable culture, for better or worse, technology takes its place at the head of the parade.  What else?  It is complicated.  Not long ago, I would have said much of America is expressed by cars and Hollywood and NFL football and fast food joints that line the highways and byways of America: those core definers of American culture.  I would have said that we are a “melting pot” of sub-cultures all mixed and comingled into an unlikely conflation.  But let’s admit it, lowbrow mass media have saturated our screens.  We are watchers and clickers and tweeters. We google more than we look others in the eye.  Many of our places of worship employ high-definition monitors above altars and daises.  In our colleges and universities, course offerings in literature, visual arts, and music that cover periods before, say, 1800 are disappearing from catalogues.  Brick and mortar classrooms are being replaced with online classrooms held in the ether and recorded in the Cloud.  Even Shakespeare courses (and other backbone offerings that once served as core courses) are being taken off the books in many institutions of higher learning.  Let’s face it, artistic expression, the sort we once studied in college humanities classes, has yielded to movies, television, computer platforms, other forms of mass media with cookie-cutter corporate imprimatur.

Literature, painting, sculpture, music, dance, cuisine, and other arts once defined the better part of our culture.  We could understand in context a certain historical period by the artistic expressions left for us to examine.  These arts conveyed experience, allowing us to feel alive within the historical moment taking us beyond wooden descriptions and dates, permitting us a visceral understanding of another time and culture.Alas, lofty art lost its place at the head of the culture queue.  It no longer serves as a trophy that the elite, the clergy, the aristocrats, the educated, and privileged enjoyed.  It became, one may argue, increasingly hollow.  “Art is what you can get away with,” said Andy Warhol, and in no time, we witnessed manufactured art: tee-shirts, bulk produced so-so art, if art is even the word for it, which certainly is disputable.

As ideas, images, audio clips, and words were mass produced, high art lost its matchlessness.  Once a potent prescription for society, art was diluted, attenuated, spread to everyone (Extra!  Extra! Read all about it!).  The middle class, the working class, even the classless had access to the full treatment of what now passes for our culture.  And it is our culture, like it or not.  We have become the billboard, the sound track, the thirty-second Coke spot, the laugh-track culture.  Our “headpiece(s) filled with straw,” if that.  Duh.

Measure how quickly we progressed from quill to printing press to digital communication to all of us awash in information and sensory overload.  As a result, the sui generisof high art, art with a capital A—once housed in the Louvre (or some other such cathedral of Art) is now found on placemats, in gift shops, on t-shirts, on coffee mugs, on every surface the commercial forces can think to leave their mass-produced litter.

Religion once was the sun around which art orbited. Now with meta-information (film, television, computers, streaming devices, mobile phones) screens have become the center of our attention.  Artistic expression, then, has become either less identifiable, or more so.  Widely duplicated (like pressing a finger on one letter on a computer’s keyboard as the image scrolls down the page), art has become the opposite of iconoclasm, an outcome as welcome as a stuttering opera singer.

Okay, we should not be worried that art will somehow become irrelevant.  It will, as always, express the spirit and passion of the human experience.  But, like Waldo, it will be harder to recognize in a crowded field.

Get Off My Lawn

How did it happen so quickly?  Not long ago I was the youngest person on the playground.  Now when I scan the faces around me, I calculate that I am the oldest one sitting here on the bleachers.  Time seems to accelerate, doesn’t it?  At first, the landscape passed me as if I were riding atop a slow-moving freight, but then, without warning, I found myself riding in style on a high-speed bullet train.  The fields and faces began to blend into a blur as I hurtled toward my destination: the last depot, end of the line.

The realization that the ride ends sooner rather than later can work on a traveler’s emotional well-being.  I have long resented the privilege and impudence of old guys: those self-possessed, opinionated, grumpy, and overbearing way-past-their-prime men we often see frowning at youth’s swagger and inked-up bodies.  My view has always been that old folks are jealous of young folks because, well, young people have potential, while old people have all those track miles behind them.  But, Holy Moly, now I am becoming all that I loathe about grumpy old guys.

I should make clear that my changes in temperament and tone have come partly from a bad parathyroid.  Apparently when one or more of those little glands goes sour, the person hosting the dysfunctional gland pumps out way too much calcium for his or her own good.  Imagine that!  Among the liabilities of this condition is a downturn in the patient’s mood and general disposition.  It’s true, a person’s behavior can be commandeered by the slightest change in blood chemistry.  If you doubt that conclusion, try drinking six shots of vodka an hour before you meet your boss for a job performance review.

In short, I am quantifiably a bad-tempered old man.  And I resent myself for being such a one.  I stand before the bathroom mirror and “Boo!” myself.  But until that bad gland is removed, I must get used to the little flares of temper and self-righteous behavior that punctuate each day.  If I were to spill a few drops of wine on my wife beater T-shirt while eating dinner, I will get an instant fury flare-up that spreads to the immediate family, if not to the entire neighborhood.  Look out world!  How could this happen?  I have become a cliché.

I have not yet stood on the front porch and screamed at the local children, “Get off my lawn!”  But if a few children were to set up croquet wickets next door and start walloping a wooden ball toward my grass, I probably would.  No, I definitely would.  A little age and a lot of extra calcium will turn this old guy, usually a mild-mannered man, into the curmudgeon he has feared he might become.

In addition to the bad parathyroid (scheduled to come out soon), I have bad hearing, a bad back, kidney stones, a spot on my liver, another on my lung, and some plaque buildup on an artery or two, not to mention a host of other internal issues to monitor—all this a result of 70 years’ wear and some stretches of profligate living.  Added up, these defects cause cantankerousness no matter what the calcium level in one’s blood might be.  You get the picture.  Best to stay the hell away from me if you chew with your mouth open.

Nevertheless, the triumph of mind over matter remains a dependable principle to which I subscribe.  As one grows older, however, it becomes more difficult to endure the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” while remaining hopeful and positive.  But to resign oneself to moans and groans is the same as yielding to a daily whipping, which I refuse to do.

I have found that exercise helps beat down flare-ups of anger. What’s more, counting to ten soon after I trip over the dog and knock over the floor lamp on my way to the hardwood also allays some of the steam from emotional outbursts.  Also, reading serves as a mild deviation from present pangs of discomfort; one can easily get lost in a good book for hours before realizing that one should take several of those pills that the doctor prescribed for the general malaise of old people with high calcium issues.  But exercising, counting, and reading are all mere deflections from core health deficits.

Maladies and blood chemistry aside, one must endure.  See!  I can smile no matter how out-of-sorts I am.

Hey, I’m talking to you!

Now leave me alone and stay the hell off my lawn.

P.S. I wrote the above article months ago.  Since then, I had successful surgery.  I am no longer grumpy.  Just old.

THe Final Whistle

I was just a kid in March of 1962 when the Bennie “Kid” Paret and Emile Griffith squared off in a welterweight championship bout, a moment that I still think about all these years later.  Griffith killed Paret in the ring, in part because a referee failed to stop the fight when Paret became powerless as he sagged against the ropes.  Until that fight, I had enjoyed watching boxing bouts on television.  But after the “Kid” died right in front of the nation’s television viewing eyes, I soured on the sport.  I just did not have an appetite for such violence.  Just recently, I soured on pro football.  Any sporting event that brutalizes its participants is now on my list of games to avoid.  Sure, I know, lots of athletic competitions may lead to hospital visits (or worse), but some competitions such as MMA, boxing, and NFL football are unambiguously injurious to combatants.  If you choose to get involved in one of these sports, you will be hurt.  Period.

Over the last few years, pro football has been flagged for unnecessary roughness because, as Bob Costas asserts, “this game destroys people’s brains.”  An honest view of NFL football depicts freakishly big and muscular men smashing into one another, creating spectacles of violence for the pleasure of American fandom.  Whether or not that pleasure falls into the sadistic classification, you decide.  With some ambivalent feelings, I have decided that the game has become more blood sport than straight-up athletic competition.  The bigger the hit, the louder the applause.  A common sight in most every NFL game is a player down and being attended by trainers and medical people while a group of competitors from both teams take a knee as a show of sympathy, if not a suggestion of prayer, for the fallen player.  No surprise because each player knows that one bone-crushing play can end a career and leave a body crippled.  Or dead.  More, ask any aging footballer how the knees, shoulders, and hips feel on an icy winter morning, and you’ll discover that no one graduates from the game without a long list of physical deficits.  No one!  Simply put, the game hurts people unlike any other American sport.  Because football is so imbedded in American culture, it is difficult to turn away from it even when most of us know its harmful physical effects.  But beyond damaging a player’s bones, brain, muscles, and soft tissues, other toxic results remain.

Steve Arnold, author of Against Football: One Fan’s Reluctant Manifesto, makes a case against the morality of the game, at least at the professional and collegiate levels.

“Football is a remarkably exciting game, but it also reinforces a lot of basic American pathologies around race, violence, greed, sexuality, sexual orientation, and we give a free pass,” he says. “We don’t even think of it as something that deserves moral scrutiny, when it’s the biggest thing in America. And that’s nuts.”

                  Steve Almond The moral case against football (Jeltson, 2014)

Lately, we have witnessed the flap over NFL players not standing for our national anthem, a restrained demonstration against the upsurge of killings of black men by policing agencies.  As expected, many of the white owners of NFL teams saw these remonstrations as disrespectful to our flag, our military, and our nation, not to mention to the boss class of which those owners are a noteworthy part.  Just take a look at the power structure of football, and the angle on racism becomes evident.  Nearly 70 percent of the players in pro football are black.  Guess how many owners are white?  Take a look at how many quarterbacks are white.  Now count the number of black quarterbacks.  Hmmm—Those numbers sound about right to you?

On the topic of violence, the obvious presents itself.  Do you think the game would have a large viewership if tackling were outlawed?  How about some spirited flag football?  Perhaps some two-hand touch?  How many television commercials could the league sell if violent contact no longer was permitted?  The peanut-munching crowd wants bloody heads and cracked bones.  It’s just human nature, I guess.  Shame on me.  Shame on all of us.

Football has no place for wusses, you will agree.  Ever since the Richie Incognito bullying incident a few years back, the notion of sexuality tolerance has been a stain of NFL football.  Big boy football is a team game driven by floods of testosterone.  The idea is to push people around.  And, I’m sure it will take a while for the football culture to adapt to progressive changes in the larger society.  But for now, football is measured in capacities of testosterone, the heterosexual paradigm of manliness, the pick-up driving, unrepentant thick-necked, smash-you-in-the-face-if-you-piss-me-off lowbrow tough guy.  I know it is not fair to suggest that all footballers fit into this stereotypical description (they don’t), but for the sake of a workable snapshot, there you have it.

When Almond refers to “American pathologies” embedded in our favorite sport, he points to obvious disorders reflected in our larger society.  Sure.  We are sick and neurotic!  Perhaps, then, if we change our culture we will by default change the way we play games or change the games themselves.  Don’t hold your breath.

That is, one way to change who we are is to change the way we play games.  Is that even possible?  Should we accept that we are violent creatures and concede that our games are correspondingly violent?  Really?  Or should we take a greater interest in baseball, racket sports, golf, track and field, and so on?  These less violent games, however, may simply be what methadone is to heroin, a substitute that masks the real addiction.

Really, how does one distinguish the dance from the dancer?  And how do we change culture?  Isn’t it more likely that the subsuming force of culture will change us rather than the other way around?  Should we accept the notion that people are by nature violent and are thus condemned to blood sport games or contests that can be reduced to territorial struggles (hockey, football, soccer, basketball), i.e., games that simulate war?  Can’t we simulate war in non-violent games?  Chess, for instance, or, gosh, I don’t know, how about a board game such as Risk?

For all my liberal high-mindedness, I recall an incident from my sport-viewing youth.  I was at a hockey game blabbing to my companion that hockey did not appeal to me because it was fiercely brutal.  But there I sat—can’t remember why—in spite of my shallowly held beliefs.  As I was demonstrating how morally worthy I had become, a fight started on the ice.  An enforcer named Connie Madigan was playing for Portland, and he started swinging at one of our Seattle players.  I broke off my sermon on non-violence as the fight got larger, the ice littered with sticks and gloves.  Then I was on my feet.  I have forgotten what I screamed, but I know that I encouraged our Totems to punch, kick, bite, and strangle those Portland stinkers.  I am ashamed to admit how much of a hypocrite I was and continue to be.  That confessed, I continue to believe that we can rise above our savage nature and play nicely.

In The African Queen, the besotted and intemperate captain of the boat played by Humphrey Bogart, says to Rose Sayer, the character played by Katherine Hepburn, “A man takes a drop too much once in a while, it's only human nature.”

Rose replies, “Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above.”

I keep trying.

(Jeltson, 2014, p. Huffpost)

There's Nowt So Queer as Folk

       I’m here on the park bench.  It is a bright fall day, and I am unaccountably smiling at ducks, geese, squirrels, walkers, and in-line skaters.  Funny how a little sunshine and a moment of ease can turn one’s emotions upside down and inside out.  For the last 30 minutes, I have been considering the quality of humankind as it moves past my vantage point.  It is an assessment, aided by associational thinking, that I often make when a procession of my peers passes my judging station.  One thought leads to another because, alas, I ponder Hamlet’s conclusion: “What a piece of work is a man!  How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty!  In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god!  The beauty of the world.  The paragon of animals.  And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?”

         Hmm—seems that the prince is conflicted?  He confesses to an excessive admiration of people in general and then reverses his view of the “paragon of animals,” arriving at a conclusion that casts humankind into the trashcan.  At the least, he kicks the human race to the curb for the time being.  I understand.  People are wonderful; people are horrible.  People are clever; people are stupid.  People are graceful; people are klutzy.  People are kind; people are cruel.  People have godlike attributes; people are full of the devil.  You get the picture.  The duality of our nature makes us a living paradox.  So be it.

Hamlet did not think too much (what a thought!).  He simply made an honest assessment that may have been different had he not been in such a cheerless spot.  Consider his burdens: his father had recently died (murdered he soon discovers), his mother was shamelessly carrying on an incestuous relationship with his uncle, and he (Hamlet) had been displaced for promotion to the throne.  More, except for Horatio, he had no one, not even Ophelia, with whom he could confide.  Not a lot of sugar in that recipe.  At the time of his pronouncement, Hamlet was having one of his bad days, which is understandable.  Makes sense, does it not, to conclude that heaven is inextricably connected to hell just as hell depends upon the contrast to heaven.  We have William Blake to thank for the marriage of heaven and hell, and I suppose Hamlet sees the link all too vividly.

         But what strikes me from my view on this bench is something related but indeed dissimilar: the deep-down grotesqueness of each of us, something hideous and secret in all of us, that part of us that links us disgracefully to hell.  My concentration shifts away from what is godlike in humanity to the dark side, the repugnant part that apparently is as much a part of us as is our spines, that snakelike construction that is the core of our physical selves.  Look at these people.  My God!  What pieces of work, and I do not mean that in a worthy way.  Hard to find delight in these specimens as they pass.  One is dressed as the Mad Hatter—at least he has the ridiculous hat and the powdered face.  Another passerby, a woman of prodigious girth, wears bib overalls and has a tattoo of a serpent wrapped around her neck.  She is followed by a dog pulling a skateboard on which a naked man rides (actually he wears a G-string).  These people are either grotesque or are showing off in such a manner that makes them grotesque.  Now here comes a swell piece of work, a mid-thirties woman wearing yoga pants and clutching hand weights, an attractive woman except for one glaring flaw: she has more facial studs adorning her nose, lips, earlobes, and eyebrows than the Queen Elizabeth has jewels on her crown.  It hurts just looking at her.

Sherwood Anderson underscores the grotesque theme in his portrayal of the citizens in a small town in middle America, a fictitious but nevertheless real place named Winesburg, Ohio, the eponymous title of the book.  With the exception of the narrator, George Willard, each character depicts some inner abnormality or distressed emotion: loneliness, horror, isolation, or existential dread.  The first story (the book is a series of short stories) is called “The Book of the Grotesques.”

Once we see through the “sweetness and light of people” we must confront the bitterness and darkness that also inhabits each human being.  The poem “Richard Cory” comes to mind, as well as most of what Kafka and Flannery O’Conner offer in their fiction.  Others (Shakespeare, Poe, Conrad, as well as many more) also find the funny and frightening element of grotesquerie central to their works.

Literature aside, the subjective view from this park bench shows the odd twists rooted in most people.  I say most because here comes a guy out for a stroll who appears unremarkable in every way.  He wears khakis, a polo shirt, clean sneakers, and has a standard-looking dog (cocker spaniel, I think) on a retractable leash.  Average height, average weight, fortyish, symmetrical features, no distinguishable abnormalities, a man we might call a regular, average fella.  I narrow one eye as I follow this man’s movement on the footpath and determine his grotesqueness is too well hidden for me speculate at the moment.  But it is there.  It must be.

I wonder.  Does he have a duffel bag full of women’s underwear that he tries on?  Perhaps he enjoys poisoning the neighborhood cats?  I am sure there is something twisted about this guy.  Then it occurs to me that for no reason beyond what I speculate, I am grotesque in that I gather such wild imaginings.

Ah, look at what comes here: a man wearing leather leggings and holding a dog leash to which is attached another man wearing leather chaps and little else.

It is a bright fall day, and I am unaccountably smiling.

Old White Guys

Isn’t it about time that old white guys quit calling all the shots?  They have had a long run with mixed reviews, but, I mean, really, let’s try a new strategy, shake things up a bit.  While John F. Kennedy and Teddy Roosevelt were relatively young when they became presidents, all the other U.S. presidents (save Barack Obama) would be classified as old white guys.  And with Trump’s ascent to the seat of power, we have affirmed that the richer and older and whiter and penis-bearing a person is, the greater the likelihood that he will snatch the keys to the front door of the White House.  Enough!  This trend must come to an end.  Fellas such as Donald Trump and Harvey Weinstein have done little to recommend themselves as anything other than leaders of a sexual offenders’ support group.  Trump could hold forth on the strategies of effective pussy grabbing, followed by Weinstein’s timeless demonstration of masturbation in front of shocked and disgusted young women.  Moreover, each day lately, another privileged, old, white guy is implicated in a sexual exploitation scandal.  Could it be that just about all men who fall into the powerful, white, and old category are in fact sexual manipulators, sick men who need to prove their dominance in a carnal manner?  How could that be?

At least in the cases of Donald and Harvey, these exhibits for the prosecution have money, power, influence, and centuries of patriarchal hegemony—all of which condition us because that’s the way it has been for, oh, as long as anyone can recall.  Give the car keys to the old white guy.  Let him drive.  It’s okay.  Old guys have been taking us for a ride since the invention of the wheel.  Fair disclosure: I am an old white guy, though lacking the wealth and influence (and, I would hope, the moral failing) that would allow me to take you all for an audacious ride.

But wait!  Considering recent political and social developments, perhaps it is time to change the pattern.  It is not simply two guys representing a whole privileged generation—two dreadful people, by the way—that lead me to this conclusion.  Look at America’s board rooms, at the corporate HQs, at the powerful committees in Washington D.C., at the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and at the top earners in about every quarter of our work world.  What you find is a preponderance of old white guys.  Power guys.  Rotary Club members.  Golfers.  Tailored suit people.  Bully boys.  Lexus drivers.  Tax haters.  Movers and shakers.  They sit in the halls of power and influence damn near everything.  And by the way, these votaries bound to influence and wealth will not yield their positions willingly.  Why should they?  Surrendering power is more difficult that acquiring it.

Excuse the cliché, but here is my unwanted and unasked-for suggestion: let’s take out the trash and do some deep-cleaning.  Time to take the harnesses off the old guys and put them out to pasture.  Time for youth and women and ethnic minorities to take their places as caretakers of the American experiment.  Time for our leaders to reflect the racial and cultural diversity of who we are.  We no longer have a monotype society, a father-knows-best society; rather our country has grown complex in its structure and composition.  So, it follows, doesn’t it, that change is necessary for healthful vital signs of our republic?

That change is already happening, in case you have not noticed.  Each week, each month, more and more people conclude that our leadership model is broken.  The old power structure, represented by Trump and all those like him, are, of course, fighting back.  Inevitably they will yield to all the formidable societal forces demanding a new template, a new social order.  It must be.  No stopping it.  For now, our country will suffer from the malaise and fever that comes from systematic corruption.

The fever will break.

We will make America well again.

Patriotism, Flags, and Scoundrels

“When tyranny comes to the United States, she will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a bible.”                    --Gore Vidal

       In a Tacoma cemetery this past Memorial Day, thousands of little flags marked the headstones of those who served in the military.  Along with millions of Americans, I felt a swelling emotion, pride mingled with commiseration, for those men and women who gave years of their lives to defend our freedoms and way of life.  Regardless of one’s political leaning, a visit to the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial Wall in Washington D.C. will bring about a visceral definition of patriotism.  For obvious reasons, stomping around graveyards and hallowed memorials stimulates us to appreciate our country, its values, its culture, and its place in the world.

A few summers ago, our travelling party strolled along the paths of The Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial in Colleville-sur-Mer, Normandy, France, and found the experience moving as we pondered the magnitude of the historical battles fought offshore, on nearby beaches, and atop high bluffs along the coast.  Here again, moved by the capacities of our countrymen and countrywomen to defend our way of life, we felt great appreciation for those guardians who died or were injured standing up for all of us.  Even so, why, one wonders, does it take a war to strike up patriotic music and get us all marching in a common cause?

       Group devotion and allegiance for our republic, its culture, its people, its customs and values defines patriotism, and it is most evident during times when our way of life needs defending.

       You may remember, after 9/11 an electric jolt of patriotism surged through the veins of our citizens.  In my small community, people wore Old Glory lapel pins, flags flew from porches up and down the streets, and dozens of young men and women suspended their career plans and headed for military recruitment centers.  We were attacked on our own soil, which gave us a common purpose and a sense of victimhood.  Nothing provokes a nation’s sense of unity more than a violent incursion from a sworn enemy.

As we all know, flights around the world were cancelled shortly after the attack, and heroic acts of bravery and kindness followed the toppling of the Twin Towers.  Thirty-eight wide-body transatlantic flights landed in Gander, Newfoundland.  Over 7000 passengers received food, shelter, and caring touches from the people of that small Canadian town, its population slightly more than the number of stranded passengers.  Disasters often bring out the best in people, and our Canadian cousins displayed uncommon kindness during our time of need, a like-minded patriotism of sorts.

Disasters, though, may breed overreactions, folks allowing their sense of patriotism to goad others into lockstep marching.  In some ways, patriotism, as a reaction to the last war, is the cause of the next war.  Here in our quiet community one old soldier insinuated himself into the local high school assembly a few days after 9/11.  Moved by the atmosphere of crisis and tragedy, the principal agreed to turn over the program to the old soldier who made every student stand and sing “God Bless America.”  Okay, a nice gesture, right?  But the retired military man kept coming back insisting that children salute the flag, pledge allegiance, and sing vainglorious hymns extolling the virtues of our country.  Soon the principal and all his staff became fed up with the xenophobic overreach of our ultra-patriot and cut him off before he could arrange whatever he had in mind next, probably a book burning of all Muslim writings, complete with a heart-warming ceremonial bonfire at halftime on the fifty yards line during the homecoming game.  Conclusion: if one wants to watch a patriotic parade, fine.  But one should not be induced to join lockstep marching.

Too much!  Lately, the struggle to define patriotism has rendered exclusionary results.  Ultra-progressives and ultra-conservatives see different versions of what it means to be a patriot.  But, really, no one has exclusive ownership of patriotism.

It is simple to appreciate.  It is an unshakeable commitment to one’s country.  No one political ideology has a monopoly on it.  Dissent can be patriotic.  Going to jail can be patriotic.

But some gestures of patriotism are staged theatrical displays, folks just showing off and behaving badly in the process.  They include:

     Flying an oversized American flag from the bed of a pickup truck.  Or, for all that, burning the flag in the town square.

     Screaming “USA USA USA” at international sporting events.

     Selling cars, mattresses, hot tubs, and anything else by using our national holidays (Memorial Day, Veterans Day, the 4th of July) to headline big blowout sales.

     Claiming every person who wears a uniform is a hero regardless of circumstance, even those who hold ambivalent views on allegiance to our country.

The Patriot Act seen from a slightly different angle might be called the Unpatriotic Act.  More, most of us excoriate and judge harshly those who promote radical political viewpoints, which goes a long way toward discouraging a free and open society.  Can we accept that we are not a one size fits all society?

A few years ago, my wife and I spent the better part of a year in Canada, and on Remembrance Day that year we were astounded to witness patriotism Canadian style.  The shops closed as people gathered to honor flag and country.  Even though our neighbors had sharp differences over politics, they demonstrated an amazing unity for shared values.

Would that we did the same here in America.  All in all, we have plenty to rally round, but like contentious children, we insist on bad behavior and I’m-right-and-you’re-wrong deportment.

Think of patriotism this way: we are one big dysfunctional family here in America, but family we are regardless.  We quibble, argue, curse one another, and harm one another without shame.  But finally, we are one family sharing more than we wish to admit.  Hey, we need to talk.  Screwed up families are like that!

NOISE POLLUTION

 

       Various categories of pollution—air, light, soil, water, visual, radioactive, and thermal—have degraded the habitat of the human family regardless of where we wander on earth.  Add one more to the growing list of pollutants that foul the home in which we live: noise.

       Think of it this way.  Step right over here.  Open the door.  Come through.  I’ll show you around our home.

       Straightaway you notice blue clouds of cigar smoke so thick in the parlor that you are forced to duck down the hallway, gagging as you cover your mouth with your hand.  You walk into the kitchen and decide that a drink of water would clear your throat.  Yuck!  Water from the tap is brownish, brackish, and tastes vile.  What’s more, it comes out in a trickle.  Oh well, perhaps a bite to eat will settle your growing anxiety.  So you go to the pantry only to find post-it notes stuck on most of the canned food.  “Warning!  Contents may be contaminated with pesticides and/or unnecessary hormones.”  Now what?  What more could possibly foul the comforts of home?  Feeling hemmed in, you climb to the widow’s watch to view the night sky.  Seeing stars should deliver a spiritual sense of well-being as it has since you were a child.  Soon you realize that you cannot see even one fucking star because lights from the mall, the city, the ballpark, and the industrial complex overwhelm the heavens with a magnesium glare.  Forced to retreat, you wind up in the cellar.  There you find a Geiger counter on a workbench.  Yikes!  You turn it on just for kicks, and the gizmo goes crazy firing clacks like Gatling gun.

       Holy Moly!  Nowhere in this house is contusive to a healthful life.  Nowhere!

       Perhaps a good night’s sleep will ease your mind.  Feeling your way back through the funky cigar smoke, you find a bedroom down another dark hallway.  Ah, restorative slumber, yes, and tomorrow you will face the chores of making the house habitable.  But wait!  What the…what is that noise?  Beeping from a truck as it backs up, a pile-driver pounding the earth down by the railroad tracks, a car alarm nearby, a low-flying jet plane directly over the roof, and a car stereo full blasting through the intersection.  Good God!  Is it possible for this place to get any more disquieting?  As soon as you ask the question, artillery practice gets underway at Joint Base Fort Lewis and McChord.  Thump!  Thump!  Thump!

       Not to overstate the analogy, but shall we simply admit that we are not good stewards of our larger home—this good earth?  The more we foul the tender balances of where we live, the closer we edge toward collapse.  At some point, repairing the results of our abuses will fail; remedial solutions will have no redeeming effect.

       Of all the ways we despoil our estate, noise pollution gets less attention than the numerous other ways we lay waste to our environment.  Each decade we turn up the volume on the racket we create.  Our machines and transportation systems insinuate clamor into our lives.  More people, more machines, more need for earplugs and white noise.  The constant auditory assault infects our health and well-being in ways that we are just now beginning to understand.  Weed eaters, leaf-blowers, lawnmower engines, rackety compressors, chain saws, and motorcycles without mufflers have forced municipalities to impose noise ordinances all over America.  Even so, noise grows louder as more people buy hootenannies and snowmobiles and Briggs and Stratton engines for everything from pressure washers to racing machines.  There seems no end to the noisemakers we employ.

       Noise creates human stress, not to mention the disruptions visited on animals, birds, aquatic creatures when they suffer from the tortuous din we spread over the surface of our world and beneath the surface of the sea.  Simply put, noise damages us and all the creatures with whom we share space.

       A few years back, my wife and I took a sabbatical to a small outport in Newfoundland.  I assumed that winter there would bring the peace and quiet found in remote northern places.  Far from cities and traffic, far from airports and sirens, Newfoundland would, I thought, be a sanctuary from the clanging, noxious urban areas in which I had always lived.  As we watched the snow pile to the tops of our windows and icebergs float into our bight, we heard the real sounds of winter: snowmobiles pouring over the snowbanks, young riders revving their engines and whooping it up.  I had not heard such racket since as a child I attended hydroplane races on Lake Washington during Seafair in Seattle (roaring engines one could hear 20 miles away, plus Blue Angels and other jet planes zooming over the lake in a celebration of deafening noise).  So much for my idealized boreal winter sanctuary far from the madding crowd.

       Perhaps I have misophonia, which entails an insensitivity to sound usually associated with OCD.  But it is not just me.  We keep turning up the volume.  Noise pollutes our world, and it is pernicious.  Smoking cigarettes, over time, will kill you; just as the bombardment of noise, nuanced though it may be, will also kill you.

Beggars

Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?

You must have noticed that we have turned into a nation of beggars.  Every way one turns, someone has a hand out with an entreaty that you cover it with a folding money.  Charities, scams, political groups, religious organizations, colleges, and thousands of gimmie-gimmie organizations stare unrequitedly at your wallet.

It may seem ungracious and parsimonious of me to turn away from the blitzkrieg of beggars, but I am blocking their calls, saying no to most, if not all, of their face-to-face requests, and feeling righteous and emboldened to say “No.”  No, no, no.

No, I am not a skinflint.  Over the years, I have contributed to many good causes, and that pattern will continue as long as I remain rational, but the pushy foot-in-the-door approach to fundraising has soured me and, sad to say, given me a distinctly Scrooge-like attitude toward those whose job it is to extract money from the public.  Dozens of requests for donations flow into my email box each week.  The phone brings more beggars.  The radio voice hectors me with solicitations to donate my car, my boat, even my house for a good cause.  There is no escape.  Which brings to mind Herman Melville’s last novel, The Confidence Man, an allegorical story that puts the question to the reader: Should anyone be trusted?  Hustlers present themselves whichever way one turns.

Just this morning a call came through, a man wanting donations for a law enforcement fund of some sort.  Was it a scam?  Who knows?  Perhaps some of the money raised actually goes to law enforcement needs, but how can we know?  Later, I went to a website that grades charities for honesty and percentage of funds put to good use.  Whoa!  Before I could find out about that police fund, an appeal blocked my screen asking for a donation for the very website that rates charities.  By the way, that law enforcement charity distributes a mere 6% of the funds they receive to aid police departments.  After operating costs, about 92% goes to fill the wallets of the swindlers who prey on an ignorant but well-meaning public.  If I were a cop I would want to throw those crooks into the hooscow.

Certainly, all beggars are not frauds.  Most of the highly trafficked corners near the off-ramps of I-5 here in Washington state feature a drifter with a sign asking for money, usually ending with an invocation to higher powers, something such as, “God Bless.”  If honesty were in play, many of these signs would read, “I’m addicted to drugs and/or alcohol and need your money to get high before nightfall—God Bless.”  So the ethical dilemma comes to this: do I help someone who is in need, or do I help to kill someone who is a martyr to addictions?  Giving a few bucks to the one holding the sign may be lifesaving.  On the other hand, I could be aiding a person’s suicide.  To further complicate matters, on rare occasions I make prejudicial visual assessments (well, that guy certainly does not look like a tweaker) before handing over a few dollars.  Should I trust my impromptu judgements?

As I do weekly, I drive into the Fred Meyer parking lot.  A woman pulls alongside of me as I walk toward the grocery store.  Her window rolls down.  “Pardon me, sir,” she says.  “I just came from the airport to drop off my brother, and I spent my last dollar on a gift for him.  Now I am nearly out of gas and fifty miles from home.  I wonder….”  You know the rest.

After filling my basket with eggs and veggies, I swipe my credit card through the digital reader.  While I wait for the transaction to post, the checker asks if I would like to contribute to the Children’s Hospital Fund.  “No!” I say emphatically.  Perhaps because I all but shout “No” I want to explain my refusal, but it would take some time and probably sound disingenuous to the indifferent checker.  To cover my overreaction, I merely say, “Another time.”

A simple explanation to a long disputation: if I choose to donate, it will be my initiative, not by someone forcing the moment with shame or awkward insistence.  Some aggressive begging strategies come close to extortion.  Each year a “Fill the Boot” campaign to support the Muscular Dystrophy Association finds dozens of firefighters in the streets to raise money for an unarguably good cause.  They walk between the two lines of traffic waiting at the red lights.  No way to avoid them because they knock on your car window as they shake the rubber boot presumably loaded with spare change and dollar bills.  This practice is not only dangerous but qualifies under any definition as aggressive begging, which many municipalities prohibit.  Wipe away smiles and friendly demeanor; the motivation coming from the solicitors is “Give me your money.”

Because of all the requests, I now use the advice of Charity Watch or Charity Navigator, two online sites that do enough research to direct one to worthy charities, ones that do not fleece the unsuspecting donor.  These watchdog organizations vet charities and provide transparency by breaking down the percentage of money that goes to soliciting funds, the number of dollars paid to those who manage the charity, and finally the actually number of dollars invested in the non-profit cause itself.  You will find that an alarming number of organizations prey on people’s munificence by paying executive management as much as 96  of the take.  Some charities funnel money to special undisclosed causes (Kars4Kids), so the kind giver is bamboozled into thinking his or her money is going to do one thing but will actually do something quite other.  In short, too many of these switcheroo campaigns are not what they seem.  Deception and dissembling effectively detour the good intentions of generous people into the wallets of deceitful predators.

Anyway, after I left Fred Meyer I turned on the radio and landed smack dab in the middle of the fund drive for our local PBS station.  How many ways can beggars make the point that public radio is a good cause?  Yes, it sure is, but, oh, they do go on about it.  All of a sudden commercial-free radio hosts the longest most annoying commercial ever imagined.  Come to find out they fail to mention that their reserves are incredibly loaded, $10,000,000.00 to the good.  But they want more, much more.  They even suggest—rudely, if you ask me—that before I die I should include them in my will.  Maybe I have a car I don’t drive.  Sure, they’ll take it.  As part of the listener’s motivation to contribute on this particular fund drive (“As soon as we reach our goal we will stop this fund drive.”) was to end the fund drive.  That is a cause I can get behind.

All sorts of organizations raise money to aid people or improve research.  Yes, I want to fight cancer.  Yes, I care about veterans.  Of course, I want to feed millions of starving people.  Thousands of good causes and worthy organizations try to meet the needs of a sick and unjust world.  But be aware of the amount of money that actually squeezes through the administrative strainer.  In some cases, few if any dollars go to the target cause.  If you contribute to a phony charity scheme, you’d do as well to send Bernie Madoff a check for his defense fund.

A few Christmases ago, I bought a goat as a gift.  I have forgotten how much I paid for the goat, but it wasn’t much.  The animal I donated through Oxfam went to sustain an impoverished family somewhere in what used to be known as the third world.

It is fitting for one to seek good causes that are meaningful to the gift-giver, so I am cutting off the noise from all beggars who hector us, even if some of them represent praiseworthy charities.  I know that may sound unkind, but I subscribe to Hamlet’s declaration: “I must be cruel only to be kind.  Thus bad begins and worse remains behind.”

Free Speech

Well, it isn’t, free I mean.  Like lunch and love, there is always a cost.  You must have noticed that billionaires and mega-millionaires, especially the celebrity types, have great influence on public policy.  We see them on television news, in the newspapers, and hear them on the radio.  No secret that money buys influence.

Luminaries may have no other qualifications beyond a fat bank account and name familiarity, yet those ingredients alone will buy a bully pulpit, a public relations staff, lawyers, and strategists to engineer some sort of advocacy. 

Some recent examples: what does a slum lord, thirty-something, wheeler and dealer (Kushner) know about international diplomatic negotiations?  What qualifies a NBA basketball owner (Cuban) to suggest that he would make a good running mate for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election?  More, what gives Bill Gates the wisdom to shape and recommend changes in our educational system?  Does The Rock (Dwayne Johnson) believe his CV, which includes pro wrestling and acting in godawful movies, think he can muscle his way to stations of national primacy simply because he is a tough guy with an oiled body and lots of tattoos?  Sorry, I do not mean to blow an air horn in a sacred place.  But what qualifies Trump, the village idiot, to any lofty position?  Added up, the voices we hear most often offer not much more than barking dogs do.  Amazingly, we, the hoi polloi, must listen to these familiars because they dominate the media.  They crowd the speakers’ platforms, and they demand our attention in the same way that the bearded lady catches our interest at a sideshow.

I am a fan of the 1st Amendment in theory, but in the arena of politics and influence in our culture I realize that speech and authority go to the rich and bloated.  In other words, money talks and celebrated status opens locked doors posted “keep out” for the rest of us.  Regular folks, listen.  The owner of the kitchen gets to bake while we wait around for the crumbs.

Sure, I speak my mind at the wine bar or in a letter to the editor, but my influence, if I have any, does little more than amuse my neighbors.  Perhaps I have nothing much to offer, but if I did it would make little difference because I don’t have the chops (as a musician might say).

If I had a few extra thousand dollars, I might rent a billboard and declare almost anything at all within reason.  Without that money or inside pull, I can stand beneath the billboard and shout my lungs out.  Which communication strategy do you think most effective?  Point is, free speech is, as we witness every day, most effective to those who shoulder their way to the front of the audience.

Perhaps this has been the way of civilization for centuries, no matter the political system or culture.  The rich and powerful purchase the word.  They control the conversation.  If you stand up at the back of the auditorium and disagree with the speaker, hired security will remove you from the premises, maybe even arrest you for interfering with free speech.

Free speech—we know—is not free.

Dystopia

Evidence mounts each decade that suggests we in the early part of the 21st century face a global death spiral.  Well, perhaps not so much a death spiral but rather something that resembles an attempted suicide, like taking one’s chances on downing a cupful of Jonestown punch.  In some academic quarters, experts conclude that we are already on life support with little hope for recovery.  Truth is, though, we cannot be certain, no matter what the medical chart reads, whether we will survive into the 22nd century.

Without sounding overly pessimistic, I admit the long arch of human history has often presented us with end-of-days menaces—Biblical plagues, bubonic plagues, global weather threats, world wars, and so on.  But as resilient as life on earth has proven to be, the dangers have grown as well as the odds that we will not survive much longer.  Perhaps this beautiful world and its contents may last a couple of hundred years, maybe a thousand, but the odds do not look good for a healthy world over the long run.  Minds far more insightful than mine have weighed the likelihoods of just how much longer our planet will sustain life, as we know it.

One such predictor, The Doomsday Clock, suggests that we are close, just a couple of figurative minutes before midnight when we all turn into dust, when we destroy our civilization with dangerous technologies, chiefly nuclear weapons.  Threats are numerous and put to us clearly: climate change, paucity of water and resources to support a burgeoning worldwide population, endless wars fought with catastrophic weapons of mass destruction, evolving pathogens for which medical science has no antidote, an astronomical event for which there is no defense.

The full list of “risks that threaten human civilization,” according to Global Challenges Foundation:

Extreme climate change

Nuclear war

Global pandemic

Ecological catastrophe

Global system collapse

Major asteroid impact

Super-volcano

Synthetic biology

Nanotechnology

Artificial intelligence

Unknown consequences

Future bad global governance

Steven Hawking said: "Although the chance of a disaster to planet Earth in a given year may be quite low, it adds up over time, and becomes a near certainty in the next thousand or ten thousand years," he [Hawking] told the BBC. "By that time we should have spread out into space, and to other stars, so a disaster on Earth would not mean the end of the human race."

It is hard to envision a real-life Star Trek exodus from this neat solar system to some distant and future home/world for humankind.  And since an ark will not play into the narrative this time, what will we do for a supporting cast: dogs, trees, fish, insects, birds, all those important environmental co-inhabitants that make living here on earth so magical?  The landscape, seascape, heavenscape, all settings will be altered.

These wild speculations are not fanciful if we consider all the damage life on earth has suffered (five extinctions over the history of our blue globe).  But we should face the conclusion that another endgame, possibly engineered by humans, is as inevitable as fire feeding on fuel.

Doublespeak

After airport cops dragged Doctor David Dao off a United Airlines flight recently, the first public comment from United’s CEO was to apologize for having to “re-accommodate” the passenger.  That doublespeak expression, “re-accommodate,” is less objectionable than saying, “We threatened the passenger, physically abused him, and then hauled his ass off the plane.”  Language works that way—if truth needs a makeover to mask a flaw, doublespeak, euphemisms or jargon can provide a distracting cover.

You have probably received a robo call that began, “This is not a solicitation….”  That lie preceded a solicitation.  Shameless lies work as well as doublespeak because a gullible public just does not often think critically.  Um, have we ever?  We become accustomed to the doubletalk and simply shrug our shoulders in acceptance of language that on close inspection is dishonest, misleading, and blurry.

For the purpose of confusion, it is much better to acknowledge “collateral damage” than to admit, “Regretfully, we killed a multitude of innocent civilians.”  Along those same lines, among the espionage people there is an expression “wet work,” which indicates an assassination is on someone’s job description.  “Wet work,” really?  Naturally, it is much better to die from “friendly fire” than from enemy bullets.  Oh, you know how this works.  Wrap a bitter pill in a square of cheese to get it down your dog’s throat.  Language is flexible and can be twisted into grotesque shapes to mislead one and sundry.

George Orwell’s observation: “Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”  If a politician does not want to vote for a tax increase, he may frame his vote as a user fee.  If a CEO needs to boost profits for his or her shareholders, the term downsizing replaces less attractive word choices such as layoffs or firings.

In many ways, we are all susceptible to propaganda.  The doublespeak method comes from various high pulpits—media, government, public relation firms, academicians, CEOs, and commercial advertisers.  If we were to count the doublespeak lies and deceptions inflicted upon us each week, we would see the pattern of damage to our sense of honesty.

Sometimes the nakedness of telling truth is unnerving, I know, but it is much better than coming up with a phrase such as “servicing the target,” a military expression for bombing an enemy outpost.

In the spirit of truth, I have always had a fondness for one firebrand character in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I, a man named Hotspur.  He insisted on cutting through the verbiage and posturing of those around him.  He wanted plain-speaking dialogue and people who led principled lives.  He said, “O, while you live, tell truth and shame the devil!”  Certainly, Hotspur cares more about honor and honesty than he does about patience, impetuous as he is, but I like him for his honest speech and lack of guile.

“How much do you usually charge for a gift?” I asked after an offer of a free gift if I purchased a subscription for a certain local publication.  Really, sloppiness and deception is everywhere in our language.

It is a daily challenge for all of us when someone asks, “Are you pro-life or pro-choice?”  Simply reply, “Both.”  You do not need to decode foolish doublespeak.