Friday, January 28, 2011

America always works.

You can hear it in her poetry:
From Walt Whitman:
“I hear America singing.
The carpenter singing, the mason singing, the boatman singing,
The delicious singing of the mothers
Their strong melodious songs”.
From Langston Hughes:
“I too, sing America,
I am the darker brother,
I laugh and grow stronger,
I too, am America”.
From Marge Piercy:
“The people I love the best jump into work head first,
I want to be with people who submerge in the task,
Who do what has to be done.”
In a limerick:
“There once was a baker named Fred,
Who checked out his checkbook and said,.
My funds are so low
Guess I’ll knead some more dough
That’s the best way I know to make bread”.
As the curtain rises on “The Glass Menagerie”, Tennessee Williams’s narrator says “It was that quaint period, the thirties, when the huge middle class of America was matriculating in a school for the blind and were having their fingers forced down in the fiery Braille alphabet of a dissolving economy.” Even then, girls could still earn ten cents a dance and sing “Ain’t we got fun”.
The billionaire George Soros lost some serious money in the Crash of 2008 but said without bitterness, “I was betrayed by my dreams”. He has moved on, which is what I would advise everyone to do now. This week I read about Patricia Kluge who seems to have blown $100,000,000. She too, was betrayed by her dreams. As for Bernie Madoff and his rich clients, the word schadenfreude comes to mind. When I worked in Zurich we said “Das ist schade” when someone had a cold or a headache. Losing millions requires more advanced German.
All pain is instruction and so America is back in school and will emerge smarter about money, the market and mortgages.
I was fired once upon a time in a very cold room in Toronto by a guy wearing a cheap suit. Did the world end? It was the best thing that ever happened to me. I moved on and in three years I was in the best job of my life, living in London in a 5000 sq.ft. flat overlooking Regents Park. I could even approve my own expense account.
Things will work out for America. They always have. Stephen Sondheim penned a great song in “Follies” about the ups and downs of a showgirl. It goes something like this:
“Good times and bad times come and go and I’m still here…went through the Depression, met a big financier…and I’m here”.

Thursday, January 13, 2011

Wisdom can walk in any door.

I believe it was Russell who said, “ We all live the same lives”. That’s not Bertrand Russell, the philosopher, but the actor Kurt Russell. Just the same, it has the ring of truth. You can study Plato and Wittgenstein and not learn as much as you would from a few Fortune cookies.
If you remember the film “My Dinner With Andre”, Wally tells Andre that Fortune Cookies know exactly who they are going to. Mine do. Here are two recent ones: “Your senior years will be happy and fulfilling, and “Establish harmony and balance in your life”. For all I know Sarah Palin’s cookies say: “You will make big money spewing nonsense”.
I ponder something the dramatist Franz Werfel once said, “Mildness is wisdom”. This seems to be true everywhere but in present day America where someone mentally disturbed can buy a gun and go on a murder rampage.
You can study books on philosophy but they are only the tech manuals on morality. My insights mostly come from literature. “Either it comes easy or it doesn’t come at all”, “The greatest thing life can give you is youth”, “Her voice was full of money”, “Hit the baseball where they ain’t”. “The habit of careful veracity can be extended to the whole sphere of human activity, producing, wherever it exists, a lessening of fanaticism, with an increasing capacity of sympathy and mutual understanding.” That’s not Kurt, that’s Bert.

Thursday, January 6, 2011

The N-word goes down the memory hole

Winston Smith’s job at the Ministry of Truth in Orwell’s “1984, is charged with rewriting (really falsifying) history to conform to Party doctrine. This is what Mark Twain scholar Alan Gribben is doing in rewriting “Tom Sawyer” and especially “Huckleberry Finn”. He is replacing the N-word with “slave”, thus taking the text away from Twain and misinforming a whole generation of students. First of all, everyone knows what the N-word stands for and is really too antediluvian to be used by anyone today. But Twain was writing in 1885 before immigration and before any racial sophistication. This guy Gribben also changed the name of the villain in Tom Sawyer from “Injun Joe” to Indian Joe. When Smith found some bit of information that annoyed the Party, his job was to toss it down the “memory hole” for permanent destruction. His girlfriend Julia works for Pornosec, a division of the Ministry of Truth which provides “literature” of a sort for the Proles. Her novels are written by machine , and have only six possible plots which are shuffled around to distract the readers. “We’ll let the readers decide,” Gribben said. Actually I’ve just emailed him with my suggestion for another offensive book: Joseph Conrad’s “Nigger of the Narcissus”.
How about “ African-American of a ship that is overly vain”. Let the readers decide.