Weird, perverse, lethal, vulgar, stupid

Of course I’m talking about the internet. I saw a link to Stephen Hawking this week where he stated there was no heaven. It took me to an AOL site called Weird which seems to be a perennial beat. It wasn’t Hawking that was weird , it was all the things on the same screen with his view of the Universe. “Any tweethearts out there?” A large ad for Argosy University which has as much value as a degree from Kay Kyser’s Kollege of Musical Knowledge, Behold the Jesus fish stick. May is zombie awareness month.
This is an example of the great symbol drain noted by Neil Postman. Such sacred or serious symbols such as the flag, Jesus, Lincoln and Hawking are juxtaposed next to Donald Trump, Dennis Rodman and fish sticks.
Just as advertising has decimated the narrative on television it is now over-distracting the message on the laptop.
And speaking of the medium is the message: McLuhan! Thou shouldst be living at this hour: We hath need of thee. He predicted this as the waning of the literate print world was giving way to the acoustic, tribal visual world . Perhaps he wouldn’t even be surprised by Facebook and Twitter. After all, he coined the term “the global village”.
Where does that leave us in a world that won’t leave us alone
Abandon hope all ye who enter here. Leave your privacy at the door. Join a chat room and have a stranger call you names and insult you. Run a classified on Craigslist and have someone come over and kill you. Bump into a porn site and leave the house in handcuffs
There seems very little that is humane or rational on the web. It’s now all gossip or links to dubious commercial destinations. It trivializes the human condition but you can’t spoof a tsunami, or water down a flood or send up a plane crash. One of Dwight MacDonald’s prime examples of “Masscult” , the dumbing down of culture, was the new, simplified version of the King James Bible, robbed of its majestic language and reading like a press release. This was 60 years ago. What can we look forward to for the functionally illiterate high school graduate of the future: The King Jimmy Bible?

Revenge is sweet

Osama bin Laden in dead. Great news for everyone, although I do have reservations about the crowds screaming USA, USA. This isn’t the Miracle on Ice. Still, as one who was caught up in the joyous celebrations for both VE Day and VJ Day I can understand the emotion. It’s a victory to be savored. I have no idea how our Special Ops did it (we’ll have to wait for the Bruce Willis movie to see) but it was quite brilliant. Also clever was the burial at sea. No pilgrimages, no burial site, no monuments. He’s gone. George Orwell wrote that he couldn’t really hate Hitler because he saw so much pain in his face. This didn’t win him any friends in England but it was a personal, human reaction. Looking into bin Laden’s history we see that he was using our Stinger missiles to help drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan . He was in our good books then. But when he returned to Saudi Arabia he was disgusted with our deal with the oil rich royal family there. He then became a sort of Arabic Che Guevara and turned from a gentle (the papers description of him) and idealistic young man into a murderer. I hark back to Mary Shelley’s famous novel “Frankenstein”. It has nothing to do with Boris Karloff but is a morbid story warning about the dehumanization of art and the corrupting influence of science. The final lines are chilling and apropos of bin Laden’s ending: The Monster said, “my ashes will be swept into the sea by the winds” .He sprung from the cabin window, as he said this, upon the ice-raft which lay close to the vessel. He was soon borne away by the waves and lost in darkness and distance.

Bill and Kate's Excellent Adventure

As if you didn’t already know about the wedding of the century between Prince William and Catherine Middleton. They are now heirs-in-waiting and given a steady diet of Malvern Water and constant attention they should be ready to ascend the throne in, oh, about thirty years. Until then, you shall see them dressed smartly in every magazine and reality show on earth. So far they have even had a pizza done with their likeness as a topping. Top that Donald Trump (the T is silent). They have now performed (in Phillip Larkin’s wry phrase) “their tabloid fertility rites”.
I love the new titles: Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and the unbeatable new monikers Baron and Baroness Carrickfergus. As for us, The King of Queens is not listed in Burke’s Peerage and The Dukes of Hazzard were only a television dynasty, but we do have one person who outranks anyone produced by England: Duke Ellington.
Actually, I know a couple in San Francisco named Bill and Kate. They live a sane middle class life with their two sons and don’t have to worry a fig about the oppressive and omnipresent paparazzi. Human lives don’t really need 24/7 press coverage unless that’s what the great unwashed demands of them, until the day they die, and then it really heats up. (Pace Princess Diana).
Orwell said the English were just one big family, with the wrong people in charge. Hopefully, he is wrong about this couple. I won’t be around to see it. We still have to deal with Bonnie Prince Charlie and Dowdy Old Camilla

Classmates, reunions and Hard Truths.

This is not going to be pleasant reading. If you do get through it I’ll have some comforting words for you.
I’ll be 76 next month. Same day every year, May 8th. It won’t be as joyous as May 8, 1945 when I celebrated both my 10th birthday and VE Day riding around Edmonton Alberta in an open car until way past my bedtime. As Scott Fitzgerald said, “the greatest thing life can give you is youth”.
I was at a reunion last week of staffers (not me) who worked together on the UC Berkeley Daily Cal newspaper in the 1950’s. They’re still a pretty spirited lot, have all their marbles, are courageous but are coming to the last chapter of the story. One has had a stroke and walks with a cane, one is recovering from cancer and has her head covered with a cap, the rest are balding, gray haired, widows or widowers. My zaftig wife is one of them but she still has hair the color of Rita Hayworth’s.
When Casey Stengel was showing his young outfielders how to play the ball off the fences one of them said, “How does an old guy like you know this stuff?” and Casey replied, “Jeez kid, I wasn’t born this age”. None of us were.
I have a high school reunion next month in Vancouver but won’t be going. It’s too far and too depressing. My best friend from the sixth grade and President of the Class didn’t even make it to the 25th reunion. He had drowned in his thirties. At the 55th I asked my “two kiss” girlfriend” of my Senior year if her feckless, divorced husband was still around and she just pointed up to the sky, the shortest, sweetest obit I’ve ever seen.
The giant scythe keeps mowing us down with a bumper crop on the horizon. But, as Jean-Luc Picard says, “It’s a condition of our existence”. However, what is the quality of our existence these days anyway? Recession, wars, poverty, terror, Newt Gingrich. “People in nursing homes die watching late-night television,” Garrison Keillor said, “ and if I were one of them I’d be grateful when the darkness descends”.
Orwell advised his readers to face the hard truth that we are all forgotten in one generation and in two no one will ever know we had ever lived.
So, here’s my advice to keep the ball rolling, no matter what age you are: read more poetry, more Hagar The Horrible, go to the movies but only if it’s a Pixar film, don’t waste time with Oprah or the evening news, compliment three people every day, including strangers. As Yogi Berra says, “It isn’t over till it’s over”. If this has left you depressed get out your DVD of “Singin’ in the Rain” or put on the Hi Lo’s cheerful version of “Life is just a bowl of cherries” with the life-reinforcing chorus: “Live and laugh at it all, you know, like Ha-Ha, Ha-Ha, Ha-Ha”.

Faust Finds The Formula

The new film “Limitless” is a modern take on the legend of the man who sells his soul for youth, knowledge, wealth and power. Only he gets away with it and the devil goes away empty-handed.
As the promo line says, “What if a pill could make you rich and powerful (the way it does large pharmaceutical companies). It’s one of those faux literary films like “Inception” all full of the special effects that infantile young men love.
The lead character, Morra, starts out as a feckless loser, moocher, bum. He comes across the “pill” by chance and instantly is focused, energetic and quite brilliant. The pill wears off , so to keep supplied, he has many brutal adventures, kills a few people until he finally makes a fortune and learns how to make the pill safe and abundant (for himself, nobody else).
But what does he do with this power? Become a modern Prometheus, champion of mankind? Who dat? No, he goes to Wall Street, makes bazillions and in the final scene he is running for the US Senate. There are no ethics or morality in this film. For that you need to see “The Lincoln Lawyer”.
Morra doesn’t want to cure cancer, save Africa a la Albert Schweitzer, work out the gaps in Quantum theory, no, he wants to go to Washington, be on CNN, meet Katie Couric.
What an underachiever. As we used to say in high school, “what a pill!"

Suze Orman channels Ben Franklin

I saw Suze Orman, the financial guru with the butch haircut, declare on TV that the American Dream was dead. Sorry Thomas Jefferson. Using her blend of simpleminded and unsophisticated language (she is not a trained economist) she claimed that the new American Dream is peace of mind and frugality, a page from Poor Richard’s Almanack. A penny saved is a penny earned. Waste not, want not.
I can’t disagree with her although it does dispense with one of the tenets of bourgeois living, namely the materialist urge which provided the incentive for work.
So, who will survive the slump? Significant shifts in economic power are here already. The Chinese are buying Buicks hand over fist. We’re vulnerable because of our dependence on oil and the bite it takes out of our disposable incomes. Save money? Fiscal sociology is the central feature of a modern political economy. We’re a consumer society. As Marx said in The Communist Manifesto, “ the bourgeoisie has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all previous generations together.” Poor Karl can’t get no respect from Americans.
Who would put themselves in hock for a Cadillac today? Who wouldn’t scissor their credit cards with their cunning fine print and never-ending fees? But that’s the problem. Western society is dependent on wants and the squander of resources on needless products of status and display. The New York ad agency Young & Rubicam once said: “All you NEED is a cave, a fire and a piece of meat”. So much for needs in a society dependent on wants and a multitude of products for status and display.
In my blog of Nov. 8. 2010 I quoted Marx, Veblen and others who don’t have TV shows. Orman wouldn’t know Keir Hardie from Andy Hardy so she can’t enunciate classical or modern economic theory. As McLuhan says, television pollutes the thought environment. She runs a “helpful hints” column, a Penny wise and Pound foolish approach. It’s somewhat like the fortune cookie I got this week that said wisely, “Look to your inner being for guidance”. Indeed I shall. Still, I suppose she is trying to help the poor middle class get back on its feet. People who have lost their jobs, lost most of their home equity, their savings and their hope can use a little feelgood talk. I’ll even chip in with some useful advice of my own: give up valet parking and watch those pennies add up!

What makes Gatsby run?

Let me play literary critic for a moment. I’ve just finished a book that I haven’t read since high school. It’s Budd Schulberg’s “What Makes Sammy Run?”, a scandal when it was first published in 1941 and far over the head of this reader circa 1952.

But now older and much better read, I saw something I wouldn’t have seen before, nor would many other readers: it is a companion book to the pre-eminent novel of the twentieth century, Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby”.

American Lit is now in session. Both novels have first person narrators: Sammy’s Al Manheim is Gatsby’s Nick Carrington. Both main characters are uneducated young men who make big money and achieve success on their terms. Both Gatsby and Sammy change their name to “Americanize” it. Both yearn for the same wrong and unattainable woman. Both books have New York City as central locales.

Of course the action takes place a decade apart and the backgrounds are very different. Gatsby is from the Midwest and Sammy Glick is from a poor lower Manhattan family.

It happens that Schulberg and Fitzgerald knew each other in Hollywood and worked on a film together with disastrous results.

Gatsby remains the greatest novel of the twentieth century while “Sammy” is now just a footnote, like other Hollywood novels such as Christopher Isherwood’s “Prater Violet” and Nathaniel West’s “Day of the Locust”

Scratch a novelist and you’ll find a moralist, which is the strong bond between the two books. The final passage of Gatsby is considered one of the most lyrically tragic and beautifully written in literature.

But the final paragraphs of “Sammy” are no slouch either, reflecting on the moral lessons life teaches us. “It was too late to hate him or change him,” says the narrator, “his will had stiffened, formed to the life-molds, the terrible hungers of body and brain, the imposed wants, the traditional oppressions and persecutions”…and so we beat on, boats against the current.