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“A Sickly Moment of Dark Surprise”

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Unexpected

It is a curious thing, the death of a loved one. We all know that our time in this world is limited, and that eventually all of us will end up underneath some sheet, never to wake up. And yet it is always a surprise when it happens to someone we know. It is like walking up the stairs to your bedroom in the dark, and thinking there is one more stair than there is. Your foot falls down, through the air, and there is a sickly moment of dark surprise as you try and readjust the way you thought of things.—Lemony Snicket, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can’t Avoid

“Like Beads on a String”

Kurt Vonnegut

The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.

When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in the particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is “So it goes.”—Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five

Papa Bear Gets It Right

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“Papa Bear” Bill O’Reilly

The nickname is from Stephen Colbert, who has occasionally had him on as a guest on his Comedy Central show. In all the media and political verbiage being flung back and forth yesterday, he made probably the most accurate statement of why Obama won last night: “It’s not a traditional America any more…. The White Establishment is now a minority.”

While O’Reilly meant that in the most rueful way possible, it’s what I have been saying for years. The whole Conservative political movement in the United States has been driven by aging Whites, many of whom feel disenfranchised and alienated. They tend to be either rich (a small minority of them), or small businessmen who made it big at one time and are now facing an attrition of their past gains, or poor and wanting to identify with the rich. In any case, they are not young. If they have any children, there’s no guarantee that their children are either numerous or politically in step with their parents.

Even though I am White, I am part of that new America that O’Reilly decries. I am not a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP); nor am I Scotch-Irish; nor am I a member of any other demographic cohort that runs with the Right Wing. I am a White Hungarian Renegade Catholic (WHRC) with Black, Latino, and Asian sympathies.

When I used to work with census data at Urban Decision Systems some twenty years ago, I saw the handwriting on the wall for the White political establishment.

The Handwriting on the Wall

Over the next decade or so, most of the Tea Party recidivists will either die out or enter nursing homes. Those who remain will be increasingly irrelevant in the face of a demographic groundswell for those who had, until lately, been lumped together as “minorities.” In Los Angeles, it is the Whites who are in the minority. And, really, it’s not so bad as all that.

It has always been the fate of political establishments to be supplanted. Remember the Irish immigration of the 1830s and 1840s? Then it was the “Yellow Peril” when people feared being replaced by Chinese coolies who were brought in to work on the railroads. Then it was the turn of us Eastern Europeans later in the 19th and early 20th centuries as they arrived to escape political and religious persecution. Then it was the turn of the Mexicans.

Somehow, enough always remains of America to be worthwhile, even if there is a slightly darker shade of skin, an epicanthic fold about the eyes, or broken English. Hell, I didn’t even know the English language existed until I showed up in kindergarten. (That was just before the days of a TV set in every home.)

So yesterday I called it right. I thought Obama would win. And I think we all will win in the long run as a result. Don’t worry about me becoming an embittered Conservative complaining about the relentless tides of change. That’s what life is all about.

 

 

Notes on the Zombie Apocalypse

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What’s With the Zombies Already? No, Wait, That’s Just a Republican!

Until George Romero’s 1968 film The Night of the Living Dead, zombies were simply thought of as Voodoo-reanimated corpses. A good example is the character (if it can be called one) of Carrefour in Val Lewton’s lyrical I Walked with a Zombie (1943). Then, too, there was Victor Halperin’s early White Zombie (1932) starring Bela Lugosi. Also zombies (or was it vampires?) played a role in Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel I Am Legend.

But it was Romero who really got the ball rolling and transferred the concept from an African or Haitian context to the general population. And the idea took hold, especially among the young who, perhaps, saw zombies as a metaphor for the breakdown of civilization and, perhaps, the mindlessness of an older generation that won’t let the young get on with their lives.

In any case, now that the Twilight novels of Stephenie Meyer have blunted the whole concept of vampires for young males, it is perhaps natural that they moved on to the zombies as the new thing in horror.

It was only a matter of time before the concept of a zombie apocalypse was born. What happens when the zombies threaten to attack en masse? Even the august Centers for Disease Control (CDC) got into the act by issuing a tongue-in-cheek website entitled Preparedness 101: Zombie Apocalypse. Actually, it was a shrewd move because, if you are prepared for a zombie apocalypse, you are prepared for any eventuality.

Looking around me at America today, I see little chance of a zombie apocalypse. I think most Americans—even dead ones—are allergic to brains, whether devouring or even using them for anything more sophisticated than supporting a hat.

Photo credit: I hijacked the above photo from a website entitled You the Designer, which has thirty-seven zombie photos for your amusement and delectation.

 

The New Yorker Scores Again

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A Great New Yorker Cover

I don’t always like The New Yorker, which I slavishly continue to read every week. There are far too many detailed biographies of boring national business figures and other thieves whom I would consign to the lower circles of Dante’s Inferno. (Witness, in particular, the October 8, 2012 issue, which on one hand kisses up to the top 0.001% and on the other attempts to maintain its Liberal editorial policy.)

The September 24 cover, however, which is shown above, is a classic take-off on an America which I no longer profess to understand. It’s not that I’m a Socialist or even necessarily a Liberal. But most certainly I am not a flag-waving motherhood and apple pie type. Whenever I meet some Tea Party type, I usually prefer to think of myself more as a Hungarian-American rather than an American—just to distance myself. (Though, God knows, there are as many if not more horror stories connected with my Magyar antecedents.)

It is always surprising to me to fight Right Wingers in other countries, yet they are there. In fact, they are everywhere.

Will I ever come to terms with them? Probably not. At best, I can co-exist with them, and not always peacefully. I am always amazed by the disconnect by these people, who usually profess to be such good Christians, yet are so hateful toward the unfortunate, in direct opposition to Christ’s teachings. Trying to reconcile one’s beliefs and make sense of them does not appear to be part of the American way.

 

Happiness vs. Contentment

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Happiness is a lasting state which does not seem to be made for man in this world. Everything here on earth is in a continual flux which allows nothing to assume any constant form. All things change round about us, we ourselves change, and no one can be sure of loving tomorrow what he loves today. All our plans of happiness in this life are therefore empty dreams. Let us make the most of peace of mind when it comes to us, taking care to do nothing to drive it away, but not making plans to hold it fast, since such plans are sheer folly. I have seen few if any happy people, but I have seen many who were contented, and of all the sights that have come my way this is the one that has left me the most contented myself. I think this is a natural consequence of the influence of my sensations on my inward feelings. Happiness cannot be detected by any outward sign and to recognize it one would need to be able to read in the happy person’s heart, but contentment is visible in the eyes, the bearing, the voice and the walk, and it seems to communicate itself to the onlooker. Is there any satisfaction more sweet than to see a whole people devoting themselves to joy on some feast-day and all their hearts expanding in the supreme rays of pleasure which sign briefly but intensely through the clouds of life?—Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Reveries of the Solitary Walker, “Ninth Walk”

Spider Webs and Mucus

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Feels icky when they’re in your lungs

Doesn’t sound terribly appetizing, does it? But that’s only half the problem: Since we’ve returned from vacation, my lung feels as if it were filled with spider webs interspersed with globs of mucus. The choking that drove me crazy during the trip has gone down. What remains are juicy coughs which, instead of bringing up the gunk in the chest, seems to redistribute it among the spider webs.

In addition to another, shorter, course of antibiotics, I have been on Advair and Albuterol to fight the asthma that accompanied the choking spasms of coughing. I just wonder how long it will take before the coughing stops. After all, it has been going on for a little over three weeks now.

It is amazing what life can throw at one when one isn’t prepared. And how is one ever prepared to fend off an infection or a virus? They just seem to come higgledy-piggledy and have their way with you.

I have seen several of my best friends afflicted similarly in this last year—all with different things. One had MRSA; another, incipient Alzheimer’s; and yet another, a broken hip and wrist from a fall. When one is young, one could just don jogging shorts and go through all the approved little exercise routines, patting oneself on the back for doing the right thing and preventing any illnesses. One eats one’s prepackaged salad greens with the desired sugary/fatty dressing, the right breakfast cereal. I guess it helps, but there are no guarantees in this life.

One has to be eternally vigilant, but one is still mortal.

Photo Credit: The photo above comes from the National Geographic for Kids website.

The Life of the Party

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No, I was not the life of the party

Last night, Martine and I attended the wedding of my best friend’s second son, Eric. The ceremony and reception were held at the Heritage Museum of Orange County in Santa Ana, about 45 miles south of where we live.

Since Eric is more than a generation removed from us, it was interesting to see the differences between a social event for the young compared to old poops such as myself. To begin with, once the DJ cranked up the music, my communication skills were all but shut down. Although we were seated at a table full of people we knew and liked, I was unable to hear anything.

And insofar as dancing went, I have never had the skill the move in time with music—ever since I was banned from the folk dancing class at the First Hungarian Reformed Church in Cleveland back in 1950 for accidentally stomping on the feet of my dance partners. And, dear readers, I have not improved since then.

So, far from being the life of the party, I felt as if I were immured in a carbon prison like Han Solo in Star Wars III: Return of the Jedi. What made it worthwhile was being with old friends, not to mention honoring the wedding of someone I have liked since he was an infant. I find, after the wedding, that he is even more of an upstanding person than I had thought.

I wish him well as he treads the dangerous paths of this life.Fortunately, he has a killer sense of humor that I think will carry him and his young wife through in style.

Photo Credit: No, this was not taken at the wedding. It is an ad from a website called People Skills Decoded which offers to teach you how to be the life of the party. I suppose they could do that if they replaced my hearing and subtracted a few decades from my age.

Morose Delectation

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Mack Sennett Bathing Beauties

Certain stylistic differences separate us from our ancestors; but every once in a while, we can see people from eighty or a hundred years ago as if they were alive today. That was brought home to me at Cinecon today, when I saw a rare reel of Mack Sennett Bathing Beauties outtakes shot at nearby Venice Beach.

The scene was that the director had the girls run into the ocean. Evidently, the water was too cold for them, and they pleaded with the director off-screen to let them get used to the cold. Suddenly, the outlandish bathing costumes of a century ago and the stupid ringlets that the girls curled their hair into didn’t matter any more. In every other way, the scene could have been shot yesterday; and the girls were cute and rather appealing.

On Saturday morning, I saw a 1930 Fox Movietone newsreel of a stage rehearsal of a troupe of chorus girls entitled Backstage on Broadway. Again, once you looked past the inevitable blonde ringlets, the girls were incredibly beautiful, with gams that most of today’s women would kill for.

It is sad to think that virtually all of these girls are now dead. We snicker at minor details that divide their time from ours, and which place a spurious distance between us and them. No doubt their slang was outrageously different; and their everyday beliefs were probably more puritanical (though that’s hard to know for sure). In the Mack Sennett film, the bathing beauties were probably seen as brazen women, and the very large and appreciative male crowd along the Boardwalk lent credence to that that guess.

One of the poster dealers at the Cinecon show had a nude frontal body shot of the lovely Louise Brooks, whose dark bangs make her sexy even today. But, alas, she was found dead in her house from a heart attack after years of suffering from emphysema and arthritis. Mabel Normand, the most famous of Mack Sennett’s Bathing Beauties, died of tuberculosis in a sanatorium in 1930.

I suppose it’s dangerous to fall in love with ghosts. And yet the Lloyd E. Rigler Theater of the Egyptian Theater was filled with aging film fans, some of them in wheelchairs, whose eyes lit up at memories of their youth and of the women who made their lives seem worthwhile. Now they themselves are slowly vanishing into the past. New generations will take their place with dreams of tattooed and pierced young women in the outlandish costumes of Hollywood nightclubs.

Just remember: The outlandishness doesn’t count. They’re just people like us.

In the Year 2000

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It is always fun to look at how a previous age viewed the future. More than a hundred years ago, Jean-Marc Côté drew a series of illustrations to be used for cigar boxes and postcards depicting what the world would be like in the year 2000. You can view a selection of these pictures at The Public Domain Review, from which I have taken the charming “Rural Postman” above.

Far from having flying postmen covering the farm households of America, we are now considering how to pay to deliver mail to them at all. And what kind of fuel would all these personal flying vehicles use? And, given France’s horrible auto accident rate, who would police the traffic in the air so that an accidental sneeze or text message would not send flyers plummeting to their deaths below?

A casual look outside your window would demonstrate that the steampunk dreams of yesterday were not realized. We now live in a digital world, immersed in tiny handheld gadgets with teeny-tiny screens that contain our lives and distract us mightily from the business of daily life.

And our forecasts for the future? We are so tied now to a digital paradigm that we don’t see that it can—and will—be replaced by something else, and probably sooner than we realize. Subconsciously, we have internalized Moore’s Law, which states that the number of transistors on integrated surfaces doubles every four years. But as we know, trends do not last forever. There will be a new paradigm, a new equivalent to Moore’s Law, and there we go again!

What will it be? Can it be, possibly, a return to analog? It’s possible. There may even be something which we haven’t yet begun to imagine.

Nonetheless, I will hazard a prediction. I predict that the future will bring new wonders and new problems in roughly equal measure. Certain problems that we now regard as insoluble will be solved; and new problems which will seem insoluble will emerge. Of one thing we can be sure, our children will look upon the wonders of the digital age exactly the way we look at steampunk. Those thirty-somethings tapping away on their notebook computers and iPads at Starbuck’s will look like mustachioed suspender salesmen behind the wheel of their Ford Model-Ts.