To Have and Have Not

In 1937 Ernest Hemingway published what even he called his, worst book. Critics agreed. It was a hodge-podge of short stories and a novella pasted together. He had lost his way after Farewell to Arms. Disappointing as the novel was you have to admire the title.

The name was about all that remained when Hollywood got through with it in 1944. Cuba, the setting in the book, became Martinique, under control of the Vichy government. Warner Brothers’ Howard Hawks tried to reincarnate Bogart’s Rick from Casablanca and give it a WW II twist. After all Casablanca was cash in the bank. In this version Bogey runs a small fishing boat in the Caribbean. The studio enlisted Hemingway’s rival, William Faulkner, to weigh in on the script and cast Hoagy Carmichael at the piano to play it again, Sam like Dooley Wilson to whom it was never quite said in the first place. The result owed more to Casablanca than Hemingway’s novel but was far more than a hill of beans.

The most memorable moments were Bogey’s liaison with Lauren Bacall. She was a sultry 19 year-old model from the Bronx who taught 45 year-old Bogart how to whistle. Just put your lips together and blow, became the most enduring line from the movie. They sizzled on screen and off in marriage till in death did he part in 1957.

The title had a double meaning or so it seems to me. The clear intention was to draw a distinction between the filthy rich and the great unwashed. However if an individual is to both have and have not anything it strikes me that it gets to a more metaphysical plane. To have achieved a measure of success or security is an illusory state which usually begs for more. You have it and you don’t. It’s never quite enough.

In any case the Haves and Have-Nots might be a caption for our times. The gap grows wider abetted by the High Court, stoked by Congress and fueled by Wall St. The top 1% own 40% of our country’s wealth while the bottom 80% own just 7%. The disparity has never been greater. The wealth of the Walton (Walmart) family alone is equal to the bottom 40% (140 million) Americans.

The numbers are numbing and headed south. They only hint at the human toll. The security and privilege that comes with wealth translates into political power. This insures continued domination of our policies and instruments of decision-making. Middle class stagnation can lead to a loss of personal empowerment. Many Americans have grown dispirited, alienated and cynical which removes them further from the agencies of possible change. The landscape of our youth exists only in the rear-view mirror. We have witnessed the slow collapse and disappearance of family farms, factories, downtown stores and inner cities. Morals have been bent so that greed is admired and with it corruption is a normal way of doing business, particularly in Washington.

Bogart seemed to know what was coming. The hard-boiled cynic finds his moral compass joining with the cause of the French Resistance. How far has our ship of state strayed? Seventy years later we have richer Haves and far more Have-Nots.

This country has been through many storms. Every generation or two we seem to experience a sea change of a sort. Yet out of the wreckage something new and unforeseen emerges. As Wallace Stevens wrote, There is a substance in us that prevails.

Patterns

In the march of time, if time indeed marches, I see four generations in the passing parade. Heading the procession would be my parents and bringing up the rear, today’s youth with my generation and Baby Boomers in between. In fact we all overlap and bump into each other but it satisfies my need to view from afar however dissonant the big brass band.

My mother and father were profoundly shaped by the Depression years. I understood their insecurities and the coming together against fascism. I have a fair grasp of my own contemporaries living through post-war prosperity, Cold-War anxiety and the upheavals of the sixties and early seventies. Our children experienced these social changes at an earlier age and came to terms, more or less, with an array of options including further individualization, Yuppie-dom and the falling away of community. Finally we have so-called Gen X, the Slackers, who fell to Earth in the wireless superhighway born with a silver phone in their mouths.

A century in brief admittedly over-generalized but all in the service of finding a pattern. We have gone from a nation of immigrants marked by assimilation, and ambition to a new lost generation which seems to have embraced a form of Nihilism. I witness a culture of repudiation, both in values and language. It feels like the beginning of dystopia.

Music is a rage against all the sentiment we accommodated. Pattern recognition, not literacy, is a measure of intelligence. Dress is a statement of disdain. Adolescence has been extended into the thirties. Our wars seem like an extension of computer games. Sensation function has replaced deliberation. Traditional institutions, political, academic and religious are regarded as irrelevant. Geography has been obliterated by the Internet. This may be the generation least conversant with History since the lights went out in the Dark Ages. There is a disconnect between an act and its consequence. One tweets their way out of a job…..like what just happened? Connectivity without purpose seems to prevail.

Another pehnomena which isn't altogether new is the tracing of dots that aren’t there as when the Far Right, who alone have a toll-free number to God, come back to tell us how we are being scolded with horrific weather. Let's blame those damn Liberals for those quakes, temblors and twisters.

New technology calls for new behaviors and perhaps the Slackers are more aligned. Some of our cultural norms need to be abandoned or repaired anyway. Do they smell deceit more acutely? Their short-hand language is a way of rejecting our sometimes graceful, sometimes bloated sentences and media rhetoric. Like it or not we are in the midst of Slacker Aesthetic.

Their Art is often random holding presumed givens to ridicule, challenging old hierarchies and rendering identities as battered. The Slacker Aesthetic is a declaration of cultural war. It is a call for raw authenticity mixed with detachment embedded in a highly commodified society. If the tattoos, lip-rings and torn jeans are a pose they are also a powerful signifier for like minds. Are we being re-tribalized?

Of course all my observations are noted from a distant perch. I’m trying to make sense of it with my habit of seeking a pattern. Maybe that very impulse of contextualizing has itself been discarded for being bogus. Maybe the Slackers need to be cut some slack; after all these are our heirs and this is the world we bequeathed them.

Unanswered Questions

There are certain Qs for which there may be no A. For instance, where do dead birds go? Or more importantly how did my collection of bumbblegum cards disappear? Or what happens to failed poets?

I shall tackle the third proposition since I am intimately acquainted with the species. in fact, I'm one of them. Some of them (us) are running workshops instructing others how to be one. There's nothing wrong with a nation of failed poets.

Most are unrecognizable having been absorbed into the hum-drum life. Perhaps that guy in the market who waters the lettuce is one or the checker who let me in the express lane with eleven items. Ordinary folks... of this world but not quite in it.

It needs to be said that by most measure's in our greed-driven society the term successful poet is an oxymoron. At best we put up with them as court jester or some nuisance on the far margins.

Before taking my place in line I generally let others speed through the checkstand in a happy stupor with bar codes beeping obediently. I prefer the queue that barely moves horizontally but offers vertical flight instead; where else but from my weekly fill of tabloids. A cursory glance at the headlines convinces me that I have located the sanctuary of failed poets.

If there isn't a story about inter-galactic visitations then it's another citing of JFK or Elvis or the nonagenarian child found frozen on the sunken Titanic.

I'd love to sit in on the meeting room of the fabulists, that garden of fecund minds where gossip grows wild and baby alligators are hatched into our plumbing. I knew I was on to something when I read about half a mermaid found in a tuna fish sandwich.

One less question to ponder; as for dead birds maybe the answer is in the tabloids.

Invention Is The Mother Of Necessity

Those of us raised on old studio movies know that Don Ameche invented the telephone a year before Spencer Tracy worked through the night to come up with the light bulb which he may or may not have put to his ear and said, “Hello.” He was exhausted, of course, and the world was waiting to be electrified.

We learned from movies the basics of life. Namely, that most everyone wore tuxedos, all navy men were great dancers, babies came from towels and hot water and a cough meant certain tuberculosis curable only by a Viennese doctor who had developed a new procedure.

New discoveries happened to meet a crisis. Columbus was sent out for some Chinese food and returned with a continent for Izzy and Ferd. Now Columbus, disguised as Bill Gates has returned with his cargo of information. The world is still round but it just got smaller.

Those of us caught on the super highway with a typewriter and nothing cordless have been denounced for resisting the new orthodoxy. We’ve been put to the rack where every Luddite bone in our bodies has been deleted.

Who’s your mother? Not necessity; it’s invention, itself. Build it and they will buy it, so it seems. Ever since the answering machine I‘ve asked myself whether this or that will make my life more meaningful, or dimensional, or help get me through the night.

Now I’m making room for all the new "essentials of life" I’m told I must own to keep up. I’m dropping my old baggage, Archimedes Principle and Pi. There goes Newton’s Law. My spelling is an approximation and the multiplication table is exhausted. I’ve been purged of all things retro and confessed to thinking in syllogisms. Like a plane circling the ocean might jettison fuel to lighten its landing I am dumping theorems like bricks. All that’s left of me is my pin number and a few sentences from the Gettysburg Address.

Without understanding how anything works I am taking my place at the threshold, learning the new speak as a second language and clicking on the latest breakthrough without which tomorrow is unthinkable.

Not In So Many Words

Mark Twain is credited with defining an "expert" as any damn fool away from home. Today we regard an expert as anyone who can boil down a complex issue into a digestible sound bite.

Groucho Marx is having his way with us. The smart-aleck quip along with a raised eyebrow could overthrow governments. On his show, "You Bet Your Life" Groucho engaged in a little banter with each contestant. "I see that you have eleven children and you're 30 years old", Groucho observed, "how do you explain that?"

"I love my wife", the gentleman replied.

Groucho gave him a faux-startled look and answered, " I love my cigar but I take it out of my mouth every now and then."

The Marx brothers tapped into our psyche with their iconoclastic and zany antics. Their brand of subversion won our hearts more than Karl Marx. Groucho and Chico spoke the language of the streets, of the immigrant masses in New York City in the early 20th century. They channeled the quick repartee, the moxie, the pushcart swindle and survival in the urban jungle.

While those two brothers pierced the pretensions in our name with machine-gun rapidity it was Harpo who said his piece with a nod, a shrug and a honk. He carried silent film into the fourties as the wisecrack his brothers never said. He was the interval in the fast-talk, the mute in the clamor.

When humanity is all talked out, words at our feet exhausted, we can look to Harpo who distilled the pain and the frolic to the essentials inside his coat - a telephone, one ice skate, a cup of coffee. Junk man, collage artist, archeologist,
he gave us back the artifacts of our fractured civilization.

He saw the world as a broken piano and made a harp of it. When he embraced the strings it was almost too private to watch. His arms reached the firmament making waves that moved the tides and his eyes stared down the stars with the human lament.