Arrested Development

It’s based on greed. Deception is a virtue. There is violence and braggadocio. Collusion and obstruction are part of it. But enough about Trump.

I’m talking sports here. Playing professional baseball, football, basketball etc… belongs to the physically endowed. Watching it is something else. Spending my lifetime as a spectator must surely be a form of retardation. Not merely a spectator but a fan as in fanatic. There must be dozen of reasons to turn away from this fixation. The obscene profits by owners, outrageous salaries, commodification and endorsements such as by shoe companies, public money to build stadiums and conflation with the military along with phony patriotism to name a few.   

Like any addiction I can’t help myself. It defies the rational. The reptilian brain overthrowing the frontal cortex. It’s hormonal. My child is still alive. Grow up, I hear you say. But why would I want to do that? Maybe I was concussed playing touch football as a kid and never recovered. Sports is my alternative reality. That section of the newspaper I can count on to whisk me away from the even more duplicitous avarice of institutional malevolence issuing from the White House.

Indefensible as the case may be immersion in sports stats and personnel offers a ticket into an on-going human drama in which a curtain goes down at the end of each season only to open at the start of next with new hopes and dreams. As if we, as avid fans, can move a few chess pieces and declare victory. Don’t you love spending other people’s money? Of course you do.

Fans live vicariously with the joy of championships and die bitterly with defeats. We curse our team and players on Monday and embrace them by Thursday. They become us. And while they become old we never do. We are puer aeternus. There is always some young phenom with great promise waiting in the wings into whose skin we can crawl. Each new season we are reborn.

The Dodgers, once the Boys of Summer, haven’t won a World Series in thirty years though we have come close. I suppose some fans see it as death by a thousand cuts. Not me. All I ask is six or seven months of diversion. Go ahead, make me care. Provide me with transport like a good poem or any work of art.

And to plagiarize myself..........Real fans are descendants of pagans, idolaters who converse with the gods who know the power of a sacrificial act. If it takes closing my eyes I’m willing to miss the play. We are zealots who move our bodies into others to do battle, once removed, against the forces of darkness. We are beyond spectators. We suit up for the game in a different skin. For the next three hours we are possessed.

Maybe it’s not just distraction but some form of extension of the real world mysteriously connected to the larger canvas of human progress. Athletes do not regress. They are bigger, faster, and stronger than their grandfathers. Virtual Adonis-like with exceptions here and there. Yes, yes, I know about the greats of those good old days but as an aggregate, pitchers now throw faster, and more hitters hit farther. What is retrogressive is Trump.

If, as Marx proclaimed, religion is the opiate of the masses then watching sports on T.V. may be the myopia of the asses. But in these days of derangement we need our opiates. In fact it may even be healthier than wringing our hands and gnashing our teeth watching 3-4 hours of MSNBC. Better yet...I could go to the library, listen to Billie sing Gershwin, cherish Peggy, commune with my favorite tree or improvise on that recipe for bread pudding.

Yellow Days

Love that tune. It has colonized my head for a few days, especially the rendition by Tony Bennett...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMlMW-CChLE

I remember when the sunlight had a special kind of brightness
And laughter held a lover's kind of lightness
Yellow days, yellow days

She would hold me and the smile would spread around us so completely
And the softness of a kiss would linger sweetly
Yellow days, yellow days

I think it was triggered by all the Gold Medallions, aka butter daisies or melampodium in full bloom in my neighborhood. They are those small to medium-sized trees that pop up from an unremarkable green-leaf into yellow lollipops along the verge or grassway between walkers and drivers in West L.A. and the San Fernando Valley. They are noted for tolerating a high level of neglect. And yet they bring the sun to the sidewalks with thousands of yellow bulbs from June to August.

https://www.google.com/search?q=gold+medallion+flowers&tbm=isch&source=iu&ictx=1&fir=96mYxuRCPl60cM%253A%252CBWkqKemoO6n8QM%252C_&usg=__XRo1IAEsaCkGS8CQzFTJXFyZM54

Residents of Yorkville Guzzle Beer in Vats. That is how my 

physics teacher in high school had us memorize the spectrum. And there is (Yorkville) yellow flanked by two of my other favorites, orange and green. What’s not to like? Autumnal orange with its offspring, sienna, rust, pumpkin etc... and all those increments of greeny things. Yellow is, of course, the sun, brightness, optimism and daffodils, banana peel, lemons, scrambled eggs as well as one of the Lakers uniforms. What says summer better than mustard on a hot dog? And let us not forget, the color of Marvin Gardens.

I’m remembering back to my days in suburbia. Regardless of attention paid there were always devil grass and yellow dandelions in patches of dichondra lawn. It was a mix of weed and trim that had the ring of truth to it.

Along with yellow for Yes there is the suggestion of caution, slow down, look out for pedestrians and runaway trains. It is the color of school buses transporting our future. It also signifies cowardice owing to racist rant against the Chinese. Needless to say Chinese are no more yellow than indigenous people are red or Caucasians, white. And then there was Yellow Journalism, which today describes the National Enquirer and Foxy News.

Tied as it is to the seasons yellow is cyclic. Not seen much in winter except in Christmas tree lights and gift wrap as compensation. Even the song ends in a chilled heart.

But then came thunder
And I heard her say "goodbye"
Through tears of wonder
Now I'm alone and my heart wants to know 
Yellow days, where'd you go?

But then came thunder
And I heard her say "goodbye"
Through tears of wonder
Now I'm alone and my heart wants to know
Yellow days, where'd you go?

Life is empty and the sunlight seems so harsh instead of tender
And the laughter's just an echo I'll remember
Yellow days, yellow days.

In these dark days of Trumpadump we need all the Yellow we can find. The lights are out on the Yellow Brick Road.

"Yellow Days was written by Alan Bernstein and Alvarro Carrillo

Awe

Awesome he said when I gave him my name and awesome 

again when I verified my address. One more awesome and I’m canceling my order and hanging up, said I. Your hyperbole offends me, I told him. It does violence to my ear. There’s nothing awesome about anything I said. Save the word. Stick it in your wall safe. Try to go through your day without using it. That would be awesome. Cool, he promised.

Strange how some words travel across the entire spectrum. Terror long ago became terrific which you would never use to suggest fear. But there may still be time to salvage awe.

Awe was cousin to reverence. It was evoked by the sacred. Awe accompanied an epiphany. It describes the sublime. It is the language of our discourse with the unknown. Awe is the last word before the inarticulate.

Awesome is an exclamation reserved for my first sight of Van Gogh’s Iris vibrating off the wall in Amsterdam or Paul Robeson’s bass-baritone voice shattering my glass anatomy. Awesome is Peggy, robust at 97. It is the Grand Canyon, the redwood forest, the pictographs at Chauvet, the amaze of the Gehry-Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao as we turned the corner to our astonished eyes or the words on the page of a certain Wallace Stevens poem which knock my unmatched socks off.

Awe morphed into awful as if it contained some nasty seed for mischief. Now we have Shock and Awe describing what happens when a village is bombed to smithereens in a manner designed to break the opposition's will. I suppose Hiroshima was that instance of terrible beauty that Rilke and Yeats  referenced and awesome was the mushroom cloud as we witnessed the instrument for planetary suicide. With Beauty now discarded we have accepted the demotic into the notion of grandeur.

I can accept this negative awe for its proximity to something both numinous and destructive surpassing all else but not the debasement of the word to describe my name and address. Certain words deserve special handling as they travel across millennia. Yes, I know language is organic, growing wild outside the garden wall. It is what everyone says it is. And yet…

The problem is that to dispense awesome in a casual way is to debase it, to assign it to the garbage pail of exhausted words. It needs to be earned. We need to conserve certain language for our vocabulary of wonderment. Without it we are bereft. In these times of bereavement as Trump has raided our glossary with his third grade grasp of superlatives we have to at least protest against the theft of awe. The damage he has done to our democracy is the equivalent of a nuclear bomb but I wouldn't waste the word awesome on him.

Tech, High and Low

The future has already arrived, I’m told. The past is not even past, so says Faulkner. I’ll take his word for it. Give me a break. It’s getting too crowded to live in the moment. As a mid-octogenarian I’m still reviewing my life and figuring out how I got to this page in my saga. Or more currently still asking, what just happened after the defeat of Hilary 591 days ago.

There is something about sci-fi or whatever names apply to that genre of cautionary tales about runaway technology which numb my brain. It’s the great what if and to be sure much of artificial intelligence is already with us. When Orwell wrote 1984 he was really addressing what he saw in 1948. Momentous change arrives on cat’s feet through the back door while I’m in a rocking chair on the front porch.

I bought shoes last month and can’t figure out what to do with those 54 inch laces. I trip over the excess aglets going into the eyelet or else buy a toggle. It probably took me eleven years to learn how to tie my shoes and I refuse to yield to the new technology. I’m getting nostalgic for those good old days when our mothers took us to the shoe store and we were treated to a dose of cancer-causing fluorescence to see our toes wiggle.

I don’t particularly like quinoa or kelp. Whatever happened to lettuce and romaine? Not good enough for you? When I call any large corporation I always hit zero in order to speak to a human being. It’s no fun arguing with a recording. But I understand that Google has now simulated the human voice with all our stammers and pauses to make us think we are talking to one of our fellow species.

I’m the guy who still gets the newspaper delivered. Here it comes now. I also watch T.V. by candlelight. Love those eternal verities.

I know it’s a losing battle. Even indefensible. I suppose there were folks like me resisting the innovation of lawn mowers. That led to the removal of grazing goats and assorted quadrupeds to trim the front grass…which in turn led to more social calls and then to tea servers and even costume jewelry worn by the hostess and who knows what else. I was born too late.

It’s hard enough getting through the day with all those apps plotting an uprising any minute provoked by a restless algorithm. Must I also read books and watch movies about soulless robots and clones? I find it too strenuous transporting my aged brain to dystopian precincts. Trump has already driven us to the edge of the apocalypse in a driverless chariot. If Donald is the future I want out of this comic book. Can I click and delete him? Where did I park my space ship? If that doesn’t work I’ll settle for a time-travel machine set in reverse, destination unknown.   

Flag and Country

My earliest memory of the flag is probably pledging allegiance to it in the 3^rd or 4^th grade. Of course, I had no idea what allegiance meant or who Richard Stands was either. Nor did I understand why our nation was invisible. I figured it was a good thing to be invisible so the Nazis couldn’t find us on a map and bomb us. It wasn’t till we learned long division that I got the concept of being indivisible. It’s a good word; one of those that no longer applies.  

Today we are very divisible. Not only in half but more like in thirds. In the 2016 election the largest fraction were the None of the Above party numbering 94.2 million eligible voters. We have become a country of no-shows. Then came the Democrats (65.8 million) and the smallest number went to the winners (62.9 million). Try explaining that to the kids in third grade.

The 4^th of July brings out flags displayed in windows, on fences and poles to say nothing of mattress ads, holiday buying sprees and assorted block buster sales events. It’s the American way. Nothing is more patriotic than consuming.

Flag-waving is so pervasive it isn’t usually seen as the political act that it is. Like a bumper sticker or tattoo the flag is an advertisement, an identity. It has become the great signifier of the Republican Party. The word Patriotism seems to belong to those who watch Fox News because it connotes might and blind loyalty and never dissent. Just as the Confederate flag enraged Blacks in particular and Liberals in general the U.S. flag is rapidly reaching that powerful a symbol. Enormous flags are unfurled at opening day baseball games as well as professional football games along with planes buzzing the stadium and a military presence. It is a statement which says that the sport is allied with flag and country; that is to say, Power and Law Enforcement.

And then comes the National Anthem. The announcers are White. The owners are White. Those of us watching on T.V. are mostly White. The coaches mostly White. The players predominately Black. How to make a countervailing statement with a national platform? How else to protest but to take a knee? No disrespect to uniformed men in the armed service. No flag burning. Not even an arm raised as in the 1968 Olympic Games. Just a knee before 15 million viewers to remind us of a culture of police shootings of unarmed people of color, to remind us that the extravaganza of White dominance has an answering voice. One political act warrants another.

Response to the courage of Black athletes demanding to be heard has largely been outrage by sports writers and commentators. These are the same people who know nothing about the daily indignities and existential threats endured by the Black population. Just play the game, they say. Don’t bring politics into sports, they proclaim as if they haven’t already done so for years. The few football players who have knelt in solidarity have risked millions. 70% of the teams are Black. There would be no National Football League without Black players. Three out of every four players in basketball (NBA) are Black. There is a rich heritage of Black athletes speaking out from Paul Robeson to Jackie Robinson to Muhammad Ali to LeBron James though the silence of Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan is deafening.

The legacy of Robinson has been kept alive by the persistence of his wife, Rachel Robinson. She has been an equal hero for the past fifty years. However he is usually celebrated for his constraint on the playing field rather than his militancy. This is White society’s fantasy. It should be noted that Robinson, in his final years, DID NOT STAND for the national anthem.

The Pledge has more going for it than the Anthem. The latter is star-spangled bombast. The former has references closer to the Constitution in all its allusions to equality and justice. It was written by the socialist, Francis Bellamy. Maybe if Woody Guthrie’s, This Land Is Your Land, replaced Francis Scott Key’s drinking song it would bring the country closer together to what we might truly call, indivisible.

For further reading on the subject I recommend, Howard Bryant’s new book, Heritage, published by Beacon Press.

Loving Trump

Now that I have your attention…………….

I seem to remember how the poet Allen Ginsberg suggested we learn to love Ronald Reagan or, at least, find the Reagan inside ourselves and embrace him. Ginsberg led a poetry group at Naropa Institute in the mid-eighties in which everyone was asked to finish the poem with an opening line, I’m going to vote for Ronald Reagan because……………. My underwear is on backwards, said one student. Because my pen is running out of ink, said another …or because a squirrel came into my room yesterday.

Sorry, Allen none of these work for me.

I imagine Ginsberg, ever the Buddhist, would preach the same message today. However reaching for our interior Trump might require many hours of chanting to the wall in a loin cloth while inhaling massive doses of some intoxicating incense. We would also need a Bodhi tree and a new set of gongs. It strikes me as the ultimate alchemical transmogrification perhaps even too much for the Dalai Lama.

I wonder if Ginsberg thought Hitler was also lovable. True, Adolph did a great impersonation of Charlie Chaplin. A psychotherapist might praise him for not repressing his aggressive impulses. Go ahead, Adolph, get it all out. He appreciated Wagnerian operas and was said to be a fair painter. Perhaps all he needed was an affirmation here and there.

Coming back to Trump, first I must buy a red tie and get a total make-over on my scalp topped with a red cap. Now, under deep drug-induced narcosis I can seek out this shadow side of myself.

Here I am in kindergarten knocking over some kid’s blocks. I wouldn’t put it past me. Maybe I thought he stole my milk money.

Now I’m reusing an un-cancelled stamp and parlaying that three cents into a shopping mall and hotel where I act as a slumlord evicting poor families. Of course the property I buy is on the Atlantic City Boardwalk …but that was all in a Monopoly board game where I found my true habitat between Baltic and Mediterranean. Yes, I love you for that, Donald, revealing the primordial greed and avarice to myself.

Here’s another instance of my inner-Trump. I, too, colluded with Russians. Well, not really Russians. But Soviet apologists who turned a blind eye to Stalin’s megalomania during the early years of the Cold War. So vehement was I against U.S. support of assorted tyrants, military dictatorships and colonial repression. I join with you, Donald, as a selective isolationist. I even made the headline of the Daily Worker which no doubt got me a place in J. Edgar Hoover’s filing cabinet. Now look at me bragging about it. 

And yes, I probably insulted some ball players during the game. Call it trash talk. Call it the heat of competition. But it was all from the couch yelling at the T.V. set. Thank you, Donald, for legitimatizing my infantilism.

Is that enough? I feel myself coming back from the slime of my reptilian brain. Now I must take a very hot shower. Is it really fair to presume that we all have particles of Trump DNA infecting our soul? And if so must we descend to our own underworld and learn to love it? No, but perhaps it is useful to own it as a cautionary note … and then mature, grow up, gain some measure of enlightenment and compassion.

It’s too easy to demonize Trump as if he’s a visitor from outer space. The truth is he displays an aggregate of ignorance, arrogance, mendacity and malice, rarely seen in one individual, particularly in a public official. But all human deficiencies we’ve either disowned or outgrown.

Now Hear This

Peggy got hers from her late ex-husband, Sam, and now that’s being replaced by the generosity of M... who got his from a friend who died three years ago. This is no small gift. We’re talking about $7,000 hearing aids. For a mere $250 our audiologist has reset the instrument and provides new ear molds.

And why not? The damn thing is probably the most over-priced gadget in the history of over-priced gadgets. Yes, I’m sure world-class technology has gone into miniaturizing and fine-tuning them according to an individual’s frequency and decibel loss but once that mountain had been climbed there is little to justify such an enormous mark-up….even given the follow-up visits for adjustments.  

I suppose a hearing-aid dealer would argue that thousands of dollars of expertise goes into each instrument in addition to years of education in the creation of these state-of-the-art hearing aids. And considering the life-altering change it is a reasonable value. Furthermore that one cannot simply add the cost of material to determine the true worth. By the same reasoning a Reuben sandwich probably contains about 11 cents worth of ingredients and sells for approximately $15.

That argument falls upon my deaf ears. I still believe they are taking advantage of us old folks who in our eight or nine decades let in too much punk rock or Pavarotti. Pharmacists, having endured five or six years of higher education and licensing exams, dispense life-saving medications plus consultations for a fee set by insurance companies of five or ten dollars. When I arrived in California in the mid 1950s you could buy a house for today's price of a hearing aid. 

I wonder if Martha Washington passed along George’s old teeth or did the termites make a meal of them first. We’ll never know. But it’s a good idea to cozy up to Uncle Abner in his twilight years. It wouldn’t hurt to laugh at those jokes he’s told for the past forty years…even if you no longer can hear them as you wait for him to check out and stake your claim to his old trumpets.

It might be time to summon the lawyers to re-write the will. To my good-for-nothing son, Clive, I leave the heavily mortgaged manor house. To Marigold I bequeath my Lamborghini which no longer runs. And to Neville I hereby pass along my hearing aids.

On the other hand, with all the lies emanating from high places, maybe an irremediable hearing loss is the preferred state. I understand the new Blue Tooth bilateral devices come with an on and off switch to save us from the moral violence in the air.