UnHitched

It has been twenty years or more since I sat in my apartment living room watching C-Span and witnessed the brown field mouse of a moderator introduce a slouching, smoking, honest-to-God roué named Christopher Hitchens.  His presence alone was astonishing–has there ever been another creature so louche, so much a denizen of the halflit world on C-Span before or since?–and when he began to speak in a manner fluid, recondite, controlled, voluminous, and yet outrageous, it was almost as if the screen of the set had opened up and life had some how leapt out.  It was obvious, right from the first, that this man was not like other men.

And now that man is no more.

I was never quite certain what I thought or felt about him.  I admired him–you had to admire him–but I never wanted to trade places.  I certainly, and this happened more so as time went on and was only redoubled as he started his experience with cancer, wanted to know him.  I, of course, never did.

I was in a room with him once.  A rather large room normally called an auditorium.  He was on the stage with Salman Rushdie and a professor of my acquaintance, and I was about a dozen rows back in the audience, one seat off the aisle, house right.  It was a great discussion between two great writers and talkers.  Their friendship and regard for one another was obvious and abundant.

Which brings me to the story of how I forgave Christopher Hitchens.

The never-actually-consummated friendship between Mr Hitchens and me was torn asunder by the Iraq War.  I was firmly and from the beginning against it.  Whatever the benefit might be derived from ousting Saddam, I could never see the point in killing Iraqi citizens in their tens and ultimately hundreds of thousands for his sins.  I had been against our protracted and wrongheaded insistence on destroying the infrastructure of Iraq in the years following the Gulf War, against when Bush the First was President and against it when Clinton joined in.  Since it was simple for any reasoning person who wasn’t so blinded by messianic patriotism to realize that there were no nuclear (the only true “weapons of mass destruction”) or usable chemical weapons in Iraq, it was also simple to understand that the war could not have been instigated for the reasons stipulated, and I was appalled to find Mr Hitchens shilling for the witless thugs who led us at that time.

I didn’t stop reading his work.  I just read it with a grudge.  And then the turnaround came.

In February 2009, Vanity Fair published a Hitchens piece that concerned the fatwa that the now long dead Ayatollah Khomeini had leveled against Rushdie for his having had the temerity to write The Satanic Verses.  The opening paragraphs about Sir Salman (as I’m sure he is uncomfortable to be known) were large-hearted and generous and reminded me of grand qualities that Mr Hitchens possessed.  And the totality of a man is far more important than his opinion about this issue or that, especially if it is not his responsibility to make the decisions.  Then, no matter how well known, he is just some guy popping off about the passing show.

And so it goes.  A person, a famous person, dies and I feel sadness an a loss.  The unknown are not burdened with this extraneous mourning and bereavement.  But now, at the end, it comes down to this for me:  Never again will I get the complex pleasure that came from clicking on link and thinking, “I wonder what Hitch is going to be on about this time.”

Wendell, Friday Evening

My most recent film is a short dramatic vignette, “Wendell, Friday Evening.”  You can see it below.

Not Knowing

How can it be known that what I call knowing is not really not knowing and that what I call not knowing is not really knowing?–Chuang Tse as translated by Lin Yutang

Yesterday, on the CNN website, Penn of Penn & Teller published a response to an appearance he made with English muckraker and ethical train wreck Piers Morgan.  It seems that Morgan had challenged Penn’s atheism (“How did you get here?–God.”) and libertarianism (“How do we, as a society, help the poor?”  “I don’t know.  I’m a libertarian.  I don’t believe in society.”), and Penn sought to clarify what the philosophical underpinnings were to his beliefs.

The underlying theme that Penn came up with was the phrase “I don’t know.”  He claims that he is an atheist because he does not know, which is fine, except that people who claim to not know about such matters are usually referred to as agnostics.  Atheists, by definition, claim that they DO know and know with absolute certainty that God does not exist and that the observable universe is all there is.  Like all other fundamentalist faiths, atheists deal in certainties rather than possibilities and are offended that anyone could deign to disagree with them.  For atheism is a religion, of a sort, and its adherents believe fiercely in an Old Testament straw man (sometimes gussied up in the annoying and condescending guise of “The Flying Spaghetti Monster“) that they can easily refute.  Any subtler concept of the transcendent than an old white guy sitting on a cloud chucking thunderbolts does not exist for them, which is part of what makes them so annoying and dull.

I don’t claim to have any answers in this area.  I find the term “agnostic” to be too confining.  I do wonder, though, where, in that ball of all matter that scientists say preceded the Big Bang, was life?  And why life at all?  This is not meant as proof of anything for there can be no proof.  Since we live within the constraints of space and time, how can we conceive, truly, of anything that might transcend space and time?  We end up in a very tricky area in which saying that we know there’s something is wrong and saying that we know that there’s nothing is wrong.  We can’t even be certain that our universe isn’t a cell on the tip of a hair of a creature whose universe is a cell on the tip of a hair.  And that each of our cells doesn’t contain a universe as well.  There comes a point at which we are faced with a mystery, a mystery that we try to resolve and discuss through various religions and approaches.  Sacred books are attempts to discuss the undiscussable, and they work as poetry and not as prose.  The problem encountered by fundamentalists and literalists and atheists is that they try to read poetry as prose and get lost in the attempt.

And so Penn gets lost.  He thinks (and I do not doubt his sincerity in the slightest) that he thinks he does not know.  He actually thinks that he does know and so calls himself an atheist.  If he really didn’t know, he would just stand in awe of the mystery.

Libertarianism is also, in my opinion, a sort of religious belief.  The god of the libertarians is called No Government, and he is a harsh god who admits no idolators and who sees any communal actions through the machinations of government as the only sin.  To a libertarian, anyone who does not believe in No Government is fallen, an apostate who may be reclaimable, but only through an unquestioning belief in libertarian orthodoxy.

And again, Penn claims to have gotten to this point by not knowing.  And yet, again, libertarians by definition think they DO know.  They know that government is bad, always and forever.  There is no doubt, there is no question.  Penn doesn’t know that he knows, but he knows well enough to tell everyone what he knows.

People certainly have a right to be libertarians; I can see its charms and occasionally agree with its propositions.  However, it’s too narrow for me and too dependent on having a single idea explain a vast, multifaceted, and subtle world.  It has the appearance of intellectuality, but is anti-intellectual, shunning, as it does, questioning and nuance.  Perhaps we could live without government, which is the libertarian utopia, but what would such a world be like?  How would we build a road or pave a sidewalk?  Would everything come with a price tag on it?  Would it be possible to build the Hoover Dam?  What I really don’t like about libertarianism is that it attacks the concept of community, and, like it or not, we are a communal species.  We come together to form bands and tribes and towns and cities.  It is our nature.  And all of those groups (and any group, really, with more than three people in it is going to develop some sort of structure for leadership and administration–in other words, a government) have governments and always have.  I doubt there has ever been a time in human history in which people lived together without there being some overarching structure to make the decisions and plot the strategies.  And at no time in human history has there not been some communal vehicle for caring for the sick and the aged, for making sure that all were fed and the children tended.  There are theories about the evolutionary advantage of altruism, but I make no claims to be an expert.  I’m also not a philosopher, but I believe that Kant and Schopenhauer had some thoughts about altruism and community.

As for me, I saw a fellow yesterday afternoon, a homeless man who appears from time-to-time near the place where I get groceries.  I had a few extra dollars in cash, so I folded them up, approached him, and offered them to him in the least condescending way I could think of.  He thanked me and took the money and shuffled away.  And as he thanked me, I saw the damage that will never be undone.  He is a wreck of a human being, lost on the shoals of modern life.  I nearly cried, and should have were I really a man.  And I knew, in that instant, that my few dollars would not save him and that the tragedy lay in living in a society that saw this man, this human, as mere detritus.  Alone as an individual, I could do nothing.  My help was so insignificant as to not be help at all.  Charities and their most devoted contributors had not saved him.  Perhaps the community as a whole could help him and those like him, but we cared not to.  Too many think it is not the government’s business.  Not its purpose.

I remember reading in the local paper when I was in high school about a school board meeting at which an old man complained about funding various after-school activities for students.  “I don’t have any school-age children,” he shouted.  “Why should my taxes go up?”  And I thought, “Because a kid who is involved in an after-school activity isn’t thinking about breaking into your house because he’s bored or unhappy.”  I thought then and think now that we must look past the narrow borders of our own immediate concerns and see that, as Jacob Marley said, “Mankind is my business.”

So, Penn is free to believe what he wishes.  I do not seek to convert him from atheism or libertarianism, but merely wish to show that his purported “not knowing” is not not knowing at all.

Critical Mass

There has recently been a firestorm–as there so often is in these Internet-fed, cable television-stoked days–concerning the comments that a young woman, a self published novelist, made on a book review blog that gave her tome a mildly unflattering review.  The attendant hoo-hah is not my concern.  Others have covered that territory as thoroughly and even-handedly as can be done.  My concern is something other:  Should writers or any artists read reviews?

I doubt it.  Despite the well-worn notion that criticism should be taken with a tugged forelock and a mumbled “Thank’ee, Mrs,” I think it is a mistake for artists to read criticism of their own works.  (Even when the criticisms, as in the cited case, involve proofreading errors and rhetorical disasters.)  There are a couple of assumptions I hold, fundamentally, that lead me to this conclusion.  First, I think that a review of anything is essentially a conversation between consumers (sorry about calling readers and movie watchers and everyone else who takes in some work of art a “consumer,” but it was convenient shorthand) of that particular art.  It is the reader’s hope to find out whether a given work is worth the time they would need to commit to it, and it is the reviewer’s job to give them the best hints they can on whether it is or not.  The artist is not part of that conversation; the artist is no more than an artifact in such a discussion.

Second, I think that such criticism–from a reviewer and not from an editor, a colleague, a director, a loved one–is irrelevant to the work of the artist.  For one thing, reviewers can only review the work that is the most recent, not the next in line.  Therefore, from the artist’s point-of-view, reviewers are talking about something that is dead and in the past.  There comes a point in every project in which the artist must let go of it and move on.  Otherwise, all any artist would ever do is worry over a work endlessly and compulsively, for every work is flawed, especially in the eyes of the poor sap who created it.  And you can’t go back, only forward.  All of an artist’s focus has to be on the next project, the next work, the next thing to which that person must commit his or her imagination, attention, and energy.  As with Lot’s wife, looking back is disastrous and paralyzing.

And what can be gained by an artist from reading a review anyway?  Let’s say that there are two reviews and they conflict, as is generally the case.  Which review is the correct one?  Should the artist make the corrections demanded by one critic and remove them at the behest of the other?  Is one more correct than the other, and, if so, how is such a judgment to be made?  No.  As I see it, there are only two things that can happen when artists read their reviews, and both of them are bad.  On the one hand, if the review is negative at all, the artist’s feelings will get hurt and confidence undermined, and there’s a pretty good chance that you’ll end up with the sort of brouhaha that I linked to above.

The second possibility is even worse.  The reviews could be good and the artist can start to believe them.

Creating a decent work of art is difficult enough without one’s head being filled with notions.  From what I know from my meager experience and what I can glean from the comments of my betters, creating a work of art–even a mediocre or bad one–is an arduous task, won with sweat and molded with craft.  And once one is convinced that one is a genius, a magician who creates timeless masterpieces with a mere wave of the hand, how is one supposed motivate oneself to do the dirty work that is needed?

I know that in this age of workshops and focus groups, critique groups and MFA programs that the idea that the artist should walk alone without correction, suggestion, and “support” is a kind of blasphemy, but there you are.  That’s how I feel.  It is a lonely trail the artist wanders, filled with brambles and sinkholes.  I think of something that Joseph Campbell talked about, an image presented in the Arthurian legends.  In one version of the tales, the Knights of the Round Table approach a thicket and agree to each hack his way through the tangle on his own path.  And each one who crosses another’s path and starts to go down it follows it to his own peril.  It is a hard and lonely and perilous journey that the artist embarks on, but the glory of it is that, whatever that journey may turn out to be, it is that person’s own.

The Afternoon Game

My first foray into filmmaking:

 

My Year in Film, Part 1

There was a time in my life when I seemed to live for film.  From late adolescence through early manhood, I existed mostly in movie theaters, especially first in the Avon Cinema in Providence and then later in the late, great Rhodes Theater in Atlanta.  Both were, at the time, repertory theaters, which meant that they played double bills of art films and classics on programs that changed three times a week.  I started out seeing the Marx Brothers and ended up watching the films of Louis Malle and Francois Truffaut.  I saw Five Easy Pieces at the Avon and Taxi Driver on a double bill with Looking for Mr Goodbar.  (That was a fine night out.  My friend Tom and I left the theater to walk around the East Side while we contemplated suicide.)  At the Rhodes, I saw L’Age D’Or, Fellini Satyricon, and Jules and Jim.

When I then moved to the DC area, I spent a reasonable amount of time at the AFI (Mr Roberts on the big screen; can’t be bad) and at a repertory theater the name of which I cannot dredge up although I’m pretty sure it was on Pennsylvania Avenue (Seven Samurai, need I say more?).  As the ’80s wore on, the repertory theaters started to disappear.  The Avon changed back to a first-run house, the Rhodes was closed down by a greedy developer who ended up abandoning the property anyway, and I left the DC area, AFI and all.  Movies drifted from generally being about people to being about plotlines and explosions and gadgets and gimmicks and special effects, and therefore less interesting to me.  There have been stretches in which I have not set foot inside a movie theater for years at a time.

Which brings me to my New Year’s resolution.  Ever since we got a big flat screen TV, my movie consumption rate (MCR) has increased incrementally.  I introduced my son to Seven Samurai, and caught up on some of the Kurasawa that I had not seen before in Ikiru and Rashoman.  Some Renoir, Sahara (starring Humphrey Bogart, again with my son), my beloved Marx Brothers and WC Fields.  However, that viewing has been haphazard and unfocused.

Therefore, I have decided to make this a year of film.  Fifty-two weeks, fifty-two films.  I’m already up to two, with another two leftover from last year.  (Hold your mouse over the titles to see my quick comments.)

The two leftover from last year were the restored version of Touch of Evil, which my son very thoughtfully got me for Christmas, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, which I had been trying to get my wife to watch for some time.  The two official entries are:

1. The Bicycle Thief
2. O’Horten

I hope to keep this updated as the year progresses.

Laughter on the 23rd Floor

About fifteen years ago, the last sad dying embers of my ambitions to be an actor were cruelly and pointlessly stamped out at an audition for a production of Neil Simon’s then fairly new comedy, Laughter on the 23rd Floor.  I had been working just previously as part of a comedy trio and had been performing somewhat regularly for the previous couple of years, although never once in an actual play.  (My life as an actor in plays had occurred another dozen or more years before that.  After working on and appearing in thirty-something shows in a five-year period, I was as burnt out as a well-ridden clutch.)  We had mostly done audio comedy, a couple of things that actually made an appearance somewhere outside our living rooms, as well as some nonpaying, non-pretty-much-everything self-produced video work, and three or four bizarre cabaret sort of appearances.  I also descended into that lowest chum pit of an actor’s dignity, the interactive theatrical event.

By the time that Laughter on the 23rd Floor was announced, I was already slipping back out of that world, although, thanks to certain acquaintances I had at the time, I was still not completely free.  Two guys in particular–one of the other two members of the comedy trio and my then-roommate–were especially interested in those auditions and, in fact, had both been invited to try out.  The director was dying of AIDS, and he wanted to assemble, essentially, his dream cast from the local talent pool as a last hurrah to a theater scene he had done much build and to nurture.  I was unknown to him and, therefore, not invited, which was just fine with me.  However, I was interested in the show, and I helped my two–for lack of a better term–”friends” prepare by reading through scenes with them.  Over the course of these readings, it became apparent that I had a pretty good handle on the play and especially on the character of Kenny, who was modeled on the young Larry Gelbart.  My roommate–and if you ever get the chance to room with an alcoholic, compulsive-talking actor, just do yourself a favor and either fall on a sword or stick an icepick through your eye or something else less painful instead–became settled on the idea of getting me an audition.  So he did what he was good at (besides acting; he was always a very good actor):  He whined and complained and nagged and wheedled and cajoled until a dying man agreed to have me audition for a show he didn’t want me in.

When the day of the audition came, I waited with the rest of the cattle in the lobby of the the theater and waited for my name to be called.  Both of my colleagues were called in several times to participate in readings by groups of four or five.  Me, nothing.  Finally, I was called in.  Alone.

Now, of the parts of the five older writers in the play, there was one that I was born to play, and that was Kenny.  However, I could have done serviceable work in any of three of the other roles.  There was only one who was completely out of my range.  The director, slumped in a seat in the audience, and obviously exhausted by the exertions of the day, said, “I want you to read Ira.”

Kenny was, like Larry Gelbart, taciturn, dry, and witty.  Ira, on the other hand, was based on Mel Brooks, and was–well–like Mel Brooks.  I died like an unarmed Nazi in a shtetl.

I don’t blame the director.  I don’t even blame my roommate.  He was trying to be nice; it was just that even when he was actively trying to be nice, he couldn’t help but wound me deeply.

None of which is why I started writing this.

The positive thing that came from that experience was that I read the play several times and saw it performed and listened to endless stories about it night-after-night during the rehearsal period.  As a result, I have had a couple of small thoughts concerning it, basically directorial notes for the production I will never try to get off the ground.  Here goes.

First, the Wikipedia entry is wrong when it gives the correlations between the characters and the actual people who inspired them as

Parts of this are right or half right.  Kenny, as previously discussed, is based on Larry Gelbart, and Val Slotsky was based on Mel Tolkin.  All that is good.  However, Max Prince is not in any way Jackie Gleason.  He is Sid Caesar through-and-through.  Even his name, Prince, is a play on Sid’s last name, Caesar being the Latin basis for words like Kaiser and Czar.  And that’s also why Harry Prince was based on Sid’s older brother, Dave.  There’s also an argument that the character of Carol was based on Lucille Kallen rather than Selma Diamond or is a combination of the two.

The rest are plainly wrong.  Milt is neither Mel Brooks or Carl Reiner, neither of whom was known as a snazzy dresser and womanizer of middling talent.  That would be Neil’s brother, Danny.  And, after all, what would a Neil Simon show be without a portrait of his older brother Danny?  A show by someone else, that’s what.  I suspect he even snuck a portrait of Danny into The Good Doctor.

Ira is, of course, Mel Brooks.  Note the manic energy, the habit of showing up late, the sheer, unmitigated chutzpah.  It could be no one else.

And Brian Doyle was based on Tony Webster, not Michael Stewart.  The proof of this is that Stewart, who went on to fame on Broadway by writing the book for Bye Bye Birdie, Hello Dolly, and other musicals, was born with the last name Rubin, and it is a point made in the play that Brian was not only Irish, but the only goy in a roomful of Jews.  Webster, who worked mostly in television quite successfully for several more decades, may have been Irish and most certainly was goyische whatever his background.  They both died young–actually within weeks of one another–Stewart from pneumonia and Webster from cancer (which is what is indicated in the case of Brian Doyle).

My most controversial assertion–if anything concerning this particular play could be considered controversial–is that Lucas, our young, naive narrator (again a Neil Simon staple), is not a portrait of the young Neil himself, but is, in fact, Neil’s take on Woody Allen.  I think this, in part, because Laughter on the 23rd Floor is not a meditation on Your Show of Shows, on which Neil worked as a tyro, but was based on the final year or so of Caesar’s Hour, as well as a series of specials Sid did that Woody cut his teeth on.

The thing about Laughter on the 23rd Floor is that it is not a memory play, as is generally supposed.  It is an act of bravura from a supremely shy man.  It is Neil Simon showing that he can not only write in his signature comic style, but also in the style of most of the best comedy writers of his generation.  He’s showing off and telling stories he heard from other people while he was working on Bilko.  And he does a damned fine job of it.

Which leads me to my one quibble with every version of it that I have read about or seen.  The entire cast is too old.  The oldest member of this cast–the person playing Max or Val–should be no older than about 35.  The rest should all be in their 20s.  They are young and going places.  Except for Milt, who is also around 35, but who gets by by mentoring younger, more talented writers.  (As Danny Simon did with his significantly younger brother and with Woody Allen.)  Young.  In fact, there is a story about the first day that Woody started work.  He was brought in by Milt Kamen, a comedian who worked with Sid and who was very good in his own right and if you’re my age and American and don’t remember him shame on you.  All the other writers had assembled when Kamen guided Woody into the room.  “I have with me,” he said, “the young Larry Gelbart.”

Gelbart, who was then about 27, shifted in his seat and said, “Excuse me.  The young Larry Gelbart is sitting right here.”

These were not middle aged men.  They were young men, which accounts for some of the strutting and games by which young men settle out a pecking order in a group.  Someday, somehow, I hope to see a production of this properly cast.  Of course, I’m still hoping to see a Hamlet who comes in at under 40.  We all have our dreams.

And so it is done.  Now I can leave this behind me, my legacy for Neil Simon scholarship.

(This has been edited from the first version that I wrote in a white heat yesterday.)

John the Baptist or the Parish Priest

(The below is a rewritten version of a comment I left on a post on a blog called Stock Photography Museum.  The post was discussing a book review written by a young woman whose work I am suddenly seeing everywhere I look called Elif Batuman.   [After reading the piece on the London Review of Books website yesterday, I started in on her piece on the existential dilemma faced by some of Franz Kafka's papers on the website of The New York Times.]  The discussion on hand had to do with the effect on literature made by MFA programs in Creative Writing as discussed in a book called The Program (or, in the UK, The Programme) Era by one Mark McGurl.  As of this moment, there has been no response to my comment.  Perhaps my argument and logic are unassailable.  Perhaps by admitting that I neither have nor want an MFA I was considered to be one of the Unclean, and, therefore, not worthy of response.  Or perhaps nobody gave a rat’s ass.  Other explanations are also possible.)

It seems to me that the main problem with the MFA concept is that it takes a calling and reduces it to the level of a mere profession, and the same approach is taken to artistry as is to accounting or plumbing. Certification can be attained by mere persistence and a willingness to meet the expectations of teachers rather than through talent or achievement. And, as these people with certification fan out through the literary world as editors and teachers (rarely, it seems, as self-sustaining writers), they demand the same talisman, the MFA, from others. And while those from outside the MFA world may not be completely disregarded, they will be looked at as being suspect in the eyes of the initiated. (And, yes, I am one of those outsiders, although I am one who works in an English Department that has a Creative Writing program.)

Creative writing programs (and since they are all built on the model of The Iowa School for Famous Writers, we can assume some level of uniformity, at least in terms of underlying assumptions) place a greater emphasis on groupthink through the social pressures of roundtable critiques than they do on attainment of a personal artistic vision won through experience and suffering. Being located exclusively in academic settings, students work in a special and specialized environment, one that, for all of its rewards and pressures, is very different from that of the rough-and-tumble world outside it. Writing then becomes increasingly abstract and less connected to life as it is lived by the vast majority of people in the society. As a result, short stories, which were once the single most popular literary form, have become denizens almost exclusively of specialist publications. (Publication in trade journals is a signifier of writing’s new-found status as profession rather than art form.  Professionals always publish in select specialist publications that are read only by their fellow professionals as a way of plumping up one’s CV.)  Short stories are no longer written as a means of discussing the human condition with a general readership; they now constitute a rather dull technical conversation between professionals.

I tend to distrust the academic approach to any of the creative (as opposed to interpretive) arts.  Critiques by groups of teachers and students are, I think, deleterious to an artist’s development and are, simply due to the dynamics of group psychology, going to enforce conformity to the group rather than encourage the discovery of one’s own unique outlook.  Writers in these programs can only learn how to please others rather than please themselves.  And while it is not impossible that an artist could develop in such circumstances, I think that the odds are against it.

It seems to me that writers are more valuable to a society as artists than they are as academic professionals. Perhaps I’m wrong. Perhaps it is easier to become a true visionary artist in an ivory tower than it is if you’re one of the penny groundlings below. But if you were asking me–which you weren’t–I’d say that the ground is the place to be.

The Nadir of Cowardice

I tried to be quiet about this. I really didn’t want to have to write what I am about to write, but I had no choice. The idiocy has gotten too grand, too massive, for me to not speak my peace. And it was this story from AP that pushed me over the edge.

The “story,” of course, is the one that ought to be a nonstory, the whipped up “controversy” concerning the building of a “mosque” “at ground zero” in Manhattan. I know that I had to use an inordinate number of quotation marks in that last sentence, but the vast mountains of nonsense and folderol at the heart of this made that unavoidable.

Let’s start by talking facts. Fact #1: It is not a mosque, but a community center. Fact #2: It is not “at” or “next to” ground zero. It is two blocks away. How far away would it need to be before it is in good taste to build? Three blocks? Seven? Twelve? Give me a number. Newt, Rush, and all the rest of you lying fuckers, any one of you, give me a fucking number. Fact #3: This is only a controversy because the Republican Party repeatedly uses fear to sell bullshit. And they are doing it again because they have no respect for the People of the United States, and judging from the idiotic response to this sideshow, they may be justified.

Let me give you a quick rule of thumb: Any time someone seeks to make you afraid they are selling you something, and they are selling you something you don’t need and wouldn’t ordinarily want. Fear is the salesman’s weapon of last resort. And the only defense against it is a well-displayed middle finger. When politicians sell you fear, confound them by showing courage. Tell them to fuck off.

And this goes for Newt and Rush and Gov. David Paterson and Sarah Palin and Harry Reid. The Republicans are all opportunists using the wedge of fear in order to grab short term gains. The Democrats are spineless, vile weasels who are cowering in fear rather than being defenders of the truth. Even the President’s remark about not commenting on the wisdom of building there was gutless and pitiful.

This whole thing makes me sick. Is this the gorge into which this great nation has been pushed by partisan politics and the vast propaganda machine for idiocy that we call “the media”?

It makes me bottomlessly sad to look at the news and to see how little so many Americans think of America and its possibilities. “We have nothing to sell but fear itself” should be the motto of our political class. What a bunch of craven, worthless toads. Is it possible that the American experiment, at the hands of loud and opportunistic cowards, is dead?

I don’t think quite, yet. But the prognosis doesn’t look good.

One more thing. As of late, it has become a moron talking point that building the community center two blocks from ground zero is akin to the Japanese building a Shinto shrine next to Pearl Harbor. My response is this: A Shinto shrine–from what I know of Shinto, which is apparently far more than what Rush Limbaugh knows–would be a lovely and healing thing. Please America, please, do not give in to ignorance and hatred and fear. Newt and Rush and all of the blank faces on Fox have really put the “con” into conservatism and have thus perverted a necessary and once vital political force. Just say no. In fact, go that threadbare phrase one better and replace it with this threadbare phrase instead: Tell them to go fuck themselves. That’s the only way out and the only way back to the greatness that is the American experiment.

Political Target

In the last week or so, a controversy has grown over a donation of $150,000 by the mega-retailer, Target, Inc., to a group called MNForward, a political action committee that appears to be merely a front for the campaign of the Republican candidate for governor in the state of Minnesota, Tom Emmer.  I say, “merely a front,” simply because they do not seem to be supporting any other candidate for anything else anywhere in the world.  It’s website, bathed in generalities and misdirections, has the alarming stench of a con.  It’s “Who We Are” page tells us nothing of the sort.  It is vague and valueless, its text the kind of drivel that ad men and PR vultures spit out by the vat-full, kind and gentle words all designed to subtly mislead.  (I have asked MN Forward for information concerning candidates other than Mr Emmer that they support and how they support those candidates, the size of their staff, and the percentage of their donations that come from corporations.  I have not yet heard from them.  I will gladly update this post should I hear from them in the future.)

The essence of the controversy stems from Tom Emmer receiving significant corporate support through an outside agency funded significantly by Target when he clearly holds views that conflict with the policies espoused by Target elsewhere.  For example, Target  likes to tout its commitment to diversity.  They even extend benefits to domestic partners, which is an approach to society that I cannot imagine WalMart ever developing.  However, Tom Emmer opposes gay marriage and is perceived as being fiercely anti-LGBT.

Now, both Target and MN Forward hide behind the idea that they are supporting candidates based purely on how “pro-business” they are without consideration of any other area of policy.  And yet, is this truly possible or desirable?  For example, I could have, in the 1960s, have said that I supported groups that provided daycare and opened free clinics in poor neighborhoods.  And yet, would that have made contributing to the Black Panther Party a reasonable thing to do?  Would I not have been contributing also to their more radical policies, to their Maoist beliefs, to their reliance on violence?

This idea that support can be given to a group or a candidate along such narrow lines is, on its face, absurd.  As Johnny Carson used to say, “Buy the premise, buy the bit,” and when one buys the allegedly “pro-business” aspect of Tom Emmer’s candidacy, one also buys the part that seeks to deny equal rights to gays and lesbians as well as the xenophobic anti-immigration part.  The CEO of Target, Gregg Steinhafel, has contributed the maximum allowable–$2000 from him and $2000 from his wife–directly to Emmer’s campaign, which would seem to indicate some empathy with Mr Emmer’s general philosophy.  When that is taken together with his $5000 contribution–again the maximum allowed and again identical to one by his wife–for ultra-Conservative maven and mouthpiece Michelle Bachmann, it’s not difficult to think that his personal views might tend to be a bit to the right of center.  In fact, it is not hard to imagine that they are a bit to the right of the center of the right as a whole.

His personal contributions are his business.  He has every right to support any candidate that he so chooses.  However, as the steward of the interests of Target shareholders–shareholders who presumably hold a wide range of political and social philosophies–does he have the right to use money that technically belongs to those shareholders to make an end run around state and federal campaign laws and limitations?  Is the money that is gotten from the loyalty of Target’s customers–who again must hold a wide range of beliefs–his with which to try to elect a candidate whose policies may not be in the best interests of those consumers?  Should I have to, as a consumer, vet the political contributions of every store I patronize just to make sure that they’re not using my money in a covert attempt to screw me or to deny rights to my friends and perhaps family?

I would suggest that the real, ultimate culprit here is the concept of corporate personhood.  When trying to decide whether it is correct for corporations to have the same rights under the 14th Amendment to the Constitution that actual people do, I first think of Shylock:

Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs,
dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with
the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject
to the same diseases, heal’d by the same means,
warm’d and cool’d by the same winter and summer
as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed?
If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us,
do we not die?

When a corporation can answer “yes” to any of these, then, in my opinion, they deserve the same political rights as people do.  We regulate corporations for the simple reason that we recognize that they are not people or even, fundamentally, collections of people.  They are organisms of their own that wear people as an animal wears its bones.  And while the purpose of a person’s life may be complicated and open to religious, theological, and philosophical debate, corporations exist for only one reason:  to make money.

Can corporations vote?  No.  Can they run for elected office?  No.  Can they serve their community through the honor of being called for jury duty?  No.  If they are not accorded these political duties, why should they be accorded any political rights?  When a corporation can sponsor a candidate by the back door to the tune of $150,000 and even the wealthiest private citizen can only spend $2000, is not the playing field skewed?

I was going to quote Mussolini earlier, who is regularly quoted as saying that “Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.”  I’m glad I didn’t, though, because it seems he never said it.  However, he did say this:  “Democracy is beautiful in theory; in practice it is a fallacy. You in America will see that some day.” And while the warning is useful, he was wrong.  The beauty of democracy can be found in the word itself.  Democracy.  From the Greek, meaning “rule of the people.”  The people.  Not the businesses, not the military, not the national security state.  The people.