The Departed

Famous people keep dropping like flies.  This seems to be the worst year for celebrity death in quite some time, perhaps since the year that John Denver and Sonny Bono died young and needlessly.  Of course, not all of the celebs who shuffle off this mortal coil are on the level of a Michael Jackson or a Patrick Swayze.  Some are known for other things than performing and are really only celebrities in the loosest definition of the word.  Two of those who have recently died are Larry Gelbart and Jody Powell.

Gelbart was a writer and more specifically a comedy writer and more specifically than that an immensely skilled comedy writer.  In death as in life, he is best remembered for creating, or, rather, adapting from the movie of the same name, the sitcom M*A*S*H.  there was more to him than that, though, and he wrote movies and plays and other TV shows.  Some of those are pretty damn good, too, such as the play Sly Fox and the TV movie Barbarians at the Gate.  He started out in radio at the age of 16 when his father, who was a Hollywood barber,  got him a job writing for Danny Thomas.  that led to a stint working on Duffy’s Tavern which led to writing for Bob Hope for a while.

In the ’50s, he worked for Sid Caesar on Caesar’s Hour and some specials.  He is represented by the character called Kenny in Laughter on the 23rd Floor, and I want to go further off to the side on that and say that the character of Lucas is not Neil Simon’s presentation of himself, but is, in fact, his take on the young Woody Allen.  It’s not about Your Show of Shows, which is what Neil worked on.  It is about Caesar’s Hour, which was where Woody came on board.  In fact, there is a legendary story about Woody being brought to the writer’s room by Milt Kamen, who you probably don’t remember, but should.  Kamen had found Allen when Woody was writing sketches at a resort in the Catskills and convinced Caesar to hire him.  On the appointed day, Kamen collected Allen and ushered him into the writer’s room with the introduction, “I have with me the young Larry Gelbart.”  To which Gelbart, who had been a top comedy writer for about ten years, responded, “The young Larry Gelbart is sitting right here.”

But that’s how young he was when he started.  He was maybe 26 or 27 at the time and seemed like an old pro.

Gelbart was best known as a writer of clever dialogue in the spare, unsentimental tradition of George S. Kaufman.  As the guy who wrote most of the best episodes of the first four seasons of M*A*S*H and who also had a hand in all the others from that period, his influence on me was enormous.  His characterization of Hawkeye showed that he could have been a good writer for Groucho, had Groucho still needed top-notch film writers in the later decades of his career.  for many years, my true ambition was to be the young Larry Gelbart.  For a while, it was to be the middle-aged Larry Gelbart.  A person could do worse.

The second person I wanted to bring up was Jody Powell.

Now, I can’t say that he was any particular influence on me, although I’m sure he would have been had I actually known him. ( At least that’s what I got from the tribute that Hendrick Hertzberg wrote about him on The New Yorker website.)  I just wanted to note that I saw him once when I lived in Washington.  He crossed K Street in the opposite direction that I was, and I recognized him.  He gave no indication of knowing me, as shocking as that might seem.  I didn’t stop him, didn’t follow him, didn’t pester him, just took note of him.  “That’s Jody Powell,” I thought.  “Cool.”  He certainly didn’t look like a guy who would die, unexpectedly, of a heart attack at age 65.

You just never know.

What Closes on Saturday Night

People like to throw the word “satire” around a lot these days, but the term is rarely understood or applied properly.  I say this after reading a review of what sounds like a dog of a movie, Hamlet 2, in The New York Times.  At several points, the reviewer, Stephen Holden, refers to the satire in this film, only I don’t see anything satiric about it.  It’s merely a spoof, and Mr. Holden seems to think that sending up Dead Poets Society–however abysmal and worthy of derision that film may be–qualifies as satire.  However, it doesn’t, at least not to my mind.

Satire is a political and social weapon, and it has one target:  Those who have too much, control too much, and think that they have a right to dictate what sort of lives the great mass of humans get to live.  It is a cudgel that should be used in defense of the defenseless and against those in power.  You can make fun of a cripple, but a cripple can’t be satirized.  Neither can someone who is poor.

However, it seems to me to have been a trend in this country over recent years to attack those without power while giving those with power a relatively free ride, the main exception being partisan caricatures.  The Daily Show is capable of rising to the level of satire, but not much else that I see.  In the main, we spoof the rich and powerful–the “how stupid is Bush” trope is more spoof than anything else– while attacking the poor and downtrodden.

Let me use a couple of examples to show what I mean.

The first is an example of how popular it is these days to kick the poor. It’s a sketch from That Mitchell and Webb Look concerning two homeless men, Sir Digby Chicken Caesar and his cohort, Ginger.  Now, I like Mitchell and Webb.  I’m not here to run them down.  I just found this sketch disappointing because it does nothing except reinforce stereotypes and take potshots at people who are already down.  This takes no courage, no wit, no incisiveness, nothing.  At best, it takes a bit of a mean streak.

Contrast this with Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer as Tom fun and Derek:

There is an element of understanding and sympathy here that makes it poignant in a completely unsentimental way.  The small stain of satire in the piece is inherent in its sympathy with the characters and addresses the narrowness of a society  that pushes some of its weakest members to homelessness for their eccentricity (in losing their lodgings for Derek’s “unconventional way of eating an arctic roll“–a kind of dessert) and to theft in search of a bit of fun.

Satire denies the supremacy of the powerful by invoking laughter, but it is a laughter tinged with outrage.  Satirists are injured idealists, disappointed lovers.  They are people who use wit in order to defend those who cannot defend themselves and to deflate pretension.  And of all the things that one might claim about the homeless, calling them pretentious isn’t one of them.

What If?

In the wake of the controversy surrounding the arrest of Dr. Henry Louis Gates last week, I’m struck, yet again, by the pointlessness of our news coverage.  I’m not going to get into the particulars of the case.  That has already been done ad nauseum, and since I wasn’t a completely neutral party who was there, how can I say what went on?  I will say this:  Instead of drinking beers under a magnolia tree, it would have been better had the President joined them in the White House screening room for a viewing of Rashomon.

Last night, while I was skimming the umpteenth post on The Daily Dish about what’s being moronically called Gates Gate, I was struck by the thought of how ephemeral the whole thing is, how although it’s the big thing of the moment, in a few weeks it will be forgotten.  The news, as a concept, is a voracious consumer of outrage.  Based in melodrama, it searches endlessly for heroes and villains and works mostly by manipulating emotions by taking very real people and reducing their sufferings to a kind of marionette show.  You can’t sell papers, even digital ones, without stoking somebody’s discontent or their pity.

The news is grounded in sentimentality, which makes it harder to take any given story seriously for any particular length of time.  Since the story is sentimentalized, it is shallow.  Since it is shallow, it cannot be sustained.  To do otherwise would be like watching the same scene from a soap opera over-and-over again.  And it’s hard to imagine anything that could be duller than that.

Even longer-lasting stories, such as the War in Iraq, are presented in sentimental ways and are presented as a series of distinct sentimental stories rather than as one continuing narrative.  In the case of the Iraq War, it started out with a patriotic pageant called “Shock and Awe.”  This was followed by the desert melodrama “The Looting of Baghdad.”  “Abu Ghraib,” “al Qaeda in Iraq,” “Saddam Down the Spiderhole,” “Crisis in Fallujah,” “Improvised Explosive Device,” “The Hanging of Saddam Hussein,” and “The Surge,” among a plethora of titles, all had their moments in the sun.  And just to be clear, I am not trying to belittle the suffering incurred by the soldiers involved, their families, or the Iraqis themselves.  These are all people who experience these stories not as melodrama but as tragic farce.  Their suffering is real and should not, cannot, be diminished.

And that is part of the hell of it.  By sentimentalizing such a story, the news business does exactly that.  It diminishes the suffering of those directly involved.  It takes something profound and makes it passing fair just for the sake of making a few more dollars.

The chaff of this approach to news is the kind of person we call a celebrity.  These are people of no discernible talent who attain a sort of notoriety, quite often from a scandal, and they work quite hard to remain in the public eye.  I just saw a headline concerning Kim Kardashian this morning that described her as a star, and I’m still not sure why I should know her name at all.  Except that she was involved in some scandal at one time, which made her part of the news cycle.  For the person who gets addicted to the notoriety, life becomes a melodramatic story of various romances and break-ups and career moves.  It’s a very sad thing, this addiction to fame, and I can’t imagine the bottomless, existential dread that must envelope Ms Kardashian every time she looks in a mirror and notices an imperfection.  Michael Jackson was killed by his fame and by the sentimentalized parody of a person he became in its service.

And so the omnivorous news cycle continues, chewing up people and stories and spitting them out as parody humans, no longer noble or tragic but merely pitiable.  And there’s nothing to be done about it because most people prefer melodrama to tragedy and sentimental comedy to farce.  They like everything tied up at the end with ribbons made of avuncular smiles and homebaked pies.  It’s a reality of a kind, a shabby, sentimental one, but that’s what folks like.  For the advantage to sentimentality is this:  When the emotions produced are fake and trite, you don’t have to risk the power of true pain and joy.

Newspaper Madness

One of the arguments that people–and by people I mean print journalists–make for the inability of newspapers to move online is the claim that the level of reporting would suffer because news outlets, due to the smaller levels of revenue available online, would have to close foreign bureaus and layoff staff and just generally not be able to do as much reporting as they have traditionally done.  Fair enough.  The loss of solid reporting would be a loss to society.  However, that argument can only hold water if the two basic assumptions underpinning it–that quality reporting can’t be accomplished without a wide network of standing bureaus and that online reporting is inherently inferior to its print cousin–are actually true.  I’ve encountered a couple of things in recent weeks that lead me to believe that neither is.

The first has been the coverage of the demonstrations in Iran.  While The New York Times has mostly reported on the press releases and statements of the most hardline Ayatollahs and the dismal to the point of being pathetic Ahmadinejad, Andrew Sullivan on his blog The Daily Dish has been doing actual reporting based on Twitter tweets and emails and on information gleaned from people who have connections with family and friends inside Iran.  This is reporting.  And this is why, when a very important and respected group of Ayatollahs came out against the recent election, all the big news outlets were slack-jawed in their disbelief while Andrew and his readers were not.

The second piece of reporting has had to do with the sudden resignation last week by Governor Sarah Palin.  (For the sake of the argument I am presenting, I offer no opinions for or against Gov. Palin.  This has to do with reporting facts, not opinions.)  While the MSM took the Governor’s statement at face value and, even in interviews, tossed her softball questions, online outlets were checking her statements to see what was factual and what wasn’t.  Again, the online outlets are reporting while the MSM is passing along press releases.

None of this is new.  The MSM let us down in considering the Iraq War.  They let us down on torture allegations.  They’ve let us down over-and-over again for the longest time.  It predates Mr. Bush’s presidency and it has outlived it.  The big newspapers and the networks and the other big news outlets have routinely relied on press conferences and government contacts instead of real reporting, which is simply awful and lazy journalism.  All the actual journalism that gets done gets shunted into a special category called “investigative journalism” and is done mostly by magazines rather than newspapers and news shows.  All the MSM really does is support the status quo, which is what state-supported media are supposed to do.  If they are not asking questions about everybody in power all the time (and this is where Fox News also misses the mark:  they coddle one side and attack the other) they are not doing their jobs.  They have stopped being reporters and started being merely typists and apologists.

I think that the MSM can either adapt or die.  I think that journalism suffers from being made into a profession instead of a calling.  I think reporters should dig and question and be cynical about politicians and aloof from them.  I think that finding ways of supporting them in their current condition is bad for democracy and bad for the Republic.

When Illiterates Try to Read Between the Lines

I tried twice yesterday to get comments on a New York Times blog called “Moral of the Story” by a fellow named Randy Cohen.  The blog purports to be dedicated to looking at stories from the news through the lens of ethics. (Never mind that ethics and morals are two distinct things and that people who are ethical aren’t always perceived as moral while folks who are moral are oftentimes not ethical.) As of this writing, neither comment has made it through the censors, which, for the purposes of this post, is neither here nor there. The blog post in question concerns the recent public relations tug-of-war between David Letterman and Sarah Palin.

First, let me say that the whole thing is a tempest in a teapot. I can’t really imagine a less important news story. The situation is essentially this: Letterman told a joke–in some eyes a rotten joke–poorly, and Palin reacted in an absurd manner. There is no winner in this tiff, especially not the great American public.

Sprinkled amongst the comments generated by this post were a number that berated Letterman for joking about Willow Palin being raped, a thing which he did not do. Being a lover of the English language and of reasoning as an avocation, I wrote the following as my second comment (the first comment is lost to history):

There is not only a semantic but a legal difference between rape and statutory rape. In the one case, one participant in an allegedly sexual act is unwilling. The act is forced upon that person without their consent, whether they have the legal authority to give consent or not. In the other case, a person is engaged in a sexual act at an age that the legislature has determined is below the age at which informed consent can be given. The person’s willingness to engage in the act is irrelevant. They are deemed too young to be trusted to knowingly consent to such an act.

Conflating the two does no one any good. In fact, it cheapens the harm done and the injury felt by the victims of rape, those who were unwillingly violated by another.  However, in this matter and for the sake of making a few third-rate political points, it is convenient for Governor Palin and her acolytes to muddy the two very distinct terms into one so as to misstate the intent and effect of the joke. And if anyone actually thought that Letterman was referring to Willow Palin when he made that joke, you should be ashamed of yourself. You’ve got a dirty mind.

Finally, it is hypocritical to worry about protecting the children when both Willow and Bristol Palin have been repeatedly used as props and weapons by their parents. If the folks who are so worried about them are true to their word, they would find these kids a foster home.

(I have slightly revised this comment to remove spelling and other such errors and to amplify the argument in a couple of places.)

As I’ve trudged through life, I’ve been subjected to a long stream of numbskulls and dimwits who disparaged “book learning” in favor of “street smarts” and who decried the need for a large vocabulary (originally called the use of “twenty-five cent words,” inflation has them valued at somewhere around five dollars these days) and the subtle use of language. And yet the entire line of thinking that goes into jumping to the conclusion that Letterman was joking about anyone being raped shows exactly why book learning and a varied vocabulary and a subtle sense of language are virtues, not vices. For without understanding how words work, without understanding the difference between reasoning and believing, a demagogue can mislead and citizens are reduced to the status of cattle. (I made a similar point in an earlier post.)

Despite what is believed in some quarters, this nation was not founded by men who had faith in religious belief.  They had faith in the ability of humans to reason their way through problems.  They understood that reason elevated the member of a mob to be a functioning citizen.  Reason allowed them to be governed rather than ruled.

And Why Is It That Everybody Hates Lawyers?

Take this snippet from The New York Times as an example:

[Hugh Verrier, chairman of White & Case,] suffered a depressive 2008 holiday party at Cipriani’s, which had half the budget of the prior year’s $500,000 event — a Neroesque fete at the United Nations with fireworks and a band.

Poor baby.  He had to make do with a Christmas party that only cost a quarter of a million dollars.  Speaking as someone whose work Christmas party was a potluck held on the premises, it is my considered opinion that Mr. Verrier can go fuck himself.

The Dan Brown Conspiracy

With the release of the film Angels & Demons, the time has come again for op-ed pages all over the movie-going world to ask the burning question of the 21st century:  “Why does Dan Brown sell so many more books than I do?”  Many theories are posited, from Mr. Brown’s alleged proselytizing for some sort of suburban demi-Christianity to, I suppose, mass hypnosis.  The deeper sort of reader is puzzled by the enduring allure of drivel, and the more mercantile sort drips with envy over money being generated so easily and quickly by someone who is obviously no more talented, clever, or intelligent than they.  And yet, I think none of this explains the implausible popularity of  Angels & Demons or, more especially, The Da Vinci Code.

For many people, of course, it is simply a matter of–to use an old comedy nostrum–”buy the premise, buy the bit.”  It seems unlikely to me, though, that there’s 100 million copies-worth of the suspension of disbelief available in any one century.  If that is true, another explanation must apply.

Being a modern, frantic, beleaguered American, my mind leaps immediately to the conspiracy theory.  It’s not so much that I think that there is some hidden international conspiracy that is trying to sell Mr. Brown’s books–although that would explain a lot–it is that, I think, the appeal of The Da Vinci Code and its lesser brethren, all of which invent huge, unseen conspiracies, comes from a widespread need for the conspiracy theory as a way of understanding reality.  I would contend that, in a dizzyingly complicated and existentially fragmented world, a world in which most people feel themselves to be the victims of their lives rather than the heroes, the finding, keeping, and maintaining of conspiracy theories is a lifeline that people latch on to in an attempt to keep themselves functional, to keep themselves sane.

There’s a paradox in using something that is fundamentally paranoid and insane as a defense of one’s sanity, but desperate times call for desperate measures.  And the proof of the usefulness of conspiracy theories is in their very ubiquity:  Off the top of my head, I can come up with a great pile of popular conspiracy theories.  There is, of course, the granddaddy of them all, the alleged conspiracy behind the Kennedy assassination.  There’s the idea that someone besides William Shakespeare wrote his plays and poems.  There is a whole slew of them having to do with the Tri-Lateral Commission.  There are the ideas of the left-wing media, the mainstream media, and the vast conspiracy that uses right-wing radio as its mouthpiece.  There are conspiracy theories about 9/11, various recent elections, the Moon landing, Israel, Jews in general, the Queen of England, and a number of Popes.  There are conspiracy theories involving the Mormons, freemasons, Democrats, Republicans, Communists, and Fascists.  That’s the problem with conspiracy theories:  They’re everywhere if only you look hard enough.

We are taught to be rational.  In fact, one of the hallmarks of Western civilization has been its championing of the rational mind.  And rationality has led to many boons and wonders.  Unfortunately we live in an irrational universe, and when we are confronted with something that challenges the order that our rational minds have imprinted on the world–such as that a deluded loser can kill a President, that 3000 people can die in a lunatic’s idea of a publicity stunt, that a middle-class burgher in the Midlands of England can have the greatest ear for language and feel for character of any writer in English–we feel that we have to explain it in terms other than the obvious.  If the prejudices and biases we use to defend ourselves are wrong in this, how else are they wrong?  Without the shield of these biases, we are Lear on the heath and the world is a madness.

One of the lies of the conspiracy theory is that conspiracies are cloaked in an impenetrable secrecy.  The Bush Administration, to use a recent example, has shown us that this is not true.  They operated mostly openly, behind only a thin veneer of secrecy.  As the recent release of the so-called torture memos makes clear, they colluded and conspired and–most importantly–rationalized their way around and past laws both national and international.  They hid their intentions and lied to our faces to start a war on terror and a war in Iraq that they thought would combat–wait for it–a vast international conspiracy.  Perhaps it was a case of “it takes one to know one,” but I think it was just another collective delusion.

And so Dan Brown sells books.  It’s comforting to think that a rational explanation is readily available for something–the divinity of Jesus, for example–that doesn’t seem rational, that challenges our prejudices, that tests our biases.  If only Mr. Brown’s books were rational.  Or readable.  But I guess the appearance of rationality is better than no rationality at all.

The Elements of Style, Not Steel

In reading an article in The Times this morning concerning the 50th anniversary edition of The Elements of Style, I reflected on a blog post I wrote a little over a year ago in which I discussed the effect the so-called “little book” had on me as a writer.  It was a small stroll down memory lane inspired, at the time, by a slight detour.  I had read a blog post by Paul Krugman in which he danced a piroette on the wonders of George Orwell’s essay about clarity in writing, “Politics and the English Language,” and I ventured the opinion that not only might Orwell’s essay perhaps not have been “the best essay on writing ever written,” but was, at least in my case, one of the best sleep aids I had ever encountered.  Some days later, I noticed on the dashboard for this blog that there was a link incoming to that post.  It connected to some website devoted to Orwell, and the author of the link added one of the “rules” from The Elements of Style in which E.B. White enjoined the nascent writer to not “affect a breezy manner.”  Apparently my lack of enthusiasm had struck a nerve, and someone who lacked the courage to identify himself had constructed what he thought was a witty rejoinder to my slander against his hero.  That’s how things are done in the digital world.

Unfortunately for our Orwell-loving sniper, my piece, while playful in spots, was not written in a breezy manner, and he (or she; idiocy is not gender-specific) missed the point of a section that White referred to in the book as a selection of reminders.  This point was also missed in a recent article published in The Chronicle of Higher Learning by a professor from the University of Edinburgh called Geoffery Pullum, although, in fairness, Professor Pullum has more reasonable, compelling, and useful ideas to put forth.  Both seem (although I might be misinterpreting Professor Pullum) to be under the misapprehension that The Elements of Style is anything other than a collection of guidelines for the beginner and is not–especially after E.B. White got through with it–a polemic or manifesto.  Of course, they are not alone.  Too many thousands, including the folks who created the grammar wizard in Microsoft Word, have taken the Little Book too seriously.  They treat it as if it were holy writ, not merely some quick ideas that put forth the notion–the same one as put forth by Orwell, by the way–that clarity in the writing of English prose is a virtue.

Because Professor Strunk followed his own advice concerning the making of definite assertions, the early sections of the book do read like an extension of the Ten Commandments, but this can be overcome.  And the second section, the one dominated by White, is far less proscriptive, although, I guess, by the time that people get that far, they have been conditioned enough to jump when commanded that they unconsciously omit White’s advice to season one’s taste of his reminders with a pinch or two of salt.  It is long past time for everyone to relax a little and to remember that The Elements of Style is not a sacred text.  It began its life as a guidebook for college freshmen and not as a learned disquisition on the English language in all its complexity.  It is a style guide, and a decent one, I think, and entertaining to boot.

Now, two more things before I go.

First, I want to make it clear that I am not anti-Orwell.  1984 and Animal Farm are two of the best novels I’ve ever read, extraordinary in every way.  What I failed to make clear previously was that it was that one essay that put me to sleep.  If it is truly as great as Professor Krugman had it, then the fault is mine.

Second, Professor Pullum’s essay should be read by anyone who is infatuated with The Elements of Style and his words heeded.  I think he is right in just about everything he says except in his insistence on taking the book sooooo seriously.  It also seems to me that some of his notions, such as that “[t]he students who know which words are needless don’t need the instruction,” are logically flawed and detract from his overall argument.   (Not that he’s arguing with overalls.  Whoops!  There’s that breezy side of me rearing its ugly head again.  For shame!  For shame!)  I think it would be great to see his essay published with the standard text as an afterword or something.  Everyone would benefit from a bit of scoffing, for there is no animal duller than a sacred cow.

I Get the Picture

Despite checking it relentlessly throughout the day, I don’t always get a lot of value out of Facebook.  I look at my homepage, shrug, and move on.  There’s something about both it and Twitter that I have trouble with.  As egocentric as I am, I still can’t be persuaded that anybody needs to know the excruciating minutiae of my daily life.  Does it really matter what I’m doing at any given moment, as long as it’s reasonably legal and only involves consenting adults?

However, I have just had an interesting experience on Facebook.  The niece of one of my “friends” (he and I were true friends during high school, but are, in reality, something less than  acquaintances now) posted a series of pictures taken at some family event.  Now, of course, there’s a very human tendency to remember people as they were rather than as how they are.  This was brought into sharp focus for me when I came across, among these photos, a shot of my friend’s parents.  I remember them as they were 30 or more years ago, probably about the age I am now.  And here I saw them, aged appropriately, still easily recognizable for who they were, who they had been.  And yet it was still a shock.

The smiles were still the same, hers open and friendly, his more wry and knowing.  He looks at her with love, as he always did, and I am transported.  I am young and callow, thin as a straw and riddled with acne and insecurity.  We are in their kitchen in the sturdy yellow house on a quiet small street.  My friend’s mother is cooking or cleaning or waiting on someone.  His father sits at the table at the wall by the door, reading the paper which is spread flat before him.  He sips a beer in tall, slender beer glass at patient intervals, spicing it with a taste of salt taken from a supply he keeps in the crook at the base of his thumb.

This is a happy memory for me.  More than that, it is a memory content.  This is a home for me, a second home, not in opposition to my real home as is so often the case, but an extension of it.  Another haven of acceptance and accord.

To see these people again, the mother, the father, the brother, the sisters, to see the person who was once the friend of the person who was once me is a pleasure, a welcome wave of sentiment and remembrance.  Many years have passed and all of these lives, mine and theirs, have gone in ways discrete and different.  I am, such as I am now, mostly unknown to them and they to me.  And yet in  my memory, so many years ago, I feel their presence and their being.  And amongst the strains and trials of life, amongst the difficult people and the slights and troubles that refuse to be forgotten, I still have that haven.

The Joke’s on You

As I’ve noted before, I keep tabs on the A Prairie Home Companion website the way that a boy keep tabs on the girl who broke his heart, and a Post to the Host there has gotten me thinking about practical jokes.  Apparently, on a recent show, Garrison Keillor revealed that Buddy Holly hadn’t died in that plane crash on the winter of 1959 and that he was now a minister with the Church of Christ working the lower westside of Manhattan.  One listener, confused, posted to the host and asked for clarification.  Mr Keillor thereupon took the opportunity to expand on his story, and even threw in that Holly now went by the name of the Reverend Charles Holley, with an “e,” which is the way his family spelled his true, nonstage name.  Now, a cursory Google search revealed that the named church, the Manhattan Church of Christ,  was not on W. 12th Street, but rather on on E. 80th Street, and that there was no Charles Holley ministering there.  So, the whole thing is a spoof.

And that’s fine, except that it makes me uncomfortable in the way that almost all practical jokes make me uncomfortable.  There is something fundamentally cruel and heartless about practical jokes.  The basic premise of these attempts at humor is to make one person look like a jerk for the amusement of others.  And while such an activity is certainly legal and Constitutional in the most trivial possible sense of the word, is it, in fact, civil?  Is this a way for a well known radio performer, humorist, and novelist to be acting?  And does this suckering of a listener–and most of his loyal listeners are nothing short of adoring–betray a well hidden contempt for the very people who make him a success?  Doesn’t Mr Keillor make a very nice living from the attentions of people like our unfortunate Thad and other hapless listeners like Carla, who posted a comment begging for clarification?

Personally, I’m not big on playing people for suckers, especially people who (and they are few in number) would look up to me and who would support my projects and celebrate my creativity.  As I was rereading Of Mice and Men over the weekend, I was struck by a passage in which George tells Slim why he stopped playing practical jokes on Lennie.  He says,

Tell you what made me stop that.  One day a bunch of guys was standin’ around up on the Sacramento River.  I was feelin’ pretty smart.  I turns to Lennie and says, “Jump in.”  An’ he jumps.  Couldn’t swim a stroke.  He damn near drowned before we could get him.  An’ he was so damn nice to me for pullin’ him out.  Clean forgot I told him to jump in.  Well, I ain’t done nothin’ like that no more.

That, of course, is a small parable on compassion.  When we see people as suckers, we see them as objects.  We shield ourselves from their humanity so that we can feel a tiny bit superior and so that we can “have a little fun.”  And yet, you can never tell where your “little bit of fun” ends and someone else drowning begins.  It doesn’t hurt to err on the side of compassion, especially when a person occupies a higher, more powerful social position.  And perhaps it is a good trait in an artist to see in his readers and listeners fully formed human beings rather mere suckers.