Faces of Death

Of course Pat Robertson is against Halloween, but then again Halloween is a thing people derive pleasure from, an automatic "no" in the Robertson internal moral discernment negotiation flow-chart. Asking strangers for candy while dressed adorably as a ninja turtle is apparently on the same level of thought-crime as gay sex or advocating for the end of the tax-exempt status for religions.

His strong hot-take on Halloween has all the careful consideration and self-awareness as the rest of his prescriptions for an improved social discourse and general moral welfare, like his brave public declaration of not understanding how separation of powers works or his denunciation of the pernicious and persistent presence of black people.

"This country desperately needs moral guidance. Parents see 250,000 crimes being committed every month. They see 27 million functional illiterates. They see 50 percent of black young people of inner cities not being able to read or write, and they sense a crisis in education."

It's a fascinating pivot from "we need moral guidance" to "look at all this crime!" to "soooo many black kids." Am I pulling this quote out of context? Probably, but only because doing so serves the the rhetorical point I'm trying to un-subtly make and this is the internet, so those are kind of the rules.

And OK, to be fair, his main point of the webpage I lifted it from seems to be about "states rights" which has never before been used to obfuscate or complicate any other negative social point regarding African-Americans.

Of course I do disagree with Pat Robertson about Halloween, but only kind of on the finer points. I also object to Halloween, but only on personal laziness grounds, as I do for all holidays that have a participation requirement. He says:

"That’s the day when millions of children and adults will be dressing up as devils, witches, and goblins … to celebrate Satan," he explained. "They don’t realize what they’re doing.”

First of all, pick your head up, grampa. When was the last time you saw anyone dressed up as a "goblin"? Spider-Man villain Green Goblin maybe but only in that window between the first and second Sam Raimi versions, before Spider-Man 3 came along and contaminated all related merchandising with the deadly radioactivity of suck.

In that quote though, it's that last bit... do we not realize what we're doing? Really? We offer sexy Darth Vader costumes, which is basically a latex cat-suit and a helmet. It's not just that it's pointlessly and exploitatively sexualized, it's a pointlessly and exploitatively sexualized Dark Lord of the Sith. This didn't happen by accident. People thought about this. What are the two things Pat Robertson likes the least?* Sorcery and boners, easy. Two for two in one costume. Obvious evidence of intelligent design.

Also, I object to his glib dismissal of Satanism as unthinking or unintentional in general. We've had some very specific points of action recently showing Satanists coming right out to make very showy and pointed political stands in the name of constitutional freedom and the Prince of Darkness. See, two for two again. They come in pairs, Just like Sith lords.

Just this week, Satanists insisted on being allowed equal time to hold an invocation after a high school football game in Washington state because the coach was insisting on having a Christian one. The coach has now been suspended.

In Oklahoma, demanding equal consideration for their religious beliefs, Satanists successfully got a proposed Ten Commandments monument scotched by insisting on installing alongside it a $100,000 bronze statue of a demon being looked at adoringly by children. Happy to say the statue still survives and has been moved, probably appropriately, to Detroit.

Despite my own misgivings, we will be celebrating Halloween again this year, as I have children under 18 still to contend with under my care. They've already decided on their costumes (Porter Wagoner, Keatsian melancholia and Iron Man), so we're committed. If it means accidentally advocating Satanism, I guess I'm OK with it.

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*After taxes and black people, I mean, obviously, as we've already established.

It's Calling to You

I don't have a great memory of most of my childhood up to about fifth or sixth grade. There was a lot of moving around (not, like, fidgeting, but from domicile to domicile. If someone told me I did my fair share of twitching during that period, I wouldn't fight 'em though) and some familial chaos, so I figure I've either a) blocked it out or b) it didn't really register. As I know from being a father of three kids myself, the capacity for children to identify a situation--no matter how patently absurd or straight-out fucked up--as "normal" is without boundary. Part of that is the unavoidable and blissful naivete of a lack of comparable life experiences in which to build a competing context. The other part of it is likely a default defense mechanism for having parents who are, to varying degrees of course and with differing levels of consistency or commitment, assholes.

I do remember 1983 though, nine years old, street-lights already out, standing at the top of a cul-de-sac in an absurdly safe south Orange County bedroom community* in the company of a clutch of similarly aged boys, ones I normally felt conspicuously Inland Empire around, sharing thoughts about how we felt about Return of the Jedi. In retrospect this was not us at our most critically objective or motivationally pure, which was something of a missed opportunity given that Jedi provides plenty of stray threads to pull at. In the moment, though, I believe the delimiters of the discussion group lie in deciding which parts of the movie were awesome vs. the parts that were the most awesome. To our credit, though, I don't think anyone was pointedly or explicitly enthused by the presence of Ewoks.

While there may have been camps formed around championing this sequence ("...and then? At the end? Darth Vader? Threw that bitch emperor down a well!") or that design choice ("...and Jabba? The worm dude? Had a pet tyrannosaurus!") in singalong cadences of declarative uptalking, we all easily agreed: Star Wars was the best thing. Across all categories, not just of film or entertainment, but of all things including food or relationships or our planetary position relative to the sun. Earth could be a dim, cold, lifeless rock on a meandering ovoid orbit skirting the weak edges of a star's gravitational effective range and there would still be no denying the potency of Skywalker.

I don't know that any of us expected it as it certainly felt like the end of the story, but I know we all wanted there to be more. And, to be fair, there was. I made a point of being very good friends with a kid who had all the goddamned Kenner toys, so we could set up and animate canonically accurate extensions of story and action.** I read Timothy Zahn's Thrawn trilogy extending the story sometime in the mid-1990s. There were more books and comic books and TV shows and (mostly poor but a couple of extraordinarily good) video games, not to mention (and I try to rarely do so) three whole prequel films.

[Look, maybe the prequels were OK and they only suffered from the bad luck of coming out when I was old enough to compare them to... anything good. But my kids are all 16 and under and they know they suck too.]

I set up my DVR to record a fairly shitty Monday Night Football game between two teams I have a combined interest in, on a scale of one to 10, of minus-1,000 because I wanted to see the premiere of the trailer of Star Wars Episode VII. And right as it ended, I was surprised to find that I was--JUST A LITTLE BIT--teary eyed. Note please that I am a 41-year-old adult very aware that what I'd just seen was less a cultural event and, much more blatantly, a crass act of corporate synergy between ESPN, Lucasfilm and likely many other branches of the entire Disney corporate family.

But for all the Star Wars I've consumed over the last 32 years, it really kind of hit me in the moment as I thought about what the fuck was happening (and it's not that odd for old dads to cry at commercials really, so it could have been encroaching elderliness) was that none of that content had or could possibly give me what I wanted: the next film of this story about these characters. And their crew of multiethnic friends? FUCK YES, all them too.

I'm clinging on to the roof of the Advertising Car of the Hype Train, on purpose. Knowing that it might be terrible, because I'm old enough to have been excited for Phantom Menace as well before volunteering to experience that dick-punch. And knowing that J.J. Abrams has weird tendencies, like writing and directing space movies where the goddamned space ships are always tooling around in the atmosphere of planets, even when they're called Star Trek, and always making the MacGuffin a Giant Red Ball of Power.

But the trailer looks fantastic. Not a flat, lifeless CGI cartoon like the prequels. And the new leads are proven, solid actors like John Boyega (watch Attack the Block) and Oscar Isaac (watch... lots of things, but especially recently Show Me a Hero) and Daisy Ridley (watch... uh... OK, I've never seen her do anything, but from the 15-20 seconds of work I've seen in the trailers, I know she's a vast improvement over poor Hayden Christiansen). I'll ride the train as far as it will take me. It also helps to know that if this fucker derails like the last one did, it's unlikely I'll actually die.


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*visiting family. Most of the places we actually lived through that age were not of the out-after-dark variety.

**OK, mostly action. The TIE fighter's wings popped off with the push of a button. Nobody was exploring relationships, except for the occasional Han/Lando shipping.

Our Lips Are Sealed

It's hard to know what the office rumors about yourself are since, if they are operating correctly, they are the thing everyone stops talking about immediately whenever you enter a room. They exist in a negative social space that manifests in the inverse of your actual physical presence, like the ghost of you that exists before you've had the courtesy to die.

Since I've been a supervisor, I've always assumed someone somewhere was saying something about me. I certainly bitched about my boss when I had a supervisor and continue to do so to this day, only now it's about a vice president of something or other. There are certain superficial aspects of your working life that will change depending upon your level within the bureaucracy, but there are some things that are comfortingly constant, like how 100% of the people you talk to are some combination of overworked/underpaid/unappreciated/the font of all solutions if only they were listened to in proportion to their prodigious ability. I have full confidence that Mr. Vice President that I report to has a daily surreptitious eye-roll or three at the expense of the president above him, and who in turn will on occasion have zero minutes to spend giving a fuck about whatever it is the company owner/CEO won't just get to the goddamned point about already.

We, all of us, work for idiots. It's as certain in American life as taxes, death and the Dodgers losing in the Division Series. It doesn't really matter what your level of respect is for your boss or how much you genuinely enjoy working for him/her,* man, if they'd just get their shit together on this one/a couple important/all aspect(s), your life would be so much simpler. Of course we have the option of pointing out exactly what that/those aspect(s) is/are, but the only thing worse than being annoyed by someone is knowing that they know exactly how they annoy you and them then actively deciding to make no effort to change or fix it. To be fair, though, it can be a tall order as usually the only feasible solution offered is "become a completely different person, please."

So I assume the people I supervise bitch about me, if/when I'm a topic of conversation at all. Or at least that whatever choices I make have left a kind of social and professional residue that others are able to pile up into a snowman version of me. But it's part of the understood contract between us that they pretend they're not saying it and I pretend I didn't hear any of it.

One of them broke the code last week, though, and gave me a little bit of a glimpse of what I look like from the outside. It's not something you always want to know. It's like seeing a picture of yourself that someone else took (people used to do that!) from an unfamiliar angle and being genuinely confused about who the fat bastard with the receding hairline, undeserving of human love is before realizing oh yeah, he's wearing my shirt and HEEEEYYYYyyyy...

When I started eight years ago, at minion level, I was part of a group that was six men and one woman. Since I became a manager (and hiring official) four years ago, we have evolved to the point where we are about to be seven women and four men (myself included). So the big rumor/conclusion that's been reached about me is: I don't like men. I find them intimidating, apparently.

I have to say, I feel pretty good about that.

I'm sure there are other rumors or characterizations to be discovered. And I guess if I pressed I could find out, but that feels a little thirsty to me. All I know is when the inevitable gynocracy gets here next year and they start to divide the men up into breed slaves and wine mules, I may have enough votes amongst our overladies to have my preferences considered.

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*Yeah, statistically still probably him.

The Catcher

October!

It's that time of year again when we as Americans embrace the ritual of tradition and holidays to distract us from the very real and visceral reminders all around us of the onrushing calamity of inevitable death. Those lovely orange and brown leaves shriveling, detaching, floating and lying listless and stark, only to be stacked into piles for disposal and then callously run through and cruelly scattered by those (chronologically) farthest from dying. This is followed by the ritual excerebration and mutilation of pumpkins--guilty of no offense!--and a satanic orgy of both intimidation and gluttony. All in preparation, of course, as we brace ourselves for the cold bleeding-out of brown autumn into gray winter, with all warmth escaping into the ether like a wheezing last breath, with only a trace hope--but no promise--of, someday, spring. Yes, I'm also this much fun at Christmas.

Also there is playoff baseball!

The qualifier seems a bit on the nose, but there's a very important distinction to be made between baseball and playoff baseball. By itself, baseball is a thing you might go to live because you need an excuse to eat a deep-fried cinnamon roll. Food choices like that only make sense when the impact is diluted by the presence of other people, the more the better. The threshold for making that kind of self-harm acceptable is around 17,000 people. The fewer people around, the sadder it is. If you're eating a deep-fried cinnamon roll at home alone, let's face it, you're probably enjoying it (euphemistically speaking) between drafts of a suicide note. Baseball provides you with this protective context. Otherwise it's not a thing people actually watch in 2015.

Playoff baseball, on the other hand, is a completely different thing. I'm not sure if it's the best thing in all of sports,* but once you get past the meaningless regular season games (roughly 155 of 162 are skippable, and this is a best-case scenario that includes only teams in playoff contention. If you were a Phillies fan this year, this is probably the first you're hearing of the 2015 season at all), nothing can match it for moment-to-moment drama. Well, not all the moments, like the interminable break from pitch to pitch, but the built-up tension and payoff when the ball is delivered, when literally anything within the rules of the game could potentially happen up to and including the spilling of human blood among the innocents, the theater of it becomes a riveting, undeniable spectacle of melodrama on a Wagnerian scale. But with nobody singing about magic dwarfs in German. That was supposed to lead to a joke, but now I honestly can't tell if that's a plus or a minus.

Baseball isn't exempt from the seasonal perturbation and unease, however. In fact, it's a deeply ingrained part of it, acting as a transitional balm to soothe the existential downshift from summer to fall. It has its own rhythms and sounds, a music of its own to lull and to tranquilize, unless your team is participating, then fuck the music, I may have to throw this chair if things don't go exactly right.

Even if your team is not participating, just underneath the pacifying calm is a barely stilled hot-oil barrel of rage ready to atomize and explode any drop of creeping, polluting moisture that might sneak its way in to threaten the sleepy status quo.

Like for instance if a girl showed up. Like, anywhere. But worst of all, speaking where men-types can hear her. On the baseball telecast. And not in a bikini and impractical shoes holding up inning numbers like a boxing ring girl either, like talking about baseball with the regular bepenised baseball people who are supposed to be mulling over the important stuff like which pitch count Dallas Keuchel likes to throw sliders in.

This happened just a couple of days ago. A girl. In a broadcast booth. Talking about baseball. And nobody even tried to stop her. Fuck, for all we know, some lunatic actually invited her. That's the kind of world we live in now, people. The president is a black guy and ladies talk about baseball.

What happens to white guys, then? Oh, just one of them almost loses his job just because he referred ONE TIME to the broadcaster lady as "Tits McGee." It's like you people don't understand that this is supposed to be the hibernation time, where we store up our energy for the long push for the hoped-for thaw so many, many months out. It's a matter of survival that we're allowed to lay out, with everything exactly as we expect it, so we don't, like, die from startle-induced hypothermia some time in the middle of January.

Total peace. Total rest. Except for that one day after Thanksgiving when we break out to beat the shit out of strangers in a contest blessed by the extralegal embrace of multinational corporations. Sounds contradictory, but that's traditional too.

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*Summer Olympic platform diving, another thing I couldn't be pistol-whipped into giving the first shit about every other week of the quadrennial, but when there's a medal at stake, goddamn it if I won't talk all day about the tragedies of over-rotation and the triumph of a clean entry.

The Fateful Lightning

I'm trying not to be an old person. I don't have a lot of space in my head or on this platform that I'd like to devote to reminiscing about the "old civility" and the way people within the scope of political discourse, in politics and among the lay polity, used to be so much nicer to one another because like most nostalgic appeals to the past, it's not supportable by the facts. Maybe you could point out that it used to be possible for Tip O'Neill and Ronald Reagan to work together on some stuff or at least have a jovial exchange the way old white guys assured of their own personal power can and what a shame it is that that kind of collegiality no longer exists, blah blah. But like with most history, the story you think you know is a lie you've decided to accept probably because, if you're anything like me, it's a subject you're super tired of trying to think about at all. Glomming on to someone else's feels-based narrative of comfortable historical symmetry is far simpler and more emotionally comfortable, soft and warm like a bed made from a thick fleece blanket laid over a layer of fresh bullshit.

Also these things are both cyclical and arbitrary. Sure, there are periods when people are more subjectively civil to one another, but if appealing to the past lends legitimacy to an argument, appealing farther back should lend even more legitimacy, right? Whatever argument anyone wants to make about the Old Days being more consensus-y and respectful, I can always point back to the mid-late 19th century when some Congressional debates resulted in the deaths of 600,000 Americans (including one president) over a period of roughly five years.*

Call me a shameful optimist I guess, then, but I don't really feel like our current political epoch, depressing and cacophonous as it is, really represents any kind of mortal wounding of the American political process as a whole. It's more resilient than we think. We've been trying to kill it with the dumb Electoral College for 225 years, for example, but it just keeps on ticking.

When something like the fucking horrendous Oregon college campus shooting happens, though, it's interesting to read the chatter and figure out where people actually are. There is no perceived space between accepting the language and emotional surrender to the complete fetishization of something (an issue, a cause, a person or even an object) and active, violent, visceral hatred of a thing bent on its active destruction. The flag, police, guns, service members, Jesus... these are thing you not only have to love, but if you don't, your denial of their emotional primacy in your life is proof of you actively hating one or (as is usually assumed since they come in a Beliefs Packet you get when you register as a Republican) all of these things to the point of being an agent of their erasure from American life. And an agent of Satan.

I'm sorry, but I'm just not as simple as I seem. My views on Christianity, for example, are complicated. And they are complicated by the fact that they are informed by my own, personal questions and musings about theoretical and practical theology, the differences between the two things and their expression in liturgy, ritual, catechesis, social outreach, ecumenicalism, the overlap into or with political expression, just lots and lots of stuff, without relation to anyone else's personal cosmology. But if I start with the premise that the mythology should be treated like a mythology on par with Zeus and Mithra and hell, even Mothra (but obviously less cool), then anything I have to say about it is another shot fired in the War on Christmas or a War on Christianity or a War on Cops. I don't think it's a coincidence that since we started winding down our actual wars, these new Wars have proliferated like rabbits. In Australia. With roughly the same effect.

The simplified categorization between People I Tolerate and Mortal Enemy is a bit manichean, sure. And so there are some disagreements and some intemperate language gets used, even among old buddies when something important like 8th place in the GOP presidential primary field is at stake. But look, there were like over 20,000 casualties just at Antietam in 1862 and we're certainly not facing anything as extreme as all that. Sure, we lose 10 or 20 here or there as a direct result of the discourse sometimes, but there are some people for whom those kinds of regular losses are acceptable in defense of the principle of something like, for example, lax-as-possible gun control laws. And I'm free to disagree, with or without suggesting such a person lies somewhere on a scale bound on either end by categories of "sociopath" and "asshole," but it wouldn't be right to characterize that disagreement as threatening to the social order because, between us, we know that no matter what anyone says or how often this happens, nothing ever, ever, ever, ever, ever changes.

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*Pointing out that it was called a Civil War is not going to win you any points here, Mr/Ms Clever Boots.