“Call me, call me anytime. I want to know.”   What a strange request.  I have my own: “Wait until 7 A.M.  I don’t care what it’s about.” 

Let’s say Barack O’Chief dies at 3 A.M.  Don’t call me!  There is really nothing i can do.  Why does anybody suppose I’d rather be informed of bad news than go on sleeping?  

Up the ante.  Your son in New York dies unexpectedly at 3 A.M.  That’s different, right?   Well, no, it isn’t unless I have to catch a 6.30 A.M. flight to get to New York.   If there are no flights until 10 A.M., why are you calling at 3 A.M.?   Why can’t this bad news wait until 6.30 when I am just about finishing my morning cup of coffee?  Does that sound insensitive?    Not to me; it is just good sense.

“Do you know that Chet Huntley of the old Huntley/Brinkley News Hour died?”

“I thought he died long ago.”

“He did.  1974.  35 years ago.  I just wanted to be sure you knew.”

“Well, this time I have real bad news.  Virginia Mayo died.”

  “Oh, my gosh!.  Beautiful Virginia.  How awful.  I loved her face, even her expressionless way of acting.  What happened?  When?”

“4 years ago.   She was 85 years old.  Heart attack.  Almost 31 years to the day after Huntley died.”  

“Well, why are you telling me now?” 

“I didn’t want to upset you.  I knew you were a fan.  I wanted to wait until the time was right.”

Actually, this makes very good sense.  I would not have called you early in the morning had I learned of her death on a late night TV gossip show.   Now with several years behind the tragedy, you are ready for this, and the news lands gently.   When you think about it, just about all bad news can wait.  An hour?  A week?  100 years?  Why not 100 years?   Where’s the fire?   Now, at last it can be told - Sarah Bernhardt and Isadora Duncan are dead.  May they rest in peace.  Abe Lincoln I needed to know because the year of his death came up on a multiple choice quiz when  I was in junior high school.   And Big Julie Caesar?  Also doing the “dead as a doornail” act.  It’s good to know.  

Do I feel that way about good news?  Push it back, waaaay back?   Maybe.  I don’t want that 3 A.M. call informing me I just won $100 million in a lottery.  What am I to do about that?  The State Lottery office doesn’t open until 9 A.M.  The jerk of an official who thought he was doing me a favor with his early bird news should drop dead.  But I don’t want to hear about that, either, not until the next afternoon.    

I can’t think of any news that is actually timely.  ”Bulletin!  This just in from the U.S. Weather Service.  World scheduled to end at 6.30 this morning because of a shower of super gigantic meteors.   Not even cockroaches will survive.”   So? What do you want me to do?  Hold prayer services for cockroaches?   Isn’t it better to sleep through the great event?    ”Don’t you want to hold hands with your wife the last 3 and 1/2 hours of your lives?”   Actually, no.  But do me a favor.  Let her sleep and don’t tell her this.

The warranty on my wife’s scooter ran out three days ago.  Today,, we had a problem with it.

SG: Can you please fix the plug on the cable so we can recharge the scooter?

Modern Man: We can  but since the warranty just ran out, it will cost her $200.

SG: Just fix it and don’t charge us.  It won’t hurt you.

MM: I can’t do that.  Rules are rules.           SG: So ignore the rules.  

MM: How can I do that?         SG: Is there a rule that says you can’t ignore the rule?

MM: But rules are rules.  I’ll tell you what I’ll do.  I’ll charge her only $100       

We accept the deal and  leave.   

A few weeks ago we went to a restaurant for the Early Bird Special.

Waiter: Sorry, you just missed the Special by 5 minutes.

SG: Make believe we didn’t.         W: I can’t do that.               SG: Why not?                   W: Rules are rules.

We end up paying full price.  

I return an item to K-Mart but don’t have the receipt for the item.

Clerk:  I can’t give you money back without a receipt.  I can give you a credit on another purchase.

SG: I prefer to have the money.        Clerk:  Can’t do that.  Rules are rules.

We live in high tech times.  Precision and rules are everywhere.   We are inundated with them.  Once upon a time, people were people but nowadays they are bound to formalities that did not exist in better times.   The phone message in the physician’s office says, “If you are sick, please go to your nearest emergency room.”    Phones exist to prevent appointments.    Once upon a time, you could walk into a movie theatre and see a movie whenever you arrived.  Now, you must wait until the next showing begins.   You own a perfectly adequate TV set that runs on some mysterious system called analog waves.  The government insists you must switch over to “digital”.   You can’t say, “I’m happy enough with what I have.”   Rules are rules.        A student wants an “override” into a class.  The professor says, “It is not up to me.  The Department has a rule against this.”    A cop stops you for driving 40 MPH in a zone that forbids driving over 35 MPH.   To your request that he show you a bit of compassion, he says, “I’ll write the ticket out for 38 MPH.  That will help.”  Strangely, it does. 

You go home and write an essay about the rigidity of rules and submit it to a magazine.  The editor informs you that submissions must be on white paper so he cannot accept your essay because it is written on ivory colored sheets.    You decide to blow up the planet but you can’t.  You have authorization to buy nitroglycerine but not dynamite.   

I give up.

This is an extensive excerpt of a book review.   As usual, [see my practice in watchingpolitics.com] I seek no reprint approvals.

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Kathryn Shevelow -   Sunday, June 7, 2009 - Washington Post, National Weekly Edition

THE WAUCHULA WOODS ACCORD 

In February, a 14-year-old pet chimpanzee named Travis — a former actor in Coca-Cola and Old Navy commercials who used a computer, drank wine from a long-stemmed glass and had no previous history of violence — was shot dead by police after he escaped from his owner’s Stamford, Conn., house and nearly killed a woman he had known for years.  Journalist Charles Siebert observed that, like humans, chimps have “minds enough to lose and memories that can hasten the process.” 

Now, in “The Wauchula Woods Accord,” Siebert provides a book-length exploration of the role humans play in inflicting mental disorders on intelligent animal species, particularly great apes.  According to Siebert, the 3,000 or so chimps who live in this country are likely to be severely traumatized creatures. Such chimps might have witnessed the slaughter of their mothers, often the only way female chimpanzees in the wild will relinquish their babies. Or, if bred in captivity, they would have been separated from their mothers prematurely and raised in isolation from chimpanzee society. These damaged creatures can grow to weigh 200 pounds, become much stronger than humans and live until they are in their 70s. 

In cataloging the many ways we abuse apes, Siebert rightly includes domesticating them as family members and surrogate humans, practices that deny them their otherness. We have, he suggests, created beings that are neither human nor fully ape: “humanzees,” he calls them.  

“The Wauchula Woods Accord” is a welcome, highly readable contribution to the rapidly growing body of writing that challenges our long-entrenched exploitation of animals. To this end, Siebert formulates his Wauchula Woods Accord: “The degree to which we humans will finally stop abusing other creatures and, for that matter, one another, will ultimately be measured by the degree to which we come to understand how integral a part of us all other creatures actually are.”

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Shevelow, whose most recent book is “For the Love of Animals: The Rise of the Animal Protection Movement,” teaches at the University of California, San Diego. 

Google will refer you to many articles on Wauchula Woods and to the entire Shevelow article.   You may be able to link directly to the Washington Post article by CLICKING HERE. 

Nothing so becomes celebrity as death.  It instantly transforms a very fine performer into a legend.  Many stars shift back and forth between being legends in their own time and legends in their own minds. Certainly, in pronouncing himself  ”The King of Pop”, Michael Jackson crossed the line between the two.  

Worse than being thought a legend, Jackson is profanely referred to as an icon.  Thanks to this abuse, the word has lost its reverential meaning.   My dictionary says, “ A sacred picture representing the Virgin Mary,  Christ, a saint, or a martyr, and having the same function as an image of such a person in the Latin Church. The term is used especially for a highly stylized and       conventionalized representation of a holy person, rich in symbolism and used in devotional services.”    

When we said goodbye to the term “star” and substituted “superstar”,  [I challenge you tell me the name of any celebrity who is merely a star], “icon” was demoted from its religious use to being a term referring to a superstar who verged on the point of devotion from his fans.   What are the achievements that can justify this devotion to Mr. Jackson?   

Fame, itself, can usher in more fame.  As was once said of Zha Zha Gabor, she was famous for being famous.  Jackson was much more than that.  He had talent.  His fame was deserved and with the possible exceptions of Muhammad Ali, Martin Luther King and Barack Obama, he became the most famous black man on the planet.     Good and well, but what was the nature of his talent?

To his crazed idolators, no one in the world could dance as well as Jackson.  Insiders knew better. In fact, as his choreographer, Michael Peters, stated publicly, he was not a dancer at all.  But he had a natural grace and could follow directions extremely well, and Peters delighted in working with him.   The hard part for Peters was toning down the professional dancers who surrounded Jackson so that they would not upstage the star.   [Fred Astaire once said of Peters himself  that we must choose between calling him the greatest living dancer or the greatest living choreographer.]   Peters was humble and content to stay away from praise showered on Jackson.  

Composing even pop songs of any merit is not child’s play and there is no doubt that Jackson was unable to compose at all but those, like Lionel Ritchie, basked in the limelight Jackson shed on all who partnered with him.   “We are the World” was Ritchie’s creation but megalomania got the upper hand and the self-declared King of Pop claimed partial credit for it.  Ritchie did not complain.

The famous video Thriller was directed by John Landis.  Video is not exactly a director’s medium as is film but it is close enough and when you combine the work of Landis and Peters, an honest assessment means that Jackson was only a valuable star, falling short of essential.    As for Jackson’s singing, it was clearly not of stand-alone quality.  One can not imagine Jackson standing next to microphone, accompanied only by an orchestra.  Dancing and staging were an integral part of his singing.    We must admit that Jackson as an artist is much overrated.  

And what of Jackson’s cultural significance of which much is being made now that he is dead?  The truth is there not much to it.   Yes, he sold many more albums than Al Jolson and Bing Crosby combined.   There is much less to this than meets the eye.  In the first place, it does not in the slightest point to cultural significance.  It says something about the fact that the population has tripled since Jolson and doubled since Crosby.  It says something about the relative ease with which kids can nowadays throw around their dollars.   And, of course, Al Jolson never performed before audiences of 50,000 hysterical youngsters.    Jolson fans hardly had the wherewithal to scrape up $3 since complete Broadway shows in his day sold for $3.   Jackson fans happily dole out $100 even at the cost of foregoing a new pair of designer jeans for a month.   Jackson is now declared to be beloved and to judge from the behavior of the mourners at his funeral he is….now.  During his lifetime, he was often mocked for his changing skin color, his seeming sexual flirtations with children, his all-round bizarre antics such as dangling his son over a balcony.  These did not endear him to the world at large even if his most ardent supporters never stopped adoring and loving him. 

Jackson had little impact on the emotions of his fans and absolutely none on their thinking. Compare him to Bob Dylan and you will quickly see what I mean.    Jackson had no impact on the lives and struggles of those who listen to his music.  Compare him to Charlie Chaplin whose Saturday afternoon films inspired the desperate immigrants he entertained in the 1920s and 1930s.  Chaplin singlehandedly provided hope for a better life through his roles as the downtrodden  tramp with whom we laughed but never laughed at.    [I say nothing about Chaplin as an artist for to mentiion his incredible craftsmanship humbles all other entertainers.  He was and remains THE NONPAREIL  

Jackson is gone now.  May he rest in peace.  Even in his ordinariness, he deserves that much.

Most persons reach www.watchingpolitics.com simply by browsing the internet.  There is a better way.   Over on the right hand side of this page, somewhere near the bottom, there is a handwritten “friends and links”.   You can click on that and be taken to the website.  Among the features of watchingpolitics is a very extensive listing of newspapers and magazines.  In fact, over 1500.  I don’t think any other blog has close to that amount.  It is a nice, one-stop shopping way to get to major publications and many you never heard of but which are fun to browse.   In the old days, I used to post 4-5 articles every day but this was exhausting and I now put up about 3-5 per week.  Today, however, we have about 4.

If you wish, you can self-subscribe (you can’t do that with gendinsjournal). On the right hand side of watchingpolitics, you will find near the bottom of the first page,  an invitation to subscribe.  By clicking on “your profile”, you will be on your way.  I think that is the port of entry.   I don’t know for sure because I have never tried it.   If this isn’t right, fish around.  Something will allow you to get email notices of new posts. About 1000 persons choose to do so.  Why not join them?

Tom, Master of the Blogs, can you confirm the method of subscribing?

The old suffer from cataracts in their eyes but not necessarily from cataracts in their minds. They observe the passing scene with an insouciance that is not grounded in complacency but with the discouraged feeling that the decline of man is simply an inevitable fact of life.  Is it only that their minds have clouded over?    From me, you will receive a resounding NO. 

From my perspective, trying to adjust to changes in language is surrendering to the ignoble.  I am dismayed by those who preach “Language changes over time and we must try to accommodate ourselves to those changes.”   Language does change but mostly this is due to its degeneration.   When black kids playing basketball scream out “You the man!” they set a new substandard speech that the rest of us would do well not to imitate.   There is no special color or  pithiness to this discourse.  It is only that the word “are” eludes them.   They are not offering a new economy of expression.  Nor could there be a good reason for desiring such.   Few are the babbled five word sentences that cannot be improved by adding five more well-chosen words.  Verboseness is no virtue but clarity and precision (or more exactly in this context, “preciseness”)  are.  

I am proud of my granddaughter who marks her developing independence by saying “I do it myself” but I wish she would say, “I’ll do it myself.”   In time, she will get it right, I hope, but if she becomes a famous writer and  abandons forever the “I will” construction which is required, and if, thanks to her prominence, she helps usher in an important change in discourse, it will be another instance of the devolution of  language.  I will not be proud and tell the world, “That’s my gal.”  

Some new speech is colorful and I do not regret it.  ”New speech” itself was replaced with “newspeak”  by George Orwell but he did that as part of his political agenda.  As he put the point, “newspeak is political prose formed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”  Degenerate speech has no such purpose.  It is not wily, it is not crafty, it is ugly.  

I am bombarded daily with such locutions as “Me and Tom went to the movies last night.”  I will always resist this to the day I die and if God choose, I will resist it better after death.  

Certain manglings of speech are so commonplace that they carry over into written language.  It is not hard to be more careful about language when we write but the trend now is to dismiss those who would correct us on the charge that they are being pedantic and pompous and just “not with it kinds of guys.”    Consider this most awful of savageries.  ”Everyone is entitled to their own opinion.”  It has a billion miniscule variations.   No longer are even the best educated persons able to make their pronouns conform in number to the nouns to which they refer.   Simple remedies are available but the words “all” and “people” are falling by the wayside.  They will, in time, be obsolete.  In time, we will not be able to understand “People are entitled to their own opinions.”  Or the language will seem quaint and archaic.   “All of us should speak up when we dislike what our government is doing”  will appear as uncomfortable dialect and will present a challenge few of us are any longer up to.  Instead, we say, “Everyone should speak up when they dislike what our government is doing.”    We have tin ears and if someone says, “You mean “he dislikes”, we don’t realize a linguistic correction is being suggested and simply don’t get the point.  It is not that we choose to reject the suggestion.

Old men may go where even angels fear to tread.  Now that our “best and brightest” proudly parade along the same path as the most incompetent, those who want to fight the good fight are looked upon as victims of cataracts of the mind.  I will not go gentle into the night but will fight the madness to my dying breath and with the decaying fingers of my typing hands.

If I were to be eaten by cannibals I would prefer they eat me whole, including my clothing.  It strikes me as worse if they first prepare me for their eating by stripping me of my clothes, my skin and my bones.  And, if they proceed  with exotic seasonings, so much the worse. 

Thousands of years ago, the vegetarian Porphyry said, pretending to speak in the voice of animals, “Eat me, if you must.  Eat me for thy good eating. But do not eat me for thy better eating.”  

The great philosopher was saying there is a limit to what one should do in the cause of gratification.  If you can enjoy spaghetti with marinara sauce to the 99% limit of your enjoyment, why must you squeeze out that additional 1% by putting meat sauce on instead of marinara?

If you can be happy enough stealing 90% of my money why must you take the remaining 10% and leave me penniless?   If you enjoy cooking and eating me, why can’t you leave my shirt and pants on instead of debasing me by stripping me naked and then eating me?   If sardines strike you as delicious, why must you remove their skin and bones to maximize your enjoyment?  What won’t you do to squeeze out the last drop of pleasure from your grim misdeeds?  And even if they are not misdeeds, why must you go for all the gusto?  

I recall an old beer commercial that said, “We only go around in life once, so reach for all the gusto.”   I was perplexed and thought, “Is that all we are? Pleasure maximizers?  If I can enjoy a piece of candy much more than the baby can, should I take it from him?”   Does it matter that he doesn’t know I am taking his candy?  Am I being advised by the pleasure maximizer that if the baby is not being harmed in the slightest by my taking his candy,  not only is it permissible to take it but that, in the interest of rational philosophy, I have an obligation to take it since I can enjoy it more than he can? 

I have never had an inclination for asceticism but I have always understood the fascination it has for its practitioners.  I believe the ascetic thinks that once you wedge your foot in the door, you will inevitably want to pry it open so far that the hinges will break.  Maybe he is right.  I hope not.  I hope that it is not contrary to human nature to seek and find a harmonious balance between self-regarding interests and other-regarding ideals.  If it isn’t, then I must sing, “What’s it all about Alfie?”   And, if at the end of my quest for enlightenment, I do sing that song, I will sing it more mournfully than ever you heard it sung.

I was at….well, excuse, the expression, “the doctor’s office”.  A young woman, dressed in white garb, [W in W] entered the examining room and asked me to rate my pain from 1 to 10. 

SG: Why? 

W in W: We use this information to keep track of changes.

SG: Why not ask me how much pain I have?

W in W: It’s how we do it.

SG: Give it up.  Do it right.

W in W: Please just tell me, even if it is not right.

SG: Suppose I told you 5.5.  What would that mean to you?

W in W: That says you have a little more than moderate pain.

SG: Okay.  I have a little more than moderate pain.

W in W: Would you say, then, 5.5?

SG: No.

W in W:  I don’t understand.  What, then?

SG: How about, I have a little more than moderate pain.

W in W: I need a number.

SG: But the numbers make sense to you only when you translate them into English.  You are doing things backward.  My description doesn’t get translated into a number for you to understand. Get it? Anyway, surely one person’s 5.5 is another person’s 5.6.  Got it?

W in W: Please.  [Getting a bit exasperated]

SG: Listen, young lady [say I, getting more astonished by her mental sluggishness], suppose I told you 5.8.  Is there some continuum that helps you distinguish that from 5.5?  Do you have a clue as to what you are doing?

W in W: I’ll call in the doctor.  [Exit left, young lady.  2 minutes later, enter Man in White]

M in W: What seems to be the trouble?

SG: What do you mean?  My leg is the trouble.  That is why I am here.  I am experiencing a degree of pain in my left knee I would describe as a little more than moderate.

M in W: About 6, then?

SG: I’m beginning to think it is more like 5.85.   Maybe 5.87. Is that helpful to you?  Will my treatment be different if it is 5.87 rather than 5.5?

M in W: 5.5 sounds  a bit  like moderate pain.  I don’t understand 5.8.   The number you are giving me makes me think you are playing with me.  Why do you want to do that?

SG: Sir, I am doing that because I have a condition that requires your attention, not your pseudo-grading.    Put down any damn number you like.

M in W: Excuse me for a moment.  I’ll get the nurse.   [Exit left.  Re-enter W in W]

W in W: The doctor told me to put down 5 and go on with the examination.   Okay?

SG: What a splendid idea.   No more math quizzes, please.

Two news items caught my eye this morning.  In one of them, a Spanish bar in Valencia is now encouraging its customers to swear at, and insult, the staff.   The owner says that in times like these, people need a place  to release their frustrations, and they should employ the Spanish language’s rich store of earthy obscenities.

The other story is about a Mexican gang that hid a ton of cocaine inside the carcass of a frozen shark.  I have been pondering how to connect these stories because I feel there must be a deep connection.  

Suppose the Valencians had hidden the cocaine in a shark and not been caught.  Would they still find things to cuss about madly?    Suppose Mexican bandits were encourage to cuss wildly at police.  Might that, in some way I can’t quite see, incline them to let dead sharks be?   Also, I can’t stop wondering whether live sharks have an unknown appetite for beer.   If we poured thousands of tons into the regions where they congregate, what effects might that have on their moods?   Perhaps they would mellow out and abandon their taste for human legs.     

Life takes twists and turns that seem crazy to us but aren’t, really.  I went to college and my father was amazed.  I’m still a little amazed myself.  How does that compare with cocaine in a shark’s frozen belly or with cussing Valencians?   I think that if my going to college is not the 20th century story of stories, then there is nothing very odd happening in the bars of Valencia or the tummies of dead sharks.

When a friend of mine told me she had seen a certain movie at least 100 times, my initial reaction was that this is crazy.  And how does she have the time for that?   On further reflection, I see nothing crazy about it at all.  The film first appeared at least a dozen years ago and that means some 4000 days or so have gone by.  In 4000 days, many people watch 4000 movies in total, combining TV and theatre.  So what is the big deal about 100 of those viewings being of one particular film?    Is there a race on to see how many different films we can see in 4000 days?

Don’t we all have certain pleasures we can’t get enough of?   Certain songs or symphonies are commonly enjoyed endlessly.   I must have listened to Tchaikowsky’s 4th Symphony 100 times during my undergraduate college years.  I thought I heard something new each time but even if I didn’t, would it have been such a bad thing to have the same pleasure repeated over and over?  It may be that my first reaction to hearing about the 100 viewings of this same movie was based on the idea that you couldn’t possibly extract anything new in repeated watchings.  But surely this is wrong, especially if you are a connoisseur of some sort, perhaps of acting craft, directing, cinematography, maybe of all of them.  And, even if not, why must the pleasure fade?  No one says it has to fade in the case of music.  What about eating ice cream?  I know a few people who have it for dessert every day, even the same brand, the same flavor.    What about starting every day with the same brand of coffee and two slices of the same brand of toast?   

Life need not be an endless search for novelty.  Indeed, the endless search for novelty is itself a repetition that is puzzling.  An old bathrobe worn a 1000 times feels better with each wearing and is thrown away only when it is in tatters.   It would puzzle me if someone said he bought a new bathrobe every month.    Well, enough of defending repetition.  I think I’ll go to my favorite chair, the one I have sat in 3000 times and read Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.  I have only read it three times in 40 years and it suddenly occurs to me that that is shameful.