DON’T LOOK BACK IN ANGER

WHY WOULD YOU WANT TO LIVE HERE WHEN YOU CAN LIVE IN THE GOOD OL’ AMERICAN RUST BELT!!!

Fantasy and Voyeurism: Men and the Violence Culture

Ariel Levy, author of Female Chauvinist Pigs, worries that pornography is carving out a false image of femininity in our national consciousness. She is troubled at how the natural is being supplanted by the artificial, and by the glorification of performance sex over love making.

The negative gender stereotypes associated with pornography are no doubt worrisome, and more so for females because of the demeaning way in which they are often depicted in this genre (name one other form of lowbrow entertainment where perverted fat men get to crack jokes and rate the sexiness of females who they are simultaneously fondling, probing or getting fellated by?). But if women have good reason to be offended by their underling roles in this testosterone-driven industry, we men should at least be leery of the equally testosterone-driven entertainments that appeal to the generic aspects of our gender.

Spike TV is perhaps one of the most notorious purveyors of the notion that all men get hard-ons for cage fighting, muscle cars and bikini clad women. Shows like UFC: Ultimate Fighter Championship and Deadliest Worrier attempt to awaken our animalistic bloodlust with raw, savage depictions of guys beating the hell out of each other and scenes of ancient weapons of warfare slicing through slabs of meat as a way of demonstrating their deadly effectiveness. Entertainment such as this is troubling if one considers the sobering statistic that, in 2006, 1 in every 72 American men was incarcerated in a county, state or federal prison. By comparison, in that same year only 1 out of every 746 women was behind bars. Given our innately virile propensity to fight, murder and self-destruct, shouldn’t the modern man boycott all things which glorify senseless violence and brutality? Is the world so lacking in actual violence to necessitate the creation and consumption of fantasy violence? And just how are we contributing to human growth and progress if we give in to these natural urges which – when carried out in real life – only wreak havoc on our lives and the lives of countless others?

To get a taste of the very real and very permanent consequences of senseless acts of violence committed by men in the throes of passion, one need look no further than A&E’s First 48. This is a series which follows actual detectives around in the first forty-eight hours after a murder has been committed. The blood soaked crime scenes which the burned out and exasperated detective workers must canvass, and the trail of clues which invariably lead to a stoic, cold-blooded murderer – these things evoke a stark reminder of just how ugly a pandemic violence is in our culture. There are no heroic desperados of Hollywood proportion in real-life shootouts and slayings, just lowlife gang members and common street thugs. In light of this, pop cultural glamorization of death and killing seems, at the very least, irresponsible and jaded.

And yet shows like First 48 do more than just feed our curiosity about the procedurals of detective work. There is a voyeurism to it all, starting at the point when the detectives lift the tarpaulin to reveal the slain victim, all the way up till the end when they slap a pair of cuffs on the prime suspect and read him his rights. These police shows are a way for us to peer into the lives of people who we don’t really know or care too much about, allowing us to observe how they kill each other off. This is the real curiosity which gives programs like First 48 their momentum. Everything from the senseless motives for the killings, to the killers’ nonchalant attitudes about taking a life – given their unflinching indifference in the interrogation room you would think they were being accused of stealing a bike – causes every episode to convey an inexplicable foreignness. We know what we’re seeing, and yet we don’t understand it. We know who these people are, we have a vague idea of what they’re all about, and yet after seeing how they kill and react to killing, we understand them even less.

Other real-life shows feed our voyeurism in similar ways. Every weekend MSNBC runs back to back to back documentaries about prison life, visiting places from Alaska (like institutions which house that state’s worst murderers) to Folsom’s historic penitentiary in California to modern day chain gangs in the South. After watching just a couple of these programs, it quickly becomes evident that NBC is indirectly pillorying the weak-willed and downtrodden inmates on their cross country big house tours. The cameras take us though the prisons as if on a tour of a zoo, pausing before a cell to observe how an inmate makes contraband moonshine from fruit and shampoo as if he were a gorilla doing something strange. It is veritable Schadenfreude with a glossy shine. The result is that we feel a comforting contentedness knowing that these manimals are locked up where they are, and not walking the streets with us and our children. The shows also remind us that prison is no place we’d ever want to be, further driving home the old adage not to do the crime if we can’t do the time.

(Let’s also remember one thing: NBC may not have invented subtlety, but they have certainly perfected it in their coverage over the years. They have become psychologists; every word spoken by their anchors or pundits, and every news show, sitcom, biopic, miniseries or movie they broadcast is so saturated with multiple meanings and nuance that it is impossible to take them at face value anymore.)

***

When we give up thinking for the day and cast our burdens upon the TV, there are multiple choices from which to get our violence fix. If we want to vicariously experience fantasy violence there are car chases, endless murder mysteries, or sci-fi movies where we can insert ourselves into the role of a hero who saves the world from an outer space bug invasion just so he can win the girl he loves. If we want entertainment that blurs the line between fantasy violence and actual violence, there are shows like UFC: Ultimate Fighting Championship where the kicks and punches might be truncated so as not to deliver the full force of the blow, but they still draw blood sometimes. Finally, if we want the real, raw stuff without all the dressing up and glamour, there are shows like First 48 and MSNBC’s prison marathon weekends.

As a modern man, which form of televised violence should we turn to when our peaceful boredom becomes too much to bear? As the physically stronger sex, we need outlets for all that extra energy. Viewing violence, reading about it, dreaming of it or partaking in it in some minimal (or big) way almost feels like a necessity – violence always has been and probably always will be one of our many hungers. Perhaps the goal of the modern man therefore shouldn’t be to eradicate violent tendencies from our DNA, but rather our goal should be to learn how to control these tendencies. When violence is in your grasp, you feel powerful, mighty and invincible. But as we’ve witnessed far too often, this power always becomes too great too quickly and invariably leads to people being physically or emotionally hurt, and the imminent imploding (or exploding) of the violence bearer. Riding high on violent power is like riding a huge serpent, you cling to its scaly back for as long as possible before you are eventually thrown off and tossed about in its wake.

Perhaps violence is sacred, something to use only in rare instances when there is no other alternative. They endlessly try to teach us in anger management classes about the realistic allocation of negative feelings – feeling murderous rage towards the guy who killed your daughter is normal, feeling that same type of rage towards the lady that cut you off in traffic is not – but the lessons take a while to sink in. If we can’t control our hormonal tendencies, perhaps it is best to banish them to a faraway place within us.

Violence serves an inverse evolutionary purpose. The longer we are alive, the more it becomes prevalent that the cool kids – the desperados, the slackers, the gang bangers and all the other guys who lived by the seat of their hormones – didn’t get themselves or us anywhere. The phrase “only the strong survive” – coined by Jerry Butler in his titular song and later immortalized by Elvis – may not be such a truism after all. As evidenced by the aforementioned A&E and MSNBC shows, men who fight to defend their personal territory, virility and respect against frivolous threats often end up in prisons or morgues. They finish each other off in street brawls, wars and drag races gone awry. By living in the moment, these men lack the planning and foresight necessary to effectively pass on their genes.

Peacefulness is becoming the new golden rule. There is no place in the future for combative rogues and hot tempered territorial nitwits. The conquerors of history, the ones who will make most proud the thousands of generations of our ancestors who suffered and fought and foraged so that we could exist today, will be the men who were capable of being the better man by walking away from a fight. These males are the humble and happy men who value book smarts over street smarts. They are the teenagers who sacrifice their youths so that they can have a rich future which doesn’t involve a lot of tattoos, gas-pumping and frequent trips to Wal-Mart. They are the future. We are the future. The immature naysayers and trash talkers are shouting into a wind which blows louder and more fiercely with each passing season.

That wind is the Modern Man.

THE GOSPEL OF JOHN (Part I)

RECENTLY I traveled to St. Louis to spend a few days with my old high school friend John Jones. John and I knew each other back in 1992 when we both attended a high school in the upper middle class suburb of Fair Oaks, California. Circa 1993 John moved to the St. Louis area and I departed for upstate New York a few years later. We hadn’t kept in contact since John moved away all those years ago, and our coming together again after half a lifetime of forgotten separation is nothing short of a miracle.

***

JOHN was staring out of the window at his parent’s house which was located three hundred feet away. “When Jesus comes to reclaim his apostate church, He won’t reclaim me,” he said ominously. At 32, John is athletic with blonde hair and a bronze and slightly sun-burned complexion. His eyes are like two burnished blue spheres that seem to probe the depths of your soul and look right through you at the same time. When I met John at a Starbucks the day before, I was amazed by how little his appearance had changed since high school. Besides being a few years older and having a slightly receding hair line, he looked more or less like the 15 year old version of himself. Except now he claimed to know the truth.

“When the people asked him about heaven Jesus told them to, ‘look around them’ because heaven was much like Earth. When I look around me all I see is violence, suffering and poverty. Children are abused and neglected, injuries and illnesses afflict the righteous, and people are getting squeezed into ever tighter corners by fear and lack of resources.”

Across the street from our dark little godless meeting a much happier scene was unfolding. John’s mother was chasing two of her grandchildren around as John’s brother Kaleb and his wife Megan stared on in rapt amusement. There was sunshine, smiles, hand clapping and laughs compared to John’s dimly lit bedroom chilled by the home’s central air conditioning system. John had moved out of his parent’s house a year ago and been invited to live in a spare bedroom at his friend and next door neighbor Brian’s house. His physical proximity to his family, however, did not translate into a spiritual proximity. John had done the unthinkable two years ago and had renounced God and Jesus one night during a packed family dinner.

John humorously describes the occasion as his “coming out party.”

“I came out,” he says unabashedly. ”I told them what was what. I don’t believe in God anymore and that was it.”

“So they kicked you out for it?” I said.

“No. I made the decision to leave later on. I didn’t want to be a part of their programmed way of life anymore. I wanted to watch the TV shows that I wanted to watch and listen to the music that I wanted to listen to. You just couldn’t make those kinds of decisions when everybody is trying to sit you down and have a serious man-to-man conversation about the Bible and eternity all of the time.”

John is like a lot of thirty-somethings who were raised in fundamentalist church communities. Before John’s departure from the rest of the Jones clan, his life revolved around the fundamentalist church in his St. Louis suburb. He attended Christian rock concerts, weekly young adult functions and even participated in sports leagues which were organized by various area churches. He never had to travel farther than the five miles it was from his house to his church’s multipurpose room or soccer field. “I’ve never dated a girl who wasn’t a member of my church,” he said. He listed the names of his former sweethearts as if listing streets in a new sub development: “Kimberly, Allison, Megan.” All one had to do was put the word “Way” or “Circle” behind each name.

In comparison to the split level house John was currently residing in, the Joneses two story home was a constant work in progress. John said it was unusual to not see scaffolding erected along the walls, and the constant traffic of electricians, contractors, architects and plumbers he assured me was dizzying.

Besides Mr. and Mrs. Jones, John’s older and younger brothers both lived at home with their wives and children. The oldest son Mike is 33 and has a 24 year old wife named Katie. They have two children, Noah who is 5 and Eve who is 3, as well as an 11 year old child from a marriage that ended when Mike’s first wife was hit and killed by a drunk driver. The upstairs of the Jones house had been converted into a small apartment for Mike, Katie and their kids.

John’s younger 27 year old brother Kaleb lives in the large basement with his 31 year old wife Megan and their five children. Three of the children, 8 year old Noah, 6 year old Moses and 5 year old Sarah are biological, while two of the children, Elijah and Shadrack, were adopted from Ethiopia.

Mr. and Mrs. Jones occupy the first floor of the house. The living room has been converted into a master bedroom and a wall next to the family room was knocked out to build an extremely large formal dining room addition.

When I looked out the window at Mrs. Jones who was now twirling one of the grandkids around by the arms and muttering goo-goo gah-gah talk to the infant, I thought she looked like a happy and sane enough woman. Mr. Jones soon joined her and added loud and boisterous laughs to all the carefree family commotion.

This can’t be such a bad thing, I thought. Why would John want to run away from all of this?

***

TO UNDERSTAND THE SIGNIFICANCE of my meeting up with John after so many years, one needs to travel back in time to the early nineties. I was raised in a family that can best be described as religiously indifferent. We were Presbyterians but only attended church on the obligatory holidays and a few other days out the year. I never read the Bible, I couldn’t have told you who Moses was, and if you had asked me who was the Son of Man I probably would have said they were a heavy metal band that toured with Judas Priest.

Despite my theologically deprived childhood, however, I had a number of friends who were ardent evangelical Christians. My best friend who lived up the street from me was an evangelical who attended a newfangled church that incorporated ancient fire and brimstone Christianity with modern rock music and Republican Party values. It was through him that I came to meet other fundamentalists – like John.

If one had pressed me in those days to explain the unexplainable, I may have gone so far as to admit to the possibility of supernatural or spiritual phenomena existing. But ultimately I was an atheist: I saw absolutely zero evidence of God’s existence either in nature or in my head. I believed that everything had either a rational or scientific explanation, and my fear of non-existence after death was attenuated by the fact that 80 years on earth was enough time to enjoy life’s sweetness and leave some footprints to be remembered by. One would likely think it impossible, for someone of my temporal persuasions, to get by with a group of fervent Christians. Despite the limitations to our friendships – even though I played with my best friend nearly every day, I was barred admittance to his house by his stoic and suspicious mother – our social synergy was mostly buoyed and maintained by other common interests, and an agreement to disagree on theological issues also helped keep the peace (this latter pact was arrived at after several unsuccessful arguments marked by mutual stubbornness and attempted persuasion reached an impasse every single time).

The distilled sum of our various commonalities was the crazy glue that held us together, and when we were flying down hills on our skateboards or practically asphyxiating from laughing none of us cared that I was a non-believer and vice versa. But this still didn’t prevent me from becoming a fifth wheel on more than a few occasions. No matter how innocent I was, there were times when I felt no better than Dr. Faustus in the company of my Christian friends. If I said, “Let’s swim under that bridge,” I may as well have been the snake in the Garden of Eden tempting them with forbidden fruit. If I suggested we ride our bikes along the river, I was afraid they might reply the way Jesus did when he rebuked Peter saying, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me.”

My Christian friends could get so high on God at times that it would have been futile not to go along with them. Like a straight man to a group of comics, I only would have been adding fuel to their spiritual fire. So I kept quiet at these times out of a desire not to rock the boat. The Titanic was a lavish and majestic ship before it ran into that dreaded iceberg.

Despite all of the good times we had, I also couldn’t shake the creeping suspicion that they were secretly planning to convert me. They probably realized my anarchic independence posed the biggest threat to their purity, and in order to maintain our friendship through puberty and beyond, they would have no choice but to convert me. This is why – after 7 years of having a mostly secular friendship – my Christian friends started introducing me to the religious side of their lives. I attended more Christian parties, youth groups, rock concerts and church services during my early teen years than I did during all of my previous childhood years with my family.

I was standing at the threshold of a new life. But of all the new possibilities that were forming and materializing quickly evaporated and came unraveled. In the rapidly changing world of adolescence, my Christian friends and I were soon scattered to the four winds. With all the things vying for the young mind, psychedelic drugs soon made more sense to me as a religion than Christianity ever did or could. My best friend was growing more and more serious about his guitar skills and his band than anything else. And John just sort of dropped off the radar before up and moving with his family to the St. Louis area. Other people in this Christian milieu also faded away too.

But just as drugs proved a short-lived avocation for me, my former Christian friends soon tired of their godless hobbies and each eventually found his or her way back to God. And after a brief religious epiphany in the late nineties when I was sure I had accepted Jesus as my personal savior forever, my belief and interest in discipleship slowly faded from skepticism and now – in the spectrum of religion and spirituality mindedness – is hovering somewhere between atheistic clarity and agnostic curiousness.

During my teens and twenties, after experimenting with drugs, dabbling in religion and battling addictions to nicotine, food and sex, I had finally come full circle. I was once again an ascetic practitioner of the Great and Responsible Here and Now. By my late twenties I had matured into the boy-man I always dreamed of becoming – an adult version of my 12 year old self. The only vestiges of my coming of age spiritual journeys is an awareness of and respect for the unknowable and unexplainable, and an acquired humbleness from the realization that I am mortal and insignificant in the larger picture of the universe. This is why I have traded in my naïve teenage atheism for a mantle of intellectual agnosticism.

***

JOHN UNDERSTANDS IRONY. It is all he ever seems to talk about. When he is talking about baseball it is as if he is really talking about irony. If he talks about what he is studying in college he is really indirectly expounding on irony.

“Everything I do feels like an affront to God,” John says. “And yet it’s entirely liberating, like being a millionaire.”

We are strolling through the quads and breezeways of his former church, a modern structure that looks half like a high school and half like an office park. A large pyramid-shaped building with a cross-topped copula and stained glass roof in the center of the complex is the only indication that this is a place of Christian worship. Even though it is Saturday (the day of preparation for the Sabbath), the place is practically deserted. Only a custodian and some kids on skateboards unsuccessfully attempting to hop a stairway are the only other signs of civilization besides us.

“In the mid nineties I dropped out of community college after two semesters,” John says. “What is a Christian going to do with an education?”

The actual reason John stopped attending college, however, had to do with the conflicts between a liberal arts education and the doctrines of the Bible. When religious dogma clashes with science, history and social studies, the religiously revved mind often repels any teachings that conflict with its scriptures. “The overlap between the Bible and all other fields of study is very small,” John says, “and most fundamentalists aren’t willing to yield to anything.”

“I can’t think of a single Christian I know of who aced Geology,” he adds. “In high school we all sat together and had to cheat off of each other because we just couldn’t swallow the scientists’ theory that the world was however many billions of years old.”

John says it is the same for other subjects such as political science, philosophy and even literature. He dropped his American Government 101 class after his teacher refused to admit that America was founded on Christian beliefs and principles and that the framers of the Constitution were actually devout Christian men with the same views as Pat Robertson and the late Jerry Falwell. John thought he was righteously following God by rejecting what he perceived to be the lies disseminated by higher education. He was trying to obey the 9^th Commandment: Thou Shall Not Lie.

“I thought if I just sat back and pretended to learn what they were teaching me, I would be no better than a liar.”

After two years of scooping ice cream and dating a girl at his church, John got married at the age of 22. With no room at the Jones house and an inadequate income between the two of them, John and his new wife had to move in with her parents.

“It was cramped,” he said. “Screaming infants (children of his in-laws), crowded kitchen, ten people at the dinner table not to mention all the pets – it was insane.” John likened the experience to living on Noah’s Ark. “I was claustrophobic and sick to my stomach the whole time.”

Unlike the other potent and fertile members of both of their families, John and his new wife were unable to conceive. It turned out that, because of a congenital birth defect, his wife’s egg supply was deficient and she had already gone through her whole supply by the time she was 19.  John would later ironically identify this as his Deus ex machina moment, the divine intervention that saved him.

“Things started to go downhill in our relationship after the realization that we could never be parents,” he said. “But I think as things nosedived toward divorce, I was secretly grinning in the back of my mind the whole time. I knew that eventually I would be free.”

After 6 years of a rocky marriage, John finally moved back into his family home in 2004. But it was not the familiar home life he remembered as a teenager. His older and younger brothers were now both married with biological and adopted children of their own. Several additions had changed the architecture of the house and more were constantly being planned and added. While there may have been more room than there was at his former wife’s house, the lack of privacy was the same.

“When I first moved in I was sharing a room with my niece and nephew,” he said. “All these kids were like spies, looking over my shoulder every time I went on the computer or watching me every time I so much as took a dump.”

John felt as if he had switched boats from one Ark to another, and he was not happy. He found it hard to pray and find God in the midst of so much chaos. “A lot of jaded people think of religion as a private experience,” he said, “But in the households I had been living in it was a group experience – like a cult.”

John dreamed of the cloistered dormitories of the monks, he fantasized about wandering the countryside like an ascetic and not being turned away whenever he knocked on any door. He spent a lot of time listening to music on his iPod, reading books and magazines and watching movies on his laptop. These isolated experiences became his escape from the noisy world he was a part of. He had a job at Blockbuster for a while, and later he worked at Penguins and Borders. Oftentimes after work he would go to one of the college libraries in the area and read until closing time, which was as late as 2 am on some occasions.

John’s family members began to take notice that he was becoming increasingly more distant and exclusive. Concerned that his faith was slipping, people in John’s household began to sit him down and talk one-on-one to him about his relationship with Jesus Christ. They started praying for him, they gave him Bible passages to read, and his siblings even went so far as to corner him in an intervention style family meeting.

This show of family concern, John assures me, is when his real troubles began.

With Age Comes Wisdom: Part IV (I think)

On pushing the envelope: “Why do most democrats live in the coastal Northeastern, Midwestern and Western cities while republicans largely live in inland, southern places that have shitty climates and poorer economies? And why do democrats tend to be well educated, have more wealth and are more culturally fleshed out than conservatives, who just sit at home and watch TV all their lives.

Contrary to what you may have heard, democrats are NOT Socialists. They are in fact living examples of how the system of capitalism works. That: if you work hard, apply yourself and follow the rules, you will reap the fruits of your labors. Also, we do not pander to Middle Americans in order to win votes. It was republicans who started the whole class warfare system which pits the Joe “six packs” against the Joe “Honda Accords.”

Conservatives always bash Obama for not knowing what he is doing. I’m sure they think McCain had all the answers in his wooden leg, or the solutions were up there somewhere in Sarah Palin’s beehive.

Damn! If only the GOP were in charge right now. A trillion dollar war is what we need to get us out of this recession, not a trillion dollar bailout package. Contracts for new jets and tanks would revitalize the factory cities of the Rust Belt by putting people to work. We need to be expanding our missile guidance research instead of trying to become a leading exporter of alternative energy technologies. Remember, there is still enough oil to get us through the next 100 years. And the world is going to end before that anyway, so who cares, right?

Never mind about the piles of innocent dead people who will have to be sacrificed for our progress as a nation. They will all dance and sing with us in the New Jerusalem which God will create after Jesus slaughters everybody in the year 2036. Manifest Destiny, people! Manifest. Fucking. Destiny!

It’s too bad high school dropouts aren’t being drafted to go fight in Iran or North Korea. This would not only make us safer as a nation, but it would have the added benefit of making the chasm between haves and have-nots even wider. A greater polarity in wealth would ultimately mean more people for the GOP to pander to. Faced with only two options – become a soldier or become a business professional – young people would have to decide. And the ones who chose the latter would be better off than the generation before them. No more half-assed professionals like teachers, social workers and librarians, right?

-Trickle down economics, yay!

-No more wealth redistribution.

-More development.

-Real estate values that become increasingly out of out of reach.

-And a giant wall to keep the Mexicans out.

Just think, it could be the 1980’s forever. You republicans with your same-old, same-old. Just keep on drinking Rush’s Kool-Aid.

OK, time to take my meds.”

Return to Center

I was talking to Dave recently and I came up with a good thought that, I think, accurately captures what I perceive is occurring  in the U.S. media. It was so good that I had to put it in a post so (hopefully) more people can see it:

“Bias runs so deep in the media today that straight factual reporting of the news doesn’t even occur anymore. Because the information disseminators know that facts can be biased one way or the other. So the facts always have to be carefully worded, photographs are cherry picked and graphics and pull quotes are utilized in a special way all to put a certain spin on the facts. Then all of this is followed up by vacuous speculation from corpulent know-nothing talking heads. The news writers and reporters have all become psychologists. Media is circling round the shitter my friends.

We should all be aware that something is not right when even art is starting to censor itself.”

mano a mano (or Economics 101)

Beavis and Butthead, after eventually growing up and earning BA degrees, sit around discussing some of the implications of the current economic recession.

Butthead: “At a time when more honest Americans than ever could use some financial assistance from the government, there won’t be any money left in Washington’s piggy bank for them because it will already have gone to all the usual lazy bums who have made welfare a way of life. These same slobs will be treated with unmerited compassion like always. The hardworking Americans will just have to make do. They will be blasted for not saving enough, for getting too far in debt and for buying things like houses and cars just before both the real estate and auto industries folded. But like always they will pull through stronger and more resilient as a result of these trying times. The usual welfare slobs will be standing in line at the county and state buildings in every state 10, 15 and 20 years from now.”

Beavis: “The government just bailed out the big lenders to the tune of $700 billion so people can keep their homes. And Uncle Sam just pulled another $25 billion or more out of his magic hat and gave it to the auto makers as a bridge loan. Some may call this corporate welfare for the wealthy, but it will have a trickle down effect which will help the hardworking Americans who are trying to stay afloat during these rocky times. And don’t forget the stimulus checks Obama promised to the productive members of society. They should be receiving these in their mailboxes soon.

Will the usual welfare bums be getting a stimulus check this year?”

Butthead: “Huh-huh-huh…you said bums.”

Father Global Warming

OK. Barack Obama has now become – I guess it’s safe to call it – president elect, it is the fourth day of November…AND THE WEATHER IS FREAKIN’ BALMY AND DOWNRIGHT TROPICAL!!! I could have worn shorts today it was so unseasonably warm. My windows are flung open, I have my fan going and I’m pretty sure the vegetation is as confused as hell.

This is frustrating. I mean, I don’t know why I’m complaining about nice weather. Usually people complain about rain or snow or icy conditions. When I lived in California people would complain about the slightest amount of precipitation even during a drought. Wrinkled, middle-aged ladies in the supermarket lines would say, “The forecast is calling for rain, ah, I hope that’s not true.”

Maybe I complain because I’m an acculturated Easterner. Somehow balmy weather invokes the artificial: stucco houses with Astro Turf lawns, irrigated desert oasis city grids and that brand new carpet and drywall smell pervading every home and building. I don’t hate California, or Texas or Florida. I think each of these places has as much a right to exist as, say, Canada does. But when Mother Nature oversteps Her bounds and the balmy climate wonders why it ever decided to stay South of the Mason Dixon in the first place–that is when I get angry. I can’t help thinking that there is some grumpy old man who was forced to relocate from South Carolina to North Dakota for financial reasons who wasn’t willing to part with his warm, sunny weather. The fact that grumpy old man is most likely a shut in who only ventures outside for doctor appointments and his monthly Wal-Mart shopping spree only adds to my ire. I picture grumpy old man sitting in his small apartment in the dead of winter working on a crossword puzzle all day as he prays in the back of his mind for warm, sunny fifty degree weather.

But I know better than to think this. Each winter here in New York has been getting progressively milder while each summer gets more oppressively hot and more unbearably humid. Global Warming is definitely, without a doubt a real and imminent threat to our planet’s future. I haven’t lived in New York all of my life. My first two years here were spent upstate. During the summers of 1996 and 1997 we had some of the most lovely weather imaginable. Every day was 85 degrees with 50% humidity. It was perfect weather for farming, painting, playing guitar or snoozing in a hammock. Adam and Eve would have felt right at home. As I basked in the lovely weather of my new home state I realized I had come a long way from the hot, arid suburbs of northern California.

But the summer of 1998 seemed to bring with it a new weight of moisture and mugginess. Not that we didn’t have a few muggy days in ‘96 and ‘97. But after ‘98 the nice days became as few as the humid days used to be for those first two years. And this has continued up until now, only the hottest days become even hotter with each passing year and the mugginess only gets muggier. And, sadly, the 85 degree days with low humidity are now as rare as blue moons.

I used to live in Allentown, PA when I was a boy. From 1979 to 1984 my family lived in a suburb of older red brick houses and newer 1960’s and 70’s subdivisions. There was humidity back in those days. In fact, it took me a while to realize that the New York humidity is a familiar kind of humidity. It is just like the humidity on a July night in 1983 that caused my brothers and I to sleep in the basement of our home. It is the same humidity I experienced in a cramped 1981 Mazda on the backed up freeways on the way to Jones Beach on Long Island. It is a humidity that made you impatient to arrive at the ocean so you could dive into the cold water without even cringing.

The humidity has found a way into my heart, but I will always have a sort of love/hate relationship with it. I am from the dry regions of northern California where your skin flakes and your nose bleeds during the summer. Where fires rage through the hills. Where lizards and snakes live. Where dandruff flakes cover your pillow case.

But warmer ocean temperatures are creating a new kind of humidity. This humidity has emerged in the last five years or less. It is not the humidity of my Pennsylvania boyhood, but it is more like a Mississippi bayou humidity flooding the northeast and the Midwest. It creates massive thunderstorms, torrential rains, flooding and days of stagnant oppressive heat.

FINAL WORD

I fear the eventual consequences of this natural blight. Whether it’s flooded cities, population migrations or a future that has us all wearing special air conditioned suits and breathing masks two months out of the year, the outlook doesn’t look good. It’s all too scary to think about. I guess that it why I invented the grumpy old man in North Dakota, Father Global Warming. I would rather believe that this man and his cold-allergic flesh are responsible for the current climate crisis. This fantasy works because it allows for the hope that things can always improve. Father Global Warming can die. His son might pay to move him back home after two years. He might finally acclimate to his new environment and decide that he likes the freezing cold. The fantasy goes a long way in delaying the practical worries of the long term implications of planetary pollution.

But the day will come when people will realize that they will have to start making sacrifices. I think the victory of Barack Obama shows that many people are already aware of this fact and ready to make the necessary changes.

 This is Father Global Warming’s pickup truck which he almost never drives.

Follow the Leader

The overall consensus at Yahoo Answers today seems to be that Obama pummeled McCain last night in the debates. I am sure you will not get this from the major media networks, however, which will have corporate puppets of every kind engaging in analytical gymnastics to try to justify how McCain in fact won. I thought Obama knocked McCain out of the park with his vision, his rational plans for dealing with the crisis our nation is facing and for defending himself against McCain’s numerous false accusations. McCain was mostly powerless without his media heavyweights on hand to defend or promote him or cut Obama’s mic whenever he started making too much sense for the average dumb American (which was every other time he spoke).

The best thing I heard from Obama was that we need to stop using China as a credit card and start strengthening our economy here at home. I loved how he said no nation that has ever had a weak economy has ever had a powerful military. McCain’s counter-intuitive plan is to increase the size of the military (and I assume the military budget) while cutting taxes for big businesses and the wealthiest Americans. Whew! I would love to see David Blaine pull that one off but, alas, even that guy is not crazy enough to try something so foolish.

McCain was mostly full of platitudes which is what I guess one would expect from an anachronistic politico. These types of politicians don’t have to prove that they have any kind of workable plan to keep the nation running on the right track. All they have to do is appear as neighborly as possible and wink whenever they look into a camera. I hope America comes to its senses in ‘08 but I fear all of the acid tongued youth residing across Middle America who hate Obama as much as their elders do. The young men with brush cuts, the heavy women, their blind zealousness and hot-blooded holy anger. I wonder how a nation that used to be so progressive could pull such an unexpected about face so suddenly?

This cynicism will no doubt inject my reading of The Way We’ll Be with a healthy sense of skepticism. I have to read this book to prepare for an interview with the political pollster John Zogby. Since Zogby is a pretty smart and optimistic guyhopefully he can calm some of my fears about a McCain victory. But since he falsely predicted a Kerry victory in 2004 I’m not putting too much faith in the guy this time around.

It might not be bad idea, therefore, to contact the British immigration office before November.