Sometimes I think I should stop loading my birdfeeders with seed every day. Mostly I just attract house sparrows and pigeons, two kinds of birds regarded as “nuisance species.” In fact, there’s a big sign posted near the entrance to the local pet store, telling what section of the penal code you are breaking if you feed pigeons. So I’m breaking the law every time I let the pigeons get the bulk of the seed I put out.
Then too, I read recently that the vast majority of birds don’t eat seed. Most birds eat insects. I’d never thought of that before. Most of those insectivores naturally migrate south in the winter. So nine out of ten birds don’t really need me anyway.
But then whenever I think I’ll stop feeding the birds, my regular family of cardinals shows up – and I feel I should load the feeder - one more time, every time. Occasionally some rarer bird will show up too. Lately, I’ve been getting a red-headed woodpecker working away at whatever peanut butter suet I put out there. But it’s the cardinals that really keep me going. They are such a startling splash of color against the white shroud of snow. And all the neighbors comment on the brilliant fluttering of the cardinals in my yard. I wouldn’t want to let the neighbors down.
The cardinals sometimes feed during the day, but mostly they’re notable for being the first ones out at dawn, and the last ones eating at dusk. I’m seldom up at dawn, but I usually am around at dusk, and I make a sort of ritual of going to the window to see “the last cardinal of dusk.” There’s one more dazzling flash of color before the night closes in.
But standing at the window, looking for that last late feeder, I’m reminded of other lasts. I almost never knew they were lasts at the time. There was the last horse-drawn wagon going down my alley. I’d always run out to see the horsie – but then, around 1960, I realized I hadn’t seen a horse in a long time. And there never was a horse clomping past my gate again. All the ragmen, all the salvage men had switched to trucks.
Then of course there is always that “last rose of summer” made famous in song. Every year, after the first frost of winter has hit, there’s always that one flower in the garden that manages to temporarily escape, by hiding under some weeds or by huddling close to a wall.
There was the last time I took my dog Schnoodle for a walk along the lakefront. I could see she wasn’t enjoying her walks much anymore. Her hip was hurting her. So for a few weeks, I didn’t take her on any more walks. I just let her out into the yard and stood by to help her in over the stoop again. And then she died. The last time can only ever be seen in retrospect.
There was the last time my mother said, “I love you.” That was in a message she left on our answering machine. I was just taking the garbage out when she called from the hospital and, not reaching me, left the message on the answering machine. She went into anaphylactic shock sometime in the middle of that night and was intubated. With that tube down her throat, she couldn’t talk any more. While I sat besides her in her hospital room through the following weeks, she would occasionally scribble a request on a notepad. But the doctors never succeeded in weaning her from “the tube,” so she never spoke again.
Which brings me back to each evening’s last cardinal. If there’s a good portion of sunflower seed mixed in the birdseed I put out, either the male or female cardinal might stay over the boundary between dusk and night for a few moments, gorging on the birdseed. Then my yard light will reflect off of it, making its red glow into an eerie, iridescent fuchsia.
As I stand looking at the last cardinal of the evening, I often think how one evening, it will be the last cardinal forever. It’s not that the cardinals won’t be there anymore. It’s that I won’t be there.
Saturday, November 06, 2010
Farewell Al Capone; Fade to Oprah
Al Capone used to be the symbol of Chicago. Wherever Chicagoans went in the world and announced themselves, they would be gleefully greeted by the rat-a-tat imitation of a Tommy gun.
Many people deplored this association. They pointed out how Al Capone and his St. Valentine’s Day Massacre were black marks on Chicago. They’d scold people for reducing Chicago to these most brutal moments of the City’s past, when Chicago is so much more and has so much better to offer.
But somehow the association stuck. Al Capone reigned as the quintessential emblem of Chicago, despite its invention of everything from skyscrapers to atomic energy to the urban blues - despite its Magnificent Mile, its lakefront, its Art Institute, its hundred ethnic neighborhoods. Al Capone was still the icon that stood astride all that other.
Gangsters have often been mythologized and elevated to the status of heroes. But Capone’s apotheosis seemed even likelier, even more appropriate. Hadn’t Carl Sandburg memorialized Chicago as “Hog Butcher for the World… Stormy, husky, brawling… City of the Big Shoulders.” And Al Capone was all that – from butcher to brawling. On his Big Shoulders there rested the summary image of all things aggressive, vigorously self-assertive and claiming. Al Capone and Chicago fit together.
But over the last decade or so, I’ve noticed a change. When I travel, I’ve rarely been greeted by references to Capone any more. The air Tommy gun has been stowed away in people’s air violin case and forgotten. Now whenever people anywhere in the world hear I’m from Chicago, they instantly squeal, “Oprah!” and clap their hands.
People clamor around me, wondering if I know Oprah, if I ever met her. They ask if I can get tickets for her Show. Even more urgently, they wonder if I can use my influence with her as a fellow Chicagoan to get all sorts of favors granted from her.
One European woman I met immediately started to tell me tearfully about the horrible oppression her mother had suffered as a Basque native in Spain, especially during Franco’s regime. The woman had written a book about her mother’s suffering. She tried to impress a copy of her manuscript on me so that I could carry the precious pages back to Oprah. “Maybe Oprah can get it published? Maybe Oprah could even make it a ‘Book of the Month?’”
When I was on Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula and a tour guide heard where I was from, she immediately spoke up on behalf of the children of her village. “Do you think Oprah could come here and start a school, like the one she started in Africa?”
As I settled in to have lunch at a neat, prosperous little restaurant in Canada’s southern Ontario, I thought I would be safe from having to transmit any major, heart-rending appeals to Oprah. So I didn’t gird myself as I usually would have when the pretty woman at the next table started a conversation with me and asked me where I was from. But the word “Chicago” was barely our of my mouth, when she shrieked, “Oh, Chicago! Oh, Oprah! Do you know Oprah? Do you think you could get her to help me? My teeth are bad. Oh, I’ve been suffering so! I need some caps, some implants, something - and our social insurance refuses to cover it. And I just can’t afford to have it done myself. Could you get Oprah to help me - maybe through her ‘Angel Network?’" the woman smiled appealingly at me, revealing a chipped front tooth that listed a little at cross-purpose with its neighbor.
Yes, it’s clear that Oprah has become Chicago. The mention of Chicago evokes immediate worldwide association with Oprah, and consequent hopeful appeals for everything from tickets to teeth. Al Capone’s star has been dimmed by the sunshine glare of Oprah’s popularity and largesse.
I can’t help regretting this at least a little. You see, as Al Capone’s star has declined, so has mine. I have no claim to any connection with Oprah whatsoever. I never met her, never was able to get tickets to her Show, never even passed her on the street - whereas I can lay claim to some connection with Al Capone. Before Oprah, when my announcement of my Chicago citizenship would evoke the predictable excited references to Al Capone, I could be a crowd-pleaser by regaling my audience with my personal knowledge of the man. Well, it’s my personal knowledge once removed. My father worked with Al Capone.
My father helped Al Capone design, print and apply, some of the labels he put on the illicit bottles of whiskey he was producing in his stills. Perhaps their association was a glancing one, but it was enough for me to make capital of when Al Capone was Chicago to the world.
My father was a singularly taciturn person, even more taciturn than most husbands/fathers have a reputation for being. He was an “older father” when he had me, and he had lived a varied, knock-about life that had included the trenches of World War I, piano-playing in silent movie houses and in brothels, a stab at raising greyhounds for racing, as well as his bootlegging and Al Capone interlude. When he met my mother, he would court her in a modified version of the classic gangster pin-stripe suit. And he wore a Panama hat, jauntily tilted to one side in the same way Al Capone wore his signature Panama hat. Capone perhaps tilted his hat to put in shadow the scar on his cheek that he was so ashamed of having become his brand, an integral part of his public identity – Scarface Al Capone. My father tilted his hat as a rakish homage.
So my father reflected and perhaps imitated the times he’d passed through. However he had no gift for narrating them – no aptitude for weaving his life into anecdote for us. There was so much it seemed he could have told my mother and me, even if his participation in these gaudy enterprises was exaggerated and had actually only been tangential. But whatever he had seen, he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, relate.
The only information we got out of him about Al Capone was his assessment that the gangster had been “an amiable guy.” That singularly repeated adjective “amiable” seemed ironic to my mother and me, being applied as it was to one of the most notoriously brutal mobsters of all time. But that probably really was an accurate description of Capone’s demeanor when he was just in casual conversation with his family or friendly associates.
The actor Rod Steiger portrayed Capone in a brilliant 1950’s movie about the gangster. Steiger’s depiction of ruthless, vulgar self-assertion was mesmerizing, but probably not very accurate if applied personally to Capone. Steiger’s performance captured the times more than the individual. It captured the spirit of the Roaring Twenties in general, with all of that era’s diamond-studded, acquisitive, un-corsetted excess. But it wasn’t specifically true to Al Capone. Capone’s family objected to the movie portrayal, saying that quite unike the loud, raw, table-pounding, commanding figure Steiger had projected onto the screen – their uncle/brother/friend had really been a very polite, soft-spoken individual. Putting that picture together with the few general hints I’d gotten about Capone from my father, it did seem that in ordinary conversation Capone was likely a quiet, mellow, polite, and above all “amiable” individual.
I had this personally confirmed information of Capone to retail to the enthused world when Capone was King. I had shaken the hand of someone who shook the hand of … Now I have nothing. Never having met Oprah or having met anyone who met her - I have nothing to tell people who clamor “Oprah” at the sound of my “Chicago.” I don’t even have a nugget of inside information about the amiability of our current icon. I come off a complete disappointment.
But in addition to the diminishing effect this change of Chicago icon’s has had on my status, I have other reasons for being a little regretful about it. Yes, Capone’s influence and actions were reprehensible, while Oprah stands as a benevolent, enlightened symbol for Chicago. And yet, something about the adoption of Oprah as Chicago’s symbol doesn’t seem to be wholly positive. When people used to imitate the action of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre at the drop of the word “Chicago,” it was unlikely that many of them were expressing any aspiration to go on a shooting spree themselves. Nor were they expressing any admiration for the actual act of killing people. I don’t think most people were even considering the bloody real-life consequences of firing submachine guns at adversaries. Most of them probably wouldn’t really consider breaking the law in any way. No, Al Capone, like all gangsters and outlaws, lit people’s imagination in a more general way.
Al Capone represented the epitome of the can-do, take-charge attitude. While most of us are caught in a Gordian Knot of restrictions and complications, Al Capone simply blasted through all barriers. And oh what fun, oh how exhilarating it would be to assume that kind of right-of-way. You want something? You’re responsible for making it happen. And you CAN make it happen – not by literally disabling or killing other people – but by cutting through all the trivial demands that other people want to tether you to. Does the world say you are too fat, too poor, too dumb to accomplish your goals? You don’t listen. Does the world try to hobble you with endless tasks and taboos - wear a jacket to work, don’t smoke within 100 feet of the condo swimming pool, keep your dog on a leash at all times, sit up straight, smile – and on and on? You blow all that away and clear the field for what you really want, for what’s really important to you. Massacre all the mealy, all the mundane. That’s the kind of empowerment that most people relished in Al Capone’s example. Al Capone was a metaphor for the possibility of rising to command one’s fate by targeted indifference.
Oprah on the other hand has come to stand for acquiring things not through one’s personal, positive action, but through supplication. Whether people make their entreaties to God, to “the energy in the Universe,” or to Oprah herself, she seems to have fostered a passive expectation of deliverance. Oprah assumes and plays into a world of neediness. (More about that in another one of my blog essays). Rather than achieving potency by arrogating to oneself gritty, in-the-world authority – Oprah is the symbol of gaining favors by asking. By contrast, Al Capone, whether rude or polite, whether belligerent or amiable – somehow stood for a vital kind of self-empowerment. He had the image of a man who “Never asked nobody for nothin'.”
So yes, for several reasons I’m a little regretful that Al Capone is no longer the symbol of Chicago. Since Oprah replaced him as emblem of Chicago, I’ve lost considerable cachet. And we’ve all lost something of the proud energy that characterized the early part of the last century.
As I walk down Michigan Avenue, I sometimes picture Al Capone walking ahead of me, with his Panama hat jauntily cocked. But the distance between us gets longer and longer. He at last fades into a barely perceptible figment – off into the mistiness of Chicago history.
And now that Oprah is ending her Show, as she is leaving her most public platform – I wonder who will in turn, in time, replace her as the symbol of Chicago.
Many people deplored this association. They pointed out how Al Capone and his St. Valentine’s Day Massacre were black marks on Chicago. They’d scold people for reducing Chicago to these most brutal moments of the City’s past, when Chicago is so much more and has so much better to offer.
But somehow the association stuck. Al Capone reigned as the quintessential emblem of Chicago, despite its invention of everything from skyscrapers to atomic energy to the urban blues - despite its Magnificent Mile, its lakefront, its Art Institute, its hundred ethnic neighborhoods. Al Capone was still the icon that stood astride all that other.
Gangsters have often been mythologized and elevated to the status of heroes. But Capone’s apotheosis seemed even likelier, even more appropriate. Hadn’t Carl Sandburg memorialized Chicago as “Hog Butcher for the World… Stormy, husky, brawling… City of the Big Shoulders.” And Al Capone was all that – from butcher to brawling. On his Big Shoulders there rested the summary image of all things aggressive, vigorously self-assertive and claiming. Al Capone and Chicago fit together.
But over the last decade or so, I’ve noticed a change. When I travel, I’ve rarely been greeted by references to Capone any more. The air Tommy gun has been stowed away in people’s air violin case and forgotten. Now whenever people anywhere in the world hear I’m from Chicago, they instantly squeal, “Oprah!” and clap their hands.
People clamor around me, wondering if I know Oprah, if I ever met her. They ask if I can get tickets for her Show. Even more urgently, they wonder if I can use my influence with her as a fellow Chicagoan to get all sorts of favors granted from her.
One European woman I met immediately started to tell me tearfully about the horrible oppression her mother had suffered as a Basque native in Spain, especially during Franco’s regime. The woman had written a book about her mother’s suffering. She tried to impress a copy of her manuscript on me so that I could carry the precious pages back to Oprah. “Maybe Oprah can get it published? Maybe Oprah could even make it a ‘Book of the Month?’”
When I was on Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula and a tour guide heard where I was from, she immediately spoke up on behalf of the children of her village. “Do you think Oprah could come here and start a school, like the one she started in Africa?”
As I settled in to have lunch at a neat, prosperous little restaurant in Canada’s southern Ontario, I thought I would be safe from having to transmit any major, heart-rending appeals to Oprah. So I didn’t gird myself as I usually would have when the pretty woman at the next table started a conversation with me and asked me where I was from. But the word “Chicago” was barely our of my mouth, when she shrieked, “Oh, Chicago! Oh, Oprah! Do you know Oprah? Do you think you could get her to help me? My teeth are bad. Oh, I’ve been suffering so! I need some caps, some implants, something - and our social insurance refuses to cover it. And I just can’t afford to have it done myself. Could you get Oprah to help me - maybe through her ‘Angel Network?’" the woman smiled appealingly at me, revealing a chipped front tooth that listed a little at cross-purpose with its neighbor.
Yes, it’s clear that Oprah has become Chicago. The mention of Chicago evokes immediate worldwide association with Oprah, and consequent hopeful appeals for everything from tickets to teeth. Al Capone’s star has been dimmed by the sunshine glare of Oprah’s popularity and largesse.
I can’t help regretting this at least a little. You see, as Al Capone’s star has declined, so has mine. I have no claim to any connection with Oprah whatsoever. I never met her, never was able to get tickets to her Show, never even passed her on the street - whereas I can lay claim to some connection with Al Capone. Before Oprah, when my announcement of my Chicago citizenship would evoke the predictable excited references to Al Capone, I could be a crowd-pleaser by regaling my audience with my personal knowledge of the man. Well, it’s my personal knowledge once removed. My father worked with Al Capone.
My father helped Al Capone design, print and apply, some of the labels he put on the illicit bottles of whiskey he was producing in his stills. Perhaps their association was a glancing one, but it was enough for me to make capital of when Al Capone was Chicago to the world.
My father was a singularly taciturn person, even more taciturn than most husbands/fathers have a reputation for being. He was an “older father” when he had me, and he had lived a varied, knock-about life that had included the trenches of World War I, piano-playing in silent movie houses and in brothels, a stab at raising greyhounds for racing, as well as his bootlegging and Al Capone interlude. When he met my mother, he would court her in a modified version of the classic gangster pin-stripe suit. And he wore a Panama hat, jauntily tilted to one side in the same way Al Capone wore his signature Panama hat. Capone perhaps tilted his hat to put in shadow the scar on his cheek that he was so ashamed of having become his brand, an integral part of his public identity – Scarface Al Capone. My father tilted his hat as a rakish homage.
So my father reflected and perhaps imitated the times he’d passed through. However he had no gift for narrating them – no aptitude for weaving his life into anecdote for us. There was so much it seemed he could have told my mother and me, even if his participation in these gaudy enterprises was exaggerated and had actually only been tangential. But whatever he had seen, he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, relate.
The only information we got out of him about Al Capone was his assessment that the gangster had been “an amiable guy.” That singularly repeated adjective “amiable” seemed ironic to my mother and me, being applied as it was to one of the most notoriously brutal mobsters of all time. But that probably really was an accurate description of Capone’s demeanor when he was just in casual conversation with his family or friendly associates.
The actor Rod Steiger portrayed Capone in a brilliant 1950’s movie about the gangster. Steiger’s depiction of ruthless, vulgar self-assertion was mesmerizing, but probably not very accurate if applied personally to Capone. Steiger’s performance captured the times more than the individual. It captured the spirit of the Roaring Twenties in general, with all of that era’s diamond-studded, acquisitive, un-corsetted excess. But it wasn’t specifically true to Al Capone. Capone’s family objected to the movie portrayal, saying that quite unike the loud, raw, table-pounding, commanding figure Steiger had projected onto the screen – their uncle/brother/friend had really been a very polite, soft-spoken individual. Putting that picture together with the few general hints I’d gotten about Capone from my father, it did seem that in ordinary conversation Capone was likely a quiet, mellow, polite, and above all “amiable” individual.
I had this personally confirmed information of Capone to retail to the enthused world when Capone was King. I had shaken the hand of someone who shook the hand of … Now I have nothing. Never having met Oprah or having met anyone who met her - I have nothing to tell people who clamor “Oprah” at the sound of my “Chicago.” I don’t even have a nugget of inside information about the amiability of our current icon. I come off a complete disappointment.
But in addition to the diminishing effect this change of Chicago icon’s has had on my status, I have other reasons for being a little regretful about it. Yes, Capone’s influence and actions were reprehensible, while Oprah stands as a benevolent, enlightened symbol for Chicago. And yet, something about the adoption of Oprah as Chicago’s symbol doesn’t seem to be wholly positive. When people used to imitate the action of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre at the drop of the word “Chicago,” it was unlikely that many of them were expressing any aspiration to go on a shooting spree themselves. Nor were they expressing any admiration for the actual act of killing people. I don’t think most people were even considering the bloody real-life consequences of firing submachine guns at adversaries. Most of them probably wouldn’t really consider breaking the law in any way. No, Al Capone, like all gangsters and outlaws, lit people’s imagination in a more general way.
Al Capone represented the epitome of the can-do, take-charge attitude. While most of us are caught in a Gordian Knot of restrictions and complications, Al Capone simply blasted through all barriers. And oh what fun, oh how exhilarating it would be to assume that kind of right-of-way. You want something? You’re responsible for making it happen. And you CAN make it happen – not by literally disabling or killing other people – but by cutting through all the trivial demands that other people want to tether you to. Does the world say you are too fat, too poor, too dumb to accomplish your goals? You don’t listen. Does the world try to hobble you with endless tasks and taboos - wear a jacket to work, don’t smoke within 100 feet of the condo swimming pool, keep your dog on a leash at all times, sit up straight, smile – and on and on? You blow all that away and clear the field for what you really want, for what’s really important to you. Massacre all the mealy, all the mundane. That’s the kind of empowerment that most people relished in Al Capone’s example. Al Capone was a metaphor for the possibility of rising to command one’s fate by targeted indifference.
Oprah on the other hand has come to stand for acquiring things not through one’s personal, positive action, but through supplication. Whether people make their entreaties to God, to “the energy in the Universe,” or to Oprah herself, she seems to have fostered a passive expectation of deliverance. Oprah assumes and plays into a world of neediness. (More about that in another one of my blog essays). Rather than achieving potency by arrogating to oneself gritty, in-the-world authority – Oprah is the symbol of gaining favors by asking. By contrast, Al Capone, whether rude or polite, whether belligerent or amiable – somehow stood for a vital kind of self-empowerment. He had the image of a man who “Never asked nobody for nothin'.”
So yes, for several reasons I’m a little regretful that Al Capone is no longer the symbol of Chicago. Since Oprah replaced him as emblem of Chicago, I’ve lost considerable cachet. And we’ve all lost something of the proud energy that characterized the early part of the last century.
As I walk down Michigan Avenue, I sometimes picture Al Capone walking ahead of me, with his Panama hat jauntily cocked. But the distance between us gets longer and longer. He at last fades into a barely perceptible figment – off into the mistiness of Chicago history.
And now that Oprah is ending her Show, as she is leaving her most public platform – I wonder who will in turn, in time, replace her as the symbol of Chicago.
J'Accuse! Who Is Really To Blame for the Oil Spill?
Most people blamed abstract entities for the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The entire company of BP was blamed. Tony Hayward, the former CEO of BR, was reviled, but only to the extent that he was seen to represent BP as a whole. Similarly, various government regulatory agencies and governments in general were blamed. Some people have criticized President Obama, but again, only because he stood for the U.S. Government as a whole.
However, my impulse is not to blame any abstract agency or any composite, corporate entity. I want to blame individuals. It’s true that there is such a thing as a corporate culture, and specifically some sick corporate cultures that push employees to all kinds of ruthless expedients just to make a profit. It’s similar to growing up in a bad neighborhood. The bad influences hold sway and eventually push many youths to conform to the criminal standards of their peers.
Judith Rich Harris wrote a controversial, but generally convincing book entitled The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do; Parents Matter Less Than You Think and Peers Matter More. That title sums up her thesis that peer group influence, rather than parental mores, is the primary determinant of most young people’s behavior. She points out that if you take a juvenile delinquent out of his gang environment and put him in a relatively crime-free school in which criminal behavior is considered an alien, outlandish, and even laughable mode of conduct by most of the student body - chances are the delinquent will literally re-form.
Other authors have extended this concept of the primacy of peer group mores into adult settings. In the classic book The Lonely Crowd, David Riesman argued that most people in Western cultures have long since moved from being “inner-directed” to being outer-directed and “other-directed.” Most people no longer stand stalwart in an individualistic identity transferred to them in the form of the mores and expectations of their parents. There is very seldom any “We Have Always Lived in the Castle” mentality in people. Rather, people are protean, assuming whatever shape fashion and their peers dictate. So now you CAN take the country out of the boy.
Considering the influence of peer pressure from another angle, it’s obvious that a twisted mob psychology can grip people at certain times and turn otherwise civil people into holocaust perpetrators. Everywhere we find instances of the madness of crowds.
So there’s a cogent argument that would blame people’s misdeeds on the pressures they experience from their peers, from their fellow students, from their prevailing neighborhood gangs, from their companies’ established cultures, from their society’s expectations. Nevertheless, I STILL want to blame individuals. I STILL want to name names. I STILL want to point the finger at specific individuals rather than at abstract, faceless groups such as governments or corporations. It’s individuals rather than teams I want to admire; it’s individuals rather than teams I want to accuse.
In a courtroom, we still ultimately convict the individual rather than the society that individual came from. We are more and more taking into consideration bad environments, extenuating circumstances, etc. But in the end, the individual stands alone in the docket. So I want to place each individual involved in any man-made disaster in the docket alone.
That’s why when it comes to the recent oil spill, I felt frustrated not to know the names of the individuals whose actions contributed to the accident. Certain individuals might be in the process of being called to account for the accident and might be prosecuted, but most of society’s blame still has been falling on those abstractions of company, agency, and government. No! I wanted to see the faces of individuals.
The closest that I was able to come to assigning such blame was through the "60 Minutes” interview given by Mike Williams, a chief electronics technician on the oil rig. Williams gave very intelligent testimony about the behavior that piled hazard upon hazard – until the final explosion. He talked about the series of mechanical failures that came about as the result of individual decisions. Williams told how someone okayed a plan to speed up the drilling into the Gulf floor. That caused the bottom of the drill hole to split, the way wood will split when a nail is driven into it at a bad angle or without benefit of a pilot hole. The mud that circulates through the casing around the drill bit and drill pipe to cool these elements consequently spilled into these cracks. The workers had to start drilling a new hole. I blame that individual who thought it was okay to speed up the drilling process.
Then during a test, the drill was carelessly raised out of the hole, causing it to scrape away some of the necessary seal, the “annular,” that has to be kept intact in order to maintain pressure on the gas that will emerge. I blame the individuals who allowed and who executed this haphazard lifting of the drill.
Chunks of the annular started to appear in the liquid circulating to the top of the drill hole. When Williams called these chunks to the attention of some of the supervisors, they pooh-poohed his concerns. They okayed a go-ahead. I blame these indifferent individuals.
Because of the damaged seal, gas rushed out past the seal and was sucked into the rig engines. The rig exploded and eleven people were killed.
Williams reported a more fundamental human failing that preceded all these negligent decisions though. He talked about how BP supervisors and TransOcean supervisors disagreed earlier in this chain of events about what drilling technique to use. Men from the two different major companies involved in the drilling disagreed about procedure and predictably turned their disagreement into a jousting match. The men from each side were only intent on being right, on winning the argument. As TV judge Marilyn Milian says, it became a matter of “Quién es mas macho.” Or as Williams put it, the conference became a “chest-bumping.” I blame the men who let the discussion degenerate into verbal combat.
But that sort of impulse to turn what should be conversation into contest is all too frequent an occurrence, especially when all the conversants are men. This isn’t a sexist comment I’m interjecting out of the blue. There have been many serious sociological studies documenting (as a broad generality with many exceptions, of course) men’s and women’s different conversational styles. Deborah Tannen is one of the sociologists who has documented this difference most convincingly. In books such as You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation, she observed how women tend to make a collaboration of their discussions, while men tend to enjoy pitting themselves against each other until a clear winner of the confrontation can be declared. Even those men who come out on the bottom of any particular exchange prefer to enter the next exchange as a contest, because there’s always a chance they might come out winners in that next verbal fray. Having rules, keeping score, driving towards a central victory, tends to be preferable to them than what strikes them as the indecisive, mealy conciliations of women’s talk.
So here blame gets bounced off the individual from another angle. Here the fault is seen to lie not in ourselves, but in our genetic inheritance from primal ancestors. We are acting out the gender strategies that made our early families most successful.
Deborah Tannen and other authors on the subject usually bend over backwards to make it clear that they don’t feel the women’s conversational style is superior to the men’s. The styles are just different. Tannen emphasizes that men and women simply arrive at resolutions with different shadings. Women’s style reflects the use of a mixed and muted palette. The decision reached is a committee compromise. Men’s style favors vivid primary colors. The dominant man’s view is imposed as a coherent whole, in a winner-takes-all flourish of primacy and consistency.
I don’t think I would be as generous as Tannen and others though in granting what’s defined as men’s conversational style equal validity with what’s defined as women’s typical style. Men’s styles too often do seem to result in a Gulf oil spill, in destruction, in war. The dominant man, having failed to take into consideration any countervailing views for fear that might signal weakness and therefore a loss of face, a losing of the contest – issues a plan that is therefore limited and preemptory. It’s “Damn the torpedoes - full speed ahead” too much of the time when an issue is decided only by men engaged in verbal sport.
But can’t men see how damaging it is to operate by contest, to make every encounter an occasion for a challenge to a duel? Can’t they see how succumbing to this primal instinct to be the alpha male is no longer serving them, their communities, or the world well in most cases? This is where I would like to come in and shake those men who “chest-butted” in order to reach a decision about how to proceed with the drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. This is where I would like to name names, to assign individual blame. Rather than billowing regret about “big corporations,” “corporate culture,” “capitalist greed,” and the like – I would like to bring it all down to a personal level, to point my finger at Tom, Dick, and Harry (and Tony) each in succession and punish them for their destructive competitiveness.
My wish to place individual blame and to punish as a parent or a spouse might – with full frontal finger-pointing - is probably MY counterproductive impulse. When has blame ever really changed a person? When has simply yelling at a person, “Don’t BE that way!” ever spurred anyone to self-improvement?
It is probably better in some ways to hold those larger, more abstract entities responsible for much of the evil that men do. It is probably more productive to try to reform school environments, neighborhood ethics, corporate cultures, and societal presumptions than it is to try to reform individuals independent of the network of influences they operate in. But just as many men will continue to find women’s method of coalition emotionally unsatisfying, so I find putting the blame on abstract organizations emotionally unsatisfying. As futile as it might be, I still long to find out exactly WHO issued the order to speed up drilling in the Gulf of Mexico – and to harangue, blame, prosecute that person into making an apology, into making personal amends, and into becoming a better person in the future.
I don’t want to blame the wheel; I want to blame the faulty cog. I don’t want to blame the system; I want to blame the individual at fault in the system. I don’t want to blame the Devil; I want to blame the person who chose the Devil as mentor.
However, my impulse is not to blame any abstract agency or any composite, corporate entity. I want to blame individuals. It’s true that there is such a thing as a corporate culture, and specifically some sick corporate cultures that push employees to all kinds of ruthless expedients just to make a profit. It’s similar to growing up in a bad neighborhood. The bad influences hold sway and eventually push many youths to conform to the criminal standards of their peers.
Judith Rich Harris wrote a controversial, but generally convincing book entitled The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do; Parents Matter Less Than You Think and Peers Matter More. That title sums up her thesis that peer group influence, rather than parental mores, is the primary determinant of most young people’s behavior. She points out that if you take a juvenile delinquent out of his gang environment and put him in a relatively crime-free school in which criminal behavior is considered an alien, outlandish, and even laughable mode of conduct by most of the student body - chances are the delinquent will literally re-form.
Other authors have extended this concept of the primacy of peer group mores into adult settings. In the classic book The Lonely Crowd, David Riesman argued that most people in Western cultures have long since moved from being “inner-directed” to being outer-directed and “other-directed.” Most people no longer stand stalwart in an individualistic identity transferred to them in the form of the mores and expectations of their parents. There is very seldom any “We Have Always Lived in the Castle” mentality in people. Rather, people are protean, assuming whatever shape fashion and their peers dictate. So now you CAN take the country out of the boy.
Considering the influence of peer pressure from another angle, it’s obvious that a twisted mob psychology can grip people at certain times and turn otherwise civil people into holocaust perpetrators. Everywhere we find instances of the madness of crowds.
So there’s a cogent argument that would blame people’s misdeeds on the pressures they experience from their peers, from their fellow students, from their prevailing neighborhood gangs, from their companies’ established cultures, from their society’s expectations. Nevertheless, I STILL want to blame individuals. I STILL want to name names. I STILL want to point the finger at specific individuals rather than at abstract, faceless groups such as governments or corporations. It’s individuals rather than teams I want to admire; it’s individuals rather than teams I want to accuse.
In a courtroom, we still ultimately convict the individual rather than the society that individual came from. We are more and more taking into consideration bad environments, extenuating circumstances, etc. But in the end, the individual stands alone in the docket. So I want to place each individual involved in any man-made disaster in the docket alone.
That’s why when it comes to the recent oil spill, I felt frustrated not to know the names of the individuals whose actions contributed to the accident. Certain individuals might be in the process of being called to account for the accident and might be prosecuted, but most of society’s blame still has been falling on those abstractions of company, agency, and government. No! I wanted to see the faces of individuals.
The closest that I was able to come to assigning such blame was through the "60 Minutes” interview given by Mike Williams, a chief electronics technician on the oil rig. Williams gave very intelligent testimony about the behavior that piled hazard upon hazard – until the final explosion. He talked about the series of mechanical failures that came about as the result of individual decisions. Williams told how someone okayed a plan to speed up the drilling into the Gulf floor. That caused the bottom of the drill hole to split, the way wood will split when a nail is driven into it at a bad angle or without benefit of a pilot hole. The mud that circulates through the casing around the drill bit and drill pipe to cool these elements consequently spilled into these cracks. The workers had to start drilling a new hole. I blame that individual who thought it was okay to speed up the drilling process.
Then during a test, the drill was carelessly raised out of the hole, causing it to scrape away some of the necessary seal, the “annular,” that has to be kept intact in order to maintain pressure on the gas that will emerge. I blame the individuals who allowed and who executed this haphazard lifting of the drill.
Chunks of the annular started to appear in the liquid circulating to the top of the drill hole. When Williams called these chunks to the attention of some of the supervisors, they pooh-poohed his concerns. They okayed a go-ahead. I blame these indifferent individuals.
Because of the damaged seal, gas rushed out past the seal and was sucked into the rig engines. The rig exploded and eleven people were killed.
Williams reported a more fundamental human failing that preceded all these negligent decisions though. He talked about how BP supervisors and TransOcean supervisors disagreed earlier in this chain of events about what drilling technique to use. Men from the two different major companies involved in the drilling disagreed about procedure and predictably turned their disagreement into a jousting match. The men from each side were only intent on being right, on winning the argument. As TV judge Marilyn Milian says, it became a matter of “Quién es mas macho.” Or as Williams put it, the conference became a “chest-bumping.” I blame the men who let the discussion degenerate into verbal combat.
But that sort of impulse to turn what should be conversation into contest is all too frequent an occurrence, especially when all the conversants are men. This isn’t a sexist comment I’m interjecting out of the blue. There have been many serious sociological studies documenting (as a broad generality with many exceptions, of course) men’s and women’s different conversational styles. Deborah Tannen is one of the sociologists who has documented this difference most convincingly. In books such as You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation, she observed how women tend to make a collaboration of their discussions, while men tend to enjoy pitting themselves against each other until a clear winner of the confrontation can be declared. Even those men who come out on the bottom of any particular exchange prefer to enter the next exchange as a contest, because there’s always a chance they might come out winners in that next verbal fray. Having rules, keeping score, driving towards a central victory, tends to be preferable to them than what strikes them as the indecisive, mealy conciliations of women’s talk.
So here blame gets bounced off the individual from another angle. Here the fault is seen to lie not in ourselves, but in our genetic inheritance from primal ancestors. We are acting out the gender strategies that made our early families most successful.
Deborah Tannen and other authors on the subject usually bend over backwards to make it clear that they don’t feel the women’s conversational style is superior to the men’s. The styles are just different. Tannen emphasizes that men and women simply arrive at resolutions with different shadings. Women’s style reflects the use of a mixed and muted palette. The decision reached is a committee compromise. Men’s style favors vivid primary colors. The dominant man’s view is imposed as a coherent whole, in a winner-takes-all flourish of primacy and consistency.
I don’t think I would be as generous as Tannen and others though in granting what’s defined as men’s conversational style equal validity with what’s defined as women’s typical style. Men’s styles too often do seem to result in a Gulf oil spill, in destruction, in war. The dominant man, having failed to take into consideration any countervailing views for fear that might signal weakness and therefore a loss of face, a losing of the contest – issues a plan that is therefore limited and preemptory. It’s “Damn the torpedoes - full speed ahead” too much of the time when an issue is decided only by men engaged in verbal sport.
But can’t men see how damaging it is to operate by contest, to make every encounter an occasion for a challenge to a duel? Can’t they see how succumbing to this primal instinct to be the alpha male is no longer serving them, their communities, or the world well in most cases? This is where I would like to come in and shake those men who “chest-butted” in order to reach a decision about how to proceed with the drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. This is where I would like to name names, to assign individual blame. Rather than billowing regret about “big corporations,” “corporate culture,” “capitalist greed,” and the like – I would like to bring it all down to a personal level, to point my finger at Tom, Dick, and Harry (and Tony) each in succession and punish them for their destructive competitiveness.
My wish to place individual blame and to punish as a parent or a spouse might – with full frontal finger-pointing - is probably MY counterproductive impulse. When has blame ever really changed a person? When has simply yelling at a person, “Don’t BE that way!” ever spurred anyone to self-improvement?
It is probably better in some ways to hold those larger, more abstract entities responsible for much of the evil that men do. It is probably more productive to try to reform school environments, neighborhood ethics, corporate cultures, and societal presumptions than it is to try to reform individuals independent of the network of influences they operate in. But just as many men will continue to find women’s method of coalition emotionally unsatisfying, so I find putting the blame on abstract organizations emotionally unsatisfying. As futile as it might be, I still long to find out exactly WHO issued the order to speed up drilling in the Gulf of Mexico – and to harangue, blame, prosecute that person into making an apology, into making personal amends, and into becoming a better person in the future.
I don’t want to blame the wheel; I want to blame the faulty cog. I don’t want to blame the system; I want to blame the individual at fault in the system. I don’t want to blame the Devil; I want to blame the person who chose the Devil as mentor.
Saturday, February 06, 2010
The 2010 Grammy Awards - More Spectacle than Special
The recent Grammy Awards Show was frightening in its implications. It demonstrated the extent to which public demand for special effects has completely overtaken human interest. The arena has replaced the stage; gladiators have replaced singers. The music has died. The singer and the song have gone down in defeat amidst the roar of the crowds. Personal rendition is lost in extravaganza.
This Awards Show was a three-ring circus raised to the nth degree. We had Lady Gaga and Elton John dressed as futuristic figures, battered from battle in some Terminator-like post-Armageddon of a world. We had dominatrix dresses - women crouching, swinging their hair like lassos – rappers madly declaiming inaudible lyrics – 3-D video projections – and much, much more. Finally, we had the “show-stopping” performance of Pink spinning high up in a harness, spraying water in all directions. But again, where was the music?
Perhaps Taylor Swift won so many awards because, as nondescript as her singing is, she was one of the few nominees still producing anything even remotely identifiable as music – with melody, poetry, and resonance.
In general though, the music has been getting pushed farther and farther into the background for years. Now it has all but vanished. Like the Cheshire cat, only its garish grin is left. It is hard to imagine how the various performers could try to distinguish themselves with any more sensationalism far removed from music the next time around. What’s left to do that could be yet more “daring,” that could “push the envelope” further? I’m reminded of a New Yorker cartoon that appeared years ago – showing a stark naked stripper smilingly dangling her entrails over her arm for the ogling spectators. After she’d appeared completely naked, what else was there left for her to display, to expose to her expectant audience? How else could she top herself?
And why aren’t people protesting this trend toward Roman decadence and decline? The day after the Grammy Awards, everyone was preoccupied critiquing the performers’ various costumes. Commentary focused on the length of the show, on Steven Colbert’s comedy introductions. But no one pointed out that the emperor had no clothes – that there was almost no music being honored at the music awards!
Did this trend toward making the spectacle the message manifest itself so slowly that virtually no one noticed the change? Well, the final shift of emphasis seems to have been compressed into the last decade or so, and that is a short enough time that it should have been evident. The transformation can be traced in the changing style of one particular band – U2.
Musically, the zenith of U2, for me at least, was their 1988 “Rattle and Hum” album and their live performances featuring that collection of songs. That music had enough of the rebel call in it to be clearly rock and roll. It was strident and sensual. But it still had a human face.
One Time magazine essayist who did notice this trend toward over-the-top, once commented on how rock musicians are left struggling to stay ahead of their technical projections, to maintain a presence against the backdrop of all their special effects. For a while, U2 was accomplishing that. Bono and the band members were still human presences on stage, the focus and heart of the music. Bono was an arresting figure on stage, with his black panther prowling through the songs.
With their video “The Fly,” Bono’s singing took back seat to the fractured multiplex presentation. However, his singing was still an integral part of what was still preeminently music. What’s more, the multifaceted screen that dominated the video and the stage performances of this song had a reason for being there and for flashing different scenes in each of the panels. It mimicked what a fly’s world might actually be like, with its compound eyes darting, gleaming beacons into its surroundings for danger and for prey.
But that was the last time that U2 band members came across to me as being salient to their own output. After that, with their “Achtung Baby” and certainly then their “Zooropa” albums and tours, it was multi-screen, fracturing, flashing, fireworks, for their own sake - not in service to the theme of any particular song. Bono, The Edge, Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen all disappeared into their pyrotechnics. They were dwarfed, and then completely drowned by the noise and distraction they had going on behind them all the time – the ultimate concession to short attention spans.
And so most mainstream music has gone in general. These recent Grammies were testimony to how far this appetite for sensation over sense has gone. As performers emoted their pseudo-anguished, unintelligible lyrics into the mikes they were swallowing rather than projecting themselves into – as women stomped the stage in platform shoes – as men in baggy pants pounded out their anger against a background of grindhouse gyrations – as Pink stripped and spun – as the whole three-ring circus spun faster and faster in a “widening gyre” whose center could not hold – I wondered when the music had died.
This Awards Show was a three-ring circus raised to the nth degree. We had Lady Gaga and Elton John dressed as futuristic figures, battered from battle in some Terminator-like post-Armageddon of a world. We had dominatrix dresses - women crouching, swinging their hair like lassos – rappers madly declaiming inaudible lyrics – 3-D video projections – and much, much more. Finally, we had the “show-stopping” performance of Pink spinning high up in a harness, spraying water in all directions. But again, where was the music?
Perhaps Taylor Swift won so many awards because, as nondescript as her singing is, she was one of the few nominees still producing anything even remotely identifiable as music – with melody, poetry, and resonance.
In general though, the music has been getting pushed farther and farther into the background for years. Now it has all but vanished. Like the Cheshire cat, only its garish grin is left. It is hard to imagine how the various performers could try to distinguish themselves with any more sensationalism far removed from music the next time around. What’s left to do that could be yet more “daring,” that could “push the envelope” further? I’m reminded of a New Yorker cartoon that appeared years ago – showing a stark naked stripper smilingly dangling her entrails over her arm for the ogling spectators. After she’d appeared completely naked, what else was there left for her to display, to expose to her expectant audience? How else could she top herself?
And why aren’t people protesting this trend toward Roman decadence and decline? The day after the Grammy Awards, everyone was preoccupied critiquing the performers’ various costumes. Commentary focused on the length of the show, on Steven Colbert’s comedy introductions. But no one pointed out that the emperor had no clothes – that there was almost no music being honored at the music awards!
Did this trend toward making the spectacle the message manifest itself so slowly that virtually no one noticed the change? Well, the final shift of emphasis seems to have been compressed into the last decade or so, and that is a short enough time that it should have been evident. The transformation can be traced in the changing style of one particular band – U2.
Musically, the zenith of U2, for me at least, was their 1988 “Rattle and Hum” album and their live performances featuring that collection of songs. That music had enough of the rebel call in it to be clearly rock and roll. It was strident and sensual. But it still had a human face.
One Time magazine essayist who did notice this trend toward over-the-top, once commented on how rock musicians are left struggling to stay ahead of their technical projections, to maintain a presence against the backdrop of all their special effects. For a while, U2 was accomplishing that. Bono and the band members were still human presences on stage, the focus and heart of the music. Bono was an arresting figure on stage, with his black panther prowling through the songs.
With their video “The Fly,” Bono’s singing took back seat to the fractured multiplex presentation. However, his singing was still an integral part of what was still preeminently music. What’s more, the multifaceted screen that dominated the video and the stage performances of this song had a reason for being there and for flashing different scenes in each of the panels. It mimicked what a fly’s world might actually be like, with its compound eyes darting, gleaming beacons into its surroundings for danger and for prey.
But that was the last time that U2 band members came across to me as being salient to their own output. After that, with their “Achtung Baby” and certainly then their “Zooropa” albums and tours, it was multi-screen, fracturing, flashing, fireworks, for their own sake - not in service to the theme of any particular song. Bono, The Edge, Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen all disappeared into their pyrotechnics. They were dwarfed, and then completely drowned by the noise and distraction they had going on behind them all the time – the ultimate concession to short attention spans.
And so most mainstream music has gone in general. These recent Grammies were testimony to how far this appetite for sensation over sense has gone. As performers emoted their pseudo-anguished, unintelligible lyrics into the mikes they were swallowing rather than projecting themselves into – as women stomped the stage in platform shoes – as men in baggy pants pounded out their anger against a background of grindhouse gyrations – as Pink stripped and spun – as the whole three-ring circus spun faster and faster in a “widening gyre” whose center could not hold – I wondered when the music had died.
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