Farewell To a Greasy Spoon

My favorite restaurant is closing. It was a greasy spoon where you could get a full dinner (including a big bowl of soup) for $4.95. In many ways besides the prices, it was a throw-back to the 1930’s-1940’s.

It had big booths with picture window outlooks onto a busy 3-street intersection in a Yuppie neighborhood. But the restaurant’s clientele ranged well beyond the Yuppie. There were seniors who reminiscing about the rides at Chicago’s Riverview Amusement Park. There were middle-aged people challenging each other to games of “Name That Star” – one of them throwing out the name of some classic movie for which the other then had to provide a roster of its lead players. “Was Kirk Douglas in that? I don’t think so!” I recently overheard a conversation between a young man and his parents. The young man was justifying his failure to settle on a career path. He told his disgruntled father that he wanted to “find himself” by taking a year off touring Europe before he seriously chose a college major. The father was overly stern against such slacking off – and the son was overly verbose about the advantages of such a “Wander Jahr” (a year of wandering as the Germans call it).

All this was woven through with the speculations of policemen and plumbing contractors who’d settle into adjoining booths for a while to “take a load off.”

There was almost always been an interesting conversation I could eavesdrop on at “The Golden Angel.” The low prices and informality of the place attracted this eclectic mix of customers who could relax into the unimportance of it all.

Of course, it really was sort of a greasy spoon. The soups were always good and homemade – with the minestrone being chock-full of vegetables. But then the entrees often showed the cut-rate nature of the place. The meatloaf was usually 90% filler, a fact disguised with heavy ladings of canned gravy. But I really didn’t mind. I don’t gravitate to the nouvelle cuisine with its wisps and curls and drizzles of exotic ingredients. And the fact that the meatloaf was mostly filler was actually a plus for me. I could feel I was adhering to something close to a vegetarian diet. No cows killed to make that meatloaf.

And when you ordered coffee, you truly got a bottomless cup – with the waitress attentively filling it every time your cup threatened to go below the half-way mark. So I usually came away from the place with a pleasant buzz of hopefulness about the world. I was filled with the echoes of all sorts of lively conversation, and I was percolating with plans about all sorts of things I could myself accomplish. All this was fueled by the thick, sometimes twice boiled, servings of caffeine that kept being poured my way.

It was the perfect place to retreat to when I’d come to the library across the way to work on my writing. I’d write a while in the library, then I’d “take a break” (which I needed about as much as that young man needed to tour Europe to find himself). But I’d indulge myself. I got to know the waitresses well enough that they would welcome me as a “regular,” but not so well that we would intrude on each other’s lives.

And now this is all going to be gone. I might be able to get in one more visit before I leave for Spain. But the place is closing on November 12, while I’ll be taking my own Wander-Wochen (weeks of wandering) in Europe. And with it will go that rag-time refuge for the homely and near homeless, for the aspiring and the expiring. With it will go the ideal place for grazing and gazing.

The site has been bought by Lou Malnati’s, a pizza chain. They are going to re-configure the place, expanding to make an out-door café in what is currently the parking lot. I checked online for the menus Malnati’s offers at other locations. No, this won’t be the old greasy spoon anymore. The new owners are going to be decidedly upscale. Their recipes feature arugula, and the main beverage they serve will be Dasani’s bottled water. No, this isn’t going to be the sort of place where you can relax over discussions of your triumphs dumpster diving.

I told the elderly Greek owner of The Golden Angel that I’d miss his restaurant. A tear welled up in one of his eyes, and he snuffled out his own regret, his own confession of how he’d miss doing what he had been doing for so many decades.

And so hail and farewell to the Golden Angel. All of us misfits and miscreants will miss you.

Simon & Garfunkel Commit Murder (Well, at least Manslaughter)

Mostly I’m not a stickler about using correct grammar. I enjoy English being limber and colloquial some of the time. That includes watching it flex itself on the parallel bars of mixed metaphors occasionally. What could be better than, “I’m drinking like a chimney; smoking like a fish.

But there is one mixed metaphor that makes me cringe every time I hear it. It’s the mixed metaphor that dominates Simon and Garfunkel’s popular song, “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” That song is meant to be comforting – a reassurance that there could be someone looking out for your best interests, someone ready to take your side and ease your way through troubled times. But really, the lyrics of that song assure just the opposite. They encourage their friend, their beloved, to sail ahead, oblivious to the fact that they are going to smash her to smithereens in just a few more lines.

This murderous onslaught happens as the result of a mixed metaphor. The singers’ friend is represented as being a sailboat – “Sail on, sail on silver girl.”

But alas, her “time will come” all too soon, and in a way that the song’s soothing tone doesn’t warn about. The singer/singers generally represent themselves as being a bridge, likely a drawbridge. (Although there’s confusion even on this point, because one stanza makes the singers themselves sailboats. “I’m sailing right behind.”) But the dominant image represents the singers as a bridge. When they get to the crux of the song, “Like a bridge over troubled water, I will lay me down,” I picture the two brackets of a drawbridge lowering onto the unsuspecting masts of the sailboat going underneath. I see the masts shattering, snapping to one side, weighing the whole boat askew. I see the boat capsizing, sinking like a mini Titanic. Instead of easing the way for their friend, Simon and Garfunkel smashed down on her head, throwing her overboard to drown.

Part of the reason I have such a vivid imagining of this disaster is that I live in Chicago, the city that features a series of famous bridges going over the Chicago River. Sailboats attempting to navigate the River have to line up and wait for topside vehicular traffic to be stopped at certain intervals, and for the bridges to be raised, one by one, to allow the boats passage. See the picture of one of Chicago’s trademark raisings.

A bridge would be a good thing to lay down if your friend were a pedestrian or if she were driving a car. Then making a crossing for her over troubled waters would be a good thing to do. But if she’s a sailboat – the results of laying down a bridge in her path are likely to be fatal. Smash, bang, whap! One girlfriend eliminated, leaving Simon and Garfunkel free to move onto the girl with “diamonds on the soles of her shoes.”

The Power of Preference

A Neighbor Makes a Power Play

A new tenant moved into the apartment building next door to me recently and a controversy soon developed - over my three cats. She believed they had been leaving droppings in the back yard included in her rental. We talked briefly about how to solve the problem, possibly by engaging a professional “pooper-scooper” service that I’d pay for. But then the woman became more encompassing in her complaint and stated flatly, (“plonkingly” as the British would say) that she didn’t like cats – period. She didn’t like to smell them, see them, or think that they were anywhere in the neighborhood.

Well, that was quite a challenging exclusion she was posing. I smiled at her in an indulgent, conciliatory fashion - and assured her I would do everything possible to keep the cats away from her territory.

But afterwards, I began to think about what had just happened there. Although the woman had staked out a wider claim against something than most people would have, her basic proclamation of an aversion was not at all an unusual conversational gambit. I thought of how often people introduce themselves with some sort of assertion of likes and dislikes. They wear these preferences for and against as identifying badges. “Hello, I’m Susan,” is, somehow, almost immediately followed with, “I hate spicy food.” Susan knows herself by the kinds of things she likes or dislikes, and she expects her listeners to similarly identify her, and to identify with her, according to such lists. What’s more, her remark floats the tacit expectation that people will dance to the tune of her preferences. That’s because, in addition to announcing preferences as a key to their identities, people also often make these announcements as power plays in their eternal game of one-upmanship.

To have a preference, especially in the form of a strong and definite dislike, is to shape the social environment around you. It makes others curve their behavior in accommodation. You become a strong magnet dropped onto a table of tiny iron filings. With the slightest nudge against the table, all those random little filings are compelled to start jostling into an arc around you, until a nice, neat little pattern of propitiation is achieved, with you at the center. That’s another reason Susan will make sure you know soon after meeting her that she hates spicy food Her assertion puts you on notice that she’ll require special treatment and will obligate you to make special arrangements on her behalf. “Oh, that’s right, Susan can’t stand hot peppers. I’ll make a separate batch of chili rellenos for her. That means I’ll have to go out and shop for mild bell peppers for her batch.” And so on and so forth. Thus, without firing a shot, Susan put herself in command. She achieved the ultimate in “passive-aggressive” conquest.

In the same way, my new neighbor put herself in command and achieved ascendency over me with her one utterance about cats. She thereby sent me into a scurry of deploying litter boxes and monitoring feline movements. She sent me into what could be a lifetime of watchfulness and worry.

Common Complaints

So it is with so many of the sensitivities and distastes that people are more and more proclaiming. With all their various thrusts of aversion, they leverage themselves into positions of control. Social gatherings become contests about who can pour the biggest speed bump into the flow of conversational traffic:

“I can’t stand cigarette smoke. So go outside and back off 50 feet!”
“I only drink Coke. Take away that Pepsi!”
“Yuck, I don’t know where that fork has been. Get it away from me!”
“I don’t like jazz. Can’t you play something else?”
“But we’ll have to do something about this green paint. I want a nice clean look. Let’s redecorate and paint everything white.”
“I have a headache. I can’t stand the noise. Can you talk more quietly?”
“Can you stop those kids from bouncing their ball? It’s driving me crazy!”

All these statements are like hand grenades lobbed into what might have been simple conviviality. Such statements of predilection refocus everyone else’s energies on the complainant, at least temporarily. Augustin Burroughs, who wrote some award-winning accounts of the domestic dysfunction he experienced growing up (Running with Scissors), wondered why it’s always the person with the dislike or the disability who must be accommodated. Why do the presumed needs of the person with the headache take precedence over the need that the healthy person has for ebullience? Why does the whine always trump the unfettered outburst of the wine?

Well, in cases of the most serious “handicaps,” that often doesn’t happen. Despite all the last decades’ worth of “Citizens with Disabilities Acts,” the world still is a difficult place for anyone in a wheelchair or with some other major nonconforming physical condition. When I made a trip downtown last week, I tried to do it from the viewpoint of someone in a wheelchair. I was stymied right away. The rapid transit station where I’d naturally board a downtown train had no elevator. The elevators at other stations were “Out of Order.” There were unleveled curbs and bumps on every block along my route.

However, when it comes to the peeves of house and garden, it’s the complainer who usually wins the day. The utterance, or the mere look, of a “Yuck!” marshals people to do the individual’s biding. “Are you getting a chill? I’ll close that window right away.”

Domination through Desire

However, statements of positive preferences can be just as powerful. By expressing her like of something, Susan can gain popularity. It gives others something to do on her behalf. “Oh, Susan collects souvenir mugs. I’ll have to remember to get her one when I’m in Madrid. I don’t think she has a Madrid one yet.” Whenever and wherever the traveler sees a mug, he will indeed think of Susan and assess the object in terms of suitability for her collection.

Having an enthusiasm, a positive preference, at first might seem a more benign a way of controlling people. Most people are downright happy to be given the knowledge of Susan’s love of souvenir mugs. It gives them a goal and a focus on their travels. What’s more, it gives them a handle on Susan. It makes Susan easier to relate to. Rather than being confronted by a sort of amorphous, ectoplasmic entity at social gatherings, people have a ready-made way of opening conversation with her. “Oh, you’re the Susan who collects souvenir mugs, aren’t you? I have one my father brought back from Morocco. I’ll bet you don’t have any from there. I’d be glad to give it to you for your collection.”

This is a feel-good transaction all the way around. On the one hand, Susan is going to add a pretty mug to her collection. On the other hand, Susan’s new acquaintance will be able to unload a cluttering tchotchke from her house, and at the same time get the feel-good rush of being a benefactor.

And yet, both Susan’s positive and negative preferences are tacit ways of exerting control over others. By her preferences, she activates people into service on her behalf. The statement of a preference can be a subtle controller, even a welcome one – and yet, it does fence off and limit the possibilities of each person’s ability to be in the world. It narrows the definition of who each person is and of what those around them are aimed at accomplishing. By definition, preferences are “partialities.” They turn a whole into a partial.

Give Me a Little Caesar

Maybe this is one reason the gangster has been such a popular anti-hero in the media. From Edward G. Robinson in “Little Caesar” up to the more modern incarnations of mobsters in “The Sopranos” - the charm of such utterly anti-social characters is that they take what they want – fast and furious. They don’t slowly, insidiously deflect other people’s lives by wielding the pincushion of preference. The mobster dominates with the decisive move, with the threat of and the actuality of sudden execution. He doesn’t slowly drain the other person’s life away with the on-going necessity of having to accommodate his wishes in a million little ways. If a neighbor’s cat is bothering him, he shoots the cat – or the neighbor. And it’s done. He doesn’t make the neighbor scuttle around securing door latches, deploying litter boxes and baffles ad infinitum.

I’m certainly not advocating or condoning the shooting of cats or people. I’m just pointing out that as a fantasy, we enjoy being briefly reinvigorated by entering into the mobsters’ way of coup de grace. Mobsters represent escape from what’s likely become the tiring quality of most of our routine associations. We can forget about all the trivial, petty exclusions and inclusions that our co-workers impose. We can briefly step outside our marriage to Susan and the decades’ long abstention from pepper that has entailed. For the span of the movie, we can keep company with someone who doesn’t prefer over the long haul, but who demands in a flash.

Without George Foreman Grills, What Have I Got Left?

But readers might object here – if we exclude mention of preferences from our lives, what’s left? If we discourage Susan from stating or from even having preferences, how will we know what to buy her for her birthday? What’s more, aren’t preferences primary conversation enablers? What would we talk about with our neighbors, if not our preference for a George Foreman Grill over a XXX Hibachi? And doesn’t the jargon that arises from having a preferred hobby grease the wheels of conversation? When two model railway buffs get together, they can have the immediate mutuality of discussing gauges and voltages. What’s more, how could we ever post an ad in a “Singles Seeking” forum without reference to likes and dislikes? If not “SWM, likes skiing, snowboarding, absinthe, the Dave Matthews band, working out. Looking for same” – then what? How could we introduce ourselves, become solid to other people, and hope to find matching pieces of the puzzle?

The Eastern Alternative

It’s true. The kind of selflessness that follows from having no distinct preferences can pose a problem socially. It can actually alienate a person from this society, which is so geared towards fashioning and legitimating consumer likes and dislikes. True followers of many of the Eastern religions might find it difficult to meld into the mainstream of Western society’s emphasis on stated preferences. That’s because Eastern wisdom often encourages the opposite of identifying with any strict, prickly little set of preferences.

Rather than sporting armored plates of preference, Eastern sages try to model porousness. They encourage their disciples to let the world flow through them, to open themselves to the whole experience of life. They point out that the constant critic separates himself from the full experience of life. His bristling assessments separate him from the world. It prevents him from seeing the universal divine in all things and from realizing his oneness with that inspiration.

It’s difficult to imagine a devout group of monks standing around weighing the relative merits of Nikes over Addidas shoes. They simply wear the cast-off sandals that fall their way. But in a more general sense, it’s difficult to imagine anyone who sincerely espouses an Eastern philosophy ranking potential mates on a scale of 1 to 10, refusing to do some task because “it is beneath” him, or appraising every morsel of the world offered to him and then apprising all the rest of us of his predilection in the matter. The sage doesn’t stand outside every experience, giving it a thumb’s up/thumb’s down. He hopes to stay available to all experience, to stand before the world, awash in the pure experience of it. He hopes to know it as something in and of itself, not in relation to any personal reaction for or against it.

But indeed that’s where East doesn’t meet West. The West equates having strong preferences with being a properly ambitious, productive, interesting person. While Westerners might occasionally find statues of the “Laughing Buddha” cute, that kind of merry embrace of “the all of it” just isn’t a pose any right-thinking Westerner would seriously consider imitating as a way of life. In fact, most Westerners disdain a lack of self-assertion, an inability to dominate by making other people attend to your preferences.

Born Buddhist

I know because, through some fluke of biology, I believe I have been a disciple of Eastern philosophy born in a Western body. As a young person, I couldn’t at all get the hang of choosing or wanting to choose, especially when it came to the array of items offered by popular culture. I wouldn’t have known how to prefer Barbie over American Girl, 401’s over Calvin Kleins, Pepsi over Coke. There wasn’t anything at all I wanted for Christmas. For me, the Holidays loomed as a sort of devotee terrifying invitation to become a member of some frenzied cargo cult. While others eagerly waited to have specific dolls and dishes and little model cars delivered to them, I scrambled to my retreat behind the Christmas tree, hoping I could make myself invisible to the rain of distraction and clutter. I certainly wouldn’t have become the appealing subject of any classic tale such as Jean Shepherd’s “Christmas Story” about little Ralphie Parker’s fierce machinations to be the recipient of a BB gun as a Christmas present.

This failure to manifest the kind of desirousness that would make me a force to be reckoned with did make it difficult for people to know me or even to want to know me. People were handed no ready way of celebrating me. I carried that alienating aura of anomaly into adulthood. I had no recognizable story of trials and tribulations to tell others. I never spent nights pondering what college I wanted to go to and how I would manage to get in. I never gave much thought to whether I’d go to college at all. But when one was built down the street from me, I happily walked there and eventually got a degree. I attended just for the joy of learning, not with any career goals in mind. I never considered choosing a career. I just fell into step desultorily lending a hand in my parents’ printing business. And then after that waned, I got by on savings, which were sufficient, since I had never dissipated my meager income by buying stuff along the way. I never struggled with any form of addiction or had any other dramatic narrative of failure and triumph I could present to people.

My un-wanting personality did not endear me to anyone, and in fact tended to make me rather unwanted in the larger world. If I had in fact been an Eastern sage, I might have been attended to as someone who could impart wisdoms along the way. But I couldn’t claim any such official standing. So I was discounted. I was just seen as a weird teenager who came out of left field, not wanting to drive, not concerned with school or grades or with branding myself into a future distinguished business career that would generate a loyal group of consumers. Then later, I was a cheap date, a boringly undemanding person in place of the date my companion would have preferred - as stated in his singles profile, someone “sassy and self-assured.” I didn’t have the vividness or vivacity of lust. My lack of assertiveness was occasionally interpreted as a lack of self-esteem. My un-wanting was seen as a constricted inability to enjoy myself. Both conditions were seen as something to be corrected, for the few who even considered taking the time to correct them.

Meanwhile, I had just the opposite of the wishy-washy self-denying personality that most people characterized me as having, if they thought about me at all. In reality, I was always the secret hedonist, inwardly aglow with pleasure.

How To Be a Flicker in an Inferno

The sort of misperception and devaluation I suffered will likely be the fate of anyone who doesn’t concentrate on evincing definite preferences. It will leave you as a difficult person to pin down, and therefore as someone others might avoid. It will leave you without a power base in a world that relishes and respects the drive for power – either in the way the gangster seizes it, or in the way most others craftily leverage it with their partialities.

But I still maintain it’s worthwhile to at least consider limiting proclamations of preference. I don’t advocate adopting Eastern wisdoms as a placarded, T-shirted announcement of oneself, in the faddish way many of the hippies of the 60’s and 70’s did. That would be a subversion of Eastern wisdom from the start. And I don’t advocate becoming artificial and extreme in disclaiming all preferences. I recognize how having likes and dislikes are unavoidable, even necessary and positively admirable when it comes to standing up for truth and humanity. After all, a good percentage of this Blog has been, and will be, about advancing my opinion of what is the better way. This Blog is itself primarily aimed at commenting on and commemorating what I think is better, in terms of what I think is more interesting and has more heart.

If attempted in a temperate, innocent way though, a relatively open-ended, open-minded approach to life might not have that many disadvantages after all. You won’t be left as speechless, as featureless as you might at first suspect. You will still find things to talk about with other people. But instead of proclaiming your fervid dislike of some past or present movie stars, you might offer some interesting insight into some of their unsuspected talents. “Did you know that Hedy Lamarr, glamour girl of the 40’s, also had the brilliant insights of a physicist and mathematician? During World War II, she invented a way of preventing the jamming of radio signals – a method we use today in wireless communication.” Instead of skimming over each other by comparing trivial lists of likes and dislikes, we might get to the substrate of what others have experienced in life. “How did your grandfather survive the hardships of the Dust Bowl, having to start his farm over and over again like that? I know if I have a hangnail, I get discouraged. Where does a person get the fortitude to persevere in the face of such large adversity? Do you think you’ve inherited that survivalist spirit?”

The Path of TV Sitcoms

I’m reminded of an episode of the popular TV sitcom “King of Queens.” The starring couple of that series are reluctant to make a long-term financial commitment because they aren’t sure they will still be a couple in twenty or thirty years. They decide they’ll each privately make a list of favorite things. Then they’ll compare lists. If there isn’t at least one match on their lists, they’ll take it as a sign they might not be compatible for the long haul and they won’t take out that mortgage. As they compare their respective lists, they find a jarring disconnect – “wrestling vs green tea,” “sloppy Joes vs sunsets,” etc.

They call a halt to their comparison just short of the end of their lists. They float the fiction that that last item on their lists will be a match. Of course, we in the audience know that there’s no way that last item will match. And really, they know it too. But it doesn’t matter. For all the seasons of the show, Doug and Carrie have been a good couple. There’s been something satisfying about their togetherness that overrides their having so little in common in the way of trivial likes and dislikes, or even in the way of weightier elements of a common outlook on life. They simply have that X-factor that makes them so right together.

The ultimate importance of the X-factor is what defeats so many dating websites in their attempts to match people on the basis of checklists of mutual likes and dislikes. An ability to embrace each other, and the world in some special glimmering way, is, in the end, more important than sharing hobbies and hates. It’s more important even than that often cited “chemistry.” It is based on an ability to have an openness to each other that goes beyond assessment. It’s the ability to be light and delighted in love with what presents itself. It’s Edith Bunker and Archie; it’s the lilies of the field that “neither toil nor spin”; it’s yin and yang.

The Middle Way

So to get back to the point of this essay – I’d encourage people to place less emphasis on identifying themselves by what they label “cool” or “lame.” I’d encourage them to cast off those name tags that limit them as surely as they limit other people’s interactions with them. My advice would be to - step outside the box, stretch the envelope, go beyond those boundaries and be boundless.

What’s more, I’d encourage people to be willing to be relatively small and powerless at least some of the time – by wielding fewer preferences. I’m reminded of the mysticism of the closing lines of that classic cult movie The Incredible Shrinking Man. As Scott Carey dwindles down, down to a biologically impossible, but dramatically poignant speck – he reflects that by becoming infinitely small, he’s actually becoming infinitely large at-one with the universe.

That’s a sort of steep philosophy for everyday life. But in its exaggeration, it brings home my more accessible point. That point is: Don’t make a life out of pondering what you prefer and then seeking only that. Take a few breaks; take what’s given and appreciate the unique experience of whatever comes your way. Don’t be like Susan who, behind her sweet, seemingly apologetic smile - always has a discommoding chill, always hates peppers. Certainly forego that more extreme sort of bid for power that my neighbor made when she asserted her loathing of anything feline. That sort of tyranny will ultimately limit you as much as it limits the person you harry with all your provisos.

Besides, by voicing such dominating preferences - you’ll get me seriously mad. I can’t stand people who hate cats.

When We's Home

Some years ago, I rode the train from Chicago to Charleston, West Virginia. It was a long trip, calling for some over-night scrunching up among those of us who hadn’t bought sleeper car accommodations. Two grandmotherly women from the South Side of Chicago travelled the distance in my same car. Shortly after crossing the border from Ohio into West Virginia, we stopped in Huntington. Even though we were still over fifty miles from Charleston, it felt as if we were virtually at our destination at last. I heard those two fellow travelers exclaim in relief, “When we’s in Huntington, we’s home!”

It struck me that the point at which we feel we’re virtually home is relative to the total distance we’ve travelled.

I didn’t learn how to drive until I was well into my thirties. (I was the only teen-ager who DIDN’T want to drive.) So I would go shopping for my family on foot, pulling a 2-wheel shopping cart. I’d usually have quite a precariously balanced load to haul. The grocery store was four blocks away. But after I’d covered three blocks, I always breathed a sigh of relief. Only one more block to go! I knew at that point that whatever happened - if my shopping cart lost a wheel, if I sprained an ankle – somehow I could make it that extra block. I’d mentally celebrate, “I’m home.”

Then after I learned how to drive, I’d visit my brother in the suburbs. I was always nervous behind the wheel. It was such a relief when, on the return trip, I’d pass into Chicago’s City limits at Cumberland Avenue. Chicago busses start running at Cumberland, and I knew if I crashed or broke down, I could still make it the rest of the way by catching a bus. So as soon as I hit Cumberland, about 6 miles from my house, I’d feel, “I’m home.”

As I’ve forced myself to become a somewhat more adventurous driver, I’ve started visiting friends on the shores of Lake Erie in Ontario, Canada. That drive takes me along a nerve-racking route that includes expressways and the Ambassador Bridge. But on the return trip, as I pass through Benton Harbor, Michigan, and then certainly as I pass through Gary, Indiana, I feel a huge relief. That other side of Lake Michigan is only 30 or 40 miles from home – a mere hop, skip, and a jump. If anything bad happens to my car, I know that from those points I can take the Chicago Metro train into Chicago. When I’m in Gary, I’m as good as home.

When I’ve flown to various European cities, the pilot usually announces when we are over Newfoundland. Coming back, I can relax once I glimpse those icy edges of Newfoundland below. That means we have successfully navigated over the vast, treacherous waters of the Atlantic Ocean. We’ll be flying over solid ground from there on in. It’s my continent, my accustomed territory. When I’m over Newfoundland, I’m home.

Now there’s increasing talk of sending manned spaceships to Mars and possibly to other points in the Solar System. I can imagine the astronauts’ relief when, on their return trip, they fly past the orbit of the Moon – the Moon, that safe and familiar luminescence that has presided over our Earth’s night skies for all the eons we’ve been around. Surely, the astronauts will feel the safety of that trail of light that the Moon casts over Earth’s waters as they propel through the circumference of our friendly satellite. They’ll glow with reassurances to each other, “When we’re past the Moon, we’re home.”

Scientists currently say it would be impossible for astronauts to go farther than our Solar System in a lifetime. But who knows? Some way might be found to beat the System, to navigate some loophole (or some wormhole) through Einstein’s rule against the possibility of traveling faster and farther than the speed of light can take us. Then our astronauts will feel the safety and assurance of being in familiar space when they shoot through the Oort Cloud of icy rocks and asteroids that‘s beyond Pluto. “Only 10 billion miles to go! We’re in our solar system. We’re almost there!”

And if somehow, we find a way to go even farther, to “break the surly bonds” of our galaxy and follow Carl Sagan’s unimaginable trail of zeroes out to other galaxies – the point at which we feel the relief of home-coming will be pushed outward farther yet. As the great, great grandchildren of our original astronauts make their way back from Andromeda, they will perhaps be like the monarch butterflies that migrate back to the place their forbears left, a place they’ve never personally been, but know just by instinct. Our astronauts will not only see by their dials, but will perhaps feel by some unique intersecting influence of light and gravity, that they are coming back into the vast womb where their kind was born, once they’ve burst over that rough edge of our Galaxy. It will only be another 20 thousand light years then. They will look at each other in triumph and beam, “When we’s in the Milky Way, we’s home!”

Wheeeeee!

Death of a Cat

I agreed to have my cat of 15 years euthanized the other day. This was the first time I’d ever had a pet euthanized. The other three long-term pets I had in my lifetime all died naturally by my side. They just slipped away asleep after periods of having gotten weaker and more lethargic. It seemed as if this cat was going the same way.

She had been diagnosed with a hyper-thyroid condition, apparently common in cats. Vets said if that condition couldn’t be corrected with the pills they prescribed, her various systems would just shut down.

That’s what eventually seemed to be happening. She just stopped eating. She wasn’t tempted by any of her favorite tidbits. With increasing feebleness, she would just get up to drink water and then go back to sleep. After the second day of this, I thought the end must be near. I’d go in quietly and check on her every couple of hours. But no, she was always still there. My checking in on her would rouse her to get up, go drink some more water, then retire again.

Into the fifth wrenching day of this, I felt that just perhaps I had been wrong about the inevitability of her demise. So I took her to an emergency clinic, thinking there might be something that could be done to turn her condition around.

But no. The vet there found my cat had some other compromising condition on top of her hyperthyroidism. She said that cats can live for amazingly long periods without eating. But that didn’t indicate there was any hope for real recovery. Correcting both of my cat’s conditions would have required more than heroic measures, and then would have resulted in a brief, sluggish life under medication. So we decided to euthanize.

My cat didn’t make that decision any easier in those last minutes though. As emaciated as she was, she rallied into kittenish animation. She thrived on the stimulation and attention the vets and their assistants were giving her. She played with the scale on the examining table. She explored the examining room with keen interest. She purred in sheer delight at all the patting and praise she was getting. However I knew if I took her home, the wasting would just continue apace. So we went ahead.

I didn’t think I would break down at the prospect of this ending. Frankly, Gammon had always been more of a duty for me than a chosen delight. I had first seen her as an apparently abandoned kitten cadging food in the bushes of the Post Office across the street from me. Every time I went out my front door, she would bounce out of the foliage and attempt to follow me back home. I resisted this forced adoption for some time. I then had an elderly dog whose last years didn’t seem likely to be made any easier by having a bumptious kitten around. But the cat’s persistence began to affect me. I started to worry about her.

I’d look often out the front window to see if I could glimpse her darting through the Post Office shrubbery. Was she still there? Was she alright? If I didn’t see her for a day, I worried she might have gotten run over. Once around midnight, my heart almost stopped in fear for her. I saw a group of 18-19-year-old boys who had all the earmarks of being members of Hell’s Angels sauntering down the street. Their jackets were emblazoned with skull and crossbones; one had a dragon tattoo fuming an inky coil of smoke around his neck; one had a length of heavy tow chain dangling from his belt. As they passed in front of the Post Office, the little cat darted out, stood square in front of them blocking their path, and meowed a plea that was at once both piteous and commandeering. Oh no! I almost wretched at what I thought would surely be the ensuing cruelty. I pictured the gang gleefully twisting the cat’s head off, sadistically pulling out a knife and cutting her legs off.

When the boys didn’t immediately do that, but instead stopped, sat down on the Post Office steps, and extended pinched fingers out to her while cooing and meowing a come hither encouragement, I was not immediately reassured. I thought they were probably playing cat and mouse with her, teasing her with the prospect of friendship – so that they could all the more cruelly surprise her with some horrible pain. But they didn’t do that.

They took turns gently stroking her, talking baby talk to her. Then one of them left the group. When he came back a few minutes later from the 7-Eleven a few doors down the street, he was carrying a can of cat food. He crouched back on the steps, popped the lid off the can, and set it down for the kitten. The boys looked on with good-deed grins of satisfaction as they watched her gobble up what was probably the only decent meal she’d had in days. So they weren’t going to hurt her, all their appearance of brutality to the contrary.

But then after a while, it was plain the boys were starting to get bored. They had meant this to be a one-night stand, no long-term commitment. They got up and started to walk away. The kitten followed them. They looked back, clearly worried that this demanding little creature might attach itself to them. They picked up their pace. The cat matched their speed. Soon she had them on the run! It was the climaxing chase scene you find in every proper action film. It was The French Connection all over again. Except this time, the hooligans being chased weren’t in a car – they were on foot. And their pursuer wasn’t a cop in a souped-up Fury, but a10-ounce kitten intent on finding a home.

The boys ran full tilt to the end of the block – checked and saw the cat was still coming on strong. They shot around the corner and fell silent. They were likely using every evasive tactic in the book. I could picture them cutting through the alley, down the pub’s gangway, then falling in hushed caution under Mr. Bandera’s back porch. “Shhhh! Don’t let her hear us. Maybe she’ll go right past!”

Whatever they did, they succeeded in eluding her, because in a little while, I saw her straggling back into the Post Office bushes - defeated, unadopted.

But not for long. A few nights later, as I coaxed my dog through the front door after our nightly perambulation, I thought I saw a gray flash of something shoot past us into the house. I dismissed it as some trick of my eyesight though – until I saw the kitten sitting in full proprietary possession of my computer desk. I had been in the middle of a computer backgammon game with myself when I’d taken my break to walk the dog. As I watched in amazement at the sheer assurance the kitten had of its right-of-way – she leaped onto my keyboard, brought the computer screen back to life, and made the decisive move that won the game for me. So I dubbed her “Gammon” - and that was that.

As I suspected it might, the cat’s presence in the house probably harried my elderly, failing dog to a somewhat earlier-than-otherwise grave. The dog took back seat to this new arrival’s needs, although Gammon was never very active or mischievous. She was fairly self-contained from the start.

Still, my caretaking of her tended to be done more from a sense of obligation than from the heart. When my dog died, I very much would have liked to have adopted another shelter dog. But the timing never seemed right. When I bestirred myself to do something about it, the potential adoptee’s biography mentioned that it should be an “only pet,” without any other animals in the house, especially without any cats. Then I procrastinated. Then I became the official guardian of a feral colony of cats who have stuck close to me in my back yard. It seemed it would be too much to try to introduce a dog into this reign of cats inside and out. And so fifteen years slipped away.

Because of what I thought was my partial detachment from the project of Gammon, I didn’t think I would cry when it came time to euthanize her. I had fulfilled my commitment to her – better than those Hell’s Angels had been prepared to do. I had given her a good life. So I was surprised when I started to sob uncontrollably in the vet’s examining room as we closed in on our conclusion.

But then the worst of this overwhelming sadness passed. After the decision had been made and it came to actually giving her the injection, I was even able to muster a calmer, scientific attitude towards the procedure. I chose to stay in the room while the vet administered the shots. They first inserted a catheter just above her paw first. Then two quick injections – one to anesthetize her, one to stop her heart. It seemed she was gone even as the first needle approached the port of the catheter.

In my newly becalmed (or benumbed?) state of scientific curiosity, I noted how absolutely painless this passing had been. By contrast, I remembered some of what I’d read about the occasional failure of lethal injections given to Death Row inmates. I’d read that there had been unseemly delayed reactions, and that even a few recipients of this form of capital punishment had had time to report excruciating burning sensations as the chemicals coursed through them. But none of that had happened here. I wondered, if animals can be so humanely dispatched – why can’t they always find the right chemicals and dosages to dispatch humans equally humanely?

By this time, with all the long worry about what to do about Gammon’s failing and when to do it behind me, I became almost inwardly jovial at elaborating the analogy I was making between euthanizing an animal and giving a prisoner a lethal injection. I patted Gammon on the head and silently speculated, “What did you do to have it come to this? Were you a little serial killer? Too bad, you couldn’t beat the rap.”

I guess none of us will beat the rap in the end.

The clinic had made an imprint of Gammon’s paw in a clay medallion – a token they gave me to take home and bake as a permanent remembrance.

I put it on the seat next to me in the car as I pulled out of the clinic’s parking lot. I’d driven a few yards before I realized that I was in the middle of a thick fog. This uncharacteristic daytime fog in Chicago, juxtaposed with that paw imprint medallion resting on the passenger seat - inevitably called to mind Carl Sandburg’s poem:

The fog comes
On little cat feet.
It sits looking over harbor and city
On silent haunches
And then moves on…..

Low Self-Esteem Is Not the Problem

Bullying has become a popular subject for media psychologists. When Dr. Phil addressed the subject the other day, he predictably ascribed the problem to a lack of self-esteem. Almost everything is attributed to a lack of self-esteem these days. This plague of low self-esteem is cited, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, in spite of the thousands and thousands of awkward, tone-deaf people who audition for “American Idol,” cocksure of their talent.

When it comes to bullying, both perpetrator and victim are assumed to be suffering from low self-esteem. The accepted interpretation is that the bully torments unpopular classmates because he/she actually feels inferior and needs someone to belittle. In turn, the victim of bullying is assumed to suffer because he/she is too ready to believe the cruel jibes of the bully. Dr. Phil’s recent guest was a woman who was carrying the pain of the verbal assaults she’d suffered in high school on into her adulthood. Dr. Phil assured her that the reason for her pain was low self-esteem. She’d internalized her tormenters’ remarks, become her own worst critic, and perpetuated the pain by repeating the insults to herself over and over, convinced of the truth of them.

Well, maybe. But I think there might be a more basic, yet a more unreachable reason for the actions and reactions behind bullying. The TV psychologists’ interpretation of low self-esteem is too much the standard jargon of 12-step programs. The problem of bullying might be beyond the reach of all those pat self-help dictums.

Maybe a bully’s behavior stems from the age-old, animal impulse to dominate, to conquer, to prevail through brutality. And maybe the victim’s pain stems from a more complex instinct. First, the victim might feel a need to protect herself physically from the kind of mob violence that often has its roots in “mere” playground bullying. But a victim’s more difficult, more diffuse need might be to avoid recognizing that cruelty in others in the first place. People long to feel that the world is a beautiful place worthy of their efforts to enter it and fully engage with it. They long to feel that there are others waiting in that larger world, capable and worthy of receiving their mature gifts - most importantly, their gift of love.

Many people, but perhaps young people and heartfelt young girls especially, long to be enamored, to have a hero who is worth the love they want to bestow. So when a victim meets with the bully’s sneers and sadism – she wants to avoid recognizing that behavior for what it is. She wants to twist the other’s innate cruelty around, to call it something else, to call it deserved. That way, the bully can still be perceived as a wonderful, worthy being. The victim only needs to correct her own faults. Then everything will be all right. That’s ultimately a more manageable project than trying to correct the evil in others. Such evil, if fully acknowledged, would make the world a grim, uninviting place.

We don’t want to see that our world is riddled with profoundly flawed, morally deformed people, people incapable of receiving the bounty of our affection. If we perceived this reality, we would lose all motive to reach out with effort and ebullience to such a world. Such a world would plainly have no room for the upwelling of love. And, as all the songs say, who are we if we have no one to love? Such a prospect is excruciating.

To make an analogy with more extreme cases, we might remind ourselves of the otherwise inexplicable persistence of battered wives and abused children. Why do the victims of such abuse so often refuse to leave their persecutors? Why do they so often refuse to blame them or name them when the police come to their doors, ready to help? Again, these victims’ problem is usually diagnosed as either fear of their bully’s retaliation, or else low self-esteem. But that doesn’t explain the victims’ frequent, ardent defense of their tormentors.

In most of these cases, self-blame is likely just the victims’ cover-story. Deep down, the victims probably don’t fully believe they are at fault. It’s all just a desperate attempt to maintain the illusion of the goodness of others.

I wasn’t bullied in school, but I lived in fear of being bullied. I wasn’t energetic enough to go to all the trouble of conforming to accepted standards. So in order to avoid becoming a target, I kept a very low profile. I made myself a ghost. My school life was built around avoidance. Again, that wasn’t primarily because I had low self-esteem. If I were to have become the target of bullies, I would not have thought any less of myself. I would have thought less of all my tormentors. My shadow existence was my way of protecting myself from the knowledge of others’ cruelty.

If I’d had this cruelty flung in my face, I’d no longer have been able to believe that most other people were deliciously, secretly primed to be my friends and lovers, if only circumstances would allow them to demonstrate their affection. By hiding from the reality of other people’s all too frequent prejudice and hatred, I could be like every Academy Award winner – gushing my thankfulness to my family, my co-stars, my producer – the whole wide, wonderful world. I would not have to face the fact that in actuality, my spouse was cheating on me, my co-stars had all been working to upstage me every step of the way, and that the director and producer hadn’t wanted me to star in the film in the first place because they had crudely declared to each other that “Her ass is too BIG!”

No, as long as I was careful not to elicit or overhear any negative reactions from others, I could still believe in their goodness and good will. I could remain enrapt by the possibility of them. That option, that imagining was left open. As long as I didn’t see the little boy pull the wings off the fly, I could dream him into an ideal friend. As long as I could aggressively deny anyone else’s testimony that the boy did in fact pull the wings off of flies and beat up weaker students on the playground – I was still able to count him among the many who could be loved. I could remain eager for each new day because it held him in it.

The constant struggle of avoidance and denial was exhausting. But I managed it until a relatively advanced age, largely because my family and I had the resources to build our own world and keep carefully inside of it much of the time. But perhaps others who have to be out in the “hood,” out in the “barrio,” out in the more subtle enforcements of condo associations and suburbia, without supportive parents to buffer them from all such ambient tyranny – perhaps they tend to succumb earlier to the hopelessness of there being no one to admire, no one to love.

The Irish say that “Sooner or later, the world will break your heart.” That’s a bitter pill to swallow. Maybe it doesn’t happen with quite that kind of melodramatic flourish. Perhaps the dying takes place more as a downtrodden resignation – more as a whimper than a bang.

I remember the low-key wisdom imparted by Mr. Adams, one of the many itinerant handymen my parents employed to help maintain our odd, echoing quarters. We had a new puppy then. The mutt followed Mr. Adams everywhere, yipping at his feet. We couldn’t corral or control it. It got out of our grip over and over, and before we knew it, was snapping for attention at Mr. Adams’ heels again. I thought its annoyances would soon have to provoke a really angry outburst from Mr. Adams, But no, Mr. Adams remained patient. He was one of the few people I’ve met who didn’t seem capable of rage. I doubt if he would even have yelled obscenities at someone who cut him off in traffic – if he’d ever had a car or ever driven (which was unlikely). But after a while, he did react to the incessant barking for attention. He leaned down forlornly and addressed the dog. “Hey there, little one. You’re not a newborn any more. You’ve got to think about being on your own. That’s what growing up is – learning how to be alone.”

That struck me at the time as being an indescribably sad piece of experience to pass along. I was just a teenager myself then, and didn’t want to contemplate that aging held such a fate. But I feared Mr. Adams might in fact be right.

Love probably won’t happen for most of us. It is rare to find anyone who was never a bully or who wouldn’t become one given the opportunity. It is rare to find someone who doesn’t honk and swear in traffic. And it’s rare for any of us to be so admirably devoid of petty self-interest and petty tyranny ourselves. All most of us can do is struggle along and try to maintain some illusion that we ourselves, but more urgently, that the partners who have come to be our lot in life, might still be worthy of the infinite love we haven’t completely forgotten is our reason for being. We have to hold onto that fiction.

And so we desperately try to get thin, get buff, get stylish, get rich, and generally improve ourselves. If we are in need of correction, if we are in the wrong - then the other person’s criticisms must be right, and therefore the other shines all the more brightly.

Dr. Phil says our desperation is low self-esteem. And we hang our heads dejectedly and agree. We play into the idea. Yes, our parents never really gave us the boost we needed; they never made us feel special; they never praised the artwork we brought home from school. All the while though, we know our struggle is much bigger than low self-esteem. Our struggle is not to feel better about ourselves, but to feel better about other people. We battle, not to be loved – but to love.

A Mis-Step in The Stepford Wives

I saw a re-run of The Stepford Wives last night. It was the original version starring Katherine Ross. It’s a chilling classic of a tale, but I always felt its premise was oddly off-base.

I’m not referring to its overall premise – that the people we’ve known, our nearest and dearest, have somehow suddenly be replaced with simulacra. That’s also the theme of another classic movie – Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and it’s the underlying theme of all the legends of doppelgangers. These movies and folktales are so frightening just because they play into an all too realistic and justifiable sense many of us get at times, a sense that someone we considered a friend has turned strangely cold toward us.

When carried to an extreme, this conviction that the people closest to us have been replaced by robotic alien life forms, is considered a psychological problem. It has a name – “Capgras’ Syndrome” or “Capgras’ Disease.” Neurologists such as Oliver Saks have written about such cases. Although there are theories about what portions of the brain might be stricken so as to lead to this twisted perception, no one, as far as I know, has pinpointed the source of the problem or been able to advance a cure.

However, in milder form, a perception that someone we’ve loved has changed into something mechanically subversive of us, is all too common and all too accurate a perception. Often the people we invested ourselves in were actually mercenary from the start, just using us - but we were too bubbly in denial to recognize that. Just as often though, people do change into regrettably joyless versions of themselves. In advanced Western societies, it happens notoriously when children hit their teens.

The little girl who was laughingly building sand castles with us one day, suddenly becomes a seething cauldron of rage. The little boy whose greatest joy was once going fishing with his Dad, turns brutally dismissive of anything connected with “the older generation.” An acquaintance of mine sighed over her boy the other day, “Oh, he’s becoming mannish.” She saw her once eager little “handyman” around the house going the inevitable way of guns, gangs, and profligate parenthood.

There often isn’t such a sense of alien substitution in tribal cultures where children remain continuously integrated into the larger society. They aren’t sent off for lengthy periods into the peer group enforcements of schools there. They also aren’t expected to dissociate themselves from parental mores, and to “lead their own lives.” So no sad and inexplicable, but seemingly inevitable, transformation into teen rebellion plagues tribal societies to the extent it does technologically advanced Western cultures.

However , all over there are medical conditions that snatch our loved ones from us. Strokes and Alzheimer’s happen. More subtle, undiagnosable conditions can also alter people’s personalities in indefinably hardening ways. People can become emotionally as well as physically sclerotic as they age.

So that aspect of the premise of The Stepford Wives reflects a lot of real life experience. The Stepford Wives is a stepped-up version of that suspicion we hold regarding some of our relationships. In a larger sense, it’s a representation of the general oncoming coldness of our human universe.

But something else about the movie’s plot didn’t ring true to me at all. The part of the movie’s premise that I did NOT find reflective of any inner reality – was the nature of the replacement women that the men designed for themselves. I don’t think the resultant compulsively house-proud woman is the ideal of many men. The movie script was obviously designed to play off the model woman implied in the word “house-keeper.” It aimed at being a sinister exaggeration of that role into which women were bound for so long. However, I don’t think the average man is very much concerned with how his wife maintains the house.

There are exceptions. Husbands with some tyrannizing version of OCD, like the husband in Sleeping With the Enemy,” might want a wife preoccupied with the relative virtues of different scrubbing products. But I don’t think typical men rate “keeping the house immaculate” very high on their list of qualities they look for in a wife. Some might hope for a good cook, but even that attribute would probably not rank high among the majority of men. What’s more, I don’t think a majority of men in Western societies would particularly want their wives dressed in frilly long skirts and blouses. Quite the reverse, A lot of men I’ve met are pressuring their wives to wear mini-er mini skirts and tighter, flesh-tone tank tops – at least around the house. But even at that, men don’t generally seem to be consistently particular about, or observant of, what their wives are wearing. Their priorities are elsewhere.

There’s a joke circulating on the Internet about what women look for in a future husband. You’ve probably received the joke in your email. It goes:

A store that sells new husbands has just opened in New York City, where a woman may go to shop for a husband. Among the instructions at the entrance to the building is a description of how the store operates. Women entering the premises are advised that they may visit the store ONLY ONCE! There are six floors and the desirable attributes of the men increase and compound as the shopper ascends the flights. There is, however, a catch. A woman may choose any man from a particular floor, or she may choose to go up a floor. But once having passed a floor, she can’t go back, except to exit the building.

So, a woman enters the Husband Store. On the first floor the sign on the door reads:
Floor 1 - These men have jobs.
The second floor sign reads:
Floor 2 - These men have jobs and love kids.
The third floor sign reads:
Floor 3 - These men have jobs, love kids, and are extremely good looking.
At this point, the woman is tempted, but keeps going. The fourth floor sign reads:
Floor 4 - These men have jobs, love kids, are drop-dead good looking, and help with the housework.
Still the woman is impelled to keep going. The fifth floor sign reads:
Floor 5 - These men have jobs, love kids, are drop-dead gorgeous, help with the housework, and have a strong romantic streak.
It gets better and better, Still the woman proceeds to the sixth floor, whose sign reads:
Floor 6 - You are visitor 31,456,012 to this floor. There are no men on this floor. This floor exists solely as proof that women are impossible to please. Thank you for shopping at the Husband Store.

Quite a few people have added another section to this joke. They have posited a counterpart “Wife Store” across the street from the Husband Store. Same set-up, same rules apply.
A man enters the Wife Store. The first sign he sees says:
Floor 1 – These women like beer and sports.
He proceeds to the next floor. That sign says:
Floor 2 – These women like beer, sports, and sex.

Here the review of the Store Directory ends. When the reader is prompted to ask, “What’s next? What’s on Floors 3 and 4 and so forth?” – the answer is:
No one knows. No man has ever gone beyond Floor 2.

There are a few different versions of this joke addenda about what men want. Sometimes an early floor will include mention of attractiveness – sometimes of wealthy women. But no version mentions a propensity to cook and clean all day.

The Stepford Wives are shown being accommodating to their husbands sexually. But that’s a minor theme. A Stepford Wife is principally characterized by her transfixed affinity for doing housework. And that’s where the book and the movie seem to be so oddly dissonant to me. Based on every know permutation of the Husband Store joke, and based on the predilections of most of the men I’ve been acquainted with – women preoccupied with the relative merits of different oven cleaning products would be scorned rather than married. If anything, many men might appreciate a woman willing to tolerate and even lend herself to the kind of messy casualness that the stereotypical bachelor and husband both tend to favor, as long as things don’t get too far out of control. A man would more likely want to create a partner who would be intelligently available to participate in those beer and sports bashes, and who could be an inventive partner in sex play. In summary, if real men had the power to replace their real, fractious, imperfect wives with simulacra, it’s unlikely that many would create bland scrub women floating around in Victorian modesty.

So there’s a layering of eeriness about The Stepford Wives. There’s the obvious chill factor of its main theme regarding men’s desire to replace real women with some idealization of women. But then there’s the eeriness of what’s shown as being these men’s ideals. That ideal is so contrary to what most men have likely ever really wanted, that it poses its own question. What was going on in our culture in the late 60’s and early 70’s, when Ira Levin’s book was written and when the move was made, that caused this skewed vision of men’s desires to be posited?

That was the era of the Cultural Revolution, of love-in’s, of a push for liberation – particularly women’s liberation. The movie is obviously a reflection of that new consciousness raising. In its terrifying extremity, it highlights the fact that women had for so long been impressed into being, not themselves, but whatever men wanted them to be. However, in the process of advancing such a chilling awareness of women’s subjugation on this score, did the movie inadvertently subject men to an equally stifling falsity? Does the movie advance a very unnatural, prefabricated image of who men are and of what they want?

The Roots of Addiction

I feel like waxing epigrammatic, so I’ll start with a La Rochefoucauld-style observation. I’ll maintain that “All addiction is procrastination.” Or perhaps I should say, “All addiction is a form of postponement.”

Of course it’s always wrong to use the adjective “all.” But that word lends my pronouncement such an air of universality and importance that it’s hard to resist. So I’ll leave it in, although you and I will understand each other to know that life is more complex than to be characterized by “All.”

Nevertheless, I do believe that the goal of postponement is at least a component of most addictions. I know that it’s at the base of my eating too much. In my case, there’s also reading. As long as I’m reading something, oh so justifiably educational - I can’t be writing. But eating is my most certifiable form of excess.

Oh, there is the deliciousness of the food available from modern grocery stores. Once I get a bite, I can’t pass-up further indulgence in the sheer tastiness of it. I eat even though I’m not hungry – to treat myself, to give myself a degree of pleasure that the world so often withholds. But most of all, I eat, in order to postpone having to do anything else. While I’m eating, I can’t very well be digging ditches – or horror of horrors – facing the empty page and writing something worthwhile. I’m allowed a respite from hard manual or mental labor while I’m eating. And so I eat some more, and I prolong the eating, and I eat again. The more I can eat, the longer I can postpone doing anything really taxing.

Sometimes there are bonuses to overeating that extend beyond the meal. After I eat too much, I feel logy. So of course I can’t start any serious writing project then. I have to wait until my mind is crisp again. In fact, maybe a nap is called for. I tell myself I shouldn’t launch into that crucial first sentence of the Great American Novel until I’m thoroughly rested, until I’ve digested my meal, and with it, my thoughts. And so it goes – for the day – the week – the year – the years.

People who have more serious addictions are probably often subconsciously intent on avoiding obligation on a wider front. The alcoholic incapacitates himself so he can’t possibly be expected to function as a good father, a good worker, a consistently productive member of society. All those things can be so importuning – and so downright difficult. So taking that extra drink that disorients him enough to make him ineffectual is the perfect answer.

The drug addict can be an even more hard-core avoider. Spaced out on crystal meth, who can be expected to succeed at any job? No one can possibly expect anything of you and you can’t possibly expect anything of yourself once you go all the way and become “The Man with the Golden Arm.”

You start the downhill spiral. Negative circular feedback is the hallmark of every sort of bad habit and addiction. You besot yourself – on food, liquor, drugs, or some more subtle wont - in order to avoid doing the hard work of life. But as you’re lying abed in that stupor of incapacity, you can’t help but feel the weight of your avoidance. You feel like a draft dodger. Perhaps you were justified in keeping your life safe and in not involving yourself in such-and-such a senseless war. And yet, there will always come that suspicion of shirking to weigh you down. To squelch that feeling of guilt, you will increase your consumption of whatever activity or substance served to disqualify you in the first place. And the decline accelerates. And round and down you go.

To break out of this spiral of decay, you have to stop delaying. You have to stop using the excuse that you’ve got your mouth too full just now, or that you’re too woozy to get moving. You have to force yourself to do what, deep down, you know you are uniquely meant to be doing, what you are uniquely capable of creating. You’ll have to do the hard thing. That will mean removing yourself from all the easy, habitual haunts, and stretching yourself to sing that high note, crystalize that difficult thought into clear sentences, build that bridge brick-by-brick. You’ll have to pull yourself up the steep stair of rightful accomplishment. How cleansing, how right it will feel to be up and at it at last.

Oh, but it’s a labor of bone. It’s tough to start, and even tougher to sustain a creative regimen. I frankly don’t know if I have the energy right now. A snack might fortify me for the road ahead. Yes, surely it must be snack-time. I’ll start after I have a little something to eat.

Reflections On Becoming a Cat Lady

I’m afraid I might be moving in the direction of becoming the neighborhood "cat lady." I might be going there involuntarily, but I'm still going there. My life is carpeted with cats.

A feral female cat brought her litter into my house, one-by-one, in the wake of a heavy rainfall. She carried each one by the scruff of the neck through the pet door I’d installed years ago for my own, my one-and-only cat. The feral stowed her kittens in a cupboard whose door I’d carelessly left open. Two of the litter of six were dead – apparently drowned, as if the mother might have ill-advisedly made her original nest behind a downspout somewhere. But that left four kittens plus the mother herself for me to feed and tend to. All the City’s animal shelters are full up, what with the bad economy. None of the no-kill shelters I contacted had room for one more cat - much less for four or five. So anyplace that would have accepted them would no doubt have euthanized them immediately. That's left me to soldier on, caring for this superfluity of cats as best I can.

The shelters told me that my best option was to go the "catch-and-release" route. In recent years, this has been deemed the best way of dealing with the growing population of stray cats. You get a larger Have-A-Hart trap (or else the shelters will loan you one) - then you set about trapping any stray. You make an appointment with the clinic, then you set the trap and hope to catch your target animal. If you succeed, you take the animal in to be fixed, then you re-claim it and, after tending to it through a convalescent period, you release it back into the alleys. While the animal is in the clinic, it also has one ear "tipped," that is, it has a part of one ear cut off to identify it to animal control workers as a cat that is being monitored through this program. You promise to put out food for the cat a couple times a week for as long as you see it in the neighborhood.

So I set to work. After the kittens had gotten old enough, I lured two of them into traps and shuntled them to the clinic early the next morning. (Operations are performed first thing, just as in hospitals for humans.) I was lucky. Both kittens turned out to be males, so the cost for "fixing" them was minimal. I was criticized for having brought one of the kittens in a carrying case. (I only had one Hav-A-Hart metal trap.) The attendant at the clinic told me that they usually require you to bring animals in the standard traps, so they can inject them with anesthesia right while they are in the cage. With carrying cases, the clinic attendants are put in the position of having to decant the animal into the open where it can be injected - and many strays are extremely aggressive, inflicting injuries on the attendants in the course of their attempts to restrain and inject it. However since I was there, they agreed to go ahead and fix both animals.

While I hadn't been able to socialize the kittens enough to make them readily adoptable, they were somewhat tame and posed no threat to the clinic workers. So all went well. They were fixed, tipped, and also had ID chips implanted. I came back to claim them at the end of the day.

Males only require a 24-hour period of convalescence. I had prepared one of my bathrooms as a recovery room, spreading the floor with clean towels and newspaper. I put bowls of food and water around and released the two into the dimly lit quarters.

When I carefully peeked in on them six hours later, my heart almost broke. They were wedged behind the toilet, hugging each other for dear life. They looked dazed, in ultimate despair. At that moment, I felt that burgeoning cat population or not - this was just too cruel a trauma to inflict on any creature.

However things quickly improved. Towards the end of the 24-hour recovery period, they started coming out from behind the toilet, nibbling at their food a little, and looking more like themselves. I gave it a little more time. Then I heard an insistent "meowing" coming from the bathroom. When I checked on them this time, they bounced out, ready to greet the world again - seemingly none the worse for wear. What's more, they didn't seem to hold a grudge against me. They were as tentatively friendly as they had been before, apparently not quite associating me with the rigors they'd just endured.

They had already been used to playing outside on my patio before their operations. Now with spring having fully blossomed, they wanted to go outside where their siblings and their mother were already spending most of their time.

I was soon forced to ban the mother and "Gang of Four" from the house altogether because of fights with my own cat and because of their general obstreperousness. But I doubt that these cats will ever truly be "alley cats" in the sense the catch-and-release program anticipated. In reality, I’m destined to be much more involved with them than merely monitoring their alley prowlings.

I set up quarters for them in my garage - complete with heater, blankets, litter boxes, and two or three delectable meals a day, always including some treats such as sardines or broasted chicken. The kittens have thrived into sleek, plump adults under this regimen. They rarely stray into the alley, but instead have become affixed to me. Only one will let me pat him, and that only in skittish snatches. That’s probably all to the good, because if these cats were to try to buddy up to other humans, there would likely be horrible consequences.

I named the friendliest of the cats "Tux," in reference to the way his black-and-white patterning looks like formal wear. He and his siblings now generally confine themselves to my yard and to my garage, with access through a pet door I installed in the garage. Their mother, an extremely savage, savvy, always on-guard alley cat, also comes back into the fold quite often now – along with several of her suitors and several other strays who have discovered the free eats I’m handing out. So I repeat - I'm carpeted with cats.

At night, the cats play happily with each other. They climb up to my roof using the ladder I have permanently in place and chase each other merrily from one parapet wall to the other and back again. I can hear the pitter-patter of their little feet overhead into the wee hours. I’d always hoped to have the pitter-patter of little feet around the house – but I never thought it would be cats’ paws!

The man who is renting a room from me is an animal-lover and tens to the crew when I'm away. I'll have to get busy myself though and trap the other cats who are becoming regulars in my yard in order to take them one-by-one to be fixed. I’ll especially have to try to corral the Mama cat – or else come next spring, I’ll have ANOTHER litter deposited with me. This means I’m facing virtually living at the veterinary clinic. I might as well bring a tent and set up camp in their reception room.

Most days, all this responsibility and the new, unwanted identity of “cat lady” makes me feel a little like Tux and Cumber (after his similarly formal cummerbund appearance) did after their operations – frozen in maimed futility. I don’t know where this can lead or where it can end. So I just take it day-by-day.

There are moments of grace though. I've tried practicing what Oprah preached about ending each day with a recounted list of things you were grateful for that day.
Even as I was experiencing a recent moment with the cats, I knew it would head my list of moments to be grateful for that night. Dusk was just fading into darkness and I was hurrying to re-attach some privacy fencing that the winds had flung loose from the chain-link fencing surrounding my yard. This involved hoisting 30-40 pound panels of plastic privacy fencing into place with one hand, while tying them to the chain-link fence with the other. It was almost an impossible task for one person, but two people could have accomplished it easily in seconds. However, I saw my renter slip past me through the yard wraith-like, to take refuge in his own digs – well away from the work he saw afoot in the yard. So obviously, I wasn’t going to get any help from that quarter.

I continued to struggle. I just wasn’t strong enough to hold a panel in place with one hand. But then I hit upon a system of leveraging the panel into its proper position using pole extension sections from one of my pruning saws. The job was still difficult using this technique, but it was do-able. It was cold out, but not bone-chillingly cold. It was more the bracing coldness that spurs a person to a task. The gang-of-four and even their mother cat rallied around in curiosity over the proceedings. I’d never seen them so friendly! They seemed to enjoy watching this project take shape – privacy panel flapping, rope curling out of my overall pockets. Tux even came forward next to me and rose up, putting his forepaws on the lower part of the panel, adding his little bit of weight to help hold the panel in place while I tied the top of it to the chain-link fence. I felt we were a team. The cats’ company was encouraging. We were working in tacit harmony to accomplish a goal, there in the spicing night air, with a full moon rising.

When the job was finished, I sat down on a plastic patio chair and let myself feel the glowing warmth of satisfaction at having completed a necessary job. It was as good as having a campfire in a pine-tingly woods. The cats seemed to feel the same sense of satisfaction at having participated in a job well-done. Now they could play! They started to chase each other in circles across the patio, into the undergrowth. Now Tux was in the lead, now Cumber, now Mama. When one caught another, the two would roll joyously over and over – become one furry ball of exuberance.

It was indeed a moment of grace. In addition to the sheer sensuous delight of the moment and the satisfaction of having secured my privacy fencing – I also had the satisfaction of seeing the animals' sheer joy-in-living. All the months of inconvenience I'd had and will have, tending to these cats that were obtruded into my life – had some meaning. Through it all, I had succeeded in fostering some little creatures into a full and healthy life. I’d given them the epitome of feline felicity.

The Last Cardinal

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.

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.

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.