Thanks to the Flu

The current flu pandemic has many positive aspects about it and might leave our world a better place. Of course, it has its tragic side. We should remember those who died before their time because of it.

But there are ways in which the flu might inject new life into our lives. Some commentators have mentioned how this period of self-isolation might bring families closer together. Instead of scattering in all directions each day, with children going to different schools, then off to different soccer fields and socials, and the adults rushing off to separate high-rise jobs as admen, madmen – families are forced to gather close together around that old metaphoric home-fire. It’s possible that each family member will retreat to his or her own room to tweet and watch separate TV shows. But it’s also possible that this enforced togetherness might spark a few conversations between family members. Children and adults might get to know each other a little better, and for the first time find out, for better or worse, who is really aboard those other ships that previously just passed in the night.

Some people might get cabin fever with this enforced isolation. But that was never my problem. I always found the times I had to stay quietly at home to be delicious reprieves from social obligation. When the Great Snowstorm of 1967 hit Chicago, I was a teenager and the surrounding piles of snow cast me as Queen of my own Ice Castle. I iglooed in place; I cocooned in the wonderland of my thoughts. I could quietly metamorphize into my own fated maturity.

Not that I wasn’t generally able to be more unto myself than most people my age. I was largely homeschooled, (or more accurately, I was a learner-at-home) in a time before there was a word or a movement for that practice. Almost invariably, when people who are imbued with the necessity of going to school hear about that philosophy, they ask, “But what about socialization? Don’t you miss out on learning how to interact with other people?”

Well, one could observe how most teens interact, and see that their social skills haven’t really improved as they’ve advanced from first grade through high school. In reality, it seems as if, during that time, many of them have only honed their techniques of cruelty to others – and to themselves. If anything, I would argue that the world is suffering from too much socialization. What people need, especially young people, is more time away from social pressures, more time to be themselves, or rather, to become their best selves. They need time away from bullying, peer pressure, and pressure to conform.

To interject a somewhat sadder, more world-weary note of wisdom into these considerations, I think of what a handyman once surprisingly said to me – or rather, to my dog. After my father died, my mother and I went through a difficult series of handymen enlisted to do odd jobs around the house. Most of these catch-as-catch-can itinerants proved to be rather incompetent or unreliable. Some proved to have positively sinister ulterior motives for coming into our house, motives other than repairing the leaking faucet. However, for a while, there was one capable stalwart of a fellow we could count on. He had the weathered, raw look of a ship’s figurehead. He generally concentrated on his work, not seeking to engage in any small talk.

I’d just acquired a new puppy then, a little mutt who was proving to be an incessant yapper, a little bundle of uncontrollable energy who wanted to dart into any household activity she saw going. Our handyman was remarkably tolerant of this noisy interference most of the time. But one day, he paused to address this fur-ball cavorting around him. “You have to go off by yourself and be quiet now, little one,” he said. “That’s what growing up is. It’s learning how to be alone.”

And so this period of sequestration that the flu is bringing upon us might be an opportunity to practice that larger lesson. Maybe we can all grow up a little.

But simply considering the cozier, more down-to-earth aspect of this enforced enclosure - English writer J. B. Priestley expressed it well in his essay “Not Going” in his collection of delights. When he was young, he said it was horrible not to get an invitation – to the party, the dance, the excursion. But as he got older, he realized he wasn’t missing anything by being at home. As he would ensconce himself in his favorite chair, people would ask him, “But don’t you like to enjoy yourself?” To which he’d reply, “On the contrary, by Not Going, that is just what I am trying to do.”

However, there’s another boon this period of stoppage can confer, a boon that I oddly haven’t heard any news commentators remark on so far. This widespread slowdown in industry can give the environment a brief respite, a brief time of healing. I’m surprised that this advantage to the earth’s ecology hasn’t been widely heralded as something positive that can come out of this epidemic.

A couple of decades ago, there was a lot of regret about the loss of our Sundays. Environmentalists noted how Sundays used to be a time of rest, a time when people didn’t go to work. They stayed home and slept late, then read the Sunday newspaper over a second cup of coffee. Scientists noted how CO2 levels in the atmosphere sharply dropped on Sundays. There wasn’t the dredging, the drilling, the extracting, the in-putting. The levels of all kinds of pollutants in the atmosphere declined – on Sundays. Our atmosphere got a breather.

But then Sundays stopped being so sharply marked by cessation. With flex-work schedules and with a more general ambition to get the job done around-the-clock, Sundays weren’t as quiet as they used to be. They stopped being Kris Kristofferson’s “sleeping city sidewalk.” People were almost as much up-and-at-it on Sundays as they were on other days. So the earth hasn’t had quite that same one-day-a-week to recuperate and rejuvenate.

But now with the shutdowns the flu has enforced, the earth might be getting a whole swatch of time to recover, perhaps its first since the industrial revolution really got rolling. Again, when scientists look back at this time, they will probably record a steep down-turn in effluents being dumped into the atmosphere. It probably won’t be enough to allow the glaciers to start to accumulate inches of ice again, and not enough to make our next winter noticeably colder again, like Victorian winters used to be. But it will probably make some difference, however small.

What’s more, mortality rates from a variety of usual causes will be seen to have declined during this period. The police in big cities have already been noting the decline in crime. One report said there were 30% fewer street murders in Chicago this month than there were in the same month last year. Although, some worry that for every street crime prevented by our encouragements against congregating – there might be a domestic crime committed in the created hothouse of indoor togetherness. But so far at least, that kind of offset doesn’t seem to have happened.

Meanwhile, the reduction in sheer levels of activity must surely have a net positive effect in other areas. With sporting events postponed, there will be fewer sports injuries. With fewer people rushing to get to and from their jobs on time, there will be fewer car crashes, fewer highway fatalities.

And then there are the animals. I know I should be more concerned about humans than animals, and yet, the life and death of animals has been made so much a matter of human whim that their injury can be so much more guilt-producing and heart-breaking. I feel somehow complicit in each such death, with my presumption of need to go somewhere or consume something. So when I see a deer hit on the road, left to limp off bleeding and broken to almost certain torturous death, I feel a more piercing sadness than I feel over the death of many humans.

But with the slowdown of the world in the wake of this Covid pandemic, there will be fewer such killings. The world will be less splattered with dogs, cats, raccoons, squirrels… If it’s true that “not a sparrow falls but that our Father sees,” there will be a lot less carnage for Him to see.

When this is over and the scientists go back and calculate the decrease in pollution and bloodshed that marked this period, I wouldn’t be surprised if some leaders don’t consider making a regular event of such cessation. Let one week out of every eight be a “Faux Flu” week – a week in which everyone whose job isn’t absolutely essential for life support stays home. For that week, stop the “getting and spending” and coming and going, and simply abide in quiet appreciation of what we all already have.

A Born Atheist

I’m the only person I know who was born an atheist. I never went through any crisis of faith, so I’ve never had anything to say when I’ve been with a group of acquaintances who, in the small hours after a number of drinks, have started to confess the wrenching feelings of desolation they experienced when, in their teens or beyond, they slowly began to realize there might not be a God.

I’m not sure about the reason for my precocious lack of belief. Neither my father nor my mother ever mentioned the word “God” as I was growing up, or ever observed a religion in any way, with one exception for each of my parents. My mother had perhaps not completely abandoned her Catholic upbringing, which she said she had done when her favorite aunt died during the influenza epidemic of 1918, despite all my mother’s fervent prayers. But I don’t think my mother quite made it all the way to absolute atheism. I remember she had me baptized when I was a toddler, rather late in the game. I think she might have been pressured into it by her brother and other still devout relatives. But she told me she had finally agreed to the baptism… “Just in case.”

Then when I was in my late teens, I happened to drift through the kitchen where my father was sitting while I matter-of-factly muttered some statement of disbelief to myself. My father caught my under-the-breath remark. He startled up from reading the newspaper and said to me, “What? You don’t believe in God?” I said “No, of course not. What? Do you?” In a shocked tone, he answered, “Yes.” We looked at each other in wild surmise for a moment, realizing how little we’d known of each other all those years. Then, in resignation, my father went back to reading the paper. And I went on out the door to go sit in the yard and read.

Those were the only two times that religion was mentioned in the house. But I knew from the start that all my other relatives were religious, and I knew that included an over-arching belief in an omnipotent God. Before I started kindergarten, I would often stay the weekends with my grandmother. We would sleep together in her king-sized bed. But she’d set the alarm for 5:00 A.M. so that she could get up and go to early Mass. One of my earliest memories is of me thinking, at the moment that alarm clock went off, “Thank goodness I don’t believe in all that. I can go back to sleep.” I’d snuggle back under the covers while my grandmother trudged off through Chicago’s wintry streets to St. Michael’s.

I’ve wondered about this lack of any religious feeling on my part, this lack of any sense of a directing higher power. Perhaps, in addition to the fact that there was no religious atmosphere in my house, I grew this way because there was a lack of any hierarchy in my house. My parents talked with me as they would talk to an adult from the start. I can’t remember a single instance when they told me what to do, when they issued an order or made a rule. They never told me to go to school or do my homework. I went to bed whenever I was sleepy. I ate whatever I wanted. I watched anything on TV for however long I wanted to watch it.

My parents had started a small mailing business just before I was born, and I became a full partner from the start. By the time I was 2-years-old, I was amazing passers-by as I sat in our front display window on my little chair, collating flyers and stuffing them into envelopes at lightning speed. We had a financial struggle. I think it must have been like growing up on a farm where the children often become needed partners from the start. At the dining table, family conversation centers around how they are going to bring in the harvest against daunting odds, rather than around the delivery of orders and options to the children. So our family conversation centered around our customers’ foibles and demands. There was no hint of, “OK, you can either do your homework tonight and skip the movie, or else you can get up early tomorrow and do it.”

This pattern of treating me as an adult was carried down to the smallest detail. How different other families were from mine in this regard was brought home to me with a seemingly insignificant incident. I had never liked toys or playthings of any kind. I almost dreaded Christmas because it meant more distant relatives would be bringing me novelty gifts that I really didn’t want but that I’d have to seem delighted with for a long period of time in order not to hurt anyone’s feelings or squelch their joy of giving.

But there fell one brief exception to this opinion about the tawdriness of toys that I held. For some reason, a little Farmer in the Dell musical contraption that Art Linkletter was hawking on TV caught my attention. You’d turn the handle on the tin box, and as you turned – farmer, farmer’s wife, child… mouse and cheese would pop out in succession. They’d advance around a little proscenium stage, then would go back into the recesses of the box again, all to the ditty of “The Farmer in the Dell.”

I expressed a desire to own such an animated box. My mother was rather surprised by this. I’d almost never wanted anything before, and this seemed an unworthy object on which to expend such an exceptional longing. My mother did mention that the toy would likely become boring in a short time. It had very limited versatility; it allowed for a very limited play of the imagination. I could see a bit of regret shadow my mother’s face – and perhaps also a bit of fear that I might be turning into a trivially demanding little brat. She had almost never signaled any kind of disapproval over my actions before. So this in and of itself was a departure of attitude for her. But I persisted. I made a case for the enjoyment this type of toy could offer.

So at our family Christmas gathering that year, the duly wrapped Farmer in the Dell appeared “from Aunt Hazel and Uncle Carl.” Sitting off to one side of the adult circle, I eagerly started to crank the handle of the box and bring the farm family onto stage one-by-one. I went through the “Hi-ho the derry-o” ditty once. Then I launched the parade a second time. When I showed signs of cranking into a third go-round, my uncle leaned over and somewhat sternly ordered, “Ok, you can play it one more time. But then you have to put it away.”

This assumption of command over me sent a shock wave through me. I was torn by a multitude of emotions. I suddenly realized that the repeated rattling of the ditty was annoying the people around me trying to hold a conversation. How thoughtless I’d been! I also realized at that moment that I’d have made that third go-round the last one of the day of my own accord. I had already realized how right my mother had been about such a toy. I could myself already see how tedious the toy would soon become.

Most of all though, the emotion that gripped me was one of utter shock over being issued what was tantamount to an order. Since I hadn’t started school yet, I’d never before been addressed that way. My utter equality had always been assumed, as well as my capacity to intuitively know what was right and proper. My parents would no more have told me how many times I could do a thing than they would have ordered their own parents or an adult guest to stop indulging in a relatively harmless enjoyment. How strange!

Of course, when I started school, I was hit with the pervasiveness of that pattern of adults telling children what to do. Children had to be lined up, had to ask permission to go to the bathroom, had to comply with an endless stream of instructions, rules, orders, commands. I never came even close to getting acclimated to that alien way of relating to people. Not that I was ever a rebel or a trouble-maker. I became a slavishly meek, compliant person – not always so much out of niceness as out of sheer fear of that drive I saw in other people to assume dominance and control over others, or else to be dominated and controlled.

My point in relating this piece of autobiography is that I’ve sometimes read that there’s a correlation between the degree of people’s religiosity and the amount of dominance they experienced growing up. People raised in an atmosphere of strict hierarchy, particularly within the intimacy of their nuclear families, often seem to become the most fanatically attached to fundamentalist religions. Those who have experienced households in which the father is boss over the mother and in which both parents are in agreement about the need to boss their children, to the point of controlling them with harsh physical punishment – quite often become people committed to the concept of a punishing God. They grow up convinced of the need for discipline in the form of continuously imposed rules and order from above. What they experienced in microcosm, they project onto the macrocosm.

Whatever led to my assumption of atheism, it’s provided me with the only answer I can give to Oprah’s interview question, “Tell me one thing you know for sure.” My one thing is, and has always been – there is no God.

Meghan and Harry - The Dying Swans

I’ve never taken too much of an interest in the doings of the Royal Family, so I don’t have a lot of emotion invested in their defaults and defections. I wouldn’t spend a lot of time tweeting either praise or criticism of Meghan and Harry for dropping out of the continuous round of royal duties. And yet, and yet – I do sort of regret their decision. In the British Royal Family, the world has one last long view back down a colonnaded succession. The British Royals are the last Royal Family that can capture the imagination and make a stand for life-long duty to tradition.

I wish Meghan and Harry had watched the movie The Swan before making their decision. It’s an almost lost gem of a movie. Grace Kelly found the perfect, prescient role for herself there. She plays a Princess in a branch of a royal family that was side-lined by Napoleon. The Crown Prince is scheduled to pay a visit to her family’s manor house, reputedly in search of a suitable wife. This has sent her mother into a flurry of preparation and hope that a union might be secured for her daughter and that the family might thereby be restored center-stage to the Court.

When the Prince arrives though, in the form of Alec Guinness, he is a distinct disappointment. He is rather dismissive, almost rude. He seems to take no interest in Grace Kelly whatsoever. He makes himself scarce about the house, generally registering his presence only when he needs to be waited on.

When it seems he’s not going to court Grace Kelly, her mother hatches a plan to spark his interest. She advances Louis Jourdan, Grace Kelly’s handsome tutor, as a likely love-interest for her daughter in order to make the Crown Prince jealous. The plan backfires though. Grace Kelly sincerely falls in love with her tutor and plans to elope with him, even in the face of Guinness’ rather back-handed proposal after all. This decision sends her mother into a tizzy of despair and entreaty. The audience is bound to side with the eloping young couple at this point. But even as a child, watching the movie for the first time, I didn’t feel drawn to root for that commoner conclusion. I felt something rarer should prevail.

And indeed, it likely does. As Kelly is all packed and ready to take flight, Guinness approaches her with a sadder, restraining wisdom. He proves himself to be a much better man than we took him for in this unexpected turn. His speech to her then stands out for me as one of the most moving moments in movie history. He likens her to a swan – a creature who floats beautifully out on the water. But he reminds her that if that swan should choose to wade out on land, it becomes a mere goose, waddling along in a gaggle. So it is the lot of that swan to never make its home on solid ground. It is the swan’s lot to maintain a commitment to that more distant beauty, out on the water, essentially silent and alone – through to the end.

This is a memorable rendering of Ferenc Molnar’s play and it confirmed me as a monarchist. Again, I don’t mean that in the sense that I take an interest in what the Royals wear for their weddings or in the details of their peccadilloes. I certainly wouldn’t collect Royal Wedding plates or scan People magazine for tidbits of gossip. But that movie, that speech, made the final case for there being somewhere, always, at least one last persistence of duty to tradition.

When Wallis Simpson and King Edward VIII stepped out of the procession – they most decidedly became mere geese. After that one stirring moment of abdication, their lives became dull and devoid. Well, they probably were essentially geese all along. But if they had maintained the mantle of royalty, they would have had the stirring bearing of authority that comes with kingdom. They would have meant something, to onlookers and to the world. They would have meant history. As it was, they dwindled through shallow, listless lives, making the scene, going to the casinos in Monaco, appearing as prize catches at socialites’ parties.

The Prince of Wales became Governor of the Bahamas for a while, but really didn’t do much of anything. In a late interview done with the couple when they were older and the Prince of Wales was ill (available on YouTube), this sense of wasted lives becomes apparent. When the interviewer asked the Prince why he never took a job, he implied he’d thought about it. But for some reason, he said, “I never did. I don’t know why, but I never did…” and he trailed off in regret.

Jerry Seinfeld more cruelly summarized the couple’s later life in one of the episodes of Seinfeld. When the gang briefly discusses Wallis, the Prince, and the abdication, Jerry finishes them off by pronouncing them, “Euro-trash.” I hope that’s not the kind of vacuity that Meghan’s and Harry’s lives become.

There’s a quote from another play that rings back to me now and that seems as if it also might have informed Meghan’s and Harry’ decision. It’s spoken in Act V, Scene 2 of Shakespeare’s Henry V. After Henry’s stunning “We few, we happy few” victory at Agincourt, Shakespeare changes the mood to what’s generally rendered as a comic scene set in the French Court. It’s already taken for granted that Henry will now take Katherine, the French Princess, as his wife. It’s his right as the victor to consolidate the English and French royal houses in this way. But Henry wants to make a more personal proposal, not as a matter of form, but as a matter of the heart. Much of the scene centers on Katherine’s humorous attempts to speak English and on Henry’s attempts at a few French phrases.

But in one outstanding presentation of the play, Richard Burton rolls the proposal to a more serious, sonorous bidding. After having listed both his good and bad points as just a man, he concludes, “If you would have such a man, take me. Take me and get a soldier. Take a soldier and get a king.”

It’s entrained as one inevitability that must be honored. And so one feels it should perhaps have been when Meghan accepted Harry’s proposal. The world doesn’t need another cute Yuppie couple dabbling in charity and then drifting among the coffee shops and boutiques of some upscale Canadian neighborhood. The world needs those last, lonely swans who in their remote beauty seem not to be flesh and blood at all but who have assumed a lifelong commitment to being symbols – symbols of tradition, Country, and Majesty.

Who Was That Masked Man?

An intruder got into my house. I’d fallen asleep on my couch, with my face buried in the couch's back cushions. I was in that sort of twilight doze, between sleep and wakefulness - when I heard a long, low sound of exhalation right in my ear. I drowsily thought it might be my own heavy breathing. I was just getting over a cold. I tested it. I took a breath. No - it wasn't me.

The heavy breath came again. Now I woke a little more, but I still thought I might be dreaming, hallucinating. No. It came again, a heavy, resonant exhalation, a long “Whhhooooooooo.”

Now I was fully awake, rigid with fear. Someone or Something was definitely right behind me, breathing into my ear. It wasn't any of my cats. They never make a sound like that. What? A serial killer who’d quietly crept into my house somehow, and now hovered over me before striking – toying with me as he pondered, “Where shall I make my first cut?”

Well, there was nothing for it. As much as I didn't want to, I knew I had to turn around and face whatever it was. I rolled over and came nose-to-nose with - an enormous raccoon!

The raccoon was on the footstool right next to my sofa, and had been leaning over, breathing directly into my ear. Had it been snarling? Had it been salivating, ready to start feasting? Or had it been trying to communicate with me?

About a dozen years before, I had befriended a raccoon I’d named Ricky That raccoon would often come into my house through the pet door, play violently with my feather duster, whipping it around back and forth as if shaking a bird it had caught. Then it would settle down on that same footstool and watch TV with me. I’d give it popcorn or peanuts or other tidbits and it would sit there, picking the crumbs of food off its paunch. Once it had held out a paw, and briefly, (I know, against all warnings about the dangers of raccoons) - we'd held hands/paws. But I hadn’t seen Ricky in over a decade.

It was hardly likely though that this raccoon was Ricky. It would be very unusual for a wild animal like this to live that long. As this raccoon stared into my eyes, it seemed mild-mannered enough. It wasn't snarling at the moment. We just looked at each other. Then, after a few more seconds, it matter-of-factly jumped off the footstool and made its way back to the cats' pet door. It stopped to peer in my garbage pail on the way (which I had luckily just emptied before starting my nap).

Then when the raccoon got to the pet door, it had a problem. Like Winnie-the-Pooh after over-indulging in rabbit's honey-pots - this furry 40+ pound creature also got temporarily stuck in the opening. For a moment, I thought I might have to risk going over and giving it a push on the derriere to get it unplugged from the door. But that didn’t seem as if it would be a good idea. The creature’s friendliness might be strained by being delivered of a good shove in the rear.

So I just watched as it wiggled and wriggled. It eventually contorted itself, Houdini-like, through the opening, and was gone. I went out in the yard every night for a couple of weeks after that, looking for it. But I never saw it again. It had just materialized to breathe ominously in my ear - and then had vanished. Had it been Ricky saying a last good-bye to me? Or had it been the transferred spirit of Ricky? I was left with the question - Who was that masked man?

Wisdom in Passing

Sometimes just wisps of things people say, remarks made in passing, stick with me and influence me more than whole tomes of philosophy. Two such throw-away lines have been particularly haunting me lately. One was a mild reprimand issued to my dog decades ago. The other I heard just recently.

The long-ago comment was uttered by an itinerant handyman my mother hired to do odd jobs after my father died. We had a variety of handymen we called on in those disoriented, posthumous days. I’m not sure why we had such a parade of workmen through the house then. My father had been neither handy nor interested in making any repairs about the place, and we seemed to get along without calling in much help. Why suddenly, after my father’s death, did we feel the need to fix leaking faucets, replace broken tiles, etc., etc. Those things had been leaking and broken for years.

Maybe it was because when my father was still around, we felt we had a safety net. If a minor problem should suddenly explode into disaster – there was at least someone else around to psychologically share the fright of it. Now that he was gone, we felt vulnerable to such dire eventualities. So we bestirred ourselves, getting the little things repaired in hopes that we could prevent any of them from mushrooming into catastrophe.

Most of the local handymen available to do odd jobs turned out to be disasters in and of themselves. Some proved to have very limited knowledge about making any repairs. When one undertook to change the washer on a faucet, he didn’t think it was necessary to turn off the water supply to that sink before starting. Water gushed. Unbelievably, another handyman thought the instructions had said to moisten your hands before working on the fuse box. He had somehow failed to see the NOT featured in bold type in all the warnings that preceded how-to instructions on working with electricity. “Do NOT work in standing water or with moist hands or clothing.” Electric shock ensued.

Then there were a couple of lechers whose primary motive for “helping out” had been the access it would afford them to a new, and therefore presumably lonely, yearning widow.

Finally, there were the teenagers whose parents had insisted they earn some money before heading off to college in the fall. The teenagers didn’t want to be working at our house, or anywhere. They wanted to be out having a last dating fling before buckling down to the books. They oozed resentment. One managed to dislodge part of our gutters in his angry, aggressive attempts to clear that gutter of leaves as quickly as possible. So irate was he at having to go back up and reattach the gutter, he slammed the ladder against our building with such force that he smashed our yard light.

However, after all this mishap and mayhem, we did find one reliable workman who knew what he was doing and who went about the jobs in a steady, professional way. His name was the Presidential “John Adams,” and indeed he looked as if he might have been born a New Englander. He was tall and thin, with a somewhat wooden, weathered look, like the figurehead on an old whaling ship. He also had a New England kind of taciturnity and reserve about him. We somehow gathered that he might be a recovering alcoholic who found sketchy lodgings in various shelters.  But he didn’t bring any of his life problems onto the job. Except we did get a glimpse into the hard-scrabble road he must have travelled in that one memorable stone of philosophy he cast in the direction of our dog.

Actually our dog was more of a puppy, or a dog on the cusp between puppyhood and adulthood. During the times we were too distracted elsewhere to keep her strictly in check, she would follow Mr. Adams around, yapping in a mixture of playful eagerness to participate in his energetic doings and of resentment at the intrusion of this obvious interloper.

Mr. Adams took this pesky tag-along in good part for a while. But finally, when the dog’s company threatened to become actual interference, Mr. Adams addressed her directly. “You have to be quiet and go sit by yourself now,” he instructed her. “That’s what growing up is. It’s learning how to be alone.”

The melancholy truth of that hit me. I was a teenager then, but I suddenly knew that he was right. I knew that’s what awaited me. Adulthood was a matter of entering into an essential aloneness. It was a shouldering of responsibility without the likelihood of any true companion to share it. Adulthood would certainly be devoid of the unconditional love some of us know as children. Instead it was a setting sail into a vast ocean - without another soul in sight.

The second piece of wisdom that I’m sure will stick with me was not uttered as an article of philosophy. It was just a casual personal observation. I happened to catch it as part of an interview with Angie Dickinson appearing on CBS’s Sunday Morning Show. Dickinson has largely retired from her career as actress and sex symbol. She has become an avid poker player and challenged her interviewer, Mo Rocca, to a card game. As they played, Dickinson reflected on her life. She felt her years of stardom had been a wonderful adventure. She didn’t mind having been known for her beauty and sex appeal. That had enabled and added to the adventure of it all.

After a little while, the two broke off playing cards. Mo Rocca walked with Dickinson to the balcony of her home to share her spectacular overview of Beverly Hills. After they had gazed together at the rolling vista for a moment, Dickinson gave a slight shrug of contented resignation. She said, “One day I won’t have all this.” (She didn’t inject the word “soon” into her reflection, although, since Dickinson is in her late 80’s now, that hint of soonness hung unspoken in the air.) But she just issued the truth of the matter bare. She said, “One day I won’t have all this…. but I won’t know it.”

She delivered that last line with an air of confiding triumph. Yes, we will all lose everything we have in the end, but we won’t know it. We won’t dwell in that desolation, experiencing it endlessly. Therefore, we can fling back defiantly, “Take that, Death! You’ve done your worst, but I’m not aware of it. So the joke’s on you! Ha HAAA!”

These two wisdoms bookend my own reflection on my span. There was Mr. Adams’ somber view at one end of all the packed activity. But then here came Angie Dickinson’s point – ultimately a happier thought about the other end of it all. She made me realize what a final invictus it will be.

Donald Trump and Al Capone

The impeachment of Donald Trump will probably be a fait accompli by the time I post this essay. But the process has reminded me of the conviction of Al Capone.

Everyone knew that Capone was responsible for many serious offenses beyond bootlegging. He was clearly at the center of a web of extortion and murder. But the FBI and local authorities felt they had no hope of pinning any of these crimes on him. He existed behind a fog of contrived alibis and forced testimony. It’s been widely acknowledged that Capone ordered the notorious 1929 St. Valentine’s Day massacre in order to eliminate rival Bugs Moran whom he thought was encroaching on his territory. But once again, Capone was like Macavity in the play Cats. There’s a crash, a bang, a shattering of some prized possession. But when you go and look, once again, “Macavity’s not there.” In the same way, Capone was in Florida on that St. Valentine’s Day – nowhere near the scene of the crime.

However, public opinion did turn against Capone after the gruesome violence of the massacre. The FBI increased its push to depose Capone from his throne as kingpin of Chicago crime. They hit on the idea of examining his income tax returns. He could hardly report the millions he was raking in on a regular basis. He couldn’t believably be earning that sort of money by selling second-hand furniture, the profession he claimed on his business cards.

The FBI was able to demonstrate how Capone’s spending, how his lavish lifestyle – indeed couldn’t be accounted for by the returns he reported from his “furniture business.” And so Capone was convicted for tax evasion and was finally neutralized by being put away in federal prisons such as Alcatraz and serving seven years.

It seems to me that Al Capone’s tax evasion is Donald Trump’s Ukrainian bribe. Trump’s withholding of funds from the Ukrainian President contingent on his investigating Hunter Biden’s role on a Ukrainian gas company board is indeed reprehensible. It had some obvious negative consequences in compromising the Ukraine’s ability to combat Russian aggression. It could have had even farther-reaching consequences. Capone’s withholding of tax funds from the public was perhaps somewhat less consequential. Still, failure to pay such a large amount of taxes is reprehensible. Whatever money Capone gave to soup kitchens and to other charities was more than offset by the money he failed to put into public coffers where those funds might have gone much farther to support those in need.

But in neither case were the infractions that the men were charged with the worst of what they had done. In Capone’s case, there were all those intimidations, felonies, and murders. In Trump’s case, there has been the total lack of knowledge about geography, history, the U.S. Constitution, or what constitutes true statesmanship. There has been the rain of random, irrelevant tweets, the schoolyard name-calling, the inconsistency, the illogic, the arrogance, the stupidity.

But it was hard to convict a man of well-deflected crimes and hired hits. It would be almost impossible to convict a man of utter inanity. So in each case, the authorities had to focus on something smaller, something better defined. Your total failure as a human being isn’t prosecutable. The long arm of the law has to pick something graspable. And so the charges are reduced to tax evasion, and the demand of a quid pro quo from the Ukrainian President – respectively.

Isn’t that the way it is with life in general? You yell at your spouse for not putting the cap back on the toothpaste. Well, it’s possible that transgression can itself be a major annoyance. Paste can ooze out over your comb, down the side of the sink, onto the bathmat – necessitating a massive, time-consuming clean-up. But usually the toothpaste cap is just the tax evasion of each individual household.

You can’t yell at your spouse for never helping around the house, at least not with any reasonable expectation of effecting any reform. Although what you’re really angry about is your spouse’s lazy disregard, that’s too big a fault to prosecute.

Similarly, you burst out in grievance after your spouse absented himself and left you to deal on your own with the burly, pugnacious handyman who failed to sand the windowsill before slathering paint over its lumpiness. In that case, what has really disappointed you about your spouse is his cowardice. But that’s too unwieldy a charge to bring to court.

You can reproach your spouse for forgetting your birthday, or for telling a demeaning story about you at a party, or for cheating on you. But you can’t reasonably convict him or her on the vast, intangible basis of being a bad person. You have no recourse against your spouse for being incapable of love.

And so the argument revolves around toothpaste – or a failure to pay taxes – or dishonorable actions in the Ukraine. 

Miraculous Transformation

I went to a performance of a new musical play, Parcel from America, at the Irish Heritage Center in Chicago last weekend. It had a heartwarming resolution, perfect for the Holidays, likely to become a kind of It’s A Wonderful Life tradition for smaller theaters around town.

I had a little trouble getting into the spirit of the afternoon though. Before the performance started, I was put in a grumpy mood by the gyrations of one of the audience members. I recognized her as being one of the regular hosts of PBS-TV’s pledge nights. Her appearances there irritated me. She always seemed to be so mindlessly bubbly as she solicited funds and introduced each new segment of the special programming. Her uniform boosterism and effervescence often seemed out of place. She would burst into the midst of a program about the Holocaust with her usual hyper enthusiasm. She’d gush, “Wow! Isn’t that great! What an important history lesson!”

None of the solemnity or grandeur of any of the programming ever seemed to register with her. Her predictable “Wows!” always smacked of a teenager’s babblings about who-likes-who in 5^th period English class. Now here was this woman again, characteristically flitting around the auditorium, greeting people in rapid succession, supervising who should sit where, changing her own seat repeatedly, laughing, shuffling people’s coats here and there. Just as her bubbly appearances on TV exhausted me, the woman was exhausting me here in person.

Her skimming flightiness was turning me into the perfect Scrooge. I was mentally grumbling “What an airhead! Sit down and relax already! Silent night, please!”

But then, a Christmas miracle. The woman oddly paused in mid-sweep down the aisle next to me. She paused, and looked down with intent friendliness at me for a moment. It wasn’t as if she seemed to think she knew me. We’d never met. I’d never volunteered at the local PBS station on any of the nights when she was hosting. But it was as if she suddenly realized some transcendent kinship between us. She paused – and lit up with a sincere, staying smile.

When she moved on, resuming her social butterfly briefness, I thought, “What a nice woman!”

Taking a Dim View - Part III

In Parts I and II of this series, I mentioned how I make a point of watching The View as often as possible. The women are well-informed about many facets of the political/social scene that I don’t follow on my own. However, the women consistently demonstrate blind spots in their discussions. In the previous essays, I focused on lapses that occurred in the panel members’ thinking on the issue of abortion and on the issue of celebrating our true selves. Here I consider how dangerous their support of political correctness has become.

The women often deplore the excesses of political correctness (PC) that characterize our society. But then they go on to indulge in some of those excesses themselves. Some of what I regard as the worst and most dangerous examples of their commitment to PC involve their calls for various people to apologize for saying something viewed as being insensitive or reflective of a prejudiced attitude. All sorts of people from cooking show host Paula Deen to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau have been called upon by panel members to apologize for having made insensitive, racist remarks or for having engaged in behavior seen as demeaning to people of color.

One of the panel’s most insistent calls for an apology involved Don Sterling, owner of the LA Clippers Basketball Team. A conversation that Sterling had on the phone with his mistress was recorded and eventually got aired by that mistress. In the conversation, Sterling asked that this off-again/on-again lady friend (herself of black ancestry) not bring any black people to his games. He apparently was saying this in the context of objecting to her flaunting her relationships with black men publicly in front of him.

No one comes off looking good in this exchange. Sterling’s attitude is plainly a narrow, dreary one. His mistress’ penchant for showing off her alliances with other men and then making public a private conversation in which Sterling objected to that, particularly when it came to black men – shows a relationship devoid of any love or regard on either side. The League officials’ resultant ousting of Sterling from his team ownership shows an over-reaction to a dim, befuddled fellow’s errant remark. It was an over-reaction prompted by society’s current irrationally punishing impulse towards anything deemed politically incorrect.

But it was The View panel’s indignant insistence that Sterling be made to abjectly apologize that represented the most disturbing aspect of PC. Haven’t any of the people demanding such apologies read the classic novel Darkness at Noon? In that book, Arthur Koestler vividly shows how tyranny was maintained in Stalinist Russia, and by extension, in all countries in which dictatorships prevail. People in Koestler’s world must be on guard against making even the most casual remarks in private that might be construed as critical of the current regime. Close friends and even family members can’t be trusted not to report them for such dissidence in order to gain credit with the powers that be for bringing noncompliance to light. After a transgression is revealed, the offending party is brought before a tribunal, is made to confess and to abjectly apologize for betraying the principles of the regime. After a sufficient public show has been made of the offending individual’s immiseration, that individual is brought into a back room and shot.

Such tactics prevailed in Russia even after Stalin’s era. They were also Mao’s way, Hitler’s way, and the way of almost all corrupt dictatorships around the world. Even those who haven’t read books such as Darkness at Noon are surely aware of these methods that dictators use to maintain power. Is that really the way advocates of political correctness would have America go? Do they really want us to make a common practice of encouraging the outing of people for the stupid remarks they make in private – then forcing these people to publicly wring their hands in apology and deposing them from whatever career success they might be having?

I don’t think that’s the American way. In order to maintain ourselves as “the land of the free,” people must be allowed to say anything they want to say, anywhere they want to say it, including the most stupid, insensitive things - as long as they don’t go beyond the very specific boundaries that the Supreme Court has established. Those boundaries include the famous injunction against yelling “Fire” in a crowded theater (when there is no fire). The Court also restricts what is regarded as “fighting words” That is speech addressed directly to an individual or to a group that a reasonable person can predict would incite an immediate, violent physical response from that individual or group. This clearly would not include a whispered request not to bring any “blacks” to a game, any more than it would include a whispered, personal request not to bring any “fat chicks,” any “Lithuanians,” or any “short people.” A bent toward such exclusions is indeed most often the sign of a limited, boring person, someone from whom intelligent individuals might want to dissociate themselves. But it cannot be the basis for any officially punitive action.

Furthermore, contrary to popular opinion, the U.S. has no laws against “hate speech.” As a recoil from horrific historic developments, some countries such as Germany now do have strict laws against publicly uttering defamatory remarks. It can even be punishable for a German citizen to anywhere call members of certain groups “freeloaders.” But there are no such restrictions in the U.S. Americans are free in theory, and should be free in practice, from official repercussions - no matter how mean and defamatory their remarks.

But there are more things wrong with demoting, firing, or demanding apologies from individuals who have vented their prejudices, besides the fact that it sets us on the slippery slope to tyranny. Another problem with such enforcements is that they don’t accomplish what they claim to want to accomplish. Making people apologize for racially insensitive words and deeds, or in fact for outright racism - never reforms these people. It doesn’t awaken them to the error of their ways. Forced apologies merely make hypocrites of them.

Beyond that, there’s a problem with these apologies in that they are being extracted in a lopsided way. There’s an inherent inequality in the way in which the PC society is trying to enforce equality. While white people are severely taken to task for any hint of insensitivity or offense to blacks, the reverse is not true. There is not the same level of criticism directed at anyone who makes defamatory remarks aimed at white people as white people – or indeed, until recently, remarks demeaning women. Quite the contrary. Hip-hop artists and rappers such as Snoop Dogg have become the darlings of the intellectual set, despite, or perhaps because of, their misogyny and racism. Snoop Dogg was invited to the White House as a result of President and Mrs. Obama’s enthusiasm for him. Martha Stewart appeared in a friendly roast of him where she was challenged to prove she could get as down and dirty as Snoop himself. (Stewart was generally approved as rising to the occasion.)

Essayist Theodore Dalrymple has observed how people used to try to imitate their betters, and often appeared ludicrous in the attempt. Now, the “betters” strain to imitate the worst, the most violent and vulgar elements of society. These wannabes appear equally as ludicrous in the attempt. While Don Sterling is stripped of his team ownership for his sotto voce request not to bring any blacks to the game – white fans of gangsta rap are bouncing in presumed energetic enjoyment of lyrics such as those by Dead Prez -

We gonna order take out and when we see the driver
We gonna stick the 25 up in his face......
White boy in the wrong place at the right time
Soon as the car door open up he mine
We roll up quick and put the pistol to his nose
By the look on his face he probably shitted in his clothes

The fashion for excusing, justifying, and hopping on the bandwagon of the rap culture goes beyond mere imitation and feigned, fawning enjoyment though. The internet is filled with professorial individuals interpreting the lyrics of Chance the Rapper and Snoop Dogg. These translations of rap lyrics by both black and white writers often include the imputation of profundity and actual genius to the songs under consideration. For example, there’s Chance the Rapper’s “Same Drugs” -

We don't do the same drugs no more
We don't do the, we don't do the same drugs, do the same drugs no more
Cause she don't do the same drugs no more
We don't do the, we don't do the same drugs, do the same drugs no more

When did you change?
Wendy you've aged
I thought you'd never grow up
I thought you'd never
Window closed, Wendy got old
I was too late, I was too late
A shadow of what I once was

Critics agree with Chance that the song isn’t about drugs. According to them, it’s a perceptive take on how Chance and his girlfriend aren’t on the same page anymore. What’s more, they hear the lyrics echoing the plaintive regrets of a Peter Pan-like reluctance to ever grow up. They find touching metaphor and literary synecdoche in the song.

Critics similarly praise the “literary legerdemain, the puns, the playfulness, and the sheer genius” of Snoop Dogg’s lyrics, such as those of his biggest hit, “Gin and Juice” –

Later on that day, my homey
Dr. Dre came through with a gang of Tanqueray
And a fat ass J of some bubonic chronic
That made me choke, shit, this ain't no joke

I had to back up off of it and sit my cup down
Tanqueray and chronic, yeah, I'm fucked up now
But it ain't no stoppin', I'm still poppin'
Dre got some bitches from the city of Compton

To serve me, not with a cherry on top
'Cause when I bust my nut, I'm raisin' up off the cot
Don't get upset girl, that's just how it goes
I don't love you ho's, I'm out the do' and I'll be

Rollin' down the street, smokin' endo
Sippin' on gin and juice, laid back
With my mind on my money

And money on my mind…

One critic again found telling metaphor here, metonymy and a loose-limbed, compelling chronicle of someone rolling breezily through life.

My goodness. Metonymy, synecdoche, playfulness, ingenious punning. It all puts the likes of Cole Porter and Irving Berlin to shame. Apparently, such dead white songwriters can’t hold a candle to these modern hip-hop artists. Except, I say – “The Emperor has no clothes! The Emperor has no clothes! The Emperor has no clothes!”

This straining to impute brilliance to so many rappers who are just peeling off random fragments of these-mean-streets vernacular is a shameful display of PC. That’s all the more so because such praise is not equally applied to both white and black performers coming from their respective colloquial cultures. While ghetto performers are praised in intellectual circles, the predominantly white country music performers are seldom seen as displaying any literary genius, playfulness, or astute use of metaphor. Lyrics such as “I’ve got friends in low places,” and “My baby is American-made, born and bred in the U.S.A.” are looked upon with sneering condescension or else ignored altogether by the politically correct.      

Most professorial people, when discussing music, are quick to spurn country music. If they don’t always go quite so far as to instead claim deep enjoyment of Snoop Dogg, they certainly impress upon listeners their appreciation of jazz, the kind of jazz that comes from the soul of the black experience. Forget about the soul of the Appalachian auto mechanic. Such a person ostensibly has no soul.

Despite Ken Burns’ efforts to confer a certain respectability on country folk music by tracing its historical context in his recent PBS series, it’s unlikely that any of the intellectual elite will be moved to embrace it. Political correctness will continue to demand that they dismiss its corn pone whiteness in favor of Snoop Dogg’s presumed gritty, anarchic cogency.

The trouble is, this kind of PC pressure leads people to abandon all standards, all striving towards goodness in art and in personal conduct. They excuse and even affirm any violent, misogynistic, racist attitude when voiced by blacks. They continue to see profundity where there is only mediocrity. They betray what likely would be their true feelings and their essential humanity in favor of their forced affirmation of sentiments such as:

“Kill the white people; we gonna make them hurt; kill the white people; but buy my record first; ha, ha, ha.” (Apache, Time Warner) – or

“It’s time to rob and mob and break the white man off something lovely.” (Dr Dre, Time Warner)

Any white performer singing such lyrics with the word “black” replacing “white” would not be praised; he would be condemned.

But the final problem with PC is that it constrains all normal, friendly human relations. It puts everyone on a hair trigger, cocked to take offense or to accuse the other of some PC infraction. Slamming people out of a social circle because of a narrow expression deemed to be non-PC hardly helps to create a less prejudiced, more welcoming atmosphere. You can’t fight for inclusion by excluding people at the drop of a hat.

I have personally been both the recipient and the perpetrator of such PC flash-over. Quite a few years ago (the reign of PC has been going on for some time), I invited a woman from the Libertarian Party over for lunch. During the brief contact I’d had with her at Libertarian meetings, she’d voiced an interesting, informed mix of conservative/liberal ideas that were the best of what I thought Libertarian philosophy should be. I felt the woman might be good friendship material, someone to cultivate. Unfortunately, our lunch went cold very soon.

We happened to get on the subject of the Chicago public school system and the woman mentioned the fact that well over a third of elementary school students in the City were black. I registered surprise at this. Indeed, I was amazed. The woman angrily asked me why that should matter so much to me. I could see she had interpreted my astonishment as dismay – a skinhead’s revulsion at the thought of being surrounded by black faces, a fear of being outnumbered by “the enemy.”

Actually, my surprise over the statistic had an altogether different cause. I’d recently been at a meeting of a local teachers’ association and I recalled that almost all the teachers there had been white. So I wondered - if so many students in the system were black, why weren’t there more black teachers?

But the bad impression I’d left was irrevocable. It would have been useless for me to explain. Anything I said would have come off as backpedaling justification. We finished our lunch in stony politeness. The only other time I ever heard from the woman was when I received a form notice inviting me to a gathering at her house to stuff envelopes for the coming campaign.

But there were times when I was the rush-to-judgement accuser. I remember the last time I so heartily indulged in that form of haughty appraisal. I don’t exactly remember what had provoked my censure, but I was walking down the street telling my companion how stupid someone I’d met had obviously been because that person had uttered a slur against some other race or ethnic group. To my tirade I added the cliché observation that “People always seem to need to feel superior to some other group. They sense their own inherent inferiority, so they have to fish around for some way to feel superior. They really are inferior though,” I pronounced.

My companion, older and wiser than I was – winked at me and said, “It’s enough to make you feel superior, isn’t it.”

“Epiphany” is a much over-used word, but I had an epiphany at that moment. Yes! What I had really been doing with my little speech was feeling superior to all those benighted others who were prone to making prejudiced, non-PC remarks. Of course there are standards that should be maintained. I’m not someone who believes all opinions are equally valid or that all actions should be allowed. Certainly, anyone poised to make some violent attack against the target of his or her prejudices should be stopped. But indignant rants such as the one I made that day against people who have simply voiced stereotyping remarks - is not the way to change things for the better. My criticism, even if I’d made it directly to the offending parties, would certainly not have turned anyone into a more loving human being. I knew that. So I’d indulged in that criticism merely for the purpose of getting a charge. I was energizing myself with a sense of my own superiority and I was intent on demonstrating that superiority to others.

I realized then that that’s what most PC is about. It’s self-serving. Its only purpose and its only result is to make a display of how much better the accuser is than all those left-in-the-dirt others. The critic gets to feel oh-so-superior to those who feel superior to black people, or Lithuanians, or short people, etc., etc.

If anyone truly wants to bring about a more welcoming, inclusive society, declaring others to be stupid, prejudiced Neanderthals is not the way to do it. Countering other people’s name-calling with name-calling of one’s own won’t accomplish anything. If will only tend to entrench those other people in their prejudices. So how could you go about changing others’ opinions? How would it be possible to deflate others’ prejudices?

Someone posed just that question in the Quora forum recently and Michael McFadden gave an interesting, reasoned answer. He suggested that you give people a chance to simply listen to a different idea. Give them a chance to listen - quietly, alone, unsurrounded by challenge. Any personal confrontation will put others on the defensive, forcing them to defend, justify, retort, and up the ante of hatred. But just give them a chance to sit silently exposed to a better way.

For example, if someone has notoriously been spouting some negative stereotypes about Jewish people, you might give her a ticket to a performance of The Diary of Anne Frank. That shouldn’t be done as obvious rebuttal to her floating anti-Semitism. Just present the theater ticket as a gift to a popular production that has been legitimately praised by critics. Similarly give someone who has expressed a fear of black people moving into his neighborhood a ticket to a production of A Raisin in the Sun, the acclaimed Lorraine Hansberry play about a black family moving into a white neighborhood. On the other side of the coin, if a black person seems locked into characterizing “poor white trash” as his enemy, you might give him a DVD of the documentary Harlan County USA. That documentary shows the struggles of Kentucky coal miners to wring some safety measures and a living wage out of the mine owners. In the same vein, literally, the John Sayles’ documentary Matewan shows West Virginia coal miners initially clashing with the black men brought in as “scabs” to break their efforts to unionize. But ultimately the blacks and whites join forces to make the mines less deadly places. Moving along to another kind of non-PC attitude, you might give the man who is ever-ready with a sexist joke a DVD set of the TV miniseries Human Trafficking. This dramatization graphically shows how a young Czech mother thinks she has finally found love only to be brutally initiated into the sex slave trade.

While using these kinds of gifts, the non-PC individuals can sit alone in the dark, watching, listening, without any pressure to feel or to react a certain way. Their mental pores can open and in this unthreatening atmosphere they can perhaps relax into learning something new, into feeling a different way. Their presumed nemeses can be humanized. Perhaps the recipients of such gifts can be moved off their set point of prejudice to see that we all have a common struggle to make this a better, kinder world.

Self-important denunciations of those deemed to have broken PC rules won’t do anything to accomplish such a goal. Political correctness becomes like a barbed wire fence between people. Until or unless people prove themselves to be imminently dangerous or riddled with truly homicidal anger, we should approach them with understanding – and perhaps more. Perhaps we should even go so far as to follow Goethe’s advice when he wrote that the only opinion worth voicing about the choices of others is one that springs from “a certain… enthusiasm, or from a loving interest in the person… All else is vanity.”

Taking a Dim View - Part II

In Part I of this series, I mentioned how I make a point of watching The View as often as possible. The women are well-informed about many facets of the political/social scene that I don’t follow on my own. However, the women consistently demonstrate blind spots in their discussions. In the previous essay, I focused on how many lapses occurred in the panel members’ thinking around the issue of abortion. Here I discuss how panel members fail to see the inconsistencies in their attitude toward celebrating different gender, ethnic, and social identities.

The women of The View are especially eager to demonstrate how they are in full support of the “coming out” of all those with non-conforming sexual orientations. But their philosophy of acceptance is expansive. They also assert their belief that we should all be able to demonstrate and celebrate our true selves (assuming our true selves don’t involve doing harm to others). The days of having to dissemble are over, no matter what our problems or propensities.

The View panel members give a warm welcome to individuals such as RuPaul, the flamboyant gender non-specific celebrity. They laughingly suggest that Chance the Rapper run for President, so cogent did they find his narrative songs about life in “the hood.” They have praised authors and celebrities for making public the details of their struggles with conditions such as alcoholism, addiction, cancer, HIV, and mental illness. Discussion of all these problems used to be taboo. People coping with them had to scuttle veiled through the twilight. They had to live as pariahs. But now they can come forward into the full light of day and talk openly about these aspects of their lives. They are freed to congratulate themselves on letting it all hang out without any need to gloss over any of the gritty reality of their lives. Acceptance and, above all, self-acceptance, is the order of the day.

People who have the kind of difference that might have evoked schoolyard bullying or that might once have gotten them hidden away in attics - can now come forth and parade in all their glory. This is a good thing - although I sometimes wish that people who never got addicted in the first place might be applauded as heartily as those who beat their addictions. Still, I’m glad to join in, to get in the spirit of appreciating the world in all its diversity. We should all be unabashed, able to celebrate the way we’ve come, the different paths we’ve taken in life (again assuming we’re not committed to trampling over others in the process). The women of The View are right to be waving from the floats of these new festivals of self-regard.

Except, except - a glaring hypocrisy rears its head at the end of many of their shows. At least once a week, The View concludes with a “View Your Deal” segment featuring sales on all sorts of accessories such as cosmetics. As the designated panel member enthuses over the lipstick, the mascara, and the wrinkle-erase products in the latter category, it seems to me she betrays all the principles she might have been espousing just moments before. “Oh, that’s what I need!” she’ll purr over some touch-up product that claims to hide your gray hairs, or temporarily suppress those bags under your eyes, or add the kind of glow to your cheeks that your body no longer naturally produces.

Other shows are also notable for contradicting in the second half of their programs all the reassurances they had issued in the first half. Dr. Phil might finish counseling a woman who had feelings of worthlessness instilled in her by constantly belittling parents. Dr. Phil will again stump for the philosophy that we should all reach a point where we let the negative opinions of others roll off our backs. We should instead recognize what makes us of unique value in the world and we should make our lives about contributing those unique gifts. We shouldn’t waste time remaking ourselves in attempts to satisfy other people’s half-baked judgments.

After this ringing encouragement to be true to ourselves - segue to Robin McGraw and a tray full of her new line of Revelation cosmetics wheeled onstage. Dr. Phil’s wife comes out aggressively promoting these products, perhaps even using the woman from the first part of the show to illustrate the transformations that the Revelation skin care brand can create. Robin will daub foundation, skin toner, and a variety of other camouflaging substances on the woman’s face, telling her how much younger and more refreshed she’ll look with the use of these products. “And we all feel so much more confident when we are looking our best,” Robin will soft pedal her hard sell. (By “best,” Robin of course means “different.”)

Sometimes the contradiction gets even more startling. I’m struck by the many about-faces that have occurred on Oprah’s shows. Oprah might spend the first part of a program talking with an anorexic girl and a counselor. They will agree that part of the cause of this kind of body dysmorphic disorder is often that the sufferer has been raised with an emphasis on perfection. The girl learns to push herself to achieve at levels that can’t be sustained. When she fails, she compensates by losing weight, something that she can continue to control. While one can’t always come in first at a track meet, one can always lose another half-pound by starving oneself or by throwing up.

Then Oprah will also cite how out society’s obsession with being slim contributes to the anorexia epidemic. Women especially have a lot of pressure put on them to have the bodies of slim, athletic teenagers throughout their lives. Fat girls are “dogs” who don’t get dates. Fat women are overlooked altogether. Thinness is sexually fetishized in this society. Oprah always chimes in her disapproval of this attitude. She leads audiences to believe that she might champion a fight against this kind of attitude that puts such emphasis on being girlishly skinny.

Yet throughout her career, Oprah has been preoccupied with dieting! She has come out with diet foods, diet regimens – diet, diet, diet. Then when diets don’t work, Oprah goes to extreme lengths to make herself look artificially thinner. The pictures of her that appear on the cover of each month of her O Magazine are usually heavily photoshopped or airbrushed. In addition, Oprah is girdled to the hilt, giving evidence of routinely going through an even more painful process than Scarlett O’Hara did as her maid cinched her corset in an attempt to achieve the 18-inch waist she had before giving birth. Where not even airbrushing or girdling can do the trick, headline blurbs are judiciously placed to hide any remaining bulges on Oprah’s picture. Every cover of O Magazine, every one of Oprah’s important public appearances, is a masterpiece of topiary art with Oprah being pruned, staked, and contorted into an artificial shape.

But her shows often have contained a further betrayal of her philosophy of “Eat, Pray, Love” – of “Celebrate the Real You.” After the segment on anorexia is wrapped up, Oprah sometimes will parade the results of the makeovers to which she treated some members of her audience. Formerly distinctive-looking, workaday women (usually women) will be brought out, now all dolled up into fashion uniformity, now sometimes teetering a bit in high heels.

Incidentally, Oprah herself once inadvertently acknowledged how anti-feminist and handicapping such heels can be. When one of her celebrity guests admitted that she couldn’t walk from the wings to the stage in such heels and only put them on once she was seated on stage and the camera was ready to roll - Oprah exulted that she could do better. With jolly triumph, Oprah said, “I can walk on stage. I wasn’t always sure I could do it, but I make it!” It’s hard to see how women are being liberated when they regard it as a supreme achievement to be able to walk a few yards in the requisite stiletto heels. Meanwhile, we wonder at and deplore how the Chinese upper class used to bind women’s feet in order to keep them to sexually appealing baby-steps.

At any rate, Oprah’s made-over audience members now stand on stage posing in their new get-ups. The audience members gasp in approval. Everyone applauds. The women no longer look their age, their weight, or their experience. All those distinguishing features have been concealed. The women have been cinched, pinched, and painted. They’ve been re-branded, re-fashioned into new identities.

So, what are we to conclude from all this? We conclude that it’s good to celebrate yourself if you’re gay, ghetto, struggling with mental illness, addiction, or myriads of other problems. In all such cases, you are invited to come out and shout.

BUT – if you are not what’s considered attractive (especially if you’re a woman), or if you are over 30 (especially if you’re a woman) – then it’s not okay to celebrate yourself as you are. Rather, in those cases, its incumbent upon you to spend your days glossing it over, hiding it, disguising it, lying about it, denying it. You must make yourself up and make yourself over. And if you don’t - you should be ashamed of yourself!

Taking a Dim View - How the Women of The View Get It Wrong - Part I

I make a point of watching The View as often as possible. The women are well-informed about Who’s Who in Washington. They follow the devious paths of Washington officials in a way that I’d never have been able to track myself. The women also dish on aspects of popular culture and celebrity scandal that likely touch on personal issues affecting many viewers.

However, the women consistently demonstrate blind spots in their discussions. Often, these blind spots are the result of their unquestioning acceptance of prevailing political philosophy, or of their partially unconscious acceptance of the current dictates of political correctness. These lapses in the women’s conversation often leave me with a trailing sadness. There’s so much more that could be said, that should be said – but that now gets smothered in the fog of political cliché.

The women of The View aren’t the only ones who suffer from tunnel vision. Oprah and her guests, and in fact the casts of most talk shows are almost all similarly limited. But The View provides the handiest current example of shallow political platitude.

In the following essay I point out one of the issues that leave the women blank on a number of points. That’s the issue of abortion. I’ll follow with a couple of other essays dealing with other issues where I feel something significant gets left out of their considerations. In all these instances, I wish the women of The View had taken a larger view.

In discussing abortion rights, a majority of the panel felt that women owned their bodies and should therefore have complete say over what to do with those bodies. These panel members believed that laws restricting women’s right to have abortions were patent sexism, the kind of gender bias that gets directed solely against women. One member of the panel posed the question, “Can you think of any instance in U.S. history in which legislation was passed dictating what MEN should do with their bodies?” The women looked at each other, for once silenced and stumped in unison. No one could think of any legislation that had ever affected men’s rights over their bodies, especially over their reproductive rights.

Well, one could get technical and say that almost all laws dictate what men and women can do with their bodies. For example, the most basic laws against committing murder dictate that you cannot hold a loaded gun in your hand, extend your arm, point the gun at some unsuspecting person’s back, and intentionally flex your fingers in such a way that you pull the trigger of the gun. But I know that’s not what the women meant.

However, even when one sticks to the spirit of the question the women were asking, their inability to come up with a single example of men being told what to do with their bodies shows some real lacunae in their knowledge and thinking.

There have been very specific laws passed that included men in their specifications regarding reproductive rights. The notorious sterilization laws that many States enacted in the early part of the 1900’s, and that were sometimes enforced through the 1970’s and 1980’s, certainly represent an interference with both men’s and women’s control over their own bodies.

These laws were enacted as the result of a nation-wide (and indeed world-wide) enthusiasm for the principles of eugenics. Following in the wake of the “survival of the fittest” interpretation of Darwin’s theory of evolution, many eugenics societies formed to advocate compulsory sterilization of the feeble-minded, the criminally inclined, the chronically ill, the chronically shiftless and unemployed, and also of unwanted immigrants as well as of unwanted aboriginals. Wikipedia presents a good summary of the history of “Eugenics in the United States.” There it tells how:

“In 1907, Indiana passed the first eugenics-based compulsory sterilization law in the world. Thirty U.S. states would soon follow their lead… The U.S. Supreme Court, in Buck v Bell, upheld the constitutionality of the Virginia Sterilization Act of 1924, allowing for the compulsory sterilization of patients of state mental institutions in 1927.”

Even so generally humanist a jurist as Oliver Wendell Holmes supported the Virginia sterilization law, famously asserting “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” And so Carrie Buck was sterilized.

One can see the irony of these shifting attitudes towards abortion. The eugenics laws were aimed at preventing births (through enforced sterilizations and abortions), while modern laws are tending to require all pregnant women to give birth. Autre temps, autre moeurs.

Enthusiasm for the eugenics laws waned somewhat in the U.S. in the 1940s when people became aware that the principles behind eugenics had been central to Nazi philosophy and lay at the base of the extermination of six million people. However, Buck v Bell has never been overturned, and instances of enforced sterilizations continued until quite recently.

It’s true that many more women than men were sterilized under these laws. Some of this was due to raw sexism. It stemmed from a Jack the Ripper-style abhorrence of “promiscuous women” and a barely concealed intent to punish them. But also, the fact that more women were sterilized than men often had to do with simple calculations of population control. It’s women’s fertility that is the determining factor in how many babies will be born.

Nevertheless, of the 64,000+ individuals forced to be sterilized or sterilized without sufficiently informed consent - at least several thousand were men. And in theory, the laws were generally written to apply to men and women equally. This is a significant chapter in American history that the women of The View seemed strangely ignorant of when they couldn’t think of a single instance when laws were enacted impinging on men’s control over their bodies and their ability to procreate.

There was a still larger blind spot in the women’s overview of American history though. During the 1960’s and 1970’s, the question on every young man’s mind was whether or not his “number would be called.” Almost every young man was on tenterhooks. Would he be drafted to go to Viet Nam? Would he be required to expose himself to being maimed or killed in a foreign jungle? I would call any draft a very definite legislative impingement on men’s ability to do what they wanted with their bodies. How could The View women forget about that?

Getting back to the question of how strict anti-abortion laws unequally oppress women though – The View panel consistently fails to consider the obverse of that point. In virtually all countries that have more liberal abortion laws, that is, in countries that allow abortions under a wide range of circumstances – the fetuses that get disproportionately aborted are female fetuses. There is still a virtually universal preference for male babies. The result of the “one couple, one baby” policy that prevailed in China has been widely publicized. When a woman gave birth to a female child, that child was often put up for adoption, or, more brutally, was left to die by the roadside or was covertly killed outright at the moment she appeared. Ahem, another still birth, miscarriage, etc. These erasures allowed couples to try again and hope for the better luck of a male child the next time.

As it became possible to more readily determine the sex of a baby in utero, it was overwhelmingly females who were aborted. But that is true even in Western countries that are considered to be past such obvious sexism. Doctors in Britain report that when, after an ultra-sound, a woman requests an abortion – it is more often than not a female who gets aborted.

So in a way that the women of The View don’t probe deeply enough to consider – it’s a no-win situation for women. If most abortions are outlawed, women are forced to have children they neither want nor can afford. But if abortions are readily available, it’s disproportionately females who are denied life.

There are still a few other crucial points that are rarely taken into account as talk show panel members ping-pong the same old clichés about abortion – women’s rights; the right to life; women’s rights; the right to life…. I discussed one of these other ignored aspects of the debate in my previous Blog post entitled “The False Premise of the Abortion Debate.” The point of that essay was that while many are insisting on women’s right to have abortions, they neglect to consider ways in which women might be given the precedent right not to have sex. In that previous Blog, I maintained that most women usually don’t feel such a compelling urge to have sex, that they must have it NOW, no matter what the consequences.

Contrary to the way in which women are portrayed in the movies, most often women are not so urgently desirous that they have to rip off their partner’s clothes as soon as they get in the door. This is a far bigger misrepresentation of women’s true feelings than the often-cited Victorian assumption that women were naturally reticent. The truth is that women most often have sex only in order to accommodate men’s urgency. A woman has sex in hopes of “keeping” her man, of bonding him to her so that deeper feelings might have time to flourish. If women had their way, if they had just their own wishes to consider - they would tend to have sex only if and when they were ready to accept that a child might be the result. However, as a practical matter, women aren’t given that right to say “NO” to sex, and few people are currently working to give them, not so much that right, but that ability, in the course of ordinary romantic relationships.

Then there is still another aspect of the abortion debate that the women of The View fail to consider. Most “Right to Choose” advocates talk about how women should be allowed to “own their bodies.” But this idea of ownership is disturbing. In most modern liberal contexts, ownership has come to have some negative connotations. It’s usually supposed that one can only rightly own a thing, not a person. What made slavery especially abhorrent was that it necessarily made things out of the actual human beings who were being bought, sold, and owned. It reduced human beings to mere items of inventory.

If one considers that ownership can only be exercised on a “thing,” it doesn’t matter whether you are talking about owning other people – or yourself. Both should be seen as equally repugnant.

Many individuals are now calling for reconsidering that usage even as it applies to animals, plants, and all the earth’s resources. The rise of factory farming makes it especially apparent how depreciating the concept of ownership can be. Creatures who should rightfully be treated with respect, with an awareness of and a sense of awe at the singular, miraculous life force that fills them – are instead brutalized and considered only as commodities under the farm’s regime of ownership.

Those who are fighting for reform of the factory farm system often point to the traditional Native American philosophy as an example of how life and all of earth’s resources should be regarded. Native Americans did not strictly apply the concept of ownership to the animals they hunted for food, or to the land’s bounty in general. White people’s attempts to enforce the concept of private ownership on them were perhaps responsible, more than any other depredations, for disorienting and dispiriting the Native American population. The modern idea that each individual should own himself or herself would have been even more profoundly alienating to Native Americans.

But aside from this broadly problematic application of the term “ownership,” it should also be remembered that ownership doesn’t mean one can do exactly as one wishes with one’s property. The “Right to Choose” faction of the abortion debate seems to imply that by granting women the right to claim ownership over their own bodies, the women can be granted total freedom to do whatever they want with their bodies. But ownership almost never grants any such carte blanche. Indeed, ownership of something usually carries with it a heavy burden of responsibility, restriction, and broad conservatorship. The owner of an apartment building can’t deny African Americans the right to rent there based on their race; the owner of a chemical factory can’t dump toxic waste, even on company property. Just because you own something doesn’t mean you can do whatever you want with it – and that includes your own body.

There’s one further aspect of the idea that each of us owns our bodies that actually flies against enlightened philosophy. Such a concept of ownership evokes the old Cartesian dualism that modern science has larger discredited. By saying “I own my body,” you imply that there are two separate entities involved in your personhood. There is an immaterial mind controlling a material corpus. There is the owner and the owned inhabiting you. Who is this owner, the one who assumes such haughty proprietorial rights?

Contrary to the idea that there is such a schism constituting each of us, now most science falls on the side of there being only one unified entity comprising each of us, and that entity is an interactive physical network. The processes that give rise to all thoughts, including thoughts each person has about his or her own identity - are chemical, electrical processes at work in a real, material substrate. The person and the thought are one. We are all both indivisibly the singer and the song.

It’s true that these metaphysical considerations might seem to be a bit rarified for daytime TV. Talk shows are meant to be entertaining as well as informative. But the women of The View do audiences a disservice by ignoring these aspects of the abortion debate altogether. The truth is – men have been legally denied control over reproductive capacity and over their lives as a whole. Ready access to abortions can work against the interests of females. Pregnancies are more the result of men’s urgency than of women’s real desires, with the latter being subordinated once again. By trapping women into adopting the idea of a robber baron’s right of ownership - they are being trapped into a limiting falsehood.

This is just one of the issues on which talk shows fall short of taking a larger view. In a couple of follow-up essays, I’ll cite other ways in which I wish talk shows would step outside the box of the usual political cliché and open the discussion to wider, wilder fields of thought.