My Fellow Cranks

The silly season is in full swing. November 24^th and Christmas tree lots have sprouted like toadstools -- across the street in the County Bowl parking lot, at Earl Warren Showgrounds, Lane Farms, and Orchard Supply and Hardware in Goleta; jolly Christmas music is already playing on at least one local radio station; and of course the TV is littered with sappy ads.

The older I become, the more this time of year annoys me. The holiday “season” now begins before we store the Halloween decorations, and approaches warp speed weeks before we attack our turkey with a sharp carving knife. Black Friday is treated like a national holiday. Commercial media whip the gullible into a frenzy with promises of cheap flat screen TV’s, blenders, toaster ovens, iPads, tablets, popcorn makers, cell phones, non-stick cookware, gourmet coffee makers, espresso machines, electric can openers, toys, electronic games, laptops; everything marked down and in stock, today only!

Fucking madness is what it is. No sane person pitches a tent outside Wal-Mart three days in advance of Black Friday, in the hopes of saving $100 on a new TV. The entire spectacle is ridiculous and disgusting, infantile and embarrassing. Whatever meaning these holidays are supposed to have is bled dry by crass commercialism that becomes more sophisticated, insidious and hysterical every year. By the time Christmas Day rolls around, many people are too exhausted to enjoy it.

OK, I admit, I’m a crank. Anoint me king for a day and I would decree a law prohibiting any Christmas, Hanukah or Kwanza advertising, sales, paraphernalia, music or hype prior to December 1. Fines would be severe, and repeat offenders would be stripped naked and forced to collect trash along Interstate highways. Nothing ticks me off like hearing Jingle Bells on the radio on November 23. Stop trying to manipulate the public, you greedy bastards; stop trying to stretch the season beyond all reason; stop trying to separate nitwits from money they don’t have.

Holly, jolly, o’ holy night!

The holiday season is one continuous assault on my senses and sensibility. Bad enough the religious hoopla – the virgin birth in a manger of Christ the king, the three wise men, the guiding star, the camels, donkeys, sheep and whatnot – but when the fable of Saint Nick and his magic reindeer, his industrious elves (who must all be Chinese by now), the North Pole, insipid holiday parties, false good cheer and phony good will are tossed on the heap, it’s all I can do not to lock myself in a room and switch off the lights, hibernate for a month.

My wife and I floated the idea of not bothering with a tree and all the trimmings this year, but our daughter freaked out at the prospect of foregoing the rituals she adores, so once again we’ll shuffle through the motions, haul the decorations up from the garage, overpay for a tree, break a few ornaments, wrestle with strings of lights that don’t work, search in vain for extension cords and ornament hooks, and that Bing Crosby CD…

It’s not that I’m opposed to celebrations of faith or gatherings of family and friends. Excess is what I’m opposed to -- the crass, meditated manipulation of a religious holiday for the sole purpose of commerce.

Here’s to my fellow cranks – I know you’re out there, in cities, towns and hamlets – giving the middle finger to all that is false and contrived about this season of holy nights.  

Bombs Away

Israel is at it again in Gaza, and the American news media plays right along, perpetrating the fiction that Hamas is a military power. The fact is that whatever offensive capability Hamas can muster, Israel has ten or twenty times more. If Hamas kills five Israelis, Israel will kill 500 Palestinians in retaliation.

Diplomats from western countries turn their heads and avert their eyes. On ABC’s Good Morning America, the time spent on Gaza is dwarfed by reports about holiday travel and Black Friday shopping tips. Our priorities are crystal clear: get home to kith and kin, gorge on turkey and beer, and then rush to the mall to sink deeper into debt.

Right now, every day in Gaza is black. Artillery shells whistle across the sky and turn houses and buildings into rubble; children die; hospital wards overflow with the wounded and maimed; too many casualties, too few doctors and nurses, plasma, blood or bandages. There is no electricity or running water. Humanitarian aid can’t get in fast enough or in enough volume to alleviate suffering.

Except for North Korea and Iran, the United States would not let this happen to any other nation, nor we would allow any other nation to flaunt international law the way Israel has done for decades. A nation that occupies another by force, practices targeted assassination, kidnapping and sabotage, decade after decade, while UN resolutions turn yellow with age would be treated like a pariah. Israel appropriates Palestinian land and water, erects barrier walls, and builds settlements on territory taken by military force, and the United States applauds and bows. 

Hamas is not innocent in all of this, but the Israeli response never fails to be disproportionate. If your neighbor punches you on the arm, hit him over the head with a sledgehammer.

While bombs rain on Gaza, some Americans pitch tents outside their local Wal-Mart, Best Buy, or Target, waiting for Black Friday and the deal of the century. 

The Fat Bald Guy

We’re in the car, driving home from my in-laws house when my eleven-year-old daughter asks, “Do I have to believe in God?”

“Not unless you want to,” answers my wife.

“Why do you ask?” I say.

“Because at science camp Brandy prayed to God before we ate and before we went to sleep. She goes to church.”

“That’s nice,” my wife says, “but religion doesn’t make you a better person.”

“Brandy thinks it does; she said I’m going to hell because we don’t go to church.”

I ask my daughter if she thinks hell exists; she’s not sure, though Brandy claims it’s an awful place, full of murderers and child molesters, and people who lock children in closets. My daughter wants to know if I believe in God.

“Not really,” I say.

“Do you believe in hell?”

“No.”

“So,” she asks, “what do you think happens when we die?”

I tell her I have no idea and that nobody else does, either. As far as I know, heaven was created to give people hope and reduce the fear of death, while hell was created to frighten people into behaving themselves.

My daughter says, “I like that fat, bald guy, what’s his name?”

“Do you mean Buddha?” my wife asks.

“Yeah, that’s him, Buddha. He seems cool.”

I think of the smiling Buddha figurine on my desk at work, and then I think of all the territory in the world disputed because of religious differences; I think of the partition of India and all the people killed because they suddenly found themselves living on the wrong side of an arbitrary border; of Arabs and Jews fighting over Jerusalem; of Crusaders marching out of Europe to battle Muslims; I can’t help but recall the evil perpetrated by Catholic priests.

My parents were Catholic (though my father lapsed early on and never looked back), and my mother did her best to pass those traditions down to my brother and me, in the same way the faith had been passed to her. I remember squirming in the pew, uncomfortable in my Sunday attire, too young to understand the meaning of it all -- the solemn authority of the priest, the readings from the bible, and the strange ritual of kneeling to take the Eucharist. “Body of Christ. Body of Christ. Body of Christ.” I remember homilies about sin, original and otherwise, of punishment and guilt, and of course, the devil and the burning fires of hell. I tried one year of parochial school, wore the uniform, had my knuckles rapped on by a nun; I remember being sentenced to stand in a corner for some infraction or another, my nose pressed to the wall while Sister Catherine or Margaret or whatever her name was told my classmates what God had in mind for sinners like me.

When we get home I find my copy of God Is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens and flip through the pages in search of a passage about belief that I highlighted. Here it is: “And it seems possible, moving to the psychological arena, that people can be better off believing in something than in nothing, however untrue that something may be.”

There’s the rub for me: believing in something as wildly contradictory as the Bible, or the fanciful idea that a benevolent, loving God watches over and protects all his children. If that’s the case, God is doing a crappy job -- his children transgress with regularity, and some of the most powerful of them appear hell bent on destroying the planet on which their survival depends. His good book is chock full of admonitions to murder, plunder and subdue. You would think a concerned God would give the wayward children a nudge and ask them to stop misbehaving.

No thanks. I’ll take my chances on the secular side, and I’m happy to let my children find their own way to whatever faith works for them. I go into my daughter’s room after she is asleep, stand by her bed studying her face; no trace of sin to be found. 

Election Night

I wrote most of the post on election night. For a while it was close, and then it wasn't close at all.

Watching the election returns on MSNBC. As I write this, the human cipher, Mittens Romney, is leading President Obama in electoral votes; one talking head after another takes to the airwaves to prognosticate. Virginia, Ohio, Florida, which way will they lean? How many votes will not be counted? If you can’t win the vote, steal the vote or deny the vote. I still can’t believe the race for the White House is as close as it appears to be, but I don’t believe Romney will win.

Too close to call in Florida.

Senate candidate Todd Aiken is not only an idiot, his comb-over is terrible; it’s like what’s left of his hair is plastered on the side of the head with Elmer’s glue. A dear friend of ours just called to confess that he cast his ballot for Romney. I’m considering disowning him. The returns continue to trickle in. Elizabeth Warren wins a senate seat in Massachusetts – maybe there is some justice in the world. The Republican moneybags poured tons of dough into Scott Brown’s campaign, but their boy was such a lightweight that even with a gigantic advantage in money he couldn't win. Another smart woman is heading to the Senate.

Appears the Republicans will maintain their stranglehold on the House, meaning we can expect at least two more years of partisan posturing, gridlock, and John Boehner.

Romney is projected to win Arizona. No surprise. Arizona is doing everything it can to be as ass-backwards and retrograde as Texas. Fuck it, let Arizona cede from the union. Switch to the Daily Show for a dose of truth disguised as comedy. Jon Stewart knows what we all know: the entire race hinges on one state, Ohio. O-Hi-O. Why do we bother holding a nationwide election when only Ohio matters? Toledo, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Columbus. Great rivers in Ohio, rivers that run through the heart of the old Rust Belt, sliding past dead factories and crumbling foundries, tattered union banners flapping in the wind.

Jon Stewart reports that Obama has 243 electoral votes to Romney’s 203. 270 is the magic number. 270 to maintain the status quo, 270 to continue socialism for the wealthy, 270 to deny humans are altering the climate, 270 to launch a preemptive strike against Iran, 270 to back Israel, no matter what, 270 to continue killing Afghans.

I voted.

I held my nose and filled in the bubbles on my ballot. The lady who handed me my ballot reminded me to return her pen after I finished voting.

The Republicans refuse to concede Ohio, even though the major networks have called the state for Obama. Maybe the GOP will claim massive voter fraud on the part of Democrats…

Chris Matthews is spewing some rot; Donald Trump is calling for a conservative revolt. What a dumb fuck. The pinheads over on Fox are foaming at the mouth and howling at the camera. They refuse to believe that their boy Romney is going down, taking a whipping from the black guy. That fat fuck, Karl Rove, claims Ohio should not have been called for Obama; Rove has charts and graphs that prove nothing more than that he’s a sore loser. Demographically, rich white guys are in trouble, and they know it on some level, even though they refuse to admit it. 

Obama must have cheated, somehow. The folks over in Romney’s camp look somber; cruel reality is settling in. In the days to come they will learn that Romney was such a lackluster candidate that a majority of his fellow Mormons voted for his opponent. Romney lost Michigan and Massachusetts, a clear repudiation of the man. I’ve written it before but it bears repeating: the more people saw of Romney, the less they liked him. Romney can exit the national stage now, take a final bow, he’s done.

Obama will win a second term, and I hope this time around he grows a spine and stands up to the freaks and fools of the GOP. By now Obama should understand that he can’t negotiate with these people; that attempts to compromise are fruitless; that Republicans only respond to one thing, power. Obama needs to put his foot on John Boehner’s neck and keep pressing until Boehner admits that Obama is his daddy.

More important is what the American left and progressives do to keep the pressure on Obama. They need to push him to restore some equality to the economy, to raise taxes on the super wealthy, to reign in corporate power, to take meaningful action on climate change, and to get the hell out of Afghanistan, Yemen, Iraq, Pakistan. 

Governing starts when the election ends.

Enjoy the celebration, Mr. Obama, but then be ready to make your bones.

The Good Book

We drive to Los Angeles to see the musical, Book of Mormon. My wife has been dying to see this production for nearly two years, and bought tickets as soon as she heard it was coming to Los Angeles. The anticipation is killing her; for her this is like having seats directly behind home plate for a World Series game.  Book of Mormon, hottest ticket in LA, sold out Pantages Theatre. We’ve left our children with their grandparents, after advising them not to bicker and fight – or else there will be hell to pay when we get back. (Our bark is many times worse than our bite, and our children ignore us most of the time.) 

Before we reach Ventura, my wife already has two text messages from the children, each accusing the other of cruelty and mistreatment.

I always enjoy venturing into the area around Hollywood and Vine because it’s a former haunt of the late Charles Bukowski, one of my favorite writers. Legend has it that Buk used to drink at the Frolic Room, a bar next door to the venerable Pantages.  The art deco theatre opened in 1930 and was owned by RKO. We’ve got ninety minutes before the show so we head for Dillon’s Irish Pub at the end of the block.

A hostess with ink designs on both shoulders ignores us for a moment; she has blonde hair but her face has an Asian cast. Finally acknowledging our existence, she dismissively says the wait is fifteen minutes; in order to place our name on the wait list we have to show ID. It’s LA, so, whatever; hand over the driver’s license.

There are flat screen TV’s everywhere, some tuned to college football, others to soccer. We find two empty stools at the bar; Real Madrid is playing Real Zaragoza on the screen above our heads. A striking brunette in a short kilt takes our order for iced tea.  Like every other waitress and female barkeep, she has the look of an aspiring actress, dancer or XXX film hopeful. None of the girls are older than twenty-five; I presume most are college students. Showing cleavage is obviously as much a job prerequisite as being able to balance a tray full of empty beer mugs, and some of the cleavage has been surgically augmented; dramatic eye makeup and false eyelashes don’t hurt, either.  Play the slutty Irish serving wench to the hilt and tips will follow. A man sitting to my wife’s left is pulling for Real Madrid, and he’s happy because the club is leading Zaragoza, 2-nil; the man on my right is eating what smells like corned beef and cabbage. We sip our iced tea and watch the waitresses hustle between tables, the bar, and the kitchen. The section on the second floor is full of guys wearing Real Madrid jerseys; Cristiano Ronaldo’s number 7 is very popular. I can’t count the number of beers on tap – it looks like every continent and nation is represented, amber and dark, pale, and of course the Guinness is flowing freely. A digital clock counts down the hours until St. Patrick’s Day.

The interior of the Pantages is breathtaking and takes one back in time to an era when motion pictures were gaining popularity, and Hollywood was just beginning to establish itself as the world’s dream factory. We’ve seen a few musicals here, and yet each time the place stops me in my tracks. The crowd is mixed, elderly and young, straight and gay, white, black and Asian, filing in and claiming their seats. I can feel the anticipation growing, but I wonder if some of the older patrons realize what they’re in for, a few minutes hence, when the lights go down and the music comes up; Book of Mormon is a scatological extravaganza, and for the next hour and a half or so the word “fuck” will cascade from the stage. Fuck you God, fuck you Jesus, fuck you and you and you, too.

I remember seeing Mormon missionaries in Tokyo when I lived there in the late 70’s and early 80’s, pairs of young white men in white shirts, black ties, and black slacks, carrying their sacred book and trying to convince Japanese people that Mormonism was the path to happiness and salvation; I saw them in train stations and shopping areas, on streets where few foreigners were ever seen.  

I start laughing ten seconds into the first number and hardly stop until intermission. Joseph Smith and the fable of his digging up gold tablets in his pasture is satirized, as is the idea that Jesus Christ walked the North American continent, way back when. I still have trouble believing that an entire religion is based on these improbable yarns, and even more trouble with the idea that American voters might elect a Mormon president. We aren’t that desperate or gullible, are we?

By the time the number Hasa Diga Eebowai is performed my sides are hurting from laughing so hard. Roughly translated, Hasa Diga Eebowai means – at least in the context of this musical – fuck you, God. This is not the upbeat Africa depicted in Disney’s Lion King, this is not “no worries for the rest of our lives,” this is AIDS and famine and want and death, and in this hopeless hell hole, a middle finger raised to the heavens makes sense.

At intermission the crowd surges for the lobby and the restrooms. Although venerable and historic, the Pantages is desperately short of toilets and by the time we reach the lobby long lines have already formed. Restroom queues are always worse for women, longer and slower moving. My wife turns west and I turn east, and the lobby is so jammed with bodies that I wonder if I can reach the bathroom, take a piss, and get back to my seat before intermission is over. I fear getting stuck in line behind some old guy with prostate issues.

When I finally get back to my seat my wife is nowhere to be seen. Most of the patrons in the immediate vicinity are checking their cell phones. What critical information have they missed in the last hour or so? My wife returns. A few rows in front of our seats, an elderly man and his wife are having an argument, though they are doing their best to appear not to be arguing. The woman appears to be telling her husband to calm down, take it easy, not be offended by the foul language or the gay overtones; this man may be the only unhappy person in the entire theatre, a curmudgeon who can’t, or won’t, allow himself to cut loose and laugh.

The second act is as satisfying as the first. The choreography is crisp, spot-on, and the actors are in fine voice; they look like they are enjoying themselves, giving their all to the show and the audience, and they deserve the standing ovation they receive. Bravo. I could easily see this production again. My wife is thrilled; the long wait was worth it.