Bedtime for Bonzo Saturday, June 05, 2004

Political extremism and I go way back. I remember bouncing around my buddy Johnny's apartment in 1981, high-fiving him and fisting the air, when we found out Reagan had been shot. Through high school I had a poster taped over my bed: "REAGAN'S GOTTA GO," with organized labor supply the cartoon boot.

He's gone now, and I have mixed feelings. Obviously, he saved the world, him and Mrs. Thatcher and that eminently sensible Pole on the fisherman's throne. It takes me twenty years of wandering to come to that conclusion. At the time I thought that the three of them weren't saving the world in the ways that mattered: People still hated each other, people were still poor, people were still dying sad and terrified and alone. It takes me twenty years of searching to realize that those problems can't be solved by politics--only talked about in ways that make us feel smug or guilty and remove the burden of action.

The debate shouldn't be, how do we create utopia; you're never going to eliminate poverty or hate. Trying to solve all the world's problems is useless and frustrating, and all the discussions become a pissing contest over righteousnes. The argument should be what our responsibility is to each other, and how best as individuals we can help others who are poor or lonely or hated. The poor you will always have with you, as a certain keen-eyed Jew observed a few years back. And as a Southern doctor commented a bit more recently: Tenderness leads to the gas chamber.

At any rate, while we were waiting for Reagan and Thatcher and the Pope to give everyone a pony, they discredited a profoundly anti-human doctrine and destroyed its strongest agents on earth. (The NYU English Department notwithstanding.) For that they deserve something. If nothing else, a sincere apology and a rest in peace.

Still, I don't love the guy. Many righty commentators are in love with him--his message, his charisma, his vision. I appreciate him but he always seemed like a politican to me, and I mean that in the worst possible sense. One with his head screwed on straight, one with the drive to do good, but a politician nonetheless. Tolkien has spoiled me: I'm still waiting for a god-king. Or the dictatorship of the proletariat. I'm easy that way.

And now the mailbag. A reader writes in, apropos my Randy Newman bullshit:


I wrote:
That, I think, is the proper response to Newman, Parker, Jackson and all the rest of them. Yup, people cheat, murder and hypocritize. You nailed that. So when are you gonna stop pouting and come on up to the grown-up table already?

She wrote:
This was funny to me because that sounds EXACTLY like something Randy would say. His point is: there is no great Father Figure in the sky running
things. God is not responsible for stupid human (or cat) behaviour. We are
our own responsibility. I don't think you've understood him at all.

I agree completely with the idea that we're responsible for our own fuckups. One of the formative moments in my philosophical career, although as usual it took me twenty years to realize it, came when I was watching "All in the Family" with my father. The Meathead made what Norman Lear imagined was a killing point about religion: If God exists, why is there so much evil in the world? My father, who has precisely the same accent as Archie, turned to me and said, "God didn't put evil in the world. People did." Score one for the engineer.

At the same time, that is not Newman's point. What I hear in his songs is: We're responsible for making the world a bad place, and that proves that there's no God. If you think otherwise, you're a dope. My point in the earlier post was: I concede the point that the world is terrible. In fact, Judeo-Christian philosophy is one long caveat that the world is a terrible place. But that doesn't mean that God doesn't exist by any stretch.

I think Newman, like Norman Lear, has a simplistic, village-atheist view of what believers believe: Oh, Jeebus, my house burned down and my wife done left me, so please make everything all right! I think you'll find, in the aggregate, that believers know perfectly well that God, like Ronald Reagan, is not going to give them a pony. But they know that if you believe in God, and allow Him to underwrite your actions, you can work practical wonders. e.g., defeating the Amazing Dancing Bear.

Enough contention! I got a game to write and a wife with a sinus.

@ 8:53:00 PM, ,

It Wasn't Living, It Was the Other Thing Friday, June 04, 2004

Great bits from the morning reading (more Kingsley):

Work was like cats were supposed to be: if you disliked and feared it and tried to keep out of its way, it knew at once and sought you out and jumped on your lap and climbed all over you to show how much it loved you.

And then:

'But it isn't the job I mind, nothing much wrong with that. It's having it, and having to have it. It's coming here so often and staying here so long that I don't like. Having to come here and having to stay here. So often and for so long each time. After you've started wishing you could stop. And coming back here again so soon after you have stopped. When you don't want to.'

Did I mention that Monday begins my last week working in New York? Must've slipped my mind...

@ 12:32:00 PM, ,

Come Sail Away! Wednesday, June 02, 2004

I should point out, since I never have before, that Sister WTJ is the eternally patient female in the photo in the upper left-hand corner of this page. The guy in the middle is an unidentified assailant.

@ 8:29:00 AM, ,

I Stand Corrected

The co-proprietor of the Last Homely House in Jersey City writes in a clarification:

As I remember it, the funniest thing about Kevin and his cat in Valis is
that the person who tells him his cat was stupid is that alien or that opera
singer or someone who is basically the conduit for Valis (a.k.a God). So,
God is answering Kevin's big question more-or-less directly. Like that old
"Nietzsche is Dead" joke.

See? Phil is even better than I described. Go make his estate even more money by buying some of his books!

@ 8:29:00 AM, ,

Yeah, They Were the Israelites!

It is a sign of the degradation of my religious and cultural imagination that I feel a tremendous goofy pleasure whenever the song "All You Zombies" comes on the iPod. I mean, there's basically nothing there to recommend it aesthetically; it's the "Greatest Story Ever Told" of religious pop songs. Or, rather, "The Ten Commandments": Unlike most holier-than-thou pop tunes its referents are strictly Before Common Era. But you can tell those lovable mop-tops from Philly are singing and believing their balls off, so I guess that makes it OK. (I actually have very warm Philly associations from the year that record came out: Sister WTJ was dating soon-to-be Brother-in-Law WTJ, who was raised outside Ben Franklin's stomping grounds. We took a trip down there, crashed the car and went to a fete. The only tapes we had on the drive were "Katy Lied" and "Born in the USA." I'm sure the Hooters were on the radio at some point...)

Does anybody know what significance the title has, biblically? I know it's the name of a short story by everyone's favorite dissolute fascist, Robert Heinlein. (Put the army in charge of everything--except my pants!) Anything more than that?

A friend suggests, in response to my post below, that Mark Twain has the hallmarks of an American Kingsley Amis. I guess I just don't see it--or rather I think Amis is more immediate because he's contemporary. Twain is funny as hell but there's still a century between us. Not a well-reasoned answer, but there you go.

A paragraph from this morning's reading:

"Very odd, this whole thing. I was a shit when I met you. I still am in lots of ways. But because of you I've had to give up trying to be a dedicated, full-time shit. I couldn't make it, hadn't the strength of character. Which is a pity in a way, because when you fall back into the ranks of failed shits or amateur shits or incidental shits you start taking on responsibility for other people."

It's probaby not as profound as Huck and Jim, and Calaveras County, but...

@ 8:06:00 AM, ,

Pointing His Plastic Finger at Me Tuesday, June 01, 2004

Random wonderfulnesses. First, from the AOL home page, a blurb about the obesity epidemic--but also the defining statement of my life:

It wouldn't be such a big deal if the problem were simply aesthetic.

Meanwhile, Kinglsey Amis continues to delight. He put me off for a while, after I realized all of his books were about middle-aged cranks obsessing about women problems. Now I've realized that this is in fact his greatest virtue. It's like sonnets--he's working in a very narrow format that gives him the freedom to come up with brilliancies. Like the following, describing a cranky Brit lacking for reading material in the American South circa 1968:

Ronnie got through the morning with the unwelcome aid of Drugs: the New Dissent and LBJ--Tool of Fascism. The former suggested to him that the penalties for going out of your way to inflict on chaps and unshocked and deeply understanding human document about bloody little fools who took drugs should be in line with the penalties for peddling the stuff; the latter that whatever LBJ might or might be a tool of he hated him slightly less than most of the people the author liked.

Also on the South:

Ronnie had already heard so much about the [Civil War] ... that he wondered occasionally, as now, whether the Americans had not somehow managed to slip in a second civil war when the rest of the world had not been looking, in 1914-17, perhaps, or 1939-42.

Brill! Here's a question for any other aesthetes in the audience: Was there ever an American writer who could pull off that kind of narrative voice? i.e., cranky, conversational, frank and dissolute--but reactionary at the same time? I mean that in the sense of a naturalistic, unaffected style--not crime writers, who turn "I'm the last honest man" up to 11.

@ 2:49:00 PM, ,