Category: Best

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Your Reward for Buying a Ticket

It’s a lot of money– $72. For a ticket to a Blue Jays game.

Nobody goes to Blue Jays games. When the Blue Jays were very successful and packing them in–18 years ago, now– tickets were about $30 for the same seats. The stadium was full– 50,000 people coming out every night to root for the Jays. If I remember correctly, the Jays were the first team to break the 2 million mark in annual attendance.

Now that nobody wants to come, the tickets are $72 each.

Why don’t they lower the price? One guess. Obviously, because there is no competition. Who is is going to fill up a baseball stadium by charging less than the Blue Jays? Nobody. That’s how baseball operates. In exchange for this special dispensation from the usual rules of competition and free enterprise, you get…. what? Yes, there is a reason why there is only one top-tier professional baseball league– because the government officially allows them to stifle competition. In exchange for that, you get to buy the team a stadium, pay $72 for a lousy seat, and buy cold chicken and fries for $14.95.

If the stadium is empty, why not lower the prices? I believe they are afraid that it will alter the public’s perception of what they should pay for a major league ticket. And once lowered, it will be difficult to fool us again.

So when nobody else wants to come to a Blue Jays game but you do, and you are generously willing to pay the outrageous sum of $72 for a lousy seat (there are no good seats anywhere in the Skydome, or in most stadiums), what exactly do you get for your hard-earned dollars?

You don’t get to see a replay of close plays. Nope. You should have stayed at home if you want to see if a runner really beat the throw to second base.
You get assailed with noise and flashing lights emanating from every square inch of the stadium. Constantly. All the time. After a while, you realize that the owners of these professional teams are desperately aware of the fact that their product is actually quite dull and uninteresting to most people most of the time so all the special effects are required to prove to you that you are having an exciting experience.

You get to buy crummy food for high prices, warm beer, ugly, cheap souvenirs, a “program” that consists mostly of lavish praise for mediocre players, and over-priced shirts and hats with the precious logo on them.

Within five minutes of the start of the game, half the stadium decides to get up and buy something to eat or go to the bathroom, forcing you to stand up to let them pass, five, six, seven times.

The seats are too small to ever feel comfortable.

The netting in front of home plate, to protect the fans from the rare event of a fluke foul tip hitting someone in the head, is annoying and ugly. I bet it’s possible to have a reasonably safe normal backstop without that massive, ugly net.

Most people seem to spend most of the game waiting to see if they get shown on the jumbotron video screen. When they do get on the screen, they jump up and down with excitement, spilling their beer. Then they go home happy, having paid $72 to see themselves on a giant TV screen.

I can’t prove it but at times it seemed like they were playing crowd noise through the speakers, as a way of hyping the alleged excitement of what was going on on the field.  I have no doubt that it is something they would do if they wanted to, while holding nothing but contempt for spoil-sports like me who want to hear the honest sound of a stadium crowd.

Every player on the Blue Jays is presented as some kind of god-like super-athlete of unspeakable accomplishments.

It’s hard to believe that on May 9, this conglomeration of staggering talents is in third place, 5 games back of Tampa Bay.

The Blue Jays in 2010 are a very odd team so far. This was a rebuilding year– they traded away their best pitcher, Roy Halliday– yet, so far, they are hanging in there in the American League East, in third place. They are five games back of Tampa Bay and the Yankees, but in any other division, they would be first, or close to first.

They lead the league in home runs, and they have had four starting pitchers throw no-hitters into the seventh inning. Four different pitchers. They also have five players hitting below .200, including the hugely expensive Lyle Overbay, and last year’s breakout star Aaron Hill.

Unfortunately, Alex Gonzalez, who leads the team in home runs with 10, doesn’t seem likely to continue the pace. Vernon Wells is a nice guy but, like Overbay, ridiculously overpaid given his achievements. I don’t expect much from the Blue Jays in 2010.

The hope for this team for the future is the five or six starting pitchers (Marcum, Romero, Cecil, Morrow, Eveland– and young Drabek in the minors), who look very promising, along with Adam Lind and 20-year-old Cuban prospect Adeiny Hechavarria.

Those starting pitchers, seriously, look like the core of a very strong starting rotation in another two or three years.

Travis Snider has yet to show he can handle major league pitching. Bautista and Fred Lewis are place-holders. I like John Buck so far.

But the Blue Jays will never again be able to match the Yankees and Boston in spending (as they did in 1992-93), so, this season, and all the rest, the Blue Jays will likely finish 3rd.

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Just Sentencing: 35 Years

Why is there no discussion about criminal sentencing in the U.S., other than the usual nut cases advocating even more and more of it?

Is there a single politician in the U.S. who doesn’t run on a platform of “getting touch on crime”. Those criminals! They commit crimes. Next thing you know, they’re out there just walking the streets and committing even more crimes, right after their 30 year sentence is up!

There is a logical absurdity at work here, of course. Ever since Nixon in 1972, every American politician, including Democrats Clinton and Carter, have pledged to get tough on crime, just like the Republicans do. But if every new generation of leaders gets tougher on crime than the previous generation, we must have long ago reached maximum toughness. In fact, I think we’re at a level of insanity that approaches the very high standards set by Salem, Massachusetts in the 17th Century, and Spain during the Inquisition.

So, how would you react if someone said, “you know what– I think we need to start showing some compassion, and we need to reduce prison time, improve prison conditions, and concentrate more on rehabilitation? How would you react? I’m not sure. Polls suggest that most people will react with sneering and laughter. Are you nuts? Do you know how easy criminals have it? Man, I wish I could sit around all day in my comfy prison cell just watching TV and stuffing my face all at taxpayer expense! No worries! No bills! Did you know how often they weasel out any sentence at all?

I would challenge anyone who thinks like that to spend a day in one of our lavish, over–crowded prisons.

What we have is a society that has become vicious, heartless, vindictive, and irrational. Yes, that’s us. We’re nuts. We have been increasing sentences– in the U.S., at least– and Harper wants to do it in Canada– and we have reached a level of absurdity: 20, 30, 40 years for property and drug crimes!

How does anyone know what the right sentence is? I just read about a first-time offender in the U.S. who got 33 years– I’m not making this up– for hiding a video camera in a women’s locker room. How do you know 33 years is “right”? What is 33 years? What pleasure does the judge get when he looks into this man’s face and decides his life should be destroyed. It was his first mistake– enough. Destroy him. Crush his spirit. Erase his existence. Annihilate his soul.

You could argue that it likely wasn’t his first mistake: it was the first time he was caught.  But you could also argue that most of us have sinned at one time or another and never been caught.

That is the kind of human being the judge is: he will deny it until he is blue in the face, but it’s true– he takes pleasure in doing it. It gratifies him. He should admit it, so we can have an honest discussion of crime and punishment in America.

And America needs to look at itself and ask: if what we believe about crime and punishment was true, how come we’re not the most crime-free society on earth, because almost nobody punishes as harshly and ruthlessly as we do.

On Obama:

Tommy Barnett, 56, an independent of Cullman, Ala., said: “Somebody told me he’s not from here. I said I never heard of Barack Obama, that’s not American, then we find out he’s Muslim. What they got somebody like that running our country for?” (NY Times, April 21, 2010)

He doesn’t. You do.

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Tiger Woods

You have to give it to Tiger Woods– his “strategy” for dealing with his scandal was flawless. Controlled disclosure. Hide. Pro-forma confession and penitence. Chill. “Treatment”. Resurrection and resumption of endorsements. It’s all as if nothing had happened except– guess what– he’s now even more famous and thus worth even more than he was before. Even PBS Newshour had to do a story on him. That’s depressing.

I personally thought the Nike ad was brilliant. It was, of course, entirely manufactured by a pr firm (which at one time even included Ari Fleischer, press secretary to George W. Bush for a few years), but you have to consider the fact that a good pr firm would certainly advise Tiger not to undermine his own very expensive strategy by carrying on as if nothing had happened. I imagine they might have asked him– what do you want to do? Do you want to continue to philander as if there was no tomorrow? No problem– we can do that. We can do the George Clooney approach. Stay single and make no commitments to anybody. Choose carefully. Don’t, for God’s sake, promise anything.

The Nike ad was bold, brilliant, and moving. Don’t listen to the critics who claim–as if this was a revelation–that Tiger’s father was actually describing Tiger’s mother, not Tiger. That is irrelevant. It’s a work of art, not a documentary. The important thing is that it appears to confront the issue in a tasteful, dignified tone. What would you say to Tiger: what were you thinking? And the beautiful thing about it is that Tiger doesn’t give an answer. He doesn’t say anything at all. It’s as if he was above that sort of pedestrian give and take, the kind of thing the tabloids suck on. It’s as if a mere apology would be inadequate and demeaning. It’s as if no scandal, no matter how salacious, can touch the real Tiger Woods. It’s as if he took the paradox at the heart of the question– do you mean, about my behaviour or about the consequences of getting caught— and raised it, in his mind, to the level of poetry and religion. What is “is”? What is morality and ethics and principle when you make enough money to buy and sell entire nations? When you spend your spare time in a darkened casino in Las Vegas betting you can have even more money, instead of travelling, or reading, or supporting a charity– I mean, really supporting a charity, not that token foundation crap– No, Tiger says nothing. He might just be thinking, I had no idea how the media would try to cash in on the destruction of my family, with such self-righteous glee. I had no idea that the public would project themselves into my story except that would have had the luxury of pretending they really deserved it. He had no idea of how entitled the public feels to your soul, your dignity, your privacy, once they have bought into the image you fabricated just for them to substitute for the emptiness at the core of your talent.

Don’t forget– none of the scandalous stuff was anybody’s damn business in the first place. I heard a golfer state that he used to think of Tiger Woods as a role model and now he is so, so disappointed, and I wanted to slap him on the side of the head and scream: Tiger Woods was never a role model. He was a manufactured plastic robot intended to manipulate you into buying extravagantly worthless trinkets with his face or name on them. Then he took your money and gambled with it, alone, in Las Vegas, with his body guards to keep smelly, unimportant people like you out of his life; he spent it on nannies and maids and gardeners and publicists and lawyers and pr consultants, and the women… Anyone who would see Tiger Woods as a role model in the first place was always a fool.

But anyone who buys the repentance shtick, and the phony reconciliation, and the phony therapy– is even more deluded.

You want a role model? Go down the street and watch somebody work hard to support his family. Read about Bethany Maclean or Brooksley Born or Bernhard Schmidt. Never heard of them? Of course not.

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The Magdalene Sisters (2002)

“The Magdalene Sisters”(2002)

My biggest gripe with Hollywood movies, like “Shawshank Redemption”, “Freedom Writers”, “The Blind Side”, “The Fisher King”, and, most egregiously, “The Dead Poets Society”– and many others– is the way they try to convince their audiences that they are having a deep, authentic experience, by showing you things that seem edgy and profound, but which, in fact, have been carefully packaged and cauterized to remove anything that might be genuinely provocative or compelling.

They habitually simplify life into villains who practically announce their nefariousness, and angels who practically wear halos. You might think this is a benchmark of cheesey action flicks, but “The Blind Side” and “Freedom Writers” and “Mr. Holland’s Opus” and the rest all do it with just as much cheese. The audience is clued in on who to cheer for and who to hiss at. The villains conveniently stand and listen in humiliation as the hero makes his or her grand speech. Then they crawl away in defeat as virtue triumphs and goodness prevails. When the film is supposedly based on a true story, these straw men are often fictionalizations.

What happens to the audience? Because the film is careful to clue them in as to who is “good” and who is “bad”, the audience feels that they possess the ability to make those judgments in real life, even if the people they know don’t look like Morgan Freeman or George Clooney. (They feel even better if it’s Freeman– I am not a racist!)

In real life, however, the good guy, the misunderstood artist, the person with the disability, don’t have the charisma of George Clooney or Julia Roberts. So we treat them just as badly as they are treated in the film. If only a camera crew were around to record us, we might begin to recognize ourselves. But not in the roles we expect.

I believe it encourages hypocrisy. It encourages people to publicly embrace one set of values and believe they actually believe in them, while glibly practicing another. Hollywood actually trains us to look for certain simplifications and signals that don’t exist in real life. We are convinced that if we saw the right clues, we would make the right choices, but those markings never appear in real people. We believe we would know a Van Gogh if we saw him, but most of us buy our wall decorations from Walmart.

So I recently re-watched “The Magdalene Sisters”, and I was struck at a number of times it refuses to cater to that uplifting feel-good Hollywood spirit. For example, one of the “victims”, named Bernadette,– whom we’re supposed to root for in the Hollywood version– is caring for an older woman who is dying. This older woman was not as cruel to the girls as the nuns were, but she did supervise the girls. Bernadette, listens to the older woman ramble on about how she herself had a child out of wedlock years and years ago, and she didn’t want to go to the hospital, and she wishes someone would stay with her. But Bernadette is impatient to get on to her other jobs. She says she has to go. The older woman begs her to stay and comfort her for a while. Bernadette hisses at her: the nuns don’t care about comfort. They only care about getting the work done. They don’t care about you and I don’t care about you either. “So why don’t you do us all a favor and hurry up and die”.

It’s a stunning moment, shocking, and yet utterly believable, and powerful. But wait– Bernadette is one of the “victims” of the movie– she’s supposed to be admirable and virtuous, so we can give her a rousing cheer when she escapes in the final reel.

But of course, that’s not life. It’s not the reality of life. It’s the rose-tinted picture we are given by Hollywood, and, all too frequently, by the news, but it’s not reality.

So when I read this review of “The Magdalene Sisters” by Steven D. Greydanus, I was puzzled by his distress:  [2022-05-09 update: I believe Mr. Greydanus has revised his review since I first read, possibly in response to my comments which he acknowledged reading.  Fair enough.  So I give you a link to his apologia for rejecting the film.]

the film simply presents its nuns, priests, and parents as cruel, judgmental, and evil — end of story. Its sole interest in them is insofar as they are responsible for the unjust suffering of the girls.

Well, we know that the Magdalene laundries existed, and we know that up to 30,000 girls were imprisoned in them, and we know that many of them treated the girls abusively, like slave labour. There’s not much dispute about that.

So whatever does he mean? Does he believe that the girls’ memories are wrong– that actually, it was all more like “Bells of St. Mary’s”?

I found the portraits of the nuns convincing and very believable. No, the film wasn’t about the nuns, so it didn’t spend a lot of time looking into their background or their personal lives outside of the convent– but, seriously, does Mr. Greydanus believe they might actually have been nice?

In fact, I thought the strength of the movie was that it tried very hard to create a feeling of authenticity by leaving things in the movie that are not easily explained. At one point, Crispina takes her night gown and soaks it in cold water. Then she puts it on and goes back to bed. Why? We don’t know. It isn’t explained to us. The Hollywood audience walks out– I don’t get this movie.

But it struck me as exactly the kind of inexplicable detail a person would relate to somebody in real life. When the real life listener asks “why”, the answer is, “I don’t know”. To leave these things out of the movie, would be to create a false sense of logic and linearity to the plot that we never, ever experience in real life. Real life is full of little puzzles and unpredictable turns of events. In real life, events are often directed by hidden compromises and arrangements that aren’t revealed to us by a narrator.

Astonishingly, Mr. Greydanus then proceeds to compare “The Magdalene Sisters” to “Birth of a Nation”, D. W. Griffiths’ tribute to the KKK. I don’t have enough bandwidth to explain to you why that is unimaginably perverse if you don’t already know. But Mr. Greydanus feels he has to defend Christianity against this film– which is truly absurd. Real Christianity has as little to fear from this film as capitalism has to fear from the sub-prime mortgage scandal. Wait a minute…

At one point in the film, Sister Bridget decides to “treat” the girls to a showing of “The Bells of Saint Mary’s”, the saccharine Bing Cosby/Ingrid Bergman picture about saintly nuns and priests helping disadvantaged youth in Brooklyn. Sister Bridget introduces the film by confessing a “shocking” sin: from the time she was a young girl, she has had a secret love…. films. It tells you something about Greydanus that he sees this as a token, inadequate attempt to “humanize” the nuns. In fact, it is clearly a revelation of just how twisted they have become. Sister Bridget expects the girls to find this “confession” endearing, and we see just how this has more to do with her own deluded self-image than with any genuine attempt to be kind to the girls.

It is a direct comment on those ridiculous lives of the saints stories that are in endless circulation wherein they try to tell you that St. Stuffedwig or whatever was not always incredibly pious and devoted, but could sometimes actually be mischievous and fun-loving. Aaaahhh. So you see, Sister Bridget (a wonderful performance by Geraldine MacEwan) is not really the stuffed shirt she seems to be. Greydanus got it completely wrong, just as he got the entire film wrong.

And that’s when I realized that his criticism that the film was not realistic was actually criticism that the film was not Hollywood enough– it didn’t give you a single evil character who was responsible for the evil that happened to Bernadette and Margaret and Crispina and who could then be vanquished by the forces of goodness in the end. The problem with the film, though Greydanus doesn’t admit it, is that it places blame squarely within the institution of the church. The sisters are cruel to the girls because that’s what they do: they try to bend the recalcitrant back to the will of God through brute force. That’s what the church stood for when it built these institutions, and that’s what the nuns and priests were trained to do by the church. If Greydanus wishes to be an apologist for the faith, he is right about one thing: this film, unlike cartoons like “Dead Poet’s Society”, is a genuine threat.

Sure enough, Greydanus likes the very Hollywood “The Blind Side”, though even he has to acknowledge that Michael Oher is merely a prop for the Tuohys’ amazing virtue, even though he doesn’t admit that the scene of Mrs. Tuohy charging onto the field to encourage Michael to defend his quarterback is a far more ridiculous distortion of reality than anything in “The Magdalene Sisters”.

He also loves “Star Wars”, perhaps one of the most trivial popular films of all time. He even gave “Episode VI: Return of the Jedi” an A- ! Perhaps because Darth Vader, as opposed to Sister Bridget, is such a richly developed, nuanced character.

In a separate review of a film called “Amish Grace”, about the willingness of an Amish community to forgive a man who murdered their children, Greydanus is dissatisfied with the depiction of some journalists. His comments are instructive:

A subplot involving a TV news crew investigating the sincerity of Amish forgiveness is the film’s most notable weakness. These outsiders are meant as bridge characters mediating between the audience and the Amish, but their merely journalistic investigative curiosity about the facts of the case is an obvious screenwriting foil. A more effective approach might have been to give the journalists complacent, dismissive assumptions about the Amish, about whom they presumably know little or nothing, and then gradually challenge and overturn those assumptions over the course of the story.

Here we have the naked Christian reviewer: he openly admits that a “true story” should have made up, out of whole cloth, a negative depiction of the media.

Here we have a reviewer actually suggesting that the film would have been improved if the film-makers had only reduced a character to a stereotype. He wants them to cater to that conservative Christian canard about the “liberal” media and it’s alleged bias against true religion and traditional values.

My personal experience is that a lot of journalists have more respect for the Amish, who appear to at least be sincere about their religion, than they do for two-faced bigots like Michael Medved.

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Kitty Cat: Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenin”

“The Shcherbatskys consult doctors over Kitty’s health which has been failing since she realizes that Vronsky did not love her and that he did not intend to propose marriage to her, and that she refused and hurt Levin, whom she cares for, in vain. A specialist doctor advises that Kitty should go abroad to a health spa to recover. ” From the Wikipedia synopsis of “Anna Karenin” by Leo Tolstoy.

“Anna Karenin” is allegedly the greatest novel of all time. Well, on some lists. “The Brother’s Karamazov” is often at the top of the list, and so is “Ulysses” by Joyce, and Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary”, and “In Search of Lost Time” by Proust.

So Kitty needs to go to a spa to recover. That, in essence, is the problem I have with Anna Karenin. The whole book is about extremely privileged people committing stupid acts and then having nervous breakdowns and scooting themselves off to a spa or an estate somewhere to “recover” from their awful, horrible, traumatic experiences. It’s sounds like a Russian “Gone With the Wind”. We all want to be rich and privileged just so we can have such beautiful crises.

In the film “The Last Station”, Sophia, Tolstoy’s wife, is informed that Tolstoy has run away from home. Yes, he did, at 80, fed up with his wife’s nagging him about giving her the copyrights to his books. There are a lot of terrible flaws to this scene that are emblematic of the entire film.

Firstly, Sophia immediately becomes hysterical and tries to throw herself into the pond. But you thought, he just left on a train, right? And she’s been married to him for 30 years, right? It’s simply hard to believe in that reaction. Dramatically, that moment cries out for a few moments of “what do you mean he left on a train? Where to? Why didn’t he tell me?” You would expect some annoyance on her part, rather than this immediate, overwhelming despair.

She really does throw herself into the pond and sort of drowns. It’s a silly scene. It’s not like she picked some lonely time and place where no one was likely to rescue her. Her family and friends haul her out and turn her on her side, but she hasn’t swallowed any water and doesn’t vomit, and then, later, she reacts comically when she is told that Tolstoy was merely concerned about her. You do wish that someone would grab her and shout, “don’t be pathetic!” Send her to a spa.

I started reading Tolstoy again because of a reference by Philip Yancey, and because of the recent movie “The Last Station”, which, by the way, is as melodramatic and overwrought as “Anna Karenin”.

“Vronsky, embarrassed by Karenin’s magnanimity, attempts suicide by shooting himself. He fails in his attempt but wounds himself badly.” Wikipedia Synopsis.

Is this tragic or comic? When I first read this novel back in the 1970’s, I thought it was gloriously, beautifully, astonishingly tragic.

Now, I find it a bit ridiculous.

My personal list of the best novels ever written?

1. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoevsky)

2. Brothers Karamazov (Fyodor Dostoevsky)

3. Beautiful Losers (Leonard Cohen)

4. The Stranger (Albert Camus)

5. The Pearl (John Steinbeck)

6. The Castle (Franz Kafka)

7. Animal Farm (George Orwell)

8. Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain)

9. Slaughterhouse Five (Kurt Vonnegut Jr.)

10. Anna Karenin (Leo Tolstoy)

But don’t put too much weight on my list: literature is not American Idol. There is no point to this competition, except perhaps to draw peoples’ attention to great books.

“Wolf Hall” by Hilary Mantel is also a great book. So is “Life of Pi”.

More uptodate:  Jonathan Franzen’s “The Corrections” and David Foster Wallace “Infinite Jest” and “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men”.

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The Harper Valley PTA

When I was very, very young, I actually kind of liked this song, even though it was country, and obviously a little cheesy.

The Harper Valley PTA sends a note home with a little girl. It’s addressed to her mother. The Harper Valley PTA has decided to take it upon itself to correct Mrs. Johnson’s approach to parenting. Mrs. Johnson, it seems, has been going around with men, drinking, and just generally “going wild”. She wears her dresses “way too high”.

The PTA just happens to be meeting that afternoon and Mrs. Johnson struts right over to the meeting and walks up to the front and lays it on the line for the Harper Valley PTA:

Well, there’s Bobby Taylor sittin’ there and seven times he’s asked me for a date
Mrs. Taylor sure seems to use a lot of ice whenever he’s away
And Mr. Baker, can you tell us why your secretary had to leave this town?
And shouldn’t widow Jones be told to keep her window shades all pulled completely down?

Well, well. I really do like the wrap-up:

And you have the nerve to tell me that you think that as a mother I’m not fit.
Well this is just a little Peyton Place and you’re all Harper Valley Hypocrites.

I liked that “as a mother, I’m not fit”– punchy and thunky. Wow. You almost feel sorry for this mythical institution, the Harper Valley PTA. I liked the song. Everybody did– it was a huge cross-over hit. I dare say I thought, there, that will be the end of hypocrisy in the world. Now that we’ve all agreed about how contemptible it is.

The funny thing, you just know that the thousands of Harper Valley PTA’s across the country all loved the song too. They all probably sang along, snapping their fingers, and shaking their heads at those hypocrites.

It calls to mind Jon Stewart’s joke at the Oscars in 2008: listing the films that dealt with important social issues, he closes with “and none of those issues was ever a problem again.”

Or fat, pant-suited, middle-aged women in Las Vegas joyfully singing along as Kenny Rogers contemplates putting Ruby “in the ground”.

There was a brief flurry of songs about hypocrisy in the early 1970’s and Joe South– improbably– won a Grammy with “Games People Play” in 1968.   There was “Signs” by Five Man Electrical Band and “Indian Reservation” by the Raiders.  There was “Billy Don’t be a Hero”.   and “One Tin Soldier”.

It was a veritable orgy of righteousness and purity.

It was real trend!

Don’t forget– this is the year the “Little Green Apples” beat “Hey Jude” as “Song of the Year”.

The New Seekers had a worldwide hit with a Coke jingle (“I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing”). How sad is that? Wow. Makes me wish I could go back in time just so I could hate that song even more than I did.

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A Saint in Every Dream

And they all pretend they’re orphans and their memory’s like a train
You can see it getting smaller as it pulls away
And the things you can’t remember tell the things you can’t forget
That history puts a saint in every dream
(“Time”, Tom Waits)

A great phrase in a great lyric comes to mind as readily as a lovely image you remember from a distant place of important events in your life. In this case: “history puts a saint in every dream”. I’ve wondered for years what exactly that means.

It’s not the kind of line you sing while hanging upside down, wet, on a trapeze dripping over those awestruck young women who all seemed, in their faces, to be screaming “I want to be her!” It’s something you overhear in a bar, over the smell of urine and stale beer, and the rumble of streetcars or trains, and the dismal cuckold of useless tears.

I think it means that what we don’t remember–that we are not conscious of– constantly intrudes on our interpretation of past events, especially when our memory of those events is suspect.

History is written by the victors, of course, including the emotional victors, and we typically interpret events in light of the prejudices adopted afterwards. Most of us probably remember that the Americans entered the war against Germany to stop them from killing Jews. They did not– they entered because Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and Germany happened to be allied with Japan. Most of us probably remember a kind thing or two about someone who later treated us shabbily.

Only a few years before Pearl Harbor, Great Britain had negotiated a great peace with Hitler and Nazi rallies were held in Madison Square Gardens. A few years later, Stalin became our best friend, our comrade, until he too had to be reanimated. America supported Bin Laden when he took on the Soviets– we know how that ended.

But “history puts a saint in every dream”.

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Ian and Sylvia

I was reading about the folk scene in New York City in the early 1960’s once and came across what I thought was an extraordinary comment. This was time of incredible intellectual and cultural ferment, and Greenwich Village was rich with young talents like Bob Dylan, Simon & Garfunkel, Phil Ochs, Tim Hardin, Peter, Paul, & Mary, Tom Rush, Tom Paxton, the Roches, and so on.

The comment was something like this: many aspiring folk singers envied the talents of any number of song-writers and performers, but if you asked anyone who they would most like to be– if they could be someone else– the answer was usually Ian Tyson or Sylvia Fricker.

Ian & Sylvia were not among the most successful of those performers– though, for a time, they were quite successful– nor among the most prolific or talented. But they were very talented, moderately successful, and, perhaps more than anything else, beautiful. They were beautiful in that magical, transcendent mode that radiates class and intelligence and sophistication. Even this album cover conveyed this: they are not posing. They exist in a sort of conscious state of distinguished self-contemplation, with neither ego nor false humility. They have momentarily paused for the image, not caring if we are impressed or not, because they know what they look like and they know what they are.

One of my brothers owned the album “Lovin’ Sound”, pictured above, which was released in 1967. As an adolescent, the cover picture of Sylvia with the low-cut top– that elegant cleavage– stirred me for obvious reasons. I wasn’t yet a huge fan of their music — now I realize it was probably too authentic and complex for my tastes at the time. When I listen to the song “Lovin’ Sound” today, I am far more impressed with it. Restraint and taste are the last things an adolescent learns to appreciate. But the album cover stayed in my mind for decades. A few years ago, I started searching the internet for it and, surprisingly, had great difficulty locating a copy. Just recently, I finally succeeded.

Listen to “The Lovin’ Sound”. It’s trendy– songs about universal love and peace were hot for a while there in the late 1960’s — but a little richer than something like, say, “Come on people now/smile on your brother/ everybody get together/ start to love one another right now”.

Your world is crying now my friend
But give it Love
And it will mend
And, teach you All
The music to the Lovin Sound
Oh, the Lovin Sound

Well, okay. So maybe it isn’t that much more sophisticated. But it’s a fine song, a bit marred by a somewhat jarring attempt to meld folk and rock styles that reminds me of “The Sound of Silence”.

They had a tv show. They struggled through a few more albums that never seemed to go anywhere.

Then they split. Ian went out west to become a cowboy and sing cowboy songs and run his ranch in Alberta, and Sylvia worked for the CBC. Maybe he cheated on her. Maybe she cheated on him. We don’t know– that’s part of what gave them class: no public drama. Peter Gzowski of the CBC, in narration over some documentary on ’60’s folk groups, says they had “artistic and personal differences”.

But they remain iconic to me, the definition of grace and class, the essence of intelligent, cultured expression, and I can’t think of a single other ensemble that comes close to them in their prime in that regard.

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At Seventeen

Janis Ian wrote “At Seventeen” in 1973, at the age of 22. She was already somewhat well-known for an earlier protest song, “Society’s Child”. “At Seventeen” — it seems astonishing to me now– became a huge hit, on the pops singles charts, eventually reaching #1.

Here’s a bit of interesting trivia: Janis Ian appeared on the very first episode of “Saturday Night Live” and performed this song.

I don’t know of any other song like it. How many singer-songwriters would write and perform these lines:

And murmur vague obscenities
To ugly girls like me, at seventeen.

About the same number as those who would write a song like “Donald and Lydia”.

The song, if you’re not familiar with it, is about the judgments teenagers make about each other, about “those of us with ravaged faces/lacking in the social graces”, about excluding those who fall short– those who are too short or clumsy for basketball, who never receive valentines, and never get to hear those “vague obscenities”– the most rich and allusive line in the song. It is suggested that the beauty queens will get their comeuppance:

So remember those who win the game
Lose the love they sought to gain
In debentures of quality
and dubious integrity

The small town eyes will gape at you
In dull surprise when pain in due
Exceeds accounts received
At seventeen.

I’m not sure what that means. That the love you get for being beautiful is of “dubious integrity”? Temporary? Transient? I thought the song would have worked better if the “small town eyes” were “gaping” at the wrecks of the lives of those who were excluded because of their “ravaged faces” and who found solace in other places, like drugs, self-abasement, whatever. And I’m not sure that just because you’re beautiful you can’t have true love.

Either way– “exceeds accounts received”– is a clever line. Either way, your punishment, your suffering will never be the amount you deserve. Oh how badly we want to cling to the idea that you do deserve what you get. In almost all the movies about people with disabilities who overcome monumental obstacles to “succeed”, the person with the disability is glamorized. They are disabled, but beautiful, or charming, or peaceful and quietly stoic, like Michael Oher in “Blind Side”. They make you feel good because you tell yourself that you would have behaved decently to this poor, unfortunate soul.

Would we behave as decently to unfortunate souls who don’t have anything lovable about them? Who don’t agree to be the “canvas” upon which we paint our own virtue?

John Prine, an indispensable artist, wrote the song “Donald and Lydia” in 1971, and it appeared on his brilliant first album “John Prine” (which also included “Sam Stone”, “Flag Decal”, and “Hello in There”–three other great songs).

Here’s a taste:

Lydia hid her thoughts like a cat
Behind her small eyes sunk deep in her fat
She read romance magazines up in her room
And felt just like Sunday on Saturday afternoon.

Lydia and Donald are both ill-equipped to have any kind of success in society. They are unattractive, socially inept, and they know it. They’re like Janis Ian’s seventeen-year-old girl– desperate for a shot at love.

They are as real as your right hand, but they are very, very rarely the subject of music or song or film, in our society. We’re too busy selling phony stories that worship women like Leigh-Ann Touhy (Blind Side) while short-changing the very people she wants to help by reducing them, as they say, to “canvases upon which we paint the image of our own virtue”.

Lydia is just plain fat. Donald is just one of “too many”, a private first class in the army.

There were spaces between Donald
And whatever he said
Strangers had taught him to live in his head
He envisioned the details of romantic scenes
After midnight in the stillness of the barracks latrine

Donald and Lydia find each other– in their dreams. In a flight of fancy, Prine imagines them reaching out from their homely little enclaves of self-doubt, across the ether and flotsam of human insensitivity, to find each other and connect in some mystical, orgasmic union of lost souls.

They made love in the mountains
they made love in the streams
they made love in the valleys
they made love in their dreams
and when it was over
there was nothing to say
’cause mostly they made love from 10 miles away.

There are very, very few movies that deal honestly with the harsh facts of life for people like Donald and Lydia and girls with “ravaged faces”. Since most of North America believes that the function of entertainment is to allow you to escape from your dreary little life into fantasies…

Perhaps the best, still, is Paddy Chayefsky’s “Marty” (1955), about a likeable Italian American butcher with no illusions about himself or his prospects.

Great Dialogue (from “Roger Dodger” 2002)

Roger: You can’t sell a product without first making people feel bad.
Nick: Why not?
Roger: Because it’s a substitution game. You have to remind them that they’re missing something from their lives. Everyone’s missing something, right?
Nick: I guess.
Roger: Trust me. And when they’re feeling sufficiently incomplete, you convince them your product is the only thing that can fill the void. So instead of taking steps to deal with their lives, instead of working to root out the real reason for their misery, they go out and buy a stupid looking pair of cargo pants.

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Glenn Beck

“What I feel like saying is, sir, prove to me that you are not working with our enemies, and I know you’re not. I’m not accusing you of being an enemy. But that’s the way I feel and I think a lot of Americans will feel that way.” Glenn Beck, interviewing Keith Ellison, the first Muslim member of Congress, in 2008.

With the exception of Anne Coulter, I think most rational people today accept that McCarthyism was a bad thing. So we are waiting for the correct label for this kind of behavior by Glenn Beck, if it’s not simply McCarthyism. Well, it is McCarthyism. And it is as ugly and contemptible as we always thought McCarthyism was. And as it was in the era of Joe McCarthy, the majority (probably) of respectable conservatives are standing by silently because they are terrified of taking on these assholes.

Wouldn’t it be amazing if someone like James Dobson or Billy Graham or Ted Haggard posted an editorial saying that while he is a God-fearing Christian and principled conservative, he won’t stand for this kind of bullying or baiting or personal attack and he urges all citizens to show some respect for each other? And while he’s at it, he might mention that every night he prays for Obama to be safe, and for his children to be blessed with a father, and for his wife to feel deeply the richness of a good family life.

Sigh.

This is not trivial. As a Christian, the fact that the most prominent “leaders” of the church in the United States will never in a million years say anything like that is a theological and philosophical problem that I can’t solve.

Was there a race issue involved with Joe Wilson, calling Obama a liar?

Do we even need the race issue to recognize stunningly bad manners? Do we need a box of kleenex to deal with the fact that his election campaign fund-raising went up after the incident?

How long before a scary new political party is formed in the U.S.? Wait– is there a need for a radical, far-right, extremist party? Can’t the Republicans fit the bill?

The Toronto Police recently discovered some strange pipes and wires in the back of a van. The owner, apparently, told them that he had an alternative fuel system installed in the vehicle.

In the mistaken belief that you can’t be too careful (I believe that you can, in fact, be too careful), they cordoned off about 1.6 kilometers around the vehicle, barred people from their homes and businesses, and called in the bomb squad.

They then announced the bomb squad had defused the bomb by the early evening.

The owner of vehicle was charged with violation of his probation and possession of a bomb. Six hours later, they announced that it was, indeed, an alternative fuel system, and the charges would be dropped but the owner was not released.

The next day, the owner was released and the police announced he would not be charged.

My question is this: what did they “defuse”?