When people hear the word "environmentalist" they generally think "tree-hugger": That is, someone who likes going for walks in the woods and thinks flowers are pretty. Basically, a pussy. And I will admit that I do like going for walks in the woods. But I don't particularly want to be chased through the woods by grizzly bears. That is to say, I like being "out in nature" as far as that goes, but I've spent just enough time amidst wild surroundings to have lost my illusions about nature returning those warm feelings. A lot of my experiences in "getting away from it all" have really driven home the point of how dependent I am on all those things I claim to be getting away from, like grocery stores and central heating. It's all well and good to say that you want to go experience solitude in the tranquility of nature, but it only takes one time getting your truck hopelessly stuck in the mud twenty miles from nowhere before you start getting a powerful jones to talk to somebody, anybody -- preferably somebody with a good high-clearance truck and a tow line. So I realize that a kind of theme-park appreciation of nature is often an artifact of middle-class urban white people. My experience so far of people who live in rural surroundings is that not many of them seem to shop at REI. But they do know how to make it through a cold winter. And they have tow lines.
The kind of environmentalist I am is the kind who thinks that modern humans have a warped idea of where we stand vis-a-vis the Natural World. Basically it comes down to the idea that there is such a thing as "the Natural World", and that it's somewhere over there. Over there out in the woods with Bambi and Thumper and all the other little woodland creatures. Over there in Somebody Else's Problem Territory. This view is not unique to people who believe that mankind is separate from nature because we were made in God's image and he has given us dominion over the Earth (sure was nice of Him, wasn't it?). It's often just as pronounced in self-proclaimed rationalists. Even the standard depiction of evolution shows a line of progressively more evolved creatures ending in us, as though the upright-walking hominid at the far right of the illustration is the only reason the little amphibian at the left bothered to crawl up on the beach at all. (And as always, where you crop the frame is as important as what's inside it. )
This is the outlook of a culture with an extremely short memory. A culture where real estate agents seem to have no problem selling view houses in the hills around Los Angeles in spite of the fact that they have a habit of getting washed away by mudslides or destroyed by wildfires on a regular basis or that they are built at the base of a still-growing mountain range on top of a major seismic fault; Because as long as it's been several years since the last of these catastrophes wrecked the neighborhood, nobody seems to care. This is not a culture with the patience to reckon with concepts like "geological time."
It's interesting to see how this view differs from cultures who marked the passage of time in millenia rather than in bits-per-second. As a kid, the Old Testament version of God (or, for my readers of the Jewish faith, just plain God) made a big impression on me. Not just because the Old Testament had the most exciting stories in it -- Samson and Noah and the like -- but because the God it portrayed had a real flair for the dramatic. Old Testament God was kind of like a divine version of the Incredible Hulk. Most of the time he was an alright guy, clear-thinking and good-hearted. But man, get him angry (and to be honest, this wasn't particularly hard to accomplish) and next thing you know he's all "Arrr! Puny humans! God smash!!"
Always with the smiting, Old Testament God. Flooding the Earth, wiping whole cities off the map, killing all the firstborn children, turning people into pillars of salt. You definitely wouldn't like him when he's angry.
This portrayal of the personification of the forces of nature seems pretty consistent with a lot of religions springing from societies that lived on a thin margin of survival. If the harsh, often violently capricious natures of Zeus or Poseidon or Odin or Jehovah seem unduly grim from a modern perspective, it is worth noting that the people who revered these gods were often only one bad storm away from oblivion. In the absence of any understanding of why these things happened, it was probably more comforting to think of natural forces as resulting from the actions of ill-tempered gods than as random, unpredictable occurrences. After all, a god could be bargained with. If Very Bad Things happened because God was angry, well we'd better make sure not to make him angry, right? People like to think there's something they can do.
And while the current usage of terms like Druids or Wiccans may conjure an image of middle-class anglophiles with an odd predilection for flowing silks and spelling magic with a "k", it's a safe bet that back in the day the original practitioners of those well-known nature-worshipping traditions took a substantially more, shall we say "nuanced" view of the workings of the Wondrous Forces of Nature. Which may go a long way towards explaining the pits full of human bones that archeologists keep digging out from under the altar stones in their holy sites. Something about showing the gods that you were serious about winning their favor, serious enough to give up something of value.
If I say that modern humans have lost something by reducing Nature to a lovely postcard sunset when it used to mean "Everything In the Universe Including Me", I am certainly not suggesting that we ought to try to return to the good old days of human sacrifice or recreate some era of Noble Savages that never existed in the first place. But I do sometimes think that we have lost something in our capacity for awe in the way we view the world around us, awe as in "great reverence mixed with mortal terror". This is what I'm thinking when I consider that the most powerful earthquake I've ever experienced, a 6.8 on the richter scale, was several orders of magnitude weaker than the quake that just occurred under the Indian Ocean. Seeing the unbelievable devastation currently visited upon the inhabitants of that region by the merest hiccup of the planet's tectonic plates, it occurs to me that we humans are still pretty puny, still huddled together for warmth against the unrelenting storm outside.
It's probably a good thing to remember from time to time.
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Here's a link for Oxfam's relief fund if you're interested.
I always enjoy the commercials around the holiday season for their shamelessness. Never is the tendency to equate money with love more nakedly displayed than during the "holiday shopping season." Of course it's a given that if you want your kids to love you it is vital to purchase the right gift. It's the true meaning of Christmas! Don't be a Scrooge -- do you want your kids to grow up to be serial killers?
The funniest bits, though, are the romantically-themed ads. Jewelry ads are particularly heavy-handed in this regard. The best example I saw this year featured women at a cocktail party swooning over the ring that their friend is wearing, with the buzzline "he got it at (insert name of company here)." Then we pan over to a wife looking in disgust at her husband, who presumably didn't get her ring at (company name.) Now she can only gaze in envy at the superior number of carats displayed on the ring finger of her rival and curse the day she married her pathetic excuse for a husband. Meanwhile said husband sits hunched forward, drink in hand, muttering the tagline through clenched teeth, his voice shaking with a mixture of avarice and barely-contained rage.
Don't let this happen to you!
All well and good, but I was sure I'd found the best example ever of this kind of manipulation in the ad that featured a woman kissing a man who was holding the keys to his Beamer over his head in place of mistletoe, with the caption "better than mistletoe." Here, I thought, was the most straightforward presentation of the message "our car will get you laid" (also "women only care about your money") that I had yet seen. But that was before I heard the ad on the radio that said "Our car will get you girls."
So there it is. Maybe advertising has reached a point of diminishing returns, where they've run out of clever ways to imply the basic messages that are used to sell everything. Just as the death of double entendre in music has led to pop hits like "Back That Ass Up", maybe we will soon see a world of ads that actually say what they mean:
"You are unattractive and nobody likes you. Our product will change that."
"Drinking our beer will lead to exciting and fullfilling sexual encounters with shapely, desirable women."
"Buying insurance from us will prevent bad things from happening."
"Shopping at our store will lead to a temporary cessation in those crushing feelings of loneliness and self doubt so common in worthless individuals such as yourself."
"No woman ever said no to a diamond this big."
I for one can't wait.
Funniest thing I've seen today: The wrapper on the Clean-Burning Superlog (the stores have been out of real firewood for days, alright?), which has this warning printed on it:
"Warning - Risk of Fire"
Oh yeah. Good stuff.
In some places he's Farmhand Ruprecht, in some he's Pelznickel, Pelzebock or Schmutzli Samichlaus or any of a dozen other names. Throughout the Germanic world, he is Santa's servant who makes the rounds with him, doling out punishments to the naughty children while Santa hands out presents to the good ones. Most of these traditions make it clear that Ruprecht is Santa's servant (in the Netherlands he is Black Peter and is quite explicitly a Moorish slave of Santa) while maintaining the good cop - bad cop dynamic that concentrates all the horrifying aspects in the servant while allowing the Master to maintain his saintly, jolly character.
My favorite version of all is the Austrian Krampus, who looks pretty much like your standard-issue devil. He is depicted carrying a rod or a switch in one hand and a sack over his shoulder, and is usually festooned with chains. The sight of Father Christmas (depicted in many of these places as a Catholic bishop with a tall pointy hat and long flowing vestments) strolling down the street next to Beelzebub is synonymous with the season in many parts of the world.
In olden times, when this pair showed up at the door on St. Nicholas' Day children would be asked to perform for them; They would be asked to do a trick, a little song, or a dance. If they performed well, Santa gave them treats. If they performed poorly or if Santa had inside information that they'd been bad little children throughout the year, Krampus would give them a good switching. Particularly naughty children, it was rumored, would be thrown into his sack and carried away. It was primarily the threat of this sort of action that was used to encourage good behavior, and in some regions this may have actually taken the form of the local priest dressing in the traditional Christmas garb and, armed with the parents' reports on the child's behavior, threatening recalcitrant children with rod-beatings.
In more modern times, this appears to have evolved into parents giving children sticks ( the universal symbol of an impending ass-whupping) on St. Nicholas' Day and warning them that if their behavior didn't improve by Christmas, it'd be beatings and potentially the sack for them. The terrifying visage of Krampus would still have been fresh in their credulous little minds, having been duly reinforced the night before (St. Nicholas' Eve) during the Krampus festival, wherein local ruffians were encouraged to dress in costume, drag chains through the streets, make lots of noise and generally do their best impersonation of Santa's Vengeful Minions of Darkness. Add "drunken" to that description and you probably begin to get a picture of what it looked like in practice. So the period between St. Nicholas' Eve and Christmas thus became known throughout the Germanic world as the time of year when children's behavior was at its very best. History remains mute on whether their song-and-dance routines were at their most polished in anticipation of one of those door-to-door auditions, but it certainly brings a smile to one's face to recall those wistful yuletide seasons of yesteryear when little children might be commanded to "Dance for Santa!" or face swift and violent reprisals.
This all might seem a little weird to us, but my theory is that festivals and holidays are expressions of a culture's everyday priorities, and those cultures placed a high value on scaring the hell out of children in order to instill good behavior. Krampus' not-coincidental resemblance to Lucifer adds an additional layer of eternal damnation to the equation, but it's worth noting that depictions of the devil were everywhere in the church from medieval times on, and they certainly weren't shy about emphasizing the dire consequences of Straying From God's Path even while extolling the kind and loving virtues of God's Boundless Forgiveness. In light of that fact, this particular tradition probably didn't seem unduly macabre.
In the U.S., the current popular depiction of Santa is widely credited as originating in a series of Coca-Cola ads.
I was awakened this morning by the phone ringing, which I answered before I had fully opened my eyes. There was a woman's voice on the other end, asking me was this Flaming Banjo and did I live at 123 blah blah blah and was I the sole proprietor of blah blah and after I'd answered one or two of her questions I started to reach consciousness and realize that I was being grilled by a telemarketer.
"Who is this?" I asked.
"This is InfoDenizen. We gather information for more effective marketing and datacentrickettlemulchination for credit and business..."
"What do you do with this information, exactly?"
"At InfoVasion we compile information for more accurate classification of existing business entities to facilitate a wider range of marketing opportunities within the..."
"So you're selling this information to telemarketers?"
"At DemographicCon we are seeking to compile more accurate information to distribute to credit companies and marketing enterprises with the goal of..."
"So you're asking me to tell you my income, sexual preferences and hat size so you can sell this information to people who will use it to further harass me?"
"Would you classify yourself as left, right or ambidextrous?"
"Goodbye."
And I thought the automated voice telling you to hold for an important message was the apex of telemarketing brazenness, but I guess I was wrong. This, for now at least, takes the cake.
I was watching To Be Or Not To Be the other night, a 1942 comedy featuring Jack Benny and Carol Lombard. Still holds up as a funny movie, not always the case for me with films from this period.
The movie concerns a group of Polish actors in occupied Warsaw scheming to foil the Nazis and aid the Polish resistance. The farce all turns on the actors having to act out parts in real life to outwit the evil Nazis and keep from being found out and, presumably, killed. The dire consequences of failure never really have to be spelled out, other than that the main Nazi being duped is nicknamed "Concentration Camp Earhardt." I gather a 1942 American audience didn't need any more information than that, and probably didn't want it. This is after all a comedy. Modern audiences have a much greater stomach for on-screen violence but then again 1942 audiences had to deal with a lot more of the real thing.
Which leads me to the scene I found most interesting. It's almost a throw-away, maybe twenty seconds of actual screen time. As our intrepid heroes are making their escape in a car driving through Warsaw, we see a shot out their window of a building bursting into flames.
"The Railway Station! The Resistance is alive!"
It is a triumphant moment. Again, all the information a 1942 audience needed was that it was in occupied Warsaw and the resistance was responsible. From there on it naturally followed in their minds that blowing up a rail station was a good thing. The implicit moral clarity really struck me as I watched it in 2004:
As in "Yay! The insurgents have blown up the Railway Station!"
Sure, there was some set-up, earlier in the movie, showing what a prosperous, modern city Warsaw was just prior to invasion, and what a squallid, bombed-out wreck it was as the German troops marched in to take over. Yes, every time we see inside the Nazi offices they are smoking cigars and drinking expensive liquor and generally living it up, while outside the Poles huddle in the ruins of their city, shuffling along with hurried steps and downcast eyes to avoid the scrutiny of the heartless occupiers. And when one of the villains tries to woo Mrs. Tura (Carol Lombard) with a line about how life is good if you're on the right side, it's pretty clear that it's a Faustian bargain he's proposing. The irony of his defense of the Reich as consisting of human beings who just want to make the world a better place and for everyone to be happy isn't oversold. I'm sure the people sitting in the theatre watching the movie got it.
Both homicide and suicide are played for laughs. As long as it was happening to a Nazi, Americans probably felt okay laughing about it, and really the sight of an actor dressed as Hitler ordering two soldiers to jump from a plane without parachutes and them immediately and unquestioningly complying is still pretty funny.
Fate has conspired to put me in the position of having only one stocking cap that didn't get lost last winter -- I normally lose at least one as well as a scarf every year. The reason I didn't lose this particular one is because I never wear it, and the reason I never wear it is because it's too ridiculous for me to bring myself to wear in public. It was a costume piece in a play that I was in, and it has two enormous white ears sewn on the sides, meant to resemble monkey ears. Don't ask.
So far my limited experience with the monkey hat has been that no sooner do I put the hat on than passersby commence with the staring. Not just amused glances either, but full-on no-holds-barred slack-jawed rubbernecking.
So although the hat is without question warm and comfortable, that comfort comes at a price. In my own twisted fashion I accept this as The Way of Things, which is why I don't just cut the ears off and wear it like a normal stocking cap. That would be altering what was never meant to be altered. Besides, you never know when monkey ears will come in handy.
The upshot is, tonight I find myself faced with the choice of freezing my ears off or looking like an idiot. A warm idiot. Freezing is coming out ahead. Were my own stoic salt-of-the-earth forbears to witness my predicament, they might well advise that the disapproving glances of others were character-building and accuse me of the sin of pride (still holding steady at number one on the Top Seven chart for the last seven hundred years!)
Of course, if my stoic salt-of-the-earth forbears could see me, they might also point out that I look like a damn fool.
"You call that a hat?" they might say. "Here, try one of these numbers. Nice wide black brim. Keeps the rain off."
For my own part I tend to see it as a kind of zen exercise in selflessness; Similar to the monks being entreatied to abase themselves by accepting menial positions or walking on all fours and barking like dogs in public, all in an effort to dissolve any sense of self-importance or identification with one's reputation.
"Why is your attention drawn to these ephemeral opinions?" the masters ask. "They do not concern you. Don the monkey hat of enlightenment and know true liberation."
But I guess that I am still a long way from being that enlightened. No matter what I may tell you when I'm feeling all cocky about what an iconoclast I am, evidently I care a great deal about what other people, even strangers, think about me. Because so far, no matter how cold the wind blows, the hat has stayed in my bag. I have known pride and pride is a cold, cold feeling.
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I can't tell if it's an accent or a speech impediment, but I can't understand a damn thing the bus driver is saying over the speaker. He sounds like Astro, the dog on the Jetsons. Every word starts with an "r", ends with an "r", and has several more "r"s in the middle. I am happy just to be on a heated bus. After standing at the stop for a half hour in the freezing wind, I realized I was waiting at the wrong stop and had to walk six blocks to get to the right one and then wait some more.
Now that I'm warm my mood has improved a little, but when the guy in the seat next to me, who is trying to impress the girl he's with by talking an endless blue streak, informs her that Barbarella is a movie about a female vampire, I move to another seat. Because it will be easier for me to suppress my geek impulse to correct him every time he makes a factual error (no, cows do not have four hearts) once I'm out of earshot.
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Not much can be said about the Guitar Toss. A room full of singers and strummers, probably a few too many sensitive songs about hard living and love gone wrong but also the guy who sings an acoustic version of "You Make Me Cream In My Jeans" and the bartender who dedicates a cover of Barry Manilow's "Mandy" to his brand-new wife, the unbelievably cute blonde who is working behind the bar with him tonight-- It is an oddly sweet moment, and I have had this song stuck in my head ever since. Damnit. At one point in the evening, somebody on stage asks if anybody has a pick and there is nearly a stampede as a room full of guitarists rush to provide him with one. The only way he could've gotten a similar response is if he'd asked if anyone brought their demo.
The real fun of the evening happens at the end, where the mike is thrown open and all the now-drunken singers (yours truly included) start playing drunken covers of dumb pop songs, drunkenly. Good times. My friend Nance gives me a ride home, sparing me another round of the monkey hat dilemma. Thanks, Nance!
I was awakened by the radio, a conversation with a woman who worked for a
company that makes caskets . She was talking about their plus-size caskets, which are really big sellers these days. She claimed they were the only company to offer a 52 inch wide model, which is necessary to accommodate a person weighing 1000 lbs. They used to get an average of one order for these a year, but now demand has risen to about one a month. (Note that this does not necessarily mean that there are now twelve times as many 1000-lb people as there were in 1994, as they tend to die at a higher-than-average pace. )
She then went on to detail the special considerations that went into planning these funerals: Allowing three to five days for delivery of said casket, which must be shipped by flatbed truck. Purchase of two or sometimes three adjacent plots. Crane rental.
I have to admit I found the whole conversation riveting. I had never considered any of this.
I wonder if this company is publicly traded? It seems like a good investment.