Let Them Eat Cake!

I think of libertarian tech engineers, and there are plenty, who separate ideas into categories, making command paths through logic, feeling quite freed up to do so. Then, politics seem to follow: Do this, get that. Don’t do this, don’t get that. Clean and simple. In America, they’d call it the Rush Limbaugh effect, typically displayed in tenth-grade boys. Someone doesn’t work? The state shouldn’t give him money. If he doesn’t work, there are no entitlements. Oh, he’s disabled? Well, too bad. Oh, he’s a war veteran? Well, that war is over now.

Frances McCue*

*

I have just finished reading the single best article of the year: “In the Shadow of the Poor Law” by Stewart Lansley. Published in the January 2022 issue of History Today,** the article analyzes Great Britain’s laws dealing with the poor and their poverty and eviscerates the attitudes and thinking that lay behind the failure to improve their lot. As the subtitle of the article states, “Britain has been a high inequality, high poverty nation for most of the last 200 years.”

There was a decades-old quote that went either “Thatcherism is Reaganomics with knobs on” or “Reaganomics is Thatcherism with knobs on.” I don’t remember which way it went (and a Google search didn’t help). But the important point is that what Lansley shows about Britain’s callousness toward the poor was similar to the policy of the American government that flowered during the presidency of Ronald Reagan and has led to the gross inequality we experience today in this country.

I will not attempt to quote from Lansley’s article; it would take up the rest of this post. Instead, I urge you to read the article itself (the link is below). And see if you agree with me on its importance.

*

Let me end this brief post with Steven Nadler’s summation of Spinoza’s view of religion:

Being truly religious is not a matter of what you believe or how or where or even if you pray. Rather, it consists only in following the simple moral precept to love your neighbour, to act towards all with justice and charity.***

***

* https://www.thesmartset.com/what-yeats-has-to-do-with-it/

** https://www.historytoday.com/archive/behind-times/shadow-poor-law

***  https://literaryreview.co.uk/letting-go-of-god

   

Hammer and Tongues

As the saying goes: “To a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” 

Republican and fellow rightwing hammerheads have been busily banging away at imaginary nails. Take Ronny Jackson, for example. An MD who once claimed that Trump was the paragon of physical fitness, Johnson is now a Member of Congress representing (where else?) Texas. Seeing the Democratic party as a nail head, Johnson brought his tool down mightily: 

Here comes the MEV - the Midterm Election Variant! They NEED a reason to push unsolicited nationwide mail-in ballots. Democrats will do anything to CHEAT during an election . . . ,

he tweeted.*

Somehow this alleged man of science (aren’t doctors supposed to be men of science?) didn’t give a logical explanation of why his claimed bogus COVID variant needed to take a route from South Africa to Europe before being sprung on gullible US voters. Or why it is that non-bogus people are dying from a bogus disease. I wonder in what medical school class one learns to finesse such questions.

¶

This is what people say to me: he doesn’t represent science, he represents Dr. Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor who did experiments on Jews during the Second World War and in the concentration camps.

Thus, Fox Nation host Lara Logan offering a comparison between Dr. Anthony Fauci and Nazi doctor Josef Mengele.**

Logan’s playing of Whack-a-mole, using her hammer on the pate of the distinguished director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is a very advanced example of weaseldom. Note that she doesn’t say that she herself  is making the comparison; she is allegedly only repeating “what people say to me.” She claims, “People all across the world are saying this.” I haven’t heard that in my part of the world, but, then again, I don’t have much to do with crazies. Apparently, Logan does, but don’t blame her for what she hears and repeats—because, weaselly, she doesn’t dare say it directly.

¶

Tucker Carlson is not a man who is going to be outflanked by the likes of a Lara Logan. He gets out his hammer for Fauci’s noggin and disdains any weaseling. He will own up to his whacking. 

If you haven’t checked in on Tony Fauci lately, you may be a little surprised to discover what he’s become . . . . After two years of being nonstop media adulation, Tony Fauci has morphed into an even shorter version of Benito Mussolini.***

(Whether it is worse to be banged on the head for being a Mengele or a Mussolini, I leave up to you.)

Carlson subtly engages in a cute bit of anti-Italian bigotry here (and, considering his record on immigration, perhaps something of a warning against southern Europeans in general). 

¶

Time, I think, to take away the toolbox from the wingnuts. Though I think someone should first take a monkey wrench and tighten the screws that are loose. 

***

*  https://news.yahoo.com/white-house-doctor-raved-trumps-024430725.html

**  https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/fox-news-lara-logan-compares-015448939.html

***  https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/tucker-carlson-makes-unhinged-comparison-123650608.html

   

Get Real

Sixty years ago, the Oscar for best short subject (cartoon) went to a Yugoslavian filmmaker named Dušan Vukotić. The winning film called “Surogat” (re-named in the US “Ersatz”) was a cartoon fantasy in which the whole world was unreal—it was brought to life by a bicycle pump. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjWXxfZ252I

I think we can thankfully say that over the last six decades there has been some room for the true and the beautiful to breathe, though it seems that space continues to narrow. 

The latest massive effort by the fake and artificial to conquer the world has been evident in the aisles of our favorite supermarkets: the un-meat movement. Fake food is not a new phenomenon. Imitation crabmeat, for example, elbowed its way some time ago into the fish department of the markets. But that was equivalent to Claudius’s sorrows coming in “single spies”; now we have his “battalions.” 

The new fake meat movement seems to pride itself on being “plant-based.” My reaction to that is to proclaim that if God had meant for me to dine on grass, He would have made me a cow. And as a cow, I would have doted on the grassiness of the grass, and not cared a jot that it didn’t come to my feedbox in the costume party disguise of a hamburger or a pork chop. 

*

The man with the hammer treats everything as a nail, the saying goes. Something like that seems to be afflicting Eleven Madison Park in its new vegan incarnation. The restaurant’s chef and owner, Daniel Humm, is using the skills he brought to meat and seafood to whack away at vegetables.

Thus began Pete Wells in his New York Times review* [Take it from me, the whole review will be your best entertainment of the month.] of the $335 menu offerings at the above-referenced eating place. 

Almost none of the main ingredients taste quite like themselves . . . . Some are so obviously standing in for meat or fish that you almost feel sorry for them.

A beet is made to stand in for a duck; the result being something that “tastes like Lemon Pledge and smells like a burning joint.” Wells wonders if a the summer-squash dish he was served was a stand-in for a lobster. 

The ingredients look normal until you take a bite and realize you’ve entered the plant kingdom’s uncanny valley.

*

I confess that today I ate radishes, scallions, tomatoes, mushrooms, broccoli, and onions—and guess what? They tasted like radishes, scallions, tomatoes, mushrooms, broccoli, and onions. And the chicken tasted like chicken.

*

The other day I was assaulted by a network promo for a show called, if I remember correctly, “Battle of the Tribute Bands.” That has to rate in the 800s on the FICO scale of ersatzness. If the show is, as I presume, a crap contest like so many others on the telly, one’s mind boggles at the attempt to determine which of the fake acts is most unersatziest.   

*

Over a century-and-a-half ago, Lewis Carroll put the mock on the mock, with his particular logic:

Then the Queen left off, quite out of breath, and said to Alice, “Have you seen the Mock Turtle yet?”

“No,” said Alice. “I don’t even know what a Mock Turtle is.”

“It’s the thing Mock Turtle Soup is made from,” said the Queen.

 

***

* https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/28/dining/eleven-madison-park-restaurant-review-plant-based.html?searchResultPosition=6

Head Games

And this, unlike the previous post, is not about pipes. 

Oh, OK—it is about the last two mentions of pipes for this blog.

But that’s it—fertig.

*

But that’s not it for hats.

After writing the previous post, “Up In Smoke” (https://drnormalvision.blogspot.com/2021/10/up-in-smoke.html), it occurred to me that there were two groups of present day American males who are never seen without a lid on. One group are the Hasidic Jews. Now what we can say about them is that they have a very good reason to sport their headgear: As the old Hebrew National hot dog commercial went, they have to answer to a higher authority. So one understands the masses of hats one sees on Hasidic occasions. 

Though one wonders if the Higher Authority demands black hats and wouldn’t prefer a fedora or Panama mixed in for variety’s sake.   

*

The second group of present-day American hat wearers I found it hard to give a name to. They may be seen singularly or in groups. Here is a group photo:

And here is a solitary wearer:

But the thing that all these ten-gallon fakers have in common is that they don’t take off their hats when they’re indoors. Every now and again when a president feels the need to include one of these mad hatters in a White House photoshoot, the shmuck doesn’t have the courtesy to doff his lid even in that august venue.

That’s it! That’s the word that defines the group—shmucks.

Here’s the wonderful Saul Steinberg depiction of them:

*

  

Back in the days when I was a regular rider of the New York City subway system, I was standing in a car in which a Hasid was sitting catty-corner with a young Black woman and her son, who was about five years old. The child, viewing the man’s black hat, turned to his mother and asked, “Is that man a cowboy?”

Sorry, son, Hopalong Horowitz he wasn’t. 

Up In Smoke

A few weeks back, the Guardian newspaper in its “Notes and Queries” section queried, “When and why did men stop wearing hats?”* Five-hundred-and-forty-six reader responses later, the questions remained unresolved. Did the decline begin in the ‘50s? Or was it the ‘60s? Were older men still clinging to their headgear in the ‘80s? Was the cause of the decline President Kennedy, who was seldom seen with a hat? Or was it the increase in car ownership—hats being a challenge to wear in one? Or a fashion change in hair styles, which didn’t accommodate a hat?

Or maybe it just should be acknowledged that men still wear headgear, only now it’s the ubiquitous baseball cap?

At any rate, as noted above, the result of the debate was a standoff. 

Personally, I liked wearing a hat, especially my boater in summer. I wonder what happened to it?

And as a side issue, why did hatters suddenly start advertising bowlers in 1959? 

It is hat advertising that I will use to attempt to answer to the questions posed in the Guardian; when that disappeared from The New Yorker, I think that was the sign of the demise of the hat.

Stay tuned.

*

I am in my second round of going through the archives of The New Yorker. Having started this time around in 1940, I am now up to 1960. While thinking about men’s hats, I have also been noticing women’s hats. (Next question: When did women stop wearing hats?) Unlike men, it seemed that women never took off their hats. There they are in a restaurant or a club meeting with their lids on. 

And why did women have veils on their hats? What was that all about? Today, it seems that the only women wearing hats are the Queen of England, who looks so good in them, and dipsy dames at the Kentucky Derby in hats with wingspans out to here.

*

As L. P. Hartley famously wrote in his novel The Go-Between, “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there,” the hat-wearing country of the past is different from today. Different, too, as I learned from my archives trawling, was the constant depiction of men with pipes. Cartoonists hardly showed a domestic scene without the pater familias having a briar clenched between his teeth. Men at meetings, on trains or planes, on the street, anywhere at all, they all had a pipe in mouth or hand. Advertisers hawking raincoats or sporting goods as well had their models piped.  

Looking back at the ‘50s and ‘60s, I have recollection of only a handful of pipe smokers—a drafting teacher, for one, whose pungent tobacco is a smell that still lingers in my nasal passages. I can only wonder how all those smokers stayed out of my ken.

I suppose something about the idea of the pipe smoker appealed to those admen and cartoonists. You know: that they were deliberate, stoic, deep thinkers, not prone to rashness or precipitate acts. After all, pipe smoking involved a whole michagas: you took a pouch of tobacco out of your pocket; you placed a pinch into the pipe; you tamped the tobacco down; you lit a match and applied it to the pipe; you took several puffs to get the fire started (it never started at once). Then you leaned back in your chair and proclaimed, “In my considered judgment . . . .”

The banning of tobacco advertisements and depiction in the media has meant the disappearance of pipe smokers from our lives. Cigarette smokers still can be found loitering outside the doorways of their workplaces. But pipe smokers, what place for them?

***

* https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/aug/24/when-and-why-did-men-stop-wearing-hats

"West Side" Sorry

In late September, 1957, I was staying with my grandmother, having been deputized to keep her company while my uncle who lived with her went on vacation. Besides the pleasure of the company of my formidable ancestor, I had the opportunity of reading each day both the New York Times and the Herald Tribune, which my uncle had delivered every morning. Thus, I was able to read the glowing reviews that the theater critics of those papers lavished on a new Broadway musical called West Side Story. 

How wonderful, I thought. A musical not about elephant-high corn, but about the serious business of living in New York City. 

I was unable to catch up with the play during the initial year-and-three-quarters run, which ended on June 27, 1959. I did get to see it after it returned from touring and played Broadway again from April to December, 1960.

I was crushed.

*

Now, the one thing everyone knows about WSS is that it takes its story line from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. A professor whom I dearly loved (I should; he hired me) edited a paperback which included the texts of both those plays. For all his good points, Prof. W. was a classic middlebrow, and his book was geared for those people who thought that by seeing/reading WSS they were getting R&J-lite—Shakespeare without all the funny old language, thees and thous and such. For better or worse, though, what they were getting was a work that existed in its own right, without the borrowed stardust of an old classic.

*

For me the first indication that WSS was not going to live up to my expectation was the third song, “Something’s Coming,” sung by Romeo, er Tony. 

Could be . . .

Who knows? . . .

There's something due any day—

I will know right away,

Soon as it shows.

It may come cannonballing down through the sky,

Gleam in its eye,

Bright as a rose.

Who knows?

It's only just out of reach,

Down the block, on a beach,

Under a tree.

I got a feeling there's a miracle due,

Gonna come true,

Coming to me!

Could it be? Yes, it could.

Something's coming, something good,

If I can wait.

Something's coming, I don't know what it is,

But it is

Gonna be great!

My thought when I heard this was, “What great thing could happen to a boy in his situation? A college scholarship, maybe?” No, it was nothing more than that old banality—meeting a girl. A miracle, indeed!

And look at the nouns of the lyric: “day,” “sky,” “eye,” “rose,” “block,” “beach,” “tree,” “miracle.” Can anything be more banal than that?

Later, after our prosaic Tony has met Juliet, er Maria, he rhapsodizes thus:

Maria...

The most beautiful sound I ever heard:

Maria, Maria, Maria, Maria . . .

All the beautiful sounds of the world in a single word . .

Maria, Maria, Maria, Maria . . .

Maria!

I've just met a girl named Maria,

And suddenly that name

Will never be the same

To me.

Maria!

I've just kissed a girl named Maria,

And suddenly I've found

How wonderful a sound

Can be!

Maria!

Say it loud and there's music playing,

Say it soft and it's almost like praying.

Maria,

I'll never stop saying Maria!

The most beautiful sound I ever heard.

Maria.

I think you can take it as read that anytime something is compared to a prayer or praying, you’re up against a writer/lyricist who is completely lost.

*

Let me turn my attention for a moment to the real Romeo. At the beginning of R&J, Romeo is in love—no, not with Juliet—he hasn’t seen her yet—but with someone named Rosaline, who wants nothing to do with him. Romeo acts like a classic spurned lover;* when challenged by his friend Benvolio, Romeo’s description of Rosaline is purely conventional.

Then, Romeo sees Juliet; Rosaline is forgotten, and I say to myself, “Why should I, an alleged adult, pay any attention to someone who can switch his affections in a blink of an eye?”

My justification lies in the words that Romeo speaks upon seeing Juliet for the first time:

O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!

It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night

Like a rich jewel in an Ethiope's ear.

The words come gushing out spontaneously; they are new, of the moment; not studied, not conventional. A metaphoric masterpiece. Picture it. He is a poet of love.

That is why Romeo matters.

*

What can we say about Maria? She has as much (or as little substance) as her lover boy. What has she to say about herself?

I feel pretty,

Oh, so pretty,

I feel pretty and witty and bright,

And I pity

Any girl who isn't me tonight.

I feel charming,

Oh, so charming,

It's alarming how charming I feel,

And so pretty

That I hardly can believe I'm real.

 

Stephen Sondheim, I’m sorry to say, was the culprit (AKA lyricist) who composed the words for Tony’s and Maria’s outpourings. But I think I might just be able to get him off the hook. In May, 1962 he (as lyricist) with his colleagues gifted Broadway with—what I think is its best ever musical—A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. A play with no pretenses to social significance, it brought Roman comedy to 20th century America, packaged as a laugh-filled joyous farce.

The ingenue of the play is Philia, whose song about herself deserves contrasting with Maria and her song.

I'm lovely,

All I am is lovely.

Lovely is the one thing I can do.

Winsome,

What I am is winsome,

Radiant as in some

Dream come true.

Oh, Isn't it a shame?

I can neither sew

Nor cook nor read or write my name.

But I'm happy

Merely being lovely,

For it's one thing I can give to you.

She’s empty-headed--but self-aware—as I hope Sondheim was when he composed Philia’s song and that he was deliberately satirizing the emptiness of Maria’s own fixation on herself. 

*

For me the one highlight of WSS, is the song “America.” What drive, what sassiness, what thrusting music! I could listen to it all day.

*

  

What led me to revisit WSS and to write this blog entry was a review of the Broadway cast album by Douglas Watt of The New Yorker (Mar 8, 1958) that I read yesterday. Here is a major excerpt:

At last! Vindication of my view of the work. 

*

Please, don’t get me started on Death of a Salesman!

 

***

* https://drnormalvision.blogspot.com/2010/05/lovers-and-losers-part-one.html

American Stasi

The Mexicans won the battle of the Alamo. So how come we’re stuck with Texas?

*

The latest news out of Texas is that it not only has the toughest anti-abortion law in the country, but that that undoubtedly-unconstitutional law has put in place (for at least what one hopes is only a brief moment) an unprecedented mechanism for the spying on and ratting on one’s neighbors. The state has turned enforcement of the law over to the general public. The law will allow any ordinary citizen to

bring a civil action against any person who: (1) performs or induces an abortion in violation of this subchapter; (2) knowingly engages in conduct that aids or abets the performance or inducement of an abortion . . . .*

The state has taken its famous state song to heart: “The Eyes of Texas Are Upon You.” What Texas has done here is to introduce the Culture of Snitch. And a capitalist one at that—for a successful snitcher will receive $10,000 and legal costs. 

Jeannie Suk Gersen, recently wrote in an on-line article on The New Yorker website:

In “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” Hannah Arendt observed the early tendency of a totalitarian regime to draft private citizens to conduct “voluntary espionage,” so that “a neighbor gradually becomes a more dangerous enemy than officially appointed police agents.”**

Perhaps the most efficient state control of the populace by use of the citizens themselves was by the Deutsche Demokratische Republik (two-thirds of which name were lies)—East Germany, what was. That government established the Ministerium für Staatsicherheit (Ministry for State Security), colloquially known as the Stasi. 

After the collapse of the regime, members of the Stasi tried to destroy the files it had on individuals. But they did not succeed in getting rid of all records. As a result over the last thirty years or so,

researchers have been offering former citizens of East Germany the opportunity to view their personal Stasi file, a complicated rite of passage that often reveals that family members, friends or neighbors had reported their activities to the Stasi.***

“Family members, friends . . . neighbors” had all been co-opted into the Stasi snitch network. 

How soon will it be that citizens of the Lone Star State will fear the eyes of other Texans upon them—even their family, friends, and neighbors?  

***

*   https://www.nytimes.com/article/abortion-law-texas.html

**   https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/the-manifold-threats-of-the-texas-abortion-law

***   https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/10/arts/design/stasi-archive-puzzle.html?searchResultPosition=1