Into the Wilderness

I have just discovered why I have had lack of success in my life; I have never had anyone on whom I could blame my lack of success. I have not had a scapegoat.

Consider Novak Djokovic. A great tennis player but also a great schmuck.* He has just been booted out of Australia, where he wished to pursue his tenth men’s singles title at the Australian Open, for not being vaccinated and for (let’s be nice and call them) “misstatements” on his visa application. And who was to blame for the errors on the application? Certainly not Djokovic. It was his “agent” and his “support team.”

Novak Djokovic has blamed his agent for an “administrative mistake” when declaring he had not travelled in the two weeks before his flight to Australia and acknowledged an “error of judgment” by not isolating after he tested positive for Covid.

The world No 1 released a statement on Wednesday in a bid to address what he called “continuing misinformation” about his activities in December before he came to Australia in a bid to retain his Australian Open crown. . . .

Djokovic said the incorrect pre-travel declaration of 1 January was “submitted by my support team on my behalf”.

“My agent sincerely apologises for the administrative mistake in ticking the incorrect box about my previous travel before coming to Australia. This was a human error and certainly not deliberate.”**

So, there’s the support team thrown under the bus.

*

Five years ago to the day, I wrote a blog post about plagiarism and the excuses that are forthcoming when the stealing is outed.*** I did not at that time directly cite instances when the convenient scapegoat was produced. He/she was usually a hired researcher, go-fer, or typist who allegedly practiced one-handed shuffling with the author’s file cards. And the anonymous scapegoat, bearing the sins, was released into the wilderness, while the author him/herself attempted to remain in the tabernacle.****

*

You remember the story (apocryphal, of course) about young George Washington and the cherry tree. If George were alive today, the dialogue about the tree would go like this:

Washington Senior: Who chopped down the cherry tree?

Georgie: I cannot tell a lie. It was the gardener.

***

* "There was his encounter with Dr. Igor Cetojevic, a Bosnian Serb, who, while watching Djokovic on TV during the 2010 Australian Open, became convinced that the player’s need for medical time-outs had nothing to do with asthma, as some thought, but with too much gluten in his diet. Not long after, Cetojevic met Djokovic in Croatia, during the Davis Cup, where he asked Djokovic to raise his right arm twice, once while holding, in his left hand, a slice of bread to his belly; the exercise convinced Djokovic that his muscles were weaker when proximate to wheat. There was also, in 2016, his hiring of Pepe Imaz, a Spanish coach who evangelized about the transformative power of long hugs. More recently, there was Djokovic’s friendship with the wellness entrepreneur Chervin Jafarieh, who talks of having lived in jungles and among shamans, sells supplements and elixirs, and, in May of 2020, listened approvingly during an Instagram Live conversation as Djokovic explained that polluted water can be purified by human consciousness, because water molecules 'react to our emotions, to what is being said.'”

https://www.newyorker.com/sports/sporting-scene/djokovics-strange-australian-odyssey

** https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2022/jan/12/novak-djokovic-statement-blames-agent-for-australia-paperwork-mistake-covid-positive-test-result

*** https://drnormalvision.blogspot.com/2017/01/the-dog-ate-my-file-cabinet.html

**** [H]e shall take the two goats, and present them before the Lord at the door of the tabernacle of the congregation.

And Aaron shall cast lots upon the two goats; one lot for the Lord, and the other lot for the scapegoat.

And Aaron shall bring the goat upon which the Lord's lot fell, and offer him for a sin offering.

But the goat, on which the lot fell to be the scapegoat, shall be presented alive before the Lord, to make an atonement with him, and to let him go for a scapegoat into the wilderness.

Leviticus 16

Stars and Stripes

I have just finished reading The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester, an account of the creation of the renowned Oxford English Dictionary. The “Professor” was James Murray, the editor of the work, the “Madman,” Dr. William Chester Minor, an American army surgeon who killed a man in London and, having been found not guilty by reason of insanity, spent all save the last year of his life thereafter in mental asylums, but who contributed many citations to the project.

Reflecting on the book, I discovered that I had no real talent for fashioning dictionary definitions. Thus, I am at a complete loss to engage in a lengthy debate with those personages who are advocating that schools in the United States teach “Americanism” in a battle to combat the alleged nefarious instruction accompanying new looks at American history.

There are those who seemingly would put “Freedom” foremost in their definition of Americanism. On the one hand, the term has been appropriated by the worst reactionary politicians of the Republican Party (the Freedom Caucus in the House of Representatives, for example). On the other hand, while the American national anthem boasts of the “land of the free and the home of the brave,” the anthem of our northern neighbors, who stuck with King George, asserts that they are “The True North, strong and free.” Since both North American countries claim the same thing, I dismiss “Freedom” (however interpreted) as a defining factor of Americanism.

What I have come up with as the essence of Americanism (my limited ability could take me only so far) is the concept of Government by Consent of the Governed, which means fair elections open to all citizens who are to be ruled by the elected. (Somehow, it seems that many of the advocates of “Freedom” are working to subvert this concept.) In a fair election one person’s vote counts as much as the next person’s. They are unintimidated by outside forces, and their vote is unimpeded by political contrivance. The vote count is supervised by impartial observers. The person with the most votes wins; the loser concedes, maybe to prevail the next time. For Americanism, there must be a next time.

*

I once lost an election by one vote. It turned out, however, that two ballots had arrived in the mail after the set deadline. I was urged by someone who had a personal dislike of the other candidate to appeal, to try to make the late ballots be counted. I refused. The rules were the rules. And according to the rules, I lost. End of story. 

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