Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead!

They killed Saddam in the Emerald City before the dawn and the munchkins are still going at it hammer and tongs. Bombs and bodies everywhere. The acrimony on the gallows between Saddam and his executioners proves that Iraq is dead pool of hatred and tribalism. And now Bush wants to mount a "surge" in Baghdad?

How do you make sausages? By pumping meat into the grinder. But who will mop up the blood? The tears?

Thank god my boy is getting his Canadian passport.

Authenticity vs. Sincerity

The Godfather of Soul is dead. Hard to believe but there you have it. As John D. MacDonald wrote, the sandbar starts to get pretty narrow. Egads! Just look at what we're left with!

Will Brown be remembered only for his music? I hope not. His music belonged to the now yet his vibe echoed loudly into Afro-Futurism. Brown gave no less than Miles Davis, the ultimate space brotha, new energy and new direction coming out of the sixties. Bootsy Collins tutored under Brown for years and brought his learning to bear on George Clinton and his myriad of funk satellites.

Brown was a man who didn't just preach civil rights; he lived it. He was a black man self-made in America and he was mindful of his life every day and every night. Brown was authentic because he lived free on his own terms. And in living that life, he inspired millions.

This morning, the great Orlando Patterson, in a NY Times guest column that should be made permanent, discusses the difference between the quixotic quest for authenticity in the United States and the dearth of sincerity in public life. Patterson notes that people who go looking for "authenticity" often end in deep doo doo. Stephen Colbert calls the same thing "truthiness" - feeling over reason, no matter what. That's why Bush is in the White House and fans of James Frey have yet to abandon him. Their stories just seem "right".

Patterson though was discussing how people deal with bigotry in America. If, as he suggests, we're all bigots deep inside, then we have to figure out how to behave in public. Patterson is what can only be called an existential sociologist; he believes people are responsible for their life and we need to study how people make choices in life. He quotes Shakespeare to put forth a dramaturgical model of life: "All the world's a stage." If you act civil, you will be civil, no matter what you're thinking. Everyone takes on roles everyday which require different kinds of face paint. Rather than trying to find some sort of simple, unified, true identity (cue the psychoanalysts) that is static no matter what, Patterson suggests we make and re-make ourselves in the artful and tasteful navigation of the complexity of life in a modern society. Find the fat repulsive? Think Blacks are vulgar? Keep your thoughts to yourself and do unto others as you would have them do unto you. If the action is sincere, that's enough.

This to me is where the next Civil Rights movement, if it's going to happen, has to begin.

Post Christian Christmas

After I got tired of watching yet another special year-end wrapup on "Countdown", I flicked the dial to Fox where Billy-O was once again carrying on about how Christmas is under siege and what the devil can be done about it.

Lordamercy. Perhaps I'm being overly optimistic but I'm hoping that this past election not only put paid to Bush's wet (with blood) dream of spreading democracy through the Middle East but has given pause to the Christian fundamentalists who thought they were going ride on Karl Rove's coat-tails all the way to a hundred year scolding of America's mores or lack thereof. Christmas is a lightening rod for their project and it seems that this year, in comparison to last, the tempest really is in a teapot.

I keep reading stories that many people, including students, are becoming more religious but they are less interested in questioning their religion. Erich Fromm noted that man finds all kinds of escapes from freedom and as the world reveals itself to be more and more maddeningly complex and absurd, sanctuary is hard to find. I'm sure more than a few of the leaders of the Christian right wished the judge in the Dover "Intelligence Design" trial had merely issued a quick and dirty yea or nay rather than a 100+ page document that puts the wood to Intelligent Design and Creationism. Those are their hole cards and they can't afford any more public ridicule. And, if a recent NYTimes story is to believed, a whopping 90% of teenagers who grow up in fundamentalist Christian homes turn away from the religion.

At the same time, I can hardly say that I am enthusiastic about evangelical atheists like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris and, (of course with us mired in a savage civil war that is eating our soldiers alive), Mr. Amputee.

The most exciting news of the past year is that students in Tehran are once again rebelling, this time against the mullahs. Indeed, was the original Iranian Revolution really for a theocratic state (and a cult of personality) or against a corrupt secular one? Tehran 2006 is awash in junkies and whores and grifters and various other kinds of malcontents who are testament to the elemental fact that theocracy and the human animal are incompatible. People need room to think, to doubt, to live, to get it on and to have a job where they can nurse their hangover.

What do I care though? I'm an existentialist who drifted into Hinduism, perhaps the least doctrinaire of all the major religions. But I am also a father and I wonder how I will convey my cosmology to my son without closing his mind and his heart to other paths. People are closing down at the very moment history demands we open up.

Dog Day Dream

Do you ever get lonely for something you know you can't have? I do.

The other night, the missus and me were canoodling on the couch and musing on how nice it would be to have a dog. Alas, all three of us are highly allergic to dust and dander. Popping Sudafed all day every day is not an option. A pooch will not hunt in our house.

One can dream. This clip from Chris Marker's film, Sans Soleil, illustrates beautifully why dogs are so great to have around.You take them to the beach and they frolick in the surf while you stroll. Easy living.

Every year, I teach at least one American lit survey course. Death in the Woods by Sherwood Anderson is a classic story about...what? An old lady who lived a hard life? No, it's about the wonder of dogs and their connection to us. As the old girl lies dying in the snow, the dogs engage in a primal dance in the moonlight, calling her out of her slumber to keep them from returning to the wolf of their ancestors. After she dies, the dogs take the food she's carried on her back and leave her in the snow. They don't mean anything by it.

I hope that medicine cooks up something real good for those of us who want a dog but our sinuses won't allow it.

Man Is Born Free...

...but everywhere he is on the phone.

To Cingular after the screen on my cellphone went blank. I spent the weekend on the road with only the landline at my mate's house to keep me in touch. The missus was not pleased.

I arrive expecting to breeze in to the back of the shop where they have a company junkman who tends all the discarded and broken-down gadgets. Many a time, he's produced from his heap a replacement back or front for a phone.

Not anymore. The junkman is gone. Now you are greeted at the door by a customer service rep whose function seems to be sussing out your complaint or scam. The place was packed with a motley crew of folk, waiting for their turn to take on sales rep. All around the room you could hear the murmurs of pleading, wheedling and jiving. "I'm already on overdraft at the bank. You gots to give me more time. I need this phone." or "I told her to keep her minutes down but that girl she can talk!"

I noticed that the people waiting, almost all black, were either talking on their phone or fondling it, as if it were some strange, magical oracle who would reveal all at any moment. I find my students doing the same thing. More than once, I've caught students text messaging in class, second only in audacity to instant messaging on a laptop while I'm preaching the gospel of Joyce Carol Oates and her gothic take on Amercian womanhood.

In his book, Speaking Into the Air, John D. Peters suggests that we should never assume, no matter how advanced and how prevalent the technology, that our message is going to get through to our intended receiver. We have faith "you can hear me now" but it is sorely tested at many different levels, not the least of which involves the Almighty and the dead. Yet we are more and more obsessed with making some sort, any sort of connection, if only with a gizmo that has plenty of expensive add-on features to kill the time or the distance. The phone companies know this and price accordingly.

If the FCC hadn't allowed for so many rapacious fees and tariffs, having a landline in the crazy age of the cell would be a dream come true. Can you hear me now? No? Good.

Tatoo You. Not Me.

On January 1,2007, all visual advertisement - billboards, neon signs, flyers - will be banned in the city of Sao Paulo, Brazil.

If only the same legislation was possible for tatoos. I can't think of anything more boring and often more unappealing than exposed tatoos. There are so many and so many bad ones on display. Today at the gym I noticed a guy covered in tats that looked like they belonged on the cover of a fifth rate hip-hop album. What was he thinking? What does he think I'll think? Or some chick? Or some square? Yawns all around.

Do people really believe these eyesores signify edge? Edge is over, baby. Everything gets co-opted so fast, the only way to keep your revolution alive is to keep it in your head until you're ready to act. When the sociologist Clinton Sanders was making his career writing about tatoos, they were still the domain of the sailors, bikers and various demi-mondes. Not any more. The searchlight of commerce finds all nooks and crannies. Indeed, the minute you start broadcasting your "stance", your intentions or your biography, it's for sale on the open market. Any good Marxist will tell you capitalism produces a limited number of life stories anyways. You may think you're living a unique life but are you really? Watch the people that show up for consultations on these tatoo reality shows. How different are their motives? How different are their stories? Not very.

Tatoos, particularly those such as the one here, testify to a) the banality of edge and b) the growing fetish of exhibitionism. As the theologian Lincoln Swain noted in his great book, Dare to Defy, when everything and everyone is under surveillance, exhibitionism is the panic response. People may want recognition, they may want fame but more than that, they want to be seen on their own terms, no matter what. Stop looking at me. Look at me.

Someone asked me if I was going to put my boy's birthday on my arm. No thanks. I'll put a candle on his cake but that's it.

Shortcut

After too many years of planning and too many months of construction, a new exit has gone into I-696, the highway that cuts across the top of Detroit, the new faultline between Detroit and its older inner suburbs and Oakland and its exurbian McMansions. The new exit feeds into Franklin Road, an old and picturesque road that leads to many of the more tony and tasteful neighbourhoods of Oakland County. For those of us who live south of I-696 but between Telegraph and Orchard Lake Road, the new exit saves plenty of time.

The catch? You have to make a shortcut through the back gates of Holy Sepulchre Cemetery. During the week, the back door is always open but on weekends, the guards get sneeky and shut it at arbitrary times, no doubt to keep the likes of me off balance and hence off the premises.

Nonetheless, I use this shortcut whenever I can. And the more I use it, the more I am enchanted by this well-kept and well-populated necropolis. As someone who has drifted from evangelical existential agnoticism into evangelical existential hinduism via marriage, I don't have much use for the intended purpose of this place. When my corpus packs it in, the kinfolk will send me to the flames and then send my ashes up the river.

And yet, as I crawl (and crawl you must with 15mph posted limits and the occasional Southfiled police car lurking in the bushes) through the winding "streets," I notice that the city belongs to living as much as the dead. There is always someone taking flowers or a wreath to a grave. Or someone standing over a grave, looking down at the marker or up at the trees. Nature has been pruned and primped to act as a suitable, tasteful backdrop that screams the dead are not alone. They are not forgotten. They are not wholely dead yet or ever will be.

Who hasn't been in cemeteries left untended? Just as nature takes over an abandoned lot, it takes over an abandoned graveyard. Who let the place slide, you wonder? Did the illusion, the hope finally dissipate?

It's an old cliche, utterly most famously by Rodney Dangerfield in Caddyshack, that the two biggest wastes of land are golf courses and cemeteries. As an avid duffer, I must protest the former. As an inveterate lover of city life, I must protest the latter. Not only does this cemetery host some of Detroit's luminaries of the past, it is a special space that offers us, the living, a chance to contemplate the finitude and finality of our life and the lives of others. It is part of the neighbourhood, part of the collective narrative of the neighbourhood and the city at large.

A friend of mine is working an academic article about computers and death. Life ever after on the web, whether you want it or not. But the web is not a place. Its materiality is always suspect and provisional. In his fantastic short novel, Everyman, Phillip Roth has his sadsack protagonist visit the grave of his parents. "Your boy's 71," he intones, brooding down at the marker. A moment later, he happens upon that oldie but goodie, the rueful, knowing gravedigger. Unaware that he will be shuffling off this mortal coil in no time, the protagonist asks the labourer how one digs a grave. The low temperature Negro obliges, detailing the process as the protagonist listens on with grim bemusement. Everyman has made false starts into and clumsy exits from the crucial stages of life. In death, with his few friends and fewer friendly family members standing around his grave, our hero becomes a place, a physical place, where those left behind can try to make sense of what came before with him and what is yet to come without him. Can you do that on-line?