Notes from a Rockies fan.

 OK, let's look at the facts, Rockies fans. Worst record in team history: 119 losses. the worst run differential in BASEBALL HISTORY (-424), and the highest ERA since 1901 -- 6.64! Tied for most losses by a rotation: 93.

[Note to readers: I have been informed to my chagrin by a smart person that the Rockies don't have the worst run differential of all time, merely since 1899. It was the Cleveland Spiders who dun that, posting a stupendous -723.]

Per Colorado Rockies on SI, "As for the lineup, the Rockies' .237 batting average was the worst in team history, as was their .681 OPS. Their collective fWAR was minus-3.3 as a lineup, and they scored a franchise low 3.72 runs per game. This resulted in them being shutout a franchise record 17 times."

This is undeniably as bad as it can possibly get. It is historically awful. This obverse distinction is resonant; it will live forever in our minds.

To those of us who listened in, and went to games, this year, it was obvious that we had reached the nadir of our expectations. We came to the field not with the hope of victory, but with the weary resignation of the faithful.

I have been a stalwart Rockies fan since the beginning, and the Zephyrs before them, and the Bears before them. I remember the Sky Sox, ferchrissake.

And yet I still love them. In all of their Charlie Browniest, they played earnestly and poorly, stoically marching through sweep after sweep, sacrificing themselves to the vagaries of the game.

What is going on with this team? It has gone on for years now. It has not spurred a dearth of paying fans. We love the game, and we will come out and watch ourselves lose in a friendly and amicable Denver manner. There's not an abandonment there as there is in other cities.

Evolution is possible. You stick with your guys. But there is something seriously wrong, and we all need to address it. I appreciate the effort, and I am sorry you sucked so bad. We'll work on it in spring, I guess.

Resistance persistence

 

“The summer solider and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.” -- Thomas Paine, Dec. 23, 1776

You are living in a police state. If you don’t know this by now, you missed the transition. It was as fast as the snapping-off of a light; one day we were a functioning democracy, the next armed, unidentified militant gangs were kidnapping innocent people off the streets and throwing them into concentration camps.

This is a fundamental problem. The current presidential administration is reportedly considering suspending the writ of habeas corpus (the right of an accused person to be brought before a judge, not held imprisoned indefinitely). However, in effect, this right has already been suspended for those suspected (not proven) to be in the country illegally, and for those who exercise freedom of speech that the government dislikes.

There is so much more malfeasance on top of this. Besides the staggering amount of corrupt, fortune-enhancing activities by the rich men who would run our country for their benefit, there is action against Black people, Latinx people, women, LGBTQ+ people . . . in fact, anyone not aligned with straight white Christian patrimony.

The other two branches of the federal government have already let us down. The Congress has proven itself unequal to the task of striking down these egregious criminals. The Supreme Court has enabled the dysfunction. It turns out that the checks and balances that preserved our free democratic state only work if the will to work them is there. This is a responsibility those supposedly in power have shirked, to our collective detriment.

That’s the bad news. The good news is, you can do something about it.

The ultimate political power in the United States is wielded by the people. Our consent is required for the conduct of government, for good or evil. Yet this power of consent has been largely abandoned; 90 million people did not vote in the last election, a number that is more than the number of votes either presidential candidate received. In short, too many people really don’t seem to give a shit about their quality of life, the right of their neighbors to live a peaceful life, or their children’s future.

Those who don’t actively resist these developments are in the same boat with those perpetrating them. Silence is consent. Do you really want to be on the side of the fascists? Of course not. Well, that means you need to go off your ass and do something about it. Compliance is complicity.

As the Declaration of Independence tells us, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

The almost insurmountable obstacle here is indifference. Resistance requires participation in the democratic process, through the use of your First Amendment rights of peaceful protest and freedom of speech. These must be exercised, frequently and energetically, in order to combat the erosion of liberties. Politicians don’t listen to a few dissenters, but as those numbers increase, so the mandate for change is more effectively promoted.

Now, here’s the problem – resistance is exhausting. There is no immediate gratification involved in resistance; it is hard to measure progress and daunting when it seems to change nothing. Here are some tips for persisting in resistance:

1.     It’s a job

The United States of America was founded on the principle of individual freedom and autonomy. With this principle, however, comes a responsibility. We are in charge, and we need to act like it. You are a boss. Resistance should become a daily practice, part of your routine. It’s a full-time job. You can write or call your representatives daily (5 Calls is a great phone app for that, for example). You can make a sign and march in the streets. You can spread the word. You can stand up when someone tries to take away the rights of those around you who are targeted for oppression.

Now, is it fair that this amount of effort needs to expended, when you already have a life with plenty of demands on your time? No, it’s not. Too bad. We are all part of this ongoing experiment, and our participation in a free society means that, in time of crisis, we have to do pain-in-the-ass things to a bunch of pain-in-the-ass people. In a time when our vision of good government is under assault, it means you have to gird your loins and grind out acts of justice, acts of mercy, acts of compassion, on a daily basis. If you thrive on defiance, there is plenty to go around. 

2.     Lessen the stressin’

In order to sustain any kind of effort, you need resources – not only physical, but mental and emotional. Protest can be draining, especially when you don’t see the fruits of your actions right away. This means you need to step up your self-care. Be nice to yourself. Make time for those activities that make you feel human. There will be days when it all seems hopeless. It’s OK to feel down and discouraged. It just takes that little bit of extra effort to get back up again and take it on the chin, and continue to resist.

But, take breaks. Obsessing about all the bad news coming down the pike can lead to hyper-vigilance, paranoia, perpetual agitation, analysis paralysis. Get away from the headlines, the doomscrolling. Make room for friends and family, for laughs, for art, for music, or something silly, anything, something simple that brings you joy. In this way you can recharge your batteries. In this way, you can stop dictators from living rent-free in your head. 

3.     All together now

 Form alliances. If you are out there busily standing up to bullies, you will inevitably come into contact with similar-minded people. Develop these relationships, make friends, exchange contact information. Look for groups that align with your sensibilities and join them. There always have been and still are many organizations fighting for justice. Get involved. If change is to take place, it will only do so if a preponderance of people get up on their feet and make their voices heard.

Now, is there safety in numbers? Probably not. Anybody who steps out of line, who refuses to cooperate, who calls the bastards out on their shit, has the potential to be a target. If you resist, the odds are that sooner or later you will suffer for it. The alternative, however, is a miserable life controlled by greedy, sadistic ideologues who don’t care about you or your values.

Welcome to the Resistance. No kings.

They want you stupid

 

The present administration is doing its darndest to turn America into a fascist autocracy. To this end, they are attacking many government departments, services, laws, and regulations in order to deliver the nation into the hands of Trump and his billionaire friends. To date, this effort has not been stymied by lawmakers or by the judiciary (although the judiciary is beginning to get its back up). It’s on us, the citizens, to stop it.

There is plenty to complain about. A laundry list of the executive branch’s malevolent actions would fill many pages. Part of their plan is to hit us all with as many encroachments as fast as possible, so that we’re overwhelmed. But what action do we take, and how?

The key piece I would like to address is the attack on education. The destruction of the Department of Education, the defunding of the Institute of Museum and Library Sciences, the takeover of the Kennedy Center, and the ham-handed attempt to control the curriculum of universities all add up to one thing: they want you stupid.

We are already faced with the reality that we have a long way still to go to function as an educated and informed public. 90 million people didn’t vote; 54 percent of adults can’t read above the sixth-grade level; 21 percent of Americans are illiterate. 21 percent.

And that’s how those in power like it. Stupid people obey. Stupid people don’t think their way to solutions. Stupid people live in an environment dominated by fear and anger. They fall for a dictator’s lies without the ability to use critical intelligence to peel apart and destroy those untruths.

Mitch Albom writes: “If the culture doesn’t work, don’t buy it. Create your own.” Conservatives have been working for decades to create a culture in which minorities, immigrants, the LGBTQ population, women, “unproductive” people (meaning people with disabilities, a subsection of the population that the Nazis murdered), and those who champion them don’t count. Let’s face it, if you’re not an able-bodied white straight Christian male, those in power do not have any use for you. The “official” culture they seek to impose (MMA? WWF? Square dancing?) is a recipe for regimented disaster.

So, it’s time to create a new culture. How do we do that? It begins with creating a space of self-respect, a feeling that you are a valuable and significant human and that you have something to contribute to the larger world. Then, there’s the little matter of will power. Can you make the time in your life to be a little more conscious and informed person?

This is always possible, even for us with full-time jobs and no discretionary funds to speak of. The diverse and multicultural society that America is isn’t going anywhere. It’s there, we just have to celebrate, honor, and exercise in it. The best way to do this is to KEEP LEARNING.

You can do it. Anyone who feels that they have done their due diligence in the realm of their personal education by graduating from college (another rapidly shrinking part of the populace) is mistaken. We need to STAY CURIOUS. We need to utilize our libraries to the greatest extent possible. Every book you check out, every hour you spend on the library’s internet, every class you take there increases your knowledge base, and it certifies the usefulness of the institution. Libraries are the last safe space, the place where you don’t have to buy anything to hang out there, the place where you can read and think and learn.

Every trip to a museum opens up your mind a little. Every concert, even every new type of cuisine you try, every time you try something new – music, art, film, books, plays, dance – you are increasing the I.Q. of the general populace. It doesn’t take much time or money.

I don't come from money, I come from just-barely-making-it. When I was little, I fell in love with the arts. I feasted on them growing up, and I dreamed of being a playwright, of being an actor. After an aborted college career, I decided to continue to work in the culture, to become a comedian. And I became one. (I wasn’t very good, but I do get an A for effort!) When that career ended, I decided to become a journalist. Just like that. I had no training, no certificate or diploma to legitimize my ambition. I just went for it. And I did it!

I created a position for myself where I could dig into and report on the culture extensively. I couldn’t afford to patronize opera houses, concerts, museums. Instead, to get access for free I reviewed plays, concerts, albums, and books. It worked! Soon I was writing on arts and entertainment for newspapers and magazines – while they were still in good health.

Then the bottom fell out of the journalism industry – no more work there. What to do next? I decided to write a book. And I did. Then I sold it. Then I wrote another one, and sold it. I’m working on three more books right now. I look at my efforts and I think, “Wow, how did you do that?” The learning never has to end.

I am still living life on the low end of the economic spectrum, but my days are filled with purpose and interest. You don't have to be rich to enjoy art – and in fact, a non-wealthy people’s perspective on the culture is just the kind of subversive thinking we need. By expressing yourself, you can still create new and better realities.

Keep your mind open. If I can do it, you can. YOU CAN DO IT. Try new things. Think about and discuss issues that perturb you. Culture gives us two great things needed for an ethical society to function – empathy and remorse, neither of which our opponents possess. Live and breathe the culture YOU WANT TO BRING INTO BEING, and spread it.

Do white people suck?

What in the hell is going on? The new administration’s hostility to Black people, gay people, women, and just about any minority you can think of is palpable. It is moving to dismantle all the diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in the country – not just governmentally, but in the private sector as well. Any and every racial justice program is facing termination. I expected a lot of hateful action and petty behavior from Trump’s people, but this is ridiculous, granular in its approach to detail, going out of its way to incarcerate, humiliate, abuse, and torture individuals it doesn’t like without due process.

What in the world makes white people think that their grip on reality is threatened by the existence of people unlike them?

The achievements of these minorities are being scrubbed from government websites. Books about minority issues and contributions have been removed from military libraries. Censorship is stifling free speech at universities, in the media, at our workplaces, and it is only a matter of time before we will be warned not to express ourselves freely in public. That’s how dictators do.

What is the motivation? First, let’s remember that only 30 percent of the American electorate voted these Nazis in. 30 percent of you didn’t vote. THIRTY PERCENT. So much for civics. Of those who did vote, a slight majority favored the fascists, and put them in power.

Now this third of our nation, the part that’s vengeful and prejudiced, is in the driver’s seat. Remember, there is another third of the country that opposes what is happening, and is just now getting its head around a plan of action to ensure that people are treated decently. So there is hope.

But it’s such a LOT of hate out there. The pent-up anger and resentment of white supremacists is real. What is it based on? It’s based on pure, stark, unreasoning fear. They have a “replacement theory” which states that minorities are flooding the country in a conscious and concerted effort to outnumber the white inhabitants of the U.S. A. To which I say: so? And to what end? I was raised on the concept that America is the great melting pot – not one that pours its matter into identical molds, but one that allows us to work together while retaining our unique qualities and sharing them with others.

The knuckleheads are afraid that, if for some reason more non-white people lived here, there would be retribution. That white people would be treated in the way they’ve treated minorities down the centuries here – that they’d be killed, oppressed, locked up, and beaten in their turn. Because they can’t imagine people being different from them, of having higher moral standards than that.

President Lyndon B. Johnson once said, “If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.” The Trump administration is gleefully trying to restore the separation of the races, the suppression of the other, and the forcing of ideological conformity all down the line. It’s trying to ship us back to a so-called golden age that never existed, one in which everyone but straight white males didn’t count. There is a desperate edge to all the administration’s actions, a blind lashing out that’s creating damage and havoc.

One thing we do know about white people is that, when they threatened, they get violent. They are experts at killing other people and taking their stuff. That’s the principle this country was founded on! And since we have more guns than anyone, look for the last vestiges of restraint to flake away, bringing us back to the days of the Wild West. Look for self-appointed armed militias to spring up and terrorize the populace. Look for it and keep looking – the institutions we thought would guard us from this did not do their job, and the mainstream media is in the hands of the powerful. We have to work together and keep each other informed in order to coordinate action to change the dreadful state of affairs we are in.

And, hey, what would we do if we had to lean on only white culture? Square dancing, spelling bees, quilting, country music, hymns, pie-eating contests? Will we all wear gingham? Imagine the culture as a Lawrence Welk broadcast, repeated over and over, forever. No thank you. I need the whole culture, the full spectrum. I want to hear from Black artists, women artists, gay artists, Muslim artists, Albanian-American artists, I don’t care. We need the collision of identities and ideas. That, and not conformity, obedience, and suppression, is the hallmark of America’s greatness.

So do white people suck? They do when they feel cornered.

Fight the power

 

We elected a dictator. We are living under an autocracy.

It’s far too late to clutch our pearls and bemoan the sad state into which our country has fallen. We do not have luxury of being victims. Reprehensible people have taken over our government, aided and abetted by our enemies. These fascists are destroying all that makes America great, starting with eliminating this country as a beacon of freedom for immigrants round the world.

Things will not magically get better. I fully expect martial law to be declared at some point, if the populace proves not to be OK with the changes coming their way. Already this government is suspending civil liberties, censoring language, and attempting to control the culture. The sadistic ideologues and the simple garden-variety assholes control the presidency, the Congress, and the courts. Aid programs to the poor and disadvantaged around the world have been cut. Many, many people are going to die as a result of this administration.

And you know what? They don’t care. You don’t matter. They have pretty much confessed that they see anyone not in collusion with them as non-people, “non-player characters” who can be disposed of much like animals or inanimate objects. They plan to destroy our social welfare system and “cull the herd” of those who are determined to be unproductive or worse, undesirable members of this right-wing white-ass Christian patriarchal society they're trying to force down our throats.

So what can we do? I have heard from a lot of folks whose plan it is to tune out and mind their own business for the foreseeable future, to disconnect from an unpleasant reality. It feels like a heavy burden, but we must remain present, cognizant and involved. Silence is compliance, which is why I wrote this in the first place.

Fortunately, the Constitution is still in effect. We still have the right to speak out, and to peacefully demonstrate for redress of grievances. Non-violent civil disobedience is a great tool for battling these stupid and destructive bastards.

Keep speaking out. Share information. Participate in marches and boycotts. Above all, preserve your integrity.

If you are Muslim, you are safe with me.

If you are Black, you are safe with me.

If you are LGBTQ+, you are safe with me.

If you are an immigrant, you are safe with me.

If you are a woman, you are safe with me.

If you are among the disenfranchised, you are safe with me.

Remember, 49 per cent of us did not want this to happen. We are not helpless, and we have the mechanisms in place to create positive change. Any number of bad things can happen, but we do have hope and determination. Yours for truth, justice, and mercy. No kings.

Death to selfies

If you look at my banner photo on my Facebook page (that is, if you even go there anymore – isn’t FB for old and/or dead people?) you will see that it looks like a selfie. There’s my big old face dead center, scenic mountain backdrop, artful sunflare, and all.

Except I wasn’t trying to take my picture. I am technologically inept and was trying to take a picture of what was in front of me, in the other direction – a beautiful mountain panorama. Therefore, what you see is the most unpremeditated view of my face you are likely to get in this life.

Taking photographs was painful in the flashbulb and film days. We were always steered to “look into the light,” which resulted in many pictures of me cringing and clutching my face, albeit in good, solid lighting. I still have flash-flinch, and few photographers have captured me with my eyes open.

Now I bob amid selfie takers. The medium is the message. Everyone’s a star, and anything is permitted.

With the democratization of the media, everyone is now their own broadcaster and network. The gatekeepers have fallen. News and information can no longer be monetized, and in a capitalist society that means the communication apparatus is now for rent, with no public responsibilities (not that this hasn’t been always true to some extent). Initially liberating due to the ability of alternate voices to make themselves heard for the first time, the dissolution of the news industry means that there is no impetus to find out and tell the truth, to the best of one’s ability. And if truth is gone, all that remains is assertion.

Anti-intellectualism is on the rise. An overarching sense of being on the same page as a nation, no matter how awkwardly produced, is gone. Ironically, that consensual reality was a product of diversity. That mixture of opinion, fact, advertisements, propangadna, and as many viewpoints as could be crammed into a print publication at once forced the reader to be exposed to unfamiliar ideas, to be aware of other people’s problems, of trouble on the horizon. We self-select now. People do not want to know what’s going on (unless, seemingly, it’s upbeat stories about contemporary living for a savvy readership). We have ensiled ourselves.

We are almost post-literate. We quite literally express oursevles in images and video clips. We pose, we identify where we are, we say how we feel. We contextualize ourselves for our friends and followers, always foregrounded against a referent. We expel concussions of self-regard. We like things, we share things, we argue online, but it’s all little bush fires out on the grand savannah. That atomization of the media has fragmented the popular will, stunted its attention span. We are all chasing page views now, and anything goes, and goes by quickly.

We are exchanging the lasting for the ephemeral. The advent of “disposable” media services such as Snapchat means that the content vanishes after a time. With that the idea of generating something permanent is lost, and under that I find a fundamental, intolerable despair. It makes me fear that there are more people who think that there’s no reason to aim for something that lasts than there are otherwise. (Since I’ve taken it on myself to tell stories for a living, it’s of course in my own interest that I promote this concept. Have you Googled me lately? Online, in archives, my stuff’s still out there, and that’s the point.).

Instead of broadcasting to an unrestricted audience, the nature of social media is constricting us into a multitude of discrete sets of relationships – as numerous as cells in a beehive, each with a restricted, mediated point of view. With no new paradigm of consensual reality emerging, everyone is more easily entranced by their own illusions. Instead of the digital revolution pulling us all out together into the light, it has merely helped us build better bunkers.

So what’s the answer? Take otheries, I think. The obvious metaphor from my tale of my photograph, that I obtain the most accurate self-portrait when I focus outside myself, is trite, obvious, and ridiculously sentimental, even for me. But it is true.

When we turn the camera around, when we really look around us and transmit that, we’re on the right track back being human. All the old media can dry up and blow away, and the new ones can assume their rude shapes. The value in telling stories persist. We still need them. And when we tell them, we do wind up asserting ourselves in the most powerful fashion.

Killing Germans

'Where Eagles Dare' -- a righteous bloodbath

They always made me play the Nazi.

There was one thing all the boys in our neighborhood was keen on in the 1960s – World War II. Our martial ardor was stoked by the flood of film and television of the time replaying the war for us. We all tuned in to “Combat!,” “Twelve O’clock High,” and “The Rat Patrol.” These took their cue from the popularity of the popular war films of the time – “Battle of the Bulge,” “The Guns of Navarone,” “The Longest Day,” “The Dirty Dozen.”

It wasn’t the propagandistic stuff made during the war, although we could catch plenty of that on late-night TV. It was the propaganda of the generation after. Already the Western, which dominated 1950s media, was collapsing in popularity. It was time to culturally process the war through mass media.

Each crop of surviving soldiers takes decades to work through and integrate these experiences, and some never do. Men who had fought the war were middle-aged fathers by now; the horrors they perpetrated and endured were repackaged into entertainments, made largely bloodless, noble, and above all necessary. Above all, these films featured scads and loads of bucket-helmeted, gray-uniformed Jerries getting slaughtered in every way imaginable.

This was our male paradigm. The warrior, reluctant to kill but grimly determined to defeat the enemy, ready to sacrifice his own life if need be. The G. I. Joe doll, Sgt. Rock, "Star Spangled War." The same archetype adored by the fanatics, the suicide bombers, the mass murderers. No cause is unrighteous in its own eyes. A fart has no nose.

As the youngest and scrawniest of my gang, and gifted quite inadvertently with a Teutonic surname, I was volunteered to play the bad guy, over and over again. I learned a few things – it is much more fun to play the villain, for instance. But by and large it got old quick. I was tired of dying a thousand different ways and coming home covered with the dust I’d bit all afternoon.

Oddly enough, the great-grandparent with the German name had adopted it on arrival in the U.S. – we should rightly be named, like most good Danes, Andersen. I’m not sure if this ever caused trouble for my Dad’s side of the family, but I do know that my mother’s father, a good solid 100-percent Kraut, knocked the umlaut off his moniker when the war broke out, rendering its pronunciation a bit more un-German. He also volunteered for the U.S. Army cavalry, and made it all the way to New York before peace broke out in November 1918.

Evidently, anti-German sentiment during World War I was pronounced. I first ran into mention of it in Steinbeck’s remembrances – the neighbors looked askance at his family until the war was over. Groucho Marx as a young vaudeville comic had been playing a German-stereotype character, already euphemized to “Dutch comic.” The night the Lusitania was sunk in 1915, he changed his act.

“If I had come out as a German comic, they would have killed me,” he recalls on his 1972 concert album “An Evening with Groucho.” He changed his makeup “and now I was a Jew comic,” he continues. “I had never been a Jew comic before!”

The threat was real. 4,000 German sympathizers were imprisoned in the U.S. from 1917 through 1918. The Red Cross wouldn’t accept volunteers with German surnames. Business names and street signs were changed; they stopped teaching German in many schools. Sauerkraut became liberty cabbage, dachshunds became liberty pups. German books were banned or burned. A few men were killed by angry mobs.

Sound familiar?

Each rolling wave of immigrants to America has had to run the gauntlet of prejudice. The Irish, the Germans, the Polish, the Italians, the Mexicans, the Japanese, the Chinese, the Vietnamese, the Russians. Suspected, disliked, stereotyped, and acted against. Now anyone vaguely Middle Eastern is tagged as a Muslim and a violent one at that. A bit harder to hide a complexion than a last name.

Of course, the Nazis were the perfect enemy. Evil personified. No problem killing them and anyone associated with them. Our polar opposite, we thought. 

The lines of prejudice were redrawn after World War II. The Germans, formerly one solid ethnic unit to despise, was now split in half. Democratic Germans were good, Communist Germans were evil. The Red Menace was harder to typify, differentiate, personify. The Cold War was fought by identical men on each side, all wearing gray flannel suits, indistinguishable.

But . . . we still had memories of the perfect enemy, the Nazis. Being seemingly perfectly inhuman, it was easy and guilt-free to kick their asses in copious amounts in our fantasy lives. 1968’s “Where Eagles Dare” held the record for decades for most German soldiers killed – here’s a funny video tallying the count:

Steven Spielberg, that not-so-obscure filmmaker of my generation, has related a fondness for this preposterous film. I wonder sometimes if we all got desensitized to body counts in this manner. It certainly seems like Spielberg follows in the wake of 1960’s World War II films when he created the violent extravaganzas of “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and “Temple of Doom.” Spielberg’s action films often mimic video games, with stage after stage of peril to be run through and their inexhaustible supply of baddies to be wasted. After Spielberg, the Matrix movies, Tarentino lately, and many other franchises and standalone film sagas filled with mass, righteous killings.

So what’s the appeal? John Cleese has the most succinct explanation of what shadow projection is:

 Sound familiar? In a year when our shadow selves seemed to leap into the light, brandishing weapons and killing innocent strangers in the name of slaying dragons, I hope we can learn that these arbitrary distinctions shouldn’t endanger us, that the misperceptions of others won’t get us killed, that our superficial characteristics don’t mark us for a beatdown or worse.

When you come right down to it, most of our identity is based on a set of imaginary constructs. Why should we let one set of illusions prompt us to destroy lives that operate on a different set?

We shouldn’t have to blend in or hide. That’s why we came here in the first place. Remember?

A salute to Dennis

Dennis Oviatt on his last day at the helm of Cafe Food. (All photos by/courtesy of Bonnie Chaim)

By BRAD WEISMANN

Here’s the thing. I don’t think that Dennis Oviatt’s Café Food ever got any press until the day it closed.

He spent 21 years running the eatery in the Aspen Place shopette at 2095 30^th St. in Boulder. For a full 40 years it occupied the space, under three owners before Dennis as well. (The site is being bulldozed to create new Google office space.) When he closed on November 21, most of his many faithful customers came by to get one more magnificent lunch from him.

 His menu was simple – soups and sandwiches. Yet I and other regulars could go day after day, gulping down his signature borscht, or his vegetarian chili, or his clam chowder. His sandwiches had the same ingredients as those at any chain sandwich place. Yet they were a thousand times more delicious than the usual fare, more filling, more satisfying somehow. And I would crawl over broken glass to get one of his famous German crusty rolls – sometimes we’d just buy a bag of them to munch on. How did he do it?

I think it was a function of Dennis’ unique character. He was completely honest, for one thing. If he thought you looked terrible, he said so. If he disagreed with your order, he’d try to get you to change it. He made you bus your table. And, if he was feeling lighthearted, you could joke and laugh with him, get into a delightful conversation that made you wish you didn’t have to sit down and eat.

Dennis was for real. He cared about what he was doing. He never took a day off. He came in, he set up, he served along with an ever-changing roster of assistants, he cleaned up, he went home. Day after day, in serene consistency, he fulfilled himself by making good food for people in his own modest establishment.

The reason why he never got any press? He didn’t advertise. This drove every single ad rep in town crazy, and they all eventually stopped coming by and trying to sell him and became regulars as well. Dennis had all the business he needed, and didn’t see any reason to bring in more. He was immune to every sales pitch, technique, contract, and offer. He wouldn’t even try some advertising for free, on spec, something a media company just doesn’t do until it has tried everything else.

Well, the system does not know what to do with people who won’t advertise. This is the life blood of any media enterprise, so inextricably bound up with the business of news that the mechanism hardly recognizes a story that doesn’t have some kind of profit motive behind it.

What motivation is there to cover the activities of any business save to promote it? What leverage does any story’s subject have if he or she is not, in the end, selling something? Given the state of things here in the post-journalistic age, reporters are mostly just content creators for the bar down the street, the favored cause, the politician in sync with the publishers’ agendas, the institutions they’re indebted to for information.

The late Bill Vielehr was little-known, too. He sculpted for decades in his little rattrap studio at the end of Pearl Street in Boulder, getting a commission here and there, gradually increasing his popularity He kept his head down, scraped along, kept making work. He kept all his rejection letters in a drawer in his office. It contained more than 1,400 separate expressions of disinterest. 1,400. He was still going strong when he died suddenly on October 11.

What Dennis and Bill had in common was the knowledge of what they were good at, a dedication to doing the best work they could, day and day out; and a sense of proportion – being content with working to the limits of their capabilities, but no further. Who can say what worth it is to craft huge, shiny, serrated sculptures? What’s the value of a quiet little lunch spot? Who’s to tell these guys that they didn’t dream big enough, or were on the wrong track? And who cares if neither of them got a write-up until their work was done? They fed us.

Bill Vielehr at the Boulder International Film Festival, 2014.

At our best we measure ourselves against the template of our ambitions on a daily basis. Motivated properly, we work as hard as we can to fulfill our lives, to fill them with meaning. Hacking away at stories here at my desk, dropping them into the media stream, hoping they reach those who need them, I feel like I have some sense of what these guys went through. Dennis and Bill toiled away in obscurity, and affected far more people than you might think. I still love to watch the kids playing among Bill’s sculptures in the park here. I will always be able to taste that crusty roll.

Life imitates comedy: Murdoch and ‘Pravda’

“It always seemed strange to me that the things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first, they love the produce of the second.”

     -- John Steinbeck, “The Log from the Sea of Cortez”

People love to paint their judgments of others in primary colors. Media mogul Rupert Murdoch is currently decked out in ebony.

Murdoch, now seemingly brought low due to the criminal activities of his journalistic employees, is being grilled by Parliament even as I write this. All and sundry are gloating over his downfall.

The powerful press lord, creator of the Fox Broadcasting Company and recent purchaser of the Wall Street Journal, is a legendary monster in the business – perceived and portrayed as ruthless, right-wing, opportunistic, with an editorial mission to cheapen the minds of readers with sex, scandal and celebrity obsession, with a healthy dollop of abuse and persecution of political targets in the pages of his publications.

Yet, as much as he is despised, he is feared. And admired. Undeniably, he gets things done, he makes things happen. According to the customs of unrestrained capitalist practice, he is not particularly out of line. Is he a hero or a villain?

In 1985, British playwrights Howard Brenton and David Hare saw the staging of their “Pravda,” a brilliant satire of the media with a thinly disguised Murdoch clone at its center. (It was one of Anthony Hopkins’ last star stage turns before his rise to international prominence with his performance as Hannibal Lecter in the film “The Silence of the Lambs.”) Nearly 30 years before today’s events, they summarized the dilemma the journalism business – can you have success and influence and still fulfill the ideals of the profession?

In the play, the Australian Murdoch becomes the South African Lambert Le Roux, who mercilessly consolidates and dumbs down his media holdings, making countless enemies who nonetheless are unable to band together and bring him down.

“I provided the formula,” Le Roux states in Act Two. “ . . . Page One, a nice picture of the Prime Minister. Page two, something about actors. Page three, gossip . . . a rail crash if you’re lucky. Four, high technology. Five, sex, sex crimes, court cases. . . . Then six pages of sport. Back page, a lot of weather and something nasty about the Opposition. There you are.”

Is Le Roux a monster, or simply an astute businessman? “Good papers are no good,” he continues “There’s no point in them. All that writing. Why go to the trouble of producing good ones, when bad ones are so much easier? And they sell better too.”

In the end, Brenton and Hare do not indict Le Roux. They indict his victims. “Journalists are not noted for standing up for each other. It is not in their nature,” Le Roux comments. And indeed, a publication’s discomfort with some truths is laid at the feet of editor Andrew May in the first act. May, who later becomes Le Roux’s puppet, is seen dealing with a woman who comes to his provincial paper seeking a retraction of a damaging falsehood.

“We don’t publish corrections. Because we don’t like them. I’ll be honest. They don’t look good on the page. If every time we got something wrong, we published a correction, then a newspaper would just be a footnote to yesterday’s newspaper. . . . if we apologize and correct, how can the readers know what is true and what is not? To print corrections is a kind of betrayal. Of a trust. It’s a matter – finally – of journalistic ethics.”

May’s corkscrew logic explains much about the temptations of the business. Is a newspaper a repository of facts, or not? This problem can be found at the smallest local rag. Agendas are pushed, perspectives are omitted, mistakes are made and glossed over, false conclusions are promoted. Access is traded for influence. Above all, the popular prejudices of the readership are reinforced.

As Andrew’s first boss ruefully states at the beginning, “As a young man I forged new copy. I hammered at words. I wrenched them. Until it was kindly pointed out to me that what people wanted was something that was every day the same. The illusion of timelessness, that’s what we sell. . . . Anything else and you’d stimulate people. Never do that. It can only compound their unhappiness.”

The shallow and manipulative route is remarkably and speedily successful. It works. I’ve seen editors make room for more and more crap, promising themselves that the extra “eyeballs” they generate will give them the leverage to assign more serious, in-depth work. I haven’t yet seen that happen. Laziness and deference to the lowest common denominator drives out the kind of journalism we all claim to want, but so few seem to read.

“Delusions.” says Le Roux at the play’s end. “Does nobody see? What on earth is all this stuff about the truth? Truth? Why, when everywhere you go people tell lies. In pubs. To each other. To their husbands. To their wives. To the children. . . . Why single out newspapers? Why there? ‘Oh! A special standard!’ Everyone can tell lies except newspapers. They’re the universal scapegoat for everybody else’s evasions and inadequacies. It is a totally unworkable view of the world!”

A publication can be many things. It can be a revenue stream, a beacon of light, a delivery system of consumer to product, a bludgeon, a pleasant waste of time. Who really wants the truth?

In this time, it’s easier than ever before for a journalist to wrestle with his or her conscience. The destruction of the profession’s economic viability, and the freedom to publish independently, means that “good” journalism is now a hobby.

Go for something thoughtful, complex, of social value, or flog the latest fad, promote the newest advertiser, rewrite the shortest press release? Get in bed with the government, bribe the police, tap people’s phones? All these things are simply logical extensions of what are generally considered to be sharp business practices. And it made Murdoch a billionaire.

Brenton and Hare saw it and named it and nailed it, decades ago. Perhaps Murdoch inspires such disdain because his choices are ours, writ large.

Winning the war: old, fat men vs. the Taliban

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I

I know all about combat -- I have seen "Stripes" at least 15 times.

I volunteer!

Me! Me! Me! Me! Me! I’ll go!

Look, this war on terror thing is not working, at least in central Asia. We beat up on the Taliban, leave -- and they come back. We bribe the inhabitants to be on our side, and they use the money to buy more weapons with which to kill us.

Meanwhile, this whole drone thing isn’t working. Remember how we killed Pakistan Taliban chief Hakimullah Mehsud last year? Oops, it turns out we didn’t, probably because he wasn’t disguised as a wedding or a funeral. (In July of 2009, the Brookings Institution reported that the ratio of civilian to militant deaths via Predator drone-launched Hellfire missiles is 10 to one. Not a great public relations move.)

This is by no means a slam against our enlisted people. Hey, I’ve worked for big companies – whether or not your bosses know what they’re doing, you have to follow orders, right? However, poor executive planning in civilian life usually leads merely to bad phone service or the cable guy never showing up – not the killing or maiming of the staff.

The only answer is sending out soldiers with nothing to lose. I’m talking about middle-aged men. Get us off the couch and into the fray!

Why? Let’s look at the facts:

1. Biologically speaking, we are expendable. By the time we hit 45, we’ve probably procreated all we’re going to – unless we get incredibly, stupendously (un)lucky one night. Let’s face it -- if we were bees, our sexual organs would already have been ripped out of our bodies during intercourse. Ouch. In terms of advertising demographics, we don’t even exist.
2. We love action movies. John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, Charles Bronson, Bruce Willis, Sly, Arnold . . . Snake Plissken . . . these are our role models! We are the most likely age/sex group to do some ridiculous things with ammunition and explosives, with little regard for consequences. We could blow ourselves and everyone around us up at any time. It would be like having a bunch of suicide bombers on your team – only we’re just dumb. It all worked out in “Stripes,” didn’t it?
3. Now that I can get access to espn.go.com just about anywhere, I am flexible about my location, and I feel I can say the same for my sports-loving brethren. And sistren.
4. We are always alert! Always! At least, I am. I think it’s because I always have to pee. Or I can’t pee. Or I pee a little bit, all the time. That makes me grumpy! And alert! All the time!
5. My middle-aged fuddy-duddiness leads me to just OOZE counterintuitive attack concepts. For instance – young soldiers play gangsta rap and heavy metal when they go into combat to get pumped and intimidate opponents. I prefer to dash into action with the lilting voice of Mel Torme crooning “Nice Work If You Can Get It” in my ears. In fact, I would prefer to blow the enemy away -- with the sweet stylings of award-winning tenor saxophonist Joe Lovano. (Actually, if I could find some terrorists who are into pre-electric Miles, we may have a peace process on our hands.)
6. We don’t need basic training. Not because we are battle-ready; because we are incapable of being trained. Ask our wives. We do follow orders well, however, as we are leery of being bitched at.
7. We are clean and sober, as our doctors have already told us to quit smoking and drinking. OK, maybe we need a little weed. OK, a lot of weed. And some acid. But none of the hard stuff.
8. War is not for the young. The young should be home, having sex. Raising kids. At the very least, getting in over their heads with bad mortgages, as God intended. Ask, tell, gay, straight, I don’t care. (I draw the line at animals -- you cannot spoon with a cow. You cannot train a goat to get you a snack in the middle of the night. God knows I’ve tried.)

Ladies and gentlemen, follow my plan and the war will be over in weeks. Of course, we may all wind up speaking Pashto. Inshallah!

Your mom goes to the opera: the ever-threatened fine-arts audience

Ever notice how the arts are always dying? They’ve been in a perpetual swoon since I can remember. Periodically, a U.S. study is released stating that arts attendance and participation are lower than ever, and that “something must be done.”

There have been forays into topics of the moment, such as “Jerry Springer: The Opera” and a newly proposed piece about the life of Anna Nicole Smith. 

Orchestras, museums, theater companies, and other entities are constantly trying to reach the coveted 18-35 demographic by feigning hipness, good cheer and snarky humor in their promotional materials – and showing some skin doesn’t hurt either.

Fine-art appreciation is stereotyped as a rich man’s pastime. In fact, many times high-art tendencies are supported and perpetuated by people with disposable income and a desire for prestige. And, many times, they drag themselves to high-falutin’ cultural events for reasons of social distinction, not on the basis of enthusiasm or deep appreciation. Yep, those dudes in the tuxes are just as bored as you.

There’s a lot to be said for maintaining and expanding arts education and participation for school-age kids. A recent proposal by Colorado’s Boulder Valley School Board to reduce or eliminate 5^th-grade music programs has raised parental uproar, but is a typical move for a financially distressed school district.

But is there much you can do to lure audiences of young adults to the concert hall? I doubt it. Should you try? I say get Grandma and Grandpa gussied up and send them down to the cultural events only they are capable of appreciating!

Japanese philosopher Shunsuke Tsurumi split art, for the sake of analysis, into three categories: pure, popular and marginal. Pure art requires a certain level of expertise and knowledge from both its creators and its consumers. In popular art, the creator is still a professional but the audience is undiscriminating. Marginal art is everything else – from decoration to gesture – the raw material of aesthetic creation and response in everyday life.

So pure art is smart art. It needs the audience’s critical tools to complete the communication circuit. It requires contextualization, intelligence, education, and indoctrination; it has connoisseurs, cognoscenti, specialists and interpreters. Smart art aims high, features demonstrations of technical expertise, and to be sure errs on the side of seriousness and significance and pretentiousness. Accordingly, it has a much higher failure rate. It’s despised, made fun of and marginalized by a populist reverse snobbery that discourages explorations that can’t be easily packaged or sold.

The very things that are unique about these niche arts are what marketers and publicists are trying to overcome. Instead of trying to make them palatable, perhaps their best move would be to emphasize these points of difficulty.

Smart art doesn’t require money – it requires passion. Occasionally, art bridges the categories of pure and popular for a time – opera in the 19^th century, jazz up to the bebop era. Its popularity phases out, or never develops, but the art form stubbornly persists and continues to speak to its audience, however small.

Smart art also requires maturity – that dreaded word! Hopefully, the longer life goes on the greater the stock of life experiences and learned lessons grow within each person. Those who age successfully develop a tolerance for ambiguity and complexity, develop longer attention spans and more nuanced receptivity. And I think that those closer to the end of life have a more keen appreciation of artistic work that asks hard questions.

Smart art has a research and development arm – it’s called life. Life grows the gray-headed, always-dying-off audiences that mysteriously maintain the arts in America, replacing the fans that pass away with others who have aged out of the commercially bombarded demographics into the more deserted areas where, at last, they can sit down and look and hear and feel and think.

Now, get cracking!

ESSENTIAL TEXTS:

 A Night at the Opera: An Irreverent Guide to the Plots, the Singers, the Composers, the Recordings; Sir Denis Forman, Random House, 1994.

The New Penguin Opera Guide; ed. Amanda Holden, Penguin, 2001.

The Grove Book of Operas; Stanley Sadie and Laura Macy, Oxford University Press, 2009.

The Metropolitan Opera Stories of the Great Operas; ed. John Freeman, W.W. Norton, 1997.

The Oxford Illustrated History of Opera, ed. Roger Parker, 1994.

JUST FOR FUN

"P.D.Q. Bach: The Abduction of Figaro," dir. Kaye S. Levine -- 1984.

"Anna Russell Sings! Again?," Anna Russell, CBS Masterworks, 1953.

"Das Ring Gott Farblonjet," by Charles Ludlam, 1977.