“Nothing Strange” About Jackson?

Leave it to the ineffable Al Sharpton to inject ugly racial politics into the Jackson mournathon over the past few days. When did he get close to the Jacksons, anyway?

Jackson’s kids look like beautiful, sweet children. I wish them a far better life than he had. But what in the world did Sharpton mean in telling them, “There wasn’t  nothing strange about your daddy. But it was strange what he had to deal with. But he dealt with it anyway. He dealt with it for us.”

For “us”? Who’s us? Black people? But the vast majority of black people, thank God, do not end up paying millions to settle molestation charges, and they do not walk around swathed in masks and toting umbrellas, and they do not have household  shrines in which hundreds of candles burn 24/7 in honor of Diana Ross, and  above all, they do not undergo endless plastic surgeries and skin bleachings until they resemble waxen middle-aged white women. Was all this Jackson’s way of taking on the burden of black suffering? Please.

Sharpton seems to be shaping a martyrdom myth for Jackson that is  ill-suited to the facts, (if, as Ross Perot used to say, facts matter, which I often doubt. ) Of the many powerful forces that no doubt shaped Jackson’s life, does Sharpton  really believe that the criticism and ridicule of white people–who, by the way, spent untold millions on his records and concerts– was one of the chief drivers?

Based on what I’ve always read about Jackson, I’d say his early relationship with his parents, especially his father, had more to do with making him what he was than the machinations of  any white tabloid editor.  He was trapped in  a traveling circus from the age of five, cut off from reality, the captive goose that laid the golden eggs for an army of hangers-on.

So Jackson was in part a victim of his family’s exploitation. But there’s another side of him. Far from living as a puppet of the white oppressor, he was in truth a hugely powerful man who did more to create the life he wanted than most of us ever do.  Some actions in that life were harmlessly eccentric, kind,  charitable and touched with artistic genius.  Some  were  highly strange, neurotic, unhealthy, and perhaps predatory.  To say they were not is to wave away the truth, and to leave Jackson’s children a legacy of lies.

Edgar Allen Poe on Procrastination

You think you procrastinate too much? Edgar Allen Poe was also plagued by the problem, as he  explained in his psychological inquiry, “The Imp of the Perverse.” But few of us have ever rationalized our inaction so eloquently:

We have a task before us which must be speedily performed. We know that it will be ruinous to make delay. The most important crisis of our life calls, trumpet-tongued, for immediate energy and action. We glow, we are consumed with eagerness to commence the work, with the anticipation of whose glorious result our whole souls are on fire. It must, it shall be undertaken to-day, and yet we put it off until to-morrow, and why? There is no answer, except that we feel perverse, using the word with no comprehension of the principle. To-morrow arrives, and with it a more impatient anxiety to do our duty, but with this very increase of anxiety arrives, also, a nameless, a positively fearful, because unfathomable, craving for delay. This craving gathers strength as the moments fly. The last hour for action is at hand. We tremble with the violence of the conflict within us,–of the definite with the indefinite–of the substance with the shadow. But, if the contest have proceeded thus far, it is the shadow which prevails,–we struggle in vain. The clock strikes, and is the knell of our welfare. At the same time, it is the chanticleer- note to the ghost that has so long overawed us. It flies–it disappears–we are free. The old energy returns. We will labor now. Alas, it is too late!

I wonder what organization guru David Allen, author of Getting Things Done, would say about that?

From DiMaggio to Sanford: Where Did Dignity Go?

The other day,  re  Mark  Sanford’s self-flagellation tour, I wrote:

He has become the Britney Spears of American politics, his self-destruction enabled by hordes of media leeches who dish the garbage to the mob. If there was any remaining line of demarcation between the sleazy tabloid media and the supposedly serious media, this all but erases it, along with the antiquated ideas of honor and shame.

In a thoughtful column today, NY Timesman David Brooks outlines some of the causes of the decline of dignity.

First, there is capitalism. We are all encouraged to become managers of our own brand, to do self-promoting end zone dances to broadcast our own talents. Second, there is the cult of naturalism. We are all encouraged to discard artifice and repression and to instead liberate our own feelings. Third, there is charismatic evangelism with its penchant for public confession. Fourth, there is radical egalitarianism and its hostility to aristocratic manners.

Brooks also names some public figures whom we still respect because of their dignity–among them Martin Luther King Jr., Tom Hanks, and Joe DiMaggio. Of these, I think DiMaggio was the quintessential dignified man.

What do we mean when we say DiMaggio had dignity? We mean, I think, that he insisted on limits and borders. He was willing to live his professional life in the great fishbowl of Yankee Stadium, but he would never give everything of himself to the fans. They had a right to see him play great baseball; they had no claim on  him beyond that.  Unlike so many of today’s celebs, he did not sell every part of himself to the highest bidder, and did not natter on publicly as if his opinions on politics and social issues carried weight. Unlike the Hollywood mouths of today, DiMaggio may even have known, deep down inside, that he didn’t know much except baseball and therefore had little to say about matters beyond his grasp. That’s humility, another quality, like dignity, that has left the building.

DiMaggio’s dignity forced him out of the game while he was still a young man. The   moment he knew his skills were slipping, he retired. His dignity, his proud sense of himself, would not let him become  a has-been hanging on for another paycheck. He had always given the public his best. That was the deal. If he could not give the best, he would not give at all.

Can you imagine the money DiMaggio  could have gotten from a book–make that a magazine article–about his life with Marilyn Monroe?  (Granted, large elements of the 50s-early 60s public would have scorned him for such revelations, because they, unlike us, still knew that confidences should not be betrayed for  entertainment and money.) Later in life, when reporters hounded him for more, he said no even to respected writers like Gay Talese for Esquire.

All this helps to explain–yes, we’re dating ourselves now–the shock and disbelief when DiMaggio did  the Mr. Coffee commercials in the 1970s. He needed the money, apparently, having not made the gigantic fortune that a .227-hitting utility infielder can make today, but many of his admirers never forgave him for hitting the pitchman circuit.  And I wouldn’t be surprised if DiMaggio never forgave himself. Near the end of his life he may have traded some of his dignity for cash. But at least he had something to trade.

Check Brooks’ full piece here if you like.

Monday Morning Laughs: “Web Site Story”

More singing satire about the crazy world of the InterbloggenTube. Start the week with a chuckle here .

Saying Goodbye to an Idol

I was never a huge Michael Jackson fan, but it’s hard not to be moved by the sadness of his bereaved fans. As I thought about it the other day, I realized that my feelings about the late John Updike, explained here and here,  had something in common with the sense of loss Jackson’s fans feel.

I put those ideas into a KERA/NPR commentary that aired this morning. Read or listen here if you like.

Sarah Palin, President of Tabloid America

From the Just Because an Idea is Extremely Unsettling Doesn’t Mean It’s Not True Department:

Consider this excerpt from the buzzilicious Vanity Fair piece on Sarah Palin:

Palin is unlike any other national figure in modern American life—neither Anna Nicole Smith nor Margaret Chase Smith but a phenomenon all her own. The clouds of tabloid conflict and controversy that swirl around her and her extended clan—the surprise pregnancies, the two-bit blood feuds, the tawdry in-laws and common-law kin caught selling drugs or poaching game—give her family a singular status in the rogues’ gallery of political relatives. By comparison, Billy Carter, Donald Nixon, and Roger Clinton seem like avatars of circumspection. Palin’s life has sometimes played out like an unholy amalgam of Desperate Housewives andNorthern Exposure.

Now cross-check it with Ross Douthat’s recent Op-Edifier in the NY Times, which suggests that the “real America” may in fact be “tabloid country.”

[Is it] the land of Jon minus Kate, and governors who vanish to “hike the Appalachian Trail” — not to mention gossip-column fixtures like Britney Spears (rumored last week to be contemplating her third marriage in six years) and the mistress-parading Mel Gibson?

One possible answer is that our stars and politicians are a species apart — more impulsive and incautious than the average Dick and Jane, and more libidinous as well.

But the evidence suggests the opposite. The high-wire love lives of a Jon Gosselin or a Mark Sanford — or a Spears, or even a Lindsay Lohan — are remarkably true to the America that watches their shows, buys their CDs, and votes them into office.

In other words–Holy Mother of God, can it be true?–in a cultural shift that seems to have been missed by critics who think we’re still a nation of church-going  latter-day Puritans despite our billion-dollar porn industry–Sarah Palin may in fact be the representative American of our time. If you look at how many of us, perhaps the majority, really live, where we put our time and money and attention, perhaps we are just about all Sarahs now.

Excuse me. I was going to ask what might happen, given that scenario, if Palin were to spend a year studying and emerge in 2012 with even a Reagan/GW Bush-level grasp of the issues.  But first, I  need to lie down for a while.

Britney Sanford Must Shut Up

The Mark Sanford saga ploughs on like a giant commercial  fishing trawler, its massive nets sweeping up every kind of cultural garbage and dumping it on the docks so we can gape at the mess.  At this rate, he could  eclipse Bill ( “That Depends on What the Meaning of ‘Is’ Is”)  Clinton in the  Alpha-Male Idiot Hall of Fame.

In this tawdry melodrama, as with Clinton and his insufferable pursuer,  Ken Starr, there are no good guys. Yesterday, I heard a lip-smacking snark artist–no, not Maureen Dowd–  refer to Sanford as “the gift that keeps on  giving.”  If you believe that the spectacle of watching a human being commit emotional hari-kari in public is a “gift,” I suppose he is.

A few days ago I felt sorry for Sanford, believing that even a hypocritical adulterer who shamed his family in front of the world did not deserve to have his private love letters exposed to the  voyeuristic masses. The fact that there has been so little protest against that violation of privacy speaks volumes about our degraded state. Bring on the bread and circuses. The great beast must be fed.

Now, however,  Sanford  seems determined to sacrifice his last shreds  of dignity and magnify his disgrace with an endless series of self-exposes. He has become the Britney Spears of American politics, his self-destruction enabled by hordes of media leeches who dish the garbage to the mob. If there was any remaining line of demarcation between the sleazy tabloid media and the supposedly serious media, this all but erases it, along with the antiquated ideas of honor and shame.

The Ibuprofen Overreach

I’ve noted  before, in the Bush Chicken Hawk and  Bong Hits 4 Jesus cases, that students don’t park all their rights at the schoolhouse door, but everyone knows, and other court decisions have made clear, that minors don’t enjoy the full range of rights granted to adults (starting with the fact that by law,  kids must attend school up to a certain age;  adults, by contrast, can’t be forced to work or go to school).

Schools below the college level still have some of the old in loco parentis functions, and if administrators and teachers didn’t have the power to limit student freedoms in numerous ways (locker searches, for instance), schools in many cities would be even more unmanageable than they are today, if that can be imagined.

All that said, the Supremes were exactly right to rule 8-1 that strip-searching a middle school girl in search of Ibuprofen is just a wee bit excessive, though the school administrator’s actions in this case were so extreme, and so unlikely to be duplicated in many other schools, that it’s hard to see the case having a very widespread effect. Given our litigious ways today,  I can’t believe the principal was even able to find anybody who would conduct the search.

Sanford and the Boys: What Are They Thinking?

Again, as so often before, we must trot out the eternal question: What, what are these guys thinking?

Dunno, but here’s what they’re NOT thinking:

A. “You ’know, I’ve got a pretty good deal here–decent salary, lotsa perks, some power. . . why, reporters even listen when I talk.  Why would I wanna mess this up?”

B.  “Can I really trust  the thong-snapping intern/long-time staffer/dog-torturing crony/classy hooker/brother-in-law/would-be Senate-seat buyer forever?  What if these folks blackmail me or just get mad and decide to drop the dime?”

C. “What would my family/wife/children/parents/pastor/old friends think of me if I blackened my name in disgrace?”

D. “You know, this kind of behavior is just wrong.”

Can Micropayments Save the Newspapers?

In previous bemoanings of the dying American newspaper, I’ve hoped that techies would come up with some kind of simple, unintrusive system of micropayments that would allow us to pay small fees for news we get online. The always-bright James Fallows takes the ball a few more yards here .

Sanford: Alpha-Male Idiots, Media Disgrace

A drum roll, please, as we add Mark  Sanford to the Clinton-Spitzer-Edwards-Ensign-Vitter-Craig Parade of Alpha-Male Idiots that’s been a regular feature on this blog. Again I shake my head, dumbfounded: What  possesses people who already have so much to arrogantly, blindly  grab even more?

Their collective autobiography title: Insatiable. As Springsteen sings in “Badlands”:

Poor man wanna be rich,

Rich man wanna be king,

And the king ain’t satisfied ’till he rules everything.

But as loathsome as Sanford is, as hypocritical as he is for voting to impeach Clinton for his sexual gamesmanship, then subjecting his own family to worldwide ridicule, there’s got to be an even hotter  circle of hell for the media leeches who have now printed the private e-mails between Sanford and his Argentine flame.

I’ve been a journalist for more than 20 years, so I know he’s a public figure and I know he has no legal recourse, and some of the e-mails were sent on state equipment, yeah, yeah,  but this is doubly disgraceful. Not only does it  add more pain and humiliation to Sanford’s family, it drags the most private thoughts of a man and woman into the voyeuristic glare. What “right to know”  justifies this? What public good does it serve that outweighs the damage done?  This reminds me of scenes in  Orwell’s 1984, where Winston Smith learns that Big Brother’s reach has no boundaries.

I would never have published these e-mails. I’m not even posting a link to them. What a lousy day for journalism.

Summer Solstice Garden Report

Given the problems underscored in the gag-inducing documentary Food, Inc., discussed here the other day, it’s clear we need alternatives to this out-of-control food behemoth.

One such step is growing some of your own food if your circumstances and energy permit. As I’ve mentioned in several posts, I’ve been planting a garden for the past nine springs. I think the payoff is well worth it, as discussed in this radio commentary, but as they say about old age, gardening ain’t for sissies.

Or at least it ain’t on the sun-ruled  acres of North Texas. The instructions on packets of vegetable  seeds always say: “Plant in full sun. Needs at least 6-8 hours of direct sun a day.” And I’m thinking: Uh, yeah, if you’re somewhere in northern Iowa or Central California, maybe.

Of the 19 tomatoes I planted in late March, about 15 have borne some fruit so far, but given the conditions they’ve had to face, I think I should pin medals on them instead of eating them. After moderate temps and decent rain in May, June rolled in like a blast furnace. The past week, we’ve had cloudless skies and 95-98 degree highs, and the forecast for the next week calls for 100 degrees every day.

From my experience, that’s just too much heat too soon for most tomato types. A few varieties such as HeatWave and Sunmaster are supposed to be able to set fruit in 95-plus, but I only planted two or three of those this year, preferring the size and taste of Supersonic, Celebrity, Early Girl and others.  And several of those, alas, are starting to show signs of heat strain usually not seen until late July or August. At the solstice, I’m predicting a small to moderate yield this year–enough to fill our plates for a couple of months  but probably not enough to give away to friends and neighbors, which is part of the fun.

As for other garden survivors, the green and yellow  peppers are coming in nicely, though they’ll be better in a month.  The cucumbers are almost burned to a crisp–third straight year of cuke-flop– and  the eggplant has put out several tasty purple specimens. The okra, one of my favorites, looks great, but the heat is causing the okrettes, or whatever they’re called,  to harden fast if they’re  not picked almost daily. And to my surprise, the watermelon is spreading out like crazy. Could this be the year?

So, as noted, it’s always something, a continuing mystery. This spring ritual always deepens my respect for the people who are in this thing with all their chips, trying to pull a living out of the soil. If my little plot fails, I roll off to the grocery store, but for millions of people around the world, freakish weather or an insect invasion can mean disaster.

“Food, Inc.” is Hard to Swallow

I didn’t think anything could make America’s Industrial-Caloric Big Food/Corporate Farming Complex less appetizing than Eric Schlosser’s book Fast Food Nation. But now comes Food, Inc., a documentary that, according to early reviews, may have us exploring the option of never eating again. One troubling review is here.

We really have cooked up a dilemma here. With a population as large as ours, some kind of industrial farming/food production seems almost unavoidable, and yet, as Fast Food Nation and this film demonstrate, the sheer size of the industry and the astonishing amounts of food that must be produced almost demand environmental damage, cruelty to vast herds of animals, subhuman working conditions, and a “race to the bottom” cost-cutting mentality that sometimes puts health and good nutrition second to profits.

Food Inc. reminds us, among other things, that cows never evolved to eat corn, which is what they’re stuffed on in the factory farms. The result is that the typical cow gut teems with deadly E. coli bacteria, so the animals must be constantly pumped up with antibiotics to prevent disease. Hello, frequent recalls of ground beef and  all kinds of tainted products.

What are the alternatives? We have this gigantic population, most of whom live in the cities, many of whom don’t have any land for gardening. It’s heartening to read that in World War II, about 40% of the country’s food was produced in small “victory gardens,” but imagine the personal changes and difficulties that would be required to approach that number again.

Obviously, this is yet another argument for embracing a vegetarian diet. The mass production of vegetable and grain products isn’t perfect, but it’s the picture of sanity and cleanliness compared to the meat biz. A recent update on my ongoing vegification  efforts is here.

Blogger’s Shame: “I Was So Wrong About Twitter!”

Okay, okay. I thought I was so smart in ridiculing Twitter.  I thought, “Why would I care about getting a 140-character blippette,  or whatever it is, from somebody stopping by Burger King for a double cheeseburger?”

I mocked. I sneered.

But now that  Twitter has proven so valuable in the Iranian sorta-revolution that the U. S. State Department asked the service to stay up the other day rather than shut down for maintenance, I give up! I give up! Never have so many said so much to so many in so few words.

In fact, if you’ve signed up with Twitter, as I did, though I have yet to Tweet, you can follow the Iranian action on this feed live from Tehran.

Twitter rules. Start following me at sosowrongabouttwitter tomorrow.

The “Heroes” of. . . Woodstock?

I knew the word “hero”  was getting badly overused once we started slapping it on every single cop and firefighter who ever lived, even desk jockeys who hadn’t chased a crook in years.  Now, with the 40th anniversary of Woodstock hard upon us, rock profiteers have given the term yet another beating.

Guys, get real. Some of the Woodstock players  were good musicians and a few were even great, and Woodstock, so I hear, was a ton of muddy, anarchistic fun, but. . . heroes?

And what does this tour offer? You got the Dead without Garcia; you got the Holding Company without Janis; you got the Airplane without Grace Slick; you got the Quicksilver Messenger Service, the official band of about 5,000  people who once  lived within  five blocks of Haight-Ashbury.

Oh, and don’t forget. . . Melanie. Yes, heroic Melanie, with that epoch-defining revolutionary anthem, “Brand New Key.” Gotta love her:

Well, I got a brand new pair of roller skates
You got a brand new key
I think that we should get together and try them out to see
La la la la la la la la, la la la la la la
Oh! I got a brand new pair of roller skates
You got a brand new key

You know, they just don’t make heroes like they used to. More raw courage at  www.theheroesofwoodstock.com