Mad Dog and The Odyssey

 

This week's New Yorker carries an article by a critic, David Denby, which I started reading thinking it was a review of the new IMAX movie "The Odyssey," and although he begins with the movie, he quickly admits he hasn't seen it yet, and what the article is about is the whole "return home" story genre.

But my mind wandered off to The Iliad and the  Odyssey quickly and away from trying to place it in a canon of literature.

For me, the story is personal.

On my eleventh Christmas, I opened a long flat present last, knowing it was a book. I had got the presents I was hoping for--a new baseball mitt, other important eleven year old boy stuff, and here was a book. 

It was a big book, seventeen by fourteen inches, the Giant Golden book series, this one by Alan and Alice Provensen, illustrators. It was called "The Iliad and the Odyssey."  The illustration on the cover and those throughout the book struck me as strange and off putting. I was accustomed to illustrations from Marvel comics and Mad Magazine, but these were ethereal, different.

"What is this?" I asked my parents.

"Read it," my mother said, smiling.

"But what is it?"

"Read it and find out."

She seemed secretly amused, and that annoyed me, and she was atypically closed mouthed about this whole thing, so naturally, I set the book aside, but in the late afternoon of a quiet, boring Christmas day, I finally opened it up.

I had read Golden Book Bible Stories and Aesop's fables, and other stuff which seemed a little like this book, but there were no morals at the end of a page in this one.

There were gods and warriors which should have been enough for an eleven year old boy, but the art was so strange and the language so flat and neutral, as it described the rage which propelled the Iliad. 

And these people were killing each other, and it wasn't clear to me exactly where Helen stood in her own mind. She was some Greek's wife but she seemed pretty passive, standing behind and peering through the wall at Troy as the battles raged. 

My mother called me down for dinner that night, but by then I was completely hooked and did not answer. She came to the door and I looked up momentarily, and she closed the door behind her, but I could hear her tell my father I wouldn't be down for dinner.  

"He's reading," she told him.

I lugged that book with me to college in Providence, R.I.,  to medical school in New York City, to a farm in southern Rhode Island, to New Haven and back again to Washington, D.C. when I finally moved back "home."

I had been gone 16 years, got as far as 500 miles up the east coast, but in all the moves and packing and boxes, I made sure that book did not get lost.

I had fought some monsters and had some adventures in my travels, but nothing as magical as the Odyssey.

When I had sons of my own, I read it to them. When they were four and six, we had a bedtime routine: The older boy lay in his upper bunk and the younger one sat in my lap on a reading chair. As I read each page, I'd hold up the book so the older boy in his perch could see the illustrations.  

They absolutely loved that book. 

It had warriors and fighting, and gods doing magic in the Iliad, and in the Odyssey there were monsters and narrow escapes, the ultimate sci fi super hero stuff.

When my younger son read the Iliad in his freshman high school English class, the teacher, who thought he was something of a dolt, a dumb jock admitted to the private school because of his athletic ability, got a shock when she asked the class about Zeus's wife, Hera. 

"He's frightened of her," my younger son told her. "He might be king of the gods, but he's afraid of his wife."

The teacher was so stunned she mentioned it twice during our parent/teacher conference. 

"He reads with more insight than anyone in that class," she marveled. 
"It's a boy's book," I told her. "Among other things. Boys don't have to be explained what is going on during that war. How are the girls in the class liking it?"

"Odd you should mention that," she said. "They read it. But they do better with 'Pride and Prejudice.'"

When my older son went off to college, he took a freshman course called "Anger," and the first book they read was the Iliad.

"Good grief," I told him. "We thought Columbia was hidebound and ossified because they insisted every freshmen read 'the classics' beginning with the Iliad and here you are at freewheeling NYU, and you're reading the same damn thing. And this is a course about anger."

"Well," my son explained patiently, "There isn't very much in the Iliad but anger."

I still have the book. It's now nearly 70 years old and it's getting rebound this summer. 

I tried reading it to my seven year old grand daughter. 

She was polite, but not really taken. She's more into "Moana" and "Frozen." 

To her credit, she did like "Banshees of Inisherin," until her mother walked in during the finger cutting scene and rescued her from her incorrigible grandfather. 

Maybe she'll circle back and pick up the Iliad and the Odyssey later. 

But I do think it's a boy's book, politically incorrect as that statement might be.

I'll definitely go see the movie, but, for my money, I'll be very surprised if anything on screen can ever match the Provensen's and their Giant Golden Book.

Rape/Defamation Judgment Stands: Trump Vows Mexico Will Pay

 

The Supreme Court of the United States, or at least what passes for the SCOTUS nowadays,  after the rape of that institution by Mitch McConnell and the Sycophant Senate, has let stand the verdict against Donald Trump in favor of the woman he raped and then defamed by claiming: 

A/ She lied about it 

B/ She is a skanky ho, and not his type.

C/ He thought he was raping his ex-wife, Marla Maples, an innocent mistake.

This $5 million judgment is, of course, chump change to the President who makes that daily from his crypto currency scams, or simply by announcing he's going to nuke Iran or Palestine before lunch, sending the stock market tumbling at which point he (or Jared or Ivanka) buy low all the stocks Wall Streeters have shed in a panic, and then in the afternoon Trump announces, "Only Kidding" and the stocks soar and he sells at a huge profit.

But, Trump is still indignant at the offense from his disloyal super vetted bought-and-paid-for Court and he announces Mexico will pay for the judgment.

Or maybe, unnamed "private donors" (wink, wink, Musk, Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg.)

The Court, locally known as the Roger B. Taney Redux All Star Band, has declined to null and void the verdict from the lower courts, figuring, apparently, "No harm, no foul," which is a sort of default stance this Court has preferred.

Chief Justice Taney

Meanwhile, Stephen Miller has announced that White House Police have put out a All Points Bulletin for the arrest of Davey Hearn, the American Olympian, for the destruction of government property, which Mr. Trump noticed when he went looking for the East Wing of the White House and discovered it had disappeared and there is only a hole in the ground where it once stood.

Davey Hearn: Caught in the Act

As the Fourth of July approaches, Democrats across the state of New Hampshire went full on "Fahrenheit 451" and held readings of the anti-American, revolutionary and seditionist track by Frederick Douglass, "What To The Slave Is the Fourth of July?"  Like those pathetic, heroic and ineffectual ghostly partisans of Ray Bradbury's novel, who wander around the woods reciting from memory the texts of burned books, the Democrats had readers stand up and read from Douglass's speech of 1852.

Better than Lincoln

"At at time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument is needed. O! had I the ability and could I reach the nations' ear, I would, today, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering scarcasm and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire, not the gentle shower, but thunder. "

Greening the Swamp: Reflections in a Green Haze

 

Every day, it gets better and better. 

The man who promised to drain the swamp just created a big swamp in front of the memorial to the President who he is challenging for the "best President" title.

Turns out, the creator of the reflecting pool painted the bottom silver because, you know, it's supposed to be a mirror and white or light gray or silver reflects sunshine back out of the water and keeps it cooler.

But when you paint the bottom dark, (American flag) blue, that absorbs sun rays and heats the pool, so now you've got warm water more or less stagnant, and the perfect place to grow algae.

The resulting stagnant stuff kills ducks who plop down to float around in it. Geese fly over and poop in it, and goose poop is green. And, all in all, the man who came to drain the swamp quite literally created a new swamp of his own.

Donald Joffrey Trump has claimed this is all the result of vandalism, which is demonstrably true, as he has vandalized the site in broad daylight.

One of the best related gags is they arrested Davey Hearn, an American Olympian, a guy who knows water, as a canoeist. The charge was "destruction of government property."

Donald is outraged that anyone other than himself should try to destroy government property. Next thing you know, Davey Hearn will be over at the East Wing of the White House desecrating the crater over there.

Reflections in Algae Green

 

Of all the Trump follies, my favorite is gelling as fast as the soup green algae of the Reflecting Pool. 

Even the name is ironic, as it reflects just what Trump is.

Trump decides to show the world what a force of creativity and restoration he is, and he tries to recapitulate his one success--the skating rink in Central Park--by demolishing a part of a house which does not belong to him, by hanging banners on federal buildings, by proposing an outlandish Arc De Triumph at the entrance to the National Cemetery for actual real soldiers as opposed to heel spur soldiers who never actually served but sort of did by going to military school. 

But his piece de resistance, was going to be the Reflecting Pool, which he promised would be American flag blue, and although he did not promise Mexico would pay for it, he did arrange for a no bid contract with a swimming pool guy he knew, but within days of completion, the vinyl bottom split apart and floated in pieces up to the slimy surface and the water turned green with algae, just the way all the experts said it would.

But Mr. Trump does not believe in experts any more than his Secretary of Health believes in vaccines.

It was just so predictable.

And it was not Trump's fault.

Trump insists vandals vandalized his treasure, although none of the security cameras detected any vandals. But as any fan of the Jeffrey Epstein saga will know, surveillance cameras do not always catch every malfeasance. 

Well, there was one vandal, Davey Hearn, who stopped by on a bicycle ride along the mall, where he saw a floating piece of blue debris and tried to fish it out and was arrested for destruction of government property. And if anyone should know about the destruction of government property it should be Donald J. Trump, who has destroyed an entire wing of the White House, which, last I heard, was actual government property, even if Mr. Trump believes it belongs to him. 

For Mr. Trump, if you've occupied a house from VRBO, you own it and can do anything you want to it.

Davey Hearn, it turns out, is an American Olympic canoe guy, and he has a history with the Park Police, so he's lucky they didn't send him immediately to Alligator Alcatraz or deport him.

But, I digress. Even without Davey, the story is just so great.

The water is most determinedly green, not blue, and the Green Party is usually an environmentally committed party in most countries, and Mr. Trump says global climate change is a hoax, so he knows hoaxes.

King Canute ordered the sea to stop its tides.

The ocean did not pay him any mind.

King Donald ordered the algae to stop blooming. It stayed green.

Mr. Trump is not unreasonable; he would have done a deal for a blue bloom. The art of the deal.

But the algae has been no more willing to accommodate Mr. Trump than the Iranians have been about the Strait of Hormuz. 

Mr. Trump has trouble with water. Just ask Atlantic City.

And we all know, it's not easy being green.

The Preservation of Self in Every Day Life

 

After 17 years of battling ingrained New Hampshire prejudices, mores, intransigence, Scott Bogle, the director of Transportation Planning for Rockingham County, New Hampshire managed to open a rails to trails bike path from Hampton to Portsmouth and it has been a great joy, an anomaly and a threat to life and limb.

Of course, a public work like a rails to trails bike path met with the usual immovable object resistance and objections that meet all projects to improve community life in New Hampshire:

1. It will cost money.

2. It will cost money which means it will raise my taxes.

3. It will violate my property rights.

4. It will cost towns money to maintain the surface, which means it will raise property taxes, which, of course, are the only taxes in New Hampshire.

5. It hasn't been done before, which means it probably isn't a good thing.

6. And, did I mention: It will cost money? And that can't be good.

This is New Hampshire. We don't spend money here.

                                               Scott Bogle: Public Servant

Scott managed to find federal dollars to buy the land, owned by a company called, of all things, "PanAm," and the rich men who owned the moldering, unused, over grown strip of land saw the possibility of a a windfall of cash, and did not want to sell if anybody actually wanted to use that land, but somehow, Scott managed to get the powers that be at the state government, the federal government to lean on the owners and construction began. And it wasn't just a matter of clearing away undergrowth, trees, railroad ties, rusted railroad tracks--there were huge pipes and drainage stuff to lay under the path and swamps and salt marshes and, in the end, it was the Seacoast's version of building the Panama Canal, minus the mosquitoes and Yellow Fever.

But Scott soldiered on, a sort of local Teddy Roosevelt without the wars, and he got the thing done.

And, once opened, it had this amazing result that people from Portsmouth traveled all the way to North Hampton, where they stopped near Joe's Meats for breakfast, or they continued on to the Airfield Cafe, and even to Bogies, all of which are along the path. Bogies opened a new deck on the bike path and Santiago's restaurant and the Blue Harbor Coffee cafe and Island Vibes smoothie emporium, and Stillwell's Ice Cream are all seeing more business. 

There is an architecture firm at North Hampton, in an old railroad station building, with signs that say, "Private Property," and "No Trespassing" but the firm has not erected watchtowers with searchlights or razor wire. 

The path is wide enough that people can bicycle side by side and talk as they go. 

It's much safer than the roads where a bicycle path in New Hampshire is a strip of yellow paint. On the path, there are no cars or trucks, except at well marked crossings, which are few enough to count on both hands.

Which is not to say, there is no danger. The danger just comes from unexpected sources, and people feel so safe, they let their guards down. 

There are warning signs to bicyclists that hunting along the path is legal and bikers ought to consider wearing bright orange for safety, because this is New Hampshire and the rights of two hunters shooting at a deer across the path outweigh the rights and safety of mothers and children on bicycles, because, you know, the Second Amendment. This is, New Hampshire, after all, where there are only eight roads you cannot shoot your gun across: and these are mostly huge roads like Route 95, which a hunter would likely have trouble even spotting a deer on the other side.

But the hunters are likely not the main source of risk to bicyclists along the Scott Bogle Bike Trail and Recreation Thing.

The inner city may have its gang violence, and rural folk deal with the murderous culture of men with guns who like to kill mammals, but along the seacoast there is nothing more lethal than ten year old boys on bicycles, especially motorized (electric or otherwise) bicycles. 

There are many entrances to the bike path, but the one Mad Dog prefers is the path which allows him to avoid riding along the killing zone of Route 27, where pick up trucks, 18 wheel rigs, none traveling less than 45 MPH along the two lane road, do not share the road with anyone on a bicycle. You can enter the path off a neighborhood street, which winds through the woods behind houses, and weaves its circuitous path along blind curves down to the bike path proper. 

strolling along the bike path

You have to keep your eyes on the path for roots and rocks and sudden jogs and turns, but if you do this you may miss the 10 year old boy pedaling hard, head down, coming in your direction. And unlike silver back gorillas coming along a trail in the forest, the 10 year old boy is not about to give way to the bigger, older person on bike.

When the boy is on a gasoline powered bicycle, you can hear him coming before he runs you off the trail, but if he is on an electric bike, going 25 MPH, you cannot hear him; you get no warning; you are dead meat.

It's really amazing how fast 25 MPH is. In your car, driving down High Street past the schools in the school zone, it feels as if you have re-entered the earth's atmosphere on your descent from outer space: it's agonizingly slow, but on a bicycle 25 MPH is lightning, if not warp speed.

When automobiles first hit the roads, a roadster going 25 MPH was considered a racing vehicle. When automobiles got roads and widespread use in the early 1900's speed limits were 15 MPH and 25 MPH was considered high speed transport.

In Hampton, there is nothing more lethal than a 10 year old boy on a bicycle. 

Well, except for any adult behind the wheel of an automobile.

But on the path, you put a 50 year old woman on a bicycle, trying to use the same path as the 10 year old and call the funeral parlor.

Or, put that woman on her bicycle, trying to keep up with her 6 year old grand daughter on training wheels and her 24 year old son, carrying his 3 year old daughter between his handlebars on one of those rider seats, and you've got potential for a disaster drill at Exeter or Portsmouth Hospitals.

Mad Dog has spoken before the Hampton Select Board about this new Silk Road, but, of course, the members of the Select Board simply sat there, mouths agape, as if Mad Dog was talking about some UFO's which he claimed had landed on his front lawn, thus diminishing his property values. They stared at him and said not one word. 

They may have been waiting for him to get to the "this will raise my property taxes," or the "this violates my property rights."

But that's local government in Hampton. Elected officials do not do "Back and Forth" in Hampton. Citizens speak to the Select Board with much the same expectations they pray to their God or gods, with no expectation of an answer. 

There have been two deaths in Hampton of children on electric bicycles. 

None on the bike path.

Yet.

The K-Nut At the Reflecting Pool

 

So many wonderful stories from the Trump era will, if our nation survives, enter into the pantheon of folktales, Bible stories, parables, but, for Mad Dog, his favorite just might be the story of our nut king ordering the Reflecting Pool to turn American Flag Blue.

The Reflecting Pool, over which Martin Luther King delivered his immortal "I Have A Dream" speech, where Jennie Curran  leaps into the water and splashes toward Forrest Gump, and a national moment is transformed into a personal moment for a man who Trump would inevitably deride as a worthless "low IQ" sort. The Reflecting Pool which is hard by that elongated, modest black streak which is the Vietnam Memorial, which is so simple its power was, initially unappreciated. 

Oh, the power of a long ribbon of meaning. Mad Dog read about the Vietnam Memorial and looked at the artist's rendering and thought, "What an ode to defeat and wasted lives this is." But when Mad Dog later approached that black marble trace, and he saw the people gathered at it, reaching out and touching names engraved in gold, and he read the names, from Hispanic, to Puritan to Jewish to WASP, to Irish, Mad Dog was struck that this war was fought by the full breadth of American citizenry, not just the unfortunate, unconnected Black men who got caught in the web of the draft, but by men up and down the scale. His own brother, who thankfully survived, fought there, and he could have avoided a hazardous path but chose a swift boat along a river. And Mad Dog thought that memorial to be, hands down, next to the Lincoln Memorial, the most moving and best of all the memorials in the Capital City.

Sometimes, you build it and something happens totally unexpected: The thing gets a life of its own. 

And maybe the Vietnam memorial is safe from Trump as he doesn't want to talk about his heel spurs, and there is maybe enough gold in the lettering to satisfy him.

Mad Dog supposes architects know about this, and talk about it: The Sphinx, the Pyramids, the Parthenon, Stonehenge--they all just continue to speak to us.

And then Donald John Trump, who knows that he is the Great Trivializer, who has hung banners with his own photographs all over federal buildings in Washington, looks at the Reflecting Pool and it looks back at him and says, "You are just dust in the wind. You are a sour burp, flatulence. You do not matter. You will be gone and be remembered as a sick joke, if you are remembered at all."

And he becomes furious, like King Knut, who had the insight that for all his earthly powers, he could only order men to bend to his will, but to be really great he'd have to bend nature to his will--so he ordered the tide to stop washing in.

Didn't work.

And now, Mr. Trump orders the Reflecting Pool to turn American Flag Blue and it turns, instead, green.

And, as we all know, it isn't easy being green.

What Bill Burr Knows the Democrats Don't

 

"You only see the President twice a week. I don't understand why everybody's so upset. Like: What's going to happen? If you liked Obama: Did he call you in the last eight years?"

--Bill Burr, On Donald Trump's election in 2016

George Carlin famously advised people to not vote. It doesn't make any difference. He shared Burr's belief that you have only a meaningless choice between greedy old men. 

I think Carlin and Burr, two of my favorite public intellectuals, are wrong on this point, but there is wisdom in this argument. Most people--not all by any means, but a preponderance--do not care about anything that does not affect them personally. Freedom of speech? Hey, if I can say what I want in the bar to my buddies, I'm fine. I don't care if I can't go on CBS and crack wise about Donald Trump.

Winslow Homer, Herring Net

Turning away from coal and oil to wind and solar power? Hey, as long as my home tank gets filled and it's affordable, I'm fine. Climate change? Maybe, maybe not, but what're you gonna do about it? Like the man says, "Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it."

Burr's appeal is Archie Bunker's appeal. You laugh, even if you're thinking, on some level, "Well, hey, that's not right."

But enough of what he says is right, you get carried along:

1. "The speaker on Oprah says being a mom is the most difficult job on the planet. I question whether that's true, comparing it to dangerous professions like Ice Road Trucking, where people died. Jobs like catching lobster traps seem harder than looking after children, who can be put to bed at any time. Any job done in pajamas is not difficult."

Imagine guys sitting in a bar in Boston, or Damariscotta, Maine, who go out on lobster boats, or fishing boats hearing somebody say being a mom is the most difficult job on the planet. Of course, motherhood is ladened with difficulty, but comparing being a trad wife to being a lobsterman, a fisherman, an astronaut, a surgeon, an electric high wire power man, an airplane pilot--well, we know there's a wink in the eye--and the point is, people don't realize how hard being a mother is and so this is hyperbole--but when you are talking about what people do for a living, and guys who really work hard hear that someone else is working harder, at home, driving to the grocery store, and doing all the things mothers have to do, it establishes in their minds that the speaker does not appreciate how hard their own lives are.

2. "I got a dog recently. I went down to the pound and got one of those free dogs. Yeah, that's how I say it. I don't say I rescued a dog. I hate when people say that. It's a complete exaggeration. Did you pull her out of a burning building? Did you jump in a river with your clothes still on?"

What he is getting at is that beyond annoying tendency of people who live soft lives trying to dramatize and make heroic what is not, which really makes people who really do dangerous or demanding work snort and snarl. A fireman rescues people. Surgeons rescue people. Sometimes even police rescue people. And they all do that at risk to themselves, under pressure and they sometimes fail, but when they succeed they know the true satisfaction of putting yourself on the line for someone else. 

Obadiah Youngblood

3. "The way I was brought up is like, you can make it to heaven, but some of your family members possibly couldn't, or some of your friends. Doesn't make sense. Like, how am I supposed to enjoy heaven if that's the deal? Just sitting here waiting for my friends to show up: 'Jesus Christ, where the hell are they? It's been 150 years!...Then one day, it settles in that they didn't make it. Then what? Jesus comes walking over: 'Hey, how is it going? Isn't this great' 'Yeah, dude, it'd be even better if all my family and friends weren't burning for fucking ever. Kind of hard to enjoy heaven when you just keep thinking of that there.'"

For some reason, as soon as Burr said this, an image of Stacey Affleck in "Manchester by the Sea," flashed through my mind. Not because that movie is the saddest, truest, most wrenching movie I've ever seen--which it is--but because you see in that movie, almost as a parenthesis, the centrality of friends and family to the workaday stiffs who populate this film are. They don't have college friends, or tennis friends, or friends from the kids' PTA. They have guys they grew up playing baseball on sandlots (or nowadays in little league), playing hockey on the pond with, who have lived in the same town their whole lives.

One summer, an electrician who came by to fix the refrigerator in the house we had rented on Kezar Lake, Maine, noticed the baseball gloves belonging to me and my kids and he asked if I played and when I said yes, he invited me to a game that afternoon at a nearby field. It didn't take long for me to realize everyone on that diamond had played in these games for their entire lives. They laughed at all the jokes two sentences before the punch lines, because they knew them all. These were thirty, forty something men who had grown up together and none of them had ever moved away. 

It made me think of what that must mean--to be frozen in time and place like that.

Where I grew up, everyone knew that at age 18 we were all gone--every one of my friends would leave our suburban town outside Washington, D.C. and likely we'd never move back. We'd go to college--the most prestigious, expensive colleges we could manage--pursue careers in glamor cities and likely, we'd never move back, unless we got elected to Congress. Some kids knew each other from age zero to 18, but most of us had moved in and out of WDC as our fathers got different jobs which brought them to and fro. My best friends, I had known from age 9 to 18, which is a significant part of life, but I did not expect to know them my entire life. 

For these guys, their friends were part of their souls. They knew each other, suffered slings and arrows together. The longest they spent away from town was maybe two years in the military, and most of them had not done that. 

They would have seen small town friendships depicted in "The Deer Hunter" and understood exactly why Robert DeNiro had to return to Viet Nam and rescue Christopher Walken, because that's what lifelong friends do.

So, how does a national politician, even one as real and tested as Obama appeal to these guys? 

They see politicians as rich greedy guys, a class apart, people driven by ambition not friendship, loyalty or love.

Wyeth

4. "You know what I'm afraid of? Robots. I saw one get interviewed on 60 Minutes and he's sitting there, not nervous at all, just rattling off all the fucking answers. Not smoking, not leaking oil or whatever you would do as a nervous robot. And the reporter's asking him questions. In the end, he goes, 'So, tell us, what are your goals?' I'm alone in a hotel room, and I literally lean toward the TV. I'm like, "Do these fucking things have goals?' But the reporter just blows by it. He's like, 'Okay, and what's your favorite color?' Meanwhile, I'm standing on my bed, yelling at the TV, like, 'Dude, unplug that fucking thing! Take the batteries out! How many sci-fi movies do you have to see before you realize where this is going?"

So, the brilliance here is that he's talking about what constitutes sentient life. This is what David Brooks and all the public intellectuals will spend hours discussing in The New Yorker, the Atlantic and on PBS. But for Burr, all you need to do is watch "Battle Star Galactica" and you know all you need to know about cyborgs and machines achieving sentience. This is what the guys at the diner or in the bar talk about. 

And they don't need no friggin' college boys to tell them about it. 

They are right out of "Good Will Hunting," and they know it.

The problem is, the folks at the Democratic National Committee and the New Hampshire state Democratic Party do not.