Monthly Archives for December 2009

Obama, Spock and Yosemite Sam

When I troll the newspapers on the internet every morning I read for style as much as I do substance, and I am on constant alert for trends in wordsmithing. The usual end-of-year round-up stories that editors use to plug the gaps in the slow news week that separates Christmas from New Year’s predictably yields a bumper crop of new material. This morning was no exception, and the penny dropped for me as I read Maureen Dowd’s deliciously vituperative bit of snide in the New York Times.

It wasn’t Dowd’s now-familiar nattering on about having been sold a bill of goods by Obama that caught my attention so much as it was her use as well as her readers’ of the comparison of the president to pointy-eared Dr. Spock, the logical Vulcan whose lack of affect is offset by his courage and devotion to principle. As she described the president’s reaction to the foiled terrorist attack on Christmas day, Dowd does not invoke the similarity as a compliment, nor do her most of readers, at least those who comment, take it that way. Some do, though. Those who interpret Obama’s Spockian demeanor as sang-froid see it in positive contrast it to, in the words of one, “McCain reacting to [the trouser bomber]: blood vessels on his forehead pulsing, his face turning beet red as he orders all passengers to travel without underwear.” Or another, describing a “Rep. from NY who’s [sic] red faced hand-wringing rant on the Sunday talk shows was anything but reassuring.”

I like hyperbole as much as the next person. In fact, I probably like it more. I like my comparisons sharply drawn. I have even been known to elbow aside the truth if it stands in the way of an irresistible simile. But I wonder if it might not be time for a change, a new year’s resolution to cool our feverish political discourse. There is much more in the landscape of American politics than a choice between two extremes. Our president on the one hand a cool, calm, and collected alien (I wonder if it was a birther who was the first to compare Obama to Spock?), and his political rivals on the other cardiac cases waiting to happen, wild-eyed spittle-spraying Yosemite Sams? Well, no, not exactly. Sure it’s a gas to turn political figures into cartoon versions of themselves, and the resulting reductio ad absurdum may in fact reveal fundamental truths, but caricature also eliminates the possibility of common ground, shared interests and—reductio ad absurdum—true national interest.

Which leads me back to our president. Stiff, gangly and long-limbed, he is a stick figure of a man. His don (Oxford or Chicago, take your pick)-like persona a mask of perfection. He can’t be caricatured because he already is a caricature. The American people cannot look to him as their defender of national interest, as the living, breathing, emoting leader who shares in their dreams of a peaceful and prosperous nation. Stick figures are incapable of those things.

Give up hyperbole? Maybe next year.

Pooh-Pooh to Terrorism

My youngest nephew is a few months shy of three years old. Which means clothes I gave him for Christmas that fit him now won’t by the time he reaches that milestone birthday. It means that his eyes lit up (I now know what that phrase means) when the mechanical gorilla I also gave him let out a mighty roar and set out across the dining room table to fall, literally, into his arms. Being almost three means a nascent interest in other living things, such as my semi-comatose dachshund, who sleeps, eats, does his business and sleeps some more. But more than anything else it means my darling nephew has a great and abiding interest in bodily functions.

At his preschool he is encouraged to sit on the potty, but the daily reports my sister and brother-in-law receive from my nephew’s teachers indicate that while he happily complies with the suggestion that he sit, sitting is all he does. The good stuff he saves to be off-loaded at home by his mommy or daddy. When he visits me, or I visit him, he gleefully raises both hands high over his head when a sudden change in the ambient atmosphere prompts me to suggest that “anybody with poo-poo in their pants raise their hand.” And when my ancient doggie is ready to relieve himself, my nephew starts jitterbugging to his own refrain of “Puppy po-poo! Puppy po-poo!” unable to contain his excitement at the prospect of watching the old dog squeeze off a few rounds.

So you can imagine that the talk this Christmas with family gathered for the holiday focused more on defecation than on deficits or other news. Classy, I know.

It was only the awful news of how close the passengers on Northwest flight 253 came to being blown to bits in the air over Detroit that put down the lid on our conversations. The early reports of a jihadist’s failed explosion appropriately lauded the heroism of passengers and crew. I hope that Todd Beamer and his fellow brave souls are smiling down on them. But then the news shifted to an investigation of the Muslim terrorist, and of how apparently simple it was for him to have boarded the plane wearing an explosive device as a diaper. Paid cash for a ticket? Check. One-way ticket? Check. Luggage? Nope. What part of “I am going to kill the people on this plane” did the “screeners” not understand when they let this creature board flight 253?

Soon that creature was, inevitably I suppose, dubbed the “trouser bomber.” I can’t be bothered tracking down the first pundit to use the term, but it certainly gained traction fast and appears to be as solidly implanted in the language as the term “shoe bomber.” One can only pray that there is not an Al Qaeda cell hidden in some cave busily sewing garments for undershirt, weskit, and pantyhose bombers to come. Apparently clothes do make the terrorist.

This morning ABC News took in the lead in fashion/jihad reporting by giving us all our first look of the terrorist’s somewhat worse-for-the-wear underpants. At least that’s what I thought I heard as the television blared in the background. And no, I did not look up from what I was doing to get a glimpse of the charred remains. But the news did get me back to thinking about my nephew and how his diapers will now be considered potential weapons of mass destruction whenever he and his parents attempt to board an airplane. It’s difficult to imagine a flight attendant asking passengers to “raise their hands if they have a detonator in their pants.”

The trouser bomber has reminded us that jihadists are out to flush all Americans down the toilet. If we are smart we will find a way to wipe them out once and for all.

A Christmas Miracle

Just when you think that you’ve grown too old to get caught in the grip of Christmas spirit, it sneaks up while you’re not looking and snares you in its web. And just like that you are once again believing if not in Santa Claus, then at least in Christmas miracles. So, there I was last night, falling for one of the oldest if not the most preposterous miracle of all: “How to Meet a Man at 40,” a five-page, step-by-step guide shining out like the Star of Bethlehem from the pages of the London Times Online to lead me to my prince.

And so, reader, I clicked on it.

I am a great fan of the British press, especially the tabloids, and avidly follow the gossip in them. I read of the sorrowful demise of Jade Goody, I follow the blossoming fashion career of Mrs. David “Becks” Beckham, nee Posh Spice, and I keep up-to-date on the latest travails of Waity Katie. So of course the Times Online would be my reliable go-to source for dating advice.

Unfortunately, instead of a sugarplum, “How to Meet a Man at Forty,” turned out to be nothing more than the usual lump of coal a spinster finds in her stocking each year, regardless if she’s been naughty or nice. Oh for the chance to be naughty! Now that really would be a Christmas miracle!

Yeah, yeah…I can see your eyes glazing over: you’re thinking “another rant about life’s unfairness to single women.” And you’d be right. But indulge me, please, just once more. If the following excerpts from “How to Meet a Man at Forty” are not enough to convince you that old maids should be considered a protected class, up there in the pantheon of victimhood along with the rest of the alphabet soup of sexually disenfranchised losers, then you are part of the problem.

“How to Meet a Man at Forty” begins reasonably enough, roasting all the old chestnuts about being too picky, holding oneself too aloof, but then, having lulled the reader into a false sense of familiarity, the article turns mean, and launches its ad feminan full frontal assault:

If there is one thing the single woman cannot afford to be, it’s a burden. You must be sunny and amenable, the best guest, the most reliable friend, the tonic at the party and the one who blends in on the family holiday. Precisely because you are not part of a couple, you need to give out the message, loud and clear, that you are no trouble and guaranteed life-enhancing. Being successfully single means having lots of different options and knowing plenty of people who might think, “Yes, bring her along!” rather than, “Maybe not.”

Gotcha. Remember the old belief that in order for a black person to be accepted in the workplace, she must work twice as hard as her white counterparts? In what way does the above paragraph (written, I might add, by a married woman) differ from the prejudiced thinking that held the black to a different standard? The answer of course is that it is no different at all, except—and this is a big one—that discrimination against people because of their skin color is not only against the law, it’s socially unacceptable, thank God. All you recovering racists out there, take heart! You have a new outlet for your prejudice. But I digress.

“How to Meet a Man at 40” continues, “People notice single women getting drunk more than they would notice any other demographic. They are waiting for you to get swervy and take to the dance floor, on your own, clutching a bottle of champagne, and then collapse sobbing on the shoulder of some man who has long since married your best friend.” Ah yes, poor Aunty Lucy, she loves her schnapps, doesn’t she? It keeps her warm at night.

What I don’t understand is that when I say things like that, my married friends look at me as if I were crazy. “Deluded” in fact is how one of them puts it. But leave it to a British tab to print an article that vindicates my views. What a gift! Maybe there are Christmas miracles after all.

I’m a Believer

Have you noticed the growing number of comparisons between religion and environmentalism? This analogy seems to have sprouted legs, and is scampering its way across the punditsphere. For a definitive and perhaps seminal read on the subject, check out Michael Crichton’s 2003 speech to the Commonwealth Club, in which he elaborates with astonishing clarity the similarity of going green to going to church.

Although I have no conversion plans, I admit that I am intrigued by the notion of adding April 23 to the calendar of saints and feasts. I also believe that this new religion might be just the ticket to revive the moribund sect known as the Shakers, and I am all for that.

Shakers as you know broke off from the Quakers and found their way to upstate New York and New England. They lived simply, in harmony with the land: they ate what they grew, built furniture to last, and believed in the virtue of thrift. Yes it is true that they expressed their faith by sometimes speaking in tongues and by a rather prescient form of modern dance, but even the most spiritual among us needs a hobby.

Shakers were also decidedly ahead of their time in their attitudes about gender and divinity, seeing in the body of the lord both male and female characteristics. For this reason, among others, Shakerism (the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, actually), was organized around a matriarchal hierarchy. Mother Church, Gaia Hypothesis…the Shakers were definitely on to something!

It is also true that Shakers believed that as God’s chosen people they were singled out for being, well, single. Celibate, they grew their ranks through adoption and conversion. Imagine if you can (I cannot) a world in which single women were not only the norm, they were in charge! Imagine if you can (I cannot) a world in which marrieds were the second-class citizens, accepted by the group but looked at askance and ineligible for the top jobs. Talk about heaven on earth!

Heaven on earth is of course an oxymoron. If earth were heaven, I suppose we would have no religions at all. We wouldn’t need them. So I suppose it is too much to hope that today’s neo-Shakers, the members of the AGW Church, incorporate the tenet of single supremacy into their religion. Pity. If they just made this one sensible change to their dogma, they’d win a new convert.

Up for Grabs

A note from Callmemiss: This post, in a slightly abbreviated form, was originally a listener essay read during Morning Edition, WFCR-FM, December 24, 2004.

On Saturday, two days after Thanksgiving, one day after Black Friday and two days before Cyber Monday, I heard a Christmas carol on the car radio. Since I had spent the day on the hunt for early-bird specials and door-busting values, I was already aware that ’twas now the season.

I did not need the reminder: my thinning wallet and thickening stack of receipts were a dead giveaway. But those first cheery notes harmonized with my inner alarm bells, ringing full blast with their annual warning: Get ready! Paste on a smile! Practice looking like you care! Office holiday party ahead!

Now, don’t get me wrong. I am as sociable as the next person. And I genuinely like my colleagues. Most of them, anyway. It is the annual workplace ritual of gift exchange that starts me contemplating if not hibernation then at least early retirement.

These rituals start off innocently enough. Tins of cookies or fudge appear in the copy room, seemingly free for the taking. When complimented, the stealth baker will modestly reply: “it was nothing. I made them for my kids’ teachers. These are the leftovers.” Inevitably, the hint, along with the last gingerbread man, is swallowed whole by some rookie in the relentless game of holiday merry-making. “I have a great idea,” he’ll say, “let’s bring in some little something for each other.

Plans for an office party then begin in earnest: lists are compiled, assignments are doled out, and names drawn for a “secret Santa” gift exchange. Then come the decorations: a plastic wreath here, a blow-up vinyl Rudolph there and cunning elves capering across the secretary’s desks. One year, we even had monogrammed stockings tacked to our doors, and our office was the envy of the campus. All in preparation for an afternoon orgy of high-calorie snacks and grab-bag presents.

My experience with office holiday parties and gift exchanges spans a quarter century, and I have been the bemused grabbee of gifts that range from soap-on-a-rope so old it’s wrapped in yellowed cellophane, which, along with the surfactant inside, crumbled to a fine power …to a battery operated mechanical dog that barks “Jingle Bell Rock” while shaking its booty.

Yes, yes. I know it is the thought that counts. My thought is that the only real way to survive the office holiday gift exchange is to adhere devoutly to a single, simple rule: gifts for the office must not only be cheap, they must look cheap. Nothing cuts through the faux holiday cheer and says, “forget the bonhomie, give me a cash bonus” like a hastily selected, carelessly wrapped gew-gaw–preferably purchased at the dollar store. At the very least it must have “Made in China” stamped on the bottom, or, if it is a comestible, be rapidly approaching if not past its sell-by date. If you buy something on clearance, make certain that a tell-tale portion of the red or yellow “reduced” tag is clearly visible. Better yet, recycle that little something under last year’s tree–the gimcrack you shoved in the junk drawer on Boxing Day. Best of all: re-gift what you pulled out of a prior grab. This is not only the apotheosis of apathy, if challenged you can simply look smug and declare you are celebrating a “green Christmas.” What with that global warming and all, you are seeking out every opportunity to conserve!

Colleagues of mine, and perhaps you will join them in this view, have accused me of being petty and mean-spirited. Actually, I am not. My office-party survival rule does have one important exception: it applies only to the gifts you give, not the ones you receive.

Michelle Obama: Style Savior?

Like many other women, I have followed Michelle Obama’s fashion choices with great interest. When the First Lady gets it right, as she so often does, her look is spectacular. And when she gets it wrong, she goes beyond a mere Glamour “don’t” and ventures into “don’t even think about it, ever” territory. But fashion is all about risk, and risk includes the possibility of failure. When Mrs. Obama goofs—the prizefighter belts cinched over dainty blouses—however, she more than offsets her flubs by looking at other times positively incandescent, as she did at the recent State Dinner.

So when the Daily Beast promised a new gallery of “Michelle Obama’s best photographs yet” I of course avidly started clicking away. The photos were all right, but the accompanying text by Stanley Crouch, whom I think of as a jazz critic, but who evidently is also something of a connoisseur of First-Lady style, was stunning in its own right. His essay, a review of two picture books about Mrs. Obama, begins:

“In our period of manic and hollow decadence loudly and consistently dehumanizing a public convinced that flimsy trends constitute the up-to-date truth, the always contemporary power of fine art is not diminished. This is most obvious when expensive forms of trash are forced to backflip until they obviate their standard uses. John Ford did this with Westerns, Fred Astaire with musicals, and our best jazz musicians with some of the worst popular songs. Two recent books of photographs have captured the invincible life of human feeling in high places and the indestructible glare of the heart preserved in the still gestures of ritualized dance.”

Having read these three sentences several times, I can follow them, maybe even diagram them, but as to understanding what they mean, well your guess is as good as mine. And what the last sentence has to do with the first two, which at least relate to each other inductively, may well remain a mystery to both of us. I get that “human feeling” has an “invincible life,” but why limit that life to “in high places”? Is Crouch contending that only the privileged few who dwell in “high places” remain in possession of “human feeling” while the rest of us make do in a place “consistently dehumanizing [the] public”? As to the “indestructible glare of the heart,” one asks why Crouch evokes the Christian devotion of the Sacred Heart, bloodied and flaming, before noting that he gets his Keats on in the paragraph’s final clump of words describing where the artorial organ can be found “preserved in the still gestures of ritualized dance.” Oh be still my unravished bride of quietude! I have long been of the mind that writers of prose stand to learn a lot from poets, but Crouch has deeply shaken my confidence in that conviction.

The remainder of Crouch’s article is equally impenetrable (that pesky bride again!); in his effort to beatify Michelle Obama, Crouch lets loose with language that a first-year creative writing student experimenting with religious symbolism would be ashamed to use. According to Crouch, the two books of First Lady photos are instead iconographies which depict, among many other virtues, “the perpetual feeling of vitality found in the image of the first lady.” Vitality, he goes on to observe, that “is always paced by the peculiar sorrow of the extremely sensitive in positions of great power and ceaseless attention.” He breathlessly concludes, “Lady Obama actually seems to be as she appears, the common woman made into a queen by her soulfulness and the love of the people.” And, yes, you read that right, Crouch calls Michelle “Lady Obama,” as in Our Lady of Perpetual Vitality.

Please do not think that I am attacking Crouch unfairly. He himself makes the sanctification of Mrs. Obama explicit later on in the essay, when writing I suppose about the occasional aloofness some of her portraits belie: “The aura of a spiritual rapier always remains in place. It is used to silently defend Lady Obama against all of those things that anyone bearing the cross of being considered an icon must hold as far at bay as possible.”

Evidently Crouch’s post crossed in the mail with Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank’s December 6 editorial, which begins, “Some parishioners in the Church of Obama discovered last week that their spiritual leader is a false prophet,” goes on to talk about falling poll numbers, and concludes, “This is what happens when true believers mistake a mortal for a messiah.” I suppose, however, that Stanley Crouch would point out that he’s talking about the other Obama, Saint Michelle, and not the false prophet who is her husband.

I end as I began, Michelle Obama is a great-looking First Lady doing marvelous things for working women who want to look stylish: she’s bringing back dresses; she’s wearing adorable flats; she’s got great accessories (except the ugly belts). And I’d like to think she has more than fashion sense, that she has the common sense to be appalled by Stanley Crouch.

Maybe Crashing Is the Answer

A friend of mine asked me why I hadn’t written about the Salahis, America’s newest fun couple, and I replied that just like Michaele Salahi’s midriff, the topic had been overexposed. And besides, as someone pathologically allergic to parties of any kind, the thought that anyone anywhere anytime would voluntarily seek entry to a gathering to which they weren’t even invited confounds me. It’s bad enough to make a forced appearance as a matter of friendship or familial duty.

Of course, I chalk my anathema up to being single, and to having read one too many of the discrete “no singles need apply” sign most couples have posted near their doorbells. Try walking alone into a holiday open house in any suburban neighborhood. If you are smart you will head straight for the bar; if you were really smart, you would have declined the invitation in the first place. Drink in hand—better make it a double—what will you find should you attempt to mingle? Most men and women will self-segregate, and even in an academic town such as mine the men will likely be talking sports. Moving on. The women will be talking about their husbands or children or both. OKaaay. The few mixed-sex clusters will likely have husbands and wives in fused dyads…best not to intrude and upset their equilibrium. As a last resort, you look to the kids for companionship and if they are well mannered it is here you may strike conversational gold for a moment or two. By this time you’d best head back to the bar for a refill.

Single women everywhere know the strategies for surviving parties: help pass hors d’oeurves, volunteer to sit with senile Aunt Josephine, enlist as a litter patrolman and police for discarded napkins, glasses and plates. In other words, they assume the role intended for them by the hosts: unpaid laborer. “Working the room” has a very literal meaning for single party-goers. So why do we subject ourselves to such abuse? To placate the inner child for whom the words “Christmas party” signify ineffable excitement and possibility even though experience has taught the grown-up otherwise. To dress up in outlandish sweaters and jewelry that by their decorative themes have limited runs on the calendar. To scope out ideas for our own repertoire of Christmas recipes. Whatever our reasons, year after year, many of us continue to be authors of our own agony and show up like the good sports we are.

But what of the Salahis? Do they, like me, have a terrible time of parties to which they are invited? Did they, unlike me, think that in their desperation they’d have a better chance at enjoying themselves at one where they were not wanted? Could be. In that case, may the holiday season bless each of them with more invitations than they can accept. I couldn’t imagine a more fitting punishment for their crime.