The Weekly Screed (#1000)

 The heartbreak kid

by David Benjamin

MADISON, Wis. — Essayist Margaret Renkl recently recalled a question she posed to her great-grandmother about her great-grandfather, who had died some thirty years before. To Renkl’s surprise, great-grandmother barely remembered the man to whom she’d been married for three decades. She told Renkl, “It’s almost like it happened in a dream.”

This anecdote captured for me the capriciousness of human memory, because it brought to mind a girl named Toni, whom I hardly knew. Although she and I were sweethearts, of sorts, for just a few weeks in the winter of 1964, Toni has haunted me — in vivid recall — ever since. She should have come and gone, “almost in a dream,” but she has lingered.

Toni was a freshmen then at a neighboring high school. One evening at CCD — weekly religious classes required of Catholic students who attended public schools— she burst into my orbit. She was petite and lissom, with short dark hair, pretty in that catlike way Audrey Hepburn was pretty — and bubbling with vivacity. Why she spoke to me I can neither recall nor believe. Although only fourteen, she had already been spotted, targeted and courted by the upperclassmen at MG High. Casanovas in cars regularly pulled over, flirted with her and invited her for a “ride.” She was used to this sort of attention. She had already developed a technique for brushing them off sweetly and sending the boys emptyhanded on their way.

Toni’s rejects were guys older, smoother, handsomer, richer and cooler than me. So her willingness to consort with me, rather than all those quarterbacks and BMOCs was a mystery I never fathomed. I was undersized, unkempt and — as far as I could judge — unattractive. I was at least a year from having a driver’s license, couldn’t imagine ever owning an actual car, and I lived two miles away from Toni.

But there I was, sitting beside Toni in a corridor at Immaculate Heart School, walking her home from CCD, looking into her eyes and asking for a date. And here she was, bouncing on her feet, smiling and saying yes.

To me.

I could ever forget a moment like that?

That first date required a bus ride to downtown Madison. I’ve forgotten the movie and whether the theater was the Orpheum or the Capitol. But I remember our footprints in the snow, holding hands, walking her afterward from the bus stop to her front door. I thought about kissing her. Looking back, I realize she expected the kiss and probably wanted it. All those guys with cars had kissed her. But I didn’t try and somehow, that worked. I was different from the other ones. 

Little did I know that more than three years would pass before I ever would ever again get so close to kissing a girl who wanted me to kiss her.

In retrospect, I suspect that Toni — who had become by necessity one of the more boy-savvy girls at MG High — regarded me as a sort of experiment. I was more complicated that the typical high-school male whose single objective in life was to get into her — or any girl’s — jeans. I wasn’t like those boys and this made her curious. 

Toni possessed a sort of “smart” that I sensed but didn’t understand. So, of course, I underestimated her. Although in tenth grade I didn’t know much and still regularly confused my ass and my elbow, I was a know-it-all. So, I contrived to rescue Toni. I was going to enlighten, mold and teach her. 

Teach her what? I had no idea, but I started to talk. I’ve forgotten what I said, but I’m pretty sure most of it was self-indulgent crapola — which was my tenth-grade forté. I spent hours on the phone with Toni not listening, not appreciating the bubbly wonder of her but trying to save her. I poured out sophomore wisdom, guiding, correcting and belittling her. 

I didn’t have to be so intense. Toni, who wore her feelings on her sleeve and enjoyed them, would have liked me anyway. But I didn’t want her to just like me. I couldn’t settle for mere teenage romance. I wanted to be madly, brilliantly, James Dean-Natalie Wood in love. Since Toni, through trial and repeated, humiliating error, I’ve managed to trace to my parents this hair-trigger hunger for head-over-heels. Sometime in the latter 1940s, Mom and Dad ignited a scorching high-school romance that almost burned Tomah High School to the ground. The result was a shotgun wedding and eight predictable years of torrid passion, excruciating heartache, jealousy, infidelity, crying, yelling, drunken rage and broken furniture, climaxing finally in a rupture that left three confused kids still hoping to be in love someday but not like that. 

Toni, I dreamed, was destined to fall in love with me, after which together we would stroll hand-in-hand down Lover’s Lane correcting all the mistakes my mom and dad had made. Ridiculous yes, but I was fifteen and poorly in tune with my subconscious. Still, we might have lasted longer and had fun (and I would’ve gotten that kiss) if only I had left Toni to her own spontaneous devices.

But I granted Toni’s intelligence, personality and uniqueness no more respect than the predators who contrived to inveigle her into the back seat. To them, she was a piece of ass. To me, she was Galatea.  

So, one night on the phone, as I was haranguing Toni, adjusting her outlook and getting her mind right, she stopped me cold — I remember the moment — and said “That’s enough. That’s it. I can’t stand this anymore.”

She hung up. I never spoke to her again. She disappeared. 

It was my fault. I’d ruined everything and I knew it immediately. There was no going back. There was no running through the night, climbing her balcony and begging her forgiveness. When Toni was finished, she was finished. At least I knew her that well.

I was crushed with regret. As soon as she was gone, I remembered everything good, joyous and adorable about Toni — her smile and her touch, her curiosity and her fizzy, uninhibited affection. Had I just shut up for a few minutes, she would have tumbled into my arms, grabbed my idiot face and drowned me in kisses. But I just kept talking and talking, defining love in terms that left her out of my romantic formula and piling up words between our young, electric bodies. 

All my life, I’ve wished I had that moment back. Perhaps I remember so clearly because my time with Toni was so brief. Maybe it hurts a little, even now, because I’m certain Toni, within the week, shrugged off our entire flirtation, forgot me forever and took up with a football player. Mine is the only memory that remembers us.

Toni kissed me off without a kiss, and came away unscathed. After our sudden goodbye, all the hurt was on my side — which is fit and meet. No matter how briefly it lasted and how long ago, I can’t forget because Toni was my first lost love. She introduced me to a truth it has taken me much of a lifetime to fully absorb.

Most of the time, it isn’t someone else who breaks your heart.

You do it to yourself. 

The Weekly Screed (#999)

 The sublime ambiguity of the tormented villain

by David Benjamin

MADISON, Wis. — One of America’s most familiar figures, Rush Limbaugh, projected a persona that offered barely a smidgeon of nuance. Rush, who died last month, was a two-dimensional construction whom you either loved or hated, No middle ground between. This is how he chose to be esteemed. When interviewed about his incendiary broadcast style, he described himself not as a pundit, analyst or public intellectual. He was, he averred, an entertainer. He presented himself not as character but caricature. We hardly knew him. He was, for all practical and political purposes, a cartoon. 

This facile and inch-deep facade made Limbaugh passionately popular. His “dittohead” followers, sensing in his bombast neither complexity nor self-doubt, found not just affirmation for their fears, superstitions and prejudices, but blind faith. For three blessed hours a day on talk radio, Rush was simple, blunt and absolute, conveying the conviction that life itself — uncluttered by the intrusion of second thoughts or moral misgivings — is simple, blunt and absolute.

Limbaugh’s believers reveled in the emotional validation that their hero was, to his radiclib, feminazi foes, the perfect villain.

Besides being radio provocateurs, perfect, impenitent, implacable bad guys are the grist of pulp fiction. As I read Limbaugh’s obituary, I pictured Lex Luthor, the cackling arch-villain of Superman comics. Luthor belonged to a literary tradition whose archetype was Professor Moriarty. In creating a nemesis for Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle fashioned a villain both thoroughly evil and hermetically enigmatic. 

We never got to know Moriarty. We knew he was bad to the bone, but never knew what made him that way. Conan Doyle never let us — nor did he even permit Holmes — to pick Moriarty’s brain, dissect his motives, meet his family or scratch his dog behind the ear. He was a deep and perpetual mystery.

When we compare Moriarty to Holmes, we see the method to Conan Doyle’s mysteriousness. While Moriarty is smug and comfortable in his evil cocoon, Holmes is irreparably flawed and bothered by his flaws. Among his many symptoms, Holmes is addictive, manic and depressive, plus pompous and rude with a touch of the vindictive, a hint of misogyny and a haunting insecurity about his own brilliance — especially in comparison to Mycroft and Moriarty. 

The reader learns all about Holmes and must decide whether to like him, or to stop reading because his many petty afflictions are just too annoying. 

Holmes is a morally ambiguous protagonist who engages us through his or her angst, indecision, impulse and heartache. His heroism has been with us since Achilles chose to compromise his principles and fight an entire godawful war over Who Got the Girl. From the very beginning, storytellers have understood that the listener to Homer’s Iliad or the reader of Tom Jones must feel an intimacy, a mixture of affection and reproach toward the lead character. The audience might accept — but would never love nor long tolerate — a protagonist who’s flat, simple and predictable. The hero must evoke feelings, fears and misgivings that we feel in ourselves. A well-drawn hero has the power to break our your heart.

Ironically, the same rule doesn’t apply to evildoers. A villain who’s just plain bad, without nuance or introspection — is as fascinating as he is predictable. He fills us with righteous rage and makes us ache for his comeuppance. Dudley Do-Right is a crashing bore, but Snively Whiplash is a show-stopper. 

However, the enterprising author can also create a villain imbued with moral ambiguity— a badass with redeeming qualities. This motif traces all the way back to Beowulf, in which the seemingly monstrous Grendel is the loneliest being in the kingdom he’s terrorizing and where, in Seamus Heaney’s translation, he “haunted the glittering hall after dark,/ but the throne itself, the treasure-seat,/ he was kept from approaching; he was the Lord's outcast.”

I’ve always had a soft spot for villains with anxieties and misgivings. For example, John Milton’s greatest character, in Paradise Lost, is Satan himself, the quintessence of evil. Milton loved his Satan. Over and over, he thrusts the reader inside the mind of his villain where “the thought/ Both of lost happiness and lasting pain/ Torments him” for all eternity. Milton’s epic evokes a desolation that can’t help but wrest from the reader a reluctant pang of sympathy for the Devil.  

Purveyors of pop culture and pulp fiction, of course, tend toward the easily sketched 2-D Lex Luthor villain, lest they offend their squeamish audience by glorifying mischief. But I’ve always contended that readers, watchers and listeners are smarter than their panders. Else why, for example, in “Leave It to Beaver,” was Eddie Haskell vastly more compelling than whitebread Wally? In the same light, the character who made the TV sitcom “Taxi” a classic was not Alex or even Latka Gravas. It was Danny DeVito’s virtuoso turn as Louie De Palma, mean, cheap, profane and lewd — but torn, troubled and secretly needy. 

And then, there’s Tony Soprano. Talk about your rotten guys. He’s a ruthless mobster. He steals, kills, pimps, lies, bribes and cheats on his wife. But as we get to know him, episode by episode, we learn his secret anguish. Even as he rules an empire of sleaze, he struggles to give his kids a future undefiled by their father’s iniquity. He suffers anxiety attacks that overwhelm him with self-reproach and render him desperate for a shoulder to cry on. Because we’ve seen the tortured Tony who hides behind his brutish facade, we feel his plight, we hope for his redemption and we dread the prospect that he might be rubbed out by the Mob before he can summon up the better angels of his nature — although we’re pretty sure there are no better angels. 

As Lloyd Bentsen might say, Rush Limbaugh was no Tony Soprano. But there is a celluloid analogy that comes to mind — in the baseball comedy, Major League. The villain of the piece is team owner Margaret Whitton (Rachel Phelps). Determined to ruin her team so she can move it to Florida, she’s as 2-D as a bad gal can be. She betrays no inner life or emotional range. True to her cartoon persona, her merrily defiant baseball players turn her into life-size cardboard cutout and wage their battle for redemption against a two-dimensional effigy. Of course, because Major League is a feel-good movie — rather than real life — Jake, Lou, Willy Mays Hayes and Wild Thing strip their cardboard nemesis and win the pennant.

Over here in reality, where one of the nation’s political parties is still pledging its undying allegiance to an exiled self-caricature of Rush Limbaugh’s self-caricature, and where social media is a vast illusion in which millions of neurotic mummers hide behind cardboard cutouts of their imaginary selves, we might be wise to appreciate the ambiguous real-life downfall of Andrew Cuomo. 

Cuomo was a pandemic hero until he undercounted the elderly dead. He stood tall and truthful against a torrent of White House lies, but then he queered his hero act by talking dirty to women and kissing girls who didn’t want to be kissed. You’ll never love him, but can you really bring yourself to hate the guy? He was like all of us except, for a while, he was better. He was like all of us except, a few times, he was worse. He says he’s sorry but he doesn’t seem entirely sure what he did to be sorry about. 

It was Yeats who saw Rush and Trump and Cuomo slouching toward Bethlehem and told us we better watch out, because “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity.”

The Weekly Screed (#998)

 The snow babies of the Great White North

by David Benjamin

“The arctic trails have their secret tales that would make your blood run cold…”

— Robert Service

MADISON, Wis. — Although systematically hushed up by the mainstream media, there are signs that the Wisconsin tradition of setting surplus children out in the snow in the dead of winter to be eaten by wolves is enjoying a clandestine revival. 

The practice has long been suppressed by the state’s officialdom, whose latest effort to discourage this timeless method of population control (and parental discipline) is the restoration of a hunting season for wolves. 

Indeed, the reintroduction of wolf packs into Wisconsin is seen as an unintended trigger for the rebirth of “hygienic infant mortality” in a region of harsh winters, barren breasts and undependable harvests.

It has long been thought that the practice of abandoning toddlers to the tender mercies of top predators in the northwoods originated with the Nantoka tribe, whose nomadic range covered much of the northern tier of territory that now composes Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan. However, in his groundbreaking study of the now-extinct Nantoka, Snow Babies and Pagan Ritual in New France,1634-1763, historian Garrett Huxley stresses the fact that no infants were known to have been sacrificed to the Nantoka wolf god, Seena-Trah, until after the arrival of French missionaries in the 17th century. 

Because of their nomadic nature, the Nantoka were an elusive target for the fervid efforts of French priests to pin down and indoctrinate these tribesmen into Catholicism. However, around 1645, according to Huxley, a swashbuckling cleric named Distinguette, who had a knack for learning Native American dialects, cast aside his priestly robes. He donned buckskin and moccasins and insinuated himself into the great traveling band of Nantoka led by legendary Chief Bloodtooth. For ten years, Père Distinguette plied Bloodtooth and his people with passages and prayers, which he translated into Nantoka, from the New Testament. 

Père Distinguette, whose rare portraits show a striking resemblance to Brad Pitt, might have succeeded in converting the peripatetic Nantoka to the Catholic faith. However, he fell under the spell of Bloodtooth’s pubescent daughter Nancy, who was reputed to be breathtakingly beautiful and a little bit slutty. When Nancy turned up pregnant, she fingered the Father as the father, launching Bloodtooth into a rage that ended with Père Distinguette being skinned alive, stuffed with wild rice and cranberries, basted with bear fat and roasted on a spit over a slow, smoky fire of birch logs and damp spruce boughs. According to Huxley’s account, Père Distinguette made a tasty feast for the Nantoka version of Thanksgiving.

However, when Nancy gave birth to the bastard child of the missionary Frenchman, the baby boy’s angry grandfather gave Nancy a choice. Either she and her offspring would be banished from the tribe or she could simply abandon the baby to its inevitable fate in the February forest. Nancy, whom Huxley describes as “gay, sociable and immature” — being only twelve years old at the time of the birth — opted for Door Number Two.

In an effort to justify this act of uncommon cruelty, Bloodtooth told the tribe that their dalliance with the Catholic Distinguette had offended their Nantoka deities and that only a blood sacrifice from the family of the chief himself would restore the tribe to the gods’ good graces. The tribe bought this premise and the little boy was dropped into a snowbank overnight. All that Nancy found the next morning were shreds of the baby’s buckskin snowsuit and a lot of wolf tracks.

Over the ensuing decades, this sanguinary innovation evolved into a Nantoka ritual, first as a tactic to reduce the band’s numbers in years of scant foraging and bad hunting, then as an annual — then more frequent — rite meant to appease the gods — especially Seena-Trah. This strange but dramatic tradition became fashionable among some non-Native settlers who filtered into these remote regions toward the end of the 17th century. 

Initially, the offering of “snow babies” was justified as a survival strategy in years of crop failure or during the frequent epidemics of diphtheria, typhus, smallpox, rickets and other frontier plagues. Eventually, however, it became — in some deeply isolated and backward wilderness outposts — a pseudo-religious belief that crying, misbehaving and “rambunctious” infants had been possessed by a northwoods demon known to indigenous shamans as “the Wendigo.” Although wolves, bears or mountain lions inevitably devoured the forsaken babes, the preferred story was that they had been swept up by the horrible Wendigo — who repaid the community by sparing it any further depredations.

Perhaps the greatest tragedy of the “snow baby” tradition was the literal obliteration of the Nantoka. They got so carried away with setting their children out in the snow, as offerings to Seena-Trah and the Wendigo that, eventually, no girls in the entire tribe ever reached child-bearing age. The wolf packs of the Great White North feasted and grew fat while the noble Nantoka, fatally corrupted by a randy priest from France, became as scarce as Easter Islanders. 

Of course, as civilization spread through Wisconsin, the “snow baby” cultists who lived “Up North” were forced to abandon their grisly analog to the witch burnings of New England. Historian Huxley speculates that a small band of non-indigenous die-hards fled their village near what was once the French bastion of Fort Le Sueur and began a nomadic existence like that of the Nantoka. 

This group, today constantly on the move in small convoys of recreational vehicles and Airstream trailers, practices a mix of French Catholicism and pagan animism, with an emphasis on worshipping the fertility of very young girls. It has been rumored that these “snow baby” cultists, tracing their roots all the way back to the sacrifice of Nancy’s firstborn son, are spreading their gospel among remote and impoverished denizens of northern Wisconsin and Upper Michigan. 

With only the slightest suggestion, the economic desperation common to this frosty region can combine with the spiritual aura of the wildwood’s most powerful icon — Seena-Trah, the timber wolf. A family of five or six who are hungry, cold and at their wit’s end, can come to see a snow-baby offering as their Eucharist, and the flaming Wendigo as their Savior.

If the potential snow babies of Covid-ravaged Wisconsin are to be protected from the terrible choice of either freezing solid in the woods or being torn apart by ravenous wolves, the state’s leaders must stop denying this crisis. If they persist in their silence, cuddly kids in snowsuits will continue to wade motherless through the blowing drifts as they blunder into the fangs and merciless claws of the Great White North.

The Weekly Screed (#997)

 Peculiar education

by David Benjamin

“If a slave say to his master: "You are not my master," if they convict him his master shall cut off his ear.”

— The Code of Hammurabi, No. 282

MADISON, Wis. — Since the establishment of public schools, one of the hallmarks of American education has been the suppression of knowledge about slavery. While many historians refer to slavery as America’s original sin it has been, as a matter of pedagogy, our original secret.

When I was in school, I received perhaps an entire hour of instruction on the subject. Uncle Tom’s Cabin dominated this quick run-through. My textbook’s authors left the impression that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s saga was a mawkish, tendentious and a largely inaccurate depiction of the plight of the slave. My history book did not, however, balance its dismissal of Uncle Tom’s ordeal with an “accurate” depiction of slavery. 

The subsequent national bloodbath, according to the Texas State Board of Education — which has long dictated the content of U.S. history texts — was only elliptically associated with slavery. Most texts used the term, “War Between the States,” a Confederate euphemism that presents the Civil War not as a struggle to redress — in Lincoln’s words —the “bondman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil.” Rather, texts and teaching sought to explain the war to me as a tussle over North-South economic disparities, states rights and Southern chivalry. 

My brief history lessons about that war tended to emphasize the nobility of Robert E. Lee, the flamboyance of Stonewall Jackson, the incompetence of George McClellan, the drunkenness of Ulysses S. Grant and the savagery of William Tecumseh Sherman. And… oh, yes! The Gettysburg Address (but not the battle).

In the end, most of us learned more about the Civil War from Vivian Leigh and Clark Gable. And frankly, we didn’t give a damn

Well, actually, I did. Since my high-school miseducation, I’ve been a student of what Kenneth Stampp called America’s “peculiar institution” and its offspring, the creation and enforcement of a nationwide century-long system of American apartheid. I’ve long believed that kids in high school cannot understand or feel outrage about Dred Scott, Jim Crow, Plessy v. Ferguson, 5,000 lynchings, the souls of black folks, the slaughters at Fort Pillow, Colfax, Greenwood and a hundred other occasions of racist bloodlust, the death of Emmett Till, Medger Evers, Martin Luther King, Fred Hampton, George Floyd and Breonna Taylor unless they have a foundation in the truthful explanation of slavery in America.

So, I was dismayed recently to hear about the suppression of a clever slavery unit at a school in Sun Prairie, one of Madison’s burgeoning white-flight suburbs. 

In a lesson lifted from an ed-biz website called Teachers Pay Teachers, sixth-graders at Patrick Marsh Middle School were assigned to picture themselves as slaveholders in ancient Mesopotamia. This lesson was drawn from the Code of Hammurabi, often regarded as the first written set of civil laws. The kids were asked: “A slave stands before you. This slave has disrespected his master by telling him, ‘You are not my master!’ How will you punish this slave?”

I’ve read a few accounts of this shocking incident, but found no clue as to why it was supposed to be shocking. Nonetheless, it incited a panicky backlash from Sun Prairie’s school honchos and a swift deletion of the lesson from the offending website. It was deemed a racist outrage that “trivializes traumatic experiences.”

Okay, let’s go back to Babylon where, in the 18th century BC, slavery was not a noticeably racist enterprise. Being a slave in Babylon was probably a traumatic experience but it was also, in Mesopotamian terms, sort of a rainbow coalition. Slaves — who did most of the empire’s work— consisted of the lowest caste of native Babylonians, plus thousands of captives from Hammurabi’s military conquests. This ethnic melting-pot probably included Syrians and Assyrians, Hittites, Akkadians, Canaanites and maybe the odd Egyptian. 

Among the Code’s 282 tenets, twenty-three refer to the care and treatment of slaves. Because slaves were valued property, none of Hammurabi’s rules provides for the killing of a fractious slave, nor does the law allow the severing of a slave’s hands. Hand-chopping was an otherwise popular punishment, and the death penalty — for free Babylonians — applies to twenty-four different crimes. 

Among my favorite slave laws in Babylon is No. 129: “If a man's wife be surprised (in flagrante delicto) with another man, both shall be tied and thrown into the water, but the husband may pardon his wife and the king his slaves.”

Of course, the genius of invoking Hammurabi as a teaching tool is that Babylonian slavery is evil but not racial. The teacher introduces slavery’s inhuman debasement through its roots in a long-defunct and faraway empire. Thus begun, the lesson plan can tiptoe toward the revelation of slavery’s lingering and unresolved influence on American society, politics. education and systemic bigotry.

By casting students as masters rather than subjects, the lesson forces them to personally confront the moral monstrosity of slavery. It’s easy, after all, to sympathize with the slave and say tsk-tsk to her miseries. It’s harder —even traumatic — for a student to behold the horror of human bondage from the monster’s point of view. The power of turnabout — the experience of walking a mile in the other man’s smelly moccasins — is startling. It induces far more self-examination, and a deeper moral insight, than can be derived from the softhearted sentimentality and melodrama conveyed in the quaint Victorian prose of Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Although it’s a deft pedagogic stroke, asking an eleven-year-old in 2021 to order the torture of a slave is politically incorrect. Never mind that torture has always existed hand-in-glove with slavery and that the atrocities visited on slaves, for at least the 3,800 years since Hammurabi, have been tactfully minimized in most of our big-picture, great-man history texts. Never mind that the lesson works.

According to a spokesperson for the Sun Prairie schools, “What happened at Patrick Marsh Middle School is not aligned with our equity work. It was not approved or endorsed at any level of leadership, and does not define our commitment to and work toward racial equity.”

In other words, yada yada yada.

Accidentally, the kids at Patrick Marsh had the rare and enlightening opportunity to confront the intellectual, moral and visceral reality of human beings owning other human beings. If they’d been allowed, they might have been able to open their minds to the vast historic injustice of human bondage, and to consider it separate from the squirming snakepit of American racial politics.

Instead, they got the racial politics without the lesson.

The squeamish overseers of education in Sun Prairie saw harm where there was no harm and horned into classrooms where they don’t belong. In a sort of ass-backward fashion, they proved themselves more demonstrably racist than the suspended teachers or the website providers. Supposedly, they were protecting minority students from the secret that their forebears were Aunt Jemima and Uncle Tom. But these kids know where they come from. They’re more wised-up than most adults will ever figure. 

The losers here are the white kids, who won’t get wised-up about slavery until they get out of school and look it up themselves. If they give a damn.

Miraculously, Sun Prairie decided not to fire the teachers involved. We can only assume, however, that each of them now has one less ear.

The Weekly Screed (#996)

 Flaming Bikini Rabbis from Planet Sodom!

by David Benjamin

“Then oddly there are all these people who have said they saw what looked like lasers or blue beams of light causing the fires, and pictures and videos…”

— Marjorie Taylor Greene

MADISON, Wis. — Whenever I catch up on the antics of QAnon Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, The Sound of Music comes to mind and I wish Julie Andrews were still around to portray Greene in the biopic of her life. The song that sets the tone for our heroine’s saga would be, of course, “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Our Margie?” A Mitch McConnell mimic would render the solo, backed by a baritone chorus of jowly gray Republicans, while Margie dances crossfit circles around the Capitol rotunda. 

Among Margie’s artifacts is her (deleted but searchable) 2018 Facebook post, in which she imputes a wave of California wildfires to an evil cabal that includes Pacific Gas & Electric, “Rothschild, Inc.” (actually Rothschild & Co.), Solaren Corp., the California Public Utilities Commission, ex-California Gov. Jerry Brown, Diane Feinstein’s husband and a cast of thousands. Margie deftly squeezes her sprawling but damning indictment into a mere 535 words. 

The other day, when I stumbled into Margie’s exposé, I realized that she had created a sort of CliffNotes exegesis of a communication style native to the conspiracist underground press. I use the term “press” because the spokesfolks of QAnon-world take pride in knowing secrets unrevealed to the mass of benighted “normies.” Sleuths like Marge do the homework the rest of us are too myopic and brainwashed to heed. For example, Marge is barely fifty words into her revelations when she invokes the word “research.”  

She knows stuff, ‘cause she’s been digging.

I’m tempted to critique Marge’s effort as faulty journalism in many respects. But I have to grant some indulgence because her polemic tends to fall under headings like “op-ed” and “analysis,” which permit a modicum of subjectivity.

However, even a personal commentary can be judged by reportorial standards that measure the author’s credibility. In this respect, from her very first sentence, Margie repeatedly screws the journalistic pooch.  Most unfortunately, she commits the cardinal sin of AP Style by “burying the lead” (often spelled “lede’). 

The lead is a who-what-where-when capsule that captures the vital elements of the story in a single opening sentence. Alas, in her exposé, there’s nary a whiff of the lead ’til almost halfway, when Margie springs the stunning claim that blue lasers from Outer Space, seemingly linked to the Rothschild banking empire, ignited the California wildfires as a clandestine public service, to clear the path for Gov. Brown’s high-speed rail “pet project.” Holy smokes!

In newsroom lingo, this is the sort of kickass scoop that should go “up top.” Indeed, the deadline task of extracting the perfect prologue from a blizzard of facts, assertions and insinuations can challenge even the keenest of grizzled newshounds. But locating this particular bombshell, even for an amateur like Marge, should be a layup. I mean, really: Multiple sources who’ve witnessed the horrific handiwork of pyromaniac Parisian bankers lurking in the Van Allen Belt and pointing flamethrowers at wine country? Any enterprising cub reporter who buried a lead this hot would spend the rest of his abortive career as a copyboy and coffee gopher. 

Margie’s botched lead isn’t her only misstep, unfortunately. She describes her numerous sources as “all these people.” I know most of you out there aren’t journalists, but I suspect you might see the problem: “All these people”?

When you’re bird-dogging the news, it’s nice to cite a bunch of eyewitnesses to an outrage as ghastly as an extraterrestrial conspiracy of rabbinical arsonists. But it’s even nicer to tell your readers who these witnesses are (attribution), what their credentials might be (citation of authority), where and when they all saw these laser shafts of sizzling blue light and whether their accounts and descriptions are consistent with one another (corroboration). 

One of the distressing trends (to me, at least) in the news in recent decades is a loosening of the rules of attribution, resulting in a plague of “Deep Throat” stories based on the testimony of unnamed sources. This tolerance of secrecy compels the reporter to hunt down additional witnesses — ideally with names — who can independently verify the testimony of the anonymous snitch. 

Citing “all these people,” or “everyone knows” (the favored formulation of a former president) falls pathetically short of minimum transparency, especially when you’re talking about an allegation as far-fetched as Jews and Jerry Brown scorching Smoky the Bear with death rays from Mars.

Margie sows deeper doubts about her investigative rigor as she rattles off an all-star squad of purported malefactors, from Roger Kimmel — a sort of board-of-directors gadabout (he belongs to five of them) — to Gov. Brown, Richard Blum (Sen. Feinstein’s husband), a guy named Michael Peevey and, indirectly the New York Stock Exchange. By her own cheery admission, Marge connects all her bad guys, bad companies, bad banks and bad Jewish astronauts through “speculation,” “coincidence,” suspicion and guilt by association. 

Some of Margie’s defendants and their organizations are probably guilty of something, but an actual journalist doesn’t burrow to the bottom of their alleged shenanigans simply by dropping names. When you mention, say, Michael Peevey, you’re required by your editor and your ethics to explain who he is (former member and president of the California Public Utilities Commission, 2002-15, board member, Solaren Corp.), what he did and how he contributed to all those forest fires. This is the sort of background scutwork that requires even more “digging,” takes up a lot more space on the page and tends to dampen the veracity of a nice juicy accusation. It also leads, for example, toward the website of Solaren, the outfit Margie has linked to the Rothschild firebugs. There, one disappointing sentence renders moot the whole diabolical conspiracy. Issued on 29 January 2021, 26 months after Margie chronicled the Jewish blue streaks piercing the redwood groves of California, the (readily verifiable) Solaren statement reads: “Solaren has not yet launched any Solar Power Satellites into space.”

I looked up this tidbit of buzzkill. It took thirty seconds, too easy to call it “research.” Much harder to dig up, for example, is the term “Dundreary whiskers,” which I encountered this week in a ghost story by Algernon Blackwood. Thanks to Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, I ferreted out the reference and reveled in the richness of its heritage, including the death of Abraham Lincoln. I could write a whole feature story on the subject. 

But not here. Because journalism is a discipline that eschews digression (another of Margie’s expository sins). 

Journalism, of course, is hardly a prestigious calling. It lacks glamour. It lacks the technical rigor of neurosurgery, rocket science and teaching geometry to tenth-graders. It is, more accurately, a craft — like joining wood or blowing glass — that can, in the right hands with proper seasoning, elevate to a sort of art. It serves its purposes according to rules both written and implicit, with tools of the trade that take years of practice and frequent humiliation, and through faithfulness to a sticky moral code. It’s a subjective profession that aspires to objectivity and bends, hopefully and haltingly, toward the truth.

When rank poseurs like Marjorie Taylor Greene horn in and sound off, but bring no chops and observe no ethics, well… Is that Julie Andrews I hear twirling and warbling in a fictional meadow?

“The hills are alive with the sound of bullshit…”

The Weekly Screed (#995)

The essential egg

by David Benjamin

“And it is not necessary to have great things to do. I turn my little omelette in the pan for the love of God.”

— Brother Lawrence

MADISON, Wis. — We left Paris last year just as the pandemic was starting and we haven’t been able to return. But when we go back, we’ll resort to routine: arrive in the morning, climb to our loft, take a short jet-lag nap and then, venturing back to stake our place in the City of Light, we’ll have an omelette.

Where we choose to eat our eggs isn’t a big deal. In Paris, it’s impossible to get a desultory omelette. Finding an outright bad one would require a task force and citywide dragnet. For example, one of our nearest omelettiers is Le Hibou (“The Owl”), a panoramic bar-restaurant in the Carrefour de l’Odeon. The Owl people serve a picturesque golden omelette, absent any brown on the surface, accompanied by an entire head of butterhead lettuce. 

When we go there, I notice that my eggs, although perfectly prepared and beautiful, seem a little overwhelmed by the salad’s immensity. I think of a slim volume by the great, late comic artist, B. Kliban, entitled Never Eat Anything Bigger Than Your Head. 

If we decide to venture farther, my sentimental omelette choice requires a hike to the Right Bank, where place de la Madeleine meets rue Tronchet. The Cafe Madeleine is the rare venue where tourists and Parisians mingle without friction. I owe this uncommon harmony to the waiters, who are brusque, efficient and scrupulously egalitarian. At lunch, in non-plague years, this elegant eatery is a churn of organized pandemonium.

I must digress here. The omelette in France is rarely, if ever, breakfast food. In the morning, as a rule, Parisians prefer a simpler repast, composed of bread (a criossant, pain au chocolat, tartine au beurre or, in an onset of madcap excess, a nice palmier) and a cup of café crème. The omelette cones later in the day. Typically sidekicked by salad or frites (referred to vulgarly in the U.S.A. as “French fries”), it’s a heartier dish that reigns at the center of a mid- or late-day meal. American tourists — even those who dress appropriately and speak serviceable menu-French — give themselves away by ordering eggs for breakfast and looking perplexed when the omelette comes without bacon, butter, white toast and strawberry jam.

Let’s venture into the Cafe Madeleine at one p.m., when the noon-lunch Americans are ceding their tables to guidebook tourists from Japan, as business Parisians pour into the joint and bee-line to any available two-top. The lookout waiters at the doors gently steer the traffic. Hotlips (my wife) and I use eye-contact with one of the trail bosses to indicate our desire to manger and quickly snag two appropriate seats. There’s a menu but — as demi-Parisians — we skip that formality and simply say, “Deux omelettes mixtes,” along with a carafe of water (which is free) and two glasses of red, (which isn’t free). “Mixte” means that gruyere cheese and little squares of sliced ham will be folded inside the omelette. There will be bread, sliced chunks of baguette, in a basket.

This is vital. The ideal three-egg omelette, as one chef put it, arrives medium rare. Cut into it and it will bleed a puddle of yellow ambrosia. As he tucks into the egg and its contents, the gourmand sops up the spillage with bread that was baked that morning at a boulangerie that ’s likely visible from the cafe window.

Another digression. Once, at a cafe on the tourist-infested rue de Rivoli (kitty-corner from the Louvre), I was subsiding near a pair of American women of a certain age. Waiting on them was one of those long-suffering serveurs who’d been sentenced to constant contact with the trampling hordes from far far away. Despite a daily torrent of ignorance and discourtesy, he had miraculously retained a patient air of bonhomie. One of the women ordered an omelette, which seemed to please the waiter, but then raised her voice to a near-scream. “Raw!” she roared. “I don’t want it RAW!” Alas, the waiter didn’t understand this particular English expletive. “Roi?” he said, puzzled. Which king — France has had so many of them — could compel this harridan to protest so passionately? Their dialog, punctuated by another dozen china-rattling repetitions of the mystery syllable, “RAW!,” went on long enough that I was tempted to intervene. But the woman eventually went into a coughing fit, and I left the joint before her omelette arrived and sent her into as fresh frenzy.

Her point was that she wanted her omelette not tender, supple and deliciously leaky, but Wisconsin-style, brown, dry, leathery and flavorlessly “well-done,” like a ruined rib-eye at Ponderosa.

The unappreciative woman eventually received an omelette that was — I’m absolutely sure — irreproachable. The French do many things badly, but not eggs. Every short-order cook in every cafe, tabac, brasserie and bar in France must be a master of the omelette or else won’t be long on the job. Among Paris’ blue-collar egg-beaters, styles vary but their skills are remarkably uniform, and rarely does an omelette reach the table that has been burned, mangled, ill-folded, soiled or treated indifferently. 

Hence, Hotlips and I don’t sweat the particular place where we seek our homecoming omelette. There are, of course, a few joints that specialize in eggy treats like quiche and omelettes. Unless we’ve missed a better place, the best omelettes in Paris, in profligate variety, can be found at a nondescript Left Bank storefront on rue Verneuil. I know its name. It merits an entry our voluminous Restaurant List (Hotlips is a foodie). But I’m not telling. Better you should wait out the pandemic, fly to Paris and explore rue Verneuil, which is a buried treasure of Parisian subtleties that most visitors will never see. If you find the omelette place, you won’t get in. Natives know about it. You’ll need a reservation, even for lunch.

But if you get turned away? There’s always the Cafe Madeleine, the Owl people or any no-name tabac on the next block. Paris is an embarrassment of omelettes.

Which brings me around to Big Night, the best food movie ever — or at least our favorite. It’s about two brothers (Stanley Tucci and Tony Shalhoub) somewhere on the East Coast struggling to succeed as purveyors of gourmet Italian dining in a world of spaghetti and meatballs. Toward the end, brothers Primo and Segundo  explode into a quarrel that escalates into violence and threatens to rupture the bond that has knit them together all their lives. 

In the final scene, Primo, Segundo and a young sous chef return silent and anguished to the kitchen of their dying enterprise. No one speaks as Primo (Tucci), finds a skillet and a handful of eggs. As the others slump at the table, Primo melts butter, beats the eggs and delicately, effortlessly fashions a perfect omelette. He has done this a thousand times.

Primo finishes. Deftly, he divides and shares the simplest of meals, the essential egg. They eat in peace together. Their hopes have been shattered but the sun is coming up. 

Weekly Screed #994

 The death-wish naiveté of the digimaniac kid

by David Benjamin

“A car doesn’t understand why it’s driving anywhere.”

— Bart Selman, computer science professor, Cornell University

MADISON, Wis. — My mom drove a ’61 Fairlane until the day it more or less exploded in the left lane of Interstate 90 just north of Wisconsin Dells. I was driving, both hands on the wheel. At first I was fascinated, then troubled, by the grinding, crunching and clanking from under the hood as oily smoke obscured my view of the road and a piercing odor caused my sister Peg, in the back seat, to say, “Ew! What’s that stink?”

At that juncture, a car that my friends referred to affectionately as the Brown Bomb lived up to its nickname. Long before I pulled over to the shoulder that day — where Mom, Peg, Bill and I hurriedly exited — I’d seen this moment coming. I had long waged a literal cold war with the Bomb, which Mom expected me to “warm up” every morning before I shlepped down Simpson Street to wait for the school bus. If the mercury dipped below zero, the Bomb felt no duty to turn over and purr throatily beneath her hood. I resorted to various wily tactics, involving gas pedal, carburetor, spark, starter, a crescent wrench and profanity, in hopes of rousing the Ford. Sometimes, I beat the Bomb. Sometimes, the Bomb beat me.

But I learned from my frigid morning skirmishes a philosophical truth previously revealed by visionary thinkers like Ned Ludd, Philip K. Dick, Arthur C. Clarke and Jean Shepherd’s old man:

“Never trust a machine.”

My relationship with the Brown Bomb came roaring back when my wife, Hotlips, one of the world’s foremost technology journalists, treated me to a short video (http://youtu.be/VS5zQKXHdpM), which starred a teenager and a Tesla. (Tesla is a car.) The teenager was demonstrating the Tesla’s dazzling talent for “driving” itself without assistance from any carbon-based life form. 

The teenager — let’s call him Poindexter — proceeded to create a little nest in the back seat. Filmed by his frighteningly permissive mom, Poindexter next steered the family Tesla out onto a six-lane freeway and fired up its “autopilot” function. He then pretended to fall blissfully asleep in both the front and back seats, while his mother watched, filmed and cooed in loving ignorance.

(Flashback to circa 1966. I’m a teenager. I’m driving on Simpson Street, with Mom riding shotgun. We’re nearing 15 miles an hour. As we approach the unmarked intersection with Hoboken Road, Mom — in a 200-decibel High C that could have gotten her cast as a voice-double in an American/International creature feature — shrieks my name and wails, “Stop! STOP!” I cruise to a gentle halt, look both ways — at nothing — and ask, “Jeez, mom. What?” Mom calms slightly and says, “There might’ve been a car coming, You were going TOO FAST!”)

Back to Poindexter, who’s bundled in a blanket beside his mother, pretending to doze. No one’s in the front seat. The Tesla, in the middle lane, is overtaking human-driven cars going 70-odd mph. Poindexter is mugging for the camera and blithely pledging his adolescent faith in a speeding steel shell whose only control is a twitchy stream of ones and zeroes fed through a web of semiconductors that might go “Zzzt! Poof!” if the car’s right front Michelin hits a pothole deeper than a dogfood bowl. 

The infallible Tesla, it is presumed, will alert Poindexter and Mom to the pothole mishap and grant them ten seconds — before they die — to crawl out of “bed,” climb back to the front seat, squeeze in behind the steering wheel, fumble around for the autopilot switch, turn it off and wrench the car manually away from the approaching bridge abutment that is, by now, six feet from the front bumper. 

(Flashback to 1 March 2019, when — reported by Michael Coren of Quartz — a Model 3 Tesla, “slammed into a tractor-trailer attempting to cross a Florida highway traveling around 68 miles per hour… The impact sheared the roof off of the car, killing the driver, 50-year-old Jeremy Beren Banner. Investigators say Banner had engaged Autopilot about ten seconds before the crash, and did not have his hands on the wheel for up to eight seconds beforehand.”)

According to investigators, it was later judged that the car’s “sensors” (an unintentionally ironic term) thought the side of the 50-ton truck was “the sky.”

Up, up and away.

Because Hotlips’ beat includes coverage of “autonomous driving,” I’ve learned quite a bit. I can explain, with moderate accuracy, the differences among the five levels of so-called autonomy. I won’t bother here, except to note that Poindexter and his mother were attempting a Level 5 trick in a Level 2 car. According to most automotive experts, it’ll be at least 15 years before anyone will be able to nestle down in the rear parlor of a L5 Escalade and drift off to Dreamland while re-reading Remembrance of Things Past. 

As I’ve accumulated a lot of unwelcome “AV” knowhow, I’m yet to find an answer to this technology’s big mystery, which is: “Who asked for it?”

Granted that Poindexter is a certifiable digimaniac who thinks a “self-driving” car (does a machine have a “self”?) is way cool. But he’s the exception who seems to prove the rule — the rule being, “Who cares?” I’ve struggled to find a broad consensus — or even a person — who favors filling our streets and roads with cars that tool around all by their lonesome, some empty, none of them licensed to drive, and every one educated by algorithms that were written by non-driving nerds.

If people wanted autonomous cars, buses, trucks and mopeds, they would say “Whoa, gimme one of them.” In the tech biz — or any biz — this urge is called “consumer push.” The opposite force, which applies to self-doing cars that nobody asked for, is “technology push,” which is inaccurate.

The right term is “marketing push.” Elon Musk is the founder of Tesla. He’s a formidable inventor and a middling businessman. But his best thing is marketing. Elon could sell pogo sticks to paraplegics. He’s heir to a long line of techno-mountebanks who depend on gadget reporters and business shills in the trade press to swallow whole any high-tech pitch that takes place on a convention-center stage with a blizzard of Power Points, three giant video screens and a headache-inducing soundtrack. Hand Elon a laser wand and a microphone and he could convince an entire auditorium full of wide-eyed high-tech “influencers” that he can make a thousand tiny robotic chorus girls with huge boobs dance the Varsity Drag on the head of a stickpin. And he’ll have video to back it up.

Poindexter survived his ride on the wild side. I can only pray that his dad has since burned Poindexter’s driver’s license, snapped his joystick and sent Mom to her room. If he hasn’t, he should, because — despite Elon — autonomous driving is still in its infancy. At this stage, it’s fraught with scary what-abouts — one of which is that only an adolescent naif with a death wish and a mom named Jocasta would crawl into the back seat on a four-lane highway at 75 mph and expect this contraption to jockey down the road ass-by-teakettle with eighteen-wheelers driven by Benzedrine cowboys who haven’t slept for three days.

Philip Koopman, an auto safety expert who teaches at Carnegie-Mellon, once said to Hotlips: “Don’t tell me your autonomous vehicle is safe when you haven’t done the engineering legwork to determine whether it is safe or if you aren’t sure.”

Besides which, most of us — despite the known danger of putting a steering wheel in the hands of fallible human beings — don’t want to let go of it. Many of us don’t even like driving. But we heed the lesson of the Brown Bomb, stinking and smoking beside I-90, her passengers unscathed because one of them had hold of the wheel and understood:

“Never trust a machine, especially if the tires are bald and the shocks are shot.”