School Days

I went to the same school from first grade (there was no kindergarten in our district) through graduation from senior high school. It was a terrific school, state of the art, for those dark ages of the 1940s and 50s. When I arrived at college, there were kids who were far more cosmopolitan, far more aware of the arts, but there were none who would have had any educational advantage over me had I worked as hard in high school as those who had ranked higher than me in class standing, instead of indulging in the fooling around that I preferred. Even given this, the quality of my school was such that I was fully able, had I wanted to do so, to graduate with excellent grades from college. If I had lived in a different school district to the north, south, east or west of Reedville-Charlotte, I would have had the same quality of education.


During the late 60s, the 70s and later, people set about making schools ‘better’ and there were ways in which my school could have been better, I suppose. And there is no question that there were bad schools back in my era; the film Blackboard Jungle, as well as a number of other similar works in films and books were reflective of some conditions in some schools; in some of the rural, poverty-stricken areas of Appalachia and the South, for instance, schools were probably pretty bad. But in district after district in the North, Midwest and Far West, as well as the better off (white) schools in the South, education was damn good.

Of course there were great inspirational teachers – at every class reunion there are a handful of names that always come up – and there were those who were merely good but who are remembered with affection by a few students from each class, and there were mediocre teachers and there were bad teachers. But even with the worst of the bad, we learned – I learned - what I needed to know. There was no such thing in our school as a teacher who didn’t know his or her subject or curriculum; bad teachers were those who could not teach their class. They might be obsessed with discipline or too timid to maintain control or have some other failing and the very bad ones rarely lasted beyond a year. These, however, were a very small minority. I had one really bad teacher – my sixth grade teacher, who was gone after a year. I had one ineffective science teacher, whose problem was an inability to exert any control in class, but we did manage to learn the subject, even if we were not inspired at all.

A goodly number of the best students in my class went on to spend their lives as teachers, one or two are still teaching although they are beyond the normal age for retirement. I have kept in contact with a number of people with whom I graduated and many of them tell me that teaching was a joy for most of their career, but that every year did seem to get worse. I once asked my good friend who became a teacher – one of the guys that was my housemate during that wonderful carefree surfing year in Southern California – why it was that in this area of Western New York, where there was little school violence, little abject poverty, only a modest variation between the wealthiest and the poorest families, and where there was pretty decent parent involvement, why the schools just get worse and worse, and the first thing he said was, “Every time a parent sits across from you at a parent-teacher meeting, there is a lawsuit waiting to happen.”

He told me, for instance, that the parent of a “C” student sued when that student was not asked to join the National Honor Society – and won. He said that now in his school membership in the Honor Society is open to anyone who wants to join. When I was in school, those kids who got asked to join the Honor Society had to be top students as well as exemplary in behavior. I had the grades to be admitted, but I was not invited to join. Why? This was because I was a behavioral problem. I knew it and, although I was disappointed, I knew the failure to be invited was my fault, and I knew exactly why. My parents knew this as well (and were more than willing to pass this knowledge on!); they sure did not blame the school, the teachers, the times, the schoolboard or the school bus driver for this situation. I don’t recall my mother actually saying anything, but I know if she had, it would be some variation on, “What did you expect?”

My parents were pretty busy with nine kids, and they were not active in the school, although they did attend individual parent-teacher conferences when requested, and PTA at times and, very rarely, some extracurricular activity in which I was involved. I did well, though not spectacularly, in school, my sister was near the top of her class, while a number of my brothers failed to graduate, but they got damn good educations nonetheless. Gary did not join any activities and did not achieve the required grades in one or two classes, so he was not allowed to graduate. (He did later get a GED). He was elected Justice of the Peace in his town, as well as being a member of the volunteer fire department, the local volunteer ambulance driver and a scoutmaster. So even though he did not graduate, he got a damn good education, and was a far greater contributor to his community than I ever was.

I have been watching the news this week as the discussion has centered on National Education Week or whatever it is, and on the powerful new documentary film Waiting for Superman. I saw the filmmaker on Oprah, and I saw Governor Christie of NJ and Mayor Booker of Newark talk about changes needed. I have seen some footage of Michelle Rhee, the crusading superintendent of DC schools. And it is pretty clear the new demon in education is teachers’ unions, which protect incompetent teachers.

I know that this is a big problem and I do hope that the issue of tenure for poorly performing teachers will be torn from the control of the unions. But I also noticed that a survey showed that, when asked who caused the problems in the schools, elected officials and parents ranked above unions and teachers on the list. My experience is that my rare encounters with poor teachers did not stop me from learning or cause me to drop out, they merely made school attendance a miserable experience for that year, or for the hour each day in which I endured them. I still learned what I needed to learn even though I never was reliable about doing my homework. We did not have teachers’ unions, so it is easy to say that the rise of the unions must be the problem. But really, it is only one of the problems, and not, I believe, the biggest of them.

There are several bigger problems and I know what they are; thank you for asking.

First, although schools must now spend an inordinate amount of resources to teach the exceptional students – exceptional in terms of physical or mental handicap – for the vast majority there is a ‘one size fits all’ mentality now in schools. Like the “C” student who can now join Honor Society, there are kids who love cooking or fixing things or selling things or drawing or any number of ‘vocational’ type skills who are being pushed into college-bound scheduling and who are being measured against those kids who are drawn to college required subjects. The greatest teacher on Earth cannot make a boy who loves to fix cars change his passion to English Literature. And this greatest teacher should not try.  If he or she is truly great, then he or she will NOT try and will thereby lose his or her job.

Previously in NY, there was a state Board of Regents who mandated a curriculum for students who wish to receive a ‘Regents Diploma,’ which qualified him or her to enroll in college. A third, at least, of the kids in my school opted to get ‘local diplomas’. These students went to school, had classes in English, math and so forth but spent much time in classes such as typing (who knew keyboard skills would be a college necessity one day?), shorthand, home economics, shop and agriculture. They were learning how things worked, even if they were light on why Heathcliff loved Cathy. My observation is that these kids tended, in later years, to remain in the local area and to become the local leaders, the driving force in volunteer work, the best members of the school boards; they opened restaurants and small shops such as local auto repair shops and generally became the small entrepreneurs that so many politicians extoll (and ignore). They became, like Gary, the local volunteers in all kinds of areas – areas which required practical experience and hard work toward specific useful goals. On school boards they are often the ones who want to make things work, rather than spend hours discussing ideological texts and better ways of doing what is already working beautifully. We do not need a ‘new math’, the old math works perfectly.

The vocational (non-college-bound) classes should be restored and made respectable. Even in my time, there was a whiff of ‘second tier’ to the shop and secretarial students. But these were the ones who stayed in the community, who made things work locally, who grew (or continued) to love their town. Many of them later did seek some further education, after they knew who they were and what they wanted to be and what they needed to get there. The college kids moved to cities and moved from place to place bringing to any school involvement new theories and a profound lack of any sense of what the local community was all about. They often want to improve what needs no improvement and are indifferent to what really brings in a paycheck for most graduates while he or she is waiting to be elected president. Taking the position that all kids must go to college is no different than taking the position that all black urban youngsters should aim for the NBA. The number of kids in a school who go on to college should be only ONE measure of that school’s excellence. Of course, a decent math and language performance, as well as some knowledge of history, are essential for all, but the college bound curricula are not.

Second: The parents, the community at large, and the school board supported the teachers in the 50s. The parents thought and acted in terms of ‘our kids’; now an inordinately large percentage of parents think only of ‘my kid’. I cannot think of a single instance where my parents did not support school or teacher decisions, even when that meant one of their kids came in second best. When I was expelled from school (twice) my parents NEVER questioned the decision, nor did they expect to override any teacher in that or any other matter. In this they were not extraordinary – this was the attitude of nearly all parents in our district. Parents' response (after making themselves highly unpleasant to the child in question) was to contact the school and ask what the child must do to improve the situation. And you damn betcha that child was the one who did the hard part – apologize, work harder, accept the consequences, stay after school in detention, repair the damage. Were the teachers ever wrong? – sure, although rarely. When I had that terrible sixth grade teacher, my mother’s response was, “It’s only a year; next year will be better.” That is a very valuable lesson – it has stood me in greater stead than all the math and science I learned that year.

Part of supporting a teacher is being very flexible when the teacher’s methods or behavior or material (within limits of course) are unorthodox. In my senior year, we had a young teacher who made a point of being somewhat of an enfant terrible. He would stagger in unshaven on Monday in the same clothes he had worn on Friday saying something like, “God! I need to sit down!” (OK – this happened once). He was definitely contemptuous of the normal class material. He made us read Dylan Thomas and T. S. Eliot, which were not in the curriculum, at a time when Robert Frost and Longfellow were pretty much the cutting edge. He taught drama and was pretty brusque when one did not perform up to par. He was not prone to break things gently. When two of us wanted to take a fourth year of Latin, he added us into his third year Latin group and spent part of his time with the third year kids and part of his time with the two of us. But you better believe we didn’t get away with just translating Virgil; we had to translate it into poetry. I will never forget his face when he learned that a substitute teacher during his absence allowed us to translate a line as “Say, Miss, why is everybody rushing to the river?” This man did so much to make me know and love good writing, even though he didn’t really single me out much or spent extra time mentoring. What he did do was make me know that doing OK, or merely being understood, wasn’t really very good. He is one of the teachers whose name always comes up at any reunion.

We also had a teacher whose political views were well known and freely expressed – a history teacher who was also passionate about his subject, and his students’ performance. Yet kids emerged from a year with him with wildly differing political views – most commonly kids’ views reflected their parents beliefs, not those of even the most ardent teacher. So vetting the classroom for subversion is a counterproductive, wasteful and foolish exercise. People who need everyone to believe as they do reflect only the weakness of their own convictions. If I am right, it really doesn’t matter what you say to me OR to my kids.

One thing I heard while watching these various shows castigating teachers’ unions was that we need to get rid of poor and mediocre teachers. I concur that we must weed out poor teachers, but I contend that a mediocre teacher will be perfectly adequate in an excellent school, with support from parents and the school administration. It would be impossible for every school in America to be staffed with nothing but superstar teachers. There are a lot of great teachers, but not that many. Just as any large company does, a school will perform perfectly well, and students will learn everything they need to know, when adequately performing men and women are intermingled in schools with superior ones.  Expectations of, and insistence on, superior outcomes for a school as a whole, matters hugely.  This is measured by a child knowing how to do something well enough to be a desirable employee or a successful entrepreneur, but that something need not always be math or science, or another college-centric discipline.

Third: Schools are too big. It is not so much that classes are too large as that schools themselves are too large. My old school district and a great many of the exurban school districts in Western NY encompass two townships or more. This was fine when it meant that a senior class might total 100 students or less. But now the same area provides hundreds of students at each grade level. The cost in transportation and logistical support, the inability of single families to impact decisions without resorting to a courtroom, the likelihood that school boards are composed of politically ambitious ideologues who are unknown personally to most voters and who are more interested in imposing their views than in all kids doing well. Even bullying would probably be greatly lessened, in severity if not in incidence, in smaller schools. To start with, the parents would be more likely to know each other and siblings are more likely to be aware of each other’s situations. When Michelle Rhee talks about schools currently being for the adults rather than the kids, this size issue is not what she seems to be addressing, but it should be a big part of it. Small class sizes are good, but they are not as important as small school size. In the one-room school days, there were a lot of kids in the care of a single teacher, and worse, they were split among several different grade levels, so that only an hour or two per day was given to any one grade. Yet, look at the graduates these schools produced – many of the greatest of the Greatest Generation came from just such schools. Would the sports teams in gigantic high schools be reduced in quality? Probably, but in high school this is not such a big deal (and a local Christian school near me, which is so small that nearly all the boys had to play in order to field a team, recently played to a very impressive level against much larger schools). The great ballplayers before World War II came from somewhere, even though these mega-schools did not exist then. School sports might even be fun again for the average-performing kids, which, I am here to tell you, they emphatically are not now. Somehow the same folks who applaud the ideal in Little League that everybody gets to play, are just as eager to restrict their high school teams from having any members who are not professional material whenever possible. Talk about school being for the adults!

I really suspect that the negative impact of teachers’ unions is not so much in its protection of abysmal teachers’ jobs as it is in conveying to the majority of good teachers that "it doesn’t matter how well I do". This is a crucial distinction. It is not that they are protecting the bad, but that they are not protecting the good in a sense. In every company I have worked, and as a consultant I have worked in many well-known companies such as Halliburton, Texas Instruments, John Deere, Greyhound, Textron, Timken, Toro, Bechtel, Allison Engine (even though I cannot remember if it is spelled with one ‘L’ or two!), PG&E, DuPont, Saudi Iron & Steel, Accenture and others, as well as governments – San Francisco, NASA, Royal Commission of Jubail, and even a college, it was not a problem for performance or for morale when there were bad employees who kept their jobs. The negative impact on both morale and performance was when it did not matter how well the good employees performed. It isn’t even a case of the best making more money. It was important that the best be listened to and that respect (and possible promotion) be accorded to the good performers. An emphasis on excellence and a recognition thereof, even if it did not mean more money, was the crux.  The outstanding performers must feel that they make a difference, no matter how this recognition is expressed. There will always be super-performers and there will always be duds. But the great middle was moved toward excellence in the companies which had standards, not of dress and deportment or of time required in the office or on the job, but of excellence in the common result – the product and company's reputation for service. Where one merely had to meet goals – pieces output, programs written, hours in attendance – where ‘good enough’ was the standard – then the great middle was moved toward cynicism, time-serving and corner-cutting. It is essential that the top-level people in a company be subject to the same standards and rules as the bottom people. The worst places had the most inflexible rules, hours, dress codes, the greatest deference to seniority (this tends to cause the best young talent to leave), and often the most ‘official’ recognitions and rewards – such as service awards (although these latter also showed up at the best places). I recall at one very low-morale company (with a strong union), an employee threw her 'years of service' pin back at the supervisor because he had not presented it to her on the exact day she reached that level. This was symbolic of an overall malaise, not of a specific failure. It is also a very bad sign when a promotion signals release from some of the behavioral restrictions that apply to the levels below.

But I am digressing. And you are very likely sick of reading. Go forth and be strong.

What Were You Thinking?

The latest seven-day wonder of a non-political variety is the story of a woman who threw acid in her own face and told police that she had been attacked by a black woman. I was torn between disgust and ho-hum in my reaction until this morning when one of the ‘news’ shows broadcast an interview with an ‘expert’ (expert in what, I didn’t notice), who placed this episode within the context of people hurting themselves to get attention and also within the context of self-mutilation, in general. By far the most common recognized form of this mutilation is the phenomenon of ‘cutting’ whereby people, mostly young, mostly female, cut themselves with razor blades or knives. This, too, I have heard about and I have been mostly irritated by the topic. “Screw ‘em,” has largely been my attitude, although I know if it were a girl I cared about - a niece of mine, say, or a daughter of someone I liked, I would probably be more concerned in that specific incidence.



This expert said that quite a number - I think he said eight percent, but I could be wrong - of people, or young people or of some population like that actually did things like this - he mentioned cutting and other forms of self-injury that I have forgotten already. And all of a sudden I realized that I was, when I was young, one of those people. It is kind of annoying to be contemptuous of a set of people, and then to realize that you are one of them.

When I was in college, there was a small spate of self-mutilation among a loosely defined group of my friends, and I would say that only one of the guys involved (it was a men-only phenomenon) was as deeply involved as I was myself. This took the form of challenging each other to an endurance contest where two guys put their forearms together and lay a lit cigarette between them to see who would move first. Most of the guys only tried this once or twice, and most of the guys were more than willing to be the first to pull away rather quickly. But if I recall, I always won (except when it was a tie by mutual agreement) and I was one of the contestants far more often than anyone else. The only guy who equaled me in this regard was a friend of mine who was one of the more unusual of my college friends, whom I will call Grady.

Grady came to NPU two years after I did, and we became friends rather quickly. He usually had to be the wildest guy in the crowd - something that always attracts me. His older sister was a year ahead of me, a pretty girl who was fairly popular, particularly with the guys in my fraternity. I hasten to say that popularity, even with a fraternity, at NPU in the early 60s had nothing to do with promiscuity or sexual availability - but had to do with attractiveness and personality. I didn’t know Yvette well; I probably never had a one-to-one conversation with her beyond a greeting or farewell. I heard later that Yvette had been born with a club foot (whatever that is) that had been surgically corrected. I never noticed anything unusual about her, however.

Grady, however, was afflicted from birth by a far greater burden: both his hands were deformed. His left hand had a single thick finger replacing what should have been his left index and middle fingers. This was, in the scheme of things, not that much of a handicap. However what should have been his right hand consisted of just two fingers, one of which probably was a malformed thumb and the other longer one probably was the entirety of what would have been his palm and four fingers. The whole looked vaguely like a lobster claw, and when he held something, the first impression was that he was holding it between his index and middle fingers until one noticed that these were all that he had. By the time I met Grady he was a master of somehow minimizing the appearance of deformity; my recollection is that I did not even notice his hands the first time I met him. I would like to say that deformity did not faze me, but the truth is that I had a severe and deep revulsion for physical imperfection - especially amputations or deformities - which I have overcome to a large extent, but which I still have to fight against to this very day. I don’t even really like ‘normal’ bodies all that much, I prefer not to touch others unless I am attracted to them. I am the last to hug or shake hands in any given group of people. And I cannot look at any open wound where the underlying flesh or bone is visible; I cannot watch NCIS or Bones or ER or any of the TV shows which make a fetish of showing close-ups of decayed flesh or open wounds. I hate even seeing unattractive people - old or wrinkly or fat or saggy - on the beach. The movie Cocoon was not a happy experience for me. And I loathe having my shirt off in public.


Grady overcompensated for his physical shortcomings in a big way. One might say that he overcame them and point to him as a shining example, like Ray Charles or Stevie Wonder or Stephen Hawking. One might find it hard to believe but he was an accomplished musician - he played trumpet and guitar well, and he played the piano so well that he actually got a part time job playing lounge-style music thereon at a local Holiday Inn’s lounge. Anything that required finger work was a challenge which attracted him. I never really watched his hands play closely, but I can affirm that if I didn’t know of his problems I would not have guessed from what I heard that he was different from any other pianist in any way. I suspect that to a person more versed in piano music there were some interesting substitutions in harmonies, but it sounded good to me. I know that he played notes quickly in succession; since he could press only a limited number of keys at once, I’d guess he compensated by breaking chord harmonies into their component notes and played the individual keys in rapid succession, but that is just my guess. Grady was quite good looking in that curly-haired Eddie Fisher/Cornel Wilde way that was popular in the 50s. In fact Grady, now that I think of it, looked like a paler slimmer Eddie Fisher. He tended to keep his right hand pushed into his back pocket, but upon being introduced to someone would quickly offer it for a hand shake. When we were better friends, I asked him once if he preferred that I prepare people for this before I made an introduction. He told me no, he liked seeing the look on their faces, but I don’t think this was true. I think he was determined to be defiant about his situation in this as in all things. Unfortunately, the impulse that made him challenge himself to become proficient at music, also led him to try to be the wildest of the wild, and to strive to outdo all others in anything that was self-destructive. In this, he was often joined by me; I realize, looking back, how vastly self-destructive I was in my younger days. I think both Grady and I were saved from involvement in drugs only by the times we lived in. I am almost certain that both of us would have jumped in with a glad cry had we been born a mere ten years later.


I really don’t know who was the first to think of the cigarette game; it may have been Grady himself, or it may have been my friend Tony who spent that week in the DC jail with me, or it may have been another of the gang that usually wound up at the local bar when finances permitted. And, as I say, most of the guys tried it once, and briefly, but Grady and I once let a whole cigarette burn its entire length as it lay between our arms because neither of us would back down. I have quite a number of burn scars on my forearms, as well as one or two on my calves and I even had one once, which has disappeared over time, on my forehead. I actually never, until this morning, equated this to the current teen fad of cutting, and even less so to the more dramatic forms of self-mutilation. For one thing, I never did any of this burning when I was alone - there was always some element of public spectacle; the actual appearance of mutilation was beside the point, except in that the effect was not reversible. But I realize that my curled lip when I read of these things occurring was a lip that would do well to uncurl itself and take a look within. So why, as any adult at the time would ask me, would anyone do something like this?


I wish I could say why I did this with any clarity or degree of certainty. There were a whole raft of feelings involved. Am I sorry now? Absolutely. I do not like being marked with scars. I did not really like the blisters and scars back then, especially when my peers looked at me like I was weird. The rewards, whatever they were, were in the moments of doing the burning. I was slightly shamefaced and defiant in the aftermath. It was an easy way of appearing brave to myself, and in my mind, to others. There was an element of control in a sense, I think. I know I thought of those of my peers who were critical of this practice as being more ‘grown up’ than me, although I might have denied this at the time and certainly framed their greater maturity in unflattering ways. I thought, in the moment, that I was somehow cool although I didn’t feel afterward that I was so cool. Among the loosely defined and inchoate group that also participated, I was one of the insiders because I always ‘won’ the challenge. The fact that we usually did the burning in a bar and were usually drinking had nothing to do with the activity; we were not drunk when we did it, or if we were, that was not really relevant to the ‘why’ issue.  At most it removed that tiny hesitation at doing what we wanted to do anyway.  "In vino veritas" is something I do believe.  You may do something you would not do otherwise or may not think of otherwise, but you never do something that you do not want to to do on some level, in some way. 

I think I always felt that there was an invisible barrier, thin but impermeable like cellophane, between me and other people, between me and what mattered, between me and what was ‘real’. I always felt like a wannabe, even though I didn’t know what it was that I wanted to be. Part of me wanted to be admired and noticed by others, but I never wanted to be like others. I never felt that anything that I read or heard really applied to me. This was not because I felt I was better, although sometimes that was the case, but because I never felt that anything fully covered all the facts as I knew them or felt them to be true. When I was burning myself in one of these contests, for that one moment that was the only thing that was happening, it was the full focus - it was completely and describably real. There was the fact of burning myself and nothing else had any relevance in that moment. It was a moment of complete clarity.  It was something that could not be undone or explained away later.  When someone says or thinks, "I'll show them!" it is really, "I'll show me!"  or "Then I'll know."

I can figure a lot of things out; I have always been good at seeing patterns, but there is always a grey area that I can’t entirely erase. I do not have the gift of being absolutely certain about anything. This has kept me from ever finding a cause or career or religion or purpose or hobby or even life partner to which I can fully commit myself. Even if I find something to be completely true, I have a horror of someone responding, "But wait a minute.  What about such-and-such?"  When I was young this feeling was more pronounced; now it is a dull reality that forms the background of everything I think or do or feel. There seems to be a dictionary full of words that never quite mean the thing that I am seeing, hearing, feeling, thinking. I believe I know exactly what most words mean, and they never seem to cover the topic under discussion. Adolescents, by definition are in a state of becoming adults; that is the actual etymological meaning of the word. But in the eyes of the world at large, that word describes people of a certain age range. When applied to someone older than that age range, it is an insult. But I wonder: has anyone arrived? Is anyone sure of who he is exactly? It seems that most people have found something that describes them satisfactorily - it might be a racial description, or a gender description or a political label or a religious conviction or a career choice, or something else, but it is a final destination; they have become something and are happy (or unhappy) to have arrived. I certainly don’t think I am youthful, but I do still feel adolescent. I feel like I am still in the darkness of my cocoon waiting to see what kind of butterfly I’ll be. I am indehiscent, and it looks like I’ll stay that way. I am the fruit that never ripens, an apple still green on the leafless bough already covered by snow.

But I don’t cut myself or burn myself or throw acid in my own face now. So what is the difference? I don’t know. The only thing I know is that now that I have seen the acid thing in this context I get it. That the woman in the news accused a black of doing the throwing is harmful and unforgivable, but I kind of get the acid itself. There is the momentary throwing of the future to the winds. There is a certain glee in inflicting the scar, a glee that will not outlast the act itself. It is like getting drunk on Sunday night; you know you will be sorry tomorrow, but... I wonder if anyone has considered that tattoos and piercing are part of the same scenario. Those moments of sheer relief (which may include such things as accepting Jesus or Islam or coming out of the closet or whatever) which are crystalline in their clarity at the moment and which can never entirely be undone. It is like assuming your position onstage and seeing the curtains open, the moment that you do this thing which will mark you forever; the flood of feeling that you have finally done SOMETHING in all this vague unclear messy stew of facts that aren’t always true and words that don’t quite mean what you want to say - this is a split second of rest in the hurtle toward the end of a game that it looks like you will neither win nor receive honorable mention. And then your whole life will be some kind of defense of why you were such an ass, but at least it won’t be the same as it was before.  You are forcing the issue, and hope that by doing so you will finally know what the issue is.


There are so few things that one can do and then say to oneself, “There! That’s done!” and know that what is being done is exactly that thing and nothing else. It is like a mini-suicide. Whatever was wrong, whatever was pushing at you, that may not have been gotten rid of but it has unalterably changed. The focus has been shifted, at least for a while, to something else. It never works, really; or at least not for very long. But that is tomorrow’s worry. For the moment, this is it.

Read, Jump, Eat, Read

The Shaughnessys had a family reunion this July, and my sister Lucy stayed with me for two weeks. I think that during the last two years she and I may be coming to something of a rapprochement in our relationship. Certainly, the fact that my brother Jack and his chere amie of ten years standing, the Lovely Medea, also stayed with me for a few days helped put Lucy in perspective for me. On the scale of how awful a woman can be, the Lovely Medea scores so high that Lucy’s more annoying qualities shrivel into insignificance in the pitiless sun of Medea’s imperfection – in fact, Lucy and I may have bonded somewhat in our extreme distaste for her. The Lovely Medea, though a grandmother, is a trophy type of woman: platinum blonde and flawlessly made up and dressed at all times. This could be seen as admirable, I suppose, but the personality that goes with it is not. The woman emerges talking in late morning from her labors in front of the bathroom mirror until her final putting to bed at whatever hour. And her talk is divided into three categories: her friends, family and experiences, none of which have reached even the lowermost level of interesting; the many and divers men who have attempted to seduce her (all of them, all the time); and honeyed blades of poison inserted into the backs of any of my kin who is not present. The Lovely Medea is a rich topic for a lengthy entry, but she is not my topic for today.



My sister Lucy brought with her a quilt she has been working on for a year, which depicts various scenes from our days on the Farm. In one scene, she has my mother pinning up laundry on the pair of clotheslines that spanned most of our back yard. Sitting with his back against one of the anchoring posts that held the clotheslines is the figure of a boy reading from a book. Lucy says that is me; she says that Mom told her I used to sit and read to her as she worked. I don’t recall doing this, but certainly it seems like something I might do. If one wanted to picture me when I was happiest as a boy, one would have to show me reading a book.



I loved books. I read and re-read anything I could get my hands on. I can still picture our local library, which consisted of two rooms and an adjoining alcove on the first floor of the Town Hall, which was located a little more than a mile from the Farm. Entering the library to return books and to get more was one of the great pleasures of my youth; it was akin to the feeling I had when entering a theater. I would linger long over my selections; there were books that I considered and dipped into over and over again for years before I finally selected them. When I found an author or a genre that I loved, I would get a book from that source each time until the supply was exhausted. I read the dog books (Lassie, Come Home; Lad, A Dog), the horse books (Farley’s Black Stallion books, and the Island Stallion books), the Little House books of Wilder, the Moffat family chronicles by Eleanor Estes, the Lois Lenski books with their pen and ink sketches of children who always had a certain almond-eyed look – to this day I occasionally see someone on the street who looks to me like he or she stepped from the pages of Lenski’s books. I read boys’ series, girls’ series, and the tales of the talking animals in Walter R. Brooks’ Freddy, the Pig series. When I found The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew, I was ecstatic. I followed the fortunes of this impoverished family through the several sequels, each centered on one of the children: Ben, Polly, Phronsie, Joel and one I distinctly remember being called Ned, but Google tells me he was Davie. Have I confused the Peppers with the Moffats or some other series family? The Peppers echoed the girls of Little Women or the plucky lads that filled the pages of Horatio Alger’s books in that they were poor people who managed to have the good (and plot-enhancing) fortune to attract the attention of a wealthy benefactor who was attracted by their virtue and unspoiled spirits.



As I moved into the more mature books – the Young Adult category, I believe it is now called - I only grew more entranced. Of course I read Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys (How I loved mysteries! What is more magic than a secret stairway, room, alcove or passage?) and Tom Swift and a host of series that are no longer remembered: the Mimi books, the Little Colonel series, the Go Ahead Boys, the Rover Boys, the Girls of Central High and so on. In fact, when I was introduced to Harry Potter by the daughters of a friend, two girls as book-crazy as I was, I realized that underneath the wizardry and magic Rowling’s books were exceptionally skilled ‘boarding school’ series books, with all the familiar and much loved trappings – the sports contests, the ‘good’ hero and his ‘chums’ versus the rival ‘bad’ boy (bully, braggart, spoiled child, whatever) and his ‘toadies’, the unfair burden on, or accusation against, the hero – a noble, plucky lad or lass who bore the bad with grace and who rose above adversity. Our side wins again!



For me, the absolute acme of young adult books was a quartet of books written by Eloise Jarvis McGraw, which I read and re-read and then read again. These centered on a life choice in the lives of teen-aged heroes or heroines, all orphaned, in exotic settings – logging camps of the Northwest, the circus, the old frontier West or ancient Egypt. Though on a recent re-reading, I find the Newberry winner Moccasin Trail to be better, my personal favorite, a favorite which led to a lifelong interest first in archaeology and then in history, was Mara: Daughter of the Nile. I don’t know how many times I read Mara’s story, probably twenty or thirty times at least. My goldfish were named Mara and Sheftu after the leading characters. Oddly, my best friend Emily tells me that she was equally a Mara fan and that she met a lifelong friend when she noticed that each time she borrowed the book from her school library, a girl named Kirsten had borrowed it in the interim and sought that girl out at her school. Ms McGraw also wrote some of the sequels to Baum’s Wizard of Oz (something I only found out recently). The high point of the school day for me when I was in third grade was when Mrs Holfoth would read the next chapter of the Wizard, and when the original was finished, one of its sequels. Occasionally she would try to introduce a different book, but popular demand always returned us to Oz. I was spellbound by the Oz books. Oz time beat recess time all hollow for me.



I read everywhere. In summer, one of my parents would see me curled up with a book in the house on a lovely day, and tell me I should be outside enjoying the weather. I would move, book in hand, to the porch or to a spot under a tree and continue reading. My dad would get very irritated because I would not hear him speaking to me when I was lost in some book. I can still quote from memory the entire first page of the first hard-cover book I ever read, The Tale of Betsy Butterfly. Losing myself in a fictional world was like settling into a warm bath.



I have lately realized that I am still that guy. While I can’t seem to find books I love like I once did or continue reading uninterrupted for hours, I am still a guy that is indoors on lovely days, reading or writing or watching a film. I feel guilty about it, and it is a part of a larger issue for me, that I have only begun to see clearly. There are two ‘me’s – the one I wish I were (and sporadically believe I am), and the one I actually am. I constantly plan for things as if I were Doing David and wind up way off the mark because I am really Reading David. There is nothing like a long period of isolation, which this first full year of retirement has essentially proved to be, for getting a new perspective, or maybe a clearer one, on oneself. I find that I planned my retirement, insofar as I planned at all, for the wrong David, for the David I wish I were. I had the odd idea that I would be this man who gardened faithfully: mulching, weeding, fertilizing; who made repairs and enhancements to his home, learning new skills as he went along; who went about visiting old friends and making new ones in his new-found open-ended leisure time, and who opened his home to friends and relatives for long visits. I actually imagined I was self-directed, and throve without a schedule to limit me as work had done.



It would be OK, in fact it would be wonderful, if I could say, “Oh, but I am Reading David, as I have been all along”, and could pick up a book or magazine or watch a film with unalloyed pleasure, as I once read through my young summers. But it doesn’t feel right; it seems like wasting time. I can’t seem to forgive myself for not being that elusive Doing David that occasionally put down the book and learned to surf and to box, or who went off to Saudi (though I spent a lot of time there seeking out English language books, it must be admitted) or who hitch hiked west to see what was there. I feel I should be doing something more active and useful, particularly during these truly beautiful summer days we’ve been having. Any time I actually do anything in the gardening or home fixing vein, it seems to be desultory and in passing. I am very much afraid that I have a commitment problem that makes Casanova seem like a solid family man. If life were a multiple choice test, my answer would be “E. None of the above.”



Even Reading David is not what he used to be. George Will wrote a column for Newsweek very recently which crystallized a lot of thoughts I have had about my attention span. He brought up something, however, that I had not thought about (or known) but the results of which I have experienced. He mentions that brains can actually be rewired (even at my advanced age) by constantly repeated experience. What I HAD noticed is that I have drifted into a lot more magazine reading and a lot less book reading. I feel more comfortable with the shorter attention span required. I read Newsweek every week, and I subscribe to Atlantic and read it cover to cover. Recently I re-subscribed to the New Yorker, a subscription I had allowed to lapse, because it has a lot of reading in each issue and is a weekly. I was pretty much backlogged, and with each week I was falling further behind, which created some kind of guilty feelings. But I find myself casting about for something to read often, without feeling like I want to plunge back into any one of the several novels I am halfway through. So I am back with the New Yorker– I guess anything that I’ll actually read, even sometimes, is better than computer games.



I just cannot read for long hours like I used to do. Occasionally I will come upon a book that is an exception, but for the most part I find I constantly interrupt my reading to get coffee, to go to the kitchen on vague errands, to check e-mail – anything to avoid long stretches of uninterrupted reading. I don’t know why this is, but I truly believe that it is related to the theory put forth to explain the growth of attention deficit disorder in children – the nature of current television programming. It is not the watching of television or movies in itself that is the problem, it is the way that more and more the fare is sliced into tiny bites of interwoven plot narratives. Back when we were watching Beaver or Lucy or Gunsmoke or Mary Tyler Moore (although the last named showed the beginnings of the trend), a TV show had a single plot line that played out over the course of the show. Incidentally, there were fewer interruptions for ads, and even these tended to be for a single product per interruption; shows were ‘sponsored by’ a single advertiser. Now, however, every show has a series of plotlines playing out, and the ad breaks are for multiple sponsors. In Modern Family, for instance, (or Parenthood or The Good Wife) there is an ensemble of actors who, in various combinations, play out three or four plotlines in brief interlaced scenes. You are here, you are there, you are somewhere else, and you are watching three seven minute stories at once. Crime shows have moved from the single star detective to teams on different parts of an investigation, or even whole squads pursuing different issues. Add the nearly constant commercial breaks, which many of us use to try and do tasks in the 90 second interval thereby provided and you are doing some serious brain wiring: move, move, move. I am becoming incapable of sustained attention to anything. I notice that even one of my favorite crime novelists – Robert B. Parker – keeps my attention by writing novels of 50 or more very short chapters – many only a page and a half in length. Compare that with something by Mark Twain.



I don’t like this development in myself, and I don’t like it in others. I resent people putting me on hold during personal calls while they take a second call. I resent people constantly checking a mobile device when we are together. I realize this is the world today and it will not change for me. I am trying to decrease the feelings of insult and anger that arise over something that is not personally or exclusively aimed at me. But most of all I resent that I can’t keep my own attention on a good book any more – I resent my own addiction to constant stimuli. I suspect I can only change this for myself if I stop watching TV and other modern electronica, and I am pretty sure that isn’t going to happen. So I guess I am watching the evolution of a third me – Jittery David.


I wish I liked him more.

In The Zone

Three things seem to be absolutely written in stone: first, politicians will invariably bypass addressing any important or pressing issue by driveling on about anything under the sun so long as it is irrelevant to solving a real problem; second, religious people will always behave in provocative ways, and third, everyone will always say in any situation that this time is different from any previous occurrence of the same issue. So, illustrating all of these principles beautifully we now have an excess of bloviation concerning the expansion and renovation of a Muslim community center in Manhattan which has already been in existence at the exact same location for some time.

Zoning laws are the province of local governments, and the mayor of New York has clarified what the law is, as well what as the local government’s position is, in regard to this project. If the people of Manhattan do not care for the existing zoning laws, they can attempt to change them. It is really no one else’s business. But no, we seem to have to hear daily, at excruciating length, from politicians everywhere, from the prez on down to candidates for office in Florida (and that is pretty far down). Has the recession ended? Is the national deficit paid up? Are the wars resolved? Have we come to an agreement on immigration and the policing of our borders? Has the oil gone from the Gulf? Is New Orleans (or any other city) thriving? Has the nuclear policy of Iran been brought to a beneficial conclusion? None of these issues have, so far as I know, been solved; in most cases they have not even been discussed rationally with any aim other than to play Gotcha! with the opposition. So why are we wasting our time on zoning issues in one small neighborhood when the law is clear, the Constitutional issues are completely resolved and the government of the area in question has made a clear decision which is completely in accordance with both?

As to the desire of all religions all the time to be provocative – well that is common sense. When you hold the hearts and minds of your followers, their wallets and votes will follow. And nothing grabs the hearts and minds of followers like the illusion (or reality) of persecution. In Europe, in those countries whose Christians of any stripe have been free to worship (or not) as they please for the last hundred years or so, church attendance and religious affiliation is a ho-hum affair. I have read, for instance, that 3% of Church of England adherents actually attend church in Britain. But next door, in Ireland, religiosity is far greater (although in the independent portion thereof it is fast declining). And why is the religious feeling greater? Because as recently as when the grandfathers of the current population were alive, the practice of Catholicism was banned; Catholics could not have priests or churches, could not be taught reading or writing, could not own land. So naturally, Catholicism was strengthened and flourished in Ireland like the green bay tree. Similarly, religion is practiced even more virulently in the former Communist countries because the ban on it was lifted far more recently. I recall an American Catholic in the early days on my job in Riyadh coming up to me and, practically speaking out of the side of his mouth like a spy in a movie, telling me where I could attend a clandestine Mass locally; he assumed I was Catholic because of my surname. On some level, being persecuted is fun and exciting; if it goes beyond the level of fun and actually gets a lot of folks killed, well, so much the better in the long view, because this can be used as leverage, both for keeping the indignation (and faith) of the believers at fever pitch, and for getting special concessions from later, more tolerant regimes. Religions prize tolerance, so long as it is the other guy who must do the tolerating.

On a personal level, provocation is traditionally achieved by wearing funny clothes or hairdos (shave this, grow that) – very much as any teenager pursues the same end. If I were founding a religion, the very first thing I would do is try to come up with a hat that was sillier than a bishop’s mitre or the various turbans or veils of Asia or the ridiculous practice of some Jewish women of shaving their heads and then wearing wigs to achieve the appearance of having the hair that was just shaved off. Apparently a woman is less sexually provocative in a wig than in her natural glory – a piece of information that has evidently escaped Dolly Parton and her fans. Jews, in fact, having had a lot of practice both of being disliked and of making the little gestures that keep the intolerance going, have come up with the silliest headgear of all – the yarmulke, which is so insubstantial that it often doesn’t even stay on without being held in place by bobby pins or barrettes of some sort, and is too small to cover the bald spot, and it certainly doesn’t protect from sunburn. But one should never underestimate a religion so skilled at provocation: how many religions have parlayed their underdog status into the acquiescence of most of the world in seizing a whole country of its own? It was the anti-Semites in Britain – Balfour of the “Balfour Declaration” being notable for his dislike of Jews, for instance – who most strongly supported the creation of Israel; probably these men could be compared with the white supporters in the USA for the “Back to Africa” movement.

To digress a little bit: The greatest threat to the fervor of the religious is when power is combined with wealth among the majority of its adherents within a political entity. As with political parties, wealth and power combine to blind the faithful to consequences - or even to shame. The history of the medieval papacy is too well-known to discuss – the rise of the Protestants actually moved the popes to become better morally (eventually and after holding out as long aws they could) and instilled in the faithful of both sides principles of moral and ethical behavior (toward co-religionists only, of course) that lasted so long as religious leaders could credibly point to each other as existential threats. As soon as their existence and ascendancy was assured, the leaders returned to screwing the faithful in both the metaphorical and literal senses.

The greatest threat to religious leaders and to religious fervor is the growth in wealth and security of the average members of the faith. Although individual members of a faith may continue in devotion here and there, when a general rise in wealth and security among the devotees occurs, the falling off of religious fervor soon follows for the majority. Thus it is important to always keep the faithful feeling that they are somehow the persecuted group, the hated one, even when they actually are in control of all aspects of political life. This works with ethnicity as well as with religion. The old southern oligarchy in the USA maintained their wealth and status by constantly convincing the poor of both the black and white race that the other race was the cause of all their woes; the same folks continue to hold power by pointing out all sorts of threats to their way of life. When the “enemy” is demonstrably less powerful and numerous than the majority, then recourse is made to tales of wicked practices and secret plans or powers, as was demonstrated in Germany in the 1930s, or in the recurring warnings about Satanists or witches throughout American history. If the threats don’t exist, one can easily make them up, pointing to powerless old ladies with too many cats or mildly deranged misfits scattered here and there, as examples of The Enemy pursuing its evil ends.

In actuality, the use of repression towards a portion of a population can actually create a danger where none had previously existed.  An excellent example of how dangerous a wealthy and secure follower can actually be when he is excluded from power in his own society is Osama bin Laden, who is of Yemeni descent in Saudi Arabia where this ethnic defect does not promote entry into royal power and prestige. Bin Laden’s target, at the time I lived in Saudi, was the Saudi royal family. He was utterly indifferent to the wiles of the Great Satan, until Desert Storm gave him an issue that he found resonated with the disaffected. Tammany Hall, the Mafia, the Bloods and Crips all arose when clever and resourceful people were excluded from full participation and the reaping of legitimate rewards in their own societies. There is a whole generation of powerless Saudis, many members of whom are actually rendered even more powerless by their own actions (failure to bother learning in school and so on), boiling with resentment against anyone who has it better than themselves, and much like the poor whites of the USA before and during the Civil Rights area blamed the Yanks and the Coloreds and the Jews – anyone except themselves for their own fecklessness - these lower class Saudis are blaming the Royals and the Westerners – and of course, the Jews. You have to admire the Jews, they seem to have found a way to always be perceived as part of the oppression; perhaps they ARE chosen.

As to my third point, I confess that I fall into the error of thinking this time is different on occasion, try as I will to maintain some sense of history. Of course each time IS different, but never in the way that is presented by demagogues. Since I was young, I have lived through a number of crises where a substantial number of people believed that certain principles should be abrogated because this time, this threat, this group of enemies is different. People will pronounce in great detail that continuing to extend the same rights or to follow the same principles that got us to where we are today will lead to our demise or will change everything. And, of course, at some level, the inclusion of a new group that is different does change things. The discrimination in the 1800s against the Irish because they were Catholic or poor or uncouth correctly saw that inclusion of Catholics in great numbers in a previously Protestant Anglo-Saxon culture would have consequences. Things DID change; prevailing customs were altered, at least subtly. But inclusion altered the Irish newcomers even more than it did their hosts. The descendents of these newcomers often lost or moderated their faith, they certainly changed many of their customs and ways of speaking. The same was true of the Italians and the Slavs who followed; and who, despite sharing the same faith, was right in the forefront of discriminating against them, arm in arm with their Anglo-Saxon brethren? The Irish, of course. The Italians and Slavs were happy, in turn, to prove their all-American credentials by holding the line against the inclusion of blacks or Jews, and so on. As I say, I have fallen for the ‘this time is different‘ line. When I was quite young, the red scare was in full force, and I (understandably I think, since I was in my teens) was persuaded that the Fifth Amendment was being used as a weapon aimed at my home and family as witness after witness invoked the Fifth Amendment to avoid answering questions while testifying before the various committees on Un-American activities. I would have been, at the time, happy to have the amendment revoked to stop protecting these Commies who were threatening America and my very home out there on the farm. Later, during the civil rights struggle, I supported the integration of blacks, (although, shamefully, not at the very beginning), but I truly thought in my heart that it could not really succeed in the sense that one day a black would appear as just another man or woman to me some time in the future. They looked so DIFFERENT; how could I (or anyone) not notice? Yet, again, I was wrong – interracial couples are everywhere, I have had black doctors and co-workers, I have black cousins, I was half of an interracial couple myself for many years and it all seems so normal.

Now we are asked to view with alarm the presence of Latinos in great numbers, and worse, that of Muslims. This time it is different! The problem is, of course, that these people are HERE. Had we excluded them at the outset, there’d be no issue, or at least, the issue would be very different. But now that they are here in great numbers, what are our alternatives? We can discriminate, and ban them from neighborhoods or jobs or whatever. When we tried that with blacks, we got the Panthers; once the discrimination was alleviated (even though not entirely), the power and attractiveness and bellicosity of the Panthers waned. This is the way it works. It never, ever works differently. The first generation or two of a new group might acquiesce, at least tacitly, in their own mistreatment, but sooner or later their descendents will be radicalized. So, whether this time is different or not, in the sense that a particular group of people present a greater threat to the status quo, we really have no options except three: extend the existing laws and rights to the new groups, discriminate and thereby radicalize the new groups, or get rid of the new groups entirely by mass deportation or extermination.

We will, of course, take the second of these courses, as we have always done – at least at first. It is the one that is easiest, just as it is easier for politicians to talk about zoning laws in Manhattan than about substantive change in important fields of policy. Tolerance and having faith in our system is just too hard for people, especially when it is different this time, as it is every time. Sooner or later, the radicalization of the new minorities will increase to the point where some accommodation must be made, or their numbers will grow in concentrated areas to the point where they begin electing their own politicians to office and one or both of the major parties will discover that it is in its interest to begin catering to them. And very likely they will go from seeking acceptance to getting special consideration because of past suffering.

It is absolutely true that the minority group in every case practices its own discrimination: very frequently Irish were pressured to marry Irish, or at least fellow Catholics; there are black racists a-plenty, Muslims will give preference when possible to fellow Muslims, and similar things can be said of every religious group or ethnic group. The important issue is whether the law is being changed or followed, and whether the discriminating group is in power.  Bad behavior should not be enshrined in the law.

Much is being made of the feelings of the families who lost members on 9/11 – that is to say, the majority of these families; no one advocates catering to the grief of the Muslim families who lost fathers or mothers or sons or daughters. What exactly is the statute of limitations on their particular grief? And what are the geographical limits to the grief area? I have heard many people suggest that the center be moved elsewhere in Manhattan. How far is far enough? Five blocks? Ten blocks? Can the center be located near where the survivors live or where the dead actually lived? Are the areas around the Pentagon and the crash site in Pennsylvania similarly proscribed? My brother was killed by a drunk driver in front of my house when I was younger. Should I be able to prevent drivers or drinkers from entering that stretch of highway? Would it be legitimate to ban Christian churches from Hiroshima or Nagasaki?

People who have been touched by terrible tragedy seem to respond in two main ways. One response is to try to make the world better, the other is to hold the world, or some portion of it, accountable and to require retribution of some sort. This latter response is entirely understandable when the tragedy first occurs and emotion is overwhelming. But to continue to hold this view leads to vendetta and blood feuds, to attack and reprisal and counterattack; nothing gets better. I understand that the Christian is required to forgive; apparently this only applies if the person to be forgiven is also a Christian. I guess I think I would be reluctant to declare that in honor of my loved one, I made the world a little less tolerant, and I lowered my country's standards just a trifle.

But that’s just me.

A New Me - or Was He Here All Along?

Jim, a high school friend and fellow altar boy, recently wrote me when a predatory faux social website which I mistakenly joined sent him an invitation to replicate my folly. He was wise enough to decline the opportunity. We have maintained desultory contact since high school, moreso in the last 20 years than earlier.

I don’t remember when we met. It was at some point in grade school as our unified school district began collecting the pupils of small public schools in the area into larger groupings, culminating in my fourth grade year in the building of a single one-story sprawl designed to house all the kids from two townships in a single building, providing education for grades K through 12. Actually, there was no kindergarten before this big school was built, so I never had the doubtful pleasure of attending one, but was thrown willy-nilly into the shark pool of first grade untempered by any earlier exposure to other kids who were neither relatives nor neighbors.


I had ‘best friends’ in the earlier grades, but by the time I reached Junior High School, I really had no one that I would call a best friend – at least not in school itself. I did have a younger neighbor boy to whom I was passionately attached for about a year, after which he chose to spend most of his time with my brother Gary and his best friend Alex Westfall. But at best, in high school years, I had only what might be termed better friends and less close friends. There was no one with whom I hung out outside school other than my brothers and a neighbor or two. There was a loosely-knit group in my class that attended a few parties together – usually at the new suburban home of the Riggs family, which had an oldest son my age and his four younger siblings. We were hardly a collection of the popular kids, which would be the cheerleaders and other girls considered pretty, and the better sports guys: we were rather a collection of somewhat socially oriented ‘brains’, not quite the super-nerds, but close.


Jim was not of this group; he was more like one of the outer fringe guys of the popular group. He did not play sports – I found out recently that this was largely because he had a ‘lazy eye’. I had thought these were what is known as a ‘cast in the eye’ – that is, one eye wandered aimlessly while the other focused – a very visible problem that looks like, and sometimes is, crossed eyes. But Jim’s problem is not visible; apparently just one eye does all the work and the other just sits there matching the first in alignment, but not really doing much in the way of vision duty. He is, for all practical purposes, blind in one eye, which eliminated him from playing most sports. He was a little more refined than me, from a family that was better off financially, and he was less prone to follow extreme fads or to behave without forethought (or any thought at all) than me. So, if a girl on the outer fringe of the popular group had a choice between dating Jim or me, she’d choose Jim. All of this is kind of laughable in retrospect, because although I hadn’t a clue about this in Jim’s case, we were both gay.

I really got to know Jim more because we were both chosen to be altar boys at St. John the Ashamed, and both elected to be regular servers at the Sunday 8 o’clock mass. True, one could loll in bed and serve at 10, but the 8 o’clock mass was a low mass and therefore significantly shorter than the 10 o’clock high mass; besides, it got mass out of the way and left more of the day for the thin pleasures of our youthful Sundays. Jim and I were both in the “A” group at school. These were the college-bound kids who would take the New York State Regents exams in certain subjects at the end of certain school years – we were classed among the “Brains”. The “B” group kids were sort of the college-optional kids – they had the option of taking the Regents exams or not and were encouraged to apply for college, but no one was terribly surprised if they did not. This group held the bulk of the sports crowd, although some of the A group were on some of the teams. The “C” Group were non-Regents students. They took the core curriculum classes, but then had a lot of shop, agriculture and vocational classes for the boys, and typing, shorthand and home economics classes for the girls. In order to take typing classes, an A group kid had to stay after school and take it as an after-school elective. This turned out to be a bad strategy for training the brainy kids who were going to be launched into a world where computers would become important and keyboard skills would be highly helpful. Who knew?


There was also a “D” group, which consisted of those, nearly all boys, who would drop out of school as soon as it was legal. They were more or less encouraged to drop out, in that harsh triage of the 1950s where leaving a child behind was considered to be a damn good idea. They were dumb, or otherwise ineducable, and no one could see spending up resources on them, even in that era where nothing was too good for the educable children in the suburbs.

In the 50s, even before Sputnik shocked the country, people had no thought – at least in our area – of the arts as a career. I had a teacher, a wonderful woman who taught me English and Latin, who encouraged me to write, and I actually had a vague idea that writing could be a lifework, but I had not a clue how one went about making it so. Mrs. C would probably have been of great help in helping me through this, but I was way too immature back then to ask (or want to ask). A large number of the A and B group kids who finished college went on to teach, and Jim was one of these. He spent his teaching career in Chicago, but not, I gather from the little we have discussed it, in the inner city. He told me when he retired, as a lot of my other teacher classmates have also said, that toward the end each year got worse and worse. The constraints placed upon teachers to restrict innovation and individual style grew, and the mighty threat of lawsuits and politically-motivated activist parents and school boards intent on correct thinking in preference to open-ended inquiry reduced teacher flexibility to near zero.


Jim, I think, liked me better than I knew. He once said, much later in our friendship, that every so often he got a student that reminded him of me, and that these were the real reward of teaching. This was not meant in a personal or sleazy way. I think he referred (although I never look too closely at a compliment) to my somewhat untamed ways in school, and my slightly disruptive approach to classes. I know Jim thought I was a terrific writer. But I was a real disciplinary problem to teachers who expected – and got – the perfect patterns of behavior that made up the 1950s A groups. The boys in my class, to a man, had crewcuts or a short haircut brushed to the left from a part on the right (girls parted on the left; this was a STRICT rule), but I had the ‘50s greaser look, the elaborate front curl coiling its oily way (thanks to Vaseline!) to a point between my eyes, with the upswept shining sides. I couldn’t afford a black leather jacket, but I got a black jacket that came as close as possible. Today, I would probably be a Goth; in those days I perplexed my teachers by easily getting A’s – at least in English and History and courses I liked – like the other A group boys, but dressing and acting like D group boys did.

At our tenth class reunion, I saw Jim again and it was then that I became aware that he was gay as was I. He made some effort to broach the subject, but I was still deeply ashamed and embarrassed by the topic, although I had met Tumwell the previous year and lived with him, so I pretended not to understand what he was getting at. In fact, although we have each known about the other since that time, it is only within the last year that I finally wrote him a letter and referred to the elephant in the room openly.

What I am getting to is the fact that I got an e-mail from Jim the other day, saying that he thinks we are both happy people, and that is why he thinks we have stayed friends and had reasonably good lives. I hadn’t ever thought of myself as a happy person, but as a whole I think he is right. I am an optimist. I assume things will work out or change for the better, despite gloomy times (which usually happen to be when I blog the most) like the time I last wrote in my blog. Jim says he thinks that is why we make friends, and I guess he is right. I know people really do enjoy being around people who are more up than down. I certainly do. I just never thought of myself as being one of the up ones. However, my gloomy times are usually when I am alone. As soon as there is someone in my orbit to talk to, I can become quite the Pollyanna.


This is the latest in a series of – I guess you might call them insights – that I have been having lately which are leading me to realize that I am a completely different person than who I always thought myself to be. I have gone along since I was a kid with a certain image of myself, and with certain beliefs about the world around me, that I am suddenly realizing are not at all correct. About ten years ago or so, I began having these sudden new looks at life. I had always assumed until then, that if a person took the time to love me, and to become my partner or the like, that he was getting someone pretty darn good. I thought of myself as easy to be with. I am not sure what was the cause (maybe because Tumwell made it seem so easy), but it suddenly struck me that, no, I was a very high maintenance partner. I don’t mean I require gifts or a high-flying lifestyle, but that I am moody and changeable and have a big requirement for alone time when I want it and not when it is mutually convenient. I can hide or moderate some of this, but the more comfortable and secure I am with someone, the more I let those parts of me show that I know I wouldn’t like too well if our positions were reversed. I think that realization was the first time I was actually a little rocked by a new view of myself.


Lately the revisions in my view of myself and my world have come thick and fast. I realize I don’t really like a lot of the people that I am in the habit of thinking that I love. I am finding family functions more stressful than happy. I always thought I was exempt from that angst that so many people express about family behavior. I truly wanted to own a big place back in my home town and to have it be the gathering place for family when they are in town, or when a big event occurs. Now I have all that, and I am finding that I don’t really like these people all that much. Things I imagined to be peripheral behaviors and characteristics in some family are actually core parts of their personality. Even when I like family members, I am not that interested in their life choices. But this applies equally to me. I think a big part of denial in addicts or racists or whatever, is the belief that ‘well, yeah I do this or that, but that isn’t the real me.” Well, yes, that IS the real you (or me). We are defined by our behavior, not by the motives that lead to it. I have come to believe that we are that which other people see, not who we imagine (or ‘know’) in our mind’s eye. That damn Catholic upbringing that has made me look to my deepest, secret and most unsavory motives in any act has previously permeated all my self-examination. There is always an element of self-interest in even the most generous act. So what? It doesn’t define, mitigate or deny the generosity or the benefits of that act, and contrariwise, it does not sweeten our bad behavior. Consider if a serial killer said he only kills on Tuesday but six days a week his behavior is exemplary.

Anyway, this is where my thoughts are trending. Life-wise, the major events in la vie Shaughnessy have been that I joined a gym in March and have been faithfully (somehow) visiting it three times a week, with a single 3-week layoff, since then. I have more energy and feel better, not least because of the annoying sense of virtue that now attends me during every waking moment. And then a few weeks ago, out of a clear blue sky, I was contacted on a social website which I no longer even bothered to visit (an e-mail told me I had a message) by a man who found me interesting. This man turned out to be so far out of my league in physical beauty, not to mention being 27 years my junior, that I looked – so far, in vain – for a base motive, or at least a flaw. I actually have a friend with benefits! And he has a good job and a new car, and has shown no interest whatever in what I can do for him in any way other than the mutual physical relationship. He is a completely nice man. I know this is not “The One” because he has no interest in what the ads call an LTR and is quite honest about that, but it is damned pleasant to be found attractive and to have a partner, however uncommitted. I am getting quite above myself in my own esteem.

So forget all that angst that riddled my last entry. Whereas I know I am not where I want to be exactly, I am in pretty good shape. And it seems like there IS a tomorrow after all. What’s better than that?

Frustration

My Aunt Belle once came to visit us at the farm bearing some rather expensive gifts. These consisted of two or three intricate, expensive, finely-wrought wind-up toys that I vaguely recollect were considered by the adults present to be special in some way – I think it might have been that they were imported from Europe, or were made by some renowned manufacturer. I remember one more clearly than the others; it was a model of a Ferris wheel which, when wound, rotated with its brightly painted little cars going up around and down, as Ferris wheels are meant to do. There was also, I think a carousel and possibly a third toy, which I can no longer recall or even be sure existed. Aunt Belle and my parents marveled at these fairly spectacular objects – I actually have a greater recollection of the adults’ sense of their specialness than I do of the toys themselves.



We kids were, of course, excited to receive these as we were excited to receive any toys. New toys were few and far between in the late forties and early fifties, and having these show up on a day other than Christmas or birthdays was a rare event, indeed. Even children far wealthier than we were, with parents far more indulgent than our own, did not seem to live amongst the constantly growing welter of playthings that create an almost pornographic excess in even the poorest homes I visit today. Pink, plastic and pornographic; it sounds like a magazine article, n’est-ce pas? But the problem was, once the adults had retired to talk of adult things, we were left with these expensive, seductive, colorful items with which there was nothing we could really do. One wound them up and then one just sat there watching. There was very little difference, really, between owning these toys and gazing at them in a shop window. Some instinct for survival warned us that our usual recourse with toys which no longer fascinated, either disassembling them to see what the insides looked like, or bashing one another over the head with them, were not options conducive to our continued happy co-existence with Mom.


So for a period of my youth these toys sat there giving rise in my young breast to feelings of impotence, frustration and a kind of anger. Did other, better children wind these things up by the hour and sit happily watching the wheels turn? Were other children inspired in some way by this expensive indulgence? Is it possible that other children – maybe city children or European children – actually wore these kinds of things out from constant happy playing with them? What was wrong with us (or with me at least), that we just had no idea what to do after about three wind-ups per toy?


I have no idea of what became of these toys; there will be no trip to the Antique Roadshow with happy ending for me. My clearest recollection of these toys is of the feelings of letdown they provoked; I can only vaguely visualize the Ferris wheel, and of the other(s), I cannot even recall how many there were.


I am very much afraid that Retirement is currently provoking feelings remarkably akin to those engendered by these toys. All the conditions are amazing; just now the weather is lovely, every seed I even thought about planting has sprung up, the expensive fixes I put in place just before I retired are all doing just fine – my fancy beveled glass front door, my just-in-time water heater, my flat screen TV, the new refrigerator. But I sit here amidst the luxury and I wonder, day after day, what can I do with all this? Don’t get me wrong, I would not for anything return to working. Freedom is a wonderful thing, but there just seems to be so much of it. It almost seems too precious to waste on anything I can come up with, especially on the sunnier days. I might put in a desultory hour weeding a flowerbed, but I can’t bring myself to commit to actually getting any one of the many plots into tiptop, weedless, well-mulched and fertilized perfection. I read a bit of this and a bit of that, but there are so many unread books I can’t seem to settle on one. I went for a brief canoe trip up the creek out back yesterday, and the difficulty I had untying the canoe from the tree to which it was anchored forcibly reminded me that I had not used this canoe for at least a couple of years. The rope had grown into the tree to which it was tied, (or I guess it was actually the other way around). And the canoe trip just filled an hour; even though the scenery along the creek was spectacular, like the toy Ferris wheel there was nothing I could do with it.


I have always been like this; I can travel to the most spectacular wonders, I can finally come to a castle I have read about for years, and then, well, there it is. What now? I have spent hours designing wonderful verdant bowers to which I can retreat for reading – and I have even spent some hours bring a few of these plans into a semblance of reality, but I never actually read in them and rarely even sit in them for more than a passing moment. There are mosquitoes or the stems scratch my leg, or I can’t lie down or the coffee pot is too far away and I have to keep getting up to get things, or the sun is too bright or the breeze keeps turning my pages or I just get bored, or I am not in the mood just now – mostly, the last. I get to thinking that I should replace or add some plant that I don’t have, or that I should build something that I’ll never build although there is a fifty-fifty chance I will spend a bunch of money I can’t afford to buy some or all of the necessary materials.


I am very good at purchasing for contingencies. I have not one, but two, Chinese brush painting sets. I have acrylic paints and water colors and sketch pads. I have a complete set of more than 30 wood-carving chisels which I bought in Bali, as well as some supplemental American blades, in case I should ever actually be inspired to carve or sculpt some wood. Oh – and I have the wood itself in great heaps. There is also a wall of firewood in case I ever want to build a fire, and an air compressor should I suddenly become a person who does whatever one does with those. I have a bike I rode once and a helmet I bought after the one ride in case I might want to ride again, although the latter is still wedged into the fitted cardboard construction that it came in. I have a calligraphy pen somewhere, probably more than one. I have a set of 100 bits for one of my two cordless drills, and several smaller supplementary sets of drillbits. For leisure, there is a hammock folded up in the garage.  I am fighting an urge to spend $229 on yet another course in Arabic and I will probably lose the battle sooner or later. 


I have planted a number of vegetables this year, but if history is any guide, it is very unlikely that I will cook, eat or even harvest most of them. If I do want to cook them, I have more than one set of pans, and even some canning jars, just in case I become a completely different person than I ever have been, and if, miraculously, this happens just at harvest time. What are the odds?


I am doing one positive active thing, and frankly, I am amazed at myself; I wonder how long it will continue. After I returned from Bali and found myself slogging through the Slough of Despond, during the first half of March I joined a local gym. I actually have gone three times a week (missing only once or twice) since then. I didn’t really anticipate meeting any convivial souls there – that was not my purpose – and it is well that I did not hope to do so because other than my trainer (you get a person assigned to you to start you out and to measure progress every 6 weeks or so), I haven’t met anyone. I tend to dread going to the gym as I once dreaded going to work, but it has provided a semblance of structure to my life and unquestionably has made me feel a little more energetic and I look a little better. At first it actually seemed to motivate me to come home and do stuff (hence the semi-weeded and fairly well planted gardens) – it probably provided the oomph to get back to the old blog. But lately the motivations have tailed off, and even when I do something, it has the feel of throwing a teaspoonful of dirt into a yawning bottomless hole. It filled that moment; it got that task completed or started, but nothing seems to be strung into an ongoing chain of engagement. I have looked up a number of old friends from long ago, but none of these have caught fire. I know I need desperately – especially before the onset of another winter – to engage myself in something that I care about. I have looked up a local writing group and am thinking about some form of workshop or class or the like. But my fear is that I will end up feeling like I have a series of assignments, that I will turn one of the few things that are pleasurable into work.


The trouble with me is that I have to connect with a person or with people to really enjoy anything. When travelling I will remember a friendly taxi driver long after I have forgotten what the castle or hotel or cathedral looked like. I need someone to impress, someone to please, someone to admire, someone to like. I have a horror of groupthink. I don’t feel like other people – or as I imagine other people do. If I go to Hawaii, I dread things like the arranged luau or the lei greeting. Schedules make me shudder – at 5 we meet for a preparatory drink, at 5:15 we board the bus for the Waikiki Tour. The world seems to be full of versions of those children who actually enjoyed those elaborate wind-up Ferris wheels. Whereas I don’t like people who strive to be different just to be different, I do like people who don’t mind being different. And I really don’t know where to find what I am looking for. I am not even sure what I am looking for exactly; well, yes I do: connection and passion. I want to find something that I stick with because I love it or love the people it brings in its wake, not things that make me feel scheduled or as if I have an assigned task or thinks that make me a spectator. I know that the kinds of things that I want are not all pleasure, there are always the hard parts, but I know from experience that there are things which the hard parts are leavened by the awareness of moving forward and of getting to the rewards.

My efforts to find love have bogged down and are, for the moment, abandoned. I am pretty sure that I am not one who can find a partner through writing or answering ads. People seem to like me well enough when we are engaged together on a job or activity, but I do not appeal to people in either the exchange of letters or in discussion groups. I am so impatient with common wisdom. I do not understand how highly irreverent comedy can be so popular (as in, for instance, the Seinfield show) while people are so put off by anything but the most bland platitudes in real life. Am I the only person who dwells in the area that lies between cute kittens and dead baby jokes?


I really could live, I think, without having the things I want; what is really hard to endure is not knowing what those things might be.

Oh, well, off to another damned day in Paradise.

Breaking Bad

A number of economic or financial trends – I am not sure what falls under each of those categories, exactly, but I am talking about cost of things – have come together to degrade the quality of some traditional entertainment (if 50 years or so can be called a tradition). People can only be drawn to theaters in sufficient numbers to pay the bills by either reliable genre products (horror, juvenile comedy, ‘family’ animation films) or by over-the-top special-effect spectacles which nearly always sacrifice subtlety or character development or quality script-writing to fireworks and blood. In traditional TV, the cost of production and the desire to knock off the competition has led to imitation, ‘unscripted’ reality shows (where the drama and scripting are provided by the editing of endless film (‘film’ being an archaic and incorrect term for the bits and bytes by which these travesties are recorded) and require no more than willing non-entities whose physiques are matched in spectacularity only by their shameless exhibitionism and good editors.


The TV networks seem to attempt, from time to time, to generate a few award-worthy shows, which are apparently very costly, only to cancel them within the first year or two, to the anguish of the few viewers they have managed to attract. NBC, in particular has broken my heart again and again by hooking me and throwing me back like an undersized fish. I still mourn American Dreams, the only drama which ever got the sixties right, and which captured the anguish, the insecurity, the push and pull that tore at families of that era, which is now viewed as either all black or all white and as faintly comic. The sixties era was exhilarating for some of us, but frightening and painful too; there were a LOT of casualties, and not only in Viet Nam or at Kent State. Currently there are a few- very few – excellent network dramas, notably Friday Night Lights, which is only hanging on because a deal was struck with one of the satellite ‘cable’ distributors.

Even when a series has some quality at its outset and manages to survive, the scripts often degrade over time because the plot possibilities have been exhausted. The first season of the original Beverly Hills 90210 show attempted to deal with a number of real issues – the sense of entitlement among the children of the wealthy, teen suicide, absentee parents – but devolved into a soapy mess as the need to keep the characters busy and to deal with the impossibility of having the whole concept – life in an upscale high school – go on and on with aging actors. Even TV high school students must graduate sometime if we are to take them seriously. Incidentally, Friday Night Lights has dealt wonderfully with this dilemma by having the coach transfer to a new school, thus writing out a number of popular characters whose storyline had essentially played out and introducing a number of issues that are found in high schools of a less affluent area such as that in which the student body of the new school dwell.

The problem with good drama is that it must arise from the locale and the times and the characters and, if these are not to be cartoonish, the characters must take time to develop and most situations need to be set up with a solid back story. Moreover, there is something silly about important human dilemmas which are resolved in 30 or 60 minutes (much less, really, since it seems that about half of any show’s runtime is given over to advertising.) Cop and hospital shows are able to deal with this, because of the natural fact that police and medical work is essentially episodic – the crimes are solved and the patients killed or cured and the main characters move on. But many viewers have a point where they are surfeited with crime or illness and can tire of a whole genre, unless some compelling new aspect can be found. The western craze of the 50s and 60s suffered this fate.

For those who are interested in believable relevant drama, there has been over the past decade or so a growing number of well-written, well-edited, beautifully acted dramas and comedies which do not rely solely on tits and pecs, gross-out body part close-ups and massive explosions. It started in the pay cable sites, notably HBO, and has been moving into the non-network free cable channels like AMC. These sites do not feel the need for the massive viewer count that the major networks find essential, although by giving us real quality content, they are sometimes finding extraordinary popularity, positioning their shows as must-see events, capturing word-of-mouth attention and critical approval. The Sopranos was a most spectacular example of pay TV achieving this kind of success, but there is a growing list: Six Feet Under, Deadwood, Big Love, Oz, Entourage, The Wire. There have been ambitious (and much loved by the few) failures like Carnivale and John from Cincinnati. In part, the successes have benefitted from being freed of the requirement to avoid controversy which drives advertisers (and, apparently, viewers) away in droves from quality network offerings. They have simultaneously moved the bar on network content, by allowing ‘adult’ themes and language to become more widely accepted, although the imitators and followers have utilized this latitude primarily to make endless juvenile ‘quips’ about farts, or to say the words ‘vagina’ and ‘penis’ liberally, usually to no intelligible, let alone worthwhile, purpose.

I have no idea why free cable stations like FX or AMC are able to develop or purchase, and sustain, quality shows with smaller followings than the major networks will countenance but such is the case. One difficulty for these quality shows, whether on network or free- or pay-cable is that they are nearly impossible for a viewer to get involved in, if he or she has missed the earlier episodes. A second characteristic that is overall a positive, but which has the negative issue that it can be off-putting to a viewer who has not yet been captured, is that good characters which are well-written and compelling plotlines which are portrayed realistically take more time to develop than is afforded by a single episode. Network TV often has attempted to resolve this dilemma (because it is a real problem if a viewer has not found enough ‘meat’ to return to the table next week) by beginning with an unusually long pilot episode which is more like a theatrical movie. This requires schedule juggling and can alienate fans of the regular shows displaced by the extra long pilot, especially if the pilot is very different in content from that to which the viewer is accustomed at that hour. The pay cable stations just go ahead and start the series and give the viewer the respect or benefit of the doubt of believing he will sample more than one episode before deciding that a show is not for him. One of the first successes of free cable was The Shield which, being a cop show, had the advantage of the kind of story that can immediately grab many viewers. But more recent shows of high quality on the free TV channels such as Breaking Bad and Mad Men have made the same bet that the pay channels made: they have taken their time to develop plot and characters.

One of the most amazing, and wonderful, of these high quality shows on free cable is the aforementioned AMC series Breaking Bad, which on the face of it has an almost comic (or horrifying, if you are a sober-sides) premise, a milquetoast high school chemistry teacher turns to manufacturing meth to finance his medical treatment when he develops cancer. This show, underneath the surface, is a remarkable study of how a man can become completely given over to evil. The characters are, without exception, brilliantly written by the writers and even more brilliantly played by the actors. They are believable people and many of them are not all that likable where they would normally be expected to be sympathetic roles – the wife, the son, the teacher himself, the in-laws… A friend and I both find ourselves put off mightily by the teacher’s wife, yet when I stop and examine her actions given only what the character knows and sees, I find her behavior believable, almost inevitable.

The astonishing arc of this story over three seasons – especially over the first two seasons - show a decent guy slowly becoming a monster. The lead character, Walter White (played by Bryan Cranston) becomes ever more manipulative, ever more callous, yet you can see the logic, the denial, the shielding of his psyche from observing the cost to others of his decisions. He manufactures meth, but does not sell it, so he need not deal with the devastation his product wreaks on the lives of his customers. When some inkling breaks though his firewall of denial, caused by some event spectacular and undeniable, such as an airliner accident caused, in a series of twists, by his product he is impacted, but his choice is always to harden the callouses that shield his sensitivity. He uses the grand old excuses of victimization (life has not treated him fairly) and love of his family to justify his activities, but slowly we can see how he moves way beyond any justifiable position. More and more people are made to suffer, and increasingly these are folks to whom he claims to be dvoted. Manufacturing meth is as addicting to him – the money, the use of his strengths, the validation of his manhood, the power – as his product is to the addicts who purchase it. He uses the show’s best character, Jesse Pinkham, a former student, to market his output and it is Jesse who actually retains some conscience and some feel for the moral issues and human suffering that is being enabled.

Jesse Pinkham as played by played by Aaron Paul is a marvel. He manages over the three seasons to retain sympathy. He is always just one tiny step away from cleaning up his life. He is the quintessential heart-breaking son, the boy whom parents try over and over again to trust, to bring in out of the cold. He is the friend that brings harm to all who care for him without intending to. He just never can quite get past the point where he bails when the going gets tough – and for Jesse, the going gets VERY tough. I have known addicts who would have been great guys or girls if they had not ever become addicted, but who can never quite make up the lost time required to get back to where they would be if they hadn’t slipped. As a person moves into addiction or gives in to his worst instincts he inevitably burns bridges which must be slowly and painfully reconstructed, requiring the very qualities of persistence and toughing-it-out that an addict most lacks.
I have seen shows I liked better overall than Breaking Bad – Upstairs, Downstairs, American Dreams, The Wire, Six Feet Under, to name some of the best – but I have never seen a show that so intelligently addresses who these drug folks are. We want to smack the characters sometimes. The show lets us see what they tell themselves, and why the near and dear hang on for too long, and why these same associates often give up just when their love and connection might actually have helped. Most of all it is a fascinating study of an ordinary man slowly giving himself over to total evil. The baby steps, the situational solutions that must be made instantly under pressure, the taking just a little more advantage of other people’s love, the lure and arrogance and self-justification of evil: all these are faultlessly shown as the series takes its time to develop.

There are many peripheral characters that are funny or engaging or heart-breaking. Each is played by a master actor. The show is not afraid that you won’t like it; it trusts you to see what is going on. There is never a misstep.

It all sounds rather awful and off-putting, but some of the characters are so likable, so human, and often even the worst situations are funny as hell. There is real suspense, the show never loses sight of the extremely dangerous world that drugs inhabit. A former dealer told me that any time a dealer, however white collar, however small-time, begins to make some real money, people notice. People with guns and connections and a notable lack of scruples.

There are a few scenes with a high ‘ick’ factor, but these are not constant as in Bones or the CSI series. And often, amidst the ick, the scenes are very funny – and this is coming from a guy who looks away when someone shows the ultrasound image of a fetus, or a lion pouncing on an antelope.

As is the case with many of these quality series, I probably would not have become a fan were I to have watched just one episode per week. For me, the opening to enjoying and appreciate these series is the full-season set of DVDs. This is how I watched the Sopranos, Nurse Jackie, Six Feet Under, The Wire and others. Since I have already rented the DVD, I will usually watch a least a full disk – two to four episodes. And I am hooked. I think these series and mini-series are where the highest quality writing and acting is going these days. I thing the whole of some series will one day be regarded as the equal of some of the greatest theatrical films. This is even more remarkable since (I assume) the storylines are developed as the series continues, rather than being written as a single long work before filming begins.

So anyway, folks, that is my take on the state of modern entertainment; you can take it or leave it. But I bet, if you take it, you’ll like it.