That Was Then

Okay, here's the thing: My mother, the social justice warrior, has seen Gone With The Wind more times than she can count. She has a poster for that movie hanging in her house. Her sons got if for her. I am one of those sons. So, if there is a reckoning to be had here, then it is multi-generational. It should be pointed out that my mother was born in the 1930's, and she lived a life of dreams fueled by the movie magazines she read behind the counter at her parents' drugstore in Granby, Colorado. It was some fifty years into her life that her sons chose to join in her fondness for Margaret Mitchell's tale of the Antebellum south and how "This war talk's spoiling all the fun at every party this spring." 
Except it is a monument to another time. Not even the Civil War. Or the Confederacy. It is a sweeping four hour epic about the burning of the sets from King Kong. 1939 was a watershed for Hollywood, a year in which armloads of films that have become classics by most definitions: The Wizard of Oz, Mr. Smith Goes To Washington, Stagecoach, Goodbye Mr. Chips, The Women, Of Mice and Men, Charles Laughton's Hunchback of Notre Dame. This list does not include Tarzan Finds A Son. This particular feature does not appear on HBO Max, but you can stream it on Amazon and Apple TV. Or you might wait around for Turner Classic Movies to dip into their vault and enjoy all that Tarzan has to bring to the discussion of racial equality and justice. 
1939 was not a time in America when things were better than they are now. While it is true that the Great Depression was in the rear-view mirror for most, there were still huge gaps between the haves and have nots. Blacks and whites. This was the year that John Steinbeck published Grapes of Wrath. The film version didn't come out until the following year. Shortly after that, the world was at war. This time America was fighting fascists. Nazis. It should be noted here that Hollywood like so much of the rest of the country spent a good deal of time before Pearl Harbor was bombed ignoring or making excuses for what was happening in Germany. For many, there was money to be made.  
At the end of the day, that's really the business part of it. HBO makes money by pulling a film from its streaming lineup as an exhibit of their understanding, only to return it a week later. Except now there is a lecture preceding the feature that will explain its historical context and significance. Meanwhile, Amazon reported that Gone With The Wind had vaulted to the number one position on their movies and TV bestseller list. 1939 continues to make money in 2020. 
And my mom could not be less interested, beyond a certain amount of chagrin for having introducing it to us all way back when. She has seen a lot of movies since 1939. She has new favorites now. 

Wishing

I was whining the other day to my wife. Keeping in mind that I am not traditionally much of a whiner, but when I do whine, I do it full force. I was whining about normal. I was whining about how tired I was of the way things are and how I wish that I could return to that once upon a time when things were slow and oh so mellow.
It has been three full months of shelter-in-place, and for the most part I have been a good egg about following the recommended distances and masks and social bubbles and World Health Organization's stipulations. I never rinse my hands off anymore. Each time I turn on the water it is as if I were preparing to scrub in for extensive and delicate neurosurgery. I resist the temptation each time I stand in the little taped off box at the grocery store to pull down my mask and yell "What?" through the plastic shield as the cashier asks me some mumbled question.
At the same time, I am boiling over with anger and frustration with the way police across this country are brutalizing black lives. Each day brings a new outrage and while I feel compelled to speak out here and wherever I can make my voice heard, a new day dawns and I am delivered another fresh insult to our collective humanity. This war would be impossible to wage in the best of circumstances, but the fact that it is taking place during a global pandemic makes it all the more terrifying. It is a certainty that even more lives will be lost because we are trying to stand together as one when we would be safer at home.
Somewhere in the middle of this wild indignation came that weak voice inside my head that cried out for comfort. Something that felt safe and familiar. The trip to Best Buy with my son. A baseball game. A trip to the bathroom without worrying about the number of squares of toilet paper used or the song I would sing as I washed my hands. Having people over to my house without carefully screening their health records and cordoning off a holding area in which they could stand free of infection or infecting.
Whine, whine, whine.
We've got bigger fish to fry, metaphorically. We are currently being called upon to raise the stakes on how we live our lives. This too shall not just pass but create a lasting change in how we treat one another and how we demand to be treated. And into all this turmoil came the notice for jury duty. So I guess I should be careful about what I wish.

Let Us Breathe

As most sentient beings in the United States know, there were three additional Minneapolis police officers on the scene when Derek Chauvin put his knee on George Floyd's neck for eight minutes and forty-six seconds. J. Alexander Kueng, Thomas Lane and Tou Thao have been fired from their jobs and arrested. They are now charged with aiding and abetting second-degree murder and aiding and abetting second-degree manslaughter. These men stood by and watched Chauvin kill another human being in what must be the most ugly and blatant opposition to the phrase "protect and serve" imaginable. 
Meanwhile, from the relative safety of his recently inspected bunker, the "president" continues to blast out inflammatory tweet after inflammatory tweet. Sure, he was censored once, when he decided to quote former Miami police chief Walter E. Headley, "When the looting starts, the shooting starts." Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter added a disclaimer, reminding users that the post went against their rule of not glorifying violence. Additionally, a few of the "president's" recent outbursts about voting by mail have been fact checked by the folks at Twitter. 
So here's what I am attempting to tie together here: No one is telling the "president" to get off America's neck. Okay, to be fair, Twitter seems to be doing their passive version of the job by pointing out to anyone watching, "Hey! He's got his knee of America's neck!" Maybe without the exclamation marks. Certainly no one standing next to the big orange clown is doing much to stop him. Ivanka was too busy carrying her daddy's bible across a park that had been freshly tear-gassed and rid of rubber bullet-ridden protesters to speak up. Her husband is far too busy mismanaging the Middle East and ventilators to be of much use. Mike Veepence wasn't allowed to take the walk much less get a seat in the bunker, so he can't do much to monitor the "president's" hate speech. And even though Fox News seems to be losing patience with their favorite impeached Cheeto, no one is actually calling on him to just stop. 
Stop making things up. Stop retweeting lies. Stop amplifying voices of hate and fear. Stop dividing. At this point, I would not even suggest that he do anything so brazen as to try and unite the country he so anxiously wants to make "great" again. Just get off our necks. Let us breathe. We can get around to arresting the lot of you come November. Let us breathe. 

Tree Fall

It was me, the Yard Ape, versus the plum tree. Initial returns suggest that the Yard Ape won.
I know better.
This was the little twig that was battling a stand of bamboo in the corner of our front yard when we moved in. One of the first battles I endured with the flora and fauna of our property was to eliminate the bamboo. Little did I know that this would serve to be my undoing.
A little background: I am not a "plum guy." There is an apocryphal tale about plum jelly that describes my antipathy for this fruit. Rather than repeat it here, I will simply state that I prefer apples and grapes. Plums somehow seemed to have attempted to insinuate themselves somewhere between these two favorites.
I don't care for plums, but somehow I still have to.
That tree has grown some twenty-five feet since it was initially allowed to breathe free. If grapes or apples were falling from its branches, I might welcome such tenacity. Instead, we are inundated each year in June with a yard, sidewalk and neighbor's driveway full of yellow plums. Mirabelle plums if you're keen to know even more. My wife likes them. Not enough to consume them by the bushel. Our dear departed dog Maddie was known to eat a few from the ground, but not enough to come back from the dead to help us clean up.
This year it was all about the beefy limb that had found its way into the phone and electrical cables coming into the neighboring apartment building. This was exacerbated by the sheer weight of the fruit dangling from the branches. The initial harvesting shake of the tree gave us our usual ridiculous amount of of produce, shared somewhat effectively via an email alert my wife sent out.
But there was still the matter of the wires. Once again, my wife's ability to mobilize the community came in handy, as she invited a neighbor down the street to share his thirty foot ladder to help us tame the beast. He came and set his ladder in such a way that I could scamper up and begin trimming with a reciprocating saw. At no time during all these arbor acrobatics did I consider all the ways things could have gone wrong. I just went about my business, disciplining the tree as plums continued to drop as tiny insults to all my endeavors. Cutting into a cable full of electricity. Dropping a branch on me or an passersby, especially the gentleman kind enough to hold his ladder while I hung in the air. Maiming anyone or anything with the power tool I used with one hand while clinging desperately with the other.
And none of those things happened. Instead, I filled a green bin with plum lumber and leaves to be hauled away. And I know that all I am doing is encouraging the beast. Like the anecdote about the cockroaches who will be outliving us in the event of a nuclear war, I hope they like Mirabelle plums.

In The Evening

The mountain finally came to Muhammad. For the past couple of weeks, my wife and I have tried to take part in various marches and gatherings to protest, but somehow we have not been able to sync up our calendars with those of the organizers. We had a near miss last weekend when we hustled down to Lake Merritt where we were certain that we would find a gathering of some sort. We did encounter a great many people there, many of whom were carrying signs, but mostly seemed to be carrying on in a way befitting a warm weekend just before summer. Then, on our hike back to our car, we came across a rolling flotilla of cars, passengers hanging out of the windows, standing up through sunroofs, horns honking and banners waving. It was a mini parade for Black Lives Matter. We stood and hollered our assent and raised our fists in the air. And then they were gone.
Which is why, a few nights later, we heard a rumbling coming from outside. It started in low, and started to grow. There was a march headed our way. We gathered ourselves, my wife taking the time to cut a piece of cardboard large enough to support her slogan: "Defund the Police - Refund People." Hustling just a block over, we found the street filled with a sea of people all headed in the same direction.
Our march was here.
We jumped in the line and made our way, quite consciously, down the middle of the street. It was a big enough group that there were a number of different chants, led by those with the most impressive "outside voices." As we traveled through the heart of what we know as our neighborhood, my wife and I took in the sights and sounds, pleased to be out of the house and on our feet, voices raised.
And then, it was time to drop out. Not because we changed our mind. Not because the problem was miraculously solved, but because we both became aware of our proximity to other humans. Social distancing was not a luxury that could be afforded by this mass. Our county has become a COVID-19 hotspot over the past couple of weeks. Right about the same time that my wife and I have been anxious to head out and join in the marches. So, with some shame in our hearts, we peeled off and headed home.
Somewhere along the way, we saw a guy waving from a passing car. I looked over and couldn't recognize him, but he was asking, "Are you going home?" This only added to our guilt.
"Yes." I was going to staple an excuse on the end of it, but it wasn't there.
"Can I take your sign?" he asked.
"Sure," my wife raced out hand off her carefully lettered message. The march had begun to climb the hill in the distance. These cars were the last of a group that would eventually and up in front of the mayor's house. That's where they lit candles and asked for the mayor to come out and speak with them as darkness fell. That didn't happen. So most of the protesters left their signs on her lawn.
I would imagine that's where my wife's sign landed.
These are strange days indeed.

Patronizing

I used to work late night at an Arby's in Boulder, Colorado. This provided me with money to subsidize my parent's generous gift of putting me through school as well as a series of life experiences that have put me in good stead for lo these past forty-ish years. Hungry drunk boys who came in looking for "food" who could barely speak the words "Beef 'n'Cheddar." Lost pilgrims looking for A) Mork's House or B) The Boulder Dam. But one of the Arby's moments that sticks with me the most did not occur on one of those hazy late nights. Sometimes I worked the lunch shift. An entirely different beast.
Working the counter at a fast food restaurant during the hours of eleven in the morning to one in the afternoon is no sprint. It's a marathon, and you have to pace yourself. Most days, it was hard to see the five booths we had for seating in our lobby because the crowd was so thick, lined up for their meaty treats. Two to three customers in two to three minutes was our expectation, and the best of us could do even more if we were in our best form. And eventually, the siege was over, and it was time to wipe things down. "Dave, go grab a lobby," came the order from my manager behind the slicer. I grabbed a sponge on my way through the back room, out and around to the lobby where the debris was piling up. Wipe this, that, and check the trash bins, making sure that there were no large chunks of "roast beef" left beneath the tables. Nope. Good.
What's this? A business card? Some IBMer left his credentials as a lopsided thank you for that speedy service? No.
"You have been patronized by the KKK," read the card. I stopped my hustle and bustle and read the card again. This was Boulder after all, recently described by Newsweek magazine as the place "Where the hip meet to trip." This was not something I expected to find while scouring a fast food lobby and scooping waste in the direction of the trash.
Trash. The Invisible Empire. I carried the card with me into the back room, set down my sponge and made a point to pin the card to the bulletin board above the manager's desk. It stayed there for a week or two, inviting a good deal of comment from my fellow employees. It also stayed on my mind each time I found myself on the other side of the counter, trying to imagine the face or faces of the person or persons who dropped that ugly reminder. I had heard stories from old-timers about how they had been held up and how their initial terror had become a story to tell young Tuna like myself. I wasn't terrified, but I told the story to anyone who would listen way back then.
And I'm telling it again here because the Ku Klux Klan continues to exist. Announced appearances of this hate group continue to draw many times the number of counter-protesters than those in the bed sheets and pointy hats. Those are the ones we can see. The frightening thing is that they continue to exist at all, and continue to spout their racist screed to anyone who will listen. And there are much worse groups showing up in their wake. Imperial Wizards and Grand Dragons have given way to Proud Boys and Boogaloos. These idjits don't want to be invisible. They want to be the news.
That's scary.

Safe And Sane?

A few days ago I was wondering if I cold be funny anymore. Now I'm not sure if anything will be funny anymore.
There has recently been a fuss stirred up by a new series of Bugs Bunny cartoons. While it has often occurred to me that Bugs and his sexual identity may have something to rankle the conservative masses, I have not spent a lot of time worrying about the way mayhem is meted out in his adventures. This sort of thing falls solidly and definitively in the category of "cartoon violence." People and associated mammals tend to get mashed, squashed, boiled, blown up or shot in ways engineered by the friendly folks at ACME, eviscerators of Roadrunners since 1949. It is part of the cathartic joy of watching those bits of animation.
Well, it's 2020. Elmer Fudd has been defunded. He will no longer be carrying his trusty shotgun while hunting that wascawy wabbit. He will chase him with a scythe. Or some other means of dispatch that won't fall under the category of gun.  “We’re not doing guns,” said Peter Browngardt, executive producers of the series, “But we can do cartoony violence – TNT, the Acme stuff.”
Executives at ACME breathe a deep sigh of relief. 
Does anyone remember that one scene where Elmer Fudd ends up with a sucking chest wound, or blows half his face off with the now discarded shotgun? Did Bugs ever bleed out as a result of a gunshot wound? The effects of dynamite and anvils are generally more consequential to the momentary health of the Looney Tunes gang. They are quite resilient in fact. 
And before the outcry of desecrating the memory of our childhood favorites begins, let's remember for whom these cartoons were originally created: Adults. These were short films intended to run before Warner Brothers films in theaters. Gangster films and westerns that included a whole lot of actual humans shooting other actual humans. It was only in the sixties and seventies that they found their way to the small screen and in many cases were trimmed for their excessive violence and unsavory references. Like the horrifying racial stereotypes found in so many films made seventy years ago. 
So, will it be funny to see Elmer Fudd chase Bugs around with an ax, or a pointed stick? I suppose it depends a little about on how you feel about rodents tormenting humans. Like Wile E. Coyote and that Roadrunner, it sure makes you worry about priorities, since they are obviously in it for the sport, and not the meat. 
And isn't that funny?