Fear Itself

Recent headlines pose this question: Has al-Qaeda become more organized? The bombs found on airplanes in Dubai and Britain are signs of a new, more dangerous wave of terrorism. I guess they want to differentiate from the kinder, gentler waves of terrorism that existed prior to last week. Maybe they're trying to distinguish these guys from the ones who carried their explosives around in their underwear or shoes.
Maybe the folks who make such distinctions about our level of fear have a point. According to reports about one suspect in the most recent attempts to blow things up, suspect Ibrahim Hassan Al Asiri, was described as a young man so ruthless he once hid a bomb inside his own brother in an attempt to kill a top Saudi counterterrorism official who was encouraging jihadists to reform. I'm an older brother, and while I have used my younger brother as an accomplice for numerous despicable acts, most of them centering around getting out of practicing the piano, it never occurred to me to use him to blow up the piano.
That's why they call them "terrorists." If the intent is to strike "intense of overwhelming fear" into the hearts of their enemies, then I believe they are doing their job. It will certainly give little brothers across the globe pause, but I remain less impressed and here's why: entropy.
I know. This is my answer for so many things, but it hasn't let me down yet. Think of every group you've ever belonged to. As it has become more and more "organized," has it become more and more efficient? I, for one, will be happy to see layers of bureaucracy eventually choke off the relative effectiveness of al-Qaeda. Imagine the United States Congress, but with high explosives. How long do you suppose something like that could survive? Be afraid, but take solace in the third law of thermodynamics. I do, and so does my little brother.

Scary Monsters

Zombies are back at my house. Not in a life-threatening, wear protective headgear to keep your brain safe kind of way, but as a topic of parental discussion. It is interesting to note that the walking dead have appeared on the playground at my school as well, as the X-Men and Transformers that used to chase one another around the yard are now, more often than not, flesh-eating corpses. Why then would I have any hesitation to allow my thirteen year old son to own a copy of "The Zombie Survival Guide?" The seven year olds at my school seem quite happy to act out their undead dramas on a daily basis. My son merely seeks a way to protect himself from such danger.
I am well aware of the fact that I think way too much about parenting. It does get a little confusing, when I play the argument that I want my kid to turn out better than I did next to the whining lament, "Hey, I turned out okay, didn't I?" It makes for some very annoying cognitive dissonance. After all, here is my chance to welcome my son into the world of creepy beasts and blood-sucking freaks. But the gore out there these days seems so much thicker than it did back in my day. My night of the living dead wasn't even in color. That was Bosco chocolate syrup all over that little girl's face, not blood.
In the meantime, while I fret and stew about how best to proceed, my son has taken it upon himself to make time on our stops at bookstores to pore over the book, committing sections to memory much the same way he does with favorite Garfield or Foxtrot cartoons. He begrudgingly respects the fact that his mother and I continue to monitor the purchase of his video games based on the rating stickers on the covers. The same kind of stickers that I scoffed at when Tipper Gore tried to keep me from listening to Frank Zappa. Back when I was a free-thinking college student. Now I'm a fussy buzz kill: somebody's parent.
I know it's just a line in the sand, really. There will be plenty of other concerns that will come along soon enough that will push this to the side. Some of them will be more serious. Some of them less. But at least I'm using my brain for something other than food.

Tone Deaf

Forgive my late arrival to the discourse, but digital video recording allows me to generate opinions far past the window of prime time. In this case, I refer to the "Rocky Horror" episode of "Glee." I have plenty of friends and co-workers who are very enthusiastic about this musical-variety-comedy-drama that airs on Fox. I have seen bits and pieces of episodes, and thanks to their efforts, Kristin Chenoweth is no longer singularly responsible for the revival of musical theatre. Here is where I tell you that my wife is a huge fan of muscial theatre. And "Rocky Horror." And Kristin Chenoweth. That is shy I felt the need to set my DVR to record this very special episode.
When it was over, I held my tongue, because I did not want to trample on the feelings of my dear wife. We grew up as band geeks together, and this story of kids finding their way in the rough and tumble world of high school glee club seemed to be a fitting allegory to our youth. And they just got an award from the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation for outstanding comedy series, so why didn't it seem particularly sensitive?
Initially, the performances of the songs seemed extremely faithful to those of the 1975 film. Then came the discussion among the faculty and kids, sorting out issues of the maturity of the subject matter, as well as casting the central character, Doctor Frank-N-Furter. The good doctor is, by is own admission, " a sweet transvestite," and though there were several odd feints at certain male characters taking on the role, including John "Uncle Jesse" Stamos, it went to Mercedes, played by Amber Riley. My wife said, "It's like 'what if Frank were played by Aretha Franklin?'" And that would be fine, given the grand tradition of casting against gender, from Shakespeare's time to Linda Hunt as Billy Kwan. Then they started messing with the lyrics. Why couldn't this character, appearing in a very special episode of a GLAAD award recipient show identify herself for the purposes of Rocky Horror as a "transvestite?"
The answer seemed plain enough to me: It's a show that is still being paid for by Rupert Murdoch. This point became all the more painfully apparent when, at the end of the episode, the Glee Club's director decided that "pushing the envelope" of what his kids should perform was asking too much of them at such a young age. So he had them stage it in an empty theatre. Where no one else could see it. Not unlike a closet.
Maybe I just don't get it, but for the record, neither did my wife.

What Are You Doing Tomorrow?

The death toll for campaign staff and election workers during the elections a year ago numbered twenty-one, according to Tabish Forugh of Afghanistan's Independent Election Commission. Another twenty-one people were wounded.
Back in March, the turnout for the election in Iraq was sixty-two percent. This was in spite of attacks that killed thirty-eight people. Contrast that to our last general election, the one in 2008, where we saw sixty-one percent of our registered voters in the the U S of A show up at the polls.
There are a couple of things that struck me about this news: First, and perhaps most obviously, it has been some time since anybody was shooting at potential voters in our country. Violence on election day is limited primarily to those hanging chads. Secondly, how do we reconcile the fact that these fledgling democracies seem to have greater participation than the country that is out there trying to plant and fertilize them?
I know. We've been at it for almost two hundred and fifty years. Representative democracy: ho hum. My boss won't let me have time off work. I just spaced it. This Tuesday? Really? Or how about everyone's favorite: "It doesn't matter anyway. They're all idiots."
The suggestion that we shouldn't vote because it only encourages them was tired before P.J. O'Rourke got to it. It is the opportunity that we have to make a difference in our daily lives in a simple, yet profound way. The stories of our elections have become mundane because of their relative calm and efficient occurrence. Glitches like the presidential election of 2000 are the exceptions that prove the rule. If more registered voters had found their way to their polling places way back at the turn of the century, Albert Gore might never have won an Academy Award.
It is the part of the otherwise nutso rhetoric that flows from the tea-bags of the party of frightened Americans: participation. Maybe it takes a certain amount of anger or fear to become completely connected to the democratic process, but perhaps it doesn't have to be a life or death proposition.
Vote.

Dead Celebrities

To my credit, I did wait two years. After I figured that the wounds had begun to heal, I tried this one out at a party I was throwing: "What do you suppose John Lennon would be doing if he were alive today? Maybe finishing up another album with Yoko, or even getting back together with the lads?" Then a beat. "Or maybe he would be scratching frantically at the lid of his coffin." From across the room, a rather large young man with many beers in him got up and bumped his rather impressive chest against mine. Though I was hosting the party, I had no idea who this person was who was telling me, "Hey man, that's not funny."
There was a lot of hemming and hawing and I ended up making some vague apology before I slithered off to the bathroom to savor the fact that I hadn't just joined John in Heaven. Imagine that. Actually, when I reflected on it, I assumed that if any person, famous or not, would appreciate that joke, it would be "the smart Beatle." As a result, I have made it a practice over the years to make that same joke about a great many stars who have left our material plane. I consider it, in my own snotty way, a tribute.
That's why, when I read that Michael Jackson earned two hundred and seventy-five million dollars this year, I wondered if passing on wouldn't be the best possible career advice. It also gave much more credence to the notion that someone might fake their own death just to cash in. Elvis made sixty million dollars last year just for hanging around a pet store in Kalamazoo, Michigan. John Lennon showed up on the list by raking in seventeen million the year he turned seventy. That's not AARP money. That's some serious cash.
Maybe it is cruel to suggest that bankrupt artists, either financially or creatively, would fake their own deaths. Maybe it's cruel to joke about it. Or maybe it's better than imagining John, Michael and the King clawing their way out of their own graves and dancing in the moonlight. Happy Halloween.

'Tis The Season

Make no mistake: I grew up in a house that did its best to go overboard when it came to decorating for Halloween. Each year, my mother would allow each of her three boys to pick a scary candle from the selection at the local five and dime to add to the display that grew and grew each year on window ledges and other horizontal surfaces around our house. There was also a big box of autumnal colored bric a brac mixed with countless cardboard cutouts of witches, skeletons, and monsters of every stripe. Each October, it became increasingly difficult to find a spot to place and tape it all.
As a parent, I have taken this tradition and passed it along to my own little family. We have our own box of Halloween, and there is a sense of mild relief that having only one kid means that our presentation is limited by a factor of three. It does mean that my wife and I feel free to carve our own Jack-O-Lanterns to place beside the one my son dutifully creates to decorate our porch each year. We have some orange lights that roughly approximate a spider's web that we hang in one window, but our spectacle is generally limited to our front porch.
That's not the case with some of the houses in and around our neighborhood. There is one house in particular that gets my notice. It should be noted that this is a house where you will find the icicle lights for Christmas hanging from the eaves year-round. And at the end of September, their tiny yard begins to fill up with a wild assortment of ghouls and ghastlies. Not simple cardboard cut-outs, but full-sized animatronic contraptions that pull their own heads off or writhe about on the lawn in electronic agony. There are a number of faux stone tombstones, and a skeletal pirate that guards the front walk. This year they have even added an inflatable black cat that towers some eight feet over the rest of the display. The fact that they are only a hundred yards up the street from my elementary school may have something to do with their mild extravagance. They are guaranteed an audience of three hundred and fifty parading youngsters each years when we empty onto the sidewalk for our annual parade around the block.
By the next week, the zombies and headstones have all been put away again, but the icicle lights are still hanging there, waiting for the first week of December to signal the coming of winter.

Contact

Let's start with the headline: "Romo breaks his collarbone in loss to Giants." To read that, you might expect that Dallas quarterback Tony Romo threw a ball so hard that it snapped his clavicle. Or in some fit of pique, he reached up and collapsed his own shoulders around his neck, causing his collarbone to break. In reality, New York linebacker Michael Boley, all six-foot three and two hundred and twenty-three pounds of him, ran at full speed and landed on top of the Cowboys' field general. Tony Romo, according to Boley, "let out a little scream." This was how the weekend of the National Football League scrutinizing "hard hits" ended. Boley was not penalized or flagged for driving Romo into the turf. This is, after all, a contact sport.
Because, sports fans, it was a "legal hit." We watch the game to see the extraordinary physical feat: the fingertip catch, the ninety yard runback, and yes, even the occasional teeth-rattling "snot bubble." As long as it's legal. That's what made Brett Favre the man he is today, hobbling about, throwing interceptions and grimacing in pain, but still almost leading his team to victory. It is what we are paying him to do.
Of course, speaking of "hits," we aren't paying for him to hit on female employees of the NFL. This kind of contact will get you a call to the commissioner's office, and maybe a few game's suspension. Contrast this to the six to eight weeks that Tony Romo is expected to miss as a result of the on-the-field activity he found himself in, and you wonder just exactly where the priorities of our great nation have fallen. Ben Roethlisberger, quarterback for the Pittsburgh Steelers, received a six game suspension for sexual assault. Not on him, but by him. This ruling was then backed off to just four games, because he was "contrite."
For his part, Tony Romo was contrite as well. With his arm in a sling. Michael Boley? He'll be showing up on highlight reels for the next few days.