Pop Goes Our Culture

Let's start with an affirmation: "I'd like to buy the world a Coke." Never mind that the cost would be prohibitive, and getting all those cans and bottles back into the proper recycling streams would be a huge pain. I would like to buy the world a Coke. Things go better with Coke. It's the real thing. Coke, after all, adds life.

I didn't need Don Draper to tell me any of this. I've been a Coca Cola devotee for the adult span of my life. I confess to feeling a little deflated when, upon ordering a Coke, the waitron tells me somewhat apologetically that the establishment only serves Pepsi. I have been known to let this happen to me, with the understanding that it is an aberration, and won't be repeated regularly. But to be denied a Coke, or any cola product anywhere in this land or anywhere else on the globe is unthinkable. Until now.

It seems that last week, while flying what we understand are the "friendly skies" of United Airlines, Tahera Ahmad asked a flight attendant for a Diet Coke. When she was brought an open can, she asked for an unopened can for "hygienic reasons." Who knows where that can has been, after all? Aside from a cruising altitude of some thirty thousand feet, that is. Ms. Ahmad's request was rebuffed by the flightron, who asserted that an unopened can could be used as a weapon. Never mind that the man next to her had been handed a sealed can of beer. Never mind that Ms. Ahmad is Muslim. Wait a minute. Back up. First of all, it could be that if she had simply ordered a beer, or a Coke (Classic), or had a last name like "Smith," she probably would have been offered an unopened can, and some extra peanuts.

No Coke for you. And now, no work for the flight attendant. What could be more quintessentially American than losing your job after you acted like a xenophobic twit? All of which brings me back to an event some six years ago: The Beer Summit. This was back in the early days of Hope and Change, when our newly elected President sat down with black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. and white Cambridge, Massachusetts police Sergeant James Crowley, who had arrested him for disorderly conduct. They had a beer together to see if they could work things out. Judging by the past year or so, I'm guessing there are still a few beers to be shared. In the meantime, maybe Barack Obama could find a way to get government funding for this "buy the world a Coke" idea. It might even slip past the Republican majority, disguised as part of a defense package, since we all know now that Coke can be a weapon. A weapon of mass destruction for your thirst.

Tradegy Plus Time Plus American Equals Real Tragedy

The death of any one is a tragedy. There is always some way or someone who has a connection that will spend the rest of their lives coping or mourning the moment of that passing. Sometimes it is the sheer number that makes an event even more terrible. Thousands die in an earthquake in Nepal and the world reacts. The challenge being that those who died are strangers, too many to be remembered as one face or one name. They become a statistic, like the death toll on our nation's highways during three day weekends. Somewhere, however, that number translates into a missing plate at the table. A name scratched off the Christmas card list. An empty bedroom that has to be walked past daily until moving to a smaller place is the only option.
This is how we grieve. It makes sense that we do it in the most personal way possible. We light a candle. We say a prayer. We hang a wreath. We pour a bit of our 40 on the ground. We tag off on the departed, but rarely do we do so en masse. Unless you're Obi Won Kenobi, that's not how we feel things. We mourn up close and personal.
That may be why, in the midst of all the death and destruction in Nepal, we chose to highlight the story of Chris Norgren, a U.S. Marine helicopter pilot who went missing along with his crew during a rescue mission there. Knowing that a guy from Wichita, Kansas had gone missing amid the ruins of Charikot makes it all so real. Real personal. Assistant coach at Bishop Carroll High School close. And now we have a face for the tragedy. An American face.
This thought came to me not as a result of the coverage of the earthquake. It came via the side door, another story about a horrible death: A lion mauled a tourist at an animal park in Johannesburg, South Africa. Why should I care? Because the headline informed me that it was an American tourist. This was the third attack in the past four months at this park, so why are we just hearing about it now? At the end of March it was an Austrailian, as well as the beginning of April when a thirteen-year-old local boy was gnawed on by a cheetah, wild animals have not been working and playing with humans. This past week, somebody died. Katherine Chappell. An American.
Now that's a tragedy.

What Do I Know?

"We are vain and we are blind

I hate people when they're not polite"

- Talking Heads "Psycho Killer"

And so, years later, the trial of Colorado's "cinema gunman" continues to unravel in a Denver courtroom. Guilt or innocence isn't the issue here. The murders James Holmes committed back in the summer of 2012 continue to spark frustration, concern, and paranoia by the truckload. Mister Holmes is not denying his participation in the events that lead to the death of twelve moviegoers at that long-ago midnight premiere of "The Dark Night Rises." He has admitted to that. The trial is all about whether he was sane when he did it.

I am not a mental health professional, but fifty-some years of living in a moderately polite society has given me some guidelines, some of which I try to impart to my young charges on the playground each day: If you are upset, it's best to use your words to try and solve your differences. If the differences you are having happen to be with the voices in your own head, then there may be a bigger problem. I deal with problems like ADHD, but not schizophrenia. Being able to distinguish reality from fantasy can be a chore when you're seven, but if you're still not clear on the distinction once you pass twenty-something. And when those differences are so very unclear that you start to see murder as a chance to "power up," as Holmes did, then maybe we're leaving the realm of the common senses. 
Of course, when he said that he targeted a midnight showing of a PG-13 movie with the intent of avoiding any children as casualties, James showed a kind of reasoning that might border on compassion. This contrasts mightily with his assertion that the seventy people he wounded "didn't count" because it didn't fit in with his spiritual economics. "Human life has value. If you take lives away, that adds to your value," Holmes said. "Anything they would have pursued gets canceled out and given to me." As for that whole reasoned attempt to avoid killing children? He shot six-year-old Veronica Moser-Sullivan four times, killing her. So much for the master plan. 
Is he sane? I would suggest that my rule of anybody who goes to a movie theater with the intent to kill as many people as possible for "power-ups" would probably live on the opposite side of the fence from those of us who don't. Then again, when they make a movie about a guy who goes to war with the intent to kill as many bad guys as he can, we call him a hero. It's a pretty thin and twisted line. 

In House Support

Recently I had the experience of working with my son at his school's theater tech shop where I learned just how far he had progressed in the realm of power tools, woodworking and associated skills. I learned not to mess with him when it comes to using a pneumatic staple gun, or if he knows the old "measure twice, cut once" adage. He knows. He also knows his way around a room full of electronics.
I shouldn't have been surprised. I have been watching him over the past few years, dragging disparate pieces of computers, video game consoles and sound equipment. He has, over that time, cobbled together a great many working devices that have gone on to useful lives in his room and those of his friends. The reputation he has gained as a "tech wiz" is earned, and his efforts are appreciated by his teachers as well. My son is that kid who will eventually raise his had while the class waits for someone to come and bail them all out of a class in which they would have had to listen to their instructor describe the power point presentation instead of watching it appear magically projected from the digital projector that, without my son's rescue, would be a very expensive paperweight.
Which brings me to this past weekend, during which a new home theater component came to our house. This one was for dad. There isn't any other way to shade it, since all the excuses and rationalizing about how we will all benefit from better sound in the living room would border on the ridiculous. I pitched it to my wife in the following manner: "Dad needs a new toy. He's been good all year and he's been saving," I should have quit when I was ahead. I am a grownup, after all. I don't need to justify the purchase of stereo equipment.
Unless I need my son to help bail me out of all the wires and connections that need to be made. We brought the new box with lots of buttons home after dinner on Saturday night, and I proceeded to apply all the hookup skills I have used from my sordid component laden past. I got speaker wires twisted and tightened onto the posts that allowed music to come out of the boxes across the room. The music was coming from the CD player box that had wires that I recognized, and then things started getting hazy. There were more wires than I had remembered. Where does the blu-ray player go? How do we make the Tivo play through the surround sound? What does an FM antennae look like these days?
There was my son, having already downloaded the remote control app to his phone, he helped me sort out the spaghetti of HDMI and composite cables, and when he was done the whole mess was shoved back up against the wall where we took turns trying to make noise come out from all of the different boxes at ever-increasing volume. It was past midnight at this point, but the relief I felt kept me happy and awake for another hour, fiddling with inputs and outputs. Shiny. New. Fun. My son retired to his room, where he had his own swirl of music and electricity to enjoy. I thanked him for his service, and welcomed him back to play with our new toy anytime. Did I mention that he's my son?

Letter Of The Law

Coming down the home stretch of the school year, we are doing everything we can at our elementary school to try and keep the fifth graders on the hook. As opposed to off the hook. They have a pretty solid sense that we have reached the limits of our jurisdiction, and the leverage we might once have had in the midst of all our scholarly endeavors has all but disappeared. They have taken all the tests that we can think of, and the grades are pretty much in the book. That's when we send out the "two strikes" letter. It's the one that tells parents that, while we can't do a whole lot about whether their children are promoted, we can decide if they participate in the follies that celebrate that achievement. It's a unique gambit: We won't fail your kid, thereby bringing them back to us for another year, but we will keep them from being a part of the recognition of that fact. That hasn't kept them all in line, however. Two strikes seems to be at least one more than some of them are comfortable with. Where is the intimidation? Where is the fear?
When I was a senior in high school, the marching band was invited to perform in Mexico as part of a cultural exchange that never fully made sense to me. What did make sense to me was the threat that was held over my head by the band director and administration, as our trip was set to take place after commencement. If we misbehaved, we would be sent home at our expense, and we would not receive a diploma. I didn't question the validity of their claims. I knew something about running up against the man. In my world, there were those who toed the line and kept up appearances. These were the Band Goodies, or the BeeGees as we called them as an additional slam. I was not part of that group. I was a legacy in the other guys: The Band Baddies. We didn't call ourselves that, nor did we refer to ourselves as "BeeBees." That wouldn't have been cool. Having been kicked out of the Pep Band just a few months before, I didn't have the chutzpah to tempt fate one more time. I wanted to graduate. I didn't want to have to call my parents, long distance from another country, explaining how they had to send me a plane ticket because I decided to go off script one more time. While my girlfriend and I followed the rules and obeyed the curfew, we noticed the BeeGees, almost to a one, stayed out and drank and partied and canoodled in ways most unseemly. Didn't they want to graduate? Didn't they know they could be hitchhiking home form Mexico City at any moment?
Nope. But it worked on me. I behaved and came home without any of the ribald stories that so many of my bandmates did. I came home to my diploma and left behind all the adventures of my high school career. Not the ones from Mexico. Not that I'm recommending misbehavior of any sort, but to paraphrase Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, it always worked for me.

Not Our Fault

If California slides into the ocean
like the mystics and statistics say it will
I predict this hotel will be standing
until I pay my bill - Warren Zevon "Desperados Under The Eaves"
Last week, Nostradamus predicted that there would be an earthquake of 9.0 or greater on the West Coast of the United States. May 28th, to be precise. In these matters, it is important to be precise, since millions of lives are at stake. This is why earthquake prognostication is such an important art. Did I say "art?" I meant science. There is a website, called "Earthquake Forecasting" which includes the admonition: "We do not predict earthquakes." Instead, they use algorithms and formulas that us all anticipate the possibility of something that has become increasingly inevitable. It works on a series of percentages and watching them keep ratcheting up and up and up. I live in a place where the question has never been "if" but "when" as it pertains to seismic activity.
Which brings us to the art of predicting earthquakes. Nostradamus wrote in quatrains, which is art. They may even, at one time, rhymed. We have, off and on through history, based our fears on a book full of poems written a very long time ago. Five hundred years is a lot, right? The day after the West Coast was supposed to tumble into oblivion, poets from a new age unveiled their vision: San Andreas. It's a movie about an earthquake, that opened the day after the earthquake that was supposed to make the release of a movie about an earthquake inconsequential. Pretty savvy marketing, since the end of the world didn't happen after all.
Returning to the words of the late poet and philosopher Warren Zevon, I think he's got a point. Part of all the work we've done preparing over the past five centuries for the end of the world, especially here in California, the chances of getting us all to "slide into the ocean" has diminished from the prophecies of old via the retrofitting of today. In many ways, it would be simpler if we would all burn out rather than fade away. But those are the words of a Canadian. What do they know about earthquakes? I predict we will all spend about as much time worrying about the end as than we will living in them. But don't quote me on that.

When Life Gives You Prom, Make Promenade

I drove a white Mustang II to my senior prom. While my girlfriend and I were at the dance, we stopped to get our picture taken as a memento of the occasion. The photographer ushered us around the side of a great beast of a red Rolls Royce, neatly obscuring both me and my date in all our prom finery: her Gunnie Sax and my ruffled rental tux in matching powder blue. At least you could make out my powder blue top hat. Still, upon reflection, I couldn't help but notice that cars seemed to be a very big part of my senior prom experience.
The Mustang II came about as part of a carefully managed attempt to affect some cool into my school by a friend from down the street who had graduated the year before. He started off the year back in August by insisting that he take my senior photo for the yearbook. To his credit, he did a very nice job, even if the result looked a little like I had been photshopped into a Coors commercial. This turned out to be fine, since it tended to diffuse any attention that might otherwise have been used up on my adolescent visage. I remembered this kindness when prom time came around. I hoped that he would do me the favor of upgrading my ride, the copper-ish '72 Chevy Vega. That's because on the night of my prom, I wanted everything to be just right. Powder blue tuxedo included.
This is all to say that I completely understand my son's obsession with getting his car just right before his big night out. The night before his prom, he covered his car to keep the birds who nest in the tree right over our driveway from diminishing any of the elbow grease he had used to make his car, his pride and joy, shine. He spent the night before his prom mulling over whether or not he should take off the targa top for the evening. It made me think of the sunroof in that Mustang II. I remembered how important that car was to my night. He put the floor mats back into his car after an absence of several months. Trips to Smashburger with his buddies don't require floor mats. Or vacuuming the upholstery. Prom night will be different. It will be like something out of a Bruce Springsteen song. Someday, he'll look back on the pictures from this night and smile. Probably because he won't be wearing a powder blue tux and matching top hat.