Taking the Fifth: I'd Like to Testify about Flynn

Insofar as it is fun to point out the utter hypocrisy of General Flynn, presumed traitor and foreign agent,  former cheerleader who loudly proclaimed at the Republican convention that being under FBI investigation makes one unfit for office, claiming protection of the fifth amendment and refusing to comply with a Congressional subpoena for personal papers related to said (ahem, cough cough, alleged) treason, this is exactly the sort of situation the Fifth amendment's guarantee against self-incrimination was intended for. And it in and of itself shouldn't be construed as a signal of guilt. 

Let me revisit a couple of the many times in which the clarion chorus of "guilt by suspicion" just for old time's sake. OK, and for comparison.

Lois Lerner was a senior civil servant -- not a political appointee -- who was in charge of the division that supposedly targeted conservative non-profit organizations for investigation of their tax-exempt status. I'll cut to the chase on the substance of the allegations, which was horse hockey; the IRS were actually doing their jobs in trying to find the extent of political activity by groups that were hiding behind tax-exempt status as "welfare organizations" (forbidden by the tax code) and were investigating both left-leaning and right-leaning groups in roughly equal numbers. (It would have been malpractice not to investigate groups with anti-Tax names whose primary activity was political as to whether they were illegally using tax exemptions for political activity. Their mantra was they didn't want to pay taxes, and they didn't.)

That said, under the tender ministrations of the reprehensible Congressman Darrrell Issa and his Orwellian House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Lerner was called to testify on the substance of the matter. That's a reasonable request for a normal investigation, but one fraught with peril when the motivation of the investigation is purely to create a fake scandal for the benefit of the electoral fortunes of one party, as was the case here.

Civil Service protections are limited but intend to protect employees in career service from influence to violate their oaths from the political branches of government. So, basically, the same principle that protects such employees from being harassed by, say, the President to use their authority to persecute individuals or groups unjustly, equally extends to them when members of Congress attempt to exhort them to suborn themselves to create a fiction about events.

It's not difficult to understand why this in turn extends to the proper use of the Fifth Amendment as an additional protection -- one might even say the root protection -- in the situation Lerner was in. No matter what she was going to testify, the majority members of the committee were looking for a scalp, and they would try to twist her testimony and entrap her into technical perjury to create wrongdoing where there might not have been one.

To say that in taking the Fifth, Lerner was evading scrutiny, is not correct. The GAO and the Inspector General of the IRS both investigated the matter thoroughly, Congressional Committees combed through reams of documentary evidence, communications were reviewed, and dozens of people interviewed, all leading to no evidence of wrongdoing or even anything close to the substance of the allegations made. The FBI/DoJ investigation determined there was no crime. (It's worth repeating again that the allegations were brought to the Republican Congressmen by Republican-supporting political groups that were using taxpayer money, through their tax-exempt status, to try to change tax policy, and not incidentally aid these same Republican Congressmen in their election efforts.)

Lerner was an honest actor in all this. Being guilty of mismanagement (a conclusion the FBI and Department of Justice came to and voiced publicly, for however they seem to be experts in the matter) is not the same thing as being corrupt. Nevertheless, Issa and the majority proceeded to hold Lerner in Contempt of Congress, a finding that does not have strict parameters the way a finding of contempt of court in a civil or criminal proceeding does, and which was, surprise, very much politicized under the "if she has nothing to hide, why's she taking the fifth?" theory. (Explicitly articulated at the time by many, including current White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer.)

Well, duh. She took the fifth to avoid being persecuted, and the holding of contempt pretty much proves what was in store for her. But had she testified to the Committee, she would have subjected herself to legal jeopardy through possible perjury. Issa himself seemed to not understand the fifth amendment in both intimating Lerner had committed crimes and insisting she not use her Constitutional right.

In a criminal case, as you probably know, there's no way to compel a defendant to testify. This is to avoid a similar problem under cross-examination, where a prosecutor can take statements that may or may not be germane and do a good job of conflating them so a jury might be persuaded it constitutes evidence. A defendant once on the stand can't refuse to answer questions without that in and of itself seeming to show guilt.

Let me briefly also mention Bryan Pagliano. Don't know who he is? He's the sysadmin who installed and ran Hillary Clinton's private residential email server (and successfully defended it against hackers). If you google Mr. Pagliano, he's mentioned almost exclusively in such stalwarts of fake news as the World Net Daily, Free Beacon, and Fox News, because his refusal to comply with subpoenas to Rep. Jason Chaffetz' House Oversight Committee "investigation" into Clinton's email server -- itself a spinoff series from the 11 different Benghazi investigations -- was also touted as evidence of his guilt in a crime. (If you think this has stopped, think again: Chaffetz as recently as February 2017 asked Attorney General Jeff Sessions to criminally charge Pagliano for invoking his fifth amendment rights.)

Pagliano, it's worth noting, cooperated with the FBI in its investigation, in exchange for immunity. The FBI didn't comment on his involvement in James Comey's infamous "she's innocent but she's really guilty of something" announcement in July of 2016, but he clearly made official statements to investigators that may or may not have been made available, whole or in part, to Chaffetz' committee. Since Chaffetz was also in the middle of the infamous October, 2016 leak of the supposed new cache of email from Clinton related to the Anthony Weiner case, which supposedly forced Comey's hand at making the second announcement that hurt Clinton at the polls, it's not unreasonable to assume he and members of the committee had access to FBI material on Pagliano's involvement in the original server and mobile computing access investigation. In fact, it's absurd to think otherwise.

So in turn, Pagliano being called to testify twice -- in September, 2016! What timing! -- before Chaffetz was clearly intended to be a political stunt, but also clearly would have put Pagliano in criminal jeopardy of perjury even with no previous infraction of law on his record.

I will add parenthetically that while we can't know precisely what Pagliano told FBI and DoJ investigators, if he did commit infractions of law while in the private employ of Clinton before or after she became Secretary of State, they would have had to have been technical ones. There's no law against setting up an email server for someone. If there were federal rules about email forwarding, it's not incumbent upon a sysadmin to know the access or storage rules for the recipient of an email. I digress a little, but the idea that a guy like Pagliano -- not a political player, not a wealthy guy -- is guilty of something because he takes an immunity deal is not convincing, given that immunity would be a way of ensuring he wouldn't come into legal jeopardy and have to endure the humiliation and even greater legal expense of defending himself. I just get the sense of Pagliano is that he's a fellow geek hired to do a job and has gotten the short end of the stick from history here, and would prefer to fade to obscurity.

All that noted, there's nothing substantive he could have added to the Congressional inquiry, already itself quite dicey, and Chaffetz, with access to the confidential FBI investigation, was in a perfect position to ask questions in such as way as to create the impression of wrongdoing on Pagliano's part and in turn possibly actionable perjury. And despite this, Chaffetz (as of February 2017 at least) is still trying to pursue a criminal case against him. I'll repeat this: he was granted immunity by the FBI, but not by Congress; he cooperated fully with the authorities; the FBI concluded there were no crimes committed; but Chaffetz is still trying to criminally persecute the guy.

So that brings us back to General Flynn. I'm no legal authority but the prima facie case that he committed crimes seems to be relatively evident. He is the subject of an ongoing FBI investigation of which he the primary target for criminal wrongdoing, and his attorney has been informed of this. We know this because his attorney said this publicly.

So his refusal to comply with subpoenas from Congress to supply materials, which would then be part of the public record, is fairly consistent with the intent of the fifth amendment. Flynn, unlike Lerner, was a political appointee. He is also subject to stricter standards under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, as a reserve and general officer of the United States. He has both an astounding amount of legal jeopardy and multiple sources of that jeopardy. It's possible (not saying it is so, but that it might be so) he's innocent on either technical or substantive grounds. But he has to have his fair hearing in court, as part of the system, and the right against self-incrimination is just as important for the apparently guilty as for the exonerated.

And even with a friendly Congress, there may be an interest in throwing him under the bus to save Trumpolini's bacon, or possibly the Vice President, or all of the above. The suspect perambulations of Devin Nunes in relaying private Congressional investigatory material directly to Trumpolini is Exhibit A that at least some Congressmen of the majority party are more than willing to short circuit due process in the interests of political expediency, or whatever odd motiviation Nunes had.

Some people-- notably former drug czar General Barry McCaffrey, a one-time intimate of General Flynn in an intelligence capacity  -- have for months now suggested Flynn has some mental health issues. (And as recently as last week on MSNBC.) I hope it is self-evident that if this is the case, it's a material factor in a question of criminal culpability with respect to the crimes of which he is accused.

Whether this is the honorable thing for Flynn to plead the fifth is another matter. There is the concept of the interest of the country before personal fortune (sort of the crux of the substance of the allegations) and in some cases that means willingness to go to prison for the truth to be told. I'll say that as loudly about Edward Snowden (also apparently guilty of the crimes of which the government accuses him) as I would about Mike Flynn. Doing the time sometimes exonerates you in the court of history; coming clean (a la John Dean) can make you a prophet with honor. So I hope General Flynn relents, even as I admire the wisdom of his counsel in urging him to take the protection of the fifth amendment.

So while I will not be joining in the catcalls of "if he has nothing to hide, why is he taking the fifth?" (tempting though it may be), I do not excuse General Flynn of the higher duty to his country. But I do not have the intimidating powers of government at my finger tips. That's why we have a bill of rights in the first place, and we can't pick and choose who gets its protection. Rights are inalienable, as someone once said.

Your Pocket Guide to Republican Constitutional Crimes

Of course Trump could get away with it. Four of the past five previous Republican administrations have engaged in fairly dire Constitutional crimes (not even discussing the 2000 Presidential election) with diminishing consequences, aided in part by Republican Congressional delegations with succeedingly smaller interests in Constitutional governance and greater ones in power at any cost.

I'll leave the current debacle off the pocket guide, but run your own checklist for: venal personal gain, motivation to get elected at any cost, political payback/vengeance, and the all-time winner, cover-ups and obstruction of justice in the interests of all of the above.


Administration:

Nixon

Constitutional Crime:

Broadly, abuse of power in furtherance of electoral manipulation.

Extensive use of government  and political party machinery and outright crime (including burglary and money laundering) to gain re-election, and then a criminal conspiracy to obstruct justice. 

(It later turned out Nixon also deliberately scuttled the 1968 Vietnamese peace accord in order to affect the 1968 election, but that wasn’t proven until just a few years ago.)

How it was uncovered/investigated:

Dogged reporting, followed by (ultimately bipartisan) Congressional investigation, followed by two Special Prosecutors.

Special Prosecutor(s):

Archibald Cox, Leon Jaworski

Role of Congress:

The Democratic majority was aided by many Republicans of good faith in pursuing the investigation, after initially partisan reactions to the initial revelations, and it was the televised Congressional hearings that ended up uncovering much of the most damning evidence and propelled the establishment of the Special Counsel and subsequent criminal indictments.

What Happened to the Perps:

Lots of people went to jail. Nixon was forced to resign nearly three years after the major crimes which he committed or helped to cover up, but was pardoned (possibly unconstitutionally) before being criminally charged by President Ford.


Administration:

Reagan

Constitutional Crime:

Violating explicit Congressional laws, the US government, at the direction of the executive branch, including senior members of the National Security establishment (both NSA and CIA), sold military arms to our adversary Iran as ransom in exchange for the release of hostages taken in the wake of the US military intervention in Lebanon, and then used the financial proceeds to arm and train a rebel (terrorist, in some eyes) group in Nicaragua. Members of the administration then proceeded to obstruct justice and the investigation by perjury and  spoliation of evidence (notably Oliver North shredding documents and smuggling them out in in Secretary’s underwear). Money from these sales was also diverted to persons for personal expenses.

How it was uncovered/investigated:

Foreign “partners” in these crimes, in both Iran and Nicaragua, revealed details of the arrangements in late 1986 (perhaps in part to embarrass the United States) at which point Reagan admitted in a televised broadcast the gist of the arrangement. An independent commission without subpoena power or the ability to compel testimony under oath was appointed by Reagan to do initial two-month investigation (The Tower Commission), generally seen as an attempt to whitewash the affair, after which special committees of the House of Representatives and Senate were formed specifically to investigate the affair.  After public and Congressional pressure, ultimately Lawrence Walsh was appointed Special Prosecutor in late 1986, where most criminal details of the affair were exposed.

Special Prosecutor:

Lawrence Walsh

Role of Congress:

Congressional investigation uncovered many details of the arrangement, but was marred on several counts. The first was granting limited immunity in testimony to key participants, notably Oliver North, which ultimately allowed the conspirators to escape criminal prosecution (in North’s case, on appeal). The second was in having a significant split between the majority (then Democrat) report and the minority report, which differed on levels of culpability and the degree to which the senior political members of the administration were involved.

What happened to the perps:

13 members of the conspiracy were indicted from crimes ranging from perjury to defrauding the government to destruction of evidence. Two were given immunity for testimony for the prosecution, 1 was convicted of crimes and had his conviction overturned due to Congressional immunity (North), 1 was convicted of crimes and had the conviction thrown out on a technicality (Admiral John Poindexter) and the remaining nine defendants were all given probation ranging from six months to two years. President George Bush then later pardoned: Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane, Assistant Secretary of State Eliot Abrams (who almost got a similar role in the Trump administration) and two CIA deputies who were in charge of the covert operations, erasing their criminal records and ending their probations.

President Reagan, forced to testify in criminal trials after his term was over, essentially pleaded he couldn’t remember anything, so his role may never be known in full.


Administration:

George W. Bush

Constitutional Crime:

Conspiracy to manufacture evidence to convince Congress to  pass an authorization of a war; subsequent cover-up and political dirty tricks, including uncovering the identity of US covert agents as retaliation, intended to mask the manipulation and manufacturing of evidence. Evidence extended to strongly implicate the Vice President, Dick Cheney, although evidence of the President’s involvement and knowledge of these conspiracies has never been made clear.

How it was uncovered/investigated:

Following the illegal exposure of the identity of its covert agent, Valerie Plame, by the planned leak to discredit Plame’s husband as a source — intended to cover-up the manufacture of evidence concerning Iraq’s alleged desire to obtain uranium from Niger —  the CIA requested the FBI and Department of Justice investigate the particular offense. John Ashcroft, then attorney general, had a conflict of interest in that he had received nearly a million dollars of consulting fees from several members of the administration (including Karl Rove) who had peripheral or direct involvement in the conspiracy, and recused himself in late 2003. A special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, was appointed (by none other than  Acting Attorney General James Comey), who conducted a remarkably discreet investigation with virtually no leaks about suspects and crimes for which insufficient evidence could be produced.

Most other aspects of the false Weapons of Mass Destruction propaganda campaign were uncovered by the press, but in some cases (Judith Miller, Robert Novak) the press were willing participants or unwitting dupes in the initial misinformation campaign. Subsequent Congressional investigations concluded there were no weapons of mass destruction, but little came of them in terms of practical consequences, and Libby was the only criminal defendant ever charged and convicted in the affair. Most of what is known about the broader WMD conspiracy came about through independent reporting by multiple parties, although the Special Prosecutor shared explicit details of the Plame affair with the public in bringing the sole indictment.

Special Prosecutor:

Patrick Fitzgerald (limited to Plame Affair)

Role of Congress:

Several Congressional Committees, including the House Select Committee on Intelligence and Armed Service committee, conducted both closed door and open hearings and investigations surrounding the WMD events, and released summary reports that there were no WMDs without assigning culpability for the misdirection. Republican members of congress frequently repeated administration talking points conflating 9/11, Sadaam Hussein, and WMDs even after the issuances of fairly definitive evidence as to the lack of such weapons or weapon programs. Congressional action was ultimately blunted by a deeply partisan divide on the war itself.

What Happened to the Perps:

Vice Presidential Chief of Staff Scooter Libby was sentenced to 30 months in prison and fined, but George W. Bush issued a commutation of his sentence, but never issued a pardon. Libby’s law license was revoked, and later restored in 2016. Other notables involved, including Karl Rove, Richard Armitage, Donald Rumsfeld, and Cheney, never were charged. Cheney was an advocate until the end of the Bush administration for a pardon for Libby. There was no criminal investigation of the manufacture of evidence of WMDs itself, nor has the classified version of the major Congressional investigations ever been released. Use of government money to pay sources who faked evidence (“Curveball”, et alia) has never been accounted for formally.

A New Hartford Convention?

n 1812, we were tripped into a war that did not enjoy the full support of a majority of the American polity, one that quickly turned into a disaster. The schoolbook history pretends this war was was a victory, because we happened to win the biggest and last battle of the war, which was actually fought *after* the peace treaty settling the war had been signed (thanks to communication delays of the time). That the war was largely expansionist (freedom of the seas, while indeed a serious problem with Britain, was not a new problem in 1812, but made a convenient cassus belli) is often forgotten. It was desired by southern and western blocs because those persons desired more land, British land, for expansion, and more room for slavery to grow.

The reason the declaration of war was possible was because of the 3/5 rule. If you're not familiar with this, check out the Constitution. It gave slave-holding states extra representation in Congress, as part of the compromises of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, by counting all slaves as 3/5 of a person for purposes of representation, even though they weren't considered human beings with representational rights. This paradox -- relying on slaves to maintain a political majority despite having a populational minority -- was at the heart of the political fighting that went on until the 1860 Presidential election finally put the matter to head when a plurality-winner in the popular vote, Abraham Lincoln, won the clear majority of electoral votes.

In 1814, a group of New Englanders -- devastated by the war most of them hadn't supported, and unable to find purchase in a government that was not proportionately representational to their numbers -- met in Hartford to consider a number of means of forcing constitutional redress. Although characterized by contemporaries and many later historians as a "secessionist" movement -- and secession from the Union was in fact discussed as an option, to be sure -- the primary problem discussed was how the Republic had been advanced to the point, 38 years after independence was declared, that the power of the federal government could be moved to war, the most extreme state of affairs possible for a nation, on the basis of a minority of its electors.

The Hartford Convention sort of fizzled out after a few months of deliberation, because of the Battle of New Orleans and the succeeding news of the Treaty of Ghent having been signed in late December, 1814, ending the war, removed the most urgent and immediate problem the convention was called to discuss.

I wonder how the history of our country might have played out differently had the sequence of events not been as it was -- if we had had, in effect, a second constitutional convention addressing this inequality in our political balance that went to its logical conclusion of making a concrete proposal, possibly an ultimatum. The compromises of 1820 and 1850, splitting the baby down the middle, forestalled the civil war but didn't address the major problem of discord in the 1850's, which was that a conservative Supreme Court and a slave-state minority increasingly tried to impose slavery on the rest of the country -- through attempted expansion to the west, and the abrogration of the rights of non-slaveholding states to provide sanctuary for escaped slaves, or even those born free (such as Solomon Northrup) who were kidnapped into slavery.

Might we have averted the civil war? And would the electoral college, already considered a problem in 1815, have been addressed by the threat of a split in the Union?

And I am in turn wondering if we might today convene a sort of rump convention of our own, Hartford style, to discuss these parallel modern issues among the aggrieved majority in our country, in solidarity with one another, and not in quaking fear of the tyranny of the extremist minority which controls our government?

Neologism: Emailzheimers

emailzheimers. The inability to find a message in your inbox you left as a reminder to yourself, due to forgetting the keywords upon which to search and dredge it up out of the archives.

David Bowie

David Bowie

There are many eulogies for David Bowie today, and many personal reminiscences, and I cannot say that I have much to add to the discussion of his musical or cultural legacy in the broadest sense. I liked a lot of Bowie, loved some of his work (probably not yours - my favorite LP is Low, a hit-free record; I always thought “Let’s Dance” was literally a joke by Bowie, maybe to settle a bet he could get a number one hit if he chose to), but I was not a hardcore fanboy the way I am or have been for some other contemporaries.

But Bowie was my avenue to becoming a better human being in a particular way, which in many ways is superficial, not profound, but real nevertheless. Bowie converted me from being a homophobe as an adolescent; not entirely directly, but by understanding he was very important to people around me, and in that subtle walk between establishing my own identity and unearthing empathy and activating it for adult use, I’m pretty sure he saved me from being (more of) an asshole than what could have been.

Let me set the wayback machine to the mid-70s. If you were a boy living in the midwest back then, you can be pretty sure you’d be called a faggot as a routine insult. It was part of the territory-marking process of males, setting pecking orders, and if you were different in any way from the pack, you were a “faggot”. Adults made disparaging remarks about homosexuals, particularly men, routinely. Without much understanding of what it was, it was made clear by people around me all the time that being gay was just about the worst thing ever.

It’s hard as hell being an adolescent, and I can’t ever quite appreciate how hard it must have been back then to be gay in that kind of culture.  Developing a sexual identity is a universal part of being a human being, and the conflicting mass of messages from societal norms, moral strictures, the throbbing mass of our tribal and family cultures come into paradoxical conflict with one’s own developing personal identity.

I do know that as a young, virginal straight male, in the 70’s. it felt imperative to establish I AM NOT A FAGGOT from well before the age of physical sexual maturity. The urge to do this was strong and came with many perceived advantages. Advertising availability to the opposite sex; having access, at least in theory, to mainstream groups of peers; not getting beaten up.

So in my earliest teen years, I participated in the disparaging jokes. I called other kids “fag”, although it never felt as satisfying being on the giving end as it felt degrading being on the receiving end. I wore “Death Before Disco” t-shirts with an explicit anti-gay message (and no one called me out on it). And I hated David Bowie. Because, you know, he was a faggot.

Bowie’s gender-ambivalence/questioning need not be explicated, but it should be remembered the concept of gender spectrum and identity was pretty much binary back then. As a consumer of pop culture, I had little appreciation of nuance. I picked my first 7 inch record purchases because the songs were popular, and I wanted to be part of that feeling, if not the reality. (For the record - my first purchases, in 1976, a year before I discovered punk, were “Silly Love Songs” by McCartney/Wings and with recognition of the appropriate retro-irony, “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” by Sir Elton John and Kiki Dee. I’ve always been a romantic.)

Why would I like Bowie? The word down from the older kids, especially the boys, was if you liked him you were a fag, too. So other than the odd song on the radio, I never listened to any Bowie, nor did I seek him out.

Evolving one’s taste in music, at least pop music, is also a common exercise of adolescent identity-building. Like the John Cusack character in High Fidelity, I’ve occasionally rearranged my record collection in autobiographical order. It’s a history of influence as much as self-discovery. First, following my older sisters’ favorite artists (Carole King! Gilbert O’Sullivan!), and the ones popular with other kids in my class (see also: Don’t Go Breaking My Heart.) Buying an album because I liked the single on the radio. Finding a record at the public library and taking it home based on the cover and finding something new. Reading about a song, or an artist who influenced another artist, and buying the album of the influencer. Hearing the unknown opening act at an early concert experience and finding their obscure record in the bargain bin. Finally, finding other people who liked those things, and having them play their records for me. I can show you my evolution from the Beatles’ 1967-1970 compilation to Zen Arcade, from the Ohio Players to Howlin’ Wolf, with at least one other person responsible for my step from spine to spine. Culture is by definition a collaborative project.

It’s a process of listening, but with open ears, and not to get too schmaltzy, an open heart. Questioning the concept of “liking” something, making choices between intellectual aesthetics and the logic of moving your butt to the beat, being dogmatic and wrong or dogmatic and right and then graduating to accepting and willing to listen, literally and figuratively, to what moves another person. You find all sorts of things that way.

I was a dedicated and soon to be hardcore punker for quite a while, but an omnivore at the same time. It was among my punk friends — a group safely outside the inward-spiraling social orbit of school, for the most part — I first became aware that I actually *knew* some other people who were gay. And they didn’t try to convert me, rape me, or by their mere presence brainwash me. The path from glam to punk was unknown to me at first, but the New York Dolls were all that it took to sell me on the idea that cross-dressing was no impediment to a good thrash song. It was one of these friends who had the imported version of the first Clash album, who had a copy of Too Much Too Soon, and a stack of seven inches actually purchased in England, who re-introduced me to Bowie.

The particular album was Station to Station, which is a pretty damn good album, strange (for the day) in the long length of its tracks and the low number of cuts on the album. As in the glory days of vinyl, it was a record that demanded you sit in the dark and listen. It was definitely more disco than punk, in retrospect, funky, layered; fun. And I got a dub tape of this friend’s “greatest hits” of Bowie that day, giving me a chance to really listen to the lyrics of anthems like “Rebel, Rebel” and “Changes” and “Fame” and the like.

I listened, instead of of reacting on face value to my perceived image of Bowie, because I’d learned that there were great rewards in discovering new music that way. And slowly, understood the larger lesson of discovering new people, and not being afraid of them, that way. Bowie mattered to this friend, quite a bit, and while he never quite penetrated my soul to the same extent, from then on I could understand how important he was to others.

I can’t say as I remember a particular epiphany about connecting Outsider status on matters of simple taste in music, or in politics, or the condition of oppression based on class or ethnicity, with that of sexual identity, but I do remember taking out my “Death Before Disco” t-shirt one day a few months after getting that personalized Bowie “hits” tape and listening to Station to Station all the way through in the dark, with my friend — a person as weird and outcast as I was, maybe in different ways, but a person, whole and individual and connected to me. I didn’t have to love Bowie to like my friend; he didn’t have to be a Ramones fanatic to be a good person. He didn’t have to be straight to be a friend. The t-shirt had been a staple for concert-going, once upon a time — and on this day, I looked at it anew, realizing the illustration on it was making fun of gay people. And on that day it felt wrong, and I put it away.

Turn and face the strange.

The Undemocratic Republican Primary Calendar

The fix might not be in, but the mechanics for making the fix are all in place.

Republican voters this Presidential cycle, do you think your vote counts? You might want to think again and consider the potential manipulations and shenanigans in your party's rules and voting schedule.

I won't lay out conspiracy theories here or pick the potential winners and losers of this system; you can do that yourself. This just lays out the rules and the calendar and you can work out how to manipulate this.

If you vote in the Democratic primaries for President, your vote will be counted proportionately for the candidate you’re voting for. So, if Clinton gets 50% in a state, Sanders 40%, and O’Malley 10%, Clinton will get 50% of the delegates for that state, Sanders 40%, O’Malley 10%. There are rounding issues here and there, but that’s basically the same rule for every Democratic contest.

Now, for the Republicans, instead there’s a weird quilt of rules about allocation of delegates based on the amount of votes they get in a caucus or primary as to whether they get delegates proportionally, if the winner by plurality gets all of them, who gets “bonus” delegates and at-large delegates assigned to the state delegation to the RNC convention, and so forth.

The bottom line is, your vote may count double, triple, or tenfold, or may not count at all, or may count proportionately. Whether it’s going to count or not has a lot to do with state party rules, which are set up basically so they can be manipulated around a party-favorite candidate.

Details:

For the first two weeks of March of 2016, the RNC requires sort of proportional representation of delegates - but leaves up specific rules about what the thresholds are to receive delegates on a state by state basis. They also allow states to set up a system to award at-large and bonus delegates (delegates given to a state because they have Republican elected officials at the state or federal level) as winner-take-all, either by Congressional district or statewide.

After March 14, state parties can set their delegation rules anyway they want. They can actually change the rules at any time; so one state could be winner-take-all, another could be strictly proportional, another could be proportional with thresholds for candidates to earn any delegates.

The intent of this latter rule was (ostensibly) to allow states to adopt winner-take-all rules once an apparent front-runner had started leading the field, so it would force everybody to effectively rally around the leading candidate. However, note that the flexibility in state by state rules allows each state party (run, by definition, by the Establishment) to basically pick their rules based on which candidate they want to earn delegates or be denied delegates based on the polling going into primary day.

Note also caucus rules are wildly variable; some caucuses have their own threshold requirements on a site-by-site basis (such as 15% of voters present must support a candidate to get a vote in the state totals, otherwise the voters are forced to caucus with another candidate) and the allocations of groups of votes can change by county, congressional district, or special district in the state. There’s so much room for shenanigans here it’s hard to describe in detail.

Here’s how this will play out (Republican calendar only):

States locked in to the semi-proportional format: * = caucus, otherwise a primary

February:  (basically one a week) 2/1 Iowa*, 2/9 NH, 2/20 SC, 2/23 NV.

(Washington caucuses are on 2/20, but their Presidential delegates are not selected at the caucus. It’s complicated but the bottom line is there are no delegates to go into the delegate count and thus affect the overall race.)

March:

3/1 - Alabama, Alaska*, Arkansas, CO*, Georgia, MA, Minn*, ND*, OK, TN, TX, VT, VA, WY* (“Super Tuesday” this year)

3/5 - Kansas*, Louisiana, Maine*.

3/6 - Puerto Rico

3/8 - Hawaii*, Idaho, MI, Miss.

OK, so now we’re at the end of the enforced proportionality window and will have a “leader” in the delegate count.

States where the states can basically change the rules about delegate selections anytime, including winner-take-all:

3/15 - FLA, ILL, Missouri, NC, OH (<— actually more delegates to be awarded than “Super Tuesday”)

3/22 - AZ, UT*

4/4 - WI

4/19 - NY

4/26 - CT, DE, MD, PA, RI

5/3 - Indiana

5/10 - Neb, WV

5/17 - OR

5/24 - WA delegates actually selected

6/7 - CA, MT, NJ, NM, SD

6/28 - UT (delegates actually selected)

It's Larry Yount Day

Today, September 15th, is Larry Yount Day, in honor of the patron saint of September Call-Ups.

For those of you not familiar with the older brother of Hall of Famer Robin Young, Larry is the guy in baseball history who out-did the fictional Moonlight Graham.

Larry got called into a meaningless game for the Houston Astros in the 9th inning on this date in 1971 for his major league debut. He was out of baseball shape, having been out with the National Guard the previous week. (The common Vietnam-era practice of draft-eligible baseball players was to join the National Guard and get a friendly exemption from most actual duties, but they did have to drill from time to time.) He was stiff in the bullpen, but hid it from the coaches, and was announced as the relief pitcher without being entirely warm.

He got to the mound and started throwing his warm-up tosses, but was flinching from elbow pain as he threw them. This got the attention of his catcher, and then the coaching staff, who came to the mound, and removed him.

Under baseball rules, normally a pitcher has to face one batter before he can be removed legally (a pinch hitter may be announced and then replaced; the stricture on pitchers is to avoid an endless series of swaps that would delay the game forever as managers jockey for right-lefty matchups). However, there's an exception in the rules for injuries.

That said, when a player is thus removed from the game, he's credited with a game "played" - and thus in Larry Yount's case, he was an official major leaguer the moment he stepped onto the mound.

Yount's stiffness continued so he never got into another game that year. In the spring of 1972, he had a great spring training but got optioned to AAA with the last cuts due to some other players on the roster having run out of minor league options. The club expected to bring him back later that season, and indeed Larry started out great at AAA. But something happened -- not an injury, Larry swore later -- and he lost his effectiveness suddenly, and ended up spending a very mediocre year entirely in AAA. He kicked around the minors a few more years, and was traded to the Brewers in 1973 for another minor leaguer, where he broke spring training camp with his younger brother Robin -- then a rookie-- in 1974, but he hung up his spikes after not making the big club.

Here's his line from Baseball reference:

1 major league game "played"; zero batters faced; a perfect line with mathematically undefined ERA and Wins-Above-Replacement.

Dream the dream, you September call-ups of life.

Pete's 22, and the Many, Many Open Mad Men Questions Before the Final Episodes

One last stab at trying to wrap it all up before the series conclusion starts tomorrow.

Will the series end in 1969, or will it bleed into 1970? Will we see a years-after scene of some sort? Will it end on a trite New Year's Eve, or will the series do one last time-jump of some sort?

Important events of 1969 yet to come after Season 7 Episode 7: the Manson Family murders, the Beatles crossing Abbey Road, Woodstock (will Sally go?), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance kid is released, the Mets win the World Series (you have to believe *that* one will make it in, given the repeated shout-outs to the Mets over the years and the lingering token of Lane Pryce's Mets' pennant finding Don in 7.4), debut of the 747 (continuing the series' use of planes and jet age imagery - that plus the first flight ended in New York City, on December 2), the Rolling Stones concert at Altamont (the unofficial "end of the 1960's).

What musical outros will guide us down the final seven episodes? The latter half of 1969 is replete with classic releases, from the first Stooges album to Nick Drake's debut album to breakout albums from Laura Nyro and David Bowie to Abbey Road and Let It Bleed (ominously, in December). But please, no Harry Chapin.

Will Don get into an elevator? Will the elevator be used as a heavy-handed metaphor for something going on in Don's life? Will he fall down an elevator shaft? Will he overhear some important plot detail from an elevator? Will he get into a fight in an elevator? Answers: Yes, yes, maybe, yes, yes, and yes.

Will Ben Michaelson, Don's Lawyer, finally make an appearance on screen? Will it be to get Don out of that awful contract with McCann?

Speaking of which, are we finally going to meet Hubert Green and the crack team of executives from Secor Laxative, the firm's most loyal client through ten (plus) years and four changes of ownership? How about seeing a little of the creative?

Will there be an acting role for a taxi driver? Or will we learn Mad Men is set in a parallel universe where there are robot taxis in the 1960's?

Will Ginsburg make a cameo, a la Paul Kinsey and Danny Siegel? If it's a sad expository scene underscoring the insanity of modern life set in the nuthouse, as with Pete and Beth, I'll be disappointed. Buick's Bob Benson?

We've already skipped over the Stonewall Riots (in June of 1969) and gone straight to the moon landing, missing a golden opportunity to find one of the series' best-loved write-off characters in the midst of the historical action, or at least running away from it. Will Sal Romano show up again, out of the closet and directing fabulous, fabulous commercials?

Which former paramours of Don - there are so many to choose from - will make an appearance? Or are we past the monkeying around of Sex and getting down to the brass tacks of Death? There are some good candidates - Sylvia Rosen is still in the building, Rachel Menken Katz was still in Don's heart, and poor Suzanne Farrell was literally left holding the bag the last time we saw her - Lord knows Dr. Faye has every motivation to come after Don with Pete's .22 - but my money's on Betty being the only significant figure from Don's past love life to play a real role in the end.

Uh oh. The Manson murders were just three weeks after the moon landing. Is Megan's Sharon Tate t-shirt going to be just one of those coincidences? Hunch: Megan's going to know somebody involved, and something will happen as a result, and it will not be that interesting. (We are hoping it's not flying back to Don's arms.)

We all know Harry Crane will never, ever make partner. Will Roger finally get his wish and get Harry fired, or will he become the king of SC&P, lording over the agency from his throne in the computer room?

Will Henry become Attorney General and continue his rise, or will be become Lieutenant Governor and join the obscure dustbin of history?

Who, exactly, is Pete going to end up shooting with the .22 rifle  that's been hanging around since Season 1, episode 3? Or is this the Godot of Chekhovian guns, never to be actual shot after all? It is the last act.

A small but persistently nagging question leftover from season 2: was Anita's little boy actually Peggy's? If so will Peggy reunite with him as his mother, or be forced to make a choice between career and having a family?

Will Sally lose her virginity? Please, please God, if it happens, please don't let it be to Glenn. (The acting talents of the two young actors in this off-again, off-again romance spread over eight years have diverged mightily, and what chemistry might have been created for either a happy or sad first physical union has now veered over into the prospect of simply yucky.)

Will Don Draper literally die, literally plunge off a building, and literally see his life's work fly by? Or will Don be killed metaphorically so that Dick Whitman can live?

What, exactly, is going to be the fruition of all this astronaut imagery and explicit reference from the previous nine seasons? Apollo 12 is barely remembered and the drama of Apollo 13 lies in 1970.

Will Ken Cosgrove quit advertising to become, oh, say, John Irving? Duh, of course.

Will we have the fifth Bobby Draper? Will anybody in the family notice the only regular character in the series to have been played by different actors is any different?

Will Captain Harris be killed in Vietnam, freeing Joan to marry Roger, which she will refuse to do? Will Joan end up as President of the new agency?

Will Roger get back together with Mona? Of course.

Will Peggy and Stan split off to form their own agency, or be content as mid-level cogs at McCann? Will Peggy and Stan, you know, get together finally? What about Peggy and the now-suicidal but New York bound Ted Chaough? What about Peggy and the hunky handyman, Nick? Answer: Peggy always will have her cat.

Will Betty get a life? I keep thinking that ship has sailed, but hope springs eternal. Episode 2 of season 1 started out with establishing the basic conflict of an intelligent woman bred and inculcated into living a life of background subservience to men's more important doings, but the series has never quite stepped into the pitch and swung for the fence with Betty. We can only hope she realizes that Henry is not that much of an improvement over Don, and at least joins Francine at the travel agency.

Will the show, in the end, be about Don or about Peggy? Will it be about the irredeemable burden of the past preventing personal evolution (Don) or the great leap forward of liberation (Peggy)?

Will anybody care in seven weeks?

The Case Against Bobsledding

The origins of this sport were in tobogganing. Can you recognize the modern bobsled as a toboggan? You cannot. A bobsleigh was invented by putting sled runners on a toboggan, as a novelty for mountain resort guests. It was primarily popular at St. Moritz and a few competing resort areas in Switzerland and Germany. Next they added on a steering wheel. Then they put on the space cowling to cut down on air drag. Now the top of the line bobsleds cost between $25,000 and purportedly a million dollars for the BMW-designed sleds.

There are only 17 bobsled runs in the entire world. 15 of them were built for Olympic games. Originally just laid out on a mountain on snow, first they watered them down to get an ice run to build up the speed. Now they're all artificially-iced, prescribed courses. ALL of the modern tracks have been designed by one person.

It's not like snowboarding or archery where anybody who wants to can try out the sport as a novice. A junior in the US program spends $40 a day just to stay at the facility; it takes $20,000 a year to keep a junior in the training program for luge, skeleton, and bobsled. The ones who prove to be good drivers but aren't good enough athletes for luge or skeleton are the only ones who "graduate" to bobsled. It's actually far more accessible to join motor sports as a junior competitor. It's more elitist than yachting. Bavarian Curling - Ice Stock Sport - has far more participants worldwide.  Casual Olympics watchers may recall the Crown Prince of Monaco was an Olympic Bobsledder, granting a set of sprinters citizenship and bankrolling the whole thing because…well, he wanted to be an Olympic athlete.

You *can* take a bobsled ride - with a professional driver in front of you and brakeman behind you, from a start where somebody else pushes off, for half the distance the Olympians go (at least in Utah and at Lake Placid). For your 90 seconds at Lake Placid, you pay $85 (but you get a souvenir photo).

There are two kinds of bobsledders. There are the drivers, who are as specialized an athlete as you can imagine. They basically spend their training time not associated with training to make ten steps pushing the sled in memorizing the exact turns of all the bobsled runs in the world. Over and over they run them in simulations, until they've got full memory of every turn. Not to say there isn't a lot of skill involved; but unlike skiing, where the slopes are different and often the courses are laid out differently from year to year, the bobsled runs are never changing.

Then there are the pushers/brakemen. Their one and only skill is running fast and jumping in the sled, which is why you have world class sprinters now replacing pretty much every former winter sports person.

As Slate pointed out in an article, you get highly predictable results from a competition where you make four runs on exactly the same track with the same athletes. The team in first place after one run wins 70% of the time, after two runs 85%, and after three runs - 100%. Slate called the fourth run the most meaningless contest in athletics, and with the exception of the Pro Bowl, I will agree.

Even so, the variation among the top competitors is in thousandths of seconds. The predictability of the times on a given event is extremely high.

it is a sport that exists for one reason only: because it's an Olympic event. (A tenuous enough one that it was briefly dropped in 1960 due to lack of participating countries.) Countries want those medal counts so they pay for the Olympic program (Jamaica's team is currently sponsored by the Jamaican tourism board) because it's an Olympic sport. There are a few sports invented for the Olympics (decathlon, for example, or that funky skateboard-on-skis/snowboards event, slopestyle, they added in recently or any of the X games things) but they're hybrids of other events or sports.

I say: fake sport. There is nothing "sporting" about it, little drama or amazement at the athleticism.

The Parable of the Cave

Today is the 72nd anniversary of the discovery of the cave paintings at Lascaux. There are other paleolithic paintings, and many were known prior to Lascaux, but the sheer volume, the imagery, the immediacy, and the "signatures" (traced hands) at Lascaux are still sui generis.

Here we have a time tunnel to 15,000 BC, to see how humans thought, how dominating the world around them was, as they still clung barely to survival of the species. The depiction of animals and the stars has often been attributed, without much evidence, as being part of the cosmology or religion of people at large. For all we know, it could just as easily have been some lone artist, grooving on his or her own aesthetic. Maybe they just loved drawing. Perhaps the artists' (artist's?) contemporaries considered the activity weird, or maybe it was the center of recreation, or a contest, not a religious rite. Who knows? The "art" may have been the birth of science: taxonomy of animals, depictions of recognizable clusters of stars. (At Lascaux, we have human witness to the truth of evolution: disappeared species are depicted, their bones available for inspection and confirmation of their existence nearby; surviving species are shown in earlier forms. We have evolved since then as well.) In any event, it's (now) a monument to human creativity that predates any surviving building or written record, and more to the point, the drawings are still just fun to look at, without any context. With the context, they're fairly jaw-dropping.

But the cautionary tale of Lascaux is not in the creation of the paintings, or the mysteries of the art, but what's happened to the paintings since.

I have always loved the fact the paintings were rediscovered by a group of teenagers, goofing around, with their dog (named Robot). In terms of the cycle of rebirth and rediscovery, I find this more heartening than if they'd been discovered by an academic expedition or some official organization. Of course, the site, even during World War II, was quickly taken over by "authorities" and "experts", who have held sway ever since.

And this brief 72-year history of modern supervision has been a disaster for the paintings. First thousands of visitors a day tromped through: I don't blame them, I'd love a chance to see these in person as well. Their gaseous emissions -- carbon dioxide, of course -- started degrading the paintings that had sat for 170 centuries relatively well preserved almost immediately, to the point they had to close the caves off to the public in 1963. In the ensuing years, attempts to "preserve" the caves with humidity control, the use of lighting, and simple disturbance of the soil have kicked up lichens, formed crystals, and introduced various forms of toxic molds that are destroying the art fairly efficiently, considering the time frame involved. The laws of unintended consequences certainly apply, but such consequences should be expected, because it's our way to leave a path of dissolution in our wake.



Our footprint is heavy: how many of those extinct species depicted did we extinguish ourselves through hunting? Is the quest to understand ourselves worth the destruction of our own heritage? What responsibilities do we have to our posterity?

Talk to the hand.

Five Things I Liked About Sally Ride

5. She went to Swarthmore. OK, for three semesters, but I strongly suspect Swarthmore of her era did not provide her with the kind of updrafts for her to spread her particular wings and fly. But I love that she started out there, and she had the sense to move on. (And I point out to future generations, she did not leave Swat with the intent of transferring; she dropped out, ostensibly to focus on tennis.)

4. She was a lesbian with a committed partner of 27 years.  Can we edit this in the future? This should be jarring to someone who reads it years hence as being a weird thing for me to note. To say nothing here, at all, and that in her obituary she left her wife of 27 years behind as a survivor? Because Sally Ride, first American woman in space, is the tagline for her obituary, which in 1983 was a huge freaking deal because of where we were, so wretchedly, in 1983. But I want to point out the issue in 2012 is that Ride died with a loving wife, and because of the lack of legal recognition, she won't have the simple line in her obituary that "legally married" Americans have. Maybe she didn't want to get married, I don't know. A hundred years from now maybe she'll be forgotten for "both" "achievements" (was she the first gay person in space? I don't know), but you know what, in 2012, I say, this is what an Astronaut-hero is. And you're going to tell me her survivor couldn't be buried next to her in Arlington (if that's what she had chosen for burial, at least)? Is this how America treats its heroes? Well, it's how it treats everybody who's gay. You could cure cancer, balance the federal budget, save Lassie from a burning building, and defeat Voldemort and in America in 2012, if you happen to be a lesbian, that won't get you a marriage license if you want one. It won't get your spouse survivors' benefits and it won't get them the simple recognition as a widow.

3. She was a Steely-Eyed Missile Man. This was the phrase they used in the 1960s, during the most macho and testosterone-fueled era of astronautics, to describe somebody who could solve complex and demanding problems under pressure. Its obvious phallic overtones had their origins in the test pilot program, but were extended to the technicians and engineers who worked problems on the launch pad. Ride was famous, famous for being cool under pressure in training and in space, notably while controlling the centerpiece robotic arm in the shuttle. Was she ever called a Steely-Eyed Missile Man? Well, I'm calling her one. She was a damned good engineer by all accounts.

2. She believed Roger Boisjoly. She ranks up there with Richard Feynman for unraveling the engineering side of the story, all too obvious in its origins of groupthink and "go fever",  of the Challenger disaster in 1986. Boisjoly was, like most whistleblowers, ostracized instead of lauded for truth-telling. I don't know whether Ride had a special position of security that allowed her to publicly support Boisjoly at a time when he was being scapegoated, or was perhaps even more vulnerable because of lingering sexism, or because of her sexual identity, but either way it still took a lot of courage to speak truth to power in that atmosphere.

1. She did not sell herself; she was not full of herself. In a society full of self-promotion and hype, and at a time when NASA is all about constant public relations to try to keep the human flight program prominent, she didn't yap. She might have been a booster of NASA, to be sure, but she was not a self-booster. She didn't take endorsements. She didn't make a big deal out of herself, even though she was, yes, a big deal. You can make the argument she was just a private person, or she didn't, with good reason, want her private life on a pedestal, or she was just an engineer at heart. Maybe the Gary Cooper attitude was a myth, and we've always been a nation of hucksters, but I prefer my heroes to be humans, not cardboard cutouts.

Extruberescence

extruberescence - (n) - an architectural feature, usually an addition, which does not match the original style of the building to which it is attached, in an unattractive and particularly noticeable manner. Also: a general term for an architectural crime.

Example: "Ooo, what a lovely Craftsman!" "Wait, what's that extruberescence on the side of the house?" "MY GOD, it's a vinyl-sided hot tub enclosure with sliding glass doors!"

Studytainment

Here's another neologism I'm predicting will take off soon: studytainment. Def: the unhappy hybrid between the act of studying and a distracting multitasking enjoyable recreational activity, such as listening to an iPod or watching a movie, simultaneously. This will eventually evolve to some kind of designed approach that will bleed into actual curriculum, becoming as commonplace as the idea, say, that effective teaching is a form of entertainment and good teachers are good entertainers.
As per my previous prediction about the word edutainment, which I made circa 1992, this is without much joy on the subject, it's based on an advertising marketing concept about selling things to kids and teenagers (and to their adult enablers) by promising to make 'studying' more fun

Jonathan Richman, A Man Among Gods

Jonathan Richman Live at the Henry Miller Memorial Library, May 16, 2010

I've loved Jonathan Richman for years and for various reasons, but I have to admit I never really got him, I don't think, until I finally saw him live.

As a punker, I adored the early Modern Lovers, having found "Government Center" on the Troublemakers weirdo compilation and a much-copied tape of the original Modern Lovers record via another John Cale-loving friend around the same time. Boy, did Jonathan have the cred from all that, the stories of him living on Andy Warhol's couch, Jerry Harrison and whats-his-name from the Cars having been in the Modern Lovers, that rocking good time. And of course my college band did a version of Road Runner -- who didn't?

But there, the earlier version of me succumbed to the then-rap on Jonathan that he had somehow walked away from the hardcore of the alternarock scene, to go off and make silly if pleasant records, in obscurity. I missed a decade of Jonathan for the worst reason in the world, not because he wasn't making good music - he was, it was excellent - but because of some screwed up idea I had about what good music was.

Happily I rediscovered Jonathan in the late 80s when he was on Rounder, which was located right down the street from me (and is/was run by the great Red Sox fan, Bill Nowlin). Since then he's shown up in my ears off and on as his pleasantly diverse career has poked itself up here and there. I laughed so hard at seeing him in Kingpin, basically doing what he was doing then -- playing at small venues and playing his heart at -- I once again got the mistaken idea that he had now become a sort of sly jokester, projecting hipster irony all over his rather sweet and sincere repertoire. His further cinematic appearance, this time to considerable narrative importance in an outright Hollywood hit, There's Something About Mary I'm sure brought him to wider acclaim as he deserved, but for those of us who seeming had been listening to him forever, it was sweet narrative delivery. It seemed like the kind of kidding-on-the-sly message Jonathan's music was made for. Not confessional in the singer-songwriter sense, just out and out honest about the difficulties of sincerely pursuing one's heart in an age of stalkers, slackers, and sly looks. The presentation of his music -- and his on-screen persona as a chorus -- was so tongue and cheek but melodically graceful it felt, well, wonderful Jonathan had arrived, or rather, America had caught up with him.

My latest phase of Jonathan misunderstanding is sort of retro: my son, at the age of six, knows his work via "I'm a Little Airplane" and "Ice Cream Man", the very so unhip songs we lamented back in the decade after the early Modern Lovers that made his alterna-rep. Now really appreciating the way Jonathan channeled the whole experience of childhood - it wasn't nostalgia, it was genuine insight, that drove those songs - I thought, well, he's been singing to different audiences, maybe just tailoring his message all this years. A true entertainer.

When Jonathan got around to his only "hit" song (well, one of two) of the concert he played at the outdoor Henry Miller Library in Big Sur on Sunday (his 59th birthday, incidentally), he did so with a great ad lib mid-song that he was playing at the Henry Miller library, after all -- looking at the many other middle-aged fans such as myself who'd brought their young kids along -- and said, "This ain't Romper Room!" before carefully slurring the last syllable in "Pablo Picasso". "He never got called an ASS-O...NOT LIKE YOU!"

Here's the thing about Jonathan of 2010. He has no Facebook page. There's no official MySpace. No Twitter Feed. He has no web site. There's a stub on the website of his "label", Vapor Records, which carefully points out Jonathan has nothing to do, at all, with the internet. At the concert, there's no swag or souvenirs for sale - no t-shirts, no CDs, nothing to buy. What you get is the experience of Jonathan singing. I feel like such an...Ass-o, Fanboy that I am, when we started talking to him before the show. I asked him if I could take a picture of him with my son -- which he obliged, coming down off the stage -- Jonathan's response was "hey, do whatever you like." I awkwardly told him about my own Massachusetts roots as we both got tea. He said, "I'm from Natick." I paused, dorkily. "Um, I knew that!" Jonathan looked at me and said, "How'd you know that?" Here's where my ugly past as a self-absorbed poseur, a reader of fan magazines and liner notes and self-described encyclopedias of rock and roll, a browser of Wikipedia, was shamefully exposed. The best I could do was to say um a couple of times and respond..."I'm psychic...?"

And it wasn't until the music started that, yes, I think I finally got it. I got Jonathan. It's not just that he's a performer, an artist, a songwriter. He's the original punk rocker. He's completely fucking sincere to himself, and to the audience. He emotes, he makes eye contact, he sings straight to you, and while he's funny, and self-aware, and political, and cultured, and erudite, and yes, entertaining, there's just no artifice about the whole thing. I've been to some amazing, great, rock and roll shows, but even among the most "honest" artists and groups I've walked among, there's always a distance of the rock star, the idol, the very stage itself. Even in the glory days of the hardcore scene, when bands performed on the same level (literally) as the fans and let them take a turn at the microphone, there was the artifice of the faux equality at the heart of the matter. Never, never, before I saw Jonathan play did I ever get such a sense of such utter honesty at a show. Hell, I got the rock star vibe from none other than Pete Seeger when my son and I saw him last fall. He was fabulous, but he was on a pedestal. Not so Jonathan.

And the lo-fi minimalism -- it isn't really lo-fi or all that minimalist. I finally also get the point of bringing the volume of the music down so far that it's still the essential rock and roll of rockabilly days and before. Jonathan stepped out in front of his microphones several times during the show, just singing to the air and playing his half-size Spanish guitar to the air and the redwoods. It might've been a little harder to hear, but not much so, and at those moments the last barrier between artist and audience -- the technology of amplification -- vanished as well. But rock and roll it is. The drumming from Tommy Larkin may not be loud but it has the complexity of syncopation required by each song. The role played by the electric bass is simply played by Jonathan having a strong chord structure that articulates both bass and treble lines. He makes this dinky little acoustic with nylon strings as "loud" and clear a rock guitar as you could imagine. It dawned on me fairly early: Jonathan, at some point during the last 40 years, has become a guitar maven. He has this way of channeling, well, Segovia or somebody, with pseudo-classical licks, but he has this vast vocabulary of quotes in his notes. It's a seamless chord dictionary on one hand, but alternatively it's often just your basic three-chord sequence with little lyrical jaunts up and down.

So Jonathan does two "hits", Pablo Picasso and a ten-minute encore of "Let Her Go", he does "Hurricane" he does a song called "Celestial" (in Spanish)about reading aloud with his wife and the virtues of a good book, he sings in Italian, French, Spanish, English, and Bostonian, he does a Leonard Cohen with such a wicked lick to it it could've been a heavy metal hit, he does "Vermeer" one of the truest songs about a painter I ever heard and "Keith Richards" with the same admiration and a taste of the same slight alienation from the peculiar talent and life of that particular artiste. He started out with an update of "Old World" about how, yeah, he liked parts of the Old World but he doesn't miss torture and sexism and tyranny and so forth.

Jonathan started the show when somebody asked him "When are you going on?" while he talked with a couple of audience members, and decided to go on then; the first thing he did was told everybody to pull the chairs closer, because "we're not afraid of you if you're not afraid of us." (We did pull all the folding chairs closer.) He ended it with a single encore and then went right back to talking with everybody in the audience.

Jonathan is the anti-rock god. He's just a man in a profession that has always been full of the bullshit of the idol, the elevation of the artist over the audience, most especially commercially. All those elements that were used to describe Jonathan as "cult" or "eccentric" suddenly make perfect, wonderful, sense to me. The acoustic-minimal instrumentation, the ever-changing interest in genre, the insistence on simple gigs with so little equipment it could fit on the back of a bicycle (plus a trailer for the drums), the eclectic song subject matter, the rejection of almost all the trappings of the business (from the concert t-shirt to the very idea of self-promotion). It's DIY, for real. No wonder there's a small cadre that follows him like he was the Grateful Dead, sort of, but don't really because they have lives and Jonathan does, too.

The experience is still fresh in my mind, so this may just be the happy mojo and good karma talking, but I have this feeling this may have been the best rock concert I'll ever go to. It cleansed me of much of the crud I feel I've been carrying over the years about experiencing the music. The Gods are dead. Long live humanity.

The Proper Use of Social Media

I'm skeptical about the literary value of the so-called social media -- movies being made from blogs notwithstanding, it does not seem like the sort of thing that lends itself to complicated ideas, or even simple ideas -- but I would make a great exception for this twitter feed, which is just asking to be made into an epic novel followed by a film trilogy.

Cyberformication

Documenting one of my neologisms, in the vain (?) hope of preserving credit of authorship:

Cyberformication (n) to cyberformicate (v) - the strange feeling your website is being crawled. By extension, any sixth sense concerning electronic media being invaded by uninvited parties, such as computer virus infections, robots, etc. "Imelda felt her spine shudder at the thought of her blog being cyberformicated." "When Antonio grep'd his system process table, he realized that his eery feeling of cyberformication was probably in error."

The Three AM Web Search

I just checked my google web history trends, and discovered the only hour of the day I haven't made a search since they invented this thing -- and I, idiot that I am, have tracked the web history as long as I can -- is 3 AM. I note this includes searches done in different time zones, so 3 AM may simply be a boundary condition for my consciousness. I wonder if Hillary Clinton is ready to google at 3 AM...?

Ken Burns, Liar

The War is a documentary film, but one that reminds me not so much of a brilliant scholarly work, a single-volume history, a collection of primary material artfully organized, or even a popularized retelling of a story so much as a clips show. There's nothing about the story that hasn't been done better elsewhere, and possibly even more economically if you cut out all the commercials on the History Channel and its brethren. I won't get into quibbles on the history, as I did previously with (the much superior) Civil War and Baseball, because that's beside the point. If Burns' mission was, as he's intimated in interviews, to correct the misapprehensions of American high school students that World War II was fought against Russia, he could've used a few Cliff Notes devices to get the point across a little more succinctly. If the true motivation of the film, as one suspects, is to explore the "why we fight" theme for "the good war" in an age of diminishing moral clarity about the use of armed force by nations (which is itself a relativistic assessment), then he's buried his lead rather ham-fistedly. (Embarrassingly so: the script uses foreshadowing in a way that would get a 10th-grade English essay a "B", with one-off lines about a soldier enlisting in 1942 'who would find out why he fought in 1945' -- is there going to be a concentration camp liberation in the last episode, by chance?) If the point of view was supposed to be the close to the ground social web of a Studs Terkel, the backgrounding which takes up over half the movie is inexplicably discursive. If it's to provide that survey course everybody in this country needs in World War II 101, then the bullet points got messed up during the transfer from PowerPoint.

If, as the term "documentary" suggests, it was meant to be a collection in the first person -- Burns has also cited the rapid disappearance of World War II vets to the march of time as a reason for doing this project -- then perhaps it should've spent more time with veterans who hadn't already told their story elsewhere, much more thoroughly. The starkest example is Quentin Aanenson, the fighter pilot who touched on virtually the entire American campaign in Western Europe (and ended up on the ground as a forward air observer and close attack coordinator, so had the unique combination of a bird's eye and a worm's perspective). Aanenson did a magnificent, DIY documentary 15 years ago, "A Fighter Pilot's Story", which was a remarkably gritty, grim, and honest description of a job overly associated with glamour and gung-hoism. So in the Burns version, we get a watered-down cut-and-paste, better photographed and produced but already distinctly a third-person second-sourcing even when Aanenson is being interviewed directly.

What did PBS do with the release of "The War"? It pulled the DVD of "A Fighter Pilot's Story" from sale last month. That should describe in detail the educational motivations of the network.

All that said, my text today is the lying that passes for documentary film-making. I'm not speaking of specific historical facts; as I said, mine is not to quibble on this front. It's the Burnsian technique of mixing still photos, narration, sound, soundtrack, and in this case, archived film amongst his set-piece interviews. (This is a common issue, one not unique to Ken Burns, of course, but whenever there's a well-spoken of documentary, the fact that it is mostly artifice and very little in the way of on-screen truth-telling should be brought up.)

The problem is this. The viewer hears a narration about men in a particular battle, while a picture taken from another battle is shown. That's a lie. It creates the false visual association of what the picture conveys with what the narrator is talking about. Perhaps the picture is an accurate reflection of that experience, perhaps it isn't. But the viewer isn't given the fact that it's not a "matching" picture to make up his or her own mind. Similarly, nearly every time you hear an explosion, a ratatat of a machine gun, or another sound in this film you're hearing something that's been pasted on to the film, not something that was recorded at the same time and place as the visual image displayed. It's no different than, say, Saving Private Ryan, or even Sands of Iwo Jima; it's a war created in post-production. The experience of the sound of the war, of the moment, might match what the sound editor and director have inserted, but I doubt it.

This is not documentary. It's a form of historical fiction, which no matter how well-researched or well thought-out to convey the larger truth of the situation, is simply an act of artifice. As such it's also ahistorical, a form of narrative that's about the filmmakers' understanding and not the topic at hand.

How do I know this? To even the amateur historian, there are plenty of tells. Some of the footage and stills is familiar. To the simply observant viewer, there are plenty more tells. Describing the ascendancy of Major General George Patton in the Tunisia campaign, for instance, we see a picture of Patton surveying a dusty battle field -- wearing three stars, the mark of a Lieutenant General. In footage of the D-Day landings in June, we see stock footage of Navy personnel apparently supervising the bombardment -- wearing winter clothing. We have pictures of "H Hour" at Omaha Beach, which are all from the third wave or later (the lack of photos from the first waves has been a well-discussed issue; the combat photographers in the first wave lost their equipment or spoiled their film, leaving only one partial roll of pictures.) I noticed at least a half dozen more such anachronisms in a very short period of film, and as I said, I'm an amateur.

One might argue that a filmmaker without access to a true visual record of a specific event isn't obligated to do more than provide a backdrop to the verbal text. But by the same token, it would then be OK to provide erroneous captions to photos in history books if one is missing a really good photo for the text on the opposite page. I don't buy it.

Can you footnote a TV show? Yes -- by simply having accurate date and place descriptions attached to photos or film when they're played. This would at least break up the associative array in the viewer's mind when they hear one thing and see another.

But this is rarely done, because it breaks up the visual continuity of the film. That's what this ultimately comes down to: the filmmaker who wants a flow, a pace, a visual feel, who uses the pan and the fade and the wipe and the timed edit, because those are his or her tools to create an emotional response in the viewer.

And that, in turn, is the bottom line here. When documentarians and historians sacrifice accuracy for beauty, they're creating something that, fact-based and reality-driven though it may be, is intended for emotional consumption, not analytic consumption. It's as much a work of fiction as any John Wayne shoot 'em up.

I don't mean this as a blanket condemnation of Ken Burns' work, which has had some real virtue to it over the years. But there's a difference between recreating the Civil War, which in the collective consciousness is entirely a fourth-hand memory, and World War II, which is still available as a first-person. One thinks the money and time spent on this documentary would've been better spent getting lower-tech, archival interviews with surviving vets and Americans of the era, doing real first-person documentary work, maybe a higher-effort version of the many Oral History projects that are proceeding spottily in the country (as has been done quite well for holocaust survivors). If the point was to put together a survey, the way the Civil War did, there wasn't perhaps quite enough of a rethinking of the canonical recounting of the War, the point of view or voice, or the basic (and now nearly dreadfully famliiar) film technique for making that story. In a war that arguably had even higher stakes than the Civil War -- not just the future of the country, but of the world, at stake -- the dreadfully desperate situation doesn't seem quite so vivid. The World at War, forty years old now and done for a foreign audience originally, actually still has a more direct approach to the topic.

The controversy over the "inclusiveness" of Burns' talking heads (even if they aren't historians, but participants, they're still talking heads) misses the point that there's so much clutter in this film, which is neither a good survey nor a good first-personer, nobody's going to learn the real social history of the war accurately from it, anyway. A braver filmmaker might've trusted himself to stick to only interviews and maybe still pictures of the interviewees and their families, and left them to speak for themselves without the all-too-available action footage of combat. (That in itself is a kinetically-charged succubus to a movie maker - soooooooo sexy, visually.) Or alternatively, to put together that good single-volume modern semi-revisionist history to show to our high school kids, made it a bit more exciting and ignored the artifice of pretending to be an inclusive first-personer, simply rifling his interview subjects for the goods and using what works. (The number of truly boring and unilluminating anecdotes left in this movie is rather startling.)

Here, I think, is the real point of the film:

Burns closes the film with a picture of his dead WWII vet dad, the man who never told Ken his own story. The Spielbergian-missing-father psychological motivation for making a film is a little too pat, of course, although it's very, very tempting. But look at how PBS is positioning this: it's a nostalgia trip, launched during fund-raising season, aimed not at the World War II generation or even at today's callow and misinformed youth, but at Burns' generation, the Baby Boomers who need to have that emotional connection with their own parents affirmed as their parents die off and they in turn become the senior generation. That's what this film plays as. And if that happens to get more corporate sponsors from that generation, or pledges during pledge drive week...

Angry Dead White Men

Oh the bemusing juxtapositions one gets when one's reading list is selected by a three-year old semi-randomly based on the cover. A few weeks ago my little Oprah picked out James A. Garfield by Ira Rutkow ("Look, Daddy, it's Abraham Lincoln!" -- he recognized Garfield from the 'Presidents of the United States' place mat but couldn't quite place him), Orbit by John Nance ("Hey Daddy, it's the space shuttle!"), and Ralph Ellison: A Biography by Arnold Rampersad ("Look! It's Daddy's friend!" referring perhaps to the statue of the Buddha Ellison is posing with on the jacket cover).

The Garfield biography is part of a comprehensive series of biographies of all the Presidents. One of the problems with a project like this is one gives equal shelf space to the administrations of Franklin Roosevelt and William Henry Harrison. You're stuck finding a biographer for all of them, and in Garfield's case, at the second shortest tenure among our chief executives, there's probably a good reason why there's a paucity of biographers. Garfield's chief achievement was to have died a lingering and probably medically unnecessary and excessively painful slow death after being shot by a whacko. So the editors of American Presidents tapped a medical historian to detail Garfield's life, and the result is unsurprisingly weighted a bit towards Garfield's agonizing and fairly disgusting final three months.

Now, being a fan of accounts of strange 19th-century medical practices and obscure Presidents, I have no objection to this, and I did learn a thing or two about the late President. (Disclaimer: as a callow youth in Cleveland, on occasion I was known to have partied on Garfield's grave, as well as frequenting the nearby and then-incredibly-disgustingly-cool collection of lancets, tumors in jars, and other pleasing medical memorabilia at the now sadly-modernized Dittrick Collection, which featured some of the instruments used to "treat" Garfield). Ironically enough, he was a believer in homeopathic medicine, which in the early first-do-no-harm school of thought, would probably have saved Garfield by leaving him the hell alone. But the "heroic" (read: medieval) school of medicine was employed on Garfield, largely because his cabinet made the decision as to which physician to put in charge of him (medical ethics and laws suggest this would not have happened in an earlier and certainly not a later age, when his wife would've made the decisions on this front), and the poking, prodding, and literally horse-manured handling of Garfield's wound in an unnecessary effort to get the assassin's bullet out gave Garfield multiple infections and finally blood-curdlingly (literally, perhaps) painful sepsis. What is especially disturbing is that the work of Dr. Lister concerning sterile environments and germs was well-known, widely practiced in Europe, but misapplied in the US. Comprehensive sterile practice was associated with medicine's younger generation, and in a guild-oriented system where some of the most senior practitioners had little formal medical training by current standards, time-honored practice and precedent was honored and practiced over the considered novelty of empirically-derived medical science. In a time when the scientific method as we understand it was still being developed, for those without an analytical approach to the human body, disease, and so forth, it was difficult to distinguish a genuine breakthrough from faddish quackery. So much the better reason to engage in time-honored quackery instead. So as a "compromise" position, some of the practices of sterile medicine were adopted with an obvious failure to look at the underlying cause and effect. In the specific case of Garfield, the surgeons would douse his wound with alcohol but introduced unsterilized hands and instruments directly into his wounds. And it was the senior (and therefore least knowledgeable) physicians who had charge of the system (and thrall over the US hospital system in general) by the very gravity and importance of the patient. The family were kept in the dark about his condition, the chief physician and the opposing homeopathic family physician fought battles over Garfield's care via the press instead of in medical conference with one another.

As for Garfield, this strikes one as a familiar story: raised by a single mother in poverty, he escapes his hick town through ambition, currying of favor, and natural talent to get to an elite Eastern college (in this case, Williams). In an age of open rapacious capitalism where government was viewed in very limited terms with respect to forging national prosperity but in the most open terms when it came to patronage and personal gain, our hero ascends the ranks through a combination of pluck, greed, good timing and back-slapping charm. Managing to make the most out of an 18-month military career in the civil war that started with a political appointment and ended up with a staff job that lead to a Congressional seat in the middle of the war, Garfield ascends through the ranks of Congress by being utterly affable and fairly unremarkable in terms of taking extremes on any issue. Along the way, he commits not a few infidelities to both spouse and country. He emerges from a brokered convention as a compromise moderate candidate, and takes an utterly corrupt Vice President whom he can't personally stand on as political deal as part of the nomination process. It's the all-American story! Only instead of ending with the puppy licking his face, Garfield ends up getting shot at by a delusional nut job who wanted to become ambassador to France and thought the less than luminary Chester A. Arthur presented a better opportunity than Garfield, who rejected him repeatedly (he was hanged, of course, instead of being committed.)

A couple more odd factlets I learned from this book: despite Lincoln's assassination, Presidents still had very light protection - Garfield walked by himself to the Capital building and various appointments, for example, and the assassin simply read his schedule in the paper and trailed him to the train station. Congressmen typically also picked up extra money as lobbyists in those days, Congressional pay not being enough to support a person in Washington, and Garfield as a practicing lawyer did all sorts of lobbying that would be shocking today (if done above board, at least). There was no revolving door - none necessary, as you could keep your seat in Congress, represent the robber barons, and still be re-elected by landslides because of your alleged war record.

Garfield himself comes across as likeable if arrogant in fairly recognizable ways. One gets the sense that he would've been a competent caretaker President had he survived, which is a favorable contrast to the Peter-Principle incompetence of the Grant and Hayes administrations and the execrable accidental Presidency of Arthur. (It's a sign of how prosperous the country was during the guilded age that the rampant corruption and general mismanagement seemed to have had a negligible effect on the overall commonweal, even if it was an egregious offense to certain segments of society, notably the freed slaves in the post-Reconstruction era.) If he's forgotten, it's probably because he was so much of the type that he wouldn't've been that memorable even had he lived.

One more footnote: I was a bit surprised at the description of the national mourning and keening over Garfield's death. Even if he was well-enough liked, he did not win the Presidency by much of a majority and his election and person still represented division in a country at internal odds with itself. Even his own party was disputation and divided: the nature of this schism in the Republican party played a role in the mindset of his assassin. But then one considers the nature of Garfield's death, played out by hourly telegraph bulletins and in broadsheets over an extended period. The media hasn't changed much here, either, considering the coverage of celebrity deaths and cute missing persons in exotic locations. If Garfield weren't as well loved as the noting of his passing might have indicated, people had come to believe he was. Which is why there's a gigantic honking memorial tomb of him in Cleveland, and why nobody remembers who he was otherwise.

Orbit had all the earmarks of the kind of brain candy I normally find very amusing: an everyman hero who wins a trip into space on a private spaceship and who, after a freak accident kills the pilot, finds himself alone and on his own in orbit around earth with a broken spaceship and only five days of oxygen. It's the kind of story that Robert Heinlein should've written in the 30s or at least in his boy-science-fiction phase in the 50s. Alas, Orbit's hero isn't a plunky 12 year old but a middle-aged white guy on his second bad marriage, disrespected by his haraden of a wife and blamed by his eldest son for the untimely death of his psychologically unbalanced first wife, living vicariously while drudging away at a meaningless if well paid white collar job for the pharma industry and lusting secretly at the hottie PR director of the private space tourist company (who of course lusts after him, too). This wouldn't quite make it one of the worst, most self-indulgent pieces of crap I've ever read, but the implausible, techincally dubious, and extremely unsympathetic schtick that follows does. See, our hero, Kip, who is presented as a man of action, decides to write up his biography-cum-theory-of-life into the laptop that functions on the spacecraft, for the benefit of future generations fifty years hence when his body and the ship just might be recovered. The theory here is that no man is as free with his thoughts as the dying man, in this case literally free of the constraints of society, not even to mention gravity. Even though all his communications have been blacked out by the space junk impact that killed the pilot (but conveniently left the life support system and the laptop intact), there's one of those "backdoors" the author apparently read about (probably in the same report that Senator Stevens used to describe the giant Tubes on the Internet), linked up to a downlink that works but can only transmit information one way (are you following?) So what Kip thinks he's writing for posterity is actually being scrolled real-time on the internet thanks to an intrepid hacker-boy. Kip's honest truth-telling makes him an instant worldwide celebrity, and his screeds representing the poor oppression of upper class white guys in America become the inspiration for millions of ungrateful teenage boys to start respecting their dads, millions more uptight biatches of wives to start putting out for their husbands again, and for America to regain its faith in the promise of technological space over pussy-domestic politics as the true measure of its national masculinity. Oh, and then after he's spent five days spieling to the world, he suddenly figures out how to fix the spacecraft and land it all by himself, against all odds, of course, so he can return to earth and teach his eldest son how to flyfish, divorce that bitch of a wife he has, and swap fluids with the pliant PR director who's never really met a 44-year old man quite like Kip. While one might argue, in a different universe, how the abstractions of fiction, particularly putatively science fiction, ought not to be confused with autobiography, I'm fairly certain about how John Nance feels about issues such as the Carter Presidency (America's limp-wrist), Ginger vs. Marianne (Ginger), Don Imus vs. Larry King (Imus is a hoot, King's a long-winded bag of gas), government bureacrats (agin' 'em!), brave-hearted venture capitalists (for 'em!), and a number of other rather extradiagetic matters of zero national or fictional concern. To give credit where credit is due, the plotting at least had me reading to the end to find out the ultimate-if-predictable fate of our truthtelling hero. The theme of this book seems to be: if there's one segment of society that's ignored, it's the high-income middle-aged white male in the middle of the military-industrial complex. I would go so far as to say most self-published books are better at providing new voices.

Speaking of familiar stories voiced by the over-voiced, here's a familiar tale. Brilliant but misunderstood young man raised in poverty by a single mother knows he is an artist and is certainly smarter than everybody else around him and yearns to get out of his backwater provincial hometown. Thinking himself to be a great musician but torn between jazz and classical music (as represented by two very different teachers), he yearns to go to an elite educational institution where at long last people will understand him. Through hard work and perseverance, not even to mention quite a bit of talent, arrogance, ambition, and personal appeal, he manages to get to said college...only to arrive and find it to be a place of petty academic politics, anti-intellectualism, sexual hypocrisy, and tight-fisted failure to recognize his genius at whatever it is he might be doing. He sticks with it for years, miserable, and finally drops out to go to the big city -- New York City -- in order to make it big as an artist, except now he's decided he's a sculptor, not a musician. Eagerly falling in to the cocktail-party circuit of left-wing politics, he becomes a radical and accumulates a blue collar resume of short-term dead-end jobs even while becoming the darling of a certain segment of the radicals for what he represents much more so than who he actually is. Along the way he marries a fireplug, a woman with talents and ambitions that exceed his own, a relationship that of course falls apart under the weight of his own ego. Finally deciding that he's a novelist, not a sculptor or musician, he embarks upon a seven-year struggle to write the Great American Novel. Oddly, his talent and ambition and pretension and strange combination of self-taught mythology, literary criticism, and sweeping class history of the country actually produce something close to the Great American Novel. Parts of it leak out. Even as he's eating stale macaroni and cheese and fighting periods of homelessness, hints of its genius sweep across literary circles, and he is encouraged and then supported by a series of benefactors and foundations to finish the novel. Given a hefty advance, he then finds his perfectionism won't allow him to finish the book. He finds numerous ways to procrastinate when the writing, which doesn't come easy, doesn't go well: he takes up photography, he builds his own amplifiers at home, he obssessively makes coffee according to an exacting procedure. He seeks a teaching job only to reject it when it's offered to him. Years drag on as he works and reworks it under the respectful and supportive eye of his abused second-wife, who never will get the credit she deserves in the great book that follows. Along the way, the hero does a political one eighty and becomes a strong advocate of a progressive but mainstreaming approach to society's gravest ills. Finally the book gets published, not just to great acclaim, but to international acclaim. It's banned in Ireland and Boston as obscene, blamed for riots and the downfall of America's youth, while simultaneously being proclaimed as the voice of his people and generation by everybody except his people and generation. He wins prized and awards and becomes a sought-after board member, foundation director, guest commentator, lecturer, interviewee, et alia.

And there's the rub. He then spends the next four decades praised for his seminal first work, and completely unable to finish his second. Shades of the Great American Novel about Writing the Second Great American Novel (cf. Michael Chabon and Wonderboys, Richard Russo and Straight Man, etc.) His very success makes him the target for attack as a new generation of young writers comes along and attacks the bourgeois nature of the writer. As the years wear on, the accolades continue, as do the one-year teaching appointments, the special fellowships, the lecture appointments, even as his audience begins to wonder if he's really working on a second book after all. Is he blocked? Does he have the writer's affliction? No! He's working on a novel, after all -- and it's 2000 pages and counting and there's no end of it in sight. He ends his days surrounded by his manuscript, supported by his long-suffering wife, with prizes aplenty but an uncertain legacy.

OK, so this sounds not unlike the Bret Easton Ellis story thus far. But because it's Ralph Ellison's life, you have to introduce the fact Ellison was black, born into the worst era of Jim Crow and to what some consider to be the golden age of the American intellectual. The story is quite a bit more complicated as a result.

Still, the Ralph Ellison story can be told very simply in two acts: boy spends the first half of his life writing his first novel; spends the second half of his life not finishing his second novel. Part of Ellison's fascination for me has been this very fact that he managed to get one great novel out but tanked on another. Harper Lee (whether or not she actually wrote To Kill a Mockingbird is beside the point, perhaps), another case in point, seems not to have even tried. Ellison, having struggled to write a strangely beatnik book (IMHO) that is a funny and kind of surreal ride, was determined to write a topper. I'm actually fairly convinced that he had just made up his mind he was an Intellectual and a Novelist, having a thin skin and a huge ego, and was stuck living that out (shades of Vonnegut's dictum about we become that which we pretend to be.) Ellison, but all these accounts, was quite a brilliant thinker in his way but also thoroughly addicted to the canon, for better or worse. I've never read anything he wrote except Invisible Man and an excerpt of Juneteenth, which itself is a posthumously-edited excerpt of the 2000+ page unfinished second novel. What I did read in this biography seems distinctly of its time; a period when criticism was perhaps unduly respected, an attitude that resulted in a highly constructed novel but (to me at least) pretty stale non-fiction. God, what a name-dropper of a biography this is: every literary light of the mid-20th century in America (the alleged golden age of America's novel) is here someplace. Ellison's buddies with John Cheever, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, the protege and then opponent of Richard Wright, the employee of Langston Hughes, the dinner mate of TS Eliot (whom he worshipped, but who probably loathed Ellison if he thought of him at all), and so on all the way up to Toni Morrison.

The kind of ur-tragedy of Ellison's life is his identification as a "black" writer (then: Negro; now: African-American). From what one gleans of Ellison's basic character, he would have done much better to have been born in a time where he would've simply been an American writer, or a writer, period. As such, with the racially-tinged and pseudo-autobiographical flavor of Invisible Man defining him, more was read into Ellison as a black writer than he was perhaps naturally willing to express on his own behalf. He struggled for a theme and a plot even for his first novel, practically taking notes from his wide reading, lectures he attended, dinner party conversations, and so forth. He had more natural love for Melville and Joyce and Eliot than for the writers he gets associated with in survey classes. Speaking as someone who read Ellison during the same summer I devoured William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, and discovered PK Dick, taken on face value I'd lump Invisible Manmore in that line than with Black Boy just on the experience of this reader. Of course, what one brings into reading a book in terms of life experience and cultural baggage has much to do with how one reads it, and the fact that, say, Burroughs and Kerouac are practically the only 20th century writers not dragged into this biography perhaps speaks to my bias here.

I have the distinct impression that had Ellison been born, say, fifty years later, he'd've ended up a perfectly well-liked and respected but obscure professor of English someplace, teaching Mark Twain and Jane Austen. If he'd been born, say, fifty years earlier it's unlikely he would've achieved what he did. He managed to squeeze a considerably articulate talent, if overly ambitious and, dare I say it, lazy one, into a window where because he was born African-American in the society he was born into, produced a life that was at once burdensome and strangely easy. To be brutal about it, one gets the impression that Ellison spent the last forty years of his life riding on his laurels -- which consist of one book -- at perhaps the only time in history when one could've gotten away with it. To take nothing away from his talents as a critic and lecturer and teacher, which no doubt were considerable. But it's equally hard to imagine the talented author of a single book today, regardless of his ethnicity, cultural background, or other descriptive characteristic, being able to make a career out of one book.

I dislike the biography-as-criticism. I read biography to live another person's life vicariously, and in turn, one hopes, to apply that to my own life, or at least be entertained by it, or at least to learn more about the times and life closed off to me. The problem with this book, or perhaps Ellison's life, is that I'm fundamentally uninterested in the fact that Ellison paid $10 to have his windows washed in 1954 or that a lot of his colleagues were sleeping with one another at the American Academy in Rome or that NYU had a mandatory retirement policy. It's a comprehensive biography, very scholarly, but after slogging through all 700+ pages I'm still left wondering at the essential question of Ralph Ellison's life, which to me is the second act. I find it unremarkable in a way that a talent such as his rose to the top despite the odds; I do find it remarkable that, if he really did think of himself as a novelist, he couldn't pull the trigger again, and mysteriously tragic that he couldn't reinvent himself otherwise except in the rather mainstream way he did.

Invisible Man: that was the book we didn't read in the "books by black authors that show up on the reading lists" back in school in the 70s. There's too much sexual content, strangely confusing and anachronistic racial commentary, bizarre imagery for a high school teacher (at least back then) to be able to accommodate. We got Black Boy (instead of, say, Native Son) and Mockingbird and maybe a little selected Maya Angelou because they lent themselves to teacher's guides, and fit into the then- (and possible still-) fashionable approach of solving the problem of the traditional canon by simply adding authors on to the traditional reading list and dropping out a few of the more boring and mostly dead white guys that had padded it out. Invisible is a more challenging book not the least because it's not really autobiography so much as a filter of Ellison's biography, and there's more meat to it in the long run, even if there's a lot more baggage to riffle through as well. That Ellison started out a Communist and ended up about as bourgeois as they come is another subtext one can read in the book, the fulcrum of his life, if we were going to stoop to reading subtexts. I still can't decide if Ellison was a talent that had to be wrung hard, or an opportunist, but in keeping with my self-professed attitude towards biographies, maybe I should just abandon Ellison the man and re-read Invisible Man. Literary biography, after all, isn't dessert, it's not even sauce, it's more of a place setting -- salad fork? -- that may be completely unnecessary if one has finger food and a ravenous appetite, not even to mention little regard for making a mess of one's face.