Legacy

For nearly forty years now, I've been carrying things around in my head that nobody else alive today is likely to remember, with the possible exceptions of my brother and one or two former members of Syracuse Little Theater. My mom, Dr. Ruth Anne Johnson Funk, was a composer and a lyricist, a director and a satirist. (She was also a clinical psychologist and an educator.) I still remember most of the songs and some of the dialogue from her 1960s musical revues, DeManleyville (1964), DeManleyville '65 and They'd Rather Be Right (1968). Here's a sample from one of the songs in DeManleyville / DeManleyville '65:

excerpt from John Burp Marching Song

Let's take the Red out of Red, White and Blue;
America, we'll be true!
The only patriots left are me and you -
and I'm not too sure of you.
--from DeManleyville (1964)

This was the Cold War era, remember. Joe McCarthy was no longer a major force, but there were still accusations that a peacenik (for example) was a Commie Pinko, or whatever term was in vogue that year. That first show satirized a few carryovers from the 1950s, including the Happy Homemakers ("We adore keeping house; it's the thrill of our lives/And we freely admit that we're all perfect wives") and the Beatnik Mama ("In matters intellectual, she's strictly nowhere.") Other targets for the satire were automation, bridge players and General Electric ("But now you've gone and transferred him/And your light in our heart's growing dim").

By 1968, the political and social climate had changed a bit. The former Beatnik Mama was now Rockin' with the Viet Cong. Mom included a slide show memorializing Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., accompanied by Requiem for the Masses by the Association. (One night a member of The Association showed up for the performance, and Mom was thrilled.)

They'd Rather Be Right included a new satirical song for each of the surviving major candidates: Richard Nixon, Hubert Humphrey, Eugene McCarthy and George Wallace. The songs were The Newest Richard Nixon ("Has he changed since Checkers was a pup?"), Saint Eugene ("A man of monumental calm/Except on Viet Nam"), Lonesome George ("But would you let your daughter marry him?") and the Hubert Humphrey Blues:

When he's not on tv, I hit bottom.
Tell me, is it fair that Johnson's got him,
And Muriel is stuck with her cigar?
I would gladly share him with another,
singing praise to apple pie and mother.
Tell me how to shake this hang-up, brother,
For I've got the Hubert Humphrey blues!
--from They'd Rather Be Right (1968)

Here's a sample of the dialogue, from a sketch in which a female suburbanite is accused of being middle class ("Oh no! Not that!). I've been thinking about it since I wrote last night's entry about guilt that I'm not out saving the world:

Prosecutor: Do you lie awake at night on your silk sheets--
Defendant: Percale. I got them on sale at--
Prosecutor: In your silk sheets, knowing that thirty million people in America live below the poverty line?
Defendant: I gave to the Salvation Army.
Prosecutor: Thirty million people!
Defendant: And the Community Chest.
Prosecutor: Do you or do you not read William F. Buckley?
Defendant: Whenever I can find a dictionary. You're right. I'm guilty!
--from They'd Rather Be Right (1968)

Over the years there were also love songs, a song about the empty nest syndrome (I think that was in DeManleyville), and even a ballet about a lame little girl who was able to dance with her doll-come-to-life when the clock struck midnight. My doll, Tootles, played the inanimate version of the doll, and I, in a matching outfit, played the doll come to life. I was eight years old, and at least as clumsy as I am now. Trying to learn and perform the simple choreography just about killed me.

Now, here's the point of all this nostalgia. For all these years, I've treasured my mom's music and her comedy, with the possible exception of some material she wrote for my school drama club when I was in seventh grade. But looking back now, I'm suddenly finding I have a slightly different perspective. I've always thought of my mom as a Johnson Democrat - pro-Viet Nam War, pro-equal rights, but perhaps a little to the right of my own political views (and believe me, I'm not exactly a Deaniac myself). But thinking now about the out-of-date satire, I'm seeing underlying attitudes that I didn't notice at the time, and don't necessarily share now. I would have voted for Humphrey over Nixon too, as my mom did, but I don't quite approve of a sketch in which a teacher is arrested for saying a childish prayer.

Hmm. Weird. All these years later, I'm reassessing the legacy. I'd like to discuss the old satire and the old politics with my mom, but it's too late for that. She died in 2002.

Karen

Ruth Anne Johnson

The Aging Lottery

Let 'Em In

 
Artist Unknown, from a St. Michael's church bulletin

This is the time of year when the Arizona desert is at its most dangerous, a place of death and desperation.

Forced east from the physically safer California border by enforcement efforts there, thousands of men, women and children cross from Sonora into Arizona near Naco or Douglas or some other likely spot, and do their best to walk across desert that's 140 degrees on the ground, 100 to 120 air temperature, bound for Tucson.  Many are picked up by the Border Patrol, given medical treatment, and shipped back into Mexico.  Many others die from dehydration, heat stroke, or sometimes from snakebite or gunshot wounds.  Some are transported in overloaded vans and trucks, only to be abandoned en route, or to be killed or injured in traffic accidents.

Some of them make it.  Their reward is a chance to be in this country illegally, to earn wages that are paltry by our standards but princely by theirs, to give their families a chance at a better life. 

That is the dream that sends all those people on such a deadly trek, year after year.  They spend their life savings to hire "coyotes" to get them to Tucson alive, or they supply themselves with as much water as they can carry and make their way across in small groups on foot.  Either way, their lives are on the line. If they don't make it, but survive, they'll try again.  And again. Economic necessity drives them on.

Why in the world are we more willing to let these people die in the desert than we are to let them enter the country legally?  Can't we screen them for criminal records, drugs, and terrorism ties, and then welcome them to the U.S. in a reasonable, regulated way?  Is it so terrible that a city like Tucson, with its rich intercultural heritage, be allowed to take in poor folks willing to work hard for low wages, along with the middle-class WASPs from the Northeast who simply want to get away from snow and ice?  Can't we document them and let 'em in, on a trial basis, and arrest or deport them later if they turn out to be criminals or fail to gain employment? Sure, there would be problems to be worked out, but it could be done.

St. Michael's used to have a sign out front that said, "Jesus was a refugee."  That sign, at Fifth and Wilmot, helped to draw me in when I decided, years ago, to give church another try. I loved the compassion behind the sign, which showed the Holy Family en route to Egypt.  The people in the picture could almost as easily have been a Guatamalan family displaced from their home, or almost any refugees with a donkey, anywhere in this strife-torn world. Nowadays, the sign says, "Either we are all God's children, or no one is," another compassionate response to war and poverty.  St. Michael's also has a social concerns committee that tries to help people in Guatamala and elsewhere.  Frequently, we read in the church bulletin or hear during the church announcements about a border trash pickup expedition, or the effort to build and maintain water stations in the desert to help people stay alive, or the needs of a border health clinic.  We are told about groups called Humane Borders and No More Deaths, and are urged to support their good work.

I never do anything about any of this, except to stick a couple of bucks in a white envelope once a month, or copy the latest event info from the church bulletin onto the schedule page of the St. Michael's web site.  I'm too broke to give a lot of money to this, too fat, too shy and too busy to go walk around in the desert trying to help. But I feel bad every time I read or hear of more people dying for no good reason.  They shouldn't have to die.  It's a poor reward for such a valiant attempt at the American Dream.

Karen

Fox 11: No More Deaths
No More Deaths.org
Tucson Weekly: Traces of Identity
Humane Borders.org
Here and Now: Hard Line

One Christian Responds to Another - Or Tries To

I got my first negative comment today, on the What Would Jefferson Do? Does it Matter? posting. The commenter's handle, "pinetreeheaven7," is not a valid screen name, so I will respond here.  Please be aware, though, that I really, really don't like to argue about religion or politics, or much of anything, to be honest. So this is a one time deal.  If at the end of this entry you think, as pinetreeheaven7 does, that I'm somehow not "really" a Christian, you're mistaken, but I'm not going to spend my life trying to convince you about this. Any further attacks on this church-attending, Bible-reading, Kerry-supporting Democrat will be deleted without comment.  You are, however, free to express your views elsewhere, as long as it's not for the purpose of slandering me.  Onward.

My unsendable email reply (slightly edited) begins:

I really don't like confrontation, so I'm only going to do this once.  You took your shot at me, and now it's my turn.  After that there will be no more turns, not between you and me, anyway.  

In a message dated 7/31/2004 10:45:27 AM US Mountain Standard Time, AOLAlerts writes:  

If you are a Christian I will eat my hat. Episco what?

The Episcopal Church has been around for centuries, and was one of the first to diverge from the Catholic Church.  Like everything else in this world, it's not perfect, but it is certainly Christian. St. Michael's in particular is a wonderful place. It's arrogant and ignorant in the extreme of you to assume that Episcopalians are not really Christians, or that I am not.  I not only attend church every week, but I usually serve at Mass as crucifer, torch or lector, especially in the summer when we're shorthanded. It has always horrified me that some Christians will narrow the definition so that it means "everyone who agrees with me" rather than "everyone who does his or her best to follow Jesus."  Once people put someone else in the box labeled "Them" instead of "Us," they tend to feel justified in treating that person as subhuman, which is the very antithesis of the teachings of Jesus.

Christians are against murder (killing babies).

I am very much against killing babies.  I am also against killing adults and children. Somehow, some of the same Christians who think that birth control is a mortal sin have no problem with killing Iraqis, prisoners, or even doctors who disagree with them. "Thou shalt not kill" is not an easy commandment to live up to, even if it's recast as "You shall not murder."  I, personally, have never killed anyone.

They beleive that marriage is Sacred and Holy insitution between a man and a woman, ordained by God as a symbol of our faithfulness and committment to Him.

For a gay couple to emulate that in the eyes of state law (which is separate from God's law, although it follows most of the same principles) does not make this any less true.

Ten commandments has these two listed as top commandments. Lies and slander are also something that God condemns.

First of all, depending on your numbering (which varies in different sects according to where the text gets broken up, but still adds up to 10), the top two commandments are about one's duties to God (not having strange gods before Him, etc.). The ones against murder and slander come later in the list.  All of the commandments are subsets of the main two: "You shall love the Lord your God with your whole heart, your whole mind, and your whole strength," and "You shall love your neighbor as yourself."  The commandments you refer to are part of that second one.

As for lies, all my life I have tried very hard never to lie to anyone about anything. I manage it about 99.9% of the time. That doesn't mean that people always agree with me. I have never lied or slandered anyone in my journal. (I have written fiction, though.)

If you are truly for religious freedom then i suggest that you join the groups that are fighting the ACLU. This organization's main goal is to get anything that points to the bible or Christ out of everything.

Many Christians, including myself, disagree with you.  Your claim about the ACLU *is* slander.  The ACLU believes that people have a right to believe as they choose, or not to believe at all.  Religious freedom is exactly that.  What you want is the "right" for everyone to be forced to agree with you.  Nobody is preventing you from believing what you believe.  They are merely defending the right of other people to believe something else. (In retrospect, I suppose that the commenter means "out of everything in the government." The concept of separation of church and state was important to Jefferson and other Founding Fathers, and remains important today.  If a courthouse can't post the Ten Commandments, or if "under God" is eventually removed from the Pledge of Allegiance, that in no way "prohibits the free exercise" of religion. It merely keeps a governmental institution from openly endorsing a particular form of religious faith.)

Hollywood is the only ones that have true freedom of speech now and they are great supporters of the ACLU.

Shall I correct your grammar?  You go from singular to plural in the same clause. The correct construction would be "People in the Hollywood entertainment industry are the only ones now who have true freedom of speech.  They are great supporters of the ACLU."  Even with corrected grammar, the first part is a false statement. You demonstrated your right to free speech by posting on my journal.  I will allow the comment to stand--once.  I will block future postings by you on my journal, as is my right as editor/publisher of this particular forum.  You are still free to post your misguided nonsense elsewhere--for example, in your own journal. (Of course, that would require having a real account somewhere.)

Larry Flint is also on their membership list.

He's a jerk, (IMO) but so what?  It doesn't mean that he's wrong 100% of the time.  People are complex, and one of the complexities is that nobody (except Jesus) is completely right or completely wrong in every way.

How about "What would Jesus do?"

Which, of course, I acknowledge indirectly in the piece you commented on. In the current instance, I think Jesus would want me to treat you with compassion, but speak out against your errors.

You can find this out by reading your bible. Take the time and you will never regret it.

If you had read my whole journal (which admittedly is a lot of reading), you would see that for Lent I reread the four Gospels and part of Acts.  I have been to classes about some of Paul's epistles.  I've read much of the Old Testament (but not all of it), including bits that most people would prefer to skip over, because otherwise Christians would still be offering burnt sacrifices and keeping Kosher (to name two of the less over-the-top practices that don't involve actually killing people).  I read aloud from the Old Testament in church.  And what's more, I think I understand some of it, a little.  I'm not perfect, but I don't hate anyone.  I do my best to love my enemies.  Can you say the same?

Regards and with prayers that you will someday understand your own faith better,

Karen Funk Blocher

In Defense of Nuance

So what's wrong with nuance?

Douglas Adams wrote:

"The Universe, as has been observed before, is an unsettlingly big place, a fact which for the sake of a quiet life most people tend to ignore. Many would happily move to somewhere rather smaller of their own devising, and this is what most beings in fact do."

Life is complex, and, as the cliché goes, things are not always as they seem.  However, many people can't handle complexity and nuance.  They want to believe the easy, black and white answer.  Anything more nuanced than that requires critical skills that many people either don't have or don't bother to use. They don't want to have to think things through, or investigate for themselves, or listen to anyone who says that the answer is neither X nor Y,  but somewhere in between, taking into account factors C, D, and J. Answers like that don't fit into sound bites, and leave the speaker open to false charges of "flip-flopping."

On the other hand, people can be very uncritically accepting of a forwarded email that appears to confirm something compatible with the reader's world view. If the claims in it make readers angry or sympathetic enough to send money to a cause or to vote  against certain candidates, so makes the better--from the original sender's point of view.

Take for example the email I recently got from a former member of a learning team I was in at University of Phoenix.  G. is a reservist and a prison guard who, when I met her, was so new to computing that she didn't know how to send an email. She's probably been in Iraq since I last saw her.  I haven't asked.  At any rate, she now knows how to send an email, and how to forward one.

The forwarded material was a nasty little attack on John Kerry's voting record, claiming that he's "voted to kill" every major military weapon system to come down the pike since 1988. "With Kerry as president," the email concludes, "our Army will be made up of naked men running around with sticks and clubs." Now, really, think for a moment. Even allowing for hyperbole, how likely is this claim?  I didn't believe it, but I didn't want to argue with G., either (I was terribly busy at the time, but that's another rant), so I deleted the email without comment.

Last night I finally got around to looking up the email attack on www.snopes.com, the Urban Legends Reference Pages.  It's the same place I always go to check on claims of dubious veracity.  Snopes has a whole page of links to analyses of claims about John Kerry.  Most of the claims aren't true, which is fairly typical for a lot of the topics that Snopes covers. The George W. Bush page also debunks more claims than it affirms.

The emailed claim about Kerry's anti-weaponry votes is rated "False."  Actually, the reality is more complex than that, with superficially true data forming the core of a highly misleading, basically false claim.  I'm not going to reprint the explanation here; you can go to the page and read it for yourself. Essentially, it says that Kerry voted against three appropriations bills that included the listed weapons, some of which, as Dick Cheney acknowledged in a separate quote, were obsolete.  (The B-1 bomber, for example, dates back to the mid-1970s, and was argued over by my high school Star Trek club.) The bills included many items each, from weapons systems to pay increases, and senators only got to vote yea or nay on the whole thing.  Kerry voted nay. 

As the Snopes page points out, senators may vote against an appropriations bill for any number of reasons.  Maybe the overall military appropriation is too high.  Maybe it's too low. Maybe it just needs to be tweaked, and the hundred dollar hammers and such removed (not that they're actually listed that way), before the senator will sign off on it.

I haven't researched these bills myself, so I don't know exactly what happened and why.  But it's a clear example of a complex reality reduced to libelous distortion for political purposes.  On Snopes you can also find discussions of false claims about Kerry's wife and Heinz outsourcing, a fake quote in which Kerry disses Reagan's body and Reagan's followers, and, for that matter, a false, particularly egregious example of George W Bush misspeaking before a pro-life group. Just the other night, a radically left-wing acquaintance of mine was chortling over that one.  I should have realized it probably wasn't true.

So while I didn't get to see Kerry's acceptance speak last night (I was in class), I fully agree with him that life is complex and nuanced, and the complexities must be acknowledged.  Otherwise, you're in danger of falling back on answers that are easy, and comforting--and wrong.

Karen

Another Blogger for Kerry - A Defense of General Purpose Journals

Photo courtesy of JohnKerry.com. (Hotlinked - now long gone.)

I was a caller on NPR's All Things Considered again this week, this time putting in a word in favor of literary and general purpose blogs and journals. Neal Conan's guest, a journalist and fan of political blogging, dismissed essentially all non-political ones as "I got up this morning and I brushed my teeth," in other words, dull and pointless.

He's mistaken.

One has only to look at the lively discussions on Making Light and Electrolite to see a blog community in which politics is only part of the equation. Aspiring writers swap ideas, techniques and news of their progress on Within the Qelenhn, Presto Speaks! and many other individual journals. The friends function of LiveJournal enables journalers to keep up with several blogs at once, and add their own comments to each. And over on AOL, John M Scalzi's By the Way helps to keep journalers motivated to write on a wide variety of topics. True, a few of his posts run a little toward the tooth-brushing end of things, but even that has value, as we peek into the life of a writer who works out of his rural home, far from any AOL HQ.

Such goings-on do little to get John Kerry elected, but frankly I doubt that political blogging will tip the scales in the upcoming election. I'm much more interested in the results of Neil Gaiman's and Harlan Ellison's respective lawsuits, the dubious merits of POD, and how Sara Geer's tv production is coming along.

But okay: yes. You should vote for John Kerry this fall. Satisfied? You shouldn't need me to tell you that. This truth becomes clearer with every news report. Anyone who isn't thoroughly disgusted with George W Bush by now probably has been getting his or her news, if any, exclusively from Fox and other conservative media.

If you actually like what Bush and his cronies are doing, I'm not going to change your mind by blogging. All I can do is suggest that you pay more attention to NPR and other news sources that do more than skim the surface of stories.

Next subject, please.

For more cool not-necessarily-political blogs, follow some of the "Other Journals" links at the right, or visit the ones mentioned in the comments below.

Karen

Dubious Legacy

First Aaron Burr, and now this.

In the rush to lionize the 40th president of the United States, there's a push on to put the face of Ronald Reagan on the $10 bill, replacing Alexander Hamilton. This would be, I think, a short-sighted mistake: politically motivated, sentimental and somewhat ignorant.

Myself, I was never all that fond of Reagan. Oh, he was pleasant enough as the host of Death Valley Days, which is as far back as my memory of him goes, and he was by all accounts a nice man, extremely personable, optimistic and reassuring.That is what made him so popular, even beloved. He made Americans feel good. But does that make him a great president, worthy of bumping one of the Founding Fathers off the $10? Not necessarily.

Reagan's presidency was marked by Iran-Contra, soaring deficits, an increase between the gap between rich and poor, and the unchecked spread of AIDS. In a comment that I've remembered all these years but can't track down or quote verbatim, someone once said that he was the kind of President who would give you the last dollar in his pocket, and then sign a bill taking away your Medicare. One of the funniest SNL sketches of the late Reagan era showed the president as a decisive, high-energy genius, pulling an all nighter to converse with Gorbachev in Russian and issue rapid-fire orders on every issue to his bewildered staff. I don't know whether there was any Alzheimer's in evidence by1987 or so, but such high-octane competence certainly wasn't the style of a president who once said that trees caused pollution.

It is bad taste to say nasty things about a recently-deceased President, and I really don't want to tear the man down here. Some of the accolades being heaped upon him this week are justified. Democrats and liberals therefore bite their tongues this week as Republicans, conservatives and the general public sing Reagan's praises.

But the $10 bill? That's a pretty big accolade, one not to be offered in a moment of acute sentimentality. To displace a historical figure as important as Alexander Hamilton, who helped to shape this country long before Reagan was born, one must be able to make the case that the new honoree had a greater and more beneficial effect on the 228-year history of the United States than Hamilton had. I think it's too soon to make that judgment about Ronald Reagan.

Besides, Hamilton needs all the publicity he can get in a country that tends to ignore anything that happened before each of us was born. Until this latest controversy, the last time the first U.S. Secretary of the Treasury got much press was in reprints of James Thurber's 1942 science fiction story "A Friend to Alexander." Oh, and in a 1990s milk commercial.

That said, I have a great deal of respect for Reagan, and even more for Nancy Reagan. Her love, courage, dedication and candor, especially inthe last years of her husband's life, are an inspiration to anyone who has ever been a caregiver, or struggled privately or publicly with family and health problems. Kudos and condolences to her. I wish her all the best in her efforts in support of Alzheimer's research.

Karen

Thought for the Day

A propos of a large number of George W Bush's policies, I offer this quotation from my old literary hero and acquaintance, Harlan Ellison:

<<...After all, there was a war on.
But wasn't there always?>>

from "'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman,"
Paingod and Other Delusions


More quotes on my recommended authors page: http://www.mavarin.com/authors.html

and my favorite quotes page:

http://hometown.aol.com/kfbofpql/quotes.html

Karen

Quick Rundown of Miscellaneous Opinions

Top reason I'll never vote for George W Bush: I disagree with virtually everything he says, does, or believes.

My opinion of gay marriage: the marriage of two men or two women does not in any way invalidate, impair or cheapen more traditional pairings. So how does forbidding same sex marriage "defend" the institution?  It doesn't.  This is a civil rights issue, fought against more for emotional reasons than ethical ones.

On the Middle East: "an eye for an eye" is the worst possible approach to solving the many problems over there, as evidenced by the constant retaliation and terrorism.  So why is that pretty much the only alternative ever tried?

On religion: if you think you have all the answers, you probably haven't asked all the questions. You may think one answer (e.g. "There is no God" or "It's in the Bible, so it's true") covers the lot.  I respectfully disagree.

On Buffy: Spike's much more fun than Angel, but Angel clearly wins over Spike in the "Buffy's True Love" contest.

Karen