Toilet Bowl Socio-Economic intercultural Drama

One of the most enlightening and educational conversations of my formative life commenced just about forty years ago around this very time.  It encompassed facets of sociology, biology, psychology and civil engineering, all rolled into one brief exchange.  And for it all, I'm in debt to someone I never even really knew.

Carolyn was the stunning young classmate that sat one row across from me in my tenth-grade English class each afternoon.  Flowing blond hair, and bearing a variety of knit sweaters, Carolyn was the embodiment of a scene straight out of a Bergman movie, or maybe a Polo ad in the Sunday Times.  Me and my fourteen-year-old pre-adolescent cherubity were silently mad for Carolyn, but did not need to be reminded that the likes of us were of no attraction to the likes of her.  As a daily acquaintance, we did in fact know one another quite enjoyably, and greeted and joked with one-another from time to time.  But certainly nothing further.  Carolyn was proudly the arm-hook of a motorcycle-riding young fellow who showed up to our schoolfront each day to politely collect his prize.  I'd watch this designer-jeans commercial from afar each day.  

With my love hopelessly unrequited, I shared my tale of admitted defeat to my mom, who offered her condolence.  When I told her of my retained intention nonetheless, to somehow let Carolyn know how I felt about her, although my mom warned me to be careful not to allow myself any embarrassment before others (this was, after all, high school..), she did remind me not to be deterred.  "Don't forget, she's just like any one of us.  Remember....we all go to the bathroom..."

Forty years after my brief encounter with Carolyn, that phrase remains in my lexicon with the greatest philosophical quotes of the last six centuries.

To be reminded, or to remind one's self of the common human function of bowel activity is perhaps the most leveling awareness possible.  It generates both humility and courage.  Gratitude and fortitude.  Peace and hope.  It connects us with our domestic and feral animal brethren and puts us closer to our devotion and beliefs of creation.

And typical to us irrational human beasts, we conditionally prefer to never think about it.

There has got to be a reason why perhaps the holiest and most critical of human functions of the human organism is characteristically the most unbroached, un-discussed and openly unacknowledged.  Bowel activity is perhaps the single most intimate function of any warm-blooded mammal.  Yet, in today's scientifically hypochondriacal world, where people will wrap their heads in masks ineffectively, in fear of the spread of some virus they don't really understand, a bodily function the process and related science of which is only too well known is chronically avoided and deterred, both in word and in mind.  Is it really that hideous..?

When one's car proceeds to leak oil or develop troublesome sounds or symptoms, the owner will dash over to the mechanic, and likely discuss all the finer specs of the matter to really anyone, professional or not, who will tolerantly listen.  If the same car owner is having a bout with constipation, no one will know.

There's a good chance the constipated owner won't, either.  Even the most health and illness-fearing folks won't debase themselves by referencing their bathroom activity to even their most intimate partners sometimes.   Spouses are one thing, but if you're in some new intimate fortnight situation at the girlfriend's apartment, you're not going to come out of the bathroom before bedtime and talk about how concerned you are that you haven't moved your bowels since Tuesday night.  Or to make the reference more contemporary, you haven't pooped.

What a cute little word.  I thought "pooped" meant tired.  But apparently it's a verb as well, to poop.  It's too bad they don't have cute little euphemisms like that for things like appendectomies or hysterectomies.  If it's just a little fact-of-life human function like that, the least we can do is give it a cute name.  That'll help conceal it's existence.

We don't seem to have the need to re-name such activities as eating, breathing, or having sex.  But something this hideous in nature apparently demands it.  And the problem isn't so much the re-naming.  It's the overwhelming stigma that goes with it.

It's bad enough living in a culture where people deem certain words wrong or evil.  But by no fault of its own, here's an entire, unavoidable bodily function, perhaps the most critical of all, and pretty much no one will express full comfort in discussing it or even referencing it. If nothing else, it's not doing our bodies any big favors.

On that base matter alone, our culture has in the last several hundred years seen little if any advancement.  But, the Grand Canyon wasn't formed in a day, either.  The reconditioning of a traditionally repressed culture's sensory perception of bodily function is a process.  Perhaps one of the first great monumental, sociological strides past the fifty-yard line was marched prominently by entertainment innovator Norman Lear in 1971, when the punctuating sound of the upstairs toilet flush had audiences roaring at themselves uncontrollably on many an occasion, in no less than prime-time, on All In The Family.

This small little digression is most likely the basis of more than a few recently published, incisive books by any number of alternative and medical doctors and practitioners, with a devotion and determination to educate once and for all.  It wouldn’t surprise me.  But sadly, an abundance of hard science information, the kind no religion will necessarily refute, still will not reach an intolerant republic.

But as far as what we might cite as intolerance goes, therein just might lie the basis of the traditionally and economically successful, and vastly ineffective digestive health pharmaceutical industrial complex.  

It has long been the fascination of the unfortunate domestic patrons of plumbing maintenance engineers, those divine dispatches who arrive, tools-in-box, to quickly patch up that broken toilet, just how precious they are in a globe of “important” people.  The domestic patron is then only devastated by the healer’s price long enough to be placated by the relief of what is undeniably the most critical appliance in the household back in service once more.  Many economists have astutely stated that were the academic youth lure of lucrativity in cyber-development, stock brokerage, science, nursing, M.B.A. or C.P.A. certification swapped for an intended future in trade skills, things like carpentry, roofing or electrical wiring, one’s place in our economy would prove way more cost-effectively valuable.  At the top of the trade list would be plumbing.   There are in fact people who don’t own or use a computer, cell phone or even a television of any sort.  What’s the one piece of machinery every domestic bathroom, big or small does have..?  

And if that’s the case, why are there not in fact at least six to eight plumbing maintenance engineers to the ratio of every civilian worker..? If the market were flooded (I think you pretty much knew that pun would show up soon..) with plumbers, just how would that effect the economy and health of the trade unions..?  

Why not a romance image of such career pursuit..?  As total speculation on my part, could it stem from a genuine aversion to a daily intimacy with the intrinsics of the arbitrary biological functions of others, and their end product..?  There are many who insist they could never be paid enough to venture their face or hands into the desolate orifices where lie the whole or remnants of toxic human waste.

Yes, toxic it is.  It is perhaps the most renown toxic substance known to man yet.  More than even that stuff that leaked at Three Mile Island decades ago.   You wouldn’t want that stuff anywhere near your hands, face or body.  Yours or anyone else’s.  

It is a substance pervasive and common enough to be traditionally cited in analogy down through time, in every cultural language, as a pejorative poison.  So hideous in fact that its most familiar slang title was, long before any invented word, deemed language vulgar and restricted.  And still the most effective when one needs to rip out in a verbal blue streak.  

Our warm-blooded, domesticated pets, feline and canine alike, man’s alleged best friends, have made unwitting enemies out of their well-intentioned owners in their infant difficulty to achieve a passing grade in housebreaking.  Many old-school traditionalists who “have raised them for years’ will have no difference with teaching an out-of-bounds-relieving pet the error of his ways by snatching him by the neck and shoving his snout into his fecal matter, Cool Hand Luke-style. He won’t do that again.  Perhaps that strategy works just as well on their children.

Of course, that’s a badly acerbic joke right there.  Nevertheless, just what is it that creates amongst our idealistic young such aversion to the respect and awareness of one’s operative bowel health..?  Is there a healthy twenty-three year-old, one who isn’t in fact afflicted to the point of medical gastroenterologist-waiting room patronage (a population onto itself) that along with concerns of distances run, weights lifted, fasting and dieting goals accomplished, skin and muscle tone achieved, as well as hair volume, actually brings equivalent concern to one’s daily fiber intake and resulting bowel function each day…?

And how about those helpless waiting-room patrons…?  The young ones, those “otherwise healthy”, but are forced to get to the bottom of why their stomachs are always miserable...?  And for that matter, as a result, the rest of their anatomy…?

What are long known and termed as “gut health” conditions are actually a convenienced phrasing for the science of bariatric health and wellness.  There are certainly enough of us brave and unbreakable “walking wounded”, who simply grin and bear our aches and pains every day.  But some chronic ones are harder to grin past.  And if we don’t pay attention to our lack of attention, they might not go away.  

The bowel is the climax and resolution to the stomach’s proper nutrient-and-waste sorting and elimination system.  Mindful approach toward what gets consciously placed into it will have direct cause and effect on how it makes the insides feel, and how easily the trash is disposed.  If you try to create any product with cheap, rancid or defective material, or even incorrect material to begin with, the machine will still do it’s job and produce.  But what will it produce..?  Or in fact will it..?

Poor gasoline won’t run an adequate automobile well, the time-honored theory holds. That’s the first thing mechanics will point out.  Car Repair 101.  Is there such a thing as Bowel and Gut Health 101…?

That’s not really the stuff taught and learned by the gastroenterologists behind those waiting rooms the young folks spend hours watching afternoon TV and gazing at ask-your-doctor flower-and-kitten decorated drug print ads in.  They are scientists far advanced in the business of connecting the dots.  The dots are the patient’s symptomatic claims.  The connection challenge pertains to tying each claim to a symptom recognized in the encoded glossary of serialized treatments acceptable by insurance coverage.  It’s a cottage industry.  As a teenager, a friend of mine got a job once at a fast-food stop.  I asked how tough that must be, taking and ringing up all those items ordered.  How do you remember prices..?  She said it was a cinch:  The cash register buttons were all designated by menu selection title. “Golden Browns” had it’s own key.  She knew little about the products themselves.  But she knew how to distribute them.  Medicine has no real history of being genuinely spoken for.  Business is an exact science.

Some of the greatest health epiphanies, usually for those most desperate, many war-scarred by their four-or-more-figure odyssey and inferno of waiting-room prescription vigil, come from the most unlooked or medically least respected places.  With all the due respect emanating from any licensed physician, the most immediate and often first-stop approaches to gut and bowel repair are the ones legitimately outside the bounds of their reference lexicon.  These are what are known as Alternative or Naturopathic Doctors.  Indeed, there are many who bear conventional medical license as well, but the difficulty in accessibility comes in simple uncommon existence of those in practice.  And those who are usually bear prices and services that most medical insurances will not hear of or honor.  

That’s when some out-of-the-box detective work is necessary.  Your gut and bowel need to hit the phone book and locate Jim Rockford, or the non-M.D. licensed Naturopathic Practitioner, who doesn’t exactly work undercover, but does treat only on an insurance-free out-of-pocket basis, and as such will not be the next-step candidates referred by that waiting room G.I. doc who’s too busy and out of solutions.  For a grand wallet total of probably well less that whatever ends up spent in waiting room co-pays over a six-month course, a good and concentrated naturopath will engage the patient frankly and directly over just what they’re eating every moment of every day, what actually is “going down” in the restroom each day, if it is, and what supplements along with sometimes an unhappily corrected diet will soon put a smile on that gut’s face, make that bowel system run better, kill the bugs inside and discover that “Number Two” is not some foolish euphemism for something best ignored.

A timeless phrase I’ve long heard in reference to entertainment and culture is “toilet bowl humor”.  You don’t hear the phrase “roof gutter humor” or “carburetor replacement humor” too much.  Why do you suppose that is…?   One’s plumbing fixtures are pretty important and serious stuff, far as I know.  Why would one equate them with humor…?  Wouldn’t “TV repair humor” be a much more relevant reference..??  It’s just possible that our culture, our socioeconomy, even our religious tenets might see some very constructive change when we recognize that absolutely no part of our body or human function is at any time something to be ashamed of, ignored, or best handed off to a service professional because we’d just rather not be bothered.  It could in fact lead to a re-structuring of the nation’s long-criticized health system.  But it’s a cooperative effort.  And truthfully, it only begins with large-scale enlightenment.  

I have no idea where my unrequited short-term high school heartthrob Carolyn or that kindly boyfriend of hers are today, together or apart.  But I’m still grateful for the encounter that brought that immortal quote into my life.  And I pray that those two are still alive, well, and have at some point today, flushed successfully.

N.F

 

All That We Have Left.....

 

Margaret Mead left us way too early…

I just recently got hold of a great, exclusive article written by the late, great Dr. Mead in 1969 (for no less than TV Guide) about television’s overall divisive effect upon the separative generations, old and young.  Her findings concluded that the elders, many to whom TV was this new, trendy but take-it-or-leave-it device, bore no intention of taking it’s reportedly deleterious effects seriously.  The young however, were at the same time at the dangerous idealistic mercy of this inoculative medium, drawing minds to violence and unreal, defeating fantasy.  The result was a generation gap widening by the mile, with no communicative unity on the horizon whatsoever.

Well over fifty years later, and a collective culture miraculously glued together since, another, more invasive technological advancement has now proven to accomplish the same, if not in such an alarmist fashion, then possibly in an even more disturbing, resigned vein. Can you guess what that force is..?

Television did one thing.  It has, since its inception, despite vast pre-century World’s Fair predictions, served as a powerful one-way commander of cultural image and dictate.  If the TV says it, it must be so.  In the last twenty years, the internet has reversed this power radically.  It’s the silent revolution no one recognized because it didn’t quite commence with violent demonstrations with network-branded TV trucks filming angry mobs yowling “The whole world is watching…!!” That sort of reactive behavior has long since been more of a timepiece than any kind of active form of effect.  This might have something to do with the reason the famed “protest” that overtook Wall Street’s square-foot Zuchotti Park over a decade ago was met with little more than disparaging scorn.  

The un-televised “revolution” as it were, in this case, corresponds to a globe of humans rapidly turned largely and clinically reliant upon their capability to have their immediate voices heard and thoughts projected in last-word fashion at any possible moment.  Audible, linear conversation, (linear as in that medium once decimated by television, according to Professor McLuhan in 1964..) would in less than one decade, to no one’s conscious intent, become vastly obsolete as a communicative science.  What’s more common on your phone lately..? Talk or text..? Quite sadly, I can recall that moment on my life’s continuum when I finally tired of conversation.  Somehow, it seemed that talk became redundant, and ineffective.  Now we scroll down and stare at redundant, ineffective stuff.  But unlike conversation, we can scroll, shut it off, turn away, ignore with impunity, and keep our throats unsore.  

Of course, for those of us in the “shifted” generation, it begs the question, just what has that done to our communicative skill, our emotional incentive, our sense of base morale and our generalized success in that constant, war effort against the enemy known as Depression..?  Were the internet something purely tantamount to a disposable, dismissable toy in any given modernized life, no such questions or concerns could be deemed relevant. Unfortunately, in this immediate world, the one containing the device on which you’re reading this, that’s not the case.

Then of course, there’s that generation succeeding us, the ones we’re not about to even try to make heads or tails of.  Parents of youth are pretty keen at maintaining a connection with their children’s neurology.  To a point.  Ultimately, many give up.  And giving up nowadays is a much more scientifically complex surrender.  Is that a bad thing in a world predicated upon fast-moving technological advancement..?

As the legend goes, it’s only bad when the communication erodes. Supposedly, the installation of values in one’s young is the most important thing.  In the last couple of web-driven decades we’ve seen the property line.  Our nation’s youth has acknowledged it with temperance.  Over the line you have the “Snake Pit”, the psychotic, firearm bearing murderers. On the other side, a frightened, clutching, affectionate population of mindful, mature thinkers, in many ways on a quest for an intellectual collective that transcends an endless scroll of foolish bumper-sticker memes.

In the meantime, any or all of these surfers are making use of this ubiquitous technoessence. Blogs, video channels, podcasts, it’s all a new “platform” for self-expression.  But there is in fact a kind of smirk generated by onlookers Gen-X and older, perhaps life-worn and too cognizant of just what these new “forms” of communicative “platforms” are.

Just what were those wooden boxes of early design, with all the wires, that plugged into a wall socket in homes blissfully endowed with electric power one hundred years ago..?  What was that wild picture box that divided an entertainment industry nearly eighty years ago, one that had determined innovators insisting there’d never be enough new, intellectually stimulating material creatable to fulfill our mentally voracious republic..? Perhaps the only significant difference lies in the pedestrian accessibility to venture into such, in ways that did not exist in the early 1900s.

But what we’ve come to recognize in the last decade or more is that much like any new, explosive advancement, a fine example being the progressive “underground” rock music genre borne over sixty years ago, the counterculture will fast be swallowed by the commercial mainstream.  The “underground” internet culture just might win the award for the fastest swallow yet.  Has anyone seen anything more clueless than the scared expressions of magnate Mark Zuckerburg upon federal questioning some years ago..?

It’s all these vast predictabilities, like the tidal waves of a stormy beach, that leave us dry, blanket-bound, elder beachgoers in the overview distance, unseduced by the technological possibilities, and charmed rather by the facilities made available to our own lexicon:  An access to the identifiable history and past we’d care to selectively recall.  On our own, comfortable terms. 

In a world of banks and boutiques replaced by Starbucks, walk-in clinics, cellular phone dealers and high-end optical shops, the wars of Rock versus Disco replaced furiously by Left v. Right, Fox v. CNN, amongst a society young and old, all who seem to know best because “they said so on the internet”, there’s only one peaceful directive to survival.  

And that’s unquestionably a mindful return to the intellects by whom we were once raised, in a web-free world dominated by well-formed, questioned and argumented thoughts, based upon concepts read rather than raved, professionally published and taught rather than “blogged”.  For us, the most natural, life-giving forest is the vintage bookshop.  The internet is our precious chariot to the on-line libraries, of scanned and re-printed journals, scattered television clips and articles of eons past.  It’s the precious galleries of exquisite photographs, allowing us to recall the splendor of a time governed by genuine adults.  To be certain, this indeed is a lifestyle mostly virtual.

Virtual is to this day perhaps the only uniting force between the gapped generations of our time. The so-called “holodeck”, that atmosphere-generating device that sends so many crews on sci-fi drama reruns into the 1930s, 40s, and the like is not yet a common device.  The fantasy shows for that reason still remain predominantly popular.  But the technology remains the ruler, and its owners and founders will undoubtedly remain the almighty leaders of our future Hunger Games.  Meanwhile, the corporately owned and policed earth of internet virtue is the ground we all walk.  Old and young, much like the divided factions of the Nixon Era are now united just as strongly in their lives by the same connective grip that pulled a nation together long ago:  

The utility bill.

N.F

 

Fatigued

My usual train commute the other day offered me quite a trip.  Back to 1981, in fact. It all started when I took note of this shirt worn by the lady seated across from me.

She was wearing a rather fashionable looking, kind of fitted olive-green denim shirt that recalled the image of Army fatigues, to this day probably one of the U.S  post-war culture's most common hipster designs, homogenized now after well over fifty years to the point of haute-couture style.  

In my mind, this is one of those things that defies explanation, even though I'm well aware of it's socio-commercial genesis.  It likely began amongst the angry counterculture youth, some of whom never quite changed out of their army duds when they came back from their traumatic Vietnam draft experience.  For some, their military garb was something they'd continue to wear as their badge of honor.  In some cases, the girlfriend would adopt perhaps the shirt or outer coat, the equivalent of the schoolgirl cloaked in her track-star boyfriend's letter jacket.  Before long, the army fatigue shirt would, amongst youth, many too young to know of America's twentieth-century war histories first hand, simply become a costume accessory to the peer counterculture hard-rock image.  Were the drab olive-fatigue shirt actually a representation of, say, prison garb, to the trend-chasing kids it would make no difference.  So long as no disco cassette touched their boom box.  And in the world of today of course, where the ear-iconic late 1960s riffs of Cream and The Doors have morphed their way ubiquitously into daytime syndicated AM conservative talk-radio venues as commercial-transition decor, associations are strictly what the immediate bearer makes them.

Even I can't admit first-hand connection to the great wars of the mid-to-late 1900s.  But even as a youth uninterested or unseduced by hard rock, heavy metal, and all the substance-coveting that went with it (certainly the visible compound amongst my junior high school peers), I did in fact like army fatigue-wear a great deal  But quite clearly, I knew why...

In my earliest formidable years, way ahead of myself, I was a kitten in a family of sitcom-loving adult cats.  Entertainment for me on Saturday nights meant regular visits with the Norman Lear and MTM brigades. But despite all my Mary, Rhoda, Maude, Louise, George, Edith and Archie intimacy, I had yet to meet and greet the cast of a show I'd heard surrounding raves about:  M*A*S*H.

I'd had every chance, but the whole historic-war ground setting seemed too remote to relate to, even in spite of all the raves around me, from both the astute grownups and even classroom peers.  My introduction came finally in the Autumn of 1979, when some advancements in strip-syndication entertainment unveiled.

The curtain finally went up on the big pay-now-play-later Viacom re-run syndie deal for two seminal TV hits:  All In The Family and M*A*S*H.  I long loved one, and now I was fully prepared to introduce myself to the other.  It was a rewarding introduction.

In those unpretentious TV times, a syndie re-run cycle ran chronologically. The leasing TV station would begin with S1E1, and when the final held episode arrived, the following airing was once again S1E1, and so forth.  Nowhere near today's creative pattern of "Top 40" episode positioning, in many ways designed to accommodate a smaller available stash of episodes.

With the aforementioned two hits, unlike such golden icons as I Love Lucy, or perhaps The Andy Griffith Show, a chronological run would now mean something different in it's exhibition.  It's kind of like some of the differences between Bob Dylan's first two "Greatest Hits" compilations.  The first, released by Columbia in 1967, certainly represented the original folk hero's transition to the rock-and-roll scene.  But it was the later 1971 double-album (that Clive Davis reportedly had to persuade Dylan into releasing at the time..) that offered perhaps even to this day the most comprehensive essay on the enigmatic artist, and each of his vast adopted dimensions.  The shows that began several years earlier were not the shows they'd become.

Hence, M*A*S*H, and it's first six seasons. Anyone familiar with the classic show probably knows it's odd origins, the tale of how Robert Altman's sleeper-smash big-screen avant-garde and explicit adaptation of Richard Hooker's farce about a trio of advantageous, smart-ass draftee surgeons in wartime Korea would get optioned into an unlikely network TV prime-time sitcom.  Picture if you will such an option with Larry Clark & Harmony Korine's KIDS occurring in 1995.  In 1972, it actually happened with M*A*S*H.

While TV-scriptwriting veteran Larry Gelbart was brave enough to accept the pilot-writing challenge, he didn't really know what to draw upon.  Nothing in that fierce screen hit seemed adaptable to network prime-time family-hour sitcom television.  Beyond a few identifiable props, he had to start from scratch.  The result at the time would yield a potential CBS mid-season flunker.  But some re-scheduling strategies rendered it a hit, and it's own charmed formula of writing and casting made it a living-room sensation.

In it's earliest time, the TV series would mostly represent and speak a very antiwar message.   It launched during the post-inflammatory time of the Vietnam War, and much of it's sharp-edged gaggery was built on blindfolded swings at the U.S. Army pinada.  Unlike the unmistakable Benny Hill-style comedy that characterized such good-old goofy war comedies as Hogan's Heroes, M*A*S*H, while playing to the same America over the same network maybe a year or two later, saw an unfriendly split in it's audience.  Some were just not too warm to it's cold shoulder toward home front military spirit.  It would take a few years, the Vietnam War's end, and a shift in American views and attitudes, for the sitcom's producers to act promptly, making content and cast changes that would reflect and respect, in order to keep this hit on the air.  The result was something warm and wonderful, positioned in a setting that was anything but warm and wonderful.  A sweet little summer camp in what would unquestionably in real life be the most graphic, inhuman setting possible.

Despite the way in which thirteen-year old me and the city of peers and grownups around me blanketed themselves in this evening comfort food, perhaps the perfect side-dish to our long-awaited dinners, even I knew something was perversely juxtaposed, in a way no one cared to acknowledge.  

Perhaps my first line-drive to the head, Charlie Brown on-the-mound-style, arrived when I opened up a thrilling birthday gift that October.  It was something called "M*A*S*H: The Exclusive, Inside Story..", perhaps the very first bio and encyclopedia on the show, which hadn't even completed its run.   Alan Alda penned the foreword, which began, "It's a lot like being in a M*A*S*H unit.."  Even I knew how grossly inappropriate such an analogy was.  Were I the editor, I'd have surely knocked out that line.

But that hardly doused my codependency with this loveable little TV classic, which couldn't really be blamed in the final analysis for it's misguided representation of hard war.  There really aren't too many such types of creations that could be so easily exonerated from such responsibility.  Some, despite their popularity, got nothing but anger from certain critics.  One growler got an article in TV Guide at one time, about the propagandized imaging of the the "hood" in the hit show Happy Days.  He claimed the Fonzie character some cheery bastardization of the figure known historically as the deadly force that oft-fatally threatened the common, Argyled nerd.  Could an adorable little show about high-school or middle-school life now be sitcom-ed, in the face of deadly bullying and mass-shootings...?  Strangely, no one would really ever hold the feet of M*A*S*H to the fire of reality.  That's basically how good it was.  Less than twenty years ago, I met a retiree who spoke of his time in the Korean War as a young serviceman.  He loved M*A*S*H more than anything.  Go figure.

As a preteen, new to the show, while I knew from the outset that the sitcom had some inexplicable beginnings, I was intent on absorbing them all.  When I first got to check out an airing of the original 1970 Altman film in it's afternoon "4:30 Movie" stripped-and-diced-up offering, it was predictably hard to make heads or tails of it all.  I tried to recognize some of the character and story synapses to the series, but it was futile.  Apparently, this thing stood alone in it's pre-TV time as some counterculture blast that spoke to a vicious anti-Vietnam War population of the period.  In some misguided benefit-of-the-doubt effort though, at age twelve, realizing there was likely much to be learned about it, I tried to embrace what was some of the in-movie humor.  But ultimately I just didn't see much empathy to be had with things like wiretapping sexual encounters or a bunch of ugly men crashing women's showers.  If this was in fact the comedy of the century, as some film critics of it's time pronounced it, I sure had a lot to learn about humor.

But the humor, such as it was, was not the face value sort.  M*A*S*H the theatrical release was not It's A Gift, starring W.C. Fields.  The so-called humor was something ironic and generated quite differently in it's time, something the TV series had no interest or intention of doing.  Its so-called anti-Army humor in its earliest seasons would ultimately transition into a humanism that would in many ways embrace the better side of the Armed Forces, a directive that probably no one involved with the original film would have conceived.

In fact, the only figure that might have accepted such mentality would ironically have been the author himself, Dr. Richard Hornberger (alias author Richard Hooker).  The M.D. was not silent about his displeasure with the counterculture anti-Army veneer the adaptations of his work would quickly adopt.  Though there was little he could do about it, he never endorsed it.  The author was a uniquely silent and distant partner to it all.

Meanwhile, all of these unique discrepancies aside, still nothing was more relatable to this kid than a big camp full of ruffled characters forced to contend with daily life, blistering summer heat, biting, numbing deep winter frost, daily worries, fears big and small, the known and the unknown, volleyball games, pranks, the complexity of intimate relationships, the yearning for camraderie, and those nifty olive-drab fatigues that went perfectly with those Groucho Marx-style one-liners and and a  mop-top head of Alan Alda-styled hair such as my own.  It was almost, dare I'd have said in so few words, something akin to being an outcast, Queens junior high school kid in 1980.

And the fact is, I couldn't have been the only one put to such seduction.  How else could one explain the ocean of M*A*S*H image marketing out there at the time..?  The "M*A*S*H 4077" coffee mugs, T-shirts, shoulder bags, knapsacks, hats....I probably acquired one of each at the time.   That summer, sure enough, I took a dumb fall and scraped my knee one afternoon.  Hurt like hell. But, I bandaged up, got upstairs in the AC'd bedroom, and with some old walking cane I'd collected, and in my official M*A*S*H 4077 T-shirt, I galloped around the room, pretending I was some wounded soldier in post-op, waiting to meet with Dr. Hawkeye Pierce.  The act of pretend healed me up quick.

Within about a year, my first great crush and I kind of drifted apart.  The re-runs were finally pulled off the 11pm strip, to make room for the next contestant in the syndie cycle, Taxi.  Certainly a worthy candidate.  I'd entered high school and at last found the respect of some peer friendships and circle inclusion of sorts.  But that didn't remove me from my sense of connection to one of the greatest sitcom character galleries of all time.

I just didn't catch the re-runs any more, and truthfully didn't need to.  By the time the late 1980s rolled around, and a desperate Channel 5 (no longer a Metromedia child by then, but now adopted by Fox) restored good old M*A*S*H once more to salvage what their knockout Joan Rivers Show plan destroyed, I wasn't tuning in.  By that time, Channel 11 had turned re-runs of Cheers into the New York TV bedtime staple.  I knew the M*A*S*H series by heart at that point.  I didn't constantly need to see an opera I adored.  The series today has not left TV entirely.  It lives on various local Classic TV-service schedules.  But I don't need to gaze at it nightly,   A couple of decades ago when an emotional funk took me down hard, I acquired one of the DVD collections, one of my favorite mid-run seasons, and hoped to re-connect positively.  I think I watched about fifteen minutes of it since. But I still own that collection.

It was well into my young and accelerating adulthood too, that I'd also come to understand the fact that M*A*S*H was a television icon, a cornerstone, literally in spite of itself, and not necessarily because of it's premise and setting.  It could have been a show about elementary school crossing guards, and it still would have won.  And the fact remains, it's purpose hadn't nearly as much to do with the ironies of war as it did with creating the best little half-hour greeting card possible to sell as many cars and as much shampoo and cat food as it did.  And it succeeded.  It was a greeting card that certainly lifted my spirits when I needed it.  I'll never forget it for that.

But I also won't forget that the olive-drab Army fatigue ensemble is not a cult TV-based fashion statement, but a genuine artifact not to be misrepresented or exploited.  The historic Constitutional sites of our Colonial forefathers will not be transformed into amusement halls or fast-food restaurants anytime in the immediate future, and there's a reason for that, as well.

Even if the sight of a classic military fatigue shirt or cap draws me back to that ambivalent pre-teen summer that relied on that connective apparel, it's not a costume for a proper, civilian grownup.  Even Hawkeye Pierce would have agreed.  That was one great TV show he had....and it was one miserably great summer.

Noah F.

We Only Pray In The Car.....

 

A well-known parable that dates back likely to the beginnings of motorized travel (or at least to the time of Robert Moses) cites the tale of the driver moved to devout prayer in the sudden desperation for a parking spot. The motorist depicted is someone usually mostly secular in nature, but now immediately devout in their allegiance to God in their desperate wish for a spot. Invariably, the car does indeed get parked.

Unquestionably, prayer is proven to have its benefits. But to some still, even to this day, it remains a puzzle.

There seemed at one time to be just a little more breathing room in the world between humans. People had the personal space to believe and mentally function as they wished. In our "globally" connected world of social media, cellular communication and twenty-four-hour everything, that's just no longer the case. There is less synapse, less wonder. Evidence is all too present. In a world where life is only going to just present itself at every turn, more people need something unconditional to believe in. Something greater than all the real and virtual matter before us. That's prayer.

What better inspiration for prayer than imprisonment in a world too beset by the suffocation of reality, of imposed behaviors, of driven acts of retaliation...? And yet, even in a world where the greatest, most astute release remains readily available to all of us, some just won't touch it. Even if that mug of green tea is known to ease the stomach, cleanse the palette and serve to improve one's energy, one still veers in choice to the double-fudge latte. Presumably..? It's a matter of "comfort".

There are some that cannot find intellectual comfort in the act of common prayer. I'll hasten to say that I was raised among such heady and scholarly intellectuals. I was born into a nest of post-war New York Jews that somehow put intellect before prayer. No doubt, you've heard of those. I don't know if that qualifies as "agnostic" necessarily, but in my advanced years I'm not so sure I'm ready to dignify it with a title.

I'll never forget a memoir I once read by a successful bulemic, who spelled out brilliantly the mental madness of her teenage eating disorder. At one point she described the concept of a sandwich as being too "complicated". If you were hip enough to the whole thing at that point, you knew exactly what that meant. I know I did. I also know that to a Jew raised within intellectual secularist confines, that's also the lock-box puzzle of prayer.

Jewish prayer is not something you just show up at the place of worship point blank and join in on. It never has been. The Jews have been the deeply, famously and continuously the most persecuted tribe on the planet, and for that reason alone forced in many ways to pray in stealth. This would include a certain level of educated advancement, schooling and exclusion. And, to be clear about it, money: Paid membership. The famous story of the legendary Hillcrest Country Club tells of the creation of an exclusive social club designed by and created for successful Jews, in what proved at the time to be the unapologetically discriminatory environment of Beverly Hills. No bones would be made about this at any time. Jew vs.Gentile was, and apparently continues to be Romulan vs. Borg. Old Testament vs. New Testament. One heck of a division for a world supposedly manufactured by the same creator. And no possible better differentiation could exist than that which separates over-the-air TV viewers from cable subscribers.

I can certainly recall those early childhood years, High Holy Days meant trips with my uncle to the neighborhood temple, in that upscale village. When my mom decided to get it together as a single and move out of his suburban setting with her son, into sparer lodgings with only a finite patch of money in the bank, temple visits were very oddly a thing of the past. Prayer was, make no mistake about it, a subscription service. That very transition was the cornerstone of my ecumenical education.

None of the above of course is classified or astoundingly new information. Additionally, for those of The Faith in financial disorder, there are certainly avenues of organized worship. But it isn’t about that. Sometimes the medium itself is indeed the message.

I can’t think of a better reason for a Jewish kid growing up to have ambivalence about his sense of religion. My mother would instill in me the foundation which holds that one’s devotion relates to their actions, how they treat others, the respect they extend to even those they don’t know, and the self-respect with which they hold themselves. In other words, it isn’t about thieving, backstabbing, self-absorption, and showing up at temple on Rosh Hashanah in your best threads, hoping to out-style your cousin at the High Holy Services.. It isn’t about giving up your six-course Thanksgiving feast around the leaf-extended Ethan Allan dining room table to tie on an apron and spoon out some annual turkey stew at the homeless shelter for the evening. It’s about what you truly believe, and how closely you act on those humane beliefs in your dealings with others. It’s between you and God. What more pomp and circumstance doth one need..?

Beyond all that though, what is very often needed is a return to faith, a centering that comes only with the act of prayer. If, like myself, you have to go onto Google to look up the proper spelling of the word Berakhot, well then you’re probably not a very good Jew. You’re probably not very much in touch with your faith, and probably have no sense of devout practice, and you’re probably nothing but a hypocrite in all your spiritual convictions.

What I do know is that people much more successful, self-made and well-founded than myself, the likes of Bernard Madoff and Arnold Friedman spent plenty of High Holy time in prayer service. It was as much a social and sometimes business operation as a religious one. And they likely did the honors at home as well. You can’t have one without the other.

I didn’t come up from that packaged environment. The act of prayer was something for which I was, it was somehow conveyed, ineligible. Too poor for the synagogue clique, too astutely intellectual for any other kind of relative Bible Thumpage. My mother seemed to hold that organized religion of all kinds was generalized hype. We’d invariably find ourselves glancing at the TV during the Sunday morning public-affairs and religious-programming “desert”, and a lecture would erupt out of her on the greed-bound exploitation of “paid religion”. Active prayer on these terms was poisoned candy.

It would be many years into my maturity, and my mother’s departure from this world, that I would meet with some much more advanced minds, and acquire the realization of what prayer and devotion is really all about. Those advanced minds were not Harvard graduates, but some did emerge from the Seminary. Others were simply surviving churchgoers all their lives. But one active ritual related them all closely: The practice of prayer.

There remain too many ways to denounce active prayer as a rationalized cop-out in the defense of wrongful behavior. Certainly the misdeeds that have plagued the Catholic Church over time speak to this. But religious practice has never gone out of business as a result, and very likely will not. Because, as the fight against COVID has proven, for example, we cannot cease to step out of doors and breathe the air. In the same way, prayer is just too necessary. You could probably do yourself some serious damage with wrongful doses of Vitamin C. But that doesn’t prove it unnecessary to any metabolism.

I never did learn how to pray in Hebrew, and I’m afraid I’m not too versed in the ecumenical backgrounds of the Old Testament. I don’t really know the full story of The Ten Commandments. I don’t know the Passover Haggadah inside out, beyond a rousing chorus of “Dyaneu”. If I pray for a violence-stricken woman in Israel, it isn’t necessarily with the eye-for-an-eye anger held by the Jewish Defense League, as much as it is with the prayer for peace and survival I pray for that young Latino mother shot randomly in Crown Heights last night at 4am.

The practice of prayer I’ve self-cultivated, with the help of astute minds over time, has taught me much about self-centering, and keeping focus. Gratitude is the center of prayer. When I emerge from that subway terminal at night, on my way home from work, even in the most inclement weather, I’ll stand for just a moment, in the ice-cold wind, or pouring rain, to thank God for the safety and peace with which he has endowed me and my loved ones today. And that’s at the end of my worst days. The ends of the best only frighten me, with the gift I know I cannot repay.

My days have lots of humanity in them. Foolish conflict and inner struggle. Anger. Sleeplessness. Occasional lapses in judgement. Grumbled utterances of $%*^ in impatient frustration. Those are not impious moments. They’re everything Mister Rogers once reminded us he liked us for. Yes, Fred Rogers himself was an ordained Presbyterian minister. He wasn’t just a puppet voice.

One thing life in today’s world teaches more every day: Prayer is the best, safest and most reliable self-service going. My own practice of prayer may not meet with the approval of the Rabbinical League or the Higher Ministry. I don’t sing spirituals, I don’t get to catch too much religious programming on radio and TV, and I don’t find myself frequenting houses of worship. But I think I’ve got a pretty good relationship with God. We talk often, and he’s never met me forty minutes later with a curt “We have to stop for today…” That’s because those moments of self-conversation with some of those long-gone better ecumenical minds I have known keep me in the straightest focus I’ve ever maintained. It’s the guard rail I hold onto closely every night, as I ascend from that stairway, look toward that brightened night sky and say thanks, for the moment I’m blessed with, in ways I can't articulate.  And at the end of that prayer, I know I have.

Noah F.

The Tune-In Factor

It was in my formative years that the commonly grumbled phrase was “generation gap”.  Even after all that violence and turbulence of the late 60s and early 1970s gave way to some resigned, inflammatory apathy, too many people beyond the threshold of middle age, respectful of youth or not, claimed some inability to relate to the popular culture of youth today.  What was once an irreparable crevice though has undeniably become an ocean.

It’s probably no one’s fault. Parents interested in relating, or more likely forced to relate to the socioculture of their teens will effectively do so.  I doubt however that someone unforced, like myself, will ever bear any type of connective lexicon with that of modern youth.  While it doesn’t really concern me, I am sometimes led to wonder just what this means for the future of generational connectivity.

Invariably, there I’d be, a boy of ten or eleven, the lone and outstood child at high noon on a Sunday, in an apartment full of kibbutzing, arguing, eating, coffee drinking grownups, me seated hospitably one bedroom away, before the portable Trinitron TV throughout the visit, understandably unable to engage with the towering elders, those who roared with great fervor, argumentation, laughter, over subject matter no less than foreign to me.

TV back then was still, even in itself, a more collective medium.  You didn’t watch what you wanted, you watched what was on. Multiple channels, digital services, platforms, or viewing devices did not exist in the spring of 1978.  What’s more, that which was on the six-channel smorgasboard was limited to what television stations, independent ones in particular, deemed most cost-effective.  If King World’s re-processed, re-packaged, re-edited (and to film purists, abomination of the) Hal Roach Our Gang series, re-dubbed The Little Rascals, proved a winner in key cities, then it was the reigning kid-vid Sunday staple for a good long time. It’s what was for breakfast.

Original syndicated programming on the commercial dial for formidable youth was not quite yet the cottage industry it would soon become.  In the late 1970s, “live-action” programs, or shows featuring a host or talent of sorts was no longer a very common format, certainly not to the extent that it was in the prior decades.  By this time, with cartoons and animation efforts largely targeted by interest groups over violent themes, the mainstay for the independents flickering on the cathode-ray tube on America’s day off was off-network re-runs and old, old movies.

The so-called staple that something like The Little Rascals became was a very strange kind of intimate belonging in one’s daily or Sunday life. It wasn’t something you tuned into with great anticipation because you haven’t yet seen it, like the next episode of some long-running decade-old digital TV series from some other platform that you haven’t seen all twelve seasons of yet. This was basically wallpaper.  It was the equivalent of songs or music videos you know only too well, who does or sings what, and what happens when.  The jokes really aren’t funny, but the visuals are more or less iconic.  I don’t think any kid my age who’s eyes and TV dial gravitated towards it each Sunday would’ve been capable of explaining why he wanted to watch it, other than a cursory admission of “I always do..”  It somehow wasn’t 11:30 on Sunday morning without a TV screen branding a grainy, sound-muffled, black-&-white image of a pom-pom capped Spanky and Pete The Dog, something produced for the big screen by Hal Roach for little folks forty years prior.  This stuff composed that piously denounced image of “junk” us children grazed on, preferenced to homework, reading, or going out and getting some exercise.  If anything though, for a kid too-intelligent like myself, those familiar, foolish flickers were just a common admonishing over a lack of better initiative.  It wasn’t even the kind of offering you could ever rationalize as something you “just want to see the end of….” before getting to the book report.  It almost kind of helped to bring closure to the awareness of television as a finite entity, a containable “box” one needn’t allow oneself to indulge in like a sack of sugary, nutritionless, and mostly stale donuts.

And all this is just what would render such as uncomfortable to a kid seated before it in some stranger’s home, where you’d rather not share your more intimate, embarrassing habits, akin to eating in your pajamas, or singing some ubiquitous commercial jingle aloud as a silly parody only you and your mom might get or appreciate.  

And in spite of all your awkward alienation, you weren’t alone.

Invariably, I’d be sitting there, politely, that obligatory child in the room, trapped before the monochrome Alfafa, Buckwheat, Farina, Chubby and Jackie Cooper, in a way I would not be ordinarily, soon upon which some transient adult on the way back from the bathroom would look in on the boy in the bedroom with the TV as a brief respite from the dining room circus.  Characteristically, the visitor was some tall, overweight gentleman of urban Depression-era descent, some walking revival of W.C. Fields in his own right.  But well meant enough..

“Eh….is that Jackie Cooper…?? Ah, we used to see him at the movies all the time…….Ha..! There’s Spanky..! You know about Spanky…?”, the old coot would mutter, fixated suddenly on the screen, breaking into a grin……..”Eh, these people are all old now……..” He’d gaze for another moment before addressing the viewer.  “Ya’ like these kids..?? We saw ‘em in the movies….”  He’d chuckle wistfully and walk off.  What just happened there…?

In spite of all my staunch, pre-adolescent iconoclasm, in a world where grownups just wouldn't understand kids, this unlikely figure of a time, an era and a sociology long prior, joined me in some abridged moment of common understanding. Perhaps no other circumstance could have furnished that.

It’s a bridge more impressive in that time than likely any chronological one constructible today.  The common lexicon is somehow just less likely or less readily established.  Those rotating dozen or so little crackly two-reelers were unmistakably just those, the originals.  Not re-makes, re-boots, re-casted, or re-done.  They were not one of a massive series of offshoots or spinoffs, with endless plot or premise changes.  The little films each bore their own iconic immortality, like the runaway jalopy, or the kid tossing the cake out the window, landing on the blustery policeman’s head.

Making that connection with one’s elders over, say, feature films would already be a more involved and mature effort.  Indeed, I spent plenty of afternoon TV matinee moments with some unknown WB classic flashing onto the screen mid-feature, my uncle muttering….”Jimmy Cagney…….Paul Muni..”, recognizing them aloud while channel surfing.  For a ten-year old though, too boring.  

So the next question is, in a world where families of young and old continue to gather on occasion, the impressionable youth left to their own devices whilst the adult folk gather to ostensibly convene as the grownups, is that very connective moment, opportunity, or the existence of it even sociologically possible..?

To put it in TV terms, first you’d need some kind of common ground. Are the kids watching anything “old” on TV anymore..?  Anything you, the reader, a contemporary of mine perhaps would recall thriving on videologically at their age..?

Very possibly not.  Again, it’s no one’s fault.  Movements in the entertainment and personal-electronic “platform” industry have mandated the need for more constantly changing forms and styles of entertainment.  There is no available time for some television series to “trend” nowadays, by way of exposure.  No one cooks anymore.  The smash hits of the 1970s and 80s became so as a result of failed launches, and the determination of network programmers to give the show a good, hard try. Now, it’s not about the show, its content or quality.  It’s all about the pre-trending efforts and external on-line and social media hype.  And in more ways than one, the hype takes precedence over the show.

Some years ago, my cousin’s teenage daughter, whom I got to spend a few moments in a room with after dinner at a family occasion was busy texting her friend some image of TV’s Gomez Addams, the great John Astin in some unmissable black-&-white frame from the The Addams Family.  I thought that encouraging, at first.  The photo though had Gomez with some superimposed red hat of some sort on his head.  I had no idea what it was about, but it was obviously some short-lived on-line gag.  Unaffected by that addendum, I offered “Hey, you remember The Addams Family..?? That was a great show….I used to watch it….”

“What….?”, the girl looked up, quite obviously puzzled by my reference, no clue as to who the fellow in the trending photo was….

“He’s an old actor…..”, I dismissed.

The common absence of such immediate lexicon from one generation to the next may not seem relevant or important in a world too absorbed with greater strife.  But the question begged here remains, is there indeed the threat of a generation gap even greater than the one lamented more than fifty years ago, one that deems threat in different ways, one even more alienating and divisive between populations each more intelligent than ever before...?  It seems that before even more serious points of history can be understood in relation to today’s or future worlds, the first hand understandings of those having lived those events need in some way to convey that understanding to those of today’s generation, never having known the past in it’s very context.  It’s about the dangers, the violence, the misanthropy of today’s world.  And it’s not about an absence of Spanky, Buckwheat and Alfafa.

Come to think of it, just as powerfully memorable to the likes of myself from the time of my irreverent-humored youth is the once trend-heavy explosion of comic Eddie Murphy, and the hilarity he so brilliantly mined from that ancient, anything-but-politically-acceptable 1930’s image of little Buckwheat.  Murphy was clearly firing a comic bazooka at the outrageous creation of such figure. It was an irreverent, well-defined attitude and attack we all, of every race, appreciated and seemed to share.  And that effort seemed by contrast to outscore the fearful, witch-hunting instincts of today’s so-called, thought-eschewing “cancel culture”, one in which clearly no expressed thought as such would be permissible by anyone’s admission.  Except on social media, the most vocal platform possible, where the ugliest mental synapses rage without apology.  Or in probably any case, not even a shred of humor.

And is that in fact the frustrated connective ground to which our modern-day culture is reduced..?  The war on alienation can only be fought and better resolved with a connectivity, a communication, and in some ways perhaps a level of self-admission that needs to be taught, and learned.  And shared. Enough of a little more of that, and dare I say there’s every chance that that’s one less automatic weapon picked up and handled by a civilian hand younger than twenty-five.

Noah F.

Common Ether

Social media may have its critics.  Everyone’s a critic.  It’s their endowed right.  But the medium’s finest defense just might be its most significant offense.

It doesn’t discriminate.

If it did of course, it would not nearly be the fertile ground of commercial harvest known to its founders and financiers.  Their job is to constantly monitor, analyze and arrive at sectored determinations on their product markets and consumers.  No better way of doing this than gaining as intimate exposure as possible into the private lives of proudly shared egos, and as many as possible.

It’s the most powerful advancement in commerce yet.  Retro-head that I am, I find nothing more captivating than a trip down the Memory Lane of forty or fifty years ago, and all those highly serious and sophisticated diatribes on the social dangers of television.  Plenty of media critics and sociologists went in both directions on the social dangers and rewards.  One of the recurring attributes however, was in television's ability to unite so many co-existing cultures.  Two men, one upscale from the suburbs, and a ghetto struggler can both, for just one moment, meet in pleasurable unity over a punch line heard on Sanford And Son last night on TV.  Any medium that can provide that in such a scattered, sectored and separative world is certainly worth the highest admiration, according to some.

By contrast, it was the detractors who concluded over the years that the medium bears no such honorable social intent other than to indoctrinate innocent eyes and ears young and old into deep consumership, and a sense of self-inadequacy over any inertia or indecisiveness toward such at any moment.  Their point was no less valid, and still very much so.

The difference between now and fifty years ago however, is this brand new thing that has fast left the controversial frontier of television in the dust, and that's this new invention called Social Media.   It wasn't invented or introduced as such all at once.  Much of it began with the earliest underpinnings of the Internet.  Then, by the time Y2K rolled around, you really weren't anywhere unless you were there.  The author of this diatribe in fact was not agreeable enough to crack open his wallet for such until he genuinely deemed himself enough of a clinical outcast, five or six years into the millennium.  Even then, it took some getting used to.

Wrong as I might be, it somehow seemed that I got onto the entrance ramp of the Facebook Expressway just around the time all the other superhighway motorists did.  That was kind of encouraging.  Nothing makes arrival into a new neighborhood easier than the shared experience of such.  And before long, we'd all start absorbing the art of becoming highly sophisticated junior sociologists, standing back and watching the various toxic personalities vent themselves quite predictably in word, online, the written equivalent of their loud and incorrigible selves.  We'd see the sociopathic side of the traditionally meek and polite.  We'd see the odd, inexplicable passive-aggressive side of famous beasts sharing greeting-card memes and kitten videos with little red heart emojis.  

But beyond all the zoological exhibits we're mostly careful not to step up and hand-feed, there's us, the mentally responsible adult participants, moderating our tempers and self-monitoring our words and reactions.  Next step..? Make some friends.

Pretty soon, you're in a very friendly neighborhood of shared likenesses.....people who also get up in the middle of the night.......people who hate running late in the morning.......people who treasure Sunday brunch at home in their affectionately decorated kitchen.  People who go on vacations.   People who are grateful to God for the care their sick child got at the clinic or hospital.  People reveling proudly in their hard-labored, newly re-decorated kitchens. 

Well, perhaps I can't vacation in Rome or spend Sunday at a rented villa in Fire Island like my treasured Facebook compatriots.  But I can just as easily share the sophistication of my own, economy-sized world with some artfully conceived and just-as-exquisite phone camera-snapped images of my kitchen wall-hung art, my pet snoozing peacefully in a sunlit corner, and maybe a clever caption and music link to accentuate just how we're elegantly spending our well-deserved down time together.  See..? We can be some pretty impressive self-advertisers, too..!

It's a great, and often very positive and supportive way of asserting one's self-confidence.  Among well-meant friends its nothing but well-received.  Matters of socioeconomic division need not be a separative factor amidst this online interactive ocean liner cruise, one that transcends the barricades of COVID isolation and many other of life's unfriendly strongholds.  But as one relies more and more upon such social existence, among the kindest and most genuine of the faraway strangers, as legitimately intimate as the emotional co-dependency becomes, and amidst all its invaluable daily treasure, the stark and divisive factors ultimately emerge.  And whether or not we choose to bear effect reigns upon these so-called friendships.

There are no socioeconomic "barricades" on Facebook.  A young mother of three, situated in a NYCHA apartment in the Bronx can quite easily find close kinship with a young Carrie Bradshaw on the Upper East Side, after a blessed encounter where the young mom helps Carrie off the ground with great concern after she fell off her Manolo heels and dropped her new Apple phone to the ground.  Next thing, they're friending it up on FB.  Young Mom and Carrie have virtually zero in common beyond same biology, same birth year, and the same shows they saw on TV as kids, the same sugar cereals they ate, the same songs they heard at their prom, and same kind of irrational tempers that flare at the same ugly behaviors they see every day.  Ah, the unity the World Wide Web can provide..!

Down the spectrum somewhat, you'll encounter others of slightly better economic struggle-status in happy friendship with those Finzi-Continis of the higher tennis-courters. Friendships that prove that you don't need money to share the appreciation of a flowered garden.  Perhaps the only insignificant difference remains whether you can appreciate it from behind the gate you pass along the Botanical Garden on the way home to your complex from the bodega, or in the garden you own and have tended by your hired gardener, in the backyard of your four-bedroom home in East Islip, with the newly finished deck, all set for the summer holiday.  But to recognize and self-discriminate on such obvious basis remains uncouthedly trite.  Is the object of the game to disparage yourself or others based on such blatant economic disparity..?  Or is the better reminder that of exercising mindful adulthood, and owning up to one's position in the world, and learning to embrace it proudly, within this mall of online citizens, each in rightful possession of a sense of artful and joyful appreciation on the most visceral levels.

In the eyes of many, such co-existence is simply "where we are now", and the social atmosphere to which we're behaviorally expected to acclimate.  To some, the grind of such is really no different from the way their mom or dad had to wait on line at the bank in 1972 just to cash a check, and in the process endure a friendly conversation with some lady or fellow they know from somewhere, who can't help but regale them with tales of woe over their golf or tennis game, and wallet photos of their grandchildren and their beaming parents, degreed physicians residing in the Douglaston Hills.  Meanwhile Mom or Dad is more absorbed with how badly the cost of that blown carburetor or the kid's sudden trip to the ENT is going to kill them.

The difference now is that these passing and more prominent social media "relationships" are more elusively and conveniently both selective, and at the same time insidiously invasive, often in ways we're not going to realize or accept until we're forced.  I could insert a "Heaven Forbid" next to "forced", but the truth is that Heaven will not forbid inevitability.

Should one's barely-afforded lodging be destroyed in a local flood one fine day, should one's loved one or self be pitted against injury or illness for which treatment is undeniably unaffordable, or should one be put to any kind of crisis for which their previously livable economic situation finds them tragically unprepared, suddenly, the value of nearly all those well-meant, affectionate Facebook "relationships" with all those on the economic upper balconies immediately becomes, to no fault of anyone, confederate currency.  The best anyone can offer to anyone in those once-fantastical, joyful, picture-sharing, day-off-I'm-enjoying portraits that compose our fragile social existences is now reduced to an illustrated smiling cat-face emoji, the extent of what some far-extended well-wisher can offer, a friendly wave from the curb.  No one can come forth to save the life or even the day of the tragic struggler.  And they're not really supposed to.  Even the struggler might not bear resentment against her fair-weather Facebook friends.

Especially since there's really nothing "fair-weather" about them at all.  Social media is just what those words denote: A media providing the capacity to be social.  Nothing more.  Whether or not we, as responsible participants decide to see ourselves bearing any unreal socioeconomic connection with our "friends", greater or less, is part of our "God-Given Right To Life".  And at the same time, it calls upon the need for mindful, responsible "Choice".

And indeed, amidst this social crowd, bigger than any blanket-to-blanket beach population on the hottest Fourth of July, there is, fascinatingly enough, a level of social order, a Geneva Convention of sorts, one that no Group Administrator needs to post, articulate or remind.  One that transcends angry rants, political talk on retro-memory pages, homophobic talk on collectible antique pages, and the misanthropy that will find welcome nowhere.

Should one find themselves unable to care for a loved one, when one has to in any way bid farewell to their parent, sibling, child or even beloved pet, forced strictly by dire economic condition, where conditions held by perhaps any or more of one's Facebook "friends" would never, Heaven Forbid, incomprehensibly see them, an understanding somehow politely exists.  When divisive conditions become inarticulately clear, on line, for all to see, civilian "friends" and commerce kingpins alike, it's all well wishes, extensions of prayer, and red heart emojis.  No questions asked.  

And it's not, as prior eras and in-person acquaintanceships might suggest, an insensitive distancing or alienation.  In such case as this, it's a level of shared respect.  It's the humility that reminds that rich or poor, we are valuing shared ground together at all times.  And none of us bear the right to judge the struggle of another.  For one thing, we've no right. And for another, we've no desire.   Everyone has their own cross to bear.  Even if a greater population helps us carry that weight every day.  "For The Grace of God Go I" is more than ever just as much a secular prayer.  And if we had to log off our social media page each day or night with some type of serenity prayer known to twelve-step fellowships, that certainly would be the disclaimer at the end of the broadcast day.  

Yes, the internet, commerce-commanded social media and the like are hijacking our minds, our brains and our behaviors every day, every minute.  But it's still worth it for the relationships and what we discover they really can mean.  Because as living, breathing humans, we still know better.

Noah F.

I'm Sorry, I Can't Help You......

Not long ago, I was surfing the Facebook waves one day, where an old acquaintance shared one of those widespread, silly little "memes", one that said something to the liking of "How can I tell you're being sarcastic...?"  With all candor, I responded, "At this point in my life, even I can't tell anymore.  And even worse, I'm not too concerned..."

Fact of the matter though, is that indeed it was an evaded concern haunting me in more recent times.  Despite this acclaimed, life-long, exterior veneer of adorable, cherubic innocence, somehow over the years, in ways genuinely unbeknownst to myself, there emerged this counterbalanced, razor-edged, sardonic and brilliantly-just-as-subtle beast, one that would send the humor of Albert Brooks and Martin Mull to the borscht-belt woodshed.  

With a life-long commitment against morphing into anything even remotely cliche, my young adulthood was certainly cautious enough not to become a T-shirt clone of the renown MTV's Daria, the pop-culture comic House Representative of the morose, Gen-X 1990s.  As I recently channeled the spirit of the immortal Rodney Dangerfield and his "no respect" act, my quote was "When I was a kid...? Depression was somethin' we did for fun...!"  When it comes to the 1990s, that's no hyperbole.

Early youth in the late 70s and early 1980s had me garnering no respect for my peer culture.  If a kid in my high school bio class were to develop a cure for cancer, I'd have likely concluded that he was probably on drugs, and just being a trophy for his rich parents.  I gave short if no shrift to the pop music of the period, and MJ's white glove.  Instead, I spent plenty of headset time late Saturday nights with my mom's old Dylan Blonde On Blonde LPs, studying the musicianship of the arrangements. My mother was in fact my best friend during my altogether blacklisted pre-adolescent peerhood, the innocent, sweet little rotund boy.  At age twelve, I thought the term "jerking off" referred to some kind of sports penalty.  Needless to say, my innocence of the world's avarice and my generalized belief against any such thing as a "bad kid" got me injured, robbed and death-threatened in the far corners of some the borough's finest public schools.  

At the same time, my mother even more viciously infuriated than I, there was a stern teaching, that to turn vigilante, and act against their violence or anger with mine would only render me something worse than those troubled and injured souls, both inside and out.  It was a good reminder.  It served well in an adult future where you'd need to remember one thing:  Standing up for yourself in victimhood will at best end you up a courtroom defendant.  The best revenge is somber defeat.

As I leaned into my mid-twenties at the time, despite a lifetime of alienation from the peer culture in general, I couldn't help taking note of how the hair-flipped pastel aerobicizing of the Reagan era had starkly turned dark-flannel, black matted-haired, dark, coffee-slurping inertia.  For those whose young, presumed  "Wonder Years" and "Happy Days" were spent on the dateless, friendless, disconnected, misunderstood sidelines, this was the spiritual revenge your whole life had resisted suicide for.  And somehow, you ultimately ended up questioning whether this is in fact what you wished for.  In some ways, I found myself bearing an even greater sense of violation at the time.  Seemed like everyone was suddenly stealing my act..!

And that was a good thing. Even if was going to take myself too seriously, I wasn't going to expect to impress anyone in the process. But even still, my exterior always remained that of the quiet, innocent, respectful lad that bore no irreverence.  Or at least displayed none outwardly.  It was my professional passkey in life.  I don't know how many doors it opened for me necessarily, but it certainly didn't keep me locked out and kicking them when my hands were full.

That didn't stop me from adopting the world's best weapon against the intolerable and inescapable injustices of generalized disrespect, ineptitude and stupidity to which I'd be forced to acclimate in this world.  And I found it in nature's best source: Humor.  

Not the volatile or brazen insult kind of humor, much less the sociopathic grime of the immensely popular "Jerky Boys", or the smirking punk arrogance of Kevin Smith's beloved Clerks protagonists.  Like the figures cited earlier, I took my cue from such enlightened luminaries as the writers acquired discriminately by creator Norman Lear, in his efforts to use humor as a tool, to see our human flaws in the mirror before us, to "check us", in effect.  

To do that on a one-to-one basis in sardonic capacity however, is a dangerous knife-throwing act.  People at large, no matter how cynical you are about human intelligence, are still way smarter than you think.   And if you have any doubts about that, you're just the violence-embracing kid who's no better than his hallway harrassers.

My own deep-rooted sardonicism has rarely, if ever been used as a one-on-one weapon, with the exception of confrontations that might send others into some heated, self-defensive shouting match.  My defense, in contrast, has been that of polite, quiet and curious response, an unassuming padlock that only the intelligent stranger requiring his just desserts will detect the combination.

Somewhere along the line, maturing as I, and many have into a culture who's anthem has long been the revenge of the underdog, Michael Douglas in Falling Down, Joe Don Baker in Walking Tall, or maybe Charles Bronson in Death Wish, my prized recipe for personal-insight-humor-coated social balance lost it's eminence.  

At some predictable level, where the victims would out-populate the antagonists, youth violence would erupt nationwide, onto peers and others.  The desperate plea for a "kinder, gentler nation", the once-famously misguided mission statement famously coined by the war-abiding Republican George H.W. Bush, was now the outcry of a United States in siege.  A new renaissance of enlightenment was illuminating our despaired culture, imploring each and every individual to see not themselves exclusively, but the needs, wants, and deprivations of that creature before them, human, animal or otherwise.   Walking home one night, I let a scurrying waterbug cross my path.  I was too intimidated to squash him.  Or her.  It could have been a "her".

Sure enough, after years of enduring my own oppression, the still-no-less-than-oppressive culture now also saw fit to view themselves as eternally persecuted.  Translated into my social currency, this meant that any curiously kind, polite response I'd offer to anything that might otherwise be deemed inapproachable or objectionable by some would immediately be deemed viciously and inappropriately insulting.  In the most extreme circumstances, to meet a curt, or insidiously malicious comment with a most innocent "hey, thanks so much...." would meet with a departured "Don't talk to me like I'm a fucking idiot...!!!"  To respond with, "Well, I think you asked for it" would certainly, I'd find, be an insult to the both of us intellectually.  So, I'd just lumber off in silence, invisible trophy in arms.

That's the successful working version.  Trouble is, there's the unchecked, unperfected, dangerous version.  Still working on that, and I'm unfortunately not so sure the algorithm for success is in fact attainable.

The whole science here is based on nothing more or less than the science of human dynamics. But in lieu of the unapproachable factors, I have educated myself towards a few modifications, as my trunk has cultivated its rings of time.

For starters, humor is generally unwelcome as an approachable technique.  To try to institute yourself commonly as the brilliantly clever final box of a daily Doonesbury or Calvin & Hobbes strip, in the effort to provoke cluster-wide, situation-enlightened, irony-observant laughter is about as entertaining as "pretending" to be a knife-wielding, death-threatening Martin Sheen in The Incident.  An ungotten joke can be socially and interpersonally fatal.  You might have the urge to take pride in being "hipper than the room", until one day you realize:  There's actually in fact no room hip enough for you, except the one you're in all alone.  Is that where you want to spend your life..?

Have you ever watched Star Trek: Voyager..? Since I'm no enthusiast of the genre, I never would, until my Trekkie-wife introduced me to the 11PM strip reruns years later.  It's magnificent.  For me, it's picked up where my teenage 11PM M*A*S*H viewing ritual left off.  Of all the Trek re-constitutions over time, I'd put this one on top, and not for it's related sci-fi association.  With it's stellar cast and writing, it's primarily about interpersonal experiences, trust, emotion, betrayal.  All the things that make us the human machines we are. Nothing says it better than Jeri Ryan's brilliant portrayal of the ice-cold, stoic Seven Of Nine trying a concerted effort at embracing humanity. There's a reason a show like this remains popular well beyond the Trekkies in the living room.  It's about the struggle of every human to relate properly to one another and themselves.

I could easily define myself over time as "Vulcan", but they're just not as complicated as us desperate and confused humans.  They're relatively comfortable in their emotional isolation.  No chance of that here.  Weaponry becomes necessary, and for those in this category, it's a matter of intellectual cynicism, sardonicism, and overall incomprehensibility.  My response to that meme was the most truthful self-assessment I've admitted in years.  To myself.

In the effort to follow Seven Of Nine's admirable intentions, I've in fact sought to consciously ditch the crutch ironic-commentary humor, and respond to people and situations with merely direct and sincere straight answers.  No smackdown punch lines are needed to make my way into a room filled with private jokes.  No need to slather on some artificial Peter Brady-esque "Ya like my new personality..??" charm.  Expression of kindness and concern is always best and universally embraced before anything.  The late, great Edith Bunker in her lifetime was never known for making instant enemies.

Discriminating fiction consumer that I am, one of the few contemporary pieces of work I've treasured remains Caren Lissner's Carrie Pilby, a first-person narrative I would embrace as a cautious mirror.  Carrie is a somewhat mis-placed young woman of nineteen, on the borderline between guarded youth and accelerated adulthood, in a struggle to break her force field of life-long cultivated distrust against others, to begin the process of her only option on Earth: relating to others.  As with the best fiction, it's a treasure to know that you're one of the few, and probably the many so well and articulately understood by the author. Lissner's Carrie did it.  On a less intensive, and more elusive level, so can I.

And at the same time, human science being what it is, like a dramatist clueless on the roar that line got, I'll see my innate humor appreciated when I expect it the least.  Like when somebody mentions something miserable, with no possilble rejoinder but silence, and I'll bravely chirp, glaring out the window......."Nice day out, though..." That once met with a quiet individual's hearty, startling, explosive laugh and a handshake .  "You're somethin' else, man...!", and we'd part.   And I'd walk off, quietly but with pride, knowing I brought someone some momentary joy and comfort, in a way no one could.   I'd like to think that's what I'm really here for.

Noah F.