The Fat President

You know the guy. Everyone knows who the fat president is, right?

William Howard Taft.

There he is, the 27^th President of the United States of America. Quite the looker. According to various sources, Taft weighed “as much as 300 pounds” or even up to “350 pounds” during his time as the sitting president. Though at that weight, one can hardly imagine him standing!

If you remember anything about him besides his corpulence, it’s that he was the guy who had a custom extra-large bathtub installed in the White House. If you recently completed a year of high school U.S. History, maybe you know that he was Teddy Roosevelt’s hand-picked successor, and that his failure to follow Roosevelt’s policies led to the latter’s formation of the Progressive “Bull Moose” Party to try to retake the presidency. Otherwise, what was Taft to you, or to history? He was merely the fat president.

A sort of glory happened in 2008 when the United States elected Barack Obama to be president, a repudiation of the cynicism that said a black man could never be elected president by the American people. But as his presidency ossifies into immutable form, I fear that Obama will become another William Howard Taft – known for one prominent trait, but ultimately an insubstantial one. Will Obama be remembered as “the black president”?

Rather than seeing the Sandy Hook school shooting as a call for high-minded action, I expect that Obama will see it as yet another chance to stand with dignity above the fray, content to be The Great Sympathizer, the guy who says the right things, that we need to circle the wagons around dead kids, not dishonor them by arguing about guns. And that’s fine. He should be a nice guy, as usual. History tends to remember nice guys, right?

Generally speaking, Americans do not want their presidents to emulate Napoleon or Alexander the Great. Or do they? It seems like history remembers presidents who stuck their noses into the big problems of the day, Abraham Lincoln, for example, or Franklin Roosevelt. Is our gun culture really a bigger problem to tackle than slavery or civil war, economic collapse or a world war?

Rather than kowtowing to Americans’ supposed reverence for our “strong tradition of gun ownership,” wouldn’t it be worthier to be remembered as the president who stood up to the gun nuts and took away our freedom to turn kids into hamburger? Better yet, be remembered as the president who forcefully pried us away from our addiction to climate changing ways. There are probably a couple of other big issues that would qualify. Oh, that whole slavery thing? That hasn’t gone away entirely, has it? Equal rights for gays, those quaint second-class citizens? Perhaps the gays are doing just fine pushing forth their own agenda. They don’t need the president’s charity!

Everyone already acknowledges that presidents are highly concerned with their legacies. So wouldn’t it be a good idea for Obama to get a bit audacious with his leadership and his speeches, if only for the sake of his legacy? I for one am rather frustrated with his campaign slogan: “Change, but not too much. Forward, but not too fast.”

With reelection safely behind him, surely Obama can afford to be himself? Isn’t that what people loved about George W. Bush, that he was always himself? (Maybe he wasn’t smart enough to be anyone else, but that’s beside the point.)

Even when we all loathed Bush for going bananas after 9/11 and plunging America into two foreign wars, we couldn’t deny that this was Bush being Bush. And no matter what we might want to believe about the master of overreacting, Bush did not destroy America. Regular old Americans did that when we put our rights and future into the hands of the wealthy, the lobbyists, the selfish few.

My worry is that this passivity and guardedness is Obama being himself. That this is all there is to him.

Obama is fond of some words attributed to Martin Luther King, Jr., who himself was actually quoting the 19^th century reformer and abolitionist, Theodore Parker: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” I can go along with that; progress takes time. Hopefully, Obama can go along with being remembered only as “the black president.”

Throw some bells and a red suit on him, and William Howard Taft would have made a pretty convincing Santa Claus. President Obama, what do you bring to the table? 

It’s a trap!

If I picked one film director per day and discussed why he wouldn’t be a good fit for Star Wars: Episode VII, I probably wouldn’t get very far before the actual director is announced. Yes, the rumor mill seems to indicate that the announcement is imminent. So maybe I’ll just do a run-down of every director I can think of, with brief comment. I should note that almost every big name in Hollywood has appeared in the rumors, but it’s perhaps the few who haven’t come up who are most interesting. And a caveat: I honestly don’t think any known director is really a match for the Star Wars universe, but this doesn’t mean I don’t respect their work; I’ve just never seen a movie and thought, yeah, this guy should direct Star Wars some day.

Self-recused

Steven Spielberg – Would have been a practical, easy choice. He’s Lucas’s best compadre, the biggest name around, a lock at the box office, comfortable with huge productions, and yet I’m incredibly glad that we won’t see the Spielbergian Star Wars, a jaunty caper full of extreme close-ups, broken homes, and way too many little kids with chips on their shoulders.

Quentin Tarantino – No one could seriously want this, right? Least of all Tarantino himself.

Occasional mention

James Cameron – The Terminator and Terminator 2 are classics, but where the hell did this guy’s brain go when he made Avatar? Does having a bunch of kids really ruin a man this thoroughly? Anyway, he’ll be making sequels to Avatar for the rest of his working life (and when is True Lies 2 coming out?), so sadly, he’ll be too busy to take on another big project.

Christopher Nolan – This one puzzles me most, because of the fervor of his supporters contrasted with the utter inappropriateness of his style. To Nolan’s great credit, he actually has a style. But that brooding, mind-bending labyrinth, with its abundance of weighty dialogue and obsession with suffering as a catalyst for action – does it really scream “Star Wars” to anyone?

Zack Snyder – Reportedly not interested in the job. What a shame. Now we’ll never get to see a lightsaber duel that starts with a super slow-mo shot of both combatants sword-swinging with faces locked in “scream mode,” followed by a hyperkinetic three seconds of laser-grinding saber contact, going back to slow-mo as a Jedi somersault leaps into the air, all against a stark two-color background shot through a dirty lens filter.

Alfonso Cuaron – He made the third Harry Potter movie, which was a good one. But so what?

Heavily favored by press and fanboys

Matthew Vaughn – My favorite possibility so far. X-Men: First Class was the classiest(!) X-Men movie, and though this is not saying much considering the humiliations of the Bryan Singer era, I think it’s also the best Marvel movie of all time, hands down, and I’d like to think that the powers that be at Lucasfilm and Disney have the good taste to recognize this. This doesn’t mean his movie would feel much like Star Wars, but at least it would have emotional pull.

Joss Whedon – The ardor for Whedon has cooled in the past week, and I can’t say I’m disappointed. I consider his Buffy and Angel to be great artistic achievements, but what did he have to say with The Avengers? Sure, he stuffed it as full of his trademark wisecracks as he could, but do we want everyone in Episode VII to talk like Han Solo? Or worse, to have everyone talk like Joss Whedon, which is what seems to happen with his projects.

Jon Favreau – Iron Man was refreshing, combining the gritty realism of the first act with the optimistic superheroics of the second and third acts. But he phoned it in for Iron Man 2 (one day we’ll wake up and realize that War Machine was just a bad dream), and Cowboys and Aliens was garbage, and not even ambitious garbage. I say give the man a non-speaking cameo in Episode VII, maybe as a chubby cantina alien.

Guillermo del Toro – Probably the director whose work I most despise of all time, likely because his reputation is so drastically out of proportion with his actual talent. Seriously, I’d take Danny Boyle over this guy. Well, maybe not, but to even float the suggestion is to condemn both of these charlatans.

Brad Bird – I don’t know, he’s a cartoon guy, and as cartoony as Star Wars is, and no matter how you feel about CG and green-screen, there’s a huge difference between making an animated film and a live-action one. To wit, how many directors of the one type ever successfully cross over to the other type?

J.J. Abrams – I get this, but I think it’s for all the wrong reasons. None of the stuff he’s done – Lost, Star Trek, Super 8 – is remotely like Star Wars. His Star Trek was both grand, as a movie should be, and intimate, in the best tradition of the television series, but it felt a bit caught between being a great two-part episode of a TV show and a “real” movie. Star Wars is huge in every direction, and I don’t see Abrams doing that, at least not successfully.

The forgotten

Ridley Scott – A real pro and a sci-fi veteran, and he’s worked memorably with Harrison Ford. I have a feeling his Star Wars would be 90% serious and 10% trashy. Not very appealing.

Robert Zemeckis – The answer to my question above. Zemeckis actually has successfully worked in both live-action and full-length animated features. I haven’t seen his latest, Flight, but I have to believe his glory years are behind him, and what he has left should be devoted to gripping domestic dramas, not space operas.

M. Night Shyamalan – Why is no one talking about Shyamalan? Okay, so his last several movies have been epic bombs, and it seems like J.J. Abrams has usurped his position as Spielberg’s heir. But to speak as an apologist, The Last Airbender was actually a quite competent children’s entertainment, and I thought Lady in the Water was a highly misunderstood movie (not good, mind you, but misunderstood). The Happening was terrible, but there are maybe five minutes in there that are genuinely menacing, with bodies being mauled by lions and eaten by lawnmowers, and treetops swishing maniacally in the wind, as if we had entered the Bizarro version of a Terrence Malick film. What Shyamalan would bring is a sensitivity to childlike wonder; or at least he might have brought that ten years ago, when he still had some discernible talent. He does have history with Disney, but I don’t think that’ll help him here.

Speaking of which . . .

Terrence Malick – I so wish we could see the Terrence Malick Star Wars. We would see more clouds than city in Cloud City. James Earl Jones would be brought in to do lengthy voice-overs, even though Vader would never be on screen. Two-thirds of the movie would be set in the marshes of Dagobah, following slimy creatures and gazing through spiraling tree branches. Roll the title crawl. Star Wars: Episode VII – Leaves of Grass.

And the rest of the peanut gallery

The rest of these are just names. Try to imagine even one single frame of a Star Wars made by:

Wes Anderson

Michael Bay

Paul W. S. Anderson

David Fincher

David Lynch

Sofia Coppola (daughter of Lucas’s mentor!)

The Coen Brothers

Michel Gondry

Luc Besson

Terry Gilliam

Tim Burton

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In the 2002 TNT miniseries, Julius Caesar, there’s a line spoken by Jeremy Sisto, who plays Caesar, and he’s referring to either Pompey or Sulla, I don’t remember which: “Pompey/Sulla has merely done something, but I am for something.”

There are only a few directors on this list – Spielberg, Tarantino, Nolan, Shyamalan, maybe Scott – whose work consistently shows that they are “for something,” and yet none of them really seems right for Star Wars.

Honestly, my hope is that it won’t be any of the people I’ve named. In the same way that it was important to cast relative unknowns to star in both the Original Trilogy and the Prequel Trilogy, I think it’s important to find a relatively young, baggage-free, and highly talented filmmaker to helm Episode VII.

I had read that Lucas originally offered the director’s chair for Episode I: The Phantom Menace to Ron Howard, but Howard was gracious enough and surely smart enough not to accept. Considering how scathingly and endlessly Lucas himself has been excoriated in the press and by critics for his Episodes I-III, is there any major director who would risk his career by taking command of what will surely be the most hyped and heavily scrutinized movie of all time? I say, let someone new take that risk and make his mark.

Yeah, that’s really going to happen.

From Aeneas to Ant-Man to Anakin

I was recently asked whether I was “excited” about the inevitable yet improbable announcement of new Star Wars movies to be produced and released by Disney. As previously indicated, I am rather apprehensive about the whole affair. Honestly, I don’t know how I feel about it, but I know I’m not “excited,” if that word is measured by a distinct rise in heart rate when I think about the prospect of more Star Wars movies. If “excited” means that other things I’ve been anticipating now seem bland in comparison, then no, I’m not excited.

Now rumors are solidifying into news: Harrison Ford wants in, Steven Spielberg won’t touch the damn thing with a double-bladed lightsaber, and the latest is that Michael Arndt, writer of Toy Story 3, has written a treatment and will be penning the script for Episode VII.

Nothing against Arndt (Toy Story 3 was witty, and shows he could write within an established story world), but I think I would be much more excited (and happier) if, instead of bringing us the continuing adventures of the Skywalker clan, they simply remade the existing Star Wars movies. A Pixar version, a Wes Anderson version, a version of Phantom Menace where Jar Jar is magically deleted from every scene and then you are astounded to realize that Obi-Wan and Qui-Gonn were just talking to each other the whole time and there never was a Jar Jar! Etc., etc., whatever.

With remakes, we could expect the unannounced director (and any later artists at the helm) to make Star Wars his/her own, to apply an unusual vision, to revel in reinterpreting what has come before. But to continue Star Wars “officially,” but have it done by hands other than George Lucas’s, I wonder how closely they can hew to his voice. If the movies are to continue the story using the major original-trilogy actors, I’m not willing to entertain any grotesque notions that a distinctive voice would somehow be preferable to imitating the Lucas style. And yes, I realize that Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi were directed by two different men, but surely under the firm oversight of Lucas.

What is Star Wars without George Lucas? What is it without his inexplicable brain giving birth to operatic lightsaber duels, a galactic menagerie of creatures, sleazebags peddling death sticks, high-speed vehicle chases and races, and line after line of dialogue just awkward enough to challenge even the gravest thespian? You can say it’s a formula easily copied, and often copied in the last three decades of American cinema. True that, and yet it’s Star Wars that we remember and salivate over while the legions of followers are forgotten.

Whatever Lucas’s shortcomings, I think his greatest talent, besides just inventing the vastness that is Star Wars, is that he knows how to tell a visual story clearly. He knows how to get the audience from point A to B to C without leaving them hopelessly lost, and that’s something that many celebrated filmmakers can struggle with.

For example, there’s been minor squawking over at the Star Wars fantasy camp (which is what the internet has become over the past week and a half) about getting Christopher Nolan to direct Episode VII, and though I greatly admire his films, they tend to be a royal mess because they’re overstuffed with speeches and ideas and fisticuffs, with little awareness of how to connect one thing to another. He often can’t even make sense out of simple fistfights in the Batman movies. How on earth is he going to choreograph something as potentially complicated as a lightsaber clash? (Here’s hoping Luke wields the green beam once again!)

*          *          *

Star Wars is becoming (or has become, some would say) something greater than a collection of one man’s stories; its artistic progeny are already legion, in the form of books and games, and it will continue to be the wellspring of reinterpretations and additions, “fan fictions” some would derisively call them, but perhaps the better way of understanding the Expanded Universe is to see it as the natural outgrowth of an original body of myth.

The chief analogues in my mind are 1) classical Greek and Roman mythology, and 2) the myth-making renaissance of 20^th century comic books. 

Classical mythology (alongside the Bible, which is a codified mythology – that’s right, I said it), is the source material for pretty much every story that western civilization has come to tell. The stories of Zeus and Hercules and the Medusa and so on, though their origins are now murky, came to be reinterpreted by various writers during antiquity, and though certain traditional storylines became established, they were hardly sacrosanct.

Homer and Hesiod wrote about existing myths, tweaking them, including and excluding details as they pleased. Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides adapted from Homer and Hesiod and other early storytellers, making the myths relevant to their times and personal values. One interesting example is Euripides’s play, Helen, which describes a lesser known variant of the story of Helen of Troy, where a “phantom” double of Helen is substituted for her by Hera and Athena, and it is the double that is abducted by Paris. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to the mere mortals, the real Helen was spirited away to Egypt, and thus could not be held culpable for the carnage of the Trojan War. This is no recent revisionism, but a revered writer from antiquity who thought the variant was worth exploring, despite the fact that a traditional version existed.

In like fashion, comic book writers, and later, TV producers and filmmakers, have taken liberally from previous comics sources, and over time have become bolder about deviating from the traditional or canonical stories.

Though most comics followers will disagree, one could plausibly say that anything not written by the original creator can be considered “fan fiction.” Any Spider-Man story that was not among the original set created by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko is fan fiction, regardless of whether it was published by Marvel or by, say, Czardoz Contra World. The fact that Stan Lee approves of later Marvel versions makes them, what, somehow authentic? As authentic as the innumerable Star Wars novels and games that George Lucas has rubber-stamped?

Ultimately, what seems to matter is not whether a story can be considered canonical and true to the original artist’s intention, but rather, whether it is any good. Who begrudges the wealth of Spider-Man and Superman comics that came well after the heyday of their creators? Who begrudges Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy for creating new characters and not adhering strictly to any particular preexisting storylines?

The destiny of mythology is to be manipulated and reimagined by subsequent generations. This has already happened with Star Wars to a certain extent, but generally under the radar of the mainstream fan, who does not typically read stuff like the Thrawn Trilogy or New Jedi Order novels. Episode VII will be the bigger moment, when the franchise is presented to the world at large as a thing beyond its original form, as a story that is bigger than any one person’s ability to tell it, and worthy of retellings by any person able to lift the weight of the material.

*          *          *

There are probably a lot of people who can’t accept that this Star Wars thing they grew up with has become so much bigger than just their pet movie. And that consequently, it’s going to be the template for endless new waves of creativity, hopefully by people who are genuinely prepared to handle the subject matter.

Having said that, my greatest worry is that I’ll come out of Episode VII thinking, “Well that was very good, but it wasn’t Star Wars.” And it astonishes me that the “real” Luke, Leia, and Han would appear in another Star Wars, and yet it sounds like this is really happening. It’s like someone writing a few more books to tack onto the end of the Old Testament. How about a sequel to the Book of Job? Probably a raging controversy even back when the New Testament was being compiled, so how could you take it seriously now? You’d say, “Job 2: The Misery Continues? After all this time? I guess there must be some money in it.”

The original trilogy feels far too established, and despite all of Lucas’s attempts to “refresh” it every few years, it’s fairly well set in stone, and to imagine Harrison Ford playing old man Solo just seems wrong to me. Of course, as soon as the first trailer appears in 2014, I may be singing a different tune, and be grateful that they’re getting an encore. After all, it was pleasant to see Indiana Jones cracking his whip again after a 19-year absence.

I do wonder how the old guard will adapt to a new director’s sensibilities and a new writer’s words. Actors don’t usually have the final say, but would Mark Hamill be okay with some whippersnapper director telling him how a 60-year-old Luke Skywalker is supposed to talk? Would Harrison Ford tolerate any deviation from his conception of a character he owns in all but legal terms? Would Carrie Fisher insist that, yes, she does still fit into her old slave girl costume, and she’ll prove it in front of everyone?

And with Lucas all but gone, is John Williams coming back to score the film, or is it time to pass that torch as well? James Newton Howard is the first name to cross my mind as having an appropriate sensibility, though Michael Giacchino has history with Disney/Pixar, and did a great sci-fi score for Star Trek. Thankfully, I’m sure Hans Zimmer will be on the far side of the Disney lot working on the next Pirates film.

And finally, how many kinds of wipes will be used? Horizontal and vertical, surely. Probably diagonal, too. But what about clock and pinwheel wipes? Or vertical blind wipes? Will there be star wipes?!? That’s when I’ll get excited!

The difference between bitterness and anger

Some years ago, I overheard a young sage say the sort of thing I thought was only uttered by wizened old curmudgeons. She was apparently pontificating on an upcoming presidential election, and she said something to the effect of: anyone who doesn’t like America the way it is should leave the country. She was speaking not about individual candidates or policies, but about America as a system of governance and as a culture.

In the moment, I thought to myself that hers was a particularly hard-line stance, even if she was half-joking (which she wasn’t). It didn’t seem to me that intolerance represented America the way it would like to see itself. A more elegant formulation would be to say that all of us, by virtue of remaining in this country, have implicitly agreed to a social contract, and that if we really felt so offended and wronged by it, we would voice our opinion more strongly than by grousing.

Over the years, I have occasionally heard people express the same sentiment: find another country, you ungrateful ones who do not deserve the blessings that America lays at your feet. But words that once seemed merely thoughtless now seem vicious. To these words I now say that I would gladly leave if I could find but one inch of earth left that hasn't been defiled by civilization’s dirty institutions.

I’m sure I sound bitter, but I am not bitter. I’m angry. As I see it, bitterness is indicated by an impotent stewing and railing against a world you can neither change nor run away from. Bitterness is essentially self-destructive. Anger too is obsessed with a contrast between self-image and external reality, but it can be harnessed to produce something better than itself. Where bitterness seems to seethe at a kind of lack within oneself, anger represents a fullness of self that wants to burst out and impress itself on the object of the anger. Anger can motivate a person to look outside himself.

Wikipedia has an article on “resentment, also called ranklement or bitterness,” which draws from the work of one Robert C. Solomon, who expressed the distinction among resentment, anger, and contempt thusly: "resentment is directed towards higher-status individuals, anger is directed towards equal-status individuals, and contempt is directed towards lower-status individuals." 

If I take my cues from Wikipedia, then it goes to reason that my feelings would be bitterness if directed at Barack Obama or some senators or the fatcats on Wall Street. My “betters,” I believe is the term. But these are not the ones I would challenge, though they are easy targets. It’s the ordinary people that I am angry at, equal-status individuals who vote and by voting implicitly state that they accept the status quo, and that they don’t really want change.

I do not mean to say that voting is the disease and that people should be ashamed of what is grandly deemed “participating in the democratic process.” People should do what they think is right, but they should think first. Voting is merely the morphine for a diseased and dying society; it functions as a kind of masturbatory escapism. A way to wash your hands of the problems by saying you did your part.

So yes, I am angry that so trifling a thing as voting counts for so much in the eyes of so many. And so I rejected it and the slavery it represented. I tried very hard to live in that other country – that place of intellectualism and love and brotherhood, the country of the mind, I suppose. But it did not take long for me to realize that this other country belongs in our country, in our America, and we do it a disservice by thinking it too fragile to exist here.

Every year there’s an election, and every four years a big, unavoidable one that inevitably finds someone staring at me, appalled to discover that I do not vote. Perhaps it’s time to put my anger to use and modify my stance. I am not willing to vote the way the government tells me to vote. So I vote with my words and hope that others will listen. 

I read the news today, oh droid . . .

My initial reaction to today’s announced sale of Lucasfilm to Disney was:

No. . . . Noooooooooo!!!!!!

Apparently not content with buying Captain America, Disney now must also acquire Captain Needa!

Not to mention that I’ve grown rather fond of George Lucas’s seemingly annual refreshes to the original trilogy every time there’s a rerelease on disc or on the big screen. You know – Greedo shoots first, Ghost Anakin is now Hayden, Vader cries “No!” It keeps the movies evergreen, as if they never really ended. Does this mean that the movies will now and forever remain frozen in carbonite?

I’m sure numerous fantasy crossovers have already sprouted up in the Twitterverse; personally, I’ve so far heard:

“Darth Sidious to join the cast of Once Upon a Time.” This is shameful in every conceivable way, and would considerably cheapen the Sidious brand. It would also put to rest any ambition that Once Upon a Time might have had of actually becoming its own brand, rather than just a clumsy mish-mash of Disney tropes.

“Darth Vader in Kingdom Hearts.” This could work. But would it be Vader, the thoroughly evil scourge of the galaxy, or the redemptive Vader at the climax of Return of the Jedi?

“Darth Vader princess outfits.” I don’t really understand this one.

Next thing you know, Ariel and King Triton will be visiting Boss Nass in Otoh Gunga, Herbie the Love Bug will be resurrected as a pod racer (Ocho Quadinaros?), and the Tomorrowland Terrace eatery will start serving Jango Fettucine with “Boba” tea.

My best crack at a crossover would see a Jar Jar Binks “plush toy” join forces with Buzz Lightyear and Woody in a space opera Toy Story 4. (Ahmed Best to reprise his voice and motion capture role.) In fact, with Buzz and Woody playing the roles of Qui-Gon Jinn and Obi-Wan Kenobi, respectively, I could see Pixar making a passable “Toy Story as Phantom Menace” hybrid remake. Meesa cannot wait!!!

Reports of an impending Episode VII, followed by new movies every few years (even after a “sequel trilogy” of VII-VIII-IX is complete) smack alarmingly of crass commercialism. And the press release begins ominously by announcing that this acquisition is all part of a grand Disney “strategy.”

But then again, maybe this has been a long time coming. After all, Star Tours opened at Disneyland in 1987, and these two titans have been friends (never rivals) for a long time. Moreover, being inundated by the products of these two companies in childhood actually inculcated in me all my lifelong values. I learned about chivalry from The Sword in the Stone, justice from Robin Hood, humility from Cinderella, honesty (and terror, though that’s more a feeling than a value) from Pinocchio, whimsy from Alice in Wonderland, compassion from Beauty and the Beast, friendship from The Fox and the Hound, and most importantly, I learned how to make a man out of me from Mulan.

From Star Wars, I learned the difference between good and bad, and that you always have a choice between the two.

And if nothing else, perhaps at least one dream comes closer to reality: Disney's California Adventure theme park can finally convert its Soarin' Over California ride into Strafing Over Hoth: When AT-ATs Attack. Yes, you want that.

Baseball is over

I’ve never enjoyed football, and I long ago abandoned hockey and basketball. Baseball was the first of the major team sports that I embraced, and it’s the last I let go of.

I tried to give it one last shot. I tuned in the other day to the “first wild card game in baseball history,” as the announcer intoned on the TBS broadcast. This is a new format this year, where two potential “wild card” teams have to play each other in a one-game “play-in,” with the winner seizing the wild card spot for their league’s playoffs. The ardent sports fan in me thinks this is actually a promising innovation, because it gives two more teams a shot at the playoffs, and it increases tension as the pennant races wind down, while giving more weight to actually winning a pennant, since having the fourth best record in your league doesn’t automatically guarantee you a wild-card spot.

Or at least, the ardent sports fan in me would think this, if he hadn’t died some time ago.

I think he died a few months ago when I saw a headline in Yahoo or MSN saying that some team, maybe the Oakland A’s, went from hopelessness to being the hottest team in the game. At that moment, I realized that I couldn’t name a single player on that team, nor did I care to find out. Oh, and I hadn’t watched a single baseball game all season. Nor did it electrify me that there were seven no-hitters (including three perfect games) this year.

So when I was flipping through channels and happened upon this one last game, St. Louis Cardinals vs. Atlanta Braves, I was surprised to find some lurid fascination in it. I tuned in with the Braves leading 2-0, and I thought a Braves win would be nice, because I at least knew that their star third baseman, Chipper Jones, would be retiring at the end of the season, and a long playoff run would be a respectable way to go out. Jones is a universally respected player, and one of the few active players who was around when I was a kid who still got excited about baseball cards.

Naturally, Jones soon made a throwing error that led to three runs for the opposing team, putting them up 3-2. Then it was 4-2 after a Cardinals home run. Then 6-3, Cardinals, thanks to two more Braves throwing errors. In the bottom of the 7^th, Jones came to bat with two outs, two men on base, and a chance to pull his team even. He grounded out swinging on the first pitch.

Somebody stop the bleeding! And yet the worst was yet to come. In an act of unspeakable masochism, the Braves insisted on keeping hope alive by again bringing the tying run to the plate in the 8^th inning. With runners on first and second, some player I’ve never heard of hit a long pop into left field. A miscommunication between two fielders allowed the ball the drop untouched. Maybe a hit? Likely an error. Either way, the bases would be loaded with only one out, and the Braves would have their biggest chance of the day, aided by a heap of what is called “momentum.”

But no! The umpire invoked the infield fly rule, the details of which are so arcane that I won’t go into them here, but the result was that the batter was ruled out, and the runners advanced to second and third. Scoring position, but two outs, not to mention a burning raft of controversy surrounding a call that could not have been considered reasonable by anyone other than the employees of Major League Baseball whose sole job is to toe the company line.

Oh, the game was played in Atlanta, and what happened next was what Gorilla Monsoon might have called “pandemonium.” The fans immediately hurled drink cups, food wrappers, and assorted trash and debris onto the field, accompanied by a lusty cascade of boos and hisses. The TV announcers shook their heads and deplored this “very disappointing” and “absolutely embarrassing” behavior on the part of Braves fans. (Yes, an uncharacteristically boorish response by fans who for the last several decades have cheered their team with a “tomahawk chop” and faux-Indian chanting.) Whatever “momentum” existed was extinguished in the 20-minute delay that was required for the grounds crew to pick up the garbage.

Presumably, the Braves players were too ashamed to score after this disgraceful display. But Chipper Jones would have one last chance in the bottom of the 9^th, two outs, no one on base. He hit an infield squib that he barely beat out when the first baseman was pulled off the bag. It was ruled a hit instead of an error by the official scorer. Many commentators considered this a gift. I guess you know it’s time to retire when the scorer is giving you a hit that you probably didn’t deserve. Two batters later, the game was over and the Braves were finished, as was Jones’s career.

*          *          *

At one point in the game, during an unconventional putout (the pitcher threw the ball to first and it bounced off the runner’s back), an announcer said, “In case you’re keeping score, that play was 1-3. Does anyone keep score anymore? I hope so.”

Why do you hope so? What pleasure do you get from seeing solitary old women sitting in the stands and marking down a bunch of numbers to record the mundane details of where the fielders throw the ball?

As a matter of fact, I have started keeping score, and the score is: Sanity 1, Baseball 0

I loved baseball as a child because it was full of baseball cards that I could collect and statistics I could memorize. It’s the only sport where numbers themselves take on mythic status (61, 714, .400). It had old stadiums that people would wax poetic about, and those were just one small piece of the venerable history of a sport that seemed intertwined with the American spirit. Most of all, baseball had “hero moments.”

In the other team sports, there is always some kind of mob ready to spoil your moment – the double-team jumping in front of your last-second shot in basketball, the backfield crowding all available receivers in football, the ridiculous crush of bodies that makes even skating down the ice seem impossible in hockey, let alone shooting with any sort of freedom.

But in baseball, there is patience. The hitter stands in the box, the pitcher stands on the mound, with nothing between them, and they wait, each one knowing that the next pitch can be his “hero moment.”

My fandom had existed as a kind of hero worship, but we long ago entered an era where I no longer know who the players are, and when I can no longer conceive of hunting for heroes in pop culture, but am far more interested in becoming the hero of my own life. And so I find it remarkable that millions of men (and women) can be found who so gladly hitch their dream wagons to these sports teams and their fortunes.

Watching this Braves-Cards game, I saw that professional baseball, as reported and televised, has become a circus act. Once in a while, you get to see some bizarre or humiliating spectacle, and that can be amusing. But the days of baseball being something I identify with are over.

Hats off to Chipper for devoting two decades of his life to The Show. Time to call it a career, for you and me both.

Cue gnashing of teeth . . .

Nooooo! How can this be? This can't be happening!

WHY???????

But, it says they're "hoping to make this golden gem available again." I can give money!

No, it's gone. Hoping is gone. Loving is gone!!!

It's over. As the poet says, "Who wants to live forever?"

Aces

It is sad news to hear Andy Roddick announce that he will retire at the end of the current U.S. Open tournament, that is, at the end of his U.S. Open, which is not likely to last past the quarterfinals.

For someone who won only a single Grand Slam tournament, Andy Roddick has always seemed to command an unreasonably large slice of attention in the world of tennis. Certainly, part of that is because I live in his home country, an America starved for tennis success after being spoiled by decades of dominance. Consequently, the national fan base cleaves to its one star, grasping helplessly at the hem of his increasingly tattered garment.

I was never really a fan of Roddick’s cocky demeanor, over-reliance on his serve, and relative mediocrity in a time of titans. Playing in the shadow of the near-invincible Roger Federer, and then effectively replaced when the almost equally dominant Rafael Nadal emerged as Federer’s true rival, it’s reasonable to say that his impact on the sport of tennis was minimal.

But as I look back on his career, I find something genuinely reassuring and edifying. Though it was easy to make him the poster child of unprecedented American ineptitude, people somehow forgot that he was the one American of his generation who actually won something. Carrying the weight of a nation’s expectations, he persevered and never fell apart. He had a big decline in the middle part of his career, and the lack of self-confidence was visible at times, but you can’t really argue that he sabotaged himself somehow, like a Marat Safin, or that he didn’t want it badly enough. He simply played as well as he could, which unfortunately wasn’t good enough to win Slams in this era.

I find his efforts to be particularly ennobling in light of the insatiable American appetite for winning that has led to the lionizing of athletes like Michael “Bong Hit” Phelps and Lance “Dickweak,” athletes defined by inordinate success based largely on innate gifts that overcame questionable work ethic, in the case of Phelps, and a poisonous “win at all costs” attitude, in the case of Armstrong. If not for the narcissism in our culture born of sitting on the shoulders of the rest of the world, there would be fewer news articles asking why Roddick had “underachieved,” and more articles celebrating how good he actually was.

Maybe Roddick himself got too caught up in the failures and disappointment to realize how proud he should have been of himself that he got as far as he did.

The saving grace was perhaps his outsize personality (at least relatively speaking in the bland world of pro tennis). He was a favorite subject at press conferences, and seemed to delight in comparing the intellect of a referee or a chair umpire to that of an 8-year-old. Most enjoyable for me was his career as a funny and occasionally hapless pitchman for American Express. Remember Roddick vs. Pong, Roddick buying a towel, and Roddick forced to buy a second seat on the plane because massive trophies kept falling from the overhead cabin and onto his gourd? Even better was the spin-off commercial (and I can’t find it online) where the second seat is empty because he ended up losing at the tournament. I respected the good humor it took to make a commercial where he’s on the receiving end of a joke about losing.

Federer called Roddick“a great man.” I'm inclined to think that he gave the sport everything he had, and the sport is in his debt. Though the 2008 Wimbledon final between Nadal and Federer is a universally admired match, my favorite Slam final will always be the Roddick-Federer five-setter at Wimbledon 2009. I said it before (on a comment on my brother’s blog post): "I would love to see a Federer-Roddick final with Roddick bringing his best game ever to bear. Granted, he would still lose, but I'd like to see him press Roger to the limit just once in his life." And that’s exactly what I got.

You could say that Federer was already in decline by this time, or that this was Roddick’s last gasp of greatness, and that this somehow diminishes the meaning or quality of this match. But in the end, the tournament has to be played every year, and a player can only beat the guys who show up. Roddick showed up, and he forced Federer to show what a great player he really was.

It took a truly gutsy effort by Federer to win. As for Roddick, everything that was good about his game was on display, and mistakes were minimal. It was the greatest match I’ve ever seen him play, and I think that to perform at one’s very best level is a worthy goal in itself. Roddick’s landmark achievement is his U.S. Open championship in 2003, but I’ll always remember him for this match.

This was as close as Roddick would ever come to winning another Slam or beating his nemesis when it counted, and most viewers would agree that it could have gone Roddick’s way. Afterward, you could kind of see it in Roddick’s eyes – he knew that it was over, that he would never get this chance again. But in my mind, he solidified his signature role in the tennis world – he stood for persistence and resilience in the face of certain defeat. Americans need to be reminded of this virtue from childhood. It’s certainly more important than the Pledge of Allegiance, and will serve you better throughout your life.

So a great player retires without achieving all he hoped for, but let’s not get misty-eyed. At the end of the day, Roddick still goes home to millions of dollars, a beautiful wife, and the knowledge that at least for a few weeks, he was the world’s best player. But if you must make idols of the millionaires you see on TV, at least pick the Roddicks of the world, people who have visibly agonized over the weight of their fame and the sting of falling short of not just their own expectations but ours as well.

So how long will this dead man keep walking at Flushing Meadows? Since his next match is against someone named Fabio Fognini (and since he’s already up two sets as of this writing), I’m going to say that Roddick will prevail and reach the fourth round, and I’ll even give him the victory in a possible meeting with Juan Martin del Potro, setting up a likely (and by that, I mean, of course, “unlikely”) quarterfinals encounter with Novak Djokovic, who would surely be the end of the line for Andy Roddick, falling against the guy who once jeered him in front of his home crowd after beating him at this very tournament.

But you would request a dream scenario, wouldn’t you? Let’s say Djokovic keeps guessing wrong on Roddick’s serve, or maybe he comes down with a case of bird flu, SARS, or even anthrax. That and a few lucky breaks and favorable calls, and who knows, maybe Roddick pulls out the win and avenges the 2008 U.S. Open loss, the recent London Olympics loss, et al. Once in the semis, I think Roddick could very well handle a David Ferrer or a John Isner (and now we reach deep into the well of fantasy to consider Isner advancing to a semifinal), setting up the most worthy exit Roddick could have from the game, an impossible final “final” against Roger Federer, his true contemporary, and seemingly the only person to consistently go out of his way to label Roddick a real rival, even as Roddick himself denied the validity of such a lofty status.

One last chance to throw everything onto the court.

And who wins? Well, if Roddick is ultimately to have any kind of legacy, it won’t be about winning or losing, will it? 

I’ll have what he’s having, and make mine a double

So I was at McDonald’s the other day, and I notice sitting to my right is some old geezer eating a McDonald’s ice cream cone.

Good day to be an old guy, I thought.

Then, I notice that there is a second ice cream cone resting on his tray.

So I says to myself, does he have a grandkid scampering around here somewhere?

Old guy walks outside to get some sunshine, leaving the uneaten second cone. While he’s out there, I see that next to his tray is a 32 oz. Big Gulp from 7-Eleven, already drained, presumably down his gullet. While I’m considering the Big Gulp and noticing the distinct lack of children nearby, the elder statesman comes back inside, picks up the remaining ice cream cone, and starts to eat that too!

At this point, I’m wondering, have I entered the Twilight Zone? Who made him lord of the universe, that he gets to eat two ice cream cones in one sitting? After already downing a Big Gulp!

I am aghast. I don’t mean to judge, and I must admit that when I compare his plate to mine, he was traveling light:

My plate

McDouble – 390 calories

6 Chicken McNuggets – 280 calories

Honey Mustard Sauce – 60 calories

32 oz. Coca-Cola – 310 calories

Total = 1,040 calories (and it didn’t even seem like that much food!)

The Geezer Special

Ice Cream Cone – 170 calories

Ice Cream Cone – 170 calories

32 oz. Big Gulp – 310 calories (assuming Coke or Coke-like soda)

Total = 650 calories

He had some other edible item on his plate, but I don’t remember what, lost as I was in the haze of ice dreams. And that, much more so than caloric intake, is the point of this story.

I think I was just jealous that he had the stones to buy two ice creams, and here I was eating fast food and rationalizing it by choosing moderately priced and reasonably skinny protein-rich items. As far as the Coke, hey, it was a broiling hot day.

Maybe when I’m 95 years old, I thought, I can be like this old-timer. No. Three ice creams!

THE MORAL: It would have been leaner to have ordered two ice cream cones instead of a McDouble, and I could have congratulated myself on going veggie. 

The Greatest Play I’ve Ever Seen

Three and a half years ago, I started writing a blog post about the greatest play I had ever seen. But I kept putting the draft aside because I couldn’t figure out how to explain what made it special. I hadn’t yet “gone over the mountain,” as Thoreau would say. I’m still not sure I’ve gone over the mountain, but I’ll consider this a continued ascent as I shine my little lamp on a corner of the arts that has gotten scant attention on this blog: the theater.

It’s actually the silver screen that brings my attention back to plays today. As I flipped through articles about Tony Scott’s apparent suicide a few days ago, I came across other, lesser Hollywood news about Gary Ross, director of the sublime Pleasantville, now perhaps better known for directing the Katniss movie. It was announced that instead of helming the next Hunger Games movie, Ross’s next film project will be Disney’s Peter and the Starcatchers, based on the series of tween novels that were previously adapted into, yes, the greatest play I’ve ever seen.

*          *          *

A little background . . .

In my youth, I fancied myself clever for quipping that plays had been superseded by movies. My Shakespeare ardor morphed into a kind of revisionist fantasy as I pontificated to my fellow groundlings, “If Shakespeare were alive today, he’d be making movies, not plays.” I had seen engrossing, artful film adaptations of Shakespeare (Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet, Branagh’s Othello, the Ethan Hawke Hamlet made some joy out of a play I never cottoned to), and if they were already pretty good, imagine what the Bard himself could have done.

                                                                                                            

It’s not that I don’t like plays. I can’t remember ever coming out of a play or a musical thinking ill of the experience. But I have many reasons for thinking that the movie is the superior form of thespian entertainment.

First of all, movies can do so much more than plays can. The combination of computer technology and a nearly unlimited range of physical spaces for shooting seems to shame the relatively limited stage into submission.

Beyond this, when you examine those shows that have both stage and screen versions, I’ve never known the screen version to suffer in comparison. Watching the stage adaptation of The Lion King, I was mildly amused at the mechanical masks that the principal actors wore, as well as the novel way that, say, a giraffe neck was integrated into a human actor’s costume. These are technical achievements to be sure, but there was nothing in the stage show that suggested that it had accomplished something the movie could not have, aside from a few gimmicks, like “animals” roaming down the audience aisles (and perhaps The Lion King 3D rerelease successfully challenges this advantage). The difference was costuming versus animation; otherwise, the show played out just like the movie, and ended up feeling unnecessary.

To go the other direction, when The Phantom of the Opera was adapted into a film in 2004, under the guidance and production of Andrew Lloyd Webber himself, the look was beautiful and the music just as thrilling, but if anything, you could say that the filmmakers didn’t do as much with the technology as they could have. As with The Lion King, the two versions just looked a little different, but it’s the movie versions that would seem to have more potential. The Lion King on stage looked like a static version of the film. Phantom, having originated in a more static medium, felt a bit uncomfortable on the screen, if only because we are accustomed to seeing constant, sweeping movement on a movie screen.

I’ve already mentioned Shakespeare, but even looking at the plays in themselves, I have rarely felt that the staging and performance were necessary. I’m sure I’m not the only person who gets more out of reading the plays than seeing them live. The most necessary Shakespeare production I’ve seen was Two Gentlemen of Verona at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater, and that’s because it was set in the 1920s and had an original ragtime piano score and songs. It seemed to make more out of the source material, and thus made it worth putting down the book and buying a ticket.

And that brings me to another crucial reason for preferring the cinema. Given the bourgeois nature of the stage versus the more democratic playing field of a movie theater, it’s hard to sympathize with what the dramatists are peddling. I just paid $20 to see The Dark Knight Rises on the IMAX, and I considered this a gross extravagance. Until I reminded myself that $20 would not have gotten me a seat of any kind at most of the playhouses in town. And no, most theaters don’t actually welcome groundlings.

At the Las Vegas production of Phantom at The Venetian, the overture is accompanied by a fine special effect that you couldn’t experience in any movie – the epic vision of a gargantuan chandelier above the audience, breaking apart and swaying with spectral malice above our heads. Neat trick, I thought. But then when I considered that I had paid $85 to watch a giant chandelier sway about, I didn’t think it was so neat anymore.

One of my local multiplexes is at a shopping mall next to Ruby’s Diner, which is a mid-range hamburger chain that offers movie ticket discounts if you show your dinner receipt at the theater. Now, I never heard of anyone offering discounted tickets to see Desire Under the Elms with the purchase of a hamburger. And for that matter, isn’t it strange that it’s virtually mandatory to treat your date to some kind of swanky Waldorf salad and duck confit bistro for dinner before heading to a performance of Hedda Gabbler, even though all you can afford after buying the tickets is McDonald’s?

The difference between plays and movies is the difference between theaters that are named after some hoity-toity personality (Goodman, Ethel Barrymore, Brooks Atkinson), and theaters that are named after the number (and sometimes size) of their screens (AMC 20, Edwards 18 IMAX).

It’s the difference between “theatre” and “theater.” 

*          *          *

So much for plays, then. After all, what could possibly redeem this bastion of privilege and obsolescence?

In February 2009, the La Jolla Playhouse premiered Peter and the Starcatchers, a play written by Rick Elice, and directed by Alex Timbers and Roger Rees (yes, that British guy with the recurring role on Cheers, and a small role in The Prestige). It was adapted from the series of novels written by Dave Barry, the humorist, and Ridley Pearson, and published by a Disney subsidiary firm. The story is billed as a prequel to J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, which was originally a play before Barrie himself turned it into a novel called Peter and Wendy, and before Disney rendered it as its fourteenth “animated classic” in 1953.

Three years later, I don’t remember many of the details or plot points (another black mark against plays – where’s the commemorative DVD?), but I do recall being impressed at how Peter and the Starcatchers succeeds as creation myth behind the already well-known Peter Pan myth. We learn how Captain Hook (or the Black Stache, as he is known) lost his hand. We watch as Tinker Bell comes into being. We see Peter earn his “Pan,” and are treated to one interpretation of the name.

But what I remember most was what took the play beyond the boundaries of any movie – the conceit of having the actors play not just characters, but also props and sound effects. The most memorable special effect was the simplest and most frequent – the actors would transition seamlessly from playing orphan boys and pirates to playing doors. One actor would literally swing another actor open as though he were a door.

This and other flourishes, such as having actors play parts of a ship, or becoming a chorus of dripping water sounds, relied on the sharpest acting, and the cast was more than capable. The effect was somehow elegant and rustic at the same time, like the rude mechanicals from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, or perhaps something like Cirque du Soleil as performed by Monty Python.

This effect, actors playing props, is not unprecedented, but the execution was so smooth and realistic that it erased the barriers between actors and objects. It also created an exciting fluidity and enforced the expectation that anything could happen, any actor could potentially be anything on stage at any time, so there was no waiting for the lights to go down so that black-shirted stagehands could rush in and whisk away a table and bring in a park bench or something.

The play successfully erases the barrier that I’ve always felt existed between the stage and the audience, so that nothing compromises the illusion of being in Peter’s world.

*          *          *

Writing about the play now feels like being in that scene in The Prestige, when Hugh Jackman watches Christian Bale perform The Transported Man for the first time. The magic trick isn’t even shown on screen, but you see Jackman’s reaction and the life-long obsession it engenders in him – “the greatest magic trick I’ve ever seen.” Likewise, you may feel like my story is missing something, namely – the trick. Can no-tech effects and virtuosic acting really explain what happened on that stage that enraptured me and separated it from other plays? Wasn’t it just more expensive gimmickry?

It may seem counterintuitive, but for me, movies have a monopoly on verisimilitude. Immersion is more natural at the movies; I feel like the movie is really happening in the moment, whereas plays seem, frankly, as staged as the moon landing.

Peter and the Starcatchers was the first time I ever went to a play and forgot for a moment that it was a stage. It’s as if they invited me in, told me that the story was to be a simple one that I had heard before, told me the stage was just wood and steel, and yet when they started performing, they still somehow got me to believe in it. Transforming the inherent fakeness of the stage into something real is the magic – the kind that every play aspires to conjure, but which I had heretofore found almost exclusively in the movies.

Indeed, the play has much of the vaunted Disney magic that seems increasingly rare in Disney’s animated pictures these days. (And please don’t bring up Pixar. Their movies are enjoyable, but Pixar specializes in high craftsmanship and cleverness, not magic – floating house notwithstanding.)

Though I’ve experienced more capacity for transport in the movies than in plays, it doesn’t mean that it happens often. But high-concept magic guided the modernized morality of Gary Ross’s Pleasantville, and Ross also wrote the screenplay for Big, the seminal magic movie for boys growing up in the 1980s, so perhaps he and his team can summon some of that classic magic for Peter and the Starcatchers as well.

*          *          *

My experience with Peter and the Starcatchers doesn’t change my belief that movies can do so many things that the stage just can’t. But at the same time, the stage is capable of things that movies wouldn’t dare to attempt.

But having said that, there is one final damning trait exhibited by even the finest play; in fact, it is especially the finest plays that are most beleaguered by this trait.

The greatest play I’ve ever seen is one that you will never see, unless you and I attended the same show.  I’m being a bit dramatic, for even if we attended different performances, you probably saw more or less what I saw. But as the production moves from place to place, as the cast gets jiggered, and the staging is updated, and sets reconstructed, and lines rewritten, and concepts reconceived, and even the title tweaked (by the time it hit Broadway and started winning Tony Awards, it was called Peter and the Starcatcher), eventually, though you may see the play, it will be a different experience. 

And I think it’s this unbearably ephemeral nature of a great play that tears me up inside and makes me want to do away with the theater entirely.

I am reminded of these lines in Carl Sandburg’s poem, “Languages”:

Sing – and singing – remember
Your song dies and changes
And is not here to-morrow
Any more than the wind
Blowing ten thousand years ago.

*          *          *

So I ask myself that question now: what would Shakespeare do today, plays or movies? I’m not sure. Maybe a little of each. But surely, what with juggling both stage and screen, he wouldn’t bother writing sonnets. Right? 

A Game of Chicken

You have surely heard that the Chick-fil-A chain of chicken sandwich restaurants has been taking a beating lately in the liberal media for the proudly unambiguous anti-gay statements made by its president, Dan Cathy, which he has backed up with significant financial contributions to gay-unfriendly organizations. Considering that he runs an empire founded on poultry, perhaps one is not surprised at his willingness to ruffle some feathers.

Just before the flap began, I happened to go to a Chick-fil-A for one of their breaded chicken sandwiches. I first tried their food a few years ago, and thought they offered a flavorful sandwich at a reasonable price, and most notably, in a very clean and friendly environment. I was, however, taken aback by an odd marketing and signage campaign featuring cows foisting deliberately misspelled slogans in a particularly heinous font. Imperatives such as “Eat mor chikin” and a special promotion, “Dress like me, git free chikin,” acquired a decidedly ominous, even fascistic glower, which didn’t seem in keeping with the chain’s otherwise homey aesthetic. Upon further thought, this perhaps is meant to evoke the quaint rusticity of the chain’s Southern roots, or else leaves open some speculation about fundamentalist Christianity’s anti-intellectual tendencies.

The sun's rays are oddly reminiscent of iconography from WWII-era Imperialist Japan.

At my latest visit, the service was once again pointedly friendly. The teenaged girl who took my order flashed a brilliant smile full of braces, certainly more welcoming than the usual McDonald’s employee, who tends to have the disgruntled visage of one of Bane’s henchmen in The Dark Knight Rises. A woman who appeared to be the store manager walked out from behind the counter to bring me my takeout order, and asked if I wanted their “special Chick-fil-A sauce” with it. 

After the bad press began, I wondered, would the service have been any worse had I ordered my sandwich while sporting a rainbow flag t-shirt, or if I had tried to regale the staff with tales of my ribald shenanigans at the local Pride Parade (which happened to take place just as this henhouse kerfuffle began). On the flip side, how should I go about treating them, now that their company-sanctioned bigotry has become newsworthy?

Boycotting Chick-fil-A, that is, making a stand with your wallet, is undoubtedly good for your conscience, your finances, and your waistline – a win-win-win situation. But I wonder if it’s any kind of solution at all, in light of all the other institutions and corporations that so deftly dodge the rather narrow purview of our consciences.

                                                                                                            

Civil rights offenses are a favorite whipping boy of the media, and furthermore, they seem to penetrate down to the sensitive emotional core of the populace, laying waste to more family dinners and love affairs than comparatively benign topics such as abuses of human rights (Chinese workers slaving away to make Apple products) or the ravages of economic inequality and immobility (working for minimum wage at McDonald’s/Target/Wal-Mart/etc.). Beyond mere rights and privileges, I’m sure there are a whole host of other evils associated with just these few companies I’ve mentioned, ranging from environmental to political and so forth. But not a lot of people (gays included) get indignant enough to throw away their iPhones or stop shopping at Target (itself a company with a history of both angering the LGBT community and seemingly pandering to its purchasing power).

No person can stand up for every good cause, nor should he be expected to. But every “Chick-fil-A moment” seems to me a signal, a cock crow (if you’ll indulge the pun), to align one’s life along the trajectory of justice.

                                   

I am reminded of Henry David Thoreau, who wrote:

It is not a man’s duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support. If I devote myself to other pursuits and contemplations, I must first see, at least, that I do not pursue them sitting upon another man’s shoulders.
- Resistance to Civil Government, aka Civil Disobedience

There is a game of chicken afoot, but it’s not a game played against a corporation or a bigot or even a socioeconomic paradigm that fosters such strife and selfishness; rather, it’s a game you play with yourself. You test yourself against your willingness to engage in activity that is unworthy of you. Let us see which is the stronger. 

Will the real @czardoz please stand up?

Let’s say that among my esteemed readership is a person named Bill Jones. Mr. Bill probably has one or more email addresses, but with a name as common as his, I highly doubt he managed to snag billjones@gmail.com. He probably didn’t even get billjones@hotmail.com or billjones@yahoo.com. If he were a real tech-savvy old-timer, perhaps he secured billjones@aol.com, I don’t know.

Like Bill, you are probably in the same boat. Unless you have a highly unusual name, nickname, or favorite moniker (or you’re content with using the email address provided by your regional ISP, like Cox, where the naming land grab is much less competitive), your email is probably a messy compromise bespattered with hyphens, periods, underscores, middle initials, the numeral 0 in place of the letter O (sigh), and a birth date or lucky number tacked onto the end.

Perhaps you’ve wondered what these people were like, these usurpers of the name that was rightfully yours. Perhaps you’ve wondered how they were defiling the email address that should have belonged to you. Well, short of writing them and asking, you’ll probably never know the kinds of depraved activities that your name is embroiled in.

Now let’s look at a more contemporary scenario, since email, the original social app, is no longer very social compared to Facebook, Twitter, etc. For example, there can only be one @czardoz on Twitter, and thankfully, that’s me. So imagine my disappointment when I hopped onto the Instagram train and discovered that the name “czardoz” was taken.

Not really a big deal compared to, say, human trafficking, but did it bother me? Yeah, it did. Especially since I am an avid photographer and post on Instagram fairly often, whereas I posted once on Twitter and then promptly forgot about it when neither Milla Jovovich nor Britney Spears offered a response.

But unlike email, each Instagram account comes fully loaded with a public personality that can be stalked. And what I found on faux-czardoz’s Instagram feed . . . I didn’t like it. In fact, it was fairly reprehensible stuff. If you’re the squeamish type, don’t click on the following links:

1) a girl spilling her ample cleavage onto a pool table, graced with the words “Nice Rack”

2) a dog swaddled in a Confederate flag

3) butchered pig parts, including the head

4) some guy brandishing said head in front of his face, as if to announce “I am the pig man.”

I’m not going to delve into this person’s psyche, if only because he seems like the type of bloke who would hunt me with a shotgun as soon as spit on my boots. But to make a long and unfortunate story short, I’m going to plant a warning beacon here to tell everyone that I am not this czardoz. This is the real me:

Not the pig man. Never the pig man.

@czardoz

If this blog were a Twitter feed:

Why does “permission to speak frankly” always mean permission to tell you what an incompetent fool you are? #permissiondenied

And why would such permission ever be granted?!? #justdontgetit

Thank you TV execs for canceling Ringer and Pan Am. Once again, you prove that you don’t know your asses from your faces. #subtledifferences

If I were going to start an Asian boy band, I’d name it Boyster Sauce. #notracistjustracial

Logged into MySpace for the first time in years, noticed they now offer the option of logging in with your Facebook account. #Tomcanceledhisaccount

Man, got hot today. Makes me mad when it gets hot all of a sudden. #makesmemad

Gay guy estimated that I was “18% gay.” Should I be insulted that it’s so high, or insulted that it’s so low? #justbecauseIlikeGuyPearce

Just saw a bumper sticker that read “Obummer.” As they say, the simplest is most profound. #obamanations

New Bond movie coming. Gotta admit the only scene I remember from the first D-Craig film was the ball-breaker torture chair. #testytestes

Guy named Weiner forced to resign because he sexted pics of his wiener? Should’ve received a Pulitzer for living the pun. #livebythesword

Had a dream last night that all these tweets were really just Facebook status updates. #mindblown

Like, dude, is this my ass or is this my face? I don’t even know!!! #the1percent

You had me at "festooned"

“F” is the funniest letter that you’ll ever do. Don’t believe me? Then why are the funniest words all “F” words? For example:

• festooned
• funicular
• floozy
• flummox
• farrago
• flabbergasted

Need more evidence of the funnies? All right, why do so many “F” words refer to fools and their foolishness? Here are just a few:

• folderol
• flapdoodle
• fiddle-faddle
• frippery
• foofaraw
• flimflam
• fop
• flibbertigibbet

From the medical community comes “flatulence.”

The culinary community gives us “frankfurter” and “falafel.”

The silliest perversion to be worthy of headlining an episode of Law and Order: SVU? No, it isn’t fire fetishism (though that’s close). It’s “frotteurism,” also known by the more poetic name of “frottage.”

And I know it’s not primarily English, but you have to admit that “fatwa” is a pretty funny word.

Still not convinced? Then answer me this: who is the funniest, fattest fellow in Shakespeare? Falstaff. That’s three “F”s! 

I rest my face.