Wednesday, November 30, 2016

A Blogging Anniversary: Eleven Years Of Disturbing The Narrative At Kiko's House

DAMON WINTER / THE NEW YORK TIMES
It occurred to me . . .  that it had not been by accident that the people with whom I had preferred to spend time in high school had, on the whole, hung out in gas stations. ~ JOAN DIDION
I've struggled -- okay, not a lot, but enough -- to find a common theme in the blog posts I have selected as representative of the breadth and depth of Kiko's House over the past 11 years.   That theme, I suppose, is that the world has very much departed from the narratives to which we have always been accustomed, the ones we were nurtured on as youngsters, were reinforced in our textbooks when we were students, later still by politicians and other supposedly smart people when we were all grown up, and we comfortingly took to our graves.  Until the world began spinning off its axis. 
We stopped blowing our horn about milestones at Kiko's House a few years ago.  For one thing, it was a tad narcissistic considering that some current affairs blogs have more visitors before breakfast on a slow day than we've had in our entire lifetime.  And while history has a really annoying way of repeating itself, there also has been a certain redundancy to many of our posts.  

All that noted, November 2016 is a milestone.  We're now not only 11 years young, but we've passed the 2 million visitor mark.  Those visitors hail from 200 or so countries, including Milwaukee.  And there have been over 10,000 posts.  This is number 10,609, to be exact.  

Visitors seldom leave comments, although there have been conspicuous exceptions.  A post on the epidemic of cancers in American golden retrievers has received over 200 comments -- an extraordinary number for a smallish blog.  This post has, completely by accident, become a Wailing Wall for people who have lost their beloved dogs to cancer and have reached out to share their experiences.  And an instance where blogging can make a small but important difference in people's lives. 
Kiko's House has been photograph oriented from the jump, and we've run over 800 standalone images from photographers the world over in addition to images embedded in posts.  But the photo above shot by Damon Winter of The New York Times in Chester, Pennsylvania a month before the 2008 presidential election rises above the rest because it is such a striking visual metaphor for Barack Obama's travails -- and America's, as well -- an all too frequent topic here that lurched into warp drive during the year as the axis spinning accelerated with the ascendancy of Cheeto Jesus.
I would also like to point out that we're still being fed the same old narratives despite the ice cold national shower we took on Election Day.  And like Joan Didion, the people I preferred to spend time with in high school hung out at gas stations.
-- Love and Peace, SHAUN
CRIME & PUNISHMENT: A TALE OF TWO CITIES (September 28, 2006) Earlier this week, Cashae Corley, a five year old riding in her mother's car in the Strawberry Mansion neighborhood, became the 287th murder victim of 2006 in Philadelphia.  Eighty miles to the north, a homeless man in the Bronx became New York City's 409th murder victim.  That's one murder for every 5,200 residents in Philadelphia, a city of 1.5 million people, and one murder for every 19,000 residents in New York, a city of 8.1 million. This means that you're about four times more likely to end up in the morgue in the City of Brotherly Love  than the Big Apple. Why?
N.J. HOSPITALS CRISIS: CULLEN WAS NOT THE PROBLEM, HE WAS A SYMPTOM (October 28, 2008) Charles Cullen is every hospital's worst nightmare: A deranged nurse who methodically murders patients by giving them hard-to-detect overdoses of medications.  Cullen, who was arrested in 2004 after a 16-year crime spree made considerably easier because a severe nursing shortage enabled him to go undetected as he moved from hospital to hospital, told authorities that he murdered as many as 45 patients at hospitals in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.  
THE SAGA OF THE CEDARS: WHEN BAD THINGS HAPPEN TO GOOD CONSERVATIVES (January 5, 2010) Harvey and Harriet Cedars are not just the breadwinners in a typical conservative Christian Republican family.  They're hard working middle-class folks who have been going through some very hard times but were confident that their president, his government and the Supreme Court that he has molded over the last seven years were on their side, which is to say God's side.  This has been good enough for the Cedars because they knew that God was on their side -- their God anyway.  Then things got all crazy.
WOULD JESUS HAVE TORTURED? (September 29, 2010) The smell of autumn is in the air on this Sunday morning, that intoxicating aroma of decaying leaves, ripe apples and bedewed grass brilliantly illuminated by the sun in a cloudless azure blue sky. But there is another smell as well and it is not so sweet – the smell of hypocrisy as the faithful file into a conservative Christian church.
WHY THE AMERICAN DREAM IS DEAD (March 28, 2011) Sadly -- and for me bitterly -- the American Dream is not merely on vacation because of a return to difficult economic times. It is dead. And while it is fashionable to blame feckless politicians and greed mongers for its demise, we all share responsibility as we take ever less responsible for our country, as well as ourselves.
11 YEARS AFTER THE 9/11 ATTACKS, THE GREATEST U.S. COVER-UP REMAINS INTACT (September 11, 2012) Eleven years after the 9/11 catastrophe, the Bush administration cover-up of why the terrorist attacks were carried out despite the White House, CIA and FBI being repeatedly warned of them still holds. Not only has the final word not come out about this malfeasance of enormous and arguably criminal proportions, hardly any word about it has.
THE TRUE STORY OF THE MOST POWERFUL MEN IN AMERICA & A GANG RAPE (February 19, 2014) This is the story of how the three most powerful men in America were responsible for the gang rape of a 14-year-old girl, who was burned to a blackened char, and the murder of her parents and sister. The enablers of these heinous crimes were President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who conspired to invade Iraq for bogus reasons, then starved the Army of the men and materiel to get the job done, which led to a lengthy occupation that triggered an Al Qaeda insurgency and a protracted civil war.
'I WAKE UP TO THE SOUND OF MUSIC SPEAKING WORDS OF WISDOM, LET IT BE' (April 4, 2014) Many years on, I look back on a life in which music has been a nearly constant companion.  But until recently, as relatively well read as I am on music, musicians and even a little music theory, I never considered my own role -- the role of listener.  Why does music feel so good to me?  Why do I feel so much?
FIVE YEARS ON: WHY THE PALIN BIRTH HOAX STORY STILL SHOULDN'T GO AWAY (May 28, 2014) Rumors, innuendo and inconclusive photographs do not a true story make, but the fact of the matter is that five-plus years after the birth of Trig Paxson Van Palin, there is no proof that Sarah Palin is his biological mother and evidence he may be her grandson. 
POLITIX UPDATE: WHEN THINGS FELL SERIOUSLY APART & THE CENTER DIDN'T HOLD (September 8, 2015We'll motor past how the brilliant Yeats, as prescient as he could be, foresaw this political season and the coming of Donald Trump nearly 100 years ago in his classic dirge for the decline of civilization, but today even the best in the overcrowded Republican field seem to lack all conviction, the worst are full of passionate intensity, and surely some revelation is at hand.  Or so we should fear. 
WHEN GOOD THINGS HAPPEN TO GOOD PEOPLE: HOW TINY ELDRED BEAT GIANT NESTLE (June 9, 2016) We live in the age of the corporatocracy, and it is a strange time indeed.  Corporations have gifted us an astonishing array of goods, but also have been agents for great harm.  Often more powerful than the governments who are supposed to regulate them, corporations rule our lives in subtle but extraordinarily manipulative ways.  While they can make our lives better, they also are able to destroy them.

    IMAGE CREDITS: (CRIME) JIM MacMILLAN/PHILADELPHIA DAILY NEWS; (9/11) NATIONAL PARK SERVICE; (MUSIC) "THREE MUSICIANS" By PABLO PICASSO; (TRUMP) DONKEY HOTEY; (ELDRED) ALYSSA MEADOWS 

Monday, November 28, 2016

An Option To Putting Lumps Of Coal In That Christmas Stocking

My travail d'amour has sold steadily, if not spectacularly (beer money, really), including not a few purchases by parents who told me that There's A House gave their kids the insight they needed to
finally understand Mom and Dad, who had come of age in the Sixties and Seventies. 
Wrote one such dad: 
"The book's beauty is that it is a composite, a cross cut, an intense study of the doings the exploits the escapades the shenanigans the labor and the passions of a bruised and battered generation outraged by its government and traumatized by its war; the time of the quest for a new definition of freedom: freedom from and from to 'be me,' set against the backdrop of the drug culture which the author's true-life characters immerse themselves in with a hedonistic if not joyful abandon while remaining fully functional and creatively, responsibly and industriously providing for their own upkeep along the way.   
"To those who are old enough to appreciate those times, please read this book. You'll be glad that you did.  To those of you who are too young to appreciate those times, please read this book.  You'll be glad that you did."
There's a House is available for purchase online in dead tree and Kindle editions.

Friday, November 25, 2016

From Goshawks To Wolfes: Twenty-Five Great Books For Holiday Gift Giving

Pillars of cool hydrogen rise from a small portion of the Carina Nebula
 as photographed by the Hubble Space Telescope
Once again, Your Faithful Reviewer plowed through a slew of books in the course of 2016 with an emphasis on the cosmic (getting lost in the stars) and profane (Thomas Wolfe's earthbound novels). Here are the best 25 of the bunch.  
All are great holiday gifts for a literary inclined spouse, other family member or friend.  All but one are available online in paperback.  If your local lending library is a member of Interlibrary Loan, you can borrow a copy through that system for the price of a little bit of shoe leather.   
So no excuses, okay? 
THE ACCIDENTAL CITY: Improvising New Orleans (Lawrence N. Powell, 2012) New Orleans was not supposed to exist, let alone exist where it has existed for the last three centuries — in a mosquito-infested swamp on the banks of a difficult-to-tame river — and that is the premise of this delightful book on the first century of the Crescent City and its Creole roots.  Remnants of the original NOLA can be seen in the orthogonal grid of the French Market, but that only begins to explain the city’s extraordinary racial, ethnic and cultural diversity.  Powell does the rest in this meticulous historical tour de force
BACK TO LIFE: A Bladder Cancer Journey  (Frank Sadowski, 2015) Most commonly, cancer survivors want to forget the entire awful experience, which a few devote much of their lives to counseling those with the disease as Sadowski had done.  And in his case, write a brutally candid and profoundly inspiring book about looking death in the face and then staring it down.  But what really shines through this eloquent memoir of his ordeal is his indomitable will to live.   He simply never gave up.  Sadowski writes beautifully, imparting Back to Life with a plain-spoken passion and self-deprecating humor.  (Click HERE for a full review.) 
BARBARIAN DAYS: A Surfing Life (William Flanagan, 2015) Write well and knowledgeably, and any subject can be made interesting.  So it is with surfing, a lifelong passion for journalist and war correspondent Flanagan, who shares his adventures chasing waves all over the world -- including California, Hawaii, the South Pacific, Australia, Africa, Madeira and, surprisingly, metropolitan New York -- in this is elegantly but simply written autobiography, social history, scientific exploration and literary road movie.  Read Barbarian Days and you'll never look at an ocean wave the same way again.  
BORN TO RUN (Bruce Springsteen, 2016) The 500-plus pages of this autobio are lovingly rendered. Informative. Passionate. Mercifully hot air free.  Funny.  Immodest.  Painfully candid.  Insightful. Neurosis ridden.  Deep.  Oh, and The Boss can really write, even if it is in Jerseyspeak. His description of how he wrote his first bona fide hit single -- "Born to Run" -- is worth the price of admission for veteran musicians and especially up and comers.  And answers the question of how the hell you get from Freehold, New Jersey with a $69 Kent guitar to superstardom.  Hint: It takes 50 years.  Talent.  And proving it all night. (Click HERE for a related article.)
THE BURN PITS: The Poisoning of America’s Soldiers (Joseph Hickman, 2016 ) Vice President Biden's profound grief over the 2015 death of his eldest son has taken on an awful new dimension: It is possible that Biden unknowingly signed his death warrant.   In this shocking book, investigative journalist Hickman asserts that a subsidiary of Halliburton, where Dick Cheney was CEO before he became vice president, poisoned thousands of American soldiers and many thousands more Iraqis with the toxic smoke from the burn pits they operated in place of the incinerators typically run by the military. (Click HERE for a related article.)  
BUSH (Jean Edward Smith, 2016) Historians have been picking through the entrails of the Bush presidency since well before he left office.  Even allowing that they tend to be a liberal lot, it is difficult to find anyone who has anything remotely positive to say about Bush and his administration, and Smith is absolutely scathing in his condemnation.  "For eight years," he writes, "Bush made the decisions that put the United States on a collision course with reality. . . . [His] refusal to face up to the fact that Iraq had no unconventional weapons suggests a willfulness that borders on psychosis."  (Click HERE for a related article.)  
THE CHINA COLLECTORS: America’s Century-Long Hunt for Asian Art Treasures (Karl E. Meyer and Shareen Blair Brysac, 2015) Who has not admired an exquisite porcelain Oriental vase or splendid bronze?  This is the backstory to our love affair with Chinese and Japanese art and the eclectic collectors — ranging from Salem sea captains to Indian Jones types to Gilded Age millionaires — who bequeathed North American museums with the greatest collections outside of East Asia.   The authors do not shrink from the dark side: Much of the art was plundered, and China in particular wants to reclaim its missing patrimony. 
COMING OF AGE IN THE MILKY WAY (Timothy Ferris, 1988) Physician-philosopher Lewis Thomas wrote "The greatest of all accomplishments of twentieth-century science has been the discovery of human ignorance."  That is the dramatically huge takeaway from Ferris’s landmark tour de force on how mankind got lost in the stars, which while somewhat outdated nearly 30 years after publication, remains a preeminent example of how the mists obscuring the understanding of a complex science like astronomy from knuckle-headed laymen like myself can be parted through brilliant narrative writing. 
ENGLISH PASSENGERS: A Novel (Robert Kneale, 2000) It is 1857 and Captain Illiam Quillian Kewley and his band of smugglers from the Isle of Man have just had their cargo of tobacco and brandy confiscated by British Customs.  Just when it seems like things can't get any worse, he is approached by an eccentric English vicar who offers to charter his ship for a journey to the other side of the globe and Tasmania, where the reverend believes the Garden of Eden to be.  Beyond Kneale's historical renderings, which include deft descriptions of the brutality of British imperialism and Aboriginal life, this is an uproariously funny book.   
THE GREAT JAZZ DAY (Charles Graham et. al., 2000) This is a book about a photograph.  Not just any photograph, but the greatest jazz photograph in history — Art Kane’s immortal 1958 shot of nearly 60 jazz greats — ranging from Art Blakey to Coleman Hawkins to Marian McPartland to Sonny Rollins — gathered on the steps of a Harlem brownstone.  This selection is a little unusual for me because it is a coffee table book, although a modest one, and is sadly out of print, although used copies are available.  There also are some terrific essays by participants in the photo shoot.     
H IS FOR HAWK (Helen Macdonald, 2014) My fascination with goshawks led me to this genre-breaking runaway bestseller.  It is the story of how the author adopted, raised and trained a gossie whom she improbably named Mabel because, as superstition drenched hawkers believe, the more banal the name the better the bird will be. A big reason for the book's success is that it is as much a story of Macdonald going to pieces -- and very nearly succumbing to madness -- following the death of her beloved father.  H Is for Hawk is nothing less than a soaring triumph.  (Click HERE for a full review.) 
LONELY HEARTS OF THE COSMOS: The Scientific Quest For The Secret of the Universe (Dennis Overbye, 1991) Fortunately for me, this terrific tale is short on mind-locking theory and long on fascinating portraits of the brilliant and typically eccentric men and (too few) women who built on Einstein and began to unlock the answers to The Biggest Question of Them All in the latter half of the 20th century.  Although Lonely Hearts is 25 years out of date and there have been enormous strides in the science of wormholes, superstrings and grand unification theories, it remains a great read.  
LOOK HOMEWARD: A Life of Thomas Wolfe (David Herbert Donald, 1987) Wolfe, the great American novelist and playwright, churned out an awful lot of bad prose, but that matters not because so much of his work is "extraordinarily brilliant and moving," in Donald’s estimation, and mine as well.  Nevertheless, there may never have been a writer who was more his own worst enemy.  Donald, who had full access to Wolfe's papers, deftly explains how his massive passions, which complimented his massive physical size, kept colliding with his quest to push the boundaries of the modern novel, which was cut short by his premature death at age 38.  

LUCKY JIM (Kingsley Amis, 1954) My appreciation of English humor of the Wodehouse-Waugh school has diminished over the years, probably in parallel with my realization that the English can be classist bores.  Nevertheless, this story of Jim Dixon, a hapless lecturer in medieval history at a provincial university, as opposed to Oxford or Cambridge, has its moments.  The stuffy bores who live the cloistered lives of academia can be pretty funny, Dixon's relationship with a drip who strings him along has its moments, and I certainly can relate to his hatred of phoniness.   
MINOR CHARACTERS (Joyce Johnson, 1983) I would like to say that Johnson and other woman friends and lovers of Beats like Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady and William S. Burroughs had important roles in making these famous iconoclasts who they were, but Johnson has the good sense to not go there, because for the most part the Beats treated women like crap.  Minor Characters chronicles Johnson’s years with Kerouac, beginning a few months before his seminal On The Road was published, and I kept asking myself how she could keep on loving the bum.  I guess you had to have been there.  (Click HERE for a related article.)
MR NICE: An Autobiography (Howard Marks, 2003)  How you feel about a book I found to be a compelling and often delightful read may depend on whether you believe marijuana and hashish are relatively harmless recreational drugs or should be classified with cocaine and heroin, which are anything but harmless.  And whether you support the U.S. War on Drugs or see it for what it is: An enormous waste of money that demonizes, criminalizes and incarcerates harmless people like Marks, denying them of their most fundamental constitutional rights.  You have been warned.  
ON THE MOVE: A Life (Oliver Sachs, 2015) When he was 12, a perceptive schoolmaster wrote, "Sachs will go far, if he does not go too far."  Indeed, the British neurologist naturalist and author, who spent his professional life in the U.S., never slowed down until his death last year at age 82. He is widely known for writing best-selling case histories about his patients' disorders.  Less well known are his  youthful obsession with motorcycles and speed, as well as drugs.  On the Move is engaging, but has a thrown-together feel, and there is too little about his signal accomplishment: illuminating the ways that the brain makes us human.    
PETER PAN MUST DIE: A Novel (John Verdon, 2014) Former NYPD homicide detective Dave Gurney is an ingenious puzzle solver, but unraveling who fatally wounded a charismatic politician felled by a rifle bullet to the brain while delivering the eulogy at his own mother's funeral, triggering a bizarre murder spree, is his most challenging case yet.  With methodical precision, Gurney identifies and then lures and traps the psychopath behind the crime wave by setting himself up as the next target in this exquisitely paced whodunit, Verdon's best so far despite a little too much psychobabble for my taste.  
PURITY: A Novel (Jonathan Franzen, 2015) This is the great Franzen's most intimate and least self conscious book yet, and his best.  Pip Tyler, whose real name is Purity, is the heroine of this novel of idealism, fidelity and (yes) murder, with all of the characters, in their own way, seeking purity in their lives.  Franzen has fashioned a typically sprawling and ambitious plot, with innumerable subplots chockablock with the 21st century Dickensian twists.  His musings on the dark underbelly of our cyber society are profound ("The Internet had come to signify death for him").  And the ending is just about perfect.    
RAGTIME: A Novel (E.L. Doctorow, 1974) It is fitting that I finally got around to reading this evocation of the dreams and prejudices of pre-World War I America in the era of Black Lives Matter and during a presidential election year.  Although Ragtime is chockablock with luminaries like Harry Houdini, Henry Ford, Pierpont Morgan and anarchist Emma Goldman, it is the humbling story of a suburban upper-class New York family whose lives are dramatically changed by a Jewish immigrant and a black man’s fight for racial justice that makes this book so deserving as a classic of American literature.     
A ROYAL EXPERIMENT: The Private Life of George III (Janice Hadlow, 2014) This engrossing book was titled The Strangest Family when first published in the UK, which seems misleading until you consider that the monarchs who preceded and followed George were royally dysfunctional while he, by comparison, was rather down to earth, at least until dementia overtook him toward the end of his eventful 60-year reign.  Hadlow explores George's efforts to do better in raising his many children (he failed miserably) while rejecting the caricature of him as a tyrant responsible for the failures of British imperialism.    
A SHORT HISTORY ABOUT A SMALL PLACE (T.R. Pearson, 1985) You won't find Neely, North Carolina on any map, but this fictional town's characters -- as described in a resolutely deadpan voice by young narrator Louis Benfield -- impart a wisdom that their simple surface selves do not betray.  Therein lies the beauty of this nicely written take on small-town Southern culture, which while witty is unsparing when it comes to the realities of class and race prejudice.  And while A Small Place may not be the great American novel some critics claim it to be, it's is danged good.  
A SHORT HISTORY OF NEARLY  EVERYTHING (Bill Bryson, 2003) If Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity is Greek to you, and it has been to me despite years of trying to penetrate its meaning, then Bryson will unlock these mysteries and many more about what made the universe and our little old primordial selves in this drop-dead delightful — and by now classic — brick of a book.  Bryson manages the neat trick of being profound and funny at the same time in decoding everything from quantum mechanics to the genetics of the fruit fly while rendering the scientists who solved these puzzles in delightfully human terms.     
THE SON (2014) and MIDNIGHT SUN (2015) Jo Nesbø, one of the leading practitioners of Arctic Noir, is best known for his 10-book Harry Hole series (of which The Snowman is a personal favorite).  But in The Son and Midnight Sun, he turns away from a homicide detective-centric plot.   A junkie in prison for crimes he didn't commit and a kind-hearted hit man on the run are the unlikely heroes in these short but compelling reads.  Nesbø remains a master of the deeply complex psychological thriller, and separating the good guys from the bad is just part of what makes these books terrific additions to the genre.  
YOU CAN'T GO HOME AGAIN (Thomas Wolfe, 1940) This deep and beautifully written classic of 20th century fiction weaves the stories of George Webber, an aspiring young writer aching for fame and love in all the wrong places, with the saga of America and Europe from the Great Depression through the pre-World War II years.  Wolfe's last great work (posthumously if controversially assembled by his editor) is a searing critique of capitalism and fascism, but although you indeed can't go home again — that is relive the past — Wolfe expresses through Webber, who of course is himself, an optimism and hope for the future.     
§
Meanwhile, here are my holiday gift giving lists for 20152014 and 2013, as well as a 2012 post on the books that have most influenced me over the years and a random list of great war books published through 2009.

Wednesday, November 23, 2016

This Article Is About The Song 'Alice's Restaurant Massacree,' But 'Alice's Restaurant Massacree' Is Not The Name Of The Article, Just The Song

In the 48 years since Arlo Guthrie recorded "Alice's Restaurant," the 18-plus minute song has become a Thanksgiving Day tradition -- and an ode to a simpler time even if its subtext is the Vietnam War.
If you haven't heard "Alice's Restaurant," then you probably don't know that it's not really a song, but rather an 18-minute monologue with a little singing at the beginning and end, as well as some ragtime guitar picking.  The subtext to the subtext is that back in the day, American boys could avoid being drafted to fight in the controversial and deeply immoral war if convicted of a crime, in Guthrie's case, littering -- leaving garbage at a quaint New England village's dump when it was closed.  The song . . . er, monologue was an enormous countercultural hit in the late 1960s. 
We have been listening to "Alice's Restaurant" courtesy of the wonderful Helen Leicht for many years at noon EST on Thanksgiving Day on WXPN-FM in Philadelphia.  Tune in here and enjoy!

Tuesday, November 22, 2016

What Do Aretha & The Donald Have In Common These Days? It Sure Ain't Respect.

DONKEYHOTEY
Respect is a much malleable concept these days.  At its most basic, respect is a feeling of admiration for someone because of their abilities, qualities or achievements.   
In the case of Aretha Franklin, it is a heartfelt plea to a lover "for a little respect when you come home (just a little bit)," in the words of her hit R&B cover of the great Otis Redding song.  In the case of Cheeto Jesus, respect is merely because he is the president-elect, not something to be earned, but automatically and unquestioningly conferred despite an absence of positive abilities and altruistic qualities, as well as achievements only in the sense that he has never done an honest day's work in his life.   
Where the concept of respect goes so far off the rails of reason as to become unrecognizable is that to not grant Trump respect is not merely disrespectful in the distorted-beyond-recognition view of his sycophancy and even a few pundits before they completely lost their shit, it is unpatriotic.  This perversity predominates in the hydra-headed monster of reasons for my post-election despair over the ascendancy of a racist, xenophobe and anti-Semite. 
Yes, Trump will commingle business and public interests in what will be a four- or eight-year ethical holiday.  Can you say emoluments?  Yes, he will appoint a bestiary full of science-denying knuckle draggers and cashiered generals for Cabinet positions.  Yes, he will tack away from some of his more abominable campaign promises like jailing She Who Wears Pantsuits in a half-hearted effort to mitigate the damage, but how can I respect a man who as president will not represent all of the people, but only white people, and privileged white men at that? 
No can do. 
There is no better illustration of where reality has collided head on with absurdity than in the "controversy" over the address of the cast of the Broadway mega-hit Hamilton to Vice President-elect Pence to uphold the "inalienable rights [of a] diverse America."   
Cheeto Jesus took to Twitter, that most statesman-like of media, to throw a tantrum over the timely plea, which he characterized as harassment and brought to mind Natalie Maines's criticism of Dubya on the eve of the invasion of Iraq in 2003.  Maines and the Dixie Chicks were, of course, blackballed by the troglodytic country music establishment, while Hamilton and Jonathan Groff and Javier Muñoz, among its other superb stars, will suffer no such fate in the rarified air of the Eastern liberal culture gulch despite the extortionate prices being charged for tix.
But none of that is the point.   
The point is that everyone knows that Broadway actors are a bunch of queers.  That the theater has been a welcoming place for LGBT people.  That it is an abomination to cast people of color as the white founding fathers.  No respect for good old common decency there, right?  Never mind that Trump's latest tweet storm was confined to demanding an apology from the Hamilton cast and not a peep about the white nationalists who were triumphantly meeting a few blocks from the White House at the same time Pence was sitting in a Broadway theater. 
Right.   
I figure we owe Cheeto Jesus about as much respect as he showed us during the campaign.  Or as a black friend said to me the other day, "My black ass doesn't owe Trump a damned thing."  The same should go for anyone who is not a straight white male whose ride doesn't qualify for the gas guzzler tax.   

Sunday, November 20, 2016

Guest Contributor: 'What Is Your Earliest Memory?' I Responded: 'Losing Florida.'

I’M WITH HER

By DAVID HOLMBERG 
I decided to check myself into a loony bin. Googled “Bins, loony” and found one nearby. Drove a ways and saw a sign, “Loony bin, one mile.” Drove on. Another sign: “Loony bin, next right. “ I shouted “No!” but kept driving.  
Soon I came to a red, one-story building with a parking lot. A sign said, “Loony parking only. Non-loonies in back. “ I parked in the front and went in. A tough-looking security guard with a hatchet face said: “Loony?” I nodded and he directed me to a registration desk.  A woman handed me what looked like a ballot. It said: “Reason for committal? Trump. Other. Check one.”  
I checked “Trump” and was told to take a seat.  
The room was crowded. People mumbled incoherently and moaned. I sat next to a woman wearing a blonde wig and an “I’m With Her” button. “Hello, I’m Hillary,” she said. She smiled. “What’s your name? Did you vote today?”  
I moved to a seat alone in the back. I mumbled and moaned a while until my name was called. I was ushered into an office. A shrink introduced himself and asked me, “What is your earliest memory?” I responded: “Losing Florida.”  
“No, I mean farther back.” 
“Reading 538 in the morning and again at night.” 
The shrink shrugged and asked if I’d ever been committed before.  
“Yes,” I said. “To Obama.”  
“No, I mean to an institution.” 
“Yes, to democracy as we know it.” 
“You’re being obsessive,” the shrink said. “You need to focus on the world before the election. Do you remember that world?” 
“Well, I remember being glad we had a black president.”  
“Anything else?” 
“I remember being glad we were going to have a woman president.”  
“Okay, what else?” 
“I remember watching CNN.” 
“And?” 
“I remember crying and drinking Scotch and falling asleep on the couch at some point. 
“Then what happened?” 
“I just remember waking up and I knew it was a Wednesday morning and something terrible had happened and I wished I was dead.”  
“Do you still wish you were dead?”  
“Yes.” 
The shrink beamed. He shook my hand again.  “Congratulations!” 
“What for?”  
“Hillary won the popular vote and you’re admitted!” 
“Thanks. Could I use the men’s room now?” 
“Sure. Here’s your straitjacket. Welcome! 
I put on my straitjacket and headed for the men’s room. I could hear the moans and mumbling of my fellow loonies but I felt a sense of peace settling over me. I’d found a home for the next four years. Everything would be fine! I was still with her all the way.

DAVID HOLMERG IS A CAREER JOURNALIST AND CONTRIBUTOR TO THE NEW YORK TIMES, AMONG OTHER PUBLICATIONS.