Move On MoveOn

Today I received an e-mail from MoveOn. Well, actually, I received an e-mail from MoveOn yesterday, too, and the day before that, and the day before that. Indeed, MoveOn, like some unusually persistent Jehovah’s Witness, has been knocking on my door every day for about three years now, and no matter how often I shut the door on it; or plead that I have my own church, thank you very much, it's back the next day, ringing my chimes with renewed ardor. 

I still occasionally agree to donate to one of their campaigns, or sign one of their petitions. (I even circulated one recently urging the President to cut our losses in Afghanistan, which, now that I think about it, is a little like singing folk songs to protest a gypsy moth infestation.) But more and more I sign primarily in hopes that by signing I might satisfy them for a while and buy myself some time. 

MoveOn had a great deal to do with getting Obama elected, and for that I am grateful. It proved remarkably effective in marshalling progressives and amassing the obscene resources a presidential campaign now requires. So this is not to criticize MoveOn for its successes, only its excesses, of which today’s e-mail is symptomatic. 

After quoting Margaret Mead’s assertion that real change only comes from small groups of thoughtful and committed people, MoveOn goes on to boast a membership of five million. This suggests to me that perhaps it should consider breaking up into small groups. 

But that's not what MoveOn is proposing. As if the daily imprecations to sign petitions circulated by MoveOn and its allies were not enough, it has just inaugurated a website on which all five million of its members are encouraged to compose and circulate petitions of their own.

“We'll send the most popular petitions to other MoveOn members to help build support for your cause,” say Anna, Julia, Michael, Wes, and the rest of MoveOn team, as they sign themselves. "It's easy to get started -- just click here." (A link follows that I do not intend to share.)

Considering all the petitions MoveOn has circulated, I can hardly blame it for running out of ideas of its own. But if that's the case, isn’t the better part of discretion to simply shut up and shut down for a while? Aren’t MoveOn and its imitators running the risk of wearing out us progressives as it is? Might it not be fatal to MoveOn’s efficacy in the next presidential campaign if not just Anna, Julia, Michael, Wes, and the rest of the MoveOn team send us petitions, but we start sending petitions to ourselves?

So I’ve got a petition for you: 


“We the undersigned ask that MoveOn stop with the petitions already so we can steel our loins for the battle to come.”

Where do I sign? 

Who Was Worse: Hitler or Stalin?

I am a serial subscriber to the New York Review of Books, for reasons both laudable and lamentable. First of all, reading its book reviews is as close as I’ll ever come to reading any of the important books I will eventually claim to have read. Second, reading it in public places ropes me off as a man of letters to be reckoned with. 
        Third, I get a kick out of the egghead personals in the back, and the letters that begin with something like, “Much as I appreciated the many laudatory things Milton Ravitz had to say about my book, Arbiters Schmarbiters: The Death of Negotiation in an Age of Self, I feel I must correct several of the cavils he leveled at my assertions regarding the role scotch tape has played in the decline in the rate of teenage pregnancies.”

But in fact NYRB deserves my loyalty. It is unfailingly illuminating no matter how obscure the subject, and host to a slew of fine writers. So I was startled when I opened an issue this past March and encountered a piece by Timothy Snyder that sought to answer a question -- “Who was worse: Hitler or Stalin?”* -- that I might have expected to encounter in a secondhand copy of The Guinness Book of World Records.

The answer seemed to stand or fall on the number of people each of them killed, and in what cause. But does it matter whether you kill people because you believe that blondes should inherit the earth, or that everyone should drive a tractor? If a fellow’s responsible for the death of, oh, let’s say a dozen people, it seems to me that just going by the Biblical injunction "Thou shalt not kill," it hardly matters what he had in mind: Aryan imperialism, communist industrialization, or the barking of a dog.

Recent research conducted in Soviet archives suggests that Joe was responsible for far fewer than the 20 million victims historians have cited in the past. In fact, they think compared to Adolph and his 12 million victims, Joe was a piker. Stalin’s killing sprees began well before Hitler locked and loaded, and yet, in the end. he only managed to tally six million men, women and children. Not only did Hitler outdo him two-to-one; he intended, had he won the war, to wipe out tens of millions more in Russia itself as part of an elaborate colonization scheme. And I just think he was the man to do it, too.

I do not mean to suggest by the tone of this essay that there is anything absurd about getting the numbers right. Such tallies are important, for, as Snyder says, each number represents a life. But to ask which of these thugs was worse based on their intentions or their body counts or both is absurd. It sets up a sort of bathroom scale dynamic with which to measure the murderous thugs of our day against the murderous thugs of yesteryear. “He’s bad,” we might be expected to remark as, say, Pol Pot steps off the scales at a mere 2.5 million victims, “but at least he’s no Stalin.”

I don’t think we should allow Hitler and Stalin to set the bar for future tyrants, nor to suggest that if you sincerely intend to make a better world and keep your victims down to, say, a million -- or a thousand, a hundred, a score, or a dozen -- Hades will prove any more comfortable for you than for them. 
Or are we to reckon that the retributive punishments they should receive ought to be commensurate with the number of their victims? Should we condemn them to an eternity of hellfire for the sum total of their victims or for each individual victim, with the sentences to run consecutively, assuming for the moment that there can be more than one eternity? Can even an all wise and all powerful God do such math, let alone the negligent and impotent God who perfmitted all those murders in the first place?

But what really stunned me about the article came toward the end, where Snyder rather casually mentions that – oh, by the way -- Mao Zedong murdered 30 million Chinese in his Great Leap Forward. But then he goes on to say that Mao doesn't really count because he was only following Stalin’s example. It's as though Snyder dismisses Mao as a singularly impressionable ideologue incapable of exercising his own free will, when in fact he was the free and ruthless agent of his iron will and lunatic caprices. 
If we are truly going by the numbers, Mao must be judged almost three times the monster Hitler was, and five times the monster Stalin was. Is it because he’s Chinese that he didn’t deserve more than a parenthetical mention in the NYRB, and then only as an adjunct to Stalin’s dismal achievements? Or is it because his victims were Chinese that thirty million of them don’t even enter the equation?

Who was worse? My answer is that each of them, or so I very much hope, was as bad as it gets.  

* http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/mar/10/hitler-vs-stalin-who-killed-more/

Sarah Silverman in the Boonies

I spent my adolescence listening to recordings by Jonathan Winters, Bob Newhart, Mort Sahl, Nichols and May, Shelley Berman, Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks. I think I internalized more of their material than anything I learned in school, with the exception, perhaps, of keeping to the right.

Comics submit themselves to a harsh and relentless test. They can’t fool themselves into thinking they have succeeded: not in the way the rest of us can. The proof of their success is in the laughter they elicit immediately, on the spot, standing alone in the spotlight. And if there's anything people are more humorless about than food, it's a bad comic.

Any other performing artist can mistake an audience’s polite or relieved applause at the end of a performance for approbation. But comedians can’t, for in the comedy clubs that have sprouted up all over America there may be such a thing as derisive laughter, but not polite laughter. Real laughter has to be grounded in the truth.

The comic arts embrace a wide variety of schools and styles: male and female; gay and straight, black and redneck; blue and born-again; blue-collar and blue-blood; slapstick and cerebral; insult and geek, ethnic and WASP, topical and day-to-day observational, to name the few I can think of at the moment. 

I saw it expand over decades of talk show viewing, watching pioneers of surrealist humor like Andy Kaufman and Albert Brooks emerge from the back-stages of such unconducive venues as the Mike Douglas and Merv Griffin shows and risk their all before audiences of housewives with the diciest material imaginable.

Fancying myself a connoisseur of standup comedy, a pretention I have cultivated for over half a century, I can’t watch even the best comics without wanting to walk over and hand up a helpful note or two to suggest a few small revisions to even their most successful routines. I know they'd really appreciate it if I showed them how a little syntactical tweaking could put some extra spin on their gags and punchlines. But, speaking of punches, I’ve never had the chutzpah.

For six months after I bought my car, Honda hooked me up to Sirius Radio for six free months, and I became so addicted to its comedy channels that I would have signed up when my free subscription ran out had my wife shared my enthusiasm. (I don’t know what it is about women, but they can be awfully prickly about standup comics, especially of the male variety. I wonder if there might be pheromones involved.) 

Anyway, one of the comedians I discovered on Sirius was Brian Reagan, a brilliant bard of boyhood, a vigilant observer of embarrassing moments, with surefire timing and a hangdog Irish-American delivery that seemed to me just about perfect, and whenever he came on I would shush my passengers and crank up the volume.

But some comedians are better heard than seen. You know how it is when you first lay eyes on the person whose disembodied voice you’ve been listening to for a long time? Isn’t it always a little jarring? NPR newscasters, for instance, never look the way I conjure them. In fact, I'm considering suing some of them for false advertising.

So maybe I should have known better than to look up Brian Reagan on YouTube. I imagined Regan as a shambling, slightly overweight young man with an expression of perpetual bewilderment. But he turns out to look more like a smug and merry frat house bully. What he says is still terrific, but it seems to me that what he does on stage sabotages his material from the get-go. He does a lot of pacing and goofy pivoting, he grins and chuckles at his own material, and his pauses, which seemed so perfect over the radio, he undermines with a lot of sweaty mugging that only serves to accentuate what comes off, in contrast to his self-deprecating material, as self satisfaction. He’d be a lot funnier if he’d lose the grins and chuckles and stand there looking as perplexed and embarrassed as the rest of us. But will he listen? Probably not.

Another fine comic I’d been following on Sirius is Jake Johannsen. When I finally laid eyes on him on the Letterman show, he did not disappoint, because the man understands what it means to stay in character. Offstage he’s kind of a tough guy, but onstage he comes off as a mild and decent man living in an almost continual state of perplexity and alarm. His off-kilter observations on everything from voting booths to Chinese food jibe completely with the jittery persona he’s adopted. (But rather than try to analyze why he succeeds, I’ll append one of his appearances on Letterman so you can judge for yourself.)

I was thinking about all this when Debbie and I went to UC Davis’s Mondavi Center a couple of weeks ago to see another of my favorite comics: Sarah Silverman. There is no one else quite like her. She’s absolutely brilliant and fearless in her ingenuous expression of the unthinking bigotry, backhanded liberalism, and ignorant fatuity that afflict a certain kind of American twenty-something.

She’s also disturbingly great looking, a quality for which I otherwise find it hard to forgive a comic. There may be such a thing as okay looking comics, but there better be something a little wrong with how they look, or they risk inspiring in their audiences not the laughter of recognition but sighs of envy and grumbles of resentment. 

Silverman first came to my notice while she was curled up on a loveseat and delivering an extended riff about her childhood as the youngest of a showbiz family troupe called the Aristocrats in the movie of the same name. She seemed at first to look back on it all with nostalgia, but as she described one after another of her family’s impossibly obscene stunts, you could see her character gradually realizing that what she had always regarded as a normal childhood was actually a horrendous barrage of nonstop, Olympian child abuse. 

You had to be there, I guess, but she just about killed me. I'd never seen anyone like her. I wondered how that warped sensibility that could elicit appalled laughter with jokes about rape and child abuse and recovered memory could issue from that elegant frame. Much of her material is like that, mischievously dragging us into forbidden territory and with her wide-eyed narcissistic persona skewering not just racism, antisemitism, sexism, lust, greed, death and body hair, but our own assumptions and unseemly obsessions.    

Her show in Davis began with her enthusiastically introducing her warm-up act, a comedienne whose name I didn’t catch, and whose face I could hardly see from the back row seats for which I had cleverly paid top dollar. I always applaud warm-up acts because I feel badly for them. The only thing worse than following someone like Silverman would be preceding her. But this woman’s riffs on her promiscuity, loneliness, and general alienation seemed to me to beg an awful lot of questions.

Maybe Silverman championed her because she reminded her of herself or something, or because she's fun on trips. Or perhaps she selected her out of no doubt subconscious narcissism, so we would look forward to her own act all the more. But the effect was to put not only her acolyte’s but her own material in doubt.

After the warm-up, Silverman came onstage and rather wearily trotted out a few of her old routines and a couple of not very strong new routines, and read from what she billed as notes toward some future routines. Then she took questions, and as her warm-up walked around the audience with a microphone, she called an admittedly disrespectful young questioner a four-letter word for the primary female reproductive organ, and then she and her warm-up exchanged a lot of cracks that basically translated to “we’re-us-and-they’re-not.” 

The last thing in the world I want to be is the guy who doesn’t just find someone unfunny but takes actual offense at anything less than the troglodytic routines of comics like Andrew Dice Clay or Lisa Lampanella. And I don’t mind at all when comics go blue, because I tend to go blue myself. But I found myself souring on Sarah Silverman. 

Maybe as she alighted in this agrestic corner of the Central Valley, she didn't think that an audience in a university town focused on agronomy would be worth her trotting out her best stuff. I still wish her well, and believe that her best stuff is yet to come, so I prefer to think she was just having an off night. But if not, Silverman betrayed a kind of contempt for her audience that suggested to me that success, which can descend on a comic’s shoulders like a wet blanket, may not be doing her act any favors.

Zoo-Doo

Spring has come, which means it's time to spend a lot of money on manure. There's chicken manure, sheep manure, cow (but apparently never bull) manure, human manure mixed in with peat, bark, and vegetable matter in various stages of decay. This weekend, my wife Debbie and I spread such stuff on what passes for our garden, located as it is in clay soil well on its way to achieving its destiny as one vast deposit of sedimentary rock. 


Back in Seattle, Debbie once got wind, so to speak, of a program run by the city zoo whereby gardeners like herself could sign up for a chance to haul away what it called Zoo-Doo: heaps of droppings from an enormous range of caged and penned animals lured to Seattle from every corner of the Earth with promises of kayaking and lattes. 


Debbie won the draw, and the following Saturday, during what was billed as Fecal Fest, we drove around to the back of Woodland Park Zoo, where we were greeted by Jeff Gage, the man in charge of the program. Seattle is populated by people who make the best of things, even their jobs, even jobs that entail the management of steaming mountains of animal dung. Dubbing himself the "Prince of Poop," the "Emperor of Excrement," the "GM of BM," the "Duke of Dung," Mr. Gage was well on his way to converting an annual $60,000 in landfill costs into a composting enterprise that would earn the zoo some $15,000 a year. A handsome young man with a relentless line of patter, he was not only a darling of environmentalists and zoologists, but of Seattle's horticulturalists as well.


As we shoveled dung into garbage bags and heaved them into the back of our car, it seemed to me that the Khalif of Kaka should have been paying us for hauling away an increment of his zoo's manure. But no, it was our privilege, and for every privilege you must pay. 


So Debbie went off to settle with him and, mid-transaction, noticed that he was also peddling plastic bottles full of Zoo-Doo effluent which he recommended applying to house plants. I could see the effluent creeping out from under a nearby mountain of exotic animal excreta and wondered how he went about bottling same, or why. Nevertheless, Debbie bought a bottle, and we drove home in a fetid miasma of decay. 


After we hauled our bags of manure around to the back yard, Debbie toted her bottle into the house. At the time we were the property and charges of two excellent dogs: a sister act of black retriever mixes we had picked up from a shelter in Bremerton and presented to our daughter on her birthday. Susie was the somewhat more autonomous and retriever-ish of the two; Ida, with her foreshortened snout and somewhat jittery manner, was a far more clingy and needy beast. But they were equally devoted to each other, and did everything in tandem. 

In our living room we had installed a large ficus tree in a capacious pot. It had done pretty well for a few years after it turned up at our door, a gift from a distant friend. But the tree had lately shown signs of dwindling. So Debbie headed right to it with her bottle of Zoo-Doo effluent. As instructed by the Duke of Dung, she poured about a cup of it around the base of the ficus, and then we both sat down to rest from our execrable toil. 


What neither of us had anticipated was what this would do to the dogs. Suddenly Ida and Suzy were standing by the pot, shivering as if in a freezing wind, hackles up, teeth chattering, each with a forefoot raised and a quivering tail pointing straight as an assegai. 


At last it occurred to us that, for all they knew, the entire Serengeti  had broken into the house and urinated on our tree. One glance at their upright ears and you could almost hear what they were hearing: the roaring of lions and leopards, the trumpeting of elephants, the whinnying of zebras, the snickering of hyenas, the bellows and rumblings of charging rhinos and stampeding wildebeests: a thundering, blaring, Jumanji invasion.


It was Ida who finally left her sister's side and came over to me with a look and a whimper that seemed to say, "There are creatures lurking in this house: enormous, fanged and great-horned beasts  ready to trample and devour us all. I know I've cried wolf before, but if you only listen to me once, if you ever loved me or trusted me at all, listen to me now! We must get out of the house!"


I had to put leashes on them and drag them from room to room before they concluded that, like the automobile and the doorbell and the postman's tread, whatever it was that had emanated from the soil of the ficus was just another of the alarming imponderables with which we seemed determined to keep them on their toes.


By the way, the ficus must have been equally alarmed or maybe just affronted, for it never did thrive. After the dogs passed away, we carted it off to the dump, where I suspect some Sultan of Slop, or Bard of Discard, or Mikado of Muck has long since turned it into mulch and sold it to a matron back in town.