How the Red Sea (of Traffic) Parted

Garrett Morgan

The Red Sea is everywhere. Just try to cross the street. A good 50% of the time you’re faced with a red light, which when it changes to green immediately stops the oncoming traffic. Moses used a staff; you press the button on a lamp post. The waters aka waves of traffic then part and you’re free to pass. If you try to proceed against the traffic on most thoroughfares you're obliterated just as the Jews would have drowned in the biblical story. Actually if you believe in a supreme being he made his presence felt through an African American inventor named Garrett Morgan who received patent No 1,475, 024 for his three position traffic signal in l923. Apparently Morgan was motivated to do something when he saw a car crash. Whoever thought that crossing the street could be one of those God moments in which some common occurrence, ordinarily taken for granted, enables us to take a broader view of experience? Perhaps on any given day, you're thinking of what you could have said in the argument you were having, where you ended up getting the short end of the stick. As you walk out onto the street you're lost in thought, not seeing any of the world around you, as you try to reimagine the altercation and undo the past. But then for a moment you're forced to stop. It might not be at the first intersection, but you're not always going to have green lights. Whenever it occurs  facing the red light, you're momentary brought back to your senses. You're forced to cut short your inner monologue, your rendezvous with the plethora of impossibility that always configures the attempt to change the past.

Melissa McCarthy's Weltanschauung

“You dress like you’re grocery shopping at a CVS,” Michelle Darnell (Melissa McCarthy) remarks to her assistant, Claire (Kristen Bell), a single mother who is about to go out on a date in The Boss. On a the Richter scale of laughs it’s about a #3, but it also is a peculiar little line since it has the appearance of an in- joke. The viewer knows what she’s talking since ostensibly he or she has, in fact, stooped to buying groceries at the CVS, Walgreen’s or even the dreaded Duane Reade. There are a couple of tony words worthy of comment in the movie. "Hangry" is a mutt created by angry and hungry and “vajunification” is an apparent neologism, but also brings to mind reunification which is what happened when the Berlin Wall came down. In poli sci when countries that have formerly been balkanized are brought back together, it’s called “irredentism.” But McCarthy who's given a script credit doesn’t go that far. The Boss lowers the bar for what is considered comic, not in terms of vulgarity. No one can beat the Farelly Brothers when it comes to that, but in terms of insipidness. But what’s interesting about the movie like her earlier  Identity Thief is the creation of the comic persona, which, one has a hunch, is a kind of cri de coeur. Both characters are suffering from a bad case of sour grapes (in the wake of being orphaned as children), having turned their disaffection from humanity into a profession. If the CVS quip makes you feel at home, you probably have also met Melissa McCarthy or the characters she plays before, the kind of person who failing to be good or attractive or both becomes good at being horribly bad, even repulsive in every way. Bridesmaids is probably one of the great comedies of all time. But watch out what you want for you might get it. McCarthy’s earlier success has obviously given her carte blanche to create a brand, and the brand is that of the fat girl who shows or tells all and makes you vomit. Waxing is so ubiquitous that it now appears like vapor emitted by serial killers in the London axe murder movies and sure enough there was the obligatory scene of McCarthy with her legs spread removing unwanted pubic hair while spraying herself with a self tanner. "It’s all good" says M.C. Hammer. We might not be able to say the reverse about The Boss, which bears an odd kinship with The Apprentice, but almost.

Creative Destruction Redux

Why are the presidential candidates employing such negative tactics and back biting and acting in such un-presidential ways? Donald Trump has been singled out, but similar accusations have been made against Ted Cruz and on the Democratic side both Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton (one of the most recent being the trading of insults about qualifications,"Bernie Sanders: Hillary Clinton is not 'qualified' to be president,"CNN, 4/7/16). The complaint amongst those who expect something more out of frontrunners in an election is that the candidates are not talking about the issues. But actually the answer to the phenomenon of shining a negative spotlight on an opponent might be found in Austrian born economist Joseph Schumpeter’s theory of “creative destruction,” as described in his classic Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. Schumpeter believed that capitalism required “the perennial gale of Creative Destruction.” In order to build you have to get rid of the dead wood.  Planned obsolescence is, in essence, a form of institutionalized "creative destruction" in which a manufacturer knowingly creates something with a relatively short half-life. So if you're wondering why the candidates are belaboring the negative traits of their opponents, instead of concentrating on proposals for a new order, which will set things right, the answer may lie in the idea that progress can’t occur until the slate is wiped clean. When critics of Bernie Sanders say he has no real plan about what to do about the problems of the Middle East, the answer might be that new policies will only be implemented when the old ones are done away with and foreign policy becomes a tabula rasa.

What's in a Name?

Donald Trump's grandfather, Frederick

"What’s in a name?” Juliet asks. “That which we call a rose/ By any other name would smell as sweet.” Well let’s take Trump. Trump of course sounds like Trump card. To trump is to beat or trumpet which is to herald. Everything about Trump conjures the notion of overpowering. A three no trump bid in bridge, beats three spades, three diamonds or three clubs. You don’t monkey around with a name like Trump and Trumps don’t march to the beat of a different drummer. They’re majorettes. Donald’s grandfather Frederick immigrated from Germany and the name exudes an earthy almost Anglo-Saxon feel compared to Clinton which has English overtones, Cruz, which is Hispanic and Kasich which is Czech.  Sanders is another ball of wax. When you thinking of Sanders your mind goes to The Larry Sanders Show which starred the recently deceased standup comedian Gary Shandling. Bernie may have had to live down his initials BS but when you hear the Brooklyn accent and the urgency of which infects literally every sentence of his speech, you think of other standup of a similar vintage like Larry David. Will Sanders end up being the Larry David of politics, that is to say a big hit, but not as big as Seinfeld, the comedian with whom he was once associated? Lest Ted Cruz be given short shrift it can definitely be said that the name Ted Cruz does not conjure images of J. Crew, whose metrosexual style is a trifle too New York for someone who is unlikely to wear a rust colored belt. And what about those other names. When you  hear Kennedy you're most likely to think “dead,” like the punk rock group (Dead Kennedys), Johnson may bring up The Great Society, but not until you’ve thought of Johnson and Johnson. And then there are Roosevelt and Adlai Stevenson, whose egg shaped head, is an example of the pathetic fallacy and Nixon who got nixed. Eisenhower rhymes with power and Washington was a person before being a city or state which is something that Omaha residents are reminded of on a daily basis when they cede to the fact that Lincoln is the capital of their state. Harry Truman earned points for the connotation of his name when in a stunning upset he beat the Republican, Thomas Dewey, for the presidency.

Life in the Trumpocracy

Here is this guy who berates people like Megyn Kelly (although there have been rumors of a rapprochement, "Donald Trump and Megyn Kelly met at Trump Tower to 'clear the air,'" CNN, 4/13/16))  and says all this shit, but how does he behave when when he comes home from work? Last Tuesday night CNN’s Anderson Cooper attempted to find out what Trump was like at home and the picture painted by his two sons Donald Jr., Eric, his daughters Tiffany and Ivanka and his five language speaking wife Melania was that of a teddy bear ("Donald Trump: 'rules stacked against me,'" CNNPolitics.com, 4/13/16). If nothing else Trump’s children take the award for self-possession and articulateness outpointing Chelsea Clinton, any of the Kennedys, Eisenhower, Nixon or Reagan offspring. And even as they talked and Trump looked on beatifically, apparently tamed by this new  trump card, you couldn’t help eating it up. Here is what DT wrought…this is the real Trump…he will make America great like his family…everyone will be good-looking educated and well-spoken. If you are "good," he will even adopt you and take you under his big wing. One blot on the seemingly idyllic portrait of the Trump family (Trump’s sister Maryanne Trump Barry is Senior United States Circuit Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit) was the death from alcoholism of his older brother Freddy ("Donald Trump Opens Up About His Brother's Death From Alcoholism: It had a 'Profound Impact on My Life,'" People 10/8/15) Freddy was 42 when he died in l981 and Trump said he never took a drink ("I've never had a glass of alcohol and yet I own the largest winery in the East Coast, it's a crazy thing, but that's okay," Trump said during the CNN get together with his family) and apparently impressed the dangers of drinking and drugs on his children as they grew up. It’s hard to figure out what to say. Not only is the family totally delightful, charming and candid, but they listen to dad when it comes to alcohol and drugs. How is one to process the picture painted on CNN? Will we all have inadvertently landed in Utopia, bypassing Marxism, the dictatorship of the proletariat and the withering away of the state, if and when The Donald becomes president? Will there be places for everyone in all of his families and companies and happy solutions to all our problems as long as we work hard, don’t take "no" for an answer and say "no" to alcohol and drugs? "All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds," Dr. Pangloss says in Candide. Voltaire was parodying Leibniz, but the satire could easily be applied to the all encompassing vision of a Trumpocracy

Is it Good to Be Bad?

 Antichrist and the Devil from the Deeds of the Antichrist fresco by Luca Signorelli

“Double, double toil and trouble; fire burn and cauldron bubble” sang the witches of Macbeth, but what is the mantra of the anti-Christ? Imagine knights in armor covered with shit, fighting for a world in which everyone has the right to fuck each over with impunity and we all recite the Devil’s rather than Lord’s Prayer at meetings of our covens. Our Father Who Art in Heaven, not  hallowed be thy name. My kingdom come, my will be done on earth as it is in hell. Give us this day everything we want and fuck our trespasses. For mine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, forever and ever, amen. However blunt, does this not sound a little closer to home? Com’on do we really think that there are knights in shining armor, doing something for nothing? And what about the ego of all the proselytizers of selflessness? Where are the Gandhis of today and did they ever exist? Read for instance,"Thrill of the chaste: the truth about Ghandi's sex life, " The Independent, 1/1/12). Boys will be boys and Gandhi might have slept with young girls to test his willpower, but he still slept next to them. And what about those rumors that Mother Teresa was a bitch and that Pope Francis is just a good salesman, out to get new customers for his brand? Goodness is always a reliable sales pitch. Certainly Francis wasn’t going to increase his base by offering up more punishment for sinners. Let’s say we’re all thieves and crooks like Pinkie in Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock or Alex in A Clockwork Orange. We’ll have are cards on the table. They’ll be no surprises and perhaps the honor amongst thieves who have nothing hide is more reliable than that amongst the seemingly honorable, the equivocators who, by definition, because they're human, are condemned to live double lives.