Quote of the Week

Beware of artists. They mix with all classes of society and are therefore most dangerous.
--Queen Victoria

Book of the Week

I probably should resist the urge to comment on this book, given the fact that I've held enough blue-collar jobs in my lifetime to qualify as a blue collar intellectual in my own right, but I must admit that I liked it anyway. I kinda wished it went into more detail on certain subjects but it still delivered what it promised.

Cuento de Mi Id

“I Don't Want to Start Any Blasphemous Rumors, But I Think That the Muse Has Got a Sick Sense of Humor”

Alondra was dreaming again when she had the vision. It was a white palace adorned with purple pennants and there were servants throughout the place, dressed in green and gold. On a balcony overlooking the countryside, there stood a princess clad in a purple dress looking up at a full moon. She was gazing at a silver lake and chanting words that seemed quite familiar to Alondra...

It was then that she woke up. She reached for the notebook by the bed to write down the details of the dream while it was still fresh in her mind. But before she could write down the first words, a baby started crying.

It was her sister's baby but her sister was not home. So Alondra had to get up and see what was wrong with the baby. Did it need a new diaper? Or a fresh bottle?

Alondra could not tell. But she changed its diaper just in case and then she gave it a bottle when it kept fussing.

By the time the baby went back to sleep, it was almost time for Alondra to get ready for work. Alondra really wanted to write down her story first but she just knew that she had to take her shower now or else she would not get a chance to take one this morning.

Besides, the story was still intact in her brain. She just had to get it down on paper.

After her shower, there was no time to write because then she had to get dressed. Then she had to brush her hair. And do her makeup. Then she had to eat breakfast, only no one else was up yet so she had to cook her own breakfast first. Finally she had time but no, she didn't because she had to leave for her job at the local coffee shop or else she would be late. And her boss hated it when she came in late.

Oh, well, Alondra thought. I'll write at the coffee shop.

When she got to the coffee shop, there was no time to write because she had to wait on customers. It seemed unusually busy this morning -- not just during the morning breakfast rush and the lunch rush but in-between as well.

Ironically, one of her customers was herself a writer. She was a middle-aged redhead who continually stared at her laptop as if it held the answer to all the mysteries of the universe. Alondra thought about asking her for advice about writing, but every time she had the chance, the expression on the woman's face always discouraged her.

At long last, Alondra's work was through and she had the chance to go home. Now she finally had time to write.

But as Alondra opened her notebook and started to write down her dream, she had trouble remembering little details. Had it been a large palace or a small one? Purple pennants or green? Silver lake or blue?

Was this story really worth writing down? Alondra wondered. It had seemed so vivid this morning but now...

As Alondra read over the few words she had written, it was all she could do to keep from weeping.

xxx

Meanwhile, on the other side of town, the redhead who had been in the coffee shop was in her apartment trying to think of a story to write in order to justify her art grant.

But for some reason, the words would not come.

Indeed, no words had come all day.

And all week.

And yet people all around her seemed to find plenty of stuff to write about.

Life is so unfair, she thought. Why does everything always happen to me?

Poema de Mi Id: Parte IX

"White Trash Girl"

I want myself a white trash girl.
A chick who knows where all the pawn shops are.
A woman who looks how to use a food stamp card.
A girl whose hair smells like mayonnaise and
whose skin is the same color as cottage cheese.

I want myself a white trash girl.
A dame who hides her nakedness in Dollar Store underwear.
Who bears scars and bruises from her last boyfriend
And who continually bumps into doors when I'm not around.
A girl who still has a scar on her belly from her last child.
One who knows every last cuss word in the book -- and then some.

I want myself a white trash girl.
Of course, I could just date a girl
from the local barrio instead.
But that would be tacky.

Cuento de Mi Id

“The Living”

They were talking again. Talking about the damned story. Morales knew he should say something, but he was tired. He had been working extra shifts at Great Lake Steel again and he really did not have the patience to sit here and listen to silly chatter while his whole body cried out for sleep. It was a quarter to nine and already he was hoping that the class would end early so that he could go home and catch a few moments of slumber before he had to start the graveyard shift. His mother would probably still be up when he got home; she usually was, no matter how late he came home. But with luck, he would be able to catch a quick nap, regardless.

And yet the voices kept yammering.

Morales felt the need to scream but he knew that if he gave in, he would never hear the end of it from his guidance counselor. Besides, if he said something, he might get into trouble, and he already had enough problems at home without seeking them here at school as well.

So instead he forced himself to listen.

“The ending,” said the blonde girl ahead of him. “It was so sad.”

“Yeah,” said a red-headed guy across from her. “Just think about it. That poor boy just singing in the snow. Just dying for want of love.”

You think that's sad, Morales thought, try listening to some of the real-life stories I could tell you. The father who died of a heart attack when his youngest son turned thirteen. The older brother who died of appendicitis because there was no money to take him to a doctor until it was too late. The other older brother whose first wife and son died of tuberculosis while he was at work.

But the people in the classroom didn't want to hear stories like that. They wanted to hear happy stories about people just like them. People who had no real problems save philosophical ones. Sad, rich people who had a hundred servants to do their bidding and yet wept quite frequently because they lived in such a sad, sad world.

He knew he was being unfair now. He knew that some of his fellow students were on scholarships too, and probably came from families just as poor as his.

But he was too tired to be fair. He just wanted to go home so that he could grab a few hours of sleep.

The teacher was talking now. Talking about the difference between dying young and not dying young. As if that issue really required a lot of thought.

To deliberately die young like the boy did in the story was stupid. A smart person avoids it if he can and he is certainly not dumb enough to go out and seek it on purpose.

Only the well-off glamorize death, he thought. Only the rich could afford to cry crocodile tears over cute young Irish lads who die way before their time because they're too stupid to come in out of the snow. Only the rich could afford to spit on those who are not dumb enough to die young and who prefer to show their love by staying healthy and sharing their good fortune with their beloved for many years instead of offering one brief and stupid romantic gesture for the sum of one night.

Such folk were never appreciated by the rich because the rich do not want to appreciate such folk. They hate being reminded of what it's like to be poor -- actually poor -- and while they will weep forever over some imaginary person's troubles, they generally could be counted on to do damned little to help out a real person.

But then they have no real idea what it is like to be not rich. To not have money. To have to work so hard and to earn so little and to never have enough of anything.

He thought of his widowed mother who was waiting at home this very moment and the many times she had reminded him and his siblings about the life she had known before she had been dispossessed by the Revolution. Whenever one of them would bring home a bottle of wine to celebrate a birthday, their mother would say, “When I was a little girl, we used to celebrate with champagne, not wine.” And then she would say nothing else.

Somehow he got the feeling that she would have liked the story the class was talking about.

But he never would.

The yammering was continuing and he tried to ignore it by telling himself that it was just a story. No more important than the stories his co-workers would tell on lunch break or even the stories his mother would tell of her own girlhood. He did not have to agree with the others about it. In fact, he was better off ignoring it.

Then he noticed the silence.

“Anything to add, Mr. Morales?” the teacher asked.

Morales blinked. The class was looking at him and the teacher kept staring at him as if expecting something. Morales knew he should say something neutral but instead he said, “This story is stupid.”

He relished the shocked look on his classmates' faces as they cried “What?” in unison and then he continued.

“The woman in the story -- she spent all those years in love with this dead guy she didn't even like at first and yet she had no love for the spouse who had worked for years to put food on her table and a roof over her head. In my mind, that's a stupid story.”

The teacher just smiled. “I'm sorry you have so little appreciation for great literature, Mr. Morales. Perhaps when you're older and you know more about life, you will appreciate it more.”

There was so much more Morales could have said at that moment yet he stayed silent. Somehow he didn't see himself having the words to make either the teacher or the class understand. Perhaps no one had such words. But especially not him.

Instead he just waited silently for the dismissal bell to ring. When it did, he quietly gathered up his books and walked out into the winter cold.

Hey, I Remember This Show: The Munsters

The Addams Family was one of my late father's favorite TV comedies when I was growing up and I wish I could claim that I liked them just as much when I was a kid. But, unfortunately, my first love was The Munsters. Only when I got older did I develop much affection for The Addams Family -- perhaps because the opening credits for that show used to creep me out when I was very young.

The Munsters, for some reason, seemed more accessible. Granted, the gags were often more lowbrow and less imaginative than the ones in The Addams Family. But they were funny too.

If The Addamses were the aristocrats of the Halloween sitcom world, the Munsters were the working stiffs. Or to put it a different way, the Addamses were the rich eccentrics who kept to themselves for the most part while the Munsters were the good-hearted democrats who were not above mingling with their more conventional neighbors when they could.

In any event, here is the intro and outro from the second season. If you wish to see the intro for the first season, please go here.

Movie Quote of the Week

You gotta be rich to be insane, Hol. Losing your mind is not a luxury for the middle class.
--Gina Gershon, P.S., I Love You (2007)

Pop Song of the Week: “Wot”

Class conflict in a 1982 British music video: Discuss.

Book of the Week

Meltdown isn't the best Ben Elton novel I ever read but it is far from the worst though I will admit that once I caught on the fact that the title referred to a financial meltdown and not the ecological disasters which are usually Elton's favorite topic, I was afraid it was going to be a lot more predictable than it was. In the end, I actually found it intriguing and hard to put down. However, it does go in for a lot of restating the obvious: materialism is bad, making more money than you can adequately deal with is wrong, not saving money is bad, making a profit out of financial disaster is evil.

I must confess that I started rolling my eyes during the last few chapters when Elton stopped mocking the excesses of the very, very rich and started moralizing on the virtuousness of poor people, in effect preaching a sermon which unfortunately says more about Elton's lack of experience with real-life poor people than anything else. It is not that I do not appreciate such a sentiment but in my experience, poor people tend to be just as complicated in their morality as rich people. Not every rich person I have met was a heartless bastard -- though I have met quite a few who were hardly a credit to their class -- and not every poor person I have met qualified for a halo.

I would like to think there is as much wisdom in my late father's description of poverty as hell as there is in Elton's notion that losing one's money makes one more virtuous. Sometimes it does but not always and anyway, it is hardly a theory any decent person wants to test.

Anyway, regardless of my philosophical differences with the author, Meltdown is still a good book.

Random Thoughts

All generalizations are wrong -- including this one.

Anyone else wonder how many drivers respond to the presence of traffic enforcement cameras at certain intersections by automatically speeding up every time they approach such an intersection?

Everyone wants to be an aristocrat and no one wants to be a peasant. Yet a society that contains nothing but aristocrats can't possibly endure.

Everyone involved in a dispute likes to believe that the other guy started it.

The valuable one's contribution to society is, the less attention one gets from Hollywood.

Logic and reason would seem to indicate that calling someone stupid or evil is not likely to convert them to one's particular point-of-view. Yet many atheists who supposedly believe in logic and reason often respond to religious people by calling them stupid or evil. And of course religious people do the same thing to atheists as well.

The less likely one is to have known someone who experienced a revolution, the more likely one is to call for one.

The more privileges one has, the more one is likely to complain about one's setbacks.

The same person who complained about the elder generation in his youth will inevitably complain about the younger generation in his senior years.

If you want to see what most people really think about the importance of law and order, just see how they respond to a traffic ticket.

Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day

It's MLK Day again and while it's always tempting to wax cynical about how far we Americans still are from Dr. King's original vision of a society in which people are judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character, it's hard for me to deny that a lot of progress has been made since 1968.

For many years, even liberal Democrats used to consider the idea of a black President as something that was unlikely to occur in real life within our lifetimes. But now it has.

That's not to say that there still aren't other problems that face us. Indeed, one could argue that merely electing a black President was a relatively simple task compared to what lies ahead. Nor do I care for the fact that it's becoming more and more fashionable to judge one by one's class. The more we Americans seem to embrace classlessness, the more obsessed we seem to be with class. And it doesn't help matters that the same Internet that has been frequently touted as a medium to inspire unity has just as often inspired division.

But I like to believe that we have more potential to solve these problems than any other country. Indeed, it's worth noting that many of the ideals we take for granted in this country aren't always shared by the rest of the world. (A fact that I learned myself when I traveled outside the country back in 1987.)

Perhaps I'm being overly optimistic. But sometimes optimism seems like a more realistic attitude than pessimism for no other reason that it's all too easy to think of reasons why such and such will never be accomplished. Accomplishing such and such anyway, of course, is a lot more harder.