A Pilgrim’s Digression

George Will has an interesting article today titled “Prudes at Dinner, Gluttons in Bed.” His thesis is that as a people, we have all sorts of moral taboos surrounding food, but have become essentially hedonistic about sex. There are no sexual taboos anymore. Quoting someone named Mary Eberstadt, he says that “the moral poles of sex and food have been reversed.”

Wonkette in typical fashion reduces the Will article to an insult (Will is a “prude”) and a punchline (“He secretly masturbates to thoughts of Betty Draper making mashed potatoes with heavy cream and butter.”). However, it’s worth thinking about what Will has to say. I don’t think he’s far off the mark, but I do have a criticism.

In his article, Will cites a hypothetical posed by Eberstadt,  in which we examine the life of a 30 year old woman in 1958 and compare her to a 30 year old woman of the present day. The woman from 1958 has a kitchen stocked with food stuffs that would be considered unhealthy (unhealthy is the new “immoral”)–red meat, dairy, processed foods. But her concern is not health, but happiness. She prepares meals that she and her family likes. She would also be horrified by a society where pre-marital sex and adultery are trivialized and glamorized.

The modern equivalent, in contrast, shops at Whole Foods, buys organic, buys fresh rather than processed or frozen, and “is essentially laissez-faire about sex.” Probably wrong choice of French phrases there, George, given its literal meaning. What he means is she’s morally neutral on the subject of sex.

So far, I can agree with what Will is saying. There are food prudes–we all know them–and indeed prudishness in regards to what we eat extends even to our taste in food. There are people who judge others for their pedestrian tastes and unwillingness to try exotic fare. What, you don’t like Thai? What kind of monster are you!

The point at which I diverge from Will is that I don’t believe that the moralism of the 1950’s and even farther back in time had anything whatsoever to do with the actual sexual practices of people. People tend to look at the taboos of a society—”Thou shalt not have sex before marriage”–and assume that’s what people actually did in that era. people didn’t have pre-marital sex in the 1950’s. Well, that’s just bullshit. We all know it’s bullshit.

One has only to consider the obesity problem in America, not to mention the millions made every year by McDonalds, to know that whatever we may believe is right or wrong about our eating habits, we’re “pleasuring ourselves” while the food police have their backs turned. I may tell you I’m having a salad for lunch, but in fact, if you could spy on me, you’d find me at the bar in Bullfeathers, downing a beer and burger.

I can’t really tell if Will is bemoaning the fact that our sexual stigmas have been replaced by food stigmas, or if he is simply reporting on something he finds interesting and perhaps true. At times he seems to imply that a counter-reaction, a gustatorial revolution perhaps, is inevitable. But I look around me at all the people who say they eat healthy, but don’t (and probably can’t), and I am reminded of how if you’d asked a young man in 1958 if he masturbated, he’d tell you absolutely not, with a horrified look.

Morals may be guideposts, but there are some that the majority of us ignore, even if we believe them to be good, strong guideposts. now maybe you could argue that the problem is that the guideposts have all been torn down and now people are making wrecks of their lives–that’s a valid argument–but if few people obeyed the guideposts to begin with, are they really going to be missed? Wrecks happen on well-lit, well-marked roads as well as on dangerous curves.

Again, I think the point Will misses is that you can’t put the genie back in the bottle in regards to sex or food, because she was never in the bottle to begin with. Jeannie has been sleeping in Major Nelson’s bed all along, but the censors wouldn’t let you see that on TV.

Today was one of those mornings I would have given anything just to stay in bed.  I went to bed earlier than usual.  I slept well–too well–and then the alarm went off at 4:30.

Ugh.

Mornings like this, it takes herculean willpower not to just turn the alarm off and let the weight of the covers keep me in bed.  But for whatever reason, I did get up.

And about a half hour later, I found myself standing at the bus stop, on my way to work in 20 degree weather, on a dark February morning.  Standing there shivering in the dark, watching lines of car headlights stream by as countless other people like me go to work, I wonder what I ever thought was so great about adulthood, when I was a kid dreaming about growing up.  I think what appealed to me was this idea that I’d have all the money, and I could buy whatever I wanted, and go wherever I wanted, and do what I wanted to do.

I don’t think it occurred to me the kind of horror adults have to go through for those privileges.  And even then, there are innumerable people with the right to pick my pocket at the beginning and middle of every month–taxes, the utility company, the credit card companies, the mortgage company, the list goes on.

Somehow we block it all out, don’t we?  Still I don’t know what keeps us all from just throwing up our hands and saying to hell with it.  Well, perhaps I do know.  I like to eat.  I like my nice, warm house, and other comforts.  I have people who depend upon me, too, and that more than anything keeps me going to that bus stop every morning, no matter the weather.

But still, there are days when, to paraphrase Sam Kinnison, I am waiting at a stoplight and I just have this almost irrepressible urge to just leave the engine running, open the car door, and start running. [Insert trademark Kinnison scream of horror here]

Instead, I’m sitting at my desk, my work for the day carefully laid out for me.  I took my little white pill that makes everything mellow.  I’m not going anywhere.  I’m here.

And now that I’ve had my first cup of coffee, I can even find some brightness in this new day.  At 6:30 AM, it is no longer fully dark outside, which signals to me that the winter is on its way out.  The sky has that sleepy, steel-blue color of early morning in late winter, and I’ve got a job, family at home, and money in my pocket, and no worries to speak of (existential angst aside).  Getting out of bed this morning wasn’t such an awful thing, after all.

I posed a question earlier today, via Twitter, that I’d like to revise and pose again here at my blog: “Have you ever wondered how much of yourself will remain when you die, given that so much of “you” exists only in digital format?”

I’ve been thinking about this issue off and on for years, but I was stirred to ask it aloud by some work I’ve been doing in my spare time, transcribing and archiving some letters and other papers belonging to a “lost” relative.

When my great-grandmother died in July 2008, at the age of 96, she left behind a home packed with, literally, tons of possessions, including hundreds of letters from correspondents stretching back into the nineteen thirties.

Her sons often complained about her pack rat nature, and there was a standing family joke that when she died, her children would find their old clothes still packed away in dresser drawers just as they left them decades before, when they moved out.

I don’t know if that was true or not, but they did find these letters, one set of them from a forgotten relative who had served in World War II and died in a car accident in 1947, at the age of only 24. For the sake of giving him a name, we’ll call him Wendle.

I asked for Wendle’s letters, so that I could prepare them for donation to a proper archive. In addition to the letters, I was also given four photographs of the veteran and a news clipping and obituary detailing the sad circumstances of the young man’s death.

When I asked for more information about him, no one could tell me much. My grandpa, who was only about thirteen at the end of World War II, could remember him, and he remembered that his wife Mary screamed when the police arrived to tell her he was dead. Other than that, there wasn’t much.

Later, before she also died in the Fall, my grandmother called to tell me that she recalled that Wendle was quite a partier when he returned from the war, and she speculated that alcohol was involved in his car accident.

Other than that, that was it. I had about thirty letters, a few photographs (dates unknown, places unknown), and a brown newspaper article describing how he died.

But when you think about it, that’s more than most of us have right now, if we were to die today.

Sure, we have volumes of email and other digital documents–certainly more than thirty letters worth of writings–but that’s just it: it’s all digital. It doesn’t really exist in the way a paper document exists. Anyone who has lost the contents of their computer’s hard drive in a crash can attest to the flimsiness of digital optical drives as a preservation medium.

Then there are issues of access. If you were to die today, would a loved one be able to access your email accounts? If they did, what would they do with that data? Would they print it all out, in a sense down-converting from digital to analog formats?

Or would it all just be lost. I have a feeling that in all too many cases, it would just be lost. Who would think about that kind of thing, before it’s too late?

I’ve often wondered if, after the fall of technological man, our era will be but a great black hole in the information age. Perhaps two hundred years from now, historians will look back on our era as a new Dark Age, a time when people failed to preserve knowledge in a lasting format.

Really, for all its failings–its susceptibility to fire, water, and the ravages of time–paper and ink are perfectly good mediums for the preservation of knowledge. A monk can hide a book in a stone wall to keep the Viking invader from burning it.

I’m not even proposing that some massive electronic apocalypse is inevitable, during which the lights go out and knowledge is lost forever. Every day, the Internet grows by astronomical bounds. It has become our preferred preservation medium, now that paper is slowly being phased out. Isn’t it likely that knowledge will be lost in that burgeoning flood of digital data? And what will rise to the top, and what will sink into obscurity? You can’t tell me that it’s all just a Google search away, either, because we’ve all had the frustrating experience of going to Google and not finding what we’re looking for.

On the other hand, what’s new about all this? The only reason my distant relative Wendle’s letters were saved was because my great-grandmother was a pack rat. He wrote other people (mainly girls, it seems), and it’s unlikely they saved his letters. People die. All traces of them gradually disappear. Pretty soon, even the people who remember them die, and they too disappear.

Just recently, I’ve also started a new collection. When I visit an antique shop or junk store, I look for old photographs and daguerrotypes. Every such store has some old photos of people now unknown. The daguerrotypes are the most interesting, simply because of the age of the artifact. I buy these, if they aren’t too expensive, and I’ve started a small archive in a drawer of my desk.

Each photo is layered between acid free paper and placed in a manila folder, labeled with an appropriate caption, usually something vague like “Half-length portrait of a woman holding a child [undated].”

These photos and old tin-types are probably all that remain of these people. Even their names are gone. But even though they are unknown, more unknown even than my relative Wendle, I feel this need to preserve them. I don’t know where that need comes from.

Is it just a desire to defeat death? Certainly not my own death. What it seems to be is an attempt to make sure that something survives the abyss; not the abyss of death, but the abyss of time. I don’t know if anyone can, or will, do the same for me decades from now, after I am gone.

My worry is that there may be nothing as real and solid as a daguerrotype
left of me, after my “body” is covered over with layer upon layer of digital earth.

I am cursed to live in a small college town with little choice in coffee shops.  There are only two, and the better of the two only stays open until five on weekdays.  The second best coffee shop stays open until six on weekdays, but until eight on Sundays; however, it’s small and always packed on weekends.  Just now I literally stood at the counter drinking my coffee while waiting for a table to come open.  Finally, I think I made the two women at the table nearest me nervous, and they got up and left.

Why doesn’t the other, larger coffee shop keep longer hours?  I don’t know.  Supposedly it has to do with the owners inability to find college students willing to work evenings and weekends.  That may well be true, but it doesn’t sound true.  Whoever heard of a downtown coffee shop closing at five?  It just makes no sense.

My wife has heard this complaint of mine so many times, she’s sick of it, which is why I am now bending your ear.  No one else wants to hear it anymore.

When I was in college, the best coffee shop in town, the Blue Moose, stayed open until eleven on weekends.  It was open late during the week as well.  It was roomy, and given the layout may have been a diner at one time.  There were poetry readings and live music on those late weekend nights, and it was nearly as packed as the local bars.  I spent so many hours of my life in that place.  Every town needs a coffee shop like the Blue Moose, especially college towns.

Another thing that truly bothers me about having so little choice in coffee shops is that if the coffee is bad, I’m out of luck.  I’m no coffee snob–I’ll drink just about anything as long as it isn’t instant coffee.  In fact, I think I’m at that point in my addiction where, if I were a smoker, I’d be buying the generic brand rather than the Camels, just because my taste is so ruined that it hardly matters anymore.  Maxwell House coffee is perfectly fine for me.  But my coffee needs to have some flavor.  It can’t be muddy, hot water.

The coffee here really isn’t that good.  Mostly what you taste is the cream and sugar, if you add any.  If you don’t add anything, what you taste is hot water.

Also, this coffee shop tends to attract people who buy nothing, but who set up shop for hours at a time, taking advantage of the free Internet and tap tapping on their laptops.  If the coffee shop were larger, it wouldn’t matter; but there are only five tables, and when you walk in and every table, large or small, is occupied by one person, a laptop, and a stack of books, it can be annoying.

I’m just pissing and moaning today, for lack of anything better to write about.  I did get a table after all, after giving two girls the evil eye until they departed.  Now my wife has joined me, and we are both complaining about the shitty coffee.  Lynn says the house blend is the owner’s favorite, so because she likes it, we all have to suffer.  It tastes like bitter almonds, or baker’s chocolate, swirled in hot water.

But I’m still drinking it.  A two pack a day smoker doesn’t care if the cigarette has been laying on the dashboard for two weeks and has gone completely stale.  It may make you choke, but it’s still a smoke.

Lately it has come to my attention that, when trying to relate something important, funny, or interesting to my son, I tend to repeat stories I’ve told many times before. Monday, B. and I were driving home after I picked him up at school, and he accidentally opened his car door just as I was starting to pull out of the parking space.

This elicited one of those, “When I was your age…” stories that (I hope) he still likes to hear. I know there will come a time for eye-rolls and deep sighs of grief, but right now, at age seven, he actually still listens to me.

So I begin, “When I was a kid, oh about your age, maybe a little younger, I opened the car door once while the car was moving…”

And B. interrupts to finish my story before I could go on. It wasn’t a “Yes, yes, I’ve heard it a million times” interruption, but it startled me because I could have sworn the story was new. I didn’t realize I’d told him the story before.

Read more…

There’s an old saying that if you want roses, you have to respect thorns. Company IT people can often seem like they are made mostly of thorns, but I would contend that the benefits they confer are such that they deserve respect at the least.

A co-worker of mine off-handedly insulted an IT guy last week, and the situation made me uncomfortable for a couple reasons. It wasn’t the first time he’s insulted one of the people charged with installing, upgrading, and maintaining our hardware and software, so on the one hand there’s a moral part of me that doesn’t like to see anyone disrespected–and on the other, there’s a purely selfish part of me that believes in another proverb: “don’t bite the hand that feeds you.”

Our systems are locked down extremely tight. We can’t even download and install iTunes without supervisory approval–and even then, someone from IT has to perform the download and install from an admin account. It seems to me that it’s to our benefit to be nice to the people who do this work.

Anyway, to get to the story, last week we were upgraded to new Dell PCs running WinXP. Yes, I know it’s been about eight or nine years since XP was released. Yes, I know Microsoft is on the verge of not supporting XP any longer. This is how government works. For security and cost reasons, we aren’t on a corporate upgrade cycle. The United States Government is on my Uncle Dan’s upgrade cycle–you know, the uncle who lives way out in the sticks of West Virginia, still accesses the internet via dial-up, and runs a PC with Windows ME Home Edition. Maybe Uncle Dan will upgrade to XP this year, too, finally.

Read more…

I’ve noticed a meme developing in the mainstream media that suggests the Republican party is resurgent and that the conservative philosophy is finding its voice, as well as legs to stand on in the Obama era. What’s I find most interesting is the portrayal of this resurgence as something new and different.

The Washington Post has a story today about this movement, titled Republicans see long-term victory in negative stance. A House member, Pete Sessions, is even quoted in the article “[suggesting] the party is learning from the disruptive tactics of the Taliban, and the GOP these days does have the bravado of an insurgent band that has pulled together after a big defeat to carry off a quick, if not particularly damaging, raid on the powers that be.”

The problem is, I’ve heard it all before. I’ve been around awhile now. I was a Limbaugh conservative in 1991, before the name Bill Clinton was first spoken with a sneer in conservative circles. I distinctly remember that after the defeat of 1992, there was a similar “insurgency” aimed at defeating Clinton’s proposals and bringing down the man himself.  I’m just surprised that Limbaugh hasn’t begun playing his old “America Held Hostage” theme song from the early nineties.

Conservatives need to ask themselves, if in nearly 20 years they haven’t achieved their goals–broadly defined as smaller government and a defeat of liberalism on philosophical and pragmatic grounds–then when are they going to achieve their goals? And if conservative generals like Limbaugh are basically still fighting the same war they were fighting in the nineties, with no victory in sight, isn’t it time to fire the generals and bring in some new blood?

It took only a couple years of losses for Lincoln to fire McClellan. Limbaugh has been the de facto leader of conservatism for far longer than that, and to no good purpose. What has he accomplished for the conservative movement? It’s a philosophical movement without any appreciable effect on American culture or government.

I just can’t get over how it seems like conservatism is right back in 1993 all over again. As the Post article cites, even some Republicans “see this moment as equivalent to 1993, when the party handled a new Democratic president by resisting and capitalizing on any perceived overreach.”

But again I ask, to what purpose? If today we behold the Democrat party stronger, more united, more revitalized than it was even with the election of Bill Clinton, how can conservatives say they achieved anything in the almost 20 years since 1993?

If I were a conservative today, I’d be asking myself first whether the Republican party is worthy of my support (judging by the Bush administration’s many failures, and judging by the nomination of John McCain to run for President, I’d conclude not). The second question I’d ask myself is, with so little to show for my support of conservative ideals, and with a country trending more and more liberal and democratic, maybe the problem is not with my country or with liberalism, but with me.

Conservatives risk becoming philosophically Amish, that is, retrograde and irrelevant. The country is moving on around them, finding new solutions to old problems, changing in ways many find disturbing, but conservatives seem unwilling to recognize a need for change themselves. In their view, the problem they had in 2008 was not unwillingness to adapt, but a failure to cling more stridently to their outdated belief system.

If only Sarah Palin had been at the top of the GOP ticket.

Thus in 2009, we are witnessing a recap of the 1993 session when Republicans had no answers to our national problems, only defiance to the solutions proposed by the other side. If I were a conservative, I’d be saying, “No thanks, let me off this ride. I’m not going through this again.”

The road ahead for them is another dead end, if conservatives allow deaf old men like Limbaugh to lead the war effort with a two decades-old battle plan. In 20 years conservatives will once again be fuming about their betrayal by the Republican party, the loss of power in Washington, and the lack of any tangible change in the way our government works.

Maybe that’s the way people like Limbaugh like it. It sort of gives their contract a built-in renewal clause every couple decades or so.

Today was the first day of spring, or at least it felt like it.  The high was at least 68 degrees.  As has become typical of weather in my part of the country, on Monday and Tuesday, it snowed heavily and the temperature remained in the teens, but beginning Friday the weather changed and we have had an almost spring-like weekend.

I don’t know why, but whenever we are able to open the windows for the first time in months, I always feel this urge to clean something.  I noted that all of my neighbors decided to wash and detail their cars today, so apparently this urge isn’t confined to my house.  In my case, rather than my car, I chose to clean my desk.

I have a beautiful oak desk my wife bought me a couple years ago when I first began teleworking one day a week.  For most of those two years, that one day per week was all I used it because it had become so cluttered there was no room for my personal Mac laptop and the Dell PC  I use for telework.  So today I cleaned it off, moved the PC monitor to one corner, and made room for my laptop.

It’s really rather ridiculous to think that for two years, I haven’t even used my desk for my own computer.  Instead, when I’ve needed to put the laptop on a desk-like surface, I’ve set it on the kitchen table.  It was my wife who first pointed out that I have worn the varnish off the kitchen table through the constant movement of the mouse over the surface.

I don’t even know that this subject is worthy of a blog post, except that maybe my readers, too, have had this experience of doing something backwards or incorrectly for years, only to rather suddenly discover how easy it is to change.  All it takes is a warm winter day and the realization that something could be better, with just a little rearrangement.

Every once in awhile, I discover a writer I’ve never heard of, but whose first words I read seem to be aimed directly at me.  Richard Yates is one of those writers.  When I read the first chapter of his novel Revolutionary Road, it was both striking and frightening how deadly accurate Yates could be in capturing something as singular and volatile as a marital spat.  “Yes!”  I said, “This is how men and women fight.  No one’s ever got it right, but Yates did it!”  As Hemingway might put it, cryptically, true words are what separate a great writer from a merely good writer.

I’ve encountered other moments of truth in the months since reading those first pages of Yates’s best novel.  I can’t think of many writers who write in such un-stylized prose, yet who can so truthfully capture the people we all know.

My own discovery of Yates happened in a fairly typical way.  Sam Mendes decided to make a movie based on Revolutionary Road, and I happened to read a New York Times article about the film.  The journalist mentioned something about Yates being a forgotten novelist of the 20th century, and that was probably what sent me to the library catalog to find the novel.  I still haven’t seen the movie, but the book is one of my favorites, now.

I’m a sucker for “forgotten” writers.  However, if you read the Popular Culture citations in his Wikipedia article, you might agree with me that an author who is cited in a Woody Allen movie probably wasn’t so forgotten after all.

Read more…