Lets see how good you really are...! Can you tell what the following all have in common...?
Barack Obama....George Clooney...Jerry Seinfeld...Stephen Spielberg...Regis Philbin...David Letterman...Jay Leno... Madonna...Paul McCartney...Billy Crystal....Charlie Rose....Tony Bennett .... Diane Keaton...Robin Williams...Betty White.
That last one may have given it away. They're all over 50. OMG, being that creepy creaky old in our young young America? What's going on here?
Here's something else that's going on. Our annual Christmastime TV specials are all over 50 as well. It's A Wonderful Life...A Christmas Story...A Charlie Brown Christmas...Frosty the Snowman... Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer...The Grinch Who Stole Christmas. The stuff they've been making in the last few years are cute, clever and computerized; but they lack endearing staying power.
So, my friends, what does this tell us? For one thing, we're living longer to enjoy old classics longer. But not only the oldsters but the youngsters. They're enjoying them too. Oh sure youth gravitates to youth, and you've got the young rappers and zombies to satisfy you. But by gosh, the same audiences that tap to rap and zombies also end up watching the old stuff every Christmastime.
Why?
Having been a youngster as well as an oldster, here's what I think. Christmastime -- like Fourth of July, Halloween and Thanksgiving -- smacks of the traditional. the classic. the timeless. And so suddenly being new and cutting-edge isn't so vital. In fact it doesn't seem to have any place here. These holidays are the times when wrinkles, gray hair, and canes simply do not come between us. These are the happy times we're all sorta one at heart. A very nice if rare moment in our national life.
So cue George Bailey in It's A Wonderful Life and Charlies Brown in A Charlie Brown Christmas so we can all gather round together. To really be together.
Saturday, November 19, 2011
Friday, November 18, 2011
MOUNTING THE MONASTIC MOUNTAINTOP JUST DOWN THE STREET
We're all familiar with the scene. The serious seeker climbing the Tibetan mountaintop to meet the great guru to learn from his wisdom. Saints, sinners and the Beatles have all done it. Now may I suggest you and I can do it too. But without the tough climb...!
The quiet wisdom you seek resides in several large building complexes only a few miles from home. Any one of our city hospitals. Inside is the entire breadth and depth of life. From birth to disease to rehabilitation to death. The hundreds of white and grey gowned people therein are all part of the great drama. They stand at the ready to assist as we travel our destined human trajectory.
Forget the glistening post-natal cubicles, MRIs, radiology guns, and surgical instruments. They're merely the occasional tools used during the great drama. What counts most here is what cannot most be seen here. The skills...the experience... the compassion behind the busy hands, gloves, and masks. These are what help bring us into life, back into health, or at the end into the Big Sleep. While outside these buildings athletes, celebrities, pundits and politicians prattle on about what is important...these few inside here are the great companions along this sudden back-road to our travels.
What I'm saying -- from a good deal of experience inside these secular monasteries -- is that once you're inside one it clears your head and heart of an awful lot of trivia from the outside. Inside here very little is trivial. Perhaps a birth! a cure! a death! If ever you're going to get in touch with what makes your life make sense, it won't be at Wrigley Field! Soldier Fields! the Chicago Theatre! or even the Field Museum!
They're about our entertainment. Hospitals are about our existence. So, please, a little more respect for the place we most hate to think about.
The quiet wisdom you seek resides in several large building complexes only a few miles from home. Any one of our city hospitals. Inside is the entire breadth and depth of life. From birth to disease to rehabilitation to death. The hundreds of white and grey gowned people therein are all part of the great drama. They stand at the ready to assist as we travel our destined human trajectory.
Forget the glistening post-natal cubicles, MRIs, radiology guns, and surgical instruments. They're merely the occasional tools used during the great drama. What counts most here is what cannot most be seen here. The skills...the experience... the compassion behind the busy hands, gloves, and masks. These are what help bring us into life, back into health, or at the end into the Big Sleep. While outside these buildings athletes, celebrities, pundits and politicians prattle on about what is important...these few inside here are the great companions along this sudden back-road to our travels.
What I'm saying -- from a good deal of experience inside these secular monasteries -- is that once you're inside one it clears your head and heart of an awful lot of trivia from the outside. Inside here very little is trivial. Perhaps a birth! a cure! a death! If ever you're going to get in touch with what makes your life make sense, it won't be at Wrigley Field! Soldier Fields! the Chicago Theatre! or even the Field Museum!
They're about our entertainment. Hospitals are about our existence. So, please, a little more respect for the place we most hate to think about.
Thursday, November 17, 2011
AT THE BRINK JUST BEFORE CHRISTMAS
We are on the brink.....! Of what...? According to the doomsayers, on the brink of both domestic and diplomatic disaster, as the American Empire sinks slowly in the west. Nial Ferguson's "Civilization" is just the latest history volume to envision this.
But whether you share in his demise-of-the-West scenario or not, right about now you're entering a very different scenario. Call it the Winter Solstice, The Holidays, or if you dare simply call it Christmas. It's our annual scenario of gift-giving. Especially gits for our children.
So, my friends, let us pause here at the precipice for a sweet jealous moment to gaze upon these wondrous little diversions that we kinda wish we were still young enough to own and play with ourselves. Some Christmas toys have passed the test of time. Among these: Crayolas...Raggedy Ann...Candy Land ...Mr Potato Head...Hot Wheels...Rubik Cube...Lincoln Logs...Kewpie Doll...and that centuries old little Red Wagon.
You can still find these tucked into little corners of today's sleek modern toy-barns like Toys-R-Us. You know, the big box emporiums where toys are stacked and packed by the carloads by parents and friends who who often prize the store's efficiency instead of its charm. I mean in a world of brinks and banks, who the hell has time for charm....??
Well, I do. And so do a great many old-time Christmas players from Christmases past.
And so while I perfectly well understand the big ticket items will be electronic games and toys and wands and goggles...well, I still notice how the little ones often prefer their littlest and simplest of toys. In fact, give a kid a great big wrapped toy this year and watch how they spend as much time playing with the wrapping as what was wrapped.
But pay no attention...just another antediluvian voice...recalling the ghosts of Christmas past which seemed so much smaller, quieter, simpler and authentic. Trouble is, after spending 80 of those old-fashioned Christmases, I fear there soon will be too few of us to tell you about them...
But whether you share in his demise-of-the-West scenario or not, right about now you're entering a very different scenario. Call it the Winter Solstice, The Holidays, or if you dare simply call it Christmas. It's our annual scenario of gift-giving. Especially gits for our children.
So, my friends, let us pause here at the precipice for a sweet jealous moment to gaze upon these wondrous little diversions that we kinda wish we were still young enough to own and play with ourselves. Some Christmas toys have passed the test of time. Among these: Crayolas...Raggedy Ann...Candy Land ...Mr Potato Head...Hot Wheels...Rubik Cube...Lincoln Logs...Kewpie Doll...and that centuries old little Red Wagon.
You can still find these tucked into little corners of today's sleek modern toy-barns like Toys-R-Us. You know, the big box emporiums where toys are stacked and packed by the carloads by parents and friends who who often prize the store's efficiency instead of its charm. I mean in a world of brinks and banks, who the hell has time for charm....??
Well, I do. And so do a great many old-time Christmas players from Christmases past.
And so while I perfectly well understand the big ticket items will be electronic games and toys and wands and goggles...well, I still notice how the little ones often prefer their littlest and simplest of toys. In fact, give a kid a great big wrapped toy this year and watch how they spend as much time playing with the wrapping as what was wrapped.
But pay no attention...just another antediluvian voice...recalling the ghosts of Christmas past which seemed so much smaller, quieter, simpler and authentic. Trouble is, after spending 80 of those old-fashioned Christmases, I fear there soon will be too few of us to tell you about them...
Monday, November 14, 2011
IT'S TIME AMERICA TAKES SOME CHEAP LAUGHS FROM JAY LENO
In an absolutely unpredictable world, the pendulum is absolutely predictable.
Why should we care? Because right now you and I are riding a very big one. The pendulum known as education, teaching, curriculum. Today tens of millions of young people are in classrooms where the pendulum has swung from such traditional right-brain courses as history and humanities to our heralded left-brain courses like math and science.
Starting in the Cold War with the Soviets in the 1950s-60s, math and science became the focus of most curriculum reforms and federally funded school programs. Seen from the perspective of Silicon Valley and corporate America, the results have been impressive. Geeks and nerds are now the new campus heroes. The swell of scientific progress in space, medicine, energy, weaponry and consumer electronics has been spectacular.
But with this growing swing toward math and science, there has been a corollary swing away from the old curricula including history and humanities. We live in a highly competitive and practical age, so those traditional right-brained fields seemed more expendable. The problem -- and in the history of American education there always seems to be another problem that demands another reform movement-- we may be educating a population of more Steve Jobs and Marc Zuckerbergs at the expense of more Jonathan Franzens and Stephen Spielbergs.
The press is crowded with reports of declining grades, falling graduation rates, and a citizenry that hardly understands its nation's history, culture and place in the world. To master the computer, the Internet, and the smart-phone without also mastering the where-and-why you've come from is an empty victory. If Jay Leno's Tonight Show is the social barometer of America, listen the next time he does a street interview. Young people staring blankly at questions about the Constitution, Lincoln, the Civil Rights movement, the New Deal, and Watergate. Not only a travesty worth the audience's laughter, but a tragedy worth a nation's concern.
We stand proud of our best-and-brightest technological minds today. And we should. But minds honed by scientific brilliance lose luster when we realize how many of them understand only their here-and-now. All too often without any sense of the where-when-and-why their here-and-now has come to pass. Has become part of their life. Has become central to why they do what they do.
The life of a nation is like the necklace of time. Each bead of progress exists and shines in and of itself. However, if understood and admired only by itself, it remains but a bead. Not a necklace! America is more than the sum of its beads. It's the whole greater than the sum of its parts. And that whole asks that our young people occasionally look up from their wondrous beads to realize how they are part of a centuries-old necklace.
The payoff? Well for one thing, Jay Leno won't get as many laughs from stupidly staring interviewees
Why should we care? Because right now you and I are riding a very big one. The pendulum known as education, teaching, curriculum. Today tens of millions of young people are in classrooms where the pendulum has swung from such traditional right-brain courses as history and humanities to our heralded left-brain courses like math and science.
Starting in the Cold War with the Soviets in the 1950s-60s, math and science became the focus of most curriculum reforms and federally funded school programs. Seen from the perspective of Silicon Valley and corporate America, the results have been impressive. Geeks and nerds are now the new campus heroes. The swell of scientific progress in space, medicine, energy, weaponry and consumer electronics has been spectacular.
But with this growing swing toward math and science, there has been a corollary swing away from the old curricula including history and humanities. We live in a highly competitive and practical age, so those traditional right-brained fields seemed more expendable. The problem -- and in the history of American education there always seems to be another problem that demands another reform movement-- we may be educating a population of more Steve Jobs and Marc Zuckerbergs at the expense of more Jonathan Franzens and Stephen Spielbergs.
The press is crowded with reports of declining grades, falling graduation rates, and a citizenry that hardly understands its nation's history, culture and place in the world. To master the computer, the Internet, and the smart-phone without also mastering the where-and-why you've come from is an empty victory. If Jay Leno's Tonight Show is the social barometer of America, listen the next time he does a street interview. Young people staring blankly at questions about the Constitution, Lincoln, the Civil Rights movement, the New Deal, and Watergate. Not only a travesty worth the audience's laughter, but a tragedy worth a nation's concern.
We stand proud of our best-and-brightest technological minds today. And we should. But minds honed by scientific brilliance lose luster when we realize how many of them understand only their here-and-now. All too often without any sense of the where-when-and-why their here-and-now has come to pass. Has become part of their life. Has become central to why they do what they do.
The life of a nation is like the necklace of time. Each bead of progress exists and shines in and of itself. However, if understood and admired only by itself, it remains but a bead. Not a necklace! America is more than the sum of its beads. It's the whole greater than the sum of its parts. And that whole asks that our young people occasionally look up from their wondrous beads to realize how they are part of a centuries-old necklace.
The payoff? Well for one thing, Jay Leno won't get as many laughs from stupidly staring interviewees
Sunday, November 13, 2011
WHAT BASKETBALL SEASON? WHAT DRUG STORE?
Here's what I call an encouraging statistic: Only 12% of surveyed Americans report they missed the canceled start of the pro basketball season. Nothing against basketball, just nice to hear that our heavily hustled population doesn't always go-with-the-promotional-flow. Occasionally we do try to distinguish between what's important in life and what's not.
Which brings me to your local drugstore aisles.
I'm here to suggest that of all the sophisticated surveys about you and me, maybe the easiest and best is the one you can take right in your own drug store. When you write for so many of the Fortune 500 companies that produce so many of these products, you learn how vital their merchandising space is to them. I've seen their sales forces equipped with everything from free display counters to dollars bonuses for the drugstore in this pursuit of prominent "shelf space."
OK, so lets take a stroll and measure -- literally measure! -- the number of inches different products are getting on those shelves. Obviously, the more inches, the more important these products seem to us the buying public. Here's my report in order of inches displayed >>
* Greeting Cards ~ In an age when personally knowing family, friends and neighbors has become less common, there's always Hallmark to find the right words. And often they do. Only you wonder how it is we've lost so much of the ability to find our own words
* Confectioneries ~ We know the brain craves sugar. Candy makers have found a gazillion different ways to spin and weave their sweet diversions. Watching eager shoppers from kids to grandmas, you see our drug-infested culture reaching for one of its last safe drugs of choice
* Pain medications ~ Take another look at just how many pain relievers there are out there. Many now locked away from over-eager buyer hands. The pharmaceutical companies have found even more ways than the candy companies to woo you into their merchandising web. They know how intense Americans don't tolerate very well the discomforts that come from their intense living. Pop a pill and you'll be like those happy smiling folks on the TV commercials
* Beauty aids ~ Drug stores are famous for affording the customers a fist-full of bottles and sprays with which to enhance what they have, and/or camouflage what they don't want to have. After awhile, your merchandising survey here slips gears and turns into amazed curiosity. Wow...so many little secrets I never realized before
Of course, the ultimate beauty secret most customers over 40 dream of is that promised secret-of-perpetual-youth pursued by everyone from 16th C Ponce deLeon to 21st C Revlon. In pursuit of the Great Dream, the esteemed Mayo Clinic has recently discovered how cells "age and lose their ability to divide, thereby becoming senescent cells whose toxins produce our aging processes." Physiologist James Kirkland tells ScenceNews that using drugs to eleminate the senescent cells in lab mice has "contained the aging process."
Next visit to your drug store, bring a mouse and see which aisle he heads for first.
Which brings me to your local drugstore aisles.
I'm here to suggest that of all the sophisticated surveys about you and me, maybe the easiest and best is the one you can take right in your own drug store. When you write for so many of the Fortune 500 companies that produce so many of these products, you learn how vital their merchandising space is to them. I've seen their sales forces equipped with everything from free display counters to dollars bonuses for the drugstore in this pursuit of prominent "shelf space."
OK, so lets take a stroll and measure -- literally measure! -- the number of inches different products are getting on those shelves. Obviously, the more inches, the more important these products seem to us the buying public. Here's my report in order of inches displayed >>
* Greeting Cards ~ In an age when personally knowing family, friends and neighbors has become less common, there's always Hallmark to find the right words. And often they do. Only you wonder how it is we've lost so much of the ability to find our own words
* Confectioneries ~ We know the brain craves sugar. Candy makers have found a gazillion different ways to spin and weave their sweet diversions. Watching eager shoppers from kids to grandmas, you see our drug-infested culture reaching for one of its last safe drugs of choice
* Pain medications ~ Take another look at just how many pain relievers there are out there. Many now locked away from over-eager buyer hands. The pharmaceutical companies have found even more ways than the candy companies to woo you into their merchandising web. They know how intense Americans don't tolerate very well the discomforts that come from their intense living. Pop a pill and you'll be like those happy smiling folks on the TV commercials
* Beauty aids ~ Drug stores are famous for affording the customers a fist-full of bottles and sprays with which to enhance what they have, and/or camouflage what they don't want to have. After awhile, your merchandising survey here slips gears and turns into amazed curiosity. Wow...so many little secrets I never realized before
Of course, the ultimate beauty secret most customers over 40 dream of is that promised secret-of-perpetual-youth pursued by everyone from 16th C Ponce deLeon to 21st C Revlon. In pursuit of the Great Dream, the esteemed Mayo Clinic has recently discovered how cells "age and lose their ability to divide, thereby becoming senescent cells whose toxins produce our aging processes." Physiologist James Kirkland tells ScenceNews that using drugs to eleminate the senescent cells in lab mice has "contained the aging process."
Next visit to your drug store, bring a mouse and see which aisle he heads for first.
Saturday, November 12, 2011
THE NEXT BIG QUESTION
Because Rabbi Kushner posed that troubling question, "Why do bad things happen to good people?" it seems entirely proper to now pose the next big question, "Why do good people do bad things?"
We are headline-deep in troubling examples. Coach Paterno and Penn State are simply the latest boils on the body politic. This disease-of-misdeeds is virulent. Coaches...politicians...bankers... priests...athletes....celebrities. What is the strain that runs through the disease? Power! Everyone whose misdeeds have lately arrived in the national ER gush from their enormous hold on power.
Over a century ago the British Lord Acton said it painfully well: "Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely." In each of the current cases, the deed done was done from a position of absolute power being imposed on the almost absolutely powerless.
You don't have to look far to find ways in which this disease has now triggered social anti-bodies. Consider the rise of the powerless in today's mass protests. The Tea Party opposes the power of government...the OWS opposes the power of the 1%....the municipal workers unions in states like Wisconsin and Ohio oppose the power of the governor...damn near everyone in their local barbershop and beauty salon opposes damn near everything they read in their newspapers!
Nothing new here. Like cancer, this disease of power-over-the powerless has corrupted the body politic of tribes and nations from the get-go. This lack of mutual respect is in our very DNA. The only way to cure it -- well, if not cured at least contained -- is if the powerless compel the powerful to sit down in the patient's room as equal partners in finding a workable protocol for recovery.
Simply put.....the powerless need to get some systemic relief for their condition; while the powerful need to accommodate this need before it is seized from out of their hands. Sometimes even elections can help find such accommodation.
We are headline-deep in troubling examples. Coach Paterno and Penn State are simply the latest boils on the body politic. This disease-of-misdeeds is virulent. Coaches...politicians...bankers... priests...athletes....celebrities. What is the strain that runs through the disease? Power! Everyone whose misdeeds have lately arrived in the national ER gush from their enormous hold on power.
Over a century ago the British Lord Acton said it painfully well: "Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely." In each of the current cases, the deed done was done from a position of absolute power being imposed on the almost absolutely powerless.
You don't have to look far to find ways in which this disease has now triggered social anti-bodies. Consider the rise of the powerless in today's mass protests. The Tea Party opposes the power of government...the OWS opposes the power of the 1%....the municipal workers unions in states like Wisconsin and Ohio oppose the power of the governor...damn near everyone in their local barbershop and beauty salon opposes damn near everything they read in their newspapers!
Nothing new here. Like cancer, this disease of power-over-the powerless has corrupted the body politic of tribes and nations from the get-go. This lack of mutual respect is in our very DNA. The only way to cure it -- well, if not cured at least contained -- is if the powerless compel the powerful to sit down in the patient's room as equal partners in finding a workable protocol for recovery.
Simply put.....the powerless need to get some systemic relief for their condition; while the powerful need to accommodate this need before it is seized from out of their hands. Sometimes even elections can help find such accommodation.
Friday, November 11, 2011
A NEW KIND OF VETERANS DAY
There's something sacred about Veteran's Day, for it's been honoring the battle deaths of our young warriors ever since WWI. And we will do it again today. Only isn't there something missing ...? I mean, the honorable deaths aren't the whole story. There's also the even larger number of honorable lives. The tens of millions of lives those tens of thousands of deaths made possible.
A national genealogical chart would make the point. For every veteran-death in every war, there have been countless births that would simply not have been possible. For every twentysomething veteran-death in a family line, there's likely to have been one or more adolescent-lives who thereby survived the war. Who in time gave birth to other lives which may not have otherwise happened.
No one dies in a war to "save their country." They die because they weren't able to save themselves. And yet...! What their deaths helped save is the survival of the younger lives in the family line who went on to become the farmers, truck drivers, steel mill workers, teachers, firefighters, doctors and chemists in our nation's ranks. The makers and molders of America who might never have been born to make a difference!
We don't even need John Donne, God bless him, to remind us "no man is an island." We are all -- each of us in a family, in a land, in a world -- all inextricably connected with everyone else. If someone sneezes in a bank in Europe, America gets a cold. If someone crashes into a tower in America, the rest of the world catches fire.
So even as we mourn the battle-deaths of our veterans this week, look around at all the lives those deaths gave the rest of us. We might even want to change Veteran's Day to Resurrection Day.
A national genealogical chart would make the point. For every veteran-death in every war, there have been countless births that would simply not have been possible. For every twentysomething veteran-death in a family line, there's likely to have been one or more adolescent-lives who thereby survived the war. Who in time gave birth to other lives which may not have otherwise happened.
No one dies in a war to "save their country." They die because they weren't able to save themselves. And yet...! What their deaths helped save is the survival of the younger lives in the family line who went on to become the farmers, truck drivers, steel mill workers, teachers, firefighters, doctors and chemists in our nation's ranks. The makers and molders of America who might never have been born to make a difference!
We don't even need John Donne, God bless him, to remind us "no man is an island." We are all -- each of us in a family, in a land, in a world -- all inextricably connected with everyone else. If someone sneezes in a bank in Europe, America gets a cold. If someone crashes into a tower in America, the rest of the world catches fire.
So even as we mourn the battle-deaths of our veterans this week, look around at all the lives those deaths gave the rest of us. We might even want to change Veteran's Day to Resurrection Day.
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