Gay Hemingway

I've been listening to Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), and although it's an interesting book, there are some slow moments. But I woke the hell up when the narrator started reading this passage:

...Golz was gay and he had wanted him to be gay too before he left, be he hadn't been.

All the best ones, when you thought it over, were gay. It was much better to be gay and it was a sign of of something too. It was like having immortality while you were still alive. That was a complicated one. There were not many of them left though. No, there were not many of the gay ones left. There were very damned few of them left...

The 12-year-old boy in me had to giggle at this passage. Haha, he said he wants to be gay!!

But it's an interesting illustration of how language changes. Obviously in 1940 Hemingway was not talking about homosexuality. (Because of course there were no gays back then!) Even with the current meaning of the word, it's still a very interesting passage. But I wonder what Hemingway would think if he knew how the meaning of his words had changed.

It makes you wonder what innocuous words we use today will take on a whole new meaning in the future. I mean, what if the word hope someday becomes slang for flatulence? Or tired turns into horny? Or facebook becomes a sexual position? (If any of these examples come true, you read it here first.)

It's like historical Mad Libs.

Superbad

I started watching the movie Superbad two years ago.

I didn't finish it until this week.

I went to see the movie in the theater when it came out. And although I liked it, my mom was sitting right next to me. And her 80-year-old husband was right next to her. It's not the kind of movie you want to see with your parents.

All we knew about the movie before we went was that it was a comedy produced by Seth Rogan, who had also done the 40 Year Old Virgin. My mom had seen and enjoyed that movie, despite the subject matter, because it was funny and (basically) innocent and had a nice message.

But Superbad is a whole different kind of funny. High school boys trying to get laid and talk of nothing but sex in the most graphic language, and try to score alcohol illegally (to aid their quest to get laid.) With every "fuck" and "handjob" and "dick", I squirmed a little more in my seat, knowing that my mother was right next to me. Half way through the movie, when a creepy guy hits one of the boys with his car and then offers to take them to a party, I got a foreboding sense of pedophilia. I turned to my mom and said, "Are you enjoying this? Do you want to leave?" She said yes.

Then I put Superbad in my Netflix queue. At any given time there's usually 60-70 movies on the list, and I must be going through about 30 movies a year, because it took about two years for Superbad to work it's way to the top of the queue. I just got it last week.

Watching the whole thing through, with my cats, was a much better experience. I laughed. I cried. I cringed. At one point near the end I yelled at Michael Cera's character for wimping out when the girl he pines after comes on to him (probably because I would have wimped out the same way in high school.)

But the movie redeemed itself with a sweet ending. Despite all the language and lechery, it turns out not to be just another Teenagers Getting Laid movie. It's about growing up.

And dick jokes. Lots and lots of dick jokes.

Roger Ebert agrees with me. (Or maybe I agree with him?)

The Lottery Mentality

Here's a test to determine where you are on the fiscal political spectrum:

• In 2004, the average American CEO at a large company was payed 431 times the pay received by the the average worker at their company.
• In 1980, that ratio was 42 to 1.
• In Japan, in 2004, it was 10 to 1.

I read these numbers in a book which only cited this article. Unfortunately, that article only provides the first statistic. I don't know where the other two numbers came from. I spent way too much time tracking down the other numbers, and while I couldn't find them specifically, I found tons of data that supports the point, which is that the gap between the rich and the poor in this country has increased dramatically over the past 30 years, and specifically over the past 10. (Of those that I found, this article probably does the best job of summarizing the issue, as well as makes most of the points I planned to make in this blog, rendering the rest of my argument redundant.)

But the point is, whether these specific numbers are accurate or not, your reaction to them will tell you where you stand politically.

If you're a liberal, those numbers bother you. A lot. Congratulations! You have a social conscience.

But conservatives, at least the ones I've talked to, are not phased by such numbers. Either they look at you like you just told them that rich people make a lot of money ("Well, duh") or they actively defend the numbers. What's the big deal? Poor people are still making more than they did. It's the "rising tide lifts all boats" theory. If rich people are doing well, it means the economy is doing well. It's better for everyone.

Well, maybe. But if you believe in any kind of fairness, how can you really justify someone making 400 times what other people make? Do they work 400 times harder than their workers? Put in 400 times more hours? Do they need 400 times the income to support their families? Is their personal risk 400 times greater than the workers? Does Jesus love them 400 times more?

Aside from the inherent unfairness of the growing gap between the rich and the poor, there are practical concerns. It's just not sustainable. A strong economy requires a strong middle class. When the gap between the rich and the poor widens, the middle class shrinks. This is bad for everyone: the rich, the poor, and the (shrinking) middle.

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Like liberals, there are conservatives in every income bracket. The thing I don't get is why poor and middle class conservatives support policies that only seem to help out their rich compatriots. It's certainly not reciprocal-- the rich ones aren't looking out for the poor & middle class ones.

So why are conservatives so concerned about protecting the rights of rich people? I think it stems from something I call the "lottery mentality." A lot of people in America need to believe that, at any moment, they might strike it rich. Or maybe, through a lifetime of hard work, they will one day become a member of the wealthy elite. There's certainly plenty of anecdotal evidence for this, even if the odds of a typical poor person becoming a member of the wealthy elite are less than getting hit by lightning. But in the slight chance that that might happen, they want to protect their interests.

This belief in the lottery mentality is so strong that Americans are willing to forgo many social safety nets that exist in every other industrialized country. Their hope for winning the lottery is more important than leading a comfortable, yet modest, middle class existence.

Two examples of this: Back during the 2004 election, I heard many people bashing the Democrats for wanting to increase taxes (or just roll back Bush's tax cuts) on the richest Americans. I heard one person complain thusly: "Kerry and Edwards are already rich, now they want to stop the rest of us from getting rich!"

I don't get how increasing the tax on the wealthiest Americans a few percentage points would prevent you from getting rich. Seriously, the only thing holding you back from unimaginable wealth is having to pay a few extra grand in taxes? Really? Are are you so caught up in the lottery mentality that it personally offends you when a rich person loses more income than you'll ever make in a year?

The Daily Show sent Wyatt Cenac to Sweden a few months ago to report on the "socialist state" there. It appears that the lottery mentality does not exist in Sweden.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
The Stockholm Syndrome Pt. 1
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Ron Paul Interview

They show a clip on 50 Cent showing off his huge palace in some American documentary show:

50 CENT: I want to show you my crib.
CENAC: ...the possibilities of capitalism.
50 CENT: [In a huge room with a theater-sized TV.] I be in here watching, you know, kung fu flicks and pornos.

Then Cenac visits Robin, "Sweden's biggest pop star." She lives in what looks like a modest apartment. She has a twin bed set up in a small living room for her mother-in-law.

CENAC: Let's check out the kitchen in Robin's crib. We're checking out—. Is that the biggest TV you have?
ROBIN: Yeah, that's the biggest TV. I only have that one, actually.
CENAC: [Looking at a bunch of bags under the table.] Alright, so somebody's been doing some shopping.
ROBIN: Uh, no, it's my recycling station.
CENAC: Alright. This isn't [bleeped] working. [To camera] No. Cut it, cut it.

CENAC (voiceover): It was shocking. Sweden's pop stars live like our reality show stars.

In the second part of this report, Cenac compares the American lottery mentality to that in Sweden. Our pop stars (50 Cent):

Get Rich or Die Tryin'
Their pop stars (guy from ABBA):

Live Comfortably and Die in a State Hospital


Why are Americans so scared of that message?

Jinxing the Jinx

The last time I was at the public library, back in August, I checked out about five books. I've been slowly working my way through them. As always, some are better than others.

But the one that I've been reluctant to pick up and read is this one:

Fired!: Tales of the Canned, Canceled, Downsized, & Dismissed by Annabelle Gurwitch.

It's not that I didn't think it would be a good read. I love bite-sized real life stories like these.

I was afraid to pick it up. Because I'm superstitious, and I thought that if I read a book about getting fired, it would happen to me. I can't afford to be unemployed right now: I just bought a house. The thought of losing my job in this brutal economy was horrifying. I just couldn't risk reading that book.

But I overcame my superstition and opened it up last week. So far, it's mildly entertaining, and I have realized that my superstition was all for naught. Most of the "firing" they talk about in the book is either the kind of temporary part-time jobs you have as a teenager or student; or Hollywood firing. And Hollywood firing is a completely different animal. Those people choose to work in a volatile field where they fight and scrap for any kind of work in the hopes of striking it big. It's worlds away from the boring, but safe, cocoon of tenured academia that I live in.

Reading the stories made me feel all smug about the fact that I'd never been fired from a job. But then I remembered my very first job.

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I was sixteen, and needing money to buy a car, I walked down to the nearest grocery store to apply for a job as a bagboy. When I went to hand in the application at the customer service window, I passed out in front of the manager. I was really nervous and he was interrogating me. He asked me all these hard needling questions, like what hours I wanted to work, and I folded under the pressure. I woke up a few seconds later with a group of people huddled over me. The manager took me into his office and called my dad to come pick me up.

I figured there was no way I’d get the job, but a few days later a different manager saw my application and called me. He interviewed me over the phone and hired me. After school, I walked the mile down to the store to report for my first day of work. I worked four hours bagging groceries. When my shift was over, I didn’t feel very good, so I went into the manager’s office to sit down. Then I threw up all over the floor.

When I reported for my second day of work, I was refreshed and ready to go. The manager, who had witnessed me faint and puke in the two times he’d worked with me, eyed me suspiciously. “Are you sure you’re okay?” he asked me. I assured him I was healthy and read to work. Then he explained that the company had just been bought out by a larger supermarket chain. It wouldn’t be worth it for him to train me, since he didn’t know if there would be layoffs. (Even his job was probably in jeopardy.) So he laid me off. He wasn’t lying about the company getting bought out. It was all over the local news that day.

So after passing out and throwing up, I was laid off from my very first job after four hours of work.

As far as I remember, that's the last time I was fired.

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I may be taunting fate by writing that, but I think the fact that I'm writing about the superstition itself will protect me. If I say I'm afraid of something on my blog, it won't happen. The superstition goes both ways. I'm jinxing the jinx.

Timicism

Readers of my blog my wonder why I went almost a whole month without any posts. It's because I was working on the newest version of Timicism.

Timicism 3.0 is now up and running, this time as a blog.

Take a look and let me know all the things that are wrong with it.