MY LIFE NOW

Crowfoot Parkway. My route to work everyday for six years.

I’m at Costco yesterday, on a Wednesday, looking at chicken breasts for thirteen bucks a pound. I haven’t bought chicken breasts in about eight years so I don’t know any better. Come to find out, through Twitter (@thatdylandavis) that chicken breasts at Costco in the States are about three bucks a pound. Even with the rate of inflation and the currency exchange, Canadians are getting screwed. I’m getting doubly screwed, because I don’t really even have thirteen bucks much less three bucks. I lost my job in the oil patch the day before. So here I am, going package by package wondering if I can get a lighter one to save a few dollars. I save a buck fifty.

Ten years ago I left grad school with a Masters in History and a high self-worth. Though I was unemployed for a year, I had achieved a life goal while staying home with my son during the first year of his life. My wife worked part time teaching education at Lee College. We had crippling debt, but we were happy. However, the rate of positions available in post-grad programs to obtain a Ph.D. in history was about two to one. That was challenging enough. I had an emphasis on German history and did not speak German – this was decidedly against my favor. Within a few years, it would get worse. Currently, according to the American Historical Association, the number of Ph.D. history students competing for one full time tenure track position is sixty-four to one.

I’ve been working for my family since I was a fetus. We have a business, which does moderately well, and though I’ve had issues with some aspects of it there’s no denying its success and the dedication of my family members who run it. I love the business, actually, as backward as it is. I know it quite well after twenty years of watching people suffer through it. But at the time I felt as I worked there part-time that every time I made a mistake – which was more often than I wished – I had to explain myself to four people. This was a bit like Office Space and the TPS report cover sheets. So despite the vast advantages of the job and where it could go I decided to jump off the ledge when a friend of mine from college called about a job in the oil patch. Low pay, but no relatives.

Because I was smarter than your average bear (you probably pulled that together if you made it to this page) I could run circles around those immediately around me and because my grandfather used to throw me from a Willys Jeep at twenty miles an hour to wrestle and rope a heifer, I was no stranger to hard work. After a year of traveling the world at the bottom rung they gave me an office with no window, twenty percent lower pay, and I said ‘thank you.’ I had my daughter by then and I was happy. That didn’t work out well, but they didn’t throw me overboard. They gave me something else to do, and I excelled. I worked all over, in different departments and found myself on a transfer to Canada – which I will never regret. And though I’m smarter than the average bear, I still got thrown overboard last Tuesday not because of my job performance, not because of a faux pas with clients not because of quality service, but because the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia does not want Canadian Oil Sands competing with their light oil imports to the United States.

I am less political in my old age (just turned 41 the week before I was let go) because I don’t see much to get excited about in the continuing polemical arguments that ignore the center mass of people that we should be paying attention to. However, I see my situation and the situation of a hundred thousand Albertans as the same. What exactly did we do wrong? We made a quality product and sold it at a reasonable price to the customer. That’s what we did wrong: we pissed off the Saudis.

I don’t quite understand why people dislike oil and gas. I mean…I get it on the environmental side. It’s not friendly, okay. What I mean is, why do people dislike me because I work in oil and gas? There was an artificial shortage in the 1970s, which OPEC created to try and change US policy on Israel (for more on this, see Daniel Yergin’s The Prize). This created a huge rise in prices that has not been seen since and was not the fault of the energy companies. This pressure was relieved when first, the Kingdom and OPEC changed stances to recognize their goal was not being met and second, the industry in America started compensating for what they could not produce domestically. This eventually led to a huge drop in price that I still remember. When I was 16, I filled up my Ford Bronco II with 86 cents a gallon. I drove through the dilapidated zones of downtown Houston as I did it. It never occurred to my teenage mind that it was connected. All during these low prices, in the 1990’s, we had a series of problems spanning the entire Clinton administration with Iraq. People may not remember now, but Iraq constantly defied UN sanctions, violated military agreements with the Allies (including Saudi Arabia) and it was a rare month when we didn’t bomb them in some shape or form. When Bush took office, Iraq was not seen as an irritant, it was seen as an obstacle. In a very real sense the argument went something like this: Whom do you want to buy your oil from? Alaska or Saddam? The Oil for Food Program was a mess before it was discovered to be a fraud and the Artic Wildlife Refuge near the North Slope looked like a good alternative. The House approved the bill but a partisan vote in the Senate killed it, as they had one more Democrat than they needed. AWR was dead. Are we surprised to find ourselves in Iraq three years later? The difference had to be made up somewhere. In the end, the politicians decided that thousands of dead Americans (and hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis) was better than thousands of dead Caribou. And who is to blame? Big Oil?

And after the dead and the propaganda and the funerals and the protests and all the bullshit – scandal after scandal, approval ratings and elections. What happened? The price went up… enormously …and people got pissed. Why were people upset in 2008 when we were paying close to five bucks a gallon? Were they angry with the inept politicians who put us here, or the dead soldiers who tried to help lower the cost of production? No, they were angry with the oil companies for, in Nancy Pelosi’s famous McCarthyite lecture to the CEO of Exxon-Mobil, “record profits.” How dare you make money, the politicians said while pointing fingers, how dare you employ a record number of people getting a product to market that the masses demand? Does anyone remember this time? The finger pointing and the name-calling and the screaming “ENRON! ENRON!” because instead of thirty bucks a tank they were paying forty-five? I sold my Dodge Durango SUV. I loved it but I sold it. I bought a Civic, which I still drive…ten years later. I could never afford to replace my car in my career in the oil patch. And it looks like I never will.

What did the energy industry do after this? Did they name call and say ‘aw shucks’ and shrink back into their holes as if they were tobacco? Did they watch Syriana on the weekends and feel sorry for themselves? No. They went to work to create a viable alternative to shipping oil in from overseas: increasing the domestic production of energy. Instead of buying your 8% from the Saudis…how about you buy it from Pennsylvania? Oklahoma? Texas? And a second boom began. There were amazing developments – Shale Oil and the shale revolution. The natural gas boom. The offshore installation craze. And there were disasters. Refineries exploded. Pipelines burst. An enormous offshore rig – which I had been on before – had exploded and sank. Lives were lost. Not as many as in a war, but a life nonetheless. And though saddened, the public was satiated. Why? Because domestic production had increased so much between 2010 and 2014 that it was on trajectory to EXPORT oil in just a couple of decades. Was the energy industry the bad guys for making this happen? For getting us off of imported oil from the Middle East? Don’t people complain about “our friends, the Saudis?” Don’t people want to become less and less involved in geopolitical scruffs in a dangerous area of the world only because they make a natural resource we need? Doesn’t the public say “we have no business being over there… they don’t want us there… we should leave?” Isn’t this a good thing?

I described this to a friend in Newfoundland. You know what she said to me? “Fuck (insert my company name here), Fuck Oil, Fuck You and Fuck Off). As oil paid her boyfriend’s wages and got her through grad school, I was a little amazed. As you can guess, we don’t talk anymore. We don’t talk now that the Saudis have decided their long-term market share is more important than the billions they make off of their decreasing market share. Not only did the Kingdom NOT make money last year…they LOST 100 billion. I find this astounding. Rather than make close to a trillion every year, they would rather lose a hundred billion…because an independent producing America is not in their best interest.

And Canada…that has the most expensive oil in the world to produce because it is heavy…was the first to get hit and the one who suffers the most. Canada can completely replace all oil the Saudis import…at a price. That price is now half and Canada cannot compete. I worked for ten years, my fingers to the bone. I have tendonitis in both my arms. I missed time with my kids, tested the patience of my wife and passed on other offers to do other things in my life. Why? Because I believed in it. Because I was doing something I thought was good not just for me, but for North America. And as it turns out, that’s not the same thing as being good for the Saudis. They don’t care that I’m out of work. They want me to be out of work. And as the oil industry crashes and infrastructure suffers and depression sets in…recession sets in... families full of questions and regrets and foreclosures…who do people blame? Does the public blame the Saudis? Or are they looking at what used to be the giant industry that tried to give them independence and hope they never return? “Fuck oil,” they say as they kick the roustabout or tool pusher, “and fuck you.” Hating the Oil Patch has become as American as Apple Pie…and it’s becoming a real national Canadian sport as well. Municipalities in Quebec have plenty to say about pipelines running through their districts to help alleviate Alberta’s economy. The Mayor of Montreal said it best: “fuck oil… and fuck you.”

I am thoroughly convinced that the working class of America would rise up in a figurative sense, go to the polls and vote for the first candidate who said the following: “If you elect me, I will push a measure through congress that bans Saudi oil from our markets.” That person would win Pennsylvania; win Ohio, and most likely Florida – the only three states that swing. But that’s not going to happen. Not from Hillary Clinton, who took Saudi money for her campaigns and for her husband’s library. Not Trump, who is too much of a businessman to piss off a client. And not Cruz or Rubio, who don’t have the cajones even to challenge Trump. What are we left with, then? Corrupt politicians; corrupt overseas nations…and an industry that by and large…only wanted to give the public what they wanted. Who got fucked here? The consumer? The politicians? No. I got fucked. Not because big oil wanted an extra billion, but because the Saudis wanted an extra trillion. And American politicians are fine with that.

So now I’m at Costco looking at the buck fifty for the hot dog. It’s a huge hot dog, and I’m hungry. I’ve been out of work a day and I’m already thinking cut back. No more movies. No more dinner out. But I’ve saved a buck fifty from getting the smaller chicken breast…so I tell myself. So I pay a loonie and a half and I get my hot dog. It comes with a drink, the lady tells me, and I feel like I got a deal. When’s the last time you got a deal? Who gave it to you? Was it a politician? Or a company? 

Originally published 31 March 2016

BEING DAVID BOWIE

Keep your ‘lectric eye on me, babe.

Warning: this blog will be by far the least organized in thought or expression. Emotion being the better part of human nature, it is also sure to override all attempts to keep things logical.

Over a decade ago, Joan Jett was a guest columnist on an MSN blog about music. In one of these blogs she evoked evocative (I can do that, can't I?)  images of Mick Jagger and David Bowie in an attempt to understand what it was like to be, not fantasize, but to be a living rock and roll star. Just as you woke up in the morning and went about your day, Jett argued, so to do the living gods of rock. Humans being equal by natural rights, the only difference between you and David Bowie would be about 130 million screaming fans. Imagine what that does to a person. Bowie and Jagger, Jett explained, could not possibly know how else to behave other than how a rock star behaves. People may see the snake skin jacket Keith Richards wears or Jagger’s continuously matching purple suits or Bowie’s long list of fashion flops and think “how can they not know that it’s ridiculous?” it might be ridiculous. But it is them. David Bowie didn’t know how not to be David Bowie, Jett informed us, just like you wouldn’t know how not to be you.

So who was David Bowie?

I don’t know. Read a few dozen books, listen to all of his music. That will tell you more than I ever can. But I can tell you what he meant to me. Yes, there is that corny ‘artist’ sense: wow he was so different, made great music and all the rest of it. I was what seemed to me an abnormal kid growing up in a horribly normal suburban environment that had all the trappings of the rat race training. I’m not saying because of Bowie I escaped it, but because of Bowie I had a sense that you could, that he could, that we could all do different things without loafing off our parents, without being that joke that sits in the corner of the not-Starkbucks with a fucking beret on writing poetry about flowers and shit. It took me longer to get around to the idea that I could contribute more, that I could express myself better without being a cliché, and I’m not going to say that it was ONLY because of Bowie that I was able to do it. 

But when he died, seemingly all of a sudden, I felt that pang. That, ‘oh, shit, no, really? FUCK!’ that a lot of people get who don’t know what they got ‘till it’s gone, to quote Cinderella (if you don’t know who Cinderella is stop reading and fuck off). I’m not going to write a paragraph about how his Goblin King in Labyrinth changed my life, or how The Man to Fell to Earth stuck a chord on the two A.M. Million Dollar Movie when I was ten. I’m not gay, or bisexual, so I can’t relate that way other than to say like a lot of people may have thought that if Bowie was doing it, maybe it wasn’t okay for me but maybe it also meant it wasn’t evil as well. The most profound thing I’ve seen him do in theatre was playing Pontius Pilate in The Last Temptation of Christ, a presentation of that character so thoughtful was amazed at how sparing he dealt out his acting talent. But what did it mean to me? Not much. But if that was the case, why did I feel robbed, why did I feel horrible for his family when he passed?

The only thing I can pin it to is the realization that he was a large part of an increasing public mindset in ‘80’s culture that promoted being different not for the sake of being different but simply to say it’s okay if you are different regardless of how you are different (Yes, these were the Eighties in which now I'm being told were so violent, intolerant and fascist). Bowie himself would probably put obvious limits on that – don’t go around killing people for example – but as an Earthling who expresses himself those limits are so far gone they fit everyone who need not commit a capital crime. I’m not going to go into a self-indulgent and rambling bullshit paragraph about how I felt different when I was a child, only that it was extremely apparent to me that I was different and that other people noticed because they told me (Heathen!). In fact, many people felt it so important to tell me that they had to beat it into me. I’d love to say that perhaps if they were Bowie fans and found more self-expression they possibly would not feel the need to up my parent’s medical bills. I’d love to say that if they were Bowie fans maybe they would tolerate the rest of the world. That’s how I saw Bowie then, and see Bowie now. A guy who sings some strange songs and not through the music but through his outrageous fashion and lifestyle exemplifies the ideal that it’s cool to be cool, and cool to be whatever you want, so why would you care what anyone else wants to be? In this collective space in pop culture, Bowie was perhaps a front man of change and toleration. Millions of people may have looked at him and thought ‘why?’ I’d would look at them and ask ‘why do you care?’ Being a Bowie fan meant that you were okay with all his weird shit, and if you were okay with that then you were okay with your friend’s weird shit. And if you were okay with that then your friends were okay with your weird shit. And pretty soon, no one’s weird shit mattered any more. Like a bumper sticker my wife used to have on her Jeep: Harm None, Do What Ye Will. From Bowie’s stand point it might be Ziggy Stardust or Aladdin Sane or sleeping with Mick Jagger or the indescribably beautiful Somali supermodel Iman. For someone else it might be bucking primogeniture by not going to  the family alma mater, or not getting that job the parentals want you to get, or to take it to the next level working a more meaningful job that has more psychological awards than the square footage of a house or another zero in the bank. You can take this all the way to candle wax and butt plugs if you want. Harm none, do what ye will. And I will listen to Seven Years in Tibet really, really loud. 

On a completely different note I think it’s important to emphasize Bowie’s constant, incessant smile. Every footage I have ever seen of him off stage, on the streets of New York or in interviews dating back four decades or anything offhand: look at his smile. Not only is it glowing and effervescent, but it is never ending. Bowie smiled continuously. A beaming, wide grin. Yes, it must be cool to be a billionaire, yes I’m sure it doesn’t suck to have his life, to be David Bowie, but as you go back through the struggling years you’ll see that smile regardless of the downs he had to endure. Bowie was a happy person during a couple of decades that were really rough, especially to many people about my age.  Want to be moody? Put on some Seattle alternative. Wanna shit bats? Go goth, girl. Wanna be a complete pussy? I hear Emos like Type O Negative. I wanna be happy when I rock. I want devil horns. I wanna dance. I wanna smile. I want David Bowie playing The Man Who Sold the World, with my windows down and my system up. 

THE REAL SECOND TRILOGY

What do you think of my solution?

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED JANUARY 2016

We are immersed in the meaning of the death of Han Solo. As we ponder how the man who skeptically called the Force a bunch of “simple tricks and nonsense” who then four decades later admitted “It’s real. All of it,” we stand in awe of the attempt to recreate that which the Spirit of ’77 gave us. But as we gather into the house of worship in which we try to relive our childhood vicariously through a demoralized storm trooper and a determined girl on a desert planet who does not know how to quit, we are forgetting that this trilogy truly is not the second trilogy. Writer-Director Kevin Smith got it right in one of his endless Q & A’s in which someone referred to Episodes I, II, and III as ‘the Trilogy’ or even to Tolkien’s dramatic crash onto the screen about the same time: “there is only one trilogy,” Smith angrily declared. There can be only one. But…you can have a second place and that place does not belong to the second set of Star Wars films in the late Ninties/early Otts. The second best trilogy ever made off this world is the one in which Captain James T. Kirk faces death in the face, loses and becomes so inconsolable with grief that he resurrects the only person in the universe with whom he had a human connection…the irony being of course that Mr. Spock is only half human. 
          Star Trek: The Motion Picture was a catastrophe produced by the finest minds in Hollywood and directed by one of the greatest directors who ever lived. After he edited Citizen Kane for Orson Welles, Robert Wise directed The Day the Earth Stood Still, West Side Story,  and a multitude of others that formulate a long list that makes you say ‘oh, yeah…” But the film itself, despite its jaw dropping special effects, is only a response to the insane space opera money maker at Fox Studios down the street. Every studio looked at their inventory and brushed off whatever they had in an attempt to cash in on Star Wars. In many cases, sets and models made for one sci-fi film were simply reused with a different case and script. My favorite is a ludicrous romp in a strange ET-like spacecraft with Jon Boy from Little House on the Prairie. We can expect Paramount to stumble facing the all mighty George Lucas who had greats like Brian DePalma giving him editing notes and Steven Spielberg recommending story changes on Laurence Kasdan’s already fantastic script. How was Herve Bennett going to compete? Easy. He scaled back the production cost and let the actors have a say on the characters they were portraying. 
          Resurrecting Khan was no small feat. Who but the most ardent fans of the TV show would remember fifteen years later the Space Seed that brought the genetically superior being with the fatal flaw of having arrogance as Hubris? Ricardo Maltoban didn’t flinch. Next was the how to get Kirk into space if he was promoted as Admiral and the excuse of an emergency had already been used in the first film. Answer: training exercise to test the Enterprises’ new overhaul. This was all fine and dandy to go catch the villain but Kirk had met villains before and his wits had already proven him to be not smarter by any means but definitely willing to do something his adversaries could not in order to win: the special ability to defeat a no-win scenario: Kirk had a lifetime of Kobayashi Marus…the Carbomite Maneuver being one of the TV show’s most famous. But down to the wire, The Wrath of Khan had gone where no man had gone before when finally Kirk over reached himself and though he outwitted Khan in his attempt to hold hostage the federation he failed to save his crew in the nick of time. It was Spock who recognized the danger the ship faced…the hundreds of innocents on board…could be bought with a life. His life. To Spock, it was worth it: “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few,” but to Kirk it was never acceptable to lose anyone…despite convenient red shirts left all over the galaxy…and this loss of his was most bitter. Had Kirk been quick enough in thought he would have beat Spock to the punch and sacrificed himself, as against his nature that would be, but he wasn’t. And he was ashamed. The dialogue through the speaker is one of the hardest, most emotional scenes filmed between two men on screen, and it defines the platonic love that binds men together as Spock straightens his uniform lest he appear less than an officer to his Captain.
Kirk:    Spock!
Spock:   The ship…out of danger?
Kirk:    Yes.
Spock:   Do not grieve, Admiral. It is logical. The  needs of the many outweigh-
Kirk:    The needs of the few…
Spock:   Or the one. I never took the Kobayashi Maru  test until now. What do you think of my solution?
 Kirk:   Spock…
 Spock:  I have been, and always shall be, your friend. Live long…and prosper.
 Kirk:   No...
When Kirk’s voice breaks we see a man defeated in one of the most powerful deliveries in cinema. Defeated by Khan. Defeated by himself. Defeated by a career built around the notion that defeat was implausible. But all of this changed. Afraid of growing old at the beginning of the film, Kirk was now feeling younger with his older Vulcan friend gone, buried on a planet that unbeknownst to him was regenerating his body.  
          With Spock gone it gave what some producers at Paramount jokes was the reality of a MAD Magazine title Star Trek: In Search of Plot. Leonard Nimoy, an actor with great stage experience and who had written numerous plays threw his weight behind getting the directing role and showing the human commitment one can have to reverse the collective thought of the rational mind that justifies so many evils in favor of the triumph of the individual. The Search for Spock is a powerful rebuttal to those who assume that a majority always rules, that human rights are negotiable, that everything must be balanced and no thought given to the idea that a sometimes the needs of the one outweigh the needs of the many. Spock’s friends and Starfleet colleagues cared so much about him they violated a dozen laws that could land them in jail, hijacked a starship and disabled another in their effort to retrieve Spock’s body. The purpose of the effort was only possible because of a last minute thought Nimoy had at the end of Khan that was thrown in as a ‘just in case.’ It worked brilliantly. Before dying, Spock copied his memory into McCoy’s brain, hoping that Kirk could find an answer from Sarek, Spock’s father, on how to release it. McCoy/Spock in contrast brought humor to a dark situation when Klingons, desperate to take control of the genesis device, lay waste to all before them, including a young scientist trying to keep the device out of the hands of the Klingons. David was Kirk’s son, and he died a hero, believing that the needs of the many outweighed the needs of the few. 
          In another powerful moment that rivals most Shakespearean plays (which makes sense because Shatner is a Shakespearean actor), Kirk collapses in absolute grief and anger, repeating to the bridge: “Those Klingon bastards have killed my son.” McCoy tries to intervene but he doesn’t have to. Kirk used his moment of grief to escape another Kobayashi Maru. Luring the multitude of Klingons onto the Enterprise, Kirk detonates it as they escape to the genesis planet hoping to lure the Klingons to the surface in a trap to take control. The Klingons know it is a trap, but like Khan they are arrogant and cruel, misplacing the belief that clever equates smarts. They took his son, they took his ship. But they couldn’t take Kirk. Retrieving Spock’s body, the crew has an ancient Vulcan ceremony performed to take Spock’s imprint out of McCoy’s head and back to his own. It works, but it is not perfect, and it is right that it should not be. Nothing can be the same again after sacrificing so much. 
          The new Spock parallels his colleagues in The Voyage Home – Earth is not his home but they are his home and he must find his way. The 25th Century being what it is, the crew must use the intense gravity of the sun to slingshot around to a speed that will take them back five centuries in time to find a water mammal that can answer a foreign probe that threatens to destroy the future Earth. The crew is beset with problems, not the least of which is they stand out like a sore thumb. It is no wonder. These actors are in their 50’s by The Voyage Home. One has to remember that Scotty doesn’t have a full index finger on his right hand because the actor, James Doohan, had it shot off on D-Day. 
            Environmentalism has always been controversial and it has been hard for Hollywood to tackle the subject with a clear morality not spoiled by numbers and figures that muddle the mind or power point programs that seem way too obvious to believe. But The Voyage Home works like most films with causes work: because they are subtle and don’t preach to a people who want the message but not at the cost of entertainment. This is why The Voyage Home is such a successful film and Michael Crighton’s State of Fear has never been made into a movie. Punctuating this message is a tense schedule to get the crew home and laughs, laughs, laughs and lots of laughs that Trekkies never forget, always repeat from a masterful script and an overall cheap production. The film is so good that Kirk sitting in his chair giving directions to his crew as they fly back to the sun should be a model for all future films dealing with military rank and protocol execution. It’s quick, not overbearing, and gets you to the next scene without sacrificing screen time which would confuse the audience that such cut would treat as too stupid to follow. And…in the end Kirk got to win his Kobayashi Maru. The crew put themselves at risk in order to save the ‘many’ at the expense of the ‘few’ but they knew their captain would never let them down. He didn’t even let Spock down. The kicker is that nothing less but saving the world would save Kirk and his crew from all of their violations in The Search for Spock but lucky enough for them they’ve done it – twice now in the movies – and are relegated back to where they should be, as Kirk says at the end: “second star to the right, and on ‘till morning.”
            This trilogy is amazing. It has everything you could possibly want in a dramatic space opera without involving light sabers or princesses. The heavy themes of life, death how not to live one (gallivanting around the universe doing what exactly?) and how to cheat them both in order to preserve them for all mankind. Star Wars is fun. It’s exciting. It’s Flash Gordon on steroids, but it is not Shakespeare. Trek is Shakespeare. You can hear it in the lonely trumpet that wails a long trail of notes in the main theme of the film. It is the individual shouting out the need to save the many but recognizing that sometimes sacrifice doesn’t pay off. Such themes are why The 80’s Stark Trek films are the real ‘Second Trilogy.”

FOR THE LOVE OF TEGAN AND SARA PART II

Everything in my body says not tonight. Everything in my body says no.

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED DECEMBER 2015

As a free people in a western world we stand on the precipice of finally being able to comprehend all before us except death. We live our lives with more information on demand now than ever before, understanding the intricate roles of genetics and psychology, the hard facts of physical nature, and we can even funnel most human decisions down to a series of drop-down menus to give us the remaining options that might determine our lives. And at the same time we obsess over this technology to the point where it has controlled us, dumbed us down, made us it’s slave instead of the other way around. Instead of understanding human behavior more, we understand it less because we are interacting with our iPhones more than with other people.  More people are sexting than having sex, and those who are having sex are doing it at great risk despite the open and ready knowledge of the gamble they take on when they take off their clothes. Much of this has led us to make even more absurd assumptions of the nature of humans, their make-up, what they are supposed to be and what we judge by some irresponsible hereditary tribal knowledge to be morally right or wrong as if there was ever such a thing. 

People argue on Facebook whether or not it is morally right for a woman to put her tongue into another woman’s vagina. They argue if it is really ‘gay’ or if is really ‘sex’ or if it really ‘counts’ as opposed to the overt act of penetration males experience. How this conveys to the meaning of life for someone not involved in the act itself is quite beyond my reasoning. Who gives a shit, who is losing sleep, who cares so much about what other people do that they get angry and, after watching Fox News for three hours straight, write homophobic rampaging bullshit on Twitter on what they think is really wrong with the world – in one case, gay sex. In another case, gay marriage. In a third, the weird and bizarre relation they coordinate with bestiality. In this sad reflection of their own mindset, a heterosexual voter with a conservative, even religious, rural background is more likely to have sex with farm animals than a non-voting liberal, secular, urban bohemian lesbian. In this twisted, fucked up world, it becomes acceptable for a straight man to tell a gay woman that if she needs hot dick, to hit him up on Twitter. 

During their So Jealous Tour in 2005, Tegan and Sara Quin, twin sister musicians from Canada, were touring radio stations all over the States in a huge commercial push to make their album go gold. Since their introduction on the scene in 1999 their band, Tegan and Sara, faced the huge media machine that labels as a function of its existence in order to fulfill the innate human desire to categorize everything in an attempt to gain an understanding of the chaos around them. What is this band, exactly? Canadian. Check. Siblings. Check. Twins. Check. Sisters. Check. Attractive women. Check. Lesbians. Check. Got enough things to call them?

You could, if you cared to, download every single song the duo has recorded and listen to it back to back for the ten or so hours it would take you and not once, not fucking once, would you find in all that erotica and well written heart pulling mindfuck of music one instance, one god damned hint, that the Quins were gay. And yet, at this particular radio interview the DJ, whom I am sure had no specific agenda but will hang in the court of public opinion purely because he is a fucking idiot, skips the forgone conclusion of genes splitting off must be so similar as to spark kind replications in DNA instructions and instead asks the Quins, sisters first, musicians second, lesbians probably last, if they have had sexual relations with one another. 

There were three sets of twins in my high school. All six were boys. Two of them were skater trash, another two were heavy metal drug users, and the last were so conformingly boring I don’t even remember their mullet-with-a-rat tail names. When you grow up knowing twins for a decade or so you’ll understand that the likeness is the only thing they share. That in fact, despite online pornography showcasing the Simpson Twins and the Hilton Sisters strongly suggesting or perhaps even coyly hiding a same sex interest in their siblings in a bizarre circus act freak show the fact is, and most obviously, the DNA pretty much stops with the personality, and sexuality is not a character trait. Asking a lesbian twin girl if she would like to have sex with her lesbian twin sister is just as gross and personally upsetting as asking any sibling if they would like to have sex with their sibling, regardless of gender or sexuality. The idea that incest pervades homosexual practice only because it is homosexual is ignorant, insulting and exposes in the questioner a huge gap in knowledge about other human beings – especially if they have siblings. This absurd question is not a lesbian question, it is an incest question, and the only way to show any objectivity is if this moronic DJ then asked every sibling musical act such as The Beach Boys, Oasis, Paramour, Hansen or any other extended list the same question. I’m willing to bet the answer is no. I’ve gone through a lengthy amount of interviews during the White Stripes’ first two tours. Jack and Meg White are a particularly strange scenario as they were divorced, but to keep the media from hounding them about who they were dating and whether they were dating each other again, blatantly lied in junkets and told press they were brother and sister. This went on for years, and not once – not fucking once – did I read in any interview any query that asked this uncomfortable question:

“So, Jack, you’re a guy. And handsome. And Meg…you’re a girl…and attractive. Have you two ever…you know… or have thought about maybe the possibility, even though you two are brother and sister, just once, if you get my meaning… ever had incest?”

I don’t want to seem like Denzel Washington standing in the middle of a court room screaming to the jury “this is really about our fear of homosexuals” most notably because this has nothing to do with fear. This is about one jackass proving to the world just how fucking stupid he or she really is. In a recent poll done by the Canadian government, about ten percent of boys in between the age of 15 and 25 have experienced a same sex experience. This is HUGE, considering for a moment that the homosexual makeup of about any population continues to hover around four percent. More boys are experiencing same sex relationships than are actually gay. On the female side of the poll, the result in the same age group was about half. HALF. So we’re not talking about a few thousand people here in same sex scenarios. We’re talking about a huge percentage of our young population, mostly women, experimenting in lesbian sex to discover if they are lesbian or bisexual or just want to have a good time on Friday night without thinking about labels. As we have experienced a great invasion of technology that I previously mentioned that is driving a lot of this behavior and though it may taper off as a result of being “so second decade to do it with another chick” the fact is the future is not going to see a decrease in sexual activity as young people decide who they are and who they want to be. The nunnery has taken a huge hit the past two centuries and though some may think me crazy, I think it’s only a matter of time before other countries start banning Honor Killings, Sutees, “female circumcision” (which is in reality gender based torture) and some countries might start letting women drive cars, not wear hijabs as a requirement to not burn in hell for eternity and…just maybe…if we wait a few centuries…might even allow them to vote.

Tegan and Sara are just musicians. They play good music. They’re awesome at it. They know how to arrange, how to trust producers, and are pretty good live. These issues in some ways are quite beyond them. They have nothing to do with gender discrimination, same sex hate and these deep issues that affect so many people’s lives. That’s what I thought. Until I went to a concert and I saw a sixteen year old girl standing next to me. It was her first Tegan and Sara concert, she told me, and she started crying. She hadn’t come out to her parents yet, I could tell. But to her, this concert was her coming out party. She could be gay, be herself, for two hours and no one would care – certainly not me. And that’s what a lot of lesbians want. It’s not that they make this entire ruckus for equal rights and as Canadians say “all the rest of it” to make you recognize that they are gay. In a real sense, they want those rights so that you’ll see them like everybody else. You’ll see them and in a sense, you won’t care that they’re gay. It’ll cease to be a thing, a label, a categorization – like them not caring that you’re straight and you not caring that you’re straight yourself - and it’ll only be a world in which people choose to be with other people based on their personal preferences. 

And that’s what Tegan and Sara mean to me.

SCHADENFRUEDE AND THE SHOAH

My early intellectual formation occurred in an atmosphere where nobody paid much attention to moral questions; we were brought up under the assumption: Das Moralische versteht sich von selbst, moral conduct is a matter of course

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED NOVEMBER 2015

In my time in graduate school I was assigned an essay by Susan Sontag titled “Fascinating Fascism” which addressed the dangers of being nostalgic for or having a predilection for anything related to NAZI ideology. This included memorabilia, trophies, even books and films. After bashing Leni Riefenstahl, Sontag turned to Liliana Caviani’s film The Night Porter about a former camp prisoner who falls in love with her guard in a sado-masochistic relationship. Already overloaded with German words like Vergangenheitsbewaltigung – the working through of your past – our professor hit us with a new term to struggle to pronounce: Schadenfreude. 
     Like many words in German there is no direct translation to English. The best one can do is describe Schadenfreude as the taking of pleasure in seeing the misfortune of others. It is used to describe many things about the Third Reich that we as removed generations can never understand. A friend of mine commented in class that he didn’t know what was worse: the fact thatSchadenfreude existed or the fact that the Germans had a word for it. 
     I recently watched a wonderful film on Netflix called Hannah Arendt about the famous, or as others might think, infamous political scientist (others saw her as a philosopher, she did not). The film follows Arendt’s trip to Jerusalem to cover the 1961 trial of SS Officer Adolf Eichmann for the New Yorker Magazine. Eichmann ran the notorious Gestapo department 4BIV (Four-B-Four) which negotiated the settlements and scheduled the trains that rounded up Jews and sent them to their deaths. Arendt, a Jew that escaped a camp in France to immigrate to the United States before the execution of Operation Reinhardt – the named plan for the Holocaust – foresaw what many survivors saw: A monster responsible for unspeakable crimes.
     But in Jerusalem Arendt was instead faced with an average looking man in an average suit struggling with a cold on the first day of his trial – held in Israel after he was kidnapped from hiding in Argentina. As the trial went on Arendt saw a pattern of almost non-behavior. Eichmann used clichés in his speech, spoke very unexceptional German, and seemed wordy even in his written confession which he agreed and signed off on. How was it, Arendt asked herself, that this non-entity, this boring bureaucrat, could amass the murder of millions – a crime he admitted in taped confession and freely written statement before pleading “Not Guilty – in the sense of the indictment?” Her answer was controversial and much more complex than laying out in a blog, or making a 15 minute video for Yad Vashem or even covering it for an entire class on the Holocaust. Eichmann exhibited what Arendt called the Banality of Evil – the terrible normalness of being. Someone so completely conformed to the society around them populated by bureaucrats, rules, paperclips, rubber bands and telegrammed orders in triplicate – that he lost the ability to simply think. 
     The SS was the most feared organ of terror in the Third Reich, and was responsible for the great majority of the worst crimes of the regime. Led by wackos like Heichrich Himmler, the “Riechsfuhrer SS” and the psychopath General Reinhardt Heydrich; populated by paranoid murderers like Rudolf Diels and Heinrich Mueller – Eichmann’s superior – we find it hard to contemplate that underneath such thriving personas deserving of their own biography telling their twisted and demented point of view, are simpleton bureaucrats ‘just following orders.’ Arendt was aware of the uselessness of this defense and she made no excuses for him. In fact, she recognized (contrary to popular belief) that he was an anti-semite who deserved to be hanged (in his own words “as an example to other anti-semites”). 
     Below Eichmann was a horrible structure of concentration camps guarded by some of the most evil people the world had ever produced. Fifty years after the war, German prosecutors never really eager to bring NAZIs to trial, were forced by public opinion to extradite and charge the lowest ranking offenders who had committed the most terrible atrocities of the 20th Century. They had horrible nick names: SS Captain Klaus Barbie was the Butcher of Lyon; SS Doctor Josef Mengele was the Angel of Death; Camp Guard Ilse Koch was The Bitch of Buchenwald; SS Captain Josef Kramer was The Beast of Belsen. In actuality these executioners and masochists reported to Mueller in a different chain of command and Eichmann’s 4BIV with only an office staff had no pool of enforcers to draw from. Their weapon was the telephone, the typewriter, the Fuhrer Order. 
     In between these two levels of unparalleled evil lay an almost undisturbed office tasked with the ‘unpleasantness’ of arranging deportations. Here, the office environment was no different than a bank or any other company. Removed from the camps and the roundups, Eichmann and others like him operated almost in a vacuum aware of what they were doing but not saddled with the character traits or nicknames of the executioners. With the hurricane of the war and the holocaust they were arranging raging all around them, Eichmann and his ilk looked and seemed to many people, including Arendt, as horribly and terribly normal – banal. This didn’t make them any less guilty, especially in Arendt’s eyes, but it did convey the danger of wanting to fit in, of conforming, of not wanting to experience ‘unpleasantness’ which in NAZI propaganda describes their process of ‘Othering’ the Jews. 
     The trial was a forgone conclusion, for everyone, even before it started. Though Arendt noted in her eventual book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil that the prosecution tried to ascribe war crimes to Eichmann that were clearly not his doing (the Einsatzgruppen Squads for example, predated the gas chambers and had no connection to his deportations), Arendt was under no illusion that he was guilty as hell. Damning him forever were tons of documents introduced at the trial in which he ‘cooperated’ with local authorities and reached settlements with Judenrats (the ‘self-governing’ Jewish Councils) and negotiated with ministers and diplomats of the highest level in countries allied with the NAZIs or occupied by them with the single purpose of murdering their Jews. Eichmann claimed many truths – he never ‘killed a Jew, or a non-Jew’ for that matter; he never knew which train was marked for immediate extermination as this was done at the receiving end – but he knew the purpose of what he was doing and admitted verbally and in written form that he assisted in the murder of millions. The fact that he could talk about it in court openly without the reality of what he had done emotionally affecting him like others in the court – the judges, the witnesses, the prosecution, even the defense attorney Dr. Servatius – only underlines Arendt’s point. In the amazing documentary film about the trial,The Specialist, Eichmann can be seen in his glass booth watching film reels of the Holocaust with the most gut wrenching footage. He folds his hands. He plays with his pen. He sniffs. He never thinks. It is easier for him to not think. He doesn’t ever think. He just follows orders. 
     Following orders was always the go-to argument for those who could not talk themselves out of a tight spot, but legally they never had a leg to stand on. Eichmann and others confirmed what many historians pose and believe in which is that a ‘Fuhrer Order’ which is verbal directive from Hitler himself “had the force of law” with nothing else needed. This is why Hitler’s signature has never been found on any document ordering the Final Solution like it has on the controversial Commissar Order or other damning evidence. But regardless of this fact is the long standing German legal tradition of “Unrichtiges Recht” or ‘Unjust Law.’ Germany had like many other western “civilized” nations a clause that protected the morality of the person receiving an order they judged to be wrong: At any time any German military personnel could openly reject an Unjust Law under the legal protection of “Unrichtiges Recht.” Christopher Browning, in his seminal account of regular enlisted men participating in the Holocaust Reserve Police Battalion 101, documents time and again ordinary German soldiers, in this case civilian policemen, refusing to take part in the mass execution of Jews in the East. None of them faced court martial. In the American military this is taught as an “Illegal Order” and troops are instructed never to follow one. 
     In the face of the Unrichtiges Recht and the structure of legal protection afforded to a German citizen the common excuse of following orders falls apart, the excuse that it was policy and had to be done collapses. In the face of increasingly hostile ‘allies’ that see protecting their Jews as the only leverage with the Western Democracies, this becomes indefensible. As the AXIS waned, so did Eichmann’s ability to cut more deals to kill more Jews. But this never meant those organizations had to participate. In France for example, French cops round up the Jews into camps and later departed them to Auschwitz. Victims never saw a German until they reached Poland, and even then they were few and far between – the Poles and the Jews themselves acting as the exterminators. In fact it becomes apparent that almost anyone could have said no. The soldier shooting Jews at Babi Yar, the Kapos bribed into beating their own people, the diplomats communicating with 4BIV, the list is endless. Very rarely were ‘special actions’ or ‘special treatments’ truly carried out by force because of Unrichtiges Recht. High profile examples remain: the Jewish Sondercommando crews who loaded the chambers of Auschwitz and cleared the bodies afterward knew they were next if they did not kill their fellow man. The crews of Sobibor, Treblinka, Mauthausen all faced this certainty. 
     But for a German citizen who didn’t suffer the Statelessness created for the regime’s enemies, this simply was not the case. Finding a Wehrmacht soldier tried for not following orders in the common actions the regular army took against civilians and partisans is very few and far between. In fact, every German General could have said no. Every diplomat, every bureaucrat, every single person in the chain of command regardless of wielding a pen or a Lugar could have said no. The fact that very few did, so few that collecting their names on a few pages is not a problem, condemns all of them, Eichmann included, in Arendt’s eyes and the eyes of history. This predilection to do your duty, a Kantian kind of rule which Eichmann admitted that he adhered to is best summed up by another hard to pronounce or define German word: Kadavergehorsam. Like Schadenfruende it takes a sentence to describe Kadavergehorsam, and the best example is Eichmann himself who on 6 June 1960 told Captain Avner Less, his Israeli interrogator, the following jaw-dropping admission: “Throughout all the days of my life, I was accustomed to obey, from the nursery till 8 May 1945 – an obedience which developed in the years when I belonged to the SS – to a blind obedience, an unconditional obedience.” 
     The trouble for Arendt was two-fold. The first was her assertion of the Banality of Evil, which became immediately contested by other Jews who called her a self-hater, put words in her mouth that she never said, and searched her book for inconsistencies (and found only typos).  Her banality argument, though embraced by political scientists and philosophers as entirely plausible, came under great scrutiny by other Jews and some historians who cited Eichmann’s ‘business trips’ to the Death Camps to witness the exterminations as proof the banality argument was invalid. How could Eichmann be banal if he witnessed the Einstatzgruppen in action, the gassings in action, and still carried on with his job? Wouldn’t this affect him in some way? On top of this is the incredible job Eichmann performed when he was put in charge of deportations in Vienna before the war. Ostensibly he was only supposed to aid the process along but what Eichmann saw was an impossible situation. Jews were shuffled back and forth between dozens of departments that took months to get slips of paper just to go to another building in another part of town to get another piece of paper at a different office in a seemingly endless process to sacrifice their property for a passport out of the country. If the point of the policy was to get as many Jews as possible to leave the Reich (for at this time, after the Anschluss, the Riech included what used to be Austria) then the structure of the bureaucracy did not permit it. Eichmann and his colleagues innovated a streamlined organization on the spot, creating one place where a Jew could practically start in the morning, get all the paperwork he needed, give up all his property and obtain his permission to leave the country in the same day. ‘Deportations’ or ‘forced immigration’ went through the roof and Eichmann shined to his superiors. Does someone who can spur such a bureaucratic revolution really deserve to be called banal? This point has the most credibility and is completely passed over in her work, the film that carries her name, and most criticism of her theory. The other point, that she was trying to use the Banality of Evil to describe all responsible for atrocities is simply not only false, but a stretch of the imagination bordering on a deliberate lying campaign to discredit her. Of course she wasn’t calling sadistic camp guards or trigger happy executioners banal. She restricted it to the bureaucrats and used Eichmann as a model. It is a legitimate criticism to say, given Eichmann’s resume, that he doesn’t fit the model. 
     The second and main reason why Arendt was in trouble was her mentioning the complicity of the Judenrats. The NAZIs organized everything to help them in their quest to make Europe Judenrein – Jew Free. And this included protecting a small group of community leaders to keep order in the midst of the chaos – the Ghettos for example. During the trial, members of the Judenratentestified against Eichmann, undeniably tying his communications with them to the horror of the Shoah. The Judges, who Arendt praises in her first paragraphs as the only good human beings above it all in the trial, were forced several times to remove members of the public due to their angry outbursts directed not at Eichmann, but at those Jews who survived as a result of their dealings with Eichmann. Many of the Judenraten knew of the Holocaust but continued to ‘negotiate’ with Eichmann in an attempt to win favor by trying to mitigate disorder and chaos in the ghettos and, critically, saving themselves in the process. Arendt poses the valid question: What would have happened if the Judenraten, or if all the Jews simply said no? What if they did cause trouble? Most threw her assertion aside as absurd – it was obvious after all, the SS would just destroy all of them. 
     But Arendt’s argument was they were being destroyed anyway so why not fight? Look at the Warsaw Uprising, which most Jews point to as a proud part of their history. The rebellion of the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz, the revolt in Sobibor: All indications point to Jews of all brands being more than capable of taking up arms and causing what was in every case for the NAZI’s – a distraction that temporarily stopped the exterminations and deportations and drew resources away from the war effort. Arendt only brought up theJudenraten because of their introduction in the trial and how their testimony further condemned Eichmann. But she was castigated for it. This happened despite the fact that during the trial the aggressive Attorney General Gideon Hausner prodded each survivor standing as a witness with “why did you not revolt?” He did this implicitly to show how the system Eichmann was a part of was a vast plan, designed to tear down the protective barriers of the Jews over time and in such a way as to strip them of their ability to resist. Arendt’s point of view was easily attacked because it seemed she was attacking the victim – never good in any situation but magnificently worse when there are six million victims. But though their conclusions from the questions were different Arendt and Hausner’s questions was essentially the same. Arendt was singled out for attack because some Jews didn’t like the way she was asking the question as opposed to Hausner. 
     Arendt is often ranked very high in the list of intellectuals of the 20th Century. Mostly this is because her book, On Totalitarianism, spelled out the how the evils of such systems work. There were many rebuttals to her theory of banality that she didn’t consider and some that hold quite a bit of credit. However, these views are often overlooked because of the excellent prose she employs to convey her point. She also had her own issues with banality which she never solved. These issues are hardly ever raised by her enemies when they speak her name in the same vitriolic breath as the contempt she held Eichmann. Instead they focused on phrases she never said, conclusions she never drew and mis-characterized her theory as an outgrowth of her subconscious thoughts regarding her identity as a Jew. These are all unfortunate developments of a people still hurting from an experience so painful it is hard to comprehend. The true tragedy of the controversy were those critics who in their attempt to discredit and silence her, exercisedschadenfreunde in a pattern similar to their own persecutors. This is not what scholarship on the Holocaust is supposed to be about. Not even Denialism in its bankrupt ideology should be subjected to such a twisted and sick concept. Shoah scholarship is supposed to be about Never Forgetting, not trying to silence people who just want to ask the question: Why?