Boys will be Boys, or Just Castrate Me Now, Lord

Another Presidential Candidate brought low by his alleged sexual resume.  What to do?  

Perhaps we should ritually castrate anyone who aspires to higher office. If we rate Presidents now on the strength of their family life, I guess Reagan is out because he was married twice. As for persons like Clinton, what do you make of people who really SHOULD have been divorced and weren't. (Talk about serial adultery).   Franklin Roosevelt was confined to a wheelchair so I am sure his love life was beyond reproach. (I mean, what could he do besides collect stamps?),   Harding fathered a child outside of his marriage. Eisenhower sought relief in the form of his secretary Kay Summersby. The Kennedys, all of them got around the neighborhood with regularity. Nixon on the other hand, so far as I have read, was faithful to his Pat. Carter, on the other hand,  admitted he had sexual thought crimes in an interview with Playboy, when he was running for president. (So glad we got that cleared up before electing him).  .

The sex organs, their existence and use by individuals, should not be held against anyone. (Indeed, you hold them against anyone and you're guilty of some kind of sex crime).   " Sorry officer, I was driving under the influence of testosterone." Unless you are a saint or something you've probably done something or maybe committed thought crimes of some sort that might cause you shame and exemption from polite society.

Unless you are male and master of the universe of course you probably can't know what being away from home, liquored up, and in the presence of some young sweet things does to the mind and better judgment. God help any man with an intact set of organs. God gave us our junk to see to it that the species did not die out. Forgive us. In the future only men from the Vienna Boys choir need apply.

Visiting the Dead

Having a GPS receiver has revolutionized my ability to find and visit old cemeteries.  Using Find-A-Grave.com and google maps, I can often determine the latitude and longitude of any given cemetery.  This is especially important because cemeteries are usually located in out of the way places.  They do not usually occupy prime commercial frontage, although a few of them do.  Small ones are often tucked back of behind subdivisions or on side streets. The explanation for this is not hard to find, since they are often the oldest thing in any given locality.   Cemeteries that were out in the countryside when founded a hundred or a hundred and fifty years ago are often now located in the suburbs or in industrial parks.  There right next to a subdivision, or an industrial warehouse, is a cemetery.  In sight of a McDonalds you have the ancestral dead first planted by the suburban pioneers or billboards hawking the most ephemeral wishes of the living: such as winning the lottery.  

Money, like many things, is of no use to the dead.  They never go anywhere, never see anything, and never go out to eat.  They have no mortgage, no debts, no expenses and no one they have to please.   We, the living are enslaved by our need to keep the physiological conveyor belt going.  Food goes in here, waste goes out there.  We bide our time, we watch our video screens, or read our papers.   We make love, raise our children, we work, we sleep.  None of this makes much sense to the dead.  What could the dead possibly be doing, if anything?  Do they watch the living, as some of us watch TV?  Do they go on vacations to the Bahamas, travel in time, or play tricks on the living?  Do the dead talk among themselves and compare notes?   Do they have axes the grind against us so that when we do arrive in that undiscovered country, do they give us hell, or pat us on the back?   How do you keep the dead off the streets and out of trouble?  Indeed. 


We commonly say that the dead are "in a better place" or "beyond all cares".   It is unbearable to imagine that they are "in a worse place" and not "beyond all cares."   For our loved ones we wish all the best, that they are happy, in whatever sense happiness has any meaning for the dead. For the ones we don't love, well, should we worry about their unhappiness?  Do we need to buy them off?  Can they strike at us and nag us?  I love my dear departed spouse, but I suspect she would give me no end of grief about what a mess my house has become or how I've let certain things, our old friendships, be neglected.    Jeez, I neglect the living as much as I neglect the dead.   Forgive me, there is just one of me.  I do the best I can.  As a living person I have needs.  I need to eat, sleep, and keep myself from losing my mind. It's not always as easy as it seems.   


Anyway I found a cemetery, whose coordinates I had saved in my GPS and, getting behind the wheel of my car, told it to guide me to Elmwood Cemetery, in Elmwood Park, IL.  This is a suburban cemetery, and I attempted to visit it a week ago but they were having a huge funeral attended by it seemed half the police and many of the firemen in the region.  I learned the name of the person who had died a week later, it was a marine name Nicholas Phillips, who had apparently died in Afghanistan.  The fact that this was also Veterans Day might also have entered into it.   Of course I did not know Mr. Phillips, but I honored him with my presence, watched on the roadside as his funeral procession rolled slowly past.  But I did not explore that cemetery, because there was just too much going on over there.  I visited St. Joseph's cemetery instead,  which was right across the street, and it was interesting.  It was an Italian Catholic Cemetery, and I should have gathered that much from the name.     It was not an old cemetery, but one which had ground level markers and large sculptures of the major players in the bible, Jesus, Mary, and the authors of the four gospels.   There were two mausoleums of which I visited one but not the other.  It was an open air thing.  


And of course various markers.  These often included images of Jesus, Mary, the holy family.  Some show Mary with the baby Jesus, sometimes along with Joseph.  Others show Jesus as an adult, preaching, or hanging from the cross, or dragging the cross up Calvary, or with Mary holding her lifeless son in her lap with a look of despair on her face.  You also often see the last supper, the famous fresco by Michelangelo, reproduced in stone. 

All this is kind of predictable.  After visiting cemetery after cemetery it dawns on you that there is a certain industrial sameness to it all.  We all owe God a death.  Apparently we also owe the world a bit of stone, embalming fluid, and maybe a statuette, according to our means.  Real estate being as expensive as it is, many of the dead are going into high rise memorials with a brass plate on a marble wall.  And in monument companies all over America and indeed much of the world, there are tearful widows or widowers being gently guided through catalogs showing various models or looking through showrooms.  I did, and if I had known then what I know now, I would have gotten a better marker for my wife's grave, but it was her death that made me a cemetery tourist, and I've learned a lot about it since then.

Ah, Boredom!

What is boredom?  To be stuck in a time and place where nothing is happening, where you've seen it all and where you are disconnected from any possible interest in what is going on.  Time hangs heavy on the wage slave, paid by the hour.   For example retail on a slow day.  What do you do?   Your behavior is monitored.  You are to be on duty, chiefly, available lest anyone need you, to be attentive.  Or to give another example, to be the guard at the tomb of the unknown soldier.  The soldier is dead, and still will be dead once your shift is over.  What could you possibly think about while marching slowly to and fro?

You are somewhere you don't want to be.  You want to be somewhere you aren't.  Somehow you are here instead.  You have stopped believing that there is anything very rewarding about being where you are, except of course the little matter of being paid to do it.  Your behavior is constrained also by your job description.  You can't read a book, or talk to your friends.  You can't sit down and you can't sleep.

The essence of boredom is being stuck somewhere that is less than inspiring, is bereft of interest, holds no promise or hope for improvement.  There are usually good reasons one cannot leave the situation.  The difficulty of finding a new job, finding a new spouse, finding a new life.  The weight of everything you've done, everything you own, the weight of your whole miserable biography is crushing you.  Things are bad but they could be worse.  Excitement comes at a price, the real possibility of loss, of disruption, disaster.    Is this the best of all possible worlds?  In the words of Peggy Lee, is this all there is? 

As you get older you have fewer and fewer options.  Your past is prelude.  You are no longer viewed as a malleable collection of possibilities.  You are viewed as a rummage sale of consequences.  In a sense you are the same person you were 30 years ago, but instead of everything being easier with time, everything becomes more and more difficult.

There are two things that you might do:  (1) palliate the pain of boredom by making your situation somehow more interesting or (2) go do something else, something you think you might really want to do. 

Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho

(contains spoilers)  In a murder mystery, you know a character is doomed when she is committing adultery and stealing money.  And Janet Leigh (as Marion Crane)  has "doomed" written all over her.  After a tryst with her lover in a nap motel, she is entrusted with $ 40,000 cash at the real estate office in which she works.  Temptation quickly gets the better of her and she absconds with the money.  The guilt of it all disturbs her so much that she is off driving in a distracted state to who knows where.  A policeman wakes her up when she is found pulled over and asleep in the front seat of her car and her evasiveness when questioned quickly convinces him to shadow her.  She hurriedly sells her car and buys a new one at a used car dealership, then keeps driving, finally arriving at the Bates Motel, in the middle of nowhere appropriately arriving on a dark and stormy night.  Norman Bates the hotelkeeper rents her a room. He appears at first to be as innocent as a lamb, his only fault being his over-submissiveness to his mother.  We soon know better however.   He has creepy hobbies, like taxidermy, for example, and he spies on women from from a hole in the wall concealed behind a picture.   As soon as she is in the shower, washing the dirt of her crimes off her, someone sneaks up on her and stabs her to death.  This is of course the famous shower scene.

We are convinced that Norman or his mother or both are guilty of something.   The assailant is not revealed in this first murder.   In a later scene we see the old lady killing the private investigator (Martin Balsam) after he gets a little to close to the truth.   Eventually things unravel between Norman and his mom and the law in a climactic scene in which the twisted truth of the matter is revealed in the cellar.  Afterwards the psychiatrist, after talking to Norman Bates explains everything to the investigators waiting outside, and then cut to Norman Bates, clearly crazy as a loon, thinking to himself.  The end.

The post-game show by the psychiatrist was a bit off-putting and kind of long.  I didn't find it convincing or all that satisfying.  However many mystery movies are like that.  After all the surprises and pyrotechnics are over, it is best to get quickly off the stage, before the viewer begins to reflect on the weaknesses of the plot.

The ending seemed kind of abrupt, but then life is seldom tied up neatly in a bow.  I thought the scene with the psychiatrist was weak, but I guess psychological dramas are usually a bit thin especially when depending on conventional wisdom circa 1960.    For one thing, no psychiatrist would necessarily know so much about the goings on in Norman Bate's mind after just talking to him for a few minutes, especially when he was clearly as sneaky and evasive as he was in the film.   I half expected a more complicated explanation to surface.  But that was it. 

About Cemeteries

What I like about cemeteries

I admit it, I am a cemetery tourist.  I have visited perhaps hundreds by now.  Like people, cemeteries can by large, small, old, young, decrepit, well-maintained, abandoned,  fascinating, boring, creepy, and beautiful.  The Markers vary considerably too, and they vary from the extremely original and spectacular to the mundane and industrial.   I can't say I know much about the cemetery business, but then you can learn a lot by just looking around.  Other stuff is pretty mystifying and may remain always a mystery, because I have neither the resources or the time to track the facts down.   For example, why did the R family and all of the children die on the same day in October?    Why are there husband and wife graves where the husband's name and birth and death dates are there but the wife's are nowhere to be found?  And what of the ones where no birth or death dates are included at all?  Are these just the proactive types who bought their grave and marker long prior to need?  Or did some one not bother to carve the final date on the stone?  Or maybe there was a postmortem falling out, and the surviving spouse decided to move away and be buried somewhere else?   And what happens when the last wishes of the departed are ignored? 

Most cemeteries are free and open to the public.  In areas where there may be crime, cemeteries post hours and have gates and generally want you well out of there before sundown.  Occasionally the cemeteries are locked or have signs telling the public to keep out.  This was the case in Dallas when I wanted to see the grave of Clyde Barrow, the bank robber.  The Western Heights cemetery is in a poor Hispanic neighborhood on the West side.  The grass is dead as are the people interred and probably dried out too, considering the climate.   The cemetery was moderately interesting and I would have stayed longer except I half expected a police car to station itself at the entrance and arrest me as I was technically trespassing.  Apparently visits were controlled by the church.  They had a phone number you could call to inquire about the cemetery, either to see your loved ones, or arrange a burial I guess.  The sign was itself kind of decrepit and the paste-on letters were peeling off.  

I never did find Clyde Barrow's grave.  Bonnie is buried in yet another cemetery elsewhere in the city, and also forbids visitors.    Perhaps they don't want cultists coming by and defacing the graves the way Marie Laveau's grave has suffered in New Orleans.

Eastern Approaches by Fitzroy McLean

Eastern Approaches by Fitzroy Maclean

First Part. (The only part I've read so far)

Fitzroy Maclean was a British diplomat stationed in Paris, but having grown bored with Paris he decided to obtain a transfer to Moscow. This was in the 1930's when Stalin was in charge of the Soviet Union. There he picked up some Russian and on his vacations traveled to Soviet central Asia for no apparent reason except that it was a difficult place to get to and he had a hankering to see some of those exotic out of the way places. That he got away with doing so in a time when it was made clear that these far flung provinces were off limits to foreigners, and when people could be liquidated for so much as being seen talking about the weather with a foreigner (much less a British diplomat) . This was kind of a tribute to his ingenuity. He traveled to Samarkand and the historic old cities of the silk route. He traveled to Afghanistan. He even tried to get into Sinkiang in China, but did not succeed.

The Soviets and the NKVD were naturally suspicious but apparently his faith in his diplomatic immunity kept him safe as he bluffed, intimidated, and wore down minor officialdom that stood in his way. As a result he gained not one but two plainclothes tails that followed him throughout his travels. The fact that their surveillance was something of an open secret and he knew full well who they were , led to some comic moments as he navigated the labyrinth of red tape and difficulties. This part of the book at least is reminiscent of the adventures of Paul Theroux in his books and especially "The Great Railway Bazaar".

He also writes of his witnessing the Moscow show trials of the late 1930s when Stalin systematically destroyed anyone and everyone who could have possibly been a political threat. When his Five Year Plans and economic plans led inevitably to disaster, he inevitably cast about for convenient scapegoats, beginning with Trotsky, through Bukharin, and finally to his own henchmen, Yagoda and Yezhov. People were accused of counter-revolution, of being saboteurs and wreckers, and so the whole nation was in a state of continual terror. Evidence was manufactured, the accused threatened with the destruction of their families, and tortured in the interim between court appearances. All this was fodder for the vast propaganda machine. Above it all was Stalin, the benevolent, the fatherly, who pretended not to know about the horrifying means perpetrated by his underlings, and so was forgiven by the long-suffering Russian and Soviet peoples.

In short it is an excellent book so far. I look forward to finishing it.