Entry 522: This Bird Has Flown

I once had a girl

Or should I say she once had me

She showed me her room

Isn't it good Norwegian wood?

She asked me to stay

And she told me to sit anywhere

So I looked around

And I noticed there wasn't a chair

I sat on a rug biding my time

Drinking her wine

We talked until two and then she said

"It's time for bed"

She told me she worked

In the morning and started to laugh

I told her I didn't

And crawled off to sleep in the bath

And when I awoke I was alone

This bird had flown

So I lit a fire

Isn't it good Norwegian wood?

I was listening to Pandora Radio the other night, as I do sometimes when my podcasts run dry, and the The Beatles song "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)" came on.  I'm very familiar with the song, as I am with most Beatles hits, and I probably could have regurgitated the lyrics on command since age 16 or so, but I never really gave them much thought.  For some reason, though, I started thinking about them this time, and I realized they are pretty awful.  It's a really trite, possibly misogynistic tale.



It's all set to this mystical, Eastern-inspired sitar music, and you're imagining this untouchable, exotic woman who mesmerizes John Lennon with her mysterious ways, before frustratingly vanishing forever.  But if you actually lay out what happens, it's just a dude getting denied in most mundane way possible -- like, it could have been based on any one of hundreds of nights I and my friends had in high school and college.  A guy goes back to a woman's room and sits on the floor (which happens often when you're young, because you're typically hanging out in small, inexpensive residences, without much furniture); he drinks with her for a little while, probably hoping something will happen, but nothing does (she doesn't seem to be into him in that way), and then she gets tired and makes an excuse to go bed; he wakes up in the morning, and she's already left for work.  That's the story.  There's nothing deep or profound about it. 

There are also some parts that don't make much sense.  Why he does he "sleep in bath"?  I would have just gone home.  (I was the type of guy who would walk many miles drunk at two in the morning to get to my own bed.)  If that wasn't an option (he does say he had to "crawl off," so he might have been in exceptionally bad shape), then I would have taken the floor over the bathtub.  I mean, he mentions that she has a rug, at least.  That seems much more comfortable to me than porcelain or whatever bathtubs were made of in 1965.

Also, the lyrics say, "this bird has flown," as if this woman is gone forever, but he's at her place.  Presumably she is going to return at some point later that day.  If he wants to see her again, he could just leave a note, or even stop by to say hi at another time.  She hasn't really "flown"; she just went to work.

After having these thoughts, I did a deep-dive into the song, and I learned that it's supposedly about one of Lennon's extramarital affairs, which makes even less sense.  A key takeaway from the lyrics is that he and this woman don't have sex.  He just drinks her wine and bides his time until it's time for bed.  When does the affair part of the affair happen?  Or is it something else -- like, the woman is actually John's wife at the time, Cynthia?  Or maybe Cynthia is the narrator, and John is the woman.  Her leaving to sleep in the bath is a symbol of them growing apart, and he's the "bird" who "flies" away (to be a rock star), leaving her hurt and alone in her own house.  That, somehow, actually makes the most sense.  And it kinda fits with what Paul McCartney once said about the song:

In our world the guy had to have some sort of revenge. It could have meant I lit a fire to keep myself warm, and wasn't the decor of her house wonderful? But it didn't, it meant I burned the fucking place down as an act of revenge, and then we left it there and went into the instrumental.

Norwegian wood is apparently a slang term for a type of cheap residential siding, and the reference is to watching it easily burn.  But, why would this man have to get revenge?  For what?  If anything, he should be grateful to this woman for sharing her wine.  Is he committing arson because she didn't sleep with him?  That's, uh, disturbing*, and it doesn't tie into the theme of infidelity at all.  The only way it makes any sense is if the "bird" is the one having the affair, and it gets its house burned down because of it.  Aggrieved significant others have started fires for lesser reasons, after all.

*Although, let's not forget John Lennon also famously sang, "I used to be cruel to my woman, I beat her, and kept her apart from the things that she loves."  And apparently this wasn't just poetic license.

So, I think that it's it.  I think I've cracked the code.  In a role reversal, Cynthia is the boy narrating the song and John is the girl who flies.  Either that or it's just a bunch of pablum by a mediocre poet trying to do a Bob Dylan impersonation.  That's also a possibility.

Alright, I think I've spilled enough virtually ink on a 55-year-old recording that's maybe, like, my 103rd favorite Beatles song ever.  So, I think I'll leave it there.  The last thing I'll say is that I first started listening to the Beatles on my own in the early '90s, and they seemed like such a distant band from a such a distant era, but it would be like a kid today listening to Nirvana.  Maybe that's not as weird as The Wonder Years of today being set in 2003, but it's still messes with my head a bit.  The passage of time never does not confound me.

Until next time...

Entry 521: Bad News Day

Not a lot to be cheerful about in the headlines today.  I went to the Washington Post homepage this morning.  The first two stories I saw:

1. 15 women accuse then-Redskin employees of sexual harassment
2. Officials criticized as protesters tell of being detained by agents in unmarked vans

Then, as I was reading these, a breaking news banner ran across the top of my screen: "Justice Ginsberg Being Treated For Cancer Recurrence."

Fantastic.

Oh, and also, plenty of sidebar information about how Covid-19 is still terrorizing the population.  We are actually worse off now than we were before shutdown in many places, which is an awful indictment of our current president and his anti-science worshipers.  A lot of places are even shutting down again, which is the appropriate response.  It's one that was sadly predictable.  Here's what I wrote on this blog about two months ago:

In general, my hunch is that everywhere is going to open up too early, from a public health standpoint, and then places are going to shut back down piecemeal if they are hotspots of resurgence.  This won’t really work, because the damage will already be done by the time one area decides to shut down again, and the virus will already be passed on to the next place.  We are going to carry on in this way -- flare-ups and shutdowns -- until we develop a treatment/vaccine or we build up herd immunity, neither of which is likely to happen anytime soon.  The result is going to be a lot of unnecessary death and sickness.

Lo and behold...

And now we have the Sword of Damocles hanging over us with school set to reopen in the fall.  If we do open schools, it's going to be disaster; if we don't, it's also going to be a disaster.  There is no way to win.  There is only a way to lose the least.  I mean, maybe we could win if we (a) shut down everything again; (b) send people money so that they can scrape by once we shut down everything again; (c) social distance and/or wear masks everywhere, especially indoors.  But even then, it's still too late to safely open up schools as scheduled in many places.  And we are not going to do those three things anyway.

Here in DC, we've actually been managing things reasonably well (or getting lucky).  We only had 39 new cases today and only have 89 people currently hospitalize with coronavirus, which isn't terrible, relatively speaking, for a city of about 600K.  Our trend line is well below its peak and not moving much in either direction.  It seems, at the very least, we've flattened the curve.

For this reason, I was pretty staunchly in favor of sending kids back to school full-time, as scheduled, a few weeks ago when I took a survey on the matter.  I thought the risks of infection were outweighed by the risks of shuttering schools (of which there are many).  However, I've changed my tune quite a bit since then.  Mainly, it's because the virus is still completely out-of-control in other parts of the country.  I mean, we can't wall off our city.  We are one of the most transient regions in the country.  It would be so easy to let our guard down and get slammed again because of it.  It might happen even with our guard up.  That's the thing about exponential growth.  It doesn't take long to completely blow up.  If you take a piece of paper and you fold it over itself repeatedly, so that you double its thickness each time, you know how many times you have to fold it until it stretches from Earth to the Moon?  40.  That's it: 40.

So, I'm no longer in favor of sending kids back to school full-time in the fall.  The most likely scenario is a hybrid, two-days-in-class, three-days-remote schedule, which I guess is fine.  At this point, I'd almost rather just go full-time remote for at the least the first few months, but that might be an unbearable burden for some families.  S and I are very fortunate in that we both have decent paying jobs that allow us a lot of flexibility.  We have time and resources to home-school our children (as much as it sucks, we can do it), and after this is all over, we can hire independent tutors to catch our kids up if they fall behind.  Many parents don't have this luxury and would be devastated if schools shut down.  Not to mention, some children don't have parents or any other accountable adults in the their lives and need school for some semblance stability.

Here's an idea that just popped into my head.  What if we just had in-class instruction for the families who really need it and everybody else did it remotely?  Would that work?  Would it be possible to create workable criteria for "really need it"?  Would teachers go for it?  Would other parents go for it?  I would, but I'm pretty selfless in that way.  I'm perfectly fine paying for public services I don't need.  I'm not saying that to brag or anything like that.  It's just how I am.  I'm plenty selfish in other ways: Don't fuck with my leisure time.

And speaking of leisure time, this session has come to an end.  I need to wrap it up, and help S put the kids to bed.  Then, hopefully we will have a chance to watch an episode or two of our new favorite show: Indian Matchmaking.  It's not exactly world-class TV, but it's fun enough, and it's something we can watch together.  At the very least, it's a distraction from morbid and unsettling news, which is what I want at night.  When it comes to media consumption, the way I stay informed and sane, in times like these, is with my "mullet strategy": news in the morning, entertainment in the evening.

Until next time...

Entry 520: Star Wars, Monopoly, Polls, and Social Media

A bit short on time this weekend, so I'll try to crank out this entry as efficiently as possible.  Too many leisure activities are cutting into my blogging time.  I played trivia last night over Zoom (we had our worst showing -- 10th place out of 26 teams; we usually finish top-5), and then we watched the last Star Wars movie, number nine.  I can't remember the subtitle.  I think it's Star Wars: Same Shit, Different Movie.  We watched all nine movies as a family, so this was the final one.  S and I hadn't even seen it yet.  It's not great.  The entire sequel trilogy is pretty lousy, to be honest.  I mean, not as bad as the prequel trilogy, but still not good, at all.  Derivative, inconsistent, schmaltzy, and too damned long.  (Whatever happened to the 1:55 movie?  Why is everything 2:20 or longer now?)  I wonder if Lucas/Disney would have been better off just spinning it off completely and never doing anything with the original trilogy.  Certainly, they wouldn't have been better off financially -- you could build a real planet-destroying Death Star with the amount of money those movies have made -- but artistically I think they would have been.  I enjoyed both Rogue One and The Mandalorian quite a bit.  Anyway, there's already been more than enough virtual ink spilled on Star Wars over years, so I'll just leave it at that.

I've been playing a lot of Monopoly lately too.  Lil' S1 had gotten into it.  It's a good way to kill an hour as a family.  S will play too sometimes.  Lil' S2 is too little, but we can usually occupy him by letting him roll for us and handle the deeds and houses and stuff.  I used to play Monopoly a lot in high school (seriously), and I got pretty good at it, so usually I'll try to control the game and make it as even/fun as possible.  Like, I'll try to make deals so that everybody has a fair chance, and then it's just whoever gets the lucky rolls will win.  Lil' S1's strategy is to get Boardwalk and Park Place at all cost, which isn't a terrible way to go.  What usually happens is we will play for a while, and then once somebody starts falling behind they'll just quit, which is good, as in Monopoly, you can hopelessly drag things out for hours if you want to.  We implemented the whoever-loses-has-to-clean-up-the-game rule, which has worked out very well.  It helps abate any hurt feelings, and it gives people incentive to concede gracefully.

Man, what a weird time, huh?  We all have to stay home, while the world burns down around us.  I've started sneaking peeks at the presidential election poll numbers, which I told myself I wouldn't do.  I was so into it in 2016, and it was so painful; I vowed not to let that happen this time around.  But I can't help it.  Things just look so good for Biden right now.  It's hard not to check out FiveThirtyEight when I need a little pick-me-up.  I mean, Biden is currently leading the polls in Texas -- Texas! ...  Okay, let's move on to a new topic before I jinx this.  I don't believe in jinxes, but I'm not taking any chances.  I'm Pascal's Wager-ing this one.

I actually pulled the trigger and deleted my Facebook account.  It should be gone from view now, and in a few more weeks it will deleted permanently -- or so Facebook says.  It wouldn't surprise me if it's alive forever on some server farm in The Dalles, Oregon, or something like that, but whatever.  As far as I'm concerned, I'm out.  I recommend it, if you're considering it.  It's nice to not have to feel compelled to check anything and to not have to feel conflicted every time you hear Mark Zuckerberg give his junior-high-libertarian views on free speech and why the massive spread of misinformation is actually good a thing.  Gaming social media algorithms to spread old, out-of-context stories as if they're news is paramount to any free society!

I'm still on Twitter, and my use has gone up quite a bit since I quit Facebook, but on net, my social media usage has dropped.  In fact, my overall screen time was down 20% this week from my average, which is a positive thing.  I've been making a concerted effort to look at screens less.  I got a paper subscription to The New Yorker, and I've been trying to read it during down time instead of staring at my phone.  I'll print out a crossword puzzle and solve it on my clipboard more often now.  And when I want to stream something, I'll cast it to the TV, and it watch it there instead of on my phone.

Part of this is that I don't want to have my face in my phone while I'm with my kids (which is pretty much all the time now).  It feels so disconnecting and isolating.  I feel much more "present" reading an actual magazine than scrolling Twitter on my phone with my kids around.  Also, there's a mental/physical health component to it.  It can't be good for your mental state to be on your phone all the time, and it definitely isn't good for your body.  (I can tell my eyes are getting worse, and I don't think it's just because of age.)  In general, I want to be healthier.  It's one of the few things I can control in this out-of-control time.  Cutting back on screen time is a part of this, as is exercising regularly (back on track after a mild back injury), abstaining for alcohol (I'm down to a drink or two a month now), and eating right.  That last one is the hardest, without question.  I can go a week or so eating healthily, and then I have a night like last night, where it's 12:15 am, and I'm like, Fuck it, I'm hungry; I'm making nachos.  Oh well, nobody's perfect.  If I'm forever doomed to be "Out of Shape In Shape Guy" so be it.

Until next time... 

Entry 519: Tear Down All The Statues And Rename Everything

Statues and buildings are on a lot of people's minds this Independence Day -- sports team names and flags also.  Many monuments paying tribute to the Confederacy have been toppled the past few weeks; colleges are renaming schools so as not to honor known white supremacists; Mississippi is (finally) changing its state flag; and it sounds as if the Washington Professional Football Team and the Cleveland Professional Baseball Team are going to adopt nicknames that aren't pejorative terms for Native Americans.  This all sounds good to me.  I mean, changing symbols is not nearly enough -- I think black people would much rather see things like police brutality and housing discrimination curtailed than see statues toppled and names changed -- but it's something.  It's something we can and should do immediately.  So, I'm all for it.

Here in DC, there is the football team, and also the high school, for which my children are zoned, Woodrow Wilson, is being discussed for a possible name change.  I hope it happens for two reasons: a) Woodrow Wilson was extremely racist -- even by the standards of his time (as laid out in this article, whose headline I copied verbatim); b) nobody is really attached to names.  We might think we care a lot about a particular name -- and some people truly are adamant about "tradition" -- but for the most part once something changes its name, we shrug our shoulders and move on.  Think about how many institutions have changed their names -- every sports arena in the country has changed its name so many times, I literally don't know what most of them are called anymore; my grad school alma mater was previously called Maryland Agricultural College and Maryland State College before adopting the University of Maryland; WWE was WWF when I was a kid.  Go down the line.  Things change.  Names change.  We get over it and adapt quickly, and a new generation is raised that never knew things were any different.  Tradition alone is not a reason to honor a super racist dead president.

As for the football team, a name change is a long time coming.  The team's owner, an absolutely loathsome man by the name of Daniel Snyder, has vowed before that he would never change it, but now it seems as if he will.  Why the change of heart?  Certainly he's feeling pressure from sponsors and fans, but also it's because he wants to build a new stadium in DC, and the city council and mayor have said that that's off the table unless he changes the name.  In theory, this is only a necessary condition for a stadium and not a sufficient condition, but it has me worried.  I don't want a new football stadium built in DC, regardless of the team name.  I'm fine with it if it's privately funded, but that's not how these things ever work.  The NFL does not build new stadiums unless they can somehow rope the public into subsidizing (or paying outright for) it in some way -- a land give-away, a massive tax break, forgivable loans, city-paid stadium "maintenance" fees, etc.  In the worst case, it's a straight-up gift to a greedy billionaire owner; in the best case, it's public risk for private gain.  I'm not down with that -- at all -- and this goes tenfold if Daniel Snyder is involved.

I suspect public opinion has shifted to the point that a plurality favor name changes to things like sports teams names and school buildings (especially in a majority minority city like DC), and probably a majority support tearing down Confederate statues.  Where things get much dicier is when you start talking about slave-owning founding fathers like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.  With the Confederates the case is very straightforward: They believed in white supremacy and the institution of slavery, and also they were traitors who took up arms against the United States.  They were not proud Americans; they were literally enemies of the state.  There is no compelling reason to continue to honor these people.  If you want to play the "rewrite history" card, then let's knock down all the statues and leave their toppled likenesses in place, like the defeated chess pieces they were.*  That would be more historically accurate than portraying them as heroes of a noble cause.

*Not my idea, by the way; I read it on Twitter a few times, first by Jelani Cobb.

Another argument Confederate-iconography apologists make is the "slippery slope" argument: It starts with Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, and then it spreads to other slave-owners like Washington and Jefferson.  And to this I say, Yeah, so?  It's a case where what I believe does not align with what I think is the politically advantageous position.  As a guy writing a blog with a readership in the twenties (on a good day), I say we should stop the deification of our founding fathers and reckon with their evil sides, and this might include removing or changing monuments in their honor.  I don't think most people are there yet, though.  So, as somebody who wants to see Democrats succeed in upcoming elections, I would make the case that we can honor people like Washington and Jefferson, because they united the colonies in freedom and built our country; they were not traitors who instigated a literal civil war.  That's the obvious distinction between them and the Confederates.

But, in truth, it's a flimsy argument, because owning slaves -- forcing other human beings into lifelong servitude for your monetary benefit -- is such an egregiously horrific, immoral act that it's impossible for me to look past it when I consider the totality of the lives and deeds of many of our founding fathers.  It's absolutely indefensible.  It is wrong now and it was wrong then.  Don't let anybody tell you that "everybody was a white supremacist back then" or "people thought slavery was okay back then" because it's not true.  The slaves didn't think it was okay.  The fact that people use this argument shows how we still think of the voices of black people as less than.  "Everybody" tacitly excludes the very people whose oppression we are trying to acknowledge.  It's makes my point for me.  (Not to mention, there were antislavery white people from the beginning.)

One of the main problems is that we have a difficult time as a society of acknowledging that people can be both good and evil simultaneously.  We suffer from "great man" syndrome, but there has never been and will never be a great man.  We want to classify people as "good guys" or "bad guys," but this never works, because it's contrary to human nature.  Take Thomas Jefferson as an example.  He was the primary author of one of the greatest documents in human history.  He also was a slave owner and a rapist.  Those are facts.  He literally owned a sex slave, with whom he fathered several children, and then he enslaved these children -- his children -- after their births.  This is unspeakably evil, but  it's true.  Both sides of Thomas Jefferson -- the good and the bad -- are true.  That's how human beings are.  We need to accept that, and if this means we want to tear down, or at least contextualize, a giant monument in Jefferson's honor, it's completely understandable.

My feeling on this is that we shouldn't build these types of monuments for any specific person.  No real human being is worthy of that type of deification.  (Even fake human beings are problematic; Rocky has a statue in Philly, but he worked for a mobster and basically forced himself on Adrian in the first movie.)  If we want to build these grand tributes to our founding fathers, we should build them based on ideas or moments.  Instead of the Jefferson Memorial, it could be the Monument to the Declaration of Independence, which would obviously feature Jefferson prominently.  The Washington Monument could be the Revolutionary War Monument.  The Lincoln Memorial could be the Emancipation Monument, and along with Lincoln, it could feature the black people who were the true spearhead of the movement.

And, by the way, this doesn't just go for white people; it goes for everybody.  I wouldn't have a Martin Luther King Jr. statue; I would have a Civil Rights Monument, in which MLK would be featured.  That MLK was a hero of the civil rights movement is undeniable and will never change, but it's not out out of the question that our overall perception of him will someday.  We might learn that even somebody as universally revered as Martin Luther King did terrible things in his personal life (rumors to this effect, to which I won't link, because they're unsubstantiated, are already in the ether), because he's a human being, and human beings are sometimes terrible.  (Even Gandhi made his young grandnieces sleep naked with him.)  There is a way we can honor the great deeds of people without shrouding these people in hagiographic mythology.

When I die, don't build a statue of me.  Instead, build a monument to the time my crossword puzzle was accepted in ACPT or the time I solved the Monty Hall Problem in my head in five minutes.  I'm not worthy of deification, but these moments are worth remembering forever.

With all that said...  have a safe and happy Fourth of July.  R-O-C-K in the U-S-A!

Until next time...