What'll It Be, The Forest Or The Trees?

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My Evening With The Cleavers

1958.......What a year.

I've had an active imagination all of my life, and while I've had as many sexual fantasies as anyone else, I can safely say that most of my copious fantasising has had nothing to do with sex.

I have a whole series of "pet fantasies." One of my favorites is the good old "time-warp" fantasy. I get to go back in time like those guys did in that stupid Irwin Allen television show The Time Tunnel back in the 1960s. 



...1966...One of the dumbest TV shows of all time.

  
If you're old enough to remember The Time Tunnel, it was one of the most idiotic shows ever filmed. (Well, everything Irwin Allen did was idiotic; "idiotic" was his trademark.)

On this show, the government was (secretly, it goes without saying) working on a massive boondoggle, "Project Tic-Toc," (underground, in the western desert, of course, you know, where they see all the UFOs?) trying to build a "tunnel" that could transcend time.

As the plot would invariably have it, rumors circulate that the government is about to scrap this project. (I would. Wouldn't ANY taxpayer?)

Then James Darren, (whom those old enough to remember will recall as "Moondoggie" in the "Gidget" movies with Sandra Dee), a young idealist who fervently believes in the project, decides to prove to everyone that it works. So, without permission, he twiddles the dials, dashes into the Time Tunnel, and disappears into the past!

Robert Colbert goes after him, and for one TV season anyway, Whit Bissell and the rest of the gang back in subterranean Arizona try to retrieve these two characters as they, Darren and Colbert, bounce around everywhere from the Titanic to ancient Troy (and I think they meet Billy the Kid somewhere along the way.)

I have had this fantasy, the fantasy of going back in time.

But in my case, the fantasy usually does not involve significant incidents in history. That was one of the most idiotic things about the idiotic Time Tunnel; these guys seemed to always land in some historical spot that was famous, you know, like the deck of the Titanic or the walls of Troy.

They never seemed to land in the middle of some unknown farmer's field in Mesopotamia, circa 4,000 B.C., where nothing special was going on except cows shitting.

My time-warp fantasy only has one significant historical locus: I wonder how I could have messed with history if I had been in Pontius Pilate's position in first century Judaea.

Knowing what I do about Roman history -- and I have studied it -- I could see myself refusing to turn Jesus over to that mob..."just to be a prick," as my father used to say.

"Who's procurator here? You or me?" I could hear myself shouting.  "Beat it, all of yiz! Hit the bricks!"

Then we'd see how Jesus, determined to get himself crucified, would get me out of his way. (Or if he'd even bother.) I could see myself putting him under my protection, inviting him to have supper, maybe even washing his feet (just to be a smartass.)

About that time, God the Father would probably strike me dead with a thunderbolt for screwing with his plans, (again, just to get this nuisance out of the way.)

But if you gotta go, tweaking God's nose can't be beat as a great way to do it.

Besides, dammit, I'm an American. I have a better sense of justice than the Romans did. And Jesus was innocent of any crime! I'd like to think I would have told the lynch mob to get lost. You know, faced 'em down, like Wyatt Earp. Or John Wayne, Or one of those cool guys.

Anyway...

Hugh Beaumont (1909-1981) played the father,
Ward Cleaver, on the TV series Leave It To Beaver.

My favorite fantasy is the one where I go back in time, not to some big event like the Crucifixion or the Titanic, but to some imaginary scenario where I get to fill in the chronological "locals" on stuff that's going to happen in the future. Not the big stuff, usually: the small stuff.

But, then again, the small stuff often IS the big stuff, isn't it? Who, in 1876, thought that this new gadget the telephone was going to redefine modern life?

Who suspected that the internal combustion engine was going to make the blacksmith, a town-and-village fixture for centuries, into a man looking for a job?

Ask any twentysomething today what the word "blacksmith" even meant. They won't be able to tell you, because they don't know. They don't know anything. They weren't taught anything in school except that they should have high self-esteem.

Barbara Billingsley (1915-2010) played the
mother, June Cleaver, on Leave It To Beaver.

Twentysomethings know how to send text messages, and they know how to play games on their cellphones. Oh, and they can identify Ricky Martin and Jennifer Lopez.

That's about all they know -- I'd be willing to bet most of them never even heard of Alexander Graham Bell, who invented the prototype of that very gadget on which they're now breathlessly telling their friends, "OMG! Jessi told Sarah that Ashley likes Mason, lol!!!"

Yecch.

Okay, now that I got that out of the way, here's my fantasy:

I follow Darren and Colbert into the Time Tunnel, and after the requisite pops and bursts of smoke to show that Project Tic-Toc still isn't working right, I'm deposited into ...

the living room of Ward and June Cleaver on Leave It To Beaver, circa 1958. The Cleavers were very nice people, and if I had to land somewhere in the past, I think I would just as soon it be the Cleavers' living room as Golgotha. We could even do a Pleasantville thing here, and I could appear in black-and-white, like Ward and June themselves.

In fact, that might make it even more fun.

They wonder who I am and where I come from. I'm not sure myself. But we could borrow a page from The Time Tunnel and have Ward and June remark, (sotto voce to each other of course because they're too polite to offend me) that I'm dressed strangely: they're not used to seeing an adult wearing blue jeans and a San Diego Padres T-shirt -- suits and ties are all they ever see men wearing. (Besides, in 1958 the San Diego Padres were still a Pacific Coast League team and the Cleavers probably never heard of them.)

But they quickly perceive that I'm as harmless as I am dazed, and June offers me coffee. I don't want them to think I'm crazy and call the butterfly-net boys, so I'm not going to come right out and tell them that I appeared out of the future. They'd never understand Project Tic-Toc. I still don't. Still, they can't help but notice that there's something a tad unusual about me.

Thinking quickly, (which I've never been able to do, by the way) I tell them that I'm on the faculty of -- quick, what state was Mayfield, the Cleavers' home town in? I always thought Illinois, but the show never said so -- uh...State University. (There's a nice generic term.) We've been doing some research on a government contract (very hush-hush, like every stupid, idiotic, wasteful thing the government does) and...uh...uh....that's how I came to be here. Can't tell you much more than that.

"How do you take your coffee, Mr. Dupuis?" June politely asks.

"Black, thank you," I reply, shaking my head theatrically to emphasise that I'm still a little bit dazed. "I'll just call and have someone come get me, if you'll tell me your address."

Here I pull my first faux-pas: I reach for my cellphone.

This is now considered an antique. But prior to 1970,
just about every telephone in America looked like this,
except the wall units, of course.

"What is THAT thing?" Ward asks. My flip-phone looks a little like one of the communicators from Star Trek, but Star Trek itself is still eight years away.

"Oh, THIS thing?" I say, hastily shoving it back into my pocket. "It's a....a cigarette lighter. I forgot for a moment that I gave up smoking."

I think of asking to use their good old, standard black Bell Telephone unit, but who would I call? "We've no place to go in this time," as I remember Scotty telling Captain Kirk on an episode of Star Trek in which the U.S.S. Enterprise found itself in a time-warp situation similar to this one, only they weren't being hosted by the Cleavers. (Come to think of it, that might have been a lot of fun, too.)

June offers me more coffee.

"Well, Kelley," says Ward, humoring this goddamn nut in his living room, "What sort of research are you involved with, up there at State University?" (Or down there, as the case may be.)

"Uh, well, it's....uh, electronics."

"Electronics, really?"

"Yup," I sip my coffee, trying frantically to think of how I'm going to con my way out of this.

"Well, what can you tell us about the electronic world of the future?" Ward asks, with that feigned chuckle he used to use on the show when he was more anxious than amused.

"Yes, Kelley," June chimes in, ever the faithful spouse-as-sidekick, "What wonders are you electronic geniuses cooking up?"

Geniuses? Oh, yeah! Us guys! Well, okay, uh....

At this point there's no longer any question of my being able to bullshit these nice people. I might as well just uncork the whole nauseating vision and let them call the loony bin.

"Let's see. As of this year, the transistor has already replaced the vacuum tube. That was a step forward, obviously. We no longer have to wait five minutes for our radios and television sets to warm up, and don't have to worry about them overheating either. But...um, um, let's see. Well, we're working on a concept (yeah, right: Bill Gates was three years old in 1958, in fact he's two weeks younger than I), we call the "microchip." It's going to replace the transistor."

"Really? 'Microchip?' " says Ward politely. "What in the world could that be?"

"Believe it or not, it's going to be, if we ever get it developed, a sliver of silicon smaller than your pinkie fingernail, which will hold more information than any of today's (1958's) room-sized computers. Computers are going to get smaller and smaller and faster and faster in the decades ahead of us. You'll live to see it. At least one of you will live to see a day when the computer is as accepted a part of the average American household as the TV set is now."


In the 1950s, laptop computers
were still some distance away.


"Which one of us will live to see it?" June asks.

I blanch, then panic. "Even if I knew when someone was gonna die, I wouldn't tell them, and I don't claim to know," I add hastily. (Barbara Billingsley outlived Hugh Beaumont by close to 30 years.)

Geez, if I claimed to know when these people were going to die, one of them would call 911 immediately, were it not for the fact that in 1958 there was no such thing as 911.

"You guys are working on a silicon chip that will make computers that small?" Ward asks.

Ooh. Who the hell are 'us guys?'  I stir my coffee.  "Well, it's only at the talking stage. Nobody's actually tried developing any such thing. It's just something we, you know, yak about over coffee." I'm hoping this establishes my bona fides as a sane person, distracting the poor Cleavers from the fact that I just dropped out of The Time Tunnel and into their living room.

"But it is possible?" Ward presses me.

"Yeah, theoretically, it is. It's just that nobody's figured out a way to do it yet." And wouldn't, for another 15 years or so. "But if and when it does happen, I think it's going to really change the way we live. Imagine a world in which you can sit down in your living room and access, well, basically, the entire Library of Congress. I mean, everything will be out there, and all you'll have to do is type a few words on a keyboard, and there it is."

"Unbelievable," says June.

"Yes. But it's coming. I really think it's coming. Your sons, Wally and Beaver, (how do I explain knowing who THEY are?) will watch their own children cheating on their homework by copying stuff off the Internet, you know, the way kids copy stuff out of the encyclopedia now."

"Internet?" says Ward.

About this time, I'm wishing that the guys back in Arizona would get that Time Tunnel gadget working again and zap me to ... well, probably the wrong place. But I'd rather be telling Napoleon that he'd better postpone Waterloo than try to explain to these people about the Internet.

Still ... this is kind of fun. I ask June for some more coffee. She's a wonderful hostess. She not only brings me more coffee, but a cinnamon roll, baked just that morning at the Mayfield Bakery, to go with it.

"Thank you," I say to her. "By the way, do you really do housework in high heels?"

"No, but the network insists that I wear them," she replies. "Their reasoning is, in another season or two, Jerry and Tony are both going to be taller than I am, and they don't want me to look like the boys' kid sister."

I knew there had to be a reason.

Ward's still humoring me. "Are we going to see things like flying cars and space travel?"



I had to tell Ward Cleaver that we haven't seen anything like
this yet, and probably won't.

"Space travel, yes. In fact as you're well aware, the Soviets put a satellite in orbit just last fall.

Will men walk on the moon? Yes, and the Americans get there first. You'll both live to see that. But it didn't last long. After a few moon-landing missions, Congress cut off the money and, as of the early 21st century, man has not been back to the moon in some 30 years. There's just a lot of junk lying around up there that we left, including a golf ball. Yeah, one smart-aleck astronaut decided he just had to experience what it would be like to hit a golf ball on the moon. He did it, and in one-sixth gravity, the thing carried probably farther than one of Babe Ruth's home runs.

"Flying cars? No. In fact, you'd be surprised at how little the technology of the automobile is actually going to change in the next 50 years. I mean sure, there will be design and engineering changes, reflecting, among other things, an outrageous increase in the price of gasoline which makes people want more fuel-efficient cars. But the car of 2008 is still essentially the car of 1958, just without the fins. It's a thing that burns gasoline, and gets you a speeding ticket if you're not careful.

Air travel is with us to stay. In fact by the mid-1960s nobody, in the United States anyway, travels by train anymore, or crosses the Atlantic on an ocean liner. They fly. It's faster. It already is. That's not to say the railroads and shipping companies will go out of business; of course they don't. They just sort of get themselves out of the passenger business and concentrate on the freight business instead. Because believe it or not, in the year 2000, the steel wheel on the steel rail is still the most efficient way to move large amounts of freight. And as for ocean ships, well, if you have 250 automobiles manufactured in Japan, and you want to get them to San Francisco, sticking them on an enormous freighter is a better idea than flying them over one at a time. So trains and ships are still with us, even though for most people, travel of more than a couple of hundred miles usually involves an airplane, not a train or a ship. There are cruise ships, but that's just for people who want to take expensive vacations.There's a federally-subsidized passenger rail service called Amtrak, which seems to stay with us year after year although it loses money like a sieve. Basically it operates between Washington D.C. and Boston. It's not efficient anywhere else; America's just too big for trains. Everyone flies."

About this time, Ward starts to get seriously suspicious.


How I might have landed in the Cleavers' living
room.

"Mister," he asks me, "where did you come from? I mean, June, Beaver, Wally and I just finished dinner; the boys are upstairs doing their homework, and all of a sudden here you are in our living room. You're not dressed like anyone I ever saw -- I know where San Diego is, but who the heck are the 'Padres?' -- and I didn't even hear the doorbell ring. How did you get here?"

Sigh. I can't tell them about Project Tic-Toc.  "Have you ever heard of a 'wormhole?'" I ask.

"No."

"It's a concept in physics. Theoretically, it's possible for someone to move from one time to another. I think I might have encountered one. It wasn't my idea, believe me. I wasn't trying to travel in time, it just happened. Ten minutes ago I was in the year 2011, now here I am in 1958.

"Now, BEFORE you call the cops, let me show you something!" (Thank God, my wallet is still on me.) This is my WALLET I'm pulling out, folks. It is NOT a gun! I don't own a gun!"

I pull out my driver's license. "Look at that," I say, handing it to June, who looks at it and then, with the same astonished look on her face she had when Wally and the Beav came down to dinner wearing stocking caps in the episode where Wally gave Beaver a haircut and just about scalped him, hands it to Ward.

"That's my driver's license, issued by the State of California," I say.  "Look at the dates on it. It gives my date of birth as October 12, 1955. It expires on October 12, 2015. Now, according to that driver's license I'm not yet three years old. But look at me, I wouldn't carry around a thing like that as a gag. My sense of humor isn't that weird."

"So, you..." Ward begins

"I'm thinking I stumbled into a wormhole," I say. "Don't ask me. We've been messing with some things up there (or down there) at State University that even I don't understand. All I know is what I just told you. Ten minutes ago I was in the year 2011. Now I'm here in '58. By the way, is Groucho Marx on tonight? You Bet Your Life? That's still on, isn't it?"

"Yes, but not tonight," Ward says.

"Well, I'm sorry. As you can see from my driver's license, in 1958 I was not yet three years old. I've seen some of the old shows, but mostly I only remember them from DVD or videotape."

"I've heard of videotape, but what is DVD?" June asks.

"Oh, it's not even worth getting into," I say. "Just a gadget. It stands for 'Digital Video Disc.' Just a gadget."

Ward hands me back my driver's license. "You...you're really from the future?"

"It would seem so. Your future, not mine. I could tell you the year you're going to die, but I won't. Don't worry -- it isn't for a long time yet. You're going to be around for quite a few more years. My own date of death I don't know. That's part of my future, not yours. So...You gonna call the cops and have me picked up?"

"I don't see why," Ward says. "You may be nutty, but you seem perfectly calm. You're not raving. Finish your coffee. Then we'll decide what we should do next."

"Thanks, I appreciate that."

June straightens her dress. "Well," she says, "assuming this crazy story is true, and you did just....land here from somewhere in the future, tell us...what is life in the future going to be like?"

"Not as different as you might imagine," I say, thankful that they're not running into the street screaming for the National Guard. "We have more gadgets, and things move a bit faster, but basically, life in the early 21st century is still just life. People get up, go to work or school and come home just as they do now. They get married, have children and die, just as they do now."

"What about the Cold War?" Ward asks. "Did either side ever win?"

"Our side did. But not the way you might imagine. There was never a Third World War, although plenty of people were predicting it. The Soviet Union was never conquered, it just ran out of money. The USSR shut down in 1991. Incredible as it may seem, the map of eastern Europe in 1992 looks pretty much like the map of eastern Europe in 1912. The Russians simply realized that they couldn't afford to maintain an empire anymore. They were running out of oil money -- oil, that's what modern history is really all about. Some historians think the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor because they were afraid that American naval power might threaten their sources of oil in southeast Asia.

"Anyway, the USSR officially went out of business on Christmas Day, 1991. After that it was just Russia again."

"Does Russia become a democracy?" June asks.

"Not the way you and I understand it, no. Russia in 2011 is basically being run by a tightly-insulated circle of crooks, mainly for their own benefit. But they're no longer trying to convert the world to an idealogy, like the Soviets were. They're just stealing fortunes for themselves. But the Iron Curtain came down. Stalin's idea of sealing off Russia from the rest of the world turned out to be just too expensive."

"And the Red Chinese?" Ward asks.

"Oh, yeah. China. China made its own particular deal with the devil. China in the early 21st century is still officially a communist country. There's no political freedom there. But economic freedom, well, that's another story. The Coca-Cola company, believe it or not, moved into China in 1978. By 2000 China was swarming with private companies, making money like crazy, and the Chinese government went along with it, because they were making money too. And being essentially a slave economy, China became for western companies -- guess what? -- a source of cheap labor. Today, in 1958, 'Made In Japan' is the sobriquet for cheap goods, right? By 2005, 'Made in China' has replaced 'Made in Japan' as that sobriquet. 'Made in China,' 'Made in Bangladesh,' anywhere companies can get buck-an-hour labor."

"Where in the heck is 'Bangladesh?'" Ward asks.

"Oh, that's uh...I think today it's called East Pakistan. It broke away and became a separate country around 1970 or so. A number of countries in south Asia and Africa are going to get new names as colonialism sort of recedes. Can I think of some more? Uh, what's now Upper Volta is going to become Burkina Faso. Rhodesia becomes Zimbabwe. A lot of those countries renamed themselves when they gained independence. South Africa is still South Africa, but they finally got rid of apartheid."

"Apartheid? What on earth is that?" June asks, her pearl necklace jiggling.

"Official policy of racial segregation. You never heard of it? It's like what we have in Mississippi now, in 1958. Well, A lot of people in the United States are going to start raising hell, just a few years from now, about racial segregation here -- it's already started, in fact; you may have read in the papers a few years ago about Brown vs. Board of Education in, I think it was, Topeka? That's just the beginning. There's a lot more of that coming. Segregation in the American south is going to be done away with after much, MUCH trouble, and the same in South Africa, only it takes longer. But Nelson Mandela, a black guy who kind of spearheaded the campaign against apartheid in that country, after spending a lot of time in prison, wound up as South Africa's president before he died. History pulls funny stuff that way." (I almost said "funny shit," but then remembered who I was talking to.)

How do I explain 900-channel cable
TV to Ward & June?

"Kelley, you said something about life going 'faster,'" Ward says. "What did you mean by that? Were you talking about everyone traveling by plane instead of by train, or what?"

"That's just part of it," I explain. "Mostly, the speeding-up of life results from all those damned gadgets I just mentioned. Okay, look..." I reach back into my pocket. "This isn't really a cigarette lighter," I say, brandishing my Verizon flip-phone. "This is a telephone. Here, look at it," I hand it to Ward.

"This little thing is a telephone? But it's not connected to anything! Where's the cord?"

"It doesn't need one."

"But how on earth does it...work?"

"Today, in 1958, it doesn't. That thing's just a paperweight in this world. And I almost wish it would remain one, because if you ask me, the cellular telephone was the most obnoxious invention of all time. Essentially what happened was, they created a global network of microwave systems, and these tiny telephones work by means of those microwave networks. In 2011 you can make a phone call from your car as easily as you make one from your kitchen now. And a lot of idiots do, and it causes a lot of traffic accidents. Convenience encourages stupidity. People do stupid things because they can. Imagine being on the subway -- and in 2011 we do still have subways -- and being forced to listen to some idiot sitting next to you, having an argument with his wife on the telephone. Happens all the time. I hate those damn things. I wish I didn't have it. I'm glad I'm in '58 for the moment, where the stupid thing doesn't work."

"So...People are making telephone calls from their cars, and on the subway," Ward says. "I can see where that might get to be a problem."

"You have no idea," I say, rolling my eyeballs.

"What else makes life...faster in your time?"

"Television is a biggie."

"Yes, yes. Tell us what's going to happen with television."

"Oh, you don't want to know. It just gets worse and worse, because there's more and more of it, and it's all the same garbage," I say. "Starting about half a dozen years from now, something called 'cable' begins creeping into our lives. We folks here in '58 all have antennas on our roofs, and we get NBC, CBS and ABC and that's about it. Look at any suburb from an airplane and it looks like a chicken coop, all those antennas on all those houses. Well, the antennas gradually start to disappear as cable services become available. They will hook a cable up to your TV set and you'll be able to get more channels. Of course, you have to pay for that, like you would a magazine subscription, but over the years it greatly increases the number of channels everyone is able to get. The two things feed each other: the more cable, the more channels. By 2011 you can hook up to maybe 900 channels. But it's all the same old trash. It's just that there's so much more of it, it becomes specialized to an incredible degree. Ward, do you like to play golf?"

"Yes, I do play on the weekend sometimes."

"Well, by 2000 there's a Golf Channel. You can just watch golf all the time if you want. There's also a cooking channel, a real estate channel, a couple of channels just for women" -- I nod at June -- "a channel for African-Ameri- sorry, I think here in '58 we still call them 'negroes,' -- a channel for surgery...you name it, it's sickening. Because it has totally fragmented our society. In 1958 almost everybody watches The Ed Sullivan Show on Sunday night. By 2005 no two people are watching the same channel at any given time. Everyone's just watching the channel that panders to their particular interest. A country in which 900 people are watching 900 different channels is no longer a country.

"But you asked about the speeding-up of life. Television advertising time eventually gets so expensive that commercials get shorter and shorter and louder and louder. In 2010 I watched an old film of some television commercials from 1963. That was the year Leave It To Beaver went off the air, by way."

"We're going to lose our jobs in 1963?" June asks.

"Yeah, but don't worry about it," I say. "You'll both find plenty of work. So will Jerry and Tony. Anyhow, when I watched these 1963 television commercials from 2005, I couldn't get over how slow they were. TV still hadn't completely severed the umbilical cord that attached it to 1940s radio, and television ads were as leisurely in 1963 as radio ads had been after the Second World War. It wasn't unusual in 1963 for a TV ad to go on for two full minutes. By 2005 that was long, long past. TV advertising time is so expensive in the 21st century, and people's attention spans are so short, that advertisers have basically 15 seconds to BLAST their message at you, and believe me, they do. It's one of the reasons I stopped watching TV."

"I almost hate to ask this, but...in 2010, is there still baseball?" Ward asks.

"You might wish there weren't," I reply. "Yes, there is still baseball. There is still Major League Baseball. In fact, this T-shirt I'm wearing, which I'm sure you wondered about? The San Diego Padres, who are currently in the Pacific Coast League, joined the National League as an expansion team in 1969. Since Mayfield is (I think) in Illinois, correct me if I'm wrong...(Ward and June both turn away, embarassed--they're not sure where Mayfield is, either), you probably never heard of the Padres. Well, Ward, if you're a baseball fan, you have heard of Ted Williams. He played for the San Diego Padres in the 1930s before he signed with the Red Sox. He's going to retire in 1960, and hit a home run in his last game, by the way.

"But baseball will look much different in the future. The 'reserve clause,' which has kept players in a state of virtual serfdom for more than 50 years, owned by their teams and unable to improve their lot, was abolished in 1974. After that, player salaries skyrocketed to such heights that fans began to complain. When a pitcher like Kevin Brown signs a contract with the Dodgers for $100 million --"

"$100 million?" Ward's eyeballs just about pop out. "Well, when they moved to Los Angeles last year, I could have predicted something like that would happen. But $100 million???"

"Keep in mind, Mr. Cleaver, that $100 million in the currency of the year 2000 is considerably less than $100 million dollars here in 1958," I say. "History, as Will Durant said, is inflationary. Money always gets cheaper. By 2000, a dollar won't buy what a quarter will now."

"Still. $100 million dollars?"

"Yes. Even in the year 2000, some eyebrows went up. But Brown's payoff was spread over a seven-year contract, and as so often happens when ballplayers sign these 'monster' contracts, he promptly disintegrated as a pitcher. The game remains the same, by which I mean there are still nine players on the field, and four bases 90 feet apart. But by 2011 there are 15 teams in each league, the American and the National, stretching all the way from Miami to Seattle. That means divisions, and playoffs. The World Series is still played where I come from -- in 2011 the St. Louis Cardinals beat the Texas Rangers -- but with all the additional teams and the layers of playoffs, the Series is played close to Halloween, rather than in early October as it always has been."

"Doesn't it get COLD?"

"Yes. Sometimes, when you're watching a World Series game on television in 2011, the camera will pan across the audience and they'll all be so bundled up you'd think you were watching a football game."

"And the players?"

"They put up with it. After all, they're being paid millions. And it is TV."

"Like this."

"Yeah."

Beware The Ear-Worm

I have but one request of Him, Her or It:

With death, deliver silence.

By which I mean, no more popular songs.

I'd like some peace and quiet. And by peace and quiet I mean, freedom from "the ear worm."

You who are under 45, and who go around with those idiot "pods" stuck in your ears all the time,
You're gonna get it, too.

I know.

We know. We old folks. All of us over 50, who grew up listening to the radio, are already getting it. And we didn't even have pods in our ears.



This is what we had, not ear pods. But when
it comes to getting a tune stuck in your head,
they were just as effective.

During the 1960s, the "transistor radio" was how many of us heard the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and...well,  Sopwith Camel and other third-rate acts.

Salvador Dali painted a picture in 1931 entitled The Persistence of Memory. Dali is not my favorite artist, but go look at this picture. You can Google it.


Every time the ear-worm gets into my head, I think of that painting.

And it doesn't take much, for anyone of my generation who has any memory at all, to fall victim to the ear-worm.

What is the ear-worm? It is a popular tune, or an advertising jingle, or anything else you heard a billion times many years ago, which comes back to haunt you. It gets stuck in your head, like a piece of what used to be called audiotape "in loop," and it plays, in your head, over and over and over and over and over until you're ready to scream.

Let me just tell you a little story, since I'm so full of stories (not to mention other things.)

This is just an example. I could tell you a thousand stories like this one. But this one relates to Tbilisi, where I am living at the moment, teaching English to Georgian children.

Last Tuesday one of my students, a precious little girl named Nino ("Nino" is a common name for girls in Georgia) handed me a tangerine. My kids are always handing me, and my fellow-teachers, candy, nuts, fruit and other small goodies. The kids here don't get a formal "lunch period;" they just kind of eat between classes, and they always seem to have snacks in their pockets.

Nino is one of my favorite people, and absolutely one of my worst students. She's phenomenally scatter-brained. Can't remember to do anything, including her homework.

Nino reminds me of Eva Gabor's character, Lisa Douglas, on the old TV show Green Acres. She's that ditsy. She knows, for example, the English words "cat" and "dog" perfectly well, but she will stare at a picture of a cat or a dog for ten minutes without being able to tell me what it is. Sometimes the switch just goes to the "off" position and she's temporarily dead from the neck up.

But Nino also has rosy cheeks and big blue eyes, and therefore I am as much her prisoner as I am the old guy who tut-tuts at her for not doing her homework.

Anyhow, Nino handed me a tangerine. They grow them here in Georgia. In fact Georgia produces a lot of fresh fruit, which somewhat surprises me because, although Georgia is nowhere near as cold as Russia, this is mountainous country and it does snow here. I'm from California, and tend to associate fresh fruit with warmer climates than Georgia's.

The tangerine Nino handed me was more green than orange, underripe and more tart than sweet. But I ate it, because I hadn't had any fresh fruit that day.

But the tangerine's ripeness and/or taste are not the reason I'm writing this. The reason I'm writing this is because of what the tangerine did to my head. (Never mind Nino; she messes with my head during every class.)

The persistence of memory. Key words will trigger things. I'm awful this way, maybe worse than most of my generation. But a key word, with me, is like punching a button. And then that tape starts to play. And won't shut up.

In this case it involved a perfectly awful, long-ago-forgotten popular song. The problem is, when I was a child in the 1960s, American AM radio had a format called Top 40, which meant they played the same 40 records over and over and over and over and over. Like my classmates (when I was Nino's age) I listened to Top 40 radio. Bad decision for later life. Because when you've heard a song (or for that matter, a commercial) 10,000 times in your childhood, there ain't no getting rid of it.




\The 1960s making fun of the 1930s. It was so hip.

Hence, when Nino handed me this tangerine, my stupid brain began playing Hello, Hello.

This was a dumb, campy record, recorded in 1966 by a group called Sopwith Camel.

Poking fun at the 1920s and 1930s was popular in the 1960s, when the 20's and 30's were considered hopelessly hokey by the twentysomethings of 1966 whose male members anyway were being drafted for, and didn't want to go to, Vietnam.

As part of their rebellion against their parents' generation, which as they saw it was sending them to Vietnam, the twentysomethings of that era considered their parents' music good mainly for laughs (laughter being the best form of defiance.)

In this spirit, Sopwith Camel (which never had another hit record than I knew of) recorded Hello, Hello.

The actual, original Sopwith Camel, by the way, was an airplane, as the above paper wrapper from a 1967 45-rpm pressing of this dumb song shows. It was a biplane, a two-winger, used by the British Royal Air Force as a fighter plane during World War I, the first war in which airplanes were used for military purposes.

For the LSD-and-pot crowd of 1966-67, World War I (or actually, anything prior to that crowd's own childhood) was the campy "olden days."

With tinny instrumental accompaniment and an equally tinny leading voice intended to imply the sound of the 78-rpm records of the 1920's, the song went like this:

Hello, hello,

I like your smile.

Hello, hello,

Shall we talk a while?

Would you like some of my tangerines?

I know I'd never treat you mean.


Cute, huh? Stupid is the word. But everyone was on drugs in those days, and it was a smash hit. When I was 11 years old, I heard this song maybe 34,756 times on Top 40 radio. Just goes to show you, it wasn't all Strawberry Fields Forever and Penny Lane in those days. There was a lot of garbage too. Anybody remember the 1910 Fruitgum Company? They were to pop music what cotton candy is to protein.

And after Nino handed me that underripe tangerine last Tuesday, this damned song, Hello, Hello was stuck in my head for the rest of the afternoon. 45 years after it hit the airwaves. All because it had the word "tangerines" in it.

Memory is a devil. Against it, I have a mental device of which I make use regularly. I call it "The Block." "The Block" is an old jingle for Juicy Fruit chewing gum, dating from the 1970s. It's a round, you know, like Row, row, row your boat: "Let's pick a pack/Of Juicy Fruit gum,/Let's pick a pack/From the Juicy Fruit tree,/'Cause the flavor's so good/Ya gotta have some;/ Just pick a pack and you'll see... "Pick a pack! What a happy flavor! Juicy Fruit! What a happy feeling!" Then it starts again. I make use of The Block when I have something else that's driving me crazy, usually late at night when I'm trying to sleep.

In other words, I swap ear-worm for ear-worm, kind of like taking a shot of methadone instead of heroin.

The Juicy Fruit gum jingle is so old and familiar to me (it kept me awake itself in the 1970s) that I can invoke it to drive away another persistent tune, and then it just sort of goes away by itself. I need The Block because there are so many tunes that have bad mental associations for me, they will keep me awake for that reason alone. The Block is harmless. A chewing gum ad? How many bad memories can that invoke?

The thing about ear-worms is, you never know what's going to trigger one. It doesn't necessarily have to be the tune involved. Remember, last Tuesday I got stuck with Hello, Hello for an hour or two because one of my students had given me a tangerine.

A word, or a combination of words, can activate an ear-worm. For example, on a cold day someone might make a passing reference to lighting a fire, and the next thing you know, I'm hearing the Doors doing Light My Fire for the next couple of hours. Or I might overhear a woman (or a man) addressing her (or his) significant other as "babe," and for the next couple of hours I'm stuck with Sonny & Cher singing I Got You, Babe.

The film Ground Hog Day, starring Bill Murray, was a veritable metaphor for that one. The film's central joke is that his character is stuck in a sort of Twlight Zone, repeating the same day over and over until he can quit making the same stupid moral mistakes. This "day" always begins with his clock-radio extolling I Got You, Babe. The film was as funny as hell, but the joke drove me nuts because I could so readily relate to it.


And...it doesn't even have to be a song, or a word. It can be a bodily rhythm. My own breath, as I climb a flight of stairs, can invoke something like, say, the second movement of Beethoven's 7th Symphony. "DA-da-da-DA-DA, DA-da-da-DA, DA, DA, da-da-DA-DA, DA, da-da-DA...and the next thing you know, for 90 minutes I'm hearing the slow movement of Beethoven's 7th. Or the rhythm of my feet climbing those same stairs might bring to my head Paul McCartney singing "One-Two-Three-Four, can I have a little more..." Then I'm stuck with that for a while.

If this happens during daylight hours, when I have things like teaching, shopping and worrying to occupy my mind, I can usually just live with the ear-worm until some random thought or occupation drives it away.

But if it happens after lights-out, if one of these tunes from the previous 16 hours of wakefulness comes back to haunt me, and rob me of sleep, well, that's when I invoke The Block: "Let's pick a pack/Of Juicy Fruit Gum..."

That'll drive Beethoven, Sonny & Cher or even the Beatles away.

For me, it works better than Nam-yo-ho-ren-ge-kyo for making my mind a complete, numbed blank.

Well, there you go. The Buddhists have their traditional chants; I have a chewing gum ad.

Summus quod summus. We are who we are.

And we hear what we hear. Walt Whitman heard America singing, or so he said.

I'm surprised it didn't drive him nuts. It would have me. In fact, listening to America's damned singing, especially on the radio, very nearly has driven me nuts.


But I have my Juicy Fruit gum jingle. I wonder what Walt used?

Of Murderers and Marketing



 In this photograph, I am standing in the very room in Gori, Georgia, a small city about an hour from Tbilisi, in which Josif Vissarionitch Djughashvili, known to the world as Stalin, was born. It's a tiny room, "humble" as we used to say: just a couple of small tables, a chair and a bed. When little Joey Djugashvili, whose resume ultimately included a real eye-grabber --  the slaughter of millions of people -- was born in 1878, his family occupied two rooms of this house. The rest of it was rented by another family. The other room is as tiny as this one -- probably not 100 square feet in all. We asked the tour guide how the Djugashvili family heated this place. Apparently behind me and to my left, there used to be a stove in the wall. It wouldn't have had to be very big. I've lived in two-room apartments bigger than this place. There is a locked-up working area down in the "basement" (we joked among ourselves that it must be "the dungeon") where Josif's father worked as, what was it, a shoemaker? Something appropriately "umble," as Uriah Heep kept saying in David Copperfield until I was ready to scream.

Now, directly behind this house is the Stalin Museum proper. It's huge, and on a December day, as cold as a mausoleum inside. My friends Dan, Joe, Hannah and I signed up for the tour, even coughing up the extra five GEL they charge for a walk-through of Stalin's private (and you can bet your ass bulletproof) railroad car, which is also on the site.



Hannah and me, sitting on the porch
of the original Stalingrad.



At the current moment in history, Russians are not especially popular in Georgia. The two countries fought a one-week war against each other in 2008, and some of the bloodiest fighting took place in Gori. In fact when my friends and I paused on the street to take our bearings on our way to the Stalin Musum, we found ourselves alongside a building that still had bullet holes in it.

(I don't mean to boast, but that wasn't the first time I'd seen something like that. Many years ago I visited East Berlin, before they took the wall down. Some of the oldest buildings in the city, the ones closest to the wall, still had bullet holes from World War II in them. Still, there was something a tad eerie about these Gori bullet holes -- they were much more recent.)

Popular or not, the Russians have a cultural stake in Georgia, and vice-versa. Stalin was Georgian as everyone knows; our tour guide told us that all of his life he spoke Russian with a Georgian accent. He was fond of Georgian cooking -- as everyone who has lived here for any period of time becomes -- and his favorite wine was Georgian. (I've tasted it -- it's red, and quite sweet.)

And the Georgians have gone to some trouble to preserve the memory and memorabilia of one of the twentieth century's greatest mass killers, a man who, it has been speculated, was responsible for even more deaths than Hitler. (But probably not more than Mao Tse-Tung; my guess would be that Mao takes the prize Lamborghini in the dead-body sweepstakes, but we'll never know, will we? Well, whether he had to settle for the second-place Jeep Cherokee in the killer sweepstakes or not, Stalin was right up there with them. A real pro.)

Just as an hors d'oeuvre, he almost managed to lose World War II by killing off all of his own best generals in a paranoid hissy-fit just before the Nazis invaded the USSR in 1941. I love irony: Hitler's invasion of Russia violated his 1938 "non-aggression" deal with Stalin. Just goes to show you what "deals" struck between the likes of Stalin and Hitler are worth. Kind of like Dutch Schultz and Al Capone agreeing to stay off each other's turf.



Josif Vissarionovich Stalin, (1878-1953) The Soviet

Union's legendary "Man of Steel." (Actually, he had

skin as thin as rice paper: poet Osip Mandelstam once

compared Stalin's mustache to a cockroach, and died in

a Siberian labor camp for saying it.)

 Or, if you prefer, like the two characters in Antonio Prohias' classic Spy Vs. Spy, a favorite MAD Magazine cartoon of my 1960s childhood. On the one hand you had the White Spy, in white coat, white hat and sunglasses; and then you had the Black Spy, in black coat, black hat and sunglasses. The two of them sneaked around some place with potted palms called "Embassy," pulling violent practical jokes on each other.  Wordless. Pointless. Just two stupid government hirelings taking turns blowing each other up.


Hitler and Stalin, waltzing.

 
And it was a scream.

 Actually, historians could, and have, written whole "problem" volumes about the 1938 Non-Aggression Pact between Germany and the USSR. Hitler agreed to let Stalin grab off a chunk of Poland in return for not being interfered with elsewhere. Stalin was "orthodox" enough a communist to believe that his true enemy was England, not Germany, so he trusted Hitler, who turned out to be as trustworthy as...well, Hitler.

Stalin was also "orthodox" enough a communist to believe that anyone who disagreed with his interpretation of Holy Writ, e.g. Marx and Lenin, should be exterminated. He was his own Inquisition and his own Secular Arm.

He proceeded to exterminate several million people in the name of The People. 

Stalin's personal masterpiece in the "killer" department had to be the time he created an artificial "famine" in the Ukraine in order to force people to relocate elsewhere and to rid himself of the so-called "kulaks," whom he had created, by the way. Go, Joe, go. Pile up them bodies for the Revolution, baby. Kill millions. Remember, it's for La Causa. Someday they'll build a museum to you.

They did!

The Stalin Museum in Gori is huge, as I said. Here is one of its rooms:

And that's just one.  The walls of this particular room are lined with blown-up photographs of various types, and the museum does have a plethora of photos, ancient and not-so-ancient, chronicling Stalin's life from early childhood to his death in 1953.



Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) Stalin's fellow
sociopath. Can you imagine these two
characters dancing together? Legend has it
that after their 1938 Non-Aggression Pact
was signed, Hitler and Stalin waltzed
each other around the room. Hitler
promptly invaded Russia.

Other halls in the museum house every kind of Stalin memorabilia you can think of, from his uniforms and pipes to his private desk to the original Non-Aggression Pact with Germany signed in 1938. (You might be surprised -- for a document which had such profound ramifications for history, it's not much bigger than a five-by-eight index card.) 



Who would ever have thought that I, an "underfed, short-haired leaping gnome" from California, would find myself standing a foot-and-a-half from Stalin's pipes?



One of the things that made our tour of the Stalin Museum in Gori so much fun last (very chilly) Saturday was the felicitous accident of our "tour-fellows." There were four of us in my group: Hannah, who is from St. Louis and made a big point of telling me that I'm exactly her father's age (thank you, dear); Joe, who's from Washington, D.C.; Dan, who's from Britain, and myself, who's from nowhere.

But we were joined in our tour of the main museum by "Martin," "Thomas" and "Paul," three guys from Poland who evidently all work for the same company: they were wearing matching red windbreakers with their company logo emblazoned over the pocket.

Martin, Thomas and Paul "made" this tour for me. Why? Because nobody, and I mean nobody hates Stalin like the Poles do. All through the tour these three guys kept making snide remarks that essentially added up to "Fuck Stalin." They spoke passable English, so we were able to share in their black humor. Personally I was about to double-up laughing. There's no reason why I should make any secret of the fact that I don't hold Stalin in very high esteem. Few people outside of the late Pablo Neruda do, or would own up to it if they did. (Still, there are those flowers on his grave in Moscow. Go figure. Provided you speak Russian to them -- even if you speak it with a Georgian accent, as Stalin did -- the more you kick the snot out of the Russians, the more they love you. I don't understand it.)

Speaking of the Stalin Museum, I never cease to be amazed at the complete lack of entrepreneurial spirit here in the former Soviet republic of Georgia. We lined up, Soviet-style, to buy our little paper tickets for this tour (10 GEL for the main tour, five more for "The wagon" -- Stalin's private railroad car.) That was it, folks. No gift shop, no "Stalin T-shirts," no bumper stickers reading "Stalin Rocks" or "I  Gori." There was one tiny enclosed area where you could buy overpriced bottles of The Killer's favorite wine and a few other such items, but it was locked up tight.

Somebody is missing an opportunity here. Where's the Stalin Disco? Where's the fast-food stand hawking "GULAG-Burgers?" Where's the amusement ride you can enter for a few GEL and get to experience a KGB interrogation of your very own? They do have a fake prison cell in Stalin's fake "underground office," but where's the audioanimatronic "prisoner" moaning and groaning and demanding his rights? Come on, folks, this could be Gori's version of Knott's Berry Farm, but it's nothing except a cold, old museum, and by the way, the second, and I mean the second our tour was concluded, our tour guide disappeared like Barbara Eden going back into her bottle in I Dream of Jeannie. I mean, she was gone. She didn't even wave bye-bye. "I'm done with this group -- I'm scramming for where it's warm," she must have thought, and she was gone.

Too bad, she might have gotten a tip from us. But that's typical of this part of the world. These people are so accustomed, even two decades after the death of the Soviet Union, to thinking socialisme, that they don't even wait around for tips. "I did my job, I'm gone." And they vanish. 



Stalin's private train car. Don't need to tell you
it was bulletproof, do I?



At first, I was inclined to pass on "the wagon," as the museum called it. Who needed to see a damn railroad car? And besides they charged an extra five GEL for that; five lari will get you two beers in this country -- no, three, unless you're paying overhead at Le Cafe Snotface.

But the rest of my group wanted to see "the wagon," so I plunked down my extra five GEL and came along, (as did our three Polish friends, wisecracking all the way.)

Some of Stalin's biographers will tell you that he was a frugal man who lived simply. Well, you know, if your hobby is having people like Traicho Kostov beaten to death, how much luxury do you need? But I can tell you in all confidence that Stalin's private railroad car was just about the cutting edge of luxury for railroad service of the 1930s. Okay, the President of the United States has Air Force One, and I've seen films of the inside of it -- as airplanes go, it's pretty luxurious. So I suppose the Head Guy is entitled to travel in style, and of course in the 1930s nobody flew unless they were in a big hurry; everyone traveled by train. And yes, the Soviet Union did include vast distances. You might spend a week on a train, maybe more if you were going to Vladivostok.

But Stalin's private railroad car had amenities no other Soviet citizen would dream of in the 1930s: kitchen, sleeping quarters for himself and guests, a conference room, (air-conditioned! How many railroad cars were air-conditioned in the 1930s?)


But now a word about Stalin's private room.

Now, there's only so much you can do with a train -- you have two rails and a few feet of width. No room for a movie theater there, although if anyone could have insisted, it would have been Stalin (and he was a film buff, as people like Sergei Eisenstein discovered to their ultimate chagrin.) And it may be admitted that Stalin's private room on Stalin's private train is rather spartan as compartments for Tsars go: there's a bed, a desk ... oh, yes, and a bathroom.


A few years ago I worked for an investment banker In Washington, D.C., Ralph Taylor, who was almost as big a megalomaniac as Stalin. Ralph's office had its own private bathroom where Ralph could haul his fat butt in its $2,000 Armani suit and deposit his royal turds in complete, royal privacy.



I couldn't resist: here I am

sitting on Stalin's private toilet in Stalin's private

railroad car. I was the only one who got this picture.

Right after Hannah took it, the tour guide yelled

at us to knock if off. "Have more respect

for the great killer's ass!" (You could almost hear her

thinking that.)



Stalin, too, insisted upon The Royal Shitter. Stalin's private railroad car includes, as well as Stalin's private room, Stalin's private bathroom. And I don't just mean a john, either. This facility came complete with bathtub. Stalin could take a bath on his own train. (I wonder what happened when they went around a curve or up a hill? Did Stalin have the curve or the hill punished?)

When I poked my nose into Stalin's private compartment on Stalin's private railroad car, naturally I couldn't help but notice that, just off to the left, was Stalin's private bathroom.

"Hannah! Quick, come here!" (Hannah had the camera.) "I want you to take my picture sitting on Stalin's toilet!"

"Oh, beautiful!" she said, swiveling into position next to the sink. It was pretty snug in there; fortunately the bathtub had created a couple of extra square feet of space. (In the photo, you can see the edge of the tub next to my knee. They boarded it over, presumably so people ((like our Polish friends)) wouldn't spit in it.)

Hannah got the photo you see above. But I was the only one who had the honor of having his picture taken sitting on Stalin's toilet. As soon as the tour guide tumbled to what we were up to, she yelled at us and said she didn't want anyone else taking that particular picture. So that was the end of that. But I got mine, a souvenir better than any "Uncle Joe" T-shirt could possibly be.

The moment we all stepped off the back of the train, our tour guide vanished, as I said before. I mean she was gone.  Yes, it was chilly that afternoon in Gori, and I'm sure she wanted to get back to some place that had a stove. But mostly I think she was just sick of all of us: Poles bad-mouthing Stalin, Americans fooling around having their pictures taken on his toilet...who needs this?, she must have thought.


And she vanished in one quick hurry.

Our Polish friends invited us to join them in climbing up to the ancient stone fortress that overlooks Gori. Many Georgian cities have such fortresses -- Tbilisi does, too -- but Hannah was famished, so we decided to peel off and go have lunch. We climbed up to the fortress later ourselves, through the snow, and got some great pictures from up there despite the icy wind. Unfortunately our Polish friends were gone by then. Too bad; given how they obviously felt about Stalin, it might have been fun to watch one of them climb up on the parapet and "moon" the entire city of Gori.

However, given what I'd already done that afternoon, "mooning" Gori would have been a bit of an anticlimax, don't you think?