Avdat

Me and Michael Jackson

My junior high school bus was full of Beavis and Buttheads. This meant I couldn't express any affection for Michael Jackson's Beat It because on my bus, liking a song with a title like that was tatamount to coppin' to masturbation. I thought that this was terribly unfair and stupid; the guitar licks Eddie Van Halen laid down on that single were better than anything any hair band favored on my school bus was recording in the early 80s, but I was one of those wimpy kids and wasn't going to die on the hill of my proud, unapologetic love for Michael Jackson. But now I'm almost 40, and I don't care what anybody thinks I'm coppin' to. Billie Jean was better, but Beat It was a great rock 'n' roll single.

Still, this was back when MJ had Jheri curls, a broad nose and a black face. This was before the chimp, Neverland, dangling the baby off the balcony, and two brushes with pedophilia accusations. Those kids allegedly abused by Michael Jackson were the same age we were when Thriller came out. They may have been Beavis and Buttheads on my bus, or maybe it was the young adolescent collective unconscious sounding a faint warning alarm.

Today we learned that even in death, Mchael Jackson is still being pimped by his daddy. And I hear that Janet's already looted his mansion. Now, people behave badly when people die. They fight over the service, over the will, over family heirlooms. They blame physicians, law enforcement officers and demand answers to essentially unanswerable questions. But when it's Michael Jackson's family, small-time white trash behavior becomes a meda circus.

For the past few days I've hummed Billie Jean in my mind, but now musical nostalgia must needs give way to rubbernecking a celebrity car pileup. I need to fish or cut bait. Wall myself off from Michael Jackson news or follow every twist and turn with morbid fascination. I had an aunt who gave up all her soap operas in 1995 just to watch the OJ trial. Maybe it's time for me to make a similar commitment. Or not.

Crime and punishment

OK, pretend you're in the confessional with your collar on. Next up is Eliot Spitzer, and on deck is Mark Sanford. To whom do you assign the heavier penance?

One the one hand, Spitzer has completely debased the sex act by turning it into a good or service that can be had for money. On the other hand, Sanford, who apparently was in love with this Argentine woman, has not only committed a physical act of infidelity, but an emotional, intellectual and even spiritual act of infidelity as well.

Which is worse?

I used to wonder why men who say to their scorned wives, "She means nothing to me," thought that statement was helping their situation. It seems like the obvious comeback would be, "Sex means nothing to you?" On the other hand, the scorned spouse would surely hate it as much, if not more so, if it meant something rather than nothing.

So I ask again, Which is worse? (And I'm speaking strictly in moral, not political terms. Politically, it seems like Spitzer had to go because he'd committed a crime, and Sanford needs to go because he went AWOL for four days, and while grad students like me can get away with that, governors who do that are being terribly irresponsible.)

Bonus points for a real, live Roman Catholic priest who can actually say something authoritative about the Sacrament of Reconciliation...

Unitive subconscious anxiety experience

I dreamed that I was at the restaurant where I wait tables, only the plates in my hand were full of German verbs like vergessen (to forget) and verlieren (to lose).

Adventures auf Deutsch

There's little time to spare for blogging while I complete a crash course in reading German. I can't say anything wittier about the language than Mark Twain did in The Awful German Language, but to tell the truth I don't hate German as much as Twain did. There's something pleasantly challenging about decoding a sentence like this one, on pp. 229 of Jannach's German for Reading Knowledge:

Dieses 1816 zuerst erschienene, spaeter laufend ergaenzte, 1838 ins Deutsche uebersetzte Buch hatte einen groBen Einfluss auf die Psychiatrie ausgeuebt.

Germans have "these", "those," and "which," and while they use commas more than English-speakers, they don't use any of these handy-dandy devices when they need them, like the above sentence which begins with a really long adjectival phrase. Literally translated, it is, as best I can tell:

This 1816 first appeared, later continuously supplemented to, 1838 into German translated book had a great influence on psychiatry exerted.

If you want to understand German, think of Yoda. Basically, Yoda speaks English with German word order.

As I said, "Pleasantly challenging." Runners (the good ones, anyway) know about anaerobic threshold, the point where lactate acid builds up in your body, and you experience pain. Improving your anaerobic threshold is key to improving your time. Now I don't bother with this much because I'm a lazy runner. I can pile on miles pretty easily, but making myself run faster is like pulling teeth. But learning German is my intellectual anaerobic threshold workout. It's difficult, but not impossible, and when I'm finally able to read some dead German theologian's horrible syntax, complete with passive perfect voice, and stemwinding adjectival phrases auf Deutsch, then I will feel a great sense of accomplishment!

And you're thinking the same thing you think when you're stopped in traffic one weekend, waiting for people in their 40s to trot across the street at a 15 minute mile, +6 hour marathon pace: Why is he doing that to himself?

Domestic terrorism

Why do doctors who perform abortions tend to get murdered when Democrats occupy the White House? There seems to be a lack of patience in some corners of the pro-life movement, an unwillingness to live with the ebb and flow of the political process. As soon as an election goes against them, some of them appoint themselves judge, jury and executioner. You could call them sore losers, except that expression cheapens the seriousness of gunning someone down in the vestibule.

But it's worse than that: 

• Oklahoma City.
• The murder of ob/gyns.
• Think tanks funding specious lawsuits to the tune of millions with the sole purpose of getting the President of the United States to testify under oath about his sex life in the hopes that a fib might make the legal grounds for overturning an election.
• Torture.
• Illegal wiretapping.
• Bush v. Gore.
• A post election run on ammunition.

There is a contempt for the democratic process and the rule of law on the right side of the political spectrum that gets expressed in a variety of ways. The sane people remaining on the political right really need to stand up and take back their movement from the terrorists, conspiracy theorists and media mouthpieces that fan the flames of violence and extremism.

Which is why all the hysteria about Barack Obama's associations with William Ayers was so completely whacked. The right owns the domestic terror market, lock, stock and barrel. Thou art the man, dittohead.