I’ve always enjoyed War. Their music speaks to me. Today’s song, “Why Can’t We Be Friends”, is an excellent accompaniment to walking about town. As part of the writing practice, I walk and think about where I’m at with my writing and editing projects. Once freed of that, I drift into other things. This song, though, was heard coming from a Toyota pickup truck as it trundled by. Picking up on it, I sang it and some other War songs, like “Smile Happy”, “Low Rider”, “The World Is A Ghetto”, and “Spill the Wine”. Such classics.
The Rationale
“I had to kill him,” he said with a calm voice.
“Assassinate,” a Secret Service agent said.
He smiled. “Assassinate, kill. Funny how we decorate our killing terms. War is acceptable for killing, but terrorism, murder, and assassination are not, even though it’s all about killing. The differences are the who and why, and sanctions. Well, I killed him — excuse me.”
His smile developed a humorous tint previously absent. “I mean, I assassinated him because he was a threat to me and my family. He scared us. The way he spoke on television, the way he sounded, the things he said, all of it, he sounded insane, and it was scary when he started talking about nukes, and using nukes. I don’t want a nuclear war. I don’t think anyone does except crazy people. Like him. And the thing is, as a crazy person, he’s the one that can order us, our country, to use our nuclear weapons to attack another country. But the thing is, we don’t what would have happened then. It would have been like opening Pandora’s box, except Pandora’s box is filled with nuclear and biological weapons, war and terrorists.
“So it was simple. I had to kill him to protect me and my family, and our way of life. It’s funny, but I think he would approve.”
Today’s Theme Music
In this age….
And what is this age, this technological age of rising alt news, polarization, nationalism, fascism and repression, what is this age? Sure don’t feel like the Age of Aquarius.
Back in nineteen eighty-five, the world was facing many issues, like the famine in Africa. In the U.K., Bob Geldof responded by organizing Band-Aid. In America, a ‘super-group’ was put together to release an album to help. A group, U.S.A. (United Support of Artists), was put together to help the cause. Produced by Quincy Jones, a song, ‘We Are The World,’ was co-written by Michael Jackson and Lionel Ritchie, and arranged by Michael Omartian. Released as part of Live Aid, it helped awaken awareness of the famine in Africa. Other ‘live-aid’ type of events followed as musicians stepped up to help farmers and earthquake victims.
I didn’t particularly like the song, but I appreciate the sentiment and effort. Harry Belafonte was the first spark plug in this effort because he thought something needed to be done, but watch the video and listen to the voices, and see how many artists participated in trying to make a difference. It was a hit; it won awards; it raised money and attracted attention to the problem.
Well, here we are again, with war and terrorism shredding the world. Displaced peoples are seeking the very basics of food, water and shelter, and nations, like America under Trump, want to turn their backs. Insisting, “America First,” he builds walls and bombs other places, because walls and bombs have always been so effective. That’s why the war to end all wars was fought one hundred years ago.
It seems like that was just the opening of a War-apalooza.
A Random Stream
‘Hey Ya’ is playing in my head but otherwise, thoughts are normalized streams of randomness.
- Eva Lesko Natiello posted a blog about not quitting. I was happy to read it and read it again today because her words summarizes my writing process. Here’s one paragraph.
- “Yesterday my manuscript was torturing me. I couldn’t move forward. Stuck in my puzzle. I was having trouble with the order of disclosure and who’s POV it should be. Should the dialogue contradict what the character was really thinking? Maybe she wasn’t thinking that at all. What was she thinking? Maybe it wasn’t her place to reveal it. Perhaps we should find out some other way.”
- I like how she captured this process. Later, she mentions that she becomes frustrated and pushes herself to sit it in her chair and squirm it out. I don’t squirm; I close my eyes and bow my head. But’s it’s the same thing.
- Earlier in February, Barbara Froman published an interview she conducted with Dr. Harrison Solow in 2013. I read it again this week. I recommend it. I like what Harrison said in this paragraph:
- “And someone has had the great good sense to leave this book alone. Or if altered, respectfully tuned to perfect pitch by an invisible hand, so that each word has the unmistakable ring of authenticity. The reader perceives nothing enharmonic. A true book and a beautiful one. But although there is no false note, neither is the entire composition a universal symphony. There is vision here — intensely personal, internally arranged.”
- There is the difficulty, finding the notes so no false notes are played in the novel.
- Gray, cold air cups the buildings and trees this morning. Walking past a row of apartments, I smell…laundry detergents and fabric softeners being vented out. Nostalgia strikes a chime. This is a day like my Pittsburgh childhood. Smells often transport me.
- Striding past the cemetery, I acknowledge, again, I like cemeteries but I don’ t like them. The history they represent touches me and prompts questions about the lives beneath the headstones. But I think the land where cemeteries reside could be better used for other things. I’ve never had the interest in visiting them to talk to people who passed on; I just speak to them in my head. But it matters much to others. I guess I’m an unsentimental jerk.
- Watched ‘Hacksaw Ridge’ on Friday night. Wasn’t impressed. It seems like, as my wife called it, a movie war, dated and hackneyed. Others obviously think differently, as they nominated it for the Best Picture. Again, it must be me. I do admire Desmond Doss, the conscientious objector (cooperator, he calls himself) at the story’s center. I thought Garfield did a good job, but overall, Mel Gibson as a director seemed heavy handed. I found Hollywood vs History’s details about the differences between the movie and the facts very interesting.
- Many smart houses, with their smart thermostats, are actually connected to apps that allow you to call it from your phone and change the temperature or turn the lights on or off. That’s not a smart house, but a remote control. A smart house, to me, is one that I don’t have to program and set reminders other than to provide it with some basic operating instructions. For instance, my system is programmed for fifty-eight degrees at night. But if the temperature is dropping into the mid twenties Fahrenheit, like this week, I turn it up to sixty-four at night. Part of this is because the house design; the furnace is mounted on its side in the attic space. It’s not insulated, and the drip line runs through it and down inside a garage wall that also isn’t insulated. That sometimes allows the drip line to freeze. It’s a shortcoming that I’m working on to fix, but meanwhile, a smarter house would be helpful.
- ‘Nocturnal Animals’ was last night’s household viewing feature. Well done and everything, but not my style of movie.
- During the movie, my wife turned to me and asked, “Have you ever killed me in a novel?” No, I haven’t.
- Jake Gyllenhaal’s character, Tony Hastings, is a writer. During a conversation, he states, “All writers write about themselves.” I kind of agree; I am the baseline from which I begin, but then it changes according to the character and story’s needs and expectations. Often, though, I model a character on another person and use how I would expect them to behave as my guide.
- My wife also wondered what I thought of Tony’s revenge. While it’s not something that I would have done, I can see how a writer can end up going there.
- If you don’t know what I’m writing about, sorry. I don’t mean to be obtuse but didn’t want to reveal too much of the plot.
- Now time to dip myself back in the imaginary world of an imaginary future, technology and people. In other words, I’m going to write like crazy, at least one more time. I’ll probably do a little squirming, too.
Today’s Theme Music
Maybe it’s just me, but this song is just cool.
Put this song in your head on autoplay, and you walk around feeling and acting cool. You are cool because this song has made you cool. You’re bopping your head just a little as you walk or sit, tapping your foot whenever you’re standing still.
That the group who came out with it, War, had so many hits, is amazing. I could have gone with ‘Why Can’t We Be Friends’, ‘Cisco Kid’, ‘The World Is A Ghetto’, or ‘Spill the Wine’. But I went with the cool.
Fresh out of the Peadbody Wayback Machine and 1975, (when I was celebrating finishing basic and technical training with the military, and was driving around the my first car buy, a 1968 Camaro RS*, around my first duty assignment at Wright-Pat in Ohio), here is ‘Low Rider’.
*That’s not my Camaro RS in the set photo. My car was copper, with a black RS stripe.
Conveniences
Modern conveniences have spoiled me. Nuke something (via microwave) and have a meal in a few seconds. Refrigerators with built in ice makers. CD and MP3 players and home theater surround sound systems with speakers and woofers that are almost invisible. I use voice over Internet protocols, so I don’t have a telephone land line and don’t pay phone bills. Of course, the phones themselves don’t have wires, either. Just a handset and a charging station.
How fast can I travel the country, or the world, via aircraft? Many waits in security lines and processing to board the aircraft now take longer than the flights.
Once I thought color television was amazing. The rotating mechanical outside rotary antenna supplanted color television as an incredible addition, adding so many more channels. I think we were able to get about eight. Then came cable, and the cable explosion.
Now I don’t have cable or a rotating antenna, nor a satellite dish. I receive over the air broadcasts via a digital indoor antenna, and supplement my watching habits with Roku devices on two televisions. The third television is a curved, high definition smart TV. It doesn’t need a Roku. It has a wireless connection to the web, a ‘smart TV’. Its screen is 55 inches but it weighs about forty pounds, though it has stereo speakers built into it. Through the Roku and smart TV, I stream offerings from Amazon, Hulu, Netflix, HBO Now, Acorn and Showtime. I have monthly subscriptions but these cost me almost nothing. I use Swagbucks to buy gift cards to pay for these subscriptions.
My computers have gone from heavy, thick machines with a small green screen (and no mouse or pointing devices, back then) to sleek, four pound laptops. Enhanced Graphics – wow, sixteen colors! – gave way to VGA to digital graphics and plasma screens. My mouse is wireless. I can take my computer anywhere and connect to wireless systems, using its battery pack to write and converse with people around the world, watch videos, or create posts, like this, that others can read within seconds of me clicking ‘publish’.
All of these are almost taken for granted but the stuff in my car continues impressing me. I’ve had it almost two years, and two things, the climate control, the keyless entry, and the headlights, keep me impressed.
With the climate control, I rarely touch them. The air conditioning and heater are utilized to keep the temperature on my side of the vehicle at whatever I’ve chose. The fan kicks on to a higher speed if necessary to cope with colder or hotter conditions. Sometimes, when it’s really cold, I turn on the seat’s heater. All of this is a long way from rolling down windows, adjusting vents, sliding heating and air con controls back and forth, and turning fans on higher or lower. The car does all these things for me.
Likewise, the keyless entry impresses me. I put the fob into a pocket and forget about it. Press a button to unlock the doors. Press another to start the car. No key.
The headlights are always on, dimming themselves as needed, turning around corners to minimize blind spots, raising and lowering to keep level in relationship to the car and road’s angles. This, again, is a long way from the early days of turning the headlights on, stamping on a metal cylinder to toggle the high beams on and off. The metal cylinder gave way to switches on sticks mounted on the steering wheel column.
How long these will continue impressing me, I don’t know. Digital clocks and watches long impressed me. Cable television amazed me for about four years, I think, because it soon became a flawed offering. But the things that concern me each day are not these amazing devices, but more basic matters, like water and drought. Where are the modern devices to deal with those? And what about the hand gun deaths in the United States? I understand the second amendment but I really thought we could hold two positions in our minds and intelligently address these.
I must pause to write, too, and note, yes, and what of prejudices, prejudices based on sex, sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity, poverty, race, the color of your skin, or even your clothes or the way you wear your hair, and your politics, and your education, and the way you speak?
Of course, the flow is all about money. There is money in prejudice as fearful people keep pathetic power hungry people in leadership positions. If there was more money in solving the drought or improving water efficiency, more modern conveniences would emerge to deal with those issues. We see that happening on the power side. I have passive solar panels on my roof but I’ve had them almost ten years. I take them for granted, too, although I do pause when passing the invertor to see how many watts my system is generating, and I look at the electric bill each month. Yet its technology has already improved and that system is how the mechanical antenna with its rotor was like compared to cable.
I don’t mean this to sound or be self-congratulatory. It’s meant to be a reflection of the changes witnessed, no matter which direction they went, in my lifetime. The world amazes me, but I’m frustrated that we can’t solve or seem even to address some issues, because there’s no profit involved. Where profit becomes involved, like housing, heathcare, agriculture and politics in America, the results become depressing, with profits, power and control overwhelming the common good.
Yet, perhaps because I write fiction, and was raised on Star Trek, or maybe because I’m a natural optimist who hates giving up on anything, I keep hoping and believing that change will come our way. We’ve elected, at last, a black human to be America’s President. A female, at last, is being nominated for the Presidency (assuming all goes well between now and the convention). And the Pope has apologized for some of his religion’s more regretful recent issues, and is pushing his church to be a more charitable and humane organization, the way it was originally intended (I think…).
The USA has even re-established relations with Cuba. Back in my youth, in the 1960s, we were in the cold war with the USSR, which no longer exists, and fighting a hot war in Vietnam (which now manufactures our consumer goods). Hot wars around the world still subsume our energies and destroy lives and the planet. Cue Edwin Starr: “War! Good God, y’all. What is it good for? Absolutely nothing!” And people will argue, no it’s necessary to deter aggression and right wrongs.
Maybe it was once. But now I think of war as a small black and white portable television, with a tiny screen and limited reception. Unfortunately, there remains too much profit in war for anyone to rush to do away with it.
What we need to do is find the profit in peace. And then the modern convenience machine will go right to work.
Michael Seidel, writer 