Punching Down

I love stand up comedy. I tried it for about six months after high school and it didn’t work out, but I still love it.

Stand up was my introduction to moral philosophy as well as politics. Stand up comedians are the people’s philosophers, and they typically inhabit and convey truth in a succinct and moving way that, say, Slavoj Zizek and Jordan Peterson never could, with none of the pretension. That being said, I am so glad that ‘punching down’ has become a legitimate cultural criticism of comics.

My orientation towards art has always been summed up best by that Cesar Cruz quote that ‘art should comfort the disturbed, and disturb the comfortable’. Comedy is art as well as low-key philosophy, so I am especially glad that rich and privileged comics are now consistently receiving dings for attacking and belittling disenfranchised individuals.

Dave Chappelle used to be great. His most recent specials—aside from being overly self impressed—were dismissed for his material regarding transgender individuals. Ricky Gervais—who has never been great—has suffered from the same assessment, but to a greater degree.

Comedy is for the people. Comedians should never punch down. Punching down is designed to satiate the prejudices of the powerful. When a comedian punches down, they become nothing more than the court jester, validating the prejudices of the monarchy.

 Real comedy only works when it is either delivered by a disenfranchised voice, or delivered in order to lift a disenfranchised voice.

When our most prominent comics begin acting as clowns for the powers that be, they’ve got to be held accountable. The good thing about comedians being the philosophers of the people is that you neither have to punch down nor up to let them know they’ve missed a beat. You can punch them right in the face.

Wounds

Life seems to be an endless series of receiving and recovering from wounds. This is not a cynical observation! Often, our scars become the best parts of ourselves. While it is perfectly honorable to retreat and recover for a moment—everyone needs to be able to catch their breath—we have to move forward. Our wounds and scars are part of us, but they’re not all of us: do not move into your wound. Let it heal. Help it heal. Understand it, and learn how to avoid similar wounds in the future, but do not set up residence in that bloody, pus-filled gash. Don’t keep picking at it. Don’t keep cutting it back open.

Body Language

Body language is fascinating.

As someone who has such distinct body language that it is incredibly easy to do an impression of me—I barely move my top lip when speaking, I stroke my beard, touch my ears, fidget with the rings on my fingers, gesticulate like a caricature of a stereotypical Italian mafioso—I find the terrain of body language both informational and treacherous.

When I was a child, up until the time I was a pre-teen, I didn’t know exactly how to be human. I knew what resonated with me when I saw it in others, but I didn’t exactly know how to manifest authentic physical representation of myself until maybe my mid twenties. So, I copied other people. I copied 3 people in particular, to the point that I have completely Zeliged their body language idiosyncrasies into my own behavior to the point that even a decade after finally becoming comfortable with my authentic self, those people who resonated with me and I very intentionally studied and copy-catted are still evident in my day to day interpersonal communications.

The 3 folks I copied: My dad, Levar Burton, Jeff Goldblum.

1. My Dad

I remember the moment my mom chastised my dad for biting his nails. I looked up to my dad. I was small enough to sit in the front child’s seat of a grocery cart at our local Kroger, I remember that clearly. Also, we were in the produce section. I remember at that moment I had discovered one concrete way I could echo the behavior of my father, and I looked down at my hitherto unbitten fingernails. I started chewing. I remember chastising myself for forgetting to bite my nails when they got too long. I kept at it and succeeded in creating a habit. I still bite my nails to this day.

2. Levar Burton

A lot of PBS as a kid. Reading Rainbow was so important. Levar would do this hand gesture when he would say, ‘See you next time!’ I practiced it. It’s just something I do now. PS, thanks to my mom for reading to me when I was little, and thanks to Levar for reinforcing the importance of reading.

3. Jeff Goldblum

My grandfather loaned me a copy of Jurassic Park the book maybe one year before the movie came out. I loved it. I read it in 3 days. I suppose to reinforce that bonding experience, my grandfather took me to see the movie when it came out. The character of Ian Malcolm wasn’t that impressive to me in the book—I was a Muldoon guy—but, Goldblum’s on screen persona rocked me. He was cool and smart and charming, but most importantly, he was fully comfortable with his idiosyncratic conversational tics. The uhms. The ahs. The awkward pauses and gestures. The general sense that he was floating above all of human experience...my kids still point out when I’m Goldbluming.

It has always struck me that however bad we may want to rebel against whatever force in our life, the  laziest way to do it is to embrace the opposite of whatever that force embraced. Dad drank Pepsi? I’ll drink coke. Mom was a democrat? I’m a republican. That’s easy.

What’s not easy is to change behaviors. Reactions to stress, fear, happiness, confrontation, success...these are things our parents taught us not with words, but with the core of their beings. Language is thought out and at least somewhat prepared. Most people don’t strategize body language. No one strategizes sweat or red ears. One of my favorite quotes from some dead catholic is ‘Preach the gospel at all times. Use words when necessary’. Maybe you are drinking Pepsi now instead of Coke, but what noise do you make when that sugary liquid hits your taste buds? Plus, it’s still soda.

And it’s the same for body language. Whatever clever word games we use to convince the world we are who we say we are, our body—more often than not—is telling the world who we actually are.

History Class

Talking to my son about the history program at his school. Of course, he has a more expansive view than the curriculum suggests, but here are the common themes:

1. Iconic white people of European descent.

2. Famous battles fought by iconic white people of European descent.

3. Historical tragedies that impacted white people of European descent.

4. Wasn’t it nice that we didn’t kill Martin Luther King Jr until he was finished saying his most quotable lines?

5. Wasn’t it nice that—under pressure from a restless underclass—that eventually we gave non-white Americans the opportunity to buy into the same opiate of capitalist-consumerism that white people have been able to opt into for much longer?

6. When it comes to non-white people within the U.S., and non-European countries, here are A.) the times we (white) interceded and saved non-white people within the country and B.) ‘Maybe you have never heard of this overwhelmingly non-white country before, but we (white people) dropped a lot of bombs there, and stopped communism.

Signs and wonders.

Respect

One thing I have consistently taught my boys: you do not owe anyone respect. Respect is earned. It may be beneficial to engage someone who has more situational authority than you diplomatically, but you don’t have to respect them, or let their opinions impact your self evaluation. Title, age, position...they don’t matter. My boys respect me because I have earned it. You can’t raise children to sacrifice their own dignity in order to appease the fragile ego of undeserving authority figures.

Against Sesame Street Liberalism

Sesame Street is great and important. For children. As you pass puberty and move towards regular colonoscopies, your worldview should widen and expand. It should be capable of acknowledging the dark as well as the light, and making necessary adjustments to policy prescriptions and ideology. When I think of Sesame Street Liberalism, I admit to having a caricature in my mind: A white male or female born of economic privilege but moved by sympathetic narratives of racial, gender, and non-heterosexual sexual orientations, who has really never struggled too much in their own lives, but generally has a worldview that boils down to, ‘Why can’t we all just get along/I’m ok, you’re ok’ kind of Oprah platitudes. I think Ben Affleck might perfectly embody this label.

Now, it’s all good and wonderful to think folks should just get along and leave each other in peace. But the reality of the situation is that humans are animals, and the laws of the jungle still apply. If you were born in a two story house in a white, upper middle class neighborhood to upwardly mobile parents, you have to square with yourself: you really don’t know struggle. It’s easy for you to ‘not see race’ or suggest some kind of global group hug might eliminate all of the strife in the world. That’s because you had a nanny. And, PS, race exists. You are the person Langston Hughes wrote about in his poem about Northern Liberals. And PPS, you will never address your fashionably liberal social concerns unless you address root issues, which in this country, and—actually—all over the world, is capitalism.

Capitalism is highly concentrated in the US, but it’s ripples go far and wide across the globe. Capitalism rewards highly active consumers. It lionizes on inherited wealth and purchasing power, and only allows enough comfort to the exploited under class to keep them from revolting and to allow them to reproduce enough future workers to keep the system of alienation going. If the Sesame Street Liberal was serious about social justice, they would forsake their inheritance and become a foot soldier in the movement to abolish our capitalist prison.

Another perfect embodiment of Sesame Street Liberalism: McDonalds recently inverting their Golden Arches on Women’s Day to turn their iconic ‘M’ into a ‘W’ for ‘woman’. I’m sure some pampered, disconnected, middle aged upper class house wife might offer a polite golf clap to that gesture, but maybe it would be more meaningful if you paid your employees—many of whom are women—a living wage?

There is a difference between leftism and Liberalism. In a culture where there is real justice and equality, Liberalism would be fine and wonderful. But Sesame Street Liberals have jumped the gun becaus their privilege disconnects them from the struggles of people who are still outsiders in this system. They’re skipping scenes because they know they’ll make it to the end of the movie.

What we need right now is not this brand of Liberalism. We need militant leftism, which is capable of fighting for these beliefs in real time. Leftism is capable of winning these victories instead of simply sliding flower stems down the gun barrels of their oppressors and offering a loopy peace sign in response to the enemy order to fire on all opposing combatants.

Liberalism is John Lennon. Leftism is Che Guevara. Liberalism is Jimmy Carter. Leftism is John Brown. Liberalism is Oprah Winfrey. Leftism is Huey Newton. Liberalism is Joel Osteen. Leftism is Jesus Christ.

One of the worst parts of Sesame Street Liberalism—among so many other bad parts—is the arrogance, condescension, and apparently inherited sense of superiority. George W Bush played this cultural blind spot in order to obtain 2 presidential terms, and the Democratic Party stuck the stick in their own bicycle wheel when they sabotaged other candidates in order to put forward their own anointed candidate (Hillary Clinton, an icon of Sesame Street Liberalism, and Neo-Liberal capitalism) against the most transparently terrible (in all categories) candidate in our country’s history, and lose.

When you never have to worry about going a day without cable TV, air conditioning, or internet access—let alone clean water, housing, food, healthcare—you make lazy and arrogant decisions. When you get to the bottom line—and capitalism is all about the bottom line—the Sesame Street Liberal is only concerned about the condition of the real people as long as they get cultural cache from their support, and their own bottom line is not affected. Cut off the inheritance stream that daddy and granddaddy earned by exploiting laborers for years and years, and that’s when you’ll see what’s behind the mask.

Divine Commandments

I don’t know why, but whenever a woman begins a statement to another woman with ‘Girl...’ it almost feels to me like a proclamation brought down from the mountain by Moses himself.

Neighbors

I am so involved in my own life and my own passions that I am sometimes astounded by the pettiness and nosiness of other people. My neighbor—who must know the zoning laws by heart (they probably rest on his bedside table next to his bible)—called the police on another neighbor for a trivial zoning infraction, and all parties stood on the sidewalk discussing the situation. The person who made the complaint was animated and emotional. The police officer wore an expression of stoic boredom. The neighbor who had the complaint made against them was a mixture of amused, dumbfounded, and diplomatic. It was something to see. There are surely many shortcomings to my own orientation, but the orientation of someone with so few inner resources and so much personal boredom that they feel obligated to monitor the totally benign social transgressions of others always reminds me of the denizens that occupy he’ll in C.S. Lewis’s ‘The Great Divorce’.