Down The Rabbit Hole

 

Down The Rabbit Hole

This is Bad Bunny falling into a crowd. I hadn’t seen the half-time show, so, initially, I wondered if it was AI. Apparently, it was a stunt double. Photography has been an important part of the graphic arts part of Me; photographer, reporter, the publisher and editor of a newspaper where it and the arts played an integral part of our product. This photo I found to be the most important shot of the Super Bowl half-time show but it was lost in the deluge of images.

I used to do photography old school back when film and cameras were expensive. There was the ordeal of processing the images; the suspense of not knowing if you “got the shot”, whether it was in focus, and you waited for the wondrous moment when the image magically popped into your developing agent tray. 

Has the digital age sapped this art of some of its soul?  It’s different. But the delight of sharing your image with others who will appreciate your work must certainly still be alive. Whether analog or digital,  the viewfinder tells you that you've taken a “good” picture. It's both artistry and opportunity. You know it when you see the child running, set aflame by napalm or a Viet Cong being executed on the spot, bodies falling out of 9 -11, the raising of the flag at Iwo Jima or the liberation of Paris. Life is full of these moments and photographers capture them.

But sometimes it takes more than that to understand what it is about a seemingly mundane photo that moves you emotionally (and, also how it is you are being played, something not limited to photography).

Many moons ago I became obsessed with Brian Wilson Key. He was all about “subliminal advertising” and the idea that ad copy was being produced containing latent images designed to bolster the sale of their products. The ice cubes in your whisky glass were infused with images of sharks on the theory that these and other dangerous instrumentalities would subconsciously bolster an alcoholics' self-destructive nature.  

It’s probably not Key that moves artists like Taylor Swift and Bad Bunny in the presentation of their shows. They are not merely musicians but multi-disciplinary artists, and, also a product of the computer age where things like Easter Eggs make their products ever more tantalizing. By design, we now view everything they do for its hidden meaning, pixel by pixel. 

It’s not like they don’t stick it in your fact. There was so much symbolism in the half time show that mountains of explanations have spewed forth from pundits: Lady Gaga in a typical Puerto Rican dress, red Flor de Maga corsage, our flag colors. (But which flag?); the little boy that people misconstrued to be the little kid that got kidnapped by ICE was a tribute to his mom; conejo means rabbit, his mom’s maiden name - also the name of the little kidnapped boy (who was wearing a bunny hat) .................  .........................................(rabbit hole) 

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Yes,........... the picture. 

He is backwards on the ledge of the casita and falls backwards into a crowd who catches him and holds him up.  That’s called backward falling. It's a team-building, trust -inducing, fear-reducing experience.  That was a powerful message.

I have been, in the last weeks, suffering the same sort of mental exhaustion the rest of the country is experiencing.  I've had to talk to my kids, who are in the same way, and I try to keep a positive attitude. I have been getting angrier and angrier and lashing out at people unnecessarily. 

I didn't see the show, but I needed that picture.  It wasn't on an Iwo Jima scale. But it was therapeutic. I need that same sort of hope, resolve, and commitment.  I need the idea that we are here, that we can trust each other, that we have each other's backs. 

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The Road to Healing

 The Road to Healing

When it comes to football, like religion, I'm an apostate.  I watch Alabama football and maybe a couple of other college teams. But football? I generally abstain. It's robotic, like Tesla or CGI.  I don't think I've ever seen any part of the Super Bowl. The halftime show is spectacle that does nothing for me. Listening to music on a television is a perversion of the sound. Why sit through orchestrated thuggery to watch a marketing vehicle? You wont miss it. For the weeks that follow we will be bombarded with clips and opinions, etc.  

Add Bad Bunny to the equation.  I pass.

But that’s no slam on him. I have only recently thought of him as a positive. I had to overcome what I now realize was merely a resistance to change. Tropical music is a complex genre. It is melodic, well-structured, and respectful.  Bad Bunny had been the culmination of things with which I was not comfortable. Reggaeton. Rap, thug shit.  

His latest album set me on the road to Damascus. Bunny had made a conscious effort to link his music with my music and our culture and history. Rather than the gross sexist attitudes I had presumed were his, I saw the same sort of respect, romance, tenderness, sensuality and love that can be found in boleros, plenas, etc.  He is an upsetter and now my kindred spirit, mi compañero.

I can’t emphasize enough his significance to me or other Puerto Rican Boomers, especially if you were raised up North. My family left the island as part of the 40s diaspora. We are this country's Palestinians. We are part of the supposed unwashed, the unwelcomed. We have been displaced, discriminated, and dishonored wherever we go. From New York (where we were forced out so that they could build Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts)  to New Jersey, Florida, France, Denmark, etc. and so, we have a soft spot for immigrants; but for the vagaries of history, go us. 

I was surprised that Rita Moreno wasn't at the show. Puerto Ricans have a special attachment to her through West Side Story. The movie started telling our story and she was its blazing star. Benito quaffs our needy thirsts but Rita carried the initial water. She broke the self-deprecating Stepin Fetchit mold of Hispanics like Monty Rock III, Carmen Miranda, and Charo by being not just good but a wonder, the proverbial GOAT (EGOT if you prefer). Her portfolio culminates in the phenomenon that we're now seeing in Bad Bunny. He wields his power  - not abrasive, not vituperative, but nonetheless assertive. He is what the world needs right now, a gentleman who stands without pushing you down or keeping you back. 

The idea of putting Bad Bunny in the halftime show wasn't driven by any concern for our psyche. But for us he is a welcomed accident - the elixir, the balm, the Vicks - for the insecurities and psychological injuries inflicted on us and that we have begun to weather. We will continue to survive but no longer as just more road kill thanks to a Bad Bunny.

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Pravda!

 Pravda!

My wife and I lived with her parents back in the 60s while we were going to South Alabama.  Her father proudly labeled himself a “reactionary”. That was no understatement.  But most of us in the South learn, not only to tolerate, but to love the  things people elsewhere might not understand. Stockholm Syndrome?  He and I learned to tolerate each other and in the end, he told me he loved me.  

But getting there was fractious. There was, for example, the casual remark made by one of our friends that the “Star Spangled Banner” had been a British drinking song. She meant it as an aside.  It wasn't any kind of posturing.  She wasn't even talking to him. He lashed out. How dare she say something like that?  We didn't engage him. It wasn't worth it.  

That memory came back up for me recently with the flap over the student protest at Murphy High School and what was lost in the typical back-and-forth reactions. I congratulated the Murphy students. Others? Not. I assumed it was a Rocky Road-flavored TDS protest; a mixture of different but congruent flavors and nuts. Then I saw someone else’s response that answered the question I thought most germane. Why is the Secretary of Education, an agency that was supposed to be in the process of being dismantled, at Murphy? 

I went to bed last night pondering whether the fact that my feed was blowing up with posts touting the huge success - MILLIONS OF PEOPLE - going to the Turning Point Super Bowl counter-event. Could it be? Probably not. We learn from how groups act to look for what might be hidden, for the agenda, the “truth”. We are part and parcel of the (dis)Information Era. I remind myself; "be wary".

When the students became the only narrative, I set out to underscore what I thought was the salient point: that Linda McMahon is part of a progromme to completely whitewash history; that claims that it is some sort of leftist plot to accurately paint a picture of this country's past; that the Heritage Foundation, Carlisle, Hillsdale, Turning Point and others - the people obsessed with this supposed indoctrination programs like DEI and "wokeism" - were in the process of doing the very same thing and are using shadow techniques like Commission 1776  to sanitize our cultural and political history.  

The outrage over the “War on Christmas”, the inconvenience of  political correctness, the denial of the right of hate speech, got us here. The organizing vehicle was the making of a rump theory like critical race theory into something so worrisome that patriots needed to race to the barricades. THE TRUTH MUST BE TOLD! “Our truth.” Pravda! Peddling a line that leaves out the inconvenient facts, that somehow panders to the notion that race and sex discrimination weren’t no big thang, that won't talk, much less discuss, the country's past blemishes because it is somehow "unpatriotic" is, at best, cowardice.  

        McMahon is only the tip of the spear. 

        Yesterday, a Mobile County School Board member posted a picture of himself with Linda McMahon and Bruce Pearl. I posted what I know about Turning Point, about the "1776 Commission", Hillsdale, etc. I gave him the benefit of the doubt because if you don't know, you don't know. “That’s what happens when you don't put educators on school boards,” I thought.  His response was emblematic of this whole issue. The coward erased my comments. If you are a willing accomplice - or perhaps more - in this cultural war, your complaints will ring hollow.

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The Spark

 Iskra is the Russian word for "spark" and not coincidentally the name of a socialist newspaper in Russia at the end of the 19th Century.  The word popped into my mind this morning when I saw a picture of a student protest at Murphy High School. In Mobile. This week I've seen two videos from other high school student protests, places, that when I saw what they were doing, I characterized as atypical. 

In one, a man was arrested for bothering a student group but not before the kids manhandled him and his resultant arrest for assault. In another, an elderly man stopped his vehicle and tried to cower a group of teenage protesters. He fared horribly. They did not cower. These kids have better things to do and it at once gives me hope and also fills me with a sort of angst. 

I've been where they are. 

I got out of the service in 1968. I was politically conservative. I moved to Panama City, grew my hair long, and ended up meeting a bunch of folks from Alabama who had started a music emporium somewhat akin to the Fillmore East with some of the largest regional bands and complete head shop. (I was one of the first Panama City Beach airbrush artists). 

Our hair long, the developing drug problem, caused the authorities to center on us as somehow having brought this blight to their community. We were continuously harassed. They would arrest all of us on the weakest of arguments, even arresting our band while on break. Bond money was part of our budget. I couldn't imagine that this was happening. 

It culminated on Labor Day. They busted our house  which we used as our headquarters. On the television we saw the riots at the Chicago Democratic Convention. That was my spark. I joined the rebellion.

We've lived through this before - the sense of outrage over change, the willingness to recklessly retool the system, our economy, our way of life, this jackboot psychosis - is Nixon 2.0, but stupid. Nixon knew when to fold them. These folks marry their ignorance with the naivety that what they plan is simple, just impose your will; my way or the highway. 

These kids are emblematic. It is filtering down to them and to places that are normally complacent. Dazzle them with bullshit only goes so far.

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The rules of engagement have changed

A few years ago I was on a road in southern Honduras. I had been there one or two weeks working a case and was, finally, going to the airport, headed home, obliviously driving a convertible Mustang in one of the world's poorest countries. 

I came up on a checkpoint and was questioned by a policeman. At some point he asked for a bribe. Instead of giving him some pittance, I scolded him: He was a disgrace! A policeman! He was one of the reasons his country was sliding into the abyss.... 

I had just screwed up terribly.

There was no mistaking the evil that emanated from him. Clearly he was contemplating killing me. His face became contorted. You could see the pure evil engulf him. And for an excruciatingly long three or five seconds, I savored the prospect of a violent death.

But it wasn't my time to die, maybe because I hadn't embarrassed him in front of the other officers or maybe he just didn't have the time. 

The debate about Alex's murder now centers around the fact that he had a gun. "Why bring a gun to a protest?" is, on a loftier philosophical plane, a valid question. You can debate it back and forth and in that process the truly salient point - that he was the hapless victim of murder, that the gun is just an after-the-fact rationalization, is lost. It wasn't his exercise of his right to carry a gun that got him killed. It was the lack of respect for the first amendment.

The things we take for granted as birthright appear now more and more like ignorant fantasies. The rules of engagement have changed and we must take note of that. 

This administration sees us as something to be dominated, not governed. Alex had no way of knowing that we were playing by new rules, but now, we do. We need to stay on our toes.  Do not underestimate what they will do, how they will deny, fabricate, justify or cover up and what they will use against you. Stand tall but be wary.

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A Sobremesa

 A Sobremesa

Frustrated and depressed from the crushing world news that things are far from getting better, I took a break from Facebook this morning and went and made myself some Puerto Rican comfort food; maduros and eggs-over-easy, and buttered white bread. I shared them with the oldest child. We were having a sobremesa, that time when the meal is over and you just lollygag around sharing moments with loved ones.

"Yeah," she said, "you tell me that every time." I had told her what "maduro" meant and then launched into an etymological explanation of the word. "I know," she said. She was good natured about it, but, still, damn it, I had to explain to her why I constantly launch into tutorials about things ostensibly mundane, that it wasn't pedantry, that it was because I care; that while we live in comfort, it hasn't always been that way for me and that I appreciate the responsibility that comes with, that I would rather risk repeating myself than miss an opportunity to share something with her that may or may not be important, that the important part was the sharing. 

Every decade, I explained, I've noticed how geometrically my understanding of the universe had expanded, that ruefully I had come late in life to the meanings of things - etymological or otherwise - and that, while my mother was the sun in my universe, I couldn't help but wonder where I would be had I not had a parent hobbled by education, language proficiency, and a poverty survival mode to help me piece some of life's mysteries together. 

My kids, my partner's kids, are beneficiaries of where he and I find ourselves. Our kids have had tremendous advantages and I have seen how it has yielded the quality people that they have all become. I credit the fact they they have been presented with positive role models that take a proactive approach to their education and life choices and I try to pay it forward.

And then I told her another story about the time my mother came home to the catastrophe of the "hair cuts" I had given my brothers. She chuckled at my misadventures; my butchering their hair, trying to hide it by making everyone wear paper bag hats, my mother lining us up and forcing uncover, her over-the-top Latina reaction.  And somehow, the carnage in Minnesota - at least for these precious moments - seemed far away.

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Breaking the Close

Breaking the Close

They have arrested a lawyer, supposedly one of the organizers of the protest that took place inside a church in Minneapolis, illustrating why some of us thought that protest was wrongheaded to begin with on more than one level. 

I have a lot of heartburn, maybe that's just my formerly Catholic tapes, but going into a place of worship, whether that's a synagogue, a church, a mosque, ashram, is wrong. Not a bunch of folks would see that differently. Given the facts behind their reasoning for picking that particular church there would be nothing "wrong" with a protest outside that church. They "broke the close". Would Martin Luther King have condoned that?  

It's wrong on a practical level too. Even if our times wasn't being held in the constant grip of emotional fracture by this horrible administration - even were this some other time, a time when these goons haven't somehow managed to convince a very large swath of our population that Christianity (but not Judaism or Islam) is under some sort of an attack - these are bad optics. This incident is now being exploited well beyond the events of that day. It appears that the legitimate pastor handled the whole situation pretty well by engaging with the protesters.

People on my side are trying to rationalize what happened by pointing out the other bad things that have been happening - Taking kids, five-year-olds, off the streets and sending them off somewhere, Going into schools, No knocks, battering people's homes, breaking into cars, the jackboot hooliganism. We are understandably angry and emotionally frazzled. But that is just Whataboutism. Don't act in a way that falls into the game plan of the people who are more concerned with propagating the myth that they are champions and we are the evildoers, not the victims. If this was meant somehow as propagande par le fait (Propaganda by the deed), it comes perilously close to having the adverse effect. 

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BASTA!

BASTA! 

Trump is the poster boy for Marcuse's criticism of modern societal systems as one-dimensional. He gives thin excuses for engagement, takes synaptic leaps in the consideration of weighty and complicated issues - the economy is linked to tariffs...the border and immigration is linked to drug trafficking...is linked to the border and crime, and immigration...is linked to drug trafficking...is linked to Venezuela...Greenland...NATO...etc. - as somehow binary and easily addressed without upsetting stasis. The immigration issue right now is somehow tied to Minnesota supposedly because of fraud and it being a sanctuary city.

To be clear, the blame - for the immigration issue in general and the border problem specifically - can rightfully be placed on the inaction of both sides (as well as other complicating factors such as armed conflicts elsewhere, economic problems, migration flows, COVID, etc.). The solutions are so complicated and problematic that even when folks on my side of the calculus try to deal with it, we have issues. I've lived through two or three of these roundups. I was a very strong critic of Obama's deportation policies, primarily as a tribal thing because I felt like he was being much too cruel.

 

For years, those of us that consider ourselves moderate on this issue would argue that it was  well past time to address the immigration issue. Reagan was the last one to truly attempt to do it. We would argue what is essentially a laches concept: that "hey, you're just waking up to the fact that there's 12 million people here?"; that you can't sit on a problem and all of a sudden decide that you're going to fix it without taking some responsibility for the fact that you've been a willing consumer; and that throughout you have delayed dealing with the problem. You are complicit and have actually worked against solving the problem without any legitimate explanation for the delay. 

It's unjust. That, that is the rub. It's just not fair that after 10, 20, 30 years, you're all of a sudden going to decide in this brutality. While you are "putting on your big boy pants" you engage not just in a shock treatment against people - them and us - but also to the economy as well as to the whole concept of this country's rightful sense of justice and dignity.

Whether Obama's approach was right or wrong, some folks now use him as a justification for what is happening now in our major cities. They are woefully missing the point. And it's well past style points.

Trump is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It takes a certain type of arrogance, brazenness, imperviousness to this cruelty and to what these politicians are doing to the concept of truth. That's why you get to the point where the folks that for years haven't wanted to deal with the veteran's homelessness, runaway corporations, health care or any of the other social problems get to talk about solutions that are not helpful. The most brazen example of the arrogance of power - what was feckless power politik - was when Trump told the GOP to scuttle the solution that Biden and other GOP senators had arrived at but now uses it to justify this jackboot behavior.

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