Iced Borscht

Spent Saturday evening combing through the wreckage of my memories via Google Maps.  (If you choose the right music for such an exercise, you’ll be so fraught with nostalgia that you’ll think Dan Fogelberg stepped into the room with his suicide machines.)

The house in the upper left is where I spent a great many of my preschool, kindergarten and first-grade days. It’s the same house my mom grew up in. My favorite thing about it is the heated floors. I vaguely recall watching some 1970s prime-time TV shows there.

The house on the right used to be orange. Now, it’s decked out in a Stalinist shade of grey.

Third on Memory Lane is a house I liked quite a bit (below). I recall a lot of TV and premium-channel movie-viewing there too — Battlestar Galactica; Rocky III; Salem’s Lot; and my favorite — Galaxina…

Several years into the future is a dreary apartment tower (right, below), whose walls were filled with cockroaches. I would go to class, and if I left my kitchen sink full of water, I’d come home to find several drowned roaches floating about. I would taunt them by turning on the stove burners. This apartment also had a “Norwegian”-style bathroom (shower head arbitrarily sticking out of the wall; drain on the floor; light switch not far from the shower head). I was subleasing the unit from a young Republican guy.

Directly below was where I watched a lot of Jagad Guru on TV. The place was owned by a student-ghetto slumlord, and, importantly, it was located near a damn fine liquor store and a cop bar called the Caribou Tavern.

Last on the list is a place I shared with a performance artist (who eventually found himself ensnared in some sort of plagiarism scandal) and others I had zero in common with. Not a whole lot of fond memories there. My room had previously been occupied by a snide Marxist dweeb; I think his more irritating personality traits remained long after he left. Trapped in the curtains maybe.

I’ve had death on my mind quite a bit lately. I’m not a morose person, mind you, and I’m not one to fantasize about the sweet things people will say at my funeral. We all know the type — I had a dorm mate in college, for instance, who used to crank Eric Clapton’s “Tears in Heaven” and other weepy pop songs at high volume while contemplating the moving eulogies at his memorial service.

No, some outside influences have prompted my death-centric thinking as of late:

• Frank Wilson’s excellent piece over at When Falls the Coliseum, “Death is Something Inconceivable”;

• Haiti;

• A bizarre abortion controversy at my alma mater that I recently stumbled upon online; and

• The death of acclaimed children’s book author Howard Zinn, whose tome on fast-moving trains resonates with sitcom lovers and head-trauma victims all over the globe, I’m told.

To be clear, I harbor no ill will toward Zinn. It’s hard, after all, to dislike someone who inspires chubby bohemian chicks to play socialist dress-up games with their garden gnomes. More annoying than Zinn himself, and more annoying than his truther blatherings, are his vainglorious celebrity pals.

For real. Look at Zinn’s Wikipedia entry.  It reads like the ingredient label on syrup of ipecac:

[Zinn’s] [t]he People Speak, to be released on DVD in January 2010, is a documentary movie inspired by the lives of ordinary people who fought back against oppressive conditions over the course of the history of the United States. The film includes performances by Zinn, Matt Damon, Morgan Freeman, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Eddie Vedder, Viggo Mortensen, Josh Brolin, Danny Glover, Marisa Tomei, Don Cheadle, and Sandra Oh.[30][31][32] An original soundtrack[33] for The People Speak featuring Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Jackson Browne, Lupe Fiasco, P!nk, Eddie Vedder and more is available everywhere now.

My friends, if Eddie Vedder is anywhere near my person as death approaches, please have the goodwill to kill him in advance of such profanity.

And speaking of goodwill (which I’m not hunting) there’s also the Matt Damon Problem. As it is, I have natural, organic feelings to bludgeon Matt Damon with the frozen corpse of Gwyneth Paltrow. But for some reason, whenever Damon riffs on the greatness of Zinn, it amplifies my desire to shower the little thespian’s head with fists.

Enough, though. I don’t mean to pick on Zinn. He’s dead, and that’s not a happy thing for the Zinn family, I’m sure.  Sincere condolences go out to them and other guilty white Zinnfidels.

Let’s dovetail back to my original topic — death.

I’ve got a strong opinion about death. I don’t see it leading us toward a glorious afterlife.

No, I posit cheerily that death is the ultimate anti-climax.  It’s the day our mortal shells turn into salad bars for famished maggots — we become a carrion feast.

As gloomy as this sounds, I find it a nobler coda to our time on Earth than a frolic in virgin-soaked fantasy lands.

In a way, death does provide a certain degree of immortality. Take, for instance, the posthumous philanthropy of organ doning. Your pancreas can live on in the body of another. Just be certain someone’s not rushing you into things, though.

Before we continue on this positivity trip, let’s first do away with the guff about Near-Death Experiences (NDEs), OK? Nobody has NDEs.  The folks who undergo this gleaming bliss aren’t really dead in the first place.

How do I know, you ask? Well, I’ve had an “NDE,” or at least something similar (minus the “near death” part).

That’s right, I had…an “experience.”  Let’s call it a lucid dream.

The skinny: while asleep one night at age 17 or 18, I dreamt that I “died.” My heart raced until it completely stopped. I saw and felt the famous, intoxicating white light — the hard stuff — and I got into a subsequent tussle with strange demon creatures. I woke up eerily calm, in a near-euphoric state. I felt as though the face of God had diddled my bottom and made it coo.

A spiritually inclined person might attach a lot of weight to such an experience…but I am not a spiritual person.

One plausible explanation is that my pineal gland squirted out a megaton bomb of dimethyltryptamine (DMT). Regardless of the cause, it was one hellacious joyride through the mind’s eye.

Ever since the blessed event, I have sought to replicate the effect, with zero success. Maybe the experience of death will treat me to an encore performance.

Apropos of nothing, though, and as this post lay dying, I leave you with one bewildering thought.

When you see the white light calling you – when you see it beckon warmly and invite you inward – don’t go.

It’s a trick.

At least that’s what I heard Art Bell say while falling asleep to the paranoid lullabies of Coast to Coast A.M. one night.

Now that Howard Zinn is dead, plenty of excellent critiques of his work are sprouting up across the Internet. And some older pieces are getting more attention.

One fantastic bit of criticism comes from Dissent Magazine’s Michael Kazin in a 2004 review of Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States.

The Kazin review is remarkable not only for its keen assessment of Zinn, but also because Zinn — in the context of Kazin’s analysis — can be viewed as a proxy of everything that’s wrong with the left these days.

Kazin writes:

History for Zinn is thus a painful narrative about ordinary folks who keep struggling to achieve equality, democracy, and a tolerant society, yet somehow are always defeated by a tiny band of rulers whose wiles match their greed.

I’m curious — where are these shadowy cabals of men who look like Montgomery Burns? Does Zinn ever specify? Is it possible that such a heavy-handed interpretation of history is correct? Can everything be reduced to a simple matter of good vs. evil? Right vs. wrong? Haves and have-nots?

Kazin continues…

This is history as cynicism…Zinn’s conception of American elites is akin to the medieval church’s image of the Devil. For him, a governing class is motivated solely by its appetite for riches and power — and by its fear of losing them.

Sounds like 99% of the braying jackasses and chirping pipsqueaks who comprise the leftist blogosphere, does it not?

More:

Zinn’s flat, dualistic view of how U.S. power has been used throughout history omits what is obvious to the most casual observer: al-Qaeda’s religious fanaticism and the potential danger it poses to anyone that Osama bin Laden and his disciples deem an enemy of Islam. Surely one can hate imperialism without ignoring the odiousness of killers who mouth the same sentiment.

I almost want to kiss Kazin for writing the above lines. He continues:

Perhaps the greatest flaw of his book is that Zinn encourages readers to view so formidable a force as just a pack of lying bullies. He refuses to acknowledge that when they speak about their ideals, those who hold national power usually mean what they say. If FDR lied to Americans about the threat posed by Japanese-Americans during World War II, why should anyone believe his prattle about the Four Freedoms? So there’s no point in debating conservatives who prescribe libertarian economics, Victorian moral values, and preemptive interventions for what ails the United States and the world. All right-wingers really care about is keeping all the resources and power for themselves.

This cynical myopia afflicts an alarming number of people on the left today. The gloom of defeat tends to obscure the landscape of real politics, which has always witnessed a clash of ideologies as well as interests, persuasion as well as buy-offs and sellouts.

That pretty much says it all. There can never be intelligent discourse or a productive exchange of ideas if the left is perpetually glued to the idea that “all right-wingers really care about is keeping all the resources and power for themselves.” And clearly they are glued. To. This. Idea.

Writes Kazin in closing:

…Howard Zinn is an evangelist of little imagination for whom history is one long chain of stark moral dualities. His fatalistic vision can only keep the left just where it is: on the margins of American political life.

Or, conversely, I would add, Zinn’s fatalistic vision could inspire the modern left to keep raising the volume level on the condescension knob. To keep adding ill-informed vitriol and contempt to the maelstrom of political rage that swirls throughout the country.

I think Zinn picked a bad time to die. I have no doubt that, in death, his message will resonate even more strongly with lefties who are looking for straw men to demolish.

By all means, guys — bring on the tidal wave of Zinn purchases at Amazon.com. Continue to seek easy answers for the resolution of difficult and complex questions.

To hell with it all.

…more or less…ensuring we have to deal with the omnipresence of Brett Lorenzo Favre until the end of time…

He has killed the fashionable, rugged joy of Wranglers. What’s next for that sick sonofabitch?