MINUS THE LIKE

I readily admit, I’m biased on this one, so…grain of salt…

Perhaps I had the worst education growing up, though not so bad that I got me some learnin’ in me, but could use me some learnin’ some’ore. Let’s call it something between a flyover education and a coastal one. How about rocky? Let’s go with rocky. My education was rocky. So when I heard what happened at the end of Hamilton, I didn’t think much of it, but of course, so many others did. Stupid education, why didn’t you teach me to get all up in arms about this? Oh, that’s right, because instead of being pissed off about it, I was bummed. I wanted to be there. I believe this is what some of my better teachers would have called a teachable moment. And in this instance, a missed opportunity to take advantage of that teachable moment.

I don’t know about you, but my creative little mind began spinning. How awesome would it have been to have a present day political figure hop onto the stage after being addressed directly by a cast member in character and the two have some improvised anachronistic dialogue? It would be like Westworld, but without all the sex and violence. I mean, come on, who among us hasn’t wondered how many of our elected officials aren’t actually just robots? If anything, I think Hamilton should make this a recurring thing. Plant a politician in the audience every night, make the show a twofer.

But he was just there to enjoy the show—every person should be able to head out into public without being the unsuspecting recipient of attention whether by comment or question. I’ll give you that, but I am going to thin the up in arms heard a bit. If you’ve ever watched TMZ for longer than the five seconds it takes for a person to recognize, “Oh crap, this is TMZ,” [click – next channel], then you don’t get to complain.

The notion of being a president for everyone, or a vice president for everyone, or chancellor, or the generic leader for everyone is a little empty regardless of country, nation, state, or territory. That’s why there is something so incredibly special about the name President of the United States. It’s not President of America. It’s not President of Everyone or President for Everyone. A dictator is a ruler for everyone, a ruler of everyone—it’s why every four years I’ve always wanted some politician to have that moment of epiphany and say to his or her opponent, “I’m sorry, [insert candidate’s name], I thought we were running for President of the United States, not President for Only the People Who Believe What We Believe.”

There are many people who come from flyover, coastal, and rocky upbringings who have decided to get their doctorates. Some do it for the right reasons, others are pressured into it, while others simply do it because they want the PhD or MD at the end of their names—they like the sound of doctor before their surname. And maybe that’s where we’ve gone wrong. A rose is a rose is a rose. And a president is a politician. And a politician puts forth policy. And…and…and…And that’s the problem. President has become the pinnacle. President [surname]. As if that’s the most important title—as if that’s how every president should be addressed. And yes, that is how every president should be addressed, until he or she earns that allusive title, the one where my own rocky education has me stumped for an answer as to when was the last time, if ever… You get elected president, you get to be called president, you get to be called President [surname]. But you have to earn the title of President of the United States. And good luck on that one, because that’s as much on you as it is on us—the us that’s not united. Can you get the United States? The United. One hundred percent unity. One hundred percent united. Hell, I’ll even settle for ninety-something. You do that, you get to be called President of the United States. If not, you’re just another president. President [surname]. Close, but no cigar. And we don’t need to put an asterisk next to every name in our history books. We can read: President, President, President, President…President of the United States…President, President, President, President…President of the United States…President, President, President…Has there been one? Will there ever be one? Or should we just type “President” and [Fill Down]?

But I digress—I was talking about Hamilton, right? Yes, yes I was. So I must state the obvious. It was Hamilton. It wasn’t Seussical. It was Hamilton. It wasn’t Mamma Mia! It was Hamilton. It wasn’t Cats. Seriously. If it were Cats, then I would probably be right on board with the non-TMZers. If it were Cats, I too would be mid-sentence distracted, talking about how my day was going when I sudden—“Wait, huh…Hold on. Rum Tum Tugger said what?”

So here in America we have Cats, but this was Hamilton and not Cats. And I’m told in Australia one can throw a dead cat onto a table. But, again, this was Hamilton and no one is chucking Jellicles, left and right, to see which one is going to the Heaviside Layer. We’re here in America. We’re here in “of America”. Whether it’s the United States…I guess we’ll find out in January. Until then, as cats go…I’d put my money on Schrodinger’s.

Long before Facebook and Twitter, long before a cat could “has cheezburger”, back when my Internet connection was dependent on squeaks and squeals and beeps and boops, I had an idea, but I thought it absurd. I had been taking writing courses—progressed through 101 and 102, found myself in 201, and was faced with coming up with an idea for a new manuscript—something interesting, something amusing, something a little strange—something in particular, but grounded in a sense of reality, no matter how bizarre or out there.

I had run through books for inspiration and moved on to considering movies. Alien and Aliens were out there—oddly plausible, albeit a stretch—but I wasn’t feeling up to writing science fiction. There was Air Force One and Speed, but aviation, guns, explosions, and the physics behind…well…anything, wasn’t doing it for me at the time either. Now, it may have been Bono, it may have been The Edge, of course it also may have been the fact that I was running out of time and needed to get my ass in gear, but after popping Zooropa into my CD changer and listening to “Numb” on repeat for about two hours straight, all I could hear was Dustin Hoffman’s voice saying, “This is nothing.”

A movie critic I am not. And if I tell you that I actually enjoyed Spice World, I may lose all credibility whatsoever. (Sshh, I enjoyed Spice World). Again, a movie critic I am not, but I liked Wag the Dog—I found my muse—now I just needed to find my idea: non-derivative, new, novel, something out there, absurd, but plausible just the same. I eventually settled on a hint of science fiction, let’s call it a skosh, and politics, but I was happy nonetheless. Then I started writing it…

I couldn’t have been more than a quarter of the way into the thing when I had to stop. There is no way that anyone is going to buy this, I thought. A Jedi and a Death Star? Plausible. A shark that eats men named Quint and genetically engineered dinosaurs? Plausible. Flying monkeys and houses that drop on witches? Totally plausible. Hell, marching brooms and dancing hippos were more plausible than this.

What could possibly have been inspired by Wag the Dog via Zooropa’s “Numb”, but still more absurd than the Death Star and Fantasia? What stopped me? What made me question that the more realistic my manuscript, the more probable, the more plausible—the more farfetched and unbelievable it would be?

It’s because at the time I never imagined social media. Never imagined the news without Bernard Shaw. Never imagined a poll expert eating a bug. Never imagined that same poll expert, for all intents and purposes, having to state to a news anchor that eating a bug is not news. Never in my wildest dreams thought that a news organization would disagree. Never, even after all that’s been said and done, could imagine said news organization not heed such advice and post it as news anyway—make it a damn headline. And, oh the irony, I never envisioned an interrupting canine control soft-spoken royalty. Come on, your majesty, I want to hear what you have to say, it can bark when you’re finished.

And after 1984 and Fahrenheit 451, I thought those were the dystopias that would catch on. The ones that took a lot of work. That’s not to say that I didn’t buy into the phrase, “Never underestimate the…” (finish the line, I don’t have the heart), but for as self-aggrandizing as people can be, I always figured the “self-educated” were far fewer in numbers, and were an even smaller population when it came to understanding, and God help me, “believe” what they taught themselves. Ahh, but alas, here we are—you don’t need to convince people to believe you, you simply need to let them convince themselves. Far easier. Far cheaper. And certainly much quicker.

And that’s why I stopped. I didn’t see it. I couldn’t envision something on that grand of a scale to be at all believable to an audience. I figured the dystopian works before me with their governments and their infinite resources to be the limitations of suspended disbelief and plausibility. And I guess it’s true. Or was true…’cause, hey, truth is stranger than fiction, right? Life has just demonstrated proof of concept.

Hmm…Now where did I put that notebook…?

Originally posted on November 7th, I took this down sometime after midnight on November 9th. Not sure why, but I have theories—some prophetic. Maybe I should have kept it up, maybe I should keep it down. As far as being awake at midnight, I finally fell asleep and I woke up at dawn. And the sun came up as well. And it came up on the 10th. And it rose again on the 11th. And I’m watching it rise here on the 12th. As for putting this back up…I’ve been listening to Chris Cornell’s version of “Billie Jean” for the past few days. Whether Chris, or obviously Michael, there was always something interesting about this song for me. To steal from Roxette: Don’t Bore Us, Get to the Chorus! And whereas I tend to be waiting with bated breath for the chorus of most songs, it’s the last line of the first bridge that gets me every time. Chris’s take is haunting, and Michael’s, with its buildup and tension, and that increasing sense of pressure that ultimately has to explode, is just something other worldly, and yet so fitting right here, right now: “And be careful of what you do ’cause the lie becomes the truth”

This is not the Godzilla you’ve been waiting for. As it turns out, its symbolism is a fallacy, meaning it’s also not the one that’s destined to enlighten Washington, or if nothing else, force its hand. If you’re thinking, no, you’re wrong, it’s going to happen, we just have to wait until after the inauguration—then good luck, but for the love of God, please stop suggesting that couples who have no business being together get married to save their crumbling relationships.

I readily admit schadenfreude swept across me as I sat back during the primaries, letting the sadistic butterflies pinball around my stomach, racking up point after point as each candidate got picked off one by one—as each unsuspecting citizen, policy, and country became victim to Operation: Scorched Earth. And despite the fact that I reveled in it in the privacy of my own home, unbeknownst to you or anyone else I know, that still makes me an ass. Now I’m not suggesting that the opposite is true—that getting all up in arms and throwing a hissy fit is the answer either. I’ll be the first to slap my forehead in frustration whenever the vocal minority finds a rock in the middle of nowhere and lifts it up to unearth something that had specifically crawled underneath it to die.

I’m an ass. I’m an ass for watching this spectacle, summoning my inner I told you so in order to say, conscience aside, that they’re getting what they deserve—that they brought this on themselves. That’s not to say they didn’t, they most certainly did, but to sit there, reveling in it, like Cersei watching King’s Landing burn from afar, makes me no better than the partisan asses who’d just as soon let it all implode through passivity, stall tactics, and downright arrogance, than to try something that may very well do the same, but at least have the decency in the end to say that they tried, for better or worse.

I’m not asking the nation to throw itself under the bus. (And yes, I did not say nation’s leaders—the elected ones both local and national—just because you became a father or became a mother, doesn’t make you one. You need to actually step up to the plate, make the sacrifice, do the things you’re supposed to do, make the mistakes, learn from them, and try again. If you don’t feed your children, they’re going to die. Don’t treat them with respect…they’re going to turn, resent you, grow up to be worse than you, and pass down your failings, without taking the very responsibility for their own actions, and inactions, that you should have taken yourself.)

What I’m asking is for the nation to look both ways, left AND right, then cross the damn street! Yes, motorized vehicles are fast. Yes, they can come out of nowhere. But rarely, in the middle of the day, having done your due diligence, having looked left and having looked right, or waiting for the sign to let you know that it’s safe to go, does a car, let alone a bus, come out of nowhere and pancake your ass. Stand there and do nothing indefinitely, you’re going to find yourself starving to death; or yelled at to get out of the way; or unable to move because you’ve allowed yourself to become paralyzed—content in your certainty that doing nothing is better than the alternative; or maybe someone will come along and push you, or you’ll slip, trip, or simply fall asleep standing there and plunge into the street like some felled tree, only to get run over anyway by that bus you were absolutely, without a shadow of a doubt, convinced you knew how to avoid.

I had an old Commodore 64 when I was a kid, never had the original Nintendo, never sat down in front of my parents’ 32” Magnavox tube TV and moved Mario around from left to right and back again to collect as many coins as possible. I inserted a 5 ½ inch floppy, typed ‘Load “*”, 8’, crossed my fingers that nothing would go wrong, and eventually found myself playing Frogger. Wasn’t trying to knock down the flag at the end of the level. Definitely wasn’t trying to save the princess. Was never on the lookout for a mushroom so I could grow bigger or a flower so I could shoot fire. All I needed to do was to get that frog across the street and across the river. And I needed to do it before time ran out. I could hop right, I could hop left, I could even hop backwards, but if I never hopped forward and got to the other side, time would run out—and I would lose. Game over. Waste of time. Waste of money.

You have to cross the street—be the frog—hell, be the damn chicken for all I care. Now you’re just suggesting we do things blindly. No, but what I am saying is that a leap of faith must be taken. Are you risk adverse or merely just intolerant of learning that your way or my way or someone else’s way is the wrong way? Or, perhaps, is it harder to accept that one of those, the one you staunchly oppose, actually worked or could work? You know the one I’m talking about, the one that you’ve been told won’t work, the one you assume, like everyone else, myself included, won’t work. The one if asked to speak about ad nauseam, without skipping a single detail, without failing to explain the intricate details, and all the finite ramifications down the line, live in front of an audience of people far smarter than you or I, you’d respond the only way you know how—by some cliché laugh or vulgarity, and some blindfolded swings with your verbal bat until your sense of pride was appeased and your chance at escape and saving face permitted your exit.

I’ve seen leaders and I’ve seen followers, and I can safely say that I avoid, like the plague, followers who fail to question, and leaders who fail to surround themselves with people who know more than they do—or think they do. But a leader who’d rather stand in the road, a follower who’d rather do the same and get hit by the bus than actually take responsibility for crossing the road is worse. And shame on them for blaming the bus and its driver. And shame on any of us for accepting that as an excuse, and for permitting them to do it again and again. And shame on us for not saving these poor souls by relieving them of their duty—as it is obviously far too difficult a job for them to take action. Let’s be honest here…if you’re unwilling to get that frog across the street, then you have now right to complain when the person you handed the controller to refused to do the same. What’d you expect? It’s already been said, like father, like son. You’ve passed on the sense of responsibility. Passed on the precedent that inaction is okay.

Yeah. So what? I am but a vote, a singular selection for him—for her—and everyone and everything down ballot. I voiced my opinion, did my civic duty—excited and proud of my decision, hopeful that others will follow suit—or head shaking, out of obligation, having chosen the lesser of two evils, but at least I did it. And I understand this latter point. I get it. I understand how anyone whose priorities have social issues at two or lower can be stuck hemming and hawing about what to do. It’s not a criticism, it’s merely an observation, and an admission that I’m glad I have yet to face the same dilemma as you. Present to me two individuals from opposite parties who align socially and “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.” I don’t envy the situation these people are in, but I understand it.

What I also understand is the decision to vote to push someone into the street. The problem is you’re not actually voting who to push, you’re voting for someone to do the pushing for you. And this makes the lesser of two evils moot. This was where I was wrong. Putting aside my number ones and considering the unenviable positions I don’t see myself in anytime in the near future, I realized the evil argument doesn’t hold water.

Everyone’s past remains. We can hide it as best we can, but whether the skeletons remain closeted forever, or the floodgates of our truths burst open, we have to move forward. And so the question: Who do you think you’re voting for? The frog? Or are you choosing between the scorpion and the tortoise? If the world were full tortoises, we wouldn’t be choosing between the lesser of two evils—we’d all be stuck, in the most wonderful of ways, over whose benevolence can do the most good. At the risk of diving into a sea of cynicism beyond which even the best of us could never return, I think it’s a safe assumption that the latter is clearly not the case. So we’re voting for scorpions, right? Again, I’d have to disagree. I’m no political historian by any stretch of the imagination, but I’ve yet to see, this year no exception, a candidate willing to ride on the backs of a nation, only to stab it out of instinct, knowing full well while drowning to death that this was the only way—for it’s human nature and that this was the cross they’d been bearing their entire life, knowing the inevitable was just a matter of time. Show me a politician unwilling to save face and talk until blue in said face to save his or her political career, then we can talk about scorpions.

But for now we’re left with amphibians, ones we so desperately hope are in control of themselves, ones who can move forward, navigate the onslaught without getting squashed, or become paralyzed in a parking lot of traffic, ones who can finally get to the other side, and show the rest of us that it actually can be done. And there’s the rub. Who’s going to let them? We’ve already proven that we’re more than willing to kick the barrel over, no questions asked, and make ourselves at home. And thank you. And may I have another?

We can all glass house the hell out of this, so no point in starting. So instead I reference a comedienne back in the late 80s, early 90s, whose name escapes me, but she put it best. And I apologize for censoring her now, but this past year has had more than enough discussions below the belt. She described a woman who had an itch—nothing more—nothing needing medical attention—just an itch. And it was in that very moment that someone saw her scratch that itch, that it was over for her. And the comedienne went on to say, and how prescient her words: “You could have the cure for cancer in this hand…” but nope, she was just seen scratching that itch…So I ask again. Do you attempt the cure, or do you just let the cancer keep growing? Your only excuse: Do you know where that hand has been? Something has got to be better than that. Let’s just go home to our barrel and complain.

Except now we have our answer, don’t we? This is it. Finally. The chosen one to right this ship. Deep from under the ocean—from the sea of possibilities—risen to force the hands of all the ones in Washington: the clean ones, the dirty ones, the idle ones.

I’m sorry, but this is not the Godzilla you’ve been waiting for.

Had it been, we wouldn’t be here now. And by we, I mean all of us—from all walks of life, from all beliefs of what we hold dear, and what we should have let go of long ago. Godzilla was never meant for a select few—not a percentage, not a majority, not a super majority. Godzilla was meant for all of us, no exceptions, no exclusions. But, yet, here we are. There’s an expectation, dare I say a hope, that this is what the doctor ordered. It’s cherished, championed, prayed and rooted for. That was never the intention—a hero, anti-hero, savior…pick your noun. This was symbolic, but tangible enough, because we won’t allow ourselves to be wrong—we need to see it happen to others before we’re ever willing to consider the possibility. But you don’t root for the carnage, the tearing down of buildings, the death and destruction, the fire breathing, and the ashes once it’s gone. You root for humanity and for everyone to come together now, not sometime today, but now—drop everything, now—not tomorrow, not next week, not in four years, not when the worst of this world forces us to, for as long as we allow ourselves to be forced. And that has not happened. The differences have not been set aside for the greater good. And that’s all the evidence needed—the immediate inaction—to know that this is not the answer. The lesson was never about what it was going to do, everyone knew what it was going to do. It was about what we did to cause it, and what we needed to do to stop it—not the monster, that’s the least of our worries as we’ve already seen—but what we needed to do so that it would never rise again.

And it’s been how long now? Yet still…And still…And I’m sorry…And not yet…And I don’t know when…But this isn’t it.