Godwin's Law

Until about 30 seconds ago, I had been unaware of Godwin's Law, of which I am now an avid fan.

I've got a little law of my own, though it may not be nearly as good as Godwin's. No social media thread in which a particular recording artist or recording is mentioned in any way, however tangentially (for instance, "I was listening to Jack White while churning butter in the Lower 40 last Tuesday") will go more than a dozen comments without someone feeling called upon to let fly a completely irrelevant value judgment, such as, for instance, "I liked his/her/their/its [insert title] album best."

Of course, it can be even worse than that, as in someone feeling called upon to declare, “I can’t decide if I like [insert title or recording artist] or [insert title or recording artist] better.”

On the one hand, I find such declarations jaw-droppingly narcissistic. (What leads you to imagine that anyone cares, darling?) In a better mood, though, I find them sort of endearing, as I did when my then-11-year-old daughter informed me that she wasn’t content with making a mere cameo in one of my scripted sketch comedy revues in San Francisco, but wanted to become a full-fledged member of the troupe. I generally disdain passivity, and admire those who see something they like and want to try to do it themselves, though in many areas of life (sports, music, writing novels) this impulse has only put me on the path to tears.

It has long been my custom, when I encounter comments like “I can’t decide if I like [insert title or recording artist] or [insert title or recording artist] better” to reply, “Can you please notify us when you’ve reached a decision?” This works on two levels. First, it makes the commenter feel appreciated. What better feeling is there than that of others you haven’t even met wanting to know how you feel about things? On another level, it briefly satisfies my insatiable need to be sarcastic.

Another fun thing to do on Facebook, in particular: Insert this comment at random into almost any thread: White person's problem. You'll have hours of fun reading the Heated Responses!

The awful thing about using a photograph of Jack White to illustrate this little essay is that most people will read it solely because they’re Jack White fans. The wonderful thing is that someone will read it. I so enjoy feeling appreciated.

A Young Person's Guide to Race in America

There was only one black pupil in my elementary school, Sandra Lucas, and she claimed to be Spanish. She wasn’t given a hard time because she was gorgeous, desired by all the boys, envied by all the girls. There was one black pupil at my junior high school. His ticket to non-harassment was his athletic brilliance. I was a fervent fan of the Los Angeles Dodgers, who included John Roseboro, Junior Gilliam, Maury Wills, and the Davis non-brothers.

My parents weren’t hateful people, and, as Jews, knew what it was like to shunned for their ethnicity, but they weren’t exactly progressive in their thinking. My mother had briefly had a black girlfriend in high school in Minneapolis, but had worried that others might think less of her for it. My dad told me that black people had natural rhythm, but that property values plummeted in neighbourhoods lots of them moved into. He was uncomfortable with the thought of my little sister ever dating a black guy.

I think the first black person I actually spoke to was Charlie Neal, then the Los Angeles Dodgers’ second baseman, at an autograph event at a local department store. I like to imagine I addressed him as Mr. Neal. I admired a great many black ball players. At the time, the Los Angeles Times sportswriters always took care to point out when it was a rookie of colour about whom they were writing.

Two years later, I had more contact with black people when I worked as a busboy in Ted’s Rancho Restaurant, on Pacific Coast Highway between Santa Monica and Malibu. The place employed two black dishwashers. The tiny, wizened, and inconceivably ancient (probably around 50) one invariably found something amiss with the tubfuls of dirty dishes I’d lug into him from the dining room. Twenty seconds after I’d placed a tubful in his work area, and hurried back out to keep my custies’ water glasses and butter dishes filled, his voice, full of rebuke, would ring through the restaurant. “Young man!”, with the second word pronounced MAY-un. During my entire career as a busboy, I don’t think I ever delivered the dirty dishes in a way that didn’t annoy him.

I actually became friendly with the other guy, Collins Hall, who, by dint of being conscientious and hard-working, was promoted to chef, to the infinite chagrin of the redneck asshole who presided over the kitchen. This was during the summer of Selma and the three civil rights volunteers being murdered in Mississippi. I thought myself ever so noble for assuring Collins that I didn’t hate him because he was black. He said, “Why, thank you, sir,” non-rhotically. It wasn’t until years later that it dawned on me that he was being sarcastic. We remained pretty friendly in spite of my being a clueless little dickhead.

I was fired from Ted’s for being a rotten busboy, and went to work selling admissions to the big parking lot at Zuma Beach, 16 miles up Pacific Coast Highway. I was surrounded at work by rednecks. There was much talk of Martin Luther Coon, and of how Lyndon B. Johnson wanted to force decent, fragrant white folk to live next door to malodorous Negroes, though my colleagues pronounced the word rather differently.

My first girlfriend’s family lived in north Malibu next door to a guy who tried to put together a group of vigilantes to go up into Watts, whose inhabitants were rioting, and shoot rioters dead. My first might-have-been father-in-law was a good guy, and declined the invitation.

At Santa Monica High School, classes were supposedly segregated according to academic aptitude. There were classes for those likely to go on to higher education, and classes for those who probably wouldn’t, and classes for those who required remediation. I was unmistakably higher education material. In my three years at Samohi (from which Donald Trump's Secretary of Xenophobia Stephen Miller would graduate decades later), I was in a grand total of one class for which a black kid was deemed sufficiently brilliant. One interacted with other ethnicities only in PE. 

A black family moved into my neighbourhood, a desolate semi-ritzy real estate development on the mesa up a very steep hill from Ted’s Rancho Restaurant. Its patriarch owned a pharmacy in Santa Monica. My impression was that property values didn’t plummet. I don’t think anyone spraypainted racist slogans on their garage door.

In adulthood, I had brief flings with two black women, and repudiated all forms of xenophobia, including, but not limited to, racism, homophobia, and misogyny. In 1988, Ed, the abstract expressionist friend who'd taken me in after the collapse of Marriage 1.0, was driving me and a work colleague acquaintance of his down to San Francisco when Other Acquaintance began spouting off about niggers. I demanded that Ed let me out of the car. We were on Highway 101 in Novato, and he wasn't pleased about having to get off the freeway.

Why thank you, suh.

Not One to Point Fingers

Witnessing the horror of the ongoing Donald Trump presidency, I feel the most fervent contempt for those who, in George Will’s wonderful words, “gambol around his ankles with a canine hunger for petting.” But once, long ago, when I was in a situation very much like theirs, I did no better.

‘Twas 1980, and I couldn’t make ends meet. My attempts at becoming an internationally adored rock star hadn’t quite panned out, and the world seemed to have changed its mind about my writing, which I’d come to be unable to give away. I lived in one room in a crumbling art hovel on the edge of LA’s Koreatown ordinarily occupied by a friend who’d gone to New York City in hopes of becoming an internationally acclaimed new wave star. I was so close to pennilessness that I didn’t buy myself the Los Angeles Times, but asked my sister to save hers for me. Each day, I would enjoy an edition from the previous week. My falling-apart Austin Marina was the farthest thing from a chick magnet in all of southern California, not that I could afford my insurance payment.

Larry Flynt Publications offered me a job. I would be the articles editor for Hustler’s much more respectable little sister, Chic. I would be paid $25,000 per year, over $70,000 in 2020 money.

The guy who called the shots at LFP, the late Bruce David, was living proof that cocaine could ruin a person’s personality. I’d never heard shriller screaming. At any moment, you thought he might start yanking out handfuls of his own hair — or handfuls of that of someone who’d inaccurately enacted one of his unintelligible editorial directives. Years later, when I saw Downfall, about the last days of Adolf Hilter, I felt as though back in LFP’s conference room on the 37^th floor in Century City.

Given how everyone’s blood pressure soared at those meetings, it was a wonder everyone seemed to survive them, albeit slightly ashamed of themselves. None more than I, who never uttered a peep of protest. Instead, I sat as far from Bruce as I could, took care never to make eye contact with him, and tried to will myself into invisibility. He never laid into me, possibly because he didn’t know I was there, and I never defended anyone at whom he was shrieking. I wanted to keep my job, to be able to buy myself sushi for lunch, and to fill the little fuel tank of my new Renault Le Car with unleaded gasoline.

Let him who is without sin cast the first stone. I’m in no position to condemn those in the Trump White House who abide his monstrousness.