Holiday Rant by Orb Weaver

~~~When Orb Weaver has something truly pithy to say, she says it! Here she is, guesting on Cronehenge.~~~

 

 

 

Most of us have been stuck in the morass of pre-pre-holiday planning, and the fact that Chanukah and Christmas basically correspond this year have made it much easier for the two-star families … you know, David’s and Bethlehem’s.  And while our attentions have been elsewhere, shit, as they say, has been happening.  Another Seal Team 6 attempt to rescue an American failed.  Well, they got the detainee, but they sort of broke him during the transfer.  So he died on board ship.  Dead, by any other name, is still dead.  Sorry, Will.  It seemed appropriate.   

In any event, I’ve gone back to paying attention to some of the news, usually BBC and Jazeera, because they really don’t have any dogs in this fight of ours.  It’s interesting to hear how disinterested parties translate our societal ills into exactly who and what they are:  Our leaders, for the most part, are greedy malcontents with enormous appetite and capacity for what I call pure evil, what others call pure power.  They are mad with it, like the Caesars and  the Czars.  And they know the rest of the world hates us.  They don’t care.  Whatever it takes.  Just like Tony Soprano. 

But unlike Tony Soprano, whose murderous tendencies were reprehensible in that they were “only business”, ours are wholesale extermination of civilians, women and children, in what is being sold to the general public as a war against the infidels.  That always worked well in Hollywood, and it works almost as well in everyday life.  Hell, it worked pretty well for the Crusaders, with only a couple of exceptions.  Lie and call it a religious crusade, when in actuality it’s only business.  And we wonder why they hate us, these (to us) strange, proud, devout people who will never, never give up on it, this hatred of us.  And why should they?  We have proven ourselves to be incompetent in the running of our own government, so why on earth would they want to be like us?  But we can never mind our own business, alienate our allies, and there’s all that oil ... So we start a holy war of our own, Desert Storm.  So here we are, almost fifteen years later, and we have managed, with a little help from Africa, to turn the entire middle east as well as Afghanistan and Pakistan, into a complete cluster fuck.  As Tony would say.  Israel.  Palestine.  Lybia.  Iraq.  Iran.  Yemen.  Jordan.  Saudi Arabia (on a good day for OPEC).  And the worst part is that even though they hate each other, they are absolutely united in their great distaste for America.  Like we were with the Indians, and then the Chinese, and then the Italians, and then the Irish, and then the Jews followed closely by the Japanese, remember?  Well.  Now we are a tribe unto ourselves, the Americans.  And most days, we kill each other at an average of 44 people per day.  Per day.  How can that not be a national cause of alarm?

And now, to add injury to injury (the insult depends on which side you’re on), the brilliant legal minds of a Grand Jury in the City of New York decided (never mind what continues to occur in Ferguson, MO) there were no grounds to indict Officer Mark Pagano for his successful employment of the illegal choke hold.  Never mind this officer has been censured on several occasions due to civilian complaints.  Never mind two law suits were settled by the NYPD on plaintiffs who sued the NYPD and Officer Pagano in, I believe, civil rights violations.  And so we have a multitude of disenfranchised, underemployed, UNemployed, uneducated and UNWILLING folks ... men and women who are tired of burying their children, their husbands, and are UNWILLING to allow this to continue.  And what do we do?  What answers do we have?  Are human beings in general genetically hardwired to hate whatever is different?  I thought we settled all that shit in the ‘60s and ‘70s.  So here we are again, shades of Detroit, vestiges of Watts, the smoke’s the same, the flames burn as brightly now as then.  Fueled by the same unkept promises.  Enabled. 

I’m starting to be reasonably uneasy with my government.  I’ve had other periods of distrust in the course of the last 50 years, and I’ve witnessed them behaving badly a thousand times, with no recourse in places like Kent State and Chicago, but this is more than that.  This is an ear-to-the-ground kind of thing, like an oncoming train making the tracks hum from ten miles away.  You know you have some time, but not much, before the 3:11 makes mush of you.  That’s what I’m feeling.   You know, the feeling you get when you hear “Something’s Coming” from West Side Story.  Yeah, that feeling. 

Could it be?  Yes, it could.  But it won’t.  This ain’t Broadway, and Leonard ain’t directing.  And what’s coming is way more Sondheim than Lion King.  I hear Wagner.  And a little bit of Schumann.  I want to run into the street, screaming for people to wake up.  But I won’t.  Jail is not a place I want to be.  And so ... the proletariat will once again hide from what they don’t want to see, or hear, or experience.  They will cling to the little electronic gadgets they hold pressed to their very noses, and they will never make eye contact, and they will be safe.  Let me know how that works out for ya.

 

My Time & The Doctor

David Tennant as The Doctor

I was living in England with my mother, going to The School of St. Claire in Penzance as a day student. We lived in the end unit of a stone row house, just as you imagine a British working class neighborhood. We had just moved out of an artsy Mousehole hotel to less expensive Newlyn, to the last building on the top of the hill above the harbor. Behind us was a field with dairy cows and a stubby, well-worn stone circle, through which I walked every morning, taking the back way over the headland into PZ. We rented our telly and paid license fees, like everyone else on the street, and I began watching my first regular doses of English entertainment. It was black and white in those days, rather different from what I’d been accustomed to back in the States.


I only saw two shows containing the original Doctor, William Hartnell. Although I remember keenly enjoying Dr. Who, it was never completely clear to me what the heck was going on. I remember being thrilled to realize that this show was not only about history—and with costumes which were actually period correct (astonishing in and of itself as this was the early sixties)—but also about the science fiction notion of time travel. The Doctor and his two companions eventually escaped from trouble inside their odd little time machine—in this case, a blue police call box, the kind I’d seen standing, by the sixties dusty and unused, on street corners here and there in London. They called this handy device the TARDIS*.

Well, wow! Stories about history and time travel all in one show! The main character was not only mysterious, aged and professorial, but a little sinister, too, as if he was not entirely to be trusted. As someone who liked fantasy and science fiction but who was also loved to read about famous characters in history, I couldn’t help but be intrigued. Unfortunately, I never saw any more than those two shows. Soon Mom and I pulled up stakes again and headed for Barbados. In those days, the West Indies had no television.

Years later, The Doctor and I reconnected. My kids and I were sitting on the floor together watching public television on our Zenith, also parked on the floor. (In those days furniture was something of a luxury.) A British import began. Lo and behold--there was my time traveler and his blue box—again! Of course, the original doctor had gone. The new one was still domineering and mysterious, but far less of a stuffy old professor. Instead he now appeared to be in his forties, with a gorgeous head of wavy hair and Victorian get-ups by way of Carnaby Street. John Pertwee might have just stepped out of the Yellow Submarine.

Okay, I thought, I’ll go with the flow. My brief, earlier acquaintance with that absent-minded elderly Doctor was a pleasant memory. This, I realized, would be a great show for the kids to watch while I made dinner. (In those days 30 Minute Meals was not a “marketable idea,” just the way everybody cooked.)

My boys became fans, but almost immediately there came a change in Doctors, as reported to me by my oldest son. He was about equally disturbed and fascinated by the fact that the main character in a series might abruptly “regenerate” into someone else, all while essentially playing (more or less) the same character. Tom Baker immediately captured our fancy, perhaps because his clothes were utterly Boho- trippy. The hat, the scarf, the manic manner, the comic timing, his diction, and his “funny walks”—Baker was like a speaking, Oxford-educated Harpo Marx . The kids, and their Mom too, adored Baker, and we watched the show faithfully during the years of his reign. My youngest son begged his aunt to knit him a floor-sweeping Whovian scarf for Christmas, and we hunted used clothing stores for a cool old hat to go with it.

Time passed for us, as it never quite does in the TARDIS. The kids got older and began to lose interest when the Doctor "regenerated" again. We never entirely warmed to the handsome, dapper Peter Davidson with his question marks and 1890s university cricketer’s garb. We drifted away.

Years went by. The kids grew up and had kids of their own. I became a senior. Time Lords (the Doctor's species), however, regenerate with some regularity. And although I hadn't been paying attention, he’d done it again.

One day I was channel surfing and happened upon BBC America. And Wa-Hoo KA-ZAM! There he was, a brand new Doctor. This incarnation had a budget and enjoyed all the benefits of the CG revolution. Somewhere in the hiatus, the hoary old Doctor had become a “valuable property.” Forty-seven years after our first meeting, I’d found him again.

You might think I'd be too old now for a "kid's show," because I'm wrinkly and gray, but I'm still turned on by Doctor Who's fizzy cocktail combo of history and space/time travel. It's been great fun to be a fan at the same time my grandgirls--21and 12. Not only monsters, but more ordinary human problems are regularly explored here, such as the inevitably of change and the blessing of friendship. Rarified concepts like immortality, the persistence of evil, and the--let's face it--scariness of eternity are also pondered. There are many reasons why this series, conceived in the early days of television, is still going strong. I may myself soon vanish out of Time, but it seems there will always be another Doctor.


Doctor Who, Greatest Show in the Galaxy.





* TARDIS= Time and Relativity Dimensions in Space. Sort of silly, but there you are. ;)