My Corona Diary (Take I): I'm (*Not) In Love With My Walls"

"My Walls (First Look)"
<The Reckoner>

I'm in love with my walls.
We got a deal that's cozy.
They caress me just like Niagara Falls
and my whole world looks rosy.

Lester Bangs, 
"I'm In Love With My Walls"

<i.>

Six weeks ago or so, our whole world unwound, and it hasn't been the same. Mind you, it's taken me this long to address the whole COVID-19 situation, since The Squawker and I have been so busy dealing with all the relevant fallout, like planning the grocery runs, searching for those household supplies that used to come so easily, including paper towels and toilet paper, working out when to pay this bill, or that...it's not like we've had loads of time to think about the implications.

And, of course, we here at Ramen Noodle Nation HQ don't always chase the headline of the day, when the latest crisis shifts like so much eroding beach sand. Think back to 9/11. How many recording studios should have stayed locked and barred, to spare us odes like Toby Keith's "Courtesy Of The Red, White & Blue" ("We'll put a boot in your ass/It's the American way")? I rest my case.

I remember pointing out this small fact during the Northeast Blackout of 2003, when one of my idiot bosses mightily berated me for being the only staffer who didn't report to the newspaper office. When he finally ran out of breath in mid-rant, I ventured: "Well, there was one small matter that held me up..."

"What's that?"

"We didn't have electricity, so we couldn't have printed a paper. Besides, whatever we'd report would have been out of date by the time they'd got the power back on."

My boss clenched his face, but said nothing. I'd made my point, even if I didn't feel like celebrating. 

Then and now, though, it's the strange moments that stick with you longest, like in 2003, when The Squawker and I drove around our little town, searching for somewhere to grab the dinner we hadn't yet made when the Great Blackout came calling.

Finding nothing in or around our home, we drove 10 miles to the next town, where we spotted a long line of cars that literally snaked into the main drag, where we discovered... "Oh, wow! That's for McDonald's! McDonald's is open!" I shouted.

"You mean, we'll actually get something to eat?" Squawker said. "Well, it's not the greatest, but..."

"It'll do the job," I finished.

So what's the COVID-19 version look like, exactly? Well, as Squawker gently admonished me, "All those jokes you made about 'hiding in the nest,' you never imagined how we'd end up, did you?"

"Er, no," I conceded. "Not exactly."

"I've been warning people about this stuff since 2000..."

"For sure," I agreed. "But this is part of the usual cycle that we go through with these things, isn't it?"

"Meaning what?"

"When something like this hits, everybody runs around like ants, frantically trying to scoop up enough sand to put the anthill back together," I sighed. "Once the storm passes, though, it's all duly forgotten again. Until next time."

I'm thinking of the "60 Minutes" story I this Sunday, where one of the interviewees was earnestly proposing that America create a preparedness office that, like the National Weather Service, would strive to warn against future pandemics. Otherwise, the guy ventured, we'd risk getting burned, again and again and again.

It's a rational and reasonable response, but not one that's getting heard above the whims of the political class who screwed up so mightily in the first place. They're the reason why our town, like so many others, resembles an outtake from The Omega Man, minus the strapping Charlton Heston figure ready to put things right with a few well-placed blasts of the old AK-47. But I digress.

"My Walls (Second Look)"

<The Reckoner>

The more I love them, the more they shrink.
Can't even get them to get another drink.
I don't even care if they make me small.
No one ever loved me better than my walls.

Lester Bangs, 

"I'm In Love With My Walls"

<ii.>

Lester Bangs, often regarded as America's greatest rock critic, recorded the above-quoted song for Jook Savages On The Brazos (Live Wire: 1981), the only full-length album that he'd release in a life that ended -- 38 years ago, on April 30, 1982 -- from an accidental overdose of Darvon.

Countless songs name-check his presence, notably REM's "It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)," for instance. Fittingly, the song's shown back up on the charts, undoubtedly goosed along by such lyrics as, "That's great, it starts with an earthquake." If that doesn't creep you out, nothing will.

At first glance, "I'm In Love With My Walls" is basically an ironic celebration of a reclusive man's unwillingness to leave his apartment. The second glance, according to Jim DeRogatis's biography (Let It Blurt), is a punning salute to the late CREEM writer Richard C. Walls, a close friend and colleague, whose fear of public spaces and situations often prevented him from going out.

I wonder what a Lester Bangs or Richard C. Walls, who died himself in 2017, might make of the madness that's literally keeping us cooped in and closed off, though hardly by choice.

The biggest adjustment, as one mom told us during our weekly Unitarian Zoom gathering, is dealing with kids who now are home all the time, since school is closed, and because "parenting is a full-time job," she laughed.

I describe the irony of not being able to capitalize on my long-standing enjoyment of live performance -- as someone who gives them, and goes to them, too. "Here I am, with a little more time and money on my hands," I said, "but it's not even something I can think of doing at the moment."

"So are you doing any recording right now?"

"Well, yeah, because that's the only game in town right now," I shrugged. "It is what it is."

The Squawker and I spend the rest of our Sunday attending to various household and creative tasks -- which is how this post started -- amid the usual bite-sized discussions of where this madness is heading. At one point, Squawker ventures, "We should have gotten out of here when we had the chance."

"Yeah, well, that's the sticky part," I sigh. "We never settled on a place to go. That's the first rule of these things, isn't it?"

"I'll keep looking into it."

<"Welcome to the unwave.">

<...this music
has no future.

But it does have 

a vindictive present.">

Richard C. Walls,
No New York LP review,

CREEM, April 1979

<iii.>

The strangeness never stops piling up. Earlier this month, I paid $74 to renew a PO Box that may not exist in a few months, because, well...the Post Office didn't get any money out of the recent bailout package (The CARES Act). Maybe Trump's bringing back the Pony Express? That's how it looks from here.

This week, I'm almost finished with reading Stalin: The Court Of The Red Tsar (Simon Sebag Montefiore), a book that I started during a frigid Christmas holiday week in December 2018...as wind chills fell into the 30 and 40 below range, and the authorities warned people to stay home at all costs. 

I still wound up having to buy $100-plus worth of groceries, because our latest bout with food insecurity had stripped us of nearly everything. The gas tank lid froze shut, so I pried it open with a screwdriver.

And now? Our refrigerator's the fullest it's been in three years, thanks (in part) to an additional writing check that came before COVID-19 hammered the global economy, whatever that was. Thanks to our surplus funds, the bottom line has never looked better, but it feels strange when you can't leave those four walls behind for any extended length of time.

My mind drifts back to the odd couple of this song, Lester and Richard, thinking how they must have felt behind their four walls, pecking out their latest movie or record review and/or feature, railing mightily against a world they didn't always want to encounter, one that didn't often treat them well. 

It's the same feeling that strikes me, when I hear these words ring out from The Kid From Silicon Gulch (1981), a rarely staged slice of sci-fi noir from Hawkwind's late frontman, Bob Calvert:

<“This is my beat. The heat drenched empty sidewalks and all the millions of lonely electronic hotel rooms and cybernetic apartments. No one goes out any more. They all stay in their rooms pressing their buttons, staring at their terminals. I call it The Gulch. Silicon Gulch.”>

And that's when one last thought crosses my mind on this soggy wet Sunday, as the rain dribbles down our front window... Maybe we were just being primed, all along. -- The Reckoner

Links To Go (Quickly Now,
Before It Starts Closing In):

CNET
Coronavirus Puts REM's
"It's The End Of The World As We Know It" On Charts:
https://www.cnet.com/news/coronavirus-has-r-e-m-s-its-the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it-climbing-charts/

Dangerous Minds
Hawkwind Poet Robert Calvert's
Prophetic Sci-Fi Noir:
https://dangerousminds.net/comments/hawkwind_poet_robert_calverts_prophetic_sci-fi_noir

Metro Times
Remembering The Writer Richard C. Walls:
https://www.metrotimes.com/the-scene/archives/2017/05/22/remembering-the-writer-richard-c-walls

YouTube
The Kid From Silicon Gulch: Full Recording:
https://dangerousminds.net/comments/hawkwind_poet_robert_calverts_prophetic_sci-fi_noir

Who Decides, Who Decides?: Exit Bernie (Now Is Not The Time To Let Up)

"You are what you settle for."

<Janis Joplin>

<i.>

Let's be honest. It was always going to be a heavy lift. But it was an exhilarating run while it lasted, I learned a lot from it, and I don't feel like letting up.

That's how I feel about Bernie Sanders's exit from the presidential race on Tuesday, giving the Democratic Party establishment what it's wished for since 2016, when he first turned up to crash the party.

You can almost feel the high fiving and football spiking going on right now, all across America's boardrooms: Yeeeaaahhh! We sure showed him, didn't we? Waaa-hooo! Free college, my ass! Medicare For All, my ass! Wealth tax, my ass! The rumpled Anti-Christ from Vermont has finally, irrevocably and unalterably been put in his place.

That's the tone of pieces like the one I found on The Conversation, whose headline reads, "Bernie Drops Out, As Democrats Pick Pragmatism Over Consistency." The author happens to be an assistant adjunct professor at Colorado University, a credit reeking of irony. If somebody like this -- who apparently never won the tenure lottery -- can accept such an outcome, and by definition, the very system that keeps him at the bottom of the academic ladder, it's game over for everybody else. Telling me to head straight to the last Kubler-Ross stage (acceptance) doesn't fill me with confidence.

All's right again with the world, which is now safe for Word Salad Joe to continue with his quirky mangling of the English language.

Progressive sentiment be damned. Time to grit our teeth, as they hand us back the keys to our jail cells, and prepare to herd us into line once more, returning us to the same old, same old unforgiving muddle that's  frozen America in place for 30-odd years. Dreaming big is out; resigned exhaustion is back in. There's a pandemic raging, so what else do you expect, right? Judging by what I see on Facebook, though, more than a few folks are still expecting quite a lot. 

Reactions to Tuesday's announcement range from outright disgust ("RIP, United States," "Something is wrong"), to impatience with their fellow man's foibles ("we had a viable 'third party' candidate and fear of the word 'socialism' scared people off"), to hopes of building on the energy he let loose, as the Sunrise Movement sees it ("He inspired us to become the political revolution we had been waiting for"). 

<3D Paint Artwork: The Reckoner

Lyrics: Public Enemy ("Fight The Power")

<ii.>

If you're looking for a postmortem examination, this isn't the time or place.  Am I going to swallow hard, and vote for Biden this fall? Honestly, I don't have a clue, because I wasn't necessarily expecting to entertain the question.

It does help that Biden's pledged to pick a female running mate -- presumably to ease the pain of women voters who watched six of their own get chased out of this year's race. Maybe if he picks a progressive woman for Vice President, it'll seal the deal? Maybe. We'll see.

Progressives had other ideas, I suspect, after Biden's barrel scraping, cellar dwelling finishes in Iowa and New Hampshire. For a brief moment -- a maddeningly fleeting one, just like in 2016 -- our biggest dream finally seemed possible. Hey, Bernie might really win this thing! The stars might actually fall into alignment this time!

That's not what we got. Still, I'll always relish the panic that a potential Sanders nomination aroused among pillars of the Democratic establishment, like James Carville -- the same guy who's spent 30 years dining out on that expression, "It's the economy, stupid" -- and talking heads like Chris Matthews, who infamously equated the Jewish Vermonter's initial rise with Nazi Germany's military defeat of France in 1940. 

So what went sideways for Bernie this time? I'm sure a mini-cottage industry of books will spring up to dissect that question, but I'll save that autopsy for a different day. The only thing I'd really fault him for, honestly, was sticking by his well-documented unwillingness to air his private life more openly, which he did -- briefly, around the beginning of 2019 -- only to drop it like a stone.

Most people have long forgotten that episode, I'm sure, but it fascinated me. In some ways, Bernie's pre-fame, pre-political life reads like a Marvel Comics origin story. His mother died a renter while he was still young. She never lived to achieve her dreams of owning a home. I have no doubt that this loss, and the trauma surrounding it, cast the die for the path that Bernie would follow, from civil rights campaigner, to struggling writer and businessman, to third party insurgent upstart, and beyond. 

Should have he talked more about his childhood and early adult life, and how it shaped him, on the campaign trail? Would it have immunized him, at least somewhat, from potential red-baiting onslaughts, or helped voters relate to him better, especially the doubters?

Well, he didn't do it, so we'll never know. But it's another snapshot that tempts me to think beyond what is, and what might have been.

<3D Paint Artwork: The Reckoner

Lyrics: Public Enemy ("Fight The Power")

<iii.>

Coronavirus changed everything, of course. With so much widespread suffering and dying, it would have looked odd for Bernie to continue exhorting his micro-donor army to pledge money, and keep him in the fight. Naturally, he didn't do that, deftly redirecting the focus to fundraising for the crisis, and the various charities associated with it. 

As a donor, I appreciated knowing about them, such as the Rent Zero Tenant Organizing Fund, or the Restaurant Worker Disaster Relief Fund, for example. As a creative person, I especially donating to the Craft Emergency Relief Fund, an organization that advocates for artists. 

I'll continue giving to them when I can, because art -- and the impulse of making it -- is what keeps us human, even as the tech industry would have us become navel gazing zombie goldfish. People don't think about these things until they're threatened, but that's just good old human nature for you, isn't it?

The pandemic also killed the massive, festive rallies that provided the Sanders campaign's enduring visual signature. Virtual campaigning will never substitute for getting up close and personal with potential supporters, as Biden's awkward broadcasts from his Delaware home have already demonstrated. (Then again, Trump can't hold his massive Nuremberg-style rallies, so I guess that balances out the equation in some perverse way, I guess.)

If nothing else, however, the pandemic has brutally exposed the shortcomings of the system that's still taking millions of Americans for a ride. We live in the 21st Century, but it looks and smells more like the 19th Century: Insecurity with an app. All the shiny digital imagery and feelgood techspeak about "sharing" can't paper over those particular cracks.

The crisis also poked a hole in Trump's long-anticipated plan to coast on how well the rich are doing, as his well-documented obsession with the stock market suggests. For those at the top, it's always morning in America. For those who aren't, the mood is closer to twilight, with one missed paycheck or job loss away from total disaster.

The mainstream media's reaction to Bernie's exist has been oddly measured, and downright respectful, as this nugget from yesterday's New York Times editorial ("Bernie Sanders Was Right") suggests:

"He was right from the very beginning, when he advocated a total overhaul of the American health care system in the 1970s. 

"He remains right now, as a pandemic stresses the meager resources of millions of citizens to their breaking point, and possibly to their death. 

"He was right when he seemed to be the only alarmist in a political climate of complacency. 

"He is right now that he’s the only politician unsurprised to see drug companies profiteering from a lethal plague with Congress’s help. In politics, as in life, being right isn’t necessarily rewarded. But at least there’s some dignity in it."

<3D Paint Artwork: The Reckoner
Lyrics: Public Enemy ("Fight The Power")

<iv.>

Reading those words feels a little bit odd to me, because The New York Times -- and also, the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post -- ranked high among the complaints about how the mainstream media covered him. I'd throw in other suspects like CNBC, that hosted the now-discredited Matthews' infamous on-air meltdown.

Much of their coverage felt dismissive, jeering and patronizing, and I have no doubt the steady drumbeat of fear that they worked to arouse ("Don't vote your heart, vote your head instead/Or you'll get Trump, you'll get Trump, you'll get Trump") left its mark. This is understandable, from a historical perspective. If you beat down people long enough, they'll stop demanding, stop marching, and stop trying to hold the same empty suits who play sneaky panther power games with their lives accountable for the slow, steady erosion of those lives. 

It's a trend that picked up steam during the 1980s, when the Democratic Party rolled its eyes, shrugged its shoulders, and began forsaking its core base of blue collar, minority and poorer voters to pursue the same Big Money Chase that the Republicans already down to a science. So what's a progressive to do, exactly?

We must continue casting ballots for Bernie, who remains on the ballot nationwide. If nothing else, it'll enable Bernie to keep amassing delegates, exert an influence on the Democratic Party platform, and remind Team Biden of our energy and strength that he'll need to lift him over the finish line.

We must continue organizing around issues that matter, whether it's canceling student debt, or rent freezes, for example. Why can't we get the same national pause that Denmark gave its citizens? Sure, it's a smaller country, but people who've lost all their income shouldn't foot the bill for those who haven't, full stop.

We must continue making our case against the institutions that don't serve our interests, by any means necessary, as that shopworn saying goes -- whether that happens online, or on-air calls, op-ed pieces, and similar mediums. We shouldn't stop pointing out the absurdities of tying health insurance to employment essentially an historical accident of the post-World War II era -- or the overweening authoritarianism of the gig economy ("Hey, we're giving you opportunities to drive"), or the posturing of media outlets that cater to an established order that's never known the constant insecurity and turmoil that haunts young people today.

We must continue keeping our arguments simple, when we do make them. This ability to express complex ideas in a sentence or two proved one of the biggest assets that Bernie -- and his counterpart, Elizabeth Warren -- brought to their campaigns. The fog of nuance ("I voted for the $87 billion before I voted against it"; "Abortion should be safe, rare and legal") is no substitute for a simple message that gets people to think bigger: A job shouldn't leave you in poverty. Serious issues deserve serious discussion. You shouldn't have to choose between food or medicine.

We must continue to cultivate the deep bench, if we're serious about building a progressive movement that will outlast the man who helped to launch it. As forcefully as he came across on the campaign trail, Bernie's advanced age (78) likely threw up more roadblocks for voters who already doubted his ability to pass his agenda. In a country whose senior leadership is all over 75, it's imperative that the next generation gets a chance to make its influence felt, and its voice heard. 

I leave you with these words from that same New York Times editorial:

"One freedom 

that cannot be taken from you 

is your freedom

 not to like the status quo —

your freedom to be angry, disaffected, unimpressed,
your refusal to be cajoled, soothed or consoled with small tokens of influence 

devoid of real power.

"Mr. Sanders, ill tempered

 and impatient with pleasantries, 

embodied that freedom, 

and he offered it to you."

The last sentence irks me -- isn't the constant demand for pleasantries what's bogged us down in the first place?  But the rest of it is well taken. We have the blueprint, we have the energy, and we have the technology to gain so much more than the system seems willing to allow us. We owe ourselves nothing less. Now is not the time to let up--The Reckoner