An old friend came home for our 55th high school reunion and had a criticism of my recent novel, The King of Ningxia.
The book uses a shifting timeline and is loosely based on my experiences in China during the mid-80s. The story is about the relationship between an American man and a Chinese woman, whose antics together help illustrate China’s great ascent in the world and its changing relationship with the U.S. But the book also includes a stupid joke. My friend was disappointed that only an abbreviated version of the joke appears, rather than the elaborate version I told years and years ago.
My friend felt the short version misrepresented the joke, was a disservice to the joke, was a disservice to his memory of the joke, and also a disservice to the novel.
I, of course, disagreed.
From my adult perspective, the joke is juvenile and not even funny. But my friend remembers how our gang laughed and laughed and laughed as I extended and stretched out the simple story of a guy trying to sneak a duck into a movie theater. To do so, he places the duck in his pants. Once in the theater, he opens his fly to give it some air. The lady next to him sees the duck’s head popping out of the pants zipper and says to her friend, “Look at that.” Her friend responds with a shrug, “When you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all.” To which the first woman says, “Yes, but this one is eating my popcorn.”
Now according to my old friend, I would tell this joke for 20 or 30 minutes. I’d do the voices of the duck owner, the ticket taker at the theater, the two old ladies, even the duck. I would push the joke farther than it was supposed to go, provide great detail and back stories, improvise and go on and on. My friend especially liked how I had the guy pleading with the ticket taker to let the duck in, saying the movie – a film starring Donald Duck – was his all-time favorite and his pet just had to see it.
I told this joke at parties back in the late ‘60s and reminded my friend that most people at those parties were using a substance that made them laugh at anything.
“It was marijuana telling the joke, and it was marijuana laughing at the joke” I said. “The joke, by itself, is not funny.”
He held his position and said the entire joke – which I certainly could not recollect – should have been included in The King of Ningxia. At this point, I had to explain why a short version is in the book, and what it was designed to do.
It occurs during a scene where the main character, the American male, tries to learn about Chinese culture by asking a Chinese person to tell a joke, to see if the humor translates. The person agrees and tells a story of a guy who sneaks his duck into a movie theater. (In real life, this is what happened when I asked for a joke). Rather than popcorn, this Asian duck eats the woman’s sunflower seeds, which is what Chinese people eat in movie theaters. The actual punchline is a bit different as well, but it is still the same joke. In response, the American tells his version of the joke, and they compare the two.
So, I say to my friend as we prepare to attend the reunion, “Do you see the purpose of the joke? It was not to get a laugh from the reader. It was to show that an aspect of culture can jump 10,000 miles across an ocean, from a capitalist country to a communist country, and be enjoyed by two entirely different people. It says something about the oneness of humanity, about the commonalities of our minds, about the strength of global reach, of geography’s inability to contain us and the uselessness of political barriers to stop the flow of information.”
“Yeah,” said my friend. “But when the guy in the joke practically gets on his hands and knees and cries, ‘It’s Donald Duck, his favorite actor. You’ve got to let him in.’ How could you not have included that?”
It was as if my friend was still smoking weed.
“Well,” I said. “Maybe in my next novel.”
I really should end this here, but in contrast to the duck joke, I want to relate a funny Chinese video – Chinese howl at this one – that Americans just don’t get. It’s a video of a street scene in China, and there is a horse in the street. A man walks by and pats the horse on the ass. The horse then violently kicks the man in the head.
Why is this funny?
It is funny because there is a famous Chinese saying that to get ahead, you must pat the horse’s ass, meaning you must suck up and flatter authority figures. People who don’t suck up are angry that those who do receive special privileges. Therefore, the video gives the non-suckers delight in showing that sucking up does not always work.
Are you laughing yet?
No? Did you hear the one about the duck in the movie theater?
(ALL NAMES HAVE BEEN CHANGED TO PROTECT THE GUILTY)
By Lanny Morgnanesi
When I first tuned into the FX/Hulu TV show called The Bear, which just concluded its third season, I had no idea it was about a restaurant. Actually, it’s about two restaurants. Season One opens in a popular but gritty eatery best known for its Italian beef sandwich. Season Three ends in a classy, upscale joint (run by the same people) where the food on each plate is equal in size and weight to a Snickers. The Chicago-based series is about many things, including the obsession with perfection. But it is also about restaurant culture, a culture I was exposed to from age 15 to 22; a culture that I liked, appreciate, and understood. It was more than a culture; it was an education, one that was rare and unique.
And it all came rushing back after watching The Bear.
As a teen, I was unaware of myself. I knew I was not especially athletic, or especially smart, or especially funny. Other than that, I was blank. I didn’t know my quirks and idiosyncrasies, and assumed I didn’t have any. Early awareness, however, began developing after I took a job washing dishes at a place I’ll call De Luca’s, a small suburban restaurant that mostly served pizza, hoagies, steak sandwiches, and pasta dishes.
At De Luca’s, dishes were washed by hand, in a triple sink, with one empty, one having sudsy water, and one having a rinsing solution. On my first day, I found myself appalled that a fellow dishwasher was dumping sauce-covered dishes right into the sudsy water, turning it red, meaning all other dishes, even cleaner ones, would have to be washed in a tomato broth. Although I was the least experienced person at the restaurant, with no stake whatsoever in its management, I insisted that the saucy dishes be rinsed in the open sink before being placed in the soapy water, and I took it upon myself to change the soapy water at regular intervals.
On a busy Saturday, I expressed panic when the senior chef and consiglieri, the uncle of the owner that every called “Uncle,” tried dropping a large stack of saucy dishes into my sink. I stopped him abruptly and told him I needed to rinse them first. He looked at me with one eye and said, “OK Mr. Clean.” From then on, Uncle always called me Mr. Clean.
Next in my restaurant education, I was forced to ponder the conflict between morality and capitalism. It centered primarily on the quantity and quality of certain ingredients.
Between lunch and dinner, the dishwashers helped making meatballs. There was a set recipe to follow, and it included what I thought was an overabundance of breadcrumbs. I was outraged and started calling them bread balls. Clearly, the customer was being cheated (although they did taste good). Later, I was shocked to learn that on All You Can Eat Pizza Night, less than half the regular portion of cheese was used. What shocked me more was that no one cared. Furthermore, we were instructed to cut the lunchmeat paper thin. There were some complaints, but only because it took longer. All this led me to feel like an abnormal outlier, a crusading do-gooder that no one listens to. Then, the Uncle restored my confidence in mankind.
When I was cutting salami for hoagies, he happened to walk by with one of the managers. He saw what I was doing, paused, and looked around the table where I was working. He looked on a nearby shelf. He picked things up and looked underneath then. His head went left and right. The manager standing by his side asked, “Is something wrong?” Uncle answered, “I was just looking for the razor you use to cut this salami.”
Salvation. I was not alone. Morality and fairness can at least be a minority voice in capitalism. Humanity had been saved.
De Luca’s owner, let’s call him Tony De Luca, did have his moments of generosity. At Christmas, every employee – even lowly dishwashers — received a gift, a nice one. And every supplier, the truck driver or whoever it was that brought in the cartons of canned tomatoes, the heavy sacks of flower, the produce, received a fifth of whiskey. Once a year, Tony, a member of the Kiwanis service club, would donate hundreds of hoagies for the club to sell at its fundraiser. My young mind thought: Wouldn’t it be better to not do these things and instead make the meatballs meatier? Ultimately, I concluded, with no evidence, that what appeared like generosity was actually business decisions with a positive financial return; that goodness and kindness had only a little to do with it.
Thus was my early grounding in American capitalism and the world of commerce.
Next came my realization that common-sense rules, made sacrosanct and beyond question, had their purpose.
Growing up, I don’t recall being faced with rules that couldn’t be bent or challenged. But in the restaurant business, such rules existed, and while they meant more work for me, I considered them logical and important. I was more than willing to comply.
Three of those rules were:
Break down all boxes before putting them in the Dumpster.
When putting new supplies on shelves, rotate the old stock to the front.
Do not leave the restaurant at night until it is thoroughly cleaned.
These rules, never written down, showed me people, even obstreperous ones, can be compliant in the interest of building a great institution or even a great civilization. This was an important lesson for a guy who had too many opinions of his own.
As a person who read books and intended to go to college, I felt superior to most of my restaurant co-workers. So, when they showed flashes of intelligence, as they often did, it caught me off balance. Once I was asked by a manager if I could operate a certain food processor. I said I could not, and he walked away. That’s when a guy named Freddy, who would spend his life in restaurants, told me, “You never say no. Say yes, and when they take you to the machine, say this one is a little different than the one you used. Ask him to show you the basics, and then teach yourself how to use the machine. You’re smart enough to do that.”
Basically, Freddy was telling me the adage, “Fake it until you make it,” which I hadn’t yet heard.
The educational level of De Luca workers was shown in their limited vocabulary, but some knew more than they let on. I recall a manager named Leon scolding a waitress, saying, “You know what your problem is? You’ve got ASS-mosis. Every time your ass sees a chair, it sits down.” After that, I had to assume he was familiar with the scientific process of osmosis, and Gpd knows what else.
Another vocabularic surprise came from a waitress who, during this period, might be described as “hard.” Rita used to hang out with her gang, drinking, smoking, and intimidating people on their “turf” behind a shopping center. She and I talked once about a De Luca’s employee who was fired. “The guy was a real jerk off,” Rita said, using a term often applied to people you don’t like. But then she added, “I mean he was literally a jerk off. He’d call you into the backroom and when you got there, he’d be stroking it.”
Writers and scholars often confuse the words “literally” and “figuratively,” but Rita, a young hoodlum, got it right.
De Luca’s was filled with thought-provoking characters and innumerable personalities. There was Ralph, who today would be persona non grata for his incessant use of sexual innuendo and inappropriate quips. We all thought he was funny, and – sorry — he was. Each year on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, he’d kindly tell every waitress, “Have a good holiday, but don’t get too much bird.”
Then there was Sidney, the brother of the owner’s wife. He was the kind of person only a relative would hire. Sidney fancied himself a tough, with-it guy who had learned everything from the streets. In truth, he was of genuine low intelligence, with a mumbled, tortuous way of speaking. He was difficult to understand, but he liked to talk. When he talked to me, I listened politely and just nodded my head.
Sidney took a liking to an obese young waitress with a clever mind and, unlike him, good verbal skills. She took to him, too, and they paired up for life – a short life. She died of kidney failure. He died trying to stop a robbery in progress.
I remember a Jewish guy who started working several years after I started. For some reason, he told us to call him Bean. He had shoulder-length hair and spoke like a Malibu surfer. One day, for a reason I cannot recall, I was contemplating the meaning of the Yiddish word “shiksa.” I didn’t know if it was a reference to all gentile woman, or just used to disparage them. During a slow period, I asked Bean, “What’s a shiksa?” Bean thought a moment, then pointed to a cute blonde waitress wearing a short skirt and showing cleavage. “You see her? That’s a shiksa.”
Funny story. Even funnier is he married her.
There was a pecking order at De Luca’s, with some holding high status and some holding low. Luther was one of high status. These were the ‘60s, and Luther was a full-blow hippie living the counterculture life. He was sarcastic and smart and knew things. At 19 or so he left home, married a hippie chick, got his own rundown apartment, plastered the walls with the covers of Rolling Stone magazine, and began working the grill at De Luca’s.
There was something about him, an air of mystery, or of danger, and he was treated like a celebrity by the other workers. Years later he came out as gay. Even later, he died of AIDS.
Old and young got along at De Luca’s. There was a middle-aged guy, Nico, who had been working lots of overtime. To perk himself up, he borrow some methamphetamine from a high school student working as a waitress. Then he borrow more, and more. I recall him up on the platform making pizzas on a busy Saturday night and the waitress who loaned him the drugs laughing loudly. “Look at Nico,” she said. “He’s speeding his ass off.” I just thought he was working fast.
Jocularity was always a part of work. A running joke or gag or bit would circulate and be repeated for weeks, until it was overused, dropped, and another gag adopted. There was a period when everyone called each other “cuz” – meaning cousin. Cuz this, cuz that. Hey cuz, get over here. Cuz, they are waiting for you. “Cuz” was used affectionately, to express like-mindedness, or ironically, to suggest strong disagreement. In cases of the later, the mock would sometime be answered with a sneering, “I’m not your cousin.”
I forgot what followed the “cuz” craze, but I was glad when it ended.
At De Luca’s, we were not all family, but we were close. Over time, we grew together, sharing large parts of lives. That happened with me and one of the partner’s daughters, let’s call her Melissa, who sometimes worked as a hostess.
When I first met Melissa, she was probably (hard to remember) 17. I may have been 19. Melissa was a special project. She was being groomed by her father, Nicholas, and Tony De Luca for the world of Show Business. She was their investment, and they expected a large payout. Several days a week, her father would shuttle her off to New York for dance, singing, and acting lessons. To protect their investment, Nicholas and Tony sheltered Melissa from boys, keeping her too busy to have time for them and directing her down a path they could not follow.
But one New Year’s Eve, everyone within and even without the De Luca circle was going to a huge party at a local night club. Melissa begged to be included. As a compromise, possibly as a controlled experiment, her brother-in-law (who also worked at the restaurant), enlisted me as her date. I was happy to oblige.
On New Year’s Eve, fresh through the door of the club, Melissa, whom I don’t believe ever drank, started doing shots. One after the other after the other. She was drunk in no time. After a dance or two, she grabbed me and led me out to my car. Then she jumped on me like a feverish cat. It was quite exciting. In the midst of that pleasure came a disturbing thought: I could loss my job. Worse, I could destroy Nick and Tony’s investment and they’d murder me. Neither possibility helped the mood.
Fortunately or unfortunately, there was a bang on my car door. It was the brother-in-law, who ordered us back into the night club. Yes, a controlled experiment.
In the aftermath, Melissa and I dated a little. On Saturday nights after closing, her father would finish up the bookkeeping while we’d wait in the car and neck. That was fun. But the most fun came for me one Saturday evening at a place called Paulie’s Starlite Ballroom, which was more of a bar than a ballroom. Saturday was a work night for me, Melissa and her father. However, an arrangement had been made that after closing, we would go to Pauli’s and Melissa, even though she was underage, would perform. And we did just that. I didn’t quite know what to expect, and I didn’t anticipate anything special, and nothing special happened. Even so, the simple experience of it, once I comprehended it, gave me a Sinatraesque feeling that put me on a cloud and transformed me into something I never thought I could be, even if it was only in my imagination.
There I was. Nineteen years old. At 2 a.m. Inside Paulie’s Starlite Ballroom. Being served shots and beers – for free. With my girlfriend up on a stage looking and singing like an angel.
Who was I? Obviously, someone very cool.
All from a humble beginning as a restaurant dishwasher.
When I watch The Bear, with all its gut-wrenchingly realism, I sometimes tear up. I did that during the Third Season’s finale, about the closing of a famous Chicago restaurant. There is a “funeral dinner” held to honor the restaurant, and restaurant people from all over town attend. When they filmed this scene, they included verité-like testimony from actual chefs. Toward the end, Olivia Colman, the actress playing the owner of the closing restaurant, gives a speech. She says of all the years and all the food, the one thing she will never forget are the people.
I was jubilant on my final day at De Luca’s. By then I was an assistant manager making pizzas. As I prepared to depart, there was no sadness, no melancholy, no regret. I just wanted to get the hell out of there, knowing that I would never again have to spend hot summers standing in front of two 450-degree ovens. My new destination was the University of Missouri, where I would earn a master’s degree in journalism. I looked so forward to a future where I would do something important and serve people who were hungry for news and information – not food.
But having now watched The Bear, I realize everything I’ve done since De Luca’s has been impacted by De Luca’s, and that my memories of Tony and Uncle and Bean and Freddy and Luther and Sydney and sweet Melissa and all the others are much stronger than of any professor at Missouri, or of any high dignitary I covered as a journalist. I also realized that the invisible energy and palpable excitement that invades and dominates a packed restaurant on a Saturday night, even to someone washing dishes, is indescribable, euphoric, and almost impossible to duplicate.
One final note.
In the early ‘80s, about a decade after I last saw Melissa, I was walking through the lounge at an Atlantic City casino. There was a stage and on it was a band fronted by an attractive, stylish woman. It was my old girlfriend, and she saw me. When the number ended, she ran off the stage to hug and kiss me. The audience watched and, God bless them, applauded.
Since writing my novel, “The King of Ningxia” (available on Amazon), I’ve been using TikTok to offer unconventional writing tips, the kind generally ignored by the literary world. Find them on TikTok by searching for my site, NotebookM. Here’s my latest advice video
In 1990, I wanted to name my new-born son after a writer, or at least an Italian. In the end, we named him after an Italian writer. Dante Alighieri. Just Dante. Not Alighieri. And because of this, I vowed to read Dante’s most famous work, the acclaimed Divine Comedy, written between 1308 and 1321 and divided into three parts, Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. When I was gifted by my young son with a nice leather-bound copy, I let it sit on the shelf to marinate. Or maybe I was just intimidated. When I decided to open it, it wasn’t there. Lost forever.
Thirty years later, I am reading a free, digital version, an 1867 translation by poet William Wadsworth Longfellow. It is considered one of the best. By coincidence, at this very same time, PBS is airing a series on Dante and The Divine Comedy. The series is easy. The book is hard.
You can’t just read the book You must look things up … constantly. There are scores of other books and websites to help with this – understanding the references, the personalities from history, the Greek and Roman legends, the pagan gods, geography, and so much more — and still it remains hard.
The work is considered one of the finest in all of literature, even 700 years after it was published. I find this remarkable because I’m certain Dante wasn’t writing for us. For him, in my estimation, it was a strictly contemporary work aimed at a small audience, the people of his native city, Florence. I drew this conclusion because with the billion who have died and gone to hell, Dante, during his visit there, run into about three dozen people just from his little part of the world. There are others, like Ulysses, Mohammed, and lots of classical Greeks and Romans. But for Dante, hell was very much like old home week.
His encounters include those with Florentines whom history remembers, as well as some whom history never knew. A few were involved in provincial scandals (like the two adulterous lovers inspired by the romance of Lancelot and Guinevere, who were murdered by the woman’s brother) or committed poor behavior (like the glutton Ciacco). These characters no doubt were a source of 14th century tongue wagging. But now? For Dante to include them means he was not intending to entertain readers in the far future. He doesn’t even provide much context or background or explanations, assuming his readers know the full story. Often, there is just a casual hint, or the drop of a single name. For example, when Dante enters Purgatory, he is greeted by a person he obviously expects his readers to know. He never names the person, only the woman that person loves, Marcia, and the city he comes from, Utica. Apparently, his target audience knew, or were expected to know, that the person from Utica who loved Marcia is the famous Roman orator and statesman Cato.
Confession: I did not know. I had to look it up.
Obscure as he may seem to us, Dante wanted to reach the widest possible audience of his day, and that included the nobility and the common people. This required a revolutionary approach, and Dante was more than willing to take it. Instead of writing in scholarly Latin, he wrote in the vernacular or vulgate, basically street talk, the dialect of Tuscany. And because of this, and the influence of his work, a form of Tuscan eventually became Italian and the language of a unified nation. Aside from its poetry, this is one reason why The Divine Comedy is considered a literary landmark.
If you read it closely, and don’t take its spirituality too seriously, you might find it quite temporal, an act of earthly vengeance by the author, who makes a habit of using the Inferno to inflict pain and punishment on his enemies. Context is needed here. Readers need to know that the poet had been a victim of Florence’s ceaseless civil war between the factions known as the Guelphs and the Ghibellines. He was a Guelph (although they later split as well), and when his group lost power, he was exiled from Florence and sentenced to death should he return. One of his enemies was named Farinata, a Ghibelline military leader and aristocrat. In hell, Dante conveniently entombs Farinata, for all eternity, in a coffin of fire.
A writer can get great pleasure doing that.
At times, however, he could be merciful. He spares a fellow name Buonconte by putting him in purgatory, allowing him to cleanse himself of sin and reach paradise. Buonconte was no friend of Dante. He was a military strategist who literally fought against Dante at the Battle of Campaldino in 1289. According to Dante’s telling, Buonconte accepted Christ at the time of his death, which I guess makes all the difference. So no punishment there.
Aside from punishing his enemies, Dante places a few people he liked in hell, including his teacher, a known sodomite, but he expresses sympathy and sadness for him.
Following the then-teachings of the Catholic church, Dante condemns to hell everyone in the world who was born before Christ, and therefore did not worship Christ. He places the virtuous Greek and Roman figures there, in the tame, unthreatening, limbo portion. These include Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Homer, Horace, Cicero, Seneca, Ovid, and, of course, the poet Virgil, his underworld guide. There are always exceptions, and one of them is Cato, the Roman politician and stoic known for his virtue and defense of the old Roman republic. Cato is in purgatory, but he probably will not get to cleanse himself and go to heaven. Rather, Dante gives him a job of sorts. Cato is a greeter who welcomes and instructs the new souls.
Although Dante, as the writer, condemns to hell those who followed the Greek and Roman gods, he shows immense respect for these deities, as if he, too, were a follower. He seems to worship them and acknowledge them as if they were real. In fact, he punishes those who blasphemed against Zeus, the supreme god, known to the Romans as Jupiter or Jove. In one unusual passage, Dante appears to call Jesus Christ by the name Jove.
Let’s get back to the punishments, which range in severity depending on the sin. If you were gluttonous, you are tormented with ceaseless rain. If you were lustful, there is ceaseless wind. For the really bad, you could be continually pecked by bird-like creatures, or forever bitten by dogs, or submerged in boiling blood, or be torn apart, or forced to stand head-first in stone bowls and endure flames upon the feet. While we think of hell as hot, the worst level is a frozen wasteland. In addition to all this, Dante, as poet, sometimes punishes with a type of irony known as “contrapasso,” (to suffer the opposite). False prophets who claim to see the future, for example, have their heads turned backwards on their bodies, so it is impossible for them to see what lies ahead. That kind of thing.
Indeed, above all, The Divine Comedy is a poem, a work of art. And, at least in the Italian, it rhymes. It rhymes in such a complex fashion that, to keep their sanity, most translators of Dante don’t attempt to rhyme. Longfellow didn’t. The technique Dante used is called Terza Rima, or third rhyme. In the original Italian, each stanza is three lines. The first line rhymes with the third, then the first and third lines of the second stanza rhyme with the second line of the preceding stanza – and continues this way throughout. It’s ABA, BCB, CDC, DED, and so on.
This means the poet never gets a fresh start. As he moves on, he must craft new information based on words he already has used. It’s difficult to imagine writing a graceful or even coherent passage using this technique, yet Dante did it.
While I find The Divine Comedy utterly remarkable, I find it astonishing that Dante’s 14th century readers (and those who heard the poem recited by bards and troubadours) understood and appreciated the frequent references to Greek and Roman mythology. Dante uses them matter-of-factly and with confidence, as if he were communicated in the most simply, easy-to-grasp fashion. I sense he, while writing, was certain these allusions, descriptions and analogies would be as easily understood as the Tuscan version of “hello.” What is perplexing, almost depressing, is that these magnificent references, these beautiful literary devices, these moral tales of virtue, honor, tragedy, and comedy, are, for all practical purposes, impenetrable to us. Without the guide of a scholar, The Divine Comedy, in all its wonder, means little to us.
With the advent of modernism and the passing of the classical period, the elite and the common have lost the cultural bearings on which our civilization was built. And so we walk with half-empty souls, rejecting what had once been given to us, leaving behind the magic of our own humanity.
I envy the cobbler, or the butcher, of the Florentine farrier who maybe didn’t have an education but was washed daily, through frequent and copious tellings, in the stories of genius.
The concubine of old Tithonus now
Gleamed white upon the eastern balcony
This is from the purgatory section of The Divine Comedy. Very beautiful, but pretty much a casual throw-away line of introduction. What does it mean? It simply means: The dawn arrived. But today’s reader has no way of knowing that.
Tithonus is the key to understanding this well-crafted little stanza. In Greek mythology, Tithonus was a Trojan prince. The goddess Eos (the Roman Aurora) fell in love with him, took him for herself, and asked the god Zeus to make him immortal. In asking, she neglected to specify that she wanted him to remain young. And Zeus, with a dose of trickery not uncommon when gods grant favors, allowed him to live forever but required that he age. To the distress of his mistress, he became decrepit.
Eos and Tithonus
Eos, the disappointed lover, is the goddess of dawn. She dresses in a saffron-colored mantle and arrives in the sky each morning on a chariot, casting out the darkness and making way for Helios, the sun god, to bring on a new day. Know that and read again:
The concubine of old Tithonus now
Gleamed white upon the eastern balcony
Consider another simple passage that for us is complex. Most today are aware of the constellation Gemini. Most are aware that Gemini refers to twins. But most would not grasp the meaning of this:
Whereon he said to me: “If Castor and Pollux
Were in the company of yonder mirror,
That up and down conducteth with its light …
It’s a reference to the heavens. Castor and Pollux are the twin brothers for which the constellation Gemini was named, so Dante here seems to be talking about the constellation. But the story of Castor and Pollux is deeper and illustrative of an unusual scientific phenomenon called heteropaternal superfecundation. You see, the twins are only half-brothers. They have the same mother but different fathers. Their mother was the mortal Leda. Castor’s father was the mortal king of Sparta. Pollux father was the god Zeus, who raped Leda. The story tells us that the ancients obviously knew two eggs, in rare cases, can be fertilized around the same time by two different males. And they also knew they could use the skies to education and inform.
Castor and Pollux
I say and explain all these many things having read not even half of The Divine Comedy. Now, it is time to return to the pleasant drudgery of those pages.
Before leaving, I’ll add one thought. It concerns the frigid ninth circle of hell, where a giant-sized Satan resides, frozen up to his waist in ice, waving his bat-like wings to maintain the cold. He has three heads and is chewing on Brutus, Cassius (the assassins of Julius Caesar) and Judas Iscariot. My question: With the much-later arrival of Adolph Hitler, which of the three would Satan spit out?
Even hell can change after 700 years.
Lanny Morgnanesi is a journalist and author of the novel, The King of Ningxia.
A writer may write, and may be appreciated, but for him or her there is nothing like, say, applause. So writers take satisfaction in notes sent by readers. I received such a note this week, a reaction to a simple piece I wrote 10 years ago, one that may not have been entirely accurate.
It was a sad piece, about the death of a man named Baird Parker, who at the time of his death worked quietly in a Lansdale, Pennsylvania, grocery store. In his life, Baird Parker had known fame, but it was not his fame. It was his father’s, a man named Charlie Parker, a saxophonist and one of the greatest jazz innovators of all time. The headline on my story was: “Is the son of a god a god? The problem with famous sons.”
What I wrote was based primarily on Baird’s obit and included a statement from Baird’s mother that his life, for the most part, was destroyed by the fame of his father.
That was 2014. Ten years later, on the anniversary of Baird’s death, I received an online message from his old roommate, a drummer. For a time, the two lived together with their girlfriends on Clinton Avenue in Doylestown, about five minutes from my home. The roommate told me that Baird’s life was not one of sadness, that there was success, joy, happiness; that it was a good life, one to be celebrated. It was a simple message but moved me greatly. Most important – and this was not in any obit – Baird was a musician and a composer. On the 10th anniversary of Baird’s death, I now share with you drummer Paul Bozzi’s touching account of his old friend.
Paul Bozzi
Lanny, I read your post about Charles Baird Parker. I was disappointed and I thought I would take this opportunity to fill in a few details on the 10th anniversary of his passing. His life was not a failure by any means. Here is what I know.
Charlie “Bird” Parker died in 1955 when Baird was only 3 years old. Shortly after that, Bird’s widow, Chan moved the family to Paris. Chan remarried another great saxophonist, Phil Woods. Baird studied guitar and created a unique style, slightly dark and moody with a relaxed groove. His guitar influences ranged from Jimi Hendrix to Django Reinhardt.
In the early 70s, Baird moved back to Pennsylvania. I met Baird in 1973. My girlfriend had known Baird as a child when they both attended Ramblerny, a summer camp for the performing arts in New Hope, Pa., that has become a thing of legend. Other “campers” included the Brecker Brothers, Holly Cole and the recently passed Richie Cole, who after Phil Woods died had become the one remaining bearer of the bepop saxophone. Sadly, with his passing, there seems to be no successor to truly carry on that torch.
Phil Woods
We were living in Connecticut at the time and the best friend of my girlfriend was in a relationship with Baird, so we came down to visit for a weekend. The drummer in the band Baird was working with fell ill on Saturday and they asked me to sub for him. A few days later I returned to CT and picked up what I needed and moved to Doylestown, Pa. to join the band.
We moved in with Baird and his girlfriend in a two-floor apartment on North Clinton St. in Doylestown, where we stayed for a few years. During that time, we worked with a few bands, most notably, Ronnie Rinard and The Shadows. Ronnie was a well-known Elvis impersonator, and I think he really did channel Elvis. Ronnie had a great voice and amazing stage presence, and in true form he was absolutely eccentric. From 1972 through 1977 we played some crazy joints as well as big clubs around Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Neither Baird nor I were big fans of Elvis, but we were young and happy, the money was good and the gigs were plentiful. Several nights a week, we would hop into his bright red Oldsmobile 442 convertible, he would quip “we’re off like a herd of turtles” and we would be on our merry way to another gig. Never a dull moment! If we ended up in a country joint where the clientele was rough and maybe a little racist about having a black man on stage, Baird would speak French into the mic, until his warm sense of humor would defuse the situation. He was so funny, and often had the band in stitches with jokes and witticisms about music and life in general. Often, at 3 am we would end up at Doylestown’s now-defunct Ed’s Diner (known by the regulars as “Dead’s Diner”) where we would enjoy the company of other late-night denizens and slam down a breakfast (or two sometimes) before slipping around the corner to North Clinton St.
During that time, we also formed a group to play and record Baird’s original compositions. Unfortunately, all those recordings have disappeared. A great personal loss to me as the music was unique and now lost to the universe forever. In 1978, I took a gig touring with a band after which I returned to CT to start a family and lost touch with Baird. Then around 2010 I went to Bucks County to ride the Delaware Canal bike trail. While there I looked him up and found him in Lansdale, Pa. where he had opened a music store, I believe it was called Birdland Music. He was doing quite well, owned a home and was living happily with a beautiful young woman and enjoying his life. Also playing with local musicians, many of whom had no idea of his lineage. I visited every summer for the next couple of years. Eventually, he closed the store and wanted to try something different. So he took a job as a baker at a grocery store. He enjoyed cooking and he wanted to learn about baking. We visited a few times after that until that day in 2014 when I received the devastating call from his girlfriend with the news of his passing. I was crushed. We had plans of the two of them coming to CT for an extended visit in the summer that year.
Charlie Parker
Baird was a joyful, humble, hardworking, extremely intelligent, talented and kind man. He was the son of a great innovator, and he had the same creative pulse running in his blood. He had been born into jazz royalty, and he accepted that and was proud of it. We talked about it a few times and you could hear the pride he had about his dad and his stepfather Phil Woods as well. Many famous jazz players knew him from his childhood, and he kept up with some of them. We once attended a Chick Corea concert where we were invited backstage and he was greeted warmly by Chick. He often spoke of his childhood relationship with Dave Lambert of the jazz vocal trio, Lambert, Hendricks and Ross. Dave was killed in an automobile accident in 1966. Jon Hendricks’ telling of the story says that Lambert was a compulsive do-gooder and that he had stopped to assist another motorist in changing a flat tire. I can imagine Baird doing the same thing, he was just that kind of man.
In the mid-80s, I lived and worked in China. When I returned home in 1985, I set out to write a book partially based on my experiences. Decades passed, and it remained unwritten. But finally, this year, I finished my novel. It is different from what I first intended. Entitled, The King of Ningxia, it shifts in time between then and now. Primarily, the story is about the transformation of two people. On a deeper level, it is about the transformation of two countries. If you are interested in international intrigue, a journey from near poverty to great wealth, or a warm romance that turns cold and controlled, you might find this book interesting. The King of Ningxia is free to Kindle subscribers, and available on Amazon.com in paperback and a digital version. Use this link or a sneak-preview of the first chapter. Thanks.
On a rainy September afternoon at the Bluestone Country Club, in a ballroom surrounded by an empty golf course, the Shanghainese Association of Greater Philadelphia held its annual gala, and I was the only white person there.
The agenda included music, singing, dancing, a fashion show, door prizes, and a buffet lunch. But overall, it was more like one big commercial. Since there was no English, my escort wife, born and raised in Shanghai, explained most of it to me, even though I figured out much of it myself.
Once through the door, the first order of business was photography. Everyone, everywhere, was taking photos. On the path to the ballroom was a tripod mounted with a ringed light and a device that took and showed you five photos of yourself, then sent them to your phone. Long line for that.
Next was a large, wall-mounted banner with the group’s name on it, in English and Chinese, and a hired photographer taking pictures for the group’s website. There was no formal line. Instead, you pushed your way forward in a competitive tussle.
After that came the ballroom, with about 300 well-dressed people (told to wear black and white) mingling about and shooting with their phones.
The proceeding began when a fit-looking man in a well-tailor suit addressed the crowd. Poised and confident, he had organized the event and helped secure a panoply of sponsors. At first, he welcomed the people. In short time, however, he pitched his real estate business and advised the group to connect with him on the Chinese app WeChat to learn about the newest real estate deals. He was an effective promoter of himself, and no doubt owned a significant piece of the area’s Chinese real estate market.
He was followed by a musical performance, a woman in a traditional qi pao-style dress who sang and play an instrument called a pi pa, a sort of Chinese lute or guitar, pear-shaped with six strings. Aside from my wife, this was the only person at the party I knew, and I did not know her well. If fact, I hadn’t seen her for 20 years, and did not remember her name, if I ever knew it. My wife spoke to her first and addressed her as “lao ban,” a title of respect for a store owner. My wife was quickly advised by the lao ban that she no longer was a lao ban.
There was a time, before streaming and serious Internet use, when my wife and I made regular visits to a bookstore and Chinese emporium owned by the former lao ban. It was on Race Street in Chinatown, a huge, two-story building filled with Chinese merchandise you could not get elsewhere. We went there often to rent Chinese language videos and buy a few books. Chinatown has developed a lot since then, with a more vibrant economy and new, more innovative entrepreneurs who displaced old-school, never-change Cantonese. Longtime establishments have been replaced with contemporary noodle houses, soup dumpling places, and dim sum joints. The lao ban, who had rented her huge building, probably was priced out of the market after Chinatown became hipper and the video and book market died. Where her business once stood, there is a two-tiered Asian food court.
The lao ban, perhaps in her 60s, is now a musician and singer of Chinese opera. On this day the Bluestone Country Club had the perfect audience for her, but, unfortunately, an imperfect sound system. There was distressing feedback. The volume was too loud, and high notes came off like screeches. I felt bad for her as she played on. The feedback was fixed for the next act, but the system continued to deliver poor quality sound, which, I guess, the audience got used to. They cheered loudly for a young woman in a shiny, tight, blue-sequined jump suit who danced and sang a contemporary song called, “Give Me a Man at Midnight.” She was good, but I wanted to hold my ears. Others seemed more than content.
Next, a contingent of trained amateurs took the floor and performed a waltz-like dance to the tune of Moon River. It was more like walking than dancing, but the women wore gorgeous gold dresses, and it was fun watching them. When it concluded, audience members were told where they, too, could get dance lessons.
There was a fashion show, with women of various ages posing and strutting like runway models. This was followed by information on modeling classes. There was no entertainment related to banking, cosmetic surgery, or travel, but people pitched those services anyway.
As the afternoon unfolded, I paid attention to language. I found it interesting that speakers addressing the crowd spoke Mandarin Chinese, the national language of China. But off stage, while chatting amongst themselves, they spoke Shanghai dialect. No one outside of Shanghai understands Shanghai dialect. It is spoken with pride by members of an exclusive group that considers its hometown the singular place in all of China for high style and hipness. To them, it is the epitome of elan, a better-than-New York equivalent of 26 million people. It has such appeal you must be born there to live there or get special permission to move there. The Shanghainese are a tribe, and they think highly of themselves. They have names for people who are not Shanghainese. And they have a name for their women, who are stereotyped as self-possessed, demanding, spoiled, and self-centered. It is both a polite and derisive term, a little like “Jewish American Princess.” The hard-to-handle women from China’s largest city are called “Shanghai little sisters.”
But back to the dialect, which I’m thinking helps to define Shanghai cool. While the dialect is substantially different from the national language, some alterations are slight. For example, the common Chinese greeting “ni hao” (literally: you good), was changed in Shanghai, for some reason, to “nong hao.” The common good-bye of “zai jian” (literally: see again) was changed to something that sounds like “zay way.” To decline an offer, the Chinese normally say “bu yao” (literally: don’t want). But the Shanghai residents slam those two syllables together, speed them up, and put a different sound at the front, saying “v-yow.”
Here is an example of how protective the Shanghai people are of their exclusive dialect. I was in the dessert line and the guy behind me struck up a conversation in English. He had come to the United States as a student in 1985 and trained as an engineer at Columbia.
“I guessed you’re confused by all this Shanghai dialect,” he said in a joking way.
“Of course,” I said, “but I know a few words.”
He looked at me as if that could not be true.
Then I said the few words of Shanghai dialect I knew. Oddly, he repeated those words back to me in Mandarin. No, I said, I know the Shanghainese. And I repeated the words again, with him once again saying them in Mandarin, as if I were not allowed to speak that way or couldn’t possibly know what I was saying. Finally, I convinced him that I had gently penetrated the veneer of his beloved dialect. He smiled uncomfortably and shook his head. We both got dessert and parted.
So at the party, as the spoken word shifted effortlessly between a defining dialect and the linguistic standard, I thought about American English and concluded that there is nothing comparable to this in the U.S., no comfortable, communicative patois used in a secret way outside the button-down structure of society.
Or is there? A question for another day.
After the entertainment came lunch. When going to an affair such as this, one expects Chinese food. There was none. No chopsticks, either. The buffet was bread, salad, green beans, potatoes, pasta, pot roast, and salmon. The partygoers filled their plates high, without reluctance or aversion. I guess the country club chef didn’t offer a Chinese option, and that clearly was not a problem for this crowd.
After about four hours, the party winded down. It was time to leave, and the rain was still heavy. We did not, however, get wet. Everyone received a well-built umbrella, courtesy of the Paramount Mortgage company, whose name appeared on the umbrellas in both Chinese and English.
On the way out, the partygoers continued to define themselves as unique. You could hear lots of “zay ways,” but not a single “zai jian.” A group of young Shanghai little sisters, outfitted in fine dresses, pushed past me, seemingly arguing among themselves, or perhaps debating a point or two about the party, or maybe discussing where to go next. I didn’t understand a word of it, and I’m sure they took great comfort in that.
You are eating outside at a restaurant in a New Jersey tourist town. The people who walk by are varied, colorful, animated. Each one, everyone, has consciousness. They are creatures of thought and understanding, aware of their surroundings, aware of their fears and limitations, aware of their joys and sorrows. And they walk, and talk, and work, exhibiting complex patterns and wide ranges of motion and activity. Below the surface, within and around them, are intricate, beautiful, biological, chemical mechanisms that create their consciousness, permit their existence, dictate their actions, and allow them life. Some of these mechanisms we understand. Some we do not. Some we think we understand but aren’t sure. The mechanisms in certain individuals make them highly intelligent in mathematics, or music, or art, or philosophy, or war, or in figuring out how to configure the plumbing in a 50-story building. The mechanisms make people weak or strong, sometimes capable of near-superhuman feats. The mechanisms can create anxiety and depression and make people prisoners of their own minds. They create heroes and villains. Mostly, the mechanisms allow our species to conduct themselves normally and efficiently, below greatness and above infamy.
If you could look at the structures of these mechanisms, see into them, observe them on a microscopic or even smaller level, watch them work, watch them create and destroy, the chemicals, the neurons, the proteins, the DNA, the transmitters, the receptors, it would be like observing the face of God.
Now, pull back. Way back. Into the vast heavens of galaxies and the infinite.
You no longer see the creatures in the small tourist town. Although complex, from this perspective they are inconsequential and meaningless, as if they didn’t exist, yet they do, but for what purpose? Let’s forget them for now. So unimportant. Look at the stars. So many stars. Two hundred billion trillion of them in 2 trillion galaxies. If you could see everything up there, you’d see less than 5 percent of our actual universe. The rest is hidden and undetectable. That’s just our universe. Some scientists, obviously the silly ones, believe the universe we know is just one of an infinite number of invisible universes. The scientists say in those infinite universes, everything has happened. You became rich in one. Married a movie star in another. Became a king in a third. Were a pauper, a beggar, a thief, a Mafia don, the first person on the moon. If this were true, the God who created the multiverse could not be comprehended by the shallow, limited human mind. All prophets, all scripture would be meaningless. That God’s purpose and nature would be far removed from the anything taught us by the wise and peaceful Nazarene who lived in a small town, on one planet, in a singular universe.
If we discount the hidden, the pattern of things high in the sky are no less and no greater that the patterns inside our bodies. They are only larger. All of it made from the same building blocks. All of it in compliance with the same governing rules.
Now zoom back in close to the people walking the streets of the tourist town. Look down at the weed growing through a crack in the concrete. Zoom in even closer and see the worlds within the world of the weed. Now closer, and closer, and closer. It will never stop. You can never get close enough. Level after level after level.
Up and down. In the heavens or under foot. Infinite complexities on infinite levels. So which one is the distinguishing level? The rung of importance? The level that matters most? Is it our level? We tend to think so.
Our prejudiced is triggered by our ability to think, to communicate, to build and destroy civilizations, to philosophize, to love and hate – and our inability to properly detect intelligence in other species and organic matter. Ants build civilizations and get work done. They receive little credit for it. We are awed when we see non-primates using tools, then go on our way and forget about it. Germaphobes and others acknowledge the vast preponderance of bacteria in the world but never dream we might exist solely for it. We know – at least some of us do – that plants talk to each other. A tomato plant being eaten by a bug will signal the danger to other tomato plants, who then go into defensive mode. Yet we don’t consider them conscious beings.
Our consciousness, because it is ours, ranks supreme. We know that all life share much, DNA for example. Eternal consciousness? Sorry. That’s our monopoly.
If God has singularly granted homo sapiens heaven-bound consciousness, then God did so as an exception to the rules, laws, forces, element, and constants that every other aspect of the universe must conform to. And God did so to creatures that are a mere speck of almost nothing and hardly any use at all to the universe. Why? I haven’t heard any convincing answers.
Our concept of consciousness is that it is constructed and operated by the organic components of the body, and that when those components decay and die with the body, something remains to reassemble and transport consciousness to a spiritual world, preserving our thoughts, our memories, our relationships, our recognition of friends and relatives. We believe this without identifying the earthly components that perform the reassembling and the transporting. We explain it by saying the components are not earthly.
Nothing like this—spiritual intervention — has ever been found, for sure, in the universe. And for this reason, I cannot believe that the consciousness once existing inside a human is retained somewhere else after death. For me, the state of post-death resembles the state of pre-life, meaning consciousness, as we know it, cannot exist without the body. It dies with the body.
Recently an old friend, my college roommate, succumbed to stage four cancer. The final days were difficult. All he wanted was to pass. When the end was within hours, I asked him to be honest. I ask if he expected to go somewhere. I was thinking that by approaching death he might be closer to truth, and that he would be willing to share that truth with me.
There was nothing surprising about his answer, be it newly revealed truth or just long-held ideas. He said he is a Christian, that he believes in the afterlife, that he expects to go to the place most call heaven. I told him, for his sake and mine, I wished it true. He said, if possible, he’ll get back to me later with confirmation.
Nothing yet.
My friend said he was a Christian, and I guess that’s true. Maybe not entirely true, not exactly true. His Polish-born parents, who came to America during Hitler’s rise, raised the family as Orthodox Catholic. Several years ago, at his father’s funeral, an aunt told him he was Jewish. The Catholicism was a safe cover. I’m not sure why, and I didn’t tell him, but I was hoping he’d convert back. Instead, he continued to attend a place called Son Light Bible Church.
The pastor at Son Light, for certain, would have discouraged a return to Judaism. At the funeral service for my friend, he said the only way to heaven was through Jesus Christ, which Christ himself says in the Bible. Without accepting Christ, the pastor said, not even good works can save you.
But I suspect even if my friend had converted and lost his right to heaven, the pastor would still acknowledge the release and reconfiguration of his consciousness. It just wouldn’t go to the good place.
I wish I could believe in the resilience of consciousness and the eternity of memory. I wish I did not have to sit here in a tourist town in New Jersey, with a view of the sky, a view of the prancing anthropoids, and a view of the lowly weeds, thinking of what might or might not remain of my friend, realizing that everything just seems the same to me. Like one family. Like a complete set of Legos. If one thing goes to heaven, it should all go to heaven. But it all can’t go to heaven.
Can it?
“Would you like a refill on that coffee?” the waiter asked.
“Yes, thank you,” I said, curious if my decision will in any way affect the universe, wondering if anyone’s memory of this day will reach heaven, worried that, all scripture aside, I am doomed to never find out.
Something’s happening here. And to be frank, what it is ain’t exactly clear. There’s a man, and a woman, with an attitude over there, and a realization, and a new way of thinking, and opened eyes, and a tired will. He, and she, and an assortment of other strange, unfamiliar phenomena, have unknowingly cojoined to produce discomfort in America and the world. He, and she, and all the rest, have caused you to pay more for bacon and chicken wings and refrigerators and stoves. Because of her, and him, and all the rest, it is harder or impossible to get certain products, things you have always relied on, things that you always expected to be there. Because of her, and him, and all the rest, supply trucks to stores are late, half empty, or never arrive. Prepare to wait 26 weeks for kitchen cabinets.
In the end, what he and she have done will result in something good for America.
But what it is isn’t exactly clear. Not to me, anyway. Still, I’m trying to think it through, read about it, figure it out on my own. My conclusions may be accurate, semi-accurate or ridiculous. In these times, what does it matter?
In these times, what broken and weakened unions failed to do – join workers in a wide confederation that confronts big management and rejects low wages, decimated benefits, poor working conditions and corrosive indignity – is being done quite effectively on an individual, uncoordinated, one-by-one basis. I’m speaking of the men and women with attitudes, realizations, a new way of thinking, opened eyes, and tired wills.
In short, disgusted people have decided not work. Without consulting each other, they have – separately but together – stopped making you breakfast at your local diner, they have stopped helping you find socket wrenches at Home Depot, and they no longer answer the phone at your doctor’s office. Without unions, without campaigns and encouragement, and without organization of any kind, much of America has gone on strike. The U.S. Labor Department reported in October that a record 4.3 million workers quit their jobs in August. I don’t know this for a fact, but I’m guess this is unprecedented in the history of the American labor movement.
Ships backed up in port, unable to unload
It’s really about time. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman says the typical American worker, after adjusting for inflation, hasn’t gotten a raise in 40 years.
To illustrate the plight of the low-wage worker, a conceptual artist and self-taught engineer named Blake Fall-Conroy built a machine as a way to duplicate the frustrations and hopelessness felt by workers. The machine is a box filled with pennies. It has a crank. When the user (worker) turns the crank, he receives payment in pennies for the time he or she has turned the crank. If payment is at the rate of $7.25 an hour, the federal minimum wage, the machine gives the worker one penny every 4.97 seconds. The payments stop when the cranking stops. Blake’s contraption begs the question: How long is the average person willing to turn that crank? Today’s labor shortage suggests the answer: Not long.
In a New York Times story, we are told about Sandra Beadling, the manager of a Dollar General store in Maine. She’s claims to put in 70-hour workweeks (without overtime), doing the job of several employees, including stocking shelves. The story doesn’t mention her salary but does say she has a difficult time hiring people at the Dollar General rate of $12 an hour because Walmart is paying $16. In August, she got home from work one night at 11:30, left her house the next morning at 4 a.m. to do an inventory check, then quit. No more of this, she said.
This is happening a lot.
How can so many people just quit their jobs? How do they live?
With people quitting jobs, it’s harder to get a cup of coffee
Well, let’s hope they have a working spouse and some savings. But the person who quit no longer needs a car, can probably save money on lunches, coffee and clothes, no longer has to pay for daycare or now can provide free daycare for grandchildren. They also can earn extra cash as a free agent in the gig economy, working when they want for companies like Uber and Door Dash or even Amazon delivery.
The quitter might actually come out even, especially is you add value to free time, family time and the absence of stress and aggravation.
But as I said, it’s not exactly clear what’s going on. There is indeed a labor shortage related to the COVID-19 pandemic, with some people unwilling to work jobs that put them at risk. Also, some factories may have shut down due to COVID, making it difficult or impossible to get certain products. Then there are demand shifts that have caused havoc in the market and its supply chains. For example, in the beginning of the pandemic, there was this idea that automobile sales would suffer but people staying at home would buy more gaming systems, kitchen equipment, exercise equipment, hair clippers, and so on. So computer chip factories that were still operating shifted production away from chips used in cars and trucks and began focusing on chips for home electronics. When the auto market roared back, there weren’t enough chips for the new cars. Since then, the price of used cars has risen to unbelievable heights. And because of all those orders for gaming systems, kitchen equipment, exercise equipment, hair clippers, and so on, container ships are clogging American ports and there are not enough dock workers to unload them. There is also a shortage of containers.
Fueling some of our current woes is an energy crisis in China, Europe and elsewhere. We are ordering more from China, but China is running short of coal to fuel the factories that make the products we want. Major flooding has shut down major Chinese coal mines, and China somehow got into a spat with Australia, a main exporter of coal to China, and China no longer buys from them. So coal prices have soared and China is forced to conserve by shutting down factories. Naturally, it takes longer to get your Chinese-manufactured goods.
A coal shortage in China has caused factories to shut down
Meanwhile, in Britain, non-British truck drivers (and there were a lot of them) were forced from their jobs when Britain exited the European Union. Fuel is going undelivered, as well as other goods. Food is rotting in fields.
So the world’s in a mess.
Again, while it is not quite clear what is happening, my main culprit in all this is mostly unseen, unless you look closely. It’s a demographic shift caused by income inequality. And I’ll explain this simply and quickly:
All around the world, a higher percentage of wealth has accumulated in a smaller number of hands. The hands that go wanting see no reason to incur the added cost of children and family, and populations fall. Meanwhile, the large number of older people – part of a population boom after World War II – are retiring and leaving their jobs, or dying and leaving their jobs. With so few young people coming into the job market, and with the widespread anti-immigration movement keeping foreign workers out, there aren’t enough people around to fill the vacant jobs, especially low-paying jobs. Important things don’t get done anymore.
The end.
And so, wages must rise – significantly. Inequality must ebb. People must once again feel the degree of economic security that convinces them to bear children and work hard at their jobs, to strive for something better rather than withdraw from something worse. The process will be slow, but inexorable. When it happens, maybe everything will once again become clear. And balance, now out of whack, will be restored.
In the 50s and 60s, almost all Catholic school in and around east coast cities looked like this.
By Lanny Morgnanesi
NOTE: I wrote this piece in 2010 for the Philadelphia Inquirer. It was probably the most controversial thing I ever wrote, eliciting an onslaught of reaction — both positive and negative — and causing the publisher of the Inquirer to condemn it in a letter-to-the-editor of his own paper. With nostalgia in my heart of late, repost it here.
I read recently that Saint John Bosco Elementary School is closing due to low enrollment. Although the school teaches grades kindergarten through 8th, it has only 152 students. This startled me because when I attended, 1957-1965, there often were 100 kids in a class – a single, zoo-like class.
Where did everyone go?
Bosco opened in 1953 in Hatboro near the height of the baby boom. It was housed in a non-descript, cheaply constructed building. I received a miserable education, although I came out with good penmanship and an ability to diagram sentences. There was much to hate at Bosco. My top source of unhappiness was eating from brown bags at our desks because we had no lunchroom.
Odd, since the more logical choice might be those face slaps, hair pulls and rulers across knuckles … all administered by nuns. But to the victims, this perpetual combat was perversely welcomed and actually made class interesting. My most compelling contribution occurred one day when the nun ran down the aisle and yanked me out of my seat by the shirt. It must have been a cheap shirt because it ripped. The nun’s hand flew off and hit me in the nose, which began to gush.
She backed off and I stood before her, a little guy with a mangled, blood-covered, regulation white dress shirt. There was a pause, a long one, and she said, “Get out and fix yourself.”
In the empty hallway I considered going home. Instead, I went into the bathroom and washed the shirt in the sink. The blood actually came out. I put the wet shirt back on and reentered the classroom. Not another word was said on the subject. For a limited time I felt a sense of immunity, which made me proud and happy.
I imagine I had a reputation as a trouble maker, although it seemed all the boys did. In my final day there I was blamed for something I did not do. The nun, knowing I was graduating, sent me off as if I were a criminal, saying, “One day I’m going to see your name in the newspaper. You just watch.”
After college I became a reporter and for years fulfilled her prophesy. Well into that career I learned the school’s namesake – which we always associated with a chocolate drink – was the patron saint of journalists. Of all we were told, we were never told this.
We were told, however, of the greatness of John F. Kennedy, a Catholic and therefore our earthly savior. During the presidential campaign of 1960, a boy much bolder than I came to class wearing a large Nixon button. The nun ordered him to remove it and he refused. She took it from him and with her black nun shoe stomped it once, twice … maybe five or six times … then threw it in the trash. The next day he wore 10 of the pins, and was beaten.
I remember thinking this act represented true heroism, the first I had ever seen from someone my age. It saddened me because I knew that in my life I would never, ever, have that much courage.
Three years later when Kennedy was shot, I was being punished. Temporarily banished from the classroom, I was sent outside to clap blackboard erasers … to remove the chalk by smacking them together. When I returned everyone was on their knees.
I was flabbergasted and looked at the nun for an answer.
There was no explanation. Forcefully, she ordered, “Get down and pray.”
As Kennedy lay dying somewhere in Dallas, I was asking God to save him and I didn’t even know it.
There was so much I didn’t know at Bosco. I can’t remember learning much of anything. Once, during Geography, a small and mysterious country near India was being ignored and I stood up (you had to) and asked, “What’s Neepal?”
There was that familiar deadly pause, then the response: “Sit down or I’ll give you a knee, pal.”
As a wise guy, I actually respected this.
Soon there will be nothing left to respect. They’ll probably knock the place down. It must seem so big with only 152 students. Each one must have been valuable, treated like an angel. What a contrast to the Malthusian mess of me and my 99 compatriots, all in a single room, boys in front, girls in back, holding ancient textbooks and hiding damaged self-esteem, with baloney sandwiches wilting in the cloakroom and a single, unsympathetic, septuagenarian sister using something called a catechism to teach us that – above all –heaven is within our grasp and God loves us.
How could the pope have allowed this?
Goodbye, Saint John Bosco. I’m sorry for telling tales out of school.
notebookm.com 