American Narcissism, or, “Smiling, Crying, and Celebrity”

10 Friday Jul 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Movies, music, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion

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"Charlie X", "Original Of The Species" (2005), American Narcissism, Captain James T. Kirk, Gordon Ramsey, How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb (2004), Kitchen Nightmares, Narcissism, Psychic Powers, Self-Aggrandizement, Self-Love, Self-Promotion, South Carolina State Rep. Jenny Horne, Star Trek, Star Trek TOS (1966-69), Thasians, U2, US Foreign Policy, US History, William Shatner

South Carolina Representative Jenny Horne (Republican) speaking on floor of House chamber, Columbia, SC, July 8, 2015. (http://www.slate.com via C-SPAN3).

There are so many examples of the US as a nation of narcissists that when I step outside of my own narcissism, it literally leaves me with vertigo. I can see narcissism everywhere. In how Americans drive, as if they’re the only car on the road in bumper-to-bumper traffic. I see it in how people walk on sidewalks, as if no one else will ever need space to walk in the opposite direction, or as if everyone wants to walk at a slow, plodding pace. I see it in how we reacted to even minor criticism, as if the comment “this needs revision” equals “you’re a lazy, untalented hack of a writer,” and deserves a response equally personal and nasty.

From U2’s “Original Of The Species” (2005) video, from How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb (2004) album, July 9, 2015. (http://youtube.com).

One of the better demonstrations of narcissism American style is through our popular culture. From Frank Sinatra to Rick Ross, Mae West to Nicki Minaj, we have a century’s worth of pop culture divas as examples of narcissism at the level of prominent American individuals. The narcissism is so normal that we have benign terms for it, like “self-promotion” or “self-love.” People, especially in the pop culture world, should promote and love themselves, of course. But at what point is narcissism a self-defeating process of “me as triumphant,” “me as the center of the universe,” “me for everyone to like/love more and more?”

A clear-cut example of art imitating life imitating art for me around narcissism would be a Star Trek: TOS (The Original Series) episode. Season 1, Episode 2, September 15, 1966, was the airing of the “Charlie X” episode on NBC. It was the one in which a seventeen-year-old who had been stranded on an alien planet since the age of three was taken up to the Enterprise by a transport ship. Once on the Enterprise, the teenager displayed both petulance and his toolbox of god-like powers, hurting crew members or making them disappear at a whim. All because they either unknowingly insulted him or made him jealous in some way. As one story line summary for the episode reads, “Captain Kirk must learn the limits to the power of a 17-year-old boy with the psychic ability to create anything and destroy anyone.”

Charlie Evans, played by Robert Walker, Jr., Star Trek TOS, Season 1, Episode 2, September 15, 1966. (https://thesouloftheplot.files.wordpress.com/).

The Charlie Evans character became fixated on a female crew member — consistently called “a girl” in 1966 (that wasn’t acceptable even back then) — in one Yeoman Janice Rand. Charlie’s obsession with having her, his dislike for criticism and being told what to do, his inability to check his emotions, his destructive responses, were all based on his needs from moment to moment. Every potential slight, every action that he couldn’t control led Charlie to do some damning things. With his thoughts, Charlie took away Lt. Uhura’s voice, broke Spock’s legs, blinded another crew member, took away one woman’s face, aged another woman, and made one other woman disappear. When Charlie couldn’t win at chess, he melted the chess pieces. “I can make you all go away! Any time I want to!,” Charlie exclaimed at one point in the episode.

Within a scene or two, just before the episode’s climax, Kirk finally said, “Charlie, there are a million things in this universe you can have and a million things you can’t have. It’s no fun facing that, but that’s the way things are.” This was when Charlie was on the verge of taking over the ship and possibly wiping out the Enterprise‘s crew. But then, the Thasians came (the aliens who’d given Charlie his powers in the first place) with their own starship to take Charlie in as one of their own. “We gave him [Charlie] the power so he could live. He will use it – always. And he will destroy you, or, you will be forced to destroy him,” the face of the Thasians said. Then, the Thasians disappeared Charlie to their starship, with Charlie’s final words, “I wanna stay… stay… stay… stay… sta…” lingering on the Enterprise‘s bridge.

Defaced woman, Star Trek TOS, Season 1, Episode 2, September 15, 1966. (http://goodcomics.comicbookresources.com/).

If this episode doesn’t serve as a metaphor for America as a nation and Americans as 320 million individuals with varying levels of narcissism, I don’t know what does. America has always declared itself at the center of the world, centuries before it became a world superpower. Any affront — real or perceived — has often led to skirmishes and wars, embargoes and removals. America’s relatively short history includes Indian wars, Barbary pirates, the War of 1812, the American Revolution, Manifest Destiny and the Mexican-American War, the Monroe Doctrine, Banana Republics and Cuba, Manuel Noriega and Panama, Beirut and Grenada. The central theme of American history and foreign policy has been to self-aggrandize, to settle scores, to challenge other countries to duels, to take advantage of those in the most vulnerable places in the US and around the globe.

So too has narcissism been a part of ordinary Americans’ lives. Just watch a rerun of Kitchen Nightmares on BBC America or on FOX. Any criticism delivered by soccer coach-chef Gordon Ramsey is received about the same way as a toddler reacts when their favorite toy goes missing. Taunts, tantrums, threats, gnashing of teeth, juvenile guilt and despair.

And, for a moment, there may even be a haunting realization that your intellect and experiences aren’t at the center of the universe. But just for a moment. After all, there aren’t any Thasians to check and balance America’s narcissism. Still, narcissism has a way of using up people and nations. Maybe in a hundred years, maybe in 500, but some time in the future, historians will write about American narcissism the same way many historians write about the gross inequalities of an over-glorified ancient Rome.

Aside

A Family, A Man In Uniform, A War In Continuum

07 Tuesday Jul 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Jimme, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, New York City, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Youth

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" Wino Park, "Napalm Girl", "The Redcatchers, 199th Light Infantry Brigade, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, Alcoholism, BBQ restaurant, Collins Family, Demond Harris, Falon Collins, Family History, Felton Collins, Howard University, Kim Phuc, Lamont Sanford, MSW, Nick Ut, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, PTSD, Sanford and Son, Vietnam War, Violence, War

Extended Collins family photo (top row down, l-to-r: me, Jasmine, Uncle Felton, Falon, my dad, Aunt Christene, my son Noah), West Hyattsville, MD, May 8, 2015. (Donald Earl Collins).

Two months ago, I met portions of my extended Collins family in Maryland for the first time. I had no idea that my father had a younger brother, nor that his name was Felton, until I had received a call in August 2013 from my uncle about spotting him and his older daughter Falon a place to stay while she found a place to live here in suburban Maryland. My first cousin moved to the area to begin work on her MSW at Howard University’s School of Social Work. We couldn’t accommodate such a last-minute request, unless my uncle and first cousin had been willing to sleep on the floor.

When Falon graduated in May, I finally had the chance to meet this younger part of the Collins family, as well as an aunt I hadn’t seen since I was five (more on this next month). Among the things that came out of these meetings and our dinner together was that my Uncle Felton was not only a military veteran, but a Vietnam veteran with the 199th Light Infantry Brigade (“The Redcatchers”) between 1967 and 1969, no less. I knew that somehow the federal government managed to overlook my uncles on my mother’s side and not draft them for the Vietnam war effort (a “miracle” of rural Arkansas segregation, I assumed). So this was a lot of new information to take in.

Kim Phuc with her then infant son, Ontario, Canada, 1995. (Joe McNally/Time & Life Pics). Qualifies as fair use under US copyright laws -- photo illustrative of subject/ for educational purposes only.

Kim Phúc with her then infant son, Ontario, Canada, 1995. (Joe McNally/Time & Life Pics). Qualifies as fair use under US copyright laws — photo illustrative of subject/ for educational purposes only.

But then again, it shouldn’t have been new information at all. Except for the fact that my father had spent the first thirty years of my life too inebriated or caught up in New York City life to remember to hand down basic family history to me and my older brother Darren.

I was really almost too young to remember Vietnam, but with my ability to observe and remember going back to Nixon’s resignation and the OPEC oil crises, I had noticed a few things. Like some of the news clips of the end of the war in ’75, of refugees on aircraft carriers, pictures of B-52s destroying village after village and city after city. Not to mention, the iconic, Pulitzer Prize-winning 1972 photo “The Terror of War” by Nick Ut (also known as “Napalm Girl”), depicting a then nine-year-old, severely burned Kim Phúc, which I asked my Mom about a couple of years later. She didn’t give me an answer.

That’s what I knew in my little seven-year-old mind about Vietnam prior to moving to 616 in ’77. In the corner of our tripartite apartment building, living in a basement apartment of the “B” building, was a man who looked like Lamont Sanford to me. Except he wore a beat-up green Army jacket and green hat on his head most of the time. I often saw him come and go, where I didn’t know. I also saw parents who warned their kids to stay away from him, some young Turks who occasionally stopped the man to make fun of him, and kids who sometimes teased him for having served in Vietnam, parroting their parents, I guess.

The Vietnam veteran couldn’t have been more than thirty, but he moved like he was at least a decade older. It was as if he was afraid to move, to be outside, to be around life, the way he moved, or rather, lurked in his comings and goings. I mostly felt sad for him, because it seemed like no one wanted to bother themselves with his existence.

Demond Harris as Lamont Sanford standing next to Redd Foxx as Fred Sanford in midst of faux heart attack, Sanford and Son (1972-77), July 8. 2015. (http://gawker.com).

I witnessed his infrequent sojourns from his 616 apartment and back until sometime in late ’79, or early ’80, when I realized he had moved out. Given that I was hardly outside lurking myself those years, between being on lockdown for running away and Darren’s Clear View summer camps, it was amazing that I noticed his absence at all.

At the same time, during our (me and my older brother Darren’s) outings with my father between ’79 and ’81, I noticed that in his occasional stops at “Wino Park” (a mini-park on the corner of South Fulton and East Third in Mount Vernon), there were quite a few veterans in their late twenties or early thirties there. A typical Friday evening or Saturday afternoon outing could be spent watching Jimme and his drunk friends eat food they bought from the pit bbq joint across the street from the park while drinking beer, malt liquor, hard liquor, and cheap wine from paper bags. All while they took turns peeing on the rock face that jutted out on the side of the park, or around one of a handful of barren trees nearby.

The Vietnam veterans were the quietest people in the group. They were the ones who could laugh, but often didn’t, and rarely smiled. Sometimes, having to spend as long as an hour watching my father hang with these men, I found myself wondering about the man in his post-war uniform who used to live at 616. What happened to him? Did he take drugs? Was he really crazy? Did he drink in a semi-sullen silence and watch older drunks like my father make fools of themselves?

When there’s only either Wino Park or 240 East Third with Ida and Callie Mae to look forward to, wondering what happened to a silent veteran seemed like a much more useful activity. Of course, now we celebrate every veteran as a hero. Yet we don’t do nearly enough for veterans — for any Americans, really, much less the damage we do to the rest of the world in the name of America — who suffer from the wounds of war and life. We prefer to glorify or shun them all without thought, like the little narcissists we all are.

Aside

“Back In The Summer of ’85”

04 Saturday Jul 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, High Rise Buildings, Jimme, Mount Vernon New York, music, My Father, New York City, Pop Culture, race, Sports, Upper East Side, Upper West Side, Work, Youth

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"Summer of '69" (1985), All-Nighter, Atlanta Braves, Back To The Future (1985), Bryan Adams, Darryl Strawberry, Davey Johnson, Dwight Gooden, Eleanor Bumpurs, Escapism, Fireworks, Gary Carter, Howard Johnson, Independence Day, It Takes A Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back (1988), Jesse Orosco. Cy Young Award, Keith Hernandez, Lenny Dystra, Michael Stewart, Mookie Wilson, New York Mets, Public Enemy, Rafael Santana, Ron Darling, Tom Gorman, Wally Backman

Dwight Gooden in 1985, 24-4, 1.53 ERA, 268Ks, Cy Young Award winner, intimidator. (Ronald C. Modra/Getty Images; http://espn.go.com).

Michael Stewart (1958-1983) and Eleanor Bumpurs (1918-1984) had me thinking about police brutality long before my first Walking While Black encounter, July 4, 2015 (via Adobe Photoshop).

Since this is Independence Day Weekend, it makes thirty years since the official release of Back To The Future. And with me beyond the forty-five-and-a-half year mark, I am officially middle-aged. Funny, though. I don’t feel that different. My knees ached when I was fifteen sometimes, and so also did my feet. We had gas-guzzling cars in ’85, and we still have plenty of them on the road in ’15. White Americans treated Black lives cheaper than manure in ’85 (e.g., Michael Stewart in ’83 and Eleanor Bumpurs in ’84), and evidence from the police shootings and acts of White terrorism — especially in South Carolina — in recent years/days show that it still “takes a nation of millions to hold” Blacks back because of their indifference in ’15.

Rafael Santana, Mets shortstop from 1984-87, 1986 World Series, Boston’s Fenway Park. (AP; http://www.newsday.com/ ).

One thing that has changed in the past three decades has been me as a fan. I loved — I mean, LOVED — the New York Metropolitans in ’85. I was a baseball fan through and through, and had become a diehard Mets fans by the time I finished my first stage of pubescent growth in the spring of ’84. I read the Daily News for box scores. I would get peeved hearing bad commentary on WABC-AM 770 — from listening to the late Art Rust, Jr.’s show — about the terrible hitting of shortstop Rafael Santana or the constant criticism of Darryl Strawberry (they were the Yankees radio station). I’d schedule my spring and summer afternoons and evenings around whomever the Mets played that day.

The summer of ’85 didn’t truly start for me until June 11, when the Mets proceeded to lose a game to the Phillies by the score of 26-7. I’d been working with my older brother Darren for my father down in the city, and was on the 2 Subway and on my way home before I learned of the news. They were down 16-0 after two innings, with Mike Schmidt, Juan Samuel, Von Hayes and company having had as many as three or four at-bats in those couple of innings. The Mets managed seven runs in the third, fourth and fifth innings but with our then weak bullpen, had no chance to hold the Phillies the rest of the way. “If only I’d been home to listen to the game from the beginning,” I thought. “Then maybe they wouldn’t have been down so many runs.” Those are the thoughts of a fan whom lived and died with his team. I’m sure my blood pressure went up to 135/80 (mind you, I was fifteen, still a teenager) on days like that day.

But as I wrote in Boy @ The Window, that was hardly the end of my second full summer of Mets, Mets, and more Mets.

After the hungry end to tenth grade and three weeks of torture with my father, I had more important things to do. Watching Dwight Gooden pitch the Mets into a pennant race they’d almost fallen out of, for starters. I either listened to or watched Gooden win sixteen straight decisions between May and the end of August. And the Mets…made the ’85 season one to remember. Despite working nights, I managed to watch a rain-delayed Independence Day game with the Mets playing the Braves in Atlanta at the old Fulton County Stadium. The Mets won in nineteen innings, 19-16. The game ended at 4:05 am on the fifth of July, and the Braves still set off their fireworks at the end of the game.

Actually, the final score was 16-13 in nineteen innings (will correct in an eventual new edition). Originally scheduled for a 7:35 pm start, the game had been delayed by thunderstorms in Atlanta for nearly an hour and a half. There were at least two other rain delays during the game. Gooden was the Mets original starter that Thursday, but after two and a third innings, had stiffness in his throwing arm, had left some runners on, and left the game. The rest of the game was a roller coaster ride, as the Mets jumped out to a 7-4 lead thanks to Keith Hernandez’s cycle, then Jesse Orosco, our shutdown closer, gave up four runs in the bottom of the eighth to yield the lead to the Braves. Then the Mets scored a run in the top of the ninth to send the game to extra innings.

Scoring runs in the 13th and 18th innings didn’t help, as the Braves matched the Mets run for run, thanks in part to a pitcher with a .060 career batting average who hit a home run. When I saw Ron Darling (whom had started two nights earlier) warming up in the bullpen around 3:30 am, I knew this game had been on too long. I stayed up just long enough to watch the Mets score five more runs in the 19th inning, then dozed up until the fireworks went off at the end of the game.

(Note: just watch the first four minutes, including Marv Albert’s ’80s hair while still doing sports anchor work for WNBC-4 in New York)

Bryan Adams, “Summer of ’69” (1985), December 6, 2006. (Purdy via Wikipedia, originally A&M Records). Qualifies as fair use, as image is low-resolution and for illustrative purposes only.

I’d never been up that late into the next day before. Since no one at 616 was up with me, I’d been able to do for once what I’ve done most nights as an adult in the nearly three decades since. I thought about the future, and laid down some plans to ensure it. In this case, I planned to keep working for my father so that I could escape more into the world of the diehard Mets fan. I hoped that Bryan Adams was wrong, that the days of my Mom’s second trimester with me, the “Summer of ’69,” (a bit hit in the summer of ’85) weren’t “the best days of my life.”

But, as I correctly wrote in the memoir

Yeah, you could say that my summer was going better than expected, having worked and watched my Mets play quality baseball in July and into August. I had my usual set of chores to be sure, runs to the store, weekly washings of clothes and watching after the kids. I took Maurice and Yiscoc out for walks, would sometimes respond to the occasional bill collector on Mom’s behalf, would check the mail and give Sarai and Eri baths. I’d cook weekend brunches of fried beef bologna, scrambled eggs and grits and occasional spaghetti and broccoli dinners for my siblings. I’d long since known that I’d become the first-born of the family, in that I was filling Darren’s role on so many levels.

Hence, the welcome relief of Gary Carter, Keith Hernandez, Howard Johnson, Gooden, Strawberry, Fernandez, and the rest of the ’85 Mets crew. While I may not like everything going on in my life and world now, I don’t need to escape it through baseball — or any other form of entertainment, really — to deal these days. At least there’s that.

Aside

Part of My Real-Life Hunger Games

24 Wednesday Jun 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, music, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

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"Things Can Only Get Better" (1985), 10th Grade, 616, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, Addie Viggiano, Authority Figures, Chemistry, Disillusionment, Harold Meltzer, Howard Jones, Humanities, hunger, Iced Fudge Nut Brownie, Italian, MVHS, New York State Regents Exams, Paul Lewis, Poverty, Sara Lee, Trigonometry

Consequences of hunger in schools, NOKID Hunger, January 2015. (http://www.youthonassignment.org/).

This time three decades ago I’d started to recover from a week of seemingly endless tests and Regents exams at Mount Vernon High School, which couldn’t have come at a worse time for me. The cupboards and fridge at 616 were as bare as they had been since the days before my Mom had gone on welfare. There was only enough milk for my younger siblings, and besides cornbread and cabbage, we were SOL. That Monday we had our exams in World History and English. Tuesday was the Trig Regents, which I started preparing for at the end of February because our teacher Ms. Viggiano didn’t know the difference between sine, cosine and tangent. All of those went pretty well.

Then we ran out of food Tuesday night. I woke up the next morning with water, milk, ice and freeze-dried meat as my choices for breakfast and 50 cents in my pocket. I chose water and only water for the morning. And Wednesday was the busiest day of all. There were two Regents exams, one that morning in Italian, the other in Chemistry. I went to school feeling like I could overcome my hunger and do decently on the test. After all, I had been taking Italian since seventh grade, and I already knew I had scored an eight out of ten on the oral part of this exam. But deep down, I knew I just didn’t have the energy to get through the exam. I had a headache from the lack of food, which grew worse as I started to forget the difference between Italian in past, present, future and present perfect tense. I finished the exam and found myself just hoping for a 70 (anything below a 65 was an F, and the exam counted for a third of my total grade for the course).

Sara Lee Iced Fudge Nut Brownie (yes, they still make them), 2014. (http://saraleefoodservice.com/).

I went to lunch and walked over to Chester Heights (Eastchester) to a deli and bought the only thing I could think of to eat: one Sara Lee Brownie. It cost 45 cents, and it was probably the best investment I had made up to this point in my life. I walked back to MVHS, slowly ate the brownie to make it last, and had just enough time to drink some more water before we sat down to take the Chemistry Regents.

When I opened up the exam booklet I started laughing. Our idiot Chemistry teacher Mr. Lewis had told us the month before to “not worry” about organic chemistry as part of the Regents exam even though he had never covered it in class. Listening to him had me averaging a C in his class all year, with my highest exam grade an 87. So I bought a Barron’s Chemistry Regents test prep book the weekend after his pronouncement, and did nothing but study organic chemistry for this exam. It turned out that the first ten questions on the exam were organic chemistry ones, and something like thirty-five out of 100 total covered organic chem. With my brownie digesting, I was ready to kick some butt. I left that afternoon knowing that I did pretty well. But after that shaky morning, I found myself still wondering, did I do well, or was my malnourished mind playing tricks on me?

I found out on Friday, June 21st that I had failed the Italian Regents, with a total score of 45 — I’d only earned a 37 out of 90 on the written party of the exam (I’d taken the oral part with Ms. Maldonado a couple of weeks earlier). On the Chemistry Regents, I had the third highest score in the school — a 95 out of 100. I was bummed, ecstatic, pissed and disillusioned with my teachers and with myself, all at the same time. The goofy-assed Howard Jones tune “Things Can Only Get Better,” a hit at that time, popped into my head from that morning and off and on for the rest of June.

Luckily on the Friday we found out our scores was also the same day we were to meet our AP US History teacher. I’ve already described my late friend and mentor in a previous post. But it’s worth mentioning again how he broke down my protective wall to talk to me about things I’d never discuss with my classmates or my Mom or Jimme. One of those issues was hunger. Not just my constant need for food even when there was food at 616. My hunger, my drive for something better in life. Meltzer noticed it, and gradually got me to exhibit that side of myself in class.

NO KID Hungry campaign logo, Share Our Strength, June 24, 2015. (https://www.nokidhungry.org/).

For years after AP, Meltzer would say, over and over again, “You know, I never worried about you.” I guess it was because I didn’t take the world around me at face value. I had a healthy disdain for authority figures and the daily bullshit that the world attempted to feed my mind with every day. I wasn’t intimidated by my classmates, and I wasn’t going to allow myself to engage in worrying about grades and pleasing teachers the ways in which they did.

Meltzer picked up on this, and laughed about it all the time. He said that I had that one-of-a-kind look of a student who wasn’t just hungry for good grades, but hungry for knowledge, hungry for something to make sense of a senseless world. I guess that this is all true. Boy, it’s remembering days of hunger past that I miss people like Meltzer the most.

Not Finding My Musical Center

16 Tuesday Jun 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, music, My Father, New York City, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

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616, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, Authentic Blackness, Authenticity, Bad Ideas, Bad Music, Black Masculinity, Columbia House, Coping Strategies, Crush #2, Dahlia, David Wolf, Escapism, Estelle Abel, Glass Tiger, Honors Convocation 1987, MVHS, Phyllis, Richard Capozzola, Self-Discovery, Silent Treatment, Sylvia Fasulo, Terre Haute, Thompson Twins, Tower Records

Glass Tiger, The Thin Red Line (1986) album cover, June 6, 2015. (http://www.amazon.ca).

June ’15’s calendar is exactly the same as the one I lived through in June ’81, June ’87, June ’98, and June ’09 (you can look it up). But June ’87’s the month I graduated from Mount Vernon High School. At seventeen, my Blackness, my authenticity as a young man and as a Black man, my place in the world, all were question marks. Between Black administrators like Estelle Abel and Brenda Smith (not to mention White ones like Richard Capozzola and Carapella), teachers like David Wolf and my guidance counselor Sylvia Fasulo, plus the fifty or so “cool” kids with their ’80s pre-Nu Jack Swing/post-Purple Rain Prince look, I might as well have been an alien from another planet. That’s not even counting my strange and out-of-character incident with Dahlia, the humiliation of the Sam and Laurell Awards Show, the dissonance of dealing with Mom, my idiot stepfather Maurice and my siblings at 616, my father Jimme’s drinking, and the run-ins with not-so-normal Crush #2 in Phyllis.

The day I realized most how differently the world outside of Mount Vernon viewed me from how I viewed myself came the day after graduation at Tower Records on West 66th and Broadway. I’ve told this story before, here and in Boy @ The Window, about how some NYPD officers working security there accosted me and accused me of stealing tapes that I had bought the previous week. What I have left out, though, was my state of mind in the two-week period prior to this incident. As I said in the memoir

I had my latest Walkman, my first Sony Walkman, actually, and my book bag with my recent tape investments, including a few I’d bought at Tower Records the previous Friday. Investments like Fleetwood Mac’s Tango In The Night, Genesis’ Invisible Touch, Whitney Houston’s Whitney and Glass Tiger. Glass Tiger, by the way, was a good indication of my state of mind. Boy was I pathetic!

Here I was, attempting to discover myself through what was then my normal coping strategy of escapism via eclectic music. Given my long periods of deprivation from pop culture between religion, abuse and poverty, I’d really only been at this discovering music thing for a little more than three years. I was basically a preteen in terms of pop culture and musical development outside of choir in elementary and middle school and playing the trombone and fife.

Seriously, I look at this Canadian group Glass Tiger’s ’86 album cover The Thin Red Line now and think, “this stuff isn’t even Michael Bolton worthy!” Songs like “Don’t Forget Me (When I’m Gone)” and “Someday” were actual Billboard chart-toppers in ’87, though, and because I had no friends in whom I placed trust, I trusted my coping strategies and Casey Kasem.

That, and Columbia Record Club, which I signed up for off and on between ’86 and ’89, with my high point for using their Terra Haute, Indiana mailing operation being the spring and summer of ’87. I could use them to find music I wouldn’t dare buy even at Tower Records or Crazy Eddie’s. I bought new age music by Phillip Glass, took a hand at jazz with Dizzy Gillespie, bought Van Halen’s 1984 and 5150 (California-crazy me), and went for it with Big Daddy Kane, MC Lyte and Salt ‘n Pepa.

Thompson Twins, Here’s to Future Days (1985) album cover, June 6, 2015. (http://audiokarma.com).

But for every Simple Minds‘ Once Upon A Time (1985), there was Toto’s The Seventh One (1988), or Thompson Twins’ anything, really. For every song that stuck with me, like Sting’s “Be Still My Beating Heart” (1987) or Anita Baker’s “No One In The World” (1986), there was Whitney Houston’s “Love Is A Contact Sport” (1987) — one of the worst songs I’ve ever heard a voice as awesome as Whitney’s sing — and Howard Jones’ “Things Can Only Get Better” (1985). “Things Can Only Get Better,” by the way, is in my iPod’s random rotation, as I have come around to it again in the past decade.

I was trying to figure out what I liked and didn’t like musically on the fly, having lost a significant amount of time growing up for the triviality of enjoying music. This was hard to do, though, in a world in which my peers and many adults assumed that I knew myself well at the ripe old age of seventeen. No matter what my IQ score was in ’87 (about a 130, for the eugenicists out there), my emotional and psychological development probably put me about five years behind my now former classmates.

So my music tastes varied from genius to God-awful. They still do. The difference is, I recognize I may be the only one who listens to DMX for comic relief, because there’s no way to take him or his rap seriously. Or that I find Tupac and Eminem equally compelling and equally problematic. I still

Taco Bell’s Waffle Taco w/ syrup, sausage, eggs and cheese, March 27, 2014. (http://vice.com).

don’t understand the genius of Miles Davis, no matter how many times jazz enthusiasts like my friend Marc try to convince me to keep listening. Still, half of my music comes from the period between May ’87 and October ’97, and the rest crosses boundaries in time, genre, race and language (Deep Forest, anyone?).

I also recognize complete schlock, too. Unfortunately, commercial music these days is about as emotionally and mentally nutritious as a McDonald’s Big Mac and a Taco Bell Gordita combined. I try every few weeks to find out about the latest artists, just in case my son ever becomes interested in music again. Thank goodness, though, there’s no Lil’ Wayne, Rick Ross, or Iggy Izalea in our house! I’ll take my Glass Tiger (not really) any day over that!

Fake History, Historians’ Fakery

09 Tuesday Jun 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, culture, Eclectic, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, race

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A&E, Academic Historians, Academicians, American Heroes Channel, David Mallott, Discovery Communications, Documentaries, Eurocentric Perspective, Fake History, Giorgio A. Tsoukalos, H2, Historical Documentaries, History, History as Entertainment, Insomnia, Kenneth Branagh, Military History, Peter Coyote, Sleep Aids, Sleeping Pills, Thomas R. Martin, Thomas S. Burns, TV Series, TV Shows

Fake History Channel Twitter account, June 2012. (@NotHistory1).

For many of you, this will sound like a “been-there, done-that” kind of a post, but I’m posting anyway. It’s fairly evident Discovery Communications and A&E’s collection of history-related channels are meant for an older crowd of mostly White males with a hankering for military history, for big wars and powerful European (and occasionally Asian/Middle Eastern) men in history. H-History, H2 (soon to be Vice Channel), American Heroes Channel, and Military History are basically a collection of old and new-yet-rehashed documentaries on history that middle-aged and elderly White men can keep up with without ever feeling challenged by facts or different views on such facts. Especially when it comes to anything beyond the actual battlefields of World War II.

Giorgio A. Tsoukalos, regular snake-oil salesman on H2, History regarding Ancient Aliens, June 6, 2015. (tumblr.com).

I can only criticize the TV networks and their owners but so much, though. The fact is, the only reason I watch these channels is to fall asleep faster, after a long day, getting my hyper eleven-year-old son to bed, and after some prayer or finishing up some work. Because History and H2 now dip their toes into reality TV and dramatic TV series with Pawn Stars, Ancient Aliens, Vikings, and Texas Rising, I can’t use these useless shows to cure insomnia. In the past year, American Heroes Channel’s gotten into the act, with How We Got Here and America’s Most Badass, a regular portrayal of great White men (and occasionally, women) and their self-made, rugged individualism building a modern America with their bare hands and teeth.

The result is that I can’t fall asleep to these channels anymore. But for the past seven months, I’ve discovered a treasure chest of older or fairly recent documentaries on either Netflix or YouTube to watch, or rather, to watch me as I fall asleep. I listen for soothing narrators, like actors Peter Coyote, Avery Brooks, Keith David or Martin Sheen, or at least, British voices like Robert Powell or Kenneth Branagh.

I look for histories that I know all too well, boring enough to fall asleep to, but not so boring that it leaves me thinking about how poorly the producers did in putting together their documentary. So World War II in Colour, World War I in Colour, Barbarians, Barbarians II, Ancients Behaving Badly, Rome: Power and Glory, Engineering An Empire, Rome: Rise and Fall of an Empire, The Story of India, Islam: Empire of Faith, and The Medici: Godfathers of the Renaissance have been my go-to sleeping pills since last Thanksgiving (I also fall asleep to Wild China, Lions in Battle, Aerial America, The Universe, How The Universe Works, Cosmos, the BBC Planet Earth series, and other, less problematic shows and documentaries). Other documentaries, like We Shall Remain (on the plight of Native Americans since 1607) or The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross, would cause too much pain, anger or interest, blowing an opportunity for six-and-a-half hours of sleep or more for that night.

Thomas R. Martin, Jeremiah O’Connor Professor in Classics at the College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, MA, June 6, 2015. (http://www.historyseries.net).

So I tend to tolerate — but definitely do not accept — the ideas that the creators of these documentaries push. Like Rome being “the greatest empire the world has ever known” (the Mongols, the Hellenistic Greeks, the Arabs of the Dar al-Islam days, T’ang Dynasty China, Achaemenid Persia, even the British would all beg to differ) or Archimedes as the “greatest genius of the ancient world” (Imhotep’s probably saying, “Really now?!?”). That’s bullshit, of course, typical White and European navel-gazing. This is exactly why there’s no need for a White History Month or a college major in White Male Studies. As I often have that thought, I usually fall asleep, secure in the fact that this mythology would never make it into any class I teach.

Lately, though, I’ve noticed that some of the so-called academic historians that help move the story along in some of these documentaries. Some, like Thomas S. Burns (Emory University), Thomas R. Martin (College of the Holy Cross), and Robocop (1988) actor/historian Peter Weller (Syracuse University), all tell the story of ancient Rome’s rise and fall, or the medieval spread of smallpox and bubonic plague as if they actually lived through it. The assumptions they make about the people of 1,500 or 2,000 years ago are just staggering. It’s as if Rome and Western Europe had a monopoly on civilization, and that when Rome fell, a black cloud full of lightning bolts descended on the subcontinent like Hell itself, drowning it in invasion and sickness for half a millennium. Except that Spain (especially under the Moors), parts of Italy, southern France and Byzantine Europe weren’t exactly crying for a return to the glory days of 20,000 rich Roman families and 16 million slaves.

Krispy Kreme Hot Dogs at minor-league Wilmington (DE) Blue Rocks (consisting of glazed raspberry jelly donut, with hot dog, bacon and onions in between), April 16, 2015. (http://www.cnn.com/2014/11/18/living/gallery/hybrid-food-mashups/).

Others, like David B. Mallott, associate professor and associate dean at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, have applied modern-day thinking of social science — in his case, psychiatry — to their alleged analysis in these overly scripted documentaries. Describing someone like Genghis Khan or Alexander the Great as “bloodthirsty” isn’t exactly in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders, is it, Dr. Mallott? And, given the historical context — a time without the UN Declaration of Human Rights or the Geneva Convention on the treatment of civilians or prisoners of war — would borderline personality disorder or schizophrenia with violent paranoid delusions really apply to Julius Caesar or Napoleon Bonaparte? Ugh!

If you’re going to entertain me, Discovery Communications or A&E, can you please do it without using the pretense of academic expertise as support for your grandiose mythologizing of historical events and the powerful Eurasian men involved? At least when the BBC and PBS do documentaries, they don’t just turn it over to geeks in the fifties and sixties to act out their preteen imaginations of what Rome must’ve been like two millennia ago. How can I continue to fall asleep to your shows and documentaries if you continue to exaggerate and lie and have academically trained hacks-for-historians and social scientists do the same, all in the name of entertainment?

Didn’t We Never Have It All

04 Thursday Jun 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Hebrew-Israelite, Marriage, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, New York City, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Work, Youth

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"Why Women Still Can't Have It All", Anne-Marie Slaughter, Arkansas, Black Migration, Bradley Arkansas, Conservatism, Evangelical Christianity, Hats, Judah ben Israel, Maurice Eugene Washington, Melissa Harris-Perry, Mother-Son Relationship, Mount Vernon Hospital, MSNBC, Perfectionism, Self-Awareness, Self-Loathing, Self-Sufficiency, Self-Worth, Strikebreaker, Tenant Farming, Vanity, Wear and Tear, Welfare, Welfare Poverty, Xenophobia

Whitney Houston, “Didn’t We Almost Have It All” (released August 1987) Single 45rpm, from 2nd Whitney album (not exactly a favorite), June 4, 2015. (combined/cropped by Donald Earl Collins; http://musicstack.com and http://rapgenius.com).

I’ve been thinking about this for nearly a year. It started for me last August. Melissa Harris-Perry had a segment on her MSNBC show regarding the multiple hats women of color have worn over the years in taking care of their families, immediate, extended and non-biological. In response to Anne-Marie Slaughter’s July/August 2012 piece in The Atlantic about “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” Harris-Perry and her guests made the point that feminism for women of color has been about far more than having a successful, sexist-free career. That throughout American history, women of color have found themselves wearing multiple hats as primary breadwinners, primary caretakers and primary childrearers, often in ways that traditional feminists don’t discuss or recognize. All without fanfare and with many setback along the way.

What I’ve witnessed and been a part of in my own life reflects much of the conversation that Harris-Perry led on her show. The physical, mental and psychological scars from caring for family, friends and children, while struggling financially and dealing with racism and misogyny often manifests in disease and depression for so many women of color. There’s so much more, though, in terms of how my own mother’s multiple hats and habits led me to so many of my own. All initially to help her, but in the end, helping myself become self-sufficient. Not to mention making myself more understanding of where all the wear, tear and lack of care that wearing so much for so long can lead.

My Mom’s Hats and Habits:

The Anne-Marie Slaughter image of multitasking/wearing multiple hats (just think what this is like for poor, low-income, women of color), February 4, 2015. (ALAMY; http://telegraph.co.uk).

Before I turned thirteen years old, my mother had been far more than my Mom. She’d been a dietary supervisor at Mount Vernon Hospital, just outside New York City, since 1968, the year before I was born. She had been a high school basketball player, a caregiver to her eleven brothers and sisters, and a cotton-picking breadwinner for her family in segregated southwestern Arkansas, an area located in the Red River Valley, part of the larger Mississippi Delta region. She had become our family’s primary breadwinner in the years after she gave birth to my older brother and me. Not to mention a married young woman now living a thirty-minute train ride from Midtown Manhattan, between the Hudson and Hutchinson Rivers, on the border between affluent Westchester County and the Bronx.

Life didn’t treat my Mom too kindly once she married my alcoholic father in 1971. And it actually went from bad to worse as she divorced him for my stepfather in 1978. By then, she had become a cigarette smoker, a one-time adulterer, and an abuse survivor. My Mom did everything she could to shield my older brother and me from her habits and the realities of our tough life in Mount Vernon in the 1970s and early 1980s. But by the end 1982, as I turned thirteen, all the hats my Mom had worn began to fall to the ground. In taking on the role of a strikebreaker, all of our lives would change forever.

In response to concessions made to the union, who left her unprotected, Mount Vernon Hospital cut her from full-time to part-time. My Mom became the besieged one. She was the old woman in the shoe, with six kids — including four under the age of five — and a cheating, abusive, unemployed, sometimes-at-home husband. It was my Mom’s job to take care of us all. Yet no longer was she a breadwinner. My Mom had become one of Reagan’s alleged welfare queens, pulling in $16,600 in AFDC payments per year from April 1983 until I left for college in August 1987. With all of that, I became a hat juggler myself.

Once Her Hats Became My Own:

For a while during my teenage years, my Mom had been my friend, one in which I could usually confide, albeit out of anger and frustration. All while taking on more and more of what had been her duties, including the brunt of her second husband’s rage and fists. I’d become an everyday grocery shopper, a frequent family cook, and a sometimes provider, the last mostly through tracking down my own father for a few extra dollars every Friday or Saturday at one of his favorite bars. Or, by the time I was sixteen, through working part-time. I provided childcare on afternoons, evenings and weekends. I washed clothes with my older brother on Saturdays or Sundays every week without fail from October 1982 on.

Hat stall at a Sunday fair, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, August 31, 2008. (Jorgeroyan via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via CC BY-SA 3.0.

By the end of high school, I realized too who my Mom wasn’t, maybe for the first time. She wasn’t an encourager, a person who pushed her kids to pursue their dreams. With so many “Are you sure…?” questions my last two years of high school, it’s a wonder I applied to any colleges at all. Mom wasn’t a nurturer either, especially after I became a teenager. My Mom had only said “I love you” to me two times between my twelfth and nineteenth birthdays, including at my high school graduation ceremony in June 1987. She also wasn’t easygoing. Any mistake with money or my time would get a “Serves you right…” sermon about never screwing up.

The Toll Caring For Others Can Take:

All of this has made my Mom a conservatively cautious perfectionist, one living with depression and in constant denial about our shared past. I guess that it was all too much for her, like reaching the Jordan River, but not being allowed to cross it. Our shared experiences had also made me cautious and perfectionistic in my dealings with myself and the world, as I had to wear so many of my Mom’s hats and cross so many of those rivers with her. My mother tried to be all things to me and my older brother especially, and failed more than she succeeded in the process. For that and so many other reasons, despite her mistakes, I love her very much.

It’s been more than twenty-seven years since I moved away for the greener pastures of the University of Pittsburgh. Yet it’s only been in the past decade that I’ve learned to stop striving for perfection in all the things I say and do. It ultimately takes a lifetime to unlearn all the bad habits and prejudices and give up on juggling all the ideas and roles that our parents have put on us. My journey with and without my Mom has been no different. Now that my Mom’s in her late sixties, I just hope that the only hat she tries to wear these days is one to keep her head warm on the coldest of days.