On this day in 1819, the poet Walt Whitman was born. My preference for poetry tends to be densely packed stuff that really packs a punch, like Mary Barnard’s translation of Sappho, “Pain penetrates / Me drop / by drop.” So I’ve never been all that fond of Whitman’s breezy free verse. But I like it’s content. I like his mysticism.

There are two ideas of the soul. There is what I call the Greek idea: the essence of who I am. Even that one I’m not that clear on, but it is a useful conceit, given that I think we are all just rather over-complicated machines that fool ourselves into thinking (!) we are doing something other than just processing chemical and electrical signals. The second kind of soul is what I call the Christian idea (although most religions have this): some essential thing that dwells within me. It is this second kind of soul that causes me to self-identify as an atheist.

I am, at base, a mystic. But I am humble and I do not think that the Great Paradox involves me to any greater an extent than, say, one of the cells in my thigh. This is probably why I like Emily Dickinson more than Whitman because I think she understood: I am the body electric, I do not sing it. Still, Whitman’s dualistic idea of the soul, more indicative of deism, is fascinating and rewarding. It is also a hell of a lot less morbid than Dickinson. (And me!)

Here is a beautiful one for Whitman’s 195th birthday, “Darest Thou Now, O Soul”:

Happy birthday Walt Whitman!

This is the quote of the week, and not surprisingly, it comes from Jonathan Chait, “Guess the Median Age of Megyn Kelly’s Audience. Her viewers are so young they can do circles around O’Reilly’s viewers in their wheelchairs.”

You’re a Frankly Curious reader, so I know you want numbers. The average age of Bill O’Reilly’s audience is a shocking 72.1 years old. Well, Megyn Kelly (perhaps because of that hip “y” in her first name) has brought that figure all the way down to 71.7 years old. That’s a decrease of 0.4 years—almost 5 months younger! At this rate, they should make it to that prime 25-54 demographic some time in the year 2525. (If man is still alive!)

I know: you don’t want anymore math. But this is really interesting so let me have another paragraph. The mode of an age distribution is what single age the most people have. Because the distribution of Fox News viewers is screwed heavily to the right (mathematically as well as ideologically), it is not normal. In a normal distribution, the average and the mode (and the median) are the same. But for the Fox News viewers, the mode (and median) is actually even higher. So the best representation of a Fox News viewer is an 80-year-old.

What’s impressive about these new numbers is that Megyn Kelly was specifically put in place of Sean Hannity because she was thought to appeal more to a younger and more feminine audience. And I’ll admit, I don’t hate Kelly the way I hate Hannity. She comes off pretty well in An Atheist in the Foxhole, and I find her pretty and intelligent. She’s also not the pure-partisan that Hannity is. But let’s face it, are young people going to tune into her given that they are just going to be fed the same stream of lies, distortions, and evasions? Anyway, they can watch Rachel Maddow, who is also pretty and intelligent and funny in a very silly, but endearing, way.

Chait ends his brief article in typical snarky fashion, “Her audience agrees with her that Jesus was white because they knew him when he was still alive.” It is in reference to Kelly’s assurance to the kids (who weren’t watching her show) that Santa Claus and Jesus were just white, “That’s just a verifiable fact.” A writer at Slate, Aisha Harris suggested we change Santa into a penguin. I loved the idea. But the point is that what Megyn Kelly is saying in that segment is exactly what Bill O’Reilly would have said. People who at least wanted to try to appeal to a younger audience would have played with the idea of the Santa Penguin. Even if you don’t like it, it’s a fun idea. And you certainly wouldn’t be proclaiming that Santa was a white man (not true) and Jesus was a white man (also not true). Here is Cenk Uygur having far too much fun at Megyn Kelly’s expense:

But at this rate of a 0.4 year decrease in the age of the average Fox News viewer for each new host, they will only need 81 more hosts in the 9:00 pm time slot to reach the middle of that demographic sweet-spot: the 39.5 year old. If they all stay in that slot for 17 years like Hannity did, that will be the year 3407. Keep trying Fox News. You’ll get there eventually.

If man is still alive…

Did President Bush the Younger commit war crimes? Richard Clarke thinks so. And Democracy Now! got him to admit this in the following interview. He said, “I think things that they authorized probably fall within the area of war crimes. Whether that would be productive or not, I think, is a discussion we could all have. But we have established procedures now with the International Criminal Court in The Hague, where people who take actions as serving presidents or prime ministers of countries have been indicted and have been tried. So the precedent is there to do that sort of thing. And I think we need to ask ourselves whether or not it would be useful to do that in the case of members of the Bush administration. It’s clear that things that the Bush administration did—in my mind, at least, it’s clear that some of the things they did were war crimes.”

But let’s not be naive here. Many of the things he mentions like the International Criminal Court in The Hague are things that conservatives have been against from the beginning. The reason is simple. They think that “American Exceptionalism” means that we are above the law. It is like the international version of droit du seigneur. “It is all right for us to kill people, and maybe we will even punish those responsible. But it will be us and not the world. This is because we are better than the rest of the world!” This is a repugnant philosophy that is mostly shared with the Democrats.

There is no doubt in my mind that Bush and many other people in his administration committed war crimes. But I don’t think we necessarily need a trial. What I’ve always been for is a truth and reconciliation commission. People claim they were scared after 9/11. Fine. But let’s at least admit to what was done. Instead, we’ve just swept it all under the carpet. And as far as I’m concerned, the war crimes continue. So it isn’t surprising that Obama wouldn’t want to look back on war crimes, when he was busy looking forward to his own war crimes, like the drone killings.

Regardless, no one is going to listen to Richard Clarke except for people like me who already agree with him. Even though (Or perhaps especially because!) he is a Republican from way back, he has no credibility with the modern Republican Party. “How dare he even suggest that any American ever be held accountable by people outside America!” It reminds me of that foolish commenter VINCENTON who seems to think that everything America does is by definition good.

So nothing will change. We will continue on our path of becoming more belligerent and authoritarian and unaccountable. And the reason why is clear enough. Regardless how peace-focused a candidate is, once in the presidency, all the belligerent parts of the government converge on him and tell him how the whole nation will be conquered and there will be 9/11s eight days a week if he doesn’t bomb bomb bomb and spy spy spy. And they all know that. And so you won’t be hearing Clinton, much less Obama calling for US governmental official to be held accountable to international justice.

Yes, we are doomed.

On this day in 1908, the great voice actor Mel Blanc was born. He is best known for his voice characterizations for the Warner Bros’ cartoon shorts for characters like Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Tweety Bird, Sylvester the Cat, Yosemite Sam, Foghorn Leghorn, Marvin the Martian, Pepé Le Pew, and Speedy Gonzales—all of which he created. He did not, however, create perhaps the most iconic Warner Bros’ cartoon character: Porky Pig, whose voice was created by voice actor and real-life stutterer Joe Dougherty.

I love Blanc, but to this day I bristle when the cartoons start and it says, “Voice Characterization: MEL BLANC.” There are two issues. First, in the early days of films, actors were not given screen credit at all. It was Florence Lawrence who was finally given the first screen credit in 1910, which is pretty late. Before that, she was known as “The Biograph Girl.” It is often said that the actors didn’t want their names listed in the films, because it might hurt them working in the theater. The problem is that there wasn’t that much crossover in the early days. Lawrence, for example, never worked on the stage. And getting her name in the credits was a hard negotiation. It wasn’t the producers saying, “Oh, you want your name on the film? Fine!” The same thing went on with Blanc. Warner Bros didn’t want to put any voice actors’ names in the credits. But he was so big a part of their studio that they provided him with the credit.

The other thing is that no one else got screen credit. This greatly added to Blanc’s fame because the implication is that he was doing everyone. And sometimes, that was even true. But in general, there were other actors. I wouldn’t mind so much if the credit were more accurate: “lead voice characterizations” or “head voice actor” or something similar. But I still don’t see why they couldn’t just list all the actors. There weren’t that many in most of the shorts.

I’ve been very interested recently to notice that voice actors can be generally divided into two characters. There are those who are really great like Mel Blanc and most of the people who work on Futurama (most especially Billy West). And then there are those who really aren’t that good. I see this a lot on Bob’s Burgers. Don’t get me wrong: I love that show. But the voices are mostly done by a bunch of comedians who don’t have great control of their voices. When they do other voices, it is generally obvious. They need a larger cast. I would never have known that Bugs Bunny was voiced by the guy who did Daffy Duck.

This is a nice compilation of Blanc’s work, but I’m pretty sure that last Porky Pig is not Mel Blanc. (See what I mean?)

Happy birthday Mel Blanc!

I haven’t responded to the Santa Barbara killing spree because, tragic as it is, what is there to say? This stuff is non-news. Projections are that next year there will be more people killed by guns in the United States than are killed by auto accidents. The perpetrator suffered from Asperger syndrome, which in part is about a lack of empathy. So we have mental illness and weapons coming together again in a poisonous cocktail that left 7 dead and 13 wounded. And the reaction of the only people who matter (the NRA): see it wasn’t just guns; the kid used knives. Cliff Schecter destroys such arguments, “Of course, to the family of a victim, one stabbing death is too many. But clearly knives can’t kill as impersonally, as many, as fast or as at far a distance. Which might be why there haven’t been presidents knifed from book depositories (or grassy knolls, whatever your preference), there aren’t drive-by knifings, and we didn’t storm Omaha Beach throwing knives.”

So really, I’m not all that interested in the subject. Some time back, Jason Jones did a great segment on The Daily Show where he went to Colorado to find out why state representatives were thrown out of office for voting for highly popular and minor gun regulations. What it showed was that the people who want to make public carry of bazookas legal all went to the polls to vote these popular representatives out. The people who supported the representatives didn’t show up to vote. That’s not just a problem with gun rights; that’s a problem with everything in this country. If everyone voted, we would have a far better, more just, and richer country. But they don’t so what are we going to do?

But Jaclyn Friedman wrote an interesting take on the situation over at Time, What’s Desperately Needed in Sex Education Today. While quite aware of all of the other issues involved in the Santa Barbara tragedy, she noted that our screwed up sex education programs exacerbated the situation and also do so in much less lethal ways. She says that when we teach kids about sex, we try to downplay the most important aspect of it: it is pleasurable. She noted, “When we don’t expect sex to be a mutually satisfying experience shared by two people, it leaves us vulnerable to some truly poisonous alternative ideas, including the stubborn myth that sex is a precious commodity that men acquire from women.”

I was especially impressed with this sentence, “What if instead young men like [the murderer] could grow up learning that sex is about communication, not consumption, and that being a man has nothing to do with your number.” It reminds me of a discussion I had with a woman a very long time ago about kinky sex. She dismissed my insights into it because I had had only a handful of lovers and she had had something like a hundred. But I pointed out that people only get really creative about sex after they’ve been having sex with the same person for a while. One night stands are almost always very straightforward affairs. She yielded the question, because she saw from her own life that that was true.

Yes, we really do have screwed up ideas about sex. I don’t know a man who doesn’t know with fair accuracy exactly how many lovers he has had. But no one knows how many times they’ve had sex. This is because men see a woman allowing them to have sex with them as a vote that they are worthy. It’s actually a silly idea. In my experience, if you want to have sex with a lot of women, you don’t need to be Don Juan; you just need to come on to a lot of different women and be okay with being turned down. In the novel Reuben, Reuben, Gowan McGland discusses how he determined that if he made a pass at pretty much every woman, one in three would lead to sex. It’s like cold calling: you make the calls and a certain percentage will accept your offer.

I don’t offhand know how many women I’ve slept with, but I can figure it out by just going through my life. There haven’t been that many. But I do remember certain sexual experiences. None of what I remember is coitus or any of the other aspects of sex. What I remember are the feelings that I had being with that woman. Most of those are very pleasant memories, but some are unpleasant memories of alienation. But it is a dance and it can make you feel close or very alone.

This isn’t to say that I was or am some kind of great lover. From my many conversations with men, I have come to the conclusion that there are two kinds. There are guys who make the sex all about themselves and guys who make it all about the woman. (I don’t know if this is an issue for homosexual couples.) When I was younger, I was certainly in the second camp. But over time, I came to see it as extremely narcissistic. I always felt like I was playing a fine violin, and as a result, I didn’t allow her to give back to me as much as the best women wanted to. There’s also a control aspect of it that is not pretty.

But I think it is better to start with the idea that a woman is a fine musical instrument that you would like to make sing than to think of her as a sexual device for your pleasure. But either approach could lead to mature sexual relationships. In the case of this murderer, he was 22. Why are they always around this age? It is the age that psychosis comes on. He wasn’t diagnosed with it, but I wonder. Regardless, as Friedman put it:

And it isn’t. Sex itself isn’t. There’s a good article in Forbes that quotes the best data available indicating that only 13% of internet searches are for porn. Other than for brief periods of my life, I can’t imagine spending 13% of my life on sex. But that probably doesn’t speak well of me. Sex in its best forms is something that should be a major part of one’s life. But for our murderer, I don’t think sex was so much about “getting it” as “getting off.” And that strikes me as a rather easy thing to do all by yourself. No one knows your body like you do.

And that brings us back to mental illness and easy availability of weapons, especially guns. Because this murderer was focused on sex, but it could have been anything. It could have been Obama’s birth certificate. What makes one go from obsession to murder? I agree with Friedman: we need better sex education and as a culture we need to be able to talk about it like adults. But my thinking about the issue of murder sprees has not changed in the last year and a half, Guns Cheap, Mental Health Expensive.

Afterword

Those thoughts of wanting sex to be about you or about her are really one step away. I think the total focus on the woman is just saying, “You let me possess you, now let me show that you were right to do so!” And of course, for the young lover, regardless his intentions, the execution is usually lacking. My point is (if it isn’t clear above) that both are sexually immature.

I don’t always do wonderful people on their birthdays. I do terrible people too like John Wilkes Booth a couple of weeks ago. But at least Booth was young and very possibly psychotic. Today, I’m going to talk about that great villain who wrote the words we all learned in grammar school:

Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!

That’s right, Patrick Henry was born on this day in 1736. And he was passionate about liberty. Well, he was passionate about the liberty of rich white men like himself. Hey, come to think of it, he was a modern day libertarian! I’ll admit, my main problem with him is that he was a slave owner and I just think that slavery is such a no-brainer, especially in the United States where it was explicitly racist. You couldn’t have white slaves in the 18th century, so they must have figured out that if you are a whole man (instead of only three-fifths), slavery was wrong.

He wasn’t born to slavery. Like modern libertarians, he was just willing to twist all logic into knotts in order to justify his own privilege. So he married into slavery and then bought more and more slaves. Life, you see, was not so sweet as to be purchased at the price of slavery, but life was very sweet when you practiced slavery. Rock on! Long live the rich white man!

But what really bugs me is that school children are told about this “great man” when he was against our very own Constitution (as are most modern libertarians). But then finally, he supported the Federalist Party, because they were the aristocratic party. No champion of the common man he!

It is not surprising at all that the conservative evangelical Christian Patrick Henry College took its name from him. He wasn’t especially known as a Christian. He was just a rich white man who used fear of slave and Indian revolts to push for revolution. Good choice guys! Your college is a true testament to your namesake.

Happy birthday to the awful, liberty-hating Patrick Henry!

I’ve been a fan of Stephen Schwartz for a very long time. I don’t think his importance in musical theater is fully appreciated. He, and not Andrew Lloyd Webber, was really responsible for modernizing musical theater. And, of course, whereas Webber has a very shallow well of melodies, Schwartz is very deep indeed. His first musical was Godspell, which I saw as a kid, but hadn’t thought about much until recently. So I just watched the 1973 filmed version of it. And it is very touching. It is a story of Jesus that I can get behind.

Of course, it is hardly accurate. Jesus in the Bible is not a very pleasant guy. You know all the things that people are saying about Glenn Greenwald, snarkily observing him “telling bold truths that the corrupted partisans are too blind to see, in a manner that in no way is sanctimonious, is an inspiring example for us all”? Well, that’ kind of Jesus in the Bible. And he’s not very nice or happy. He’s always scolding the disciples. I mean, if he ain’t the son of God, you would never want to hang with him.

But the only time the Jesus of Godspell gets really upset is in the Garden of Gethsemane, and then it is clear that he is feeling very vulnerable—not so keen on dying for everyone’s sins. Otherwise, Jesus is absolutely the guy you want to hang out with. Sure, he’s a little preachy. But he’s fun and he explains what’s important in life. And they all play and act and dance and have puppets.

There are some very interesting aspects of the film that I’ll bet really bug the more conservative of the Christians. For one thing: Jesus is not resurrected. But the disciples carry his body off as they sing and dance. From this, I take it that it is the message, not the resurrection that matters. It’s a kind of Gnostic approach to Christianity and salvation that I’ve always preferred. The whole “just believe in Jesus and you are redeemed” has always struck me as more Tinkerbell than any kind of a adult theology.

There’s another Gnostic aspect of this where Jesus tells the parable of the sheep and the goats. The sheep go to heaven and the goats go to hell. But at the end, he comes back and tells all the goats to come with him. Not a proper reading of the Bible, I would say. But one most people would prefer: God gives the bad people a good talking to, and then we all get on with everlasting life.

Another interesting thing is that John The Baptist and Judas Iscariot are combined in one part. And the way it is played is rather like the Gospel of Judas, which had not been discovered until after this film was made. After Jesus is dead, John/Judas is the head pallbearer on the right hand of Jesus. And this leads to a very thoughtful ending where the disciples joyously sing and dance as they carry Jesus down and empty street. They turn a corner and the camera follows but long after them. Once we see around the corner, they are gone and the street is filled with people, going about their usual business.

What are we to make of this? To me, it is that Jesus’ message lives on. But it is drowned out by the banality of everyday life. Since the film was made (Four decades ago!) things have changed. Christians have become much more vocal. Or at least, a certain kind of Christian has become much more vocal. And they are not banal. If I had one word to describe them it would be: angry. Or perhaps: hateful. And I’m not here to tell you that this is the wrong reading of the Bible. But there are a lot of Christians out there (quieter Christians) who interpret the Bible the way Godspell does. I can’t imagine a Universalist not loving the message of this film.

In addition to all this, the songs are great. They are quite varied. The whole thing is very much like Pippin, which Schwartz also wrote. It is quite a joyous film. You ought to check it out if you have any interest at all. Here is a compilation of scenes set to “We Beseech Thee,” which is not in the film, but was in the play. It is sung by Jeffrey Mylett, who is in the film, but I assume the recording is from the original cast album: