Well, I Finally Watched It...

And Mom was right. Mark of the Devil is filled with....

• rape
• nudity
• sex
• dismemberment
• tar and feathering
• immolation
• and torture of all types (whipping, stretching, crushing, branding, and of course the famous tongue extraction)

All in the context of religious oppression. The film pretends to be a dramatic commentary on the horrors of witch hunting and carries an introduction to that effect (after sufficient time into the story so you know what's coming); it's a literary device of course, an excuse for some some pretty ugly content. Aside from that, the English dubbing is bad, the music worse.

Had I seen this at age 9, it would have probably been the first nudity I was exposed to. It is uncomfortably sadomasochistic; there must be a sizeable group of people that are consciously or subconsciously aroused by this sort of thing. An unfortunate behavioral perversion and certainly not to be presented to children as normal or neutral. I remember throughout the 60's-70's, there were many references to the Marquis de Sade in popular culture, who served I think as a more commonly welcome metaphor than I'd like to think.

It was fun, however, to see Herbert Lom in a different sort of role. You may remember him from the Pink Panther movies.

10/29 NPR Interview with William Peter Blatty

http://www.npr.org/2011/10/29/141683620/after-40-years-grisly-exorcist-book-gets-a-rewrite

As a child, I placed Blatty in the same category as Darwin - Satanic agents doing their best to pervert the plan of God.

"Satan must really be in his glory," said Mrs. Andrus frequently, wife of Pastor Ken Andrus, when us kids at Bethel Christian School would express a fascination with darker subjects, the assumption being we had been derailed from our spiritual path and Satan was watching and taking great pleasure in it.

I remember physically cringing as I pulled Origin of Species off the shelf and looked at Darwin eye to eye; this was on a weekly field trip to Erie's largest library downtown. Bethel was too small to have its own library at the time and once a week we went there to check out books.

As a matter of fact, however, Blatty wrote The Exorcist as an expression of faith, and its success was a complete surprise to him.

Reviews on Amazon portray Blatty a literary talent of some measure; I think I will read him if I get a chance, or listen to his books being read, as I do most books now.

Why Radio Drama Is More Intense for Adults Than Children

I recently remarked how much of the adult world goes over children's heads. Parents fret over adult themes, but children are oblivious to them in ordinary doses, even into tween and teen years. They don't understand the images well enough to associate them with taboo subjects and double entendre.[1]

Why is radio drama more intense for adults than children?

Because we supply our own images. It's one thing to be frightened of the unknown, but when your head is filled with a lifetime of horrific images, made especially vivid by the Internet and 24/7 news, supplying disturbing images is nearly autonomic. We can't control it.

The CBS Radio Mystery Theater episode "A Sacrifice in Blood" ends in the sacrifice of an infant; it's all handled through dialog and the sound of a mewling baby, followed by silence. No plunging, meaty ripping dripping sounds or screaming. That would have made it more immediately troubling to be sure, but nothing matches what I created in my head.

[1]
When a giggling man and woman enter a cruise ship cabin and close the door while romantic music swells and the camera cuts to an overhead shot of the ship's bow cutting through water, you and I complete the picture in our minds, and the phallic imagery neatly frames the edges for us, whether we're conscious of it or not. When a child watches, all they see is a man and a woman entering a cruise ship cabin and closing the door. And the term "ordinary doses" is important. I'm not suggesting that children are immune to pornography, sexual abuse, etc.

It's All Fun and Games until Someone's Tongue Gets Pulled Out

Once upon a time, in the olden days at Vernondale Elementary School, as you may have already read in this blog, I was seated in most classes most of the time with very ordinary children just like me.

We were generally quiet, didn't cause trouble, were usually on time for school and rarely sick, more often got the answer right than wrong, came from the same general area of town, our fathers did much the same kind of work, and we mostly saw the same movies and TV shows and went to this church or that, at least once in a while. We were unremarkable, easily forgotten. The kids you look at in an old school picture and don't remember.

By high school I had become a very good student. It was as though someone had flicked a switch. I don't know when it started, but I can tell you when it didn't. It didn't start in Vernondale and it didn't start at Bethel Christian School. Those were fine schools, but they never connected with me academically.

I think I actually found it myself.

I wasn't allowed to go to many movies before I could drive myself or go with a friend (and even then there were restrictions[1]), and I had an early bedtime when I was in grade school, so I often missed the TV shows and movies everyone was talking about.

So, long before I was 16, I found that the best way to discover the magic of popular culture was to read.

I read Airport and The Terminal Man in Reader's Digest Condensed books. And I rode my bicycle to used bookstores and bought paperbacks for a quarter. That is were I found The Andromeda Strain, Tarzan, John Carter of Mars, Pellucidar, Food of the Gods and The War of the Worlds, and when I started a life-long love affair with Michael Crichton, Edgar Rice Burroughs, HG Wells, and many others.

But back to the story: by 12th grade I was an A+/B+ student. I comprehended concepts fairly quickly and was able to apply them from one circumstance to another.

McDowell Senior High School
Millcreek, PA

My 12th grade honors physics teacher at McDowell Senior High School in Millcreek was Mr Warren Saunders, who also happened to go to my church, Bethel Baptist Church, but that never influenced him; it was a large school and in the classroom he was always a teacher, and a challenging one.

Mr Saunders always offered an extra credit question on his tests, and it was always an immediate topic of whispers when tests were handed back: Did you get the extra credit right? What was the answer?

Only two of us got a particular extra credit question correct, which is the core of this story. I was one of them.

The question required applying the concept sound frequency shift of a moving object to light, which is called red shift. This overall phenomenon is called the Doppler Effect, but Mr Saunders didn't give us any clues, we were expected to see the parallel between sound and light in order to get the credit.

I think the reason I remember it so well is that it was the first time I saw myself as a intellectual equal to Rich Nickel, my best friend, who was by any measure among the brightest people I knew.

I got three college credits from Gannon College (now Gannon University) for passing honors physics at McDowell with an A. I never went to Gannon, but I've never been prouder of any other college credit I earned, and Mr Saunders was among the best science teachers I ever had.

[1]

Mark of the Devil
Barf Bag

I begged and begged to go see Mark of the Devil (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0065491/➚ ). Steve Shloss invited me. Steve said they pulled out a girls tongue in the movie, and they were handing out barf bags at the door. How could a 9 year old resist a swell time like that? Mom said no. Moms are so practical. 

Memories: Mom and the Halloween Costume

I remember vividly when I discovered radio drama. I went into my mom and dad's bedroom to say goodnight, and Mom was listening to CBS Radio Mystery Theater. She explained which station it was on and I quickly went upstairs to bed and found it on my clock radio.[1]

The memory I am writing about now precedes that one, but not by much. Some few pieces from that time frame align - which bed I slept in upstairs, the location of the radio, how the furniture was arranged in Mom and Dad's bedroom, the dim light from twin hurricane lamps on their dresser, the side of the bed Mom slept on (Mom and Dad switched sides occasionally then would sleep that way for a long time).

You all know how our earliest memories work - they are distinct but disarticulated. You can match them to a degree, but not with a great deal of certainty.

Not long before I developed a fascination for radio, when I was still small enough to trick-or-treat, my mother made me a costume for Halloween. It was a scarecrow costume. I must have been in 2nd or 3rd grade at the time.

Vernondale
Elementary School
1432 Wilkins Road
Erie PA

In grade school we dressed up for Halloween and paraded through each classroom, all the way from 1st grade at one end of the building to 6th grade at the other. This was at Vernondale Elementary School Erie, PA on 1432 Wilkins Road. I distinctly remember feeling like I was on display, in a model/runway sort of way. It was a quiet affair, not a lot of whooping and hollering, mostly because were were all unrecognizable, but partly because we were generally a well-behaved group.[2]

Now, I didn't want this costume Mom had made. I wanted to be Superman for the third year in a row, and Mom being Mom, she of course said yes. She made that scarecrow costume by herself, I didn't ask her to, she just thought it would be cute and fun. Sometime after that, my little brain got to thinking, and as I dwelt on this in bed one night, my brother Tom asleep in his own bed, I couldn't bear it anymore and went downstairs to Mom and Dad's bedroom in tears apologizing for not wearing the costume.I thought I'd hurt her feelings.

She said it was okay and sent me back upstairs. I felt much better after that, but the emotion returns if I let it, and here I am, nearing 50, feeling badly again.

Some melancholy memories have sweet edges.



[1]
CBS Radio Mystery Theater ran late in many markets, 11pm in Kansas City for example, and it may have been late in Erie too. I suspect this memory was from a school vacation period, or at least not on a school night, because I was still very young and Mom would have told me to go to sleep. Tom was in fact asleep as I recall. I don't remember the radio I used as a child. I do remember my first transistor, but the bedside radio was not mine, it was just a family radio for upstairs.

Some CBSRMT themes are quite intense for the 70's. I recognize that now, but at the time I was only focused on the sounds and the scares. It's that way with children. As parents we fret over the material they're being exposed to, but except for the most egregious and obvious types, these themes go unnoticed. They are woven into our collective anxieties in many ways, and even as adults we miss them. Can any of us cite the fears expressed in Hansel and Gretel? Cinderella? Peter and the Wolf? Some of it, but very little. Those stories and many more are manifestations of our cultural DNA, and although we can decode it, it is not a trivial matter, and it's just as convoluted as our biological DNA.

As a pre-teen I found out they used to do radio drama before there was TV. I learned that through my local rock-n-roll station, WCCK 103.9 (or K104 as they billed themselves) when they broadcast Orson Welles's War of the Worlds; they did that for a few Halloweens running.

[2]
The largest 6th grade class, my class, had 36 students. I remember that because the teachers referred to the classes by their sizes and remarked that 36 was simply too many for one teacher.

Let me see if I can remember my Vernondale homeroom teachers:

1st: Miss Minucci (sp?)
2nd: Miss Leopold
3rd: Miss Anderson (my favorite)
4th: Mrs Budzynski
5th: Mr Veith
6th: Mr Locke
Principle: Mr Luscheon
School Secretary: Shirley Nickel (my best friend's mom, that was cool; you just don't want to get sent to the office when your friend's mom is there.)

There was also Miss Roslanawyck (sp?), who became Mrs Furhman in my 6th year; she taught the other 6th grade class; I did go to her classroom for English. I sat up front; I think she kept me away from some bad influences in the back of the class that I wanted to be closer too; those influences were named Jon Tushak and Steve Shloss, both of whom turned out just fine far as I know, they just had a lot of energy in 6th grade. They remained popular and became athletes in high school. They had cool jackets in with neat letters on them, and shiny pins. I wanted a jacket like that, but I couldn't have earned it, I simply didn't have the ability.

(I won't go into the time we were at Cedar Point on our 6th grade trip and Jon and Steve were caught throwing spit balls at the roller coaster and had to spend the rest of the day on the school bus. No, I won't tell you that story.)

I had a very poor English aptitude through grade school. I was a terrible speller. I am to this day. I was spelling at a 4th grade level in 6th grade, and Mr Locke was even kind enough to call this out in class. For some reason, spelling was very important in those days, sort of a barometer of character. They began something new at that time, the standardized test. Mr Locke, a very good science teacher, had a machine that could grade each test (a punch card with circles that you shaded with the correct answer) in a split second. An amazing device. We each took our tests and fed them through the machine, watching the card spit it out on the other end with red marks next to each mistake and a total right and wrong at the top. It made a rat-a-tat-tat sound like a very fast electric typewriter. Some kids scored poorly on purpose in order to get more rat-a-tat-tats out of it.

I wasn't regarded as particularly bright in grade school; I don't know why, but by 5th grade, I was placed by default in the "B" group in most subjects. ("A" was excelled, "B" was normal and "C" was remedial; they all met in the same classroom but were seated together). I think I was in the "C" group in Mrs Furhman's English class, probably another reason I was up front. I remember not knowing a lot of answers and being deathly afraid I'd be called on.

I think she talked a lot with Mr Locke, who wasn't impressed with me either.

(Something changed after 8th grade when I left Bethel Christian School and I developed into a very good student.)

I had a lot of trouble with my times tables in 4th grade, and that reputation carried through into subsequent grades. Rich Nickel was always in the "A" groups. Rich was a very bright kid.

Mrs Budzynski wasn't my 4th grade homeroom teacher, she had the other class, but I was in her classroom a lot. I can't actually remember who my 4th grade homeroom teacher was. I know we had a lot of substitutes that year, including Mrs B, so perhaps I didn't have a regular teacher. In those days in elementary school, although you had a homeroom, you spent most of the day in that room except for recess, lunch, assemblies, and maybe an art or English class; your teacher was a day-long companion.

I had a very good 4th grade teacher for part of that time, though I don't remember her name. She read My Side of the Mountain to us, which I remember fondly to this day.

http://www.amazon.com/My-Side-Mountain-Jean-George/dp/0525450300/ref=sr_1_3  ➚ 

I developed an aural aptitude very early.

Bet you can't guess who said this and when

Read this and see if you can tell who said it and when, then scroll down to the footnote for the answer:

"We used to get into the real spirit of Halloween, you know, the spooky, scary stuff. We'd find some old haunted house and go prowling around for some ghosts and stuff... I'm afraid Halloween is different nowadays; all the wonderful spooky hobgoblin atmosphere - that's all changed. Can't help feeling a little sad seeing the joys of your childhood disappearing in a changing world. Halloween just isn't exciting anymore."[1]

One of the wonderful things about radio time travel is discovering how much we are alike across generations. Halloweens past were very much like today and entailed jack-o-lanterns, trick-or-treat, parties, ghosts, pranks, haunted houses, and a very palpable nostalgia.

Halloween has changed dramatically even since I was child into more of an adult-oriented observance, with commensurate objections from some conservative religious quarters. (I understand it's now the third-larges retail event of the year, just behind Christmas and Mother's Day.)

I come from very fundamentalist roots, but there was no need when I was a boy to raise a fuss over pleasant little mythologies. Ghosts and goblins were tolerated as benign diversions.[2]

Listen to some Halloween Old Time Radio here:
http://www.oldtimeradiofans.com/halloween-old-time-radio-shows.php ➚

[1]
That was Ozzie speaking on Ozzie and Harriet, October 31, 1948. You can hear that epiose at the link above.

If Ozzie was 30 when that was written and broadcast (just guessing), then this 1948 episode refers to collective memories from perhaps 20 years earlier. In fact, Ozzie makes a joke comparing 1948's Halloween with "1925 Chicago," by which he means Prohibition and tommy guns and flappers. The audience laughs because they know the benign Halloween pranks of 1948 are no different from those of 1925.

Holiday episodes from the 40s-50s are often very reflective and nostalgic with a knowing nod to their naiveté.

Are old-timey movies and TV and radio shows naive? Sure. The subjects are tame by most standards, the problems created and solved in 1/2 hour (nothing new there), the jokes easily accessible by all ages, very little to offend. But they had problems like we do, of all sorts, they just dealt with them differently. There's a lot of good that comes from publicly addressing social issues in movies and TV, but but it doesn't always solve them. Much of that will always happen behind closed doors, in the privacy of the home, regardless of how much public scrutiny there is.

[2]

And the magical myths of Christmas were embraced. My mom remembers her pastor when she was little dressing up as Santa for the children. My Grandma Grandy (Ethel Grandy, my mom's mom), believed in Santa until she was 11 years old; on Christmas Eve, her father would actually get on the roof, stomp around and jingle sleigh bells. 

Remember, that was in the day when horses and sleighs and bells were commonplace, and the nearest neighbor might be acres away. There are still homes and families like that, but the simple times that sustained a little girl's belief in Santa until she was 11, those days are gone.

I Heard the Voice of Satan

I listened to a wonderful episode of CBS Radio Mystery Theater recently, "The Horse That Wasn't for Sale," starring Mercedes McCambridge.

http://www.cbsrmt.com/episode-45-the-horse-that-wasnt-for-sale.html ➚



Who is Mercedes McCambridge? She won a Best Actress Oscar for All the King's Men (1949) and has a long list of film and TV credits. 

She was also the voice you heard emanating from the possessed Linda Blair in The Exorcist, and if you listen very closely to "The Horse That Wasn't for Sale," you will hear an unmistakable echo of that voice when she says the word "death" about half-way through. It's delightfully chilling, an oh-too-brief intersection of genres.

(The Exorcist was released in 1973 and this episode of CBS Radio Mystery Theater aired in 1974, so undoubtedly many listeners at the time heard the echo too.)

Something I didn't know: "The Demon" (aka Satan, aka Captain Howdy, the entity possessing Linda Blair) was a woman - Eileen Dietz. Learn more here: http://captainhowdy.com/2010/05/new-interview-with-eileen-dietz-reveals-shes-writing-a-book/ ➚

Eileen Dietz

Eileen Dietz

I always thought the quick flashes of Satan in The Exorcist looked like Gene Simmons in full makeup but if you look closely, they are are quite dissimilar; understandable though; a perception is a product of its time, and of course in those days most people didn't have VCRs or any other way to stop a moving image on their TVs, so we were left with whatever reactions a split second might leave.

Jurassic Hash

Rex Reed once called Name of the Rose "heavenly hash." Well, Terra Nova amounts to much the same thing in the sci-fi genre by mixing elements of Soilent Green, Lost, Jurassic Park, Alien, Mad Max beyond Thunderdome (complete with a Tina Turner substitute), and every post-apocalyptic or "the world is a cesspool"-themed film that came before. It even manages a nod to the old west: "You asked me for a badge and a gun. They're yours if you want them." It may, in fact, owe more to that genre than any other.

Some unordered thoughts...

• If you start counting the numbing drums, distant horns and single desultory piano keys (a reality show staple nowadays), you'll get distracted enough that you won't hear anything else; it sounds like it was scored by John Carpenter. (Actually, John Carpenter would do better.)

• It specifically decries greed, war and ignorance but it is a product of them.[1]

• New dinosaur: "Carno" or "Carnosaurus," which looks for all the world like an allosaurus, but if you call it something else, you can make something new out of it.

• Soldiers with enough padding they could be playing football.

• Guns with enough motion tails and lights they should be in a video game.

• It substitutes emotional posturing for human interaction. [2] The posturing seems to provide a substrate for every person and event; long stares, tensed muscles - "there's gonna be a shootout" moments - where someone needs to back down before someone else gets hurt, and those awful strings or soft staccato piano notes that are only a viscous layer of crap you spread on the walls so when you throw the story against it, it sticks.Fiction has become a reflection of reality in which fewer and few people cooperate; they burst into conflict at every opportunity over minor things or plot elements that we don't care about.

• Josh is the handsome dummy with a temper. He worries about his father getting left behind before they arrive in Terra Nova then later criticizes his father for striking a police officer (which he'd done to protect his family) and serving time in jail. When Josh's sister explains some logistical time travel stuff regarding a probe (which solves some sci-fi continuity issues), Josh doesn't understand it and explains he was "having a life" while the rest of the world was interested in such nonsense.



• Now, I do understand the pieces - the producers need to explain your typical time line problems (the "grandfather paradox" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandfather_paradox ) and good lookin' dumb ol' Josh is just dumb enough to make an excuse for his smart sister[3] to bore us with the details for a few seconds, so let's dispense with that. What I wonder about why the writers and producers didn't have enough trust in their audience to have a few main characters find the probe and analyze it and discuss it.

• At one point two characters find strange writing on rocks, under a waterfall and beside a flowing stream. "Looks like it's been here for a while," says another good lookin' star (in a Twilight werewolf kind of way). Right. Flowing water carved the Grand Canyon but didn't erode this ancient writing. (Can you say "carnosaur"? Sure, I knew you could.) Look for the producers to create their own alphabet and language about previous inhabitants, and regardless of the time line issue, it will relate to our modern earth somehow.

• Episode 2, "Instinct" is a remake of The Birds without Tippi Hedron or Hitchcock or the suspense. I think I see where this is going; I suspect episodes will frequently put a familiar story in the Stone Age and let the dissonance and danger carry it along. How long can that go on? If you develop the characters, a few seasons perhaps, if they have enough money to continue inventing new aspects of prehistoric Earth.

I'm giving it a chance. When I was little, when TV was four networks and everyone talked about everything that was worth talking about, I lived inside TV and identified most closely shows like Planet of the Apes (the show and the movie), Kolchak: The Night Stalker (think X Files meets Jimmy Olsen meets Popeye Doyle), Johnny Quest (the first, original, and best, the one banned from Saturday morning TV because it was too violent). Which is all just to say that if I were a kid, I'd probably find less wrong and more right with Terra Nova.

Jimmy Olsen

Karl Kolchak

Popeye Doyle

[1]
Call me jaded, but anything you watch on TV is a product of a social caste that has little understanding of you and me. There is more power and excess and money in that circle than you or I would ever see in a hundred lifetimes. It tries to connect with us, and it needs to in order to earn ratings, but few of the people behind the connection are like you and me, want to be like you and me, or even want to be in the same room with you or me. There are exceptions, I'm sure, and that keeps the illusion appealing.

[2]
Insightful emotion is difficult. The animated ones are easy - anger, fear, surprise, hate, etc. Anyone can script and shoot and perform an argument. We do it every day without cameras and without thinking. What's far more difficult is the unverbalized anger, fear, surprise, and hate, and the verbalized acquiescence, compromise, vulnerability, etc.



[3]
Naomi Scott, every dino-loving cell-texting Nintendo-playing pre-teen's dream. 

I take no pleasure in another man's death

I take no pleasure in another man death, no matter how much I think he deserved it. That doesn't mean I feel sorry for this man, or wish he were still alive. I just take no joy in it. He wasn't the devil, he wasn't evil incarnate; he was just broken,[1] a tragically short-circuited human being in a world that permits such horrible mistakes to become leaders.

Gadhafi

Gadhafi

Gadhafi

Gadaff's Son

Gadhafi supporters

Gadhafi

[1]
What I mean by that is there is no need for a supernatural explanation or metaphors. Why invent a Devil when we are so good at messing things up ourselves?

If you drive around in circles at 200mph enough times....

... someone's bound to get hurt.

NASCAR driver Dan Wheldon died in a 15-car crash at Las Vegas Motor Speedway on October 16. I am very sorry for him and his family's loss.

People race cars, jump out of airplanes, climb mountains, swim with sharks, play football, etc, in part bacause they have a deficiency of dopamine, perhaps caused by a lower density of dopamine autoreceptors in their brains[1]. Most of us have these in sufficient quantities that we don't need to actually participate in dangerous activities; watching them is enough, though I suspect those that just watch and enjoy are also supplying additonal dopamine; those like me that have no interest whatsover probably have an abundance of autoreceptors.[2]

Drugs are used to balance or enhance or inhibit chemicals in a similar way, as is cheating, lying, stealing, gambling, etc.

It would be nice if someday we could regulate chemicals in just the right amounts so we don't equate danger with validation.

Some folks would think something is missing if we ever actually got to that point (chemically satisfying the rush of danger), but I don't think so. We would probably at the same time be able to control domestic abuse, warfare, road rage, and a bunch of other bad things. And it probably won't be solved by adding chemicals to our brains, but programming our genes.[3]


[1]
Risk takers seek thrills as their brains are more easily numbed to excitement, scientists say
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1103826/Risk-takers-seek-thrills-brains-easily-numbed-excitement-scientists-say.html

'Compass Of Pleasure': Why Some Things Feel So Good
http://www.npr.org/2011/06/23/137348338/compass-of-pleasure-why-some-things-feel-so-good 


[2]
I am an anomaly even in my own family. My dad loves sports. My brother jumps out of airplanes. My sister rides motorcycles. I write. I don't just write, I have an incestuous relationship with words and sounds. If you are not a writer, you probably don't. That's okay. As a boy, I desperately wanted to be an athlete, a hunter, a builder. I wanted to come home from work with greasy hands that were so indelibly stained that I was allowed to sit down to the dinner table with dirty hands, because it meant I worked hard that day. I looked for validation and acceptance in those things and never found it. I found it in words instead.

[3]
And maybe, just maybe, you can't have your yang without your yin to make it all work. Maybe you need race car drivers to also have astronauts. I don't know. Interesting thought. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ying_and_yang 

There Was a Gentle Naivete

The Ed Sullivan Show - 21 May 1961
http://timespast.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-ed-sullivan-show-21-may-1961?xg_source=activity

This show aired before I was born, but not so much before that it isn't very much like the shows I remember from my earliest youth, that very narrow developmental window that screens out details but permits images and places and moments to pass through.

Television was expensive and still a novelty for most Americans. If you could get three channels you were lucky. And all of them went off the air at 11pm or not long after, switching over to a test pattern which let you know your TV was working, there just wasn't any programming available.

Notice the simplicity. There is singing, of course, but there is magic and dancing and acrobatics and jokes.

There is a gentle naivete, and the men and women were fully aware of it.

If you can watch this without a sad twinge of loss, you have no connection with a generation that saw two world wars, Korea and Vietnam, that literally sweat to earn a living and raise a family, that was grateful for nutritious meals and warm clothes and shoes that fit and didn't leak.

Jack Benny and Bing Crosby's boys say hello from the audience (it was common to acknowledge stars in those days, and it made folks at home feel like they were sharing something special with special people).

Phil Harris sings, and sincerely and just a little emotionally introduces a Black singing act. This was during civil rights strife in this country. And what did they sing about? That old-time religion. It was good enough for them, and it was inoffensive and sweet and innocent, and entertaining.

Jerry Lewis does Jerry sans Dean, but watching with the benefit (and baggage) of 50 years of show biz gossip and MDA telethons[1] it's difficult not to see an aging screwball comedian looking for new relevance without a straight man.

Somewhere along the way we lost something. I'm afraid it is gone for good.


[1]
Once upon a time, the Jerry Lewis Muscular Dystrophy Telethon was big TV for little kids. We tried to stay up all night with Jerry and "watch the stars come out," stars that we knew from old black and white TV and reruns. There is a commercial from that era I'm looking for, will share if I find it. I associate it with fall, back to school, Vernondale, and Beth Williams. Wow, was she hot. In a fifth grade kind of way.

The Evolution of Moral Sense and De-evolution of Accountability

I once posed an ultimatum to myself: If someday someone could pose a reasonable explanation for the evolution of our moral sense, I would potentially need to regard the one last human thing that touches the divine as the mundane consequence of evolution and chance.[1] In other words, I'd be SOL in my search for something supernatural without a natural explanation. Since then, much work has been done in this area, and I believe it's fair to say that, as much as we might prefer not to believe so, there is a physical explanation for our human values.

The Consequences
The consequences (which cannot be overlooked however unbearable they may be) is that what is conventionally called "right" by a community is simply what's practical; the concept and components of morality have arisen by mutations over time to assist the survival of the species and groups within it.

Practical = Right = how most people behave most of the time = what our physical bodies require to produce more physical bodies in greater numbers and survive challenges within their environment and among each other.

When those connections are made, there is no moral accountability in the traditional (religious) sense because there is no higher authority to have created it nor an a priori reason for us to adhere.

You may as well ask why a parasite wasp should or should not lay its eggs inside a caterpillar so its young can eat their way out. There is no right or wrong, there just "is."

I've heard a number atheists (or skeptics if you will) celebrate diversity and life and the universe and our uniqueness etc despite this conclusion, but the celebration is hollow and I can't imagine it sounds any more satisfying to them then it does to me.

There are a whole host of conclusions that follow "Right = Practical," including "the ends justify the means" and other troublesome situation ethics.

Should we incarcerate or rehabilitate criminal offenders? I know what I think we should do, I know that I feel more human, and humane, by rising above emotional rhetoric and appealing to elevated principles.[2]

But I have no compelling or cogent reason to do so, except that I cannot do otherwise, and that is not a reason..

If our moral sense is nothing more or less than the color of our hair, our need for corrective lenses, or our ability to tolerate lactose, then there's no more reason to accept it or change it than those things or any other thing that makes us human.

In 12th Grade at McDowell High School,[3] in a sex education class, one of the film strips we watched (if you don't know what that is, read here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_strip) discussed genetic engineering. This was long before such things were possible. A voice narrated artists' renderings of life in outer space, and how we might someday manufacture humans with special abilities to work in confined spaces. In one slide, a group of men in overalls worked in a narrow duct, each wielding a wrench over their head as they tightened bolts. They had no legs. The narrator asked if we might someday be able to engineer humans to work in small spaces, and the artists showed men without legs. 

There was no ethical component to this. The class was, after all, about penises and vaginas and what you do with them, not about right and wrong. Our teacher never questioned it either, that I recall, and this was only 10-20 years after thalidomide babies.[4]


Did you know that in each ejaculation, a typical male produces enough sperm to fertilize all the women in the entire northern hemisphere? I learned that in that class. You can imagine the delight that suddenly stirred in our 17-year-old brains.

[1]
This was me talking to myself in 1981 when I was a freshman and reading Carl Sagan's The Dragons of Eden and Richard Leaky's People of the Lake, both of which I bought at the Calvin College bookstore and savored beginning to end like a small bag of potato chips through a long movie. Concluding our moral sense evolved doesn't mean there's no entity outside humankind that participates in it, only that there is no need for a supernatural explanation for it.

[2]
It is impossible in any description of values not to use language that has for thousands of years been associated with superstitions and religious beliefs, disregarding for the moment whether or not they have any merit. And even if we could not use such language, the words would be so much less beautiful, for elevated concepts give us elevated wit (in the Neo-classical sense).

[3]
McDowell High School is at 3580 W 38th St, Erie, PA, 16506. It's a very large school. My graduating class was over 700.

[4]
I knew a man who sold thalidomide. He was a pharmaceutical salesman after WWII. He was essentially a nice man but could not examine his actions very closely. He was a pilot in WWII. He dropped bombs over civilian and military targets. He enjoyed bombing trains especially. He would describe the experience like it was a video game, using the word "poof" to describe a direct hit. I asked him if he ever wondered about the people he killed, for he bombed towns and factories also. No, he didn't. As for thalidomide, he blamed the pregnant women for taking it, saying pregnant women will eat anything you give them, it wasn't his fault or the doctors'. His name was Bob. He is gone now. He lived in the same gated community that Paul Schrader's parents lived in at that time, or at least that's what I was told. Schrader directed Taxi Driver and other controversial films. Schrader went to Calvin College too. The professors that chose to comment when I was there were not very fond of him.