Happy Father's Day

Let us now praise famous men, 
the ancestors in their generations. 
2 The Lord apportioned to them great glory, 
his majesty from the beginning. 
3 There were those who ruled in their kingdoms, 
and made a name for themselves by their valor; 
those who gave counsel because they were intelligent; 
those who spoke in prophetic oracles; 
4 those who led the people by their counsels 
and by their knowledge of the people's lore; 
they were wise in their words of instruction; 
5 those who composed musical tunes, 
or put verses in writing; 
6 rich men endowed with resources, 
living peacefully in their homes- 
7 all these were honored in their generations, 
and were the pride of their times. 
8 Some of them have left behind a name, 
so that others declare their praise. 
9 But of others there is no memory; 
they have perished as though they had never existed; 
they have become as though they had never been born, 
they and their children after them. 
10 But these also were godly men, 
whose righteous deeds have not been forgotten; 
11 their wealth will remain with their descendants, 
and their inheritance with their children's children. 
12 Their descendants stand by the covenants; 
their children also, for their sake. 
13 Their offspring will continue forever, 
and their glory will never be blotted out. 
14 Their bodies are buried in peace, 
but their name lives on generation after generation. 
15 The assembly declares their wisdom, 
and the congregation proclaims their praise.

The Double Down:

This was a food review that I wrote on a whim for our school paper.  The readership seems to like it, so I thought I would post it here as well.  I'd like to thank Jacob Karlins for bringing this culinary wonder to my attention.

The new KFC Double Down seems like an exciting concept: what if you took a fast food sandwich’s least interesting component—the lousy processed bread—and replaced it with its most appealing—more meat?  These kinds of questions are how new menu items are born.

The anticipation for the sandwich was something like apocalyptic (in fact one source actually described it as a “harbinger of a breadless apocalypse” [eater.com])Words like “abomination,” “baffling,” “ominous,” “freak-show,” “deadly,” “angina,” and so on.

KFC tacitly acknowledges that the public might be skeptical.  The promotional paragraph on the KFC website begins by asserting “The new KFC Double Down sandwich is real!” which is surely the most existential statement ever made by a fast food restaurant on behalf of its product.

I too can vouch for its reality, up to a point.  On 12 April, overcome by childhood sentiment for the days when Kentucky Fried Chicken (note the lack of abbreviation) was the nearest fast-food chain to our house, I sought out my nearest KFC (which turns out to be in Danvers, where rte 35 meets 128) and ordered one.  When I arrived, I was a little nervous, since there was no sign of the major marketing blitz that I had been told of.  There were no Double Down signs, nor was it on the menu.  No “Today’s the DD Day,” hoopla.  I had to ask if they actually had the sandwich for sale, and was told, with a definite lack of enthusiasm, that they did. I bought it, and not long afterwards, I ate it, hot.

Here is where the Double Down’s touted reality begins to need qualification.  One of the great truths of fast food is that the camera always lies.  The pictures of menu items always seem to be brimming with freshness, neatly and lovingly assembled, moist where they should be moist, crispy where they should be crispy, and so forth.  Of course the sandwich that arrives is usually of a much lesser star, smushed, soggy and so forth.  With that in mind, we note that in pictures, the Double Down looks like a sandwich.  It lies flat, with its ingredients of bacon, cheese and sauce neatly arranged, and with a handy paper envelope to keep it all in place and keep hands from becoming overwhelmingly greasy.  (one commentator suggested, entertainingly, that the sandwich might be healthier if you ate the wrapper).The moment I opened my bag, it was clear that the whole “sandwich” notion was a cheerful fiction.  The handy envelope was nowhere to be found, and the chicken breasts (being pleasantly real and therefore not entirely flat) did not behave like remotely like bread, but rolled around loose in the bag.  A lonely looking strip of bacon and an ersatz-looking piece of cheddar jack seemed barely affiliated with the other ingredients.  If there was sauce, I didn’t notice it as such.

I managed to cajole the whole thing into an awkward and extremely greasy “sandwich,” however, and began to eat.  And here is the kicker: it may not be a sandwich, but it was really pretty good.  The chicken was hot and moist and juicy, and the batter it had been fried in was crispy and flavorful.  The bacon and cheese didn’t contribute much, but they didn’t detract either.  Other critics have claimed it was very salty, but no more so than any other two pieces of fried chicken. 

Of course, the Double Down is bad for your health.  Particularly if you eat a lot of processed foods or have trouble with your blood pressure, you shouldn’t go near it (and don’t think you will be any safer with the grilled version: it has even more salt and almost as much fat).  But although, calorie-wise, the Double Down is no better than a Big Mac, it isn’t any worse either.  And although I was thirsty afterwards (presumably from all that salt) I was satisfied, and had none of the queasiness that I usually experience after a fast food burger.

One still must ask the question “why?” Why have this goofy sandwich-thing? Why sell it?  But I think I have the answer.  Because it has been there all along. The Double Down could be rolled out with absolutely no changes in inventory or preparation procedures.  All the ingredients (the breasts, the cheese, the bacon, the sauce) are things that KFC already keeps on hand for other menu items.  Only the little envelope is new (and apparently optional).  Even nutritionally, the fuss seems overstated; how is this actually worse than a two or three piece chicken meal with greasy sides?  KFC has been selling that (and worse) since before this writer was born.  KFC gets to roll out an attention-grabbing new product and the only cost is promotion.  And since KFC is always running ads anyway, that isn’t really any change to its bottom line; you have got to advertise something.  So even if the whole  Double Down is a dumb idea, and disappears as quickly (and with less fanfare) than it arrived, it is still kind of smart.  Will I order another Double Down?  Probably not.  But I walked into a KFC for the first time in 20 years to try one.  Isn’t that probably what they were after?

The Double Down in its Platonic form, as represented on the KFC website, with handy wrapper, neat assembly, and a plate.  A plate?  Mine came in a bag.

The Double Down as it exists in the material world.  Note its difficulty hanging together as a “sandwich.”

The Views I Left Behind Me...

This entry is more than twice as long as it ought to be.  I try to keep my blog pieces under 500 words, and this is more than double that.  I have been carrying it around in my head since Saturday, through the frenzy of Easter and an ensuing all-family gastric flu of epic intensity.  So please bear with me on its length.  Or read half now and come back to it later.  Or, you know, don't read it at all.  That's ok too.

I just finished reading Jon Krakauer’s gripping Under the Banner of Heaven. It isn’t a new book, of course.  I think for a long time I thought it was about Al Quaeda; only in the last year or so did I realize it was actually about polygamist mormon factions.  Naturally, when I found that out, I became interested in reading it at once.

Really, I don’t think the confusion is accidental.  Joseph Smith Jr is compared more than once in the book to Mohammed, and the violence and fanaticism described among the most militant persons in the book is compared to that of jihadis.  And, despite the objections of the mainline Mormon church (who are not really the subject of the book at all), I think the comparisons are apt.  The real subject of the book, according to Krakauer, is “violent faith.”

Krakauer says early on that his main concern and interest is with religion’s capacity to fuel and justify horrifying acts.  In the prologue, after detailing the gruesome double murder which acts as the centerpiece of the overall narrative, he writes: “There is a dark side to religious devotion which is too often ignored or denied.  As a means of motivating people to be cruel or inhumane—as a means to inciting evil…—there may be no more potent force than religion.”  Later on, as one of the many many epigraphs that appear before and between the book’s various chapters and parts there is a long passage from Bertrand Russell’s “Why I am not a Christian” which is a pretty vicious attack on religion, blaming organized religion for opposing “every moral progress that has been in the world.”  Krakauer’s tone is normally more moderate than this (in a strained sort of way), and I find it hard to understand his inclusion of this passage, except that on some level, he must agree with it, and wanted to let Russell say what he felt he could not.

I used to agree with this passage too—and let me note how odd it is to stumble across the sort of thing that one used to believe and no longer does.  I would have proudly brandished the name of Bertrand Russell as proof of both my own smartness and the incontrovertabality of my point. When I was fifteen, sixteen years old, it really did seem as if many of the most dreadful deeds ever done—perhaps all of them—had been done in the name of God.  There were a few things I didn’t know of course.  I didn’t know that Hitler was an atheist, along with the rest of his inner circle.  I didn’t know about Pol Pot.  I was just learning about Robespierre and Danton and Stalin.  All these guys probably would have thought Bertrand Russell was right on the money, and Bertrand Russell would have been horrified.

So that’s problem number one with Russell’s assertion (and the strongly implied assumption of Krakauer’s book): you don’t need to be religious, in Russell’s or Krakauer’s sense of the word, to be an instrument of unimaginable violence and fanaticism.  Yes, there are plenty of examples of religious fanaticism gone off the deep end; but, arguably, history’s most spectacular crimes have been committed by atheists in the name of various non-religious idols: race theory, communism, nationalism, fascism.

The flip side of this is a failure to credit religion with any positive achievements at all.  Russell was writing in 1927, so the world had not yet witnessed the American Civil Rights movement, a movement which only began to gain serious traction when led from the pulpit.  Russell explicitly credits Christian churches with aiding and abetting the institution of slavery (which is fair), but neglects to mention the equally crucial role of the church in creating and sustaining abolitionism.  Although Americans across the political spectrum have become accustomed, over the last thirty years, to seeing religion as a pretty narrowly conservative force, traditionally the role of religion in all areas of American moral and political life has been much more complex and nuanced.  By contrast, the places where science has been co-opted to create new moral philosophies have resulted in neither good morality nor good science (social Darwinism anyone?).  The more you think about it (the more I think about it, anyway), it isn’t so much that the worst thing about humanity is religion (or government, or nationalism, or ideology, or any one thing).  The problem with humanity is that we are human.   And most of those other things (government, nationalism, religion) have developed as attempts to deal with that fundamental problem of trying to make us better than we are.  Who really thinks it would be a good idea if we stopped trying?

As an author, Krakauer is drawn to both extremism and extreme situations.  Even a glancing acquaintance with his other works makes it clear that his reputation is built on that.  And the combination of religion and extremism is powerful stuff, frightening even when it does no harm.  The New England colonies owed their existence and survival to it, and bemoaned the loss of that early fervor for two generations, before slipping quietly into Unitarianism.  Krakauer rightly describes extremist zeal as a kind of high.  And one of the things Krakauer astutely notes about extremism and the exaltation it brings, is a marked diminishment of empathy on the part of extremists.

Krakauer is not a Richard Dawkins or a Christopher Hitchens, pouring scorn on the benighted believers in religions of all stripes.  Although he admits that he has not found a religious creed that fits him, and although it is clear that some elements of faith baffle and even horrify him, he has too much empathy himself to be a kind of anti-religious zealot.  And empathy, and the compassion that goes with empathy—I have not yet seen or heard of a religion that doesn’t hold that as a central tenet.  In Christianity it is a key component of the Golden Rule.  “Do unto others, as you would have them do unto you.”  What is that but a call to empathy?  “Love one another as I have loved you.” What is that but a call to compassion?  It is religion that provides us with a meaningful moral compass with which to condemn the very religious excesses that Krakauer describes, even if that moral code has been more or less desacralized. So in the face of the horrors that Krakauer chronicles, committed in the name of faith, I am disappointed a little at his unwillingness to discriminate, to note that faith (or a perversion of it) leads some to do terrible things; but not to embrace a little more warmly than he does, that faith (as the Greeks used to say of Eros) is also a builder of cities.

Playing Mad Libs in the Car, On the Way to Manhattan

CATHY: So Oliver, we need a verb.  That is a "doing word."

OLIVER: I know what a verb is mom.  I have mastered that already.

ME: What did you say?

OLIVER: I have mastered verbs already.  You don't need to tell me what they are any more.

CATHY: Oh OK.  So. give me a verb.

OLIVER: [Pause]  Volcano.

Updates From the Anglican Wars

An editorial in today's NY Times draws attention to the movement afoot in Uganda to impose the death penalty for homosexual behavior. The Times suggests that this move is less than enlightened, and I would expect even my more conservative readers (do I have any conservative readers?) to agree that this is, shall we say, an extreme position.

Uganda rang some other bells for me though. Oh yes—the Anglican Church of Uganda has been aiding dissident American Episcopalians. Almost a third of Ugandans are Anglican, and it is a big thriving growing church, like a lot of the African churches. They are biblical and energetic and exciting, three words not normally applied to the American Episcopal Church.  And it must be empowering for Ugandans to offer assistance to a bunch of really affluent Americans, rather than the other way around.

So I have these friends and acquaintances who belong to various breakaway Episcopal/Anglican congregations. And they often have told me that the rift isn't really about Gene Robinson or about Homosexuality (sometimes they look uncomfortable and say "it's complicated"). They claim their disaffection is about God, and scripture, and really believing in something, and really standing for something. Not being wishy-washy and "do whatever you feel." I can respect a certain amount of that. But when you choose to affiliate yourself with people who believe that homosexuality is a crime punishable by death, then I think it is time to ask who the real heretics are here. No doubt people will cite the book of Leviticus or the story of Sodom and Gomorrah or an epistle where Paul is "down on homosexuality." But Anglicans are supposed to be against the death penalty, period. And Jesus is supposed to have brought us a New Covenant. The New Covenant allows us to eat pork, and be uncircumcised, and get haircuts, and all sorts of other nice things. Wouldn't it allow people to, you know, be gay without being executed for it? It seems to me that it would.

So I am thinking these schismatics, to whom I have been (or tried to be) sympathetic in my disagreement, maybe don't deserve as much sympathy as I thought. Maybe they really are just so many rabid homophobe heretics. And maybe the rest of the Episcopal church is better off without them.

Natural Born Eastmen Don't Have to Work...

Well, I don't think anyone read part 1 of this piece, regarding Furry Lewis and his version of the story of Casey Jones, but here is part 2 anyway. There may or may not be a part 3.

In the next verse, we finally meet Casey, but only indirectly. The train is preparing to leave the station:

When the conductor he holler “hello!”

Fire man he holler “all aboard!”

The people tell by the whistle’s moan

The man at the throttle was old Casey Jones

But this construction is in the historical present. Is this the final trip for Casey? Or any trip? The drama of meeting Casey is left to hang in the air, as “Old Casey Jones” is not repeated. Instead the narrator moans

Oh, on the Road Again

And stays silent through what would normally be the sixth and final line of the verse.

Then we turn abruptly to the narrator’s own life and perspective. It turns out that he is a bootlegger:

When I've sold my gin, I sold it straight

The Police run me to my woman's gate

His woman offers him her “folding bed.” This sounds generous enough, but the next verse seems to complicate the picture.

I’m gonna leave Memphis, to spread the news

That Memphis women don’t wear no shoes

The shoelessness of these women has a significance that is lost on me, but I like the image a lot. He goes on.

I got it written on the back of my shirt

I’m a natural born eastman and I don’t have to work.

I don’t have to work.

I’m a natural born eastman and don’t have to work.

You can search for quite awhile before coming up with an interpretation of this lyric that actually makes sense. The difficulty is the word “eastman” which is hard enough to make out (“easement” is one common mishearing, “easy” is another), but even more difficult to interpret. Although you can turn up evidence for what “eastman” meant to African Americans in the delta of that time, it is probably just as easy to gather it from context: an eastman is a man who lives off his woman’s income, maybe even a pimp. We should have guessed. But what does this shiftless narrator have to do with the mighty Casey? The next verse offers a clue:

When I woke up this morning at half past nine

I saw little Casey’s chillun on the doorstep crying

“Mama mama we can’t keep from crying

My daddy got killed on the Southern Line.”

That southern line

My daddy got killed on the southern line.

The narrator is able to bear witness to the human tragedy of Casey’s accident, and establish Casey as a family man (The real Casey’s children were between ages twelve and four at the time of the accident). In the midst of all his shiftlessness, the narrator is IN the story. In real life, Mrs. Jones wore black every day for the rest of her life, more than fifty years after the accident, and never remarried. In the ballads, however, she is sometimes portrayed as a pretty cool customer, in contrast to her grieving offspring:

She cried “Children Children, won’t you hold your breath

We’re gonna draw another check from your father’s death.

From your father’s death

We’re gonna draw another pension at your father’s death.

Other versions of the story even have her telling the kids that they have “another papa” on a different railroad line.

The perspective shifts again, this time back to Casey, and before the accident itself.

Now Mister Caseysaid, just before he died

There was two more roads that he would like to ride

Fireman asked Casey, "What road is he?"

"That’s the Southern Pacific and the Santa Fe.”

That Santa Fe…

The Southern Pacific and the Sante Fe

Casey’s fireman, Sim Webb, was the last man to see Casey alive, so that statement feels authentic. Casey had spent his whole career working on North-South railroad lines, and the Southern Pacific and Sante Fe presumably run East-West. But the thing from this verse that haunts me is the repetition of “Santa Fe.” “Santa Fe” means “holy spirit” in Spanish, and so the simple unfulfilled ambitions of a dedicated railroad man become freighted with spiritual portent. Underscoring this is that "Santa Fe" is rhymed with the odd pronoun "he" (which appears where we would, grammatically, have expected to hear "that.")

Now, “On the Road Again” is a late performance of Furry Lewis. A lot of verses from the earlier “Kassie Jones” are missing. The last two verses, however, are a startling departure—even in a song that has already pointed out the unusual customs of Memphis women regarding footwear. Here is the first.

Now you come all you men if you want to flirt

Here come a lady with a mini skirt

She got a half-yard ribbon wrapped around her leg

She step like she stepping on a scrambled egg

I’m on the Road again.

Step like she step on a scrambled egg.

I am not sure what a woman stepping on a scrambled egg looks like, but apparently it is highly alluring. But I am more intrigued by the re-emergence, for the first time since we met Casey Jones, of the narrators old cry of “on the road again.” Perhaps we are reminded too of the “rambling mind” of the second verse.

Then the narrator takes another sharp turn, before bidding us farewell:

If you wanna go to heaven when you D-I-E

Just put on a collar and a T-I-E

Is this meant to be a warning? Why the spelling? Do we really just need to dress nicely? Or is dressing up just shorthand for going to church and being “respectable”? The next two lines do not offer any clarification.

If you wanna scare a rabbit out of L-O-G

Just make a little stunt like a D-O-G.

Does that help? I don’t think it does. What are you going to do about it.

I’m on the Road Again.

And we’re done.

On The Road Again part one: Furry & Casey

My good friend, the webby-winning Melanie MacFarlane, told me when I first started blogging to avoid entries longer than about 500 words. This has always struck me as good advice. So I will be breaking up my magnum opus on Furry Lewis's "On the Road Again" (which is currently about 1500 words) into at least three parts. Here is the first.

Like a lot of kids, I went through a big song lyric phase in my late childhood and early teens. I remember slowly, agonizingly, trying to piece together the lyrics to Cheap Trick’s “Surrender” and treasuring albums that came with lyric sheets. Then, pretty suddenly in my mid-teens, I got to be a big classical music fan. When I got back into more popular forms of music, it was by way of the blues. Obsessing over blues lyrics seemed like a real waste of time—when it wasn’t downright uncomfortable. What was Sonny Boy going to do with his “shooting iron”? It didn’t sound like the sort of thing an enlightened guy with a lot of female friends should be endorsing.

Fast forward twenty years and more, and lyrics are interesting to me again, and the more primitive they are, the better I like them. A case in point is Furry Lewis’s “On the Road Again.” This particular song is mostly a rewrite of Lewis’s own longer song “Kassie Jones pts 1&2” in which “Kassie” is really “Casey” (the spelling is thought to have been changed by the record company for copyright reasons). Anyway, for “On the Road Again” swapped out a few number of “Kassie”’s more narrative verses, and replaced them with a curious series of lyric observations. The result is a lyrical oddity, like Bob Dylan’s masterful “Tangled Up in Blue,” where third person narration alternates with first. Who is the song then about? Casey and his fatal accident? Or the narrator and his own life and loves? What is the relationship between these two threads, between the “he” and the “I”?

The song opens with a throbbing guitar chord that doesn’t really move, almost like a kind of blues raga, or delta version of minimalist music.

I woke up this morning was a shower and rain

Around the curve was a passenger train

Under the bottom was a hobo John

He was a good ol’ hobo but he’s dead and gone

At the end of the fourth line, the chord shifts dramatically into a high and eerie territory, and Lewis repeats the end of the fourth lyric line.

He’s dead and gone

Then the chord shifts back to center and the fourth line is repeated, usually slightly altered.

He’s a good old hobo but he’s dead and gone.

What are we supposed to make of this verse? In most related versions of the Casey Jones story, the rainy morning, the passenger train are images associated with Jones and his crash. Instead the narrator tells us of a “good old hobo” who is dead. Whether he is a victim of Casey’s train accident or some other fate is never told.

In the next verse, we meet the infamous Alice Fry. Alice Fry was (in some versions) the Other Woman in the “Frankie and Johnnie” tale. Why is Alice here? Is she Casey’s mistress too? We don’t know. But she tells us something important about herself.

She said “I’m gonna ride with old Casey and die

I ain’t good looking, but I takes my time

I am a rambling woman; I got a rambling mind

I got a rambling mind.”

And is if to sum it up, the singer adds:

A rambling woman with a rambling mind.

[to be continued]