June 29: Man in the Act, Taking a Nap, Speaking Out

A little lesson in Galactic economics . . .

"Ah," said Arthur, "er . . ."  He had an odd feeling of being like a man in the act of adultery who is surprised when the woman's husband wanders into the room, changes his trousers, passes a few idle remarks about the weather and leaves again.

"You seem ill at east," said the old man with polite concern.

"Er, no . . . well, yes.  Actually, you see, we weren't really expecting to find anybody about in fact.  I sort of gathered that you were all dead or something . . ."
"Dead?" said the old man.  "Good gracious me, no, we have but slept."

"Slept?" said Arthur incredulously.

"Yes, through the economic recession, you see," said the old man, apparently unconcerned about whether Arthur understood a word he was talking about or not.

Arthur had to prompt him again.

"Er, economic recession?"

"Well, you see, five million years ago the Galactic economy collapsed, and seeing that custom built planets are something of a luxury commodity, you see . . ."

He paused and looked at Arthur.

"You know we built planets, do you?" he asked solemnly.

"Well, yes," said Arthur.  "I'd sort of gathered . . ."

"Fascinating trade," said the old man, and a wistful look came into his eyes, "doing the coastlines was always my favorite.  Used to have endless fun doing the little bits in fjords.. . . so anyway," he said, trying to find his thread again, "the recession came and we decided it would save a lot of bother if we just slept through it.  So we programmed the computers to revive us when it was all over."

The man stifled a very slight yawn and continued.

"The computers were index-linked to the Galactic stock-market prices, you see, so that we'd all be revived when everybody else had rebuilt the economy enough to afford our rather expensive services."

There you go.  An entire planet's population linked to the economy.  Instead of suffering through a recession and all of its attendant problems--poverty, bankruptcy, hunger, social injustice, social inequality, uprisings, wars--the citizens of Magrathea choose to take a nap.

If only it were that simple.  Lose a job.  Take a nap.  Get divorced.  Take a nap.  Cancer diagnosis.  Take a nap.  Donald Trump is president.  Take a nap.  Broken heart.  Take a nap.  If sleep were a cure for all the world's problems, I think we'd have a whole lot of the world's peoples hitting their snooze buttons about now.

Of course, sleep is just a way of avoiding pain and hurt and struggle.  I would venture to guess that we've all done it once or twice, as well.  Rather than deal with a problem head-on, I've retreated to my bed, turned off the lights, and just gone to sleep.  Of course, when I woke up, the problem was there waiting for me in the next room, just as big and ugly.

Most of the time, I prefer to address struggles immediately.  Work on them.  Solve them.  Move on.  That's more my style.  If I can do all that in the space of an hour, even better.  Whether it's brakes failing on a car or a kid getting sick or immigrants living in concentration camps, I want an immediate cure.  I don't want prolonged suffering or strife.

The world doesn't work that way, unfortunately.  For example, everyone knows that keeping children locked up in warehouses without their parents is wrong.  Inhuman.  Unconscionable.  We should have learned that lesson from Nazi Germany or the Japanese internment camps during World War II.  Yet, here we sit in the year 2019, and we're doing the same thing again.  We haven't learned.

There's a paragraph in the passage above where Douglas Adams makes a joke about a man caught in the act of adultery.  It's like a Monty Python moment--a husband catching his wife committing adultery, and the husband simply talks about the weather with his wife's fuckbuddy and leaves the room.  While this little section may strike the funny bone of some readers, I don't find it particularly amusing.

You see, my wife has struggled with sexual addiction in the past.  Thus, I have been that husband in the paragraph above.  Adams is trying to be humorous, and I don't find it funny.  It would be like somebody telling a joke about a drowning person to a child whose father just died in a boating accident.  So, I don't find jokes or books or movies or TV shows about people committing adultery very funny.

That kind of humor attempts to diminish the pain and hurt of the people involved.  I may be sounding like an incredible wet blanket right now, but I do have a point to make.  Most people reading that passage in Hitchhiker's would laugh at the absurdity of the situation that Adams describes.  I get that.  I, myself, wouldn't laugh, for very personal reasons. 

I am not saying that I don't find inappropriate humor funny.  I do.  Generally, though, humor at the expense of another person's/people's hurt is never good.  Anything (whether a joke or political agenda) that diminishes the suffering of a fellow human being is part of the problem, not a solution.

Language is one of the most basic ways to address any wrong.  Don't apply the word "gay" or "retarded" to a person or situation that you find irritating or ridiculous.  Use words to uplift instead of beat down.  And, when you witness something that is blatantly racist or homophobic or Islamophobic or sexist or ageist, something that violates human dignity is some way, speak out.  Keep speaking until your voice is heard.  If everybody did this, the world would be a much better place.

That's my soapbox rant of the week.  I'm stepping down now.  It's hot outside. 

Saint Marty's thinking it's time for some ice cream.

March 21: Crippled Man, Mongolian Idiot, Power of Language

The doorchimes rang.  Billy got off the bed and looked down through a window at the front doorstep, to see if somebody important had come to call.  There was a crippled man down there, as spastic in space as Billy Pilgrim was in time.  Convulsions made the man dance flappingly all the time, made him change his expressions, too, as though he were trying to imitate various famous movie stars.

Another cripple was ringing a doorbell across the street.  He was on crutches.  He had only one leg.  He was so jammed between his crutches that his shoulders hid his ears.

Billy knew what the cripples were up to.  They were selling subscriptions to magazines that would never come.  People subscribed to them because the salesmen were so pitiful.  Billy had heard about this racket from a speaker at the Lions Club two weeks before--a man from the Better Business Bureau.  The man said that anybody who saw cripples working a neighborhood for magazine subscriptions should call the police.

Billy looked down the street, saw a new Buick Riviera parked about half a block away.  There was a man in it, and Billy assumed correctly that he was the man who had hired the cripples to do this thing.  Billy went on weeping as he contemplated the cripples and their boss.  His doorchimes clanged hellishly.

He closed his eyes and opened them again.  He was still weeping, but he was back in Luxembourg again.  He was marching with a lot of other prisoners.  It was a winter wind that was bringing tears to his eyes.

I have to admit that, when Vonnegut starts using the terms "crippled" and "cripples," it makes me cringe.  When Slaughterhouse Five first came out, however, those words were completely acceptable to use in polite conversation among people who knew nothing about living with physical challenges.  Vonnegut isn't trying to shock or demean.  He's just telling a story using the language of the time.
Of course, now, if an author described a character with a disability as a "cripple" (unironically and without attempting to capture some kind of social context), that author would most certainly be the target of justifiable criticism.  Regardless of the current trend against political correctness, words can really harm and injure.

When I was in high school, I was in a world history class.  The teacher--a nice man, full of progressive ideas--made a comment during a class discussion about a "mongolian idiot."  I'm not even sure of the context of the conversation anymore.  All I remember is being really shocked by his comment. 

My older sister has Down Syndrome, and she was a student at the school.  My mother had been fighting for my sister all my life.  She fought to get my sister into a classroom.  Fought principals and superintendents who didn't want to spend school funds to educate "retarded" children.  Fought for other children with various disabilities.  My mother was an activist for the rights of kids with mental and physical challenges.

So, when my history teacher talked about a "mongolian idiot," I took it very personally.  It made me sad.  It pissed me off.  After class, I spoke to the instructor, told him how hurtful his language had been.  He apologized to me, said that he never intended to offend.  I accepted his apology.

Words can be very harmful.  My mother taught me to speak against oppressive speech.  Taught me to lift people up with my words.

Saint Marty is thankful for his mother's language lessons.

March 4: Happier Times, My Daughter, God's Love Fifteen

For her part, in the spirit of the times and not wanting the life of her mother, Caroline [Ives] thought she should see something of the world and signed up for the Peace Corps, which sent her off to Nepal.  One of Ives' happier times took place during a four-month period before she left for the Peace Corps, when she came to work at the agency, in the "international" division (one executive and a clerk).  Regarding his smart daughter with great pride every time he ran into her, which was daily, he would eavesdrop on her speaking her Italian or French or Spanish on the telephone . . . And he loved the fact that Mannis had come into his office one day to say, "Nice job you did  raising your daughter, Ives."  He'd gotten so used to riding the subway with her in the mornings and seeing her on a regular basis that when she gave notice he fell into a deep funk again.

Ives takes great pride in his daughter.  Cherishes the time he shares with her as she waits to ship out to Nepal for her stint in the Peace Corps.  He loves watching her at work, speaking foreign languages, marveling at her intelligence and maturity.  He truly loves the four months that he's a daily part of her life.  It manages to lift him out of the deep depression he's been in since the death of his son, Robert.

I've said it before, and I'm going to say it again:  I'm a lot like Ives.  I'm at my office at the university writing this post.  My daughter is with me.  Pretty soon, I'm going to have to drive her to her dance studio.  I love being with her.  The other night, she had a conversation with my wife about how she sticks up for kids in her class who are teased for being gay.  She hates it when her friends call something "gay" or "retarded."  She's very sensitive to those kinds of slurs and epithets.  She really loves everybody.

I'm looking at her right now, and I'm thinking, "I did something right."  She's a bright, beautiful, intelligent, and empathetic young woman.  I got lucky, considering all the turmoil that's happened in her young life.

That's God's love number fifteen.  My daughter. 

Saint Marty couldn't be any prouder of her, except when she's screaming at him in the morning because she stayed up way too late.

Number fifteen and her little brother