An ode to joy (reposted)

(Note from the webmaster: Mr. Newhouse is on holiday, so here's an older post of his, originally published on July 22, 2012….)

Readers, forgive me. I had a tantrum in yesterday's post. Hope this makes up for it! (Crank up the volume!)

Well, we know there are evil winds—Joan Didion wrote her famous essay about the Santa Ana winds almost half a century ago. The Santa Ana starts on the leeward side of a mountain, she writes, and warms up and becomes drier as it moves down the mountain. By the time it hits Los Angeles, it is intensely hot, intensely dry and…

…intensely strong. Hurricane force, at times.

California burning? It’s almost always because of the Santa Ana winds.

But other things happen as well. Crime spikes, tempers fray, kids become unmanageable in the classroom.

Oh, and blood doesn’t clot as easily.

That’s when Didion inserts her famous phrase: “to surrender to the Santa Ana winds is to accept a deeply mechanistic view of human behavior.”

(Or words to that effect—the damn Internet connection is still goofing off….)

Well, maybe that’s what’s needed—to accept a mechanistic view of human behavior.

It wasn’t, somehow, an easy weekend. I didn’t watch TV footage of the Aurora shooting—I’m smarter than that. But I read the accounts nearly compulsively (sometimes the same article, ostensibly to see if it had been updated). I thought about it. I wrote a post that was almost as incendiary as the Santa Ana winds.

Then I remembered—we’re being zapped by increased solar activity. Duluth reported blazing northern lights last week.

And I also remembered—the Santa Ana winds increase the ratio of positive to negative ions in the air.

Meaning a change in the electromagnetic field that constantly surrounds us.

It’s a subject that draws a lot of bunkum, and I almost hate to go there. Ghost hunters wander through houses at midnight, looking for dips in the electromagnetic fields. The UFO believers do similar things. 

But there is some scientific evidence. Solar flares occur normally three times a year. Investigators in Russia determined that suicides rise predictably in one extreme Northern Russian city with each period of flaring.

Aurora—which is seventeen miles from Columbine High School—is also a mile above sea level. Would they be more prone to the effect of changes in the electromagnetic system?

The advantage of thinking mechanistically is that it takes you away from things like “willpower” and “self-discipline.” Your drinking is out of control because of a change in genetic structure, for example, or proteins in the brain.

Might be true.

The disadvantage?

It leads straight to the Twinkie Defense. 'All that sugar made me kill Harvey Milk.'  

And my good friend Susan, I suspect, wouldn’t have it. “No woman suffering from the ravages of PMS has ever committed the massacres that men have.” 

Good point.

Whatever it was, it was intense. My mood was labile. Little things irritated me. And then, Pat sent me a link to the Beethoven clip above.

And I found myself flooded with tears in a coffee house in San Juan.

It’s something so moronic that I rarely admit to it, but here goes. I love orchestral performances because it’s one of the few occasions I can think of where one hundred people gather to do something beautiful.

And I loved this clip for the humor, the playfulness of it all. The musicians coming out of the bank (the Ode to Joy was a gift organized by a Catalonian bank to celebrate their 130^th anniversary). The people looking on, gathering, singing, filming, tapping their feet. The kids imitating the conductor.

The assassin in Aurora did more damage than the 12 / 71 he killed or maimed. But it’s also true that one person playing a musical instrument can…

…change the world?

No.

Yes.    

30,000 Lives

That’s how many people—more or less—die from gunshot wounds every year.

OK, be fair. A surprising number—over fifty percent—are suicides. Some are mishaps / accidents. Maybe forty-five percent are homicides.

Does it matter? Only ten thousand people murdered; hey—that’s nothing! 

Yeah? Every September 11^th, we all gather and recite three thousand names. Yet ten times as many people die every year from guns! And does it make a difference whether it’s you or someone else who pulls the trigger?

It’s a life lost.

I know a bit about that. I’ve had a brother scream at me, so concerned was he about my own planned death. And in my last trip to Chicago, I entered the seedy hotel where I bunked over, in my journeys from Wisconsin to Puerto Rico.

And discovered the manager, shaking, and calling 911.

The housekeeper had discovered the body.

She came out, a moment later, to smoke a cigarette and watch them collect the body. The paramedics came out, got the gurney from the back of the ambulance, entered the hotel. Sixty seconds later, they came out.

Everything—head included—covered by a sheet.

They returned with the gurney to the hotel. And came back with two suitcases, uncovered.

Took less than five minutes.

“He killed himself,” said the housekeeper. “So young, just 33 years old….”

One down—29, 999 to go?

“It’s surprisingly hard to kill yourself,” I wrote elsewhere. And I thought at the time of the decade I spent as a psychiatric nurse. Borderlines would come whimpering to show us the scratches they had carved on their wrist.

“Oh, let me get you some hydrogen peroxide to wash that off,” I’d say. “And would you like a Band-Aid?”

It’s anatomically almost impossible to slit your wrists deeply enough to hit the artery….

Tylenol? Curiously, for most people, nothing happens for the first 24 hours after ingestion.

“Just take a seat, Hon, I gotta see to this ingrown toenail….” a friend in the ER used to say, when the lost girls with their teddy bears arrived, empty Tylenol bottle in hand.

But a gun?

That’s serious. 

OK—sharp turn here. In a recent development, the University of Colorado psychiatrist who had been treating James Holmes warned the university that he posed a risk.

Did she warn the city?

And the university did nothing, since Holmes dropped out. 

Did he stop being a risk?

And does Colorado have a mental health background check?

It’s madness beyond words. 

Here’s what I’m gonna do.

I’m gonna start a petition on Signon.org . I’m gonna ask for thirty thousand signatures. Then, I’m gonna sit in the coffee shop that has now become my office and read them. I’ll film it, and put it on YouTube.

Any idea how long it’ll take?

An ode to joy

Readers, forgive me. I had a tantrum in yesterday's post. Hope this makes up for it! (Crank up the volume!)

Well, we know there are evil winds—Joan Didion wrote her famous essay about the Santa Ana winds almost half a century ago. The Santa Ana starts on the leeward side of a mountain, she writes, and warms up and becomes drier as it moves down the mountain. By the time it hits Los Angeles, it is intensely hot, intensely dry and…

…intensely strong. Hurricane force, at times.

California burning? It’s almost always because of the Santa Ana winds.

But other things happen as well. Crime spikes, tempers fray, kids become unmanageable in the classroom.

Oh, and blood doesn’t clot as easily.

That’s when Didion inserts her famous phrase: “to surrender to the Santa Ana winds is to accept a deeply mechanistic view of human behavior.”

(Or words to that effect—the damn Internet connection is still goofing off….)

Well, maybe that’s what’s needed—to accept a mechanistic view of human behavior.

It wasn’t, somehow, an easy weekend. I didn’t watch TV footage of the Aurora shooting—I’m smarter than that. But I read the accounts nearly compulsively (sometimes the same article, ostensibly to see if it had been updated). I thought about it. I wrote a post that was almost as incendiary as the Santa Ana winds.

Then I remembered—we’re being zapped by increased solar activity. Duluth reported blazing northern lights last week.

And I also remembered—the Santa Ana winds increase the ratio of positive to negative ions in the air.

Meaning a change in the electromagnetic field that constantly surrounds us.

It’s a subject that draws a lot of bunkum, and I almost hate to go there. Ghost hunters wander through houses at midnight, looking for dips in the electromagnetic fields. The UFO believers do similar things. 

But there is some scientific evidence. Solar flares occur normally three times a year. Investigators in Russia determined that suicides rise predictably in one extreme Northern Russian city with each period of flaring.

Aurora—which is seventeen miles from Columbine High School—is also a mile above sea level. Would they be more prone to the effect of changes in the electromagnetic system?

The advantage of thinking mechanistically is that it takes you away from things like “willpower” and “self-discipline.” Your drinking is out of control because of a change in genetic structure, for example, or proteins in the brain.

Might be true.

The disadvantage?

It leads straight to the Twinkie Defense. 'All that sugar made me kill Harvey Milk.'  

And my good friend Susan, I suspect, wouldn’t have it. “No woman suffering from the ravages of PMS has ever committed the massacres that men have.” 

Good point.

Whatever it was, it was intense. My mood was labile. Little things irritated me. And then, Pat sent me a link to the Beethoven clip above.

And I found myself flooded with tears in a coffee house in San Juan.

It’s something so moronic that I rarely admit to it, but here goes. I love orchestral performances because it’s one of the few occasions I can think of where one hundred people gather to do something beautiful.

And I loved this clip for the humor, the playfulness of it all. The musicians coming out of the bank (the Ode to Joy was a gift organized by a Catalonian bank to celebrate their 130^th anniversary). The people looking on, gathering, singing, filming, tapping their feet. The kids imitating the conductor.

The assassin in Aurora did more damage than the 12 / 71 he killed or maimed. But it’s also true that one person playing a musical instrument can…

…change the world?

No.

Yes.    

Should Men Be Allowed?

I know, I know….

That’s a provocative question. Also ironic, for two obvious reasons: I’m a man, my spouse is a man. Hardly the likely person to be asking the question.

Well, I did, right there in my black armchair, as I was cheating at electronic Sudoku. Yes, you can cheat—my version of iPad Sudoku allows you three wrong answers and will still declare you a winner. So, hey, why not? And I give you this tip—added value, as we used to say in Wal-Mart!—to help you along. Your guess should always be for the little box that helps you the LEAST! If putting the 8 in the lower-right hand box would give the next three answers—don’t. Put it in the lower left box—which gets you nothing. Most of the time you’ll be right. If you’re wrong, well, you have two more guesses AND those three other answers.

See?

By cheating, I manage to play expert Sudoku (I say this with pride) and win most of the time.

Today…I lost. 

OK, it doesn’t make me a bad person, as Jeanne used to say. And then I wondered—maybe it does. Not losing, but cheating. Jack wouldn’t have approved.

It was that old rigid morality I wrote about in Iguanas. That fire and brimstone, sulfurous hellfire, miserable sinner stuff. Didn’t believe in it, but he was still shot full of it….

I wondered about it because I was pondering an email Cousin Ruthie sent me—and when she writes, you read! (She correctly diagnosed Santorum—“a lizard!”—and is bang-on about Romney—“a snake in the grass!”) She had read a post about Lexapro 20mg po qd. And then remembered her nursing days. (She held out three years, I managed a decade….)

Well, both of us remember some of the same stuff—the endless notes we had to do to cover our asses, writing out medication charts at 3AM, those funny Latin abbreviations: qd, qid, tid, PO, SQ. She also remembers the guy who tried to grab her boobs every time she walked in the room….

She asks—anyone try that on me?

Errr…no.

And she mentions Clarence Thomas, and how her parents were shocked when she assured them that of course he had come on to Anita Hill, and then told them about her nursing days.

Well, her father and mine were cousins. But they both had that morality thing. And then I remembered the female colleague of Jack’s who approached my mother on the day of Jack's memorial service.

“I want you to know, John Newhouse was the only male reporter that EVERY woman felt comfortable with alone in the news room at night….”

Franny was shocked.

I’m shocked. 

And Clarence Thomas? Well, I believe Anita for one reason.

I don’t believe any woman could invent the story of a pubic hair on a Coke can.

Frankly, the whole thing is drenched with testosterone. And only an androgen-flooded mind could conceive of it.

So that got me thinking about the four guns James Holmes purchased to kill the 12 / injure the 71 in Aurora, Colorado yesterday.*

They were purchased legally, and the vendors correctly performed the necessary background check!

Well, GREAT!

How relieved the families of the 12 / 71 victims must feel! What solace to know that your loved one had been slaughtered / maimed with legal weapons! One imagines them at the graveyard, peering down six feet at the coffin. Mother bursts into sobs, Father holds her, and whispers, “But at least the guns were legal!”

She fishes for the handkerchief, dries her eyes, squares her shoulders, and looks brightly into the future!

And here’s where I asked the question—should men be allowed? 

Nor was it the case that I asked the question because James Holmes is a man. (Although name me, Dear Readers, one massacre committed by a woman….)

Yeah, he’s a guy. He’s also emerging—I write this in case you’ve just come out of 24-hour seclusion—as one of the most dangerous of the schizophrenics.

Bright, tightly wound, wildly violent. 

OK—circle around. Is the US the only place that produces this type of schizophrenic?

Don’t think so.

We may be, however, the one place in the world that reveres guns to such an extent that we allow them on our streets.

That delicate last sentence may be a disservice to the 12 / 71 of Aurora. 

How’s this?

A man’s gun is his dick. And nothing, nothing, NOTHING will take that away from him!

Breathe, Marc….

_____________________
*These numbers correspond to the original figures and may have been updated since.