I dreamed I was running last night. This is not unusual. I often dream that I am running, especially when I haven't been running for a while. (I always wonder if I burn more calories when I dream that I'm running, as opposed to, say, flying.) What was unusual about the dream was that I was running from a sniper.
I haven't been paying much attention to the news lately. I've been working on a screenplay and basically shutting out as much of the outside world as possible. That way I can create a fictional world where things happen that I can understand. But the news tends to seep in no matter what you do to stop it. Like mildew.
I know that we are still planning to invade Iraq, even though we still haven't come up with a really good excuse. I know that the terrorists attacked Bali, which just seemed so remote until I learned about the local surfer who was there for his 41st birthday and got killed in the blast. His friends are wearing t-shirts that say "Terrorists Don't Surf."
And I keep hearing about this sniper in Maryland.
In my dream I was running through a park and I remember thinking that I should keep zig-zagging so that he couldn't get a bead on me. I learned that from a movie called The In-Laws. Peter Falk plays a CIA agent who gets dentist Alan Arkin involved in a dangerous mission. At one point, Arkin has to run past a sniper while Falk coaches him from the sidelines: "Serpentine, Shel, serpentine!"
It was clear in the dream that the reason I was running was to provide a target for the sniper, hoping to draw his fire so the FBI could catch him. I was even wearing red. I had been thinking before I went to bed that I wished there was something I could do to help. Apparently this was the brilliant idea I came up with. The beauty of the imagination is that it is always trying to make sense out of things that make no sense.
They showed a guy on TV filling up at a local Maryland gas station. He looked nervous. Two or three of the sniper's victims were shot while at gas stations. Naturally I thought of a scene from The Jerk where a sniper is trying to shoot Steve Martin and instead keeps puncturing oil cans. Martin sees what's happening and shouts "He hates the cans! Stay away from the cans!" I remembered reading about one of the Rangers who was pinned down by enemy fire in Mogadishu when the two Black Hawk helicopters went down. He and his buddy watched as the Somali gunfire riddled the tail section of the wrecked chopper with bullet holes. The Ranger turned to his buddy and yelled, "They hate the cans! Stay away from the cans!"
Making jokes seems inappropriate, and yet we can't stop them. If you can't make sense out of something, maybe the next best thing to do is make fun of it.
I was watching West Wing last week and President Bartlett was talking to Sam about how no one seems to be able to come up with a solution to the big mess we've gotten ourselves into and so we just keep killing each other. Later Sam tells the President that he, for one, hasn't given up trying to come up with a solution. If things become too overwhelming, sometimes it seems like giving up is the only option. But if we can make a joke, take a step back, be imaginative, maybe we can come up with something that no one has ever tried before.
Who knows, maybe running around with a big red target painted on your ass will help catch a sniper. Just remember: Serpentine! Serpentine!
Love, HWD
I passed several orthodox Jews on my way to work today and it got me thinking about atonement. First of all, what is it? And second, atonement for what? I did a little research on the subject via the Internet and found out it has to do with forgiveness. It reminded me of a conversation I overheard a little while back about the "trouble" in the middle east. That's what we call it when innocent people are murdered in the streets: "trouble". Anyway this one guy said he heard on a talk show that the reason the Arabs and the Jews are unable to stop fighting each other is because they don't believe in Jesus. And since Jesus invented forgiveness, that means they don't have the concept of forgiveness in their cultures and so they just keep on hating each other. I really wanted to smack these idiots for being such narrow-minded, boneheaded bigots. But I thought, considering the circumstances, it was better to forgive them.
It is astounding to me how rampant ignorance is and how easily people will believe anything they hear on the radio, or see on TV, or read on the Internet, or in an email... On 60 Minutes a few weeks ago they did a story about how most Muslims seem to believe that the attack on the World Trade Center was engineered by Israeli intelligence and that 4000 Jews who worked there were called that morning and warned not to go into work that day. This is gospel truth to hundreds of thousands of people, many of them supposedly well-educated and intelligent. And it was apparently started by some misquoted news story that hit the Internet and spread like wildfire. Perhaps we have moved from the Information Age into the Misinformation Age.
Or more accurately the Disinformation Age.
There have been so many "leaks" to the media about our "plans" to "invade" Iraq, I'm starting to wonder if the Pentagon isn't really just a big P.R. agency. Maybe we aren't really planning to invade Iraq at all, maybe we're just trying to create a "buzz." If the word of mouth is good and the project seems to have legs, we can develop it into a concept and try and get some backing. If we can line up the foreign markets and pre-sell the distribution, we'll be sure to get greenlighted for production. And if that happens, we can always hire someone to write a battle plan. Hell, it practically writes itself. I mean it's a sequel after all, how hard can it be?
And what about this big "misunderstanding" involving the Shoney's waitress and the three middle-eastern medical students? First they were terrorists with bombs. Then it was all just a hoax. Now they're persecuted minorities accusing everyone of racial profiling. I'll tell you whose being profiled: that poor waitress at Shoney's. Don't tell me you haven't repressed a snicker yourself once or twice picturing poor old Eunice dutifully writing down the plate numbers of three alleged terrorists who were probably just messing with her head.
So what does all of this have to do with forgiveness? Apparently what one is being forgiven on the day of atonement is breaking a promise made to God. So what promise have I ever made to God? Thou shalt not kill? That's a place to start. But do you really get forgiven for that? I think there's something more basic than that. Something like what happens when your parents leave you on your own for the first time. They say "Be good." But they know that as soon as they leave we're going to go hog wild, jumping off the roof and having keg parties and what not. What they really mean is "Try not to hurt each other, and don't burn the place down."
I think that's all that God wants us to do. When he left us here, I think he made a deal with us that we could have the place to ourselves as long as we didn't hurt each other and we didn't burn the place down.
So I think it's a good idea, at least once a year, to take responsibility for your sins. And it's nice to think that if you do, you will be forgiven. Our parents forgave us when they came home one night and found the kitchen table broken in two and the backyard littered with beer cans. And I think that's because we didn't try to talk our way out of it. We admitted our sins. We didn't try to blame it on the godless next-door neighbors or the evil white-trash party-crashers. Even if it was their fault.
In the Disinformation Age, nobody takes responsibility for anything, because nothing is true. It's all a hoax or a spin or a hype or a ploy or a cover story or a red herring or a scapegoat or some other figment of the underdeveloped imagination.
So forgive me Lord, for I have sinned. I hated the bad guys and cheered the good guys. I felt relieved when bombs went off places other than here. I tried to ignore the suffering of others because it made me uncomfortable. I was glad that it didn't happen to me. And I promise to try harder this year to be good.
Peace.
Twenty five years ago, my Mom, my pal Mark Bush and I were driving in a wood-paneled Mercury Montego wagon through Pennsylvania on the way to my first semester at Wesleyan. On the car radio, we heard the news that Elvis was dead. That night we stopped at a non-descript roadside motel somewhere along route 80. We sat in the room that night and watched a special tribute on TV. It was kind of weird, because at the time, I had all but forgotten about Elvis -- he had kind of disappeared from view. The last I remember seeing him was the 1973 Aloha special from Hawaii. I remember being particularly grossed out by the fact that these women would throw their scarves (and underwear) onto the stage and Elvis would wipe his sweaty face with them and throw them back. This was right before Elvis ballooned into the super-fat Elvis of the final days, but wearing that leather-spangled karate suit and pumped up on methedrine and vitamin B, he must have been sweating like a racehorse. He put on a great show, though and that's really the way he should be remembered.
My first memories of Elvis are probably from the mid-sixties, when Elvis was holed-up in his Beverly Hills mansion making movie after movie about how cool it is to be Elvis. There was this kid named Kenny Ray Davis in my third grade class who came in one morning with his hair slicked back and singing the title song from "Girls! Girls! Girls!" which had played on TV the night before. Right then and there, Kenny Ray Davis became the coolest guy in the class. And even though I wasn't sure exactly what it was Elvis was doing with all of those girls, I knew that one day I would forswear the mama's boy bangs that hung down over my forhead and slick my hair back like Elvis. And then I would be cool like Kenny Ray Davis and I'd be surrounded by Girls! Girls! Girls!
It took several years before I worked up the courage to actually start combing my hair back. First I tried just parting it on the side and combing it over. I stuck with that for a while. Eventually I got around to combing it back, but now it makes me look more like my Dad than like Elvis. But I still think it's cool.
The next Elvis sighting was the 1968 comeback special, where Elvis proved that he still had what it takes to rock our world. He even brought back the original guys who he played with at Sun Studios and ran through a set of the songs that first made him King. My favorite of those was "One Night With You", a bluesy gospel number with a barrelhouse roll that paid homage to the likes of early R&B greats like Lloyd Price and Ray Charles.
After that, Elvis popped up only now and then, 'Suspicious Minds' and 'In the Ghetto' in 1969, 'Kentucky Rain' in 1970, 'Burning Love' in 1971, the Aloha special in '73... But he was overshadowed by the Beatles, the Stones and a whole generation of others. It wasn't until years later that I went back and listened to those great '56 and '57 recordings and watched some of the the concert films from the 70's that I truly appreciated the gift he had. True, he squandered it in every way imaginable, but at the heart of it was a real genius for recognizing the essence of a song and delivering it with incomparable style and charisma. That's why he lives on, because he found the universal truths expressed in the songs he chose and shared them with the audience in a way that made you believe that he was speaking from his own personal experience. And sometimes he was. He was essentially a storyteller and his life was a fable. Even at the end, fat and wasted and paranoid, he still had that spark of coolness that propelled him from Tupelo to Memphis to Hollywood to Vegas and on into posterity.
I prefer to remember Elvis as the guy who slicked back his hair and sang about girls and made me think that someday I could be cool too. I needed that back in Louisville all those years ago. I still need it.
Thank you, Elvis. Thank you very much.
