Liking to the Limit

We're like licorice. Not everybody likes licorice, but the people who like licorice really like licorice.

― Jerry Garcia

My father liked licorice. He really liked licorice, and kept the trunk of his car filled with big cardboard boxes of the stuff. I guess he needed assurance, were the Soviet Union to attack or a pestilence fall upon us, he'd never go without.

Thanks to social media, we've all become too cavalier about "liking" things. Liking today is an indoor sport demanding no effort of any kind.

But true liking―liking to the limit―takes a village (no pun intended) of "like-minded" people. Jerry Garcia understood that: when it came to liking psychedelic bluegrass, Deadheads were indeed a breed apart.

And so are other die-hard fans―of actors, movies, musicians and more―as proven by the honorable names they've earned over the years.

Fans of musicians 

• Apple Scruffs, those hardest of hard-core Beatlemaniacs
• Beliebers, the fans of Justin Bieber
• Bobby Soxers, fans of Frank Sinatra
• Diamond Heads, fans of Neil Diamond
• Dylanologists, fans of Bob Dylan
• Elvisians, fans of the King
• Fanilows, fans of Barry Manilow
• Kellebrities, fans of Kelly Clarkson
• Metallicats, fans of Metallica
• Parrotheads, fans of Jimmy Buffett
• Phans, fans of Phish (also known as Phishheads)
• Sheerios, fans of Ed Sheeran
• Swifties, fans of Taylor Swift
• Vanatics, fans of Van Morrison
• Wayniacs, fans of Wayne Newton
• Wholigans, fans of The Who
• Zepheads, fans of Led Zeppelin

Fans of actors

• Cumberbitches, the fans of Benedict Cumberbatch
• Deaners, the fans of James Dean
• Fanistons, the fans of Jennifer Aniston
• Pine Nuts, the fans of Chris Pine
• Streepers, the fans of Meryl Streep

Fans of fictional characters

• Batmaniacs, the fans of Batman
• Fannibals, fans of Hannibal Lecter
• Potterheads, fans of Harry Potter
• Sherlockians, fans of the famed detective
• Xenites, fans of Xena, Warrior Princess

Fans of movies, TV shows & Broadway hits

• Alexander Familtons, the fans of the musical Hamilton
• Colbert Nation, fans of The Late Show
• Dunderheads, fans of The Office
• Finaddicts, fans of Jaws
• Phans, fans of The Phantom of the Opera
• Ringnuts, fans of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen
• Thronies, fans of Game of Thrones
• Twihards, fans of Twilight
• Warsies, fans of Star Wars (please, not to be confused with Trekkies)
• Whovians, fans of Doctor Who
• Windies, fans of Gone with the Wind
• X-Philes, fans of The X-Files

Fans of fanatics

• Dittoheads, the fans of Rush Limbaugh (also know as Walking Dead)
• Trumpsters, the fans of 45―gentlefolk who just haven't quite yet found a fan club to replace the Bund
• QAnon, soon to be the last of the Trumpsters 

Fans of licorice

• Bonapartists, who, like Napoleon, are die-hard lovers of the stuff

Have I left out your favorite?

Rothkie

Untitled Watercolor by Mark Rothko, 1945

I've had the pleasure these past three months to teach art history to my seven-year-old granddaughter every Wednesday morning.

We've already Zoomed through the careers of such greats as Georgia O'Keefe, Mary Cassatt, Edward Hopper, Wayne Thiebaud, David Hockney, Andrew Wyeth and Pablo Picasso. Alice Neel is on deck.

Before the first lesson, I searched the web for guidance on teaching art to a child and found it in the unlikeliest of places: the so-called Scribble Book of Mark Rothko.

During the Depression, Rothko—still the starving unknown—ran inexpensive art classes for kids at the Brooklyn Jewish Center, where he was known affectionately as "Rothkie."

In the Scribble Book, he jotted nearly fifty pages of notes that pedagogues later boiled into Rothko's five principles for teaching art to kids:

Teach kids that art is self-expression—and that everyone starts life as an artist. Just as kids do when handed crayons—until life gets in the way—adult artists are expressing their felt emotions when they make art.

Don't quash their expressiveness—it's fragile. Long demos rigid assignments turn kids off to art, so avoid them. Rothko would simply set out his students' supplies and let them leap into free-form creation.

Exhibit students’ works. The art teacher's purpose is to instill self-confidence. Rothko would organize public shows of students' art across New York City, including one at the Brooklyn Museum. He also exhibited student work alongside his own at his very first solo show at the Portland Art Museum.

Teach art history with modern art. Kids can learn from modernists, whose work is like their own. The Old Masters were too precise and fussy.

Cultivate creative citizens. The teacher's other purpose is to drive imaginations. “Most of these children will probably lose their imaginativeness and vivacity as they mature,” he wrote in the Scribble Book. “But a few will not. And it is hoped that in their cases, the experience of eight years in my classroom will not be forgotten and they will continue to find the same beauty about them. As to the others, it is hoped, that their experience will help them to revive their own early artistic pleasures in the work of others.”

Fantasy

Thinking calls not only for intelligence and profundity but above all for courage.

― Hannah Arendt

I've learned my lesson in the past 48 hours: arguing with right-wingers is thankless.

Foolishly, I joined two Facebook "conversations" inviting comments about the Black Lives Matter marches.

I was daft enough not to know "only the closed-minded need apply."

Right-wingers often pose as moderate and thoughtful, but are lightning-swift to unleash mockery, once presented a view at odds with their own, or with facts that contradict the dubious and paranoid bullshit they champion. They'll even throw in emojis to reinforce their contempt.

Mockery as a rhetorical strategy predates Trump's ascendance, so you can't blame that buffoon for right's embrace of it. Nor can you blame Rupert Murdoch and his cavalcade of stooges.

Twenty-five hundred years ago, Aristotle scolded Greek orators who mocked their opponents, insisting "the arousal of prejudice, pity, anger, and similar emotions has nothing to do with the essential facts."

The writer Thomas Friedman last week called right-wingers "angry and stupid," a characterization I can agree with.

But I'd go farther: right-wingers are colorless dummies―the Mortimer Snerd kind―without intelligence, profundity or courage.

And, like Mortimer, they work hard at being ignorant.

I'll share a fantasy of mine: I long one day to make a "knockdown argument," in the sense of that term as defined by the late American philosopher Robert Nozick.

The knockdown argument, Nozick said, represents the "attempt to get someone to believe something, whether he wants to believe it or not." Perfect in its power over others, it "forces someone to a belief."

But knockdown arguments aren't easy to come by, because listeners are so stupid. "Perhaps philosophers need arguments so powerful they set up reverberations in the brain," Nozick said. "If the person refuses to accept the conclusion, he dies. How's that for a powerful argument?"

I can only wish.

Blind from Birth

The place was bright with industriousness. There was a big belief in life and we were steered relentlessly in the direction of success.

— Philip Roth

With exceptions—most of whom answer to the name Billy Ray—white Americans aren't born racist.

But they are, in fact, born blind.

From the crib, white Americans are raised to pursue competence.

Our Puritan romance with competence in fact explains why we idolize so many black Americans: black athletes, in particular; but also black preachers, poets, musicians, comedians, actors, directors—even a few politicians. They make whites' A-List.

The rest of black Americans—the non-celebrities—don't make that list. They don't make any list. You might say they're unlisted.

That's not because we're bigoted, but because we're preoccupied with competence, the gold standard drilled into us from birth. And that preoccupation perpetuates a tragic blind spot.

We're blind, as surveys show, to the effect thousands of incremental policy decisions have had on so many black Americans; decisions about matters like emancipation, homesteading, voting rights, the GI Bill, desegregation, interstates, truth-in-sentencing, and the seemingly innocuous questions asked on IQ tests, SATs, and job applications; decisions that destined so many to live their lives on the margins, without hope or the prospect of achievement, while a talented few become society's idols.

Today's New York Times reports that our abundant incomes hide from view racial inequities. “We so want to believe we are not racist,” a sociologist told the paper, “we don’t even see the way that race still matters.”

But we're not racists and we know race matters. We just can't see how. 

We were born with congenital blindness.

The Long, Hot Summer

Picketers at City Hall, Newark, New Jersey, July 16, 1967

A riot is the language of the unheard.

— Martin Luther King, Jr.

Summer '67 still lodges in my memory. It won't move out.

I was 15 and lived two miles from Springfield Avenue, ground zero of the week-long riots that, until quelled, rocked the once-placid and pretty city of Newark. 

I remember the troops and the half-tracks, the smoke and the barricades, the sniper-fire and skyward nightly blazes. I also remember all the tough talk of pals and neighbors and the gang at the barber shop (always my conduit to the adult world). Nixon and George Wallace were sounding pretty good of a sudden and the government had better crack down hard on the blootches or we're all fucked.

But at home—our still-tolerant, FDR-democrat stronghold—not a syllable of criticism for the rioters was uttered that week; and I'm glad for that.

Newark was the worst of the 159 "race riots" that combusted across the US during The Long, Hot Summer, a phrase coined in 1940 by William Faulkner in The Hamlet and made popular by the steamy 1958 movie based on his novel.

Faulkner's 1949 Nobel Prize had made him an important spokesman for civil-rights moderates who endorsed "gradualism." the notion that, for society to improve, blacks need only wait—to sit tight until whites come to around to their point-of-view. Just you wait and see, things will get better.

Faulkner revealed his middle-of-the-road stripes (I'm mixing metaphors) in a March 1956 letter to Life Magazine, published as a commentary on the recent arrest in Montgomery of the ringleader of the Bus Boycott, Martin Luther King, Jr. 

In the letter, Faulkner made clear that, though he loathed Jim Crow, he equally hated the prospect of compulsory integration: "So I would say to all the organizations and groups which would force integration on the South by legal process: ‘Stop now for a moment. You have shown the Southerner what you can do and what you will do if necessary; give him a space in which to get his breath and assimilate that knowledge."

To which King the next week replied, “We can’t slow up. We can’t slow up and have our dignity and self respect. We can’t slow up because of our love for democracy and our love for America. Someone should tell Faulkner that the vast majority of the people on this globe are colored."

And although Montgomery made integration the law of the land, Newark boiled over eleven years later. The July '67 riots began after two white cops beat and arrested a black cabbie for passing their double-parked cruiser. Within a day, the molotov cocktails were flying. The six days of riots left 26 dead and hundreds injured. Property damage exceeded $77 million. White flight escalated and once-placid and pretty Newark entered an ugly  downward spiral it has yet to reverse.

The morning after the riots ended, the Springfield Avenue precinct police chief assembled his officers on the steps of the precinct house to give them a pep talk. 

“Just return it to normal," he said. "Don’t treat it as a situation. Because once you begin to look at problems as problems, they become problems.”

PS: Go here to see a gallery of photos from The Long, Hot Summer.