Are You Strong Enough?

Are you strong enough now for a truly big fish?

— Ernest Hemingway

Braveheart, move over.

Kids in Scotland today are Chickenhearts.

Or so a Scottish university thinks.

The University of the Highlands has slapped an ominous "trigger warning" on Ernest Hemingway's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Old Man and the Sea: 

Warning: Contains Graphic Scenes

History and Literature students at the school are now on official notice that Hemingway's novel contains "graphic fishing scenes."

The university said trigger warnings allow students to make "informed choices."

One Hemingway biographer told The Daily Mail, "It blows my mind to think students might be encouraged to steer clear of the book."

A British history professor told the newspaper that all great literature depicts inherently violent pursuits.

"Many great works of literature have included references to farming, fishing, whaling, or hunting. Is the university seriously suggesting all this literature is ringed with warnings?"

Among many classics, the school has also flagged Beowulf, Frankenstein and Hamlet for excessive and graphic violence.

If size matters, Moby Dick will be banned by the school altogether.

Critics have bemoaned the concept of triggers for years, insisting its application advances a dangerous liberal orthodoxy.

What's goose for the gander, triggers are now in favor among far-right Super Moms, who cite them when banning books by Black and gay authors.

From my standpoint, trigger warnings are ridiculous because they retard teenagers' development into adults.

We have enough problems with cultural illiteracy.

We don't need rampant faintheartedness, too.

Then We Were New

Don't look at me, it's way too soon to see
what's gonna be; don't look at me.

— Paul McCartney

Paul McCartney, who turns 80 this week, entertained last night for nearly three uninterrupted hours at a Baltimore baseball stadium that was filled to the rafters.

 

I bought the concert tickets as a birthday gift for my wife, who had waited decades at long last to see a childhood idol perform live.

The review in today's Baltimore Sun calls the show "a lively performance," a chaste assessment you'd more likely expect to read in the Liverpool Echo circa 1963.

McCartney rocked, as a matter of fact.

I was happy he chose to include "New" in his set list, a 2013 tune that's one of his finest.

When it was released, The Daily Telegraph described the song as a "jaunty, Beatles-esque stomp," but I think it's much more than that.

In the guise of a Sergeant Peppery love song, "New" conveys the giddiness that codgers like McCartney can experience in the face of decrepitude.

It's a giddiness that can lead to a longer life—and a happier one, as well—and is based on little more than aplomb.

It's a giddiness that defies the withered outer shell. 

"Within, I do not find wrinkles and used heart," Emerson said of the aged, "but unspent youth."

"Don't look at me," McCartney sings, "I can't deny the truth, it's plain to see; don't look at me. All my life I never knew what I could be, what I could do—then we were new."

Take just a moment to listen.

What the Frock?

I have little respect for Southern Baptist pastors.

Tarot card readers have better credentials.

But when they preach the kind of abject hate Pastor Dillon Awes preached last Sunday, my disrespect turns into contempt.

Marking the start of Pride Month, Awes told his flock that every single gay "should be lined up against the wall and shot in the back of the head."

Hitler-like, he called the mass executions "the solution for the homosexual in 2022."

Realizing his solution might sound a tad harsh, Awes deferred to Scripture.

"That’s what God teaches," he said. "That’s what the Bible says. You don’t like it? You don’t like God’s Word."

I never realized the Ancient Israelites had guns, or shot sinners in the back of the head. 

You learn something every day.

Awe's boss, Pastor Jonathan Shelley, backed his underling's bloodthirsty solution, insisting, "This is not murder but capital punishment."

In case you're wondering, Pastor Awes' Stedfast Baptist Church occupies a strip mall in Watauga, Texas, a suburb of Forth Worth. 

The pastor, of course, doth protest too much.

His obsession is no doubt an instance of reaction formation. 

We'll soon hear, in the manner of so many clergymen, that Awes has been arrested on charges of pedophilia, a crime that, in Texas, earns you a 99-year sentence. 

Fine with me.

As Hunter S. Thompson said, "Anybody who wanders around the world saying, 'Hell yes, I'm from Texas,' deserves whatever happens to him."

Pastor Jonathan Shelley further justified Ames' venomous sermon by claiming all gays molest children.

"It is our duty," he said, "to warn families of a real threat that exists in our society."

Therein lies my concern. 

Were these two morons not influential, they'd be irrelevant—nothing more than two out-of-touch Texas snake charmers.

But they are influential.  

My fear is that scapegoating gays for all of society's problems will become a core GOP tenet; and Pastor Ames' "solution," a GOP policy.

Berserk

So now we know: when faced with the certainty of surrendering the White House, Trump went berserk.

His diehard followers—alas, there are still millions—will no doubt romanticize his pigheadedness.

When you don't know any better, it's easy to romanticize someone who goes berserk.

Berserk is awesome. 

Berserk in invulnerable. 

Berserk is heroic. 

Berserk, a 19th-century word, comes from berserker, an Old Norse word meaning a "warrior clothed in bearskin." Sir Walter Scott introduced berserker into English in his 1822 novel The Pirate.

Norsemen considered berserkers to be fearsome warriors of superhuman strength; warriors who, protected from harm by the universe, would go into a frenzy during battle, smiting the enemy with unquenchable savagery.

Modern pharmacologists believe berserkers' mysterious might was drug-induced.

Their ferocity came, scientists say, from ingesting henbane, a common weed with narcotic properties that was used throughout the Ancient World to kill pain and cure insomnia.

While ingesting a small dose of henbane anaesthetizes you, ingesting a large dose induces rage, combativeness, and feelings of invincibility. 

It also prompts you to tear off all your clothes and bite people—friend and foe alike.

While most of Trump's followers are anti-maskers, I think even they'd agree that, should he continue to appear at rallies, Trump ought to be required to wear a mask.

The mask I have in mind was the one used in Silence of the Lambs to restrain Hannibal Lecter.

It's simply a matter of pubic safety.

Above: The Standard Bearer by Hubert Lanzinger. Oil on wood.

It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. Or Was.

I dug Mad Magazine. My brain is wired to mock.

— Lalo Alcaraz

Sometimes Congressional investigations prompt criminal charges; sometimes, new laws; and sometimes, public outcries for justice and reform.

But a 1954 Congressional investigation prompted a new magazine.

Mad was the result of a bipartisan investigation of the comic book industry by the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency.

Comic books—filled in the day with murder, mayhem and sex—were on the hot seat because experts had claimed that they corrupted young readers.

And Congress agreed: its investigation of the industry reached the conclusion that comic book publishers were de facto smut merchants who needed to be censored.

A "comics code" was written and a watchdog group set up.

One publisher, however, was of no mind to comply.

Entertaining Comics skirted Congress' directive by upping the trim size of its comic book Mad to that of a magazine and renaming the product Mad Magazine.

Magazines had no code or watchdog.

Free from censorship, Mad in its heyday entertained well over a million Baby Boomers a month, providing a steady stream of puerile parodies, cornball sendups, and idiotic satire.

Most of all, Mad represented relief from the stifling conformism and earnestness of the 1950s and '60s.

"Mad's consciousness of itself as trash, as enemy of parents and teachers, even as money-making enterprise, thrilled kids," The New York Times said on the occasion of magazine's 25th anniversary. 

"It was magical, objective proof to kids that they weren't alone, that there were people who knew that there was something wrong, phony and funny about a world of bomb shelters, brinkmanship and toothpaste smiles."

My favorite feature in every Mad was the TV show parody. I still remember some of the nutty titles the magazine gave to these spoofs:

• Walt Dizzy Presents
• The Rifle, Man!
• The Phewgitive
• Voyage to See What's on the Bottom
• 12 O'Crocked High
• Mission: Ridiculous
• The Flying Nut
• Kojerk
• Makeus Sickby
• The Straights of San Francisco
• Kung Fool
• The Dopes of Haphazzard

When they worked—which was often—Mad's spoofs excelled in their ability to transport you to a cartoon world where vile windbags and moronic stumblebums reigned—a grotesque and absurd world not unlike your parents' and teachers'. The characters were all gangly, their noses bulbous, their limbs marionettish, their clothes ill-fitting. When they spoke, they spoke in elaborate paragraphs that were studded with bombast and Yiddish slang which, unless you lived in a Jewish household, you only encountered in the pages of Mad.

Mad lasted on newsstands 67 years—much longer than anyone would have predicted. But, with the appearance of rivals Zap Comics and National Lampoon, Mad's best days were over by the 1970s.

According to The New Yorker, Mad "subverted the comic form into a mainstream ideological weapon aimed at icons of the left and the right—attacking both McCarthyism and the Beat Generation, Nixon and Kennedy, Hollywood and Madison Avenue."

I can’t remember the day when I fell in love with Mad. It was too long ago. But it was an inextricable rite of passage for every kid in the '50s and '60s at least to sample the zany sarcasm Mad dished out every month and to spend a few moments in a world where both the emperors and adults had no clothes.