The Big Ball-Drop

As much time as I’ve been given to do it, I’ve never quite been able to get my head around this New Year thing.

I’m old enough to have been alive when Guy Lombardo was, which will give you a clue as to how long I’ve been around. Even when I was a small child, my mother would let me stay up till midnight New Year’s Eve, and I was allowed one sip of champagne while we heard the all-too-familiar rendition of Auld Lang Syne and watched the Times Square festivities on TV, including the famous dropping ball.

Later on, I would meet one of the early loves of my life at a New Year’s Eve party. Unfortunately, I was not one of hers, which was a familiar pattern for a while. My mom used to say, “Be careful who you’re with on New Year’s Eve, you’ll never forget it!” Well, yeah, you will, but I wasn’t about to forget THAT one.

I was raised Catholic, so New Year’s Day was also a “holy day of obligation,” and we had to go to church in observance of what was then called “the Circumcision of our Lord.” Seems like kind of an odd thing to observe, but Jesus started out as Jew, and this was a ceremonial ritual for male babies in ancient times. Anyway, the rest of the day was about football, of which I wasn’t a fan.

A friend from South Carolina used to invite me to a Hoppin’ John party on New Year’s Day. Hoppin’ John is a peas-and-rice dish – not my favorite either, but it’s a Southern thing, as is politeness, so I pretended to like it.

But what about the Big Picture here? A favorite author of mine once wrote: “Each year I have felt more keenly the unimportance of time and dates...Another year? What of it?..Do we not in a moment sometimes age years through an experience? Do we not in a year sometimes move not a step further than where we were before?” Another author wrote, rather bluntly: “The measurement of life by solar years robs youth and gives ugliness to age.”

Great concepts, except they don’t quite represent how we work. We have a finite lifespan, only given so much, so we’re constantly measuring it and evaluating it, through birthdays, anniversaries, seasons, and if all else fails, the New Year. It’s a time for stock-taking and resolution-making, which are necessities for the wise allocation of the time we’re allotted on this planet.

We often like to think of the New Year as a clean slate, but it’s only partly that. Most of the baggage we carry on 12/31 is still with us on 1/1.  We’d rather not have the bad follow us as the ball drops, but we still like to bring the good stuff along, so it’s the price we pay.

If you’re excited about what’s unfolding in your life, may your dreams come true in the coming year – at least some of them will, and perhaps some you don’t even know you have yet. If 2014 was a slog, well, if you’re reading this, at least there’s a reasonable chance you’ll make it intact into 2015 (if you haven’t already done so). If the good Lord’s willin’ and the crick don’t rise, you’ll be going through this process again almost before you know it, many more times.

Waving the Red Flag

 It has always interested me that when we have lofty debates about free speech, the debate itself is often a lot loftier than the speech.

I shouldn’t review a movie I haven’t seen – and now may never see – but just on the face of it, Sony was going to release, on Christmas Day no less, a comedy involving reporters recruited by the CIA to assassinate North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. That sounds like a real hoot, right?

Talk about waving red flags in front of bulls. The North Koreans, as you might expect, didn’t care for the movie plot, so it appears they hacked into Sony Pictures’ operations and then threatened some 9/11-style attack. Our own President is encouraging us to “go to the movies,” but Sony pulled the film anyway for safety reasons.

Kim’s minions probably don’t have the bandwidth – yet – to mount such an attack, but already the airwaves are full of free-speech discussions and how we shouldn’t let ourselves be intimidated. All this to preserve the right of filmmakers to produce, and the public to consume, what just might be crap. Somehow I don’t think “The Interview” was going to be quite up there with “Dr. Strangelove” or “The Great Dictator” in terms of sharp geopolitical satire.

I love free speech too, but I have always held that we are not freed from the consequences of that speech. Do we expect the powers-that-be in North Korea to be good sports and laugh along with us, or as another example, extreme Islamists to chuckle at a cartoon of The Prophet? Or do we expect satire to melt the adamance (is that a word?) of those who hold the beliefs being made fun of, or cause people under the heel of such regimes or beliefs to be laughing so hard that they  rise up and overthrow their oppressors? What exactly is the point here?

When it comes to free speech, I wish the speakers would, at least some of the time, do a better job of picking their battles.

Under the Myth-el-toe

There are some beliefs you embrace in your life that just take all kinds of work before you un-believe them. I had particular problems with Santa Claus.

A lot of my early life was spent growing up in an apartment in Manhattan. We lived on the second floor. Every Christmas Eve, after supposedly going to bed, I would open my bedroom window (letting in the cold air in the dead of winter) twist my neck around, and look up in the sky to see if there were a sleigh, reindeer, etc. Yes, I did worry about the logistical difficulties of how Santa was going to noiselessly deliver the toys, especially when there were nine floors of apartments above.

I didn’t usually get what I wanted for Christmas – not because we were especially poor or I had mean parents – it’s just that I wanted impossible things most of the time.

There was not nearly as much trouble un-believing in the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy – the latter in particular. When I was in bed but still awake, a family member would walk into the bedroom and slip a quarter under the pillow. If an older brother did this, he sometimes didn’t take care to tiptoe or consider how gently to shove the pillow aside to deposit the quarter, but I feigned sleep anyway. (What’s the fairy ponying up these days, $5?)

But Santa Claus – that was a tough one. I was at a rather advanced age (I won’t admit to the number here) before the breaking news was given to me about his reality. I did not take it well. I think most precious but erroneous beliefs are like that. We have to go through a mourning period when they die, just as we do when a real person close to us passes.

Yes, reality does indeed bite! But it occurs to me that those discarded fantasies leave their traces behind, and they will always be a part of us, evolving as we age, often materializing in forms other than the ones we outlined. Some of our dreams will actually come true, when the time is right. I think when all is said and done, Santa figures out how to deliver the goods.

"There Is Nothing Covered...."

 These are not good times for myth-writers and icon-polishers. Bill Cosby, beloved comedian and TV dad, appears to be a serial rapist. My premium TV channel has been repeatedly running that documentary about cyclist Lance Armstrong’s years of illegal doping. And now, a report that took years to produce concludes that the CIA tortured people to obtain information about possible attacks on U.S. interests. Not entirely news, but the report says it was much more extensive than we thought.

We thought we were the good guys. We’d never do what the Nazis or the Stasi or the Russians would do. Until 9/11. Until it was hard not to.

The debate is still ongoing about whether torture to get information “works,” – whether it coerces people with info to spill it, resulting in the saving of American lives. Actually, I’m open to hearing more about this issue. I don’t think it’s been 100 percent settled yet, though it’s not looking good for the pro-torture folks so far.

But what bothers me most is that in many cases, our CIA people didn’t even have to look the people being tortured in the eye. This is America, we even contracted THAT out, and the private contractors weren’t supervised much of the time. Now, I know many of them may be patriots, but I’m sure they liked being paid. And I’ll be willing to betcha that at least some of them enjoyed their work. Even in the TV world, while you were being tortured, at least you got to deal directly with Jack Bauer, Carrie Mathison or Saul Berenson.

Many of us may have enjoyed seeing Saddam Hussein’s statue being pulled down in the streets of Baghdad in 2003, but how many of our own idols have fallen? Why can’t things be what they seem to be, what we’ve been told for so long that they are?

In the Bible, Jesus is quoted as saying, “There is nothing covered that shall not be revealed, and nothing hidden that shall not be known.”

I don’t know about you, but I’m suffering from revelation fatigue. I’d like to have a month or two go by when a myth isn’t busted, when my idol is still supported by its feet of clay. Just for a while.