Category Archives: Pointless Nostalgia

Pointless Nostalgia

Pledging

I experienced an awkward moment at a PTA meeting I attended recently. This was something above and beyond the normal awkwardness I feel in a room full of people I do not know and whose only connection to me is having children who attend the same school as my child, as I struggle to form some cruel parody of conversation. “So, I hear your kid likes Justin Bieber?”

The moment came at the beginning of the meeting, when the PTA president insisted we all rise and recite the Pledge of Allegiance. Once I heard this, I was gripped by a childlike but very real panic. I hadn’t been asked to do this seriously* since high school, and for a terrifying split second I wasn’t sure what I should do with myself.

*I include the adverb seriously here because the live Pee-Wee Herman Show I saw with my daughter opened with Pee-Wee reciting the Pledge along with the audience, which I don’t think counts, really.

The reason I wasn’t sure what to do is because I spent a good chunk of my childhood as a Jehovah’s Witness. Witnesses refuse the say the Pledge of Allegiance. They don’t do a lot of things, due to their selectively literal interpretation of the Bible (or their translation thereof; it’s a very long story, the more you hear of the less you truly know). Being a Witness is almost like keeping kosher, but instead of worrying about what you eat, you have to worry about everything else.

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Pointless Nostalgia, Politics Schmolitics

Stamped

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Of the remaining GOP presidential hopefuls, Newt Gingrich has the ugliest soul.

Rick Santorum possesses some vile views on gay rights and abortion (like thinking rape victims who get pregnant should just accept this “gift from god”), but he seems like such a brutally strange and damaged person that I’d pity him if he weren’t in such a position of power. Ron Paul seems sincere and I don’t disagree with his anti-war and anti-war-on-drugs stances, even if some his other positions bug me (not to mention his ugly newsletters, the racist content of which he’s never explained satisfatorily). Mitt Romney has the nonplussed cheesiness of a local news anchor.

All members of this trio possess varying degrees of harmlessness, as far as I’m concerned. So with Rick Perry out of the race, Gingrich stands above all of them as, hands down, the worst human being of the bunch.

Among them, Gingrich is the most eager practitioner of Bully Politics. This has been a feature of the Republican arsenal ever since Barry Goldwater and part of the general pushback against New Deal/Great Society ideals we’ve seen since those days. However, it’s never been practiced more brutally than now, and never more gleefully than by Newt. When he talks about making kids work as janitors, there is vengeance, and almost glee, in his voice. When he sneers at Juan Williams during a debate, he all but invites the riled-up audience to attack his outnumbered questioner and seems not too concerned about the consequences. He is never happier than when he attacks those can least defend themselves.

When Gingrich called Obama a “food stamp president,” it was an obvious dog-whistle statement. (Subtext: “Remember, guys, he’s BLACK. And he’s gonna give YOUR money to OTHER BLACK PEOPLE.”) But apart from the badly disguised racism, it was also part and parcel with the delight he takes from attacking the least of us, joyfully positing that the poorest among us are the most deserving of our scorn and ridicule.

Hearing this, I had an immediate, visceral, infuriated reaction, for reasons I couldn’t quite articulate at first. Yes, it was a reprehensible attitude, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on exactly it bothered me so much. And then it all flooded back to me, a memory I’d done my best to bury: My family was once on food stamps.

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Pointless Nostalgia

A Slippery Vision of My Own Ridiculous Demise

It was just like a bad comedy. I stepped into the shower without first noting that there were no towels hanging up, or a bath mat laid down, either. It was such a dumb Man thing to do. I should have hung shelves badly and not asked for directions to complete the Idiot Sitcom Dad trifecta.

Instead, I opted for a different brand of idiocy. Rather than call out to my wife to grab me a towel from our linen closet, I chose to try and get it myself. Again, no bath mat, so I am completely soaking wet and trying to ford my way across the bathroom floor without anything between my dripping feet and the tiles.

I make it to the bathroom door, open it, and make a fumbling grab for the linen closet door, which is mere inches away. And then, one foot slips violently, doing a Rockette kick upward. The other one follows a split second later. For a moment I am completely off the ground, in mid-air, and am fully conscious of this. I feel like I’m outside of myself, observing it. Time stands still.

I’ve had an experience like this once before. On a trip to Action Park at age 12 or so, I rode the alpine slide and followed all the directions, and still found myself separated from my sled when I hit a bump just a bit too hard. I remember feeling suspended above the ground, seeing the sled on the grass next to the track, and consciously thinking “Huh, that’s weird,” before I crashed down to the concrete below me, shoulder first.

While I’m mid-air above the tiles, I think, “I’m going to be one of those idiots who kills themselves slipping in the bathroom.” For this nanosecond, I’m 1000 percent sure I will come crashing down and break my neck, leaving a wet, naked, dumb corpse for my family to find later. I’m going to be a Darwin Award winner.

I come crashing down to the floor and somehow I fall side first. It hurts like hell, but is nothing near fatal. I let out a series of loud laugh-cries, these weird stuttering chuckles that draw my wife’s attention. (Well, that and the noise of my fat ass plummeting to the floor.) She yells “What happened?” several times, but my voice is too choked with pain-laughter to respond.

Finally, I spit out “I slipped” between guffaws. Then, a “fuck!” that is chopped up by so many gasps it gives the obscenity 13 syllables. A split second ago, I was convinced I had a date with the Grim Reaper. Now, I only have a sore hip, stinging pain in my knees, and the burn of my own stupidity. I was also given a depressing reminder that you don’t get to choose how and by what manner you will meet your fate. (Unless you go for suicide, which is not really my cup of tea.) My own experiences with death in the last decade taught me that pretty much every death is undignified and unfair, and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it. This, however, would have been a shade more undignified than most, I think.

Not many people come so close to death and live to tell the tale. I am one of the very few who has been given a vision of my own mortality. And it was fucking ridiculous.