I arrive home after a busy morning and sit down to check the email when the cellphone unexpectedly rings.
"Hello?" I politely growl.
A guy's voice says, "Hello, Tina?"
"Do I sound like Tina to you?"
"Sorry, I must have the wrong number."
End of that short conversation.
Let's see, if he calls right back, I'm ready to answer: "Tina speaking. Anything I can do for you, big boy?"
***
California has a new law that goes into effect next week, on July 1st. No more cellphone use while driving unless you use hands-free technology such as Bluetooth in the form of an earbud attached to this thing that sticks out of your head next to your ear. The ultimate in walk-around geekdom. I see an old geezer wearing one of these and I wonder which twenty-something he's trying to impress. Now I are one.
Yeah, I bought one this morning. It's charging. One more thing for me to configure.
When you were a kid you could pick up a baseball bat and start hitting balls. No configuring required. Or a bike, or skates. Just go do it. Now you can't do anything until you've figured out how to configure the damn thing. Every day is like learning to program a new VCR when you're not sure how you configured the last one.
Can you imagine an attorney appearing before the Supreme Court of the United States wearing one of those things? While arguing his case his Bluetooth goes off. He tells the justices to please hang on for just a moment, it's his wife reminding him not to forget to pick up a pizza on the way home, for dinner...
They're very understanding about this sort of thing, I imagine.
***
Justice Antonin Scalia was interviewed by Charlie Rose, the so-called TV interviewer. Scalia was cool. He knew that Rose couldn't lay a glove on him. Rose was reduced to laughing at Scalia's light touches.
Rose didn't ask one hard question. Scalia knocked softballs out of the park all day long.
Scalia's a big fan of Being An Originalist. Yay, great, we should all live the way the Founding Fathers wanted us to live, as though they didn't want us to think for ourselves. Do you think they wanted to have the responsibility for telling us how to live? Have you noticed how we've screwed up? The Civil War for example? Slavery? Jim Crow? We're still hauling ourselves out of own muck, domestically, while headed over that cliff, internationally.
Scalia made one great point and I couldn't agree with him more. He said he's often asked (or that gatherings this is what he asks) what is the greatest thing about the Constitution. He often hears things like freedom of speech, freedom of worship, and the like, the things that weren't even in the Constitution when it was first ratified. It took a Bill of Rights to add those later, and further amendments, such as the Civil War Amendments (the 13th, 14th, & 15th, 1865-1868) to forbid slavery, promise equal rights, and give the vote to the former slaves (the men, not the women. ha! That came later, after more struggle).
No, what impresses Scalia the most is the way that we divide up power three ways so that no one branch of government, or no one person, or party, can, run things their way (off a cliff) for too long (we hope). Of course, if the cliff arrives before the next election, we're screwed, aren't we.
American arrogance, being what it is, invites a lot of blowback. 9-11 was just a taste.
We'd be a lot better off promoting our 'soft power' in a tolerable manner than going around invading countries on pretexts that seem to be without foundation. You'd think we might have found the WMD in Iraq after all of the looking we've done there since 2003, when we invaded.
***
George Carlin died yesterday. In legal circles, First Amendment division, he's famous, in addition to being funny, for the Seven-Dirty-Words case. It seems there are words we're not supposed to say. I have to watch it around my grand-daughters or my son and daughter-in-law shoot me looks. They don't want me contaminating the little word sponges, so I watch it. Yesterday when my iPod wouldn't work while I was driving the 3-year-old to the beach, I told her we couldn't listen to her favorite tune (Earl Klugh doing "Ding-Dong The Witch Is Dead" in finger-style guitar) because the battery was dead.
"What's a battery, Grandpa?" she asked.
Have you ever tried to explain to a three-year-old what a battery is while driving a car?
Carlin opened a lot of minds to the use of taboo words. Why are they taboo? Because we want them to be taboo, I suppose. We seem to have a deep seated urge to regard some words in our native language as forbidden. And then to say them like hell. Oops. See what I mean?
Carlin made us laugh at ourselves for doing this.
I admired Carlin a lot. His death made me sad all day yesterday. There aren't too many public figures whose passing can do that to me.
For some of the bastids, it's all I can do to avoid cheering...
***
Speaking of passing away, I took a friend to dinner. We've been friends for decades. He's one of the wisest, most intelligent people I know and a few years senior to me. Unfortunately, for him, he's been a midwest Republican forever. He's had it up to here with this White House, for years.
"I've never been so discouraged about the way this country is going," he says.
"Like it's going over a cliff?" I helpfully ask.
"Like it's going over a cliff," he replies.
Then he makes a remark to the effect that if were to die tomorrow, it wouldn't be too soon.
This is not the sort of talk I expect to hear from a specialist I send upset clients to for help in making sure they remain clients at least until the end of their case.
This is the problem. If you think about the country, you get depressed.
We're supposed to be in charge of our own fate, the captain of our own soul. Invictus. The poem. You could look it up. Learned it in high school. Half the country thinks God has something to do with the U.S. The other half thinks He's less effective than Congress. At least I think it's a He. Could be a She, for all I know. The only thing I know for sure is never to listen to a preacher who says that God talks to him.
I don't mind the preacher talking to God.
I do that a lot myself.
"Get in the hole!...
Goddammit...!"
I do mind it when God talks back, especially in the form of lightning. If I catch him telling me how to interpret theological source material, I know something crazy's been going on. Preachers have been getting away with this bushwa for far too long. "God told me just last night, therefore you must believe, or worse, behave the way I'm telling you." This was the problem with the Rev. Jim Jones of Jonestown fame, over 900 men, women and children, dead. They drank the Kool-Ade, just like the Reverend Jim told them to. God wants you to obey. They obeyed and they died on the spot.
When this sort of thing happens, I think I'll just invent a new god. If the Hebrews and the Greeks and the Egyptians and the Babylonians and the Hawaiians could invent their gods, why can't we? The God of America. A combination of our top secular saints, scraped clear of their penchant for slavery.
Shall we make him all powerful? Or just a hapless schlemiel who can't seem to do a thing about hurricanes and floods? Just as he is.
I mean, why claim that the god we invent has all this knowledge and power yet he can't save a baby? This just makes me believe, with Xenophanes, that he's all made up.
Xenophanes, recall, wrote that if cows could draw, their gods would have four legs.
So I'm not just making this up.
Xenophanes thrived around 2,500 years ago.
Place called Greece.
***
Studying St. George of Carlin, which is in Brooklyn (I'm from StatNisland, across da Narrows), will do this to you. Carlin, a parochial school kid taught by nuns, outgrew it. Found he had a mind of his own.
A mind of your own is a terrible thing, don't you think?
He didn't waste his.
In fact, he made it come out funny, which is another reason we admire him so.
***
Yup, after we finish inventing God, again, we ought to invent a university where people are encouraged to learn that they have a mind of their own, it's theirs to turn in any direction they want, that they are in fact creative if they give themselfves a chance and don't fear that what they say, or write, or draw, or play, is not completely original.
What's original is the fact that you are saying it.
We could put Carlin's statue out front of the Ad building, to remind the administrators, the faculty, and the students what this university is all about, next to Richard Feynman's.