Frick and Frack Yik and Yak

Frick and Frack yik and yak. 

No doubt most of you are thankful for my silence given last week’s rant. You’re welcome; but silence was not my intention, having brought my laptop with me to New York City to spend Thanksgiving with Roz’s son Bart, who has moved in with his girlfriend of longer than we knew, a Dominican woman with a seven-year-old son, a pocket Junot Diaz, already sardonic - and gifted almost beyond belief. (How could a seven-year-old be sardonic, if he didn’t have the brain and soul of a twenty-seven-year-old?) To spend the holiday with Bart, who has read Oscar Wao and who writes himself, besides the novel he admits he may never finish, three dozen weekly articles for sixteen different English and Spanish Manhattan weeklies, scratched out to pay his half of the rent on a not-half-bad flat in Washington Heights, his half of the food and clothing, as long as they eat cheap, dress cheap, and eliminate most non-necessities.

     I brought my laptop and Gaspar’s email from several days ago with my dilapidated response to this flat of three twenty-seven-year-olds (for Alfredo’s mother, Dominga, was actually born the same day as Bart, May 13, 1989). To these three rooms set up for our comfort, so we slept in Bart and Dominga’s bed, while she slept with Raphael in his bed and Bart kipped on the couch.

We got in late Thanksgiving morning after the briefest of twenty-minute delays at the George Washington Bridge. And Bart and Dominga’s friends, Will and Verónica, came three hours later with the turkey and stuffing and their daughter Leona, Alfredo’s best bud. And we ate turkey and green-bean casserole and something spinach and at least two different somethings sweet potato; mashed potatoes and the stuffing with gravy, and the cranberry chutney we brought; and after, the pies and whipped cream we also brought. And we drank wine from about three till eleven, talking about everything under the Manhattan sun, dusk, and dark.

     Will teaches English at CUNY, and his wife does something quite lucrative at Macy’s. Dominga works for her. And Bart knows Will from a writer’s workshop. Everything: we talked about everything – from politics to football to food to books to languages. (Roz and I are the only ones there not fluent in Spanish. Will spent three years of his adolescence in La Paz; his father was a mining engineer. Verónica is Mexican. And Bart did his Peace Corps stint in Paraguay. Roz and I are the only ones not fluent in Spanish, but her French is very good. My Dutch from my grandparents and a couple of exchange half-years in Amsterdam is passable.) From languages, particularly how they work (and don’t), to living in the City to religion’s fading away until it is only a smudged cloud in the backdrop to politics and football.

No, my intention was to get this posted on Friday, only I forgot my power cord and the damn PC ran out of charge before I could get it done. So you’re welcome, but I’ll apologize – if only to myself – for taking so long to wake you back up. I’ll do it gently. I’ll let Gaspar begin:

Gaspar Stephens 

to me                                                                                                                                          6 days ago

The hate-sown American society you describe may fly around on TV and into practically every corner of the internet, but does it have legs in reality? In the life I walk into and around in day-to-day, I don’t see it, so much hatred among races, ethnicities, varying sexual preferences. (I don’t run into many cowboys or Indians.)  But what I do see is people getting along fairly well with one another.

Only when I turn on a TV, open up a news site, or unfold a paper do I see discord described, or purveyed, perhaps even sown, by people who have a vested interest in profiting from narrative conflict.

This is not to say that there are no conflicts which erupt into hate. But the scope and breadth of hate, I've come to believe, is outlandishly exaggerated.

Begin again: I don’t want to suggest there's no tension and even hatred between various groups, the ones you identify. My point is that there is a media hobgoblin land in which this shit (to use a philosophical term) is highly magnified or amplified, a mediated reality that is almost always considerably different from (read: that exaggerates) our immediate reality.

This brings me to my fascination with our apparent (and appalling) need to embrace exaggerated reality. Perhaps this owes to our living in a society that's numbed by creature comfort.  Maybe we still hold a primal need--one from which our species has not yet evolved--to excite ourselves, to perceive ourselves as in some imminent danger. This seems to be true even when conflict and tension aren't immediately present.

You know how I have embraced “bad coffee Thursday.” (How will we know good coffee if we have no bad to contrast it with?) So down each Thor’s day to the Kwik-Kwak three streets over and one down, where I also buy the local weekly, circulated Tuesday – fifty cents for mostly ads – usually featuring on page 1 faces of smiling white kids that had achieved some minor distinction the previous week, scored a touchdown or learned and demonstrated (and are now seeking to patent) a new technique for applying blush. I could never figure out how the rag kept going, the rack almost always full when I bought mine two days later. Then a couple of weeks ago, I found it empty. “Shallo Shopper finally fold, ay?" I said to the cashier.  "No," he told me, "the front page had a picture of that black guy shot the woman in Licklack Valley; and they sold out in less than an hour."

The moral of the story? Journalism in a "free-market capitalist society" profits from scare-mongering, rage-mongering, from creating a version of reality in which the world is tilted toward destruction, and the tilt is clearly the fault of someone unlike me. Journalism in a “free-market-capitalist society” is like the circus come to town. Only this circus has camped out and is not leaving until it has extracted every nickel from every sucker born every minute. 

Ted Riich

to Gaspar Stephens                                                                                                                    2 days ago

I’m with you – and I want to be with you . . . Or I’m with you until . . . Your fable actually supports my argument. Why does that issue of Shallo Shopper sell out? Because people love to hate. “Say it ain’t so, Gas!” But it is. It still is.

11.30.15