532. Titters, Grumps, and Snarkies. A Titter.

NEW -- Titters, Grumps, and Snarkies.  But what are they?

This is a Titter.  It provokes a quiet laugh, or maybe just a smile.

    Wishes for My Friends

Chocolate truffles and warm pajamas

Naughty books, great art, marvelous sex

Contentment without boredom

And once or twice a year

A shock, a jolt

To break their habits, astonish them

And keep them stark and strong.

Next week its companion piece, "Wishes for My Enemies," a Snarky.  And maybe, maybe, an explanation of where these things come from and what I'm up to.

Wild stuff ahead.  Stick around.

©  2021  Clifford Browder

531. Killing

 BROWDERBOOKS

My historical novel Forbidden Brownstones, set in nineteenth-century New York, has many features, as the following tags indicate.  (Don't know what a "tag" is?  Now you do.)

• a young black man acquires power in a city of white prejudice
• an obsession that risks death by fire and murder
• the most exclusive brothel in the city
• a madam's fierce revenge
• the illusion of youth peddled to senescents and satyrs
• a sudden death in the parlor

Recommended by Sublime Book Review with a five-star rating. Available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and WiDo Publishing.

                  

                                                Killing

When the State undertakes to execute certain convicted criminals, it gets messy, for every possible method has its drawbacks.

Hanging, the common practice in former times in the US and elsewhere, could fail to do the job.  Dangling victims twitched and gasped in midair, before succumbing.  

The electric chair was our bloodless, scientific solution in the US.  But here too, victims sometimes twitched in agony, urinated or defecated, and the eyeballs could literally pop out.  Messy.

(A side note: white attendants strapping in a black prisoner.  

My only comment: no comment.)

So today states with the death penalty use lethal injections, administered to a strapped victim who is mercifully unconscious, having been injected with an anesthetic.  But what if an inexperienced technician injects a muscle, instead of a vein, or if the needle becomes clogged, causing intense pain to the victim?  Messy again.

Pharmaceutical companies have become squeamish about letting their products be used in executions, so if lethal injections are impossible, some states now allow prisoners to choose the firing squad.  Which assumes good aim on the part of the squad.  And yes, messy.

The French have a solution, introduced during their famous 1789 Revolution: the guillotine.  It’s quick and ruthlessly efficient.  But it’s bloody, and there are all those decapitated bodies to be disposed of.  In executing people we Americans, like the medieval Church, have a horror of blood.  (The Inquisition condemned people, but left executing them to the secular authorities, who did it with a vengeance.). 

Conclusion: when it comes to executing people, whatever we try is messy.  Which gives plenty of ammunition (oops, I mean arguments) to opponents of the death penalty.  Yes, eliminating it makes for crowded prisons, and voters don’t like to see their taxes going to such institutions, which some people label “country clubs” — people who have never been in prison.  Prison is no picnic.  I know this from stories told me by a penpal inmate.  But it lacks the terrible finality of execution, the irreversible judgment of death.

This debate will never end.  Here in the US we have fifty states, each with its own laws and regulations.  And public opinion swings between the alternatives: death penalty vs. no death penalty.  When human life is involved, it’s not an easy problem to resolve.

©   2021  Clifford Browder

530. Kill

BROWDERBOOKS

The new edition of Fascinating New Yorkers has received two five-star reviews from Readers' Favorite.  Excerpts follow.

It is really a pleasure to discover all these personalities one after the other. Fascinating New Yorkers is a book that will appeal to anyone who enjoys an interesting read. -- Five-star review for Readers' Favorite by Astrid Iustulin.

Each character is presented with a sense of familiarity that is not always found in biographical sketches. This makes for an interesting read whether you’re a New Yorker or not. -- Five-star review for Readers' Favorite by Emily-Jane Hills Orford.

Available from Amazon. 

                               KILL

 

“Be a killer,” Fred Tump told his young son Donald long ago, and Donld has followed his advice ever since.

Not literally, of course.  We use the verb “kill” and words related to it rather freely, not meaning to take someone’s life.  For instance:

• You kill me.  (You’re too much.  You’re overdoing it, but I’m not fooled.)
• I’m just killing time.
• He made a killing in the market.
• She’s a real killjoy.

But the verb kill has, in English, a force to it.  It’s a monosyllable, short, quick, and clean.  Shakespeare knew it, when he had a deranged King Lear exclaim

And when I have stol'n upon these sons-in-law,

Then, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill!

Have I ever killed?  Yes, bugs galore.  Mosquitoes, flies, roaches, mice.  The mice and roaches by using glue traps, the flies with a flyswatter, the mosquitoes with a quick swat by hand.  Did I relish these massacres?  You bet.  We’re all killers at heart, but in different contexts.

I once heard of a young man who, for Christmas, asked his parents for a motorcycle; they said they would see about it.  The young man had high expectations.  But when Christmas came, his parents apologized, explaining that they just couldn’t afford it.  The young man was crushed, then furious.  Knowing where his father kept a gun, he got it and shot both parents dead.  Then, appalled at what he had done, he rushed to the garage to get in the family car and drive away, to where he didn’t even know.  And sitting there in the garage was a shiny new motorcycle.  His parents had wanted to surprise him.

This is a true story.  The young man fled in the car, but in time he was arrested and sent to prison.  He was impulsive and prone to anger, but not a hardened criminal.  Yet deep inside him there was a potential killer, waiting for some incident to propel him into action.  Do any of us know fully what lies buried deep inside us?  Maybe a killer.  Scary.

Have I ever seen a killer?  Yes, at the Coney Island Aquarium: a shark.  It was swimming in a large tank, its sleek, streamlined body supple, its eye evil, its jaws equipped with jagged, in-curved teeth, so that the more a victim struggled, the more it would be impaled on those teeth, rendering escape impossible.  An efficient, swift killer, and beautiful.  Yes, seen swimming freely, beautiful.  But not one to meet in the open sea.  Bathers and surfers, watch out.  Sharks pop up when and where least expected, with dire results.

Gray nurse shark, Minnesota Zoo

photo credit: Jlencion 

In nature, killing is normal, even necessary.  Cats kill birds; do we then hate cats?  Once when, on vacation, I was watching a flock of migrating sparrows feeding on some seed that I had put out, a small hawk swooped down and grabbed one of the sparrows, while the others scattered in terror.  The hawk —  a sparrow hawk, smallest of the falcons — then proceeded to feed on its dead victim.  It was nature, it was basic and — in a way — beautiful.

Animals kill because they must eat to survive. To my knowledge, only humans kill for pleasure, for vengeance, out of hatred or ideology or greed.  (If there’s an exception, it might be cats, since they play with a captured mouse before killing it.)  And yes, sometimes we humans kill in self-defense, which, if true, can be justified.

A messy subject.  And when the state executes, it’s really messy.  I’ll go into that next time.

©  2021 Clifford Browder

529. PR and Old Sigi Freud

 

                PR and Old Sigi Freud

Have you ever felt manipulated, pressured to do something, buy something, vote for someone or something?  Have you ever done something on an impulse, and then later wondered why?  What probably motivated you has been called “persuasive communication,” but today the term is PR, public relations, and guess who’s to blame: Sigi Freud!

Not that he got directly involved; he remained aloof, the distinguished pioneer in the study of the subconscious mind.  It was his Americanized nephew, Edward L. Bernays, who adopted Uncle Sigi’s ideas.  Bernays has been hailed … or vilified … as “the father of public relations.”  

An example of his handiwork: In the 1920s he had Lucky Strike cigarettes as a client.  Their problem: women didn’t smoke.  So  Bernays went to work,  He launched a nationwide survey: “What is your favorite color?”  Women answered “green,” the color of nature and money.  

So Bernays hired hundreds of beautiful women, all dressed in green and smoking cigarettes, to parade through Paris, London, Milan, and New York.  The result: all over the world women began smoking.

And what did he call cigarettes? Torches of freedom.  Liberated from Victorian mores, women supposedly showed their independence by smoking — an idea that Big Tobacco would push to the limit.  

“You’ve come a long way, baby,” announced the 1970s ads for Virginia Slims cigarettes, made by Philip Morris and marketed specifically to women; I remember them distinctly.

So there you have it: torches of freedom, which some today have rechristened “cancer sticks.”  And it’s all thanks, via his nephew, to Uncle Sigi Freud.  Who, by the way, was a smoker.

PR was welcomed and used not only by merchandisers, but also by authoritarian movements and regimes determined to tame and control the moods and actions of the mobs of people empowered by democracy.  

For that, too, thank you Uncle Sigi, via your brilliant nephew, Mr. Barclays, whom Life magazine once hailed as one of the one hundred most influential Americans of the twentieth century.

Source note: This post was inspired by Bruce Poli’s article, “Sigmund Freud and the Birth of Public Relations,” in the October 2021 issue of WestView News, the monthly local newspaper serving New Yotk’s West Village.  Much of its information comes from that source.

©  2021  Clifford Browder 

528. Nine Reasons Why I Hate Facebook

 

          Nine Reasons Why I Hate Facebook

He created a monster.

Photo credit: Elaine Chan and Priscilla Chan

Why do I hate thee, Facebook, let me tell thee why.  

1. When I go to my Facebook page, I am assaulted by posts from people who may be followers of mine, but whom I don’t know and probably — with a few exceptions — don’t want to know.  And their photos appear alongside mine.  

2. Off to the right there may be ads that I have no control over, and a list of CONTACTS, some of whom I recognize, and many of whom are total strangers.

3. Among the long string of posts are photos of cats: adorable, but how many photos of adorable cats am I obliged to look at and proclaim love of?  Photos of the adorable young children of total strangers evoke the same response.

4. These posts from strangers elicit responses from other total strangers — “Adorable!”  “Beautiful!”  “So cute!” — making me feel that there are conversations going on that I am not a part of, even though all this is on my page.

5. And if the subject is not adorable pets but something political, the responses are a chorus of exclamations —  “I totally agree!”  “You are so right!”  “Well said!” — showing that the blogger is preaching to the choir.  

6. And any disagreement, even if expressed civilly, risks provoking a swarm of nasty outcries and accusations of bigotry, racism, homophobia, cynicism, and misogyny.

7. On the left of the page is a long menu of options, most of which utterly baffle me: Groups, Watch, Memories, Saved, News, plus  the ominous threat of  STILL MORE.

8. Yes, somewhere over to the right is access to my other page, the “public” one, Browderbooksbiz, as if this, my “private” page, weren’t overrun with an uninvited public.  And if I go to Browdebooksbiz, I’m immediately confronted with invitations that will cost me time and money: Create Ad, Create Post, Create New Ad, Boost a Post, Automatic Ads.  “Biz,” indeed, but whose “biz” is it?  Certainly not mine.

9. In short, Facebook is jumbled, chaotic, time- and money-sucking, irrelevant, and intrusive.  Mark Zuckerberg, its co-founder and CEO, has produced a sprawling, hungry monster that devours, or tries to devour, whatever lies in its path.  And that means us.

And this doesn’t even address such problems as FB’s failure to block Russian interference in our 2016 election, fake news, hate speech, and its syphoning off of personal data without our knowledge or consent.  Why then do we still keep our accounts?  Several reasons:

• Habit, which usually is another word for laziness, for lack of initiative, for blind and timorous conformity.
• FB reminds us of birthdays, anniversaries, and other events we might otherwise forget.
• It lets us keep in touch with distant family and friends without the trouble of making phone calls or writing letters — so twentieth-century, so “quaint.”
• It’s often needed for work or school.

If anyone wants to agree or disagree, proclaim undying love for, or unremitting hate of, Facebook, or some wishy-washy position in between, the author welcomes such interventions and would love to hear from you.  The monster is in our midst, clutching at our throats.  How can we ignore it?

©  2021  Clifford Browder