Nothing's Shocking

Last night I had a nightmare in which my youngest daughter Yael was swept away by raging storm waters, much as tragically occurred in real life to a mother holding her two young sons during the recent Superstorm Sandy. Waking up to find my family still intact, I thought back to a passage in a work of non-fiction I was recently reading, in which a historical figure from the mid-19th century was the only one of eleven offspring in his family to make it out of childhood alive. While this may have been uncommon even by 19th century standards, it would not have been shocking to those who lived through it. Given the infant and child mortality rates of the time, it would have been more surprising if all eleven children had made it to the ripe old age of 21.

In the late 1980’s Jane’s Addiction released an album whose title, Nothing’s Shocking, more adequately describes the postmodern turn than all the learned tomes that have tried to capture the essence of what it feels like to be alive right now. As a creature born of the world described by Jane’s Addiction, the only event in my life that I ever found truly shocking was the death of my father. The fall of the Berlin Wall, the first Gulf War (that first hot American war of my lifetime), and the events of 9/11, to pick three turning points from my first 38 years, were each surprising. But none of them, and none of the surprises in my own little personal narrative, were shocking. The tumor in my father’s brain was the only fact that did not compute. And today, I would be less shocked by the arrival of extroverted extraterrestrial visitors or the lowering of the curtain of history according to the timelines established by the Mayan calendar, than I would by the death of my children. The difference between 1850 and 2012, between then and now, can be summed up thusly: everything was shocking then except death- nothing’s shocking now except death.

Perhaps (post) modern parenting, in which we give our children as much unconditional love as our neuroses will allow, is only possible under the terms of this now. Our love is unconditional, because there is nothing left that our children can do to shock us out of our love, e.g. I will be secretly disappointed if at least one of my daughters doesn’t turn out to be a happy, confident lesbian (how else will I know that my love was experienced as truly unconditional?). But the secret condition of this unconditional love (other than that at least some of our children end up in some category of “other” so that we can flaunt our unconditional love) is that our children outlive us. Violation of this condition is the only means left for children to shock their postmodern parents (children are still free to disappoint these parents, in the main by joining seemingly outmoded religious movements made relevant again as megaphones for the “up yours” that children will always need to signal to their parents, no matter how unconditionally loving they may be). Meaning that a postmodern parent will only ever disown a child they’ve already lost, only ever say “You’re dead to me,” when it is literally true.

In the past, when everything was shocking except death, any parent who could have waved a magic wand over their child to prevent them from being gay would have done so. This now sounds barbarian. It is only the vestiges of this past that prevent our current nothing’s-shocking-except-death conditions from giving way to the inevitable cloning of our children and a new barbarism. I know a woman in her sixties who explained that she had her tubes tied after her second child because she had always wanted two children, and the two that she had given birth to could never be replaced. In the (near) future, women will make the same choice for the opposite reason. Tubes will be tied and vas deferens clamped because the children we have will all be replaced on an as-needed basis, burying fear along with the irrelevant corpses.

Jane’s Addiction’s album title may actually be referring to this looming future, when nothing, not even the death of one’s child, is shocking. Nightmares like the one I had last night will then be anachronistic, and I will be able to devote myself full time to my recurring dream of showing up to school without any pants (or underpants) on. But the naked guy who attended all of his classes at Cal-Berkeley in the full Monty has already traipsed through reality, leaving me to come up with a new nocturnal transgression. Dostoyevsky’s old fear that "if there is no God, everything is permitted," has been replaced by the conditions on the ground: if there is no death, everything is permitted. The infamous death of God turned out to be the death of death. And it further turns out that the one thing you can’t clone is death, making unconditional love less a moral imperative and more of a defense mechanism: Enjoy your children! (It looks like they’ll be sticking around for a while.)

Fame... I Want to Live Forever...Remember, Remember, Remember My Name

In 1968 Andy Warhol famously stated that “In the future, everyone will be world famous for 15 minutes.” More recently, it has been translated (by either David Weinberger or a Scottish artist named Momus, according to Wikipedia) to match how the predicted future actually turned out: “In the future, everyone will be famous to 15 people.”

This matches up perfectly with the version of the 1968 quote that we all carry around inside our heads: “In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.” It wasn’t until I checked on Wikipedia that I even knew that the actual Warholian version includes the prefix “world” in front of “famous.” Weinberger’s (or Momus’) reformulation of the standard, abridged version of the quotation, in which Weinberger shifts Warhol’s emphasis on the duration of the fame we will all enjoy (15 minutes) to an emphasis on the scope of that fame (famous to 15 people), although clever, is incomplete and unsatisfying once Warhol’s original statement is considered in full.

To more fully appreciate how the future has turned out somewhat differently than Warhol imagined one must consider both of the elements that Warhol’s original statement includes, both scope and duration. Accordingly, I would amend Weinberger’s update thusly: “In the future, everyone will always be famous to 15 people.”

I humbly submit that this amendment brings the contours of the future that we now inhabit (the one clear takeaway from last week’s election being that the future has arrived sooner than we thought it would; this is both good, in the case of the elections, and bad, in the already-arrived future most recently announced by Superstorm Sandy and the flooding in coastal Italy) into sharper focus.

Weinberger is correct that our shared future-is-now reality is one in which, thanks to Facebook, Twitter, texting, smart phones, etc., all of us experience a fame that expands as far as each of us can reach into the digital firmament; for many of us that reach extends only as far as the 15 people that we haven’t annoyed so much with our status updates that they have blocked us, while a select few can manipulate the digital realm like Neo bending the Matrix to his will. And just as “Neo” is an anagram of One, as in The One, these celebrities are the Chosen Ones of the Information Age. Just this week I experienced a rush of frisson as I learned that 66 people had viewed my blog in one day, a reaction that brings to mind the old Kissinger line that academic politics are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so small; we will defend our fame to the death precisely because it is so small. It is left to the Clooneys of the world to decamp to Italy, out of reach of the Hollywood paparazzi (although with Italy’s bootprint already shrinking on Earth 2.0, it appears that the Chosen Ones will have an easier time giving the slip to the hoi polloi than to climate change).

But what Weinberger’s unedited update leaves out is the way that all those of us who have been transformed from the great unwashed into minor celebrities/deities (which includes everyone except the Chosen Ones, who were already major deities, and possibly the remaining tribes of the Amazon who have thus far escaped contact with outside civilization, although they are actually already famous precisely because we haven’t met them; I saw an internet headline about efforts to make contact with the last batch of them last week, as if they were collectively the last kid from kindergarten we hadn’t yet friended on Facebook) approach our fame like the aforementioned academics competing for the security of tenure. To expand on Kissinger, the academic’s career must make up in duration (eternal, at least until a cushy retirement) what it lacks in importance (when, per Kissinger, what is often important to academics is e.g. one’s success or failure in isolating and thereby marginalizing the lone department colleague who remains a holdout against one’s theory of everything). Just so, our fame must be everlasting, an immortality that must be re-established by the number of comments on each of our status updates (I got 3 on my last one, only one of which was my Mom! ), to compensate for what it lacks in what I can think of no better word for than penetration (making minor fame, with apologies for phallocentrism, no different than that signature malady of the human condition, sexual frustration).

Which is why I am already nervous about what I am going to think of next for posting on this blog and linking to on Facebook (and why I am furiously churning out a novel, that’s right I said novel- and its gonna be one of those really long ones that make a big thump noise when you drop them down on the table to announce to the world that you’re here to fuck some shit up, to follow-up on my fantastic self-published memoir, which it so happens there is a link to right on this blog that you should absolutely click on!). Unless I get exponentially more than 66 hits on this post, in which case I will be decamping, if not to Italy, at least to some fine dining in Little Italy, if I can figure out how to “monetize” my blog, which is an actual option on Blogspot.com. But so is buying lottery tickets, which, in offering the chance for money but not fame, feels like a subversive act in this world Warhol couldn’t quite imagine.

Just Wait Until Your Mother Gets Home

In my memoir 2+1=Big I briefly touch upon the difference between my father’s role as disciplinarian and how my own children perceive me:
“My mother was a guru of parental stock phrases. Push her too far and you got either the aforementioned ‘end of my rope,’ or if you had pushed just a little farther, ‘I’ll put you over my knee.’ I can’t recall ever actually being put over her knee, so the mere threat of a spanking must have carried significant weight. Mom was also known to warn me that she would have to ‘tell your father when he gets home.’ The difference between 2011 and 1978 is that a) Jen would never even think to say this to our kids, and b) if she did my children would probably laugh at her.”

What I’ve come to realize since writing this passage is that not only does Jen abstain from ever warning our kids that she will “tell your father when he gets home,” but that I am constantly saying, in so many words, “just wait until your mother gets home.” I may do a lot of ineffective yelling (I’m working on that), but Jen is the heavy. I can (in my very worst moments) make the girls cry, whereas Jen can make them do what she says. And since making my daughters cry makes me feel like a parenting failure, we get various versions of “just wait until your mother gets home.”

There are two main strands in the explanation of how Jen came to be the heavy at chez Gaither. The first, alluded to in the passage quoted above, is the reinvention of marriage, and the roles played by husband and wife, in the last thirty-five years. When I was a child our dining room table had four chairs, only one of which had arms. The seat with arms was placed at the head of the table, and it was always occupied by my father at dinner. At my dining room table now, all of the chairs are exactly alike, and I am as likely to sit on the side, with my wife or one of my daughters at the putative head, as vice versa. I may happen to drive the family van more often when we are all squeezed in together, but Jen gets to sleep on the king –sized bed (with the baby) while I am relegated to the mattress on the floor. There is a dearth of signals that Daddy is the Head of Household.

In the absence of these signals, the second strand, the matriarchal nature of Jewish life, asserts itself. One of the children’s books in our house, Once Upon A Shabbos by Jacqueline Jules, is the story of a bear from a storybook losing its way and finding itself in Brooklyn. The bear terrorizes the grandchildren who go to the corner store to fetch some honey for their Bubbe. Bubbe then sends her husband, the children’s Zayde, to the store, only to see him return minus the honey that was taken from him by the bear. So Bubbe goes to the store herself, and when the bear attempts to terrorize her and take her honey too, “she put her hands on her hips, looked that bear straight in the eye, and said ‘Bears don’t live in Brooklyn.’” Needless to say, soon it is the bear who is the one crying about being lost and being comforted by the tough but caring Bubbe.

If I had been that Zayde, and the bear had cornered me for my honey, I would have said “just wait until Bubbe gets home.”

2+1=Big, Excerpt #1

Returning home from the hospital with a new baby, for these veteran parents at least, was like returning to the bridge and resuming command after being unjustly bucked down to private by the cogs in the medical industrial complex who had no idea that they were in the presence of decorated war heroes (brimming confidence is just as crucial to effective parenting as it is to every other avenue in life; plus Jen tells me I need to cut the false modesty crap). The proper order of things had now been restored at the Gaither household where, to steal a line from Woody Allen, I’m the boss and Jen is the decision-maker.

Samara, in her infinite wisdom, had arranged for the return home to occur in stages, as she had come down with a fever just as Yael prepared to enter the domestic scene. So when Jen and I came home with Yael it was just the three of us as Jessie Pearl and Samara split time between Bubbie and Grampy’s and Pop-Pop and Grandma’s, to prevent Yael from encountering any feverish germs. Our double-team, man-to-man defense was, however briefly, still intact.

This respite allowed me to focus on another seismic lifestyle shift, my return to the marriage bed. As practitioners of attachment parenting, from day one of the Jessie Pearl era forward, our marriage bed had transformed into the family bed, the site for one of the pillars of attachment parenting, co-sleeping. In theory, mommy, daddy, and baby snuggle up nightly for a long winter’s nap. But I soon learned that the term “sleeping” is used rather loosely next to the “co-.” And so I decamped for the guest bedroom, which began a series of fluid sleeping arrangements that included, sequentially, each of the following:
• Jen and Jessie Pearl in the king-size bed in Room A, me on a double bed in Room B.
• Jen, Samara, and Jessie Pearl on the king in Room A, me on the double in Room B.
• Jen and Samara on the king in Room A, me and Jessie Pearl on the double in room B.
• Jen and Samara on the king in Room A, me on the double in Room B, Jessie Pearl on a twin in Room C for half the night, until the moment when she would yell “Snuggle!” and then spend the rest of the night with me on the double in Room B.
• Then, after a disruptive move of house, back to Jen and Samara on the king in Room A, and Jessie Pearl and me on the double in Room B.
• Finally, in our last pre-Yael arrangement, Jessie Pearl moved back in with Jen and Samara on the king in Room A, and I was left to my own devices on the double in Room B.

Notice that Jen and I never shared a bed in any of the sleeping varietals. When I described these sleeping arrangements at work there were those who stated that they were surprised Yael had even been conceived. Yael’s presence in Jen’s womb being self-evident, I did not feel the need to describe to the audience the Sexual Support Network, i.e. babysitting, provided by Bubbie and Grampy on Sunday mornings. I had also received encouragement to have sex with Jen to bring on labor when Jen was so uncomfortably full term, at which point I declined to elaborate on the No Vacancy sign. Work Friends don’t get to know my sexual schedule, lest I feel the need to tell them how often I’ve been pleasuring myself since Yael put the kibosh on my weekly marital Mitzvah, which, of course, is supposed to take place on Shabbos, but since we are an interfaith couple our Sunday rolls in the hay are part of our effort to keep the spirit, if not the letter, of the law. This approach to religious observation is sometimes given to a bit of laxity, as reflected by Jessie Pearl’s comment that there is no Shabbos in the summer.