‘Auld Lang Syne’ prompts looks backward and forward

Revelers around the world will soon bid farewell to 2019 and welcome to 2020 with raised glasses and “Auld Lang Syne.”

The words to the song are attributed to Scottish poet Robert Burns, but he claimed to have transcribed them from an elderly man in 1788. Some scholars believe the song’s title, at least, dates to the 16th century.

“Auld Lang Syne” means “old long since.” In modern English, “days gone by.” In uber-modern parlance, “back in the day.”

However it’s translated, the sentiment is appropriate for New Year’s celebrations, as society takes a cue from the Roman god Janus, he of the two heads, one looking to the past and one to the future.

The older people are, the more rose-colored their glasses for “auld acquaintance” and a mythical past when things were allegedly simpler. This pining can be sweet and benign, yet it is also the belief that lies at the rotting heart of the modern white nationalism movement, or whatever vile euphemism it lurks under these days.

Similarly, older people are less optimistic for tomorrow because rapid change threatens to erase outmoded ways of thinking and living, no matter how ingrained into tradition they may be.

But pessimism infects our youth, too, and often for the same reasons. Some wonder — at New Year’s and other times — what kind of world they will inherit and how they will make ends meet as technology obliterates entire careers, sometimes through nothing more than a few lines of code and the push of a button.

Such fears and anxieties are natural byproducts of the age we live in, when the “cup of kindness” from “Auld Lang Syne” may be in short supply.

The speculation over past and future appears more forcefully elsewhere in Robert Burns’ verse, in “To a Mouse,” subtitled “On Turning her up in her Nest, with the Plough, November 1785.”

The poem’s speaker addresses the rodent of the title, apologizing for the accidental destruction of its home. The mouse had hoped to ride out winter, “cozie here, beneath the blast,” until fate — and the farmer — intervened. The accident prompts a sincere apology from the speaker:

I’m truly sorry Man’s dominion

Has broken Nature’s social union,

An’ justifies that ill opinion,

Which makes thee startle,

At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,

An’ fellow-mortal.

Later in the poem, the speaker laments that “the best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men” often go astray, thus inspiring the title of John Steinbeck’s classic novel a few centuries later and reminding those of us thinking New Year’s thoughts how fragile the future can be.

Burns’ speaker actually envies the mouse, despite the loss of shelter, because “the present only” affects her, while he is cursed to “backward cast” his eye “On prospects drear” and look ahead to a future about which he can only “guess an’ fear.”

Despite this comforting absence of introspection and worry on the mouse’s part, I doubt many readers would want to trade places, to live only in the here and now with no recollection of the past, good and bad, and no thought toward the future. I’m reminded too of Dickens’ Scrooge, also timely at this time of year, who learns through an encounter with a plow of his own — in his case, the spirits of Christmas — to “live in the past, the present, and the future” (and to celebrate the holiday in a way that capitalists the world over would approve).

The truth is that in life, sometimes we are the mouse, out of doors, scrambling, lost, and sometimes we are the farmer, pushing the plow and inadvertently hurting others with our deeds and words.

When we are the former, let us hope that our trials and tribulations are brief. When we are the latter, let us strive to be kind-hearted and understanding, willing to fix what we have done wrong and recognizing our shared bond with those who struggle while we have so much. And let’s keep the memory of both states of being.

It’s a sentiment worth toasting in the New Year, with or without the maudlin refrain of “Auld Lang Syne.”

chris.schillig@yahoo.com

@cshillig on Twitter

It's time for a Lifetime Christmas superhero

Christmas movies on Lifetime have borrowed a trick from Marvel.

In many films on the network this season, characters are delayed by Winter Storm Megan (or Meghan), leading to speculation that they all take place in a Lifetime Cinematic Universe, similar to how all Marvel movies take place in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

So with a connection, however tenuous, between Lifetime and Marvel, how long before an enterprising producer pitches a Lifetime Christmas superhero movie?

It’s not such a stretch, really. Christmas has always had a connection with the supernatural, going all the way back to the original Bible story. After all, what is the Nativity if not an origin story for Jesus, a man who later walks on water and spontaneously resurrects?

In “A Christmas Carol,” Charles Dickens gives readers ghosts and time travel among all the Victorian trappings of the holiday.

And Santa Claus, the jolly old elf himself, must have abilities far beyond those of ordinary mortals to manufacture all those toys and then transport and deliver them in one night. To say nothing of the laws of physics he violates with a sleigh propelled by flying reindeer.

So a Christmas superhero is a natural.

I’m thinking Yule Man, dressed all in green with a red cape, the Mastercard logo emblazoned across his chest. His powers include zooming from store to store, clearing snow-filled parking lots and helping elderly customers carry bags to their cars.

Rocketed to Earth as an infant from the doomed planet Tinsel, he was raised by kindly Dollar General managers to use his great powers to support American capitalism and shoddily-made foreign imports.

His x-ray vision can tell shoppers when a doorbuster is truly sold out or when there are more ferreted away in the stockroom. And his super hearing can detect the true identity of every Secret Santa.

Or maybe XMas-Men, a team of mutants born with enhanced shopping genes, who can conspicuously consume from 12:01 a.m. on Black Friday right through Boxing Day on Dec. 26. Shunned by most of humanity, they nonetheless are responsible for almost single handedly driving up the GNP and moving retailers out of the red and into the black.

Of course, what are superheroes without villains?

The Porch Pirates don’t even have to be invented, and they already have an alliterative name and a hissable modus operandi.

A battle between Yule Man and the Porch Pirates could be pretty epic, raging above residential neighborhoods before moving into more urban areas, where the two sides could punch each other into buildings and buses, all while shouting lines like, “You’ll never get this box of shrink-wrapped fruitcakes, Yule Man!” Eventually, Yule Man must say, “Delivery complete!” as he knocks out the last pirate.

One problem is that Lifetime Christmas movies have notoriously low budgets, so typical superhero shenanigans aren’t feasible. Plus, any storyline in the movies, from magic shoes to saving a cultural landmark, must take a backseat to a budding romance between the two leads.

So our hypothetical superhero movie must involve an enterprising female reporter seeking to solve the mystery of the town’s new hero, who is performing random acts of kindness. She is competing for this scoop against a rival male reporter who looks like the stud on the cover of every GQ.

The stud is eventually revealed as Yule Man, who along the way falls in love with the heroine and yadda yadda yadda, Winter Storm Megan, yadda yadda yadda, true love always.

I already have a title: “Christmas Cape-ers.” Get it?

It seems like a winner. In the true spirit of Christmas, does anybody have a couple of million they’d like to invest?

chris.schillig@yahoo.com

@cschillig on Twitter

If it seems too improbable to be true, don’t believe it

It was an eyebrow-raising headline even for Facebook, which has no shortage of them.

“NAACP Officially Endorses Trump for 2020 Election,” it read. The person who shared it had copied and pasted part of the story into the body of the post, a rambling quote attributed to an NAACP spokesperson. It talked about members being fooled into believing that “Trump will put you in chains,′ but eventually realizing the president “is a true friend of the black community.”

Having read just days before an official press release from the NAACP that applauded Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s decision to proceed with articles of impeachment against Trump, I smelled something fishy.

It didn’t take long to find out what. All I had to do was click on the link.

The story is the product of a website that offers “satire for Flat Earthers, Trumpsters and Y’all Qaeda” and is stored in a folder labeled “Conservative Fan Fiction.” The NAACP mentioned in the story is the Norman Association for the Advancement of Coloring People, and the president is identified as one Donald Juniper Trump.

A few observations:

For one, I mourn the state of satire, a noble literary genre that has fallen on hard times from the heights of practitioners like Jonathan Swift and his “Modest Proposal,” or even Mad magazine, for heaven’s sake.

I’m not even certain what was being satirized here. The supposed naivete of some minorities who believe Trump actually cares about them? The NAACP for speaking out against Trump? The GOP for standing by their man in a way that puts Loretta Lynn to shame? Democrats for seeking impeachment so close to an election year?

I don’t know, and I’m not sure the author does either. The piece commits a cardinal sin of satire because it does not enlighten readers in any way, does not hold any one person or group up to ridicule, and isn’t funny.

I suspect “satire” is a cover the website uses in an attempt to legitimize what is nothing more than a propaganda machine. Readers aren’t meant to go beyond the headline, but rather just forward it, like some maniacal chain letter on steroids.

So a bigger concern is how a piece like this can quickly be weaponized by people who don’t read carefully or who support a cause at the expense of objective truth.

This is a problem across all social media, but nowhere more than on Facebook, where the policy regarding political ads is to have no policy, to let content flow freely to 2 billion worldwide users (although the site may begin flagging political content as not fact-checked, which is at least a start).

At no time in history has it been more important for readers to be discerning consumers of information than in an era when every basement-dwelling, chain-smoking conspiracy theorist has access to worldwide publishing at the touch of a button — and when more than a few of these people have started companies with no goal other than to obfuscate the truth and stump on behalf of a particular person or cause, no matter how spurious or injurious to the nation.

Despite all President Trump’s grousing about supposedly left-leaning news organizations, the truth is that any bias demonstrated by these media giants is minuscule compared to the slant offered by far-right-leaning — and, to be fair, fair-left-leaning — organizations that spin more stories than a washing machine spins clothes.

(Of course, if there is an actual hell, then a special circle is reserved for Fox News, where an uber-pernicious slant coupled with a huge budget and a sheen of respectability has done more to divide this country than any other single entity, Trump included.)

To the credit of my Facebook friend, he removed the faux-NAACP post shortly after I alerted him to its questionable nature. But that was only after it had been shared by several other Facebook users.

An old saying in the news industry is that the correction never catches up to the mistake. It’s never been more true, especially in situations where the mistake is intentional and malicious.

chris.schillig@yahoo.com

@cschillig on Twitter

Excessive exclamations of enthusiasm ... whatever

Squint really hard and you will see a white flag fluttering over this column.

After a long and valiant battle, I am surrendering in my war against exclamation points. Longtime readers may recall that I’ve fought against their overuse for years, at least since 2012, when I wrote about how I allotted only two per semester, per student, in all written communication.

“Use them wisely,” I intoned, “because once they’re gone, they’re gone.”

I was fighting a losing battle even then against the forces of excessive enthusiasm. “I have to go home and shovel snow!” is not worthy of an exclamation point, even when people love winter.

Ditto “I hate broccoli!,” which looks silly with an exclamation point after the lowercase “i,” like a gremlin in the keyboard flipped the letter upside down and typed it again, although the enthusiasm would also be misplaced if the exclamation point followed “carrot” or “cabbage.” Some preferences don’t merit excitement, no matter how heartfelt.

Since I wrote that column, I have received countless emails — okay, six — where the writer starts by saying, “Please excuse me, but ...” or some variation, followed by information that ends with an exclamation point. Some of that news has been genuinely exciting, such as a child accepted to a prestigious school, and merited exclamation points. Other news, not so much. But who am I to judge?

My allocation of exclamation points has always been persnickety, anyway. Some semesters, in a rush of generosity, I dole out four or five. The point was to make them special so that they didn’t end up littering the compositional highway like so many McDonald’s wrappers.

What I failed to reckon with is the continual adaptation of language to new ways of communicating. Take, for instance, text messages.

Audiences understand punctuation differently in these situations than in more formal types of writing. A period at the end of a text can come across as cold and rude. (One study a few years back found that texts ending in a period were deemed “insincere.”)

Texts ending without a period apparently leave the door open for additional communication. Even a one-word text like “No” can be perceived differently with or without a period. Students tell me they are less likely to continue a texting conversation with somebody whose responses end in periods because that signals the person no longer wants to engage.

Exclamation points are a way of showing excitement is situations where the writer’s intent is hard to determine. They are, in effect, the precursors of emojis, which do the same. Exclamation points began as the Latin “io,” which means “exclamation of joy.” In a space-saving move, the “o” became a period and slid beneath the “i.” (The same consolidation occurred when “questio,” or “question,” was shortened to “qo” and then to today’s question mark.)

So if I’m so worried readers will miss my irony, cynicism, eye-rolling or whatever when I write “Way to go, Insert Imbecilic Politician Here” on Twitter that I add the appropriate emoji, then why am I so uptight about the exclamation point?

I guess I shouldn’t be. So I’m not anymore.

Don’t get me wrong. Exclamation points still don’t belong in formal writing, look ridiculous in newspapers, magazines and presidential tweets, and have no business in novels or short stories unless they are part of dialogue, and even then only sparingly.

Make the words do the emotional heavy-lifting, not the punctuation.

But in less formal communication, let the exclamation points take flight as often as writers like, provided they take into account the effect so much unbridled joy will have on more sober-minded audiences.

In the saccharin-sweet world of writing, I’m still a diabetic. But for those who aren’t, you have my blessing to rain down exclamation points with abandon. Not that you needed my approval — and not that you asked for it.

Here’s the place where, if I were pandering, I would say something clever and end with an exclamation point. But I’m not, so I won’t.

chris.schillig@yahoo.com

@cschillig on Twitter

Abortion foes tip their hand

One reason that authors of dystopian fiction pen such stories is because they hope these dark futures will not come to pass.

Lately, though, dystopian novels are more like Nostradamus-level predictions, and no author’s work more so than Margaret Atwood.

Atwood’s “Handmaid’s Tale” posited a bleak world where a theocratic government suppressed women’s rights and, among other nefarious activities, put abortion providers to death. Regardless of how far-fetched this scenario may have been in 1985, here we are in 2019, facing Ohio’s latest attempt to circumvent Roe v. Wade with a bill that would ban all abortions in Ohio and levy murder charges against doctors who perform them.

USA Today notes the bill has not been formally introduced, although it does have the support of 21 Republicans in the state House. The proposed legislation would likely trigger a lawsuit if passed.

It’s been a clear strategy of abortion foes to introduce more and more audacious and draconian measures in the hopes of gnawing their way to the Supreme Court, where await justices who may be more kindly disposed toward nixing Roe v. Wade than any in a generation.

Ohio Right to Life organizers feel the best chance of curtailing women’s rights — although they don’t couch it in quite that same language — will come from legal challenges to various “heartbeat bills” like the one Gov. Mike DeWine signed into law in April. Last week’s more brazen attempt is the product of an extreme faction of abortion foes, one who will stop at nothing to stop a practice it believes is tantamount to murder.

Of course, these agitators apparently see no disparity between their beliefs about the sanctity of fetal life vs. the possible execution of medical professionals involved in providing access to a procedure that has been legal in this country for 46 years.

For too many conservatives, and especially those at the far right of the continuum, concern about life begins and ends at the womb. Once fetuses are born and become actual, honest-to-goodness children, they — and their parents — must fend for themselves in a world where many of the same people that fought for their right to live now seek to deny them adequate healthcare, equal educational opportunities and living wages.

They can drink polluted water and breathe filthy air, courtesy of repealed environmental laws. They can grow up poor, be swept away by the school-to-prison pipeline, and find their right to vote suppressed. They can be discriminated against because of the people they choose to love, denied rehabilitative services for any addictions, and find their options for food curtailed by a government that doesn’t believe they are working hard enough.

And all this is fine, as long as they had an inviolable right to come out of the womb after nine months. Think of it as pulling themselves up by their bootstraps before they even have bootstraps.

With so many other problems to deal with, it is telling that conservatives so often return to the abortion issue. If they would work as diligently and fervently to address life’s other inequalities, especially economic, they might find that the demand for abortions will drop precipitously, without the need for further laws.

But that’s not really the point, is it?

No, the point for too many of abortion’s foes has more to do with addressing what they perceive as society’s (re: women’s) failure to adhere to so-called Christian morality. For their temerity to have sex outside of marriage and for their insistence that they have autonomy over their own bodies, they must be punished by carrying fetuses to term, and we aren’t too concerned with what happens to them after that.

What we need are more people who are both pro-choice and anti-abortion. Create a culture where people of all income levels and colors are loved and protected from birth to death, where all women have free and unfettered access to all forms of birth control so they can decide when the time is right to have a child, and where doctors and patients have the privacy and autonomy to discuss sensitive medical issues without interference by mostly old, mostly white politicians — and where, it should go without saying (but can’t because of insanity), medical providers don’t have to fear for their lives when they provide options.

When we do that, we take a huge step away from dystopia and toward something sane, sustainable and life affirming.

chris.schillig@yahoo.com

@cschillig on Twitter

Going full-foodie for the holidays

Welcome to Day One of The Holifats, Chubbymas, or the YuleThigh season.

For somebody like me, with little to no self-control, the next few weeks will be a wonderful yet miserable orgy of consumption. Christmas cookies, pies, chocolates, pies, stuffing, pies and more pies will call out to me with their sweet, seductive voices, and like a sailor to the sirens, I will be helpless to ignore them.

Last year, I gained almost 15 pounds between Thanksgiving and New Year’s. This year, I won’t gain that much, but only because there is one fewer week between the Scylla and Charybdis of the holiday season. (Bonus points for two mythological references in two successive paragraphs.)

I’m writing this the weekend before Thanksgiving, and the Great Holiday Weight Gain has already begun.

My wife is busy making some delightful Thanksgiving pudding desserts, mixing pumpkin, Cool Whip and Oreo crumbs into plastic cups. Because I’m utterly inept in the kitchen, my job is to wash the dishes that accrue like weeds in the sink between batches.

This is where my dilemma begins.

I’m a batter licker and raw-dough-aholic. If it’s stuck to a spoon or a spatula, it goes directly into my mouth. Do not pass Go, do not collect Salmonella — at least not yet.

So while I’m washing my way through this Mount Everest of dishes, I’m licking utensils like a dog licks its ... uh, paws, gaining more calories with each swipe of the tongue than I burn off with all that scrubbing and sanitizing.

Last year, my wife went full Betty Crocker and whipped up about 100 batches of cookies. I might be exaggerating that number, but not by much.

The initial goal was to give them all away to family and friends. But these wonderful holiday packages, sealed so nicely in Saran Wrap, seldom reached their intended targets. Instead, I gobbled them up for breakfast, devoured them as full-meal snacks after work, and made them the centerpiece of double and triple desserts after dinner.

One sweet, delicious cookie at a time, except for the times when I double-fisted. So many cookies that they made my stomach hurt and then swell from all those excess calories.

By the start of 2019, my pants no longer fit. My belt broke. My shirts were riding up on the curve of my expanding belly.

And it was all because of Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s. Well, it was all because of my lack of willpower and dearth of good sense.

The only good outcome was that I started exercising in earnest in January and lost all that excess weight, along with a few extra pounds I’d accumulated over the last few years. And I guess I can do it again if I have to.

But here’s a fun fact: To burn off one pound, a person has to burn about 3,500 more calories than they take in during a week. Running, my exercise of choice, burns about 550 calories an hour when the runner keeps a 6 mph pace, something I never do.

I’m closer to about 500 calories per hour, which means that if I allow free rein to my inner Gastrointestinal Grinch again this year, I will have to run the equivalent of 105 hours just to burn off my Yuletide indiscretions, provided that I’m able to return to semi-sane eating habits once the last ornament has been tucked away and the final carols sung.

Of course, all I really have to do is avoid sweets, which sounds so easy until I realize that in the 20 minutes I’ve been typing these words I have licked two chocolate-covered spatulas.

All I can say is that it’s going to be a long, hot 2020. I hope Santa leaves me a new pair of running shoes under the tree.

But he might not, because chances are good I will eat the cookies we leave for him.

chris.schillig@yahoo.com


@cschillig on Twitter

Capes and criticism hound prestigious filmmaker

Martin Scorsese finds himself in the crosshairs of cape fans.

The famed director caught hell from some superhero aficionados recently for his opinion that Marvel movies — epics about Captain America, Thor, the Avengers, and the like — are not “cinema.” He clarified those comments in a Nov. 4 op-ed for The New York Times in which he said that, while he recognized Marvel movies are skillfully made by talented people, they are ultimately little more than product.

“What’s not there is revelation, mystery or genuine emotional danger,” Scorsese writes. “Nothing is at risk. The pictures are made to satisfy a specific set of demands, and they are designed as variations on a finite number of themes.”

He also likened Marvel movies to theme parks, presumably because audiences get the same programmed thrills while watching them that they get from a good roller coaster — some predetermined highs and lows, a few screams, but ultimately a safe return to the ground.

Nothing in Scorsese’s comments indicates he is dismissive of Marvel movies, just that they aren’t for him, that they are indicative of a larger trend in movies and culture in general where singular efforts by auteurs increasingly take a backseat to entertainment by committee, where the goal is less about an original experience than about selling audiences more stuff at a later time.

Part of the problem, too, is that Hollywood, book publishers, the video game industry and television networks prefer serial fiction, where characters are chess pieces and where the board is eventually reset for the next match.

Spider-Man must always be angsty and tormented in his personal life, no matter how many triumphs he experiences when he puts on his costume. Superman must always fight for truth, justice and the American way. The Shadow has to know.

This is hardly new. Sherlock Holmes, whose first adventure was published in 1887, must always emerge triumphant and ready to solve the next crime or else forfeit being Sherlock Holmes. In which case, the stories stop, and the money to be made from new stories stops, as well.

This is a truth that Holmes creator Arthur Conan Doyle learned all too well when he killed the character in an attempt to transition to other types of writing. Reader response was so critically vocal that Doyle relented and brought the great detective back from the dead — and the cash cow continues to give milk today.

Sure, writers can upend the status quo and stretch the premise a little. Captain America might stop being a superhero for a year or two, Superman might reveal his secret identity to the world (something he is scheduled to do this month in the comics), and Iron Man might go broke.

But changes in serial fiction are, by and large, more about the illusion of change than about real change. Which is why secondary characters in various Marvel movies are often more interesting than the heroes themselves. These B-level characters can really evolve. They can take surprising action. They can die and stay dead.

The real heroes cannot, because if they do, they can’t be back in their appointed places a month or a year from now, ready to entertain in the next big saga — and to sell more toys, games, breakfast cereals and Happy Meals.

As a longstanding superhero fan, I accept these limitations as part and parcel of the experience, but it does affect my emotional investment in whatever big epic is currently conquering the box office. Iron Man’s death in the latest Avengers’ movie is emotional, sure, but I’ve seen him die, and come back, before, so I know that even if Robert Downey Jr.’s contract is up, somebody will eventually be Iron Man again.

And, as a result, while I enjoy the heck out of Marvel and DC movies, not a single one of them has ever cracked my top ten list of favorite films and probably never will, because nothing in them is ever permanent, and the only event that will ever truly kill these heroes is audience indifference.

Ultimately, low readership and poor box office receipts are a much bigger nemesis to superheroes than Martin Scorsese will ever be.

chris.schillig@yahoo.com

@cschillig on Twitter