What would parallel Trump do?

It didn’t have to be this way.

Instead of exiting under a tsunami of violence and a flurry of lies, Donald Trump could have left office with a semblance of dignity.

In some alternate reality, maybe he did.

In a parallel universe, vibrating at a frequency just different enough to be invisible to us, President Trump quickly exhausted any legal remedies for contesting November’s election, as was his right. But once it became obvious no evidence of widespread fraud existed, he conceded with grace, commended his followers for damming a blue wave down the ballot, and maybe promised to return in four years.

He instructed his people to smooth the way for a new administration. Subsequently, he turned his full attention to the virus ravaging our nation and world.

This other Trump went to the American people and, with an eye roll, noted how guidance in the early days of the pandemic was contradictory and confusing. There was so much we didn’t know. However, he said masks — as imperfect as they are — are now endorsed by the vast majority of epidemiologists and other medical professionals to decrease viral transmission.

He then urged Americans to stop politicizing the practice and to embrace it for the duration. He put on a mask himself whenever he was in public.

Then, this counter-Trump in a different universe worked with Congress to come up with a second stimulus plan to address the economic peril of so many Americans. He instructed his people to collaborate with states to ensure the incredible gift of Operation Warp Speed — a vaccine far faster than many pundits predicted — would just as quickly find its way into the arms of Americans.

This parallel Trump is not so different from our own president in temperament. He still picks fights with the media. He still crows about his accomplishments — hundreds of judicial appointments across all levels, including three Supreme Court justices whose conservative leanings will impact the court for decades; the aforementioned Operation Warp Speed; and a resurgence of conservatism in America.

(Hey, just because many people don’t agree with these accomplishments — or that Trump has a right to take credit for some or all — doesn’t make them less valid.)

Yeah, people like the alternate-reality me would still criticize him, calling any about-face an example of too little, too late, especially when we look at the staggering loss of life under this president, much of it preventable if he had listened more to science and less to sycophants.

But at least it would have been something, a soothing coda to a four-year symphony of discord.

Instead, in this reality, President Trump has been obsessed with overturning the will of the people, amplifying conspiracy theories, pondering military intervention in the election, making the infamous phone call to Georgia’s secretary of state, and helping to thwart his own party’s chance to retain control of the Senate.

And, of course, needling his followers on Wednesday to march on the Capitol.

Subsequently, these deluded acolytes invaded the building, disrupted a completely ceremonial proceeding, forced legislators into hiding, and sacrificed their own, all of it initiated by Trump himself.

It’s hard to point to a definitive nadir of Trump’s presidency, as the man keeps finding creative ways to set the bar lower, but Wednesday has to be it.

In the end, this reality’s Trump has been revealed as the malignant narcissist so many of us feared, a petty grifter Mitch McConnell and many other Republicans hoped to control as a useful fool, but who came far closer to destroying democracy than anybody ever dreamed.

Trump may soon be gone, and if there were any justice in the system, his removal would come from a second impeachment and a final walk of shame following a conviction in the Senate.

Regardless, his fetid legacy will live on in the distrust of democracy he leaves behind, the undeserved pall of illegitimacy he casts on his successor, and the pain and suffering he did nothing to alleviate.

This is our reality, more’s the pity.

chris.schillig@yahoo.com

@cschillig on Twitter

Celebrate diversity through 'disruption'

The Wall Street Journal’s children’s books columnist went on a tear last month.

Meghan Cox Gurdon wrote a piece excoriating Disrupt Texts, an online movement by teachers to introduce more diversity into reading curriculums. Gurdon described a situation where educators are gleefully shredding traditional reading lists, replacing classic authors with contemporary ones with alleged axes to grind about issues like sexism and racism.

The reality is far different, however.

Disrupt Texts is merely the latest in a long series of conversations about what should or should not be considered “canon” in schools. Hang around English educators for any length of time and you’re likely to hear them decry the “dead white guys” (and a select few dead white gals) whose work is often elevated to Olympian — or at least Mount Rushmore-ian — heights.

You can practically rattle off these writers’ names in your sleep: Homer, Shakespeare, Poe, Hawthorne, Twain, Whitman, Emerson, Thoreau, Steinbeck, Hemingway and maybe Harper Lee, if only because “To Kill a Mockingbird” is a sentimental favorite of many teachers and parents, probably because it was read at a formative time in their lives.

A big question about canonical creators in any undertaking — literature, music, interpretive macramé — is, “Who sez?” In other words, who decides these particular movers and shakers are representative? In the case of literature, at least, the answer has traditionally been other now-dead white guys, who selected from among works they knew, based on a culture that for centuries has foregrounded white males.

This being the case, movements like Disrupt Texts, which promote BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color) voices, are welcome. Not to displace the “canon,” but to broaden it, to help ensure the reading lists children and young adults encounter mirror the diversity of people and perspectives they see in the world around them.

Of course, traditional authors can still be used to introduce modern social issues. Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” remains a poignant examination of racism, and Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter” is practically a case study in holier-than-thou hypocrisy.

But shouldn’t the curriculum be flexible enough to include both Homer and something like Tomi Adeyemi’s “Children of Blood and Bone,” which incorporates West African mythology? Or Edgar Allan Poe’s plague-ridden “Masque of the Red Death” and Ling Ma’s “Severance,” which apparently plays with the same tropes? (Both modern authors are on my growing to-read list.)

I’m not saying either Adeyemi or Ma will still be read in fifty or one hundred years (nor am I saying they won’t), which is part of the traditionalist argument for a canon, that it provides a sturdy bedrock of shared literary experiences. Well, this and the more insidious goal of some conservatives to preserve a European-American-centric monopoly on literature. But when I think back to some of the books I read in school, I recall a blend of contemporary and classic, the former used as bait to get us to read the latter.

Which is not to insinuate the role of BIPOC authors is to lure children back to Shakespeare. Reading these contemporary authors is a laudable end in itself and likely will do more to create lifelong readers than any well-intentioned but misguided attempts to keep shoving “To Kill a Mockingbird” down students’ throats.

And while I find the Disrupt Texts website to be a little too chummy with Penguin Random House, which collaborated with the movement to produce reading guides for — surprise! — the publisher’s YA titles, I can’t fault the intent of the founders.

What Disrupt Texts seeks to do, it appears to me, is not to ban older works, but to make the curriculum more responsive to today’s readers. It also attempts to make older educators, like me, aware of the explosion in contemporary voices, the multiplicity of titles available and the need to examine critically our own attitudes and beliefs about certain social issues.

All of which sounds like something the WSJ’s children’s books columnist would want to celebrate, not criticize.

chris.schillig@yahoo.com

@cschillig on Twitter

It's time to say good riddance, 2020

If we can look on the bright side, 2020 brought and taught us many new words.

Just one year ago, covidiots didn’t exist. We had never experienced a blursday or drunk a quarantini, and superspreader had an entirely different connotation. Back in 2019, many of us may have been doomscrolling, but who knew it had a name?

Time magazine featured all of these neologisms and more in a Year in Language feature in the Dec.14/28 issue.

In brief, a covidiot is somebody who refuses to wear a mask and social-distance (another new term) during a pandemic. Blursday is confusion over the day of the week because the world has basically been on modified house arrest since March. Or maybe the uncertainty about whether it’s Saturday or Wednesday comes from drinking too many quarantine martinis.

Superspreader refers to events where a bunch of covidiots get together and ignore public-health guidelines, leading to increased coronavirus spread. And doomscrolling is flipping through social media to see what fresh hell has been unleashed today.

This is the year when all fortune tellers should have been put out of business, because nobody peered into our palms in 2019 and prognosticated anything like the past 10 months. It’s also the year when students and teachers received crash courses in hitherto unknown educational models like hybrid schedules and remote learning.

Last December, Zoom was a sound effect in comic books and cartoons, not a platform to host everything from a huge gathering of executives to little Timmy’s 6th birthday party. Among other things, 2020 recontextualized the opening of “The Brady Bunch,” so housekeeper Alice will now always look like the last person to show up for a meeting where nobody else has turned off their cameras, despite everybody knowing how to mute their microphones.

I’ll never think of “Marsha, Marsha, Marsha” in the same way again.

The past year also took personification to new levels. The practice of portraying an incoming year as a baby dates back to ancient times, according to “Panati's Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things,” when new harvest cycles were celebrated with images of infants, a visual shorthand that became wedded to the new year by Germans in the 14th century and traveled with them to the New World.

But I’m hard pressed to think of any other year so often addressed as a living, sentient being. As in, “Oh, 2020, how I despise you!” Or, “That’s just so 2020!,” referring to anything from a windshield crack to the shuttering of the family business. The calendar itself has become the ultimate scapegoat, a living, breathing embodiment of bad luck.

It wouldn’t surprise me if people started burning and burying the year in effigy over the next several days, just to make sure it’s good and gone.

Not to sound like the voice of doom and gloom here, but despite good news on the vaccine front, the first few months of 2021 could very well be touted as “the sequel to 2020 nobody asked for” regarding public health, mortality, the economy and education.

Let’s hope not.

I prefer to look on the positive. In a few more weeks, the tweeting disinformation disseminator in the White House will either leave willingly or be evicted forcibly. We can look forward to a more unified federal and state response to the pandemic, coupled with a straightforward message about vaccine safety.

With luck and hard work, we should be able to resume more if not all of our day-to-day activities by late spring and early summer, with a resultant uptick in the public mood and the economy.

Heck, my threshold for the new year is set so low that just having mail delivered in a timely way again would satisfy me.

Not needing to learn any more new words for a virus-ravaged world? That would be, to quote a credit-card company, priceless.

chris.schillig@yahoo.com

@cschillig on Twitter

Something's fishy about this Christmas tradition

Every family, I'm convinced, no matter how straitlaced and proper, has an oddball holiday tradition.

For my family, it is fish.

Not a Christmas Day meal. Not an expedition where we cut a hole in an icy lake and squat in a shanty, waiting for a nibble on our cane poles.

No, this is a ceramic fish.

It is a cross between Big Mouth Billy Bass and Flounder from Disney's "Little Mermaid," if the latter were drawn by a singularly untalented 4-year-old and bereft of any aesthetic appeal.

Technically, this hideous sculpture is a koi (not the real McKoi), but I'm not one to carp about labels. Whatever it is, it is truly horrific, with bulging eyes and a gaping mouth questing upward, ever upward, in search of some elusive worm. Or possibly human flesh.

The fish travels back and forth between our house and my sister-in-law and her husband's house each year, sometimes wrapped as a gag gift — emphasis on the gag — and sometimes secreted outside, on top of a car, or dangling from a tree.

Legend has it this piscine monstrosity was once the size of a tennis ball, but has been painted so many times over the years it has ballooned to its present size, roughly the dimensions of Rosemary's Baby or some other dark denizen of the netherworld.

One year, the fish was pink and teal. Another, it was yellow and black, a nod to a certain team in Pittsburgh whose name shall not be spoken. Occasionally, it has been adorned with battery-operated lights or pinwheels or pictures of loved ones in compromising positions. (OK, not that compromising — we're not that kind of family.)

Two years ago, my wife and I plastered peace and love stickers across its scaly surface and affixed it with a QR code. The code led to a YouTube video where I imitated Ringo Starr's passive-aggressive message to fans to stop mailing him merchandise to be signed. We shipped the fish special delivery, requiring a signature by the recipient.
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This was where I learned two horrible lessons. First, marking "fragile" 16 times on a box is still no guarantee mailroom gorillas won't play catch with a package. Second, ceramic fish can break.

The fish arrived a few days before Christmas in pieces. (I am tempted to say "in Pisces.") Photos were sent. Services were arranged. The fish, we assumed, would receive a burial at sea. Another custom lost to the vagaries of the USPS.

But it was not to be. By Christmas Day, the fish had been resurrected, shades of Danny DeVito's Penguin, who bragged to Batman that "a lot of tape and a little patience make all the difference."

Not tape, but glue allowed my in-laws to stitch Frankenfish back together and re-gift it, with bolts on each side of its neck. Later that year, they stole it out of our house on Mother's Day and gave it to us again last Christmas. This time, it was green, white and red, wearing a tie.

It has lived a hellish half-life in our basement ever since, awaiting another chance to rise and thwart our revels.

My wife and I are plotting what to do with Mr. Chips this year, aware time is running out, especially if we want to find a way to get it inside our victims', er, family's house without them knowing. Thank goodness they don't read the paper.

Some years, I'll be honest, the fish has been a damn — or is it dam? — nuisance. But this year, when so many other traditions have been postponed or canceled, it has provided a sense of continuity and familiarity, an activity we can complete in isolation and deliver while social distancing.

Provided the backdoor key we have still works.

Shhh. Don't tell. And Happy Haddock Days to you and yours.

Our love of movies 'to be continued ...'

The movie-theater industry has been here before.

In the early 1930s, with the transition from silent films to talkies.

In the 1950s and 1960s, with the meteoric growth of television.

In the 1980s and 1990s, with the ubiquity of video stores and a smaller window between theatrical release and home-video debuts.

In the 2000s, with the growth of in-home theaters.

In the 2010s, with a horrifying mass shooting at a theater in Aurora, Colorado, and the advent of streaming services.

And now, in 2020, with a pandemic and the announcement earlier this month that Warner Bros. would release all its 2021 movies to theaters and HBO Max simultaneously.

In every case, doomsayers poked their heads from behind the curtain to prophesy the end of theatrical films, to predict this or that cultural upheaval would be the one to drive home the final stake, more assuredly than any intrepid vampire hunter in the final reel of a Dracula chiller.

And yet, audiences always returned.

“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” wrote Robert Frost, and he might have been talking about a living room or basement screen, no matter how large, no matter how sophisticated the sound system.

Movies are a communal event, designed to be seen in cavernous, darkened rooms. We should be sitting next to friends or that special someone, but we should also be surrounded by strangers, if only to experience the same thrills, chills, tears and guffaws simultaneously.

Going to the movies reminds us of a shared humanity we just can’t grasp in our individual houses, even when watching an event like a Super Bowl at the same time as other people in their own homes.

Movie theaters are a place where we cannot bend a schedule to our will. We have to arrive at a set time or risk missing out. We must obey certain civilized norms — no loud talking or excessive gum cracking — for the good of the community. We cannot freeze a scene mid-frame to pick it up after a restroom break.

Like life, a movie in a theater keeps coming, whether we want it to or not.
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Yes, watching a film at home brings certain benefits. We can jump to the scene where the heroine wins, skipping her heartbreak in the middle. Or rewind a funny moment and snicker at it again. Or freeze an image to study its intricate composition or gorgeous background.

But these advantages come with drawbacks. Home screens, no matter how large, diminish cinema’s biggest moments. A battle in Middle-earth will never be as epic, a lavish embrace as romantic, a pratfall as embarrassingly funny.

And we lose the uncertainties and reminiscences that come with watching movies at the movies.

A broken projector led a friend and me to make a second trip — with free passes, no less — to see “Congo,” the most memorable moment in an otherwise forgettable 1995 sci-fi thriller. My wife and I still recall any number of visits to Mount Union Theatre, now sadly just a memory itself, sometimes for date nights, more often with our daughter, for the latest Disney animated opus.

However, I can’t recall any of the circumstances surrounding the last movie I screened at home, other than watching it between the inevitable phone calls and snack runs, starting it on Friday night and finishing it on Sunday afternoon.

Sure, right now many of us are scared to worship in those dimly lit cathedrals, munching popcorn and slurping sodas while exposing ourselves to a potentially deadly virus.

But this reticence won’t last. Just as our parents or grandparents returned to the fold despite the dominance of TV (from fewer than one million households with a television in 1949 to 44 million in 1969), just as audiences cautiously crept back after the Aurora shootings, so too will we find our way back to theaters in the next year or two.

Maybe not as often, to be sure. The current pandemic may have accelerated the pace at which movie-going will become a niche business, attracting audiences only for the newest big-budget spectacle begging for an eight-story-tall IMAX screen.

And some theater chains may not survive the lean months ahead, driving audiences into the arms of streaming services more deftly than any announcement from Warner Bros.

But at some point, we will return. Because the industry has been here before, and it’s too early to write “The End” across our love affair with cinema.

chris.schillig@yahoo.com

@cschillig on Twitter

No black oil lurks in coronavirus vaccines

Many Americans must have been scared and scarred by repeated viewing of “The X-Files” 20 years ago.

How else to explain the widespread societal reticence, conspiracy theories and flat-out zaniness surrounding opposition to an imminent coronavirus vaccine?

I’m not talking about normal caution accompanying anything new. That, I get. People want assurances from the medical community, the Food and Drug Administration and independent review boards before they put anything into their bodies or their children’s bodies.

Even during a global pandemic that has sickened and killed millions, this is sensible.

No, I’m talking about far-fringe theories — a concerted plan among the world’s elites to eradicate millions by engineering a pandemic and then offering a fatal solution, or using the occasion of an unplanned pandemic to insert microchips into the body.

These sound like plots ripped directly from “The X-Files,” where, if memory serves, a shadowy cabal introduced alien DNA through the smallpox vaccine. Some weird black oil was involved too. Whatever. I mean, it makes no sense because, well, “X-Files.”

Any real-world plan rotating on the same wobbly axis is just as risible.

First, where’s the proof? Conspiracists point to one badly made “Plandemic” video, a smattering of rogue scientists and so-called medical professionals who appear to enjoy the notoriety that comes from telling some people what they want to believe.

Definitive evidence? Hardly.

Second, would the planet’s elites really want to rub out much of the global population that provides the raw labor necessary for them to continue to lord it over the rank-and-file? Answer: They wouldn’t, even if they could somehow manage to cobble together a conspiracy of this magnitude, which they can’t.

Third, Watergate. A relatively small group of people couldn’t cover up a bungled plan to wiretap the DNC headquarters in Washington, an operation miniscule in comparison to a global culling of the herd via vaccination.

Most of us can’t stay quiet about a surprise party. Imagine how many minions would need to keep mum about international genocide.

Yet the only people who seem to have any knowledge of this massive conspiracy are a few hairdressers posting on Facebook, some semi-regular callers to AM-radio talk shows, and the unemployed guy down the street who runs his own website from a backyard shed.

Fourth, intention. Maybe the plan isn’t to kill us, but to track us. Hence, microchips in our bloodstreams.

There are much easier ways. I surrender more sensitive information on my phone than would ever be gleaned from tracking me through a microchip.

Think of all the third-party apps we opt into, the websites that collect information about our buying habits, the insurance companies we allow to monitor our driving in exchange for reduced premiums.

The sad truth is many of us have an inflated sense of our self-worth. The government has no need to track most of us. They can find us whenever they need to, and they will never need to.

It’s fun and exciting to live in a world where shadowy operatives are arrayed against us, where only Joe from Pougkeepsie knows the real truth, which he is revealing to just a select few. And we’re among the few.

It’s like James Bond minus the suave sophistication and cool cars. Without the buxom models. Sans the shaken, not stirred.

So not really much like Bond.

This imaginary world and the myths surrounding it are intoxicating. Strip it away, and all that remains is the glum reality: Roll up your sleeve, here comes the needle.

Boring, with a high degree of safety and security, but nevertheless wondrous because coronavirus vaccines will save lives.

Ponder all these researchers, toiling in obscurity, not to hide tiny cameras in syringes, but to alleviate suffering and death and allow us to get on with our glorious, messy, non-controversial and non-conspiratorial lives.

Where the only concerning cameras aren’t embedded in our bloodstream, but mounted above our streets, snapping images of speeders to fatten municipal coffers.

If we are so worried about privacy, let’s start there.

chris.schillig@yahoo.com

@cschillig on Twitter

It's a long way to the top if you wanna rock like AC/DC

A TikTok video making the rounds on social media purports to show how easy it is to write an AC/DC song.

Created by the Sydney band Seaforth (@weareseaforth), which bills itself as a “pop/country duo that talk funny,” the clip shows how to use a keyboard to simulate drums and bass, three guitar chords — A, D and G — and a singer’s “best impression of Marge Simpson.”

The result? A few seconds of credible AC/DC-style rock, with the catchy lyrics, “What’s that? / Look out! / Dog on the road!”

Many people want Seaforth to finish the song. I do too. “Dog on the Road” might be the perfect coda for this interminable year.

Yet several comments on Twitter take Seaforth’s good-natured ribbing of AC/DC to the next level. They argue all AC/DC songs sound the same and the band has been recycling the same rhythm (especially drums) for most of its history.

Not to be a mansplainer here — or in this case a bandsplainer — and not that AC/DC’s originality or lack thereof is the hill on which I wish to die, but I would argue the consistency of sound is the reason many fans love AC/DC.

Yes, they sound pretty much like they did in the 1970s. No, they haven’t matured a bit lyrically. Their go-to subjects are still getting some nookie, the joys of playing rock, and occasionally getting some nookie after playing rock. Their latest album, “Power Up,” just reuses the template. If it ain’t broke and all that.

The band took the blues, stuck it into a light socket, and cackled over the resulting crackle. In the process, they created their signature sound. But hey, they did it first.

Alice Cooper, another rocker from AC/DC’s generation, noted in a recent Rolling Stone interview that “it’s easier to write something like ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ than it is to write something like [the Beatles’] ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’” — those songs where “you could hear them one time and you knew them.”

Not that AC/DC is on the level of Lennon and McCartney, but the same principle applies. Both bands’ songs are deceptively simple. If it were just a matter of throwing a few notes together, why aren’t more wannabe rock stars doing it successfully?

Creating a song to mimic the supposed ease of another musician’s signature sound reminds me of the denouements in many Sherlock Holmes stories. Once Holmes had successfully solved some seemingly impossible crime, he explains it to Watson, who then comments on how the process is really quite simple, something anybody could do, much to Holmes’s chagrin.

And whether the limitation is a fixed number of notes or chords or a finite number of word and letter combinations — remember all those hypothetical monkeys typing the works of Shakespeare? — everybody works within the same restrictions. Some creators just do it better than others.

We are a society that too often equates simple with “easy” and complex with “hard.” Yet knowing what to take out is just as important as what to put in. The shortest sentence in a speech may have been rewritten dozens of times. A few seconds in a movie may have taken days to film and generated hours of unused footage.

AC/DC’s music, for all its three-chord cacophony, is harder than it looks to replicate. If Seaforth makes it look so effortless, it’s because they are talented musicians themselves.

In a piece that has already name-checked AC/DC, Alice Cooper, Sherlock Holmes and Shakespeare, I’ll beg the readers’ forbearance as I quote Theodore Roosevelt, who said critics count far less than “the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming” from those who “actually strive to do the deeds …”

Even if they are dirty deeds, done dirt cheap.

Something to ponder while waiting on the inevitable single, “Dog in the Road.”

chris.schillig@yahoo.com

@cschillig on Twitter