Michael Jackson's Dreams

This is allergy season, and I keep waking at one in the morning. If my boss didn’t insist on my being in the office at eight, I would simply get up and do something productive until I was sleepy enough to return to bed.

As it is, I stay in bed and try not to wake thoroughly, and so remain in the netherland between dreams and consciousness when random thoughts about Michael Jackson pass through my brain. I probably should get up anyway, since I still wake with a sense of sleep deprivation.

A registered nurse, Cherilyn Lee, was the first to state Jackson wanted powerful drugs to fight his insomnia.

Since, sleep specialists have discussed the dangers of chronic insomnia and sleep deprivation as if what they were discussing was the same thing Jackson meant. However, his insistence of anesthetics suggests what he wanted wasn’t simple sleep with REM cycles filled with dreams, but immediate and complete unconsciousness.

Everyone who has had bad dreams or suffered sleepless hours and has followed Jackson’s life could suggest a different source for a fear of dreams and half-awake associations: something in his childhood, that burning hair, the upcoming tour, the trial for child molestation. Some might even speculate on why the problems got worse recently.

What’s truly frightening is that the most useful solutions were unavailable to him, and would be shunned by most of us. Freud may have had people willing to describe their dreams, but most of us are leery about seeing a specialist who might then be forced to report to some legal or insurance authority. As it is, almost anyone who could claim special knowledge about Jackson was talking after his death, either to assuage their own shock or to gather some reflected light.

And of the people Jackson allowed to get closer to him, Gerald Posner believes Liz Taylor is the one who first overcame his childhood, Jehovah’s Witness grounded aversion to drugs by her own example. She’s the one who introduced him to the Svengali dermatologist, Arnold Klein, who was providing her with illegal drugs in the 1980's.

Jackson’s former wife, Lisa Marie Presley, said he was self-destructive 14 years earlier, in the middle 1990's, and that it was impossible to help him without being consumed by him. His personality was so strong, it was impossible for her to walk away without feeling guilty and angry for years. Those feelings resurfaced when he died. Most of his friends, sooner or later, faced the same choice.

To die from a fear of dreams. It’s too bad he didn’t listen to Ernest Tubb when he was young. Then he would just have gotten out of bed and sung "Walking the Floor over You."

Notes:
Associated Press. "Nutritionist Says Jackson Pleaded for Insomnia Sedative," 1 July 2009.

Posner, Gerald . "The Jackson-Liz Drug Link," The Daily Beast website, 6 July 2009.

Presley, Lisa Marie. Her 26 June 2009 MySpace comments after Jackson’s death have been widely repeated.

Michael Jackson

The deaths of Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson provoke shared moments of cultural shock. We abandoned television for more intimate, interactive media like the internet and Twitter for news updates. Such collective moments of unmediated emotion beg us to ask why.

Superficially the two men were similar. Both were uniquely gifted synthesizers of swirling cultural currents in music, and each expanded the language of the acceptable in popular forms.
Both reached a point where they could do no more without alienating some of their fans. I’ve seen artists as diverse as Harry Belefonte and the Osborne Brothers who try variations on songs they’ve been forced to repeat for years greeted with disapproval by audiences who’ve so internalized their music that deviation could not be tolerated.

Yet, audiences want to see more, want to see something different, and so each could only evolve as performers. The Elvis of Vegas and the Jackson of the tin soldier suits are not the artists we were drawn to, but the products of our demands for new sensations within the confines of the claustrophobically familiar.

We can’t imagine either of them married watching their children play soccer. The hyper-sexuality of the one and the ultra-androgyny of the other could not be domesticated. Our perceptions built cages they couldn’t leave without risking our wrath.

We cut off creative individuals, used to working hard, from either pursing innovation in music or seeking normal domestic lives. To evoke F. Scott Fitzgerald, what possible second act did we permit them?

In the past, religion would have provided a model. But that avenue was closed to these two. Both were raised in strong evangelizing traditions, the Assembly of God and Jehovah’s Witnesses, and already had influenced more people everywhere in the world than any conventional missionary. Presley was perhaps luckier because he could maintain his ties to his past through gospel music.

The secular alternative pioneered by Ezra Cornell to devote one’s second life to philanthropy has been attacked by conservative politicians angered by the social changes supported by the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations. Both instead used late songs instead like "In the Ghetto" and "We Are the World" to do things aggressively outspoken critics would not otherwise permit.

We put them at the pinnacle of our success pyramid with no place to go. All we allowed was what we could imagine, the excesses of materialism. When they die and we see the consequences, we’re shocked because the emptiness we discover is the emptiness of our closed culture which has no options.

By chance, Presley died when we were struggling with economic problems under Jimmy Carter which we denied by following a less talented performer who could metamorphose into a politician. Jackson died in our current recession caused by the very kinds of excesses we condemned him to live.

What we intuit in their deaths is the failure of our shared world view to function when it is most needed. They become transformed into the canaries of our cultural crises that none of us can escape.

Religion - Part 4 - Doubt

Some religions admit doubt while others deny it exists. Calvinists argued God’s grace was absolute, but no man could know if he was among the elect. Doubt drove searches for evidence of God’s favor.

Later Protestants argued from the evidence backwards. If you spoke in tongues, if you had a conversion experience, then you were in a state of grace. Good works, public service, wealth all became tokens of sanctification.

At every crisis in our past, we’ve taken the absolute over the unknown. Within a generation, the leaders of Massachusetts Bay Colony abandoned their requirements for membership and adopted the half-way covenant that allowed children of church members to join without proof of grace. Election was transformed from personal experience to a collective family legacy that could be inherited.

Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush were both schooled in southern religion, but the one was raised a Baptist, the other converted to Methodism. The first historically divided into warring sects while Methods hewed to central authority. The one group constantly argues theology, the other debates social issues. Both divided over slavery, but only the one still has northern and southern conventions; the other united its conferences in 1939.

Doubt survives among Carter’s Baptists, but not among Bush’s Methodists. One of the earliest, popular country songs illustrates the difference. Ada Ruth Habersohn, who worked with Methodist gospel musician Ira Sankey, wrote "Will the Circle Be Unbroken" around 1908.

In 1935, A. P. Carter rewrote the lyrics for the Carter Family as "Can the Circle Be Unbroken." The reason for the change was probably quite simple: record companies wanted artists to avoid copyright payments by writing their own songs, and artist obliged.

The nature of the change is speculation. It could be as simple as the preference for the sound of the hard consonants (can the circle) over the internal rhyme of the vowels (will the circle). Or, it could reflect the more Calvinistic theology of the south. A. P. was raised in a Methodist community, while his sister-in-law, Maybelle, was from a Baptist communion in southwestern Virginia.

Will, with it’s implied allusion to free will, assumes ascension to heaven, and the only issue is if an individual has taken the actions necessary to ensure a family reunion. Can invites speculation about what’s possible, introduces doubt.

Since outsiders started listening to the Carter Family, their descendants changed the keyword back to "will," probably because they were told they had made a silly error and should correct themselves. It certainly isn’t the only case where they changed one of their songs to fit the expectations of different audiences.

Still, "can" is the version that people with little money bought in the 1930s, and "will" is what the mainstream expects today.

Our public Protestant tradition continues to edge towards the moral certainty that prefers "will" to "can," and eventually recasts all received texts. Once I was told God tested Job to the point Job despaired of God. Some time in the late-1980s, I heard a radio preacher say that was wrong, that God would never toy with a believer. Instead, Job was in the hands of the devil, and his error was not recognizing the wiles of Satan.

As a child, I was also told David defeated Goliath, with the implication that the weak can prevail, that brains can triumph over physical bullies. A few months ago, a woman told me her minister had given her new insight into the story. Goliath lost because he doubted God.

When the woman started to retell the story she almost said Goliath denied his savior, but then realized that didn’t sound quite right. She kept rewording it until she could retain that interpretation with words that fitted the Old Testament.

New interpretations of traditional stories signal changing values. Voters who accept doubt will have different expectations for leaders, for novels or films than those who want absolutes. The trials of Job speak to a different audience than the travails of Goliath. The Godfather and The Sopranos are different narratives.

When we were faced with difficulties raised by racism, poverty, dependence on petroleum, many found austere Goliath more comfortable than tormented Job or complex David. Since Jimmy Carter was president, men who have been willing to negotiate, the peacemakers blessed of old, have been ridiculed as weaklings.

The cultural preference for uniformity that spreads change from a country song to the entire Bible, leads vocal shareholders to eliminate unknowns and demand boards replace CEOs who still believe they should work with their employees and political leaders in communities where they have plants. The same absolutism informs commentators who criticize parents who share child rearing responsibilities, because two decision makers in a family introduces an element of chance.

Self-help consultants tell people, when in doubt, do something, anything. A leader always acts. We’re told Goliath would never form a committee. Job does not grapple with a crisis in faith, he dithers. Even the Southern Baptist convention today seeks the hegemony of Methodists, the theological purity of Presbyterians.

Corporate Culture - Part 3 - Howard Hopkins

Folklorists always feel a frisson when they discover an artist working within a recognizable tradition. They’re as scarce as talent ever is, and especially rare in modern corporations. Indeed, I’ve only met one man who bridged his family’s tradition and his work environment. His life and work demonstrate that before there is art, there’s a habit of mind.

Doc Hopkins was a Harlan County, Kentucky, banjo player who moved to Chicago to work the National Barn Dance radio program in 1930. His son, Howard, was a computer programmer at Mark Controls in Evanston when I worked there in the late 1970s. He’s since died of cancer.

Howard betrayed no signs of a southern folk tradition. He was interested in classical music, especially opera and piano. When he talked about his family, he would attribute his and his daughter’s talents to their Welsh heritage. But he also talked about his Catholic education, like the time he joked about business ethics as taught by Jesuits.

He had a storytellers knack for setting up a situation, then leaving it to the listener to complete the tale. He once talked about the time he was at Kraft when they brought people together to announce layoffs. He happened to be holding the company payroll tape at the time. He said, he looked at the speaker, looked down, then looked back up, then looked down.

When he mentioned his father, who was named Doctor Howard because a seventh son was supposed to be gifted, it was so he could improvise the conversation that would occur between two doctors when the older man was in the hospital. He only mentioned the Barn Dance once, and then in a conversation that seemed to disparage country music. To a stranger, he was a cosmopolitan, almost Renaissance man.

In those years, before computer graphics were widespread, the typical computer folklore was a calendar or greeting card made by spacing X’s in a report line. The technique was reminiscent of cross stitch embroidery, and both shared their origins with the cards used to run mechanical looms that were one of the first applications for computer programs.

Howard discovered ways to use IBM’s job control language (JCL) to create dialogues for data entry clerks to enter run time parameters like dates into files read by batch programs. He then played with the macros to produce a primitive flip-book cartoon that was consciously derived from the house that Jack built tradition.

First the word CAT appeared in a single line and started to move across the screen, as he changed it's location in the display line for each display.

Then, the word DOG appeared and followed the word CAT at a few spaces as the word CAT changed it's display location.

Next, the word car appeared and ran into the word DOG as he decreased the spacing between the words as he changed the location, so it became CARDOG

Finally a TRUCK appeared with a hook to haul off the car as TRUCK ¬ CAR

He said, he would try to use the full screen editor next, but couldn’t decide if he wanted to do the sunset from Gone with the Wind or the Red Sea parting.

I’ve only known a few other programmers like Howard who could read a user manual and figure out how to use the commands for new purposes. Most of us can barely read a manual, and go no farther than getting an immediate answer. He certainly would have figured out how to recreate his cartoon within the limitations of HTML as it's constrained by this blog site.

I’ve known one other person who would go the next step, and experiment with the tools for artistic purposes, but he came after graphics were common and anything was imitation, not innovation. His efforts were labored and self-conscious, more concerned with proving what a cleaver fellow he was. Howard’s work always betrayed an enthusiasm for the objects themselves, and he was never the object to admire.

I’ve also knew one other person who could turn anecdotes into folk tales. He was a Texan, who never wasted his narrative talents on computer programs. But woe to his boss who went deer hunting with the boys and talked about what a great day they had holed up in a cabin in the rain reading girlie magazines. Jack had gone hunting with a guy who took to shooting rattlesnakes basking on the rocks. Jack was much tried.

Howard’s the only person I’ve known who like to play with the world of business, not to wax profoundly about bureaucracy, but to find the fanciful. He would say, everything made him hungry. Inventory turns became turnovers. General Ledger roll ups became jelly rolls.

I’m sure the thing that sparked the cartoon, that brought the disparate elements of his heritage together, was the existence of the alien ¬ key. It sat there taking up real estate on the keyboard, with no name. It had to have a purpose, and if he could find no logical one, then he would invent one.

Tradition and creativity are often juxtaposed, the one conservative, the other looking for the new and unexpected. In Howard, the two were combined, with the one structuring the form of the other. Unlike his father who made records, he left no permanent body of work. But then, before electronic media, that was the fate of most oral traditions, when only the structure and subject survived, but not the imaginative performance.

Howard shows folk tradition can exist in the modern world, use it for its context, but not be part of any surviving folk tradition. His creations never spread through the company, would never have been remembered. So far as I know, that company had no shared narrative traditions, no unique culture.

In his way, Howard was sui generis.