The Best Super Bowl Halftime Show (That Never Was)

It's not fair to be too hard on the halftime entertainment at the Super Bowl. You must consider how far this activity had to come in forty-five years to arrive at the present moment.

In 1967 at Super Bowl I the crowd and TV viewers "thrilled" to the trumpet sounds of Al Hirt and the marching bands of two colleges.

Al Hirt was so "big" they brought him back (with Carol Channing)
for SB VI in '72. Love that Goodyear blimp about to bomb his head...

This pattern of featuring marching bands along with an artist whose LPs resided beside your aged aunt's and uncle's record player next to key albums by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and Nelson Riddle persisted for years.

This was the other, older side of America. As far as it was concerned rock 'n' roll had never been invented.

The Super Bowl show was stuck back in the Big Band Era (Woody Herman, Ella Fitzgerald) or Broadway or tourist schmaltz (Pete Fountain, Carol Channing).

We can only be thankful we were somehow spared Andy Williams and Pat Boone.

When in 1988 at Super Bowl XXII rock 'n' roll finally arrived it came in the form of (hold your breath) Chubby Checkers. The Super Bowl's entertainment was literally almost 30 years behind the times.

The Up With People Era
When the Super Bowl folks finally realized, "You know we need to have something to pull in the younger generation," they just didn't get it. They brought out Up With People. They thought "Well, this group of clean-cut kids with major orthodontic smiles are young and they'll appeal to Grandma and Grandpa, too."

That was the problem.

Up With People (whom I'm sure are lovely and very "up" people) had its genesis as a singing group that recruited youth from around the country and then the globe. They sang in, no surprise, an upbeat fashion.about those great themes of the sixties: love, peace, and togetherness, but they did it minus the sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll.

The very name of the group was a reaction to the sixties' youth movement that chanted "Down with the establishment!" "Down with whitey!"

These kids asked us to think UP!

They would first appear at the 1976 Super Bowl X and make three more appearances.

I'm sorry to say, UWP was the musical offspring of Al Hirt and Carol Channing. If any person under 30 was watching the Super Bowl by 1980 the song that came to mind as halftime approached again was "Won't Get Fooled Again" by The Who. This song was already a rock 'n' roll relic, but it startlingly conveyed what was wrong with the Super Bowl musical fare.

Halftime show? Are you kidding? It's always the same drivel!

A Change is Gonna Come
In 1990 it seemed the NFL finally awoke from their cultural coma. They must have said, "The masses are restless. They're fixing snacks during halftime and not watching the show and the commercials. We need an injection of youth and acts that are actually still on the charts, not on the easy listening radio station."

You want youth, the NFL was going to give you youth: The New Kids on the Block. Now that's young!

Yeh. So was the Partridge Family.

But the next year it was Gloria Estefan. Hey, Gloria is on the charts! And she's from Miami and the Super Bowl that year was in...the Minneapolis Metrodome. Well, I never said it made complete sense.

Then came Super Bowl XXVII in the Rose Bowl. Michael Jackson. True it was 1993 and Thriller and Bad were distant memories, but MJ always was tabloid fresh as befits a global celebrity. And since at the Super Bowl the quality of the actual music at halftime show will always be handicapped by the need to set up quickly in the middle of a stadium, it helped that Michael could dance. Like no one else. May he rest in peace. There will never be another one like him.

The one and only.

Evolution Super Bowl Style
By now the Super Bowl powers that be had the memo in hand. They had to feature either current charting popular acts or classic rockers. The music should be loud, energetic and gaudily presented.

So they brought on country music stars. Then they visited the other side of the pop charts and gave us Aeorosmith, Stevie Wonder, Sting, Boyz II Men, various Motown stars, and Phil Collins.

In 2002 they brought on the rock band best suited for a 9/11 tribute: U2.

Bono, the Irishman who is an American patriot.
You've gotta love it...especially at such a preeminently American event.

Can you say HUGE? This is the kind of thing people would tune in to see.

In 2004 the halftime show discovered one other thing. The performance should not be sexy. Justin Timberlake gave the tug that was watched and talked about around the world. That oh so convenient "wardrobe malfunction."

At the moment the nethermost point of Janet Jackson's 38-year-old, pierced mammary gland touched the humid Houston night air some portion of America was scandalized. The rest was "tit-i-lated" but to no avail. An FCC fine followed. Everyone except nursing babies would forthwith be protected from visual collisions with female breasts. So this sort of thing wasn't going to happen again.

Like a bandage dressing the flesh wound, Paul McCartney arrived the next year. Legend! Former Beatle! Superstar solo artist! It was milk and cookies pop (during the most glib moments) and, come to think of it, closer to Up With People than some of us Beatle worshippers might feel comfortable admitting.

There's a shadow hanging over Sir Paul...
but he still believes in yesterday.

But Paul made it safe to watch the Super Bowl halftime show again. Bring on the Stones, Prince, Bruce, Tom Petty and...

Who Are They?
Last year I decided to watch the halftime show out of a sort grim respect for a rock band that once was the most iconoclastic and innovative that ever burned up a stage or smashed a drum kit. The Who.

Before: The greatest rock performers of all time...

Of course, when only two of the four original members are left, I think truth in advertising means they ought to add another character to their name...The Who?

After (40 years): 1/2 a Who and Who Cares?

The constantly changing lights on stage were the best part IMHO. The music was loud, but the band, like all others before it, opted for a medley of hits.

In the interest of total candor I must say that I strongly dislike medleys of hits. I've heard the song being played multiple times, perhaps hundreds (that's why it's a "hit"), and now the band deigns to play a short snippet and then segue into the snippet of another hit and another.

Medleys? Ugh. I feel like I'm listening to a machine that's slicing and dicing music. It's just an exercise.

Sure, within its medley The Who(?) played about two minutes and 15 seconds of "Won't Get Fooled Again," my favorite song back in my bell bottom jeans day. But that means 5 minutes of the greatest rock 'n' sturm and drang ever penned was lopped off. Won't get fooled again,  indeed. Which leads me to propose a constructive alternative.

Four Halftime Shows We'd Like to See

1. A man or a woman on a stage with just an acoustic guitar. Twenty minutes, 3 soul-stirring songs. Your nominations for this person are now being accepted.
2.  A band that plays an extended version of a familiar hit song for 10 minutes, then has the nerve to send the lead singer to mic to announce, "This is a new one we just wrote. We want to play it for the first time." 
3. Ice skaters. Why not? If we can send men to the moon and back, we can create a large rink quickly mid-field (and do a better job than the Teflon one they set up in front of Gloria Estefan in '92). And ice skating always looks good on TV.
4.  Up With People. Did I just say that? Yes! Why not bring back the original performers, now graying boomers in the their golden years. Because, you know what, after all we've been through with this show, maybe they won't seem that bad. And I just bet some of them can make some fancy moves with their aluminum walkers and canes.



The Up With People Super Bowl Challenge:
"Let's get UP! tonight!"



- V.W.

The Worst Super Bowl Ever

This is how the world looks outside my front door today.
The temperature is 9 degrees Fahrenheit. The wind is blowing, creating an effective "wind chill" temperature of -10 F.

Closures for all schools and universities have been announced for the second day in a row. This is unprecedented in these Sun Belt parts.

None of this has anything to do with the Super Bowl V, the 1971 contest between the Baltimore Colts and the Dallas Cowboys, my nominee for "worst Super Bowl game ever played."

Please, Don't Call It "Super"
The funny thing that occurs to me about Super Bowl V is how little I remember of the details surrounding the game and yet how sure I am of my distaste for it.  I felt halfway in that this was the most boring "big game" I'd ever tried to sit through.



Mercifully, the winning kick by the Colts in the final seconds
ends this numb-fest.

Super Bowl V  was a threshhold experience for me. Football would start to change on that day. For example, the Dallas coach Tom Landry preferred to play at quarterback a fellow named Craig Morton over young former Navy, Heisman Trophy winner Roger Staubach. Though Staubach was destined to be a future Hall of Famer, at that point Morton would obediently call the plays that the coach sent in and Staubach sometimes didn't.

Coach Landry, like all future NFL coaches, wanted to call all the plays.

Can't play football without the ear goggles...

Yes, we were moving toward the era of the Motorola headset, the technicalization of the game of professional football. As coachng staff and trainers proliferated, it felt like the players had walked onto a cruise ship with an enormous uniformed staff who watched over them and scheduled their every movement.


It would become unimaginable that on the NFL game-day cruise that a player might try to think for himself. Instead, he had become like a piece on a chess board. It was all so complicated that you now had separate coaches for the offense and the defense who called the plays when each unit was on the field. You still had the head coach, but I'm not sure what he did...

The wonders of technology. You could now buy a football field
and have it delivered...just like a rug.

Super Bowl V was also the first Super Bowl played on plastic grass, euphemistically called "artifical turf." Another switch in atmosphere and ethos: "This game is made possible by the 3M Corporation."

The game was becoming less a contest than an entertainment in which the goal was to eliminate risk and tweak every imaginable movement in a massive choreography that might even include injecting drugs into players to enhance what they did on the field. It didn't matter that this meant adopting what could seem at times an arrid, technical style of play. You did what you had to do because the money invested in this production had become enormous and you had better win so you could keep on selling tickets to the show.

Sure I would find future football highlights, some of them occurring in Super Bowls even, but overall nothing would match the days of fiery, principaled coaches like Vince Lombardi and the players making about the same annual salary as a lawyer instead of the gross national product of some small republic.

Stinking Up the Orange Bowl
Super Bowl V, variously called "The Blunder Bowl," "The Stupor Bowl" or the "The Blooper Bowl," stands out as an example of how even with the best laid plans and high expectations by players and coaches you can still flop.

I only vaguely (and uncertainly) remember that I watched the game at a high school friend's house in Anchorage Alaska. It was in the basement where they had a color TV.

Color didn't improve what was taking place on the field in Miami. The Colts and Cowboys would combine to lose the ball to the other side 11 times, 7 of these turnovers by the Colts, an appalling record. The Cowboys' own ugliness came in the form of 10 penalities, another record.

Chuck Howley, the MVP who didn't wanna be...

What this meant practically speaking was that it was like watching two people take turns trying to drive a car with a manual and neither of them could manage the shifting. They'd lurch forward, then go backwards. Then they'd stall the engine all together. Then the other one would try.

It was the only time the Most Valuable Player award was a matter of massive head scratching. Everyone who took part in the game, as we'd bluntly put it today, sucked. So the award was given to a player on the losing team, the Cowboys' Chuck Howley who intercepted two of the opposition's passes.

Howley, God bless him, refused the award.

I Bench Myself
That Super Bowl was a game changer (pun intended) for me vis a vis my football watching habits. Thereafter, I would enjoy the NFL regular season and perhaps some of the playoffs, but the Super Bowl seemed to me less than worthy of my attention.

This placed me outside the mainstream culture which responded to the increasing hype surrounding each Super Bowl as if it had to be the best and most compelling football played. The viewership in America and around the world, with a few annual blips, kept going up.

In the meantime, I'd circle that Sunday on the calendar, then to go to the grocery store while everyone was inside their houses having their cocktail meatballs, beer, popcorn and watching the game. The grocery store was empty. The checkout clerks looked like the last people left on board the Titanic. Working on Super Bowl Sunday was the last thing they wanted to do.

A Crack in My Super Bowl Boycott
In the early eighties I married my wife who was an executive in advertising. Of course, she was into ads. We began taping the Super Bowl and fast forwarding it later to get to the TV spots. Here was a whole new way to appreciate the event!

Also, our son came along and I thought I ought to give him a chance at seeing what the Super Bowl was about. He could then make up his own mind.

The year I decided to initiate him (2003) happened to feature the Oakland Raiders playing the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. The Pirate Bowl. How cool is that, son?

You like the logo, you'll love the team!
So the theory goes...

I decided to root for the Raiders. I've always liked their black and silver uniforms and that football pirate on their helmet.

So we went shopping for Raiders' wear the day before the game. Problem. Nobody in this part of the country cares about either coast. There was nothing for sale except for Dallas Cowboy regalia. Talk about irrelevant.

No problem. We'll make some snacks and wear non-logoed black T-shirts and sit down and watch the game, father and son.

Within minutes of  the kickoff there was a problem. The Raiders put on their own Blooper Bowl. The awesome passing game we expected from Raider QB Rick Gannon never materialized. Every time the ball was snapped to him, it seemed like Tampa Bay poured through and sacked him or harassed him into throwing interceptions (5 in all).

The Raiders had no chance. Final score: Tampa Bay 48, Oakland 21. Son now hates football.

Conclusion: A Bowl of My Own
The fact that I'm Van Winkled and this means I can't watch Super Bowl XLV this year isn't exactly breaking my heart.

But I'll wish for the commercials, which are often clever and lavish.

And I will regret not seeing moments like some offered us in recent years: the Titans' last play lurch that fell one yard short of winning the game in 2000, David Tyree's "helmet catch" that put the Giants in a position to upset the Patriots at the very end of Super Bowl XLIV, the "Aint's" showing last year that they had what it took to keep coming back until they had the Vince Lombardi Trophy in hand.

Still, looking a few days down the road, I'm totally all right with not seeing the game. I'm planning to sit down and spend a couple of hours with the Tax Bowl. Yes, I'm going to use the Super Bowl time slot to perform the annual ritual of striding onto the gridded lines and boxes of Form 1040A. It's a challenge. As everyone knows, Uncle Sam has a tough defense and he doesn't like for you to score. - V.W.

The Best Super Bowl Ever

I lived in Alaska with my family in those days in a semi-Rip Van Winkled state. None of us had any choice about it. Our delayed access to the news was a fact of life.

Deep into the sixth decade of the 20th Century, Alaskans still had no live TV.

This was a problem! As a teenager hoping to have some kind of life, I already wasn't exactly thrilled when my father's oil company offered him the chance to drag all of us to the Last Frontier. I began 7th grade in Anchorage, Alaska that winter, walking to school in the dark, sometimes in near zero temperatures.

The isolation was annoying, too. With no live TV (because nobody was going to build broadcast towers all the way from Washington state to the far north) you couldn't watch sporting events on weekends. My parents graciously tossed me a bone.

They got me a subscription to Sports Illustrated.

Here's the cover of the first issue I ever received.

I read SI from cover to cover. I didn't even know it, but there were some of the greatest journalists ever writing for the mag in those days. No wonder I lapped up the colorful writing of Tex Maule and Dan Jenkins. These guys could wield a line of prose like nobody's business, even if it was in service of describing big sweaty guys performing an athletic feat or a man in a sweater swinging a golf club.

So I didn't see the football games, football being my main sporting interest, but I read about them. This was a whole different level of involvement. A great game like the 1966 UCLA vs. USC match-up in which Heisman contenders quarterback Gary Beeban and halfback O.J. Simpson created the expected fireworks and then some became, upon reading it, a great short story.

But still...I would have much rather seen the gridiron heroics on TV.

What's the Score?

Before there were iPods...

My Alaskan isolation became pertinent on Super Bowl Sunday January 12, 1969. As I saw it, I had no choice but to secret in my pocket a transistor radio the size of a pack of cigarettes and take it to church.

This was the only way I would know how the game was going as the NFL's Baltimore Colts took on the AFL's New York Jets in the third Super Bowl ever.

Timing was the other problem. In those days the Super Bowl was not about an all-day build-up to the big event in the evening. Kick-off was at 3:05 EST.

In Alaska this meant the first Colt-Jet collision occurred at 10:05 a.m. as I was sitting in Sunday School class at church.

For the next two hours I kept my counsel, the radio burning a hole in my pocket. I couldn't turn it on, even if I used the ear plug. People would see what I was doing. But I just knew the Colts had to be killing the Jets. I wanted to know how bad.

To put it in biblical terms, I was like a Philistine waiting for Goliath to bring back to camp the tiny head of David. In this case the head belonged to a loud mouth guy named Joe Namath.

Earlier in the week, Namath, the Jets young quarterback, said his team would defeat the 11-1 Colts. The Colts were being called the greatest team of all-time. They had allowed a total of 7 touchdowns all season. Their offense was just as potent. The seemingly clueless Namath compounded his sin of hubris by adding to his prediction these words: "I guarantee it."

This guy "guarantees" a win? Over the Colts?
What has he been smoking?

A Tale of Two Leagues
Many people who will tune into the Super Bowl this Sunday weren't even born when the first Super Bowl was played. It might be worth remembering that originally the game was originally marketed as a sort of grudge match, albeit one in which the grudge was being played out to make substantial sums of money via TV broadcast.

In those days the NFL, which had been around for decades, thought they ought to have a lock on lucrative TV contracts in large market cities as well as the high esteem of the American sporting population. But beginning in the early 1960s they were challenged by a new league: The American Football League.

The AFL had "cool" helmets and uniforms...

The AFL set up teams in unexpected places like Kansas City and Denver and Buffalo. They played literally by a different set of rules: for example, a slightly larger football with stripes on it and the option of a two-point conversion. They brought excitement and innovation to a game that had grown stodgy and they carried it, like missionaries, into new venues.

Generally the sports establishment dissed the AFL as a league composed of NFL cast-offs and college talent not good enough to be drafted by the elite league. This was not actually true. The AFL was acquiring talented players the NFL had given up on as well as first round choices and players from all-black colleges that no one had bothered to recruit before.

And the AFL was spoiling for a fight. They had a TV contract with ABC and loyal fans. The NFL, well, they just wanted to crush these guys before they started stealing all their talent and carving up a significant slice of the football pie.

While this was going on, I found a book at the library that told the story of how the AFL survived through pluck and luck, The $400,000 Quarterback: Or the League That Came In From the Cold (1965).

As a kid I loved the true life tale book told. The AFL was the underdog, David to Commissioner Pete Rozelle's NFL Goliath. But the day the AFL announced they were signing a scruffy quarterback from Pennsylvania who had played for Alabama and giving him the unheard of sum of $400,000 that changed. The AFL was on it's way to what the NFL dreaded. National notice and legitimacy.

That's when everybody began speaking of  "parity." The AFL was coming into its own; however, many people assumed it might take years for the new league to ever achieve this golden parity in quality of players and execution. Then, and only then, would the best AFL team be able to beat the best team in the NFL.

In the meantime, the only way to find out where things stood at this point was to bring the two best teams together from each league and let them fight it out. The Super Bowl was born.

NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle was smiling: My league can whip your league!
No parity here. The AFL is a bunch of wannabe's!

As predicted, there was to be no parity for the AFL. In the first two Super Bowls the Green Bay Packers breezed to victories over the Kansas City Chiefs and Oakland Raiders.

Which brought us to Super Bowl III. It promised more of the same. I liked underdogs, but this was ridiculous. Why even tune in? The Jets, a so-so but scrappy team that was lucky to have won the AFL championship, would be crushed by the Colts. We were talking total road kill. The Colts were favored by 18. Most people thought the spread ought to be doubled.

I imagined that in 60 minutes against such a juggernaut of a defense as the Colts fielded, the Jets would be lucky to score a field goal.

Church is Over!
I hurried out the front of the building. My dad wasn't a sports fan; he didn't really care what I was doing. One of my brothers, though, was tuned to my urgency. On the steps of the church building which were covered with deicing salt we bent over the radio's tiny speaker.

Out in front of us Anchorage, Alaska looked normal for January: the downtown "parkstrip" was buried in snow, the streets were a glaze of ice, the temperature stood frigidly in the low twenties. Our breath twisted in front of us.

I couldn't believe what I was hearing. Even the announcer sounded befuddled. I listened again. Surely he had inverted the team names. We were into the second half of the game and the Jets were ahead.

We had been singing hymns, listening to a sermon, taking communion from little cups and the world had inverted. We had on our hands one of the most astounding upsets in the history of team sports. It was historic.

I couldn't see it. I could only listen and imagine...how thousands of miles away
things were unraveling for the Colts.

That same year men would land on the moon, but the American Football League had already landed. It had come down hard on Planet Parity. The NFL had already decided it had no choice. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. The fascinating competition between two styles and ethos of football, the old guys vs. the new ones, was at an end.

The following year the merger of leagues would be realized. Everything would become the NFL with teams ensconced in  two conferences, AFC and NFC. New teams would be added (New Orleans and Cincinnati) and there would be the jarring "realignment" of some of the NFL's most deeply traditional teams, the Steelers and Browns and, yes, the Colts!, as they moved to the AFC.

After that the Super Bowl would never be the same as far as I was concerned. The pigskin sibling rivarlry element would be lost. No more Cain vs. Abel. The Super Bowl would become just a glorified NFL championship game, and the AFL would be mostly forgotten.

But I wouldn't forget the lesson that happened while I was in church, the one that played out on the green grass plains of the Orange Bowl in Miami, Florida as I listened in on a tinny speaker:

- V.W.


.

Tow My Heart Away

"The Reaper - After Millet"
by Van Gogh ( Sept. 1889),
Private Collection, UK

A little scene took place in the driveway on Thursday. It lasted about ten minutes, but it represented the end of a relationship that had endured almost a decade, one that began when our son was still a toddler back in those few remaining months before September 11 ceased to be just another date on the calendar.

I said goodbye to our emerald green 1997 Toyota Corolla which we acquired in April 2001 from a college student. I watched as a decade of our life was chained up to the back of a tow truck.

It was time. The car, while still driveable and trustworthy, was dated. Anyone have use for an in-dash cassette player these days? And when you started the engine it vibrated so much that it felt like one was behind the wheel of a Kenworth.

I wasn't sentimental about this car like I was when we finally parted with our Swedish car that so effectively reminded me of days in Alaska. The Corolla was about basic, around the town, mundane transportation. In a given year we hardly put 5000 miles on it.

I thought about taking a picture, but why bother? This wasn't a grand separation.  It was nothing like the things the aged tow truck driver told me when I innocently asked him how he got into the towing business.

Now here was a story! I was standing in the presence of an old, slightly stooped, graying man who had lost the love of his life. He was the man who used to cut the wheat.

The Harvest
 

Bringing in the harvest with a high-tech combine.

For 45 years Lonnie (I'll call him) followed the grain belt. He started in the south and he worked his way north all the way into Canada.

He stood out there at the curb, hooking up my car, and simultaneously fondly recollecting the life he'd been squeezed out of by crush of the new economics, which involves so much money that a man catches his breath. And it involves something else: the persistent pattern of technology replacing human beings.

"When I first started out I had a combine that cost $6000. In the end each machine was $320,000. Course the old ones didn't even have a cab, much less air conditioning. The new-uns, they have a row of monitors in the cab  that shows everything going on outside."

A lot of what Lonnie told me involved numbers like this. It's not weather that changes a man's life. One can forge past weather. It's not always illness or injury. With the grace of God one can recover. But numbers! You can't fight the numbers once they cease to be in your favor.

"We had 5 combines and 12 people and a vehicle when we went out. Today to have that many machines would mean I'd have $3 million tied up just in equipment."

"I read last week about someone who bought 60,000 acres of wheat in Canada. Paid $40 million. That's what? $700 an acre? Used to be you could buy land for $45/acre and make $80 acre for the wheat you grew on it. The wheat paid for your land."

"I found an old receipt from 1973. I paid 27 cents for gas and 19 cents for diesel. Nowadays diesel is how much? Way over $3."

"My son is driving a truck these days. He says he'd like to go back to combining, but I tell him not to. It's too hard to make a living...last year we had a good harvest, but the price of wheat was bad."

A Life After Wheat
So Lonnie has been moving along on his gimpy leg for the past six years and driving a tow truck. "I have more money now than I did back then," he tells me. His job? To pick up vehicles like mine that are being donated to charity or, more often, to haul away wrecks after insurance companies have decided they're totaled.

If the air bags "blew," it's quite likely totaled and Lonnie
will be taking it to auction to be sold for parts and scrap.

"Doesn't take much to to total a car these days," he observes. "If  you're in any kind of accident and the front air bags go off, it's $3000 right there to replace them with factory ones."

So there are plenty of cars for Lonnie to haul to the grim place beside the railroad tracks where they'll be broken into parts and scrapped.

At least he doesn't have to pick up vehicles being repossessed from their owners by the bank.

'I know a guy who did that for a while, then quit. He got shot at too many times."

The Way It Was
All things must come to an end. I know this because my grandfather was a farmer. He had some dairy cows, then he grew old and it got too hard to get up and milk Bessie. He got himself some heifers. He continued to raise beef, some alfalfa, and wheat on his little 110-acre farm until he was in his seventies.

This is what it looked like when my grandfather harvested the wheat
on his Oklahoma farm in the 1960s.

I remember going out into the wheat field when I was a kid and following the orange Allis Chalmers combine as its wooden paddles turned and pulled in the tall golden grass. The separated chaff blew out a stack on the side of the combine. The wheat kernels poured into a bin.

Those kernels reminded me of some form of tiny bright treasure. The warm grainy scent was like inhaling a wealth of sorts. You just knew that with such things sprung from the earth, humanity always could always find flavor and sustenance.

All that's left of our '97 Corolla...
oil spots on the driveway.

In Memoriam
It's not what anyone would call tragic to see one farmer like my grandfather or Lonnie retire. It's not desperately sad to part with a car that I don't need anymore.
What does move me to concern and something beyond a cloying form of nostalgia is pondering if an important way of life is being lost.

When the machines become enormous and complicated, and as expensive as a mansion, we drive away the people who once placed their calloused hands tenderly upon the things we long to consume.

What was once of the earth has become a product, a commodity, removed from the smooth, wheaty kernels I remember digging into and letting pour through my fingers.

I'm sorry. I don't want technicians or robots harvesting my food. I want someone like Lonnie who cares about what he's doing. But I don't think that's going to happen as much as before.

You see, we've reassigned Lonnie to the same fate as that man Van Gogh painted over a hundred years ago, the man who had to put down his scythe. Instead of going out into the field to bring in the treasure, the harvester now gets paid to handle the chains and haul off  our dented and smashed trash.

That's quite an inversion and, unfortunately, it's the kind of "news" that's happening every day. Whether I choose to read about it or not. - V.W.


.

Sigmund Freud and Dreaming the News

One thing that has surprised me about this project was how initially it wasn't so difficult.
I turned off the TV, I kept newspapers at a distance, I drastically limited the websites I visited, and I began to live in blissful ignorance.

The key word in the last sentence is "initially."

Lately it's been extremely hard to go on this way. Not knowing can start to feel like not living.

Out in my garage there are two stacks which consist of saved copies of the local daily newspaper alongside the New York Times. These stacks are growing noticeably taller.



The unread newspapers archived in my garage are approaching 16" in height.


Standing there in with my feet on the concrete floor of the garage it occurs to me that most of the stories and facts embedded in that paper pile are also stored up in my fellow humans' minds in the form of memories. But not mine. Like an amnesiac, part of my brain is empty.

Well, that's not quite right. The amnesiac once knew, then his mind went blank. I'm more like someone who has been a castaway on an island and never received word of anything at all.

Not even a message in a bottle.

Not So Sweet Dreams Are Made of These...
As I've stated many times to various persons, the purpose of this project is for me to see if I can live a "normal" life while not knowing what's going on in the larger world. I'm starting to wonder these days.

Does it count as normal if I have disturbing dreams about the news?

Let me venture a guess. No.

What follows is probably not the kind of thing the rest of you are dreaming about. But just to make sure, I've brought along a special person, a notable expert in this field, to weigh in on the matter.

Introducing Our Mystery Guest
Having made his mark a long time ago in the practice of psychology, a branch of which he can be said to have invented, our guest at The Van Winkle Project today is a man who truly needs no introduction. So I won't take up much of our time or his with that.

It should be noted though, that at this point, he is 154 years old. For that reason he doesn't get around much these days, which is another reason for both of us to be brief. At that age he's a bit fragile and it's difficult for him to speak at length. Frankly, he'd rather sleep.

So, without further delay, I would like to introduce two of Van Winkle's recent dreams with a guest interpretation, which will be delivered by none other than Dr. Sigmund Freud of Vienna, Austria.

Dream #1: The Weapons of War Run Amok

I don't know how I got here. Out in nature. In the woods. Crazy thing! I see an U.S. Army tank clanking along. It's not supposed to be here. This is American soil. No orders have been given. Somehow I know that the tank has been hijacked by a veteran of the Afghanistan war who upon returning home has gone berserk.

There seems to be an Army tank in my dream...

I find myself looking down. From a bird's-eye point of view...

The tank is going around and around  in circles and knocking over trees with insane abandon...

Eventually the tank crashes through the forest, toppling more trees than I can count and it emerges from the woods to be met by a crowd of irate citizens. As the soldier climbs out of the tank they are shouting at him angrily.

"Why don't you go back and fix the forest!"

What I Thought the Dream Meant:

What on earth is going on in Afghanistan? The last time I had news of the war it was September and things were not going well. Some might have said we were just going in circles, chasing the Taliban and the Taliban cleverly running away from us.

And there is the ongoing problem of the living casualties of that war, those who serve and then come home and find the emotional trauma of war keeps them from living the way they wish, as if the legacy of this war is some awful dark force has that has hijacked their lives...

Dr. Freud's Analysis:

Wrong! Clearly this dream has nothing to do with the country of Afghanistan or geopolitical events. It is about Mr. Van Winkle's own life and story. He feels he is going in circles. He believes himself to have a certain power, symbolized by the canon in the tank, but he is unable to take aim and ignite his powder so to speak.

He also feels that in his being lost in the woods that he is harming others. These are the trees that he knocks down. In the end he thinks he will be held accountable for his failures. He will receive the disapprobation of others who will demand that he go back and do the impossible, fix the forest, i.e., live his life over again without such gross mistakes.

Dream #2: The Doomsday Scenario

I am bicycling along leafy neighborhoods in Washington D.C. Eventually the street I am on leads to wider lanes, bustling traffic, the appearance of buildings set on city blocks. Up ahead of me many policemen are waving at cars and me that we cannot go ahead. We will have to turn right as part of a detour.

That's when I see it in the near distance.

The U.S. Capitol building. It looks like this.


I can't believe what I'm seeing...

My immediate feeling is that the burning Capitol is not the result of a terrorist attack. I have a disturbing sense that an angry mob is nearby. Possibly there has been some kind of coup d'etat and the U.S. Government has been overthrown.

Stunned, aghast, I pedal away. As fast as I can...

What I Thought the Dream Meant:

When I went to "sleep" the nation seemed very divided and many people were angry. All the talk was of the mid-term elections and the Tea Party movement.

This dream seems to take my uneasiness to a hyperbolic dimension in which the competing points of views and parties become so polarized that in their divisiveness they ultimately destroy our government. "A house divided cannot stand," said Abraham Lincoln. Perhaps I am imagining not the literal demise of the buildings and organs of government, but the government's eventual inability to function in anything resembling an effective fashion.

Dr. Freud's Analysis:

Das ist unglaublich falsch! You mustn't think of the U.S. Capitol building! The U.S. Government. Think of you!

What appears as stones in the dream is really flesh and blood. You are like that burning building, you follow? These days you feel uncomfortable, as if smoke is pouring out of you. Who has done this thing? You have no idea. All you know at your deepest level of the unconscious is that you are monumentally upset.


So Who is Right? Freud or V.W.?
What am I going to say? You ask an honest question, you get an honest answer. I believe my dreams are a direction reflection of how my lack of news weighs heavily on my mind, no matter how cavalier I may act about it during certain waking moments. This not knowing leads me to imagine the worst.

Ignorance, it turns out, dwells just the other side of nightmare.

Of course, that could be a surplus of paranoia in me speaking, a word that Dr. Freud had plenty to say about. The important thing is this: While I'm sure some dreams can be profitably re-narrated to conform to a symbolic interpretation of them, I don't think this is always appropriate. Sometimes as the good Doctor himself said, "A cigar is just a cigar" and I would add a tank is a tank and a Capitol building is a building.

I may find a way to stop going around in circles in my life, but I don't expect these kinds of dreams to cease until I "wake up" on Sept. 11, 2011. - V.W.

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