Same As It Ever Was

Cartoon by Sarah Kempa: New Yorker

     In one sense, little seems to have changed with human history.  Certainly invention and methods of what could be termed progress have evolved in many fields, from transportation to agriculture, and other fields that made life easier (for some, anyway).  The Talking Heads sang about "letting the days go by" and "once in a lifetime."  But now, with my elastic memory shifting, I remember hearing that song as "many the days go by" and "many a lifttime."  In my look back at life, or the life I've led so far, it feels a bit like both, the days slipping by and also having slipped by.  It's as if we can all say that we've led many lives, and yet in reality, this time here may simply be "once in a lifetime."   So jump now to Desert Island Discs, now well past its 75th year and still going strong.  The format is that guests are to be placed on a desert island soon after revealing their life to the radio host; they're to pick 7-8 meaningful pieces of music that captured some point in their life as they grew up, say a childhood moment heard in their parents living room or a song when they first encountered love.  And later, just before they are indeed "cast away," they are allowed to take just a single book of their choice, and one non-living "luxury" item, which could range from a paint set or journal, to a pillow or sunscreen (one guest opted to have a blowup doll).  But the format of the show, no matter how interesting the guests, also leaves you wondering about the songs or book you would you have picked?  And would those have been the same ones you would have picked say 20 years ago?  

     Ed Sheeran brought this up, saying that he was quite prepared for what he wanted said and played at his funeral, telling host Graham Norton "well it's quite sensible, isn't it?" as if everyone should have already done so (I know of only one friend who has already written out his obituary).  To be honest, I've dabbled in that thought, thinking that an old tune from The Beatles would end a few of the boo-hoos and get people thinking: You say goodbye, and I say hello.  My wife would likely choose a song by the great tenor John Gary singing Once Upon a Time (his vocal range has never been matched on that song).  Her dad played it often and after my 100th listen (she still plays it often) I must admit that it takes on more and more meaning, both musically and in its words.  So 7 songs that you would use to describe your life, or that at least imprinted themselves into your memory at some meaningful point.  It's difficult, isn't it?  Certainly a single song can transport you back to a specific moment (oddly for me, it is often indeed to just a moment, one which I cannot go backward or forward from, but just the moment I was there).  But whether stuck in a lobby or a shopping mall, the jumble of music is plentiful.  So imagine my surprise when I read in The Shortest History of Music that by 2023, hip hop accounted for nearly 25% of all music streams on Spotify in the US, adding that rap: ...could adjust to any language, subtly transforming itself as it met the guttural consonants of Arabic, the strongly rolled r's and front-loaded word stresses of Finnish or the tonal inflections of Mandarin, the last of which created a palette of vocal timbre and pitch somewhat at odds with the comparatively monotone pitch typical of Western rap.  Rap in Chinese?   Author Andrew Ford also noted that virtually all classical music came from men, and from Germany:  The standard view was that "classical music" was a German thing and that it had gone on for about two hundred years.  Everything before Bach and Handel was "early music;"  everything after Brahms was "modern."  Among the modern composers were such thorny propositions as Schoenberg, Bartok and Stravinsky, but also Debussy and Ravel, whose music was less prickly and possibly less substantial, the term "impressionist" that was unthinkingly applied to the French composers always seeming a little dismissive.  That all these European composers were men was seldom remarked upon and, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, perhaps not so noteworthy.  After all, the proportion of women to men in the composition profession --and it was a profession-- was much the same as in law, medicine, commerce and politics.  Dismantling the patriarchy still has some way to go.  He goes on to talk of how music can be viewed as "dangerous" in some religions, but central "to the remembrance of God" in others.  All of which got me thinking about nonsense...

Cartoon: Roz Chast

     The days of cheerleading and cheer songs has zoomed way beyond the "give me a S" days; indeed college competitions have moved into the world of syncopated gymnastics and music beyond just energizing the stadium crowd.  But stuck in my head from those early days came that nonsensical "cumula vista" which went along these lines (there are many versions and spellings but this is the one I remember): Cumula, cumula, cumula vista.  No, no no no not se vista.  Eenie meenie, decimeenie, oowala wala meenie.  Exameenie, sala meenie, ooh wala wala meenie.  Boe boe bedotten dottin' umm bop, shhhhz...what the?  A high school stadium full of hundreds (my graduating class was over 600, for perspective) sang away with these words and like me, I'm sure that none of us knew what, if anything, it meant, nor how it related to our watching our athletic classmates trying to score downfield.  And that song wasn't alone...think "zipadee doo dah" or "supercalifragilistic."*  Only now, 50 years on, have I discovered that "cumula" is a popular children's song throughout much of the world and translated means "flea, fly, flown," perhaps a precursor to the giant in Jack & the Beanstalk. (side note: many of our memorable songs come from classical composers noted author Ford: the wedding march of "here comes the bride," [Wagner], the grand organ exit after the wedding [Mendelssohn], and the dreaded funeral trek [Chopin]).

      Our brain seems to record and try to make sense of whatever we throw at it.  For instance, you may remember this brain tease (vs. teaser because your brain will make sense of this without you even thinking about it: I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg.  The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid.  Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the first and last ltteer be in the rghit pclae.  The rset can be a taotl mses and you can still raed it wouthit a porbelm.  This is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.  Amzanig huh?  So with that, I took in the words from a review of Modern English Usage's author, Henry W. Fowler (which appeared in The New Yorker).  In part of that review, Fowler (who passed away in December of 1933) was quoted as saying: Display of superior knowledge is as great a vulgarity as display of superior wealth.  Then came the word prolixity, which I had never encountered (I've linked its definition to save you time).  And it seemed to sum up several things, including all the data we're being introduced to, so much so that we're almost welcoming AI to sort it for us, just as we accepted Google not that long ago for such simple trivia as "who was the actress in that movie."  Then we began talking to Alexa or Siri to change a station or dim the lights (long gone are the days when we didn't have any sort of remote device and had to actually get up to change one of the seven or so television channels...heaven forbid!).  And now JP Morgan is shifting its $850 billion business to AGI.  But more than that, the review brought up Fowler's first (and accepted) proposal to make a "correct" dictionary in an expeditious manner (the opposite of prolixity).  His idea was to seek out the negative instead of the positive (the end result, wrote the review, was "a length of seven hundred and forty-two tightly packed pages, comprising more than four hundred thousand words." -- imagine how many pages the "positive" version would have been).

     At times, it can feel as if our country is doing the same, whittling away at bureaucracy and illegal immigrant and whatever other "triggers" can be found, while openly displaying "vulgar" wealth...as with Fowler, using the negative to hide the positive.   As another New Yorker review wrote: ...The United States is in a speech war...We live in a society of doxing, trolling, cancelling, sanctioning, slandering, deplatforming, defunding, persecuting, prosecuting, firing, and sometimes killing over the expression of an opinion.  A big part of the craziness is that some of the people going to war over words are casting themselves as champions of free speech.  It’s the people they are trying to silence, they claim, who are the enemies.  From Marketplace, it was noted that the recent annual survey of business investors, CEOs and others were asked to rate their answers on a scale of 1-10 on questions such as "is this a good country to start a business?," "would you hire employees from here?," and "is this a good place to visit?"  The results from August 2025 showed the US dropping to #14 on the world list, the first time ever that the US had dropped out of the top 10 (the top 2 countries for this year were Japan and Germany).  And On Point noted that when US high school seniors were presented the prices for a burger, fries, and a drink (on a test) and asked to total the amount and figure a 20% tip, three quarters --75%-- did not answer correctly.  High school math scores in the US have also dropped to the lowest ever.  If that's the case, why not get rid of the Department of Education?...oh wait, Trump's already working on that.  Even the percentage of Americans who view college as "very important" has fallen from 75% in 2013, to 35% now.  One reader wrote to The New Yorker that he tried to emphasize the importance of education to students, especially to budding athletes, telling them: Do you know what N.F.L. really stands for?  'Not For Long,' because an injury or trade can end your career in an instant.  The late Roger Angell, noted for his detailed observations on baseball, once wrote that a pitcher always wonders: ...whether he will now join the long, long list --the list that awaits him, almost surely, in the end-- of suddenly slow, suddenly sore-armed pitchers who have abruptly vanished from the big time, down the drain to oblivion.  

     So where are we, as a nation, headed?  Or perhaps one should ask, where are we headed as a species?  All that aside, I continue to be fascinated by all that is still there to be discovered, even asking why someone would take the time to multiply 111,111 x 111,111 (the answer may surprise you).  In merry olde England, pub masters of the era would tell rowdy gents to slow their drinking, and to mind their pints and quarts, thus that phrase "mind your p's and q's" still circulating in our language.  At such times (for some reason) I think we're changing, or learning, or even evolving a bit.   But then I read about the Hittites in National Geographic.  Wait, the who?  Okay, history was never my top subject but still, who knew that they were powerful enough to take on Mesopotamia and the Egyptians?  And to destroy Babylon.  Not only did they fight "one of the greatest battles of the ancient world," wrote Britannica, but they ruled much of the Middle East for nearly 500 years.  I'd never heard of them (or their empire).  But there we were, fighting again...and again, and again.  The Romans, the Ottomans, the Milanni (who?).  But a quick peek at how many "empires" we humans have had seems to show that we are simply not content to just have what we have.  The more we grow in population, it seems, the more we (as in political and military leaders) want.  Same as it ever was...or was it?  Perhaps those leading us in wars and poverty are small in number, merely slick talkers who can con and conquer, who can double-speak and make lies sound truthful, convincing parishes and populations into almost-enthusiastically diving into the bowels of their perceived righteousness, even as they stand back out of harms way.

     And there I was, finding that I had fallen into that trap of the negative.  One of the Desert Island Discs episodes featured surgeon David Nott, one of many medical specialists who volunteer their time to enter often dangerous sites, areas often near or within the boundaries of countries at war.  In one of his times in Gaza in 2014 (yes, Israel and Palestine were fighting even then), he told of operating on a 7-year old girl, her stomach basically blown open with much of her organs exposed and dangling outside her body.  The staff rushed in and told the surgeon that he had to get out, that the hospital had a bomb which was due to go off in 5 minutes.  Everyone was evacuating.  Nott told the interviewer that at the time, he realized that he didn't have any family, and that if he left, this child would die unattended, and alone.  And he also felt that if this was the way it would end, then so be it, but he was not going to abandon the child.  He (and the anesthesiologist) stayed and continued to operate.  The bomb never went off, and 3 days later he has a photo of the young girl in recovery.  

     

   Our home, our world, is both beautiful and resilient, having seen species come and go, as it has with atmospheres and land masses.  A quick peek at the map of the Arctic region (courtesy of Nat Geo once again) shows just how much we still have to discover (it may take you a while to orient yourself to where Alaska is in this top-down view, but once you do so it will all come into perspective...our brain at work once again).  Spectacular late-fall sunsets, and ice flows, and waterfalls, and beaches, and family gatherings.  Despite all the negative changes the media keeps blasting at us, we have much to be grateful for.  Food drives fill up quickly, charitable donations keep coming, empathy continues to grow.  This good and positive side of humanity is again emerging as the true force, the true empire.  So wherever you are in the world, take away this upcoming holiday as being the true representative of our country, that of giving thanks.  It's a day not so much of gorging on turkey and sweet potatoes and pumpkin pie, but more a day of gathering and of gratitude.  It's a time when despite all the laughter and drinks and full tummies, people also tend to reflect on where they are, and how many remain lonely and hungry and could use some compassion and help.  A rebalancing of our role as a species.  For just a little moment, ignore the push by retailers to look at this holiday as only a preview to Black Friday, all trying to convince you to spend what little money you may have on yet another unimportant something (wrote Bloomberg: With inflation having hit 3% and unemployment rising to 4.4%, the third part of the troubled trifecta, US consumer sentiment, has fallen to one of the lowest levels on record).  At one time, Thanksgiving here in the US was at the very least, equal to both Halloween and Christmas.  Thanksgiving was a time when we gave thanks as a country for breaking away from a monarchy and set out to start a new nation (albeit at the expense of those already here, but that's another long story).  But as our 250th anniversary nears, our nation has come almost full circle: the near-return of a wannabe patriarch trying to rule with a let-them-eat-cake attitude, oblivious to all but those in the ballroom.  But there's that negative side creeping in on me, and I hate it.  Thanksgiving broken down is that of thanks and of giving; even reversed it becomes Giving Thanks.  Our attitude now, especially now, should be of gratitude.   So one quick story of an older couple leaving Atlanta and finding that they were suddenly unable to find their passport as their plane readied for takeoff.  Without it, they would not be able to enter the country (a weeks long planned trip to South Africa), so they were forced to deplane, along with their luggage.  But the flight crew didn't stop looking, and after digging through the sides of the seats, found the passport.  The plane had already backed out, but when the captain was notified that the passport had been found (it was his final flight before retiring), he had the plane return to the gate so that the couple could be brought back onboard, all to the cheers of an entire cabin of passengers.  Humanity at its best.  And one hopes that in the coming days and months and perhaps years, we will see more of the same.  A shift to our good side, worldwide...same as it ever was.  So I end with a decade-old view of our planet from space, one of the many such videos out there.  But this one seemed to display the contrast of the artificial lights in our cities next to lands little populated yet having their own displays of equal beauty.  Little has changed on our planet when viewed this way...only us, it would seem.  Or maybe we haven't really changed at all.  Same as it ever was.  Darn, go away you negativity!

 

                                                

*From Wikipedia: According to Disney historian Jim Korkis, the word "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah" was reportedly invented by Walt Disney, who was fond of nonsense words used in songs such as "Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo" from Cinderella (1950) and "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" from Mary Poppins (1964).  And an additional note: while David Byrne long ago disassociated himself from Talking Heads, Stop Making Sense remains one of the classic concert shows of early rock...