The Thunder of Butterflies

I'm certain I can't be the only one feeling as if he's living the aftereffects of Ray Bradbury's magnificent story, "A Sound of Thunder," can I? 

 Eckels stood smelling of the air, and there was a thing to the air, a chemical taint so subtle, so slight, that only a faint cry of his subliminal senses warned him it was there. The colors, white, gray, blue, orange, in the wall, in the furniture, in the sky beyond the window, were . . . were . . . . And there was a feel. His flesh twitched. His hands twitched. He stood drinking the oddness with the pores of his body. Somewhere, someone must have been screaming one of those whistles that only a dog can hear. His body screamed silence in return. Beyond this room, beyond this wall, beyond this man who was not quite the same man seated at this desk that was not quite the same desk . . . lay an entire world of streets and people. What sort of world it was now, there was no telling. He could feel them moving there, beyond the walls, almost, like so many chess pieces blown in a dry wind .... 

But the immediate thing was the sign painted on the office wall, the same sign he had read earlier today on first entering. Somehow, the sign had changed: TYME SEFARI INC. SEFARIS TU ANY YEER EN THE PAST. YU NAIM THE ANIMALL. WEE TAEK YU THAIR. YU SHOOT ITT. 

Eckels felt himself fall into a chair. He fumbled crazily at the thick slime on his boots. He held up a clod of dirt, trembling, "No, it can't be. Not a little thing like that. No!" 

Embedded in the mud, glistening green and gold and black, was a butterfly, very beautiful and very dead. "Not a little thing like that! Not a butterfly!" cried Eckels. It fell to the floor, an exquisite thing, a small thing that could upset balances and knock down a line of small dominoes and then big dominoes and then gigantic dominoes, all down the years across Time. 

Eckels' mind whirled. It couldn't change things. Killing one butterfly couldn't be that important! Could it? His face was cold. His mouth trembled, asking: "Who ­ who won the presidential election yesterday?" 

The man behind the desk laughed. "You joking? You know very well. Deutscher, of course! Who else? Not that fool weakling Keith. We got an iron man now, a man with guts!" The official stopped. "What's wrong?" 

Eckels moaned. He dropped to his knees. He scrabbled at the golden butterfly with shaking fingers. "Can't we," he pleaded to the world, to himself, to the officials, to the Machine, "can't we take it back, can't we make it alive again? Can't we start over? Can't we­" He did not move. 

Eyes shut, he waited, shivering. He heard Travis breathe loud in the room; he heard Travis shift his rifle, click the safety catch, and raise the weapon. 

There was a sound of thunder.

Shane MacGowan Wishes You a Merry Effing Ho-Ho

 

[Shane MacGowan died and he was much too young, although at 65 maybe he was also too old. In memorium, and because 'tis the season, I repost this essay I wrote a decade or so ago, a sample for my research classes examining the then-recent development of traditional (read: vanilla) Xmas songs clogging up pre-Thanksgiving radio. This was pre-satellite radio with its devoted channels and the year-round slogfest of a dedicated Hallmark Channel. Shane, we only wanted you to live.]

 

            I was driving my usual commute during the first week of November.  I hit the “scan” button on my radio and various music and talk shows faded in and out.  My attention was caught when dulcet tones sang, “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire…”

            I knew those dulcet tones.  That was Perry Como.  When I was a kid my folks were avid listeners of what’s now called Adult Contemporary Music but in my childhood was simply referred to as Elevator Music.  Perry Como, Mel Torme, Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, Kate Smith, Rosemary Clooney.  I’d learned to know those singers in the first couple notes as a child by repetitive play on the stereo.  But the novelty of hearing the late Honeyed Voice in the Sweater on the radio was soon overtaken by the realization that I was listening to a Christmas song.  On the radio.  The first week in November.

            Now, when I was a kid, Christmas was my favorite time of the year.  I didn’t have to come up with excuses not to go outside if I didn’t want to, and the cold nipping at my exposed nose on waking was neat.  Plus it was wonderful to lie on my belly and read a junk novel by the bottom lights on the Christmas tree with a plateful of cookies and some hot chocolate.  I’d start playing Christmas albums around September and not cut it out, despite firm requests from my family, until about the first week of January. 

            But that stopped when puberty kicked in.  Here were adults—Professional Adults!—programming Christmas music when everyone’s Halloween candy was still fresh.

            Rather than ranting and raving about it, I decided to look into the reason for this.  There had to be a reason.  There were several.

            No radio station exists as an island.  Every station, whether owned by a conglomerate like Clear Channel or Fred over at the Fish Shack, exists as part of a market.  The market can be as small as a city and its environs—the Twin Cities, for example—or as large as a region—the Iron Range, which is the full upper third of Minnesota from Bemidji to the Canadian border (excluding Duluth).  There is an unwritten agreement between radio stations that one station, generally the Adult Contemporary or Lite station, within the market will provide twenty-four hour, seven-day-a-week Christmas music starting in November.  On December 24^th, every station is welcome to play as much Christmas music as it chooses. 

            The reasons this agreement came about are diffuse.  Some argue it is because, well, someone has to do it, so it might as well be the station whose listeners are accustomed to listening to Easy Listenin’ Music.  If the station is an oldies station, whose listeners are accustomed to the sounds of the classic Christmas songs from mid 20^th Century—Patti Page, Mitch Miller, the Jackie Gleason Orchestra, Sinatra, Como, Torme—so much the better.  It should come as no surprise then that the most often played Christmas song is Nat “King” Cole’s version of “The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire),” but what should surprise us is the number of popular songs with at best a tangential connection to Christmas, often merely a mention, that also pop up regularly in rotation, such as Joni Mitchell’s “River,” the Pretenders’ “2000 Miles,” and DanFogelberg’s “Same Old Lang Syne” (this last divorced not only from the holiday but from reality:  how hard is it to find an open bar on Christmas Eve?), while ignoring several more controversial ones with secure roots in the holiday, like the Kink’s “Father Christmas” and ThePogues’ “Fairytale of New York.”

            The difficulty may come when a market has only, say, country and rock stations.  One of them will likely take on the duty, but this will often be a choke for regular listeners, since there are comparatively few Christmas-themed country or rock songs, and certainly not enough to program twenty-four hours a day for nearly sixty days.

            This is the interesting part to me.  While it’s been a given of every generation to bemoan how quickly the Christmas season begins, as if its generation could wait longer, and while I thought I had some memory that this was an omnipresent condition, radio stations starting earlier and earlier until we’d finally reached saturation point with Halloween, that isn’t the case.  While some stations make a practice of starting earlier—KOSY in Salt Lake City, Utah, is apparently the earliest, beginning its Christmas rotation Halloween night [although this has changed only this past January]—the practice used to have as a common starting point the day after Thanksgiving. 

            Until 2001.  Yes, 9-11 changed everything.  That was the year George W. Bush asked us to help America remain solvent by spending money, and one of the ways gleaned by merchandisers and radio programmers in tandem was to begin the Christmas season early, two weeks before Thanksgiving.  The practice has simply escalated and the dates fallen back since then.

            And here we come to the dirty secret why radio stations, especially Adult Contemporary and Oldies stations, fall all over themselves to be the first to begin the Christmas season:  Stores and shops generally play Christmas music for their customers, the better to suggest “buy early and buy often.”  A few stores, like Walmart and Kmart, have their own radio systems, and some big chains, like Best Buy and [late, unlamented] Circuit City, use piped-in Muzak.  But aside from the big boxes, the majority of stores and shops rely on the good old fashioned free radio signal to accelerate buying habits.  Naturally, the mix of garlanded shelving and spruce-scented spray with tchochkes and knickknacks with the background fuzz of Herb Alpert and His Tijuana Brass and their version of “Sleigh Ride” is a marriage made in Retail Heaven.  Most importantly, these stations are played at least for the operating hours for the store and occasionally simply left turned on for the cleaning crew.  This is a bump in Arbitron ratings for a station, sometimes as much as three points.  Arbitron ratings are an important part of a station’s profile.  The place each fits on the scorecard for its market determines how much it can charge advertisers for 10, 20, and 30 second spots.  In a market of ten stations, getting bumped from number 6 to number 3 for the year can mean a bump of tens of thousands of dollars in advertising revenue. 

            It doesn’t matter, of course, if anyone actually listens to this stuff.  The stations provide “ears” to the advertisers, and they’re selling potential sales.  It isn’t important if the employees end up by the third week of November muttering x-rated versions of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” on its tenth play of the day.  What is important is that at least ten times that day, different customers have heard it and their desire for, say, another twenty dollar stocking stuffer for Jimmy has been pricked. 

 

 

Works Cited

• Arbitron Radio Ratings and Media Research Information.  2007.  Last accessed November 26, 2007, at http://www.arbitron.com/home/content.stm
• “Christmas Music.” 2007.  Wikipedia.  Last accessed November 26, 2007, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_music
• Ho, Rodney.  2007.  “Bull Goes All Christmas.”  The Atlanta Journal Constitution.  November 23:  B1. 

·         Virgin, Bill.  2007.  “On Radio: All-Christmas format is a ratings gift for KRWM-FM, boosting it to first.”  Seattlepi.com.  Last Accessed November 25, 2007, at http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/tv/300965_radiobeat25.html. .

Why Aren't Comics Better?

 

Well, of course I don't really have an answer to that. To do so would require knowing inside baseball like costs, publication periods, working with creatives including writers, artists, inkers, colorists, even editors. It would require knowing about readership and buying habits and brand loyalty and other important and necessary stuff. And I don't know any of that.

But I do think I know what's good and what makes for good stories and, frankly, there aren't enough of them available. Every few months I go out and sit to look at the latest offerings (and I'll be the first to admit that skews what I see because I read graphic novels, which necessarily take sometimes years to accumulate enough story to be printed), so what I am looking at is not technically the latest offering. But what I see leaves me depressed.

So I suppose what I really mean is, why aren't comics as good as I wish they were? It's true, don't damn a story for what it's not. But there's so much else they can be. What I think disturbs me most is the tendency in so many stories to kill minor characters or passersby easily. I applaud where this has come from as a response against the unrealistic ability of everyone to save everyone. 

But there's too great the temptation, I guess, to whack people willy nilly to show how irredeemable a character is, how little human life means to them, all that. Is it necessary to show a character slaughtering, sometimes people on his own side, and joking while doing so? The recent Mr Miracle series was offensive in the killing of members of Scott and Barda's own forces while they argued about renovation. There aren't any noble ways to die but it's certainly insulting to be slain by the leaders of your own community while they banter about who puts their closet to better use.

I have, of course, other issues, mostly about the hypocrisy of fine tuning the reality of a series which continues to feature the same cast of a half century or a century ago. But there's something instructive too about looking backwards at those old series. What sets art, even middlebrow art, apart from the sniggering of porn and nihilistic jokes is that it presents a world a reader wants to work for or against. Here's where the optimism of space opera and the pessimism of dystopian stories come in. At their worst, they leave the reader with the sense that "this is a future I want to see/avoid." The Ronin/Hawkeye vignette in Avengers: Endgame, which might seem counter to my point, is instead an excellent example. Ronin's indiscriminate killing of drug dealers while cosmic forces are at play elsewhere is perfectly at home with his (and maybe the viewer's) belief that a world in which people who profit off other people's pain are punished as resolutely as a multiple world destroyer is a future worth working toward.

"I know the way out"

I've used this story several times in sermons and essays. It's an amalgam of two stories I really like, the parable of the good Samaritan and this story from The West Wing. It's an accurate reflection of what I see as our responsibility to one another--to be on the lookout for the needs of others--and of my personal responsibility. As I mention in the original sermon this is from, I'm not as good a storyteller as the Luke writer, so I've added detail.

Guy’s walking along the Red Cedar Trail and he’s not looking where he’s going and he falls down along one of those spots where the ground is soft and he slides almost to the river.  He’s pretty banged up, he thinks, maybe a broken arm, maybe his leg is at an angle a healthy leg oughtn’t to be.  He’s laying there a long time.  When he wakes up he notices the slope is almost perfectly sheer and even if he could get up, about halfway up the sand breaks away and he’d be right back down at the river, hurt even worse.

            Dude comes by.  He’s a local teacher.  He’s a good man, responsible, keeps his commitments.  Guy down by the river’s edge, he sees him, waves one pitiable hand at him, shouts, “Hey, brother, can you help me up out of here?”  But the teacher, he’s a jogger and this is his running time.  He’s got his headphones on, doesn’t even hear this guy, he’s not looking down, doesn’t see him waving.  He goes on past.

            Guy’s getting pretty nervous.  It’s going to be dark sooner than later and it’s late in the year.  This could be bad. 

            Another dude goes by, local minister.  He’s a pretty good person, too—everyone in this town is an okay person.  Guy down at the river’s edge waves and says, in a weaker voice, “Hey, pastor, can you help me up out of here?”  But the minister, he’s got tomorrow’s sermon due and he’s taking a walk to clear his head.  His mind’s full of what he’s going to say and how he’s going to say it and he doesn’t hear the guy either.  He just walks on.

            Now the guy’s getting really worried.  It’s about quarter to seven and the cold is already creeping up his spine.  He might live through the night from his wounds, but he’s going to be exposed to hypothermia and if he does have broken limbs he’ll probably go into shock and that can be fatal.  He cries a little.

            One of the local kids comes by.  Guy down at the river recognizes him.  He used to hang out down by the Acoustic where he sold weed to the college kids.  He got picked up by the cops, cleaned out, spent some time in prison, got his act together.  He’s been out a couple months, has a hard time finding a steady job, the story is he’s been turning tricks to live day to day. 

      Guy down by the river practically whispers up, “Help.”

            Kid hears him, looks over the edge down at him, yells, “Can you move?”

            Guy tests himself out.  He can move.  It hurts like hell and he’s going to have some nasty bruises and a scar, but turns out nothing’s broken.  He crawls to his feet and says, “Yeah, I can.”

            Kid slides down the cliff to where the guy is.  Guy’s thinking, “Oh man, this kid’s going to rob me!”  He whimpers, “I said get me some help, now we’re both stuck down here.”

            Kid puts his arm around the guy and holds him so the guy can stand and walk.  Gingerly, painfully, but he can walk.  Kid says, “Yeah, but I’ve been down here before and I know the way out.”