Here are a few frames from the Gene Deitch’s animated version of “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” The original Hans Christian Andersen story is essential reading for understanding our times, but, as I have noted before, you must pay close attention to the ending. I would also point out that in the Nunnally translation, the emperor’s new clothes are invisible to anyone “unfit for his position or inexcusably stupid.” (Show me a fairy tale more on-the-nose!)
The cartoonist Gahan Wilson died two Thursdays ago in Scottsdale, Arizona, USA, at the age of 89.
The poet and critic Clive James died three days later, in Cambridge, England, at the age of 80.
Reading their obituaries, it struck me how neatly their end-of-life care situations split between their two countries.
* * *
Gahan Wilson died of complications from severe dementia. After Wilson’s wife, Nancy Winters — “his guide through the world” — died earlier in the year, his stepson, Paul Winters, had to move him out of the assisted living facility the couple had been living in.
Wilson was profiled by the Arizona Republic in April. He was still drawing.
Gahan lives in a memory care facility not far from their house. The staff is kind. Gahan is safe. But it’s no way to live, Paul said.
“As an old person without money, you are not respected. You are no one,” he said. “It seems our society doesn’t really honor elders as we should.” […]
Paul and [his wife] Patty navigate the health care system for Gahan. The care he needs is expensive.
They have raised $58,000 on a GoFundMe account. Paul knows people donate because his stepfather is famous. He can imagine how other families must struggle.
“Memory care is wildly expensive,” Paul wrote. “If we could cover the cost ourselves, we would. We can’t, and Gahan and my mother did not save for anything like this.”
* * *
Meanwhile, across the pond, Clive James died “peacefully” at home thanks to a team of hospice nurses, “surrounded by his family and his books,” almost a decade after he’d been diagnosed with leukemia, kidney failure, and emphysema.
Now, any rich person in America can die this way, maybe, but thankfully, James had the National Health Service, whose praises he sang just last year:
The result of all this careful attention is that I have lived several years past my predicted time of extinction, and that my credibility as a dying man is in tatters. Lifting a Paper Mate Flexgrip Ultra ballpoint pen takes all my strength, but the resulting prose says I am still alive and full of energy…. So I’m stuck with still sounding healthy when I write, and the impression is only mildly misleading because the NHS has been doing a marvellous job on me.
In his last years, James wrote everything from death poems to a book about binge-watching television.
He addressed the cost of it all:
The NHS will go on for ever being almost broke because there will always be more things it can do. You might profess to be appalled that the NHS has spent millions on a new drug to stop people suddenly turning upside down and falling on their head, but you will be less appalled the first time you yourself suddenly turn upside down and fall on your head.
It wasn’t just Clive James and his friends and family who benefited from the NHS, it was readers all over the world and into the future.
* * *
“I think one way I could be helpful to British voters is they could imagine me as the Ghost of Christmas Future,” says American comedian Rob Delaney.
He recently posted a video about his experiences with the NHS after the death of his son, Henry.
He said his American friends all hear about what a mess the NHS is on Fox News.
On the contrary, he says, “I’m crazy about it.”
May I ask you to watch this short video I made about the NHS?pic.twitter.com/VNzKPYGgq2
— rob delaney (@robdelaney) November 23, 2019
Our American healthcare system is killing us. It’s bankrupting our families, chaining us to jobs we hate, and keeping us from doing the work we’re meant to do.
It is especially hard on artists and other kinds of creative entrepreneurs.
It is why I’m a single issue voter.
Yesterday, I was looking at this Stairway to Nowhere in my hotel — the kind of “luxury” hotel with lots of fancy finishes and no ice in the ice machine — and I was thinking about the news, and Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes” came to mind, as it often does these days:
Many years ago there was an Emperor so exceedingly fond of new clothes that he spent all his money on being well dressed. He cared nothing about reviewing his soldiers, going to the theatre, or going for a ride in his carriage, except to show off his new clothes…
“It’s strange people think they need Arendt or Orwell to figure things out,” Jeet Heer tweeted not long ago, “when everything was spelled out in ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes.’”
“But he hasn’t got anything on,” a little child said.
“Did you ever hear such innocent prattle?” said its father. And one person whispered to another what the child had said, “He hasn’t anything on. A child says he hasn’t anything on.”
“But he hasn’t got anything on!” the whole town cried out at last.
The Emperor shivered, for he suspected they were right. But he thought, “This procession has got to go on.” So he walked more proudly than ever, as his noblemen held high the train that wasn’t there at all.
After I finished the story again, I thought of 16-year-old climate change activist Greta Thunberg, whose autism informs her approach: “I don’t fall for lies as easily as regular people, I can see through things.”
To the politicians, she says: “You don’t listen to the science because you are only interested in the answers that will allow you to carry on as if nothing has happened.”
But will anybody listen? Will anybody change? “Is my microphone on?” she asks.
Children are able to see through our bullshit, but if we don’t respect them and listen to them, we learn nothing from them, and nothing changes. The Emperor is allowed to proceed, because “the procession has got to go on.”
“Have you noticed how riddled with fear our country is lately? We’ve never been more afraid. I’m concerned about that. Because when a society is afraid, people with a wrong motive can take advantage of that society and make them become something that they’re not. There’s a lot of fear right now in the United States of America and the most fearful Americans are the Americans that are buried deep in the middle of this country with no passports. This is a concern. Fear is for people who don’t get out much. The flipside of fear is understanding, and we gain understanding when we travel. I think it’s important for our very democracy… that we get out there, we travel, and we gain an empathy for the other 96% of humanity.”
I caught this talk last night on PBS, and it was so well done that I felt compelled to keep watching past my bedtime. (He’s been giving some version of the talk since 9/11.) It’s pretty brilliant in that it’s both a genuine plea for a saner, more thoughtful politics in this country, but also basically an infomercial for his travel services, his book of the same name, and his classics, Europe 101 and Europe Through The Back Door. (It feels very American to me in that way — both heartfelt and capitalist.) Worth a watch.
I bought so many Beto signs for our yard I thought I’d cut one up into a campaign slogan that more accurately reflects the dire state of our country.
Someone suggested if I made a bunch and put them next to each other they’d still work as Beto signs:
Whenever a heartwarming story about a community rallying to support someone with a medical issue pops up, one of my smarter friends will point out how absurd it is that any citizen of the richest country on Earth should need a GoFundMe campaign to pay for their medical bills.
Again and again, I come back to this post by comedian Rob Delaney:
I’m almost a single-issue voter. I’m not, but my thinking about government and elected officials and what their purposes are begins and ends with how they approach health care. My thinking certainly visits all the other issues along the way (or a few of them anyway; I don’t have to have an opinion on everything as I’m not running and never will run for president) but number one among all the issues for me is health care. My reason for that is that I believe that you can’t really effect positive change in any other area if your body (or your child’s body, or your partner’s body) is sick or not working. Nor can you effect change if you’re struggling to pay for – or even get – vital medicine for yourself or a family member. Nor, again, can you effect change in areas you care about if you’re in significant debt for medical care you’ve already received. You can even have a hard time effecting change in the political issues you care about if you merely live with the specter of not being able to access or pay for medical care for yourself or your family.
For me and my family, it’s the black cloud that hovers in the background of every decision we make: What will we do for health insurance? What if one of us gets sick or hurt?
Health care is my #1 issue, as I think it should be for everyone in this country. (It also happens to be the one issue my conservative dad and I can agree on: Medicare for all.)
Inevitably, someone will say, “I read you for art, not for politics,” so here’s a hook for you: Bad health care has killed more American artists than I could list here without my fingers falling off.
The midterms are coming up, so if you want to support the arts, register to vote and vote for politicians who support universal health care.
I read about this 1966 LEGO ad in Alexandra Lange’s The Design of Childhood. In case you can’t read the copy:
Let somebody else’s child get his kicks tracking a little kid through a gun sight. Let somebody else’s child build a bomb shelter in the hollow of an old tree. Remember when the hollow of an old tree was just fun? Heck, war isn’t very adventurous anymore. We think there’s lots more adventure in a medical lab, or at the U.N.
A half century later, it seems remarkably progressive . I was reminded of this pamphlet from a 1974 LEGO set:
The urge to create is equally strong in all children. Boys and girls.
It’s the imagination that counts. Not skill. You build whatever comes into your head, the way you want it. A bed or a truck. A dolls house or a spaceship.
A lot of boys like dolls houses. They’re more human than spaceships. A lot of girls prefer spaceships. They’re more exciting than dolls houses.
The most important thing is to put the right material in their hands and let them create whatever appeals to them.
Again, it seems remarkably progressive, as does this 1981 ad, written by creative director Judy Lotas, who was inspired by the Equal Rights Amendment and her own daughters:
Have you ever seen anything like it? Not just what she’s made, but how proud it’s made her. It’s a look you’ll see whenever children build something all by themselves. No matter what they’ve created.
That ad went viral in 2012 when LEGO started marketing LEGO Friends.
The response, when we see these ads, is often, “Why on Earth don’t they do it like this anymore?”
Many parents, including myself, lament the fact that there used to be more emphasis on free play and building from imagination, rather than pre-determined kits. Here’s Raul Gutierrez, of Tiny Bop:
The best toys — Tinkertoys, Lego, Play-Doh, Lincoln Logs — allowed us to build and rebuild almost endlessly. With my kids, I noticed that these kinds of toys have become increasingly rare. Lego bricks are sold primarily as branded kits. Instead of a pile of blocks that could become anything, they are now essentially disassembled toys. Instead of starting with a child’s imagination of what could be, play is now fixed on a single endpoint, predetermined by Lego’s designers.
But Lange points out that this golden age that we think of was actually just that: a golden age, a product of the specific time:
Today, the LEGO Group is often criticized for stoking the cycle of consumer desire, sequestering LEGO bricks in individual branded universes, and launching new sets on a fashion cycle, but this has been part of the company’s sales strategy for longer than people realize. The free play celebrated in their ads of the 1970s and early 1980s reflects a brief moment in American culture when the kindergarten values — embedded in wooden blocks — returned to the forefront…
We also lament the loss of that wonderful gender-neutral tone, which, according to this NYTimes article on how Disney has branded Frozen, was way more prevalent in the 1970s than today:
Princesses may seem like a permanent feature of the toyscape, but they were less common before the 1990s. “The idea that pink princess fantasy dream dolls have always been a part of girlhood is false,” says Elizabeth Sweet, a lecturer at the University of California, Davis, who studies the cultural history of toys. Sweet has found that the popularity of gender-neutral toys reached a peak in the mid-1970s. Since then, toy makers have embraced the market-doubling effect of pushing certain toys to boys and other toys to girls. Sweet says the level of gender segregation has never been higher. A typical big-box store might have four aisles of blue toys and four aisles of pink toys with an aisle of yellow toys in between. “Separate but equal,” she says. Legos, for example, evolved from simple packs of building blocks into play sets mostly sold to boys, often with brand tie-ins. In 2012, the company introduced Lego Friends, which are basically Legos for girls.
Here’s another NYTimes article from 2012 on gender-based toy marketing:
Gender was remarkably absent from the toy ads at the turn of the 20th century but played a much more prominent role in toy marketing during the pre- and post-World War II years. However, by the early 1970s, the split between “boys’ toys” and “girls’ toys” seemed to be eroding…
But by 1995, the gendered advertising of toys had crept back to midcentury levels, and it’s even more extreme today. In fact, finding a toy that is not marketed either explicitly or subtly (through use of color, for example) by gender has become incredibly difficult.
There are several reasons gender-based marketing has become so prevalent. On a practical level, toy makers know that by segmenting the market into narrow demographic groups, they can sell more versions of the same toy.
We want, so badly, for companies to stand for something good, and some companies do, but at the end of the day, advertising is about moving product, and while it can be idealistic and a force for good, is always the product of people trying to sell things to other people in a particular time and place. If you want better, more progressive advertising, build a better, more progressive world. Best not to get too caught up in nostalgia, but look back, see what’s worth stealing, and more forward.
A note on the post title, from Lange’s book: “LEGO” is a contraction of the Danish leg godt, or “play well.”
I love this picture of actor Nicholas Hoult on the set of Mad Max: Fury Road. I love that he’s in his full makeup and you can’t really see any other crew in the background — you can almost imagine another film in which his character, Nux, the War Boy, goes off on his own and spends the apocalypse making caps or something.
I thought of the picture while watching the BBC film, George Orwell: A Life in Pictures. Since there is no surviving footage of the author on film, actor Chris Langham plays Orwell in fake newsreels and documentaries, delivering monologues that are straight from the essays. At one point, Langham starts quoting the essay, “England Your England,” which Orwell wrote during The Blitz of 1941: “As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.”
Orwell is trying to describe what makes English culture unique and why the English seemed to be resistant to fascism. Only a few paragraphs in, he mentions the English “love of flowers” and their “addiction to hobbies and spare-time occupations, the privateness of English life.”
We are a nation of flower-lovers, but also a nation of stamp-collectors, pigeon-fanciers, amateur carpenters, coupon-snippers, darts-players, crossword-puzzle fans. All the culture that is most truly native centres round things which even when they are communal are not official – the pub, the football match, the back garden, the fireside and the ‘nice cup of tea’. The liberty of the individual is still believed in, almost as in the nineteenth century. But this has nothing to do with economic liberty, the right to exploit others for profit. It is the liberty to have a home of your own, to do what you like in your spare time, to choose your own amusements instead of having them chosen for you from above.
In my post, “In Praise of the good old-fashioned hobby,” I quoted actor and director Mackenzie Crook saying that he suspected that a penchant for hobbies and pastimes was a very British thing. I then suggested that as our own empire crumbles, “we would do well to observe how citizens of former empires enjoy a nice pint, a ramble, and a bit of tinkering.”
I’m interested in this idea that hobbies can not only help us cope in times of crisis, but they can also foster in us a sense of personal liberty that, no matter how small, can help us resist tyranny.
I’m thinking, now, of Leonard Woolf planting iris, or Paul Kingsnorth, in Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist, on leaving the environmental movement to tend to his own little “square of earth”:
Only two ways of reacting to the current crisis of nature were offered. On the one hand, there was ‘fighting’. This fighting was to be aimed at the ‘elite’ that was destroying the planet – oil companies, politicians, corporate leaders, the rich. On the other hand, there was ‘giving up’. Giving up meant not fighting. It meant running away from a necessary battle. It meant being selfish. It meant ‘doing nothing’, and letting the planet go to hell.
All of this hinged on a narrow definition of what doing something involved, and what action meant. It seemed to suggest that action must be something grand and global and gestural. Small actions were not actions at all: if you couldn’t ‘change the world’ there seemed little point in changing anything.
I like this idea of tending to your plot. The prerequisite for resisting a tyrannical government, as Orwell showed in 1984, is maintaining the “few cubic centimeters inside your skull.”
I suppose some would scoff at these ideas with the old expression: “Nero fiddled while Rome burned.” The funny thing about the phrase is that fiddles, or violins, weren’t actually invented yet in Nero’s time. So he didn’t literally fiddle. But there’s the other meaning of the word fiddle: to fidget or pass time aimlessly, without really achieving anything. And yet, fiddling, in this sense, is so much a part of how artists arrive at their work: they fiddle around, they putter, they waste time.
There’s another story about fiddling during a crisis: the orchestra on the RMS Titanic, who played music to keep the passengers calm as the crew loaded the lifeboats. (There is speculation as far as what final song they chose.) A passenger said:
Many brave things were done that night, but none were more brave than those done by men playing minute after minute as the ship settled quietly lower and lower in the sea. The music they played served alike as their own immortal requiem and their right to be recalled on the scrolls of undying fame.
Bertolt Brecht wrote a short poem called “Motto” about 1930s Germany:
In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing
About the dark times.
It’s for this reason that Keep Going starts with this poem, “Overheard on the Titanic”:
It’s a great tradition in American life to cherry-pick Bible verses to shore up your political positions, and as Alan Jacobs points out, if you’re happy with those in power, you drop Romans 13:1, if you’re unhappy, you drop Acts 5:29.
In A Man Without A Country, Kurt Vonnegut observed that no politicians seem to want The Beatitudes or The Sermon on the Mount printed in public buildings. “‘Blessed are the merciful’ in a courtroom? ‘Blessed are the peacemakers’ in the Pentagon? Give me a break!”
That reminds me of this wonderful excerpt that Alan posted from Kierkegaard’s journals:
Take any words in the New Testament and forget everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly. My God, you will say, if I do that my whole life will be ruined. How would I ever get on in this world? […] I open the New Testament and read: ‘If you want to be perfect, then sell all your goods and give to the poor and come follow me.’ Good God, if we were to actually do this, all the capitalists, the officeholders, and the entrepreneurs, the whole society in fact, would be almost beggars!
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