A Journal of Humor and Verbal Anarchy

 

the big red center of the universe

Feeling depressed? Anxious? Afraid? It's ok, really it is. The Ithaca Mental Health/Social Service Industrial Complex is here to help you. Robert DeLuca, deputy commissioner of the Tompkins Country Mental Health Department, tells us that anxiety or stress is "a normal reaction to an abnormal situation. -Ithaca Journal, 3/24.

Thanks, Mr. DeLuca. Ezra is feeling better already. The abnormal situation the deputy Mental Health czar is referring to , if you can't figure it out, happens to be this evil war in Iraq. There are so many abnormal situations in Ithaca, however, that it helps to be told which one you should be affected by most.

The only thing we have to fear is stupidity itself. Franklin Roosevelt didn't really say that because he was a lot smarter than the imbecile that occupies the Oval Office now. Somebody ought to lock Bush in a square office with padded walls with a picture of May Todd Lincoln and back issues of The Nation.

Ezra has another suggestion on how to combat situational anxiety. Tune out the war altogether. You won't be unpatriotic either. You don't need to see all this crap on television. You're only boosting the ratings for the networks. That's the ongoing behind the scenes war that's just , if not more important , than the conflict in Iraq. Ezra is rooting for Tom Brokaw to win the ratings war because he belongs to the Greatest Generation. -Ezra belongs to the second Lost Generation. Even though Dan Rather got points for the interview with Saddam, NBC has more articulate retired majors. Ezra likes this one guy, a regular --what's his name? Monty Montgomery or something? He looks like he took down some VC in his time.

The war will go on without you - it started without you after all.

Pop a video in the VCR when you feel the compulsion to watch the war. Schedule a dentist's appointment between 5:00 pm and 8 pm. Go to bed early so you don't feel you have to watch the news at 11. Watch Channel 78's Bringing Men to Christ instead. Or read de Sade's Justine. That will release your inner sadist. You don't have to watch GI Joe bayonet Iraqi's.

MTV is also concerned about their viewer's mental health. A top-level MTV executive directed his subordinates not to play music videos heavy on violence or that mentioned war, bombs, missiles etc. Check out the memo for yourself - http://www.internalmemos.com/memos/memodetails.php?memo_id=1424. (Thanks DB. Your comments are well taken. To paraphrase, our society has a problem with representations of obscenity but not with showing the obscenities themselves. Ouch!) It would be neat if the networks broadcast nature footage for a couple of hours each day. Like the woods around Camp David or the Grand Coolly Dam as visual sedatives. Or are they afraid they'd be giving the terrorists ideas?

But today's blog is not about the war.

Ezra needs to make a confession. Is there a priest on the internet? Yeah, if there's WebMD, why not WebRev, or WebSJ for cyber Jesuits? Is it possible to log on, make a confession and get your penance e-mailed back? Some day people will be able to get married on the Internet, thanks to webcams and streaming sound files. (Would you like to be the first?) Ezra is surprised that there aren't Internet chapels in California. That's where the techno-evangelism movement got started, home of the first drive-in church.

Don't believe for a moment that Ezra is some kind of computer geek. He isn't. Ezra doesn't even have DSL or any of that crap. His connection is so slow that every time he logs on to any site with a lot of files, it seems that they're downloading the entire US census to his computer.

But that's not his confession.

For years now he has deliberately avoided the Cornell campus. Like it was a death star or the lips of some particularly nasty black hole. By the time Ezra gets to Stewart Ave, he breaks out in shingles. On Eddy St. his lips turn blue.

A 30yr authority complex married to a locus pocus disorder prevents Ezra from entering those hallowed grounds. Ezra will never get an honorary degree from the place. Unless they mail it to general delivery.

Ezra isn't a Star Wars freak either but he knows that there must be a name for a planet or asteroid that is so loathsome that it has all the associations of that other place named Hell. Maybe some reader will provide the name. Yeah, are there any readers? That's another issue. Bishop Berkeley would ask if a blog appears in cyberspace and no one reads it, is it still a blog?

Not withstanding that Ezra had a few memorable moments on the hill. That's where he heard Bobby Seale, cofounder of the original Black Panthers. He went to a couple of Bound for Glory concerts to hear some folksingers on the way down --assuming they had ever been on the way up in the first place. (Just kidding!) That's where he heard Elie Wiesel and Carl Sagan. Before Ezra became convinced that Wiesel was just another front man for a crypto-fascist regime in the Middle East and Sagan went off looking for alien contacts. At a time people could still convince Ezra to go up the hill.

What's the deal with Cornell?

As a youth, Ezra spent a lot of time near Princeton University. He used to duck out of high school classes to spend hours in the basement stacks at Firestone Library. That was a library that let townies use their resources. You didn't have to show some kind of invisible bar-code on your forehead, stand on your hands and recite Childe Harolde at the same time either. There was an easy symbiosis between the town of Princeton and the University. That ain't so between Cornell and Ithaca.

The memory of Princeton University, that class-driven, elitist, snobbish but friendly and neat place, is so strong that Ezra can't relate to the Power Trip coming from Cornell. The school and its culture is so suffused with a sense of its own greatness, it's rightful place in the Universe, that it becomes inaccessible to anyone who hasn't paid their dues to go there or teach there.

At one time, Cornell used to tell incoming freshmen not to fraternize with the townies. Is that still true? Wear a gauze face mask when you're downtown, right?

Cornell contributes so little to Ithaca except population and trickle-down economics that it reeks. Graduates of Cornell tend not to stay in Ithaca. That means no business startups except your occasional restaurant or organic farm. Cornell faculty do not consider it terribly politic to get involved in the community - there are exceptions - but, if you're talking about the Cornell people on Common Council now, none too felicitous.

And don't be suckered by all the bullshit in the newspapers about new initiatives to break down the barriers. They're only curtains on the outhouse.

Don't take Ezra's word for it, either. Look around. Have you been to a college town that was so culturally impoverished, so - well, for lack of a better word - backward?

An accident of geography? Cornell being up the hill and not next door like Princeton? Or, back in the '50s, did the Cornell ruling elite all read George Kennan? Containment and all that crap. ( Who's being kept in and who's being kept out? )

Ever read Eugene Genovese, "Roll, Jordan, Roll - The World the Slaveholders Made?" Can you spell plantation system?

Ithaca is like some kind of pre-bellum, ante-bellum hick town in the South where folks all work for the massa, live in some dirt poor trailer parks, and drive pick up trucks. Figuratively speaking, mind you. It ain't that bad. But do we all walk around, avoiding any criticism of Cornell, like cats on a hot tin roof? Yes, we do.

One day Ezra would like to organize a slave rebellion. Get folks to make big signs
that read "Students Go Home!" and stand around on Rts. 79 and 96 starting around August 15th waiting for all the Camry's, Jeeps and hot little cars to drive by. Blockade the roads so Uhaul trucks can't get through like the Turkish border. Build catapults and siege engines. Torchlight parades. "Down with Cornell!" Board up all the restaurants on Friday and Saturday nights. Proof everybody coming to the Commons. Let the dishes pile up in the dining halls, the grounds go to seed up there, the waste baskets and dumpsters fill up. The flies will be out soon. Give them honorary degrees.

Ezra will become the new Nat Turner. He is the chosen one. Break out the machetes, stoke up the fires of Jubilee. The natives are restless. You have a date with MauMau, Cornell.

There will be much more about Cornell in these pages from time to time. Ezra has a problem with seeing red. Anyway, Ezra is posting this blog early to normalize his sleep schedule.
Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 10:08 PM