Greatness

There are certain things this election forced -- or should have forced -- us to consider. Like: Is America great? Was it? Could it possibly be? Simple questions like that.

If I ever meet a Trump supporter in a sane, uncharged environment, it's something I'd like to ask. Specifically: When exactly was America great, and what did that greatness consist of? My expectation is that the answer will be unforgivably racist (not to mention anti-feminist), either willfully or in its total disregard for those aspects, but still. I'd like to ask.

Because I have a hard time, you see, with the idea of American greatness. There are flashes of brilliance, sure: brownies, peanut butter, macaroni and cheese, Thanksgiving, Halloween, comic books... (In fact, myth-making generally. It is something we as a people are very good at, for better or worse. We build these stories about ourselves, about who we are and what that means... It is beautiful, and it is also part of the problem.) But wholesale greatness is elusive.

The more I leave America and see for myself what the rest of the world looks like, and talk to the people who inhabit it, the more I see we're not, at all, what we're cracked up to be. Here, a summary of two recent conversations:

1. R and I just got back from Mexico City, a place that people the likes of Ann Coulter regard with unmitigated horror, and you know what? The subways were cheap (around 30¢), extensive, and arrived approximately every three minutes. Public bathrooms abounded, again around 30¢ a pop, reasonably clean, with an attendant to hand you toilet paper. And yes, smog existed, but at street level it was far cleaner than NY (which, come on, is as good as America gets). It is, in short, a large, modern, well-run city that puts us -- or really should, if we take the time to examine it -- to shame. Add in the endless delicious street food options, and you really start to wonder.

2. As a non-union city employee, as of last(!) year I am entitled to six weeks of paid maternity leave. (You're shit out of luck if you're in the union, or work for any number of other companies.) So yay. Plus I have health insurance that will cover most of the associated costs of having a baby. I am definitely one of the lucky ones. In America. Do you know what I'd be entitled to as a citizen of Sweden? It's almost too depressing to contemplate. Per NPR:

Parents are allocated a total of 480 days per child, which they can take any time until the child is 8 years old. They can share these days, although 60 are allocated specifically to the father. And they are entitled to receive 80 percent of their wages, although this is capped at a certain level.

In fact, "the U.S. is the only industrialized nation that doesn't mandate that parents of newborns get paid leave." Industrialized we may be, but first-world? Maybe if a nuke headcount is the only measure. We don't even get cardboard boxes.

Forget about other health care. Forget about mass shootings and our cultural acceptance of guns generally. Forget about a nation built around the primacy of the automobile. Even so. Greatness is a long way away. If I move to another country in the coming years, it will not be a knee-jerk, fuck-this-orange-turd-of-a-president reaction. It will be because this is not a place to live, to raise a family, to be a part of the narrative.

Do better, America.

The election

It's not that I don't have anything to say about all this. But it is being said. And saying more doesn't make me feel better, or change what's happened, or even do anything to improve it for the future. I know, and my friends know, and the good people of the world know. I don't have to tell them anything more.

So instead I blasted Scary Monsters on repeat. And then The Ballad of Booth, and Another National Anthem. Not because they're from a show that's called what it is, or is about what it is. Not for those kinds of reasons. But because in addition to being about those things, it is also about hope, and the idea that no matter how wrong things go, we can, in time, recover. The ones who "thrive on chaos and despair" are the losers. Always. Eventually. So I'm holding on to that, and singing along and trying not to cry. And trying to be a little nicer, and better, and smarter every day.

Halloween

Last year, R sent one of the guys who works for him to pick up Halloween candy for the shop. The guy (to protect the guilty, I'm not mentioning names) came back with -- I don't even know. Off-brand, non-chocolate, like hard candies and shit. I can't imagine where he found them. There may have been a few Sweet Tarts or Smarties (US) mixed in, but on the whole it was an utterly inadmissible collection. Had I chosen to egg the shop, no jury in the world would have convicted me. This year my message to R was clear: get chocolate, or you'll never see your firstborn child.

I didn't specify type or provide rankings. Not that I couldn't; so could any 7 year-old in the country; but half the fun is eating fun size portions of candy bars you would never dream of purchasing in their natural state. Mr Goodbar -- do they even make those full size? Baby Ruth. Krackel. Butterfinger. 3 Musketeers.

This isn't a ding; I love all of those. But I can count on one hand the commercial, regular ol' types of candy bars I've bought in my life. Snickers. Kit Kat (Chunky and not). Maybe a Milky Way. Reese's. Peanut M&Ms. Never Twix. I have what some may consider an irrational aversion to Twix. They're not bad exactly. But why are there two? I mean i'll eat one if you give it to me. But I will never pick it out of the bowl on Nov 1. We just don't click, Twix and me.

In any event, in addition to gaining access to his likely only child, R this year also purchased himself a grade-A American education. Because if there's one thing that gets lost in translation, it is candy.

"Almond Joy! Fantastic! Like Bounty with a nut." No, Mounds with a nut. Don't you know the catchphrase? Don't you know how to use a semicolon? What do they teach them at these schools?

"Milky Way... Oh, that's not a Milky Way. That's a Mars Bar. What's a 3 Musketeers? That's a Milky Way!"

Reese's... Only on this side of the pond do we properly appreciate peanut butter, and so only we have made the discovery of the greatest pairing of all time, and i'm including Fred & Ginger here.

Snickers... Okay Snickers is Snickers. Sometimes you just cannot fuck with greatness. Therein lies what makes it great.

York Peppermint Patty... As R's coworker explained: "We can eat all these ourselves. They're too sophisticated for children. They don't appreciate them properly." Which is true. I've always liked them, but they're never something you'd trade for.

Because oh, did we trade. In the basement rec room of my friend Amy's house, with careful piles in front of us. If one person had to go to the bathroom while negotiations were still ongoing, the rest had to sit on their hands, not moving, watching each other for the slightest hint of perfidy. There may be honor among thieves, but trust? Not where 12 year-old girls are concerned.

We all visited the same houses of course. Our hauls should, theoretically, have been the same, or anyway roughly comparable. But there are those mixed bags where one person ends up with a Hershey's Special Dark and one person gets Reese's Pieces, and inexplicably, but luckily, there are some people who actually like gum and lollipops and will give you chocolate in exchange for them. Or Skittles, at the very least.

We drove hard bargains in that basement. I always maintained that it was alright if we went to school on Halloween -- more costume time, and things don't get going til 5 probably anyway -- but the day after should really, by all rights, be a national holiday.

But speaking of costumes. Looking back at my childhood, its times like this I realize what an impenetrable geek I was. Things that seemed awesome at the time... Well they still seem awesome, but with that little bit of head-shaking pride that a kid could have those ideas, and balls.

My first few years were uninspiring. I didn't get a vote. A cat, a clown. My first real Halloween costume was Peter Pan. I had a sword made out of cardboard wrapped in tinfoil, and I wore my father's wooly brown socks as knee boots. They picked up leaves like crazy. The pièce de résistance was the black eye a boy in my class had given me the day before.

Next I was a scuba diver. Probably in spandex, not neoprene. And I wore the flippers, which was a mistake no matter how you slice it. You cannot walk in flippers. We had a school parade around the field, and I kept getting lapped because I could only shuffle, inch by inch, while the cowboys and chefs and whatnot charged by.

My best costume ever, certainly by my parents' reckoning, and they could be right, was Charlie Chaplin. Again, not a fast mover, but doing the walk correctly, having none of my 6 year-old classmates get it, and only half my teachers, was worth it.

When I was a bit older, maybe one of my last real trick-or-treating years, I went as Santa Claus. It wasn't a very interesting costume -- probably the closest I ever came to something out of a bag -- but it was worth it every time someone opened the door and I shouted "Merry Christmas!"

More recently I've had my moments. My interpretive Two-Face was good. Annie Lennox and Seven of Nine both spot on. But my friend who always had the parties, who lived a block fom the parade on the right side and spent all year perfecting his own costume, is gone, and that's put a bit of a damper on things. I had my next good one all planned out too: Victorian lady Han Solo. But alas.

So this year I put on some stuff, got crushed in the crowd on the wrong side of the parade, saw a walking Chrysler Building and Michael Jackson holding hands with the Stay Puft Marshmallow man, and met R for dumplings in Chinatown. Then we ate too much chocolate. It could be worse.