Chimes at Midnight

Serendipity gives life an interesting tang. In the chaotic vibrations of subatomic particles which make up the universe as we know it, all kinds of improbable coincidences occur. One hit me this past week -- the intersection of a front-page news story with a book I had just finished reading.

The news story: The Supreme Court legalized same-gender marriage. I, like the rest of the country, had been watching for several weeks as headlines grew more frenzied with the approach of the Court's decision in regards to gay rights.

The book: Midnight Cowboy. This bittersweet novel from 1965 follows the career of Joe Buck, a naive young man who moves from Texas to New York City, planning to survive by hiring his services out to rich women.

The intersection: my complete and total surprise at finding out that the book's author, James Leo Herlihy, was gay.

James Leo Herlihy

As I read the book, it simply didn't occur to me that Cowboy was a gay novel. Sure, Joe sometimes had sex with men, but that was just for money. His friendship with Rizzo never struck me as anything but platonic. (I admit that sometimes a story's too-subtle undercurrents may elude me.)

So here again we have the question coming into play about how much outside knowledge we should bring to our reading. Does the fact that the author is gay mean the work is? Even when the wording never suggests anything even remotely romantic in the male-to-male friendship? Another author/work pair that comes to mind is Tennessee Williams and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Is that merely a "gay" drama? (Herlihy and Williams used to swim together at twilight in Key West, Florida.) How about Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's? Can't that be looked at as a fine story without seeing it as the work of a gay man? How much should the reader infuse into the book? When does a book stop being the author's and become the reader's? How different would my reading of the book have been had I known Herlihy's sexual orientation beforehand?

Another point: On 21 October 1993, Herlihy overdosed on sleeping pills. The next day, the New York Times reported that the cause of death was revealed by Joe Frazier, "a friend." Although understanding human motivation remains nothing but guesswork, one cannot help wondering if Herlihy would still have killed himself after this week's Court decision.

Zombies ... gotta love 'em

Normally, I'm not a fan of zombies. That's because usually any plot with zombies is every plot with zombies. Just about every story about zombies that can be written, has been written.

If anything makes a zombie story at all interesting, it centers on some non-zombie aspect of the story. Which is true of the zombie CD I watched this afternoon, World War Z. I only picked it up at the library because I was in a hurry and willing to take just about anything. (Actually, I think what caught my attention was the cover which shows Brad Pitt in front of a big red Z ... which might have something subliminal to do with my childhood fascination with Zorro, but I can't say for sure.)

The 2013 movie is based on a 2006 book by Max Brooks, the son of -- go figure -- Mel Brooks. (Isn't the serendipity that moves the world just too marvelous?) I would have requested the book from my local library, but the only format they have it in is electronic, and since I have no Kindle or other related hardware, I guess I'll just have to rely on the movie to fill my zombie quota.

So, let's talk about the movie. Actually, I don't want to. The movie is boring, so why should I waste our time talking about it? The only thing that made any difference to me was one short sentence uttered at the end of the movie by the hero, Gerry Lane. In a voice-over on top of the most lackluster reunion of a nuclear family unit I've seen, Lane says that in order to overcome the zombie plague, humans must help each other. In fact, his simple declarative statement is: "Help each other." And that is what I want to talk about here.

I might be willing to take the stance that "Help each other" is the prime ethical injunction. However, what would happen if, oh, say, the Republican Party were to adopt the motto of 'help others'? Would they lay aside their frenzied money-grubbing and buy a homeless person a meal? Would they help subsidize the heating bill of an out-of-work single parent and children? Admittedly, the platform of the Grand Ol' Party includes many planks besides lack of social responsibility: the fear of centralized power, for instance, also holds a powerful sway over Republicans. (Ironically, their first President -- Lincoln -- fought viciously to preserve federal power.) However, one of the the main points of contention with the GOP lies in its aversion to Federally-funded social-assistance programs such as Food Stamps and Welfare which, despite all the fraud, help keep people alive. By casting such measures as experiments in socialism, Republicans can decry expenditures as undemocratic, and therefore unAmerican. The wealth-pots of conservatism justify their tightfistedness by painting anyone who just happens to be out of luck and needing a helping hand, as a two-bit Commie slacker, an attitude which reminds me of the time the radical Jewish teacher Yeshua told a rich young ruler to sell everything he had and give it to the poor ... something no conservative in our time could do either, even to please God Himself.

So the question raised by this movie comes down to whether individual Republicans, without crucial networks of mutual support and benevolence, could survive a zombie apocalypse. Then again, with that said, when is it not the zombie apocalypse?