am neunte November

So many important events happened in Germany on November 9 it makes me wonder whether some date-obsessed person like me is in charge of their history.

It all started with the Revolutions of 1848, when a guy named Robert Blum was executed for trying to establish a democratic government. Thirty years later, on November 9, the Weimer Republic succeeded.

Then Hitler came along, and it almost seems like he sat down with a calendar to plan:

• The November 9 “Beer Hall Putsch,” in 1923, when he tried to overthrow the Republic;

• The founding of the SS, on November 9 two years later;

• Kristallnacht, November 9, 1932

The Berlin Wall wasn’t really supposed to fall twenty years ago today. On November 9, the Politburo decided they’d open it up on November 17, but they didn’t tell their poor spokesman that. So there he was, facing the press on November 9, and someone asked “When?”

And the weight of history must have come to his rescue: “Effective immediately,” he replied, and so it all began.

Damien, Don, and Damien

This is my first memory. My mother is in bed in a room off the dining room. I want to see her but a nurse, dressed in white, says she needs to rest. The top of the dining room table is higher than my head.

I must have been three, or younger. I’m not sure if my mother was recuperating from her miscarriage or from the baby who died shortly after he was born, on November 8, 1948. They wouldn’t let her see the baby, who was badly deformed, but she was able to get him baptized. She named him Damien.

My brother was born exactly one year after that baby. My mother never told him the story of Damien.

Even so, inexplicably, my brother’s son, many years later, chose the name Damien for his confirmation name.

So Happy Birthday, Damien, and Happy Birthday Don, who is 60 years old today.

Young affect, old attitude

After this in the Times today, I’ve started to worry that I’m acting old.

I recently had the opposite problem. I work as a “standardized patient” at local med schools, where I portray various conditions so the students can practice taking a medical history. My character was a much older woman, and I was told I had to work on my personality a bit because, they said, I had a “young affect.”

But are my possessions giving me away?

My shiny red Motorola Razr cell phone was quite the thing in its day, but I’ve dithered (thanks, Dick Cheney, for that evocative word) so long about whether to get a smartphone and if so should it be a Blackberry or an iphone and if I get a Blackberry which kind, with the keys or the touch screen, a Tour or a Storm 2 – anyway, I’ve dithered for so long that my shiny red phone goes dead after one, very short, call.

So I have to wear a watch, like old people, since my cell phone is always dead, and anyway it wouldn’t occur to me to check the time on it, because I have all these old-people watches. And I still have a landline, like old people, because my cell phone doesn’t work all that well in my house.

Or my communications? I know how to text, but I don’t, because typing an email is much faster, and I still leave voicemails, though I learned to my horror from the article that my kids may not be listening to them.

I don’t do Twitter or Facebook, which I’ve explained in a rather defensive way. In fact, I’m quite good at making excuses (in a very young-affect way) for why I act old, which may be because defensiveness, according to How Not to Act Old, is an “old attitude.”

So is cynicism, apparently. But I guess I’m just stuck with my old-fashioned cynicism, because you’ll never ever see me being its antonym. (It’s “respectful,” in case you’re wondering. I’m so far from it I had to look it up.)

Bring on the aliens!

There’s a new TV show I’m not going to watch because it sounds pretty terrible – aliens who all look like gorgeous Hollywood movie stars descend to Earth, and the people here welcome them instead of shooting them, and a priest is upset because they’ve never heard of Jesus Christ.

But that last little detail is fascinating. It almost makes me wish they’d come, so that all these people who are so sure they’re right about gay marriage and abortion and Obama’s a socialist would just shut up.

One more funny detail: the aliens say they’re here to heal the human race. In other words, they’re bringing us universal healthcare.

Guy Fawkes Day and Michele Bachmann

They planned it for eighteen months, rowing gunpowder up the Thames and packing it into cellars they’d rented beneath the House of Lords. If it had worked, Parliament would have blown up on the day it opened, November 5, 1605, killing the Protestant King James I and the Protestant ruling class. Then his children were supposed to be kidnapped, and his daughter Elizabeth installed as a Catholic queen (I guess they figured they could force her to convert since she was only nine).

Now in Britain they celebrate this day with big bonfires, which, oddly, is what would have happened if one of the Gunpowder conspirators hadn’t warned his brother-in-law, a Catholic member of the House of Lords.

Do you think Michele Bachmann chose this day deliberately for her Capitol Hill tea party? Probably not – I don’t think she’s that much in touch with the wider world.

But I just hope they don’t let any of those crazies into the House basement.

Only Maine was a jolt

So the meme of the day is that the New Jersey and Virginia governors’ races were, to quote the New York Times, “jolts for Obama.”

Of course I’m biased. And of course if it were Bush, I’m sure I’d be agreeing. But really, if you were a Democrat in New Jersey, would you vote for the guy who sped down the turnpike at 90 mph, nearly killing himself, or stay home? Or a Democrat in Virginia: would you vote for the guy who said he’d opt the state out of the public option if he became governor, or stay home?

And a majority of those who did vote said their vote had nothing to do with Obama. So how, exactly, is this a jolt?

Much more alarming, to me, is what happened in Maine. People loudly cheering when what they’re allowed to do, because of an accident of genetics, is denied to other people who love each other just as much.

Marriage is not for men and women. It’s for bigots.

The 23rd District of NY

Interesting how important one Congressional district in the Adirondacks has become. Sarah Palin, Joe Biden, me – all of a sudden we’re all focused on what will happen today, what it will mean for Republicans, Democrats, conservatives…

I keep reading that around 20% of people call themselves Republicans, but 40% (of total people) say they’re conservative. This means, since a recent CBS poll put Democrats at 33%, that almost all the independents are conservative. Very scary.

I also keep reading that Democrats should hope Doug Hoffman, the conservative guy who drove the moderate Republican with the unfortunate name of Scozzafava out of the race (apparently you can’t be a Republican anymore if you support abortion and gay marriage), wins, because that will mean the wingnuts have taken over the party and they’ll all lose in 2012.

I don’t agree. To me, this would mean that all the independents have been watching too much Fox “News,” and that the people who know better are doomed.

All Souls Day

Yesterday was for all the saints: all the people, according to the Catholic Church, who have performed enough miracles to get canonized.

Today is for all the dead people (or what’s left of them, i.e. their souls) who aren’t in heaven yet. They’re in Purgatory, and we’re supposed to pray for them so they can get out.

But what about all the good but not-quite-saintly souls who’ve actually made it to heaven? I think the Church needs to perform its syncretistic magic on the Day of the Dead. Maybe they could put it on top of Halloween, since All Saints Day doesn’t seem to have worked too well.

All Saints Day

“Hallowe’en has an undercurrent of occultism and is absolutely anti-Christian.”

From L’Osservatore Romano, the official Vatican newspaper, 10/30/09

Hey, Vatican, this is sounding a little desperate. It’s 2009, and you’ve been fighting this battle for how many years now?

The whole problem started way back in the seventh century, when Pope Boniface made up All Saints Day and laid it on top of the Lemuria, those three days in May when the Romans had been busy exorcising ghosts from their homes. That worked pretty well, and people forgot all about those lemures (the fall of the Roman Empire helped quite a bit).

Meanwhile Samhein, that other anti-Christian holiday, was becoming a real problem. It too lasted three days, and people were doing all kinds of pagan things like “dressing up as ghosts and ghouls.” To fix this, Pope Gregory decided to move all those hallowed saints from May to November, turning Samhein into All Hallows Eve. At least he gets credit for the name change.

The Church was also having a problem with that old Aztec festival, the Day of the Dead, where people were doing sacrilegious things like putting skulls on altars and worshipping a goddess. So they moved it from August to the beginning of November, hoping All Saints and All Souls Days would take care of it.

Well, Halloween is spreading, and Latinos are still making wonderful altars. What to do?

Maybe give it up? Let people celebrate what they want, when they want? WWJD?*

*for my true-atheist friend, who didn’t know what this meant the last time I left it unreferenced: “What Would Jesus Do?”

Samhein

My mother always told me not to hope to win a prize on Halloween, so I wouldn’t be disappointed, but this never made too much sense to me because the disappointment, beginning as it did as soon as she started making my costume, lasted so much longer that way. Even so, I won a lot of prizes, because she was so inventive. Her best costume, which I almost refused to wear because it was so ugly, was the blind Venetian: Venetian blinds, worn front and back, sunglasses, and a little begging cup.

Her baleful outlook seems appropriate for this gloomy last day of the ancient Celtic year, when bonfires burn to ward off the dark; when the veil between past, present and future thins. I wonder what she expected as she was dying: heaven, or hell, or nothing? Maybe tonight she’ll muster up her Irish superstition one more time, and let me know what happened.