Saeculum

A saeculum is a measure of time which spans the period from the event until the last person who witnessed or lived through that event or epoch has died.

Lockhouse 8, C&O Canal, Obadiah Youngblood

I learned this from Nathan Heller's rambling Personal History "Tribes" in the August 6 New Yorker.

It's a concept with great appeal, because it suggests that all our attempts at history, recording and discussing past things, are flawed and only those who actually experienced the events can speak with real authority about them.

Of course, there is the problem of Rashomon, the great 1950 film in which 4 witnesses describe a murder entirely differently, exploring the impossibility of completely objective observation, as perception, personal point of view affect the experience and memory of events.

But now, I have lived through "history" and I remember the 1960's from my own distinct and limited perspective and seeing how those times are presented even by the most intelligent historians, like Ken Burns, I see how very subjective "history" is. Oliver Stone's "Untold History of the United States" is another take on things I remember,suffused with things of which I was unaware, and am not really sure are actually true,  and Howard Zinn wrote of years which I had studied but hardly recognized in his rendition in "A People's History of the United States," told from the perspective of labor unionists and the underclass.

North Hampton Rte 1A, Obadiah Youngblood

I can only imagine how Trump will be presented, when all of us who are now living through his joke of a Presidency are gone, and history is told for us by our posterity.

The Language of Comedy? Wither the Mind

When I first moved to New Hampshire, from the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C., I found I had to expunge certain words and phrases from my speech. 
I was offending men, big burly, construction worker type men, neighbors, people I had assumed a certain 'backstage" relationship with. 

I hadn't realized how naturally I used words like "fuck" and "shit" and all like that as placeholders, exclamation points, commas, "uh," but I did and from the facial reactions, I could see that was not going to do in New Hampshire. So I cleaned up my act, toned it down, and guess what?  It didn't hurt a bit. In fact, I had to look for new words and verbal tics and it expanded my vocabulary.

Listening to Dave Chappelle, who is wondrous  and Chris Rock, who is equally astute, I sometimes think: Could either of these guys make it through a show without the words "penis" or "pussy"? 
Bunk Mooreland, the Black partner of a white cop in "The Wire" once did a drunken rumination on the word "pussy." He considered what the proper plural should be: Pussies or perhaps, pussiae?  He went back and forth about whether the Latinized version was more appropriate in certain circumstances and tried to consider the etymological origins of the word. That riff was actually funny. 
But not just throwing it in for effect. 
Chappelle does have one joke stream in which "I kicked her in the pussy" as a punch line is actually funny, but not because of that word. Any word could have been substituted and the jokes would have been just as funny. "In the netherworld. In the underparts. In the dark female underworld." Any or all would work as well.

Not that I'm offended, you see. I mean, I come from there. 
But really, it seems like such a crutch. 
A cheap laugh for guys who do not need a cheap laugh.

One could argue this is a subconscious attempt to create a sense of intimacy with a large, diverse audience. 

But they already have that by virtue of their insights and craft.

I can see the kind of transitional, breath catching "shit," or "sheeeeet," accompanying the smile after a particularly devastating remark where the punch line was implied, not stated. 

"So Trump now sees us threatened by a 'baby infestation!' An in-fest-a-tion! That dumb fucker actually said that. And he is the President who those white guys in the red hats voted for to Make America GREAT again. Sheeeeet."

Okay, there "shit" works for me.

But mostly the whole masturbation thing, descriptions of penises and "pussies" leaves me blinking. Why go there? Do you really get anything from that? 

I supposed this may be a generational thing. 
Like tattoos. 
I cannot understand tattoos.
You've got lovely, pink skin--I'm talking women here--which God, evolution, millennia of natural selection created, and you go and paint it up with some grotesque tattoo?
Vincent Van Gogh could not improve on that woman's skin and some guy with a piece of metal through his eyebrow and a bolt in his nose and a tattoo iron is going to do better?

Now, if this were Chappelle or Rock they would have said, "Vincent-fucking-Van-Gogh" and would that make that better?

I don't know. I'm just too old, out to pasture, don't understand, White, out of it, stupid and prickly. 
But really, guys, You are better than that.