Tuesday Bluesday

Thank goodness. The jackhammering outside my door has stopped. For the time being, anyway.

Some days, some times, just...suck. I can't put my finger on the exact time when things got so dull, so gray as the skies outside today. Perhaps it was our move here. My son's continuing adjustment to his new school, maybe. My spouse's dissatisfaction with his new job, or my dissatisfaction with my new part-time job. The fact that we can complain all we want to each other about our situations, but nothing will change them at the moment. Or maybe it's all the caution barrels, the jackhammering, and the excavating of the street directly in front of my house. Dumbassed small actions like buying lactose-free milk instead of regular milk only put a wobbly exclamation point on such tedium.

I listened to all of Serial last week, took in a few parodies of it, and listened to Sarah Koenig on Fresh Air about the podcast. Initially, I was kind of perturbed that she was perturbed about the parodies. (Once you've listened to the podcast to about the sixth episode and seen the SNL parody, any mention of "the Nisha call" could well induce a giggling fit.) I think Serial is an incredible example of what it takes to dig and dig and dig some more in investigative reporting, but the truth of its format is that it is derived heavily from This American Life, down to the hip yet portentious incidental music and the vocal cadences of its host. Serial aurally brings to mind every detail of Hae Min Lee's murder, the trial and conviction of Adnan Syed, and what reasonable doubts are all about, catching up even good friends of mine in its investigation and perhaps putting too much emphasis on the "whodunit?" aspect despite constant assurances from so many professional quarters that the case was a hot mess (Listen to the frustration in Koenig's voice when she talks to Syed in the final episode; I think something in her really wanted to blow the case open.). It's hard not to poke fun at Serial's presentation and the earnestness of its host. It also shows the difference between being a producer of hard news and being a show host: it's a producer's job to fret the small stuff, and a host's job to just be a good parent, put it out there, and let it go. I think of how immersed Koenig was in the case, though, and can see how tough and surprising it must have been for her to see the parodies and wonder how anyone could laugh at something as serious as a murder case.

Truth is, though, sometimes we need to laugh.

Last week's shootings and hostage situations in Paris make it difficult, though. Listening to reports from the Marais on the closure of Jewish-run businesses & synagogues brings back shades of 1930's Europe to the 21st century. And then, atop it all, there's Netanyahu being the benevolent yet overbearing parent telling diaspora Jewry they can stop this silly wandering Jews thing and come back to mind the Holy Land. I pooh-pooh such baldly paternalistic talk and then I consider the horrifying year French Jews have had and an anti-Muslim march in Germany happens. "There are stun grenades?" my son asked when we listened to the latter story on the radio on the way to school. "I didn't know you could set grenades to 'stun.'"

When it comes to brutality, we're learning all sorts of things these days. Thank goodness for satire, which has the imperfect capacity to be a universe all its own, with the best examples being the ones that instruct even as they present a repellent point of view. It is, after all, "designed to be misunderstood"...though the results should never prove to be fatal as they were for much of the staff of Charlie Hebdo. I'm heartened, that, though I cannot jump on the "Je Suis Charlie" bandwagon myself, its remaining staff members will continue to fart in our general direction.

Perhaps a breaking wind is, in the end, the only way to cut these blues.