The Johnson Sisters Sound Off About Christmas 2005

Anne
CarolSue

From: Sue Johnson
To: Anne Johnson, Carol Johnson
December 25, 2005  9:54 PM
Subject: oh yeah

does anyone know if Jeff is actually single? 

From: Carol Johnson
To: Anne Johnson, Sue Johnson
December 26, 2005  4:25 PM
Subject: oh yeah

Since Jeff is living as a caretaker to a little old lady, I would assume so. Also, he may not be so fast to rush back into marriage given his last experience.

Christmas with children of the millenium is like watching wolves devour a deer carcass - you give them money on a gift card and they immediately race to purchase anything they can. They were begging to go to the mall after we opened the presents, no matter how many times we told them it was Christmas and the mall wasn't open - they don't believe us (after all, we're adults). However, there is one difference between them and the wolves. Unlike the wolves, they don't eat what they get. They just tear it apart and spread it around. The objects accumulate, knee deep, in the house and become like the leaves of fall - you wade through them where they lay lost and forgotten. I guess it's the power of buying that is so compelling.

From: Sue Johnson
To: Carol Johnson
December 27, 2005  12:18 AM
Subject: oh yeah

> Since Jeff is living as a caretaker to a little old lady, I would assume so. Also, he may not be so fast to rush back into marriage given his last experience.

Who said anything about marriage?

> Christmas with children of the millennia is like watching wolves devour a deer carcass - you give them money on a gift card and they immediately race to purchase anything they can.

Just think of them as small Central Asian states.

I was just reading a little bit in the exhibition catalogue for the Met exhibit from last year about how hard it is to date early finds from Western China. The various peoples that controlled each stage of trade between East and West were basically like teenagers with gift cards to their mall of choice. Not only did they fight with one another viciously over access to limited resources (means of survival across an impenetrable desert, lack of parents willing to drive to the mall) but the zeitgeist of the era was not one of incremental civilization but rather one of profit-taking and consumption. Central Asian peoples shifted goods from East to West and back again caring less about what they carried than the fact that only they could carry it across that land. As they did so they opened up avenues for all kinds of cross-cultural copying and creativity, documentation of which very little survives since only the countries at either end of the trade route were highly literate (just as while both parents may be highly verbal, their teenaged offspring are usually hardly verbal at all).

So one finds all kinds of antique shit knee-deep across Central Asia, Russia, Mongolia, Siberia, and China without being able to ever say for sure where it came from, how old it is, what it is for, or how it got there. Much like your living-room floor.

On the bright side, I hear that poor people the world over can make a successful living scavenging off of trash heaps. Maybe you should send some or all of the kids to do participant-observation research on this kind of lifestyle in Morocco or the Philippines. Probably some benevolent old sage will take them under his wing as soon as they arrive on the scene. He will open their eyes to the wisdom to be found in the trash heap but then suddenly die. Just then an extraordinarily attractive young person corresponding to the sexual and physical preferences of the child in question will appear, rending his or her breast and tearing its hair, stating that he, she or it has found grandfather at long last after many years of searching, only to witness his death! Which is too bad, because said grandfather had promised to said child the second half of a Life Transforming message, and he/she/it always assumed that meant he would not leave until speaking with him/her/it! Instead, there is only this stupid fat American kid clutching an iPod and whining about some ball that rolled down the road! Fate is at work! Maybe they will even find an ancient artifact!

Which actually happened in 1982. It's weird about China, whereas in the West any educated person grows up knowing vaguely about the oracle at Delphi or the druids sitting under their trees reciting poetry, no one knows similar stuff about Chinese customs. For instance the king used to visit each of the sacred mountains every year and perform the earth and mountain sacrifices, part of which involved inscribing sealed tablets with questions or prayers to the gods and placing them on a mountain top. Some people know about the tortoise shells used for divination, but very few Westerners know about the Feng (earth) and Shan (mountain) sacrifices. In 1982 a peasant found in a crevice on one of the sacred mountains a tablet made out of gold inscribed with a petition to the gods by Wu Zetian, dated 700.

Well, I thought it was pretty cool.

From: Sue Johnson
To: Anne Johnson, Carol Johnson
December 27, 2005  12:43 AM
Subject: and furthermore! (rant)

This evening Eric paced back toward my office to vent again. This time it wasn't about how Aretha’s performance didn't live up to that of the 4 Tops or how Handel was scandalously underrated as a choral composer. It was about how cops in New Orleans had shot and killed someone who was brandishing a knife.

I happened to be in the middle of something and was not in the least bit interested in discussing the topic, although my mind raced with possibilities. I tend to be on the side of the cops due to my instinct to protect those around me and the fact that I train and am friends with several. On the other hand from what I've heard it seems like there are still quite a few white racist crackers (?) on the force in the South (I just assumed that the cops were white and the dead guy black Eric is black so you can see how he'd be alarmed). On the other other hand, how hard is it to not confront a cop with a deadly weapon? It's like, well, duh!

Eric had the point that they could have shot him to disable him, like in an arm or the knee. Which is exactly what I used to think when I first came to live in the Bay Area. That was a long time and a few attempted assaults ago. I let Eric have his say at some length (god I wish I had an office with a door) and then just said "If someone was threatening me with a knife, I'd do my best to kill him however I could." Which is something that's true, based on my past performance, although not something I'm proud of; and studying martial arts is maybe my way of trying to become more controlled in how I respond to threats.

Also, I drove Eric to choir practice the morning after that execution at San Quentin, of the gang leader who murdered four people. We talked about that some in the car. (The gang leader was black as well.) I said, I'm against the death penalty for innocent people. But people should take responsibility for their actions without fear. If I killed someone I would be ready to die (although as a person with a history of suicidal ideation, that's not saying much more, I suppose, than 'if I forgot to change the cat litter, I would be ready to die') That kinda stymied Eric - something about a mild-mannered jowly middle-aged woman with badly dyed hair talking about being willing to die or be killed just seems to shut some people up. Not, alas, the ones who know me better . . . they just ignore me and keep talking.

From: Anne Johnson
To: Carol Johnson, Sue Johnson
December 28, 2005  5:56 AM
Subject: and furthermore! (rant)

I think I will rant too, but my rant is not related to Sue's rant. It is more related to Carol's description of kids consumed by consumerism. And it is not really a rant I suppose, it is more of a simmering pot of disappointment.

Just what the heck is going on! How long has this been going on, this rampant consumerism at Christmas? Has it been there all along and only this year hit me and disgusted me? It started with all the stupid commercials about cell phones that do everything and Ipods; things I know nothing about.  The commercials imply that if you don't get one of these things for Christmas you are just SO uncool. And, I want you to know - we don't even get good commercials up here. Our commercials are nothing compared to those you guys probably see every day. (We know this because Harvey taped us something called The Daley Show from Syracuse TV, or cable rather; and we watched it and were amazed at the commercials they have). And then of course there are all the crowds at the stores the day after Thanksgiving, which I don't see in person, I only read about in the paper. Lines that form at 2:00 in the morning in front of Walmarts and so on. (Up here our only stores are Walmarts and Hackett’s Hardware and a depressing excuse for a mall, but this is still noticeable). Then from Thanksgiving on you see people buying really stupid, useless do-dads all over the place. Things from TJ Max that have no discernable use whatsoever and are ugly on top of that. And then we go to Albany on Christmas Eve day and I think the end of the Northway will be impassable because of Crossgates but it turns out it isn't - apparently it had gotten so bad they had closed the Crossgates Northway exit altogether. Then the day after Christmas - the day AFTER, after everyone just had a present opening frenzy, the stores in Albany are packed AGAIN. We stopped at Stuyvesant Plaza to look for a nice knife at the kitchen store and we got there at 11:00 and apparently got one of the last parking spots. Right after we got there people were pouring in and driving around and around looking for spaces and hovering near cars they thought were going to move. The kitchen store was full of yuppie  looking people, and at the knife counter (they have a knife center, with a person to man it, and all kinds of knives behind locked glass doors) was a young well-dressed couple saying they wanted to start a "knife collection". The knife center attendant was showing them how to hold a knife and explaining knife technique while I peered at the tiny price labels as best I could.  When we saw that the least expensive knives were $99.00 we left and walked around a little more among the THRONGS of people shopping. Shop shop shop. Buy buy buy. Things. We have so many things. What is wrong with America.

But who am I to speak. I got a Very Large stuffed bear/footstool for Christmas. Talk about useless. But it is awfully cute. And Jack the cat stole my mouse Christmas ornament.

From: Carol Johnson
To: Anne Johnson, Sue Johnson
December 30, 2005  12:47 PM
Subject: and furthermore! (rant)

Well I just got back from a historical and educational trip in which I finally saw some of the great American landmarks that we learned about in grade school. We went to Plymouth Rock and Salem. It was very educational. Plymouth Rock, for instance, is this small broken and cemented-back-together rock with 1640 chiseled on it. It's in a brick shelter on the sand. Once we got there, to refresh my history I read the sign. It said that none of the Pilgrims ever mentioned any rock. It wasn't until about 100 years later that an old man went to the beach and said "They landed about there" and so they put a rock there and later someone else chiseled 1640 on it..

Then we paid $6 each to go to the museum. There we learned that interest in the Puritans didn't occur until the early 1800s when Americans wanted to be able to trace their history to a righteous and hard-working group (the percentage of Puritan settlers in America was very small) so they used the Puritans as an iconic example, thereby creating a myth that our culture is descended from rigid workalcoholics. And also making a whole lot of facts to study and to put on tests.

I remember illustrations in our gradeschool textbooks where the Indians and Puritans were exchanging food and greetings in front of a rock that towered over them. By the way, there was no real Thanksgiving, either, in case you haven't kept up. Unfortunately, this stuff is still in the textbooks and you still have to memorize it and say that it is true on the tests.

Then we went to Salem. Now, I don't remember much about Salem, so I was happy to go to an "interactive museum presentation" that goes over the whole thing. Well, the whole thing was very, very sad. I can't think of what may caused it, although it could have partially been the ergot (LSD) in the rye, in combination with an over-controlling culture. I think, by then, this group of Puritans had moved into a position of intellectual and cultural rigidity that caused its own demise. The girls heard about the Devil every Sunday, so it's not surprising they eventually saw him. There was a graveyard in the middle of the town with many of the accusers and judges in it (the victims were thrown in unmarked graves far from the town) and so you can walk over the graves of the people that committed these horrors and we did, along with a constant stream of other tourists, shaking our heads sadly. There's punishment for you. And the town in which this very sad thing occurred now makes the majority of its income off of describing the gory details of this event and selling witchcraft gear.

Life is endlessly fascinating.

From: Sue Johnson
To: Carol Johnson
December 30, 2005  3:09 PM
Subject: and furthermore! (rant)

Well you just nuked my entire elementary education in history and social science. (I think I remember the same pictures you do). I keep on thinking I'm actually smart, and it always turns out I'm only wrong. Thanks.

From: Sue Johnson
To: Anne Johnson, Carol Johnson
December 30, 2005  3:25 PM
Subject: and furthermore! (rant)

My pronouncement on the simmering pod of consumerism - or whatever you called it - is that this is the new net.boom, the new gangsta.rap: the new cultural force that seems inevitable now but within less than a decade will turn out to be deeply flawed, potentially pernicious, and a wellspring of selective regret as critics fight to be first in position to fling themselves headlong into the maw of the next next next great mindless.

In the past, the job description of the intrepid traveler was restricted to encountering alien cultures in bizarre environments without knowing the language or local cuisine. Now all those barriers have been almost finally overcome there's nothing left to remain strange, except ourselves. Which is harder -- to travel thousands of desertified miles across unknown, usually hostile principalities in search of (scripture/treasure/a livelihood), or to drive down the interstate into a world that SHOULD be like the one you live in yet is subtly, deviously, twistedly, rantingly not? Maybe now we all qualify as intrepid travelers. (People with teenagers get double points but are penalized the same amount, it being their own damn fault to begin with.)

Which incidentally is why we rant. Ancient Israel had its prophets in the desert -- who can blame them for being pissed off: lack of water, sanitation, unequal distribution of goats; - England had Hyde Park Square; - the US has Iraq; - everyone deserves a forum.

Although I will say, one thing that living in a urbanized area has taught me, is how to avoid traffic.