Rant #2,526: In the Year 2525 (Part 2)

“Oy Vayes Meer!”
 
That is a popular Yiddish expression, with the “Oy Vey” part of it even portion of a phrase.
 
And although I don’t have a tremendous knowledge of Yiddish—I do know some words and expressions—the thing I love about the Yiddish language is that anyone can pretty much make out what the word or phrase means simply by the way it sounds.
 
And when one says, “Oy Vayes Meer!” or even just “Oy,” you know what the expression means, whether you are Jew or non-Jew, black or white or yellow or brown, or whatever your background is.
 
It is a phrase of dismay, something like, “Oh woe is me!”
 
It is a phrase that when uttered, pretty much sets the table for an explanation, because if you say “Oy Vayes Meer,” you better have one handy.
 
And as I look at the presidential election fiasco, all I can say is—
 
“In the year 2525
If man is still alive.
If woman can survive, they may find.
 
 
In the year 3535
Ain't gonna need to tell the truth, tell no lies.
Everything you think, do and say, is in the pill you took today.
 
 
In the year 4545
Ain't gonna need your teeth, won't need your eyes.
You won't find a thing to chew.
Nobody's gonna look at you.
 
 
In the year 5555
Your arms hanging limp at your sides.
Your legs got nothing to do.
Some machine doing that for you.
 
 
In the year 6565
Ain't gonna need no husband, won't need no wife.
You'll pick your son, pick your daughter too.
From the bottom of a long glass tube. Whoa-oh
 
 
In the year 7510
If God's a-comin, he oughta make it by then.
Maybe he'll look around himself and say.
Guess it's time for the judgment day.
 
 
In the year 8510
God is gonna shake his mighty head.
He'll either say. I'm pleased where man has been.
Or tear it down and start again. Whoa-oh
 
 
In the year 9595
I'm kinda wonderin’ if man is gonna be alive.
He's taken everything this old Earth can give.
And he ain't put back nothing. Whoa-oh
 
 
Now it's been ten thousand years
Man has cried a billion tears.
For what he never knew,
now man's reign is through.
 
 
But through eternal night.
The twinkling of starlight.
So very far away.
Maybe it's only yesterday.
 
 
In the year 2525
If man is still alive.
If woman can survive, they may find.
 
In the year 2525 … “
 
Yup, I had to get that in from yesterday I guess.
 
I own no rights to the lyrics of Zager and Evans’ song “In the Year 2525,” but they seem to be so appropriate right now, so I had to include them here.
 
And that’s because we are truly in the year 2525, or at least where the lyrics have put us, with this presidential election, and the probable mess we will experience perhaps for days, weeks and maybe even months.
 
Did Joe Biden win?
 
Did Donald Trump win?
 
Did Joe Biden lose?
 
Did Donald Trump lose?
 
Heck, I don’t know.
 
Third base.
 
Lest I put up the entire Abbott and Costello “Who’s On First” routine, the whole thing is a mess.
 
With mail-in ballots still coming in and legal in some states to come in for days, and with the accepted, actual voting thisclose, and with the fate of Pennsylvania still up in the air, and with legal challenges coming from the president and surely to come from Biden if certain votes aren’t counted—
 
Goodness, I am out of breath about this whole thing.
 
But as I look at what happened—and what may yet happen—I feel that we have to take things for what they are.
 
No matter who wins, and who loses, I will still put on my pants the same way each and every day.
 
I am not going to change my routines, because the smaller picture is that most Americans will still proceed as they have done during the Trump presidency, the Obama presidency … heck, through the Eisenhower presidency, the first one where I was alive for.
 
The bigger picture is that a lot will change with a new administration in charge, if it gets to that point, but the smaller picture—and the one that we can see up close and personal—is that I am going to still wear the same clothes, I am not going to change my hairstyle, and I am not going to change the foods that I like to eat because we are going through all of this turmoil at the top.
 
So unlike some absolutely crazy people who have bitten their fingernails down to the nub because of this tumult, I am just going to look at it as the mess that it is, political theater to the hilt, and just sit back and take it all in.
 
But that doesn’t mean that I won’t say the following about the whole shebang, because I know that I will.
 
“Oy Veyes Meer!”
 
“Oy Veyes Meer!”
 
“Oy Veyes Meer!”
 
Three times might not even be enough. 

Rant #2,525: In the Year 2525

Well, congratulations to the winner of the 2020 presidential race, congrats to—
 
Well, we don’t know just yet.
 
Sure, yesterday was Election Day, millions of people voted, and by the evening, the polling places were shuttered for good, and then the tabulations began.
 
The problem is that so many people decided to use and send in write-in mail ballots this pandemic year that due to various rulings, restrictions, and let’s be honest about it, downright stupidity, we might not know until next week who won this hotly contested election.
 
And that is just plain wrong.
 
The wonderful part about our election process is that Americans always knew the morning after the election who won the presidential contest, but we have sunk to new lows this year, and we might not know until literally next week—or even beyond that—who our next president is.
 
And yes, that is just plain wrong.
 
So how am I going to address this beyond what I have already said in this column about how wrong this is?
 
How do I write a non-political column the morning after the presidential election?
 
Simple.
 
I will try to make this as non-partisan as possible, even though one side or the other might not see it that way.
 
Here goes:
 
We need uniform voting laws, the same voting laws in each of the 50 states, so that this never, ever happens again.
 
We need mail-in ballots to be valid on a single date, not different dates by state, and we need all voting laws to be consistent whether we are talking about bigger states like New York and California or smaller states like Rhode Island and Delaware.
 
You can’t have such ballots be valid in one state if they are postmarked on Election Day, and in another state have them valid only if they come in by Election Day.
 
It makes for problems, as we have seen right here in this election, where the results are thus far so close that we might be sitting on pins and needles for at least a week waiting to find out who the actual winner is.
 
Therefore, we need to make the voting laws more uniform across our country--even down to the very basic opening and closing times for poll places--and hopefully, within the next four years, our legislators will see to it that they are, and that such nonsense never permeates a presidential election ever again.
 
And we also need to make Election Day a national holiday across this land, because we have to make it easier for people to vote—on Election Day, not a week before.
 
The way we have it now, it devalues the day, it takes the electricity out of the day, and the day is called “Election Day” for a reason.
 
Sure, we had the pandemic this year, so people could claim that they didn’t want to go to the polls when it would be so busy on the actual day, so they voted early or by mail.
 
But quite frankly, my entire 2020 Election Day experience took all of 10 minutes, and it was really even shorter because I was in tow with my family, so it really took about five minutes.
 
So they push to vote early or by mail was pretty much balderdash, as the lines to vote early were way longer than the lines to vote on Election Day.
 
Mail-in voting should only be reserved for the infirm or the elderly, but this year, just about anybody could mail in their ballots this way.
 
We can’t have that in 2024 or beyond. It just makes a mess of the day, and in a hotly contested race like this one, it just makes things that much worse.
 
Let’s get together on Election Day 2024 and do our voting the right way, without any hindrance or flies in the ointment.
 
So you see, I could do a Rant on the day after this election where I didn’t take sides.
 
The only side I want to be on is that of the American people, and this year’s presidential election will go down in history as the mess that it is becoming as we count the days, minutes, hours and seconds until we find out who the winner is.
 
It’s the real year 2525 right here in 2020—notice how I got the plug in for the number of Rants I have written over the past more than a decade—and even Zager and Evans would not be proud of the way the voting has been handled this year.
 
It has to be fixed--and NOT by the year 2525--and whatever the result, we should all learn from our mistakes and never repeat them—and we have four years to fix things so this type of situation never, ever happens again.
 
Let’s all vote for that.

Rant #2,524: Today's the Day

Today is Election Day!
 
Hooray, hurrah, the day is finally here!
 
Today is the day to vote, doing your civic duty as a citizen of this country.

 
Now is the time to stop the arguing and put your vote into play.
 
And your vote does count!
 
There is no reason not to vote, so go ahead and cast your ballot for whoever you believe is the right candidate.
 
Let's look back on what I wrote about the day in Rant #1,316, dated November 4, 2014. 
 
What I said six years ago still rings true today. Here it is in an edited format:
 
"Today is Election Day, and it is time to employ your civic duty and vote during the national election day being held today.
 
Who we vote for pretty much demonstrates how much faith we have in our President and his policies.
 
But whoever you vote for, get down to the polling place and vote.
 
But no, I won't monitor you to see if you are voting.
 
It really isn't my business who you vote for, just that you vote.
 
All I can say is that it is time to judge those running on what they have done during their most recent terms, and to remove those who haven't lived up to the standards that we voted on these men and women to uphold.
 
You have to stand by your convictions. I can look myself in the mirror, and I can say I did a good job voting.
 
Anyway, the most important thing is to get out and vote.
 
And I plan on doing that sometime during the day.”
 
I still believe this.
 
It is more important to get out and vote than who you vote for.
 
This is a privilege and an honor we have to uphold; service members died to uphold this privilege during all of our wars, so the least we can do is pay them back for making the ultimate sacrifice.
 
So I will vote on Election Day, and I hope that you will too.
 
And whoever wins, and whoever loses, I will still get up in the morning, take a shower, eat breakfast, and be right here tomorrow.
 
It won’t change my routine, and I won’t die if my choices are not voted in.
 
I might be disappointed, but that is it.
 
I am not going to my local stores and break into them, destroy them, or set them on fire.
 
Let’s all act like adults about this.
 
And for those who cannot control themselves, they should be punished to the full extent of the law.
 
Simple as that.
 
So have a good Election Day. Do you civic duty as I will.
 
It’s so little to ask, and so much to gain.

Rant #2,523 Diamonds Are Forever

 

This has been a very tough year for everybody.
 
The virus has destroyed the year, and made everything putrid.
 
And we have lost so many people this year, thousands upon thousands from the virus and so many others from other things, including the ravages of time.
 
I lost my father this year, which, of course, is the worst loss of them all for me.
 
But we have also lost many prominent people, personalities who have touched our lives in one way or another, and we lost one such person just the other day when the ravages of time took Sean Connery away from us.
 
We lost Connery on Halloween at the age of 90, so he lived a long and fruitful life, But now it is coming out that in his final years, he suffered from dementia, which probably made those last years pretty much impossible for this family.
 
And for him personally, it must have been torture.
 
Connery was an actor’s actor, playing many roles over a career that stretched from the 1950s to almost the current time, but while he won an Oscar for his role in the film “The Untouchables,” it was one of the few times that an actor had an Oscar-winning role that did not define him.
 
I mean, Sean Connery was James Bond---and I mean, he WAS James Bond … shaken but not stirred.
 
From “Dr. No” to his final Bond film, “Never Say Never Again,” Connery was simply the only Bond that mattered.
 
He was not the first actor to play James Bond in mass media—that honor went to Barry Nelson, the genial American actor who portrayed the character in a TV performance in the early 1950s.
 
But less than 10 years later, Ian Fleming’s character came to the movies, to the big screen, and emerging Scottish actor Sean Connery—who had been in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Marnie”--was chosen to play Bond in the first Bond film, “Dr. No,” and the rest is history.
 
The Welsh actor took the part and ran with it, and James Bond became an icon of the 1960s, a rugged individualist who bent his orders as a spy to his own satisfaction, being the good guy, getting the bad guys, all the while bedding one beautiful woman after another.
 
He was a Superman for the 1960s, when everything we had known was bent upside down and backwards, and while Superman could win out over every bad guy thrown at him, James Bond not only could do that, but he could do it all in a tuxedo with barely one hair on his head moving out of place.
 
“Dr. No” was such a success, mainly due to Connery and his portrayal of the character as a man’s man, that one sequel after another followed, such as “Goldfinger” and “Thunderball,” with each succeeding movie becoming more outlandish than the one preceding it.
 
And Connery knew he WAS Bona, and while he tired of the role, he was in the catbird’s seat as far as what he could demand from the role monetarily. And he knew that even though he WAS Bond, he couldn’t be Bond forever.
 
After the first six films as Bond—including the aforementioned films plus “From Russia With Love,” “You Only Live Twice,” and “Diamonds Are Forever,” he finally left the role that was him and moved on in 1971, leaving the role to others to take on (he had left the role for one film in between, “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service,” starring Connery lookalike George Lazenby, in 1969).
 
(And yes, let’s not forget David Niven’s portrayal of the character in the original “Casino Royale” in 1967, but that wasn’t an official James Bond performance, so to speak, but yes, Niven was Sir James Bond while Connery was still going strong as Bond in the formal series’ films.)
 
You could say that he never looked back, but that would not be true. While he plied his trade in numerous other films from 1971 to 1983—including “The Man Who Would Be King,” the Bond itch was still there, and in 1983, he came back as an older Bond in “Never Say Never Again,” a film that was downplayed by a lot of people but which I liked. I think I liked it for the very reason that Connery took on the role—because it showed not the young, omnipotent Bond, but an older Bond, a more real Bond, who showed lots of aches and pains from all the spying he had done over the years—and probably all of the bedding he did, too.
 
Connery never returned to Bond after that, leaving the role to Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig and their own interpretations of who Bond was. But since Connery WAS Bond, while those portrayals were interesting—as was Lazenby’s earlier on—they weren’t Connery, and they were all sort of always going to be second best to Connery’s Bond.
 
In 1986, Connery finally won the grand prize, and it had nothing to do with James Bond—he won an Oscar for “The Untouchables,” but funny, most people would say that his best on-screen portrayal was that of James Bond, a role that the Academy would never recognize for how brilliant he was in a role that he would define forever.
 
His Oscar win gave him ammunition for many other films later in his career, including “The Hunt For Red October,” and in 2006, he decided that he had had enough, and retired, but he would pop up from time to time on TV and movies here and there, so he probably never formally retired until his illness got the best of him.
 
And in 2000, he was knighted, and became Sir Sean Connery—not Sir James Bond, but let’s be honest about it, they were one and the same.
 
When he passed away, his son, Jason Connery, stated that his father had not been well for some time, and it just came out over the weekend that he had dementia, which was a sad ending for such a vigorous person.
 
Connery had his faults—he never took back his belief that woman could be hit by their husbands, one of the reasons why his first marriage failed—but Connery was such a larger than life personality that he could state his beliefs and even if they were wrong, come up unscarred.
 
I am a huge James Bond fan, always have been, and when I heard that Connery had died, I felt that another piece of my life—and my childhood—had been taken from me.
 
I wonder how many millions of other people thought the exact same thing.
 
R.I.P.