Anhedonia, or Things I Used to Like

By BARRY FRIEDMAN

I was having a bagel the other morning at my favorite deli when Van Morrison’s “Saint Dominic’s Preview” started playing. It’s a brilliant, brutal song, one of my favorites, but it was written by an anti-Semitic, COVID-19-denying conspiracist who thinks punching down is refreshing.

In his newest release, “Latest Record Project, Volume 1,” Morrison sings about those who “control” the media, the “others” stealing his way of life, and then complains, on “No Good Deed Goes Unpunished”: Gave you a million euros/Said that it wasn’t enough/How come when you’re still fit and able/You’re too lazy to go out and work?

“Saint Dominic’s Preview” is dead to me now.

Speaking of aggrieved white U.K. musicians, Eric Clapton believes that public-health announcements to get vaccinated add to something called “mass hypnosis formation,” a cockamamie phrase espoused by a Twitter-banned vaccine expert he admires who has neo-Nazi leanings. Clapton also once said to immigrants at a concert, “I don’t want you to just leave the hall, leave our country. I don’t want you here, in the room or in my country.”

But, you know, “Layla.”

The Court of Arbitration of the International Olympic Committee allowed Russian ice skater Kamila Valieva, 15 — who tested positive for not one, not two, but three banned substances, including trimetazidine, a heart medication — to compete in this year’s Games under the Russian Olympic Committee banner. The ROC designation is being used because Russia has been suspended from the Olympics for systematically doping its athletes. So, Valieva, drugged, coached by discredited drug pushers, performed in a country, China, that erects and puts Uyghurs in internment camps, where they’re subject to sterilization and forced abortions.

It takes all the fun out of monobob.

The NFL is facing racism charges, its players’ brains are being scrambled from CTE, and, at the moment, the commissioner’s office just took over the investigation of sexual harassment charges against one of its owners, Daniel Snyder, instead of letting it be done independently. What could go wrong there? Snyder, as an owner, helps pay the salary of the commissioner, Roger Goodell, who made $64 million last year.

Excuse me if I don’t say much on Matthew Stafford’s long road to a championship.

Phil Mickelson, who correctly dubbed the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia “scary motherf***ers” and added, “We know they killed [Washington Post reporter Jamal] Khashoggi … They execute people over there for being gay,” nevertheless supported the regime’s desire to get into the professional golf business — you ready? — “because this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reshape how the PGA Tour operates.” 

Let me put away my horror of a dismembered journalist because Bubba Watson has been really good off the tee of late.

(Mickelson has since apologized, but KPMG, a financial services company and one of his longtime sponsors, along with Amstel Light and Callaway Gold, dropped him, meaning in about 13.5 milliseconds someone will claim the libs “canceled” Phil Mickelson.)  

So how do we enjoy sports, music, movies, anything anymore when so many of the participants, organizers, businesses, creators, and practitioners seem to do everything in their power to discolor their craft?

One’s indignation, clearly, has to be selective.

I still find myself laughing at Michael Richards on “Seinfeld,” but I criticize Trump supporters for not taking the former president’s racism more seriously. Netflix still offers Harvey Weinstein movies, but W.W. Norton took a Philip Roth biography by Blake Bailey out of print (because Bailey, not Roth, was the horror). You won’t find old episodes of Garrison Keillor’s “Prairie Home Companion” on NPR, but Mike Tyson is still doing commercials. The music of Richard Wagner, a rabid anti-Semite, is an impossible sell in Israel, which is understandable, as Hitler reportedly held many of Wagner’s original scores in his Berlin bunker at the end of World War II. So you can excuse Holocaust survivors in the country for hurling invectives at composer Daniel Barenboim when he conducted “Tristan and Isolde” at an Israeli arts festival. Jerusalem’s mayor at the time said of Barenboim, “As a musician he is great, but as a human being I could say a few other things.”

But Wagner’s been dead for 139 years — shouldn’t we be able, by now, at least, to separate the art from the artist — or at the very least the artist who presents the art of the artist?

If only it were that easy. 

Art and artistry, as with athletic talent and achievement, are not like peas and carrots where you can move them away from each other on the plate. It’s a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich.

You can’t separate them. 

Two last things:

1) TaxSlayer.com uses Die Walküre to sell its financial-planning software, in case you need Wagner in your life; and

2) The title of this piece, “Anhedonia,” is the inability to enjoy. It also was the original title of Woody Allen’s “Annie Hall,” a movie I used to love.

Barry Friedman is an essayist, political columnist, petroleum geology reporter and comedian living in Tulsa, Okla. In addition to “Funny You Should Mention It,” “Road Comic,” “Four Days and a Year Later” and “The Joke Was On Me,” his first novel, “Jacob Fishman’s Marriages,” a book about the worst love story ever, was published by Balkan Press in February. See barrysfriedman.com.

From The Progressive Populist, April 1, 2022

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