Train Tracks (18 page)

THIRTY-SEVEN

The Death of Pets: Snowy Story

T
his is not about Teddy, my current dog, but my last dog, Snowy the Border collie. She was sixteen years old. For years I called Snowy “my little angel with fur.” I even wrote a poem to her. As she became quite feeble, I couldn't take care of her. People said, “Well, euthanize her,” but I said, “No, she's not ready for death.” We found some good, kind folks up near the Russian River who took her in, and she had three more beautiful years. She got better living on their little farm. She became the queen of the other dogs—they loved her! Well, as she became very sick, we went up to see her; took a long, silent ride. When we got there she was lying in the grass, and her eyes were glazed over. She was very thin. It was very sad.

What can I say to you? She was a big part of my life. I love the dog, but she didn't die. I whistled to her and talked to her and said, “Come on, let's go for a run.” As she lay there, she tried to run, but her feet moved only slightly.

Snowy didn't die on Saturday. She just lay there breathing heavily, and then we took her in the house. I didn't know what to do with her, but she was very peaceful. When I left her in the house, the little place where she lived, I said, “You know, we should all be so lucky as to lie down in the grass in the cool shade, surrounded by people who love us, when it's the end of our lives.” It's a part of the cycle of life.

THIRTY-EIGHT

When Pasta Was Spaghetti

I
found “When Pasta Was Spaghetti” in my archives. It was written—let's see—“Michael Savage, August 1985, written in a lightning storm at 40,000 feet over Cheyenne, Wyoming.” When I thought the plane was going to crash, I wrote “When Pasta Was Spaghetti.” So, you liberals get ready to sneer; and you sane people, get ready to enjoy it because it's a wonderful poem.

The hairy forearms of New York serve you your coffee with a turning gesture, an offering that says, “Drink, eat, enjoy”: The wiry Italian in Vincent's Clam Bar, the one behind the greased-over register; the young kid connected, the one who receives his deference from the spaghetti cook, older than his gangster father; the spaghetti cook who looks like an old-fashioned doctor from the Bronx, with clipped mustache. He actually pulls some noodles out of the pot and eats them as they cook, looking to the grimy ceiling for his tender answer. Well, they used to call it “spaghetti.” Now it's “pasta” at ten dollars a plate. The smoky windows of Romeo's Spaghetti now offer radios and knickknacks. It was fifty cents a plate then. In neon letters that you couldn't miss, even through a fogged-over window on a cold winter's eve, there was life: marinara sauce that stuck to the seat; noodles as long as your young arm; meatballs as fluffy as your dreams of them; bread on the table that you'd eat against your parents' admonition that “the meal was a-coming, the meal was a-coming.” And men, some burly with black hairy forearms, whose smiles scared you. And little skinny guys with the look of murder on their faces, and people who slurped their spaghetti straight to their mouths from the plate, in one motion like Chinese shoveling rice in the mouth with clicking sticks. That was gusto before it became a beer ad. That was taste before it became a synonym for fashion. That was spaghetti before it became pasta.

THIRTY-NINE

Separate
Bedrooms

I
read a
story once about the number of married couples in the United States that choose
to sleep in separate bedrooms.
*
A survey showed that this trend is increasingly
popular because of marital tension and disturbances in sleep as a result of
sharing a bedroom. They're not calling it a separate bedroom, because the people
are embarrassed to admit it. They call it a “flex suite” instead, to avoid any
embarrassment.

Let me tell you a little secret about that: It's
only poor couples who sleep in the same bed for their whole lives, generally.
Not everybody, don't get me wrong. But generally it's a mark of poverty to have
to share a bed with someone your whole life.

The fact of the matter is, if you study the history
of this—let's start with royalty. They never shared the same bedroom, never mind
the same bed! We're not talking about in the beginning phases, when they were in
the ninety days of marital heat—that's an understood fact. The ninety-day period
is over after ninety, ninety-one days according to every study that's ever been
done. Ninety days of insanity, then by ninety-one days, it's already over. It
goes on to a certain extent, but after ninety days you have to live with this
person.

So, first it starts out as twin beds in the same
room, very close to each other, with a little nightstand. Then it's not so much
twin beds—you get the bigger beds in the same room. Then if you have a little
money . . . That's how it works; that's the fact of the matter.
There's no shame in it! You can still get together when you want, but you have
two different lives, two different minds. Why do you have to share every second
in the bedroom? What, that's some sacred place to be together? The way people
are today, individually, they don't want to be in the same room—and, by the way,
this is not limited to America. I'll give you an example, an anthropological
experience about men and women.

In Fiji—let's go back to the years I was living in
Fiji, in the village. This is a delicate subject. The men had a men's house and
the women had a women's house. When a woman went through her monthly cycles, she
went into the women's house with the other women. The men didn't want to be
around them during that time! Now, what does that make the men in Fiji? Does it
make them sexist? Does it make them whatever “ist” you want to call it? They
knew, from their culture, that they didn't want to be around the women at that
time, for whatever the reasons were. And I got news for you: The women would
rather be with their friends at that time, too! So, the guys went over with
their friends in their separate house, they all hung out, slept in the same big
straw hut—and the women slept together! That's how they did it in Fiji. I'm
giving you one example.

So, this whole idea of how to raise a child—or how
to live with a woman or, for a woman, how to live with a man—there's no set
rules in this area. A lot of what we see going on today is devolution, not
evolution. The people don't even actually understand how to live with each other
or how to raise children. And what they always do is try an extremely tolerant
methodology: People think that by going with liberal social mores it's going to
work, and it often doesn't.

What you have to do is go back to the traditional
methods of raising children and the traditional methods of living in the same
household—man and woman, woman and man.

FORTY

Political Museums and the
Downfall of Western Culture

Q
uestion is
this: Do you still go to museums or have museums become “museums” in the U.S.A.?
I used to live in museums. Because I grew up in my dad's antiques store looking
at art, I spent a lot of time in museums—I always have. I stopped going years
ago, though, when the AIDS racketeers started dominating San Francisco's
collections and turned everything in museums into a sort of “plea” for a special
subpopulation of the American people. I couldn't take it anymore, so I stopped
going.

Too many exhibits have become propaganda, not art.
They put a basket from Guatemala next to a Rembrandt and they tell you they're
culturally equal! Nevertheless, the European collections are still there—and
they still stand out, and they are still worth going to see.

So, let me begin at the end: I recently went to the
de Young and came out feeling enlightened. I use the word “enlightened” in the
way it truly was written and meant to be understood: I felt lighter inside. My
spirit was lifted from association with great art. I stood nose to nose with
Hopper and Church and other great artists—you know, our sight an inch from the
oil paint is an astonishing thing to behold. You can literally feel the
movements of the brush. It does something to your mind that you can't compare
with anything else—certainly not television or a movie.

So, I saw some of my favorite old paintings. They
were amazingly fabulous. I just love the intelligent, young families with young
children; sadly, they're mainly Europeans. There are very few American families;
it's mainly French families that still take their young children to the museums,
as I did my children.

Yenta
is a term in
American slang denoting a “busybody.” There was an exhibit in the museum that
was just breathtakingly, frighteningly hard to believe it was in a museum, about
this San Francisco–native yenta with good taste in fashion.
*
When I saw this I
thought,
Now this can't be. They can't be doing
this.
But, yes, they were doing it. Here's a woman I never heard of
and her dresses were in showcases in the museum! But wait, it gets worse: There
was a whole glass case devoted to this woman's shoes. Her shoes! So, I stood
there laughing out loud. People thought I was crazy! I said, “My God, it's every
yenta's dream. There they are, the yenta's shoes, under glass in a museum after
she's dead.”

So, a guard came over to me and whispered, “You're
one-hundred-percent right. Don't tell anyone I said so.” He couldn't believe it,
either! I said, “In all the years you've been in a museum, have you ever seen a
woman's shoes put on display in a showcase?” He said, “Never.” So I said, “This
exhibit is the ultimate ‘nothing.'” It's the ultimate nothing. You have to ask
yourself, “Who is in charge of our museums, that they would put a woman's
dresses in the showcase—and her shoes?”

This woman was living on her father's money and her
husband's money—probably did nothing in her life except wear clothing. I'm
editorializing, mind you: This is my opinion. This clothing exhibit was in a
major museum in the U.S.A. This is what it's come down to, with the assault upon
our institutions in this country by the illegitimate Left. This is the kind of
garbage they're showing! They put this exhibit in an American museum, next to
paintings by Hopper, paintings by Church, paintings by the most genius artists
of our historical past. They put a yenta's clothing in a showcase.

I could not believe that this is what has become
considered worthy of showing in our museums. How did this happen to American
culture? Now remember, I grew up in museums. I spent many, many, many a happy
rainy day playing hooky at the Metropolitan Museum in New York—thousands of
hours in the Metropolitan, wandering, before it became a zoo. Wandering alone on
rainy Tuesdays, or Wednesdays, or Thursdays, in soiled raincoats; wandering the
endless halls before it filled up with the Euro-hordes and forced
schoolchildren; wandering through these halls of the museum.

It does not make me an art expert by any means, but
then, there are no art experts. When it comes to taste, the fact of the matter
is, there are people who are expert in certain areas of art and they could
probably tell you something about a painting that you don't already know, but,
ultimately, you're the best judge of whether a piece of art is really a piece of
art. You are the only judge of whether a piece of art is a piece of art! It's
the average man who is the judge. It's not the effete academic who will
determine whether a piece of art is a piece of art anymore than an academic can
tell you whether a baseball player is really a great baseball player. It's the
fan in the stadium that will tell you whether he's a great baseball player.

I need a day in the
museum,
I thought before going. The positive side of this outing was
seeing the great paintings by Hopper, the great paintings by Church, the great
paintings by so many other artists that I grew up salivating over. After seeing
these, I must tell you, I wandered into the Oceania collection, which is the
Pacific Islands collection. I spent many years during my time in the South
Pacific collecting mud masks and shields, and I am talking about collecting them
in the late sixties and early seventies, when they were really exquisite. They
were museum pieces. I have them somewhere—I don't even know where I put them—in
storage.

When you walk around the Oceania collection—I'm
talking about the Pacific Islands: Polynesia, Melanesia, Micronesia, the islands
of the deep South Pacific and the western Pacific. Observing these death masks
in the showcases—where there are human skulls in a showcase called “ancestral
masks,” where they take the head, the skull of an ancestor, put feathers and mud
around it, and put it in their house as a totem—a number of thoughts and
feelings come to mind. (A) They're spooky and eerie, and the person is in there
and I can feel the person's spirit in the showcase, and (b) they don't belong in
the showcase. They should be returned to New Guinea where they came from.

If the Greeks or Romans or Italians can demand
their art back from the crooks at the Getty Museum then certainly the poor
people of New Guinea can demand to get back the masks that contain actual skulls
from people who lived. But let me get to the next point—

You stand there and look at some of these Oceanic
artworks. First, you can dismiss them as primitive and not really great if you
don't really understand what they are, but if you do understand what they are,
you actually see the greatness in some of these pieces of mud and feathers and
bone and shell. Now, that's an area that I really could talk about for
hours.

The power of “primitive” art is great—and I'm not
talking about the garbage that they carve in the Philippines now for the
tourists or the junk that they're selling in the streets of Tahiti. That's all
junk. I'm talking about the stuff that was collected, let's say, up to 1920, or
even 1940. Pre–World War II Oceanic art is astonishing in terms of its
power.