This is a repost of a piece I wrote in 2015. I dig it up now because there’s been some discussion in social media lately of what appropriate punishment should be meted out against people who play their music, headphoneless, while on hiking trails in nature parks. This discussion made me remember a particularly odd instance of someone displaying a staggering degree of situational inappropriateness….
Every Sunday I take the dee-oh-gee on a nature walk. We go to a local park, usually one of our local county or state parks; our most common destinations are Knox Farm State Park in East Aurora and Chestnut Ridge Park (a county park) in southern Orchard Park. Chestnut Ridge is a big park, set amidst several hillsides, with lots of hiking trails and old roads and ravines with babbling brooks along with shelters for families to rent for picnics and a huge hill that’s the region’s best place for sledding in winter and a noted disc-golf course. We like Chestnut Ridge a lot. We’ve been going there regularly ever since Cane became a member of the family, and we still haven’t seen all it has to offer.
In addition to nature, Chestnut Ridge also offers some interesting people watching on occasion. When we go on Sunday mornings, there are often large groups of young people jogging through the park, and a lot of them don’t restrict their jogging to the roads, but also to the off-road hiking trails. This is always fun to watch, and Cane enjoys seeing the runners go by. There are also always lots of people with other dogs, which can make Cane either happy or nervous, depending on the dog. There was one fat brown dog who just kind of waddled around, once; this dog’s name turned out to be “Ammo”, which led me to advance my Law Of Dog Names: The more bad-ass a name a dog has, the less bad-ass the dog actually is. So a dog named, oh, Crusher will be a big whimpering softie, while a dog named, oh, Frankie will be an ass-biting menace. It’s just the way things are.
This Sunday past, we saw several groups of joggers, including one older group and one younger group. We also walked past two middle-aged women who were talking very loudly about their own medical problems, and then we took a side road that led past a small playground where two teenagers, figuring they were alone, were making out quite nicely. (They stopped when they realized Cane and I were approaching, and I turned my gaze aside and left them to their youthful hormonal fun-having.)
People watching is fun, but the main reason I love these nature walks is the nature — especially the sounds. I love hearing the knocking of woodpeckers at work upon the trees. I love the sudden flutter in the air when a bird I didn’t even realize was there takes wing. I love the whispering as the trees rub against each other in the wind, and I love the rushing of the streams, even as by this time of year they have mostly dried up to little more than a few trickles, here and there. Aside from the occasional passing car or truck engine — and sometimes not even those, if we’re far enough from the roads — there are no man-made sounds at all, save my own footfalls and the soft jingling of the tags on Cane’s collar.
But today…we were on another road, heading back in the direction of the parking lot, when I heard…music.
Somewhere in the distance, music.
I couldn’t tell where or why, but as we kept walking, I realized we were getting closer to the source of the music. I recognized the tune first: “Amazing Grace”. And then, moving forward, I recognized the instrument. It was a saxophone. And the person playing it finished “Amazing Grace” and moved right on to “Onward Christian Soldiers”. And then followed several more hymns and other bits of Americana. “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” “When Johnny Comes Marching Home,” and eventually, “The Star Spangled Banner”. We came around a corner, and there he was, standing next to his parked car across the road. He had a music stand set up and everything. This guy was actually playing his saxophone in the middle of Chestnut Ridge Park, on a Sunday morning. And he was playing it loudly. His sound carried.
Now, I must admit that the sax has never been my favorite instrument, but like all instruments, it’s a pleasure when played well. This guy, unfortunately, was not very good. He wasn’t “rank beginner” awful, but he played a lot of wrong notes and…oh, the hell with it. It doesn’t matter how well he played. If Thelonius Monk himself decided to set up a solo show in the middle of Chestnut Ridge on a Sunday morning, it would have been every bit as annoying and inappropriate. I found myself finishing our walk in some disbelief that there exists some asshole who is sufficiently narcissistic to decide that what people going to one of our area’s finest nature parks really need is to listen to his not-very-good saxophone playing. Who on Earth possibly comes to that conclusion?
By the time his playing was finally fading from my ears as I and the dog achieved sufficient distance from him, he was playing “Over the Rainbow”. I got Cane back in the car, but instead of leaving the park, I drove back in. I wanted to see this clown closer up. I wasn’t going to yell out the window or throw garbage at him (though both were tempting prospects), but I wanted to see what kind of asshole does this. When I drove by his space, he had evidently decided that it was time to move on. His stand was gone, and he was leaning into the hatch of his little red car, putting away his horn after his presumably self-booked gig. Older guy. Skinny. Had his shorts pulled up oddly high, and socks up to his knees. There he was, evidently quite satisfied. He’d accomplished his mission, see, forcing himself upon everyone in earshot in a place where “in earshot” is a pretty large area.
As I drove home, I thought about the saxophone playing asshole…the sax asshole…the Saxhole. The Saxhole of Chestnut Ridge.
I’m not sure I’ll take Cane to Chestnut Ridge next week or not. We might, because I really do love that park, but I love others, too. High are my hopes, though, that I have heard forever the last of the Saxhole of Chestnut Ridge.
Clarity from Mr. Gibson
America’s right wing is a lot of things. It’s impervious to facts, immune to empathy, and prone to conspiracy theory. It worships wealth and loathes its absence, and it is sexist and racist and homophobic and transphobic. All of these things inform the American right’s approach to everything, from how it manages its social lives to its approach to public policy. Writer Adam Serwer captured this notably when he said, “The cruelty is the point.”
But it’s not just the cruelty that’s the point. It’s the delight they feel in meting out that cruelty.
This was driven home for me twice in the last few days.
Actor-director Mel Gibson is a deeply talented man whose work I used to enjoy greatly, before he decided to out himself as a racist, a homophobe, and an anti-Semite. I remain gobsmacked that Gibson, who has made no secret of how much hate he’s carrying around in his heart, made a movie as empathetic as The Man Without a Face. But Gibson has been finding his voice welcomed again of late, as the rest of America’s right-wing has in general, with the victory of President 47*. Gibson has been sharing his thoughts on public health issues on the Joe Rogan podcast (because of course you should listen to a right-wing actor-director and a grifting podcaster for your health policy information), and then this weekend he popped up with more opinions about the wildfires in California.
It’s been an article of faith with Republicans that the wildfires have been particularly bad because the governor of California has been doing bad things and because the LA Fire Department is loaded with incompetent leaders who were all DEI hires**. Of course this is total nonsense, but whatever, it’s what they believe. And Gibson believes it too, and he’s been spouting it. But in one particular interview he said something that caught my eye because it crystalizes how America’s right-wing thinks in a very blunt and true way:
See, it’s not just that they want to craft public policy that’s mean. That’s a given. And it’s not just that their policy proposals aren’t backed by any factual information at all about how things work in the real world, because that’s also a given. It’s that not only do they know that their policies will hurt people, they want their policies to hurt people. And why?
Because they view their policies as punitive in nature.
They aren’t looking to reverse progressive policy because they disagree with it. They are looking to pass as much harmful policy as possible because they are angry with America for ever having passed it in the first place, and they want to punish Americans for it.
“Daddy’s home and he’s taking off his belt.”
Remember that metaphor. These are the people who want to be able to hit kids. These are the people who advocate for spanking. And this is why they join militias and pass “Stand your ground” laws and claim to “Back the Blue”: because not only do they not see progressive Americans as equal citizens, but as wrongdoers who need to be punished.
You see this everywhere. Every time some right-winger opens their mouth on social media, the desire to see people suffer comes through loud and clear. Check out this viral video from TikTok the other day, in which some woman openly states that people getting deported and families getting broken up by ICE agents “gives her great comfort”. (This woman has apparently been identified and let go by her employer, so there’s that.) She’s not just advocating for a policy that hurts people because she thinks that in the end it’s the best policy; she’s advocating for that policy because she likes the idea of hurting people who have somehow wronged her.
“Daddy’s home and he’s taking off his belt.”
They want to punish you for being American and not thinking the way they do. They want to punish you for thinking that your sexual orientation shouldn’t matter. They want to punish you for observing how awfully Black people have been treated. They want to punish you for advocating for the self-determination of women. They want to punish you for having advocated wearing a mask during a pandemic whose disease was conveyed by respiratory transmission. They want to punish you for admitting that climate change is a thing.
Not one policy of theirs is geared toward making anyone‘s life better, except for the rich. Their only policy goal is to punish you. Don’t ask for what. It doesn’t matter. Because ultimately they don’t care about that, either.
* His name will not appear on this site. If that’s a problem for you, bummer.
** “DEI” in this context always means, “non-white”.