"We all laughed when my sister said it was Apple’s way of welcoming Trump to 'their' village."

Writes JSD in the comments to my post asking you what you did for Thanksgiving and referring to this Apple commercial that aired during football games yesterday:



Watching the commercial with JSD's sister's idea in mind, I couldn't laugh, because you'd have to see the commercial first and then hear the punchline. With the order reversed, I had more of the experience of sweet poignancy that the ad's designers originally intended, but with a new deeper level. The monster is Trump.

If the original intent of the ad had anything to do with using a monster because of Trump — who has been called a monster — it must have been with the idea that Trump would lose, and the alienated losers would need reintegration into Hillary Clinton's America. In that vision, the little girl who screws in the green light represents the young women of America who symbolize the future and show the monster the way to join the group. Stronger together.

By the way, I saw a chalking on campus a few days ago. Should have photographed it, but I memorized it: "Safe together/Strong together/Resist together." I'm not 100% sure that "Strong" was the right word or that the first 2 lines were in that order, but "Resist together" was definitely the punchline. I thought that was funny. After Hillary and her supporters lectured us for so long about how we needed to be together to be strong, she loses the election and oneness loses its luster.

"Resist together" is the perfect oxymoron for the occasion.

"Then He rolled his big sleeves up/And a brand-new world began..."

ADDED: In the comments JSD said:

I only remember him because a musician friend of mine pointed him out on the street one day. He was very emphatic about his legendary stature. I still have the Les McCann Eddie Harris “Swiss Movement” record. “Compared to What” was a pretty incendiary song in the 70’s. The Roberta Flack “Feel Like Makin Love” was good too. Not many black people in Maine, so I thought it was unusual but cool.

Here's Eugene McDaniels, acknowledging that he's a "hermit" in Maine and reminiscing about "Compared to What":



Here are Les McCann and Eddie Harris doing "Compared To What":



McDaniels died in 2011. From the obituary:

His hits of the early 1960s... cast him as a suave performer of upbeat pop songs aimed at white teenagers; in his last years he would occasionally take the stage to deliver standards with all the graceful inventiveness of the great jazz singer he might have been.

In between came the event that changed his life, when his protest song Compared to What became an unexpected hit after being released on an album recorded at the 1969 Montreux jazz festival by his first employer, the pianist Les McCann, and the saxophonist Eddie Harris. The song went on to be covered more than 270 times by other artists, including Ray Charles, Della Reese and John Legend. Its success enabled McDaniels to stop performing in night-clubs, an environment he detested because of the lack of respect he felt was shown towards the music by their audiences....

His later years were spent by the ocean in Kittery Point, Maine. In 2010, he performed an acoustic version of A Hundred Pounds of Clay to a group of teenage girls attending an arts outreach programme....

Here are the lyrics to "Compared to What." Excerpt:

Slaughterhouse is killin' hogs
Twisted children killin' frogs
Poor dumb rednecks rollin' logs
Tired old lady kissin' dogs
I hate the human, love that stinking mutt (I can't use it!)
Try to make it real — compared to what? C'mon baby now!

AND: The same commenter, JSD, had wondered "why this is being posted today." Perhaps he thought it might have some connection to the racial discord in the news lately, but that's not why. As I answered in the comments, it came up in the context of a conversation with Meade that I wasn't able to reconstruct for the post. I remember where I was standing and where Meade was sitting when I brought up the old song.

Meade was analogizing something to the wedging of clay (and activity he's done much of in times past), and he seemed to remember that we were discussing the phrase "ashes to ashes, dust to dust." That makes me think it was part of our discussion of this BBC article about Fyodor Dostoyevsky, who was subjected to a staged fake execution, and years later said: "I cannot recall when I was ever as happy as on that day." And that might have come up in connection with the subject of the U-shaped — smile-shaped — curve of happiness, which depicts the puzzling/understandable phenomenon of happiness increasing at the end of life.



So maybe there was something about the closeness to death, something about endings and new beginnings, perhaps, as one returns to earth and becomes subject to wedging into clay.