I was in a full-blown panic, so I couldn’t help thinking of myself, even as I cleared the remaining crap out of my son’s mouth. My son was smiling, almost knowingly smiling, like “What are you going to do now?” I quickly asked the two mothers who were silently judging me if they knew whether it was imperative that I take him to the ER. Simultaneously, I thought of the repercussions, like “How do I even admit to the attending nurse that I let my son eat shit?” I know I should have been thinking of him first, and I know it seems simple enough, but pride is a powerful emotion. And it was early on in the process, so admitting to a failure this catastrophic was a really bad look.
In simple terms, was there a way, just . . . wondering . . . if this matter could go away? Like, could I get some water and wash him clean and we hope for the best, or do we have to go through the whole my-telling-everyone-my-baby-ate-shit thing? Hoping for some direction, I turned to the two women who had witnessed the incident. One immediately said, “I would take him to the ER,” and the other quickly followed with, “I wouldn’t worry about it.” This was the absolute worst possible outcome: a split decision. I really needed clarity, but they argued back and forth while I listened on.
In an effort to protect myself and my growing reputation as a father, I chose the path of least resistance: hoping for the best. I went home and flushed out his mouth off and on for about two hours and then dressed him in his mother’s favorite outfit. That evening, when Amy got home, she asked how the day was and I told her, just another day at the park. We looked over at our son, who sat in his bouncy chair pushing himself up and down with his baby legs, wearing a real shit-eating grin.
I will say that, in my case, doing nothing worked out, but I would not offer that claim as a general rule for any time a baby eats shit.
CHAPTER 16
How I Failed at Providing Some Historical Perspective on Failure Redux
When putting my failures into context, one has to consider the environment I come from. And not just my family and my heritage, but the actual place where I am from. With that, we can pin some blame on the failures of early America and see how those failures gave root to our personal failures. Maybe if I could learn a bit about why America’s manifest success is not what it seems, I could better understand my failures as a product thereof. Most Americans, at this point in our history, feel like America is essentially a success story, but one has to look deeper in order to get a sense of the cracks that developed from its early settlement. I reached out to Temple University Native American history professor Andrew Isenberg to bring some clarity to this matter and to better lay out how certain aspects of America’s culture were doomed to fail from the beginnings of our journey as a nation based on failures of communication and basic misunderstandings. Here is a transcript of the exchange.
May 17, 2017 10:52 AM
Professor Isenberg,
My name is Jon Benjamin, and I’m writing a book having to do with my personal failures in my life and I just checked my word count and my publishing contract obligates me to write over seventy-five thousand words, and I’m not even halfway there and my deadline is in two weeks, so pardon me, but I’m fucked. I know this seems out of the blue, but is there any way you can write a little bit about how the colonists failed with the Indians for me? It would be a real help, word count wise. I tried with another professor earlier in my writing process and he stopped writing me back. Hopefully, you can see it in your heart to help me. If not for anything else, to get your very important work out there to be seen by more people.
Jon
May 19, 2017 6:43 PM
I’m sorry about your predicament. Your question is quite broad. In any survey of encounters between settlers and Indians, one doesn’t have to look too hard to find “failures.” At the same time, as a historian, I don’t go looking for failures, or successes. I’m just trying to figure out what happened and why.
Maybe the most important failure, at least during the first encounters between colonists and Indians, was the failure of both sides to understand each other. Columbus called the native inhabitants of the Americas “Indians” because he thought he was in the Indies. Spanish conquistadors in Mexico referred to the temples in Tenochtitlan as “mosques” because they reminded them of the mosques the Moors had worshipped in in Spain, before they had driven them out. The English settlers in Massachusetts at first didn’t believe that the Indians’ agricultural plots were real farms, because the Indians didn’t plant in neat rows but rather put the corn, beans, and squash together in one field (so that the bean plants could climb up the cornstalks, while the squash spread out on the ground). The English thought these plants were just growing wildly.
More failures to understand: When European colonists showed up in the Americas, they accidentally brought with them the microbes that cause smallpox and measles. These diseases were previously unknown in the Americas, so no Indians had any acquired immunities. When the diseases first struck Indian communities, many of them did precisely the wrong thing—rather than quarantine those who were suffering, everyone would gather around them to help them, which only allowed the microbe to spread more easily. It’s not that colonists understood what was happening much better. Most adult colonists had been exposed to these diseases as children in Europe and survived, and thus had acquired lifelong immunities. But both Catholic and Protestant religious leaders attributed the deaths of the Indians and the health of the colonists to divine providence. John Winthrop, the first governor of Massachusetts, wrote in 1634 that “the natives, they are all nere dead of the small Poxe, so as the Lord had cleared our title to what we possess.”
Indians and colonists at first failed to understand each other when they signed agreements over land. It is not true that Indians had no conception of land ownership. They had a clear sense of usufruct rights—the rights to use property without owning it. Usufruct rights could be exclusive: in other words, we can hunt here but you can’t. When some of the first treaties were signed between Indians and Europeans, the Indians thought they were granting the colonists the shared use of the land; they thought they were granting usufruct rights to the colonists. They were rather surprised to find out that the colonists thought they were acquiring the land outright. Also, the Indians assumed the colonists were going to live under their jurisdiction. When Chinese investors buy a condo in one of Jared Kushner’s buildings, the condo does not become part of China. But when the colonists purchased lands from the Indians, they assumed that they had removed that land from the legal jurisdiction of the Indians who had sold it. The Indians did not necessarily assume the same thing—they were permitting the English to live in their territory under their jurisdiction. But the Europeans’ belief that they were sovereign is what made them colonists rather than immigrants.
May 19, 2017
Professor Isenberg,
Jesus! That is really good and interesting. Wow, the other guy didn’t do half as much and wouldn’t when asked. He actually just gave me a list of resource materials and told me to do it. It seems like you could write a whole book.
May 20, 2017
Jon,
Actually I have written a few books, most of which have traveled under the radar except in some small academic circles.
Drew
May 20, 2017
Professor,
What are the books?
Jon
May 21, 2017
Jon,
One was called The Destruction of the Bison, another called Mining California, and a third called Wyatt Earp: A Vigilante Life. Some people didn’t like that one because they thought I was saying that Wyatt Earp was gay.
Drew
May 21, 2017
Wait, Wyatt Earp was gay??!!!
Jon
May 23, 2017
Jon,
He shared a bed with another guy. For a year. But the book was mainly about his life and the politics of the time in that regi
on of the country.
Drew
May 23, 2017
Andrew,
That certainly sounds gay, but it is hard to tell. There were fewer beds back then? I have a quick idea. Would you like to republish your book as my book? It would take a lot of pressure off me to continue writing and, at minimum, I would know an interesting well-researched book was out there under my name. It would also get your work out there to a bigger audience, as I mentioned previously. I know it’s a lot to ask, but just think about it. I think I could at least reuse a portion of your material to cover the remainder of my required word count. I’m sure you know how hard it is to write a whole book, since you’ve done three. Anyway, think about it. Maybe we could eventually make a movie about a gay Wyatt Earp. That would be huge, like Brokeback Mountain meets Wyatt Earp?
Jon
May 24, 2017
Jon,
I don’t think that would work legally with my publisher, plus wouldn’t it be odd to just switch the topic of your book midway through? I think that might confuse your readers. I appreciate your interest in history, but I don’t think this will work logistically. Good luck with your project.
Drew
Andrew,
Okay, I get it, but what if we publish a bunch of copies of your book with my cover on it, seeing my book is called Failure Is an Option and the stories are predominately about my failures, but in the case of those copies that have your book in place of mine, the “failure” is on the buyer to get my actual book. Pretty clever right?
Jon
Jon,
I’m not clear on why you would do anything like this.*
Drew
CHAPTER 17
How I Failed at “the Celebrity Favor”
I know many people who are known for their work as actors, musicians, and comedians. For instance, I know Aziz Ansari. I also know Josh Groban. (Actually, I don’t. But I’m sure if I did, he would be pleasant enough.) I once was photographed by paparazzi standing next to Sarah Jessica Parker at a street corner and it was published in Us Weekly and I lied to everybody that I was friends with her.
One of the perks of being a celebrity or a public figure is that you occasionally receive preferential treatment and stuff that someone without this status would have to work a lot harder to obtain. It’s common practice, but, for example, certain people are given things complimentary just because they are notable. And that’s not totally unfair. I offered to buy a drink for James McNew of the band Yo La Tengo once simply because I loved Yo La Tengo. It’s a gesture of appreciation.
But sometimes, it’s a quid pro quo. As in, commerce plays a role. When a company sends a free pair of shoes to, let’s say, Ryan Phillippe, that company hopes he will wear those shoes while being photographed having an affair on his wife and the shoe company will benefit from the ensuing scandal. Or maybe they just hope he’ll be photographed wearing them to his gym—the gym he is probably having an affair at. Ryan Phillippe has had a lot of affairs, I think. Celebrity affairs sell so many shoes.
I have sometimes benefitted from being a small-time celebrity. I have been bought many drinks. I received a free bicycle seat from a bike shop in New York City. Also, once the attendant at the IKEA ferry in Manhattan let me cut the line. And, most notably, a hotel employee in Boston arranged, without my prompting, free porn for my room.
“Hey, Jon, I got you free porn!”
“Umm . . .”
“Yeah, it’s just a switcher. All the porn movies on the hotel channel will play now . . . for free!”
“Oh, no, that’s not necessary.”
“Already done, man. Enjoy.”
That’s when you know you’ve made it. Free porn. Porn given to you just because someone likes your work. What a gesture of solidarity for someone in the arts community.
So, I watched. It would have been rude not to. Just as a side note, the movie I watched that night starred a male actor with a particularly memorable penis, in that it bent upward. Later, I learned this may be a medical condition called Peyronie’s disease. That’s what free porn can teach you. Or any porn for that matter.
Anyway, he did have one (a bent penis), and no more than a week later, a happy coincidence occurred when I was at the baggage claim area of an LA airport. Just a short distance away stood the porn actor with the bent penis! As our eyes met, he knew I recognized him and looked away dismissively.
As I was staring, I quickly realized that male porn actors must hate their fans, because such a large percentage of their fans are sad, middle-aged men who watch porn all the time. It’s not the best feeling to get thumbs-up from perverts all day. “Hey, love your bent penis!”
I wanted to tell him I was different, and about the free porn, and the unusual circumstance of my getting it—how I wasn’t just another sad, lonely porn fanatic—but it was too late to try to explain. He and his bent penis got into a taxi and rode away into the hot LA night. Maybe I was reading it all wrong, and he recognized me and hated my work. It will be forever a mystery.
* * *
—
One of my good friends, David Cross, is a comedian who, over the years, has taken me to many baseball games. He is a big baseball fan and would often get complimentary tickets when the Red Sox (our team) played the Yankees. So, when the opportunity came for me to receive free tickets to Yankee Stadium, I was eager to return the favor.
Now, I had not ever received free tickets to a game before, so it was a momentous occasion. And here’s how it went down. At the time, I was in a cartoon called Home Movies where I voiced a belligerent elementary school soccer coach named John McGuirk. Scott Van Pelt, an ESPN sports announcer, was a fan of the character, so he contacted me to do some comedy spots as Coach McGuirk to be played as interstitial segments on his new radio show for ESPN, which had just been acquired by ABC.
I recorded a rant about Tiger Woods seeming too clean and virtuous to be believed and that it was clear he was hiding some sort of dark sex-fueled secret life. This was around 2006. Scott Van Pelt wrote me after hearing it, saying ABC was uncomfortable with the content, because I mentioned Tiger Woods and sex too much. It was perfectly reasonable for ESPN to protect themselves from libel, but my fake coach character did technically break the Tiger Woods scandal story three years before it was revealed in the media. That’s pretty good sports reporting from a cartoon character.
Anyway, my payment for the gig was tickets to a Red Sox game at Yankee Stadium, which Van Pelt said he could obtain with no problem, even though they couldn’t use the material I gave them. He sent me the tickets, and I called David and boasted that I had gotten free Red Sox/Yankees tickets from ESPN. I added they must be some really good seats because on the tickets, it read something along the lines of “Special Seating.”
We took the subway up to Yankee Stadium, and when we got in, I handed the tickets to the usher, who looked at them curiously. He stood there for a moment and then radioed someone. I was pretty confident at this point that my tickets were pretty impressive. I mean, the guy had to radio his boss. These were likely some VIP, press-credential seats. We would probably be hobnobbing with Giuliani and Bernie Kerick, eating free plateau de fruits de mer. I winked at David, believing I had set him up better than he had ever done for me.
Another usher came over and looked at the tickets, and the two, seemingly stumped, looked at each other. He radioed for a third usher to come over. Now, three people were looking at the tickets. Maybe we had field passes or were going to be brought to the locker room. Something big was brewing.
Finally, the third usher said, “Yeah, I know where these are, follow me.” This was the old Yankee Stadium, so we were standing in the section behind home plate under the overhang (the original Yankee Stadium had a huge overhang which draped over the seating running from the second tier over about half the seating area directly behind home plate) and he walked us back up the stairs into
the corridor where the food vendors were.
We walked for a minute or two until we reached an area in the hallway to the side, like an inset space set back from the main interior corridor in between two of the food vendors that had faded paint lines and about ten folding chairs in front of a cutout opening in the concrete wall. Through the cutout, the view was mainly the underside of the overhang, home plate, and the pitcher’s mound.
I would classify it as an aggressively obstructed view of the playing field. I would also classify it as sitting in a hallway. I would definitely classify it as “Special Seating.”
The usher said, “Here you are.” David looked at me sideways. The folding chairs were in painted boxes reading one to ten and in front of us, within the walls of the actual stadium, through our cutout rectangular opening, was the handicapped seating area, to be fair. The seats were conveniently located for concessions, but it was almost impossible to see the field. It was like sitting in seats assigned for registered sex offenders. It felt as if we were on a practical-joke show. At least, that’s what David assumed. A few feet behind us, people gathered in lines for food.
So now you understand the level of free gifts someone in my position receives. Free tickets to a hallway very near a baseball game. I sat in ignominy for the first few innings. I will say it was humbling, and a lesson learned that if you enter in a quid pro quo arrangement with Scott Van Pelt, don’t settle on tickets.
After about three innings, two couples came in, dressed from head to toe in Yankees apparel—Yankees hats, Yankees shirts, even Yankees sweatpants. One of the women was even holding a Yankees flag.
As Red Sox fans, this was just adding insult to injury. Not only were we sitting behind a concrete wall, but now we’d been joined by really obnoxious Yankees fans. They were very loud and excited to be there. We struck up a conversation, and they kept reiterating what really big Yankees fans they were.
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