Bay to Breakers 2013

Well, my fifth year of the 102nd Bay to Breakers has been completed.  Unlike when I was flakey and disorganized last year, I actually got it together to put together my zombie costume.  And, somehow, despite my methodical decline into decrepitude--I'm now 45...or maybe 44--I ran two minutes under my time last year, and 3 minutes less than my first race in 2007 (link to first race writeup).  Go figure.  Maybe decreased bone density?

Here's my time info:

Zombie at 6am.  The start time was 7am.  Which is crazy.  

Pre-race, down at the Embarcadero.

I'm going to use this as my clinical head-shot.

At the finished line:

And then at the Devil's Tooth Bakery:

And then some of my fellow runners.

Family Vacation--Monterey, CA, March 2013

Family Vacation--Monterey, CA, March 2013 

Heather at Italian joint in Monterey

Dad at the Italian joint

Mom, mugging at Italian restaurant

Corey at dinner, Italian

Karen at dinner

The Crew

Sea Turtle, Monterey Bay Aquarium

Deep Sea Tank, Monterey Bay Aquarium

Dolphin Fish

Sardines going for the food.

The seagull at the hotel spa

The friendly odd bird

T

From our room, looking at main courtyard of hotel

The hotel from our bedroom window

The coast of Monterey from the spa on top the hotel

Monterey Bay

Breakfast with the family

Corey and Karen at breakfast

The crew

Bay to Breakers 2012

This is my fourth B2B.  I was intending to run as a zombie, with an in-zombie joke I won't bother to explain, but just couldn't get it together.  So I ran non-descript, but did good time wise.

It was a strangely quiet race, making me long for the time when college kids puked in the bushes.  And there were not many bands or music systems set up.  The Mushuga Beach Party was out and about, playing hassidic surf tunes, and the hare krishna duo at Stanyan were doing their weird proselytizing, but not much else.

So I guess the take away from this year is:  bring back the beer.

(Here's my report on my first B2B:  link)

(And here are my results, dug out of my email, for past years:

Total time: 1:14:24 
Pace: 9:59/mile
Rankings overall: 3828th
Rankings among males: 2914th
Ranking among male 40-49: 665th

665th for the old guys! Whoo hoo!

They calculated about 30,000 registered runners and about the same number unregistered (i.e., without any stats).

(For comparison, from 2007:
Total time: 1:15:02
Ranking overall: 5017th
Ranking among males: 3800th
Ranking among males 30-39: 1077)

Frontalot!

I go through phases. Something will grab this little corner of my attention that's dedicated to finding the highest points of low culture. At one time, it was researching "Kung Fu Fighting," (Carl Douglas apparently is a media producer in Germany), and now it's MC Frontalot, the Godfather of Nerdcore. (Here for all things Front.)

What is Nerdcore? Nerdcore is rap by nerds: "nerd" + "hardcore". Very smart people telling stories about low-brow smart kid stuff: computers, pop culture, video games. It's the post-modern mind exploring it's per-modern roots. In Wilberian terms, it's Yellow exploring Red. It's the Mental reflecting on the Basal. It's pretty fun.

Heather and I went to see the Front down in a little club in Monteray last month, where he played with two other nerdcore luminaries (MC Lars and YTCracker--i.e., "whitey cracker"), which was a fun outing. We two old fogies were the most dance-worthy in the crowd of mostly stiff young geeks (though, as Heather pointed out, there were some representitives of the "hottie" wing of the Nerdcore scene), and that's not saying a lot.

The music coming out of Frontalot is not just clever or novel (as in "novelty"), but actually rich in orchestration, smart, and tells a good story.

So, as an example, here is one of his more well-known songs (because it's included in the game "Rock Band"), "Living at the Corner of Dude and Catastrophe." The song can be heard here (ignore the video of the game), and below are the lyrics descibing what a bunch of pot heads try to do with their drug-dealing friend who passed out and died on the bar-b-que. Natch.

(...and if you like that, check out a song and video about text-based adventure games, here, or about his fantasy child, here. Oh, wait, here's another favorite--again, ignore the video: I'm Gonna Be Your Man. Although, the video does say something about the scene...)
------------------------

Living at the Corner of Dude and Catastrophe

Where I’m livin’, it’s hard to say,
wasting my time at the corner of dude and catastrophe.
Where I’m livin’, it’s hard to say,
but I feel fine at the corner of dude and catastrophe.

Woke up by the pool again.
Must have played the fool again.
Wonder what them hooligans put on the grill that stinks
kind of like burnt fur and regurg’ed drinks
with an undertone of the acorn
and leather that’s laid on
thick like Liz Claiborne.
Step over with big trepidation,
lift up the top off the meat cooking station
to discover my homie Todd!
I said "Oh my God,
what grim façade
do you meet me with in my wakefulness?"
I had too many Stellas and they all was crisp;
must I rise up in the morning with my squirrel desisted
from the world? Insisted, as I did
this instant, that
him up in heaven again is premature?
If only reality would concur!
Poke him with the tongs. Dude won’t wake up.
Put him on the lawn; Ray’s about to cook a steak up
and this ain’t no kind of mausoleum.
Got to get the high degree on.
Todd’s onomatopoeia
got already all used up — I mean he sizzled —
ain’t nothing left but char, bone, and gristle.
My heart is fissile: I mean it could break
like crystal; he never learned to whistle. Don’t rake
his cadaver up, wassamadda with your mind?
He ain’t a lawn clipping. We been knuckleheads since old times.
Dig out the batting helmet and the bat
‘cause we’re all about to have a funeral, and that’s that.
We’ll do it after breakfast. We’ll do it up proper.
We’ll drop all his ashes out the Airwolf copter,
all singing up dirges, all spreading out blossoms,
and it’s gonna b-b-b-be frikkin’ awesome!

Where I’m livin’, it’s hard to say,
wasting my time at the corner of dude and catastrophe.
Where I’m livin’, it’s hard to say,
but I feel fine at the corner of dude and catastrophe.

Six bong rips later: we ain’t going to the helipad,
standin’ ‘round hella sad,
wonder where them Stellas at.
All these dudes ain’t huge on sentiment,
still they want to say a little something to the benefit
of layin’ Todd’s soul to rest.
I cold regressed, contemplated old regrets
and said, "Man why he even got to do a thing
like pass out on the Bar-B-King?"
I’m tryin’ to bring from like recesses in my mind
a word or two that wouldn’t prove unkind.
Aligned as he was with the less-than-angelic,
trafficking black tar smack & psychedelics
in that little-ass van of his, and drunk doing it,
knowing what the right thing to do was but eschewing it,
it’d seem pretty probable
flames are audible:
that’s the duty that Todd’ll pull,
not just in death, but in after-that,
like the bat out the h-e-double-vertical-slat
but inbound in the case of this rodent,
like when he got peeled-out on and ‘sploded,
or indeed when he got shanked in the joint —
hella causing me to wonder if there’s even a point
to our shepherdly tending of his life’s ending.
Bet he’s chilling at Friendly’s
and gonna be back in the neighborhood shortly,
discussing how awesome it is to be portly,
reporting the slant he just got on with Blister
(drank till his wrists hurt,
boned the ghost of your sister).
The dude’s a bucket kickster when he has to be
and this one wasn’t like a masterpiece
so yes we’re depressed but not drastically...
livin’ at the corner of dude and catastrophe.

Where I’m livin’, it’s hard to say,
wasting my time at the corner of dude and catastrophe.
Where I’m livin’, it’s hard to say,
but I feel fine at the corner of dude and catastrophe.
I’ll just wait, waving goodbye until the next time.
I’ll just wait, waving goodbye until the next time.

The Displacement of Loving

I've finished a really mellow, spacious day at work, and somehow found myself reading criticisms of Wilber--oh, I know, I wanted to see if I could find any detailed analysis of Wilber's take on Hegel. Our friend Emily, up for the weekend, via London, is partnered with a Hegel scholar who said that Wilber is not right in his reading of Hegel, and this was a reason the Emily was reacting to a set of his CDs I'd given her years ago.

So. I found myself dipping into the blogosphere's Wilber critiques, and again found myself with this sad sinking feeling. I haven't got the primary-text background to make sense of some of the technical claims, but that wasn't what I was reacting to. I've seen critiques of Wilber's model and his personhood that feels much different than these comments--ironic, because what I see in these critics are essentially emotionally based complaints, not real critique. A lot of what I read was about an incident a couple years ago where Wilber supposedly blew up at his critics--the so-called "Wyatt Erpy" incident--telling them among other things to suck his dick. This "explosion" came after having his blog post reviewed by several hundred people, which seems pretty deliberate.

Anyway, he offended a lot of people, broke rules of "nice" discourse apparently. Frank Visser, a key critic and collector of critics (at integralworld.net), writes a response that's full of a kind of sniffy offense, and like his site in general, there's this sense of simmering, vibrating discontent.

Which brings me to my title. In these writings, though there may be valid critical points, there's this overall emotional quality of, well, pissiness, but like most activist groups I've encountered. "Something's wrong here, and we need to right it. And when we right it, then we'll have the world we deserve." A displacement of loving. My reading is, like these activist groups, people will get the loving they deserve when they follow the rules: be nice, be kind, be non-hierarchical, be non-offensive, be sensitive. If not, you don't get our love, acceptance, or appreciation.

It's oppressive to read, and as oppressive as I've found in these activist groups.

I just read the other day a letter from the previous CEO of Integral Institute (Wilber's organization), which though critical of Wilber's managerial style, was also loving and grateful for what he was doing right. But more so, there wasn't a magnanimity which I've seen in others associated with Wilber or with Integral, a commitment to loving that exists totally aside from what's being loved.

I remember Goenkaji saying one time that he gets lots of letters from all over, from people with different concerns or wanting advice. But he said that some came through with such negativity, which was noticeable from the outset, and with those he mostly just sent the writer metta (loving kindness). That feels the same with these folks.

Film as fallen worship

I was listening to David Milch's lecture to a religion and media class at MIT, on the way down to work after dropping Heather off. I'd been avoiding it, partially because I'd listened to a lot of him recently, but more so because I'd accidentally ejected the cd last week, and dreaded holding the fast forward button for several minutes. Anyway, I went back to it.

One thing he said that quite struck me was his comment about the film "National Treasure," which was released several years ago. He didn't exactly see it as a milestone in film making, but he did see it as an expression of humans' practice in submitting themselves to God as an act of worship. THAT I'd never thought of, but it kind of makes sense. As Milch says, as a "fallen" act of worship, but nonetheless something that keeps people in the practice of opening themselves to something larger.

This morning, I had thought I'd slip in some surfing before starting the work week, but after doing my morning sitting, just didn't really want to. What I wanted was to drift around in the half-dream state, and then when that tapered off, to watch NYPD Blue, Milch's cop show from the 90's. I wasn't at all sure why, but various bits of theory from recent readings spoke up to say that this submission to the dream states, in real dreaming, and in the surrogate form of film/television, was an act of reclaiming something that had long ago been displaced or projected.

Heather and I have talked about this, our particular version of a generic topic applicable to all couples: what lessons do we secretly desire our partner to teach us. You can spot them, because they are the parts of our partner that we generally fight and denigrate. For me, its Heather's ability to go into dream or dream-like states and not fight them at all. For me, they are like slipping down a gravel slope into an oily goo. And yet, whose are these states except mine? What are they except another expression of consciousness? And so pushing them away, emphasizing the intellect and rational, what is that if not a dissociation of a genuine, legitimate aspect of myself?

Advanced meditators and spiritual practitioners are reportedly able to remain in witness-mind through their immersion in dream and unformed sleeping states. There is not a loss of conscious as the person remembers what it is that is always awake through all states of mind. It would seem that somewhere along the way, I learned to see consciousness as antithetical to dream states, that it's either/or.

But this morning seems to be a shifting or softening of that dis-association--there was a willingness to stay put and legitimize what was actually happening. And then with the TV show, there was an attempt to remain conscious and aware as I descended into the story.

Milch's point seems to be that film/TV, even the worst of it, is an act of submission to a different state of mind, and that that submission is resonant with and a practice in worshiping God. Maybe a more or less bastard version, or perhaps the object of worship is (extremely) fallen, but he seems to be saying that nonetheless, it's a reaching for God.

Hearing that, something clicked, or perhaps rang. My family has been watching film since my earliest, earliest days. In high school, my career aspiration was film director, and I attended UCLA as an English major, but within rock's throw of the film department, and often spending evenings and weekends watching movies and listening to film makers talk. My longing was to be in there, making films, but I never had the courage to follow through. Maybe I never wanted to challenge my experience of worship by getting to know the priests?

As a family, we didn't have a religion, and certainly nothing like worship in any traditional sense. We were called "happy heathens," by my mother, neither term being very accurate. I think that film was a stand-in church, where religious longings were squirreled in the face of discredited institutions and teachings. Our ad-hoc solution to what Wilber describes as the disaster of modernity: that religion is identified as pre-modern, and science is defined as modern, rather than understanding that there is a pre-modern, a modern, and a post-modern expression of religion. Being a modern family, we were cut off from religion, rather than given a modern version. So not being even aware of this split, and not being able to kill off our religious longings (I recently found myself pining as I passed a van full of kids from a Baptist church), we seemed to find ourselves to the altered state of worship, in front of movie and TV screens.

Nothing is cast off by God, by Spirit. Not even "National Treasure," which Milch seems to see as proof of God's grace. Isn't it something of a redemptive move to see film/TV in this way? Isn't there something deeply gracious, generous, and true in seeing man's longing for redemption and communion in something so modern and so often corrupt. It's not that the products are clear voicings of Spirit, it's that the repeated act of submission to them is a thoroughly respectable stumble towards God.

The Weekend Doings

So, this was a pretty full weekend. Friday morning, I saw a new client who has come in as an EMDR client, to work on a grief situation. There's some trickiness around money, but hopefully they'll stick.

Then, Heather going off to the chiropractor, I decided to get some surfing in. The surf report from Wise, the shop at the end of Fulton, said that it was marginally surfable, which pretty much proved true. I decided to not drive down to Sloat (the beaches are labeled by what street intersects them from the East--all are strung out along the Great Highway) and to try what I think is called Sunset Beach. The waves looked a bit choppy from the parking lot, and no one else was on them, but I figured to brave it anyway.

Suiting up, I tore my boot but since it's both relatively warm in the water now, and seemingly I'm acclimatizing to the fridgity, I went with it and it didn't prove to be a problem. It's a trek from the lot to the water (which makes for a lot of mud on the way back), but I'm getting used to the ritual. Suit up in the lot, trying not to let one's birthday suit show as the wind pulls at one's modesty towel, then schlep the board down across the sand and finally strap on the leash to your right leg before walking into the surf.

Now, the current can be a bitch out on Ocean Beach, pulling north or south depending on where the wind is blowing from, and therefore from where the waves are coming. You can be standing in the water and have to fight not to be pulled over by the force of the waves pushing along the beach. Rip tides haven't been a problem, but once in the water, the current can have you up or down the beach in no time.

But that day, it was fairly mellow, and I could get out past the breaking waves to the line where most were breaking. The problem was that the waves were big--maybe five feet, which is pretty damn big when you're laying on your stomach at the bottom of them--and were breaking quickly. So if you didn't position right, they'd either land right on you or break in front of you and knock you about with the stack of white water.

I persevered and caught a couple waves, and a chunk of whitewater, that allowed me a short ride and a quick dunk. Slowly, slowly, my body and mind are building a surfer, but the growth curve is slow because you only get a short amount of time to build said surfer each time you're out. You get to practice a lot of swimming and getting through the surf to the line, but the actual surfing part, not so much. Still, it's addictive, and being out alone in the waves is a welcome break to the sociality of my life.

One thing you learn is a real respect for the ocean and waves. That day, they were waves to make you pay attention, medium-serious waves that needed to be treated with respect. Extrapolating to larger waves, that's a long ways down the line for me (though I wouldn't mind finding some more classic waves to practice on). I ended up rather pooped from the swimming, and finding my biceps strained, just floated on the surf and let it gradually push me back to shore, doing a little prone surfing, getting a further hang of how to press into the board in order to catch more of the wave's energy. Eventually, I made it into shore in one piece and forgot to pick up a rock to mark the day's surfing (I've begun collecting a stone for each outing).

Usually, I've been surfing on Saturday morning, but having gone out three times this week, I was too sore, so just got up late and rousted Heather for our band workshop. We drove over to Fort Mason and worked on a couple songs off our setlist, with our funky group of rockers. There's Heather as the female voice (and I'm working on her to take up the maraccas), Rex on guitar and voice, Brian on guitar, Bill on bass, me on drums, and Bill2, our teacher and backup guitarist. In aggregate, the band is probably 30 years older than Cattleprod, the band from two years ago. We quickly threw out some names at the end of the session, and it seems like my idea from the morning's shower, the Estrogenics, is going to stick. Five guys and a chick: The Estrogenics. Yeah? I actually liked "The Enhancements" better, but there ya go, life in a democracy.

After that, we hit Guitar Center for a cord and maracas, then did a relatively rare Big Shopping at Rainbow, and headed home for a mellow-ish rest of the day. We spent an hour and a half working on Widgethouse--the name of our project to create a multi-purpose retreat center up near Petaluma--something we've agreed to do weekly. We skipped it last week, so it felt good to follow through with it. Then some work on finances, juggling the zero percent credit cards and shifting money around, like dodging sharks, and I read some more of Wilbur's book (again, jaw-droppingly profound) and then finished off David Caruso's tenure on NYPD Blue (yeah, the guy from CSI-Miami).

The Morning Story

So, I'm at work doing my usuals, dealing with cranky clients, and nicer clients, but lots of peccadilloes and idiosyncrasies. More so, what our work is at a psych unit like this, is holding the space for people who can't do so themselves, the psychic equivalent of what it would be like to be the skin on someone else's body. It takes a lot of effort sometime, and if you're feeling raw yourself, it can be a LOT of work.

Today, I woke from a series of dreams about misery without relief. Seems like they were stories of both other's suffering (an Indian peasant?) and of a birds eye view of suffering per se. I'd watched a string of cop shows last night (NYPD Blue, Milch's early drama), where the detectives are constantly having to negotiate with profound suffering, usually by hardening to it, or shuffling it off in dark humor. So the pump was primed for my dreams.

I've been reading Wilber's "Integral Spirituality," an astounding book that essentially lays out a system of seeing reality as a prism of perspectives, without any primary perspective, that reality is actually the simultaneous coordination of 8 primordial perspectives that cannot be reduced to each other. Reality, in his model, is the arising of all these perspectives at the same time.

So, then waking, I did my usually morning meditation, and saw into how this "suffering without relief" is a particular perspective, one way of framing or narrating the world, a particular story which is true as far as it goes, but not the primary story.

But when I came up from sitting, what was left was this story which was struggling for primacy, not wanting to be held by anything larger, insistent that it was the base story that all others led to. Curious. It seems to be something that has been emerging for perhaps the last year or two, like undigested gristle. And I've been noticing how the tenor of my time at the half-way house has also changed during this time, where the suffering of people here has become harder to hold. Perhaps as I've gotten more sensitive, or more embodied, it pushes me towards this early perspective/story which inherently denies other perspective/stories.

It's trick, holding stories that then bite you because being held itself is an insult. Being held, the story then converts into it's basic experience, being pain and contraction, which the story is there to suppress or avoid. So it doesn't want to be seen for what it is, while at the same time, secretly, every contraction yearns for release.

Milch, Fancy, and Imagination

I am on a BIG David Milch jag. I've downloaded hours and hours from a new blog I stumbled on (here), the bulk of which is Milch talking to a Writers Guild of America crowd right after the strike started at the end of last year. It's like listening to the English professor I never found in college, an erudite man with a deep life history who can find the humanity and numinous in the worst piles of crap.

Milch started as a literature professor at Yale, and a very active junkie, until getting hired to write for Hill Street Blues. He then co-created NYPD Blue, and then a couple short lived projects until he did Deadwood for 3 seasons, and then John From Cincinnati for 1 season, both with HBO. (I've written about both shows, below.)

In the WGA lectures, a central theme--and remember that he's talking with fellow writers--is the difference between fancy and imagination. He defines "fancy" as arbitrary and idiosyncratic connections of two events or objects, his example being, "When I think of the Del Shannon song 'Runaway,' I think of the first time I got a blow job from a white girl." His fanciful connection is not going to be shared by anyone but him, or a precious few anyway. Whereas imagination is the deep structure of meaning, the "natural" associations that will be shared by most people (whether in a cultural unit or more broadly would be a whole different lecture).

He say that authentic writing is the act of keeping company with the fanciful long enough that it yields up its imaginal meaning, and that the act of writing is the mind resting transparent in the ground that gave it rise, from which imagination can occur.

All his raw and beautiful stories in these lectures are about these two points: fancy vs. imagination, and the method of purifying the former into the latter. He makes huge digressions in this discourse, with rank profanity and lurid stories, but manages to bring it all together in exquisite summations and proofs, as it were, of St. Paul's revelation on the road to Damascus, that God's love is available to all people. That, Milch says, is what writers write about: the availability of God's love, with very very good examples.

Milch really points me to the fundaments of writing which were never explained or demonstrated in my romantic gropings through my undergraduate English degree, that is, what makes writing authentic, an act of service rather than a self-serving act.

I think James and I both floundered on this point, in our longings to be writers, in that neither of us knew how to surrender and serve, though both of us longed to find out how. We could feel it in other's writing, but could not figure out how to get into their company. So our attempts were contracted, limited, and thin--and therefore frustrating of the basic want of communion. If we'd been content with our own egos, or the slavish gratifications of others desires, then maybe we could have moved ahead. But I think both of us maddened from the inability to surrender, and both went in other directions in our lives. I still rarely read a novel, and the last one I started, "Divisidero" by Ondatje is so small and careful that I couldn't bear to continue it.

What has gripped my literary heart has been Milch's dramas. I'm watching the 3rd season of Deadwood again, and each episode leaves me...emptied. As my friend Michael said of John From Cincinnati (Milch's last show, last year), about the central character John's efforts towards all the other characters, "He's going to redeem every fucking one of them, isn't he?" Same for Milch, as he keeps giving very very good examples of what St. Paul got converted by, on some dusty road: God's love is for all the creatures, available always and freely.

Zohan!

After our swing dance class last night, with our perky Swedish instructor Cat ("tree-pull step!"), we went to see You Don't Mess with the Zohan. I wasn't expecting much. Adam Sandler has had about one good movie and one half-funny movie (Punch Drunk Love, and Anger Managment), and a lot of dumb-ass productions, like drawn out SNL skits.

But this was not only funny in an outrageous but not heavy-handed or contrived way, it was actually very sweet. Sandler's clueless superhero Zohan, an Israeli counter terrorist agent who apparently usually works on his own because he doesn't really need anyone else (he catches bullets in his teeth and up his nose, and sticks a piranha down his pants without flinching), comes to realize that he's tired of all the fighting, and longs to go to New York to be a hair stylist. OK, funny setup which could play the macho Israeli male stereotype against the male stylist stereotype--which does get some play, but Zohan is so sincere and unaware of the stereotypes, without irony, that he comes across as rather clean and pure. When he talks with the young man whose mother takes him in, and whose mother Zohan quickly starts screwing, he's sincerely tells the son how happy his mother is and how could he want anything different (apparently in Israel there's no such thing as the primal scene, i.e., walking in on your parents having sex). And he really means it, and you believe it totally. There's really not a wink-wink nod-nod in relation to Zohan. You are expected to take him at his word.

Thus what we get is something of a checking of the American ironic stance via this foreign transplant, who doesn't even understand irony and is fearless about his own sincerity. When he starts seeing hair clients, little old women from the neighborhood, and adds a little shagging at the end of his hair care, you get the sense that he really and truly appreciates these women who American culture (and American film culture) view as hags or sexless wisdom figures. Zohan sees an inner quality of beauty and lustiness that is so obvious to him, that you start actually seeing the obviousness yourself. It's in this way that the film really tweaks some of the dehumanizing that goes on in American culture.

Not to mention what Zohan is doing with the Middle Eastern conflicts. It's essentially a pacifist and humanistic film. All of the characters (except the evil-doing mall developer and his hick-terrorist hireling) have dreams of a better life, free from conflict and inherited hatreds and divisions. The super-terrorist The Phantom (played wonderfully by John Turturo) secretly wants to sell shoes. His hatred of Israel is something giving to him, and forced on him by circumstance; essentially, he wants to live a useful, joyful life doing something he loves.

Same with Zohan, the master soldier, who is tired of the constant fighting and wants to make the world "silky smooth." He also wants to serve others, not support division and dis-integration. He also wants to find his own internal integration, where he does not have to choose only one incarnation of himself, the soldier, over the lover or the servant or the artist. He is tired of only choosing a part of himself, and having his culture insist on only that part.

So in a sense, the film is upholding a cherished, and older, value of America, that you can come here and shed the Old World--the cultures of rigid relationships and inherited animosity--in favor of a life of opportunity. However, here's where the film updates this story to one of not Horatio Alger-like rising to the top, not a narcissistic climb over the bodies of your fellows, but of self-integration, the expansion of the human community to include all struggling, yearning beings. Even the hick hireling--played by Dave Mathews, in a weird and wonderful casting decision--is not killed in the end, but rather catapulted by the combined, uh, singing of The Phantom and Zohan--never done in 2000 years!--into the gay party helmed by George Takai (nee, Sulu from Star Trek). Even he is given an opportunity to face his fears through exposure to the feared community, which presents itself as both wonderfully idiosyncratic and totally human.

I am such a sucker for such films, because I so believe in and yearn for this deep healing and recognition of connectedness. And I love the archetypal nature of pop culture, how it can express in simple terms deep longing and hope. And I really love genre literature and art, in it's both honoring the structure/tradition/community of life, as well as the joyous reinterpretation of that life by the artist, a conscious expression of what we all do all the time.

So, the reason why "you don't mess with the Zohan" is not actually that he's so tough and macho, it's because his essential nature is loving, and there's no way to fight that.