The Sidewalks Of New York (The once and future song of the Belmont Stakes)
Down in front of Casey’s
Old brown wooden stoop,
On a summer’s evening,
We formed a merry group;
Boys and girls together,
We would sing and waltz,
While the ginnie played the organ
On the sidewalks of New York.
East side, West side, all around the town,
The tots sang ‘Ring-a-Rosie,’
‘London Bridge is Falling Down.’
Boys and girls together,
Me and Mamie O’Rourke,
Tripped the light fantastic
On the sidewalks of New York.
We know, we know. “The Sidewalks of New York” isn’t the Belmont theme song anymore. But it should be. Unfortunately, New Yorkers are so taken with themselves they find it necessary to replace the old traditional song with the self-aggrandizing “New York, New York” (“if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere”), a phony-baloney claim if ever there was one. Just ask the Yankees, who have lost seven out of eight to the Red Sox.
“My Old Kentucky Home” and, to a slightly lesser degree, “Maryland, My Maryland” are exactly the kind of songs you need for the classics races. When the horses advance to the track for the most important races of their lives, the moment is poignant. The refrain backgrounding these moments should be secondary to the parade of horses. It’s okay if the crowd is singing the song but nobody should be at a microphone. The Kentucky Derby tried it for a short time and wisely realized it was a bad idea. So this Saturday, if it wouldn’t be too much trouble, would somebody rush up to the mike at Belmont and cream the offending singer with a pie? Thanks, in advance, for your assistance.
Handicapping The Belmont
This time we like Animal Kingdom to make it two classics out of three. At a mile-and-a-half, the race seems too long for Shackleford to hold off the favorite, although a slow pace would have plenty of bearing on the finish. Nehro, second in the Derby and absent in the Preakness, looks to have a big shot here even after a slow half-mile work at Belmont (50 and change as opposed to Animal Kingdom’s 47 and change). Nehro’s trainer is known for asking less in his horses’ works so comparing the two times may be irrelevant. The English import, Master of Hounds, ran respectably in the Preakness and may be able to get a piece here, especially considering the distance. We don’t much like what’s been going on with Mucho Macho Man, who lost one of his glue-on shoes in the Preakness. First, his connections fired the blacksmith, then the rider, strewing the blame in all directions (will the trainer be next?). Not to mention, the Florida-bred looks to have lost weight in his two previous efforts, something not apparent with his competitors.
The rest of the field looks to contain a bunch of imposters, but maybe somebody will jump up and fool us. After all, nobody has any experience at this distance.
What’s That Again?
Does anybody ever pay any attention to those disclaimers on the TV drug advertisements? After the glowing endorsements for several of these products, replete with happy couples riding off into the sunset, the subdued little voice comes on announcing that “Use of this drug sometimes encourages Suicidal Tendencies. Not to mention Cancer of the Epiglottis, Yaws and crippling Gout. Moreover, long-term use could lead to werewolfism, scales and the need to urinate in public. Do not take this drug if you are human and under 88 years of age. After that, what the hell difference does it make (sorry, Norm)?”
The Search For Bridey Murphy
Before we were so rudely interrupted by the end of last week’s column, we were discussing the Afterlife. We never got to Reincarnation, which is a big deal with a lot of people, us not included. I mean, it’s not much fun to think of returning to life as, say, a cucumber, let alone Sarah Palin. Although, if you did return as a cucumber or Sarah Palin and had no memory of previous lives, it probably wouldn’t be so bad.
What we don’t like about Reincarnation is that you come back as a completely new entity and you don’t get to drag along all the knowledge it took you a lifetime to accumulate. Things like learning to read The Daily Racing Form (a five-year project, at least) or dumb lines to avoid when picking up girls (even longer).
But then there’s the Bridey Murphy episode. Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear (specifically, March 19, 1956) and this article from Time Magazine:
The woman who is creating the biggest stir in the U.S. this week is an attractive 33-year-old Pueblo, Colo., housewife named Virginia Tighe. Millions of Americans know her in another personality as Bridey Murphy, the necromantic heroine of The Search For Bridey Murphy who has made reincarnation a fad more entrancing than canasta or flying saucers.
Bridey Murphy—born A.D. 1798, died 1864—first appeared in print in the fall of 1954, soon after a chance remark by Robert Cast, an attorney of Pueblo. Said Cast to his brother-in-law, William J. (‘Bark’) Barker of the Denver Post’s Sunday supplement, Empire: “Do you think there might be a story in a guy who has discovered that a woman in Pueblo lived an earlier life in Ireland in the 1800s?” Replied newsman Barker: “Hell, yes.” He wrote the story. Empire ran it in three installments as “The Strange Search for Bridey Murphy,” and letters from 10,000 readers gave a glimpse of the national furor to come.
Last January, with some manuscript advice from Newsman Barker, Morey Bernstein, 36, a Pueblo businessman who sells farm and mining equipment, told the story again in his book. Bernstein, an amateur hypnotist, had put housewife Tighe, who uses the name Ruth Simmons to avoid publicity, into a trance in which she conjured up an earlier incarnation as Bridey, a redheaded lass born in Cork. What made the story chillingly persuasive was the mass of circumstantial detail about people, places and customs that Mrs. Tighe recounted in a brogue and in words that seemed utterly foreign to her existence. In two months, Bernstein’s book shot through eight printings and 170,500 copies into the No. 1 spot on U.S. nonfiction bestseller lists.
More than that, it has created a boom in the occult. A West Coast hypnotist advertised an offer to “establish the prior existence” of all comers (at $25 an existence). Around the country, while hostesses gave “come as you were” parties and restaurants offered “reincarnation cocktails,” ordinary Americans began turning up in earlier lifetimes as German leather merchants, French peasants, English princesses, and, in one case, a horse. In Shawnee, Oklahoma, Bridey intrigued a 19-year-old newsboy so mightily that he killed himself after leaving a note that he was going to “investigate the theory in person.”
There’s always that ten percent. Anyway, a lot more details on the Bridey Murphy phenomenon are available online. A lot of the previous-life information provided by Virginia Tighe was convincing and hard to refute. And spooky.
Not So Fast, My Friend!
As convincing as Bridey Murphy was, there are always skeptics about these things. Newspapers sent reporters to Ireland to investigate and were unable to come up with records matching Bridey’s birth, upbringing, marriage or death. One newspaper, however, the Chicago American, found Bridie Murphy Corkell in Wisconsin in the 20th century. She lived in the house across the street from where Virginia Tighe grew up. The Skeptic’s Dictionary goes on to say that what Virginia reported while hypnotized were not memories of a previous life but memories from her early childhood. “Whatever else the hypnotic state is,” this publication asserts, “it is a state where one’s fantasies are energetically displayed. Many people were impressed with the details of Tighe’s hypnotic memories, but the details were not evidence of past life regression, reincarnation or channeling. They were evidence of a vivid imagination, a confused memory, fraud, or a combination of the three.”
Well, this publication’s job is not to be objective, of course, and it conveniently glosses over many facts in the book that are difficult to ignore. Both sides present interesting arguments, but, for us, Reincarnation is quite a reach. Okay, you ask, but since you’re a bunch of old hippies, what do you think about:
Karma
Our friends, the Buddhists, believe in Karma. One accumulates “Good Karma” by performing positive acts and accumulates “Bad Karma” via committing negative ones. These acts go on one’s cosmic Personal Record. If the Good Karma starts edging up on the Universal Scale, a person may be expected to benefit from his positive actions not only in this life but also in the Afterlife, where one’s station will be determined by Karmic Standing. If a person has a lot of Good Karma, far exceeding the Bad, he may be considered for Reincarnation. If, on the other hand, one reaches the Afterlife with a giant sack of Bad Karma, he is relegated to some variation of Hell, where the spirits poke his soul with unearthly cattle prods and force him to watch reruns of The Greatest Loser for God knows how long. After which he is eventually allowed to go on into a peaceful afterlife followed by reincarnation as a right-wing Republican.
Speaking Of Republicans….
My sister, Alice, a big Republican from Camarillo, California (if you want to go by her house and heckle her), wrote me a scathing letter after last week’s blog insisting that Republicans most certainly do go to Heaven and what the hell is wrong with me, anyway? My sister is a one-issue Republican—Barack Obama, it seems, is giving all her money to the illegal Mexicans, she’s tired of it and she’s not going to stand for it anymore. Alice swears she likes the nice legal Mexicans, but we’re not sure how she tells the difference. Does she pull up to a light, roll down her window and ask for ID? Then, if they have none, spit in their car? Or, conversely, if they prove to be the nice, legal Mexicans, invite them to her house for enchiladas? Just wondering.
One Last Thing
We weren’t really through with Karma, but we didn’t want to forget Alice.
Some Karma advocates believe that each soul is divided into two parts—the conscious soul and the “divine spark.” Oh oh. We’re always a little wary of “divine” stuff. Anyway, your conscious soul is supposedly an amalgam of your mind, impulses, memories, etc. It is the core of what constitutes You. The “divine spark” is what enables you to work your own individual “magic” but also absorbs your Karma as you galumph through life. While you are alive, the two are a tightly integrated and singular entity. At the end of your life, your “divine spark” fully awakens and separates from your consciousness, twinning your soul into the two separate beings (we kind of like this one). Anyway, before you can go on to the next incarnation, you and your divine spark must meld together into a new and whole soul. Before the melding is possible, however, you and your spark need to resolve a few issues. (Does it ever end?) Your spark will try to explain to you why a lot of the things you did were wrong, perhaps forcing you to relive events as if you were the victim. Okay, that seems fair. If you’ve done really awful things, like joining the Tea Party, things that your spark feels you will never be able to repay karmicly, you will be dumped into a sort of limbo and nobody seems to know what happens then, so don’t do it.
Anyway, after you and your spark have made peace with your Bad Karma, if this is doable, the two of you move together into a wonderful place called “The Summerland,” which is probably like that place on Long Island where they film Royal Pains. You and your spark will discuss your past life together with other deceased people and with spirits and the Lord and Lady, themselves, whoever the hell they are. You will be able to reconnect with spirits of people you loved who have passed on but have yet to reincarnate (phew, this is getting awfully complicated). After a while, you and your spark may decide to move on to a new life again or you may just decide to open a knickknack shop in The Summerland. When you join together, the experience could be somewhat traumatic. Most of your conscious soul is absorbed by the spark, leaving a blank framework for your new incarnation. Then, you and your spark decide how you will be reborn, where, etc. Your spark has more to say in this regard than you do and may make a decision based on determining whether you have truly learned your lessons or whether you are likely to repeat the same mistakes. It is through this process that we supposedly refine ourselves as human beings. By teaching ourselves what we did wrong and testing ourselves to see if we have learned the lessons, we move humanity ever closer to a state of divinity.
Or you could say screw it all and become an atheist.
An atheist would say, “That’s all, folks…..”
