What Is The Meaning Of Friendliness?

In Sadistic Times? Remember "A Friend Is A Friend" From Ironman Movie? The Song Grows More Interesting, The Lyrics More Urgent, With Time

I seem to recall that when this came out, 1989, I loved it, but it was not safe to say so at SPIN magazine, not that I was doing much talking. I thought it was a brave and very warming song, against the tide of the times. The tide of the times was in incoming cultural cruelty. Sexy monsters on the cover of pop culture magazines.

I was over on the “non-music,” ie the investigative side of the magazine. I desperately hoped the cool people would come to accept the “AIDS column,” which was called “Words From The Front.” I think it could have been called “Beast In Formation.” The staff lobbied regularly to the publisher—Bob Guccione Jr.—to have it expunged, but to his eternal credit, he sent them out of his office, disappointed.

I used to cry in the elevator, or out on 18th street. I’d left my gang, my friends, when I left Sweden, and was not accustomed to scapegoating. I was accustomed to being known as myself, loved and accepted. That’s what “home” really means. People know you. They don’t think you are good or bad they just know you.

This I Remember

On the first day in the schoolyard in Örebro, winter, 1977, the kids encircled me. I was 11, and we’d just arrived.

I didn’t yet speak Swedish but they designated somebody who spoke enough English to ask me the Test Question.

“If you’re from New York, have you met Kojak?”

It was one of the shows they showed on Swedish state TV, (two channels, “TV1 and TV2”) late 70s and the kids were obsessed with him.

Have I told you this story? I feel like it the the moment that decided my fate, my social success or failure in the new strange land.

I stood up straight in my red and blue one piece snow suit, put my head back. What are the chances? I had. I could look the leader straight in the eye and say “Ja..”

How had I met Kojak? I think I have guardian angels. Don’t we all? Not sure how it works.

A few weeks before our mother Ulla, without telling us her plans, relocated us to her native Sweden, they’d filmed an episode of Kojak in the courtyard of the building where we lived on 79th and Broadway. All of us building kids lined up and got to shake his hand. That was it.

But yes, I’d met Kojak! No lie.

They were also muttering things like “Är du verkligen Jude?” (are you really a Jew?) but the Kojak thing solved everything. Being a real New Yorker, was really what solved everything. It trumped not being Swedish, which was almost insurmountable as a reason for total social rejection.

Next I had to get the correct jeans, which were from a company called Gul och Blå and a girl named Marie Louise explained that they had to be so tight you could only get into them from a prone position. Our hips were, back then, about as wide as two cassette tape holders side to side. The government sent us all clothing allowance twice a year, and we all went shopping in perfect democratic formation—nobody had more than anybody else. One never heard the end of this.

Gender Leveling

Girls were sent to car factories, boys were sent to industrial kitchens. Imagining the other gender was some kind of massive social movement and imperative. It was incorporated into the school curriculum. The school curriculums were all identical and no school was different, no parents intervened—”parents” were all but socially engineered out of the mix entirely.

One stood ashamed in a heavy man’s overall 50 sizes too big, in a ball-bearings factory, as a 12 or 13 year old, and one was in the way, but one was supposed to be learning Socialist Self Development. After two weeks it was finally over. I remember the worker man who drove me home once played STYX.

I became accustomed to that older men spoke to me about the Swedish state, good bad or indifferent, but you were expected to think and talk.

Most of my memories involve humiliation.

My mother worked her three jobs, two nursing, one translating, for at least six months before we were able to buy our first IKEA furniture, and when I was 11, I was frantic about how people might think of our furnishings. Imagine this: A working class housing complex, cement walls with 70s wallpaper, doors made of laminated cardboard, vinyl floors. For furniture, the first 6 months, the government arranged that we got the furniture from a dentist’s waiting room. Are you laughing? A dentist’s waiting room in central Sweden in the late 1970s? Now picture the furniture! Brown to pea soup yellow, mostly.

I remember cutting some kind of cloth and trying to make curtains, because somebody was going to visit us.

I stop here and I think about the children in Gaza; The unthinkable. How they all, each of them, would be so intimately familiar with every sofa, every cushion, every favorite room or corner, or kitchen table, TV set…and the child’s assumption that these things are stable and safe. The sofa, the kitchen table, Mama making food, the TV in the background, the sink with the round pink soap, the warm water. The endless endless details of a child’s mind and soul.

Nothing will ever be “ok” again, unless maybe a flood comes, and it’s all begun again in a few thousand years.

This is why being very friendly is important. I don’t like to risk it anymore with not very friendly people. And I do not mean fake friendly. Just people who aren’t angry all the time.

It was unusual to hear a song about friendliness, in the late 80s, when coldness, Ahrimanic coldness, was really entering the culture. One thing about Pete Townshend, he chose his own themes to write about, 100%

I interviewed him in 1993, for SPIN, and he was incredibly kind.

The first words out of his mouth were quite literally, “I’m sorry.”

I can tell you more about that another time but it’s almost impossible to write past encounters with famous people, as it seems you’re writing about the famous person as an unreal person. It’s almost impossible to get it right.

Anyway.

I thought of this late 80s Townshend song, this morning and saw for the first time this strangely moving music video. I believe I saw the Ironman Movie, and now that I think about it, it was based on a book by Ted Hughes:

Half-way between a modern fairy-tale and science-fiction myth, The Iron Man describes the mysterious arrival of a giant “metal man” who comes from out of the sea, and after falling off a cliff manages to reassemble himself.

—Internet

I know we aren’t thrilled about robots who reassemble in 2024, but the friendship part of the song strikes me as more and more prescient and precious.

I came to believe in 2020 that if friendliness could make a comeback, sweep the nation, we could have thwarted the beast. Not a bunch of charts. Just love from our hearts to other people who were scared and the ability to say: “You can touch me. I’m not scared of you. It’s ok.”

The beast’s cargo was not mere contagion psychosis, but real meanness, real sadism, which I guess lurked beneath the American persona, like in the Twilight Zone episodes that revealed how thin neighborly love was.

Being a Covid citizen meant being capable of acts of random viciousness at any local supermarket. And viciousness was not something people were ashamed of anymore.

Kindness is a profound instinct. The kindness of the boy in this video makes me ponder the soul of boys, around 8, or 10, and how sad it makes me to think how downright impossible it must be to be a normal boy anymore.

Pete Townshend wrote “I’m a Boy” in the 1960s about a mother we all understood to be mentally ill, who won’t “admit” her son is a boy. Today he is in mixed waters about the song, and naturally, some have called it “transphobic.” It’s phobic of a mother who treats her child as an object and extension of her fantasy world. In the intervening years, people would only become more anti-child, more willing to accept the sociological model that children are agit-prop.

This makes me so sad, but they all appear happy.

A father should be ashamed to exploit his boy on social media in this way, but he isn’t. This must mean we are engineered to the breaking point.

YouTube comments:

“I used to think Pete Townsend was weird. Now this is a nationwide crisis.”

“I adore the original Who, but man, Keith really held his drumsticks strangely.”

It’s true, he did.