The Cool Hot Center

Advice for Republicans: Scratch that Itch, Then Move On

2012-01-22T21:39:00.003-06:00

Let us assume, hypothetically, that a voter believes that a partial list of persons who would be a better president than Barack Obama -- maybe not that voter's first choice, but just a better choice -- would include Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Howie Mandel (all right, he's Canadian, but POTUS doesn't think one's birthplace is important, why should we?), Khloe Kardashian, David Lee Roth, and the constitutionally qualified population of Flasher, North Dakota. And that the short list of persons who would be worse would include Michael Moore, Pauly Shore, and Joe Biden.

All right, that's hyperbolic. But the point is that our hypothetical voter thinks that Barack Obama has been a haahhhrrible president. Whose defeat later this year is imperative to prevent further damage to the Republic and to begin to reverse the damage already done.

And let's say that our hypothetical voter is a Republican preparing to vote in a primary. And it's even possible, not necessary, but possible, that our voter voted for the President and is not only disappointed, but feels a little . . . misled. Misled by the candidate Obama, misled by the mainstream press.

And our voter is mad and getting madder with each new baffling decision and utterance of the President, apparently composed in the brief intervals between rounds of golf, vacations, smoke-and-cocktail breaks, and parties. Our voter is reminded of her dissatisfaction daily because the Republicans are lining up to try to take his job, pounding away at him.

Michelle . . . isn't helping.

But our voter knows our President is a smart guy, a very smart guy, a very smooth guy, a good talker, wears clothes beautifully, handsome, a charismatic presence. Bad as he's been, he could fool enough people again. Could win, could well win.

This is very upsetting to our hypothetical voter. It makes her mad.

And she starts to think a thought that makes her smile, that gives her something to look forward to.
She thinks: Newt Gingrich would absolutely dismantle Barack Obama in a debate. He's brainier, he's a better speaker, he's a master of facts -- and he's nasty. He would penetrate the President's smugness, his condescension, his scolding pedagogy. All right in front of him, with the whole nation watching.

Newt? Newt?? Newt!!

Ahhh. That feels good. She taps the touch-screen next to his name, smiles again, and sends her vote to the primary election computer.

It is at this point that your decidedly nonhypothetical Cool Hot Center steps into the frame.

Newt Gingrich and I agree on many things. You will note that he was on my list of improvements over POTUS.   One thing we disagree on is his suitability as the Republican nominee.   One other thing is the likelihood that come November, more voters will agree with me on this point than with him, and his candidacy will have ensured four more years of the terrifying Obama.

It may feel good to throw in with Newt’s soaring rhetoric and liberal-elite-bashing now, but the man cannot be elected. He is angry. Like Tea Party angry. But the Tea Party is not going to elect the next President, just like mainstream conservatives did not elect John McCain. Or Bob Dole. Or even George H.W. Bush against Clinton.

I agree with our hypothetical voter that Newt might well demolish POTUS in debate for all the reasons she imagines. But Newt is a man who is not in control of either his thoughts or his mouth. Did you listen to his victory speech in South Carolina? He cannot help calling the President stupid, which few sincerely believe irrespective of their disapproval of the man. In expressing incredulity at the President’s decision on the Keystone pipeline, he offered this witless appraisal: “It’s one thing to say the White House can’t play chess, it’s another to say it can’t play checkers,” he said. “But tic-tac-toe?”   The crowd was notably silent after this gratuitous shot. And that wasn’t the only one in those rather dyspeptic remarks.

And he will not be able to control his anger over the course of a difficult national campaign. He is a guy whose grandiosity is, if anything, more virulent than Obama’s. Give him a prominent forum, and he switches off the prudent politician’s filter; the controversies start to erupt. Look what happened when he was in the House of Representatives:   He developed the “Contract with America” and was largely credited with the huge Republican gains in the 1994 congressional elections, ending four decades of Democratic rule.   Good Newt. Welfare reform – good Newt. Capital gains tax cut – good Newt. But things started to fall apart. There was the government shutdown – ideologically pure, maybe, but hugely unpopular. Then the ethics charges. But his main sin was high-handedness born of his megalomania. He was very nearly removed as Speaker by his own party. Then came the Clinton impeachment which he relentlessly promoted – another one of those ideologically-driven but ill-handled initiatives that came to disgust a lot of the voting public. 1998 mid-terms – the Republicans lost seats, and his status as the face of the Party was assigned a large share of the blame. A few days later, he not only resigned as Speaker, but left Congress, having alienated the entire Republican caucus.

Bad Newt.

People who get most of their information from Fox News and featured links on The Drudge Report may find themselves puzzled as to how President Obama’s approval ratings, dismal though they may be, are as high as they are. We will put aside the makeup of the 45% (as of this writing) who tell Rasmussen that they “somewhat approve” of his performance. The point is that this is going to be a difficult campaign for the Republicans. Newt will run a campaign of resentment and anger; Obama will repeat his vague message of hope and change and comforting paternalism.

There is plenty of cause for resentment and anger over the President’s performance. But voters are going to weary of being harangued, and they’re going to quail at Newt’s streak of meanness, which they will correctly interpret as a lack of judgment and presidential temperament.

No, folks, for better or worse, Mitt Romney is the choice if the Republicans hope to bring in the moderate voters who installed President Obama. Of course he has his problems. He has flip-flopped (although his most recent flip is in the right direction). He has mishandled the tax-return issue. But his campaign is cheerful and optimistic. He is not burdened by Newt’s seamy personal history. He may be more moderate than Newt and the Tea Party on some issues but ya know something? So are lots and lots of voters, and Romney is reliably conservative on the big issues. He has said one of the most important things a candidate can say to conservatives, and that is that he will repeal Obamacare. He is well-spoken; he can easily be pictured in the Oval Office, dealing diplomatically with world leaders.

And he'll do just fine in the debates.

Mitt Romney can beat Obama. (Recent statements by George Stephanopolous and Nancy Pelosi that Romney would be the weakest candidate are dead-solid proof that the Democrats are terrified of a Romney candidacy.) Newt cannot. I don’t care what the polls say now – by the time the nation has had months of all-Newt, all the time, enough moderates will recoil and either stay home or vote to give our charming President – he is charming, you know – another chance.

So all you Republican primary voters out there: Do what you have to do to get the fiery Newton Leroy Gingrich out of your system. Enjoy it. Send a message, share your anger. I would say with the South Carolina rebuke of media elites that reversed his fortunes, Gingrich has been as effective as he is likely ever to be on the national stage. The itch has been scratched. Time to put some soothing Romney lotion on it, and get on with the important work of getting America back to greatness.

More Proof for my Elmore Leonard Theory -- And It Becomes an Actual Theory

2012-01-09T21:21:00.001-06:00

Elmore Leonard
Artist: Kerry Waghorn
http://www.kerrywaghorn.com/

Last March I posted an article wherein I noted that there was a particular phrase that appears in many, if not almost every, Elmore Leonard novel.

That phrase is: "How's that sound?"

You can read about that theory -- which I had to admit was more of an observation, since I couldn't think of any grand conclusion to draw from it -- here: A Minor but, I Think, Original Theory About Elmore Leonard.
I gave seven or eight examples from recent novels searchable online or on my Nook. I must say that I did not find it in the most recent novel, Djibouti.

I just downloaded a short novel called "Fire in the Hole." It provides some background for the award-winning FX original series "Justified" based on the adventures of one of my favorite Leonard characters, Raylan Givens, a quick-drawing U.S. Marshal. In the novella, Givens is pursuing a childhood friend, Boyd Crowder, who has gone bad. He heads a white supremacist group that plans (and carries out) acts of robbery and terror in the name of fighting against what it regards as Jewish-controlled and racially bastardized American society. Crowder's brother Bowman has just been shot to death by his severely abused wife, Ava. Ava, the late Bowman, and Raylan Givens had all been in high school together and Ava had a crush on Raylan before Raylan and Boyd went to Vietnam. Raylan visits Ava to try to get a lead on Boyd, who is billeted with his fanatics in several locations in the Appalachian backcountry.

Ava puts the moves on Raylan. The final paragraph of Chapter VII:

"She said 'Hey, I'm just teasing you. I know you have a life. You must a cool guy like you? No, I just thought, you're here, why don't we party? I can still do those old Wildcat cheers I know you liked to watch. I still have all the cute moves. Get your motor turned on. You want, Raylan, you can spend the night. How's that sound?'"

So, there you have it. More proof of my theory-which-was-really-just-a-puzzled-observation.

But wait! There may be more to this than I originally thought. On the website http://www.elmoreleonard.com/, we find the following quotes:

-- "Writing is just a bunch of sounds."

-- "Leonard admits he never visited Djibouti. He chose the title because he liked the sound."

-- In criticizing the movie made of his novel "Be Cool": "It's not my sound; it's not my attitude at all."

In my original piece last March, I wrote: "I wish I could argue that Leonard plants this phrase in all of his books (if he does) as a pointer toward the importance of sound in literature, a subliminal reminder to his serial readers that prose must have the cadence and vocabulary of ordinary speech to engage the reader."

I may have been on to something.

Or, quite possibly, not. Make of it what you will.

Some Thoughts on the Passing of -- Judy Lewis?

2011-12-31T22:40:00.008-06:00

Judy Lewis died a few weeks ago at the age of 76. Her death prompts a question I’ll get to in a moment.

You probably never heard of Judy Lewis.

She was a lovely young woman, and lovely as she aged.

She had an off-and-on television acting career, her longest-lasting role being on the soap opera The Secret Storm in the late 60’s and early 70’s. She had small roles in other series and occasionally guest-starred on others. After leaving acting, she got a master’s degree in clinical psychology. She became a licensed family and child counselor and eventually practiced as a psychotherapist specializing in foster care and marriage therapy.

I don’t know whether she was a good actress, counselor, or psychotherapist. I don’t recall ever having seen her perform.

But I do know this:

Her mother was Loretta Young.

And her father was Clark Gable.

Which is more than Judy knew until she was 23.

Gable, 33, was married to someone. Young was very young (22), and unmarried, and Catholic. They were co-starring in “The Call of the Wild.” Gable was the biggest star in Hollywood, and Young was already a star in her own right. Both among the most beautiful people in the world.

Clark Gable and Loretta Young in "Call of the Wild" (1935)

Abortion was out of the question for the (sometimes) devout and very public Catholic Loretta.

But also out of the question for each of them and for Twentieth Century (this was the last film made at that studio before the merger with Fox) – in those days – was the ruination of both of their careers. So here’s what happened:

Loretta traveled to Europe to hide the pregnancy. She returned to California to give birth to Judy, who was immediately placed in a series of homes. Then Loretta announced that she had fallen in love with an orphaned child and was going to “adopt” her – nineteenth months later. Loretta later married producer Tom Lewis and Judy took that name.

The little girl had very large ears. To dampen speculation that Gable was Judy’s pop, Loretta had the child undergo an operation when she was seven to bring them closer to her head.

Loretta frequently dressed little Judy in bonnets
to hide her Gable-like ears

She needn’t have bothered. The cirumstances of Judy’s birth were an open secret in Hollywood. But Loretta never told Judy, nor did anyone else. Gable never acknowledged her (although he met her once when she was 15, spoke to her briefly, and kissed her on the forehead without admitting a thing) and never had another child until a son born after he died. Judy didn’t discover the truth until her fiance told her when she was 23. But Loretta refused to admit her father's identity until eight years later. When Judy confronted her with a demand for the truth – when she was 31 -- Loretta threw up, asking tearfully how she could admit to a mortal sin.

As you might imagine, this was very traumatic to the young adult Judy. She grew up not knowing who her parents were, and worse, falsely believing they were some unknown couple. She wrote a book about it called Uncommon Knowledge. She became estranged from Loretta. Loretta died in 2000 and in a posthumously published autobiography finally admitted that Gable was Judy’s father.

Now, as it turned out, Judy did all right for herself; no telling what it would have been like – in those days – had the truth been publicly acknowledged.

But Judy Lewis’s story prompts a question.

One doesn’t have to approve of our times’ casual acceptance of out-of-wedlock births to wonder which is better: To have grown up like Judy Lewis in a time when the circumstances of her birth were regarded as scandalous, or to grow up knowing one’s parents, whether married or not, together or not? To grow up the victim of a series of lies to protect public morality, or to redefine morality in a way that lets a child grow up without those lies?

I guess that’s two questions.

I’m not going to thrash you with my views on the sexual revolution. OK, I’ll thrash you with them enough to say I don’t think it was a good thing. Surely, though, a morality or a religious belief (however extreme or misguided) that results in what happened to Judy Lewis is in need of some adjustment.

Happy New Year to you all, and Judy Lewis, RIP.

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Beware the Brilliant Fool

2011-11-23T23:03:00.001-06:00

In prior articles, I have wrestled with how we regard the everyday concept of “intelligence” when a person who apparently has a lot of it makes terrible decisions. I have speculated that because a very prominent person – our President – fits this description, it might cause people to think about “intelligence” in a new way. (See here and here.)
In one way it is a futile inquiry, because intelligence has many definitions. Can’t beat the first sentence of the Wikipedia entry on the topic: “Intelligence has been defined in different ways, including the abilities for abstract thought, understanding, communication, reasoning, learning, planning, emotional intelligence and problem solving.”

Well, there’s one answer right there. A person may have vast capacity for abstract thought, but poor understanding. One can still fall within the definition because a crackerjack abstract thinker, but still be defective in understanding; that is, intelligent, but wrong.

I know this isn’t any brilliant insight. Think of any issue that divides large numbers of people – for example, whether there was a conspiracy to murder John Kennedy. There will be people on both sides that we would think of as highly “intelligent,” as we mean that word in daily use. But some of those very intelligent people have got to be wrong.

In the November 2011 issue of New English Review, British writer and psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple published an essay about a prominent biographer, Isaac Deutscher, who was a Marxist. I was struck by this passage (emphases are mine):

"His language was clear, but his thought was not. He was what might be called a dialectical equivocator, made dishonest by his early religious vows to Marxism. This made him unable to see or judge things in a common-sense way. His unwavering attachment to his primordial philosophical standpoint, his irrational rationalism, turned him into that most curious (and sometimes dangerous, because intellectually charismatic) figure, the brilliant fool. He was the opposite of Dr Watson who saw but did not observe: he observed, but did not see. He was the archetype of the man, so common among intellectuals, who knows much but understands little."

I’m guessing that if any one of us spent an afternoon in the private company of Newt Gingrich, or Barack Obama, or Mitt Romney, or Nancy Pelosi, or Rush Limbaugh, or Al Franken, just shooting the breeze on topics unrelated to their public policy positions, we would come away thinking that we’d been in the company of a pretty smart person. Perhaps even brilliant.

The brilliant Junior Samples

So what? So . . . people can be brilliant but very wrong. Some of them have stupendous knowledge and experience but no judgment; some are subtle analysts but select incorrect or thin information; some, as Dalrymple suggests, are in the grip of ideology – they apply their brains to deceive others, but mainly themselves, in the service of what they regard as a higher truth.

Most of us, most of the time, can spot the unreliable smart person. The high-IQ person who you would not trust to advise you on your day to day choices, or to be a leader of any polity to which you belong. We generally get the leaders we deserve, although not enough people saw through the brilliant fool who’s running the show now. We can debate the reasons for that another time. (Hint: the usual culprits – media bias, liberal racial guilt, a deceptive campaign, class resentment, weak opposition, disgust with the incumbent, and, truth to tell, a magnetic persona and charming manner.)

And there’s the lesson: We encounter gifted minds throughout our lives. The first time many of us are overwhelmed with the brilliance of a particular individual is college, when our professors present an image of learnedness that is absolutely genuine. And yet, faculties are overwhelmingly liberal Democrats and worse. Strongly redistributionist, politically correct, and believers in enforced equality of result. Theories that have never worked in the history of mankind, at least not in any free society (and the unfree societies that have enshrined them have declined and even failed, some very recently and very dramatically).

Most adults understand that many of these academics are brilliant fools, but the unformed barely-post-adolescent mind daily exposed to brilliantly foolish instruction does not, and so we end up with things like The Sixties, the McGovern candidacy, and MoveOn.org.

Some of us shake it off when we start working, raising families, and paying taxes.

Some of us don’t.

Some of us think we have done so, but can still be wowed by the singular, eloquent, attractive intellect without regard to whether he or she is selling something that simple observation of the world would tell us is quite unlikely to be correct.

And brilliant fools are everywhere, wanting our votes, our investments, our time, and our hearts and minds.

Beware.

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I Googled "Execrable" and "Paul Krugman" and Got 81,800 Hits

2011-11-02T10:24:00.003-05:00

I’m in favor of civility in public discourse. We need more of it on both sides of the aisle.

It’s one of the reasons that as little as I care for President Obama, I always try to find a little something nice to say about him, and to avoid all name-calling and ad hominem characterizations except under the most extreme provocation.

In Paul Krugman’s case, I’ll make an exception.

Prof. Krugman is the Nobel Prize-winning economist and Princeton professor who contributes to the New York Times Op-Ed Page. He is very liberal; a leftist, I would judge. He does not believe government spends, or controls, nearly enough. He also holds forth, way left, on political and social matters, although to my knowledge he has not received any awards in this area. (His Nobel was awarded for his work in explaining patterns of international trade through consumers’ desire to chose from a variety of products, not a subject that will nourish a lot of Op-Ed pieces.)

He recently unburdened himself of some rather brief thoughts on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of 9/11, in his New York Times column “The Conscience of a Liberal.” Here it is, in its entirety, clipped here without permission:

=======

The Years of Shame

Is it just me, or are the 9/11 commemorations oddly subdued?

Actually, I don’t think it’s me, and it’s not really that odd.

What happened after 9/11 — and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not — was deeply shameful. The atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons.

A lot of other people behaved badly. How many of our professional pundits — people who should have understood very well what was happening — took the easy way out, turning a blind eye to the corruption and lending their support to the hijacking of the atrocity?

The memory of 9/11 has been irrevocably poisoned; it has become an occasion for shame. And in its heart, the nation knows it.

I’m not going to allow comments on this post, for obvious reasons.

=======

This brief insult is so full of nonsense that one hardly knows where to begin.

(1) “Are the 9/11 commemorations oddly subdued?” What could that question possibly mean? Of course they were subdued. Thousands of people were horribly murdered and our nation was awakened to the threat to it from fanatic religious totalitarians. What did Krugman expect, so that it seemed “odd” when he observed how subdued it was? Celebration? Riots? Expressions of joy? Has he ever been to a memorial service? While there, did he perhaps observe that it was subdued?

(2) He immediately realizes how fatuous that question is, so he answers himself – but even his answer is gibberish. “I don’t think it’s me, and it’s not really that odd.” Now think about that. First he says “I don’t think it’s me,” which means that he believes that his observation that the commemorations were “oddly subdued” is shared by others, validating it. But in the second part of the sentence he says, “it’s really not that odd,” which can only mean that his observation that it was “oddly subdued” was really not that correct. This isn’t just bad thinking – it’s bad writing.

(3) He then proceeds to assign his belief in the reason for its lack of oddness: “What happened after 9/11 . . . was deeply shameful.” Where was Krugman living in the days following 9/11? The nation and its leaders were at some pains to ensure that this Islamist crime did not result in our own jihad against Islam. The public’s reaction was moderate, patient, and careful. The nation’s reaction, and that of its leaders, was measured outrage. It was a proud period for the United States, not a shameful one.

(4) But he goes on, explaining that leaders transformed it into a “wedge issue.” In what respect? When the source of the terror became apparent, there was enormous support for the punitive expedition to Afghanistan. The strategy eventually employed there and the subsequent invasion of Iraq can be and were vigorously debated, but even that debate was not motivated by any “shame” in the goals articulated. To the extent the public didn’t like what the Bush administration or “neocons” did, they made their feelings known on Election Day 2008.

But even that isn’t evidence of a 9/11-justified “wedge.” Just how little of a “wedge” was “what happened after 9/11” is demonstrated by the fact that the Obama administration, beloved of Krugman, has generally continued the policies of the Bush administration in these matters, has committed even more troops in Afghanistan, and, if anything, has pursued individual terrorists with even greater heat. (The President’s shutdown of military operations comes nearly at the end of his term – coincident with a the elections, can you believe it?) Candidate Obama repeatedly said that victory in Afghanistan was essential, and stated that his administration would reverse the gains of the Taliban insurgency. Corrupt?

No, the voices calling for decreased vigilance are few and faint. The most serious “wedge” Krugman has experienced since 9/11 is the one he probably experiences when they search him at LaGuardia.

(5) Finally: To what “corruption” did “professional pundits” turn a “blind eye”? Again, there are legitimate criticisms to be made about the conduct of the Afghanistan and Iraqi wars, and pundits have made them at length almost from the outset. But in what sense is any of what took place “corrupt”? The professional punditry in this country was overwhelmingly anti-Bush both before and after 9/11. If our leadership really used 9/11 as a mask for “corruption,” wouldn’t you think that these pundits, a large number of whom are Krugman’s colleagues at The New York Times, would have their Pulizter-hungry mitts all over it? No less a liberal than Robert Kerrey, in commenting on the intelligence documents on the runup to the Iraq invasion, said that while they did not show a significant al-Qaeda connection, they did show that Saddam was “a significant enemy of the United States.”

As you sit there now, can you think of a single instance of political corruption – which Wikipedia defines as “the use of legislated powers by government officials for illegitimate private gain”? What personal, or even political, gain did any of those individuals receive? Bernard Kerik, one-time New York City Police Commissioner? He was found to have violated various laws unrelated to 9/11 and went to jail. How did things work out for “fake hero” Rudy Giuliani? George Bush? The last was re-elected in 2004, but to call that a result of corruption is to rob the word of any meaning. And by 2008, he was so widely reviled that his party suffered one of its worst electoral defeats ever.

And let’s not forget that America’s reaction to 9/11 was largely mirrored in Congressional support for the 9/11-related foreign and domestic policies during a time when the Democrats had a narrow majority in the Senate. The most dramatic reaction to 9/11, the Patriot Act, was passed in 2001 – and President Obama and the Democratic Congress has supported an extension of its most controversial provisions, and many of its provisions have survived or been extended by other legislation.

* * *

No, The only credible syllables in that entire piece are those that concede that the reasons for disabling comments are “obvious.” I myself would like to stifle reaction when I broadcast something inane.

There is a place for the contrarian, for even the provocateur, in American opinion. But most writers of that ilk at least convey the impression that they believe what they write. Krugman does not, could not. No other American, no other human, could have experienced any of the 9/11 commemorations and concluded that the proceedings today are somber because we are ashamed of how we reacted ten years ago. I’m proud of how America reacted. We have bent over backwards to give Islam the benefit of the doubt, possibly more than it deserves, while working diligently – and successfully – to keep domestic terrorism to near zero.

This column is academic elitism at its most odious. Krugman is jabbing a stick at through the cage bars at the lovers of freedom he scorns as unsophisticated yahoos imprisoned by their naivete and ignorance. He patronizes them -- us -- from his Princeton perch whenever he can. To him, average Americans with average reactions to murderous assaults on the very freedoms that the 9-11 Islamists cannot abide, the very freedoms that allow Krugman to make a jackass of himself, are reactionary rabble. He knew this column would anger those people on the very day of their saddest recollections, and it did. It was a small, mean, act by a small, mean man.

As I said, I’m in favor of civility. But Paul Krugman is a putz. When I read bilge like this, or listen to interviews with his oh-so-entitled philosophical children now “occupying” various patches of our fine cities, I think that we have less to fear from fake heroes than from fake intellectuals.

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REVISIÓN DE TEATRO: "West Side Story"

2011-10-16T21:11:00.001-05:00

The 2009 Broadway revival of "West Side Story" was a huge success. I saw the roadshow last night with the Memsahib at the Dallas Musical Theater at Fair Park. It had its moments, some very fine ones I'll get to, but I was disappointed.

When they take Broadway musicals on the road, do they scale them down? I thought the production seemed undernourished. One of the most beautiful and exciting symphonic scores in American musical theater, with two gangs of male dancers and their girlfriends. Man, with some of that music, I expected that stage to explode with the Latin-tinged rhythms and updated theatrical dance sensibilities. The Fair Park stage isn't enormous, but for some reason, the production only rarely ignited.

In fact, it is probably not possible to reduce the dancing cast of this show. West Side Story is famous for giving many of the dancers speaking parts as gang members. I have read that casting for the show is difficult because one has to find performers who can sing, dance, and act. The show failed to take off for other reasons.

Bernardo and Anita: "Mambo"

The acting is a problem, because the script was unrealistic even in 1957, when it opened on Broadway. The "white" (actually, the children of European immigrants) Jets and Puerto Rican Sharks are supposed to be juvenile delinquent gangs, but in 1957 excessive vulgarity, explicit sexual references, and violent racial slurs were not permissible. ("Spic" and "wop" were apparently exceptions.) The result is a script (by Arthur Laurents) that invents a kind of beatnik patois that sounds very odd coming out of the mouths of actors who are supposed to be violent teenagers. I've always had sympathy for actors struggling through some of these scenes, but a show that sounded unusual but fresh in 1957 sounds downright weird now.

I'm not sure at whose door should be placed another of my complaints. Amplification of musical productions is a mixed blessing. On the other hand, you can hear everything. On the other, if not correctly modulating, it's ear-splitting in every seat in the theater. Perhaps generations of theatergoers since the sixties are accustomed to extremely loud musical performances, but this music -- much of which is pitched very high, including the parts sung by males -- was sometimes painful to listen to. I assume that these shows either carry with them, or specify, their own sound engineering subject to the capabilities of the local venues. All I can tell you is -- this show was really, really, loud.

But here is my major complaint:

Large chunks of dialogue among the Sharks were conducted in Spanish. This was annoying enough, but someone had the bright idea of taking large chunks of Stephen Sondheim's classic lyrics and performing them in Spanish.

Of course the Sharks were Puerto Rican. Got it. But the actors are not speaking for one another's benefit, you know? Note to revival producers: Those people on stage, they're not real people having real conversations -- they are actors speaking lines to entertain the audience. There were probably patrons in the full house who knew what was being spoken, but if it exceeded five percent I would be surprised. I would be surprised if that percentage were much exceeded in any city in which this was performed, including New York City. And we're not talking about the occasional phrase -- we're talking about entire (although usuall brief) conversations that the audience could not understand. (Most of the intra-Shark dialogue was spoken in accented English.) Asking the audience to figure it out from the context is arrogant and presumptuous. It sounded like what it probably was -- political correctness. And like political correctness usually is, it was annoying and, most damaging to the production, a desperate lunge for verisimilitude that came across as fake, trying to make a point that the play itself was not interested in.

Too bad. There were things to enjoy in this production. The performers were talented, even though no one would mistake these fine dancers as 1950s ethnic gang members. The leads handled the very difficult-to-sing score beautifully. (The songs are very "rangy" -- you know, like the National Anthem, going from low to very high -- especially for the male singers, and feature Leonard Bernstein's characteristically jazzy intervals.) Some parts of the dance numbers were striking.

So while I enjoyed the show -- it is hard not to enjoy that music and orchestration -- I cannot recommend it whole-heartedly. If you decide to see it, you might visit the Rosetta Stone kiosk at your local mall and see if they have an abridged course in Theatrical Spanish.

BREAKING NEWS -- New Evidence on the Catholic Church's Uneasy Relationship with Nazi Germany: The Swastika Blessing

2011-10-07T23:15:00.006-05:00

Well, I suppose that depends on what you consider "news" and "breaking," since we're talking about a historical event here. This article reports on information that was posted just a few hours ago (as of late Friday night, October 7), at http://www.theswastikablessing.com/. Here's what it's all about:

Several months ago I was privileged to report an amazing discovery made by my Yale roommate, Steve Galebach. You can find the earlier report here: "Was the the Vatican Soft on Nazism?" It has lots of background you won't find here, so you may want to check it out. In short: In doing some archival research for a client, Steve found this photograph in Der Stürmer, a violently anti-Semitic Nazi newspaper (in fact, not a newspaper -- a wildly polemical propaganda rag) that was widely disseminated and influential in Germany.

Caption: "An archbishop blesses the Nazi banner."
[Click on photo to enlarge.]

It reportedly shows Archbishop Santiago Luis Copello of Buenos Aires blessing the Nazi flag (not yet the German national flag) at the worldwide Eucharistic Congress held there in 1934. Hitler became German Chancellor in 1933.

Is this a big deal? Yes.  How big remains uncertain.

(1) There are no other reports that anyone has been able to find that any senior Catholic priest ever blessed a swastika flag. This photograph has never been noticed or reported on in any of the vast scholarship on the relationship between the Nazis and the Roman Catholic Church.   The RCC forbade blessing the Nazi symbol.

So Steve's discovery is historic.   Future historians of Nazi-Roman Catholic relations will be required to account for it.

(2) Second, the Vatican's emissary to the Eucharistic Congress, guest of Archbishop Copello, and the senior Catholic official present (not at this ceremony) was one Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, the Vatican Secretary of State. Cardinal Pacelli became Pope Pius XII in 1939.   There is a lively historiography as to Pacelli's attitude toward Nazi Germany. While there is considerable evidence of Pacelli's disapproval of Nazism, there is enough uncertainty over what he knew and when he knew about the Holocaust to prompt one author to call him "Hitler's Pope." (John Cornwell, Hitler's Pope, 1999; and there was also Rolf Hochhuth's play, The Deputy which was also highly critical of Pius XII on this score, later made into a movie called "Amen" by Costa-Gavras.) Despite the controversy that continues regarding his attitude toward European Jewry, the Vatican is currently proceeding with the steps required to declare Pius XII a saint.

(3) Copello himself was elevated to Cardinal months later, in 1935.

Archbishop, later Cardinal, Copello

(4) The world -- including Argentina, and including in particular Catholics in Argentina -- knew quite a lot about Nazism in 1934. Mein Kampf was widely known, as was the violent antisemitism of the Nazi Party. The incredibly savage purge of the SA (Sturmabteilung), the Nazis' military arm, in which scores and probably hundreds were murdered (including some extremely prominent Germans outside of the military), received worldwide press and was heavily covered in Argentina. (This "Night of the Long Knives" is one of the centerpiece events of of a current popular history by Erik Larson, In the Garden of Beasts.) That slaughter took place in June 1934. The swastika blessing was in October. The Nazis' methods and motives were already viewed with alarm -- World War II, after all, was only five years off. In the months before the blessing, official Catholic publications in Argentina condemned the Nazis for their anti-Catholic actions, among other things. Could Copello possibly have been merely naive or uninformed? And if he was not, does his decision to proceed reflect in any way on his superiors from Rome?

When I originally reported on this a year ago, Galebach, a staunch Roman Catholic, wasn't quite sure what to make of all this.

Neither was I. My initial concern was that Steve did not have any confirmation that the photograph was authentic. It appeared nowhere (apparently) besides one of the least credible publications in history. I had other questions, and still do, but that one was fundamental.

Well, there are two pieces of news hot off the Internet:

First, the authenticity of the photograph is no longer in doubt. In searching through issues of the Buenos Aires newspaper La Prensa from 1934 earlier this year, Steve's wife Diane Galebach found a report of this ceremony and an explicit mention that among the flags Archbishop Copello blessed was the Nazi party flag.  Present were the German ambassador and a group of Catholic pilgrims from Germany visiting the Eucharistic Congress. Although not as dramatic as the photograph, this brief passage is every bit as significant -- more so, in fact, because it was not found in a scurrilous Nazi broadsheet like the photo but in a contemporaneous news account from the Eucharistic Congress itself in a legitimate newspaper. In fact, the newspaper reported that the ceremony was a "consecration" -- a greater Catholic honor than a "blessing." Thus, a Catholic archbishop blessed, or consecrated, a swastika on the eve of the visit to the Eucharistic Congress by the future Pius XII. It happened.

Second, Steve and Diane have begun to publish their findings in an online book called The Swastika Blessing.  (http://www.theswastikablessing.com/) You may download and read a free introduction that is pretty complete in itself, and for $12 you can download Volume 1, which contains much more detailed information and some fascinating background relating to the relationship between Roman Catholicism and National Socialism. Three more volumes relating to Vatican policy towards Nazi Germany in 1934 and 1935, and additional "causes and context" research are scheduled for release before the end of the year. For your $12 now, you get a 111-page PDF in a Power-Point-type format with lots of text and many photographs and documents, complete with translations. Extremely interesting and clearly presented.

[NOTE: I reviewed and provided extensive comments and suggestions on early drafts of Steve's work on this, before Diane became more involved. Steve's and Diane's project changed considerably in scope and presentation thereafter; I reviewed one early and very different draft of the present format, and the present incarnation not at all. I am mentioned in their acknowledgements.]

The question before the house is: Should this photograph -- rather, should the event it portrays -- provoke a re-examination of RCC-Nazi relations in the years leading up to World War II?  And, of more urgent current interest, should it provoke a re-examination of the attitude toward National Socialism of Cardinal Pacelli -- Pope Pius XII -- as the RCC moves ever closer to elevating him to sainthood?

Cardinal Pacelli, later Pope Pius XII

The latter is the question that exercises the Galebachs. Both are devout Catholics. They have chosen a somewhat unorthodox method of presenting what they've found, their book taking the form of a presentation of evidence both damaging and exculpatory to the hierarchy of the RCC in alternating sections presented by an "investigator" and "defense counsel."   I did not find this unusual approach distracting, and it has the merit of making room for a great deal of background information.   The free Introduction has quite a bit of information in summary form, it's much more than a tease.  Chapter I is a detailed overview of events at the Eucharistic Congress, including the blessing, the relationship between the major players (Pius XI, Pacelli/Pius XII, and Copello), and what was known about the Nazis' ideology and practices in Argentina in 1934.

Despite their scrupulousness in presenting evidence favorable to Pacelli/Pius XII, the overall impression the Galebachs leave is one of skepticism as to whether Pacelli's robes are entirely clean.  As a result, the reader is left with the further impression that the Galebachs believe that the episode may well be material to the ongoing beatification process for Pius XII -- and, presumably, adverse to the sainthood partisans -- although they are careful not to come right out and say it. (Although their subheading promises "an "investigation into a photograph that changes history.")

That's quite an impression to derive from one photograph and a confirmatory newspaper item. I hope I am not being unfair in attributing it to them.   Is it justified?

It should be noted that no one took special note of this event at the time. The photo appeared nowhere until it popped up some months later in Der Stürmer, but the contemporary newspaper account explicitly stated that the Archbishop had blessed the swastika flag -- it used the phrase "cruz gamada," which translates as "swastika."   Whatever this might mean to us now, it did not provoke any notice at the time that the Galebachs have been able to find. (To my knowledge -- no idea what goodies they have in store for us in later installments.)   If, as the Galebachs have shown, the Nazis' virulent anti-Catholicism and violent suppression of religious freedom were known to Catholic officials, why not?

The Galebachs have found themselves at the center of quite a mystery.

In the absence of direct evidence of either (1) Pacelli's complicity, or (2) Copello's intentions in blessing the Nazi banner, the Galebachs proceed in the only way available to them: By examining the overall context of Nazi/Vatican relations in the mid-Thirties, in Argentina and Rome. What they have produced so far, as investigators with a large family to care for and other jobs to do, is nothing short of astounding.   I don't know everything they've come up with or where their own thinking has settled, but I am looking forward to the remaining three installments.

Here's that link again: http://www.theswastikablessing.com/

* * *

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A Brief Rest on a Long Journey

2011-10-04T22:19:00.004-05:00

It started a week or so ago.

Monarchs began appearing in the sky. One at a time, flapping then coasting, flapping a little more and floating on what breeze there was.

I didn't think much about it. Monarchs are large butterflies, but not uncommon.

I was pleased, though, to see a monarch visiting our vitex tree in the backyard one late afternoon a few days ago. Vitex is a flowering tree, with clusters of small blue flowers at the tips of its branches. It hails originally from the Mediterranean. (It is also known as Chaste Tree, Chasteberry, Abraham's Balm, or Monk's Pepper.) Ours only bloomed once last year, its first at our address, but this year it bloomed off and on all summer and at this writing is fully decked out in its autumn finery. It is usually crowned with a nimbus of bumblebees and common honeybees.

Late Saturday afternoon, the scene changed.

I was out on the patio having a cigar and reading a crime novel, my back to the vitex. I got up to get the grill heating for that evening's repast, when my eye was instantly drawn to motion at the vitex.

I couldn't count the monarchs. I'll estimate two dozen, flying and lighting on the blooms. When one would light, it would fold its wings behind it and set a spell. When one shoved off, it would usually fly around the tree and find another spot to investigate.

Monarch on vitex (not ours)

After about an hour, I noticed that there was no more flying. There were only these handfuls of monarchs hanging off of the bloom clusters.

So beautiful, so rare. One of those moments where spectacle descends into your everyday life and makes you feel good about being alive.

One by one, the monarchs lifted off the vitex. They flew around the yard for a bit, but each concluded its visit the same way.

It headed north.

I thought well that's pretty cool, just like on the nature shows, they're flying about to orient themselves to the position of the sun, or the earth's magnetic field, or however it is they navigate, and, having done so, get going on their storied migration of thousands of miles to their overwintering grounds.

Which, uh, makes flying north in October a terrible mistake, since they're supposed to be flying south.

I considered the usual suspects for mass species-destructive behavior -- cell phone tower radiation (I was checking blog hits on my Droid); global warming (hard to be unseasonably warm in the summer, but DFW has managed it); deforestation (I'd pulled some weeds).

Seemed unlikely.

So what motivates living things?

Monarchs have little use for cash.

They'd just chowed down on vitex nectar.

That leaves . . .

So, after pondering the gorgeous pastoral mystery in my own back yard, I'm going with my theory that some hot monarch butterfloozy headed north for reasons best known to monarchs if not lepidopterists, trailing a string of irresistible pheromones and ardent fluttering suitors behind her, and leaving it at that.

Mm-hmm: monarchs breeding on vitex

Tuesday, September 11, 2001 -- Ten Years On

2011-09-11T10:11:00.003-05:00

What I remember most is the blue.

The empty blue, and the quiet, of a sky with no jets, undivided by crisscrossing contrails, no engine noise of aircraft going and coming from Midway and O'Hare.

Nancy and I had been married only five months. We lived on the Northwest Side of Chicago just off Irving Park, under the O'Hare flight path. We might as well have been living a century earlier, for all the evidence of the skies.

I had just turned right off Irving Park onto the Kennedy Expressway onramp when the report of the first hit on the World Trade Center came on the radio. I do not have a note on this, but I surely was listening, as I did every morning, to sports-talk radio station WSCR The Score. My recollection is also a little dim on what I listened to the rest of the way downtown, although I think The Score switched its feed to an affiliated news-radio channel, or perhaps even TV audio. If not, then I surely switched over to NewsRadio WBBM 780. For some reason, even in spite of the earliest erroneous reports that it was a small plane or maybe a DC-3 that hit the first tower, I never thought it was an accident. Can’t tell you why, just a feeling.

I was driving south on the Kennedy and toward downtown when the second plane hit.

My eyes went immediately upward – to the Sears Tower, as it was then known, already visible in the distance. The Sears was at 233 South Wacker Drive. My office was in 300 South Wacker -- kitty-cornered from it. It stood with what seems, in retrospect, like a kind of innocence.

Nancy was the principal of an elementary school in a near-northern suburb, with charge of 600 children. I called her from the car and got her out of a meeting. It was the first notice to her school. She recalls that the day proceeded with great professionalism on the part of her staff. The children were not told; Nancy thought it best that the news be presented first by their parents. The most interesting datum: Only one parent asked to take her child out of the school that day.

I had the only TV in our office, a little JVC portable with rabbit ears that had awful reception in the Wacker Drive canyon. Attorneys and staff drifted in and out for updates, disbelieving and understanding at the same time.

I didn't get any work done that day. Out my window I looked directly across the street at the looming Sears. Of course, no one knew how many more symbols of American strength and success the enemy had targeted. Building management didn't mess around. They closed the place and shooed us all out of the place by late morning.

I was struck by how normal everything seemed on the street when I left the building. No obvious evacuations, even from the Sears, no crowds gathering, what seemed like normal traffic and people just walking about as one would see on any other normal workday. The wonder was dispelled when I arrived at the parking garage to find it nearly empty.

* * *

With nothing to do, with wanting to do nothing, but watch TV, I began to write. When I began, President Bush was located just a few miles from my childhood home in Bellevue, Nebraska, at the Strategic Air command Underground at Offutt Air Force Base, across the barbed-wire fence from my backyard. (I think SAC had actually been deactivated as a command by that time, but the Underground -- did you see Dr. Strangelove, or that original Star Trek where they had to go back in time and infiltrate the Air Force Base in "Omaha"? – remained a central and highly-secure command center.)

I've gone back for the first time in ten years to what I wrote on that day and in the day or two following. A lot of it was political, and I don’t want to spoil this essay with too much of that. Here’s a sample:

-- The first word that came to mind about the attacks was not "cowardly," it was "pathetic." I thought the attacks were a spasm -- that was the word I used -- unlikely to be repeated in any form for quite some time.

-- I was prepared to believe that it was Osama bin Laden's cadres, but I also remembered Oklahoma City -- everyone assumed that was a foreign attack, but it turned out to be some white loser. What persuaded me in the short run that the rush to judgment was probably in the right direction was that the dozen-or-so attackers lost their own lives. Not your typical Western strategy.

-- I assumed that I would know some of the victims. I went to law school in New York City. Many of my friends went to work in the Financial District, and my first boss at Kirkland & Ellis had become a senior executive at Morgan Stanley in the WTC. After contacting my New York City friends, I was relieved that I was unable to identify any acquaintance who died in New York.

-- This will sound cold: I wasn't sad or horrified or excited. My primary thought was that we know much more about the world than we knew the day before. It was a supremely clarifying set of actions. “Barbarism will face challenges that it has avoided to date,” I wrote. “This is a good thing.” (I was surprised then as now that there were some of the political class who found no instruction in 9/11 at all.)
-- “Afghanistan,” I wrote. “The 51st State.”

-- I remarked on the composure of Americans There was no public demand for immediate retaliation.

-- Hundreds of movies were instantly dated. Their New York panoramas included the World Trade Center.

-- As we are moved by the memorials this weekend, we forget – I forgot, anyway – how much brainless crap we had to endure from much of the international (and even some of the American) Left in the days following 9/11. There were those who truly thought that America deserved what it got. They’re still around, and not all of them are beyond our borders.

-- I understood the concern over “destabilization” of Middle Eastern regimes if we made war against the terrorist-sponsoring governments of Araby. But what ended up on the page was: “Well, who with any sense feels invested in the stability of their particular brand of evil?”

-- Something prompted me to write: “I am not ashamed to say that I have not the slightest interest in what teenagers have to say about this conflict.” Also: “I am reasonably certain that pop culture celebrities (Madonna holding forth today, I read, that ‘violence begets violence’) should shut their pieholes for the duration.”

-- I fretted over the Problem of Islam. On the one hand, our large Muslim population was not and had never been a threat. Just as obviously, worldwide (and now domestic) terror was authored almost exclusively by Islamofascists claiming authority through the religion itself. I could only hope that extreme moral relativism took a hit that day – not all philosophies are created equal, and some of them should die.

* * *

My final memory is not a 9/11 memory at all.

It starts in September 1958 in Bellevue, Nebraska.

Nowadays when kids get to first grade, a lot of them can read. Back then, only I and one other kid had this skill when we arrived in Mrs. Duvall’s classroom at Belleaire Elementary School. We could read, if not understand, almost anything you put in front of us. Let me amend that – I’m sure I didn’t understand a lot of what I read, but the other kid – his name was Bryan Jack – probably did. Mrs. Duvall gave us a stack of books and sent us off to the corner to read them while she brought the other kids along. (Our classmates were divided into groups – the Redbirds, the Bluebirds, some Other-Color-birds. Bryan and I, for some reason, were the Snowbirds.)

Bryan was a true prodigy, brilliant even as a skinny little kid. High-strung but quite apparently a “brain,” as we called gifted kids back then. His family lived just a few doors down from us. Thrown together because we could read, we became best friends. His father, like the fathers of many of my friends, was in the Air Force, and after three or four years the Air Force transferred the Jacks to Texas and I had to say goodbye to my supersmart friend.

I kept in touch with Bryan for awhile, but adolescent boys are not good mail correspondents, and the relationship faded. Fortunately, my mother stayed in touch with his mother, so I always knew a little about what Bryan was up to.

He ended up at CalTech and Stanford with multiple degrees and a doctorate.

Eventually, I learned, he went to work at the Pentagon.

As the decades passed, I seldom thought of him.

Oddly, like me, he married for the first time very shortly before 9/11. His wife was New York City artist Barbara Rachko. On her website, she displays a striking, even startling painting of the two of them titled “Us and Them.” (Reproduction is without permission – Barbara, apologies and hoping for your pardon.)

If Bryan had been sitting in his chair at the Pentagon on 9/11, he would have lived through it. He wasn’t.

He was in the plane that hit it.

MOVIE REVIEW: "The Help"

2011-09-07T21:50:00.002-05:00

At first I did not care to see "The Help." It was, I assumed, a "relationship movie," being a movie that doesn't have much comedy or killing or special effects or monsters or Western gunfighters. But my impression was that this one was all relationships, and all-female ones at that, with not much good to say about men.

In fact, I liked the movie. I can recommend it with almost no reservations. Relationships, after all, are important.

The movie is set in Jackson, Mississippi in 1962-63. It explores the relationship between white Junior Leaguers and the black maids who raised them, and who now work for them -- a pattern that had held for generations but upon which the civil rights struggles of the Sixties were placing new and unaccustomed strains.

Emma Stone plays Skeeter Phelan, a young woman who aspires to a journalism career, and who was largely raised by a black maid (Constantine, played by Cicely Tyson in a small but memorable turn). She has the idea of writing a book (which becomes "The Help") about these relationships from the standpoint of the maids. She enlists her fellow Junior Leaguers' maids, the submissive but perceptive Aibileen (Viola Daivs) and, eventually, the much less pliable Minny (Octavia Spencer) to tell her their stories. Skeeter's growing interest in the maids' stories places her in conflict with Hilly (Bryce Dallas Howard, Ron Howard's daughter), the head of the Junior League, a woman dedicated to The Way Things Have Always Been between Southern whites and their servants. Hilly fires Minny and blackballs her from getting any other maid positions among the society whites, but Minny eventually catches on with a cheerful wealthy outcast (Celia, played by Jessica Chastain) who does not have the proper Jackson pedigree, but who has had the good fortune to have married well and who seems to have very little racial consciousness in enlisting Minny to assist her (without her husband's knowledge) in managing the large estate that (until the end, unseen) husband has entrusted to her care.

Viola Davis

Skeeter's interest in the maids' histories is not entirely altruistic. I mentioned her ambitions -- she wants to be published, and this motive is not glossed over in the movie. Skeeter is in constant touch with a New York publisher (Jane Alexander). As the film progresses, however, she identifies more closely with these tough, gifted women. It is to the movie's credit that it does not focus overmuch on this transformation; yet we feel it through Ms. Stone's fine performance.

Octavia Spencer

The movie is ultimately satisfying for reasons I cannot relate without spoiling it for you. Suffice it to say that the ending, while not entirely satisfying, is far from tragic. Hey, I cry for the neglected old toys in "Toy Story" -- I wasn't similarly moved at the conclusion of "The Help," and I got the same feeling from the attendees at the show I saw, but I count that as a good thing. The movie doesn't overtly manipulate; it tells a story that makes sense on its own terms, with goodness being only ambiguously rewarded.
The strength of this show is its performances. Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer are extraordinary, and Emma Stone holds her own with these two powerful black actresses. Bryce Dallas Howard's Hilly is a formidable foil, alternately hateful and comic; her black, close-set eyes blaze with racial righteousness. Sissy Spacek, as her mother, has too few moments onscreen, but enough to remind us that we don't see enough of this wonderful actress. Allison Janney is also marvelous as Skeeter's mother, caught between her own social ambitions and the welfare of the woman who had served her household for decades.

Emma Stone

Bryce Dallas Howard

Go see it, especially if you lived through those times, and especially if you didn't.

I mentioned some reservations.

I agree with David Denby in his favorable review in The New Yorker that the flaws in the movie really don't seem to matter much, fading as the movie progresses. I think this is because of the intrinsic drama of the material. I also think the viewer may also be distracted by the thought that to some degree, the frictions that were life-and-death in the Sixties continue to linger, in a far less poisonous but uneasy social dialogue between monied people and those who mow their lawns, fix their media centers, and, yes, assist them with raising their children and maintaining their households.

So my reservations are mainly quibbles. I did not entirely buy in to the shallowness of the Junior Leaguers or the sometimes unvarnished villainy of Hilly, although goodness knows there are villains abroad when a change that needs to happen is resisted by those whom the status quo favors. And I thought that the maids' reactions when faced with the ladies' slights were more revealing than your average Southern maid would have exhibited.

Given the dramatic subject matter and the historical fulcrum upon which both the book and the movie balance, it is somewhat surprising that both are regarded as of interest primarily to women. It must be because the men in the movie are almost invisible, mostly afterthoughts. The show tries to gin up a romantic story for Skeeter, but it's slight and unconvincing. Hilly's husband is like Hilly, bad. Celia's husband, turns out, is good. While the period clothing and hairstyles (worth the price of admission for those of us who lived through them) serve to highlight the individuality of the women, they tend to make the men unmemorable.

Hey, I'm glad it wasn't a movie about the way men treated The Help.

Check it out, guys.

* * *

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You May Now Keep Up With Right Thinking by Following Your Cool Hot Center on Twitter

2011-07-24T11:35:00.002-05:00

That would be:

@CoolHotCenter

Great Thoughts that are perhaps not great enough for a formal airing on this site. Probably lots of gags and ad hominem attacks.

I'll tweet links all new articles.

Hope to see you there.

My thanks.

County Road 26, July 23, 2011

2011-07-23T23:16:00.002-05:00

On my old Schwinn trail bike
Mercury near the century
On County Road 26, gravel
Shooting out from under
My fat tires and the
Washboard road bouncing
My disgraceful love handles,
I steered off to the roadside
Into the smoother smashed-
Down brush and suddenly
Before me rose up dozens,
Hundreds of grasshoppers
Startled from their torpor
By my offroad detour.
They flew off before me
To the left and right and
As I split the frothy spray of
Panicked flying yellow Orthoptera,
I felt like Leo DiCaprio
On the bow of the Titanic
Except that the phrase
I'm the king of the gravel roadside
Somehow lacked for grandness,
But at least I didn't drown
In the bitter North Atlantic
And was not required to appear
In "Shutter Island."

* * *

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Harry Potter and "The Tempest": J.K. Rowling Says Good-Bye with a Nod to the Bard at the End of "Deathly Hallows"

2011-07-21T22:21:00.004-05:00

[SPOILER ALERT: This article reports on a brief moment near the conclusion of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2," currently in wide release. It does not reveal any significant plot points along the way, but those who want to avoid any information about how the film ends should stop reading here.]

This is cool.

Here's an observation I haven't seen anywhere else -- I looked -- so I'm going to claim originality. However, it is almost certainly not original, since I'll bet there are lots of others who noticed it.   If you know of anyone else who has published on this, please keep it to yourself.

I am not a profound scholar of Shakespeare, much less of the Harry Potter books or films. However, I was struck by a moment at the end of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2," that the Memsahib and I saw in a nearly-empty theater in downtown Fort Worth last Saturday night. I throw it out there for you fans of either Shakespeare or Rowling to see what you think. If you find it of merit, please pass it along to any Shakespearean scholars, Potter scholars, major film critics of your acquaintance, or J.K. Rowling.

[Capsule review: The Mem and I both liked it. We had both disliked "Deathly Hallows Part 1," which we found dreary, angst-filled, slow, and incomprehensible.    We were able to figure out what was going on in Part 2, and there was plenty of action, good monsters, and some surprises that wound up a coherent plot.   The 3D was good -- these movies are kind of dark and murky to begin with, so the marginal murk you get with 3D didn't get in the way.]

[MINOR SPOILERS START HERE]

Why did Harry break the Elder Wand? Did this act have some special significance to the story?   Harry Potter fans probably have many better answers to these questions, but here's mine:

Near the end of the movie, after Lord Voldemort has been vanquished (who made him a lord, exactly?), Harry succeeds to physical possession of the Elder Wand.   He is standing facing Ron and Hermione on a bridge outside Hogwarts. He is holding the wand. I wish I had written down the exact dialogue, but it isn't terribly important -- no big speeches. Ron makes the observation that Harry's possession of the wand makes him the most powerful wizard in the world.   Harry holds the wand as if to snap it in two, and as Ron and Hermione start to object, Harry says something like it's been more trouble than it's worth, or we don't need it anymore. He breaks the wand in two pieces and throws it into the bottomless chasm beneath the bridge.

What All the Fuss Is About: The Elder Wand

Now consider a scene in Shakespeare's The Tempest. The play is set on an island ruled by Prospero, a powerful magician.   After he has used his magic to bring things to a suitable conclusion, he makes this speech in the final scene of the play, which gives our language the phrase "this rough magic":

     . . . I have bedimm'd
     The noontide sun, call'd forth the mutinous winds,
     And 'twixt the green sea and the azured vault
     Set roaring war: to the dread rattling thunder
     Have I given fire and rifted Jove's stout oak
     With his own bolt; the strong-based promontory
     Have I made shake and by the spurs pluck'd up
     The pine and cedar: graves at my command
     Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let 'em forth
     By my so potent art. But this rough magic
     I here abjure, and, when I have required
     Some heavenly music, which even now I do,
     To work mine end upon their senses that
     This airy charm is for, I'll break my staff,
     Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
     And deeper than did ever plummet sound
     I'll drown my book.

            -- Act V, Scene 1, ll. 41-57

Prospero breaks his own wand ("staff") and buries it, and also destroys ("drown") his book of spells.

Christopher Plummer as Prospero in The Tempest

That may not seem like much of a reference by Harry/Rowling to Prospero, but consider: It is the consensus of scholars that The Tempest is Shakespeare's final play; he may have written parts of Henry VIII but "The Tempest" is considered to be his last fully-realized work. Prospero's staff-breaking is widely regarded as Shakespeare saying farewell to his audience and his art. Announcing his retirement, as it were. (By the way, for you "Maltese Falcon" fans: In the previous act, Prospero says: "We are such stuff as dreams are made of.")

Deathly Hallows is the last of the Harry Potter movies and J.K. Rowling has said there will be no more Harry Potter books.

Both scenes are at the end of the story; both involve the breaking of a magic stick; both involve casting or burying the pieces deep within the earth; both involve a wizard voluntarily giving up magical powers. Prospero destroys his magic book; Rowling has ended the Harry Potter series of magic-impacted books.

Ms. Rowling did not write the screenplay but I understand something like this scene is in the book. I think it is at least possible, perhaps even likely, that Ms. Rowling is borrowing this powerful scene from The Tempest to say: This is the end and I really, really mean it.

* * *

Finally: In what I concede is only oblique support of this thesis: Prospero performs some of his magic through the spirit Ariel who serves him, and to whom Prospero has promised freedom if Ariel performs certain final magical tasks; in the end he does free Ariel. Ariel frequently acts by creating deceptive images for mortals to react to. This power was also practiced on Muggles by Dobby the house-elf -- who Harry freed from the Malfoys, and who thereafter faithfully served Harry until his death. OK, it's a stretch, but it suggests that perhaps serious Potter scholars may want to have a closer look at The Tempest.

Dobby the Magical House-Elf (as Himself)

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"Super _________ 8": A Flashy Disappointment

2011-07-10T00:03:00.005-05:00

[NO SPOILERS]

The Memsahib and I had a lovely dinner last night and then went to see "Super 8," written and directed by J.J. Abrams and produced by Steven Spielberg. Kids. An alien presence of some sort. A middle-class family setting in a small Middle America town. Sound familiar? "Close Encounters of the Third Kind"; "E.T."; "Goonies" (Spielberg story and co-executive producer [no aliens but a menacing disfigured guy]); "Gremlins" (Spielberg produced).

Uh, this movie isn't like those.

It isn't necessary for a Spielberg-influenced film to be like earlier, beloved Spielberg-influenced films for it to be a good film. A good film can be violent, lots more violent than those earlier films. Lots more.  I like violent action movies where stuff gets blown up and the alien presence isn't a positive thing for the population. And I liked this movie. I didn't get bored. There was a chuckle or two.

But I didn't like it a lot, and neither did the Mem.   Tell me true: When you turn on the TV and see that "Close Encounters" or "E.T." is on, don't you linger? I can't imagine I will do so when I stumble over this one a few years from now.

"Super 8" has received sensational reviews. Part of this is Spielberg. Part of it is J.J. Abrams being the flavor of the month. Part of it is the charm of the child actors who carry the film. The story, such as it is, moves along smartly. The effects are terrific, if somewhat overdone (no train in the history of trainwrecks wrecks ever wrecked like this train wrecked, or for as long).

But the movie has three problems:

First: The plot was full, and I mean full all the way up to the chock, of holes. Huge.  I can't tell you what they are without spoiling the film. Drop me an email if you don't care about spoilers and I'll tick off a few. When I say "plot holes" I don't mean things like "there's no such things as aliens"; I mean plot elements that don't make any sense even after you have suspended disbelief and are willing to listen to a story about kids tracking down some malignant presence in their town.

So what? you say. It's a sci-fi thing, it doesn't all have to make sense. Oh, but it does, after a point:  Once you have the illogical menace (a nasty alien presence) established, everything else has to be dramatically consistent. Reality has to be the stick in the ground that creates the tension when the menace comes up against it. This movie violates this principle that I just made up time after time with the result that the ending is so dopey that Abrams has no idea what to do with it when it arrives.   The film just ends abruptly, as though the director is fearful that the whole thing would fall apart if anyone thought about the final scene too closely. (It would.) The upshot, for me, was that I felt kind of taken when the screen went dark at the end. (I note that people in the theater just sat there, not stunned by the denouement, but thinking there had to be more.)

Is this just me being too persnickity and logical?   The nonsense of the plot doesn't seem to bother the critics. Answer: No. More people should think like me. Everyone, in fact.   Seriously, I was still able to enjoy the show even while shaking my head.   The point I want to make here is that this carelessness (and the next two points) are serious flaws that keep a pretty good movie from being a great one, or even a memorable one.

Second:   I mentioned the charm of the young actors. They are charming and mostly skillful (standout: Elle Fanning), and at the outset of the movie you think that you will come to care about them in the same way that you cared about Eliot in "E.T." and some of the characters in the other Spielberg products mentioned above. But while this movie seems to feature interpersonal drama and feelings and stuff that should cause the audience to identify with these characters, Abrams's heart is not in it.   There are a couple of parent/child conflicts, and a family tragedy, but they seem pasted on to the roaring action and explosive, mass-destruction, ear-shattering effects that dominate the picture. It's nice that they tried to make a special-effects blockbuster with a heart, but its beating is drowned out by heavy things crashing to earth after flying improbably through the air, incredibly destructive attacks, mass hysteria, and, yes, explosions.

Finally:   Twice now I've said that the kids are charming.  This is a credit to their personal charisma and their acting skills. Unfortunately, Abrams seriously, seriously attacks their natural appeal by making them incredibly foul-mouthed. These are supposed to be 14- and 15-year-old boys (and a 15-year-old girl) who are somewhat precocious. The year is 1979. I don't have the research on the speech habits of kids of that age at that time, but I had a hard time believing that these kids, who are ambitious and bright (although apparently not the best students), would speak with the casual vulgarity Abrams has assigned to them.   Whether or not kids like this spoke like this in 1979:   Irrespective of verisimilitude, the profanity transformed them from people we are attracted to into somewhat thuggish twerps.   Used skillfully, the rare instance of cuss words coming from the mouth of a child can be funny or dramatic; but here, the profanity was way overemployed and did absolutely nothing to establish a rooting interest of the audience in these teenagers.   When the film was over, a disapproving remark was the first thing out of the mouth of a parent sitting next to us who had brought her child (it's PG-13).

So if you plan to see "Super 8," leave the kids at home.

And don't take the train.

* * *

Note on our filmgoing experience: Among the unusual things that happen in the movie as the result of the escape of the alien presence is that the town's power flickers and sometimes goes out altogether. When the Memsahib and I arrived home, our garage door would not open with the built-in opener, and we soon learned that our side of the street had been without power for close to four hours. In the movie, a utility worker trying to fix a power line meets a predictable fate, but CoServ managed to hook our block back up without any of the local malignant presences taking notice.

[SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER] In what can only be seen as an homage to the very first "Star Trek" teevee series, every black character in this movie with a speaking part is killed. Even casual fans of that series know that on the rare occasions when a black crew member would appear (Lt. Uhura aside, probably spared because she was doing series creator/producer Gene Roddenberry), he was a goner.

* * *

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What a Long, Strange Loop It's Been

2011-06-29T21:44:00.002-05:00

Review of I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter

Some years ago, Douglas Hofstadter published a large book called Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. It won a Pulitzer Prize. It sold many, many copies. I have one. I am convinced that few people actually finished it, or even got far into it. It was unquestionably the product of a brilliant mind. But man, reading it was work, lots of little exercises to work through, lots of symbolic logic to learn, but worst, the goal of all that work was unclear. I like a challenging read, so I’m not proud to say I didn’t get far before I put it back on the shelf, where it reposes to this day. The fact is, I just didn’t get it, and I’ll bet not many people did.

I think I will win that bet, because no less an authority than Douglas Hofstadter himself has expressed his disappointment that not many people got it. I quote from Wikipedia: “In the preface to the twentieth-anniversary edition [of GEB], Hofstadter laments that his book has been misperceived as a hodge-podge of neat things with no central theme. He states: ‘GEB is a very personal attempt to say how it is that animate beings can come out of inanimate matter. What is a self, and how can a self come out of stuff that is as selfless as a stone or a puddle?’”

To remedy this, he says, he wrote I Am a Strange Loop – to make the point that apparently eluded readers of GEB. It was published in 2007. It had been sitting on my to-be-read shelf, in hardcover, since then. It is almost 450 pages long. I read it to the end.

Capsule review: Looks like he’s going to have to write another book.

Its goal is to – well, now there’s the first puzzle. Recall that he says he wants to explore “what is a self,” and there is a lot of talk about self-ness in the book. Also consciousness; also possession of a human soul; also what it is that distinguishes humans from other animals. But there is next to no explanation of what he means by these concepts, which question (if any) he is trying to answer. I am very tempted to say that he would say that these questions are all essentially the same thing, which launches us into a muddle right at the outset.

Which is too bad. I'm interested in these things, and Hofstadter is really a fine writer and a brilliant man with some interesting things to say, so this volume should have been right in my wheelhouse.   But I can tell you very succinctly why this is not a good book: Hofstadter not only doesn’t get to the point, his thesis is all but invisible. If you handed him the book and asked him to find a paragraph, or even a page or two, clearly describing (1) the question he is trying to resolve (i.e., “what is a self,” “what distinguishes humans from lower animals,” “what is the nature of consciousness” “what do we mean when we talk about having a soul” – am I close on any of those?), and (2) his resolution of it, he might be able to do it. Personally, I never stumbled across it. I can’t tell you how his belief that humans are like what he calls “strange loops” gets him much of anywhere.

Why is this? The cheap answer is “because he had a lazy editor, or maybe an intimidated one,” but the real answer is that Hofstadter just may not have a clear answer to any of these questions. If he does, it gets lost among the analogies and metaphors and stories and personal anecdotes he loves. Nothing wrong with those strategies. But after (actually, before) one employs them, one must articulate the idea the technique is employed to illuminate. The book is so thick with explanatory symbol-filled vignettes that they crowd out a simple, clear statement of his belief respecting these issues (and what he believes those issues to be).

The problem is illustrated right on the cover, which is a stylized representation of “video loop.” Much of the first part of the book is devoted to a description of images Hofstadter created by pointing a video camera at a teevee that was displaying what the video camera was receiving – that is, displaying itself over and over and over. Moving the camera distorts the image in interesting ways. You’ve seen the effect if you stand in front of a mirror with another mirror behind you – you see yourself receding into infinity. This is a purely mechanical phenomenon that has absolutely nothing to do with consciousness, but Hofstadter goes on and on and on about it, even including a number of useless color plates of his teevee images, as though it tells us something profound about ourselves as human beings. It doesn’t, and if there is a useful analogy to the way humans perceive the world and re-transmit it, I missed it.

Of potentially greater interest might have been his analysis of Kurt Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem (1931) and its undermining of Bertrand Russell’s and Alfred North Whitehead’s “Principia Mathematica” (1910-13). His explanation – which is very lengthy and punctuated with fictional dialogues and analogical fables – isn’t bad, but would it be asking too much for a simple statement, or even a complex or subtle statement, of what these abstract mathematical theories have to do with “I-ness,” or “soul,” or “consciousness,” or “self”?

Let’s return to his central simile. A “strange loop” is a self-referential system (that’s reductive but saying any more would not illuminate this discussion). I have called this Hofstadter’s simile, but I can’t even report that with any confidence – are we “strange loops” in the way that is understood in topology, logic, and mathematical systems, or is he only saying we’re like them in some way that is meaningful to his theory? I went in search of what other people think Hofstadter is trying to say when he says argues that human beings sorta have this characteristic and that it somehow relates to their essential humanity. What I discovered is that no one else knows, either, and those who purport to know sort of skip over what the hell they – and he – think any of this has to do with a unique human nature.

There’s a lesson here. We see it around us every day, in government, in the workplace, on Wall Street, in the academy, in science: Brains aren’t enough. Learnedness isn’t enough.  Opinion leaders, all kinds of leaders, have an obligation to be clear. Heck,we all have an obligation to be clear with one another. I don’t care how complex the subject matter is – if you’re writing a nonfiction book for a general audience, especially one that purports to solve a problem or take a position, you have a sacred duty to state your position early and clearly. If you can’t or won’t, you probably haven’t really figured it out for yourself.

With over a thousand pages of closely-printed text sitting on my bookshelf, I don’t know if Douglas Hofstadter is a strange loop. I can say that he is damned near an endless one.

A One-Term President Because He Doesn’t Care All That Much about Two

2011-06-23T21:49:00.004-05:00

And, more importantly, because it shows.

Yeah, recently he's taken to saying that he's "unstoppable," but his heart doesn't really seem to be in it.

Back in May 2010, when my readers were in the mid-one figure, I wrote that I didn’t think President Obama much cared about a second term. My theory was that the President is motivated primarily by academic theory, and he judges success not on whether anyone votes for him, or his party, but whether the theoreticians he admires in the academy (to which he’ll unquestionably return) approve of his policies.

A couple of weeks ago, the President said a couple of extraordinary things that got much less media play than they deserved. I won’t say they prove my point, but they trend that way. In an interview with ABC’s Ann Curry, he said:

“There are days where I say that one term is enough.”

He went on:

“Michelle and the kids are wonderful in that if I said, 'You know, guys, I want to do something different,' they'd be fine. They're not invested in daddy being president or my husband being president.”

How many terms does he want?

That may sound like an offhand expression of mid-term weariness, and it may have been that. But this isn’t a midterm. This is the beginning of his campaign for his second term. This is the beginning of his big fundraising push. Let me ask you: If you had just heard this and the President asked you to write a large check for his campaign, would you?

He’s said things like this before. In January 2010, he told ABC’s Diane Sawyer: "I'd rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president.”

Mind you, I’m not being critical of this mindset. It is entirely proper to say “I will govern according to my principles, which I think are really great principles, even if it proves unpopular at the ballot box.” But I think it says something very important about this puzzling historical figure.

First, he says he sometimes thinks that “one term is enough.”

Enough because . . . he’s tired? No, couldn’t be. He couldn’t possibly be intending to convey the impression of fatigue to his supporters and financiers.

Enough because . . . that is all he will need to accomplish his goals? Well, we know about the economy and the prospects for recovery before November 2012, so he won’t have improved that over what he inherited. He sometimes talks about his accomplishments, but Obamacare is on the run in the courts, will probably not survive a single-term presidency. His accounts of other “achievements” are frequently misleading; recently, the Washington Post – yes, WaPo – said of his speech extolling the success of the auto industry bailouts “What we found is one of the most misleading collections of assertions we have seen in a short presidential speech.” He got bin Laden, that was good. Excellent, in fact. But compared with his own expectations and those of his voters, it’s pretty thin gruel for three years. No, hardly anyone thinks he's accomplished much or expects him to accomplish a lot more by November 2012. And I don't think he believes it, either.

Enough because . . . he knows he cannot enact his social theories into law, at least not for long, and well, OK, he tried, and that’s enough?

Or: Enough because . . . he’s bored?

I think it’s some combination of these last two. Listen to him claiming to make a point about Michelle and the girls, but really making a point about himself (surprise!), suggesting that he might say to them: “You know, you guys, I want to do something different.”

Now think about that for a minute, especially in light of the “one term is enough” suggestion. You’re the President of the United States. What “something different” might you want to do as the end of your first term approaches that would be – I don’t know, more helpful to mankind, more fulfilling, more prestigious?

Look at it another way: What different thing would be better to Barack Obama than being President from 2013 through 2017? Really, what’s bad about being the American President when you are nothing but a politician? (Yeah, he taught some law school, but come on. Guy's done nothing but politics, and has done it pretty darned well.) I can think of some things: Hard work. Compromising cherished theories to get legislation enacted. Never-ending judgment of your performance. Exposure to a public that is sometimes less than enthralled with who you are, who see you as something other than an extraordinary symbol.

Here’s what I take away from President Obama’s remarks: He views his service in office more as a hobby than a calling. In line with my earlier thoughts, it’s an academic exercise for him. Doesn’t work out, cuts into the golf, people mad at you all the time, middle class just doesn’t understand the theory – fine, I’ll go do something different.

But I think there’s something else. Can’t prove it. Just kind of feel it.

I think Barack Obama just doesn’t think it’s all that big a deal to be President of the United States.

I think he thinks this because he doesn’t think the United States is all that big a deal to be the President of. He seems to take pleasure in suggesting that the U.S. is just another country in a world full of them. He certainly rejects American exceptionalism. He does not have a high regard for the Constitution. (That’s not a Tea Party sentiment – that’s my personal conclusion from his utterances, including this one I noted (scroll down) and others I’ve noted from time to time.) He feels bad about America’s past international initiatives. He shows absolute unconcern at its slipping status in the world -- along with much of the academy, he thinks it deserves it, and that it is historically inevitable to boot. And borders -- when you're not much of a country, what difference does it make who lives there?

So being President of that country, to him, is just one of many “different” things to which he might apply his considerable gifts. And by no means necessarily the most important one at this stage of his life. So it’s good that Michelle and the kids are so understanding.

I have a feeling that unless the Republicans nominate a diseased marmot or Sarah Palin (of which they are eminently capable), Barack Obama is going to have the chance to do that different, better thing come January 2013.

Put aside whether his policies are good or bad, or whether or not you like them.

He's just not that into the gig.

BREITBART: I've Got Weiner's Colonoscopy, Genome

2011-06-13T21:44:00.004-05:00

Rep. Anthony Weiner’s (D-NY) political and personal problems deepened today with reports that conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart has come into possession of Weiner’s recent colonoscopy and a complete chart of his entire genetic structure. The images were transmitted via Twitter to several women with whom he was conducting online conversations.

Political observers are taking these latest reports seriously. Breitbart’s earlier claims that he possessed lewd photographs Weiner tweeted to young women proved correct when Weiner admitted they were photos of him, or parts of him, and that he had sent them to the young women in question.

Weiner, Cats

Since then, Breitbart has posted self-portraits of a shirtless Weiner and has displayed a photo said to be Weiner’s massively engorged johnson, also said to have been sent to a young woman via Twitter. The image of the fully turgid thunderstick appeared to be a cell phone photo of a photo displayed on a cell phone that was originally taken by a cell phone. Despite the degraded image, Rep. Weiner has not denied that the luridly gleaming tumescence is his, possibly because it favorably compares in shape and volume what appears to be an unopened tube of Family Size Sensodyne Iso-Active Multi-Action toothpaste that also appears in the photograph.

The reports of tweeted images of Rep. Weiner’s lower intestine and gene map will likely prove a challenge to efforts to rehabilitate his image. Weiner, whose marriage to Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin was performed by Bill Clinton, has been seeking advice from the former president on how to handle this crisis. However, the Weiners’ family dog, a Samoyed named “Schumie,” has denied taking the pictures or sending the offending tweets. His alibi -- that he was out of the country representing the U.S. at a tree-planting ceremony in Kenya with First Dog Bo and lacks opposable thumbs -- has been verified by Julian Assange’s dog, “Leaky.”

On his website (http://www.breitbart.com/), Breitbart speculates that Weiner’s relationship with the numerous young women began as what was intended to be merely a joking display of his furiously aroused wrinklebeast. But, Breitbart states, “as the exchanges became progressively more intimate, it seems that Weiner thought it important to convey ever more complete information on his reproductive allure and evolutionary suitability.”

The new images, which Breitbart is currently sharing only with upper level Justice Department officials and and wacky morning AM radio DJs, show that Weiner is enjoying robust alimentary health and does indeed have a set of recognizably human chromosomes.

Eventually, Breitbart speculates, Weiner became obsessed with digitizing and preserving for transmission every imageable part of his body, “in line with his public calls for full disclosure and transparency at the federal level.”

The images were reportedly sent to a Luby’s waitress in Dime Box, Texas; LeBron James's mother Gloria James; and Marilyn vos Savant.

* * *

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Revisiting Thoughts on the Future of Israel

2011-05-19T21:31:00.001-05:00

Sorry for the partial rerun here. On February 3, I wrote this:

===========

Not Too Early to Ask – How Do You Feel About Israel? Are You Willing to Go to War for It? Egypt. Jordan’s unstable. Yemen is about to go and is a snakepit of al Qaeda conspiracy. The Muslim Brotherhood is on record for Israel’s destruction and jihad against the U.S. We know about Iran. When we leave Iraq, Afghanistan . . . . If those governments become radicalized, how long will Saudi Arabia be able to hold out?

Israel has been a critical U.S. ally for decades. Such a critical ally, that some say it has had an influence on U.S. policy that is disproportionate to its importance. At least until recently, we have been pledged to its survival.

Israel has military expertise, but take a look at the real estate involved

But folks, it is not too early to say that the noose is tightening. It is not too early to imagine Israel with not one single surrounding country with which it is reliably at peace.

I don’t need to remind you that Iran will soon be nuclear, and Pakistan already is.

And the Islamists -- and, I very strongly suspect, some percentage of Muslims who in other respects would call themselves moderate -- hate Israel and desire its destruction not because it is imperialist, not because it threatens Islam, not because its treatment of Palestinians, but because it is not Islam. And because its founding was midwifed by the victorious WW II allies and placed in their midst. I am not here to debate whether the creation of Israel in 1948 was a good idea or whether Arab perceptions are accurate. I am here to say that diplomacy is not going to change the growing Muslim fundamentalism that holds that Israel must go. I read today that the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood has repudiated the Camp David accords.

So when the missiles begin to fall – not next year, maybe not for the next five years, but maybe a decade from now, how will the U.S. respond?

Which begs the critical long-term question, really the only important question that is going to come out of this, the question for our grandsons: If the Middle East as a whole decides for Islamist primitivism, and makes Israel its first target, will the U.S. risk a world war with Islam – that is what it would be – to come to Israel’s defense?

========

President Obama today gave a strongly pro-Palestinian address and called for Israel to return to its 1967 borders. It's an extraordinary position for an American politician to take, but it is utterly unsurprising that this president took it.

Sooner or later, what is happening in this "Arab Spring" is going to be more about Israel's survival, and less about anti-Western terror. Looks like it is going to be sooner.

The Romance of the Sentence

2011-05-15T21:56:00.002-05:00

I can’t draw. I can’t fix things. I can’t act. My singing talent, best described as “modest” – actually, that’s generous -- has been committed to CD. Don’t ask me to sculpt anything. The artistry of my photography is pretty much limited to bounce flash and primitive Photoshop 3 operations. If SEAL Team 6 broke in one night and said “your life or an engaging fictional plot,” I wouldn’t be here to write these lines.

But one thing I can do, is type. For this I have to thank my mother’s genes and Mrs. Humphrey’s eighth grade typing class, where I was the champ on a manual Remington with metal caps over the keys so you couldn't see the letters, even beating the kids who got the few IBM Selectrics, the iPads of their day. (Fingernail polish hid the letters on the Selectric keys.)

You thought I was going to say, “One thing I can do, is write.” That is, of course, the animating conceit of this site and of much of my life, but when one’s public output is limited to blog entries, Christmas letters, and summary judgment briefs, one is reluctant to call oneself a “writer.”

I try to write well. My keyboard speedfingers are something of an enemy to this endeavor, as I’m able to dump pretty swiftly onto the page the contents of my head. The results frequently mirror the disorder of what is to be found there.

But once in awhile, I commit to binary code a nice sentence.

Writers are obsessed by sentences. Plots and ideas abound; words, easy. But assembling the latter to advance the former in a way that is pleasing and persuasive to the reader – brother, you gotta have sentences, and some of them gotta sing.

It didn’t start with the modern master, Hemingway, whose spare constructions are beautiful to the ear and nourishing to the inner eye. But his sentences brought the art to the attention of a larger public. Teachers of writing programs tear their hair out at the crummy sentences their charges urp out. Some of it is a lack of knowledge of syntax and punctuation. But a lot of it is simply the lack of an ear for the music of which the English language -- the palette of Shakespeare, the scribes of the King James Bible, Henry James, the Brontës, Austen, Eliot, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Chandler, and their descendants – is capable. I've written here of my admiration for Merrilil Gilfillan, whose sentences, both spare and flowing, are exquisite.

Stanley Fish, an extremely controversial literary critic and university administrator -- he is colorfully attacked by both the left and right, which probably means he’s on to something -- has written a very fine little book about sentences called How to Write a Sentence -- and How to Read One. I think we can put his political notoriety aside; I did not detect an ideological agenda here.

The title is a little misleading. After you finish it, you will not have learned very much about how to write sentences. He makes a stab at taking the reader through a few simple exercises, but his heart isn’t in it. What he really wants to do is bring to the reader’s attention the importance of the sentence, to describe the different types of sentence, and to provide numerous examples of good ones from literature and non-fiction.

You will learn more about how to read one. As I made my way through this slim volume, I recalled pleasures from my own reading. I recalled a crime novel by one of the better writers in that genre, T. Jefferson Parker, and encountering a paragraph stringing together some of finest sentences I have ever read – and their subject matter was probably rather lurid, given the subject matter. And there are those sentences like the first sentences of Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (in translation), that never quite leave you: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” And I just now remembered another one; I had to go to my library to find it because I have long forgotten the novel and its author (although strangely, when I went to the stacks, I pulled it right out). It is the first sentence from a novel called Now You See It (1991) by Cornelia Nixon, and goes: “In the summer of 1949, in eastern Colorado, far from the nearest metric wrench, our car died and sunk in a sea of sheep.”

What is it about the sentence? Do we break up our communications in this way because it mirrors our need to take a breath during speech? Or is it something more fundamental – does it reflect the way we think, in discrete bundles of information and reasoning? As I composed this essay, it occurred to me that there may be no particular reason that thinking, and speech, and writing – which is to say, understanding and perception -- could not be seamless, freed from the tyranny of subject-verb-object. But it’s the way we’re put together, and the sentence is likely with us to stay. Even the extremely long sentence as practiced by the likes of Faulkner, James, the late David Foster Wallace must be broken up into separately comprehensible clauses to allow us to get from one end to t’other.

Here’s my formula for a great sentence: (1) It must stand on its own as pleasing to the inner ear, with pauses (or not), vocabulary, word choice (not the same thing), and grammar suitable to the nugget of information it is designed to communicate. (2) It must have some intrinsic interest. It need not be something surprising, as in the two examples above, but it should provoke at least some slight recognition that there is something different here to which heed must be paid. This second requirement is not found in every single sentence, because sometimes one has to advance the narrative without even a hint of razzle-dazzle: “He drove the boulevard looking for a McDonald’s.” Perhaps this is just another way of saying that not every sentence has to be great. Sometimes you just have to say something simply and quickly to get to the more interesting stuff.

And (3), the fine sentence must be a part of the rhythm of the other sentences in the narrative. One great line does not make a great song, and the great line will sink if it is disharmonious with its fellows. (I think of Pauline Kael’s film reviews as examples of melodic writing.) Perhaps Professor Fish will favor us with a volume on “How to Write a Paragraph.”

I leave you with one of my favorite quotes about writing, from Russian short-story writer Isaac Babel, who was tortured and murdered in Stalin's Great Purge:

"No iron can pierce the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place."

Isaac Babel, practicing what he preached.

We Learned More about the President from the Release of His Birth Certificate Than He May Have Intended

2011-05-06T23:59:00.008-05:00

I was never a birther. Those newspaper announcements were pretty persuasive.

I am nevertheless very pleased that President Obama authorized the release of his Hawaiian birth certificate. I understand that the birther/truther/assassination/Roswell conspiracy crowd will continue to howl about this, and I understand some book is coming out that has some stuff in it that’s supposed to be pretty hot, but this controversy is just about dead. I’ve seen a convincing explanation of why the typed information on the online version released by the White House can be made to disappear. For the good public officials of the State of Hawaii to have been hornswoggled into releasing a fraudulent document would have required a conspiracy that would make some of the nutbag Kennedy murder theories look convincing – and would have had to have taken place under the eyes of public scrutiny of the Hawaiian archives that has not let up since the man became a presidential candidate. And the argument that he’s not a “citizen” because his birth and adoptive fathers were not – folks, it’s nuts.

Nope, the President was born here and possesses the technical qualifications to be President of These States United.

And he has performed perhaps the greatest public service of his presidency, which is to have utterly marginalized the odious vulgarian Donald Trump. Another punch-line presidential candidate sliding off the charts, thank Jah.

[Photo Credit: CBS/Getty Iimages]

And yet, as we have seen with the Osama killing (I’ll favor you with my thoughts on this soon), the episode leaves us with an uneasy feeling about this gifted but perplexing man.

What Took Him So Long? The questions of the circumstances of his birth, while coming from a faction of the right given to hysterical accusations against leaders they don’t like, were not entirely unserious. There existed circumstances which gave rise to doubt which hovered close to the “reasonable” range. For him to have ignored – more, dismissed -- this black-and-white issue of his qualification to hold office was just plain weird. I’ll come back to this.

He Made His Supporters Look Foolish. We kept hearing from the President’s supporters that he had done all he could do, that the record was as complete as it could be, that nothing further was required or even possible. I found this odd, since it did appear that a simple request from him would have sprung that birth certificate. Turns out, there was something definitive he could have done, and at long last, he did it. His supporters are probably jubilant, but from here those sounds of triumph over the birthers seem to be coming from under that bus over there.

His Delay Fed the Impression of Dishonesty About His Personal Record. His peculiar silence on this topic of immense importance served to remind people about how they elected a guy they didn’t know a whole lot about; whose academic record remains in shadow; who almost certainly did not compose Dreams of My Father (I’m not a birther, but the case that he’s fibbing about his authorship is strong); and whose political associations over the years have tended more toward the radical than he has chosen to admit.

He Managed to Look Bad Doing It. When he finally got around to authorizing the release of his birth certificate, he was – well, he was pissy about it. He actually had the sand to be petulant, not so much that anyone was asking about where he was born but that anyone even thought it was important. “We do not have time for this kind of silliness,” he said. (And how much time, exactly, did it take him to authorize the release of his certificate? The only thing that kept this issue alive, it turns out, was his refusal to resolve it. And what is "silly" about formal constitutional mandates?) Above I said he “waited too long,” but that’s not quite right. He wasn’t “waiting” – he believed that the entire topic was beneath his -- anyone's -- notice.

Barack Obama's inaction and attitude have a single explanation: He does not regard the subject of whether he is constitutionally qualified to be president of any importance.

We have seen this in him before. Here's what I wrote back in August::

“He recently made a statement which summed up for me the reasons I have come to find the course of his Presidency so disturbing. At a speech at the American University School of International Service a couple of weeks ago, he reportedly said: 'Being an American is not a matter of blood or birth, it’s a matter of faith.' Even allowing the President some rhetorical license here, it's a very revealing remark, and a silly one. Being an American has almost everything to do with birth. The very first sentence of the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution reads: 'All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.'

“While the President knows this, he doesn't really feel its truth. He far prefers the comfort of the abstract thought that America is not a chunk of real estate with borders, but rather a bundle of concepts that have something to do with freedom and equality and abundance and other fine things everyone should experience. And if you value those things, if you have faith in those Americanish things, well, then you must be an American.

“It is similar to what John F. Kennedy meant when he said 'Ich bin ein Berliner' -- that is, all people who love freedom are, in a sense, citizens of Berlin who had been confined by the Berlin Wall. President Kennedy was speaking conceptually, and in his hands it was a powerful metaphor and a signal moment of the Cold War.

“But President Obama wasn't just offering an attractive metaphor like Kennedy was. He didn't just say that people who have faith in American values are Americans, a pleasant but not terribly helpful thought in the current border controversy. He said that being born here had nothing to do with being an American. Unlike President Kennedy's graceful formulation, President Obama's treats the metaphor as reality by expressly rejecting the fact that where you are born has anything to do with being an American.

“This is how he thinks. Not troubled by rules, constitutions, statutes, traditions, voting.”

It is a very academic attitude. His conviction as to his historic inevitabilty -- and rightness -- proceeds from first principles of his own devising (rather, the devising of the academic social theorists he admires), and not from the principles of American constitutional government or even the evidence of history.

And it gives rise to an extraordinary irony: An event that should have put to rest the issue of his qualification for the White House has only yielded more evidence that he shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near the place.

Happy Birthday, Jim Osterberg

2011-04-21T08:52:00.000-05:00

Better known to the Cool Hot Center as Iggy Pop, one of the most astonishing musicians and performers of the rock era. I'll save my written appreciation until his 65th birthday next year, if both of us make it.

An Immortal Passes

2011-04-19T21:29:00.003-05:00

The world of music has lost one of its most polished artists, an innovator whose work has stunned you over and over again without you knowing his name. If you own the Steely Dan album "Countdown to Ecstasy," you have seen the most memorable image of him:

Back of the "Countdown to Ecstasy" cover: left to right:
Jim Hodder, Walter Becker, Denny Dias, Jeff "Skunk" Baxter,
Donald Fagen, and . . .

Click on that image to enlarge it, or look more closely and you will see a disembodied hand reaching up to manipulate the faders on the mixer.

That's Roger Nichols.

Roger (the Immortal) Nichols.

Roger Nichols engineered every Steely Dan track you have ever heard, as well as much of Donald Fagen's solo work ("The Nightfly; "Kamakiriad"). Engineered them to absolute sonic perfection. He won Grammies for four of them, and one for his work with John Denver.

He died on April 9 at 66 of pancreatic cancer, destitute from medical expenses.

If you are a Steely Dan lover -- oh, there are some out there who aren't, but they're probably vegans or wiccans or fish whisperers or something -- you will know that on those albums, you can hear every instrument, perfectly balanced, clear as a bell. You can hear what the singer is singing. The albums are quiet when they're supposed to be quiet. Ironic: One of the most distinctive sonic features of those Steely/Fagen albums is what you don't hear.

Having produced a CD, I am here to tell you that the contributions of the technicians are not merely technical -- they are unavoidably musical. Nichols's contribution was particularly vivid; he invented devices and techniques designed to produce a perfect beat on the drum tracks. But his greatest gift was to be as exacting and patient as the two most notoriously demanding artists in modern popular music, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker. He supposedly got his nickname -- which appeared in the credits on the Steely Dan albums -- from his ability to survive their epic grueling recording sessions, in one case brushing off an jolting encounter with some improperly grounded equipment.

Put on "Aja." If you have it on vinyl, even better. Cue up "Black Cow." Be startled by those pellucid opening figures. And breathe in deep for Roger Nichols.

It Is Ever Thus

2011-04-09T19:55:00.006-05:00

Every year I organize a trip to the Dallas Auto Show. Attending when they can are Nancy's two sons, a son-in-law, and three of our grandsons. (There are now four, but the fourth is four days old, and his dad wisely elected not to join us this year.) The grandsons are all wonderful young chaps, much beloved of The Memsahib and me.

Our Auto Show Expedition has a steadfast rule -- NO GURLS ALLOUD.

We were making our way among the exhibits, when I noticed that the three grandsons, ranging in age from 4 to 11, were standing at the Cadillac turntable. It was near closing time -- they were the only ones there. I caught the attention of their dad, who is very adroit with the camera on his smartphone, and pointed out this touching tableau:

Click on the photo for a dramatic enlargement.

Here was my Facebook description (I'm "Pops," by the way):

"At the Cadillac turntable at the Dallas Auto Show: Samuel, Jacob, and Caleb Smith admire the fine lines and sophisticated chassis, the expensive upgrades and premium materials. But boys, take it from your Pops, who's been around the block a few times -- that model's going to run you some major dinero."

Samuel seemed quite taken by the Detroit iron, as he considered (but admirably rejected) an act of naughtiness in climbing up for a closer look. Jacob and Caleb seemed more interested in the oral presentation.

The speaker continued her spiel as though one of these lads might be inspired to visit a Cadillac showroom to pursue a purchase.

As we were walking away, I said to Caleb that the lady talking about the Cadillac was pretty cute. He made a dreadful frowny-face and insisted that he was only interested in the car.

Their mother left a comment on the Facebook entry: "This picture cracks me up (sort of)."

The eternal conflict of the mother of growing, changing boys.

Remember that motto? We may have to consider some modifications come a half-dozen years or so.

A Novel of Ideas that Might Give You Some if You're Not Careful

2011-04-06T21:56:00.002-05:00

36 Arguments for the Existence of God, by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein (subtitled “A Work of Fiction”)

This is one of those novels – I seem to read a lot of them – I liked very much but I’m not sure who its ideal audience is. Perhaps one of y’all. Does this sound like something you might enjoy?:

[NO SPOILERS] First, every major character in this novel is Jewish. There is a lot of material here about Judaism of many varieties, and some of the finest scenes are set in “America’s only shtetl,” named here New Walden, where the residents maintain a strictly orthodox way of life. Second, every major character in this novel is a brilliant academic intellectual, and I do mean brilliant, and I do mean academic. Most of the novel is set on campuses, fictional and not, within spitting distance of the Eastern Seaboard. They are not only brilliant, they are the most brilliant in the world in their (sometimes competing) fields. The brilliant characters who are not academic are brilliant religious intellectuals. The plot centers on Cass Seltzer, a lapsed Jew who has written a celebrated book examining The Varieties of Religious Illusion,” and has earned a reputation as “the atheist with a soul.” The plot is difficult to summarize, but I will say only that the drama of the book arises out of the tension between his relationships with several strong (similarly lapsed) women and several strongly religious and charismatic men with whom he studies or otherwise encounters on his path to popular acclaim.

The foregoing description makes the book sound strident, biased against religion, and perhaps even sexist. And perhaps dull. And while Ms. Goldstein’s own thoughts on the existence of God are not hard to discern, I must report that I did not find the book offensive in this respect and hardly polemical at all. In fact, while I used the word “drama” in the last paragraph, the novel is comic in intention and effect. I found myself smiling throughout (and even issuing that rarity, the occasional laugh-out-loud), perhaps because in my own education and life I have encountered similar characters.

And it is not dull. Even if those characters don't sound familiar to you, you can still get a kick out of this book. The writing is lively, if erudite, and there are some very fine passages the equal of any pure writing I’ve read in quite some time.

The book has two flaws, one bordering on serious, one less so. The more serious flaw is that Cass, the central character, although – yes, a brilliant academic intellectual – is weak, both intentionally (he’s kind of a schnook) and in portrayal (he’s not fully realized, although he appears in almost every scene). Goldstein can write strong, vivid male characters, both attractive and not, so it is curious that Cass is so bland. It put me in mind of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” You needed Mary to tell those stories, but the comic freight was borne by Lou and Murray and Sue Ann and Ted and Rhoda. Not that Mary was not a fine comedienne and sometimes funny in the show – just that her role was frequently to react to the spicier characters around her. That seems to be Cass’s function throughout much of this novel, although he will get off a zinger now and then. Nothing we hear from him in the book prepares us for his final tour-de-force performance.

The lesser flaw is that sometimes Ms. Goldstein forces ideas into the novel through excessive speechifying. I was reminded of another famous female atheist writer, Ayn Rand. The sometimes lengthy speeches are so lucid – on both sides of the existence-of-God question – that they are unlikely ever to have been uttered in the contexts in which they appear.

The novel concludes with an Appendix (as appeared in Cass’s own famous book) setting forth 36 arguments for the existence of God, with commentary, “flaws,” and asides. In reading some of the Amazon reviews of the book, some readers take her to task for misrepresenting these arguments, but they looked pretty neutrally-couched to me. Ah, but Ms. Goldstein is sly – I wrote “the novel concludes,” but it is unclear whether the Appendix is in fact novelistic – something that Cass himself penned in “The Varieties of Religious Illusion” – or only Ms. Goldstein’s helpful summary of the current (and ancient) debate.

Ms. Goldstein is a MacArthur “genius grant” recipient and has written on a variety of philosophical topics, including a popular account of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem (which, I was surprised to discover, I own, but which, I was not surprised to discover, I have not read). She is married to famed cognitive scientist and brainworks popularizer Steven Pinker. She’s also kinda waifish-hot, which does lead one to wonder whether perhaps she identifies with one of the hot female genius Jewish academic intellectuals in the book (who, I concede, is not a very appealing character).

Here’s where I come out: You don’t see novels like this much anymore. I drastically reduced my reading of “serious” American fiction about twenty years ago when I wearied of dull, minimalistic writing about unappealing upper-middle-class men and women and their agonizingly uninteresting lives and loves. There are signs that things are changing. Goldstein’s characters are vivid (Cass notably excepted), her prose robust and sometimes challenging (and sometimes arch). The thing crackles with intelligence and curiosity and respect for the reader. That’s plenty good enough for me.

* * *

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That Poem Again

2011-04-02T22:56:00.008-05:00

It doesn’t have to be a poem. Maybe it’s a passage in a book, or a painting. Maybe a scene in a teevee show or a movie. Maybe famous, maybe not. But it touches you somehow, you remember it. And it unaccountably pops up from time to time in your life.

Such a poem, for me, is Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach.”

You don’t have to be a poetry lover to have encountered “Dover Beach.” It is widely anthologized and betcha a lot of you read it in high school or college. Not limited in its appeal to pointy-heads, it is one of the most famous poems in the English language, and not one at which literary critics often turn up their noses, or at least not very high. (Arnold was a critic and essayist in addition to being a poet.) It was written in the early 1850’s, but not published until 1867. Although Arnold is not highly regarded as a poet today, and his other writings are mostly ignored, nobody, it seems, doesn’t like “Dover Beach.”

The question, to which I will return momentarily, is: why?

First, a note on that popping-up I mentioned in the first paragraph. Myself, I don’t remember studying this poem in high school. I think I first encountered it when I was a teenager in a marvelous Pocket Books paperback, A Concise Treasury of Great Poems, edited by the famous critic (and poet) Louis Untermeyer. Yes, here it is. 17th printing in 1968; ninety-five cents, and full of riches.

I didn’t know what it meant. But it stayed with me. I would turn to it from time to time, and the more I read it, the more I thought I got it, but I was never quite sure, and I never cared. This was decades before the Internet could reveal in a few seconds what literary analysts think it means. No matter; I always loved the poem.

Around 20 years ago, I went to live for a few years in the San Diego area. My favorite place to hang out just to sit and think was the bluff overlooking the Del Mar beach. And up and down the coast, where the beach was rockier, I remember hearing for the first time the popping and crackling of the breakers lifting and dropping small rocks near the end of the waterline. And I thought of that line from “Dover Beach” – you’ll see it in a minute – that I never quite understood, and then I did.

In those same days there was a young woman in whom I was interested. The first time I spoke with her on the phone, we were talking about favorite places, and she mentioned the sea, because it was “egoless.” I mentioned “Dover Beach,” and she stopped short – she’d been talking to some other swain just the day or so previously, who had also commended the poem to her.

And today, I was reading a marvelous novel, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, and in a central scene, the eminent professor recites from memory, and then calls for analyses of, “Dover Beach,” which the protagonist botches. And it got me thinking about the poem again.

Dover Beach, and the White Cliffs

Dover Beach, of course, is the beach at the famous White Cliffs of Dover that overlook the English Channel and, as the poet suggests, allows a view France across the straits. The most popular interpretation of the poem is that it was written at the historical juncture where scientific discovery and Victorian materialism were calling traditional religious faith into question. The poet seems to regret this, but calls out to his beloved for comfort and reaffirmation as they witness the destructive philosophical battles of the age. (It is believed that early drafts of the poem were composed by Arnold on his honeymoon at Dover.) That is certainly a credible interpretation of the poem.
The mid-to late nineteenth was an incredible time, to be sure. The theory of evolution, Maxwell’s electromagnetic theories, the explosion in discoveries in astronomy and physics – it was a tough time for traditional religion. But why would a poem with that as its subject -- if that is its subject, as it is still regarded as a “difficult” poem in some circles – be of any interest to us today?

Matthew Arnold

For one reason: It is beautiful.

I find new beauty, exquisite new artistic strategies in it, every time I read it. The phrasing, the rhymes, the punctuation, the shift in point of view, and most of all the radical shifts in focus from -- and implicit connections between -- the greatest questions of the age to the most intimate personal relationships.

This hastily-composed article is not going to be able to explain why some things are beautiful to the senses, or to the perceiving brain. Or, perhaps I could say with every bit as much credibility, the perceiving heart. It may be evolutionary; it may be godly; it may be a condition instilled by culture.

I don’t know, but I know this – meaning is important, but it is not everything. Logic and science and analysis – gotta have ‘em, but if that’s all you have then you will be undernourished indeed.

Enough. Find a quiet place and read “Dover Beach” by Matthew Arnold. In fact, read it twice.

     DOVER BEACH

     The sea is calm tonight.
     The tide is full, the moon lies fair
     Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
     Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
     Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
     Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
     Only, from the long line of spray
     Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
     Listen! you hear the grating roar
     Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
   At their return, up the high strand,
    Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
     With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
     The eternal note of sadness in.

     Sophocles long ago
     Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought
     Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
     Of human misery; we
     Find also in the sound a thought,
     Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

     The Sea of Faith
     Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
     Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
     But now I only hear
     Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
     Retreating, to the breath
     Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
     And naked shingles of the world.

     Ah, love, let us be true
     To one another! for the world, which seems
     To lie before us like a land of dreams,
     So various, so beautiful, so new,
     Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
     Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
     And we are here as on a darkling plain
     Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
     Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Just Between Us, We Each Need to be Alone -- PART 2

2011-03-31T21:54:00.001-05:00

Riddle me this: Have you ever made an important decision, or solved a difficult personal or professional problem, when you were not alone? Certain decisions, of course, are made collegially – on the eve of my tenth anniversary with The Memsahib, I’m thinking of marital decisions – but the decision to get married?

In Part 1, I regretted (more curmudgeonly than I had hoped to appear) the oversocialization of society – wow, there’s an oxymoron. Let’s make it “the oversocialization of members of society.” I regret it most keenly among the generation addicted to email, cell phones, Facebook, Twitter, and other technologies that they cannot leave alone, and which, in turn, cannot leave them alone.

It turns out that some recent studies have identified several material advantages to people of all ages – but particularly young people – to spending time alone. They’re summarized in this article ("The Power of Lonely") from the Boston Globe. Here’s an excerpt:

"But an emerging body of research is suggesting that spending time alone, if done right, can be good for us — that certain tasks and thought processes are best carried out without anyone else around, and that even the most socially motivated among us should regularly be taking time to ourselves if we want to have fully developed personalities, and be capable of focus and creative thinking. There is even research to suggest that blocking off enough alone time is an important component of a well-functioning social life — that if we want to get the most out of the time we spend with people, we should make sure we’re spending enough of it away from them. Just as regular exercise and healthy eating make our minds and bodies work better, solitude experts say, so can being alone."

Some of the specific results:

"One ongoing Harvard study indicates that people form more lasting and accurate memories if they believe they’re experiencing something alone. Another indicates that a certain amount of solitude can make a person more capable of empathy towards others. And while no one would dispute that too much isolation early in life can be unhealthy, a certain amount of solitude has been shown to help teenagers improve their moods and earn good grades in school."

My own experience is that I don’t have any notable insights, and solve very few problems, when I’m not alone. Solitude is the time for synthesizing the massive data inputs we all experience, the time for puzzling things out. Some years ago, I stumbled on a problem-solving technique which I later discovered was very close to Zen, and which a former boss of mine called my “zero-based thinking.” Whenever I had a difficult problem that seemed to have no solution, whether personal or professional, I’d examine every assumption, including the assumption that the problem was a problem to begin with. This is solitary work. Maybe not sitting on a rural bluff and staring into space, but paying attention only to one’s own thoughts – not considering the impression one is making on another, not processing one’s impressions of another, not formulating expected responses to what one is hearing or reading or seeing. Just plain old thinking. Here’s the thing – it’s fun. And you can’t do it while you’re social networking.

There’s a skill to being alone. It must be cultivated. Witness the young man or woman who discovers to her horror that she has some time on her hands. What does she do? Chances are slim that she’ll pick up a serious book or take a walk or even doze and dream. (Blogging only half-counts – it involves organized thinking (good) but it’s not private and anarchic (bad, at least for realizing the benefits of solitude).) More likely, she’ll pull out her iPhone and make a call, check Facebook, tweet a chirpy tweet. She equates aloneness with loneliness and fears it, and so obsessively socializes. (Example could have as easily have been male.) No easy fix; just do it. For young ‘uns, parents can enforce social-networking-free times and zones. Assign some reading. Require the lad or lass to keep a (non-online) diary, with assurances of privacy – you can call it an analog blog, if that will help.

An anablog, if you will.

I understand that not everyone can find time to be alone. Families exist for a reason. Children need their mothers and fathers, and vice versa; husbands and wives need one another. Employers demand that everyone work in teams. So it’s a struggle for many to find that special time to communicate solely with what’s in one’s head.

Do it anyway.

Just Between Us, We Each Need to Be Alone -- PART 1

2011-03-27T21:57:00.002-05:00

In the days – make that “decades” – before the Memsahib entered my life, I was alone a lot. I don’t know if I was alone more than most men of my generation, occupation, and location, but I believe that I was. Oh, I had some good friends and a girlfriend now and then, and if I had invested all of the money I spent in bars and nice restaurants during those years, I wouldn’t have to worry so much about the Obama administration. But while I was no Trappist, I’ll bet that I fell on the more-alone end of the scale.

The reason is pretty simple – I liked being alone. Within the borders of my commitment to the Mem – which will have its glorious tenth anniversary next week – I still do.

The reason isn't too important to the point I want to make somewhere in the next post, but I think it may have been because I was an early reader. Children these days can read by the time they get to first grade, but when I showed up in Mrs. Duvall’s classroom at Belleaire Elementary able to read at speed anything they put in front of me, I was unique (except for one other kid, Bryan Jack, a certifiably brilliant kid who grew up to be a certifiably brilliant adult, and who was tragically killed on 9/11 – another story). Not to say that I understood everything that I was capable of reading out at speed and with expression, but for a little kid I put on a pretty good show.

So, I read. I read everything – classics, kid’s books (Hardy Boys, Tom Swift Jr.), science, history, biography, modern literature, popular fiction, current events, the newspaper, magazines. Reading and the thinking it requires is done alone. It was pleasurable; I liked it, and finally grew to need it. Among my life’s highlights are, and will be, the solitary driving vacations I would take to the American West, almost always making sure that Death Valley was somewhere on the route – the best place in the world to be alone. I kept a microcassette recorder on the seat beside me, and when I had a Great Thought, or saw something interesting, I’d compose into the recorder and transcribe it later.

Not me reading; I was, however, black-and-white in those days

Was I ever lonely growing up and growing older? Oh, yeah. But I didn’t feel it very often, or very keenly, or for very long.

Of course, it is true and quite well known that excessive solitude is not good for us social human creatures. Kids need to be “socialized” through play, interaction with their parents, and group studies at school. Being alone too much can make us lonely, depressed, make us feel unattractive and unwanted. Make us be unattractive and unwanted.

In fact, the point of view that values social interaction above solitude has carried the day. We accept that “people who need people are the luckiest people in the world.” (Don’t think about that lyric too hard – it doesn’t make much sense – but you know what it intends.)

I accept this, but also regret that so few of the last generation or so, and fewer still of the present generation (which is what? the generation that makes the biggest nuisance of itself at any given time?), spend much time alone. And by “alone” I mean “not actively communicating with or being in the presence of another person known to one.” Cell phones; email; Facebook; Twitter; Skype; there will be more to come. I feel sorry for the young men and women, mostly young, who spend enormous amounts of time and mental energy communicating the most banal trivialities with no corresponding enhancement of their social skills, useful knowledge, intelligence, or any other noticeable human characteristic.

Of course, humans derive independent pleasure from the act of communicating and receiving communications – communicating is better than not communicating. Got nothing against any of these technologies; we're demonstrably better off for each of them. It’s the amount of time spent on communicating for its own sake, the communication of crap, that makes me wonder whether these folks ever have the opportunity to think, to learn things of value, to form intelligent convictions. (Yes, I understand that this assumes that some communications are crap-heavy and some aren't, and that some learning is more valuable than other learning. This assumption is correct. I'll get to it some other time.)

In short, I'm concerned that the pleasure of easy communications is robbing us of time that we need to be alone.

In my next post I’ll review some recent work on the benefits of solitude, and my own experience. Up in a few.

A Minor But, I Think, Original Theory About Elmore Leonard -- Actually More of an Observation

2011-03-19T23:42:00.004-05:00

Elmore Leonard

I have read almost everything Elmore Leonard has published in book form. All of his novels, including the westerns still in print. All of the short-story collections. I'm sure there are some early uncollected pulp-magazine short stories that have escaped me, but if it's generally available I've read it.

It would be fair to say that I am an admirer of Elmore Leonard.

Leonard writes crime novels (his westerns are much earlier works). They are distinguished from "mysteries" in that the reader knows who the good guys and bad guys are from the start.

Actually, that's a little misleading. Leonard is known for good guys who are not entirely good, and bad guys who are not entirely bad. Consider an example that may be familiar to those of you who have not dipped into the novels -- Chili Palmer, memorably played by John Travolta in "Get Shorty" and "Be Cool." Pam Grier playing "Jackie Brown." (His novels are frequently made into movies, with uneven results. Compare "3:10 to Yuma," both versions, with "The Big Bounce.")   Chili is clearly the protagonist, and clearly the guy you root for. He is also a criminal and a killer. Lots of guys like that in Leonard novels. Even the cops are a little loose. And the guys who have the conflict with the ambiguous good guy are themselves ambiguous bad guys -- attractive, frequently amusing characters even as they go about their theiving and killing, usually incompetently.   The women scheme as much, and with about the same results, as the men.

Leonard is rightly lionized for his clean, seamless prose style. He has written a short essay called his "10 Rules of Writing" that every beginning fiction writer should read, if not memorize. (My favorite: "Never use a verb other than 'said' to carry dialogue.")

The books are not above criticism. There is a sameness to his protagonists. They tend to be laconic, somewhat affectless, detached from the scenes in which they appear. They seem to be observing the action from above, knowing more than the other characters know, and certainly more than the reader knows, and dropping in when it's their turn to talk. Revealing rather little.   I'm not criticizing the artistic choice -- I'm criticizing the sameness in the characters across many of the novels. Recall, however, that I"ve read everything. So query whether this is really much of a critcism, since this method of portraying his characters is endlessly attractive to Leonard's fans. It's more of an observation.

As is what I am about to lay on you Cool Hot Centrists.

I could go up to my library and count the Leonard books I've read -- several dozen, certainly.   And I am nowhere near the Leonard fanatic that some people are, people who can give you plot summaries of every single one of them. But a dozen or so novels ago I noticed something. This was a thing I thought that devoted Leonard readers would have noticed and remarked on somewhere along the line. But I have done the Google research on this, and I find no notice of this thing anywhere.

And this thing is:

There is one phrase of dialogue that seems to appear in every Leonard novel. In the last several novels I've read, there has been an aha! moment in each one when I come to it. I have not gone back to reread the first dozen or so I read, and although I've seen it in some of the westerns, I can't vouch for its appearance in every single one of them. But I think I'm safe in saying that it's in most of the novels, if not the short stories.

At one point or other, a character says this:

"How's that sound?"

Here are some examples:

Get Shorty, character named Fay: "How's that sound as a deal?"

Tishomingo Blues, character named Darwin: "I'll give you two hundred a day for two weeks guaranteed and we'll see how it goes. I"ll pay your rigger and the cost of setting up. How's that sound?"

Stick: "Only way I see it," Stick said, "is cash up front. Two bills gets you the name of the stock. Monday the price goes up to three, and if I see the stock take off right away the price might go up even higher. How's that sound to you fellas?"

Out of Sight:   Buddy said, "It's pretty here, isn't it? If you like looking at views. I don't think you should go out anymore. I mean for a couple of weeks anyway. You got the need to do a bank out of your system. Fell of your horse and got right back on. I was thinking we could hire a boat to take us for the Bahamas for a while. Get one right at the Haulover docks, a fishing boat. Pay the skipper the going rate. How's that sound to you?"

Maximum Bob:   He said to Dale Senior, “You know where Ocean Ridge is at? You go on over to Palm Beach and turn south.” Elvin would catch himself talking loud, as if the man couldn’t hear as good with his jaw wired, and have to lower his voice. “I’m moving into a house over there, big one, right on the ocean. How’s that sound to you?”

Up in Honey's Room: “It’s mine,” Honey said. “Carl dropped me off but hasn’t any idea what I’m doing. Actually what I thought of when I walked in and saw you. Carl would love to sit down and talk to you, and if you want, you can do it. I swear he’s been told to leave you alone. You can walk up and give him a shove, he might growl but he won’t handcuff you. He’s been ordered not to” -- she was starting to overdo it -- “and I know he would love to see you again. How’s that sound? Sit down with Carl and have a drink.”

Road Dogs: Mike Nesi said, "You mean they's rules? Like I can't hang on to your shirt or stomp on your tennis shoes I get the chance? As I understand the way the game is played, you want to put the ball through the hoop and I want to stop you from scoring, right? That's the game of basketball. But if they's no ref, we don't have to worry about rules, do we? We put up a hunnert each and play to twenty-one. How's that sound? First one to score that many points takes the pot."

Road Dogs (bonus reference (different character)!): "All right," Lou said, "let's bet on it. I read about a bank job has your MO all over it, how this sweetheart of a guy made off with five gees, I swear I won't tell the cops or the Bureau or come after you myself. What I"ll do is give you the chrome-plated .45 I was awarded by my colleagues for shooting down three Haitian guys that kidnapped a five-year-old kid. They want three hundred large or they chop the kid up and send him home in a bag. I shot to kill, the only guys I felt good about donig it. I'll give you the piece and say, 'You win, partner,' and never bother you again. How's that sound?"

*   *   *

There are lots more.

Well, there's my theory. Yeah, I know it's more of an observation. I wish it were a theory. I wish it meant something. I wish I could argue that Leonard plants this phrase in all of his books (if he does) as a pointer toward the importance of sound in literature, a subliminal reminder to his serial readers that prose must have the cadence and vocabulary of ordinary speech to engage the reader.

But it's probably only inadvertent. Either that or it's the way Leonard himself talks and he's putting his own verbal habits in their mouths. Either that or it's an inside gag.

And, quite possibly, a gag that many Elmore Leonard lovers already know about but haven't communicated in Google-searchable text.

Which, in my judgment, means that it might as well not ever have been thought up at all.

So I'm sticking with my own theory, which is that you read it here first.

* * *

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Reason No. 37 that I Am Not as Nice a Person as I Would Prefer to Think of Myself As Being

2011-03-16T20:14:00.003-05:00

I apologize to you all.

Japan and the world are facing a terrible crisis.

Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands are dead.

Many tens of thousands more are homeless, have lost everything.

Rebuilding will take decades, and much can never be restored.

Japan, no stranger to the evils of radiation, is facing yet another nuclear horror.

That horror could drift our way.

The world economy will be adversely affected.

Governments may fall, and our own is exhibiting its now-familiar dithering, feckless uncomprehending reaction.

I think on these things a lot, and follow the technical news with some care, and hope with absolute sincerity that the incredibly brave Japanese workers and their resourceful technical colleagues can cool those cores in time, and intensely and truly regret the pain of those beautiful people in that beautiful country I loved both times I have visited.

And yet . . .

And yet, as hard as I try . . .

And yet, as hard as I try, as much as I attempt to scrub my consciousness, as much as I would like to think of myself as a noble and pure-thinking adult, a man worthy of imparting wisdom and displaying an ethical example to his grandsons, as much as I try to push it out, out, out, I simply cannot prevent this one additional thought from creeping into what passes for my thinking:

I hope this doesn't wake up that damned Godzilla again.

It Is Interesting, Is it Not . . .

2011-02-24T19:26:00.002-06:00

.. . . that the Libyan army loyal to Muammer Gaddafi, or Khaddafi, or however you want to spell it (ABC News collected 112 ways to spell his name), are attacking mosques where protesters have taken refuge?

So much for the sanctity Muslims ascribe to those most holy joints.

(Not a photo from Libya, but apropos)

I guess that means it's OK for us to go get the bad guys hiding in mosques, too.

My Joke Proposal for World Peace

2011-02-23T22:01:00.011-06:00

I recently read a very lengthy and thoroughly engrossing article in The New Yorker centering on a well-known world religion. This religion has the following characteristics, among others:

     -- It believes in a very colorful founding mythology that is centered on a single charismatic leading figure.

     -- It believes that a single book has all the answers and provides a complete, consistent, and correct guide to all aspects of life and death.

     -- It has millions of believers worldwide.

     -- Some of its acolytes behave as though they have been brainwashed.

     -- Acolytes are willing to suffer all manner of deprivation and degradation for their faith.

     -- It has a single leader and sub-leaders whose edicts are regarded as infallible and must be followed.

    -- Most significantly: It cannot stand the slightest criticism of its tenets. Even the most innocuous questioning of its beliefs or tactics, even parody or other humorous treatment, calls forth a variety of well-organized and severe defensive measures. These measures include mob action, lawsuits, propagandistic publicity, accusations of discrimination, and even violence. It sustains itself largely on instilling in its acolytes the belief that the rest of the world is against it, and that those who are not acolytes are condemned. Believers are expected to sacrifice enormously to advance this religion.

Nope, not Islam. Nope, not Radical Islam, if that is a different thing from Vanilla Islam (and who the heck knows? But that's another article).

You've guessed by now.

A-yup. Scientology. (You can find the article here.)

Unhinged Celebrity Scientologist Tom Cruise declaring
his love for Katie Holmes to an apparently hissing Oprah

But read that list again. It could have been Radical Islam, couldn't it? Especially that last bit about how touchy-touchy they are about, oh, you know, opposing views in a free society?

Unhappy Muslim

So here's my proposal:

Get the CIA, the FBI, the Secret Service, and Howard Stern's listeners (that last population might be the most effective) to infiltrate Scientology and Radical Islam in large numbers. Among Scientologists, they spread the idea that the greatest threat to Scientology is Radical Islam, that in fact R.I. has an active program to attack Scientology from without and within, all over the world.

Scientology Leader and Accused Serial Batterer Richard Miscavage

You're way ahead of me: At the same time, the R.I. infiltrators spread the same information about the threat to Islamic fundamentalism represented by Scientology's highly-organized, insanely-motivated worldwide cadres.

These efforts can be supported by fake websites, propaganda, YouTube, the possibilities are endless.

And then you stand back and watch these two stupendous international nuisances eliminate one another.

An Operating Thetan VII

Result: World peace.

Or, if not, at least we can go back to arguing with the Russians and the Chinese, which we seem to know how to do, as opposed to suppressing fascistic and imperialistic religions, which we seem to not.

If you want a nice tidy Cold War, you really need to be dealing with a better class of international thug.

* * *

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I Felt Kind of Silly Flying an Airline Called "Virgin"

2011-02-18T21:20:00.002-06:00

I recently flew Virgin America round-trip between DFW and LAX. My report:

First, does the “Virgin” moniker of the various Richard Branson ventures strike anyone as kind of . . . icky? When I think Richard Branson, the extremely public face of his airlines and other ventures, I think of a gentlemen who – although I know nothing of his social life, and his love life, if any, does not seem to be tabloid fodder – I strongly suspect of spending little time supporting virginity, and his entertainment interests have likely done more than their share to depopulate the world of the subspecies that possesses it. Nor do his ventures call forth an image particularly reminiscent of Roman Catholic iconography. So all this Virgin stuff seems kind of jokey to me, and I feel a little like a punch line flying Virgin America.

Especially since all of its airplanes have red tails. Come on.

All right, enough of this distasteful talk. How was the travel experience?

Pretty darned good. The Dallas end of things is particularly flyer-friendly. Virgin America presently has few flights out of DFW and exactly one gate – E20 – so possibilities of being shunted from gate to gate, or having any trouble locating one’s flight, are eliminated.

At both DFW and LAX the in-terminal staff was courteous, friendly, and nicely-turned-out, as one would expect from a hip company like VA. At LAX, the chap who was assigned to float around the computer check-in area assisting folks was positively chatty, and even upsold me an exit-row aisle seat for $30.

Flight attendants ditto. The flight to LAX featured an attractive pair of Asian sisters, supervised by a very fast-talking young black gent – very VA-ish. A couple of beauties were also working the LAX-DFW flight. No fatties. Based on my very limited ability to observe the VA work force at DFW and LAX, I am guessing that among airlines, the male FAs and customer-service guys at VA are at the more, uh, fabulous end of the scale. Announcements were warm, boarding trouble-free. Employees seemed generally happy to be working for Mr. Branson's airline.

The highlight of preflight obligations -- actually, the highlight of the entire flight -- was the instruction in seat belts, exits, water landings, and the like. There is a monitor on every seat-back, and all of that information was conveyed via some extremely clever – funny, in fact -- and quite informative animation. (I think I learned more about that inflatable vest thing than I ever have watching a bored flight attendant.) Always wondered whether the Federal Aviation Administration had to pass on some of the snappy patter I’ve heard from flight attendants trying to liven up that pre-flight spiel. The voiceover patter on this animation is snappier than most, but entirely clear and inoffensive. I enjoyed it even more on the flight back, picking up some visual gags that I missed on the first viewing.

The flight out was an Airbus 319, a smaller jet (only 20-odd rows in coach). The cabin is quite attractive, lilt with a muted purple glow, and the seats are comfortable. I was struck with how quiet this jet was. The A320 on the flight back to Dallas, a bigger plane, was even quieter.

The touch-screen seat-back monitors offer a variety of entertainment. I did not view any of it but I looked at the menus. You can shop, view movies and TV shows, order food on the plane, play games with your kids, chat seat-to-seat, and even send e-mail and text messages. (Some of these features are not yet activated but are promised soon.) I did hear a young man across the aisle say that he tried playing a game, but it was kind of slow.

Touch-screen monitors

I only noticed two problems with my flying experience.

(1) The first was not such a problem for me, but it could be for others. I mentioned those seat-back monitors. If you don’t turn them off, or use them for entertainment, they run a series of ads, many of them for recent movies. Some of these trailers are not what parents would want a child to see. (My particular codger-based problem is that I’m weary to death of the no-talent generation of non-entertaining, featureless, indistinguishable young actors and actresses in leering slacker tales.) No nudity or profanity, but inappropriate for children. So, parents and people with standards: You may want to switch off that monitor if you don’t want to use any of its cool stuff. And even if you don’t object to the content it’s beaming at you at the particular moment, if you’re doing something else at your seat (reading, composing a website article, sudoku) it is a distraction to perceive a flickering screen in the upper part of your field of vision.

(2) The control for some of the entertainment available in your seat is in the armrest. You can pop open the armrest and take it out. But if you don’t want to take the control out of the armrest, the controls are also accessible through a large hole in the armrest itself.

Monitor control removed from armrest; note large hole in armrest

Controller in the armrest, looking down into the hole

This large hole renders the armrest uncomfortable at best and useless at worst as a feature upon which to rest one’s arms. I tried to snooze a bit and the discomfort of that ditch in the middle of the armrest positively prevented it. This is not a small thing and detracted materially from the comfort of the flight.

So – not an A+, but a solid A to A- for Virgin America. If you don’t mind feeling like a punch line. Or if you have no interest in resting your arms.

* * *

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The World Is on the Brink, but What I Really Want to Talk About Is Mini-Moo's

2011-02-11T21:48:00.005-06:00

I'm an optimistic guy. I have always thought things would go my way. I think that way about the world, too. Yes, we're going through a period of smallish world leaders pretty much across the board and evil philosophies held by evil men, but I'm thinking that in the mid-run things will be OK if people of goodwill apply their good brains to matters of public importance and let their voices be heard.

But some stuff is definitely getting worse.

Thing is, they are things that should be getting better.

I've already written about the appalling deterioration of AOL Mail with each successive version, which has caused that trailblazing service to plummet into almost complete uselessness.

But what has come closest of all to destroying my faith in the entire Universe is . . . Mini-Moo's.

But even before I tell you how this product has sent me into a descending spiral of Weltschmerz, we must deal with its name, which, as you can see, is a singular possessive: "Mini-Moo's." It designates something that belongs to Mini-Moo -- or is it "a" Mini-Moo? This in itself does not make it a bad name for a product. (Think "McDonald's.") But it leaves us with the issue of how to comfortably refer to the singular and plural of this product. I've researched this.  Some people would form the plural "Mini-Moo'ses," some would say "Mini-Moos," and some would treat the word as an invariant, like "sheep," with the plural the same as the singular. I vote for that one. But it would be better if the manufacturer had just called the product "Mini-Moo." But between you and me, "Mini Moo's" will be treated as both singular and plural. If, heaven forbid, I have to use it as a possessive, I will form it: "Mini-Moos'."

And there's another problem for the careful writer: Sometimes it has a hyphen, sometimes it doesn't -- see the photos below.   And its manufacturer, Land O Lakes? Sometimes it appears as "Land O' Lakes," with the apostrophe indicating that it's a contraction of "of," and sometimes without. Sheesh.

Mini-Moo's are little containers of half-and-half for use in coffee and other drinks. They are little corrugated plastic cups covered with foil that is sealed around the rim of the cup. As noted, they are made by the good people at Land O Lakes, who put that rather fetching Native American princess on all of their products.  Don't ask me why they don't have to be refrigerated. (I know why, just don't ask me.) You have seen them in 7-11's and other places where you can grab a quick cup of coffee (my own workplace favors the Mini-Moo's):

Perfectly fine product. Excellent product, in fact. Its major competitor, the famous Coffee-mate, is OK, I guess, but it's not half-and-half -- it's "non-dairy."

Now I know most of you have used one of these products or something like it. When the item is produced, the manufacturer leaves the adhesive off a fair portion of the foil that covers that little tab. You tease at it, the foil on the end of the tab lifts a little, you seize the newly-liberated foil tab and pull toward the cup. The foil top easily peels off and you can then pour that fine concoction into your drink. The image on a box of these items portrays -- rather more dramatically than it happens in reality -- a successful peel-back and pour:

I have been using Mini-Moo's for years. I cannot number the consecutive successful peel-and-pours I have executed.

Until the last several months.

One day I was preparing my morning coffee at 7-11. Picked up a Mini-Moo's. As I had done thousands of times, I held the cup between the thumb and index finger of my left hand. With the thumb on my right hand, I scraped it lightly against the tip of that little tab, which usually lifts the unattached foil away from the plastic, and, with the thumb still moving, I prepared to bring the index finger of my right hand forward to grasp the little loose foil tab to complete the peelback.

Except that this time, the foil did not separate from the plastic. It had been glued down all the way down to the tip of the tab.

I tried it one more time. Nothing. Tried to stick a fingernail in to pop that little foil tab off the plastic. No.

Threw that one away. Undoubtedly an outlier. Possibly rare. Maybe worth some money, like a misstamped coin. Began to be sorry I threw it away.

Picked up another one. Stunned to discover it suffered from the same defect.

After one or two more, I was able to select one that was more conventionally glued, and was only happy that my coffee had not unacceptably cooled in the meantime.

Since then, I have encountered many many Mini-Moo's that are almost impossible to open because the peel-back foil tab is glued all the way down to the end of that little sticking-out tongue.

One might think this was a conscious decision on the part of the Land O Lakes people. Perhaps . . . I don't know, product security? Except that not all Mini-Moo's suffer from this inability to actually get at the product. If you grub around in the bowl of cuplets long enough you can find one that's sealed like they all used to be.

No, this is a factory issue. Either Land O Lakes has some new machinery that slathers on too much fastening stickum, or the quality assurance function at LOL (!) has suffered some unfortunate turnover.

It may seem like a small thing, those little gold-foil cups of half-and-half serially resisting my efforts to get at their creamy nectar.

But what I want to know is: If, in this marvelous world of ours where we witness the blessings of progress day after day and year after year, does the decline in the quality of Mini-Moo's after being so good for so long represent some kind of cosmic signal that we have gone as far as we can go? That it's all downhill from here?

Or . . . that I'm just wrong about the fundamental nature of reality?

And that there is, in fact, no chance at all that we can repeal Obamacare?

Elizabeth Bishop at 100

2011-02-08T08:34:00.001-06:00

Today is the centennial of one of America's greatest poets, Elizabeth Bishop.

She published very little during her lifetime, fewer than 100 poems. However, her poems are considered near-perfect. They are not obscure in the way of much modern rubbish; the reader understands every word, every phrase. While she does not have the fame of Robert Frost, her reputation among both critics and poetry lovers is equal to his -- indeed, to that of any other poet of the twentieth century.

Here is her most famous -- certainly, the most analyzed -- poem, "The Fish," published in 1946:

   I caught a tremendous fish
   and held him beside the boat
   half out of water, with my hook
   fast in a corner of his mouth.
   He didn't fight.
   He hadn't fought at all.
   He hung a grunting weight,
   battered and venerable
   and homely. Here and there
   his brown skin hung in strips
   like ancient wallpaper,
   and its pattern of darker brown
   was like wallpaper:
   shapes like full-blown roses
   stained and lost through age.
   He was speckled and barnacles,
   fine rosettes of lime,
   and infested
   with tiny white sea-lice,
   and underneath two or three
   rags of green weed hung down.
   While his gills were breathing in
   the terrible oxygen
   --the frightening gills,
   fresh and crisp with blood,
   that can cut so badly--
   I thought of the coarse white flesh
   packed in like feathers,
   the big bones and the little bones,
   the dramatic reds and blacks
   of his shiny entrails,
   and the pink swim-bladder
   like a big peony.
   I looked into his eyes
   which were far larger than mine
   but shallower, and yellowed,
   the irises backed and packed
   with tarnished tinfoil
   seen through the lenses
   of old scratched isinglass.
   They shifted a little, but not
   to return my stare.
   --It was more like the tipping
   of an object toward the light.
   I admired his sullen face,
   the mechanism of his jaw,
   and then I saw
   that from his lower lip
   --if you could call it a lip
   grim, wet, and weaponlike,
   hung five old pieces of fish-line,
   or four and a wire leader
   with the swivel still attached,
   with all their five big hooks
   grown firmly in his mouth.
   A green line, frayed at the end
   where he broke it, two heavier lines,
   and a fine black thread
   still crimped from the strain and snap
   when it broke and he got away.
   Like medals with their ribbons
   frayed and wavering,
   a five-haired beard of wisdom
   trailing from his aching jaw.
   I stared and stared
   and victory filled up
   the little rented boat,
   from the pool of bilge
   where oil had spread a rainbow
   around the rusted engine
   to the bailer rusted orange,
   the sun-cracked thwarts,
   the oarlocks on their strings,
   the gunnels--until everything
   was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!
   And I let the fish go.

Gives me the spine-shivers. I invite you to take a minute to think on Elizabeth Bishop today.

* * *

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Egypt, Israel -- and Our Grandsons

2011-02-03T20:33:00.004-06:00

The Memsahib and I are blessed to have three sensational grandsons and two more arriving in 2011. What’s happening in the Middle East is of the greatest significance for their lives, their parents’ lives and, perhaps, depending on how quickly things move, on the life of the Mem and me. I’m going to try your patience with another blast on the Egypt situations. First, it’s necessary to understand this:

Everyone is Wrong. It is almost impossible – no, it is impossible in fact – to say anything about the situation in Egypt without sounding fatuous – no, without being fatuous. Your Cool Hot Center most assuredly included. I’ve been reading up. Nobody knows anything. Nobody knows exactly how Islamist (i..e, radical) the Muslim Brotherhood is. Nobody knows how influential it might be in a successor government. Nobody knows whether Mubarek’s plan to hold elections in September, when presumably he would exit, can possibly succeed. Nobody knows anything. Nevertheless, please keep reading.

Who Are These Pro-Mubarak Fighters? It seems as though there are some non-military types who are out in the streets fighting in favor of the government. Who are they? (See above paragraph.) I do wonder whether there is a non-military, non-“elite,” non-paid-thug, dare I call it “middle-class” faction in Egypt that maybe isn’t that crazy about Mubarak but who is even less crazy about the prospect of Islamists taking control of Egypt. What other reason would a man-on-the-street Egyptian want to risk life and limb for Mubarak? Alas, they do seem like paid thugs; it appears that they’re fairly well-equipped and rather vigorous fighters.

Looters? Or Commenters on Egyptian History? Some of the fighters – I don’t know which side – have breached the Egyptian Museum. Some King Tut artifacts were damaged, as were some mummies. At this writing, the Museum is secure. But there seems to be a great fear that there will be looting of some of the great Egyptian treasures. I am quite certain that the main motivation here is criminal, and monetary, although where one fences a mummy I’m unsure. It has occurred to me to wonder, however, whether part of the motivation here is that some Egyptians find their Pharaonic history shameful – they’re tired of living under Pharaohs and don’t want to celebrate them any more.

Yeah, but What About the Muslim Brotherhood and the Islamists? In my last post I came down on the side of the anti-Mubarak guys and assuming the risk of a hostile government in Egypt. That risk about the same today as it was a few days ago. Mubarak is going to be gone – elections have been promised in his deal with the military, although why in September and not in March or April I dunno. I think it’s pretty likely that we are indeed going to end up with a radical-influenced, if not radical-led, government in Egypt, unless the military can take over and stay put. This isn’t a good thing, but if it is inevitable, geez, let’s do what we can to stick our toe in that transition. The Obama administration has dithered, and even Secretary of State Clinton has not exhibited her usual sure-footedness. But see first point – nobody knows quite what to make of all of this.

Whatever Happened to the Enlightened Despot? What is it about being a modern despot in some of these countries that requires him to line his pockets and those of his cronies while utterly devastating his people? Isn’t being a despot likely to create a real darned nice lifestyle for you and your pals without creating conditions so intolerable that they lead to exactly this kind of revolution? Not to mention the political (and in this case, religious) radicalization of the masses.

Not Too Early to Ask – How Do You Feel About Israel? Are You Willing to Go to War for It? Egypt. Jordan’s unstable. Yemen is about to go and is a snakepit of al Qaeda conspiracy. The Muslim Brotherhood is on record for Israel’s destruction and jihad against the U.S. We know about Iran. When we leave Iraq, Afghanistan . . . . If those governments become radicalized, how long will Saudi Arabia be able to hold out?

Will Israel be Poland 1939?

Israel has been a critical U.S. ally for decades. Such a critical ally, that some say it has had an influence on U.S. policy that is disproportionate to its importance. At least until recently, we have been pledged to its survival.

But folks, it is not too early to say that the noose is tightening. It is not too early to imagine Israel with not one single surrounding country with which it is reliably at peace.

I don’t need to remind you that Iran will soon be nuclear, and Pakistan already is.

And the Islamists -- and, I very strongly suspect, some percentage of Muslims who in other respects would call themselves moderate -- hate Israel and desire its destruction not because it is imperialist, not because it threatens Islam, not because its treatment of Palestinians, but because it is not Islam. And because its founding was midwifed by the victorious WW II allies and placed in their midst. I am not here to debate whether the creation of Israel in 1948 was a good idea or whether Arab perceptions are accurate. I am here to say that diplomacy is not going to change the growing Muslim fundamentalism that holds that Israel must go. I read today that the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood has repudiated the Camp David accords.

So when the missiles begin to fall – not next year, maybe not for the next five years, but maybe a decade from now, how will the U.S. respond?

Which begs the critical long-term question, really the only important question that is going to come out of this, the question for our grandsons: If the Middle East as a whole decides for Islamist primitivism, and makes Israel its first target, will the U.S. risk a world war with Islam – that is what it would be – to come to Israel’s defense?

But Wait, Cool Hot -- I Thought You Were in Favor of Regime Change in Egypt! Quite true. And of course I don’t favor a world war with Islam, and by that I mean Islam as it presents itself to the world – accurately or inaccurately – through Islamist governments. But here’s how I figure it: (1) Successful revolution against guys like Mubarak is inevitable. (2) It is inevitable that these revolutions will be fueled by anti-Western sentiments, and that there is likely to be a anti-Western cast to any resulting administration. (3) We will be better off if the anti-Westernism of the Middle East manifests itself in constituted governments that we can talk to, cajole, threaten, sanction, inspect, negotiate with. Who have real representatives to talk to. Who have some chance of exercising authority over the bloodthirstiest among them.

(Which also assumes that we will have restored and continued to elect American presidential administrations and Congresses that believe strongly in American values, that have re-strengthened our military, and are not afraid to threaten American military and economic action to ensure international security under a regime of freedom.)

If it is inevitable that the next world war – be it a fighting war or a cold one – will be with Islam in its political aspect, we will be better off dealing with people with something to lose. And maybe keep Israel safe in the bargain.

As well as those precious grandsons.

How Do You Solve a Problem Like Mubarak?

2011-01-30T19:51:00.002-06:00

Oh oh, I feel a ramble coming on. I’ll try to keep the paragraphs short so at least it will be easy to read. But ramble on with me for a bit here.

I think the current situation in Egypt presents Americans with one of the central moral dilemmas of our time. One that we’ve seen repeated frequently, and to which we have been frequently accused of having selected the wrong answer. I’m going to try to work it out for myself onscreen here. I’ll be grateful for your company.

The present dilemma is very close to the problem of the “right-wing dictatorship” that the US has struggled with for decades. It is a problem for both liberals and conservatives. It is almost impossible to guess right. Think, for example, of the Shah of Iran. A dictator. And a friend to the U.S. in a part of the world where friends are few and far between. And a bulwark against fanaticism. The U.S. supported the Shah, antidemocratic though he may have been. Then came the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Mmm, maybe not such a bulwark. Shah out, Ayatollah(s) in. Iran now not only unfriendly, but close to a nuclear state, and a haven for anti-U.S. Islamist conspiracy.

So what to do this time around?

You got yourself a prominent Middle Eastern country, Egypt. It is a large country, and could hardly be more strategically located. It has been a prize in many a war.

The leader of Egypt, Hosni Mubarak, is authoritarian (but not totalitarian), extremely corrupt, and anti-democratic. Oh, Egypt has elections, but they’re corrupt, too. He has ruled for around 30 years, since shortly after the assassination of Anwar Sadat. Egypt’s people are very poor and oppressed. He qualifies as a dictator.

The assassination of Anwar Sadat

For themselves, Americans disfavor dictatorship and oppression, and favor democracy and self-determination. As do all peoples blessed with a history of personal freedom.

Egypt is around 90% Muslim. Some Egyptian Muslims, by no means all, are known these days as Islamists, fanatical totalitarian Muslims who want to impose Islam on the entire world, through violence if necessary. While Islamists are less active in Egypt than in some other Middle Eastern countries, they do tend to radicalize the societies in which they are active, through threats of violence against moderate Muslims, if not by the persuasiveness of their ideas.

And by the way, let’s review generally what Islamists want. They believe that a a Twelfth Imam is in hiding and will emerge to save the world after a period of unimaginable chaos throughout the world. The chaos is a necessary predicate to his appearance. The Twelfth Imam will then emerge to establish a worldwide – that includes us – caliphate in which all will live in peace. There’s more, but you get the idea. This isn’t just about local self-determination. It remains unclear, to me at least, what “moderate” Muslims expect to happen and whether they feel called upon to create the chaotic conditions necessary for the Twelfth Imam’s arrival.

There is a small but strong minority of Coptic Christians in Egypt. There has been some Muslim violence against them recently. Both Muslims and Christians have participated in the recent revolt.

Egypt is not now an Islamist state or notable as a hotbed of Islamist anti-Western conspiracy.

Egypt under Mubarak is not a threat to the United States.

Egypt has reached an accommodation with the Jewish state. I can’t tell you the details, but they’re at peace and have been for quite some time.

Given the opportunity to vote, Muslims sometimes install radical governments (Hamas in Palestine, Ahmadinejad in Iran) who are powerfully opposed to America and supportive of the violent spread of Islam. And sometimes revolution goes directly from secular despot to religious despot (the Shah of Iran to the Ayatollah Khomeini). (Iran, like Egypt, is nominally a democracy, but in name only – only those who have demonstrated unquestioned fealty to the theocracy are permitted on the ballot. Like when Saddam Hussein would win elections with almost 100% of the “popular vote.”)

Meet the new boss, worse than the old boss.

So as we view recent events in Egypt: What’s it gonna be?

Support Mubarak and “stability” in Egypt because it tends to suppress the spread of radical Islam, keep Israel safe, provide some security for local Christians, and maintain a generally pro-U.S. presence at that critical world intersection, at the cost of continued economic and political oppression of the Egyptian public accompanied by massive corruption?

Or support the people in their efforts to overthrow Mubarak and introduce some measure of self-determination into Egypt, with the risk that hostile Islamists will eventually take over, destabilize Jordan (also at peace with Israel), possibly also Saudi Arabia (which has condemned the revolution), ally with Iran, and greatly increase the radical Muslim threat worldwide?

The choice, in my view is a moral one: I understand that the following is reductive, but I think it is generally fair to say that the choice is between the short-term certainty of increased freedom for Egyptians (good) and the long-term likelihood of enhanced security for free peoples worldwide (also good)?

Well, I’m going to vote.

I vote for the people and freedom and revolution, for instability and the risk of spreading Islamist influence.

My reasons are not sentimental or a hearkening back to our own American Revolution that turned out so nicely.

-- (1) There’s the obvious: The likelihood of increased freedom and better conditions for Egyptians. Won’t happen overnight, but even in the short run hope is better than hopelessness.

-- (2) Mubarak is going to lose. He has not been effective in quashing dissent, especially the Muslim Brotherhood, nominally illegal but active in Egypt.

-- (3) Is a state with Islamist elements in the government – or expressly Islamist -- worse than one where the government professes cooperation with the U.S. but cannot control the corruption that allows Islamists to conspire under government protection in the intractable interior? Is Iran worse than Pakistan? Aren’t we better off with a government to target – a hostile government that can be credibly threatened with sanctions and the threat of military attack – than with a hypocritical government nominally cooperative with the U.S. that is completely ineffective at quashing the export of Islamic imperialist terror? Aren’t we better off with an enemy we can see than one we can’t?

If Islamism takes over a government as strong and stable as Mubarak’s has been for the past three decades, its face will be revealed even more dramatically for those who aren’t already convinced by events in almost every European country. Creeping Islamism is a palpable threat in France, Germany, England, and the Netherlands, where Sharia “law” threatens liberal Western values; the slightest criticism of radical Muslim totalitarianism calls forth violent demands for silence, and even murder.

-- (4) But I’m not that worried about an Islamist takeover. Unlike Iran, this does not appear to be an Islamic revolution. It is political and economic, with some Islamist participation. The military is strong and is a fair bet to form the new government, one not beholden to the clerics.

-- (5) Mubarak is pretty bad. Islamists are never going to be happy with the U.S., but we may make a few friends by being on the side of political freedom.

On 9/11, a phrase kept going through my mind: The Middle East needs to be seriously reordered. The United States, correctly in my view, began this process in Afghanistan and Iraq. It is true that much of its effort was incompetent, but at least we live in a society that allows us to say it. Whatever the Middle Eastern “street” may think, or claim to think, about the United States, they can see that the people of Iraq are struggling towards democracy, as difficult and fraught with danger and insecurity as that may be. I’m betting that the Egyptians will not trade Mubarak for a mullah, and that in the long run, it will continue to be a force for stability in the Middle East, only this time with a population having some voice in its future – and friends of the United States.

I'm Going to Miss Keith Olberman

2011-01-23T21:45:00.005-06:00

I’m sorry that Keith Olbermann has left MSNBC.

WHAT? The worst newsman on TV?

Yes, I’ll miss him. Oh, I never watched him, except by accident whilst channel surfing looking for Third Reich documentaries, UFO documentaries, coral reef documentaries, and Errol Flynn movies. And we won’t miss him for long. Like Conan, he’s agreed to stay off TV for a few months, but some channel will surely pick him up for something or other.

I think TV news needs Keith Olbermann.

Oh, yeah, he’s awful. And don’t talk to me about Fox News and Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck and their colleagues. I don’t much care for them, either. But at least O’Reilly and Hannity (if not Beck ) can be counted on to air the other side of the issue with interviews with people with whom they disagree. Major political figures on both sides of the political spectrum sit down for interviews with O’Reilly. He shows up on programs where he can be expected to be attacked (The View, Letterman). Olbermann was a man of the left, he was always a man of the left, and “Countdown with Keith Olbermann” was relentlessly, unrelievedly leftist.

[So how do I know that Olbermann didn’t interview persons with differing views? I don’t. I was not a viewer, so I did a little research. As nearly as I can tell, when he interviews Republicans, they tend to be pretty weak marks – Alvin Greene, the extremely improbable black Republican Senate candidate in South Carolina, and silly Republican Nevada senate candidate Sharron Angle. He may have interviewed more credible conservatives, but I couldn’t find any reference to one. I can stand to be corrected on this point.]

[One more thing: When left/right content is examined in the cable news channels, Fox News consistently scores as the most balanced.]

So why do I regret his separation from MSNBC? A couple of reasons.

First, the left needs a televised place to gather. MSNBC is a perfectly good place for it, and with Comcast’s acquisition of the network, we might expect to see some moderation of its ideology. Too bad. With Olbermann gone, that leaves the clownish Chris Matthews, reliably liberal but not seriously regarded by much of anyone.

Why do we need a network devoted to advancing wrong thinking? My reason is partly selfish: With MSNBC out there, criticism of Fox News loses a fair amount of its sting. But also, this is, after all, The Cool Hot Center, and there is value to hearing from the loyal opposition. May be corny, but I believe in public debate. It’s too bad that it has to be rancorous, and I wish it weren’t, but better some mudslinging than only having one side represented. It leads to ideological flaccidity and dangerous self-certainty. We need some cross-sniping to keep the focus on the issues sharp. And let’s face it: A lot of Republicans and conservatives need to have their own rhetoric punctured and bad actors exposed. Olbermann and Jon Stewart were good at it.

Second, Olbermann personifies a lot of what is wrong with American liberalism. He’s smug. He’s sarcastic. He knows better than you. I liked having him on TV every night, reminding voters of what they don’t like about the Democrats and contemporary American liberalism generally.

So, I wish him well. I hope he gets a starring role in prime time elsewhere, although I’m not entirely sure where that would be. He is a talented broadcaster, I’ll give him that. He’s smart and quick. He’s still interested in sports – he worked one of the nighttime NFL broadcasts until MSNBC asked him to stop because it was interfering with his “Countdown” duties. And I have a recollection that he was a lot of fun to watch on ESPN with Dan Patrick. Maybe he’ll head back there, but I reckon that having had a taste of the spotlight on national issues, he won’t want to be pegged as just-a-sports-guy again.

How about a radio show, you know, on that liberal Air America network? Oh, wait.

Maybe MSNBC will release his greatest broadcasts on DVD, which the Republican National Committee can buy up and distribute in 2012.

I'm Not a Birther, but . . . .

2011-01-22T11:20:00.002-06:00

. . . hokey smokes, Bullwinkle.

I have always accepted the President's claim that he was born in Hawaii. Partly because it seemed likely, and partly because if you're a "birther" you probably also have to hang out (on the Internet, at least) with the 9/11 "truther" lunatics.

It's an important issue. If he was not born in the U.S. (given the other known circumstances of his birth, mainly his Kenyan non-citizen father), then he cannot be President of the United States. There is no available interpretation of the Constitution and related U.S. statutes (8 U.S.C. sec. 1401, 1403) that would allow it, if I understand matters correctly. His birth in the United States is, because of the other circumstances of his birth, a critical requirement. If he was not born in the U.S., he would have no alternative but to resign, or be instantly impeached and removed.

Yes, yes, even if that would result in President Biden. That's another reason I'm not a birther.

So now, the State of Hawaii, or at least it's rambunctious governor, says that there is documentary proof, if not a gilt-edged birth certificate, that proves his birth in that lovely venue. But, says Hawaii, it can't release it because of a law forbidding release of birth info without the consent of the one claiming to have been born.

So I would expect the President to prepare a letter, certified, return receipt requested, to the Hawaii secretary of state authorizing her to release that instrument forthwith.

If he doesn't, then Congressional leaders should call upon him to do it.

If he still doesn't, those leaders should investigate the circumstances of the President's birth, and subpoena it. If it demonstrates his birth in Hawaii, we're done. If not, we're back where we were.

Now, it must be said that the Constitution does not require a birth certificate or any documentation of any kind. It only requires that its requirements be met, and there is more than one way to prove that. If you're willing to take the word of Hawaii's governor that he knows Barack Obama was born in Hawaii, that's fine. That's not nothing, that's evidence of birth. It's not great evidence, but it's something. Is it enough for something this important? Not for me, but I'm willing to listen to all nondocumentary evidence of where the President was born.

The Baby Obama

I am very, very regretfully coming to the conclusion that this topic requires some kind of official inquiry, and I would be hopeful that Hawaii can be persuaded to part with what it claims to be definitive evidence on this subject.

Hey . . . do we have any baby pictures of Barack Obama taken outdoors?

GUILTY PLEASURES: "Army of One" (First of a Series)

2011-01-21T23:21:00.002-06:00

‘Fess up. We all have them.

We all like certain artifacts of popular culture that we’re supposed to like: “The Bicycle Thief”; A Farewell to Arms; Rhapsody in Blue; “Guernica.”

But in the course of our movie-watching, book-reading, music-listening-to, or art appreciation, there are those works that will never make it onto any top ten lists of achievements in their field; face it, they’ll never make onto any top ten thousand lists.

They’re your guilty pleasures. Those works – I hesitate to call them “works of art” – that are dumb, sentimental, so-bad-they’re-good, obscure, one-hit, or just flat awful by most critical standards – that you nevertheless find irresistible for some reason or another, or maybe for just those reasons. Maybe you even feel sorry for them, or the people who made them. Some of them may even have artistic merit, perhaps even considerable artistic merit, but for some reason slipped through the cracks of public consciousness.

I’m going to tell you some of my Guilty Pleasures. And I’m going to start with the one that defines the concept for me: “Army of One,” originally released in 1993 as “Joshua Tree.”

We’ll start with the cast: Dolph Lundgren, my favorite (and, in my view, a very underrated) action star; George Segal, in his most scenery-consuming performance, which is saying something; Michelle Phillips, playing an improbably beautiful alcoholic; and a bunch of others: Kristian Alfonso, Bert Remsen, Khandi Alexander, Geoffrey Lewis.

Now, I confess, it has been some time since I have seen this movie, so I have jogged my memory on the plot with some adroit Googling. Actually, the plot hardly matters, so I’ll just give you the premise. Lundren is a truck driver wrongfully imprisoned for murder, framed by a police executive (Segal). He escapes from prison and seeks justice. He gets a girlfriend along the way – by kidnaping, I think (Alfonso) – who turns out to be a po-lice. (Lundgren, so capable in many other ways in this film, selects for kidnaping (in order to get her car) a woman who has not yet put gas in the car, which obviously requires it, making it a bad candidate for an escape vehicle, especially when this kidnaping and car theft takes place in a parking lot in which several police cars are parked, with their police officer occupants standing around outside them.) Other police chase him. I’m sure that Michelle Phillips had something to do with this plot, since I remember her, but I can’t find a plot summary quickly that even mentions her. Wait, here she is nuzzling Dolph, who is acting.

Dolph Lundgren (left) and Michelle Phillips

The show starts a little slow, but if you stick with it you will be rewarded with gobs of gratuitous violence and two truly unbelievable scenes. (Well, the whole thing is unbelievable, but these scenes are unbelievable in context.) The first is a shootout between Lundgren and several dozen Uzi-wielding Asian bad guys, and even some cops, in a chop shop. It is entirely absurd – Lundgren apparently kills them all amid many explosions, fires, shooting, and paint. Paint? You’ll find yourself start to laugh and finally shake your head at the sheer over-the-topness of it all.

The second is the climactic car chase between a Ferrari F40 and a Lamborghini Countach. Surely they’re replicas; the budget for this thing couldn’t possibly have included the real things. It takes place largely in Joshua Tree National Monument, hence the film’s – excuse me, the movie’s – original name. I tell you true -- it will legitimately put you in mind of the car chase from "Bullitt." I mean, even the brief nudity uses replicas; it is pretty plain that they employed a body double for Ms. Alfonso, whose face is not shown during this -- yes, entirely gratuitous -- scene.

A warning: I saw it on TV and enjoyed it. I have read that the DVD version is not a good transcription, something to do with the aspect ratio, but I wouldn’t let that stop you if you’re looking for a couple hours of mindless pleasure, lots of asplosions, bad guys dying in large numbers, destruction of automobiles, dialogue so wooden you could burn it and make s'mores, and George Segal finally shutting up.

A final note on the fine, fine acting of Swedish muscle thespian Dolph Lundgren. If you haven’t encountered his splendid work before, you might recall him as villainous boxer Ivan Drago in Rocky IV, or the former consort of Grace Jones, or the original Punisher (a likely future Guilty Pleasure). I don’t know exactly what the note on his acting should be, just that he’s fun.

Dolph Lundgren (left) and Kristian Alfonso

And now, a final confession, which I truly regret having to make. While I urge you to seek out the entire work so that every absurd moment of it can be enjoyed without interruption and as the auteur – director Vic (don’t call him Victor!) Armstrong – intended in his artistic discretion, the truth is that you can watch the entire movie on You Tube. Just enter “army of one lundgren,” find “Part 1,” watch it, and you will see the successive “parts” show up on the right-hand side as related videos. And candor further requires me to disclose that the chop shop battle is in Parts 7 and 8, and the car chase is Parts 11 and mostly Part 12.

So get out your rosary, and check it out.

* * *

Follow Your Cool Hot Center on Twitter: @CoolHotCenter

The President's Arizona Speech . . .

2011-01-12T21:31:00.004-06:00

. . . wasn’t bad. It was, in fact, pretty good in the respects that mattered. Oh, it was too long, and he’ll probably be blamed for trying to take credit for the miracle of Congressman Giffords’s eyes opening after his visit, but he said some very good things about avoiding the quick and easy conclusions, and asserted with some heat that the current state of political discourse was not responsible for this tragedy. For that he deserves credit.

President Obama after his Tucson speech.

A couple of other thoughts:

       (1) Was anyone else embarrassed at the behavior of the University of Arizona student body? While most of the speakers' remarks were very fitting, the constant cheering and calling out of the students -- to my ear, mostly female, but I couldn't swear to it -- made the whole thing difficult to watch. I was watching the Fox News feed of the speech and the accompanying commentary, which was complimentary to the President. It was also very tolerant of the screaming and hollering that accompanied what was supposed to be a memorial.  In large measure, the cheering seemed to be a hysterically celebratory reaction to the presence of President Obama in Tucson. Not his fault, and in fact he himself seemed rather discomfited at the students’ inappropriate behavior. The Fox guys seemed to think it was – well, I’m not entirely sure what they thought, but they didn’t disapprove. If I were that university president, whatever his name was, I’d have been mortified.

       (2) The Obama Administration has certainly discovered religion. The President, Attorney General Holder, and Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano each made extensive and specific references to the Bible and the Christian God.

       (3) The President's oratorical skill has been much remarked on, and he is indeed a fine speaker. But something has changed since he last burst on the scene with his notable appearance before the Democratic National Convention in 2004.   As I said, I didn't hear much to dislike in his speech lats night, and a couple of things to like, but it rhetorically it was a pretty ho-hum speech. His delivery has been decidedly influenced by his reliance on teleprompters, and their absence last night may have had something to do with it. (I think they were absent -- I didn't see them.) He doesn't seem to know what to do with his head. He swings it from side to side, as though moving from prompter screen to prompter screen. And the content -- just OK. I tried to imagine George W. Bush giving the same speech and I found it quite easy to do. If Bush had delivered the line about the little girl splashing in rain puddles in heaven, he'd have been hooted off the screen by the MSM.

       I think there's one more thing -- he's lost his listeners' trust with his performance over the past two years. Phrases that rang in 2008 sound insincere and scripted in 2011. He's lost the benefit of the doubt, and it's been replaced by -- doubt.

       (4) I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again – at the risk of making a political point as the winds of the Tucson storm continue to swirl around us – do not underestimate Barack Obama. He made points tonight. I wouldn’t be surprised to see an uptick, maybe a material one, in his personal popularity.

       And 2012 is a century off.

So You Think You Want to Read A Novel About Vampires, Do You, Dearie?

2011-01-12T08:44:00.001-06:00

I had always thought vampires were supposed to be evil, murderous, and scary.

Then, about 35 years ago, they became exquisitely sensitive and romantic and even beautiful in Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles and were portrayed by the likes of Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt in the movies. Now, with the Stephanie Meyer Twilight series and inevitable batch of movies, they have become even more exquisitely sensitive and romantic. And still very beautiful, in a pasty, vacant, heroin-chic kind of way. While I haven't read any of these books or seen the movies, I get the impression that they can even be protective of honkies, or whatever non-vampires are called, especially cute female ones.

Well, dearie, I've got news for you.

Real novelistic vampires, and I mean vampires in real, red-meat, hard-core vampire novels, are, in fact, evil, murderous, and scary. I know this because I have read a novel called Monster Hunter International by Larry Correia, and I novelistically believe every word of it. Any novel that begins with a guy working late one night in his dreary desk job when his slovenly, loathed boss unexpectedly arrives and before long transforms into a slobbering, furious, hungry werewolf, immediately establishes its credibility with me. The book's central figure, Owen Pitt, improbably defeats his boss's efforts to kill and eat him, and this act of heroic self-defense comes to the attention of an organization -- the Monster Hunters of the title -- dedicated to suppressing outbreaks of the malign supernatural when they pop up around the world. They recruit him to join their crusade against supernatural evil, and we're off and running.

Their efforts are not limited to vampires, oh no. They also battle zombies, several species of demons, werewolves, wraiths, and the list goes on and on. (There are also some helpful monsters of the elvish variety.) The battles are violent and bloody -- although some of the bodily fluids involved aren't so much blood as they are goop.

But here's what you need to know about vampires -- they're not just out for blood and, I guess, chicks these days -- they are planning world domination which involves the end of all other nonvanpiric forms of life (although what they would then feed on remains unclear). These are bad, bad vampires, and were it not for various organizations like the Monster Hunters, our day of reckoning would have long since arrived.

The book is great fun. The Monster Hunters themselves are memorable, there's some romance, the usual friction with federal monster-hunting authorities, and the Monster Hunters organization itself has some deep, dark secrets of its own. Oh sure, there's massive slaughter, astounding violence, exotic firearms, and serial dismemberment, but the tone is breezy and comedic, owing mainly to the character of first-person narrator Pitt.

One misgiving -- although it moves along briskly, the book is too long. The mass market paperback version I read is 732 pages and could have easily stood to have lost about 150 of them.

But if you're looking for a thoroughgoing escapist read -- that is, a read that will tell you absolutely nothing about yourself, the human condition, or the meaning of the universe, then put on your body armor and lay in a good supply of paper towels and Formula 409 and give this one a whirl.

Tomorrow's Conventional Wisdom -- Today!! (CONCLUSION)

2011-01-07T22:21:00.005-06:00

More freshly-minted thoughts – actually, getting a little musty since the election was awhile ago.

[PS: I've made a strong resolution to post much more frequently in 2011 -- a larger number of shorter observations, interspersed with the longer essays. I'll be grateful if you'll check in from time to time, even if you don't receive a notification that there's anything new up. Many thanks. -- Steve.]

It’s Not the Economy, Other than Secondarily.

I have seen polls where voters said that the economy was their main concern.

I partly believe this. When the pundits talk about the economy, they focus on jobs.

Jobs are important. Real important. If you don’t have one, then jobs are the most important thing.

But most people have jobs. And most people are not extremely fearful that they will lose their jobs. More people than usual, these days, but still a long way from most. I don’t mean to be snotty about this. I can’t imagine what it would be like to lose one’s job because of economic conditions. (Heaven forbid one is also incompetent.)

I think that when most people say they are concerned about the economy, I think they mean they are concerned about what our political leaders on the federal, state, and local levels have done and are doing to it, and that it will be extremely difficult to undo. That is, they’re not worried about the current dip – they’ve seen dips followed by booms – they’re worried about the rest of their lives, worried that after years of spending and required future spending by both Republican and Democratic administrations (with the current administration the champeen), the damage will be long-lasting and hard to undo. Deficit spending, spending on nothing, spending on (certain) public employee unions for poor service, corrupt spending, spending to create and enforce niggly regulations, pork spending, earmark spending – and only a little of it actually classifiable as economically productive. So, so much of it is paying bureaucrats to do nothing more than move it around, something markets do so much better and cheaper and with less injury to freedom.

Not my intention to mount a defense of markets versus a command economy, as if they needed one. My point here is that this election was about more than short-term joblessness, to the extent it was about the economy at all. In spite of everything, the public is optimistic. The government has screwed up the economy, by commission (spending) and omission (failure to curb financial sector wrongdoing). They can tell the government to fix it. They just took the first step.

The Peckerwood Factor.

It wasn’t a Republican sweep. There’s not much accounting for California, which continues its descent into economic lunacy. And parts of the Eastern seaboard, they can’t be helped either.

But there were some other losers. Joe Miller in Alaska. Christine O’Donnell in Delaware.

Thereby hangs the danger of the Tea Party. When the population rises, there are lots and lots of slots to fill. Some of the candidates to whom the population turns are going to be peckerwoods, just like some to whom they turned in 2008 were, to put the matter kindly, more liberal than voters cared to see as they swept out the Republicans in that wave of revulsion.

(When I use the term “peckerwood,” I mean a style of conservatism that is reactionary, extremely ideological, and almost aggressively ignorant. Your peckerwoods may vote sensibly, but their manner and rhetoric is, after awhile, offputting and offensive and guaranteed to lose the center that the Republicans need. I do not use it in the 19th and early 20th century sense of poor southern whites.)

And, like the hard libs who slipped through in 2008, some peckerwoods slipped through in 2010.

The Republicans need to keep charge of these types. I don’t have any prescriptions on how that can be accomplished. Not all – I’d say probably only a few – Tea Party-supported candidates are peckerwoods. But they tend to be loud and to draw attention to themselves and paint responsible Republicans with their broad brush.

Beware the peckerwood.

Who Will Lead?

In November many of us got a lot of what we wanted.

Now what?

The Republicans considerably increased the size of their tent in 2010. Who will emerge to lead the party to 2012? Who will step forward to avoid screwing this up?

At this writing, there are no breakaway front runners. An off-the-cuff survey:

Sarah Palin: No. I’m sure I’ll be writing more as time goes by, but let me say it straight out – she is not smart enough. And there’s the odd family life, Bristol making Billy Carter look respectable. I’m not entirely sure Palin wasn’t born in Kenya. I’m tired of flaky exotics in the White House or near it.

John Boehner: Prematurely orange. I don’t know what to think about his lachrymose tendencies. I know the guy has come up from a hard life, and that’s terrific. But I’ve never heard a public utterance of his that stayed with me. He seemed to think the first two years of the Obama presidency were about lack of transparency. Not impressive.

Michael Steele: Every team needs some really, really good black guys. I’m not sure any team can win these days without excellent black guys. Well, I gotta tell you, the Democrats’ black guy is totally kicking the Republicans’ black guy’s ass. What a mediocrity – I can’t believe the party hasn’t shown him the door. You never see him as a spokesman anymore, and he’s compromised by his profligacy in office. I think the country has really grown up – we’re confident enough in our judgment, independent of race, to kick black guys out of leadership positions in both parties. (I hope.)

Newt Gingrich: Really smart, really good debater, real knowledgeable, extremely sound on the issues, but hopelessly compromised by his seamy mistreatment of his (former) wife and his condescending manner (former professor, like we need another one of those). He should have Michael Steele’s job. He could be a party leader, just not a national leader.

John McCain: No. His maverick act was always a sham and was exposed in the campaign. And let’s face it, he’s old and seems older than he is.

Bobby Jindal: Not this time. Needs some seasoning before the cameras and some serious sartorial advice. Otherwise, really like the guy.

Tim Pawlenty: The guy gets a lot of attention, but so far I’ve found him pretty Lamar-Alexanderish. Smart but in love with his press clippings.

Rudy Giuliani: A guy who runs as bad a campaign as he ran (or allowed to be run for him) in 2008 has not exhibited a model for national leadership. Having said that, I still like the guy and believe there’s a role for him. But he has to hook up with some professional campaign management that won’t tell him to hide out in Florida for two months while every other candidate is on the news every day.

Mitt Romney: Strong, but he’s going to have to deal with the crisis of Romneycare in Massachusetts. He should say something like: "I can't believe how incredibly stupid I was, and I've like absolutely totally learned my lesson, and don't you want a president who learns from his mistakes?" I don’t think the Mormon thing is a big electoral problem. Is it? Don’t have a feel for it. He needs to get out front on some current issues, though. He’s not going to look good riding Boehner’s coattails. Maybe he’s trying not to peak.

Chris Christie: Look out. A term or two under his impressive belt and he could be a guy. A mountain of common sense.

Michele Bachmann: Never seen her look bad. Like Christie, she could be a great national leader. Need to see more.

Mike Huckabee: A lot to like here. Personable, smart, not crazy-right. I’ve seen it written that his parole decisions could be a problem, but I don’t see it. Right now, my personal favorite. Not without reservations. But he seems like a reasonable man who could more than hold his own with the President in debate, and who could attract . . .

. . . the Cool Hot Center.

To All Cool Hot Centrists, a Merry Christmas or Whatever Foundational Holiday You Recognize, If Any

2010-12-24T20:34:00.000-06:00

At the Cool Hot Center, we pitch a big, big tent.

My best to you and your loved ones.

Steve

Tomorrow's Conventional Wisdom -- Coming True

2010-12-19T09:04:00.000-06:00

You'll recall that two posts ago, in a pararaph titled "Raw Numbers Underestimate the Policy Impact" of the election, I argued that the fear of the rising Tea Party tide would continue to influence lawmakers to move to the right -- or even the center, especially those up for re-election in 2012. Mickey Kaus in Newsweek reports on an analysis of the defeat of the pro-amnesty DREAM Act that pretty convincingly shows that, at least among so-called "centrist" Republicans, this influence probably caused the bill's demise.

Tomorrow's Conventional Wisdom -- Today! (PART 2)

2010-12-14T08:25:00.004-06:00

Three more hot thoughts on Politics 2010:

This Is No Time for Bipartisanship – Let the Bickering Begin; or, Don’t Fear the Gridlock. Most of the American electorate – especially in this election -- doesn’t want the parties to get along. They don’t want the parties to compromise on bad policies. They want good policies. The voters do not agree, of course, on what those good policies are. But we now have a Republican majority in the House, and a Senate that will begin to tilt away from the Obama agenda. And the reason for that majority is because the voters want the Obama/Democratic policies stopped and reversed.

Does anyone suppose that this election was about a craving on the part of voters for bipartisan compromise? No – the majority loathed the results of Democratic hegemony from 2008-2010. They truly want to turn back the clock. They (no, no, not everyone, but the people whose numbers matter) regret their vote for Obama and are counting the days when they can turn him out (unless the Republicans nominate a peckerwood, of which they are surely capable – see later entry re Republicans' peckerwood problem). The Republicans should demand reversal of the last two years of nonsense and should not back down, even at the risk of nothing getting done.

I recall college discussions with pals over whether we would prefer almost any House or Senate candidate we could think of, Republican or Democrat, over a robot who would vote NO on every single vote. (Perhaps exceptions for veto overrides and the like.) Robot always won.

Another exception would be voting yes on certain specialized legislation, such as . . . .

* * *

Republicans Must Make Every Effort to Repeal The “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act” – Policy and Politics. Stop laughing. Yes, that’s the real name of “Obamacare.” As though it ended up having much to do with patients, protection, affordable care, or care at all. Surely the most reviled single piece of legislation in memory across a broad spectrum of American voters. Legislators could not tell you what was in it. Nancy Pelosi said we’d have to pass it to find out what was was in it. The bureaucracy it promised was gigantic and staggeringly complex. And in the meantime, we were treated to the vision of government social services collapsing economies and spawning beggar classes throughout Europe who demonstrated against any attempt to turn the tide of ruin.

And, of course, the bill itself was dead on arrival save for the legislative bribery it took to pass it.

And what’s happened since?

-- Employers are cutting back and, in some cases, dumping health care benefits, and passing on higher expenses to employees.

-- Analysis after nonpartisan analysis has demonstrated its almost certain nonviability.

-- President Obama himself admits that his repeated representations that healthcare costs will decrease under his plans may have been, um, untrue.

Almost nobody believes this monstrosity can work or is even beneficial to all but a few, at gigantic expense. To believe that people will tolerate a shrinking doctor class as MDs' rewards for excellence are slashed, while undeserving patients consume vast resources -- well, there are some who do believe that. Supporters are scarce, and they seldom emerge from what is almost always a tower of academe or cosseted media position. With each passing week, public support for the thing reaches a new low.

Obamacare doesn’t need fixing. It needs to die, and quickly, before the prospect of the economic and healthcare horrors it will unleash keep one more employer from adding one more employee.

Republican candidates called for repeal during the campaign, and now they need to demand it. Make the case – get the facts out – and work for repeal without compromise. It is the correct policy move.

But would it be politically prudent? The idea of repeal is very popular right now, and, as noted in my previous article, a large majority of Senators up for re-election in 2012 are Democrats. It is not beyond imagining that a strong Republican leadership could round up the votes required for repeal.

Nevertheless, it might well be a lost cause, since the President could veto any attempt at repeal, and Republicans are a Senate minority. A majority for repeal might not be the necessary majority for override. And, as we have seen with the recent tax agreement, there are Democrats out there (in this case, socialist Bernie Sanders of Vermont) who will filibuster.

Your Cool Hot Center advises Republicans: Let them filibuster. Let them vote against repeal. Let them vote to sustain the President’s veto. As long as you fight the good fight and present a factual, supportable case for repeal – not the peckerwood case, but the sound economic, moral, and policy case, perhaps while acknowledging the need for reform in certain areas – you will be rewarded in November 2012. If you fight the good fight and lose, all it tells the electorate is that the housecleaning of 2010 was incomplete, and will energize the base for further corrections in 2012.

And, Republicans, if you don’t fight that fight, if you just nibble at the corners of Obamacare, if you try only to “reform” the beast, then you will have justified those souls who are convinced that principle counts for nothing in Washington, that anyone who goes there is inevitably compromised, must go along to get along, in derogation of the best interests of the Republic.

It’s gotta go. It or you.

* * *

No, I Don’t Miss George Bush. And I don’t feel sorry for Wade Phillips.

Tomorrow's Conventional Wisdom -- Today! (PART 1)

2010-12-07T20:54:00.003-06:00

In my first post on the 2010 election I looked back at some of the reasons given for the shocking collapse of President Obama’s coalition. It was fun to revisit the past two years of liberal incomprehension and error, but it did not meet my personal requirement that I offer the Cool Hot Centrist Nation something other than warmed over punditry of others. (I frequently warm over my own punditry.) Herewith, then, some nuggets of what I’m thinking about the next few years and beyond. Quite a bit of it consists of priceless instruction to the Republican Party. Starting with:

Don’t Underestimate Barack Obama. I’ve received criticism from some readers for noting occasionally that the man has some very admirable qualities. His policies are so bad that the temptation is strong to judge him as a bad man through and through. Never mind whether this is ungracious – it’s simply wrong. Barack Obama is smart (see my series on the nature of his intelligence – Part 1 -- Part 2). The Republicans should not take for granted that his ego will not allow him to move to the center, will not allow him to offer compromises to Republicans that they will be unable to decline. I’m not saying that I expect this to happen; I’m not saying that it is likely to happen; I’m saying it’s wrong to assume that it can’t happen because the President lacks the brains to be flexible about his principles. In fact, it is my expe ctation that, at least at first, he will continue to press his academic statist agenda for reasons I have set forth elsewhere.

[Note: This was composed before his recent compromise on taxes. See?]

It is the case that he has squandered a great deal of his personal capital through the exposure of his tendency to dissimulate. But he still cuts an appealing physical figure. He speaks very well off the cuff and from the lectern; his reliance on teleprompters has been overstated because his oratorical skills were overpraised in the past. He has a fine speaking voice – must be the smokes. I’m not being frivolous here – style points count in American politics. In politics everywhere, for that matter. Except maybe China, Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, and Minnesota.

The economy is likely to get better, as the economy almost always does.

And if he runs again (80%) and is renominated (less certain) he will be formidable in debate against any Republican candidate who isn’t highly intelligent and thoroughly prepared, or who lacks his glibness. Excuse me a moment – coughsarahpalincough.

I’m serious. Don’t forget about the debates. We (by this, I mean I and people who don’t want Obama to win in 2012) need someone who is Obama’s equal in intelligence, grasp of policy, self-assurance, and for lack of a better phrase savoir faire. (“Charisma” is overused.) I’m not sure who fits that bill in the current batch of hopefuls, but I know a couple who don’t. Beg pardon --hackbobbyjindalwheeze.

Raw Numbers Underestimate the Policy Impact of November 2. The Republican sweep was compelling everywhere except traditional liberal strongholds – the Northeast, California and a handful of outliers that I’ll consider elsewhere. It included statehouses and local races.

But the Republicans did not regain the Senate. As things stand right now, the Senate is 51 Democrat, 47 Republican, and 2 Independent. The independents are Joe Lieberman (Connecticut) and Bernie Sanders (Vermont). Sanders is a socialist – no, that’s not a hyperbolic slam, he really is a socialist. He caucuses with the Democrats.

Of the 33 Senators up for re-election in 2012, 20 are Democrats. And of those 20, not all of them are left-crazy, although they might have gone along with what they mistakenly believed was the bulletproof Obama-endorsed legislative agenda the past two years. These guys aren’t dumb – they see what happened to apparently firmly- entrenched senators like Russ Feingold. They see Scott Brown sitting in Edward Kennedy’s seat. Would you expect them to go down the line with Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and President Obama on hot-button conservative issues? Would you expect them to ignore the message rising from the entrails of the November 2 slaughter?

Personally, I would not.

It is probably too much to hope that the Republicans can assemble a veto-proof majority to do what they need to do to undo the legislative wreckage of the last two years. But even with a minority in the Senate, the right-moderates stand some chance of maintaining effective control.

Part 2 will appear in a few days.

An Old-Fashioned Read -- I Thnk

2010-11-10T21:15:00.007-06:00

Some of the most pleasant memories I have and will ever have are of browsing in bookstores. I don’t mind the the big chains, I understand why they exist and why the small independent stores, most of them, are fewer and number and don’t live long when they pop up hopefully in artsy neighborhoods. So I cherish those small ones all the more when I find one.

On our family vacation in Estes Park a couple of years ago I happened on the Macdonald Book Shop on Elkhorn, the village’s main drag. I bought Jayne Anne Phillips’s most recent novel (which I really must get to sometime) and struck up a conversation with the proprietor. I don’t often ask for recommendations, but I wanted to spend more money there and didn’t see how I could go wrong.

At this point, my dreamy recollection from the musty stacks takes a left turn, because one of the books she recommended was one of the very worst books I have ever read, and I warned you about it here. So I was not particularly looking forward to reading the other one she recommended, So Brave, Young, and Handsome by Leif Enger.

Yet I found myself quickly charmed. Turning the pages to find out what happened next took very little effort. This struck me almost from the outset as a very old fashioned novel in the former sense of the word – a novelty, an unusual tale, something that transports us into a new (that is, novel) world. I won’t be giving anything away to tell you that the novel is narrated by Monte Becket, a man living in Minnesota with his lovely wife and lively adolescent son in the mid-1920s. He wrote one successful novel and found himself unable to finish another one. He encounters an enigmatic stranger, Glendon Hale, who, after initial reticence, becomes friends with the family. Hale, who has skill as a boatmaker, plans to set off to find his first wife he calls Blue, a Mexican woman he left many years earlier, to apologize to her. Becket decides to join him, and the book is about their journey and what happens to them along the way. There are two other major characters, a young buck who is magic with horses and engines – the automobile is still in its preadolescence – and the real-life character Charlie Siringo, a former Pinkerton detective. About the plot I will say no more.

I read this book quickly to its conclusion (285 pages) and when I was done, I thought my, what a fine book. And then I thought: but what was the point? Was there a catharsis? Did the characters change? What explains its unexpected conclusion, and how does it illuminate the darker corners of the human condition? Was it intended to do so, or was I just tricked into reading something that was just a plot, a coupla guys who started out here, to whom stuff happened as they moved along, and ended up there, the end?

No, I don’t think I was duped. I felt enriched, as I do when I feel like I’ve ingested something of value and I think I will remember this book. But I will tell you that it perplexed me, and it perplexes me as I write these lines. This is one of those books that has a study guide in the back with a bunch of questions designed to guide the discussions of book clubs. I looked through them and as I did, I thought yeah, I should have noticed that.

Which makes me think that this is one of those books with hidden riches that are so skillfully hidden that I – who must read quickly and perhaps less reflectively than I should properly to honor the author’s art – would not experience them unless I worked at it. That’s not a criticism. I felt the book’s value as I read it, but I knew just as certainly that I wasn’t going to be able to articulate its lessons. But I feel that those lessons are there.

Perhaps you can experience them. But even if you don’t, it’s a fine read, and I commend it to you.

Two Years Gone: An Election Punditry Checklist

2010-11-06T23:02:00.004-05:00

In the coming days I’ll have some original thoughts on what’s coming up in the next two years and beyond. Mark your calendars.

Right now, though, I think it’s worthwhile to look back on one of the most rapid political collapses in anyone’s memory. This went far beyond the usual mid-term corrections in legislative balance. This election meant something. Something good, in my opinion, but if you don’t think so, OK. You’ve got a couple of years to see whether the voters like what they’ve wrought, or not.

What follows is not particularly original. One pundit or another (including Your Cool Hot Center) has said one or more of these things at one time or another. I’m in agreement with most of the conventional wisdom on the reasons for the spanking the Dems took on November 2. With so many plausible explanations, it is small wonder that they summed to nudge the pendulum so far from where it was in November 2008.

Think back to the avalanche of goodwill that accompanied President Obama into office. A lot of that goodwill was from folks like me who didn’t vote for him, but who admired him in many respects and hoped – maybe even assumed – that he was shrewd enough not to attempt to govern from the far left where he had resided throughout his legislative career and before.

And a lot of that goodwill came from – yep, the mainstream media.

Two years later, his coalition has evaporated, he is personally unpopular, his legislative majorities are gone (I know, the Dems still have a tiny majority, but if you were a Democratic senator up for election two or four years from now, how would you be voting?), employers won’t hire, Afghanistan festers.

How did it go so wrong so fast for this brilliant, charismatic figure of true historical significance?

Oh, it’s not so hard to figure, really.

-- The President and Congress began immediately to promote and enact a well left-of-center, big-government, union-gaga, tax-and-spend, redistributionist Euro-model agenda. The public perceived it clearly and rejected it. Check. The President has already rejected this explanation, stating instead that there was a failure of communication. I hope he keeps on thinking this, because it’s risible nonsense. The guy was on the teevee almost every day. It became a joke at our office; we have CNN on in the lobby and every time I’d walk through, there he’d be, promoting his agenda to one friendly audience or another.

It was just a real damned bad message. And, of course, you have Nancy Pelosi saying that the contents of the healthcare act could not be disclosed and that it had to be enacted before people would see what’s in it. Well, this might be a failure of communication – only problem is, the more people found out about what was really in the thing – that is, the more accurate communication the public received -- the less they liked it. Nope, there was no failure either (i) of communication other than a failure to tell the truth about the programs, or (ii) of voter understanding.

Which reminds me: I would ask those who believe that voters were misinformed or underinformed, or who misunderstood the information they received either because they’re dumb or because they got their news from Fox News or the Drudge Report – what is your view of the status of their intelligence, information, and understanding at such time as they handed the Democrats an very impressive victory a mere two years previously? Was the uncritical and even fawning Obama coverage by the mainstream media during the election (and don’t you dare try to deny it if you hope to maintain a molecule of credibility) your idea of accurate informing of the public? They were informed and smart two years ago but ignorant and dumb now? (And by the way, Fox News and Drudge were as popular then as they are now.) I need to write about this foxnewsphobia some day, but surely it must be clear at this point that Fox News whips the daylights out of its competitors (and the Drudge Report whips the daylights out of Huffington Post and dailykos.com and the like) because their reportage corresponds more closely with what their viewers perceive as reality than does the output of the now-suspended Keith Olberman, the clownish Chris Matthews, NPR, Katie Couric, David Gregory, the New York Times, and so on ad infinitim? (And I’m not a big fan of O’Reilly/Hannity/Fox & Friends.)

        -- The Democrats misunderstood their 2008 election victory as a rejection of conservatism, when it was actually (i) a rejection of Bush for his own abandonment of conservative principles (like GHW Bush before him), combined with (ii) some Bushy personality and communications deficiencies, (iii) a very weak Republican ticket, and especially (iv) a misleading media and self-portrayal of a charismatic, eloquent, historically-inevitable black guy. Check.

          -- Voters felt betrayed; Obama ran as a bipartisan moderate but was neither from the get-go. Check. He and his acolytes were so impressed by his margin and the tsunami of praise that swept him into office that he figured voters weren’t interested in him compromising the left agenda he’d coyly concealed during the campaign. This was error.

          -- The President fibs. He is mendacious about many things, including (probably) his personal composition of Dreams of My Father, but most vividly about the health care bill and the existence of “shovel-ready jobs” ready to be stimulated by the stimulus. Check.

          -- The Democrats were thuggish in enacting their unpopular stuff, strongarming it through Congress using legislative logrolling that crossed the line into spectacularly brazen bribery.   Check. Special provisions favoring five states, unions, trial (plaintiffs’) lawyers. Obama was elected to change the way Washington did business, but his allies put on the most astoundingly craven display of legislative corruption in recent memory to enact the healthcare bill.

          -- Joe Biden.   Check. The gift that keeps on giving, although Nancy Pelosi is giving him a run for his money. Tell me true: Hypothetical: Big-time terrorist attack on the US. President drops dead of a heart attack. You would prefer the vice-president be: (a) Joe Biden or (b) Dick Cheney. Mm-hmm.

          -- The President’s overseas apology/bowing tours exhibited his discomfort with the idea of American exceptionalism that most voters rightly embrace.   Check.

          -- The President doesn’t believe strongly in the international Islamist terror threat.   Check.

          -- The President doesn’t believe strongly in the dangers represented by illegal immigration from Mexico. Check and double-check. With Mexico dissolving into criminal anarchy, and with that culture osmotically creeping into the American border states, the Obama administration sues Arizona for its efforts to do something about it. Nice.

          -- This historic black racial-healer president tolerated, if not promoted, a racist Justice Department under Eric Holder, and appointed a self-racially-identified candidate, and a mediocre one at that (Sonia Sotomayor), to the Supreme Court.   Check. The Republicans will continue to press for an investigation of Holder’s disgraceful stewardship of Justice. And now we’re stuck with Sotomayor. Just this week a memorandum to the President from constitutional and Supreme Court expert Laurence Tribe (a liberal, by the way, who has long hoped for an appointment to the High Court himself) surfaced in which he advised his former student Obama respecting this self-proclaimed “wise Latina”: “Bluntly put," Tribe wrote the President, "she's not nearly as smart as she seems to think she is[.]” But nothing was going to stop POTUS from appointing a Hispanic judge.

          -- The President dithered for months over what to do in Afghanistan, and ended up neither getting out nor giving his generals what they wanted. Check. In fairness, no one is entirely sure what to do in Afghanistan at this point. But Obama, after having identified this as Job One during the campaign, seems to have lost interest.

          -- Voters did not like it when the President, Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, John Kerry, and other Democrats repeatedly talked down to them, accusing them of narrow-mindedness, misunderstanding, misperception of their own interests, ignorance, fearfulness, rejecting of science (!), and the like.   Check. This is a variation of “we didn’t communicate our programs well enough.” What they really want to say is – hell, what they actually did say was, in one form or another -- “the American voter has not understood our communications – or has unreasonably declined to accept our assurances – on the benefits of government takeover of healthcare, bailouts, cap-and-trade, increased regulation, promotion of trade unionism, etc.”   Unstated finish: because they're too dumb, afraid, etc. Well, sure, sometimes people are dumb. But they almost always know when they're being insulted.

          -- The President vacationed and golfed even more frequently than recent presidential champs in this regard. Check. The President and FLOTUS definitely love to party and vacation. Can’t blame them for that, really. But in the midst of an economic downturn, it just doesn’t play well.

-- Barack Obama isn’t all that. Charm and eloquence emanating largely from those twin slanty transparent screens that seem always to show up at his public appearances. Sorry, no check. The President remains a very impressive man in many respects.

And I’ll pick up with this thought in the next article.

Overall, however, not so terribly surprising that the electorate got out the brooms.

Consider the Buckeye

2010-11-02T21:55:00.005-05:00

One of the benefits of a childhood spent reading everything that was remotely within my reach is that I can now dazzle (and bore, and annoy) my grandchildren with my knowledge of the natural world. I bring them what we call “treasures” – fossils, minerals, shark jaws, stuff I find on the ground.

So I was thinking of them when on a downtown Dallas sidewalk, I spied what looked like a leaf, but which I knew was not. It was a butterfly with its wings folded up, only its dull brown underwings visible. It was not dead, but it was not at all well. I was able to pick it up by its wings, and was rewarded with the sight of the beautiful wings of a buckeye – my favorite butterfly from all those years ago, narrowly edging out the mourning cloak.

Buckeyes are not extremely rare, but they are hard for casual strollers to notice because they’re usually on the fly, and they’re mostly brown – they’re not distinctive, and barely visible, when they’re on the move. One of my childhood recollections is being amazed by its beauty in my triple-digit rereadings of Herbert S. Zim's Golden Nature Guide for "Insects," and one day seeing a nondescript brown butterfly whiz by. I stuck out my net and -- I couldn't believe it -- a buckeye. It was like accidentally bumping into a celebrity in line at the grocery store.

I didn’t have any way to transport the buckeye, but I decided if it were still there when I came back from where I was going, I would take it back to the office. Turns out, it was, so I put it in the bag with my purchase. I wasn’t seriously impacting biodiversity here. The insect was obviously in distress – I suspect it was hit by a car and simply stunned beyond recovery. It wasn’t going to last long on that sidewalk. It would either roast, or a bird would get it. It flapped when I picked up, but showed no interest in flying away. I took it back and put it on an Aeron side chair, pretty confident that it would not fly away, and it didn’t. I sent out an email to the firm for people to come see, and it had a number of curious admirers. It expired about a day later. I kept it and brought it home for the grandboys, who were politely impressed. Here it is:

This little shot doesn’t do justice to its beauty. I have a point I want to make about the buckeye and about the world, but I need to show you a more accurate portrait of the creature.

Look at those colors. Even this better shot doesn’t do justice to the depth of the midnight blues and purples, the cocoa brown, and those amazing burnt orange sergeant’s stripes. Look at this remarkable combination:

So I wonder whether you have the same thought about them that I do: They’re perfect. They don’t offend the eye, just the opposite – they’re delightful, they’re in harmony, they’re not fighting with one another despite their distance from one another on the spectrum.

And that got me to thinking, so let me invite you to consider along with me: Think of the most colorful, wildly piebald living thing you can imagine. I’m thinking of the wildest koi I’ve seen in my recent koi education. I think of the coral reef creatures I watch on those documentaries on the teevee. Any number of blooms. Jungle birds. Can you think of a single one that leaves you with the same impression you get when you see someone wearing mismatched colors? Some of us have better color sense than others, and I am sadly among the others (although I’m getting better under The Memsahib’s tutelage). So I address some of the more discerning among you: Have you ever seen a color scheme in nature that displeased your eye?

I suggest to you that this is not a result of sentimentality about nature – the feeling that if it’s “natural,” it must be beautiful – but because we connect instinctively with the world around us. That is, what our senses collect from the natural world define for us what “works” when we judge beauty that we have tried to create for ourselves.

It’s just a little buckeye, only a little more than an inch across. It met with some misfortune that put it in my path, unable to fly. Perhaps it doesn’t bear the weight of my mullings. But I thank it nonetheless; would like to assure it that its life acquired meaning as people who would never ever see a buckeye paused to admire it; and hope that it finds a place with the boys’ other treasures, at least until its colors fade and its scales slough away and it crumbles utterly, all as must come to pass in the natural world.

* * *

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