After nineteen inches or so of snow back on December 19-20 of last year, most of us Washingtonians had figured we had seen the last big snow dump for a while. Based on my experience we could expect to wait another five to eight years before we would get a snowstorm that would exceed a foot.
And here it is less than two months later and the snow is back, but even worse. I will let the meteorologists tell us what the official tally was. Based on trying to shovel out our driveway late this afternoon after the storm ended (and getting only about a third done) it is clear that this storm will exceed last December’s storm. Based on my shoveling, I’d say we received somewhere between twenty four and twenty seven inches of snow. Washington Dulles Airport (just a few miles away) reported received 32.4 inches of snow so maybe our actual total was higher. Areas north and east of us reportedly received more snow. So it is a good bet that this snowstorm will go in the record books, actually exceeding the crippling snowstorm that dumped twenty eight inches back in 1979 on Gaithersburg, Maryland, where I was living at the time.
As with the December storm, this one I got to ride out in the comfort of my house. Our electricity stayed on but many Washingtonians were not so lucky. No property damage for us, as best I can tell. Our next door neighbor’s purple plum tree though fell to the ground under the weight of the snow.
The storm was preceded by the usual frantic preparations that clogged roads and emptied store shelves. Friday found me nervous, because I was expected in Georgetown to have my sutures removed and the snow was to start around 10 a.m. Fortunately, we could be seen early and the snow when it did start came down wet and for some hours did not stick to the pavement. For a few hours, the storm actually made getting into and out of D.C. a breeze compared to a normal Friday. Most people just stayed home. We were able to buy food without too much trouble before the storm hit as well.
As usual, we expect it will be a few days before we see a snowplow on our street. More than likely they will do what they did last time: plow one lane and throw some sand down. This means of course that our driveway will temporarily extend six to twelve feet into the road, which we of course will have to shovel. Ah, the paradise of living in a low tax state! We are learning more of that good old American self reliance!
No question about it, it was a lot of snow and perhaps I will not live to witness a larger snowfall. Look at how the snow accumulated on our deck and you will get some idea of the volume of snow we received. I will let Mother Nature take care of the back deck. Hopefully it will be melted by spring.
February 6th, 2010 at 09:19pm
Posted by
Mark |
Life 2010 |
no comments
Tags: Snow, Weather
In case you haven’t noticed, I just love news stories about politicians that cannot keep their zippers zipped. One rarely learns anything new from these news stories, but they always amuse and entertain even though they are heart-wrenching experiences for the aggrieved spouse and family. It seems that cheated ex-wives (and ancillaries who facilitated the cheating) are competing with each other for Amazon bestseller status. There has been a whole rash of books lately. Elizabeth Edwards recently released Resilience, her tell all book about her marriage to John Edwards. Also hot off the presses is The Politician by Andrew Young, the former myopic and masochistic aide to John Edwards wherein we get all sorts of details we probably did not want to know. These include that Edwards’ bit on the side, Rielle Hunter, couldn’t be bothered to clean up a pot of spilled coffee. Why bother when there are maids for these sorts of things? Anyhow, perhaps John would have commanded Young to lick it off the floor. If pretending to be the father to Rielle Hunter’s love child was not beneath him, licking up spilled coffee off a hotel room floor should not be either. God, what a sap.
There is also Jenny Sanford’s recent book Staying True. Jenny is of course the soon to be ex-wife of South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, who earned his day of infamy last June when he was supposed to be hiking the Appalachian Trail alone but was instead in Argentina crying over losing his mistress. Good news, Mark. Within a few weeks, you will be legally able to marry your soul mate. Some how I’m betting she won’t let you come within a hundred clicks of her.
Staying True seemed like a good name for the book, for there are few things that women like to read more than stories of courageous women who take their vows seriously. Jenny may have had a philandering husband, but at least she was faithful to her vows: score! It’s hard to feel sorry for any philanderer and I certainly felt no sympathy for Mark when I learned of his indiscretions. That is I didn’t until yesterday when I read this news article.
South Carolina’s first lady says her wedding was a “leap of faith” because Gov. Mark Sanford, who famously cheated on her with a woman he described as his soul mate, did not want to include a vow of fidelity in their marriage ceremony.
…
Not having a vow of faithfulness “bothered me to some extent, but … we were very young, we were in love,” Jenny Sanford tells Walters. “I questioned it, but I got past it.”
In her memoir, a copy of which The Associated Press obtained Tuesday, Sanford writes that her groom was worried “in some nagging way” that he might not be able to remain true.
“With the benefit of the knowledge I have about Mark now, I could point to this moment as a clear sign of things to come,” she writes. But at the time, she found his honesty “brave and sweet” and thought he just had cold feet.
The first time I read this I thought, “This has to be a joke.” Apparently not. Here is the aggrieved soon to be ex-wife of the conservative South Carolina governor writing a book called Staying True for crying out loud wherein she gets to proclaim how justifiably aggrieved she is. She gets to say how important fidelity is to her in a marriage and yet she went into the marriage knowing that her husband could not promise fidelity. She found his honesty “brave and sweet”.
Oh kay… Jenny, you must have been high on something at the time and I will be charitable and say it must have been the love hormones that made you temporarily lose your mind. I applaud you for your honesty with this admission but really, anyone who bought your book should demand their money back. Yep, your soon to be ex-husband is still a philanderer and a snake. But it’s not like he didn’t warn you. Most philanderers leave their spouse in the dark until the evidence becomes impossible to ignore, you pick up a STD or they mysteriously move out in the dark of night. Here Mark told you up front that he wasn’t sure he could be faithful to you and you married him anyhow.
Now I haven’t read the book to know if there is more to this but if fidelity is so important to you that you write a book called Staying True, for crying out loud, don’t you think you should have made it a requirement before agreeing to take the marriage vows? Granted, the Guv’s stepping out on you was not right. I hope you at least had the understanding that his extramarital relationships would be in the sunshine. But it’s not like he was not up front about his feelings before marriage. Basically, the Guv was saying he too had doubts about marrying you, but when he disclosed how he was honestly feeling, you swept an issue of such critical importance under the rug.
We all make mistakes in our marriages and I know I have made plenty. This one though was a whopper. You absolutely should not have married the guy if fidelity was important to you. And you certainly should not be writing a tell all book called Staying True saying what great character you have in contrast to your soon to be ex-spouse. Maybe it should have been titled, God, I was such a Putz.
The Guv told you he was a snake. Snakes bite. You married him it appears on the expectation that through the course of marriage you could change this. Smile sweetly, raise a bunch of healthy kids and perhaps your hope was that all such concerns would simply vanish. It sounds like you projected your feelings about fidelity onto him once the marriage was underway. He probably snuck around in part to spare your feelings. Granted it was a stupid thing for him to do, but no more stupid, in fact a lot less stupid than you were for marrying him. His behavior after marriage was not decent, but at least he was decent up front about it before tying the knot.
I haven’t read what you plan to do with the profits from the book, but here’s hoping that you at least donate the money to a good charity. Here’s a spouse abuse shelter I can recommend that desperately needs your money. I’ve given them quite a handful this year as the D.C. government greatly reduced their contributions due to the recession. Perhaps this would be a way to atone for your serious lack of judgment thirty some years ago.
If you ever decide to remarry, I hope this time that you will have the good sense not to marry the dude without making sure he first agrees to a sexually and emotionally exclusive marriage with you and you alone.
February 4th, 2010 at 09:16pm
Posted by
Mark |
Politics 2010, Sociology |
no comments
Tags: Infidelity, Jenny Sanford, Mark Sanford
I woke up this morning and realized I was living in the Divided States of America.
Actually, I have known this for quite a while, but in the last week or so, it has all become so very crystal clear. Like dust on the furniture so thick you cannot see the wood underneath it, I have been sort of pretending to myself that we really do not have completely dysfunctional government. You might say this morning I awoke fully from my intellectual stupor.
Here is what is clear: Republicans will put party and wacky extremist principle before their country. In fact, so will many Democrats. It’s my tribe over your tribe. Our country can go to hell for all they care, and as long as their base is happy, it does not matter. Take the latest cause for bitching: our exploding deficits. Republicans, who were happy when they were in charge to cast votes that caused the deficits in the first place, are now all about fiscal discipline. However, they are not enough about fiscal discipline to, like, actually do something about exploding deficits like maybe raise a tax or two, or simply let a tax cut expire. That might show leadership and political weakness. It’s too scaaaary for them to go there. What would their fellow tea baggers say if they actually moved toward a middle ground?
What an irony. Instead of showing courage, they are actually showing cowardice, not to mention abuse of their public office. When a nation has two wars going on, exploding deficits, ten percent unemployment and hosts of other major problems clearly it is the job of government to come together for the good of the country. At times like these, we need a government that cares more about whether the nation holds together at all, than whether a party gains or loses seats in the next election. By digging in their heals, of course, these political obfuscators only make the situation much worse and I might add much more costly. Inaction only breeds the bigger deficits about which they claim to be so upset.
Scared of rising deficits? It’s not too hard to figure out what’s driving most of them. It’s health care costs. What gives when they rise unchecked? Pretty much everything else gets short shrift, just the way your house would if you neglected the roof and invested it all in lottery tickets instead. If you don’t fix health care, everything continues to get much, much worse. So what is Congress busy doing? It’s trying to not fix health care, even though through a reconciliation process there is an obvious way to do so. Can’t do it. Too scaaaary.
It’s too scaaaary to do lots of things apparently. Too scaaaary to stop telling our military industrial complex to make lots of weaponry we don’t need. To scaaaary to raise taxes on the wealthy back to where they were when Bill Clinton was president and we enjoyed record prosperity. Change is just so darn scaaaary, at least when it requires political compromise. It’s in to be extremely partisan. It’s scaaaary to compromise.
I do give President Obama credit for trying. He was quite brave standing in front of the Congressional Republican Caucus in Baltimore last week. He could not have been more polite and respectful. He simply told Republicans that they have an obligation not just to oppose but also to find middle ground and work on behalf of all Americans. What an idea! It appears that it was not a message they wanted to hear.
It would be nice if there were any leaders in Congress willing to move toward the middle, but it’s hard to see where they will come from because to lead you necessarily take risk. The “leadership” got where it is primarily by moving toward the extreme and eschewing political compromise. What we need is someone with a very firm paddle to move these recalcitrant assholes. They are not leaders. They are pathetic whiners too busy covering their backs to care about the country they claim to love.
It sure would be nice just to hear a tad bit of honesty from these weasels. A mea culpa would be nice. How about this for a start: “You know what? At the time we passed those enormous tax cuts, they seemed like a good idea. They were a mistake. A big mistake. I regret with my whole heart voting for them because they caused this fiscal mess we are in right now. I also regret my vote for the Iraq War. What a waste of money and precious American lives! I cannot undo those votes, but I can vow to do what is right for my country from now on. I will vote to let those tax cuts expire as my contribution to helping reduce our $1.3 trillion dollar deficit. Moreover, I will work with my colleagues from the other side of the aisle to find some middle ground to solve many of our other pressing problems, like health care reform. It’s going to hurt, but I will give a little. In return, I expect the other side to give a little too. It may cost me my party’s nomination, but this time I really will act in the best interest of the American people as a whole, not for my political base. I know this process will be imperfect, but it will be better than the mess we have now. I will not contribute toward anymore of it.”
Gosh, I would vote for someone like this if he (or she) were sincere and actually followed through, even if they were a Republican. It’s not being mavericky, it’s being a statesman. It’s called doing your fucking job.
I would like to see the leadership on both sides of Congress come out with statements like these where they honestly acknowledge their mistakes, pledge to end the pointless finger pointing and pledge to do their jobs. I would like to see the leadership arm-twist their whips and committee chairmen into following along. If necessary, I would like to put the leadership of Congress and the White House in a room with nothing but Dominoes pizzas slipped under the door until they find middle ground. Moreover, I would not let them see their spouses or their children until we have a health care bill that contains costs and covers all the uninsured, a jobs program that puts people back to work doing meaningful work and a climate bill that actually shows Americans want to join the rest of the world in surviving as a species.
Then perhaps we ordinary Americans could feel hopeful again. Most likely we would be so thrilled to see government work again, we would reward those who showed the courage to compromise. In fact, mine is a fool’s hope. Instead, our political parties appear to favor dismantling our country piece by piece than compromise on anything. And so we sink further into the muck, sinking in part because we keep throwing more muck on each other. At some point in our not too distant future, the U.S.A. is nothing will be nothing but an ugly mud pit, fit only for the partisan pigs who brought it down.
As for the rest of us ordinary citizens, we sure would like to have a government that works for us again. Unfortunately, there is no place that three hundred million of us can emigrate to in order to get it.
February 2nd, 2010 at 09:26pm
Posted by
Mark |
Politics 2010 |
no comments
Tags: Democrats, Obama, Political Weasels, Republicans
There is nothing like a long three-week convalescence to focus your mind on the impermanence of all things. Our bodies are infinitely complex biological machines. They work with freaky regularity and excellence until one day when, of course, they do not. In my case, it stopped on January 14th when I had tarsal tunnel surgery on my right foot and nerve release surgery on the right leg.
For the first week, I spent a lot of time hobbling from place to place either in crutches or gingerly on my right leg, wrapped in multiple layers of cotton and ace bandages. Since then, the crutches have been unnecessary. I walk where I need to go slowly but mostly stay indoors. The layers of cotton surrounding my leg and foot are gone. They were replaced with two layers of ace bandages on the foot, and now just a single layer. As I end this convalescence, my final accommodations are to keep an ace bandage on the foot and not to drive.
Thanks to the charity of friends and family, I have been fortunate enough to get to the office twice. Mostly I work from my dining room table using my employer provided laptop computer. Getting through our firewall at work remotely now means inserting my smart card into a USB smart card reader and authenticating myself using a PIN, although it hardly seems any more secure than using an ID and password. Conference calls are also more restful. I can hold the receiver in one hand while lying on the couch. Dagwood Bumstead would love working from home. Yet, despite its creature comforts, I still prefer the familiarity of the office.
As regular readers know, it is my belief that I have a soul, there likely is an afterlife of some sort and I am probably stuck in some circle of life, death and rebirth. Billions would probably agree with me. Millions would not. The latter believe that life is a highly improbable cosmic accident and the consequence of billions of years of evolution. When death arrives, all the lights go out. My friend Wendy, as well as one of my brothers, are in this group. For those of us who find life worth living, nonexistence is a depressing thought. However, because of my surgery, I am thinking maybe death (or non-existence) is not such a big deal. Maybe it means nothing at all. Instead, maybe we may choose to give it a status far larger than it deserves.
Life and death are interwoven into the universe whether we like it or not. As the Buddhists and others have long asserted, the only constant in the universe is change, so you might as well accept it. There are larger forces at work that can be lumped into one world: reality. Time is real, or is at least an aspect of living that cannot be denied. Even stars are born, age and die. Sometimes when they die, they throw their detritus out into the universe in the form of more complex matter. We are all literally the product of this star stuff. Moreover, we are destined to return to star stuff. Some part of our matter and energy was once in a star somewhere. Our matter and energy will once again be part of a star someday. In that sense, we are immortal and have been since the universe was created.
We have all already traversed the universe. Should mankind make it to another solar system someday, we will simply be retracing our inorganic roots. We are not just tied to our planet and solar system; we are tied to the universe. If some day we warp around space like they do in Star Trek, we are not exploring strange new worlds, we are returning home.
During my surgery, I was under general anesthesia for about two hours. Clearly, I did not die in those two hours. Whatever anesthesia I was given had the property of shutting down my consciousness for those two hours (or gave me the inability to recall any of it). I remember being on the surgical table and then, just as in death, the lights went out. Two hours later I was in another room, I was awake and the lights went on. During those two hours, I assume I was alive, but I might as well have been dead. Those two hours of non-existence, which might be more accurately described as an inability to remember anything or to act in any manner whatsoever, perhaps prove a point made by my atheist friends and siblings: death really does not matter.
While fear of death seems to be a human characteristic, perhaps it is all wasted energy. Not that it is easy to do, but perhaps we would all be much happier if we spent our time alive concentrating on living and forgetting all about death. After all, you cannot change the fabric of the universe or its rules. We are all caught in this incredibly complex space-time matrix. If being unconscious during my surgery is any guide, death, which for us humans seems to equate to non-consciousness, really does not matter.
Being infirmed of course matters, as I discovered. Dying matters as well as it is a progressively worse state of being infirmed. In either case, you are losing your tether to your known reality. Our species takes comfort in the known, safe and predictable. In my case, I missed the comfortable ritual of driving to and from the office, and inhabiting an office with a nice view of the Shenandoah Mountains five floors up. Working from home with one foot propped up was convenient and facilitated my recovery, but was awkward and different. Hobbling around in crutches for a week was also difficult, inconvenient and at times painful. It is understandable that I would have some petty grievances over my convalescence. However, when it ends on Friday, I should be back to better health than I was before the surgery. I hope that my life will become more comfortable and less painful.
I take some comfort in this expectation. I also take some comfort in the experience of being unconscious during my surgery, because the universe is also teaching me a lesson: neither my lack of consciousness during surgery nor death in itself are worth worrying about. Hopefully I will fully absorb these lessons and live my remaining life to its fullest in the time ahead of me.
January 31st, 2010 at 01:25pm
Posted by
Mark |
Philosophy |
no comments
Tags: Death
When like me you don’t watch much TV, you don’t have to be worried about being sucked into the latest TV miniseries. I knew about the Horatio Hornblower miniseries, but because I don’t watch TV I had only caught part of one episode on TV when it originally aired, and that only was because my sister told me about it. It was much more convenient for me, more than a decade after the first episode aired, to sit down and watch all eight episodes in a row over a few days while I convalesced.
Like with most miniseries, there is a mental disconnect between what you read in the books and the miniseries. My mental imagining of Horatio Hornblower was little like Ioan Gruffudd’s portray. Director Andrew Grieve’s version of the famous fiction 19th century British naval captain took some getting used to, but overall I very much liked it.
If there is a problem with the miniseries, it is that it covers the least interesting parts of the novels: Hornblower’s career starting as a midshipman through a commander. C.S. Forester actually started with the fifth book and wrote the novels that constituted his early years much later. To put it kindly, I suspect that like me most readers would agree that the latter half of the series was more interesting than the first half. This is in part because a naval captain can have a much more interesting time than a midshipman or lieutenant. The good news is that in the unlikely event that more of these adventures will make it onto film they should only get more interesting. This is because the finest novel in the series is probably the very first written, Beat to Quarters. The TV series ends just as Hornblower is promoted to Post Captain. Moreover, since Gruffudd is aging along with the character, if someone could produce Beat to Quarters, Gruffudd would be just about the perfect age to portray Hornblower, as Gruffudd is 36.
Turning a book into a TV series always involves a number of deviations from the books. If you have read the series a half dozen times like I have you will notice plenty. In spirit, the series is faithful to the series, and perhaps that’s what counts the most. The naval battles were rendered much better than I anticipated, as was life aboard a British naval ship at that time in general. If you watch the DVD extras, you realize the producers actually had to construct a frigate as well as a number of other ships. This is not an easy thing to do these days, as frigate building is something of a lost art. Moreover, constructing 19th century naval vessels is very expensive. So the same ship stands in for a number of ships because to really show the variation of naval ships would have been cost prohibitive. For example, most gun decks were below the main deck, not on the main deck. The ship in the TV series also looks suspiciously new and overly clean, which in fact it was at the time. Although sailors did their best to keep their ships shipshape, in reality most British naval ships of the period were creaky and barnacle encrusted.
Most of the characters are dead on. I particularly like Robert Lindsay as Sir Edward Pellew and Paul McGann as Lieutenant William Bush. Bush is a recurring character in the later novels. He becomes Hornblower’s sturdy and dependable right hand man. As for Gruffudd’s portrayal of Hornblower, his Hornblower shows a streak of friendliness as well as humanity that was absent in the books. In the books, we knew Hornblower felt this way, but he considered it unmanly to actually behave this way. In short, Hornblower becomes likeable, rather than the isolated and removed character portrayed in the books. As Forester made clear, Hornblower was a secret humanitarian (and by today’s standards would be a liberal) but in the British navy of the 19th century where discipline was foremost, it was frankly not allowed. Just as if you were a gay, you kept your humanitarian instincts deep in the closet.
It seems unlikely that more episodes will be made. After sponsoring eight episodes, A&E finally figured out they were too expensive to continue. The good news is that Gruffudd loved playing Hornblower and would be glad to make some more Hornblower movies. Presumably, he needs some underwriters. Sign me up to buy a few shares of any future Hornblower movies. It would be a pleasure as I age to watch Gruffudd act through the best part of the series. All the remaining books deserve to make it to film. Given the constraints of miniseries, they were not the epitome of a Hornblower realization for the screen, but they came close. My hope for a proper Hornblower movie with this cast is likely to remain a fantasy.
If you haven’t seen the series of eight you can always buy the DVD set, of course. By the end of the eighth episode, Duty, like me you might feel crestfallen that there simply are no more episodes to enjoy. The good news is that if you have not read the books, you will have the pleasure of reading them.
January 29th, 2010 at 07:50pm
Posted by
Mark |
The Arts |
no comments
Tags: Horatio Hornblower, Navy, Television
When you are convalescing and your domain does not extend much past your driveway because you cannot drive a car, you eventually end up watching DVDs and online movies. So here are some mini-reviews of movies I have seen while holed up.
The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill but Came Down a Mountain (1995)
The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill but Came Down a Mountain certainly is an odd movie that is supposedly factual. It takes place in the fictional Welsh village of Ffynnon Garw, which is based on the actual Welsh village of Taff’s Well. There is a mountain just outside the village, or is it just a hill? Everyone assumes it is a mountain and boasts about their mountain (“The first mountain in Wales”) until during the First World War, two Englishmen come by to survey it for the government. One is Reginald Anson, played by the devilishly handsome Hugh Grant. Apparently, the RAF needs to know to make sure their planes don’t fly into it. The distinction between a hill and a mountain is apparently whether it exceeds one thousand feet. The village is crestfallen to discover that their mountain is sixteen feet below a thousand feet. Their village pride drives them to extremes, so they begin a major landscaping project to bring sod up the hill and make it big enough to qualify as a mountain.
There are a number of memorable characters in the movie, including Morgan “the Goat” (Colm Meaney). While the men are away at war spends his time bedding most of their wives. There is also the Rev. Robert Jones (Kenneth Griffith), the revered village vicar who feels called by God to make the village hill a mountain. Anson and his colleague end up boarding in a room at the tavern, and meet up with Betty (Tara Fitzgerald), whose job it becomes to distract the men while the villagers try to turn the hill into a mountain. In the process, the country girl Betty and city boy Reginald fall in love. Overall this is a gentle movie that feels quintessentially British, although really it is quintessentially Welsh. For a movie, its premise does not sound marketable but it is at least unique. Overall, it is likeable enough movie, worthy of a rental if you enjoy gentle romantic movies. As a light romance, it hovers somewhere between a B and an A. So I give it a 3.1 out of four stars.
The Last Detail (1973)
I remembered seeing The Last Detail when it first came out but it obviously did not make much of an impression because all these years later I decided to watch it again. It might have been my first R rated movie, which, if true, meant I passed myself off for seventeen. The movie has only three characters of note, all enlisted U.S. sailors: Billy Buddusky (Jack Nicholson), Mule Mulhall (an African American, played by Otis Young) and Seaman Larry Meadows (Randy Quaid). Billy and Mule have a temporary detail to haul Meadows to a naval prison in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Their journey by bus and train from the naval station in Norfolk takes them through many of the cities in the northeast.
Nicholson only plays one kind of character, so Buddusky is the smart-ass world-wise sailor. He feels sorry for Meadows, who was sentenced to eight years for trying to steal from the commander’s charity fund. Meadows is hopelessly naïve if not stupid, and is also a virgin. Buddusky convinces Mule to make their trip north a long one to make sure Meadows has a good time and gets laid before being locked in the clink for eight years. An unpretentious and gritty movie, it looks like it was not directed at all. Mainly the movie feels like a movie wherein Nicholson gets to do what he does best: be kind of oily and repulsive. As you might expect, Nicholson chews up the scenery, leaving the other actors more like bit players than supporting actors.
Their adventures include a New York whorehouse, observing some sort of vaguely Buddhist chanting ceremony and a wasted trip to the house of Meadow’s mother in lovely Camden, New Jersey. Although in color the movie feels like it is in black and white as it is typically murky outside. Moreover, the scenery in the bus depots and train stations are as ugly as these three sailors. Overall, I wished I had not seen the movie again and should have realized I had purged it from my brain for a reason. Frankly, it’s not that good and I’m surprised IMDB.com viewers give it 7.5 stars. Perhaps this is the sort of movie only enlisted people can appreciate. If you have to see it, take the time to find the late Gilda Radner as an extra in one of the scenes. This was before Saturday Night Live and she was an unknown. Otherwise, avoid. My rating: 2.5 out of four stars.
The Answer Man (Arlen Faber) (2009)
I generally enjoy a light romance so figured The Answer Man would pleasantly kill ninety minutes or so. While certainly not a bad romance, it’s not a good one either, principally because of Arlen Faber (Jeff Daniels) is a character not unlike Billy Buddusky, and is hard to love. The movie must have been renamed because IMDB shows the name as Arlen Faber. Perhaps it was renamed because the movie did so poorly in the box office.
Faber is a thoroughly annoying author who twenty years ago wrote a book where he reputedly had conversations with God. It sold millions of copies but turned him into a recluse. He hides in an attractive row house in Philadelphia. About his only contact with the outside world is his agent Terry (Nora Dunn), who is trying to get him to appear on the 20th anniversary of the publication of his book. In fact, Faber never had conversations with God. He made them up, and when he truly needed conversations with God because his Dad was dying of Alzheimer’s disease, the big guy stayed silent.
Shortly after the movie starts, his back gives out. He ends up (literally) crawling down the street and into Elizabeth’s (Lauren Graham) newly opened spine clinic. He immediately is enchanted with Elizabeth. Arlen’s only hobby seems to be trying to get rid of copies of his many books. He tries to give them away to a young twenty-something bookseller named Kris (Lou Taylor Pucci). Kris is recently out of rehab and is back living with his drunken father. He tries to manage the bookstore but it is failing and it looks like he will lose the store. The three sort of come together because they all have Arlen in common. Elizabeth and Arlen sort of fall in love, then sort of fall out of love, and Kris’s father dies suddenly. Arlen tries to be a father figure to Elizabeth’s boy. It’s all way too predictable. As much as I tried to imagine that Elizabeth and Arlen might fall for each other, I just couldn’t make the connection.
The movie is mildly amusing but truly nothing special as romance movies go and five times easier to figure out than the typical light romance, which means the movie is very shallow. You don’t need to avoid The Answer Man but there is no particular reason to seek it out either. If looking for a light romance, pick something else off the shelf. 2.8 out of four stars.
January 26th, 2010 at 08:40pm
Posted by
Mark |
The Arts |
no comments
Tags: Movies
In case you haven’t heard, not only does Massachusetts have a new senator-elect, but Virginia has a new Governor. Bob McDonnell, your typical grey haired white Republican male with a toothy smile and a blonde arm candy wife was sworn in a week ago. He won election by promising no new taxes (a position few find hard to argue with) but also by promising all these new services. Yes, he has a four billion dollar budget hole to fill, but somehow he’s going to cut spending and add services. This includes increasing funds to the Virginia Department of Transportation, which is already decades behind where it needs to be in providing sufficient roads to handle Virginia’s burgeoning population.
Good luck with that, Governor McDonnell. Not that I am wishing you any bad luck or anything, but you are hardly the first governor, Republican or Democratic, to promise all these magical new services without raising any additional taxes. In a way, it’s an easy promise to make. After all, you don’t have to worry about reelection. Virginia governors can only serve one term.
I guess it wouldn’t work to tell voters the truth: that state services, already cut to the bone, have zero fat in them already. To close the four billion dollar gap outgoing Governor Tim Kaine outlined, most residents are going to squeal when they see what it actually means. Virginia’s total budget is around $38 billion, so $4 billion is hardly a drop in the bucket and amounts to about ten percent of the budget. I doesn’t take an accountant to figure out that if you are not going to raise taxes, you are going to add services and you already have a large projected deficit, then you are going to have to further cut services somewhere. You already promised to give more money to transportation and increase the portion of state money given to fund teacher salaries. The only problem is that both the easy and the hard cuts were made years ago.
How crazy has it gotten? The last cut to VDOT budget was $42 million from the road maintenance fund. How much is Fairfax County getting from the state for road maintenance this year? Zero dollars. That’s right, despite being the most prosperous county in the state as well as providing more tax revenue to the state than any other county as well as tons of revenue in gas taxes which is supposed to go for things like highway maintenance, we will get zero dollars for maintenance. So either we just let the potholes get bigger or we raise county taxes to pay to fix potholes which hitherto has been at least partially a state responsibility.
Now as a frequent driver, I’m all for changing this, so I think it’s great that our new governor is going to add to VDOT’s funding but I just don’t see where the money is going to come from. Education, health and human services, and transportation, in that order, are the biggest consumers of state tax dollars. It doesn’t look like education will be cut, unless it is subsidies to state universities, which have already been dramatically reduced and have students howling over their tuition rate increases. You say that transportation will get more funding which leaves human services as a likely place to use your budget knife. These services of course have already been pared to the bone. It’s hard to see how you reduce spending more there. It’s not like Medicaid is optional. It’s a nice gesture that you and your senior staff are going to be taking pay cuts, but that’s all it is and will do almost nothing to address a four billion dollar shortfall.
As best I can tell, you are pinning your hopes on two scenarios. One: the overall economy will improve to the point where more tax revenues come in. I would not take that one to the bank at least for a year or two. The other is your hope to sell oil leases off Virginia’s coast in 2011 and using some of that money to fund the state budget. I’d say the odds are pretty long there too. First, you have to get the federal government to agree to do this. Second, you have to hope that oil companies will be willing to front the money. Lastly, you are assuming that environmentalists won’t tangle this up in the courts for years.
So good luck governor but as Virginia is not licensed to print money, it’s pretty easy to see what’s going to give. Since you promised not to raise any taxes, it likely means that our overstretched state services are going to be more overstretched, which is to say the state will have to stop doing stuff that states typically do and we’re already pretty much giving up on road maintenance. I think it is much more likely that you will find reason to consolidate prisons and let non-violent prisoners out early in an attempt to make your budget math work. You just have to hope Virginia voters do not notice. As costly as prisons are, you still won’t be able to cough up four billion dollars in savings from them.
One promise I can make is that when you leave office in four years we will be lucky if our transportation funding is where it is now and our public school teachers do not have an extra four or five pupils in their classes. As for my fellow Virginians, shame on us for falling for these lies once again. Just once, I’d like to hear a Republican run for office promising no lower taxes and fewer services because that’s what it always means. Virginians would be well advised to buy extra heavy-duty shock absorbers for our cars. There will be many bumpy days ahead.
January 24th, 2010 at 07:35pm
Posted by
Mark |
Politics 2010 |
no comments
Tags: Bob McDonnell, Republicans, Taxes, Virginia, Virginia Politics
Perhaps it is just winter, always a dark time of year. Or perhaps I have spent too much time reading Joe Bageant who lives life without the rose colored glasses on so well he makes my head groan. Republicans winning a special election for Ted Kennedy’s seat didn’t help either. I am finding it hard to escape the feeling that our species is toast. We are rearranging the deck chairs on our Titanic. The ship is going down but conventional wisdom is it is good somehow. “You know, we are ten feet deeper in the water than we were an hour ago. But it’s good. It gives us more ballast. Gives the crew something to do pumping out all that bilge water. Another margarita anyone?”
Then terrible tragedies like the Haitian earthquake occur that reinforce that not only are bad things happening all around us but also that they are getting worse. The human toll from the earthquake is but a wild estimate at this point, but 200,000 deaths seem to be the current working number. For many Americans, or at least some Americans like that usual jackass Rush Limbaugh, it’s like who cares about the freakin’ Haitians? Oh, and by the way, Obama is using this for his political advantage. But what else would you expect from Rush? This same guy checked into a hospital in Hawaii recently complaining of chest pains. Of course, he used it as an opportunity to gush about how we have the most wonderful health care system in the world, at least for self insured multimillionaires. As for the rest of us, well since we are not multimillionaires I guess we don’t count. In Rush’s mind, we’re just Haitians. If a 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck downtown Washington D.C., Rush would doubtless be calling for us to do no more than bulldoze the whole city under. God bless his compassionate soul.
Our world is rapidly devolving into the dystopia Neal Stephenson chronicled back in 1992 in his prophetic novel Snow Crash. Unable to afford to live in our own homes, or even an apartment, how long will it be before we, like Hiro Protagonist, call a room in a U Store It home. In fact, newspapers periodically chronicle people in my area doing just that. Ask any homeless Haitian and they would be thrilled to call a room in a U Store It a home. At least it is clean and in many cases heated. Those Haitians who are still alive are fleeing the capital Port-au-Prince. Tent cities full of refugees are emerging, but international aid can address just a tiny portion of the overwhelming need. Those who survived for the most part cannot find clean water and food. If the earthquake didn’t kill them, perhaps the cholera and dysentery which will soon be rampant will do the trick. It sounds like it would make Rush Limbaugh happy.
Meanwhile, Pat Robertson believes Haitians made a pact with the devil. That’s why they died in such large numbers. Seriously. This is what religion can do otherwise sensible people. And this guy somehow runs his own university. I guess that long established fault line running though Haiti had nothing to do with the earthquake. Or God told all the sinners to build houses right above it. Any illiterate and starving Haitian has more sense than this Robertson fool, including those who believe in Voodoo.
The sad reality is that hardly anyone without relatives in Haiti gives a shit about Haiti. We do our best to keep Haitians out of the country so their impoverished relatives won’t join us in the states and lower our property values. To the extent that we have cared over the years, we have used Haiti as an experiment in our capitalist values. Organizations like the International Monetary Fund loaned money to Haiti then turned the screws, making repayment virtually impossible.
It’s not like in the best of times their lives were not already miserable. They have the lowest standard of living and life spans in the Americas. They also sit in the middle of hurricane alley. When hurricanes arrive, like earthquakes, they tend to collapse an already fragile infrastructure. Now this: half of the buildings in and around the capital are destroyed or unusable. Of course, they could be rebuilt to modern building codes. Think that is going to happen? In your dreams! Building codes take money you can’t afford living on a dollar a day or less, and Rush Limbaugh certainly doesn’t want to give the ingrates any more. As for Robertson, it would be the same as giving money to the devil. After a year or so, we will have largely forgotten all about their plight, but they will still be as miserable and hopeless as always. Incredibly, when there seems no possible way to make their lives any more miserable, a subsequent disaster proves us wrong.
No, we will soon go back to ignoring Haiti, as will most of the world, because we will need to become xenophobic. As the health care debate has demonstrated, in America we believe in every man for himself, come hell our high water. We are not far from a time when we will leave the uninsured bleeding to death outside our emergency rooms because we won’t want to shoulder even their emergency room costs. With our national wealth quickly moving overseas to countries like China, America continues to be one big fire sale. Soon we are going to emerge from our collective hangover to discover that we are no longer a first world power. This is what happens when you neglect your infrastructure and human capital costs long enough because you are intoxicated by ever lower taxes. The whole neighborhood just goes to hell. We will realize that we can no longer afford our military, our international commitments, or even Social Security and Medicare because our creditor China says we can’t. And that means when we have no more means to beg or borrow, we move toward second-class status, which is sort of like Mexico. America will become a harder, meaner, more intolerant, more polluted place that will border on anarchy. The gated communities will go up just like in Snow Crash, but this time there will be armed guards patrolling the fence and manning the gates.
What we can do, like almost every country in the world, is keep adding recklessly to our population, which today guarantees a lower standard of living. More natural wilderness is transformed into ugly sprawl. With more mouths to feed, we have more reasons to punt issues like global warming because trying to maintain our standard of living will always trump over serious action on the environment. We are already there. The social contract is fraying. Living on social security alone means you are living in wretched poverty. At best, so long as you do not get sick you can afford to inhabit that trailer somewhere. However, there won’t be enough left over to fix that hole in the rusted trailer roof, let alone buy your heart medicine.
I see it in my own in-laws. To the extent they have a middle class lifestyle, it is thanks to a reverse mortgage on their house in a burb outside of Phoenix. It was not worth that much to begin with and is worth even less now. Most likely their equity is gone. When their air conditioner broke down, they were looking under the sofa cushions for money to get it fixed. About the only thing they can count on is Medicare and getting that monthly social security check. They allow them to exist, but certainly not to live. It’s been more than a decade since they took a real vacation. Instead, you eat light and watch a lot of Fox News.
A chain always breaks at its weakest point. In the western hemisphere, that has traditionally been Haiti. The conditions that caused Haiti are leaching all over the hemisphere. This includes here in the good old United States of America. As is well documented, in the 2000s when we had the bliss of Republican rule, our wages stayed flat, our net worth declined, our stocks lost value and we added no more jobs to the economy. Naturally, upper class Republicans did well. Their plan worked great, for them, as it always does because they are experts at screwing those who make less than they do and getting applause for doing so. Those jobs that we did add were at Wal-mart instead of IBM. However, our waists expanded. Perhaps that’s progress. All that extra eating and lack of exercise though helped cause health costs to explode.
No wonder that these days we prefer to escape reality, if not in traditional vices like booze and drugs, then, like Hiro Protagonist, in our virtual worlds in cyberspace. There we make our own pretend reality. We kill demons online in multi-user role-playing games while our first world status crumbles around us. It’s true in the U.S.A. but is also worldwide: collectively we have exceeded our resources which means we are all driven to figure out how to get a bigger share of a smaller pie. We already sense the truth. There is no magic technological fix. Anyone whiz bang new technology invariably brings with it other hidden costs. Nuclear power begat vast quantities of nuclear waste and tragic nuclear accidents. More recently, our new compact fluorescent lights carry the burden of all their mercury vapors, most of which leaches back into our already toxic atmosphere.
We are doomed and we are in denial, but in Haiti, denial is not an option. Eventually we too will have to acknowledge the truth. If we ever reach that point, it’s unlikely that we will be able to summon the nerve to actually change our situation for the better. Instead, we’ll be eyeing our neighbor trying to figure out how to make his life more miserable so we can profit from his misery. This is the new American way: ask not what you can do for your country; ask how you can profit at your neighbor’s expense.
We should weep not just for the Haitians, but also for ourselves for Haiti is our destiny too. The more we deny our connection to Haiti, the worse it will be for us and the sooner we will share their misery. We have already laid out that path in front of us.
January 22nd, 2010 at 09:02pm
Posted by
Mark |
Politics 2010, Sociology |
no comments
Tags: Debt, Economy, Haiti, Second World
It’s hard to have a Democratic Party when a significant number of “Democrats” refuse to, well, stand up for Democratic principles. For me this is the all too obvious conclusion from yesterday’s special election, which saw Republican Scott Brown wrest Ted Kennedy’s old Senate seat. Brown campaigned vowing to kill health care reform, the cause for which Kennedy said he devoted much of his public life. Kennedy should be churning up the earth there in Arlington.
Yep, that’s what it amounted to because there are plenty of Democrats in Name Only (DINOs) out there. By now, you know who they are. “Independent Democrat” Joe Lieberman. Nebraska Senator Ben Nelson. Arkansas Senator Blanche Lincoln. North Dakota Senator Kent Conrad. There are plenty of them in the House as well. For these “Democrats”, being a Democrat means never having to tow the Democratic line when it gets the least bit risky or inconvenient. Their real interests are easy to see: they look out for the interest of those who are keeping their reelection coffers full.
The way it is supposed to work is that the Democratic Party stands up for the middle class, the workingman and the disenfranchised. This is because clearly the Republican Party won’t stand up for them. In reality, most Democrats in Congress will put their reelection before principle. You win reelection by being milquetoast, not by being controversial. You want voters to barely know who you are but you also want enough money in your campaign coffers to scare off any real challenger. What you really want are most of the voters to be apathetic and stay at home so you win by default. After all, the money is good, the perks are wonderful and the health insurance is great. Too bad the working class people in your district or state will not have the same privileges.
Voter anger in Massachusetts was visceral. Voters were not voting for Scott Brown because they agreed with him. They are angry that despite a year of having veto proof majorities in Congress, Democrats have done so little for them. Why reward demonstrated incompetence? The banks and Wall Street were bailed out. They were laid off. The best thing Congress did for them was extend their unemployment and COBRA benefits. Living on food stamps and moving into your parents’ basement is not “change you can believe in”. You need a job that pays a living wage. If you want to make the people who voted for you happy, you need to pass legislation that actually improves their lives. You can do it when you actually have veto proof majorities in both houses of Congress. That is you can do it unless those majorities are mere paper majorities. When push came to shove, we clearly had paper majorities. Instead of change we could believe in, we got endless dithering from both houses, but more so in the Senate and a weak tea health reform proposal that smelled so bad it was hard for anyone to like it.
The truth is that Senate Democrats really did not want health care reform. That’s why they were busily engaged in dithering it to death. Real health care reform takes nerve and will. In short, it is politically risky and ticks off those who are funding your reelection campaign. It is so much easier to engage in endless debate rather than actually accomplish something. In truth, most Senate Democrats are relieved that Brown won Kennedy’s seat. Now they have an excuse for inaction, which is where they prefer to be. The back peddling on Capitol Hill today is a sorry sight to see but oh so predictable.
It’s days like today that make me ashamed to be a Democrat. Franklin Roosevelt would not recognize his own party. No party really represents the working class anymore. Both parties claim to be all concerned about the working class, but not enough to do anything to actually improve their lots in life or address the increasingly serious problems that are beyond any one individual’s ability to control.
The solutions are hard and require risk, will and determination. If Republicans can have their tea parties, Democrats can and must have theirs, with similar passion but without the blatant bigotry and nonsense. They might start by calling out assholes like Joe Lieberman in public meetings. In actuality, it has been underway for years, but it obviously needs to be accelerated. It involves nominating and electing real Democrats, the sort that have demonstrated they have stood up for the working and middle class time and time again, the sort who do not wilt under pressure or compromise their principles for the sake of expediency. It means we need a party of Howard Deans and not Ben Nelsons.
The illusion was nice while it lasted, but if our blinders were on, they are now off. It’s real Democrats we must have to have real change, not a party full of DINOs. We have to nominate and elect the ones with fire in their souls and determination in their bellies. If a “Democrat” in Congress cannot stand up for the working class and the middle class when it counts, he or she is useless.
In 2008 Democrats merely got to the crest of the hill. In 2010, it’s clear that there is a much larger and higher mountain ahead of us and the barbarians (the Republicans) are manning the path to the summit. Only the dedicated and hearty are going to get us to the top so government can actually work for the people again.
January 20th, 2010 at 08:06pm
Posted by
Mark |
Politics 2010 |
2 comments
Tags: Democrats, Scott Brown
I am trying to retain a positive attitude during my convalescence. Rather than look at my recovery as a drag, I am looking at it as a reason to do more self-education. One of the things I have been doing is reading Deer Hunting with Jesus by Joe Bageant.
Admittedly, reading this book is depressing as all get out. Author Joe Bageant frames the book in a town where generations of Bageants were born and bred: Winchester, Virginia. In the thirty years I have lived in the Washington metropolitan region, I have never visited Winchester, although it is only about an hour’s drive away. I had no reason to visit Winchester, nor was it on my way to somewhere else.
Winchester is like Binghamton, New York where I spent my formative years. Within its town boundaries, Winchester has about 25,000 people. Around 122,000 people live in the greater area. The City of Binghamton has around 47,000 people but add in the nearby communities of Johnson City, Endicott, Vestal and Endwell (where I grew up) and you get a similar sized area. According to Bageant, the one constant in Winchester has been its Rubbermaid factory, where generations of its working class residents have toiled. The plant is still there. The same cannot really be said about the Endicott Johnson Shoe Corporation in Endicott, New York. When I was last there in 2000, all the former factories, which for generations manufactured lower end shoes and sneakers, were idle. There was something resembling a corporate Endicott-Johnson office in a small building along Main Street. Also gone is IBM. During the time I lived near Endicott in the 1960s, Endicott was a manufacturing hub for many of IBM’s business class computers and processors. Essentially, Endicott is no longer manufacturing anything as evidenced by its crumbling roads and mostly empty downtown.
Unlike Endicott, which has had its soul torn apart when EJ and IBM left, Winchester has done a little better. The Rubbermaid factory is still there. Since the truck corridor of I-81 runs through Winchester (as it does Binghamton), the town also makes some money from truckers and tourists passing through. Working class men and women can get jobs in and around Winchester, but they are not great jobs. Bageant makes clear that today’s working class in Winchester are worse off than their parents who sweated through similar low-end jobs.
For example, Rubbermaid used to offer real middle class wages, benefits and a pension to its employees. Those days are long gone. Winchester remains a workingman’s city, but now jobs are particularly precarious and real wages are lower. Yet, its working class soldiers on because it must. Winchester is a city full of the white working class. They are the sorts who if they are not working at Wal-Mart are shopping there in what feels like a futile effort to make their $8.59 an hour wage stretch a little further. It is a city where the working class survives on their wits. For the vast majority of folks, you work two or three jobs to get by. No job or combination of jobs is likely to provide a ticket to the middle class. Most folks are but one major medical mishap away from financial ruin. It’s hard to build up a medical savings account when you are in arrears to a couple credit card companies already.
Winchester is the sort of place I might well have lived, worked and died in had not I been a bit more fortunate. According to Bageant, my family would be the exception in Winchester. Although my mother had working class roots, both my parents had college degrees. Moreover, my siblings and I assumed we were destined to end up in careers, not jobs. Yes, we sweated through our own working class jobs prior to (or in some cases during) college. We have a basic understanding of what this life is like. Our experiences informed us that this was a life to be avoided, if possible.
Bageant understands the white working class intimately because this is how he grew up. What makes Bageant unusual is that he awoke from his working class stupor. He also became a gifted writer. Through the prism of his experience, I can subsume myself into the world of Winchester’s working class. I can taste the draft beer at the Royal Lunch diner where Bageant hangs out with his kind. I can peer (however indirectly) into the souls of these people. Moreover, with Bageant’s help, I can see their world through their resigned and pragmatic eyes. It is a world where continually dodging life’s many landmines informs folk much more than some fancy pants education. It is an area where the gun feels as natural as the many sidewalk ministries in the town. It is a place where the town’s elite can keep the working class forever in control. For Winchester’s working class are largely unable to marshal the combination of family support and financial resources to really escape this lifestyle. Moreover, if you told them this was the only way they could escape, they would berate you for your silly liberal notions.
According to Bageant, the working class in Winchester earnestly believe that somehow by applying themselves just a little harder they will reach the next economic rung, despite mountains of evidence that it takes a supporting infrastructure of family and community for all but a handful of us to reach that next rung. It is The Big Lie they tell themselves which is also endlessly fed to them by their politicians. It causes them to vote for Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush or more recently Bob McDonnell, who yesterday was inaugurated as Virginia’s latest Republican governor. Naturally, McDonnell is preaching the same old tired Republican soap that has yet to work: that he will somehow do much more with much less and in the midst of a recession to boot. Winchester will be lucky if its Rubbermaid factory does not end up in Mexico, where many of its other factories have gone over the last few decades.
If I feel like I do not understand their lives very well, the same is true with them and my life. I would feel awkward drinking beer with the locals at the Royal Lunch diner in Winchester. They would feel just as awkward bellying up at a local sushi bar or buying wholly organic food at a Whole Foods. In Bageant’s case, he got lucky. Remember The Great Society? Those of us of a certain age will remember. Back in the 1960s, President Lyndon Johnson earnestly tried to right longstanding class inequities. A few like Bageant were the beneficiary of the social experiment that for the most part failed in its goals. Thanks to some grants courtesy of The Great Society and despite the considerable odds, Bageant went to and graduated from college as well as did a stint in the Navy during the Vietnam War. Those who attend a good college, like Bageant, finish with not only a degree but also with a true education on the complexity of our messy world. You might say the lens of his life opened up for Bageant, courtesy of Lyndon Johnson.
About ten years ago, he felt the need to return to his roots in Winchester. The result was this book, a seminal work on the working class unseen since the death of Studs Terkel. It takes those of us without the experience inside the lives and minds of the working class rednecks. As uncomfortable and heart wrenching as it is, it should be required reading for every progressive. For until we truly understand the Bubba’s of this world, any changes we try to make to society are likely to be merely window dressing.
Bageant lays it all out for us. I hate to admit it, but Bageant is right about gun control. In the past in response to incidents like the Virginia Tech shootings, I have railed about the need for gun control. Bageant blows quite a few holes into the myths about gun control, while perhaps selectively ignoring a few pertinent facts. He points out statistics that show how many intruders are actually deterred because of the presence of a gun in a household. He documents how homicides in places like New York City have decreased as the rate of gun ownership has gone up. Where Bageant may have a blind spot is in dismissing the number of homicides facilitated among people who are related to each other because of the presence of guns. Where Bageant is unfortunately dead on (no pun intended) is the futility of even trying to control guns. It is like trying to put a genie back in the bottle. It simply cannot be done, no matter how much we might wish it so. We might as well wish to change our eye color. Guns are part of our national DNA and will be for at least many generations to come. If it happens at all, it will be long after any of us reading this are dead.
Gun control is really a knee jerk and ill thought out response to a much more daunting set of institutional and societal problems that Bageant outlines with a painful clarity that is hard to criticize. To truly move our country and our planet toward a sustainable future, we must be able to persuade people like the working class people in Winchester to embrace real change. As Bageant makes clear, the hour is very late and the odds are very long. For the rednecks of America have centuries of Calvinist Scots Borderer breeding in them. They do our nation’s dirty work for us, almost reflexively making them easy for politicians to manipulate as long as they pander to their fundamentalist beliefs in the sanctity of God, guns and autonomic patriotism.
Bageant’s book is really a series of long essays about who our puppet masters are, how they got in charge and why we let them remain in charge. Liberals as well as rednecks are at the hands of these puppet masters. Identifying who they are, understanding how they are manipulating us and developing the skills to actually change these institutional forces will give us the ability to create real and meaningful changes. More on this in future posts as well as more analysis of Bageant’s thoughtful book. Stay tuned.
January 18th, 2010 at 11:14am
Posted by
Mark |
Politics 2010, Sociology |
no comments
Tags: Joe Bageant, Rednecks, Winchester VA, Working Class
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