Month: August 2012

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Professor Sullivan’s Faux Pas

A professor named Prof. Gregory F. Sullivan was showing a video (the article in NY Times doesn’t say if it was a film or video) in his classroom at Merchant Marine Academy in New York the other day. After he turned the lights out, he said “If someone with orange hair appears in the corner of the room, run for the exits.” That’s it. That’s what he did. That is the entirety of the controversy.

Mr. Sullivan did not bilk thousands of people out of their retirement savings. He did not buy thousands of rounds of ammunition at a gun show, for no obvious purpose. He didn’t launch a failed war on a foreign country on the basis of falsified intelligence documents. He didn’t provide a legal justification for torture to the U.S. justice system. He did not pollute anyone’s drinking water or steal the oil under someone else’s property or destroy any wildlife habitat.

Now, just because someone did not do a number of enumerated things wrong does not mean that what he did was not wrong. I’m just curious about our public culture that destroys the careers of people like Anthony Weiner and Eliot Spitzer while allowing the people responsible for the banking debacle to continue to make huge profits destroying other peoples’ livelihoods without consequence.

While somebody gets all hysterical about a lame joke like, “If someone with orange hair appears in the corner of the room, run for the exits.”

Professor Sullivan did not know that the father of one of his students died in Aurora in the attack by the orange-haired Mr. James Holmes. When he found out, he immediately apologized to the student.

So what’s the big freaking deal? Why are they now talking about firing this prof? For a single tasteless but inoffensive remark? What is offensive about the remark? It’s a lame joke, without the slightest overtones of anything that would be unduly offensive to any identifiable minority, except, maybe people with orange hair.

People need to get a life.

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Ayn Ryan

“Even as House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s budget would impose trillions of dollars in spending cuts, at least 62 percent of which would come from low-income programs, it would enact new tax cuts that would provide huge windfalls to households at the top of the income scale. New analysis by the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center finds that people earning more than $1 million a year would receive $265,000 apiece in new tax cuts, on average, on top of the $129,000 they would receive from the Ryan budget’s extension of President Bush’s tax cuts. The new tax cuts at the top would dwarf those for middle-income families. After-tax incomes would rise by 12.5 percent among millionaires, but just 1.8 percent for middle-income households. Low-income working families would actually be hit with tax increases.” The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities

We should always be disturbed when liberals and conservatives rejoice at the same the news. Or at least wary.

Do conservatives believe that most people would support a far right conservative fiscal policy if it was honestly and openly presented to them? I think they do. I think they are very mistaken. I think it was no accident that George W. Bush did not campaign on a policy of cutting taxes on the rich and making war on Iraq. That was his agenda, but he campaigned on tax cuts for everyone, improving education, and drilling for more oil. The only thing he actually achieved, aside from destroying the entire world economy, was the tax cuts for the rich, which he didn’t advertise. Republicans never announce those tax cuts as tax cuts for the rich. They announce “tax cuts for all Americans” and then only cut taxes for the rich and then, having created a massive deficit, they announce program cuts for the poor. Now, with Ryan, the target is Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

Social Security, by the way, is perfectly solvent. Social Security is this incredibly rational little plan to have employees and employers each put a certain amount of money into a fund every pay period for a person’s entire working life. When this person gets old, he is able to draw from this fund to live off of. Can you imagine a more rational social policy? It’s positively ingenius. Does it work? Hell yeah! No government or private policy in the history of the world has reduced poverty more than social security.

And no conservative policy is more sinister than the one to destroy it. Conservatives say, we can’t have it. We can’t allow people to benefit from rational policies. We must destroy them! Because, you see, we all pay in to Social Security. Even if you are rich. Even if, like Mitt Romney, you are so rich, you will never need Social Security.

The massive current government deficit– Bush inherited a surplus from Bill Clinton and immediately converted it into a deficit with his tax cuts for the rich and wars on Afghanistan and Iraq– is seen by the Republicans as the best opportunity in years to try to convince Americans that we can’t afford Social Security or Medicare.

I think about that a lot. If the Republicans are right, we live in a world in which millions of people must live in poverty without medical care of any kind. That is the only possible outcome of Republican policy in this area.

The real “death panel” is Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan planning to gut the only health insurance plan for poor Americans.

I don’t really see the logic of Paul Ryan as Romney’s running mate. Obama and Romney are running neck-in-neck among decided voters and the only way either of them can win is by winning a majority of the independent voters. Who these independent voters are is a bit of a mystery: who, in his or her right mind, in this election, could possibly still not know how he or she is going to vote for yet? What are they waiting for?

What is clear is that they are not ideologically committed, so they are not going to warm up to Romney because he chose an extremist as running mate. Ryan plays well to a constituency Romney already owns: the hard right. He is not going to play well to seniors in Florida, women in Pennsylvania, blacks in Michigan, or Hispanics in Colorado. He has nothing for any of them. He doesn’t really have any thing for white working-class Americans either but they don’t seem to understand that. “If you vote for me, I’ll wack you in the face with a spiked two-by-four.” “I’m in.” “Plus, you get a chance to go overseas and get paralyzed by an ungrateful Arab.” “Woo hoo! Can’t wait.”

By the way, don’t buy all this horseshit about Ryan being the “intellectual” heart of the Republican Party. He is a hack: someone who has absorbed something of the language and style of policy but, in the end, draws absurd conclusions that are completely rooted in his fervent emotional beliefs– not in science or rationality. I believe Romney will soon find himself backing away from Ryan’s budget and his other positions. [Aug 28, yes he is.]

That’s why it’s a bit hard to stomach Romney/Ryan claiming that they are the ones who want to have a serious discussion of the issues in this election. It’s always good strategy to accuse your opponent of your own cardinal vice, especially if you can do it before you become identified with it.

There could be a good debate. There is a fundamental issue at stake in this election. Is America a nation in which citizens pull together for the common good, or in which every person looks out for his or her own interests. The only flaw in this debate is that the Republicans don’t mean it, and they never did. They talk about self-reliance and individual responsibility but that’s for you and me. Once they get into power they fall over themselves cutting lavish tax breaks– which are subsidies in everything but name– for their corporate puppet masters, buying up bushels of new, hi-tech weapons systems from other corporate puppet masters, and shifting more and more of the tax burden on the working classes. This is not personal responsibility: it’s a plutocracy.

And of course, neither Romney nor Ryan served in the military: that is a personal responsibility conservatives invariably offload onto the shoulders of credulous patriots, while they hire the brass bands and salute the flag with contrived expressions of piety.

 

2012-08-10

Index

“Even as House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s budget would impose trillions of dollars in spending cuts, at least 62 percent of which would come from low-income programs, it would enact new tax cuts that would provide huge windfalls to households at the top of the income scale. New analysis by the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center finds that people earning more than $1 million a year would receive $265,000 apiece in new tax cuts, on average, on top of the $129,000 they would receive from the Ryan budget’s extension of President Bush’s tax cuts. The new tax cuts at the top would dwarf those for middle-income families. After-tax incomes would rise by 12.5 percent among millionaires, but just 1.8 percent for middle-income households. Low-income working families would actually be hit with tax increases.” The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities

We should always be disturbed when liberals and conservatives rejoice at the same the news. Or at least wary.

Do conservatives believe that most people would support a far right conservative fiscal policy if it was honestly and openly presented to them? I think they do. I think they are very mistaken. I think it was no accident that George Bush did not campaign on a policy of cutting taxes on the rich and making war on Iraq. That was his agenda, but he campaigned on tax cuts for everyone, improving education, and drilling for more oil. The only thing he actually achieved, aside from destroying the entire world economy, was the tax cuts for the rich, which he didn’t advertise. Republicans never announce those tax cuts as tax cuts for the rich. They announce “tax cuts for all Americans” and then only cut taxes for the rich and then, having created a massive deficit, they announce program cuts for the poor. Now, with Ryan, the target is Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

Social Security, by the way, is perfectly solvent. Social Security is this incredibly rational little plan to have employees and employers each put a certain amount of money into a fund every pay period for a person’s entire working life. When this person gets old, he is able to draw from this fund to live off of. Can you imagine a more rational social policy? It’s positively ingenius. Does it work? Hell yeah! No government or private policy in the history of the world has reduced poverty more than social security.

And no conservative policy is more sinister than the one to destroy it. Conservatives say, we can’t have it. We can’t allow people to benefit from rational policies. We must destroy them! Because, you see, we all pay in to Social Security. Even if you are rich. Even if, like Mitt Romney, you are so rich, you will never need Social Security.

The massive current government deficit– Bush inherited a surplus from Bill Clinton and immediately converted it into a deficit with his tax cuts for the rich and wars on Afghanistan and Iraq– is seen by the Republicans as the best opportunity in years to try to convince Americans that we can’t afford Social Security or Medicare.

I think about that a lot. If the Republicans are right, we live in a world in which millions of people must live in poverty without medical care of any kind. That is the only possible outcome of Republican policy in this area.

The real “death panel” is Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan planning to gut the only health insurance plan for poor Americans.

 

All Contents Copyright © Bill Van Dyk 2012 All Rights Reserved

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Geronimo: the Movie

Mr. Hill, telling why he had to fiddle with facts, said: “The audience doesn’t go to a movie for a history lesson; it wants entertainment. At the same time, they don’t want something that trashes history; so it’s a delicate line.” Ny Times, December 5, 1993

It is a very delicate line. The line, unsaid, is “audiences want the illusion of something serious and historically accurate without actually having to make the slightest effort to learn anything or to actually think beyond stereo-types and clichés: we cater to the audience’s prejudices; let’s leave education to the schools.” No no– we say they want to be “entertained”.

Firstly, the idea that maintaining a semblance of historical accuracy when using historical events to titillate audiences could cause boredom is utterly untrue. It’s not boring: it’s just not titillating and comforting.

Or I could say, “it’s just entertainment”. Not art. Not serious.

But that overlooks the fact that the changes made to make it more “entertaining” are often not related to action or visualization or sound or any of the aesthetic traits of the story. For example, the Hollywood film about the capture of the Enigma machine made the submarine American instead of British. Does that actually increase the entertainment value of the film? Not artistically. But it opens the film to an audience of small-minded parochial viewers who don’t really care about history at all.

Geronimo did something sickeningly awful. During one of his raids, he took a young white girl and hanged her, alive, on a meat hook.

John Milius wrote this incident into his original script for the movie but it was deleted in re-writes. Milius might argue that leaving incidents like this out distort the picture of Geronimo given to the viewers of the movie. That is true. You could argue, however, that it is in the nature of movies that single events can become sensationalized, and can assume an importance out of proportion to other events, like the slaughter of women and children by the U.S. Calvary and by white settlers. You could make that case.

Late in life, Geronimo became a Christian. He then spoke about how well-treated he was by “the white-eyes”, which he contrasted to the treacherous Mexicans. Is the fact that he became a Christian related to his whitewash of American-Indian relations? If so, that is a very, very sad comment on something.

Second Lieutenant Britton Davis, a man with very respectable credentials, described Geronimo thusly: “This Indian was a thoroughly vicious, intractable and treacherous man. His only redeeming traits were courage and determination. His word, no matter how earnestly pledged, was worthless.”

That seems about right, in respect of the historical record.

As much as we would love to see shades of gray here, the Apaches were a violent, ruthless tribe that raided neighboring tribes and peoples for livestock and goods, and brutally murdered anyone who got in their way– before they were themselves tricked and destroyed by the powerful Americans.

Geronimo died of pneumonia in 1909 after he fell off his horse and lay in a cold ditch over night. Do not consider the fact that he was stoned out of his mind at the time.

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The Effete Olympics

I have not been a fan of the Olympics for many years, though I love a good sporting contest, and have to admit to being a fan of the Blue Jays.

When the Summer Olympics are in this hemisphere, they are usually in the U.S., and the jingoism of the home side is hard to take. When they are in Europe or Asia, there is tape delay, which results in this bizarre parade of edited events. Obviously, the networks believe that most people do not have the patience to actually watch a sporting event from beginning to end if it has already ended– with all the little delays and formalities and suspense– so they package everything into a facile narrative without much colour or real suspense.

Here’s the winner. Now an interview with her parents who have, with the assistance of a consultant, prepared a “narrative” to sell you about this athlete, which will then be packaged and resold by Nike and Gatorade.

NBC, by the way, cut away from the portion of the opening ceremonies that honored the victims of Britain’s own 9/11, the subway bombings, because, rightly or not, they didn’t think American audiences would care. This is either a ringing condemnation of Americans or of NBC or both. It was an emblematic decision, a defining moment of gracelessness, ignorance, and narcissism.

The CTV commentators at the rowing and gymnastics are appalling. There is not even the slightest pretense of anything other than a bellicose ranting for the home side. And all rather gay, to be truthful. They all talk like nagging, proud, invested parents, always referring to the athletes by their first names, and offering unsolicited advice about how to compete– as if, after training for fifteen years, there was something their coaches forgot. You really need to get a life of your own.

Why are the empty seats so offensive? Because everyone knows how the Olympics works. City officials, other government officials, politicians, washed-up athletes, and various other parasites pick your pockets to pay for this extravaganza and then reward themselves with the choicest seats: the empty seats that I’m looking at right now are in the front row of the soccer stadium where Canada is playing Great Britain. Lovely. They didn’t even bother to show up– there will be lots and lots more freebies to indulge in later.

There is a compelling drama in every really great sports narrative but not necessarily a good narrative in every drama.   No matter– the broadcasters will invent one where none exists: the athlete overcoming tremendous odds with hard work and determination (they never credit talent because you can’t buy or sell talent), the self-sacrificing parents (when most of them appear to inordinately invested in their children– literally and emotionally), the shock of failure, the bullshit of Kerri Strug or the inelegant thunky bullying impostiture of Mary Lou Retton.