Category: Best

Posted on

A Woman in a car in Washington D.C.

Is it possible to take a minute and analyze carefully what just happened in Washington D. C. that has the entire Twitterverse buzzing like a chainsaw jackhammer?

First thing I saw on TV was a police officer telling us that the police performed absolutely heroically. They were courageous and smart and wonderful and they got Timmy safely out of the well. Boy, we’re GREAT. I mean it.

Shots were fired. That’s always electrifying and the first reports on CBC stated that “shots were fired”. They were– by the police.

The police sprang into action. Why? Because they saw other police chasing a car and running down the streets. They sprang into action, locked down government buildings, prevented congressmen from crossing the street, and I’m sure a couple of Secret Service agents threw themselves on top of Obama. All of this was the result of the perception that other police were running around pointing guns and chasing people off the sidewalks. Why were these other police running around and chasing people off the sidewalks? Because some police cars went by with their sirens blaring. And shots were about to be fired.

What actually happened: a woman drove her car towards the White House and appeared to try to drive through the very powerful barricades in front of the President’s home. When the police tried to stop her, she backed up, into a police car, and drove away.

Now, I’m as sentimental as the next guy and I’m sure that that woman spokesperson for the police meant well, and wanted to reassure us that there was nothing the police couldn’t do, but it appeared to me that the police at that moment needed more than anything else to immobilize that car, and this they failed to do. They actually let her reverse the car, back up and out, and drive off, resulting in a hysterical chase down Pennsylvania Avenue as she headed towards….. (very loud basso profundo now) CONGRESS. Where clearly she meant to GTA the Tea Party and get the country moving again.

She smashed into a guard hut and the police surrounded her car and shot her to death. Since they seemed clueless about how to block a car in so it couldn’t escape again, I guess they thought they had no choice.

I’m sure the NRA will assure us that cars don’t kill people: only women with babies kill people, and if only an upstanding NRA member had had his car there at that moment, all would be well.

Posted on

The Afflicted Audience: the Man-Boy in American Film

What is the mysterious appeal to American writers and directors of the infantile man-child who behaves despicably while drunk and then drinks to forget the consequences of his own behavior and then behaves even more despicably? His nemesis is the man with self-control, who owns things, who keeps an ordered life, and is emasculated by plot developments contrived to reveal his impotence. His redemption is the beautiful ingénue– usually much younger than the hero– who thinks nothing of her own needs and desires and everything of how she must be with this glob of raging emotions.

Paul Schrader, are you there? Robert Zemeckis? David Russell? Did you see “Lawless”? Did you think “Beasts of the Southern Wild” was terrific? It even shows up in a milder, less annoying form in “The Wire”, in the character of McNulty.

We are supposed to believe the hero– say, Wade, in the movie “Affliction”– is somehow more authentic and real and honest, and thus heroic, than the callow, effete self-restrained men around him. His rage is the product of disgust with a corrupt, unjust world. McNulty commits outrageous acts because, we are given to believe, he is passionate about getting drug dealers off the streets and punishing murderers. “The Wire” has the courage to reveal that McNulty is a flawed, narcissistic character– and his girlfriend sees him for what he is.

Most depictions of this type of character would have you believe that these characters are ruggedly handsome and virile and have life to them. The iconic model for this character is Ethan in “The Searchers”. And “The Searchers”, like “The Wire”, had the guts to give an honest picture of the man: he walks off alone at the end, a lingering shot that has become a cliché, and perversely iconic, when it’s really a profoundly tragic moment. This is an irresolvable condition. He can’t experience true love because, almost by definition, anything that appears to be love in this universe tries to possess and emasculate the hero.

Walter White in “Breaking Bad”.

The secret of the appeal of these characters is in the audience. How often don’t you see a movie in which a cop or soldier or spy– the hero of the story– brutally kills someone– and you don’t mind. You are given “permission” to enjoy the sadism and the violence because the writers and directors always carefully lay some groundwork. We will see the victim kick a dog, spit on a child, rob an old lady, rape a virgin– anything repulsive will do. So when our hero sadistically beats, stabs, and kills the villain, we can enjoy it: he deserved it. Our character is not a psychopath: he is a hero.

In the same way, we are supposed to enjoy the bad behaviour, the outrages, the infidelity, the cruelty of the drunk because he is so damn authentic. He drinks because he has soul, because he feels things intensely, because he has passion– not because he is weak. It’s a reflection on us, the audience. It’s a statement to ourselves: I may look weak, because I’m fat, and lazy, and inactive, and insensitive, but I am actually a raging cauldron of virtue and passion. If some child rapist, drug-dealer, terrorist ever showed up in my neighborhood…. just watch!

Posted on

John Cusack Syndrome

In the movie “Say Anything”, John Cusack plays Lloyd Dobbler and Ione Skye plays Diane Court. Dobbler is– how can we say it politely?– dumb. He’s not very book smart. He likes to hang out with his flakey but earnest and loyal friends and drink beer. He’s a down-to-earth kind of guy.

Diane Court is the class valedictorian. She’s brilliant. She’s beautiful. She’s classy. She’s not even a snob– surprise.  She’s definitely going to university. In a very, very wise touch, “Say Anything” shows her valedictory address as being politely received by a bewildered but respectful class. There is a lot of nuance to that relationship: she’s rich and classy and intellectual, but they don’t automatically disrespect her for it. And she gets that she’s never going connect with these kids, really.

Of course, she ends up wanting to marry a guy whose idea of culture is kick-boxing and stabbing a beer can with a pen. Don’t all beautiful, smart, well-off women just crave that authentic, boyish, missionary position with the faint smell of barf in the back seat of the domestic sedan? Of course they do.

Well, actually, sometimes they do.

So how do we know Diane is smart? We are told that she is, by Dobbler’s friends, who tell him she’s out of his league. She is played as articulate and thoughtful by Ione Skye but then this is the movies: most characters are articulate and thoughtful, as needed. But it is a striking and consistent feature of film-world that smart characters don’t have any particular taste in anything. Is it because the writer and director are afraid to go out on limb? What if Diane Court loved Rossini or Balzac or Dostoevsky or Dylan or Picasso or Van Gogh?

It would scare away the adolescent girls who want to project themselves into the orbit around Diane Court because she has boobs and looks glamorous.  And for the males, she will be their ornament and she’ll be able to balance a check book while they’re out hunting or rebuilding the engine on the pickup.

I like “Say Anything”. I think it is above average. The characters are unusually well-rounded and complex. When Dobbler takes Diane to a party, he doesn’t feel the need to be tethered to her. He wanders around freely and she wanders around freely, and he checks on her regularly, which she likes. That’s believable and fresh. Dobbler may be a grunt but he’s wise about girls.

Diane’s father opposes the relationship but he’s not mean or stupid– for most of the film–, and when Lloyd leaves another message on the phone for Diane, he urges her to pick up.

In the one sequence in which the film’s seams show, he pressures her to drop the relationship because he has better things in mind for her. Because she is, after all, out of his league.  She’s not the snob: he is.

Dobbler is charming, if pedestrian, and I suspect that Diane Court, in real life, would eventually regret not taking the time to expand her horizons before running off with a home-town grunt, even if he is devoted and nice. His only passion is for kick-boxing.

In real life, yes, I know: girls like Diane Court do fall for guys like Lloyd Dobbler, because it’s hard to be smart, to pay your own way, to work, to take a challenging job.  Some smart girls just want to retreat into the security and stability of a relationship with a reliable, hard-working, honest guy.

Of course of course of course, this is America, where smart men are always evil and dumb and women are funny. It is decreed by the laws of Hollywood that no film shall ever show a woman falling hard for a man because he is smart. This would piss off the audiences, I suppose, who seem to be, by a rather overwhelming majority, stupid. Or are they? I don’t know. This might have been a film whose success was largely driven by female taste:

The smart man in “Say Anything” is Diane’s father, James, who robs vulnerable old people.

All right, let me think. Is there a movie in which the beautiful heroine– it doesn’t really matter if she’s smart or not as long as she has large breasts — falls in love with a man because he is smart?

The 2013 version of this dynamic is “The Spectacular Now”, which rather effectively destroys the Dobbler myth: Sutter is an alcoholic jerk. He eventually finds redemption, because, we understand, he is smart enough to see into the future. We can believe that Lloyd Dobbler is a decent guy because “Say Anything” is a smart movie, but I suspect that the real Lloyd Dobblers in the world are more like Sutter before he finally decides to pursue Aimee and enroll in college.  The real Lloyd Dobblers are not smart enough to do that.  The real Lloyd Dobblers are not going to go to a liberal arts college (like Aimee and Diane are obviously doing), though they might enroll in community college and at least train in a profession.  They might, if they are smart, apprentice somewhere.  And stop drinking.

The pinnacle of the anti-smart movies, of course, are the Seth Rogen mysteries. I call them mysteries because it’s hard to figure out why it is entertaining to some people– a lot of people– to watch men act like adolescents, farting, belching, making jokes about shitting or drinking, or barfing, or sex, or commitment, or anything intelligent, and generally wallowing in their own precious Republicanhood, and upholding family values.

These men are often patriotic.  You will see them with their hands over their hearts during the anthem.  If that inspires you, well, what can I say.

In “Say Anything”, Diane Court’s father is depicted as loving and sophisticated and wise, and Diane obviously loves him deeply. Then it is revealed that he has been embezzling money from residents at a nursing home he administers.

The transformation from love to contempt is probably one of the two or three weaknesses of the film, and Hughes manipulates the score by telegraphing to the audience that her father is really a jerk.

In “Breaking Bad”, he might be seen as heroic— just trying to take care of his family. It is a credit to “Say Anything” that he is not admired for it. It is even more admirable that “Say Anything” reveals him as a complex character, a mix of good and bad, even if there is a thumb on the scale to give the film a rousing moment of resolution it doesn’t deserve.

Posted on

Hannah Arendt

I am now referring to the evacuation of the Jews, to the extermination of the Jewish People. This is something that is easily said: ‘The Jewish People will be exterminated’, says every party member, ‘this is very obvious, it is in our program — elimination of the Jews, extermination, a small matter.’ And then they turn up, the upstanding 80 million Germans, and each one has his decent Jew. They say the others are all swine, but this particular one is a splendid Jew. But none has observed it, endured it. Most of you here know what it means when 100 corpses lie next to each other, when there are 500 or when there are 1,000. To have endured this and at the same time to have remained a decent person — with exceptions due to human weaknesses — has made us tough, and is a glorious chapter that has not and will not be spoken of. Because we know how difficult it would be for us if we still had Jews as secret saboteurs, agitators and rabble-rousers in every city, what with the bombings, with the burden and with the hardships of the war. If the Jews were still part of the German nation, we would most likely arrive now at the state we were at in 1916 and 17.   Heinrich Himmler, October 4, 1943

Some people I know recently saw the film “Hannah Arendt” and reported that they liked the film and that, after all, she was right. I refer, of course, to her comment about “the banality of evil”. I have to admit that I have long misunderstood the comment, and I am glad I did.

What she meant was that people like Adolf Eichmann were not “evil” in the sense that mankind usually imagines evil, as some malevolence that is clearly evident in manners or attitudes or expressions or even body language. In fact, in Arendt’s view, Eichmann was, in a way, not even really evil. We know today that Arendt believed Eichmann when he told the Israeli court that he was merely following orders, when he facilitated the murder of five million Jews, and that he, personally, bore no animus towards them.

It has emerged that Eichmann left some writings that clearly expressed an absolutely savage attitude towards the Jews. He lied to the Israeli court and it is not to Arendt’s credit that she believed him.

It causes me no end of wonder that she believed him.

I’m astonished.

Now, I had misunderstood the phrase “banality of evil”. I had thought that Arendt was telling us that evil often looks banal to us, but it is still evil. That evil is often disguised as good intentions or well-meaning attitudes. But it is still evil. In essence, I thought she was saying that people are extraordinarily talented at casting their own evil impulses as intentions that are noble or admirable in some way, like bringing freedom to Iraq or Viet Nam, or education to Afghani women, or democracy to Cuba. What people believe in these instances is that we should kill people who don’t agree with our ideas about freedom and democracy. But of course, you can’t say that, so you say, we are here to liberate you. With very few exceptions, this attitude is always a lie. We never really ask our brave young men to die for their country, though we say we do, when we hold sacraments and rituals to commemorate it.  No, what we want them to do for our country is kill.   But to say that aloud would be to make the evil in us naked, so we don’t.  Instead, we engage in banal demonstrations of fealty and admiration.

In my view, Eichmann– even if you can believe his protestations at his trial– was actually evil, and we had better understand that most of the evil that occurs in our world is caused by Eichmanns and they do mean it no matter how talented they are at making it all look rational and sad and necessary.

Nazi Germany did not just walk into Poland and announce that they were conquering a nation in order to take their land. The Germans first staged fake attacks on German citizens by fake Polish soldiers, then howled in outrage, and set out to punish the miscreants. Yes, even the Nazis felt a need to put on a face. Himmler’s speech, as quoted above, is remarkably naked, and remarkably true. He observes the amazing capacity of a nation to indulge in utter denial: everyone pretended it was not “extermination”– it was “resettlement”. Goering himself castigated an underling for using the wrong word once. He learned.

Himmler’s purpose, you need to know, was to destroy the possibility of all those present to deny that they knew what was happening, in the face of Germany’s imminent defeat. He didn’t want them all to be able to say, with Eichmann, I didn’t know what the ultimate destination was. I didn’t know they were going to exterminate them.

This is what Hannah Arendt did not get: that people are powerfully able to present themselves as moral and conscientious while they really are selfish and self-interested. In fact, a good portion of popular culture consists of presenting ourselves as selfless and kind and adorable, for the purpose of which we knowingly falsify our own stories. We killed thousands of Viet Namese because we were all able to pretend that it was about democracy and human rights when it was really all about global domination: America was terrified that the communists would end up controlling most of Asia.

And yes, we killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis for the oil. The fact that this was officially presented and accepted as bringing human rights and democracy to Iraq does not mean that most Americans really believed that, or that they really believed that bringing democracy and human rights to Iraq did not include the oil. If, in fact, America had restored democracy to Iraq and Iraq had elected a government that chose not to sell it’s oil to America, the vast majority of Americans would have been outraged and would have urged the government foment a coup.

 

There is a VERY hot debate going on between partisans of Arendt and critics. Critics claim that Arendt reduced Eichmann to a mere “cog” in the machine, and therefore “less evil” than he really was. Partisans say she did not. But the partisans clearly mean that Arendt didn’t think Eichmann was innocent, which, obviously, is true. So, therefore, she didn’t diminish his culpability. But, in fact, she does, in my opinion, because she asserts that Eichmann’s willingness to be part of a machine, to obey orders, to go along with his friends and family and colleagues and government, is not itself an evil, or at least, not an extraordinary evil. (Borrowing from Martin Heidegger, she suggests that Eichmann wasn’t even a authentic person.)

His unwillingness to decide morally against participation and act on this conviction– is, in my opinion, itself as evil and monstrous as, say, the police in Chicago during the riots of 1968 who saw protesters as weirdoes and freaks, or Joshua Bolton advocating war on Iran, or William Calley, or thousands and millions of others.

As Buffy Ste. Marie would say, “he’s the universal soldier and he really is to blame...” The soldier asserts that he is willing to die for his country. But he knows that he is willing to kill for his country, and that is most authentic thing about him.

Posted on

Hysterical Frigid Puritans

Todd Hoffner was a very successful football coach at Minnesota State Mankato. They gave him a cell phone, a Blackberry.

One day, his children, girls aged 4 and 9, and boy 8, came downstairs in towels fresh from a bubble bath (which they had taken together), and demanded he record their performance with his video camera. The towels came off and they danced and played as young children do.

There are actually people in this world who think that children this age running around naked, dancing, and playing, is deviant in some way. I can’t tell you just how sick I think these people are. But I think these people gravitate towards positions of authority: they really think they need to run other peoples’ lives, make decisions for them, and ruin them, if necessary, to further their own egocentric power lusts.

When Todd Hoffner’s cell phone broke, he took it in to the IT Department at Mankato and asked them to recover any photos and videos from it before replacing it. This they did. When some anonymous tiny little smidgeon of an IT technician saw the video, he freaked and called the afore-mentioned authorities, who called the police. Hoffner was escorted off the field in the middle of a practice. He was arrested and charged with making child porn.

Not everybody out there is crazy. Though the prosecutor and the University were absolutely determined to save our society from this terrifying threat to public morality, a judge quickly threw the case out. Sometimes you are more amazed at good sense than at hysteria. I am amazed. She saw exactly what I think any rational person would see: young, innocent children playing, naked. There was nothing pornographic about the videos at all.

The police seized Hoffner’s computers at home and found nothing.

Todd Hoffner’s wife, not surprisingly, ridiculed the charges. After all, it was she who put the kids in the tub together in the first place, naked. She believes the children have a healthy, natural, playful attitude towards their bodies. Many intelligent people believe that.

Hoffner, in an interview with ESPN said this: “You make a simple mistake and it turns your life upside down”. He’s wrong: he didn’t make a mistake. There was not a thing wrong with what he did.

The University human resources department appears to be terrified. They don’t act terrified in public– well, yes they do: they have drawn over themselves a cloak of secrecy. They suspended Hoffner for using the company phone to take personal pictures (no word on the results of their investigations into all of their other staff to see just how many of them have also broken this rule– I’ll bet some HR staff themselves have broken it). Then they fired him for unstated reasons.

I believe they don’t have any reason to fire him except for this: they look like complete idiots. They look like unspeakably stupid hysterical barbaric irrational zealots. And they know it. There is only one way they think they can rescue their reputations: by pretending that they found something else.

And thus, on an NPR site, in the comments, someone says, explaining why they fired Hoffner after a judge found him innocent, “they must have something else: do you think they are stupid?”

Yes, I do.  Oh yes I do!  More than ever.

Afterthought

With all the DNA testing going on and the resultant exonerations of people who have served, in some cases, ten, fifteen, twenty years in prison (and sometimes on death row), it is not unusual to see a DA hunker down and insist, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that the man is guilty, guilty, guilty!

Like the University of Mankato HR staff, they refuse to take responsibility for the massive damage they have done to an innocent man. It’s human nature. It’s a part of human nature that often does more damage than any other trait, because many of these people will stomp over anything and anyone to try to prove that they didn’t recklessly destroy a man’s life on the basis of evidence that any intelligent person could have read differently.

And More on the Assholes at Minnesota State University

Minnesota State destroyed notes from its controversial investigation of Hoffner, and the Minnesota legislative auditor’s office meanwhile said it was “surprised” that the school’s investigator, an affirmative action officer, “destroyed her contemporaneous interview notes” when she conducted an investigation for Richard Davenport, the college’s president.[4][5] The school’s investigator conducted flawed interviews in which questioning was not recorded or conducted under oath.[6][7]   Wiki

Of course they did.

For the record, an arbitrator ruled in Hoffner’s favor and he was reinstated as Head Coach in 2014.  He went on to win the NSIC Championship, whatever that is.

And we just know– we know– that the administrators who destroyed their notes were never punished.

Posted on

Chinese Hackers

“I don’t need to kill you to get what I want.”

We read that Chinese hackers, once again, are poking around on U.S. government and corporate servers and stealing important data files related to national defense and patented inventions.

I am perplexed. As a computer professional, and a database specialist, I always immediately ask myself how they got in? And then I ask myself, how would I manage a data set that required a very, very high degree of security?

The answer is pretty simple. You don’t expose data like that to an external network.

In the simplest form, this kind of security can be implemented very easily. You locate the files, the applications, the data bases, configurations, libraries, code, whatever, on a local network. You don’t connect it to the internet. All the people working on your project have to be located within your physical network, that is, one or more buildings physically connected by network cable, and not connected to any external modem or line, and certainly without a wireless connection.

I would guess that, from the point of view of industry or government, this might be unacceptable in some way. Anyone working on almost any information technology would need to access the internet often. But what is “unacceptable”? Is opening your information systems to Chinese hackers “acceptable”?

How quickly could we get used to a new acceptable: when you work on a very important project that requires a high level of security, you get off the grid. That’s the way it is. The same way that scientists working in micro bacterial research now have to wear white suits, visors, and gloves and work in sealed rooms, in secure buildings.

I think it can be done. Inevitably, some scientists or engineers will need some information only available on the internet but that can easily be handled by having a physically isolated internet connection to a separate, non-networked computer in the same building. It’s not technically difficult to keep it separate from a LAN. If the information is copied or downloaded, it can be copied onto a flash drive and then transferred to the LAN. Then, even if an employee inadvertently downloaded a virus from the internet, it would have no effect. It won’t be able to connect to a mother ship. The flash drive could be reformatted before ever being used again for extra security. What’s so hard about that?

[It might be argued that all computers nowadays come with built-in wireless connectivity.  But it is possible to build computers without it if there was a demand for it.]

I know: the engineers and scientists will insist they need immediate, continuous access to the internet. If you insist, and the government or industry accedes to this demand, they should quit whining about hackers stealing the data: you have made it available to them.

If you want to rent a car and drive to Italy and park it on the street, please don’t come to me with your crisis about someone stealing your GPS out of your glove compartment– I can tell you right now, that is what will happen. If you don’t like it, go somewhere else.

We have bigger problems with China. Today, the “Inside Washington” program with Gordon Peterson and gang decried the fact that the U.S. is not preparing for war with China. Even Mark Shields seemed to believe we should not be conducting war exercises with China while they are trying to steal our data.

I think he’s wrong. I think that is precisely what we should be doing: engaging China, developing relationships, sharing knowledge with them. If you prepare for war, you will have war. If you prepare for peace, you might not.

The great problem with China is caused by us. Walmart, especially, uses China as a vast pool of cheap labour to produce millions of trinkets to be sold cheaply at the mall outside of your town, thereby driving local businesses out of business and driving more and more American workers into minimum wage jobs supporting the dispersal of the products of Chinese productivity and providing the capital China needs to build a navy that can challenge the navy of the country they expect some day to go to war with, the United States. Apple has found a congenial home in China. All the big American corporations are drooling at the possibilities of a billion new customers. That is what drives U.S. foreign policy and anyone who pretends otherwise is running for president.

If you don’t want China to become big and powerful and rich, you will cut Walmart off at the knees. Walmart will then shift their production to Bangladesh or India or Mexico. Maybe a few jobs will come back to America.

Because both sides know two things. Firstly, there is not enough oil in the world for both the U.S. and a future China when it begins to catch up to American industrial might. Secondly, neither country has the moral or rational ability to say: let’s share.

And Furthermore…

If you don’t like the Internet, get off. I mean it. Who asked you on? Who the hell insisted that corporations should be able to store their data on public networks, advertise their products, and sell their services, online? Get off. Lock your LAN up. Disconnect. Use the telephone instead. Use the courier. Fax your information. Send it by carrier pigeon.

There is no divine ordinance that says that governments and corporations must be allowed to store their data on the internet and should expect that information to be secure.

Get off, get off, get off.

One More Thing

I just think I need to take a moment and remind everyone that Wolf Bitzer at CNN said this about Sarah Palin’s acceptance speech: “She hit one out of the park.”

Let’s not forget.

Posted on

The “Harbinger”

That past sorrows and joys have merged into an elegance that permeates her presence, that “something in the air” that indicates class and courage and composure. Though she now rigorously guards her privacy, her free spirit surfaces easily, and her thoughts come crystal clear. A figure of her time, our history, Lee is her own harbinger for an iconic future. Ours, and hers. (From Nicky Haslam, Ny Times Blogs 2013-02-07)

And there you have the answer to the question, how do you flatteringly describe the narcissistic and pointless life of a true celebrity?  Nauseous yet?

Those words were written in reference to Lee Bouvier Radziwill, Jackie Kennedy’s younger sister by five years. (As admired as Jackie Kennedy was, she too was nothing more than a celebrity. If you think that inviting well-known, if serious, poets and singers to the White House or being a book editor later in life means you actually had a real life, think again: a book editor is exactly what you do if you really aren’t up the far more lugubrious task of writing. It’s not like, say, building houses with Jimmy Carter. )

What is a “celebrity”? In the real world, useless people wither and die because they are incapable of producing anything of value in order to sustain an affluent lifestyle. A celebrity is simply someone who gets the lifestyle anyway.

You get why Sofia Coppola, who made “Marie Antoinette” with Kirsten Dunst, (and a better movie, “Lost in Translation”) would be interested in her. “Marie Antoinette” did for the title subject what that paragraph above tries to do for Lee Radziwill: recast the life of a sheltered, uninteresting, unaccomplished but affluent woman into something more dramatic and significant. Next, of course, we find out why these women are victims, in a way, so we can empathize with them, so something will mitigate that feeling of privilege. So we can say they have “overcome” something, like not being born rich.

She tried. Yes, she tried to actually produce something of value and when you can’t really produce anything of value– she couldn’t– but you want to create the illusion of it, you become an actress, or, god help us, a model. She tried acting. She appeared in at least two plays. Both attempts elicited scathing reviews and she gave it up.

She was a hanger-on, with the by then artistically impotent Truman Capote, on the Rolling Stones 1972 tour, for which I don’t think she even earned a mention in Keith Richards’ “Life”. She has received France’s Légion d’honneur which astonishes me. That sounds so meaty and substantial. I’ll have to wiki that one day to find out what exactly it means. Remember– France thinks Jerry Lewis is a brilliant comedian.

The most astounding comment is the reference to a portrait of Radziwill “at the height of her astonishing beauty”.  Have a look.  I could almost let anything else by Haslam pass but it is one thing to ask us to tolerate celebrities coasting among us, parasitical (almost always acquiring wealth through inheritance or marriage), intrusive, boring, but to then insist that we recognize them as beautiful as well goes far beyond the pale. There’s her picture to the right, her coarse face, the ridiculous hair and earrings, and that vacuous sedentary expression in fervent acknowledgement of the wisdom of keeping your mouth shut if you don’t have anything particularly interesting to say.

Unless, of course, you are a “harbinger”.

Here’s an excruciating passage from Haslam’s interview:

“Were you always aware of your beauty?”
“From the word go,” she answers simply and honestly. “But no one else was, then…”

The transmutation of Radziwill’s coarse, rather weird face– Jackie Kennedy had a bit of the same odd arrangement of eyes – nose – mouth– into this “astonishing” beauty is worth a book. How we manufacture illusions.

Given Radziwill’s life and connections and wealth, any face with all of the core elements in it would eventually elicit this “astonishing” tag from a celebrity interviewer some day. Because that is precisely how you describe a woman who is really quite homely if she is rich and famous and a celebrity and obviously not beautiful at all and you have been absolutely dying to meet her and make a big point of describing how she seemed to like you. And then you use her first name. With the money you will have the teeth and the make-up and what passes for hair style, and clothing. Usually the breasts. But no amount of money can fix the flaws in the arrangement of that face. They eyes are too wide set, the nose too long, the forehead like a plateau. And that awful, awful dress.

In 1974 she and Jackie published “One Special Summer,” a memoir of their European trip, written originally as a gift to their parents.

But really, this is so good. So beautiful. This is so amazing! You should publish this! People would love to read about your life. I must insist on sending a copy to my friend over at Harper-Collins… He’s a tough editor. I’m sure he’ll give his real opinion. Let’s see what he thinks. Let’s not tell him who wrote it. No– no! That would be cruel.

And so it goes. Oh my goodness– we were astonished at the demand for our book. Who would have thought it? But after all, I have such good taste. It would surprise no one to know that I can do a bit of it myself.

As for “harbinger for an iconic future”, I don’t even know what Ms. Nicky intended with this preposterous line. I can’t figure it out. How can a future be “iconic”? Does she mean our future will be full of icons? And that Lee Radziwill will astonish young people in the future with her good looks and her savoir faire? Will they want to hear stories of her hanging around the Rolling Stones in 1972 and meeting many interesting people, like, oh Truman Capote, Joe Namath, and Olivia Newton-John?

Afterthoughts

Is Eva Peron one of these? Not entirely– she was so deeply — and disastrously– involved in the politics of Argentina that she might be more accurately regarded as a dictator rather than a celebrity. She did things– bad things, generally– but she did actually do things.

Though… now that I think about it… isn’t what happened in Argentina under the Perons precisely the kind of thing that happens when you give a celebrity real power? Things go bad. Offences to vanity become treason. The government not only insists that you obey them, but that you also love them.

Posted on

Mumford and Sons

Roll away your stone,
I’ll roll away mine
Together we can see what we will find
Don’t leave me alone at this time
For I’m afraid of what I will discover inside
‘Cause you told me that
I wouldn’t find a home
Within the fragile substance of my soul
And I have filled this void with things unreal
And all the while my character it steals
Darkness is a harsh term, don’t you think?
And yet it dominates the things I see
It seems that all my bridges have been burned
But you say, “That’s exactly how this grace thing works”
It’s not the long walk home that will change this heart
But the welcome I receive with every start

I’ve tried and tried but I just can’t bring myself to love “Mumford and Sons”. A lot of people who know my taste in music have recommended them to me and suggested that they are not like most pop bands: they are serious. Their music has substance. They have energy and passion.

The lyrics of “Roll Away Your Stone” (above) give you a pretty good idea of what they’re up to. I think I like what they’re trying to do– inject some substance into popular acoustic based folk-rock– but it always sounds to me a little too self-consciously artsy and definitely pretentious. “I’m afraid of what I’ll discover inside” isn’t very startling, really, and isn’t a very compelling evocation of self-searching or grief or guilt or anything. “Fragile substance of my soul”? “While my character it steals”? As the lines follow each other, they go nowhere. As the images succeed each other in your head you should realize that they don’t have any connection to each other. When exactly did this character-stealing happen? What were you doing at the time? Who were you thinking of? The answer is, “a song”, “a song”, and “a song”.

The answers, in a great song, is something like “one night after I kicked Rosie out my apartment”, “masturbating”, “Lisa”. Or something like “but her reply came from Anchorage”.

There is nothing in the lyrics of “Roll Away Your Stone” that suggests any particular real experience or feeling– just something that sounds like a serious consideration of something that sounds like seriousness.

Oddly– and I mean that– it’s fairly typical of their lyrics. Something that starts off with a generalized image of soulfulness but never really connects to any real idea.

It’s empty in the valley of your heart
The son it rises slowly as you walk
Away from all the fears and all the faults you left behind

And “you forgave and I won’t forget”… what? What did she forgive? What did he do that was forgiven? What was forgotten? I don’t think they think it matters– I think they feel that the idea of forgiveness just floating out there is enough to move you. It doesn’t move me. It invites you to put your own experiences into that generalized statement but that makes it a weak song.  You can get the same idea on poster from “Successories”.

Everything I’ve heard from them is weak in the same way. Vague and unspecific and generalized and rather antiseptic and platitudinous. Compare it to:

Did I disappoint you?
Leave a bad taste in your mouth?  (U2)

The “bad taste in your mouth” is visceral and tart. Or:

I was down at the New Amsterdam
Starin’ at this yellow-haired girl
Mr. Jones strikes up a conversation
With a black-haired flamenco dancer (Counting Crows)

Specific place– the New Amsterdam–, specific girl– with yellow hair– and then you can go somewhere, the singer’s desperation for girls and success, his urge to throw himself at something and hope it sticks. Or…

There’s a note underneath your front door
That I wrote twenty years ago
Yellow paper and a faded picture
And a secret in an envelope

If Mumford and Sons rewrote the song, it would sound like this:

All your notes are under my doors
All my past thoughts expressed in words
I can hardly remember anything
Except my darkest secrets

So which is more evocative? More powerful? Is there any doubt? The Civil Wars song intrigued me immediately: what was the secret? Why couldn’t he give the message in person? What’s happened 20 years ago?  You don’t need the answers to those questions to be drawn in to the sense of regret, missed opportunities, and sorrow.

And just to rub my nose in it, Mumford and Sons puts out a video of themselves performing at the Red Rock amphitheater in Colorado and the audience is just jumping! Just jumping! Waving their arms and mouthing the words and just so consummately  rapt, in that choreographed fake “look at us whip the crowd into a frenzy” production style that I find more than a little distasteful.

You wonder where they are going with this. What’s the principle at work here– the crowd in a frenzy, interspersed with cuts of the band jumping and gyrating and demonstrating “passion” don’t you know, with the swooping camera work that is almost a sign of desperation: there is nothing on the stage that is interesting enough to obviate the need to make that camera move, to compel you to admit that there is something interesting here. This swooping camera! Why, a static camera just cannot capture the adoration of this bulging crowd of acolytes! Wait– there’s music.

Who’s more interesting than Mumford and Sons:

Bon Ivor
Dandy Warhols
Arcade Fire
Civil Wars
Ryan Adams
Brian Jonestown Massacre

Who’s less interesting:

Taylor Swift
Lady Gaga
Beyonce

Who is Similarly Lyrically Stunted

Tragically Hip

Posted on

“No One Cares About These People”

Mr. Keane, in his Chronicle article, offered two major reasons the police lie so much. First, because they can. Police officers “know that in a swearing match between a drug defendant and a police officer, the judge always rules in favor of the officer.” At worst, the case will be dismissed, but the officer is free to continue business as usual. Second, criminal defendants are typically poor and uneducated, often belong to a racial minority, and often have a criminal record. “Police know that no one cares about these people,” Mr. Keane explained (NY Times, 2012-02-03)

And, I suspect, neither do you and I.

If you did, you would speak up, make your voice heard, vote for the progressive reformer, not the tough-on-crime conservative. But we don’t care about those people. Unless they are played by Morgan Freeman or Tim Robbins in a movie. Then we care a whole lot, because we really are good, decent people, and so is Morgan Freeman, and the fact that I just love him shows that I am not biased or bigoted. I judge people by what they actually do, not by which actor they look like.

And if the police lie in order to lock them up for a particular crime, it doesn’t really matter if they didn’t commit that particular crime: the important thing is that someone has been locked up for something.

Agencies receive cash rewards for arresting high numbers of people for drug offenses, no matter how minor the offenses or how weak the evidence. (NY Times, 2012-02-03)

How small a minority are we now, those who think “these people” do matter? That they have souls and feelings and inner lives? We’re not popular, that’s for sure. We are an affront to the overjoyed multitudes who love punishment because they really feel that that is the only way to keep people from taking our stuff or hurting us. This conversation takes place at one level and they either hurt us or we hurt them and if you help them you are hurting us.

My wife and I are watching “The Wire” right now. It’s a gritty, realistic police drama set in Baltimore. The police in “The Wire” cover all shades of humanity, from the obese thoughtless bureaucrat to the passionate honest street cop. The behavior of the cops on this show– and their physical appearance (as on “Hill Street Blues”, another of a handful of credible police dramas) strikes me as consonant with detailed news stories about crime and justice. Deals are struck. The really bad guys, with smarter lawyers, get the light sentences while the poor loyal schmuck who served them bears the brunt of the criminal justice system. And the police, in “The Wire”, lie. Sometimes for personal gain or to cover up incompetence or corruption. Sometimes in a well-meaning effort to put the bad guys behind bars.

Noted

Yes, the police have a tough job. So do criminal lawyers, and farmers and miners and lumberjacks, and doctors and teachers, and those kids who pick through the trash heaps in India. Cry me a river. If you don’t want to be a cop because somebody thinks you should actually be required to obey the law, or control your temper, or risk your life to try to disarm a suicidal homeless man… then get out and do something else.

Posted on

Dr. Robert Sadoff and Jeffrey MacDonald

“I see no evidence for psychotic thought progresses either present or underlying, no evidence for hallucinations or delusions. He does not reveal evidence for serious psychoneurotic disorder with poor self control. He does not show evidence for a longstanding characterological disorder or a sociopathic personality disorder with acting out processes. He denies the use of drugs of any type, which could have stimulated an acute toxic psychotic state, resulting in loss of control and explosive violence.” Dr. Robert Sadoff quoted in Errol Morris’s A Wilderness of Errors in regard to Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald, who was later convicted of murdering his wife and two young daughters in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, February 17th, 1970.

That statement should be disturbing to all of us.

Firstly, if you believe that Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald murdered his wife and two daughters on February 17, 1970, then you have an allegedly reputable psychiatrist, Dr. Robert Sadoff, offering a ridiculously inept misdiagnosis of a violent psychotic killer, a man who stabbed his own daughter with an ice pick and battered his wife’s head with a club of some kind and stabbed her 21 times with the same ice pick and then devised some preposterous story about drug-crazed hippies conducting a Manson-like slaughter in his home to tell the military police investigators.

No symptoms of any “characterological” disorder, according to Dr. Sadoff.

But if you believe MacDonald was railroaded, Dr. Sadoff’s comments are no less disturbing. Are you blown away by his scintillating use of pseudo-scientific jargon? Just what is a “characterological disorder”? Is this something you can measure or calculate based on anything other than a conversation? A conversation which is an exchange of words which is judged by man with credentials and then presented to the public and the courts and the investigators as some kind of scientific conclusion?

Is there a necessity for the phrase “longstanding characterological disorder” or for the phrase “sociopathic personality disorder with acting out processes”? What if Dr. Sadoff just said this:

“Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald seemed like a nice guy. I liked him. He didn’t yell or get angry or threaten me in any way. I thought he was swell.”

Ah, you say. No court would accept that as “expert” testimony. It would have no authority, no cachet. The attorney’s would not nod their heads knowingly or consult their table of characterological disorders to see if all the criteria were met.

Dr. Sadoff would probably admit that he is not God. He does not see into anyone’s mind. He does not have any special gift for un-encrypting the myriad complexities of nuance and suggestion and subtle inference and implication and allusion and random snatches of impulse and vocabularic irregularity (if he can make up words with dubious meanings, so can I). He had a conversation with Jeffrey MacDonald. He knows no more than any smart person could possibly know from a conversation with a suspected killer. He merely knows how to produce psychology theatre and, unfortunately, many people are convinced that there is a secret script that can be decoded by magical people with degrees and certificates.