Lance Mannion

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Jonathan Franzen aboard Hemingway’s boat

This Guardian piece by Jonathan Franzen seems to annoy everybody who reads it.  Most of what Franzen writes that isn’t fiction tends to do that.  That’s because his usual theme is “I am an unhappy, difficult to please character, who finds what other people do for fun a sign that human beings are contemptible creatures it’s best to avoid as much as possible.” This one is more of the same with a few cheap shots at his ex-wife thrown in as he explains how it was better for both of them that he went on to be rich and famous without her.

Fiction writers rarely come off well when they write about themselves.  Twain got away with it because he treated himself as a comic character.  But generally whenever they make themselves their subject whatever they write turns into advertisements for theirselves.  Norman Mailer was only the loudest and most egregious and honest offender.  One way or another they all manage to tell readers, “In real life I am a colossal bore and a world-class jerk and that’s what makes me such a great writer.”

Ernest Hemingway was particularly enthusiastic about tackling this theme and very persuasive when he did it.  The difference between him and Franzen is that Hemingway usually wrote about what excited him---hunting, fishing, Africa, Cuba, the fun he had being famous, writing---and Franzen writes about what bores him, annoys him, depresses him, or distracts him when he’s trying to concentrate on the important business of being Jonathan Franzen.

He treats readers as if they’ve shown up on his doorstep uninvited to ask him impertinent questions he feels obligated to answer in exhausting detail.  Hemingway wrote as if he was having the time of his life and had just sat down next to you at a bar to tell you all about it, certain you’ll be happy to hear what fun he’s been having because it’s the kind of fun you wish you were having yourself.  Oh, and he’s buying.

The truly annoying thing about Hemingway when he started gassing on about this was that, as far as a lot of academic and intellectual types were concerned, he was right.  It was the kind of fun they wished they were having and they felt bad about themselves because they weren’t out having it.  Reading him go on and on about this good fish, that good light, this fine boat, that fine bull made their tweed suits itch.  They felt the stuffiness of their offices, the flabbiness of their middles, the weakness of their characters, the oppressiveness of their marriages, and, most galling of all, the absolute, irredeemable, and unforgiveable mediocrity of their own writing.

He was still having this effect on the academic and intellectual types I looked to for insight and advice when I was setting out to be a writer and they passed along their resentments and self-loathing in the form of lofty and sneering dismissals of his writing that, never subtly, made a point of how his mother made him wear dresses until he was five.

Also, it was important to note that, yeah, he was famous in his day, but fame spoiled him and ultimately led to him killing himself because it killed his ability to write. Served him right for being such a show-off.

I might’ve learned a few good and fine things about how to be a writer from Hemingway if I hadn’t been so busy learning how not to be a famous writer like Hemingway, a lesson that was a tad premature.

Of course, the other difference between Hemingway and Franzen is the the big one.

Hemingway was a great writer.

Franzen is a middler.

He’s an unoriginal thinker who writes the prose of equivalent of Academy-approved painting after the Impressionists have shown up.  He’s a prominent feature of the contemporary American literary landscape, but he looms over it more impressively than he ought to because the New York Times Book Review draws the map and they’ve centered it around him while being careful not to place him too close to women writers who are in fact his chief rivals and they’ve left genre writers off the map entirely.

So reading about how Franzen freed himself up to write Freedom by ditching his unappreciative wife doesn’t offer quite the same thrill as reading about how Hemingway came to write Big Two-Hearted River.

This is shaping up to be Hemingway Week in Mannionville.  Tonight or tomorrow I’ll be posting my review of William Kennedy’s new novel Chango’s Beads and Two-tone Shoes which features Hemingway as an important character.  Tomorrow night Hemingway & Gelhorn premieres on HBO.  And I’ve been reading Hemingway's Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934-1961 by Paul Hendrickson, a fine book, a good book that will be the subject of at least one post (on depression) leading up to a review.

The book is stirring up all kinds of feelings in me. Some of those feelings are uncomfortably close to the ones I accused those academic and intellectual types of harboring when they read Hemingway boasting about all the fun and drama and adventure in his life.

One thing, it’s made me glad of.  I don’t have a friend like Scott Fitzgerald in his decline.

I go back and forth on whether or not I’d like having a friend like Hemingway himself.

He really could be a world-class jerk.

Oddly, although Hendrickson is terrific when writing about Hemingway’s short stories, he’s not making me want to go back and re-read those stories.

He’s just making me want to keep reading Hemingway’s Boat.

But the book has definitely made me want two things.

I want a boat like the Pilar and I want Ava Gardner swimming naked in my swimming pool.

Actually, since I’d have to get a swimming pool before Ava could swim naked in it, I guess it’s making me want three things.

Photo courtesy of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.

We decided to skip the parasailing

Settled for a nice lunch at a table overlooking the lake. The Boardwalk Restaurant. Lake George Village. Saturday. May 26, 2012.

The Good Raylan, the Bad Raylan, and…Don Draper?

Timothy Olyphant as Raylan Givens, not to be confused with Don Draper…or, for that matter, with Raylan Givens.

May not seem the best way to begin a book review, making comparisons between two TV shows.  But here goes.

The book in question is Raylan, Elmore Leonard’s latest novel.  Makes sense, then, that one of the TV shows I’m going to look into here is Justified.  Justified is based on a character Leonard introduced in two novels, Pronto and Riding the Rap, and a short story, "Fire in the Hole"---Deputy United States Marshal Raylan Givens, a slow-talking, quick-shooting, white cowboy hat-wearing lawman helping to bring law and order to the coal mining region of 21st Century Kentucky, which is for all intents and purposes Wyatt Earp’s Tombstone circa 1880 with reliable cell phone coverage.

Towns---whole counties---are wide-open. Crime is a bulwark of the economy, particularly the dealing of meth and oxycontin and the growing and selling of marijuana. Armed robbery is a daily hazard. Buses get held up like stage coaches. Banks get held up like...well...banks. People cross back and forth across the line between outlaw and honest citizen, sometimes in the course of an afternoon. Guns are everywhere and it seems more people die by bullet in car accidents or from old age. And many of these casualties met their justified demises after making the mistake of drawing on Raylan Givens.

I’ve lost count, and I suspect Justified’s producers have too, but over the course of three seasons Raylan may have carved more notches in his gun than Marshall Matt Dillon carved in twenty.  It’s getting embarrassing to the point that the show has become conscious of itself on that point.  Cracks appear in the fourth wall whenever characters discuss Raylan’s latest showdown.  In some episodes now, you can feel the writers scrambling to contrive ways for Raylan not to shoot anyone. 

Raylan, the novel, chronicles some of Raylan’s adventures outside what we’ve seen so far in episodes of the TV show and recapitulates a few things we’ve seen in episodes of Season Two. So I can hardly write about the book without writing about the TV show.

But the other TV show I’ll be writing about?

Mad Men.

Different types of shows. Different settings. Different genres. Different styles. Different aesthetics. Different ambitions. Different almost everything.

But their leading men have more in common than just both being tall, dark, and handsome.  Don Draper and Raylan Givens are both men with burdensome pasts.  Both have mean streaks that get them into trouble and get them out of it.  Both have self-destructive impulses.  Both can’t walk away from situations they know they’ll regret not having walked away from later.  Raylan is not as self-indulgent as Don but he is not a paragon of self-denial.  Put something in front of him he wants bad enough and he’ll reach for it.

Fortunately, Raylan is a man of few needs and ordinary desires, mainly love and sex.

Which is how he’s wound up sleeping with a witness in one of his cases and having an affair with his ex-wife while she’s married to the man she left him for.

Don can’t be happy because everything he has is stolen, in a way.  I should say he can’t be allowed to be happy because he is a fictional construct in a moralist’s universe.  Matthew Weiner is making an example of him to make a point.

Don is what is wrong with America.  He can’t be content or enjoy himself because that takes discipline and focus.  He is living a life that many people would consider ideal.  On other TV shows and in movies it is ideal.  But he’s not living his life.  His mind is too much in the past and in the future. 

On Mad Men, all the characters are being contradictorily punished. They're being punished for the sin of being themselves and punished for the sin of wanting to be somebody other than who they are. Don is only the chief sinner.  The character all the others double.  Roger, Peggy, Pete, Joan, Betty, and Lane are just as divided between who they are and what they want to be as Don.  Damned if they do and damned if they don't because they are just damned.  Their lives are little, private hells of their own making.

Leonard is not a moralist.  In his fictional universe, life is what it is.  People are happy or they're not. It depends on their circumstances, but more on their temperaments. In Leonard’s world, there are cheerful villains, grumpy ones, soft-hearted ones, tortured ones made miserable by doubt, conscience, personal sorrows, worries, ulcers, headaches, bad backs, bad marriages, leaky faucets, insomnia, or congenital irritability.  And it’s the same for the good guys.  Sins aren’t punished here.  Mistakes can cost you, but not always and when they do not as much as you’d expect or far more than they should.  There is no purpose or meaning to life except what we bring to it. It's full of pleasure and pain, sorrow and bliss, but it's all mixed up and spread unevenly, not available to everyone equally.  Up to us to make the best of it as we can.

One of the great favors we do for each other is treat each other as if our existence matters and our lives have meaning. The threat from the sociopaths, people for whom order and meaning have no meaning and not the least bit interested in helping you maintain the illusion that you matter, isn't only physical, it's metaphysical.

Like Don, Raylan gets himself in trouble over women. Unlike Don, however, he is loyal and chivalrous and always ready to help a lady in distress. Don requires rescuing.  Raylan, in riding to the rescue, has done things for Ava and Winona that he knows could cost him his career, his freedom, and his life.

Both men are heroes in the eyes of others, but far from heroic in their own minds.  They are conflicted, tormented, guilt-ridden, and tempted towards self- destruction. Raylan’s life is as full of turmoil and worry as Don Draper's and, although not as much or as constantly, still requires some lying, deception, and double-dealing to keep it together.  The differences are that Raylan, although by necessity, is a liar he is not a fraud so he can take some pride in himself for doing his job well .  Work for Don is at best an escape from himself. He can lose himself in the act of creation, which is to say, by creating new fictions or, if you’re a cynic about advertisting, new lies to sell to the public.   Raylan can be himself at his best while at work.  And he's basically a cheerful man.

Not a happy one.

Just a cheerful one.  And that makes him capable of the kind of small moments of pleasure and joy Draper is denied.

He's also a friendly man. He likes people. He enjoys their company. He gets a kick out of their quirks and idiosyncrasies. He's tolerant of their flaws and foibles, forgiving of their mistakes, and sympathetic in their moments of vanity and weakness. He is glad to see things from other's points of view.  To a degree, and, again to a degree, this includes criminals he's come to arrest.

The point isn't that Raylan is a better person than Don Draper. That’s irrelevant to a discussion of fictional characters.  But the point isn't that Raylan is a superior creative achievement either. He's a more easily likable character and that makes it more fun in the usual sense to watch Justified than Mad Man. The point is---because remember this is still a book review---that none of that cheerfulness, good nature, or friendliness is in the Raylan we meet in Leonard's novel.

The Raylan of Justified is full of displaced and barely sublimated angers and resentments.  The Raylan of Raylan is more ornery than angry.  The Raylan of Justified is mostly in control of his wants and desires. Mostly.  Raylan’s Raylan is not self-indulgent but he's not self-denying either.  The TV Raylan is a social drinker. The novel's Raylan likes a drink and has one when he wants one.  He has more self-regard.  He is full of self regard, in fact. But he is less self-regarding. He takes himself for granted.  It's enough for him that he's one of the good guys and nothing that happens in the book makes him doubt that even in the way the TV Raylan doubts it about himself, by recognizing that he's tempted by the same things as people he knows are bad guys or sinners. The book's Raylan isnt tolerant or forgiving or the least bit sympathetic.  He's just indifferent.

People's motives or characters make him no never mind. He doesn't like or dislike anybody. He gets along with them or he doesn't. If it happens that he has to put someone he gets along with in jail, that's how it breaks. Doesn’t mean though they can't go right along getting along until he has to out the cuffs on them...or shoot them.  Which is how he nearly winds up in bed with each of the book's two femme fatales, even though he knows both are murdering sociopaths who intend to kill him.

That’s not something it’s easy to imagine happening to Raylan on Justified.  His weakness lies in the opposite direction.  Justified turns the film noir convention around.  It’s not the femme fatales who undo the hero.  It’s the good women.

The two Raylans are that much different that as I was reading I wondered what Leonard was up to.  I’d expected that the novel would be a companion to the TV show but as it went along it seemed more like a critique and a correction.  I suspected Leonard of trying to steal his character back from himself and bring him back in line with Raylan as he was in Pronto and Riding the Rap. 

Then I got to thinking that what I see in the character of Raylan on Justified has been put there by Timothy Olyphant who plays him as an affable, easy-going, self-effacing, hopeful and, let me repeat, cheerful man.  On the surface, at any rate.  He’s turned his lawman from Deadwood, Seth Bullock, inside out.  Bullock wore his anger and self-doubt along with his righteousness, his resolve, his grit, and his potential for violence on the outside, symbolized by his black hat, black frock coat, and black mustache. Olyphant plays Raylan as more Jimmy Stewart as Tom Destry by way of Henry Fonda as Wyatt Earp than himself as Seth Bullock. 

But it’s not just Olyphant.  The show’s writers and producers, who include Leonard, although Graham Yost is the creative guiding hand, routinely put Raylan in the company of or up against characters he can interact with with kindness and warmth or at least react to with kindly and warm amusement.

He has his friends among the other marshals and lawmen and women.  He has, on and off, Winona and Ava.  He had someone I won’t mention by name in case any of you who watch the show haven’t made it through Season Two yet.  He has bonds of sympathy and history with any number of villains he’s crossed paths with.  Most dramatically intriguing he has his complicated relationship with his sometime friend, sometime enemy Boyd Crowder.  And then there are the victims of the bad guys’ crimes and depredations towards whom Raylan is usually, although not always, comforting, protective, more than necessarily and professionally helpful, and deeply sympathetic.

In the novel, the other marshals are on hand only to provide exposition.  Ava is offstage entirely. Winona only enters to be quizzed about Raylan by the femme fatale but never gets near Raylan himself.  Boyd figures prominently in the story but he and Raylan barely come into contact.  The villains are all either lowlife scum with no redeeming characteristics even as comic relief---except for Dewey Crowe who appears pretty much as he does in the TV show, being so stupid you can’t help but feel sorry for him and rooting for him to survive even though he’s put himself in a position where his continued survival isn’t just in doubt it would be a gigantic mistake on the part of fate---or they are grinning and leering sociopaths, including the femme fatales.  And the only victim Raylan has any fellow feeling for is himself.

But the even bigger disappointment waiting for fans of Justified is the immediate recognition of having been there and done that.

The central storyline of Raylan is taken pretty much straight from three episodes of Season 2 of Justified in which Boyd is hired as a “security expert” and bodyguard by a scheming mining company executive who intends to manipulate him into committing murder. And if the Raylan as written in the novel makes you appreciate what Timothy Olyphant has brought to the role, then Boyd’s appearance in the novel will have you in awe of what Walton Goggins has been doing with the character on Justified.

Meanwhile, the chief villain of the subplot, Dewey Crowe’s uncle Pervis Crowe will seem awfully familiar and sadly imitative.  He’s a male Mags Bennett.  Almost.  He runs a criminal fiefdom similar to Mags, being, like her, the chieftain of all the marijuana growing and the attendant criminality in Harlan County.  He runs the same legitimate business as a front, a general store.  He has two equally dimwitted sons with the same first names as Mags’, Dickie and Coover.  He even repeats many of Mags’ lines of dialog, word for word.

But since he’s not played by Margo Martindale or written to be played by Margo Martindale, he has none of Mags’ superior intelligence, none of her deceptively cuddly parental warmth, none of her wit, none of her manipulative charm, and none of her capacity for real hate and violence because he doesn’t have a heart, even a black and twisted one like Mags’.  He’s just a mean and greedy old coot who doesn’t care who gets hurt as he pushes people out of his way as he schemes for what he wants.  We believe it breaks Mags’ heart to have to smash her own son’s fingers to bloody pulps with a hammer, because for her it’s the case that a mother has to do what a mother has to do.  And we believe that Pervis could shrug off without a tear or a pang anything that might befall his boys as long as it also doesn’t befall him.  But who’s the more interesting and fun to believe in, the dirty old man with a hole where his soul ought to be or the devoted mother whose love is perverted to the point that she can think of torture as just her version of a grounding and who assures a man she’s just poisoned that she will look after his about to be orphaned teenage daughter as if she’s confident he will appreciate and be grateful for this kindness as he writhes in agony?

Which brings me back to the question of just what Leonard is up to with the novel?  Who did he write it for?  For fans of the show looking for something to enjoy while waiting for Season 3 to come out on DVD or Season 4 to roll around, it fails for the obvious reason---if you want repeats you can watch Season 2 on DVD.  As an introduction to the TV show for fans of Leonard’s writing who may not have watched any of Justified yet, it has the problem of leaving out just about everything that is likeable, enjoyable, and intriguing about the show.  And for fans of Leonard’s writing who don’t care that there’s a TV show with the same characters, I think it’ll be a disappointment.  There’s a slapdash quality to Raylan, as if it was put together in a hurry out of spare parts with the intention of just putting something on the road until something better rolls out the shop doors.  And I think I know why.

Raylan is a cut and paste job.

I think what we have here is a hastily stitched together collection of adaptations of scripts and treatments Leonard wrote for Justified that Graham Yost and his writers re-wrote and made better.

Damn.

In the last fourteen or so months I’ve written around twenty-five book reviews and only two have been negative.  This one makes three and wouldn’t you know, it’s of a book by one of my favorite writers.

But there are reasons Leonard’s one of my favorite writers and those reasons are on display in the book, so reading it wouldn’t be a total waste of time.

I just think that if you haven’t seen Justified yet, you’ll have more fun introducing yourself to that.

Raylan by Elmore Leonard, published by William Morrow, available from Amazon in two varieties, hardcover and kindle.

Pronto, Riding the Rap, and the short story collection that includes “Fire in the Hole” are available in paperback and kindle editions.

My free-range kidhood

Lucy, Linda, Larry, Lyle, Lance, and Luke Mannion, circa a hundred and ten years ago. I’ll let you guess which one is me.

When I was a kid, if I needed a new pair of jeans - we called them dungarees way back then - because I'd outgrown my last pair - you didn't wear them out. Moms sewed or ironed in patches on the knees and the seats. - I walked down to the clothing store. I didn't like to do that because the owner's sister-in-law, his chief sales clerk, practiced high pressure sales techniques. No matter what I thought I wanted and needed, she set out to convince me I was wrong. I was buying the wrong size, the wrong brand, the wrong color, the wrong amount---“It’s buy one get a second pair free.  Didn’t you read the sign in the window? You’ll save your parents money!”  I was forgetting I needed a new shirt or a new belt or half a dozen new pairs of socks.  And what about a sweater?  It didn’t do me any good to protest I didn’t have enough money. My parents had a charge account there.

“Underwear!  You’ve got to need new underwear, a growing boy like you!”

Three out of five times I walked in there I walked out without buying anything because she overloaded my decision-making circuits. The fourth time I walked out with something I didn't like that I ended up returning the fifth time when at last I walked out with the new dungarees I should have insisted she sell me the first time.

The key phrase here is not "new dungarees". It's "I walked."

I grew up in a suburb that over time became more and more defined by new developments of split levels, raised ranches, and Colonials. But our street was part of an older neighborhood that dated back to before World War II when the country was much less dependent on cars to get everywhere.  We were within walking distance of a not that little business district and that distance was walkable, with sidewalks and crosswalks and stoplights the whole way, and the summer before second grade I started to walk it every day.

I walked everywhere a kid needed to get. I walked to school. I walked to church. I walked to the park. I walked to all my friends' houses.

I walked to get ice cream.  I walked to buy comic books.  When I needed school supplies I walked to the Five and Dime. When I needed spray paint or airplane glue for my models I walked to the hobby shop. When our last baseball was lost forever in the woods that was our centerfield fence or our last good bat split behind taping, we pooled our money and walked down to Bob’s Sporting Goods.  When Mom Mannion needed some extra groceries quick she gave me money and a list and I walked to the market for bread or milk or a box of spaghetti or a jar of peanut butter.  I still remember my heartbreak when a jar of tomato sauce ripped through the bag, fell to the sidewalk, and shattered at my feet.  I stood there staring down at the mess, unable to decide what to do. I wanted to go back to the store but I wasn't sure I had enough money left for another jar because I'd spent some of the change on a new matchbox car.  I felt like a screwup for letting the bag rip and I felt like a sneak and a thief for buying the matchbox car.  I always had permission to use some of the change to buy a little reward for myself. A candy bar, a soda, a comic book, a pack of baseball cards.  But matchbox cars were expensive. Fifty cents! But I couldn't resist.  All four doors and the hood opened on this one.

At last, I walked home where I apologized profusely and insisted on walking back down to the market. I even offered to return the car. Yes, I was that much of a goody two shoes. I had to be. I was a Cub Scout. It was in the oath.

Which reminds me, I used to walk to my den meetings.

Whenever I didn’t feel like walking, I rode my bike.

Now, Mom and Pop Mannion didn’t permit all this free-ranging walking and biking just because I was a reliable, responsible, and safety-conscious Cub Scout. 

They permitted it because they knew that no matter where and how far I went, I was never out of sight of somebody’s mother.

The other day, a twitter pal called my attention to a blog called Free-Range Kids.  I haven’t had time to explore it thoroughly, but I'm intrigued by what I’ve read so far and I'm definitely sympathetic to its main theme.  Which appears to be that adults have become so desperate to keep their kids safe that they’re denying them the freedom to roam and explore and amuse themselves on their own that’s not only one of the joys of childhood but necessary to experience life in a way that will teach them how to grow up into responsible, self-reliant, and independent adults.

It does often seem that as a society we are in a constant collective panic over the safety of our children and that we are dealing with this by becoming overprotective to the point where we reflexively react as if every unsupervised move children make on their own will lead immediately and inexorably to death, dismemberment, or incarceration for a felony and parents who take their eyes of their kids for a second are guilty of something akin to child abuse.

Seems that way.

But it’s true that an seven year old walking to the grocery store by himself will likely attract the attention of a police officer.  And it’s true parents have to be more careful than their parents had to be, not for fear that something will happen but of someone else being afraid something will happen and calling 911.  Sometimes when we went on errands with Pop Mannion he’d leave us in the car alone for a few minutes while he ran into the bank or the grocery store or the repair shop, the car windows open and the doors locked, of course, and we kept ourselves amused and safely in the car with coloring books and toys.  How many parents would try that today?

Still. Too much of our public debate is driven by unacknowledged nostalgia. What made the idyllic childhoods of the 50s, 60s, and 70s possible was that the country was rich enough and generous enough that families could get by on one salary and mothers could afford to stay home full-time. That doesn't mean they were home all the time, mothering 24/7.  Individual mothers could run errands, go shopping, take classes, take breaks, do chores, even hold part time jobs, spend a little time being themselves, because there were so many mothers in the neighborhood that at least half a dozen were at home at any given moment to keep watch.

But it wasn't just mothers. Fathers were around more too. A 9 to 5 job meant 9 to 5.  And since commutes were shorter most of the neighborhood dads were home by six.  Going outside to play after supper meant being under the watchful eyes of all the parents in the neighborhood. We were always within shouting distance of somebody's mother or father.

And then there was the sheer number of us kids. On just my street alone, a cul de sac with fifteen houses, we could organize a small game of kickball or capture the flag or frisbee wars with only 20 kids on each side.  This included  teenagers and pre-schoolers.  You could go outside on your own but you were almost never alone.  Somebody's responsible big brother or sister was usually on hand to take charge if any of us skinned a knee, stepped on a hornets nest, got into a fight, failed to look both ways, or just melted down from sheer exhaustion.  We looked out for each other and after the little kids.

The country changed. And it changed because the economy changed.  There's no bringing back what was so good about growing up back then without bringing back the economic conditions that made it all possible, which, liberals take note, doesn't just mean strong unions and higher taxes on the rich and a revitalization of domestic manufacturing - it means bringing back a Japan and Europe still reeling from World War II so that the United States can dominate the world's markets for everything.   And a not likely to be even being close to equaled housing boom that brings with it a proportionate demand for new appliances, furniture, and lawn mosses and shrubbery and roads leading into and out of them. Not to mention families with an average of more than 3 children.

The current generation of mothers of very small children includes women who were born in the 1980s. (I'll pause here for a moment while we all feel old together.)  I wonder how they remember their kidhoods. My guess is they remember having more freedom to roam than they had because people tend not to remember what they didn't do.

Boomers and Gen Xers weren’t left to our own devices, unwatched and unworried over.  We were watched and worried over in a different way made possible by the times and the circumstances.

And, like I said, people tend not to remember what didn’t happen.  We don’t remember the trees we didn’t fall out of.  The strangers who didn’t offer us candy. The cars that didn’t hit us.

After I left for college, my little sister Linda was struck by a car.  Fortunately, she suffered only a broken wrist and lots of cuts and bruises.

She was nine.  She was with a friend.  She was in a crosswalk and crossing with the light.

Through a glass of Riesling brightly

The blonde has become something of an oenophile. Last night she dragged ordered insisted blackmailed kindly invited me to accompany her to one of her wine tasting classes.  This is a Riesling Kabinett from Bad Dukheim. A good German wine goes well with sushi and Thai food. But you knew that. In Good Taste Spirit Shop. New Paltz, NY. Wednesday. May 23, 2012.

The quotable Charles Pierce: David Brooks needs to RTFM

Apparently David Brooks thinks the United States Constitution, a purely political how-to manual for organizing and operating a strong, centralized government is a moral and economic treatise whose main purpose was to make the riff-raff aware of what they owe to their betters.  In other words, he thinks it was written by Charles Murray and not James Madison in constant consultation with Thomas Jefferson.  The problem today, according to Brooks, is that the riff-raff have gotten above themselves and need a good scolding if not a stern slapping down. How dare they think they are entitled to the easy life Brooks and his rich friends have earned by virtue of being, well, rich.  Charles Pierce has a few things to say about that but he finishes with this:

Does this person, with his vast spaces for entertainment, honestly believe that the people who depend on things like Medicaid and Social Security, and small-business loans and Pell grants, are emboldened by the circumstances of their lives? Does he believe that these people who are living paycheck-to-paycheck and only asking that the system be a little bit more fair are actually as smug and entitled as every syllable he's ever written proclaims Brooks to be? All over America, people are absolutely petrified that somebody in their family might get sick, thereby bankrupting them forever. All over America, people are worried that their mortgages are laden with small-print land mines. All over America, people are living in sheer abject terror that the job will disappear, or the rest of their 401K will go up in smoke, or grandma's Alzheimer's will offer them the choice of eating government cheese or letting the old girl die in her own filth in some unregulated nursing home. These are the people that David Brooks believes are destroying the country because their unreasoning hubris prevents government from making their lives even more difficult.

NPH and Hugh Jackman at the Tonys

This was also a link to this one in my Avengers review.

To see what this has to do with The Avengers, and specifically Tony Stark and Bruce Banner, you'll have to read the review.

Sitting Dance with Donald O’Connor and Gene Kelly

I linked to this in my review of The Avengers, but since most people don’t follow links---for your listening and viewing pleasure:

What does this have to do with The Avengers, you ask?  Guess you’ll have to read my review.

Gasp! Another attack on free enterprise!

I hope those are really his drawings.

Robert Reich gives away the magician's tricks.

Actually, this cleared up a few points for me.

From MoveOn.org.  Pass this one around. Email works more effectively than Facebook. Step 3 is the one to emphasize to anyone who thinks Mitt Romney’s business experience is a real qualification for President.  Making a targeted company “profitable” is not the same as making it prosper.

The Romance of Tony Stark

Thor, Iron Man, and Captain America square off in The Avengers in accordance with the rule that no superheroes can meet for the first time without getting into a fight so that fans have more fuel for their endless debates over who would win in a matchup. 

This is what you get when you let a former English professor write movie reviews.

Within the cycle of movies of which The Avengers is the latest installment, Tony Stark---Iron Man---fills the role Lancelot fills in the King Arthur stories.

I warned you.

The Avengers isn’t a retelling of the Knights of the Round Table.  For one thing, there’s no King Arthur. (If anyone wants to make the case that Nick Fury plays that role, feel free. I think it’s a reach. Try Merlin instead.)  And I'm not making a direct comparison of their personalities.  Stark is no Lancelot. If he has a counterpart among any of the Knights of the Roundtable, it's Gawain. Gawain is vain, boastful, selfish, self-indulgent, a showoff and happy to think he can do it all on his own.  He's also the second best of Arthur's knights. He was the best until Lancelot showed up. Fans can argue the actual ranking of the Avengers vis-a-vis each other. What matters is that Gawain wasn't inclined to admit to his demotion and Stark would disagree with you if you didn't rank Iron Man first. A lot of his best lines in the movie are cheap shots at the other heroes' expenses meant to let them know he's not impressed by them or their powers.

(The only other Avenger who even roughly has an Arthurian double is Captain America. He's like Galahad whose strength was as the strength of ten because his heart was pure. The super-soldier serum worked as it did on Steve Rogers because he had a good heart.)

Still, the comparison to Lancelot holds in that like Lancelot Iron Man is the hero around whose story the other heroes' stories are centered.

“I am Iron Man,” Stark declares at the end of his first movie.  But as we learn in Iron Man 2, he’s not. Iron Man is just a robot Stark pilots from within.  And for the robot to do its job it almost doesn’t matter who’s wearing the metal suit.  What matters is if Stark can make the suit into a skin, that is, into an extension of himself.  And a lot has to change for that to happen.  Every one of Lancelot’s adventures is crucial to the overall story of the Knights of the Round Table because the fate of Camelot depends on Lancelot remaining the exemplary knight he is while constantly confronted with the temptation to be just a man.  Every one of Iron Man’s adventures is crucial to the ongoing story of the Avengers because the fates of the Avengers and the world depend on Stark becoming a knight in shining armor, and he’s having a hard time with that.

Ok. Before taking this analogy any further…

I liked it.  It’s fun.  I had a good time. The Avengers is a good superhero movie.

It’s not a good movie the way Spider-Man 2 and Batman Begins are good movies.  Rio Bravo is a good movie. Rio Lobo is a good Western.  The Dirty Dozen is a good war movie.  The Guns of Navarone is a good movie.  The Avengers is a good superhero movie.  The best in this particular series of superhero movies after the first Iron Man.

Part of what makes it good is that it is very much a piece of that series.  Director Joss Whedon, who also wrote the screenplay, has clearly studied and liked and taken to heart the previous movies in the series and he deftly weaves together narrative and thematic threads from Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man 2, Thor, and Captain America: The First Avenger into one taut strand, pulls that strand smoothly through the movie, then quickly unravels it and spools the threads out towards the next movies in the series.  The Avengers sets up Captain America 2, Thor 2, and Iron Man 3.  (It doesn’t directly set up The Avengers 2.  That’s coming but it will have to pick up the threads from those sequels and do its part in continuing the series.) As Whedon has apparently learned from his long career in television and as a writer of comic books, everything doesn’t depend on single episode or issue.  The job of any particular episode or issue, in fact, is to get the audience excited about what’s coming next so they’ll tune in next week or buy next month’s issue.  For all the spectacle and mayhem that goes with bringing together Earth’s Mightiest Heroes and setting them up to fight off an invading alien army in the streets of New York City while landmarks like Grand Central Station are destroyed around them, The Avengers is a movie with an admirably modest ambition.

Moving the story along.

There’s a kick in watching the Avengers assemble for the first time and in listening to our favorites banter and argue. The dialog is sharp and snappy.  The jokes are funny.  The suspense level is high.  Whedon makes us worry about every character.  But the main reason for seeing The Avengers is the same reason why when you’re reading a book and you finish Chapter 10 you move on to Chapter 11 instead of skipping ahead to Chapter 12.  It’s a fun and exciting chapter and, if you’re all caught up with your reading, a gratifying one that will have you nodding in appreciation and saying to yourself, “So that’s where they were going with that!” and “Of course! I should have seen that coming!” and even “Wow, I wasn’t expecting that at all!”  But that’s the thing.  All those reactions depend on your having done the homework.

You don’t need to be a fan of the comic books to enjoy The Avengers, but I don’t see how anyone who hasn’t seen the other movies in the series will be able to follow this one or find a reason to care about many of the characters or the story.  Whedon is used to playing to an audience that includes lots of people who missed last week’s episode, so maybe I missed all the ways he slipped in to help viewers just tuning in catch up. But it seems to me that if you haven’t seen Iron Man 2, you won’t know why Tony Stark is a problem for the other heroes and himself.  If you haven’t seen Iron Man, Iron Man 2, and Thor you won’t know why Agent Coulson matters or appreciate Clark Gregg’s performance in the part.  If you haven’t seen Thor, you may think Tom Hiddleston is a bad actor instead of a great one.  If you haven’t seen Captain America you won’t know why Cap is so forlorn or appreciate the subtext in his and Stark’s instant dislike of each other.  And if you haven’t seen The Incredible Hulk, you might not get Bruce Banner’s best joke.

Note: I’m not warning anybody away from The Avengers.  I’m just saying if you’re thinking of going and really want to get the most of it, watch at least a couple of the other movies.  They’re good and good for you.

I’m also saying that The Avengers isn’t a good movie in and of itself because it depends so much on those other movies.  Which is not a bad thing, just something to keep in mind when you’re telling friends how AWESOME it is.

And it is AWESOME.  With the above caveats.

Of course the star attractions are the stars, both the real life ones and the ones from the comic books they play. Robert Downey Jr, Chris Evans, Chris Hemsworth, and Mark Ruffalo, Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, and the Hulk.

Evans does what he had to do going in, hold his own against Downey and Hemsworth while playing a much duller character and then make that dullness as compelling as Stark's naughty boy charm and Thor's swashbuckling sex appeal. Evans doesn't have Cap fight for his authority - if anything he has him doubting it. Cap's sense of himself is tied to what he sees as his place in the world, but his world is seventy years in the past. When the time is right, he assumes it, without fuss but with confidence. Events conspire to re-create a need and therefore a place for Captain America and Cap steps right in and suddenly Iron Man, Thor, Hulk, and the entire New York City police force are gladly taking orders from him. Evans is a modest enough and secure enough actor to let the movie come to him.

If you haven't seen Thor, you might not feel as I did that Chris Hemsworth is underused.  Whatever those of you who did see it might have thought of Thor the movie, I think you have to admit Hemsworth was terrific as Thor the god of thunder.  He established himself as a star and swashbuckling leading man in the tradition of not just Douglas Fairbanks and Errol Flynn but Gene Kelly---how else would you describe Kelly's dancing style besides swashbuckling? What is his D'Artagnan doing while dueling if not dancing?---and Harrison Ford.  In fact, if Steven Spielberg and George Lucas are truly intent on continuing with another Indiana Jones movie, they should consider doing a total reboot starring Hemsworth.

Thor's main job as part of the Avengers---and I mean the team as portrayed in the movie, not the whole movie itself---is to bring the mighty when the mighty's most needed. But the movie takes his mightiness as a given and his role in the story is to provide kindly approval of Cap, of Stark, and of human beings in general and show sympathetic disapproval of Loki.  Tom Hiddleston's Loki isn't dismissible as another cackling movie super villain because Hemsworth's Thor doesn't see him that way.

I would have liked to have seen a little more of this side of Thor in scenes with Evans and Downey. I'm also disappointed that Whedon didn't put him together with either Cobie Smulders or Scarlett Johansson. It would have been fun watching him charm them nearly out of their catsuits. And a scene between Hemsworth, Downey, and Paltrow in which Pepper Potts swoons for Thor while Stark drives himself nuts trying not to show how jealous he is would have been a real hoot.

Can't have everything, and one thing The Avengers has that I didn't expect was Mark Ruffalo's brilliantly understated take on Bruce Banner and the Hulk.

The Incredible Hulk is the weakest in the series, but it’s still a pretty good superhero movie. I thought its major flaw was the coldness and detachment of Edward Norton’s Bruce Banner.  Norton overemphasized Banner’s efforts to remain calm in order to keep himself from Hulking out.  Ruffalo’s Banner isn’t calm.  He’s ferociously, strenuously, and exhaustingly repressed.  He’s in the habit of referring to the Hulk as “the other guy,” but Ruffalo says the words with an ironic sneer in his voice and a look of fear in his eyes that let us know Banner is terrified and, even more wrenching, growing resigned to the fact that it’s Banner who’s the other guy and that the Hulk is the real him and the moment is closing in when the Hulk will assert himself for good.

When he reveals his “secret” to Cap in one of the movie’s most rousing lines, it’s one of those satisfying “I knew it!” moments. 

The breakout character, however, is Black Widow.  Can't say Scarlett Johansson brings anything special to the role besides an impressive deadpanning of her dominatrix persona and the ability to wear her catsuit with insouciance. But Natasha Romanoff---as far as I recall, she's only referred to as Black Widow once and then by an enemy spymaster who's using the code name that's the only name he has for her---turns out to have a superpower.

She thinks faster than a speeding bullet.

Literally.

Johansson doesn’t bring anything special to the part, but that’s not to say she brings nothing.  Intense and concentrated intelligence blazes out of her eyes as hot and almost as visibly as Superman’s heat vision.  She makes us realize that all Black Widow’s backflips, spin and scissor kicks, headbutts, karate chops, throat punches, and two-gun pistol shooting on the slide aren’t reflexive.  They’re plotted.  If The Avengers was a Guy Ritchie movie we’d see her in slow-motion set-ups, carefully assessing each opponent and planning her particular lines of attack.  The bad guys aren’t being out-fought as much as out-thought.  And this holds true when she’s not in a physical fight.

In mental duels, she out-thinks two of the smartest characters in the movie.

Still, I felt a little as though she was being forced into a leading role and forced at me.  Black Widow is a sidekick---my son thinks “sidekick” is a disparagement of her awesomeness. I should say she’s a first lieutenant to the hero-kings---and there is no other female character of note.  I'm not counting Gwyneth Paltrow's extended cameo.  As SHIELD agent Maria Hill, Smulders seems to be only on hand to wear the catsuit in case Johansson decides not to sign up for The Avengers 2.

At first glance it might seem that as Nick Fury Samuel L. Jackson hasn't been given much more to do but glower and growl and wear his black leather trench coat with a coolness that will make you desperate to own one yourself even though you know in your heart you will never be anywhere near that cool.  But as Stark warns, Fury is the spy's spy. He serves his country by lying and manipulation.  Jackson makes us see the sinister side of Fury's nature. He's not just Mace Windu with an eye patch.  He has more than a touch of Darth Sidious and Darth Vader to make you want to rethink that black trench coat. You never worry about which side of the Force he's on. You just wonder if there's anyone he doesn't think of as a tool or a weapon to be used.

Like I said, you don't have to be a fan of the comic books to enjoy the movie, but if you're not I can't see how you won't be thoroughly baffled by the apparently wasted presence of Jeremy  Renner as Hawkeye (or even know he's called Hawkeye) for about two thirds the way through. Then he starts bringing the archery awesome and you'll be too busy thinking to yourself “I need to get a bow and arrow!” to care about his backstory.

But, getting down to it, I still see The Avengers as Robert Downey’s movie and the story being moved along as Iron Man’s story.

Of the big three, Iron Man, Captain America, and Thor, Iron Man is the unfinished character.  Captain America just needed to get his chance and in his movie he got it. Thor has learned his most important lesson. But when last we left Tony Stark at the end of Iron Man 2, he was still not a hero.  Iron Man and Tony Stark were separate entities and Nick Fury had decided he could go without the former if the former could only be had with the latter.

He’s still an open question and I’m not giving anything away by telling you that The Avengers leaves that question open.

Downey and Ruffalo have a couple of wonderful and funny scenes together in which Stark and Banner play dueling geniuses on their virtual drawing boards.  Hemsworth’s not the only one of the stars who can dance, so to speak.  In the exuberant physicality of what is essentially a comic song and dance act, Downey and Ruffalo reminded me of Gene Kelly and Donald O’Connor or, maybe more aptly, Hugh Jackman and Neal Patrick Harris at last year’s Tony Awards.  What we’re watching is a partnership and a rivalry.

Stark has been drawn to Banner in an openly admiring and affectionate way we’ve never seen him drawn to any other character including Pepper Potts---mostly we’ve seen him deliberately annoying people in order to push them away.  In Banner he finds a potential soulmate capable of playing with him on his level, someone who shares his passion for science and can keep up.

But as they work together to solve a problem, Stark can’t resist turning it into a competition.  

At first it seems as though he’s only trying to distract Banner by teasing him and peppering him with one-liners.  But then what he’s doing becomes more sinister and dangerous.  He’s trying to provoke him.  If Banner has to concentrate on keeping his cool, he won’t be able to focus on the problem.  But it gets worse. 

He’s curious.

He wants to see Banner Hulk out.

It’s the pure scientist in him getting the better of him.  He can’t help seeing another human being as a potential science experiment.

Which is insane.  Never mind for the moment that the fate of the earth is at stake.  Trapping himself in a small room with the Hulk when he’s not wearing his armor is a really, really, really bad idea.

But that’s Stark.  He’s rash. He’s impulsive. He’s reckless. He’s thoughtless.  He’s immature.  And he’s selfish.

And this is why I say that the whole series (so far) has been basically The Romance of Tony Stark and that’s likely going to be a main theme as the series moves forward.

Whatever the ostensible plots and whoever the villains, Thor 2 is going to be about Thor being awesome while searching for his lost love and Captain America 2 will be about Steve Rogers trying to find a place for himself in the 21st century besides being Captain America.  But Iron Man 3 will be about whether or not Stark’s going to screw up again and how and how bad and how much of the result of that will carry over into The Avengers  2.

To get back to the Knights of the Round Table analogy, the one way Stark is most like Lancelot is that in both their romances everything depends on how the hero responds to his chief temptation which for Lancelot and Tony Stark is the temptation to put self before duty.  For Lancelot that temptation comes in the form of his love for Guinevere.  For Stark it's straightforwardly his ego.

Every tale of Lancelot foreshadows Lancelot’s ultimate failure and the breaking of the Round Table and the destruction of Camelot.  Every one of Iron Man’s adventures (so far) foreshadows Stark’s potential failure to be the hero he and the world need him to be.

Again, I don’t think I’m giving anything away by telling you that in The Avengers we learn that if he has to Stark can overcome the temptation and be Iron Man and not just Iron Man's pilot, a billionaire, genius, playboy, philanthropist in a metal suit. It doesn't tell us that he is past temptation.

It’s a hilarious moment and a key one when Stark recognizes similarities between himself and Loki.  But we’re left to wonder what he’s going to do with this newfound self-awareness.

The romance is unfinished.  The comedy or the tragedy is still to be played out.  The story continues.

_____________________

Important note to moviegoers:  Stay through the credits.  All the credits.  Sit tight in your seat until you think the lights are about to come on.

_____________________

Readers beware: I’ve been trying not to give too much away in the posts, but I’m not enforcing a no spoiler zone in the comments.  The discussion down there is wide-open so don’t venture in unless you’ve seen the movie or don’t mind.  On the other hand, if you’re commenting, try to keep in mind that some people might wander in on the conversation by mistake.  Be as indirect and circumspect as you can.  And for gods’ sake, whatever you do, don’t give away the final scene!

______________________

If you don’t have time to watch the other movies in the series first, maybe you’ll find this post of mine comparing the Iron Man, Thor, and Captain America movies helpful.

If you do have time to do some catching up, Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man 2,  Thor, and Captain America: The First Avenger are available to watch instantly at Amazon. Iron Man 2 is also streaming on Netflix.

The Avengers, written and directed by Josh Whedon, starring Robert Downey Jr, Chris Evans, Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo, Scarlett Johansson, Jeremy Renner, Tom Hiddleston, Clark Gregg, Stellan Skarsgard, Cobie Smulders, and Samuel L. Jackson, now playing in theaters.

Final final Avengers thought before posting my review

I get into this more in my review, but if you haven’t seen any of the other movies in the series, I don’t see how you can appreciate or even get a lot of what’s in The Avengers, including and especially the importance of Agent Coulson and the terrific job Clark Gregg has been doing with the part and the great things he’s brought to the series.

Maybe this will help with that a little.

Third final Avengers thought before posting my review

This has nothing to do with how good The Avengers is or isn’t, but just for the record, Josh Whedon understands. Steve Rogers---Captain America---is a poor Irish kid from Brooklyn, New York, and a New Deal Democrat who believes in God and is not only a proud flag-waving patriot, he’s a proud flag-wearing patriot.

Second final Avengers thought before posting my review

There’s a reason women of my acquaintance---particularly one I’m pretty close to---think Thor is the best of the Avengers series so far, besides Chris Hemsworth’s height, smile, and golden abs.

It’s the only one with a true female lead.

The Avengers doesn’t change that, even with the expanded awesomeness of Black Widow.    I thought The Avengers might have set Cap up with a leading lady for his sequel.  The whole series could still use a female superhero lead, someone who doesn't just match the men in power but in personality. I vote for Scarlet Witch because A. She's trouble and B. Unlike She-Hulk, my second choice, she's not another musclebound bruiser like the guys already on the team.

First of a few final thoughts before I post my review of The Avengers

The video game that ends The Avengers is a big noisy mess, but as big noisy messes go it’s fun to play along with in your head and almost coherent enough that you can follow the action.  Plus, it’s necessary.

When your heroes are essentially invincible---one is actually advertised as Invincible and another is immortal---you have to give them a battle to fight that at least looks like a real challenge so what else are you going to do but destroy a whole city around them? There really was no room in this movie to add and develop any more supervillains to take on each Avenger one on one.  Maybe that will happen in Avengers 2 and we’ll be spared the requisite video game ending.

Not an MG

Beautiful car, ain’t it?

It’s not an MG, in case that’s what you were thinking.  See?

It’s a Morgan.  Those of you who watch NCIS knew that, didn’t you?

Parking Lot of the Henry A. Wallace Visitor and Education Center at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum. Hyde Park, NY. Friday. May 11, 2012.

A Christian nation

Mitt Romney stands by what he said, whatever it was he said.  Well, what he said was that President Obama is working to make this a less Christian nation.

Good.

Because this is what the Radical Christian Right, which is to say, the Republican base Mitt is kowtowing to, means by a “Christian” nation:

A nation in which we all pray together in public the same Protestant prayers, even if we’re Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, Catholic, non-believers, or Protestants who don’t believe in praying in public because of what Jesus said on the subject. Where creationism is taught to children as science.  Where no women have sex except with their husbands and with the intention of getting pregnant. Where no woman can have an abortion unless the man who got her pregnant permits it. Where no poor woman can get an abortion at all. Where gay people are made to feel as miserable about themselves as can be.  And where the poor can expect no aid or comfort from a supposedly Christian government and where the rich are not inconvenienced in their efforts to store up as much treasure on earth as they can lay their grubby hands on.

A nation of guilt-ridden, joyless, repressed, self-loathing, greedy hypocrites.

Crawdaddies are always up to something

Lance Mannion at Fox Island, outside Fort Wayne, Indiana, a hundred years ago.

When we lived in Indiana, because, once you got out of town, there was nothing much to look at in the distance but more distance, I developed the habit of looking in close.  This was when I started stocking up on guide books, learning the names of birds and trees and wildflowers, and wandering about with binoculars, which, I know, are a tool for looking into the distance, but I mostly pointed them at nearby bushes and up into trees I was standing at the base of and overhead telephone wires and the far banks of streams I could practically step across.  Our apartment in Fort Wayne was at the edge of the city and it was a short walk out of the urban into the suburban and then into the country and farmland, which, in that part of Indiana, is usually just another word for cornfield.  The landscape wasn’t as flat as I liked to complain it was but to eyes trained by a boyhood and youth spent in the Mohawk Valley of Upstate New York, with summers in the Adirondack Mountains and along the Atlantic seashore, it was…undramatic.  I wouldn’t get very far in my walks before I was bored with the view and ready to turn around and head home.

There just is no here here, I thought, with apologies to Oakland and Gertrude Stein.

I don’t remember when it dawned on me that although the landscape might be featureless it was not lifeless and I might find my walks more interesting if I started looking at that life.

I said this was when I started learning the names of birds and trees and wildflowers.  But what really happened is that I started to see birds and trees and wildflowers.

When you are standing on top of hill, looking out over the treetops of a woods that fills the valley below, it seems enough to know that those trees are maples.  But when you are standing next to a tree you have to make adjustments in your thinking, your remembering, and your seeing, that is if you’re confronted with the fact that this tree is a maple too but it’s a silver maple and those trees you grew up taking for granted were sugar maples and there’s a difference.  There are differences.  The leaves aren’t quite the same shape.  The bark has a different texture, a slightly different color.  And if you are standing under a silver maple you are probably standing on what used to be a farm.  Farmers planted them or left them standing in their fields as shade trees.  Oh, and sugar maples are hardier.  You don’t want a silver maple in your yard.  They have a tendency to rot from within.  What looks like a sturdy old tree that could stand up to a winter gale might be as hollow as a drain pipe and ready to snap in a spring breeze and come crashing down on your house.

Similarly, I learned that what I took for flocks of blackbirds---as in birds that happened to have black feathers---were flocks of red-winged blackbirds and starlings and grackles and cowbirds, which aren’t even black but brown, the females, at any rate, males are brown-headed, and that every yellow flower in the grass that wasn’t a dandelion wasn’t a buttercup either.

These discoveries were thrilling, but since regret seems to be one of my default emotions, they also had me kicking myself.  Why hadn’t I seen any of this before?  How could I have been so oblivious?  How had I gotten so far in life without knowing that all of this was right in front of my eyes, if only I’d bothered to look?

It wasn’t Indiana that was boring, it was that I was boring myself.

Maybe I was a little harsh.  What it was, likely, was that growing up where there were bends in every road and hills on the horizons, I’d learned to be on the lookout for what was around the bend or over the hill, which was usually another bend or another hill.  I took it for granted that over there was very different from right here and, intrigued, was in a hurry to get over there to see.  It didn’t occur to me that here might be an interesting place to explore.

In Indiana, here and there were pretty much the same place.

Roger Ebert grew up in Illinois, which has even more here and less there than Indiana, so he learned to look at here up close early, mostly while on his knees or stretched out on his stomach in the grass, peering at things---squirming things, swimming things, wriggling things, hopping things, slithering things---that would go unnoticed unless you got your nose right down next to them.

In my grandmother's back yard, I spent long periods frozen in immobility, a salt shaker clutched in my hand. My Uncle Bob had treacherously told me that if I could shake salt on the tail of a Robin Redbreast, I could catch it. This kept me out of his hair. There were robins everywhere, hopping on the grass, cocking their heads to the side, listening for the slithering sound that might betray a worm. I haven't seen a robin in a long time. I suppose there must be about as many around today, but my life isn't calibrated to see them…

On your knees or your stomach, the world revealed a hidden population. One day at Dougie Pierre's house, we climbed under the bridge over the Boneyard Creek to catch crawdaddies. We did catch a couple, using a kitchen sieve, and kept them in a Mason jar full of water, where I suppose they must still be. I had waded in the Boney a dozen times and never seen a crawdaddy. After I saw them, I waded no more. They're always up to something.

If you’re in the habit of thinking of Ebert as a movie critic, you should make a point of reading his blog where you will learn to think of him a writer who happens to write a lot about movies.  This post, A natural history, is a good one to start with.  But it’s about more than robins, snakes, tomato bugs, and crawdaddies, so be sure to follow the link at the end.

The baker’s melancholy

"Is that a bird?" Lucien asked his father.

Pere Lessard stood over the bread table in the back room of his bakery drawing patterns in the flour with a pastry brush, his forearms dusted white like great snowy hams.

"It's a sailing ship," said Pere Lessard.

Lucien tilted his head this way and that. "Oh yes, now I see it.". He didn't see it at all.

His father slouched, suddenly looking weary. "No you don't. I'm no artist, Lucien. I'm a baker. My father was a baker, and his father before him. Our family has fed the people of the butte for two hundred years. I have smelled of yeast and breathed the dust of flour my whole life. Not one day did our family or friends go hungry, even when there was war. Bread is my life, son, and before I die, I will have made a million loaves."

"Yes, Papa," said Lucien. He had seen his father slide into melancholy like this before, usually like now, right before dawn when they were waiting for the first loaves to come out of the ovens.  He patted his father's arm, knowing that soon the bread would be ready and the bakery would boil with activity that would allow no time to grieve over ships that looked like birds.

"I would trade it all if I could lay down the colors of water like our fiend Monet, or move paint like the joy in a young girl's smile like Renoir.  Do you know what I'm talking about?"

"Yes, Papa," Lucien said. He had no idea what his father was talking about.

---from Sacre Bleu: A Comedy d'Art by Christopher Moore.

Cap vs. Mitt

Back when I was in third grade, there was a kid in my class named Charles Hallahan who had it in for me. I don’t know why.  But pretty much every day he found something he didn’t like about me and let me know it.  He was a big kid, big for his age, which was a year older than the rest of us, since he’d been left behind.  But I never felt pushed around by him or particularly threatened, even though he routinely warned me the day was coming when he was going to knock my block off.  He was annoying mostly but I felt I was able to fend him off with a deft “I know you are but what am I?” or a well-timed “Takes one to know one.”  I may even have gotten him with a good, solid “Sez you!”

The point is I thought of Charles as a bully but I never felt bullied by him.  I can’t say I didn’t worry on the days he told me he was going to be waiting for me on my walk home after school.  But since he never was, after a while, I probably didn’t worry all that much.

Then one day I found myself with my fists up, squaring off against him on the playground.

It happened like this.

Lots of other kids knew about my problem with Charles and that day Mark DeLisle decided enough was enough and something had to be done about it. Mark was a 5th grader and our playground "minder".  Minders were kids from upper grades the nuns trusted to be their eyes and ears at lunchtime and recess because they couldn't be everywhere at once, and we knew we had to listen to the minders or else answer to Sister Mary Carmel in her office.  Mark announced that it was time Charles and I settled our differences like men. This didn't make any sense to me since I didn't have anything I needed settling with Charles. I just wanted him to shut up and go away. But the other boys in our class agreed with Mark and I didn't see any hope of talking them around to my point of view.  Charles and I took off our ties and our dress shirts and put up our dukes.  Mark acted as referee and the rest of the kids circled us and began rooting us on.

I don’t know where the nuns were. I like to think they saw what was going on and were watching with a sporting interest, taking odds and laying bets.  More likely they saw the circle of of us boys and assumed we were playing a game, marbles or tiddlywinks or dice.  Like I said, I like to imagine the sisters had a sporting nature.

Can’t say how long Charles and I went at it.  Couldn't have been more than a few minutes. Charles had reach and strength on his side. I had terror on mine. I figured my only hope was to go at him like a madman and charged in, swinging wildly.  Didn't matter. Neither of us knew how to box but both of us knew how to duck so neither of us landed any punches that amounted to more than a glancing blow.  After maybe three rounds, Mark stepped in and declared the fight a draw. Then he made us shake hands and promise to be friends.

And that was that. Charles left me alone from there on out. We didn't become friends, but he was a lot friendlier whenever we couldn't avoid each other.  The next year his family moved and he went to a different school. I ran into him once a while after and he seemed genuinely glad to see me and wanted me to tell him all about what was going on back at his old school and how everybody was.  I felt like reminding him that he hadn't much liked me or the school or anybody there back in the good old days but I let it go.

Now, it may look like the moral of this story is that if you stand up to a bully he'll leave you alone. And to some extent it's probably true here. But here's what I think is more the case.  That ring of boys surrounding us that day? Almost all of them were rooting for me.

I don’t think Charles was impressed or scared off by my willingness to fight him. I think it dawned on him that I had more friends than he did and it wasn't just him against me, it was him against me and my gang.

There's more. Probably the reason I never felt bullied by him wasn't that I was such a brave kid or that he was an inept bully. It's more likely that I didn't feel alone.

The nuns and the lay teachers liked me.  I was an altar boy and Father Cote, the former college fullback, liked me. (And it’s a shame on the Church that I have to point out that that doesn’t mean anything more than that he thought I was a good kid and could be trusted not to spill the cruets when I brought them to him during the Offertory.)  And I was a Cub Scout and my Den Mother, Mrs Lavin, clucked and fussed over us and kept track of how we were doing in school.  My parents were very active in the parish. My brothers and sisters were in grades behind me.  School was part of my home life.  My friends, my teachers, the priests, other kids’ parents were in a way extensions of my family.

I was protected.

You've probably already guessed what reminded me of this story and where I'm headed, but before I get there:

The other night we watched Captain America The First Avenger again. Early on, when Steve Rogers is still little and scrawny and trying one more time to enlist in the Army, the kindly scientist who has invented the super soldier serum and has already identified the future Captain America inside Rogers' heart asks him, “So you want to kill Nazis?” A trick question that Rogers answers correctly.

“I don't want to kill any one,” he says. “I don't like bullies.”

It's easy to jump to the conclusion that he's speaking from the experience of someone who's been bullied all his life.  But I think that's wrong. I think that he's never felt bullied himself.  He doesn't see himself the way most everybody else sees him.  Without knowing it, in his heart, he's already Captain America. 

On a visit to his old neighborhood in Brooklyn with Agent Carter,  Rogers points out the landmarks of his youth, places where he got beat up---an alley, a vacant lot, behind a diner---but there’s reason to suspect he got beat up in fights he started.

We’ve already seen him in one of those fights.  He got into it by standing up to a loudmouth in a movie theater ruining the show for other customers.

Steve Rogers didn’t fight because bullies picked on him. He fought bullies because they were picking on others.

And an important part of the point is that Steve hasn't had to face down bullies all on his own.

"I can do this all day," he tells the bully, and he probably could. But he doesn't have to. At that point his friend Bucky shows up and literally kicks the bully's ass.

There's nothing in the script that tells us Rogers doesn't have any other friends.  And because we know he's a born leader there's no reason not to think that within his gang he's one of the leaders along with Bucky.

This is why being part of a team and teamwork matter so much to him.  This is what he knows:

None of us can do it all on our own. None of us should be left to do it all alone.

Now, about Mitt.

Would it have been so hard for him to say, as TIME’s Joe Klein suggests he should have, something along the lines of, I'm sorry. When I was a kid I could be mean and stupid and I did some mean and stupid things.  These weren't pranks. They weren't hijinks. They were mean and stupid acts. And what I did to John Lauber was the meanest and stupidest. I wish I hadn't done it. I wish I'd made it up to him. I wish he was alive so I could apologize?

Apparently.

Lots of people have drawn the connections between the seventeen year old prep school bully and the senior citizen running for President on his record of vulture capitalism and promises to make the poor suffer even more.  I’m not sure how direct and clear and continuous those connections are. If you read the whole of that Washington Post story you’ll find evidence that Mitt was far from the worst bully at that school and that in many other ways he was a good kid and a good student or at least tried to be.  I can see how people who know him well could honestly say that that story doesn’t show the real Mitt Romney.  It shows him at his worst, but few of us are always at our worst.  It may be that at his best Mitt is a good guy.  It just seems to me he’s too often at his worst for somebody who wants to be President of the United States and at his worst he has a habit of picking on the weak and defenseless.

But what I’m more interested in here is not the real Mitt Romney but in Mitt and his posse as the quintesence bullies at work.

In his weaselly non-apology apology Romney tried to excuse what he'd done by claiming not to have known Lauber was gay.

Never mind how much of that claim is a lie. All of it was pure political calculation. Mitt knew that last Wednesday was not a good day to be perceived as a homophobe. (By the weekend when he showed up to deliver the commencement address at Liberty University he’d calculated it was safe again.)  But here's the thing. It doesn't matter if he knew or not. What he did would have been just as vicious, cruel, and cowardly if Lauber had been straight.  And I don't think it would have mattered to Mitt one way or another, because the important fact to a bullies like Mitt and his pals would have been that Lauber was weak and…alone.

Lauber could have been as outre Oscar Wilde but if he'd been as popular as Wilde was in school and as big and as strong as capable of carrying a bully down a flight of stairs and dumping him in a fountain I think Mitt would have left him alone or at least had a harder time rounding up his little mob of apostle bullies.

But Lauber was not big and strong.  More importantly, he was not poplar. He  was new to the school. He hadn't had time to make any friends or form alliances.  From descriptions of his life after prep school he seems to have been inclined to keep to himself, although that's part of the special terror of being a closeted gay kid---get close to anyone and you risk revealing your secret.  And he’d already been marked by other bullies at the school as a target.  Mitt and his gang were going after a pre-approved victim.

What offended and incensed young Mitt was that Lauber was obviously gay.  Mitt and his buddies would have used the f word, maybe the q word or the s word if they were feeling benevolent.  But what allowed them to go after  was that they knew he had no one to stand up for him.

This is what makes the President's support of marriage equality so very important. In effect he has told all the John Laubers out there they are not alone.   I think gay people knew that already. They aren't alone, at least not as alone as John Lauber must have felt back in 1965, because they have each other.  I think that one of the great things about the gay rights movement is how over the decades since Stonewall gay men and women have freed  themselves to be able to come forward to stand up with each other and for each other.  But I think gay people wanted to hear the President tell straight people that.   Plainly and forcefully. And that’s what he did, maybe not as forcefully as he could have, but definitely he has made it plain to everybody.

You aren’t alone.

This is why I think the President’s statement is resonating with so many people, straight and gay.  It’s a reiteration of what Democrats stand for or are supposed to stand for.

Nobody - nobody - can do it alone.  Nobody - nobody - is to be left to do it on their own.

The Republicans, meanwhile, have only one thing to say.

You’re on your own.

Try telling that one to Captain America.

Several of the boys who were part of Mitt's mob that day are now old men who are deeply sorry for what they did.  I'm sure they are disgusted with their young selves for their meanness and cruelty and for having been so weak and stupid as to have gone along with it.

But I can't help suspecting that they also regret having missed their moment to be Steve Rogers.  They had the chance right there to stand up for a little guy against a bully and they muffed it.

As far as anyone can tell, all Mitt regrets is that he's been outed as that bully.

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