Lance Mannion

Rescue me from Rescue Me

Third season of Weeds comes out on DVD next month, fourth season begins on Showtime June 16, second season of Mad Men premieres on AMC in July, with the first season on DVD showing up in the stores and on Netflix just ahead of it, but right now, with nothing new to watch to watch to satisfy my late night TV jonezing, I've reached back in time and started catching up on Rescue Me.

Tell me they dial it down a knotch or three after a few more episodes.

I'm three and a half shows into the first season.  My high school drama teacher used to caution us, If you start your performance at a shout, you've got nowhere to go but a scream.  Seems like Denis Leary and company have been playing it at a shout for almost the whole way since the beginning and there doesn't appear to be any let up in sight.  Where can they go with everybody already on the brink like this?

I understand.  It's just after 9/11, the house has been decimated, everybody but the probies are suffering from survivor's guilt and PTSD, and these are not guys who are used to admitting to having any softer emotions, let alone confronting such intense ones that leave them feeling weak and out of control.  With so much turmoil going on inside them, it's no wonder a guy's guy like Leary's Tommy Gavin would grab hold of his anger as the most familiar and most "manly" and cling to it like he does the necks of his bottles of whiskey.

But you'd think people this tightly wound would have keeled over from strokes and heart attacks already or reached for the knife drawer or the gun at the back of the closet or the pill bottle in the medicine chest and by now either they or their nearest and dearest or a roomful of innocent strangers would be lying dead in puddles of blood and booze, and I'm half-expecting that this is where we're headed except underneath it all, Rescue Me appears to be...

A comedy?

Can that be right?

Don't get me wrong.  I'm enjoying the show.  It's just that I've only been able to enjoy it in small doses, fifteen, twenty minutes at a time, tops, before I feel the need to punch a wall or make a grab for the bottle myself.

How long do I have to put up with all this self-destruction and anger?  Does it ever settle down?  What are my rewards going to be along the way?

My other concern is that when it does settle down it's going to settle down into soap opera.  Tommy's going to have an affair with Sheila, his cousin's widow, with his cousin's ghost looking over his shoulder the whole time, I can see that coming, and who can blame him, considering the widow's played by Callie Thorne.   But I took a quick look at the website and it tells me that in the fourth season Tommy's ex-wife's carrying his dead brother's baby---and when, how, and why did they kill off Johnny?---Sean's married to Tommy's crazy, abusive, alcoholic sister Maggie who's twenty years older than him and played by Tatum O'Neal and how much fun can that be; Keefe can't keep up with and can't keep it up for his enthusiastically randy ex-nun of a new wife; Reilly's had a stroke; Franco's in a custody fight for the daughter he just found out he has at the point where I am in season one; Mike the bisexual probie still can't decide which side of the fence he wants to be on; and Callie Thorne's burned down her beach house and framed Tommy for arson?

Please tell me this is all being played as black comedy and farce.

Oh well.  Like I said.  I'm enjoying it enough so far that I'll be sticking with it for a while.  There's some good writing, some clever bits---I liked the phone call between Tommy and his father (played by Charles Durning, because what other character actor could have sired a heroic Irish firefighter and a cop?) in which they grunt meaningless pleasantries at each other while subtitles tell us what they'd really like to be saying to each other---the acting's good, and I don't even mind all the ghosts haunting Tommy and don't care if they're real or figments of his imagination, although I hear he starts talking face to face with Jesus don't the road and that might be hard to take.  And there're parts of me that can't help identifying with these guys and not just the part that's still a little kid thinking he wants to be a fireman when he grows up.

Denis Leary makes the series though.  As co-creator, producer, and writer he's given himself the role of his career.  Sure, he showboats quite a bit, but I can't think of another actor who can do barely repressed rage in as many different keys.  Tommy's one angry guy.  He fights fires angry.  He jokes angry.  He drinks angry.  He has angry sex.  The anger is there and at its peak when he's with his ex-wife with whom he's doing a heroic job of pretending not to be angry.  Tommy's a heartbroken guy too, and he grieves and bleeds angry on top of everything else, and Leary gives each moment of anger its own shades and its own rhythms and beats.  It's far from a one-note performance but it's a medley so far not a whole album and I can't see what more he can do with it.

There's something else worrying me.

Are women the enemy here?

I can see that situationally they are without trying to be or wanting to be.  Wives and girlfriends are threats to guys who can't handle their emotions because they don't want to admit to having any.  Love is scary anyway.  And they ask the guys to divide their loyalties and time, between home and the firehouse.  You can see why the men would wish the women in their lives would appear and disappear on cue and according to the men's whims and needs, and why the women would resent this and rebel in one way or another.  It's a world that isn't very enlightened on issues of gender anyway and it's no wonder that the men and women who live in it would see each other as adversaries if not out and out enemies.

But then along comes a scene between Tommy and Sheila in which Tommy, responding to Sheila's despondency and despair, admits to his own feelings of loss and hopelessness and she instantly turns on him, nastily and crudely, heaping her disgust and scorn on him for not acting like a man before storming off, and I couldn't decide if she was nuts because her grief was making her nuts or because she was just nuts, if she was reflexively and despite herself playing her role of Spartan wife and mother or just shocked at him for not playing his role of Spartan warrior, if she was that selfish and self-centered or if she was angry at his selfishness and self-centeredness in making the conversation be all about him when she needed it to be about her just now.

But she's going to burn down that house and get Tommy blamed for it and there doesn't seem to be any good excuse for that.

Then there's Tommy's ex-wife Janet who's blithely indifferent to what he's gone through and what he's going through and who seems to have convinced herself that he does something entirely different for a living, something ordinary and safe and not particularly interesting or exciting or worth her respect or her pride, selling insurance maybe or fixing copy machines, something that doesn't demand a lot of him so that he's free to come running whenever she calls him to fix something, take the kids, or give her more money for shopping.  In fact, she's treating him the way he probably treated her when they were married, the way the other firefighters treat their wives and girlfriends, but why?  Is she getting even, is she selfish, is she stupid, or is that just the way their life has to be right now?  But there's that affair with his brother coming up and the fact that afterwards she's expecting Tommy to take on responsibility for the baby that results.

Throw into the mix their spoiled, resentful, and rebellious teenage daughter, Franco's homicidal, drug-addled, sex-crazed ex-girlfriend Nez, and Lou Keefe's castrating shrew of a wife who is disgusted at the possibility he's viewing internet porn and even more disgusted when she finds out he's been writing poetry, bad poetry, the worst poetry she's ever read, she isn't at all hesitant or tactful about telling him, and Tommy's crazy sister whose eventual appearance I'm not at all looking forward to, even though I am curious to see how far Tatum O'Neal's come from Addie Pray.

All the women appear to be crazy in their way, and that figures, since they're victims and survivors of 9/11 too, but are these characters just grief-stricken or are they the show's villains?

One last thing you can tell me.

I don't care if her character's nuts, do we get to see Callie Thorne naked?

I'm not sure I can take that on top of all the other stressors.

These pale, wan, willowy brunettes.  I fall for them every time.

Somebody rescue me.

First three seasons of Rescue Me are available on DVD through my aStore.  You can also pre-order Season Four, which is due out on June 3, and the first season of Mad Men and Season Three of Weeds.  Remember, only you can stimulate the economy to end the recession and save a blogger from begging in the process---buy stuff.

Real elitism

Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld back in December 2006:

This President's pretty much a victim of success. We haven't had an attack in five years. The perception of the threat is so low in this society that it's not surprising that the behavior pattern reflects a low threat assessment. The same thing's in Europe, there's a low threat perception. The correction for that, I suppose, is an attack.

Now, I'm no apologist for Donald Rumsfeld and I'm normally inclined to listen sympathetically to any argument that he and the other Bush Leaguers are a pack of sociopaths and psychopaths.  But I don't think that's what was going on here.

I don't think Rumsfeld was wishing for another terrorist attack.

That last sentence strikes me more as the grousing of a grumpy old man who can't believe the whippersnappers won't listen to his words of wisdom.

"Junior!  Junior!  You get down from that tree this instant!"

"Aw, gee, Gramps, nothing's gonna happen."

"Oh yeah?  Well, we'll see after you've fallen and broken your neck!"

Rumsfeld and the other fear-mongers on the Right have convinced themselves that the Democrats are going to allow another 9/11, and it's not so much that they're hoping for it, it's that they think it's inevitable so they're looking forward to being able to say, "Told you so."

When thousands of Americans are lying dead and bloody in the concourses of the shopping malls, boy, then we'll all be sorry!

Then we'll all know what a great job George Bush did protecting us.

But that's what's so wrong about Rumsfeld's thinking here, the stern and sensible grandfather talking about his spoiled brat grandchildren tone that infects, directs, and defines it.

This is how they see us, a nation of unruly, thoughtless, and ungrateful children too busy playing with our toys to listen to the grown-ups in the White House who know better.

"Missy!  Missy!  You put down that rifle this instant!"

"Aw, grampa.  It's just an air gun, I won't get hurt."

"Oh yeah?  Well, see how you feel when you shoot your eye out."

The fact that we aren't paying attention to their stern and sensible advice and thanking them every minute for it is proof of our childishness and of our needing to being taken in hand by the stern and sensible grown-ups.

There can be no other reason for our not listening to them and doing exactly what they say we have to do---for our own good---than that we aren't grown-up enough to govern ourselves.

Of course, there may be other reasons why we aren't listening to them.  Maybe if they'd done some things that were actually stern and sensible we'd treat them as if they were stern and sensible.

For instance:

Maybe if they'd actually caught Osama bin-Laden.

Or at least made a serious effort.

Maybe if they hadn't lied to us about Saddam's ties to al-Qaeda and the Weapons of Mass Destruction.

Maybe if they had, you know, won their trumped-up little war.

Maybe if they hadn't cried orange wolf every time their poll numbers dipped or they wanted to distract us from a news story that would have caused their poll numbers to dip.

Maybe if they'd treated us like grown-ups and told us about the real terrorist plots they'd foiled and the real terrorists they'd caught instead of trying to scare us into obedience with ghost stories stolen from the plots of 24 and Sleeper Cell.

Maybe if instead of just being content to torture prisoners in the dark, they'd brought more of them into court for fair and open trials and actually managed to convict some truly scary bad guys.

Maybe if they'd put some serious thought and effort and money into actually beefing up our security instead of deciding to treat all travelers as potential terrorists and all Americans as potential collaborators and hadn't set out to take away our civil rights or taken the opportunity to spy on us all.

And maybe if they hadn't poisoned or screwed-up or politicized or otherwise corrupted every other thing they've touched, if they hadn't turned Iraq into a living hell, if they hadn't let a city drown, if the President had reacted to Katrina as if he was a stern and sensible grown-up himself and hadn't spent that week giving out birthday cakes and playing air guitar and worrying only about the damage done to millionaire Republican Senators' houses, maybe if they'd shown some signs of grown-up competence and adult compassion, maybe if they'd just done one other thing halfway right, we'd believe that they were doing a halfway decent job protecting us in the War on Terror and give them the benefit of the doubt.

But none of that has happened or going to happen now, so it's only stern and sensible of us to conclude that the reason we haven't suffered another major terrorist attack is that we've just been goddamned lucky and George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld and the rest of the Bush Leaguers have had nothing to do with that.

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By the way, for those who think that Barack Obama is an elitist, Rumsfeld's attitude, that ours is or ought to be a system in which the few stern and sensible grown-ups get to tell all the rest of us children how to think and behave, is what real elitism looks like.

And for those who think that Hillary Clinton's revealed herself as a racist, here's what a real racist sounds like.

Hat tips to Susie Madrak, Atrios, Attaturk, Avedon, and Clif.

Another reason Lincoln was right

He may not have actually said it but it's true nonetheless:

"You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time."

But that's just what the Bush Leaguers set out to do.  Fool all of the people all of the time.

It's not working.

You would think that folks from the party of Lincoln would have known it wouldn't work.

But then the Republicans gave up being the party of Lincoln in about 1890.

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A possible explanation for why it hasn't worked:  Brad, at Sadly, No! provides an illustrated guide to Bush's Legacy.

That horrible, horrible woman

Think I've finally figured it out.

When Obama supporting bloggers like Aravosis say that Clinton should withdraw from the race for the good of the party, they mean she should stop reminding them that fifteen million Democrats don't think Barack Obama is as wonderful as they think he is.

All those Democratic votes for Hillary force them to consider the possibility that they're not as smart and as hip and as on to a sure thing as their vanity has been assuring them they are.

If my guy is as wonderful is I think he is, then why doesn't everybody else know it?  Why hasn't he just run away with the nomination?  Can it be that my guy isn't that wonderful?  Can it be that I'm not as smart and as hip and as on to a sure thing as I know I must be?  Can it be that I'm....gulp...wrong?

NO WAY!

It must be something else.

It must be a trick.

It must be that those fifteen million people voting for Hillary are crazy or stupid or racist or otherwise not as smart and hip and cool as I am.

Otherwise they would know what I know.

Otherwise they would see what I see.

They would know how wonderful my wonderful candidate is.

They would see how awful their awful candidate is.

They wouldn't vote for that horrible, horrible woman then.

And since if they did know what I know and did see what I see they wouldn't vote for that horrible, horrible woman, then their votes are the products of a giant con.  They are the votes of suckers and chumps.  The votes of suckers and chumps shouldn't count.  They don't count!  The votes of fifteen million suckers and chumps---fifteen million racist and stupid suckers and chumps---are NOT as important, are not as real, as the votes of sixteen million geniuses and hipsters like me.

Hillary has no real support.

The fact that she refuses to admit this means that she's either stupid or blinded by ego and ambition or just plain malicious and wants to pull the party down into the fires of Mount Doom with her!

The fact that she's still in it, still at it, must mean that she doesn't mind making suckers and chumps out of so many people I used to think were intelligent and decent and fair-minded---why some of them even used to be as smart and as cool as I am!

This proves it.  She's stupid.  She's an egomaniac.  She's insanely ambitious.  She's a con artist.

She's a horrible, horrible human being.

And aren't I smart and hip for being the only person brilliant enough to notice this and the only blogger bold enough to say so?

Hit tips to Tom Hilton and Avedon Carol.

Probably I need to say this:  There are Hillary supporters who are as vain as Aravosis.  There are plenty of Obama supporting bloggers who aren't anywheres near as obnoxious and full of themselves.  There are many smart and hip people who sincerely believe that Clinton should get out yesterday if not sooner and they have thoughtful and persuasive, although not convincing, reasons for believing it.

There is no evidence that the prolonged campaign is tearing the Party apart.

There is evidence that has been helping the party and Obama!

There is evidence that it is making bloggers on both sides crazy.

There is no evidence that the Progressive blogosophere is at all equatable with or representative of the Democratic Party.

There is evidence that none of us is as smart and as hip and on to a sure thing as we think we are.

College is a Waste of Time 101

I say this sort of thing sometimes.

College is a waste of time for a lot of people.

They just shouldn't go.

College isn't for everybody, and everybody isn't for college.

When I say that, I'm usually talking about students who aren't emotionally ready for college, either because they're not yet mature enough or they are too restless at the moment to settle down to four years of intellectual grinding.

Those kids should take some time after high school to work or travel or join the military or intently pursue a hobby.  After a few years, most of them will discover that they are not just ready for school again, they are ready to excel at it.

But often when I say that college isn't for everybody I also mean that there are lots of college students who shouldn't be college students ever.

I don't mean that they are somehow intellectually or emotionally unfit for college.  Many of the students I mean do very well in their classes.  I mean that college isn't preparing them for a life that will make them happy.

Most courses of study, even the ones that are very close to being purely vocational training, are preparing students for a career that will keep them indoors and sedentary, for jobs that are intellectual but only in the most ordinary and hum-drum sense of the word and thinking is mostly a matter of following instructions or collecting and organizing data, for jobs that will require them to use their hands only for keyboarding, manipulating a mouse, and checking off items on lists.

What used to be called with good reason white collar jobs.

What are now usually self-flatteringly self-designated "professional" jobs.

The fact is that every college classroom has in it at least one but probably more kids who are not born to sit at desks and push paper around for their whole lives, no matter how well those jobs pay, no matter how actually creative and challenging those jobs can be, no matter how well-regarded and popularly applauded those jobs are.

They aren't born accountants, lawyers, college professors, marketing executives, scientists, or engineers.

They are born carpenters, mechanics, electricians, animal trainers, cowboys, forest rangers, tugboat captains, and train engineers.

I'm not being classist or elitist here.  These students aren't products of their backgrounds.  They are the apotheoses of their own temperaments.

There are plenty of sons and daughters of lawyers, doctors, and captains of industry who are born carpenters, spot welders, plumbers, and beauticians.

And I'm not suggesting these kids are in any way intellectually deficient.  Those jobs take brains and skill and if they aren't smart and talented they won't succeed at them anymore than if they weren't smart and talented they'd succeed as lawyers and doctors and captains of industry.  But besides that plenty of them do very well in school and go on to be successful lawyers and doctors and captains of industry.

What they don't go on to be are happy lawyers and doctors and captains of industry.

But our society is classist and elitist.  We still have a skilled artisan class, but for the most part we don't think of it as a separate class.  We tend to see it as part of the working class and few parents who belong to the "creative" and "professional" classes would be happy to see their children moving a rung or two down on the ladder of status.  Few of their children, inculcated with their parents' classism and elitism, could see themselves taking on such jobs without also seeing themselves as failures in some way.

Doesn't matter that many of those jobs pay better than some high status white collar jobs (teaching, mainly, but also religious ministers, and some government jobs) and it doesn't matter that many of these very smart and talented kids would eventually go on to start and run their own businesses and so bring themselves back into the upper middle class fold.

It would take a very brave and secure kid to tell her white collar parents, "Mom, Dad, I've decided not to go to college.  I'm joining the union."

Still, I think it would be better all around if more kids did.

Basically, then, when I say that college isn't for everybody, I mean that college won't make everybody happy.

But when the pseudonymous Professor X writes in this article in the newest Atlantic that college isn't for everybody, he---at least he refers to himself as a he; he might very well be a she, depending on how complete she/he has tried to make his/her authorial disguise---means that there are lot of people entering college who are wasting their time because they are just doomed to fail.

And he means that they are doomed to fail because they are unfit for college and probably never will be.

Intellectually unfit.

He does not, however, mean they are stupid.

I work at colleges of last resort. For many of my students, college was not a goal they spent years preparing for, but a place they landed in. Those I teach don’t come up in the debates about adolescent overachievers and cutthroat college admissions. Mine are the students whose applications show indifferent grades and have blank spaces where the extracurricular activities would go. They chose their college based not on the U.S. News & World Report rankings but on MapQuest; in their ideal academic geometry, college is located at a convenient spot between work and home. I can relate, for it was exactly this line of thinking that dictated where I sent my teaching résumé.

Some of their high-school transcripts are newly minted, others decades old. Many of my students have returned to college after some manner of life interregnum: a year or two of post-high-school dissolution, or a large swath of simple middle-class existence, 20 years of the demands of home and family. They work during the day and come to class in the evenings. I teach young men who must amass a certain number of credits before they can become police officers or state troopers, lower-echelon health-care workers who need credits to qualify for raises, and municipal employees who require college-level certification to advance at work...

Sending everyone under the sun to college is a noble initiative. Academia is all for it, naturally. Industry is all for it; some companies even help with tuition costs. Government is all for it; the truly needy have lots of opportunities for financial aid. The media applauds it—try to imagine someone speaking out against the idea. To oppose such a scheme of inclusion would be positively churlish. But one piece of the puzzle hasn’t been figured into the equation, to use the sort of phrase I encounter in the papers submitted by my English 101 students...

For I, who teach these low-level, must-pass, no-multiple-choice-test classes, am the one who ultimately delivers the news to those unfit for college: that they lack the most-basic skills and have no sense of the volume of work required; that they are in some cases barely literate; that they are so bereft of schemata, so dispossessed of contexts in which to place newly acquired knowledge, that every bit of information simply raises more questions. They are not ready for high school, some of them, much less for college.

I am the man who has to lower the hammer.

End of Part One.  Today's assignment:  Read Professor X's essay in the Atlantic, In the Basement of the Ivory Tower.  Be prepared to discuss by identifying themes, key points of his argument, and the evidence he presents in support of his thesis.  Do you agree or disagree with Professor X?  What do you think should be done about the problem Professor X identifies?  Do you think it is a problem?  Do you think college is a waste of time for some people?  Do you believe Professor X is a he?  Use the comment space for your answers.  Neatness counts.

I think the Atlantic has torn down its subscribers' only firewall.  If you can't get to the article, though, drop me a note and I'll email it to you.

Cross-posted at newcritics.

Set aside the date! The Drum Major Institute's Annual Benefit will be held Tuesday, May 20 in New York at Cipriani on 23rd Street right across from Madison Square Park..  This year's honorees include City Councilwoman Melissa Mark-Viverito,  a founding member of Women of El Barrio, political organizer Steve Phillips, president and founder of PowerPAC.org, and David Simon, creator and producer of HBO's acclaimed series The Wire.  Tom Watson has more details.

Love among the Sims

The twelve year old is dealing with a crisis in his Sims 2 game.

One of his Sims has cheated on his wife.

Not a surprise, of course, the twelve year old informs me.  The philandering Sim is a Romance Sim.  Sims are driven by their needs but also by their aspirations.  Some Sims aspire to money, others to the family life, others to popularity, some to knowledge, and still others to romance.  Romance here apparently means being horny as a hound dog.  You have to keep your Sims on track, otherwise they'll pursue their aspirations to the point of neglecting their needs, all the other things that are necessary to keeping themselves alive, healthy, and happy.

When you've got a Romance Sim on your hands, it's a good idea to keep him or her out of the same room with another Romance Sim.

I asked him what happens when you don't.

He hedged.

I think I need to take a closer look at what's going on in Sim World.

At any rate, Romance Sims do not make the best spouses, for obvious reasons, and marriage is a bad move for them and a problem for you the player.

I asked him why he let this Sim get married.  He didn't.  The game handed him a pre-built family.

Do I need to tell you that this Romance Sim is married to a Family Sim?

The twelve year old is appalled by his Sim's adultery. "He's got two daughters!"   This is not moral indignation on his part.   It's a purely pragmatic reaction.  Divorce is apparently an option that the Sim wife can choose on her own, although, since she's a Family Sim, she's not likely to do that.  She'll continue to pursue her aspiration but now at the expense of her needs and her happiness and health will suffer.  What's more likely to happen is that the cheating Sim will run out on his family.  If he does it will be to chase yet another Sim not the one he's already cheated with.  Romance Sims flit from flower to flower.  If this family dissolves it will mean ruin for both the cheating Sim and his wife.  Neither will be able to achieve their goals.  There will be repercussions that will affect his other Sims.  The twelve year old isn't about to let that happen.

"I can fix it," he says.

How many people have said that about failing marriages in the non-Sim universe.

It's interesting to me that Sims 2 is teaching him some very unromantic but important things about marriage.  First, that marriage is, whatever else it is, a financial arrangement.  A marriage in Sim World is what it is in our world, as the poet and essayist Wendell Berry has pointed out, a merging of two economies.

Second, a marriage doesn't just involve two people.

Even if there are no kids,

When a marriage breaks up a little piece of the community the couple lives in breaks apart and a small section of the local economy is shaken up.

There's a reason societies tend to frown on divorce.  It is destabilizing, socially and economically.

That's not an argument against it, just a practical observation that you have to keep in mind when you're playing Sims 2.

What I don't know is if this is teaching the twelve year old a sad fact about human nature.

There are some people who are Romance Sims.  They live to fall in love.  They are as compelled to flit from flower to flower as bees are.

And for some reason these Romance Sims don't avoid getting married.

And when they get married, somehow it almost always turns out that they marry a Family Sim.

Another reason Jefferson was right

One of the evils of capitalism is that whenever we need their money it forces us to treat morons and assholes as if they were geniuses and saints doing us all a great big favor simply by existing.

A system that makes most of its citizens defer on a daily and sometimes hourly basis to hands-ful of morons and assholes is not a democracy.

This is why unions, universal health insurance, paid family leave, job tenure, and the ability to sue are all essential to a democracy.  So that the morons and assholes don't hold all the cards.

Another thing that's essential is fewer people who think they have a right to behave like morons and assholes just because they have money.

Just had to get that off my chest.  Nothing personal, boss.
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Set aside the date! The Drum Major Institute's Annual Benefit will be held Tuesday, May 20 in New York at Cipriani on 23rd Street right across from Madison Square Park..  This year's honorees include City Councilwoman Melissa Mark-Viverito,  a founding member of Women of El Barrio, political organizer Steve Phillips, president and founder of PowerPAC.org, and David Simon, creator and producer of HBO's acclaimed series The Wire.  Tom Watson has more details.

Who's super-hot and who's super-not?

Over at Living Between Wednesdays, a soon-to-be new addition to the blogroll, because she's the kind of comic book fangirl who makes being a comic book fan seem almost cool, Rachelle's doing some important work.

Rating the superheroes for hotness.

You probably won't be surprised to hear that Batman currently ranks Number One.  Rachelle's working with a scale of 40 points as she rates the heroes on hotness of their costumes/appearance, attractiveness of their alter-egos, coolness of their day jobs, and sexiness of their superpowers, and Batman scores a 37.  He loses a couple of points on his costume because of the ears and Rachelle docks him another point because of red flags arising from some of his personality quirks:

...he has a bit of a temper.

And he...kinda...dresses like a giant bat and throws bat-shaped objects at people. And drives around in a bat-shaped car. And flies a bat-shaped plane. And pilots a bat-shaped boat. And has bat-shaped tracking devices. That doesn't mean he's...like, crazy or anything.

Meanwhile, Superman ranks second on the list, although some of Rachelle's readers think she allowed some bias to cloud her otherwise purely objective and scientific judgment and docked the man of steel three points for his fondness for making bad jokes just so he wouldn't rank ahead of Batman.

Personally, I think Superman deserves extra points for, despite his love for Lois, scoring, as Rachelle says, "some hot mermaid action on the side."  But then Batman has Catwoman, so maybe that evens out.

Superman is actually tied for second with Midnighter.

You'll never guess, though, who comes in third.

Rachelle seems to have stuck strictly to the comic books in gathering her data and not allowed herself to be influenced by any movie or TV incarnations of the heroes, which would explain why, despite what Robert Downey Jr's done for his image in the movie (for one thing, causing the blonde to say bizarre and I'd have thought totally out of character things like "He's to die for!" when describing Iron Man to her girlfriends), Iron Man scores a mere 11 points.

Follow the link for all the heroes' scores.

Tip of the hat to Jaquandor and his Sentential Links.

Wev, Wev

Happy Birthday to my blogging heroine, Wev McEwan!

I'd put a lot of heartfelt complimentary stuff and goopy palaver about what an honor etc. etc.  But she'd only come along and tell me I'm turning into a sentimental old fool and demand to know why I wasn't blogging about something important and scoff at the idea that her birthday is important at least to some of us.  So...

You know, wev, Wev.

PS.  Nice shoes.

Raiders of the Lost Ark

Updated Monday night.

The melting Nazis were not a good idea.

The Mannion guys came up with a plan.  To prepare for the opening of Indiana Jones and the Unnecessarily Long and Unwieldy Title That Sounds Like the Titles of Two Bad Movies Collided, they decided to watch the first three Indy movies in order for Family Movie Night, starting tonight so that we'd wind up watching Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade the night before we went to see the new one.  So we just finished watching Raiders of the Lost Ark.

The melting Nazis were not, not, so definitely not a good idea.

Great movie with such a disappointing and ill-conceived ending, so far removed from the tone and spirit of all that had gone before, that I'm sure the original audiences would have walked out of the cineplexes befuddled and depressed if John Williams' rousing march hadn't come back on over the end credits and carried us all back to the moment when the whip snaps the gun away from the treacherous guide and Harrison Ford's scarred and scowling face looms out of the shadows and the adventure started all over again in our imaginations.

Just a reminder that without Williams' music Harrison Ford might not have had much of a career because George Lucas might not have had one. A third if not half of the original Star Wars' contagious joyfulness came from Williams' score.  A lesser composer and Star Wars might easily have been a one-shot, a cult favorite, kept alive by repeated late night showings on the Sci-fi channel back when the superimposed cartoon aliens commented on every film.

And the Indiana Jones franchise exists only because CBS picked up Magnum PI and Tom Selleck, Lucas and Spielberg's original choice for Indy, had to bow out of Raiders.

Did I mention that the melting Nazis were a bad idea?

It's funny how that George Lucas, having originally conceived of the Indiana Jones movies as being full of the occult and the spook-tacular, had to have all that wedged into each movie, as if he looked at Spielberg's first edits and said, "Where's all the scary mystical stuff, Steven?  Go back and put some in, ok?"  Then when he began producing the Adventures of Young Indiana Jones for TV by himself he forgot all about it in favor of the history young Indy kept stumbling into.  Here's hoping he didn't remember it when he began producing the new movie.

I'm looking forward to Kingdom of the Crystal Skull although I don't have high expectations for it.  Throughout the Star Wars movies Lucas indulged a really bad habit of quoting himself.  How many versions of the Death Star did he blow up?  Kingdom of the Crystal Skull's likely to be two and half hours of allusions and homages to the first three movies, how much so depending on whether or not Spielberg, no slouch in the self-referential department himself, felt like arguing with him.  Judging by the trailer, there appears to be at least two re-hashes of the chasing down and taking over the truck carrying the ark scene from Raiders and a wholesale lifting of the opening scenes in Central America.  And how many times do you think we'll hear the line "I've got a bad feeling about this?"

But I'm glad they convinced Karen Allen to return to play Marian again.

Watching Raiders tonight brought back all the old feelings.

At the time the original came out I was madly in love with Karen Allen.  I'd fallen for her hard in Animal House and I carried that torch through a really stupid movie called A Small Circle of Friends, Raiders, and Shoot the Moon.  At the end of Starman I was ready to marry her.  Maybe it was the freckles.

Then, fortunately for my sanity, she more or less disappeared from the movie screens.

But, boy, she was a doll in Raiders!  I just wish they'd found something more for her---and Harrison Ford, for that matter---to do at the end of the movie than stand there with eyes squeezed shut while the special effects people went to work melting those Nazis.

They shouldn't have killed off Indy's nemesis Belloq either.  Wouldn't you think that, as an archaeologist rivaling Indiana Jones in learning and experience, he'd have known to turn his head away as soon as the dust particles inside the ark began to glow?  Probably nothing could have saved Temple of Doom but it and the Last Crusade would have been a lot more fun with Belloq showing up at least once in each to thwart and outfox Indy.

Last Crusade included a melting Nazi too, didn't it?

At least Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is set during the Cold War.  There won't be any Nazis around to melt.

Spielberg and Lucas will have to settle for melting a few Commies.

Indiana Jones and the Updaters of the Last Blog Post:  You'll see from my own comment below, that I'm not keen on the guys' idea to watch all three of the originals.  I didn't like Temple of Doom the first go-round and I don't think it's worth showing the guys.  Turns out Steven Hart watched it himself recently and he confirms what I was afraid of.  It's even worse than I remember:

I took another look at Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom last night and I’d forgotten the sheer balls-out nastiness of the thing, with its army of enslaved children being whipped and burned, the gross-out banquet of bugs and brains, and the coarse insult-slinging between Harrison Ford and Kate Capshaw serving as a poor replacement for the fizzy banter with Karen Allen from the original movie.

Steve's not much looking forward to the new one or any of the big summer hopefuls.

Updated upon release of Indiana Jones and the Outraged Fan of George Lucas:  Jaquandor takes serious issue with my dissings of Lucas and the melting Nazis and comes to the defense of Temple of Doom.

A friendly reminder about the future of the Supreme Court

It's not just that Justice Stevens is 88 years old that's worrisome.  Ruth Bader Ginsburg is 75.  Stephen Breyer is 70.  And that punk kid Souter is 69.  I know Supreme Court Justices are notoriously long-lived, but still...

Meanwhile, Clarence Thomas will probably be around for another 20 years, Roberts and Alito for 30, at least.  And I wouldn't be surprised if Antonin Scalia has arranged to have his mummified corpse hauled into court and propped up on the bench by his clerks for the next couple centuries or so.

Anthony Kennedy is the only one of the conservatives I wouldn't be surprised to see get tired and call it quits in the next five or ten years.

This means that the odds are that next President will be replacing more of the liberal Supreme Court Justices than he will conservative ones.

The ghost

This country has had only three great Presidents.

Washington.  Lincoln.  And Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

In the house where I grew up Roosevelt was still a living presence.  Actually, in the country I was born in he was still the President.  His ghost guided the nation and haunted his successors and kept them in line.  The first seven of them, at any rate.  Even Nixon had to propitiate his spirit.

Reagan defied it but in the end he had to make an uneasy peace with it.  But George W. Bush has come close to exorcising it at last.  Reagan thought he could get rid of Roosevelt by declaring the New Deal over and ending some of its programs.  But Bush, the accidental genius, has out-Reaganed Reagan by screwing up the government FDR built and the nation he forged from top to bottom.  It doesn't matter how much of the New Deal remains in place if none of it works.

Obviously I think highly of FDR.

But he was just a man and just a politician, the most brilliant politician to ever hold the office, which means he was the most gifted when it came to the art of the deal.

Roosevelt wheeled and dealed.

That's a way of saying he compromised.

A word that is synonymous in a lot of people's minds with "sold out."

Unfortunately, it real life it often does mean selling out some people.

FDR saved the United States.  He made it a better place too.  We love him for it now.

But how would we have felt if we---and apologies to my readers over 70, but by we here I mean those of us in the liberal blogosphere who were not alive or old enough to understand what was going on back then---were around to see him make deals with Big Business to get their support and trade away rights and opportunities for black Americans for the votes of Southern populist but racist politicians who were glad to embrace the New Deal but only for their white constituents?  How would we have felt when he turned away  Jewish refugees fleeing Hitler's Europe and ordered the internment of thousands of Japanese-Americans and then asked their sons to go fight and die for the country that did not trust their loyalty?  What would we thought when the firestorms engulfed Tokyo and Dresden?  And how would we have reacted when we learned what he'd given away to Stalin at Yalta and that the bombs that obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki were his legacies?

One of the only three great Presidents we've had and he failed us and himself and his God---FDR was a believer, by the way---so many times.

Look at what FDR did and look at what he did wrong and look at all he wasn't able to do.

Now tell me.

What did you think President Hillary Clinton was going to be able to do?

What do you think President Barack Obama will manage to accomplish?

I'll tell you what.  I won't be satisfied but I will be glad (and amazed) if at the end of eight years these things are done:

The war in Iraq is over.

We have a federal regulatory system that doesn't let tainted meat into the supermarkets and allow poisoned toys to wind up in the hands of our children.

Our Justice Department is a department of justice and no longer the legal legbreakers for the Republican Party.

We have at least one more even moderately liberal judge on the Supreme Court.

We have something close to affordable, universal health insurance.

We have made some strides towards reducing our dependence on fossil fuels and slowing global climate change.

That's far from all I'd like the next President to have accomplished but it's still a tall order, even for another FDR, which we aren't going to get.

But none of that needs another FDR to get done.  It just needs a well-intentioned and competent Democratic President and a real Democratic majority in both houses of Congress.

This is why I've kept saying and will keep saying that more than it matters which one is in the White House, Clinton or Obama, it matters who is in running the show in Congress.  Right now it's the Bush Dogs and the Republicans.

The next President doesn't have to be another FDR for another reason.

We already had FDR for President.

His government and country are still there.  What the next President needs to do is steer us back towards it.  We're off course.  But his ghost is there, up there on the highland, waving to us, showing us the way home.

We'll get there.

We don't need a great sailor at the helm.

Just a captain who can follow his own nose and a crew willing to put their backs into it.

We're the crew.

Nose. Spite. Face.

Sigh.

I wish Hillary was going to win.  I think she would have made a good President.  A part of me is still hoping she can pull it out.

Ain't gonna happen.

So, listen.  I'm disappointed too.  But helping to make John McCain President will not punish Barack Obama or any of the various Obama supporting bloggers you've come to loathe and despise.

You don't like Obama?  Fine.  There are 435 Congressional elections going on.  There are 35 Senate seats up for grabs.  Go find a candidate for the House of Representatives to fall in love with.  Throw your support behind a Senatorial candidate.  Or two.  Or three. Give them your time.  Give them your money.  More and better Democrats!

You don't have to vote for Barack Obama anyway.

Go out and vote against John McCain.

Otherwise you're just punishing yourself.

Not to mention all the rest of us, including those of us who voted for Hillary.

You'll be punishing Hillary Clinton too.

You want her to have to continue to work in a Senate where Joe Lieberman still matters and where all the Republicans who have been in lockstep behind George Bush are now in lockstep behind the Maverick and Commander?

Who do you think she's going to be voting for?

She loves New York...and Frederick Law Olmstead

Central Park.  Late April 2008.  Swiped from Claire-Helene.  Claire was in New York City a couple of weeks ago.  She just got some of her pictures back.  Yep, she still uses film.  She's got a good eye and a camera that I know covet, a Nikon n80.

Follow the link for more of Claire's NYC Snaps.

At the circus

echinde crafts a nifty metaphor in a short prose poem of economic protest:

It's like middle-class tightrope walking, this current economic scene in the United States. You step on the rope, hanging on to your balancing umbrella (that 401(k), that employer-provided health insurance policy, perhaps parents with some money) and you lift the other leg up in the air while the audience oos and ahs, watching the rope swing ever more violently under your foot.

And then the umbrella disintegrates, spine by spine, and there you are, trying to balance yourself with a stick.

One illness may be the exact distance which separates a middle-class household from poverty.  Or one divorce or one job loss.

And that's just what's happening in the center ring, read the rest of her post, Teetering On The Edge, for the more dangerous and desperate acts going on in the other rings, outside the spotlight and for the story that inspired her post.

All over but the shouting

Updated Thursday at high noon.

I still want all the states to vote.  I still think the campaign's good for the Party, and good for Obama.  Around 1.2 million people voted in the Indiana Democratic primary yesterday.  About a third of that voted in the Republican primary, which isn't surprising, considering McCain's got the nomination all sewed up, but this isn't important as a measure of Republicans' boredom; it's important as a measure of how fired up the Democrats are and I'm convinced their excitement will carry through November.  I'm also pretty sure that sooner or later most of Hillary's supporters will catch Obamamania along the way.  I believe that Clinton will concede on June 4th, after the last votes are counted, and all our fences will be mended by the time of the convention.

There's not much Clinton can hope for now except denying Obama the nomination on the first ballot and the super-delegates are just not going to let that happen.  In fact, I'd bet that plenty of her own delegates don't want to see that either and a lot of those who aren't tied to the mast will jump ship long before Denver.  For a while there, I was kind of looking forward to a floor fight at a convention that would actually decide something.  I thought it would be fun to watch and I thought it would cause lots of folks out there in TV land to tune in and I thought that if they did they would catch the excitement too.  Then I remembered.

A floor fight would make great theater but lousy television.

What would look like democracy in all its glory in action to political junkies like me would look to most normal people like a great big sleep-depriving mess.  And the convention is not going to be covered on TV by the likes of Walter Cronkite and David Brinkley, who would have enjoyed the fun and been careful and smart about explaining what was going on down there on the floor and backstage.  It's going to be covered by Tim Russert and Brian Williams and Charles Gibson and the gasbags from Fox News and MSNBC, all of whom will gleefully tell us how bad all this looks and how it shows the Democrats at their divided, divisive, disorganized, discombobulated, indecisive, internecine worst.

A week later they'll be up in Minneapolis "reporting" on how orderly and united the Republicans are and how the smooth running of their convention shows that the GOP is still the party of the stern daddies who know how to keep their kids in line while those indulgent mommies in the Democratic party let their spoiled brats run wild and how it proves that the Maverick and Commander is in COMMAND.

It's too bad that the conventions have become nothing more than a week-long free campaign ad for the candidates, but that's the way it is and it's not going to change.  I want our Obama ad to be every bit as pretty as their McCain ad will be.

But in case I needed reminding that a contentious convention is a blown opportunity I read an excerpt last night from Rick Perlstein's new book, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America.

Even if I thought Hillary could win on the floor and even if it really and truly mattered to me that she gets the nomination instead of Obama---I feel like I always have to make this clear.  I like Clinton more than I like Obama, but not that much more, and liking her more does not mean I don't like him.  And. please, save yourself the trouble of trying to persuade me not to like her.  You can't do it.  You don't need to do it, unless your own commitment to Obama is so shaky that the slightest doubt about him on anybody else's part causes you to doubt yourself, in which case your arguments just aren't going to be all that persuasive anyway.---as I was saying, even if I cared, I wouldn't want her to be delivering her acceptance speech at 3 in the morning to a roomful of angry and exhausted people and in front of television cameras beaming pictures to millions of turned-off TVs.

Obama in prime time needs to be on everybody's minds when John McCain steps up to the podium in Minneapolis.

Word of warning.  I think some people reading the excerpt from Rick's book might see some unnerving parallels between '72 and now.  The parallels are trivial, though, coming nowheres near to mattering as much as the divergences.

That was then, this is now.

For one thing, John McCain is not an incumbent President who has just opened up China and created a detante with the Soviet Union.  Nixon was ending the war in Vietnam (supposedly) while McCain's promising to keep this one going forever.  Labor's not going to abandon the party.  Abbie Hoffman's dead.  And Barack Obama is no George McGovern.

I don't know if any Democrat could have beaten Nixon that year, but the party couldn't have nominated a more certain loser than George McGovern.  McGovern was a terrible candidate from the get-go.  Obama's been brilliant all along.  McGovern turned out to be no good at pretending he wasn't a politician acting out of political expediency, while Obama has been so smooth at it that an awful lot of people haven't even noticed him doing it (a lot of those people are among the ranks of his own supporters, but that's not surprising since they've invested a great deal of their own vanity in the idea that only the Clintons fight dirty.  In the long run I think they'll be glad to learn that's not true).   Obama is a harder man and his organization's tougher and more skillful than McGovern's was.

Once again, here's the link to the excerpt from Rick Perlstein's book.

Rick's Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus is one of my favorite political histories and I can't wait to read Nixonland. Digby has a posted a  glowing review at Hullabaloo.

Rick Perlstein blogs here.

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Late-breaking:  Just heard from Rick Perlstein who wants folks to know that copies of Before the Storm custom-autographed by the author himself are available through this friendly neighborhood ebay auction.

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Some shouting before it's all over:  Chervokas and Watson make a good case here, but I can't see it happening.  Hillary would make a great Vice-President, assuming she and Obama could work together, but I think she'd be a problem as a running mate:  Too much of a chance of her upstaging Obama, too many openings for McCain's Donut Brigade in the Media and the Right Wing Noise Machine to attack Obama's manhood by pushing the idea he's whipped by his own VP, too little to be gained that can't also be gained by his picking someone like Bill Richardson or Wes Clark or Tim Kaine or Janet Napolitano or Kathleen Sibelius.

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Updated motivated by partisan loyalty:  Disassembling a David Brooks column to reveal the design flaws and built-in bugs, John Sides of the Monkey Cage lays out some numbers that show a couple of very interesting things.

One is this:  In the Pensyvania primary, "voters without a college degree favored Clinton, 58-42.  Voters with a college degree favored Clinton too, 51-49."   Sides says this shows that the lazy stereotyped thinking behind the CW that Clinton is the candidate of the working class and Obama the candidate of the "creative" class is in fact lazy and stereotyped.  Clinton won by winning the votes of both groups.  That would seem to support the argument Clinton's trying to make right now, that she has the broader appeal.  But---and Sides doesn't get into this; he's working on a different point---please notice, as if it isn't obvious, she did not win anywheres close to 100 per cent of either group's votes.  Among the voters without college degrees, which presumably includes much of the white working class he's supposedly not convincing, Obama got 42 per cent of the vote.  That probably includes a disproportionate number of African-Americans, but it still has to include many white blue collar and small-town rural voters.  He couldn't pry enough of them away from Hillary to matter because...they were already committed to voting for Hillary.  They voted for Hillary for the same reason I, with my college edumacation and master's degree, and the 51 per cent of the college grads in Pennsylvania voted for her.  They like her better than they like Obama.  But all these numbers tell us is that Barack Obama cannot win a majority of their votes when his oppenent is Hillary Clinton.  It tells us nothing about how they will vote when his opponent is John McCain.

This is where Sides' argument dovetails with the top portion of this post in which I said, "I'm also pretty sure that sooner or later most of Hillary's supporters will catch Obamamania along the way."

Sides shows that over the last few decades Democrats have become more partisan.  They vote for their party's nominees without splitting their tickets anywhere up and down the line, which very strongly suggests that despite all the grumbling and the fist-shaken to heaven promises never to vote for Obama and the assertions that they will stay home, not pull the lever or punch the button or touch the screen at the top of the ticket, or write in Hillary's name, the odds are that on the second Tuesday of November, Democrats will be voting for the Democratic candidate for President no matter what they're saying now.