Lance Mannion

Magnificent bastards. Part Two.

Part One is here.

There's experience and then there's experience.

There is no job like that of President of the United States, and there's no way to know if a particular candidate, no matter how good her resume is, will be good at the job of being President.  Even having been a successful President in your first term isn't unconvincing evidence that you will continue to be successful in your second, because there's no way of predicting what sorts of national and international crises will suddenly loom up and overwhelm you and your Administration.

It's commonly thought, and for good reason, that being the governor of a state is about as good a preparation for the Presidency as you can get because it gives you the most amount of executive experience.

But governors don't have armies to maintain and command, they don't fight wars, they don't negotiate international treaties (although they do have to work the odd foreign trade deal), and while they do have to deal with stubborn and demanding state legislatures, fighting it out with your average assembleyman is nothing like having to outmaneuver a United States Senator who happens also to be the head of a powerful committee sitting on a bill you want passed.

When trying to pick a President all we can do is look at the candidates' resumes and try to extrapolate from what's there roughly how they might handle things once in the White House.

Their resumes are not just a list of past offices held.  They include all the candidates have said and done in public, their speeches, their votes, their decisions on matter small and large, plus whatever can be learned of about their private conduct without intrusion into their personal lives, although sometimes their personal lives are a part of their public behavior.

Rudy Giuliani's personal life has become a public matter because he brought it onto the job himself. 

Giuliani, JFK, and Bill Clinton are all notorious philanderers.  The press ignored it in Kennedy's case.  They tried to make it an issue in Clinton's and use his cheating on his wife to demonstrate his unreliability and dishonesty.  The problem for them was they couldn't connect his private sins with his public deeds, and the American People decided that as long as it didn't interfere with his doing his job well, they didn't care.  There is, though, a direct connection between Giuliani's personal misdeeds and his public deeds.  He has demonstrated a willingness to misue his office and a tendency to exempt himself while on the job from rules he would force others to follow.  This shows he's a would-be aristocrat of the morally laziest sort and for that reason his private life is an item on his resume and ought to be a disqualification for the Presidency.

Over the last hundred years, the President coming into office with the thinnest resume, after George W. Bush, was John Kennedy.  He was a two three-term Congressman [Editor's note: Thanks to Charles Sperling for the correction.] and a one and a half term Senator and had not particularly distinguished himself at either job.  He himself joked that the reason he had to run for President when he did was that if he stayed in the Senate any longer he'd have become known as a poor Senator.

But there was still enough in his public behavior and in that part of his personal life that was open to the People to see that he was intelligent, hard-working (when he wasn't hospitalized, a part of his personal life that was open but never looked at very closely or the People would have known that he was a very sick man), capable, tough in the best sense of the word, and steady of mind and purpose when he was on the job.

It turned out he had another quality that indicated he would not only do well in office but thrive on the job.  That quality is obvious in his biographies now, but I'm not sure how well it was recognized at the time.  Kennedy liked to surround himself with very smart people who disagreed with each other and weren't afraid to disagree with him.  He enjoyed listening to those smart people argue.  It's this quality that saved us from World War III during the Cuban Missile Crisis and which I believe made it highly unlikely, had he not been shot, that he would have made Lyndon Johnson's mistakes in Vietnam.  Johnson, Kennedy's rival for the nomination in 1960 who had the better resume and was on paper by far the more obviously qualified to be President, did not like being argued with.  His idea of a debate was to browbeat whoever he needed to go along with his plans.  He ran out of office or marginalized those advisers he inherited from Kennedy who were most likely to disagree with him and stand-up to him, including Robert Kennedy.

Not that Bobby would have stuck around LBJ's White House very long anyway.  They hated each other too much.  The point is, though, that Bobby Kennedy was not afraid to disagree with and stand up to a President.  It's what he was used to doing with his brother and it was one of the reasons JFK trusted him and relied on him so much and one of the reasons LBJ didn't.

George W. Bush does not like to surround himself with smart people.  He likes to have around him people like Condoleeza Rice who are reputed to be smart because it flatters his vanity.  But the real reason he likes Rice is that she's a yes-woman.  Bush prefers the company of yes-persons and sycophants.  He doesn't want to be argued with.  He wants to be told what a brilliant and tough and decisive President he is.  And it's this quality of his that has gifted the country with Shadow President Dick Cheney.

From the first, Cheney cut anyone who was smarter than him and who was likely to disagree with him in front of the President out of the decision-making process.  This is one of the things the Washington Post series makes clear.  Cheney has marginalized and driven from the White House anyone he's decided would get in his way.  He has been careful to make sure that the President has no one as smart or tough-minded as himself to depend on.  He has been especially careful to see that no one who might disagree with Dick Cheney gets or remains close to Bush, and Bush hasn't noticed because he has never wanted those sort of people around him.

I wonder if Bush will miss Condoleeza Rice.  Apparently she's Cheney's next target.  The two of them are fighting over what course the Administration should take in the Mideast and Rice appears to be losing simply because she can't get around the Vice-President.

In order for Cheney to manage this feat, to become the most powerful man in the executive branch---I know he thinks he's not in the executive branch, but that's another story---he's had to surround himself with people who will do his bidding without question, flunkeys and weasels and hatchetmen and idealogogues, regardless of how smart or capable they acutally are.  He's surrounded himself with many mini-Dicks, (ha ha) who are quite happy to have their only effect on the governing of the country be a destructive one, as long as they get to share in the power and the spoils.

This is why I think it's unlikely that there could ever be a Democratic Dick Cheney.  It would very hard for such a creature to collect enough Democratic henchmen and henchwomen who just don't give a damn if the government works.

You can't be a Democrat if you don't want the government to work.

A Dick Cheney needs a party that not only doesn't care if the government works but which actively wants to see it fail.  A Dick Cheney is the perfect expression of contemporary Right Wing Conservativism.  As Rob Farley says:

While some conservatives do view Cheney as a threat, most do not. In part this is because of the good things that Cheney brings; he does, after all, put red meat on the table, whether it's through shattering international law while torturing America's enemies or killing thousands of fish while supporting a few economically unviable Western ranchers. It's more, though, because the anti-statism in the modern Republican Party is less about a fear of the state than an utter contempt for government. Cheney's depredations don't bother conservatives because they don't think that fair play in government is possible. A good conservative should be waging a guerilla war against government, because the system itself is corrupt. If good governance and a competent bureaucracy have no (or even negative) value, then ruining them by ignoring law, precedent, and common sense is a positive good. Sure, Dick Cheney may break government by subverting the machinery for partisan ideological purposes, but since government itself is just a partisan ideological racket, who cares? We should get ours while the getting's good.

So could there ever be a Democratic Dick Cheney?  Could there ever be a Democratic George W. Bush who would bring a Democratic Dick Cheney into power?

I don't think so, obviously.  I think the Democrats' tendency to value competence and define competence in office as the ability to make the government work for the public good  just makes it too unlikely that an empty suit like George W. Bush could become a Democratic governor of an important state or a U.S. Senator, let alone win the nomination for President.  George Bush may have been attractive to many Republicans because he was a poor and weak governor.  They might very well have seen his failures as successes.  His ineffectiveness was proof of his effectiveness, so to speak.  Democrats just do not think that way.

I believe that most Republicans don't think that way either.  This is why the front-runners for the Republican nomination---except for Fred Thompson, and like I said in Part One, I'll get to him, but not until Part Three---are accomplished and competent men.  And the thing about accomplished and competent men and women is that they like the feeling of accomplishing things.  They like to get things done.  This is one of the reasons that the last three supposedly conservative Presidents before George W. Bush sometimes acted like liberals.  Nixon, Reagan, and George Herbert Walker Bush were handed a whole lot of problems when they took on the job and because they were accomplished and competent men they wanted to solve those problems, and it turned out that when a President of the United States sets out to solve a problem he uses the government to solve it---which is what liberalism advocates.

In order for there to be another Dick Cheney, then, there has to be another President who is not only an incompetent and feckless empty suit but who is content to be an incompetent and feckless empty suit.  Such characters rarely rise in government beyond the office of town selectman.

Unless they become Congressmen.  Lots of dumb and useless Congressmen.  I don't know how that happens.  But they usually stop there in the House.

I think Publius would disagree with me about whether or not there can be another Dick Cheney because he doesn't think there won't be another George W. Bush.

He doesn't see the Bush Presidency as a fluke of history.  He sees it as an inevitable result of "deeper, more structural flaws in the American political system."

I'll have to deal with that in Part Three.

A magnificent bastard

Rob Farley has read the four-parts of the Washington Post's series on President-in-the-Cupboard Dick Cheney and is, naturally, not the least bit suprised to learn that Cheney's a bastard.

But, says Rob, he's a magnificent bastard.

And what has Rob thinking is the magnificence of Cheney's bastardy.   Whatever you can say about Cheney, Rob has concluded, you have to admit Cheney's been awfully good at the job he gave himself when he made himself Bush's VP, and Rob finds himself grudgingly admiring Cheney's savvy and skill as a court intriguer:

On one level, I'm impressed; Richard Cheney is an extraordinarily competent bureaucratic infighter. He has a masterful understanding of the linkage between patronage politics and ideological politics, an understanding that has enabled him to create a group of extremely capable and rigidly loyal underlings. Although the Bush administration in general is without shame, Cheney goes a step beyond; criticism from those who don't share his ideological preconceptions or his single-minded purpose has no meaning. He's a bastard, but within the narrow confines of negotiating and navigating government bureaucracy, he's a magnificent bastard.

As I said, Rob's admiration for Cheney's bastardy is grudging, and extemely limited.

Cheney is a masterfully effective operator within government, but his mode of operation is antithetical to good governance.

Of course Rob is not surprised that Right Wingers and die-hard Republican loyalists think of Cheney as, if not their hero, then the wizard without whose help the hero could not triumph.  But Rob wonders how he'd feel if we had our own Cheney.  What if he was our magnificent bastard?  Would we cheer him on?  Would we be proud to have him.

A Democratic Dick Cheney is impossible to imagine, if you think of what Cheney does only in terms of the issues and causes and laws and law-breaking Cheney has managed.  Our Dick Cheney probably wouldn't be advocating torture and giving instructions on how to go about it.  But, as Rob points out, the way Cheney operates is as destructive to democratic and republican government as the assault on civil rights and the installation of the unitary executive.  There could be a Democratic Dick Cheney working for all the right causes in all the wrong ways, and if we did have our Cheney, how would we feel about him?

Rob doesn't think so because he doesn't think we define success as achieving what Cheney has "achieved."

When the personal influence of a particularly powerful actor is needed to make the system move, government has failed. Indeed, the influence of such an actor is disruptive to the normal course of operations. Also, I think that a commitment to open, well-conceived policymaking is critical to the progressive-liberal conception of government. Cheney's method of operation is poisonous to the idea that policy should result from open, transparent discussion and debate. It's not terribly surprising that the very policies that Cheney has most vigorously fought for have been "successful" only in the most temporary bureaucratic sense; a clear line can be drawn between Cheney's contempt for good policymaking and the disasters that are Iraq and the federal budget.

A Democratic Dick Cheney, then, would be no better at getting anything of importance accomplished and he'd be a destructive force.

A Democratic Cheney would only be considered successful, and therefore admirable, even grudgingly, if you define success as being destructive, which the Right Wingers do.  This is also why, Rob goes on to say, principled conservatives ought to find Cheney as appalling as Liberals and Democrats do:

A "principled" conservative (to the extent that the phrase has meaning) should place a high value on accountability and transparency in government. No single individual, especially through unofficial channels and personal influence, should be able to bend the machinery of governance in a particular ideological direction. No single individual should be able to so transform the architecture of government that even the most basic elements of the social contract (freedom from torture, freedom from arbitrary arrest, freedom from surveillance) become endangered. Indeed, Dick Cheney should be utterly terrifying to an anti-statist or even quasi-anti-statist conservative. He is precisely the kind of figure that conservatives warn against when they speak of the dangers of "big government".

So this brings us to the question, Could there ever be a Democratic Dick Cheney?

I think the answer is no, but certainly not because all Democrats and Liberals are noble and good.  I think it's simply the case that given the value Democrats place on "competence" any Dick Cheney who arose in the Party's ranks would be slapped down in a hurry or pushed to the side.  Which by the way is what happened to Dick Cheney back when Republicans valued competence.  Dick Cheney only got to be what he is by forming his own party within the Republican Party.

Also a young Democratic Dick Cheney, being smart and ambitious, would probably learn very quickly which side his bread was buttered on and act accordingly.  He would be more democratic and republican, more actually conservative, if you will, in order to get ahead.  Self-interest would make him politically virtuous.

Over time, having had to act the part for so long, he might even become the part.

It must never be forgotten that a lot of what we call virtue is merely conformity.

It's pretty to think that the Democrats, because of what they value in themselves and their political leadership, have established a system within their Party that encourages and rewards virtue---although it's probably better to say the our system works in such a way that being virtuous isn't a handicap---but sometimes pretty pictures are also realistic pictures.

But could there be a Democratic Dick Cheney is, if you take into account Publius' point in this post, the wrong question to ask...first.

The right first question is Could there be a Democratic George W. Bush?

Because, says Publius, Dick Cheney can only be what he is and do what he is because the President he works for is what he is and does what he does, which is pretty much nothing.

We can complain all we want about Cheney, but the real story in the Post series is what a non-entity Bush has been during the course of his presidency. Bush outsourced the big, historical decisions of our age to an ad hoc, invisible institution known loosely as Cheney’s Office and stood by and did nothing while they wrecked everything they touched. So if you want to blame someone for Cheney’s excesses, you have to start with Bush.

Could there be a Democratic George W. Bush, then? 

I'd say no, again given the value Democrats and Liberals place on competence and experience.  But I'd go a little farther and argue that it's very unlikely that there will be another Republican George W. Bush.

Democrats may place more value on competence and experience, but that doesn't mean the Republicans place no value on them.  In fact I'd say they made a deliberate and conscious exception in Bush's case because of the circumstances of the time.  They don't normally nominate empty suits for the job, and if you look at the front-runners for the Republican nomination they are all, except one, Fred Thompson, whom I'll get to in a bit, highly competent and successful men.  I wouldn't vote for any of them for a million dollars but they've all got impressive resumes, unlike Bush, whose resume ought to have been an object lesson on the perils of giving a job to anyone just because he shares his father's last name.  And competent and successful men usually have big egos.  They have too much pride and vanity to be satisfied with feeling like they made a decision.  Dick Cheney tells George Bush what to do but somehow in the process makes sure Bush thinks the decision was his.  Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, and even Mitt Romney know what actually making a decision feels like and they wouldn't stand for a subordinate trying to make one for them.

The circumstances that allowed George W. Bush to become the Republican nominee in 2000 are peculiar to the moment and not likely to be repeated exactly enough for it to happen again.  I won't get into all those circumstances now, but you just have to start witht he question How soon will another former President's incompetent son become the party's favorite because the President's competent son lost the race for governor that was supposed to put him in the position to run for the Presidency?

If Jeb Bush had won his first race for the governorship of Florida, he'd have been the Bush running for President in 2000, and Jeb would not have let Dick Cheney anywheres near his White House because he respects his father and his father's friends, who do not like Cheney.

At any rate, the Republicans ran an empty suit in 2000 because of a perfect storm of accidents that are just not likely to repeat themselves.

I am in no way suggesting that we don't have to worry about another Republican Presidency just because it's unlikely to include another Dick Cheney.

End of part one.  Part two is here.

Studio 60: Last dance, last chance, for romance and love while live-blogging on the Sunset Strip

Well, folks, here we are at last.  The final episode and our last live-blogging together of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.

No.  No tears.  No tears.

This is a happy occasion.  We're here to celebrate not to mourn.  And we have so much to celebrate.  The fact that Aaron Sorkin is free of this albatross round his neck and can now move on to other projects that will engage his considerable talents more than Studio 60 obviously did.  The fact that Sarah Paulson now knows never to try comedy again.  The fact that we will never, ever, ever again have to hear Ed Asner say Macao.

True, there are losses.  Probably there are no network executives anywhere like Jack Rudolph, Action Executive, which means that there's probably nobody with the brains and the clout to bring back Jack in his own show.  Matt Albi is probably as far from Chandler Bing as Hollywood will ever let Matthew Perry wander, which means that he will never have a part as good again.   And unless he makes a surprise guest appearance tonight, we wasted an entire television season waiting for the return of the mighty Judd Hirsch.

But let us stay focused on the object of tonight's live-blogging.

Getting drunk.

I'm pretty far gone already myself.  I'm not quite in Jack Rudolph territory yet.  But there's an hour of Matt and Harriet singing their love duet ahead of so I expect to be well toasted by the second commerical break.

So, quick, call over your waitresses and order your favorites.  Our bartender's been told not to use any of the cheap stuff and to go easy on the water and soda.

One quick announcement before we begin, though.

There's a rumor going around that I and Aaron Sorkin are the same person and that this whole live-blogging thing has been a way for me/Sorkin to internalize the complaints of all the critics and erstwhile fans and try to work out the intellectual, artistic, and pyschological issues that have got in the way of my/his ability to realize the promise of Studio 60.

That would explain a lot.  For instance, I've obviously been so busy writing about Studio 60 that I haven't had the time or energy to actually write Studio 60's scripts.  All I've been able to do is write the same script over and over again with minor variations, which is how I managed to write a three part episode that moved the ball of the plot from point A to...point A.

It's not true, folks.

I am not Aaron Sorkin.  I mean, look at me.  The white guy Afro.  The shirt unbuttoned to my sternum.  The missing jacket and undone bow tie.  The elephant bell bottoms.  The sweat.

Come on, kids, isn't it obvious?

I'm tonight's special musical guest, Tom Jones.

What's new, pussycat?

Kidding.

I'm not Tom Jones.  I just have Tom Jones Syndrome.  I can't stop singing his songs.  I went to my doctor and told him.  Doc, I said, I can't stop singing What's New Pussycat.  The doc said, Son, you have Tom Jones Syndrome.  I said, is that rare?  He said, well, it's not unusual.

Rim shot.

And with that, ladies and gentlemen, it's time to start our engines.  Live blogging will begin at 9:55.

9:59.  The Office is on.  I forgot.  It's Thursday.  I'm used to doing this on Mondays.  I expected to see Heroes at this point.  I spent the last five minutes waiting for Steve Carrell's superpower to manifest itself.

I probably won't go see License to Wed.

Here we go.  Right now, here on NBC.

"What kind of day has it been?"

Sorkin doesn't really want to know, does he?

Danny and Matt do a great job of ignoring Harriet.  What's their secret?

That's my daughter?

Wow?

Danny feels like a man because he's the father of a baby he didn't actually father?

10:03  They are good together, though.  Matt and Danny, Matthew and Brad.  Good rapport.

I like the name.  Baby Girl McDeer.  And what's wrong if she grows up to be a stripper.  A noble profession.

Ok, rapport or no rapport, we're about seven exchanges past the point when this scene should have ended.

Dire straits for Jordan.

Opening credits with one name credited.  Sorkin's.

Ken Levine would say Studio 60 needs a theme song.  Any suggestions?  What songs were on Hillary's short list?

10:09   Why are we having a concert for Diana?  What anniversary am I missing?

10:10.  Aaron Sorkin thinks we all have short term memory problems.  Danny just recapped to Harriet the plot of the last three episodes, which was recapped in the scene between Matt and Danny.

Go army guy.  Tell Tom to shove it.

Though Tom is showing more grit than he's ever showed.

No grit?  Tom Jeter?  Not much.

10:15.  DL Hughley is trying too hard to hold the screen with Steven Weber.

Relax, DL.  That's how Steve does it.

Wait!  Wait!

Are they about to recap the last three episodes again?

Another flashback?????????????????????

This is K and R Part IV!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I forgot.  Do we like Luke at all?

10:20.  We're not going to get a surprise guest appearance by the mighty Judd Hirsch, I know it.

I thought AT&T had turned into Cingular.  I have to keep up with my corporate mergers.  Doesn't matter.  I don't get reception of either one here.

Bill Parcels is working a toll booth?  But didn't his team win the Super Bowl?

Every ad using sports figures makes them look like they've all just snapped a tendon.  The face of victory is the same as the face of extreme morphine-demanding pain.

Age of Love, huh?  That looks interesting.

Happy 21st Wedding Anniversary to Tom and Beryl Watson!

Matt's not an angry young man.

He's a dyspeptic, irritable middle-aged man with a persecution complex.

10:27.  I love the way Weber delivered that honorable guys speech.  And the hand across the brow on honorable guys?  Waving away Simon's supposed idealism.  Brilliant.  What a beautiful portrayal of cynicism.

Sorkin puts in another plug for writers like Sorkin.  Matt is the show.   So this is definitely not SNL.  Or Second City.  Or even Mad TV.  On those shows the cast had a little bit to do with making those shows funny.

Love is never enough.

Are Harriet and Danny talking now or five years ago?

OK.  Mary the Lawyer's involved.  It's now.

10:31.  Karen Silkwood!  Hooray!  Tonight's winner of the Tom Watson Memorial Award for Most Egregiously Out of Date Pop Culture Reference is Danny for Silkwood!

Please, folks, if you care for me at all, don't let me get an iPhone!

There was just an ad for a pizza joint.  Now I want a pizza.

10:37.  Oh, good, we do get to see Amanda Peet.

Baby moment.  Everybody say Awwwwwwww.

10:38.  Irony.  She had the papers ready already.

I like this doctor.  "Yeah, this kid's not going to be under any pressure at home."

Wasn't he strung out the first time they met?

"Hey, this guy is cute when he's flying.  I want him to be the daddy to my babies so he can teach them where to score drugs!"

Drippy piano music.  I mean that.  Literally drippy.  It sounds like rain.  Shrinks play it in their offices to help their patients relax and remember their potty training and the time they saw mommy and daddy "playing."

10:43.  Wes is an empty shirt?  Wes is an empty shirt?  Does that mean the speech that opened the series was pure bullshit?

10:45.  Tom's brother appears again to interrupt our fun.  Life is stern and earnest, says Aaron Sorkin, don't forget our troops.  Don't notice that I distracted you from the Tom plot with the sentimental Danny and Jordan scene followed by the comic scene between Jack and Simon.

A Cialis ad.

I don't like the implications of that.  I feel that I'm in the show's demographic target.  Don't mention ED around me.  It's a jinx.

Wimbledon. Now I get it.  NBC's going to England to cover Wimbledon.  That's why the Prince Harry and William and Princess Di stuff.

10:49.  Happy ending for Tom's brother.  Cheap.  Of course whatever way the plotline ended would have been cheap, because there was no good reason to bring it in to the show except to score cheap points or grab cheap tears.

More rain music.  I'm drifting.  I remember it all now.  I was climbing up on the counter...

What gives Harriet the right to say she's the one person?

Hasn't their problem been that she is obviously not the one person?

Finally!  Aaron and Kristen are back together.

Oh...

Sorry.

"Do you have any problem with Harriet and me?"  Very professional.

Matt and Harriet get to continue their whatever it is they have, but Lucy can't go to Germany with Tom?  Unfair, Danny!  Unfair.  Besides, why does he need Lucy.  Matt writes all the sketches.  Does she have to stay in the country to mope?

Damn.  This show could have been so good.

The clock.  Yep.  Had to end with the clock.

And I'm not live blogging Journeyman.  No way.

I might as well live blog the DVDs of Quantum Leap.

11:00.  And we're done.  Our clock won't reset.  It's over.  Goodbye, Studio 60.

Folks, it's all over.  A happy ending for everybody, except Lucy, who can't go to Germany because she has to stay in LA to mope while Matt writes every line of every sketch.

Thank you all for stopping by.  Thanks especially to all our guest hosts, Shakes, Jennifer and Grizzled, Ned, Ken Houghton, and our triple-threat action blogger, Pen Elayne.

Lights are going out.  We've time for one last round, one last dance, and one last song from our special musical guest.

Goodnight, everybody!

Studio 60: Please welcome our special musical guest...ladies and gentleman, TOM JONES!

Studio 60: Because the gods must be crazy

Turns out that the gods have arranged it so that I'm going to be home tonight to watch the final episode of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip and, although the redoubtable Ken Houghton has offered to take on the live-blogging chores for a third time, I'm going to take the controls myself tonight.  I started this party and I think I should be the one to finish it.

And party's the right word.  The show itself has never been the point of the live-blogging for me.  What I've enjoyed is the virtual parties that get thrown in the comment section.  It's been lots of fun and I want to thank all of you who've contributed or just stopped by to lurk.  What I'd like then is for tonight to be our farewell party.

Everyone's invited.  Even if you've never watched the show, even if you've given up and wild horses couldn't drag you back, even if you have no plans to watch tonight, and even if you've steered clear of these live-blogs before, please stop by here after 9:45 PM EST and comment away.  Comment on whatever.  Feel free to ignore those of us watching the show and start a coversation on some other topic, leave a link to a song, boost your own blog, boost a pal's, or just keep us updated on the ball scores.  Just, please, stop in and at least say hi.

See you tonight.

The Battlestar Galactica passes the Starship Enterprise, headed in the opposite direction

Five episodes in on the DVDs now and I'm hooked.

I'd been staying away.  Uncle Merlin, a BSG fan, had warned me off.  "It's dark," he said.

He forgot to tell me it's also grim.

But because I wasn't watching when the first two seasons were actually running I didn't pay any attention to the various political debates that Battlestar Galactica stirred up.  All I know is that some change in the way the Cylons are portrayed riled the Right Wingers who I guess had jumped on the show's bandwagon initially because they thought it was an allegory for post 9/11 America and hating the Cylons was patriotic in some way.

There are definite 9/11 references.  The white board in President Roslin's office with the number of survivors in the fleet scibbled on it, a number that goes down as did the numbers of the 9/11 dead but with dread not hope being the result of each erasure and correction.  The hallway walls covered with pictures of missing relatives.

But since every episode so far begins with a reminder that humans created the Cylons, a way of insisting that humankind brought their destruction down upon themselves, I can't see how the Right Wingers, even adept as they are at ignoring the broadest hints that ideological interpretations may not apply, could have seen the Cylons as stand-ins for the Islamofascist scurge.  Isn't suggesting that 9/11 or the Islamic fundamentalists' hatred for the US are in any way the result of our own doing, let alone our own fault, the talk of treasonous liberals?

Shouldn't that have been a clue?

But every episode also begins with the scene of Laura Roslin being sworn in as President in a shot that recreates exactly the famous picture of Lyndon Johnson being sworn in aboard Air Force One after JFK was assassinated.  This would seem to set Battlestar Galactica in a post-Kennedy America instead of simply a post 9/11 one.  Whenever something terrible happens in America pundits are quick to tell us that "Today America has lost its innocence," as if a nation founded on slavery and expanded through an attempted genocide ever had any innocence to lose.  Every time we lose our innocence, however, it's somehow restored in time to be lost all over again when the next tragedy strikes.

But after Kennedy was killed there was a sea-change in the country.  We did lose some quality, if not our innocence, and I think a lot of the history of the culture wars of the last generation and a half is rooted in the desire of a large segment of the people desperatedly trying to deny that loss.

Our sense of ourselves as the good guys.

Our sense of America as God's chosen country.

It wasn't the case that we discovered that we were the bad guys or that there was no moral or practical difference between us and the bad guys---which some people on the Left were proclaiming and many on the Right accused everybody to their left of believing, and they're still making that accusation.

But it was the case that we now knew, if we chose to face the fact, that just being the good guys was no longer enough.

It never has been.

Just being good is no protection from doing wrong.  Harder to take is that believing you're the good guys often blinds you to your own evil.  In fact believing you're the good guys makes it easier to go wrong because you've already permitted yourself everything from the beginning.  We're good, therefore whatever we do must be good or for the good.

But even if you aren't blinded this way, as Commander Adama is not blind to the fact that the Cylons are humankind's own arrogance boomeranging back upon us, just punishment for our having put ourselves in the position of gods, that is of permitting ourselves anything, you're still not going to avoid evil.

Too often the right thing and the self-interested thing are at odds.

Life seems arranged to force us to make choices that are according to our own precepts immoral.

On Battlestar Galactica it seems so far that no character can make a decision that is not morally compromised.

I don't see how Right Wingers could have found any vindication of their post 9/11 world view in that.

Or am I wrong about how the political debate has spun itself out.

At any rate, I think it's a mistake to make too much of BSG as a political allegory.

If it's any good, any work of art---and The Sopranos has proven that TV shows can be works of art, not by being the first TV show that was, but by being the first that made us notice that it was, so all we have to accept for the sake of argument here is that Battlestar Galactica has, if not claims to be a work of art, artistic ambitions, at least---is a closed circle of references.  I mean that it is about itself, not about anything in real life that it happens to parallel or allude to.  Not that connections between the work and life can't be made or aren't meant to be made.  Just that those connections aren't foremost on the artist's mind, or in the case of a collaborative work like a movie, TV show, play, dance, or symphony, the artists' minds.  A work of art is more likely best seen in relation to other works of art than to real life.

Artists are more likely to be having arguments in their work with other artists instead of with politicians, philosophers, and professional moralists.

If Battlestar Galactica is about anything other than Battlestar Galactica, then, it's about...Star Trek.

If Star Trek presented us with a Kennedy-era optimism and can-do spirit projected into the future and outer space, and it did, then Battlestar Galactica is set in a dystopic, post-Kirk universe.

No surprise there when you consider that Ron Moore, the series' executive producer, wrote the screenplay for the Star Trek movie, Generations, and takes pride in being the writer who got to kill Captain Kirk.

Kirk, in all but a couple of episodes, always came up with the purely right decision in the end.  Commander Adama's decisions are always tainted.  Somebody has to die for others to live.  Innocents have to suffer so that the rest can keep going.  The wrong thing has to be done just so the ship can surivive, never mind so that the right thing can be accomplished down the line.

The ends never wholly justify the means.

Kirk could rely on the advice of his wise and upright first officer and his wise and noble ship's doctor.  Adama's executive officer, although a good man, is a drunk.  Tigh is physically and emotionally exhausted, worn down not just by old age and booze, but by his own bad conscience and feelings of guilt and self-loathing.

And there is so far nobody even close to being Adama's Dr McCoy.

Kirk operated on his own.  He was out of range of restraining hand.  He was free to make decisions based entirely on his own moral compass.  He didn't have to worry about the corrupting influences of politicians and military careerists and timid civilians.

He was an independent man.

Adama is surrounded by civilians.  He has to answer constantly to a politician practically at his elbow.  So far he's been spared having to deal with military careerists, but I've heard that this changes when the Battlestar Pegasus shows up.

Kirk was young.

Adama is old.

And Kirk was taking the Enterprise boldy where no one had gone before.  Battlestar Galactica is in flat-out retreat.  Kirk was leading the way into space.  Adama is running away.

Those of you who've watched more than five episodes can tell me if I'm way off.

Couple of things I like or am intrigued by before I sign off here.

I like it that the show makes no attempt to hide the fact that it's set in late 20th Century America.  Most of the technological and cultural artifacts look as though they could have been bought out of a Sears catalog.  People in the Twelve Colonies lived pretty much as if they were living in the United States in 1982, except that they somehow have invented faster than light space travel, highly advanced robotics, and a form of artificial intelligence that's smart enough to improve upon itself.

Of course a lot of bad sci-fi movies, TV shows, and novels are full of lame 20th Centuryisms, but in their case it's usually the case of a failure of imagination or of a low budget or a lazy contempt for the audience.  Battlestar Galactica has made it a guiding aesthetic principle.

I like it that three of the coolest characters, Adama, Tigh, and the President, are over 50.

I like what they've done with Gaius Baltar.  I like how charismatically self-interested and unprincipled they've made him and I like the way they've put Number Six in his head and then make him react to her as if she's really there, making him appear to be a borderline lunatic to everyone else.

I'm not sure I like the two Sharons plots.

I'm not sure I like either Starbuck or Apollo, which could be a problem if they are meant to be the two main younger heroes.

And it looks to me as if in the Battlestar universe there are three genders.  Male, female, and tom-boy.

Males and females are pretty much what they are in our universe and get to hold all sorts of positions and jobs and although it appears that many of females are mothers in the most traditional sense, females can also be soldiers and engineers and Presidents of the Twelve Colonies, and males can be secretaries.  But tom-boys can only be pilots.

The main difference between a tom-boy and a female is that a male is free to punch a tom-boy in the nose and can also expect the tom-boy to punch him back, harder and with more effect.

Sexuality doesn't seem to be an issue.  Of the two main tom-boys, Boomer is obviously heterosexual.  Starbuck's preferences aren't clear to me yet.  Was she in love with Apollo's brother or were the three of them just good pals.  I kind of hope they were just pals.  In fact, I hope Starbuck's a lesbian.  This has nothing to do with her being more macho than any of the guys around her except Helo and the Chief.  I just think she looks like she'd be a lot of fun to go cruising for chicks with.  A lot more fun than Apollo.

And by the way does Apollo ever get rid of that stupid pompador?  It makes him look like Bob of Bob's Big Boy.

That's all I have for now.  If any of you who've watched regularly can tell me what themes and character developments and plot points I need to be on the look out for, feel free to load up the comments.  Don't worry about spoilers on my account, but put warnings in for others.

Thoughtful conservative Jon Swift says I have the Right Wing argument all wrong because I failed to see that it's the Cylons who are the good guys.

Seems like I'm always too late to the party.  According to the Armchair Generalist, BSG's finishing up after this upcoming season.

Seaon 1, Season 2.0 (Episodes 1-10), and Season 2.5 (Episodes 10-20) are available through my aStore.

Programming note:  Tonight's the final episode of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip and although I've tried to talk myself out of it, I can't do it---I'm going to handle the live-blogging one last time.

In the meme time, in between time, ain't we got fun?

Almost there at last.  Everybody but Victoria has checked in.  Scroll down.

So, I'm standing here, minding my own business, watching the clouds passing by, when suddenly up runs Susie Madrak and she slaps me with a meme.

Hard.

When I finally come to and manage to climb to my feet, the stars still spinning around my head, along comes Catherine from Poverty Barn and she whacks me with the same meme from the other side.

Ok, I'm willing to play along.  Hadn't been memed in a while anyway.  And now that the swelling has gone down and my vision has cleared up, I'm ready to tackle this thing.

Rules are pretty straightforward.  List eight random facts about yourself.  Sounds simple enough, except that there aren't any facts about me to list, nevermind eight.  There are some baseless rumors, some idle speculation, plenty of innuendos, and all kinds of misperceptions.  But facts?

Let's see what I got.

1.  When I was in college I almost got a job as an announcer on a classical music station.  I came this close.  My life would have gone an entirely different direction if I'd gotten that job.  I wouldn't have met the blonde, for starters.  But while I could handle the Germans, the Russians, the Italians, I couldn't pronounce the names of the French composers or the titles of their works.  Every time I tried I sounded like Inspector Clouseau. 

That same year I was almost hired at another station as a rock and roll DJ but I couldn't pronounce the name of the band Roger Daltrey was the lead singer for.

2.  I hate summer.  Hate it.  It's not just my least favorite season.  It's three months of hell for me.  I can't stand the heat, I can't stand the humidity, I can't stand the way the light strikes and the shadows fall in late afternoon, and I can't stand it that it doesn't get dark until after 9 PM.  I hate all the yard work that summer brings on.  I hate spending most of the day breathing air conditioned air.  Seriously, I spend more time outside in the coldest winters than I do in the mildest summers.  I especially hate the way the days drag but time still flies.

And I really, really, really hate it that the rest of you are out enjoying yourselves while I'm suffering so miserably.

3.  The one realistic sexual fantasy that I have never fulfilled is going to bed with a woman taller than me.

Would-be wish-fulfillers please note.  I am 6 feet tall.

Please also note, the blonde has a tendency to blame the other woman in these cases and she's been known to resort to violence.

4.   Although I hate mush, I can be a romantic devil, if I have to be.  Flowers, sweet nothings in the ear, surprise compliments, candlelit dinners, long walks on the beach, dinners on the beach and long walks by candlelight, the whole deal.

Any doubting Thomasinas who want to test me on this should scroll back up to number 3 and look at the last note.

5.  If I had it to do all over again I'd be a photographer.

6.  I'm planning to grow my beard back next month.  I have it marked on the calender.  July 9:  Don't shave.  July 10:  Don't shave.  July 11:  Don't shave and don't expect the blonde to kiss you again for the next 14 days.  July 12:  Don't shave.  July 13: Don't...You get the idea.

Unfortunately, the calender also says July 25:  Look in the mirror, realize you look more like Richardson the feeble-minded hotel cook on Deadwood than like Sean Connery in Outland, and reach for the scissors.

7.  I liked Shemp.

8.  It looks like I'll be live-blogging the final episode of Studio 60 myself.

There.

Now I'm supposed to tag eight more people.

The lucky winners are:

Jennifer. (Done.)
Juno. (Done.)
Thomas at Mile Zero. (Done.)
JC at Out of Context Radio. (Done.)
The Linkmeister. (Done.)
The Boy. (Done.)
Victoria.
The Viscount. (Done.)

Here are the rules:  Eight random facts or interesting lies about yourself.  Send me the link to your post when you're done.  Tag 8 more people.  Drop a comment on their blog to let them know they've been tagged.  Don't sit by your maibox waiting for thank you notes from those you've tagged.

Now, for everybody else who wants to play along.  I'm making up some new rules.  In the comments here leave up to 8 random "facts" you have deduced ABOUT ME from reading this blog.  None of these facts have to be true or even close to true.  They can be wild guesses or things you wish were true or baseless slanders you want spread across the internet to ruin my life and reputation.

Have at it.

What the heck?

If there are 20 millionaires out there with 50 bucks burning holes in their pockets---or 50 millionaires with 20 bucks they have no particular plans for---and who happen be thinking, You know, that Lance Mannion guy, he runs a fine blog, maybe I should hit his tip jar, this would be a very good week to do it.

PayPal and Amazon buttons are at the top of the right hand sidebar.  Snail mail donations can be sent to PO Box 263, New Paltz, NY 12561.

Donations of any denomination from anyone always gratefully accepted.

Age of Mush

Regular readers know I hate mush.

Mush, according to the experts—me and every cranky old coot who agrees with me—is any portrayal of romantic love as the be-all and end-all of life, any story in which our one and only rooting interest is presumed to be in whether or not the boy and the girl get together in the end to live happily ever after, with the added assumption that it will be tragic if they don’t.

(Nowdays the boy and the girl don’t have to be male and female.  In gay mush there’s always a boy and a girl even if both are the same gender.)

Pride and Prejudice is not mush because it’s very clear from the outset that if Elizabeth and Darcy don’t get together, it will be Darcy’s loss and too bad for Elizabeth, but they’ll both get over it.

The actual importance of their love affair’s success is in its potential to save Elizabeth’s sisters, particularly Jane, from lifetimes of loneliness, misery, and want.

Austen’s romantic leads aren’t an ingenue and a juvenile, they are a heroine and a hero whose heroic act is to fall in love as a way of coming to the rescue of other people.

Their love is restorative.  It brings others together.  It knits society back together.  It brings order.  This is why comedies often end in marriages—not for the romantic leads’ sake, but for everybody else’s.

In mush, everybody else exists merely to help the lovers get together—or to keep them apart—and then to be on hand to celebrate the lovers’ union at the end.

In mush, love is selfish and that is its attraction!

The mushiest movie ever made is Titanic in which 1500 people die just so Kate and Leo can smooch.  Leo dies just to remind us how vital it was that Kate and Leo smooched.

Given my definition of mush and my loathing of it, you can guess that it's risky for me to read a book, listen to a song, go to the movies, or watch TV, since mush is the subject of most of American pop culture.

You’d be right.

Still, I’m tempted to watch Age of Love, just to find out if it is as appallingly mushy as it appears to be.

Age of Love is yet another “reality” show in which a bunch of women turn themselves into a stable of show ponies up for auction in a competition for the love of a man whose only attraction is that he’s the attraction.  Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire, Beauty and the Geek, Age of Love sell themselves as advertisements for the idea that Love Conquers All, an idiotically childish notion anyway and a lie.

What’s really being sold is the idea that You’re nobody till somebody loves you.

In Age of Love teams of 40something and 20something women compete for the “love” of a 30 year old man.  The show seems aimed to appeal to the vanity of middle-aged women, and men, who need to believe that love indeed conquers all, including the fact that they are by any objective judgment past it.  If the the younger man is good and noble and wise, he will choose one of the older women because he will look beyond the superficial beauty of the 20somethings to see the good and noble and loving soul of the truly deserving older woman.

Nevermind that all the 40 year olds in the ads appear to have arrived on the set straight from the gym after a quick stop off at their plastic surgeon’s for some touch-up work and so it’s hard at a glance to tell the 40 year olds from the 25 year olds.  Just their age presumably makes them less physically desirable—it does, but in a way I’ll bet nobody on the show ever alludes to.  I’ll get to that.

Age of Love, like other reality shows of its ilk, pushes four very unhealthy but too common pop cultural attitudes about love.

One.  Romantic love is the be-all and end-all of life, no matter how old you are.  Which is to say that a circumstance of being a teenager—when you are unattached, uncommitted, looking to define yourself, and awash in hormonal tides that make thinking about anything but getting lai...ahem...falling in love almost impossible—is the defining fact of life for thirty, forty, fifty, and, presumably, ninety year olds.  If you aren’t truly, madly, deeply in love the way you were with your date for the junior prom—or with the person you wished you could have gone to the prom with—your life is a void.

Two.  Love freezes time.  Being truly, madly, deeply in love can only make you happy ever after if the feeling never fluctuates or changes, if you always feel the way you do right this moment, which can only happen of course if real life never gets in the way, making real life the enemy of love and happiness, something love doesn’t have to adapt to but something love helps you hide from.

The only alternative to believing that true, mad, deep love will last forever and time and reality don’t affect it is to not care that the feeling ends because you can just recreate it by falling in love all over again with somebody else.

In other words, falling in love forever is temporary and the object of your desire, your supposed soulmate, is replaceable.  Serial love affairs are the normal progression of a life.  Every year you can relive the summer the two of you spent at the beach except that it’s a different two of you every time.

Three.  There is such a magical being as your soulmate.

Four, and most destructive of all.  Each of us is entitled to the soulmate of our choice.

Age of Love shares the same premise of every other movie teen romance—that no matter what you look like, no matter what annoying personality quirks you’re cursed with, no matter what apparent differences between you and your chosen soulmate there are, in age, class, background, ambitions, lifestyles, religion, politics, personality, you still deserve to be the object of desire’s object of desire just because you are you.

This is just a way of saying that the other person doesn’t matter as a person, only as a reward for your narcissistic opinion of your own worthiness for being loved.

The geek should always win the love of the cheerleader, the freak should always go the spring dance with the captain of the football team, and the 40something should always get her groove back with the 30 year old stud of her choice, no matter if in real life these couples might very well have nothing to say to each other.

In real life, though, things are complicated.

It’s unusual to see a couple in love in which the woman is significantly older than the man, so unusual that people are inclined to look twice and then think it’s somehow...wrong.

But then people are inclined to think other people’s happiness is always somehow wrong.

Now I’m inclined to think that a love affair in which the man is significantly older than the woman is, if not wrong, then suspect.  I can’t help thinking that there are money, power, or twisted daddy issues involved and actually running the show.

But people are odd and don’t always conform to type, or to put it on a sampler, you can’t judge books by their covers.  A 30 year old and a 50 year old can have more in common than a seemingly perfectly matched pair of 25 year olds.

If 40something men can date 20something women, then why not vice-versa?

Well, I’ve been in a lot of conversations recently—recently being the time since most of the women of my close personal acquaintance hit 40—in which women, hearing that some sister of a certain age has a young lover, have cried out, “You go, girl,” or words to that effect.

But these same women, hearing that a man of a certain age has fallen in love with a sweet young thing, shake their heads in disapproval.

They aren’t being hypocrites.  It’s just that in the first case they are being romantic, or vain, or bitter, and in the second they are usually being simply realistic—they know that in real life behind such May-December there’s usually a broken-hearted ex-wife with a lot of bills she’s struggling to pay and kids to steer through troubled adolescences and put through college on her own.

Which is to say that their experience of love and romance includes that fact I mentioned that Age of Love probably goes out of its way to ignore—love between two people is never just a matter of those two people.

The usual outcome of falling truly, madly, deeply in love, as these women know, because they are grown-ups, isn’t happily ever aftering, but marriage, children, mortgages, bills, aging parents, sickness, streaks of bad luck, the ravages of time, and all the heartache and thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.

It looks to me as though Age of Love is humiliating the 40somethings by putting them in the groveling position of Cinderellas when they are older than Cinderella’s step-mother likely was.  The 20somethings are just as humiliated by being expected to act like teenagers when they are all old enough to run for Congress and command nuclear submarines and win Nobel Prizes for Chemistry and drop off their children at kindergarten—in short, to act like girls when they are adults.  But we are so used to protracted adolescences, at least in popular entertainment, that a lot of people, including the women themselves, probably don’t notice.  The 40somethings, though, I’m sure, notice.

And knowing it and still wanting to go through with the charade they have to be hoping that the 30 year old man whose “love” they are out to win has to be a very unusual sort of young man—one who never wants to start a family of his own.

A 48 year old woman, even if she’s in the last bloom of her youth, in love with a 30 year old man will very soon be a 60 year old woman on the brink of old age with a man still in his prime.

The 30 year old man truly, madly, deeply in love may not think this will ever be a problem, especially if he’s bought into the mush.  But the 48 year old who isn’t worried about it is either a fool or so desperately lonely that she is willing to make herself a fool.

I am in no way saying that love and marriage must or inevitably does lead to children.  They usually do, but there’s no law—yet—that says they have to.  But even when there are no children, there are still other people.  Falling truly, madly, deeply in love usually does the very opposite of isolating the couple.  Love, all forms of love, connects us to the world, to more and more people.

The premise of Age of Love, like the premise of all mush, is at the end the happy couple will walk hand and hand off into the sunset where time and other people will leave them alone in their love-struck happiness forever.

In a true romance, in the movies or in books or in real life, the happy couple’s last moment alone is the kiss at the altar and from here on out they will always be together in a crowd, two time- and care-worn people looking for each other across roomsful of friends, family, and strangers brought together by the fact of their love, catching each other’s eye instead of hand, and, if they are lucky, sharing a silent laugh at how strangely it's all turned out.

The voodoo that we do so well

Ezra Klein reviews Sicko and says it's not about health care.  It's about what Roger and Me, Bowling For Columbine, and Fahrenheit 9/11 were about.

clipped from www.prospect.org Moore's movie is only superficially about health care.  It uses the subject -- and also sick days, and vacations, and child care, and maternal support policies -- as a way to critique unthinking American exceptionalism, to challenge the tautology that states that the way we do things is the best way to do things because … it's the way we do things. The particulars of the account all add up to the larger question: Is the America we live in the America we think we live in, and the America we want to live in?

Meadowlands: How guilty am I this week?

It’s ridiculous, but I now get an uneasy feeling whenever I visit a prison that somewhere someone is preparing a serious charge against me and that I might, one day, be led off down a long corridor by a man with a clinking bundle of keys to be locked up and take my dinner seated on the lavatory.—from Rumpole and the Reign of Terror by John Mortimer.

Once when I was sitting in a jury box, the judge said, “Will the defendant rise,” and I caught myself just in time.---from "My Father's Friends" by William Maxwell.

Not a feeling unique to me—I hope—but whenever I’m in a group of people I can’t help feeling that if any of them knew the “truth” about me they’d run screaming from the room.  Even when I’m outwardly relaxed and seeming to enjoy myself, there’s a part of me looking around the room for the person who “knows,” the one who’s figured me out and is on to me and ready to expose to the world my various crimes and sins.

There’s a good reason for my guilty conscience.  Without ever having knocked over a bank, corrupted a minor, absconded with the company’s funds, run off with the preacher’s wife, or buried any bodies whose need for burial was of my making—I like to think people think I killed a man, it’s the romantic in me—I’ve still done enough over time to make me absolutely despicable in my own eyes.

No wonder I’m afraid people will find me out.

But as I said, this isn’t a feeling peculiar to me.  The quotes above show that, and now there’s a TV series built around it.  Meadowlands, which premiered on Showtime June 17 and had its second episode last night, is about an entire town full of people who are hiding the fact, and in hiding from the fact, that they are guilty of a crime or at least complicit in one—or several.  Or many.

The first episode began with Danny Brogan (David Morrissey) and his family being driven, blindfolded, in a car with darkened windows, through an unnervingly empty English countryside to a planned suburban town called Meadowlands.  Meadowlands is a too pretty collection of too perfect houses isolated from all other development on any kind in the middle of nowhere.  It looks fake at first glance, phonier than even a movie set, neighborhood after neighborhood of unlived in looking model homes.  Somebody built this place for reasons other than giving people a place to live.  And since this is England and England doesn’t have much nowhere left to put something like this in the middle of, we get the sense that the countryside around the town is as phony and well-planned as Meadowlands itself. 

Only people with a lot of money and a lot of power and with motives less than open and benign could have built such a frighteningly perfect place.

It turns out to be the government’s doing.

Danny Brogan is not really a Danny and his family aren’t really Brogans.  They are all in witness protection, hiding from unnamed bad guys Danny has offended to the point of their wanting him dead and having tried to bring that about by burning down his old house with him and his wife, son, and daughter in it.  Two episodes in and we still haven’t learned exactly how he offended them, but it’s been clear from the start that he didn’t do it by being a paragon of virtue.  Some less than honest business arrangement between them went sour in a way that brought Danny to the attention of the police and that attention is part of why his former associates want him dead.

So they’re in hiding.  They have new names, a new home, far enough away, they hope, from their old lives that the bad guys won’t come looking for them, and new neighbors to whom they must begin lying with the first words out of their mouths. 

They are literally in the position I imagine myself in at parties, terrified that if anyone knew the truth about them they’re done for and constantly on the watch for any sign that someone in the room “knows.”

But very soon after they’ve arrived, Danny discovers that everyone else is in the same boat.  All his new neighbors are in witness protection too.  The government built Meadowlands as a giant hide-out for all the people it needs to disappear after their usefulness in putting other criminals in jail has ended.  Everybody in Meadowlands, including the local policeman, is there because they are guilty of a crime or complicit in one or got caught up in one somehow.

Danny’s relieved to know this.  It means that no one has a motive for digging into the Brogans’ past and exposing their secret because they might expose their own dangerous secrets in the process.

His wife, Evelyn (Lucy Cohu), quickly wipes the smile off his face by pointing out the obvious.  The likeliest reason many of their new neighbors are in witness protection is that they are criminals who've turned on other criminals.  They are dangerous and deadly people who can’t be assumed to have reformed just because other criminals want to kill them.

She doesn’t point out that the best pieces of evidence that being given a new name doesn’t automatically mean being given a new personality are Danny and herself.  She doesn’t point it out, possibly, because she isn’t self-aware enough, possibly because she is but she can’t bring herself to accuse herself of anything, although she has no problem accusing Danny.  Evelyn loves Danny passionately but it’s her passion for him that keeps her devoted, not any sense of wifely loyalty or any sympathy for the trouble he’s in.  He put her and their children in peril of their lives and has robbed them of their past and she’s not inclined to forgive him for that.

Danny, however, seems to think that because their past is now unmentionable, it is now irrelevant.  They’ve started over from scratch and therefore whatever it was he did to himself and to his family should be treated as if it never happened.  He wants Evelyn to love him as Danny Brogan now, and since Danny Brogan never did anything to hurt “his” wife and family, Evelyn Brogan has no reason to resent or blame Danny.

Danny takes easily to his new name, but not just because it allows him to pretend the past didn’t happen the way it happened.  It turns out that he has an integrity of character that one one else on the show so far—and few people in real life—have managed for themselves.  Danny is a self-created man.  I don’t mean he has invented himself as if he was a fictional character.  (Boy, was that last sentence a work of meta-criticism.)  I mean that his character, who he is, the kind of guy he is, is a result of his own decisions about who he wants to be and not a reaction to circumstances or the opinions of others around him.

His name, what other people think of him, who they think he is aren’t important to his understanding of who he is.  His is an independent personality.  As opposed to his wife’s

Evelyn, who thinks of herself as a conventionally honest person, is in fact very dishonest in the sense that the self she presents to the world is a fiction without much of an actual personality to back it up.  She has appetites, desires, dreams, thoughts and opinions, feelings of all kind, deep and passionate ones, but she has never put them together in a way that defines an actual self.  Instead she has been dependent on having a public identity.  She has been content to be the person other people see her as, which, because she is beautiful, sexy, vivacious and charming, was, up until Danny ruined it for her, something of a minor, very minor, celebrity.  As hostess of the bar she and Danny owned together she ruled over the place as if she was a famous actress and every night was the occasion of one of her parties.  And she didn’t just love being the center of attention, she only knew herself as the center of attention.

Evelyn blames Danny for ruining her life and putting her family in danger, but when he points out that she must have known what he was up to in order to keep the bar going and maintain her in the life she’d come to think of as her due, she brushes his reasonable accusations aside.  She is not responsible for who she is; she’s only concerned with what she is, and what she is right now is nobody.

Her past self is gone, her new self is not defined and she as yet can’t see how it will ever be defined in the way it used to be, the way she liked it.  Without a “self” to be, she is at the beck and call of her feelings and desires and so she is now herself the greatest threat to her family’s safety.  She goes where her heart takes her, says whatever comes to mind and is drawn, unconsciously but irresistibly to anyone who treats her as if she is still her old admired and desired self living her old glamorous life—like the town doctor who is so repressed, so obviously twisted up with guilt and so despised and abused by his wife that we’re pretty sure that whatever past he’s in hiding from it includes something terrifically kinky and awful.

Whatever that past includes, though, has yet to be revealed.  So far we’ve only gotten to know the secret of one other resident of Meadowlands and it turns out to be not all that interesting except for its usefulness for injecting sex and violence into the plot.

More intriguing has been watching Brenda, the Brogans’ next door neighbor, attempting to take the opportunity of starting over with a new identity to construct a new personality.  Sad, lonely, victimized by compulsions and desires that are both a consolation for her loneliness and a cause, Brenda, played with heartbreaking over-eagerness and a sad, desperate voluptuousness of body and soul by Melanie Hill, presents herself to her new neighbors as cheerful, outgoing, popular, and busy, busy, busy, with no time to worry about small slights and disappointments—which we know from her scenes alone are actually the focus of her thinking; self-pity is her defining emotion—she has given herself the role of the neighborhood’s social director (essentially the role Evelyn played back at her and Danny’s bar) and she has re-cast her drug-addicted, juvenile delinquent, high school dropout and twenty-three year old daughter as a seventeen year old A student and the most popular girl in her class.  She’s working from a very trite and cliched script and forcing her neighbors to play along, which they of course feel compelled to do in order to keep the peace they all need to hide in and feel safe in.  But there are some who must be joining in enthusiastically because they have their own scripts they hope all the others will follow.

We haven’t met any of them yet.

This may be a problem.

Given the premise, that all these characters are keeping secrets and living fictions, I’d expect that Meadowland’s plots would revolve week to week around one or another character’s secret being threatened with exposure or one or another’s character’s fictional life turning out to be in some way more real than their past supposedly real lives.

But the first episode headed too quickly into melodrama, kink, violence, and romantic intrigue and the second episode has only picked up the pace.  It’s as if the producers think they need to get us hooked on the visceral excitements before they can start treating us to the psychological thrillers—and comedies—the set-up seems to naturally call for.

What this means is that a rather routine night time soap opera is developing that doesn’t at all depend on the characters having these past lives they need to keep secret.

But what’s keeping me interested and coming back, besides the hope that things will settle down and we’ll start poking around in the character’s hidden pasts, is the cast, particularly Morrisey, Cohu, Hill, and Ralph Brown as the sinister and brutal local cop and Felicity Jones as the Brogans’ simultaneously too worldly and too naive teenage daughter Zoe.

Mostly, though, Meadowlands depends on our rooting interest in Danny’s survival, and Morrisey, who could be Liam Neeson’s younger, rougher-edged brother, makes that an iffy proposition.  He plays Danny with a hero's determination to create a safe, new life for his family and a weak man’s impulsiveness that undermines him at every step.  He’s a good guy who will always do the wrong thing while trying to do the right one because at crucial moments cause and effect get separated in his thinking.  He sees what needs to be done at the moment, but then immediately loses sight of what very likely will result from doing it.  Morrisey wears a look of jut-jawed, self-confident, damn the consequences bewilderment, managing to be canny, smart, and competent and dumb as a lox at the same time.

He lets us see the exact moment when the fuse on the light of intelligence in his eyes shorts out.

So I’ll keep watching for Morrisey and the rest but I was sorry that last night’s episode ended with a body needing to be buried instead of a skeleton being dragged from a closet.

You can watch the first episode of Meadowlands here.

Episode 2 will be repeated tonight at 11 and then again at midnight, tomorrow night at 9, Wednesday at 8, Thursday at 11, Friday at 9, and Saturday at 8.

Episode 3 begins its run next Sunday night at 10 PM.

Click on the link for the complete schedule.

Study in grays and brown

Wood pile at the town compost heap.  Early afternoon.  Saturday, June 23, 2007.

You are old, Father Mannion

Eleven year old and I were on our way to the town compost heap to unload some brush and lawn clippings this afternoon.  Stopped off at the library first, where I left my wallet on a table and we had to go back.

Kid Mannion:  How did you forget your wallet?

Old Father Mannion:  I don't know.  Guess I'm getting old and senile.

Kid Mannion:  What's that?

Old Father Mannion:  Senile?

Kid Mannion:  I don't know what that means.

Old Father Mannion:  Means my brain isn't working the way it used to.  I'm getting forgetful and silly.

Kid Mannion:  Oh.  (Thoughtful pause.)  My brain isn't working the way it used to either.

Old Father Mannion:  It's not?

Kid Mannion:  Nope.  My thinking is different.  It's getting more complicated.

Old Father Mannion:  Guess we're going in different directions.

Trip to the compost heap complete, Old Father Mannion makes a suggestion.

Old Father Mannion:  You want to go home and have a popsicle?

Kid Mannion:  You have another idea?

Old Father Mannion:  Stop at the ice cream store for sundaes?

Kid Mannion:  Old man, I like the way you think.

Poetry as fiction, poetry as lies

Post-script added 7 PM Saturday night.

I've always believed Shakespeare was making it up.

In his sonnets.

About the Dark Lady, about WH, about the bisexual love triangle, about riding a horse, about even having a horse to ride.

Made it all up.

There's more of his autobiography in A Midsummer Night's Dream than in My mistress's eyes.

And because I think he was inventing on every couplet, his sonnets strike me as essentially true.

When the questions How much of this really happened? and How close is what the poet says happened to what really happened? don't have to be asked, then naturally their possible answers don't pop up to complicate your enjoyment of a poem.  Poets are born liars and aren't known for worrying about getting their facts straight when a rhyme or a metaphor is at stake.  The answers to those questions are almost certainly Not much and Not very and once the lies are on the table it's hard to care about the poetry.

Back in Shakespeare's day it was assumed poets were making it up.  Even when the circumstances of a poem seemed to match the circumstances of the poet's life the poem's audience wasn't expected to think that the speaker of the poem and the poet were the same person.

Poets depended on readers making this distinction, particularly aristocratic readers with legal authority and whimsical ideas about freedom of the press, to keep themselves out of prison and away from the block.

In our time, poets are reflexively autobiographical.  If a poet writes a poem that sounds like a suicide note, the odds are good it is a suicide note, which is why Ted Hughes was racked with guilt over his wife's sticking her head in the oven until the day he died himself.

But in defense of Hughes and everybody else who read Sylvia Plath's last poems and missed the obvious clues, like I said, even when they're not supposed to be making it up poets tend to make it up anyway.  They can't help themselves.

I don't trust autobiographies of any kind.  They demand that we accept a preposterous premise---that the author remembers everything just the way they happened.

Nobody remembers anything.

They remember the last time they remembered something.

Try to remember what you were like when you were five.

You're making it up.

You're remembering what you are like now only picturing yourself shorter.

Louise Gluck is a good poet.  I like this poem, Snow.

Late December: my father and I
are going to New York, to the circus.
He holds me
on his shoulders in the bitter wind:
scraps of white paper
blow over the railroad ties.

My father liked
to stand like this, to hold me
so he couldn't see me.
I remember
staring straight ahead
into the world my father saw;
I was learning
to absorb its emptiness,
the heavy snow
not falling, whirling around us.

But I only like it when I convince myself that she made it all up, that she made up this preternaturally insightful and resentful small child and the father the child thought didn't like to look at her or was too obtuse to know she needed to be looked at.

Naturally, I'm on the father's side here.  It's hard for me to imagine a non-acrophobic child who felt that riding on her father's shoulders was a form of punishment or a sign of neglect.  When my boys were small enough to ride on my shoulders they did a great deal of their traveling up there.  I'm pretty sure they liked it.  They used to ask to be lifted up.  I hope I wouldn't have put them up there if they hadn't enjoyed it, if it scared them or made them feel anxious or taken into custody in some way.  I liked to do it because they liked it.  But I also liked to do it because it made me feel strong and protective and in charge---made me feel like their father.  And I liked to do it because often it was the quickest way to get from one place to another.  It meant that I did not have to slow my pace to match theirs so they could keep up when I was in a hurry.   They might have guessed that.  I might have told them outright sometimes.  Maybe there were times when they weren't in a hurry that they resented being lifted up and plopped on my shoulders, trapped up there and unable to touch or smell or chase the things three and four year olds need to touch, smell, and chase in order to get to know the world.

Maybe they will write accusatory poems about it when they get old enough.

I just don't believe Gluck thought what she portrays herself as thinking when she was riding on her father's shoulders.

Those feelings aren't a child's.

They're the feelings of a bitter and depressive adolescent who thinks she can lay the blame for her own temperament on her father's aloofness, on his unwillingness to let her see him, on his forcing her to face an emotional emptiness when she was barely more than a baby.  She has made a metaphor out of a memory.

Nothing wrong with that, poetically, artistically.  If this was a scene from a short story or a movie it would be a wonderfully symbolic moment.   But is it a scene from a fiction or a scene from Gluck's real life?

If it's meant to be real, why should we trust that Gluck is remembering it correctly?  Why should we trust that there was an actual moment like that for her to remember?  People routinely fill their mental attics with false memories.  They unconsciously doctor the real memories that they do posses.

And how good a self-analyst is she anyway?  Why should be believe that her current gloom has a cause that reaches back to when she was a child and why should we just accept that she has correctly identified that cause?

I like the poem better when I think that it's made up.  When I suspect it's the truth---Gluck's version of the truth---it feels like a lie.

I think that Gluck has a streak of perversity in her that allows her to "remember" the past in ways that appeal to her vanity.  I think she is vain about being gloomy and withdrawn, vain about being a person who responds to affection and emotional claims upon her by going cold and turning mean.

I think she is nursing a grudge that has no cause but her own self-loathing.

I think she is a female, poetic Dr House.

You know why I think this?

Because I have read other poems by her in which she presents herself as just this kind of person.

She has a poem called Brown Circle that begins,

My mother
wants to know
why, if I hate
family so much,
I went ahead and
had one. I don't
answer my mother.
What I hated
was being a child,
having no choice about
what people I loved.

Once again Gluck is claiming that when she was a child she had feelings and insights into herself and the people around her that would have been remarkably precocious in a teenager and she is portraying herself vain about what a precociously bitter and perverse little girl she was and vain about her cold, stubborn, self-defensive self-centeredness now.

But I don't really know if Gluck is writing about herself or about a person like herself.

If she's expecting us to believe that this is the way she is, that this is what really happens, then her poems are a pack of lies.  But if she's making it up, if her poems are fiction, then I believe she is telling us the truth about life.

The poet and the juggler, a post-script brought on by some serendipitous afternoon reading.

This is critic and essayist Clive James writing about W.C. Fields:

Though he exaggerated his early deprivations when he told tales of his upbringing, Fields was certainly the man out of place, one of those people who are born exiles even if they never leave home.

I read that and thought, That's Louise Gluck! Or that's how she presents herself as the speaker of her poems.  A person out of place.  A born exile.

W.C. Fields and Louise Gluck?  Kindred spirits?  Not so far-fetched.  In his essay, James makes the case the case that Fields was in his way a verbal and visual poet.  He says of Fields, but could be talking about Gluck, just as well:

For some reason such misfits seem to favour the notion of verbal economy, as if turning ordinary language into the kind of compressed code that unfolds into a wealth of meaning when you have the key.

Could have come from an essay analyzing Gluck's poetry.  This is the last poem in one of her books.  It's called, as a sly joke, First Memory:

Long ago I was wounded, I lived
to revenge myself
against my father, not
for what he was---
for what I was: from the beginning of time,
in childhood, I thought
that pain meant
I was not loved.
It meant I loved.

A person out of place, a born exile, a poet, like W.C. Fields.

Snow, Brown Circle, and First Memory are from Gluck's book of poems, Ararat.

The essay on Fields is from James' new collection of essays and reviews, Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories From History and the Arts.

Studio 60: Ladies and gentlemen, once again, Miss Peggy Lee!

Studio 60: Pen-Elayne braves rogue housepainters, out of control drapery, inexperienced waitresses, and a seemingly endless three part story line to live blog on the Sunset Strip

Welcome back, folks.  I know you're all anxious to bring Pen-Elayne back out here to pick up where she left off last week, continuing the work Ken Houghton began the week before chronicling the first of the 99 parts of Aaron Sorkin's penultimate Studio 60 story arc, and get her started on tonight's live-blogging, but before we do, a few announcements.

We tried to keep this out of the papers, but many of you probably heard that our former manager had a nervous breakdown on the air last week.  We were much concerned at the time, but it turns out he was faking.  It was part of his plot.  What really happened is that while he was on stage, his accomplices were cleaning out the safe in his office.  He absconded with several thousand in cash, some of our guests' jewelry, and three of our best waitresses.  While we deplore the robbery we have to admire him for that last part.  Previous managers have managed to get out of here with only one waitress, Betty, our sous-chef's daughter, and they've always sent her back.

If you've seen our sous-chef you'll know why.  Betty's a chip off the old block.

But last week the manager left here with three waitresses in tow, one of them Betty, of course, and we expect her back shortly.  The other two were good looking and actually pretty good waitresses too and they were tough to replace at short notice.  But we've managed to hire some new girls and we have a new manager who is determined to make the old place over, which is why we're asking you to excuse the mess.  The painters will try to work around you as quietly as possible and the decorater says she'll have the drapes hung and her crew out of here by the first commercial break.

This explains why when she does come out here Elayne will be wearing a hard hat and coveralls.  Everybody's been pitching in trying to get the place ready for tonight and Elayne is wizard with a power roller.

So please bear with us and try to be patient with the new waitresses and no pinching!  They're all just out of the convent.  Thank you.  To make up for it, first round of drinks is on the house.  No shoving at the bar!

That's all.  Once again, Lance wishes he could be here with us in the comments, but you know how it is.  With great power comes great responsibility and Doc Ock was sighted climbing the Chrysler Building.

Ladies and gentlemen, Pen-Elayne!

Damn, just stepped in the spackle again.  Shows you how my day has been going.

But of course as bad as it is, it never seems to be as bad as that of the poor, poor, rich cast members of Studio 60, both the show and the show within.  You have to admire poor rich Aaron Sorkin for trying to make us care about these highly-paid executives and performers by throwing all this tsuris in their way.  "What tsuris," you ask?  "What's tsuris?" you ask if you're not from the coast.  Well, it's not my job to give you either Yiddish lessons or synopses, it's my job to, apparently, be a handywoman; besides, Lance has helpfully provided the link above to catch you up on Amanda Peet's pregnancy (she gave birth, as did her character Jordan, who hasn't been seen since and is rumored to be heading to that great Sorkin waiting-for-the-next-show room in the sky) and Simon's hauling off at the pressparazzi and Tom looking all cutely mopey over his brother's hostage situation, and actual conversation between Harriet and Danny that kept me awake more than the conversations between Harriet and Matt ever did, and of course the continuing adventures of Jack Rudolph, Action Executive Transvestite (™ and © Ken Houghton), who is poised to do a little K&R before we all do some R&R.  Which I'll need after this is done.  Tell me, oh tell me it'll be done tonight!

And with that, let's paint the town red!

9:50 PM - Oh good, an Office marathon.  Can't go wrong with those!  Get well soon, Jenna Fischer!

9:53 - "...when my mom moved in with Jeff... and once again, it's my job to fix it..." oh man, Steve Carell is so brilliant he almost makes me want to see Evan Almighty.

9:57 - Aaaand the obligatory iPhone ad.  I thought it would be more current with the YouTube cross-plug, and have that "dramatic chipmunk" playing...

9:59 - Well, when you get to high-five an elephant, where do you go from there, really?

10:01 - They're still "story so far"ing the first episode in this so-far-three-parter... oh good, at least it was brief.  Makes you wonder, if they can synopsize that quickly, wasn't all that much going on...

10:03 - Excellent -- Jack Rudolph, Action Synopsizer!

10:04 - Go Simon, don't you apologize!

10:05 - "You're fi-- oh dang, I need a drink."  Okay, I liked that little Action vs. Action chat.

10:06 - Is it just me, or does no hamburger in a fast food ad ever look appetizing?

10:08 - "A Brady took a Brady's life..." "...comin' through the rye..." Sorry, I just liked the actor's put-on accent in that soap opera ad.

10:09 - Ah good, Jack's got his alcohol.  Love where he got it from!

"You can spar with me as much as you want."  Yes please!

10:12 - Bill Maher shout-out!  Topical!

10:14 - Oh dear, that wasn't exactly sotto voce, Matt, was it?

10:15 - No, no, no, Holly Hunter impressions were cute last week and just inappropriate in the faux hospital faux environment, Harriet.  Tch.

10:16 - You know, Sorkin really could kill off Jordan.  But the audience would be pretty pissed.  It's not like Peet asked for it or anything.

10:17 - What does "doing a little Juliet Lewis" mean?  I mean, is there a Mini Me version of her somewhere?

10:18 - Yes, Simon looked great backlit like that.  Almost as though he were still on a TV show.

10:19 - He has a house in Hawai'i!  Poor, poor rich man!

10:20 - Ooh, Army guy suspects lawyer gal.  Way to skulk, Mary!

10:23 - Okay, this pharmaceutical gets rid of cholesterol.  Doesn't that mean it gets rid of "the good chol" as well as "the bad chol"?

10:24 - "Why is America's Got Talent the number one show?"  Where do I begin to answer what's wrong with that question?

10:26 - You know, a camera shot through a door AND blinds is a bit much for my eyes at this hour.

10:27 - Okay look, the "vinyl record" distraction was just superfluous and not believable.  So, stop it.

10:29 - "All just a little bit of history repeating" doesn't segue easily into Jason Alexander "five years ago."

No, "away homer" is what A-Rod hits when the Yanks are in Colorado...

10:30 - We're not ever going to actually see a single line of this so-called dangerous sketch from five years back, are we?

10:32 - Another complication for Jordan?  Well,of course, it's only halfway through...

10:33 - Not for nothing, but with all this stuff going on with Jordan shouldn't there be more than one doctor?  I mean, there would be in real life but they don't want to pay more than one guest actor maybe...

Oh yeah, prayer, that'll help.  I actually think the Holly Hunter impression was a better idea.

10:35 - Geez lady, next time you want to drive a Beemer just buy shoes without heels.

10:37 - Is anyone else sensing ANY forward movement?  Gah, this is like swimming through molasses.

10:38 - Excellent, Jack and Matt schmoozing.  We're going back five years again in a moment, aren't we?

10:39 - Oh yes, telling hysterical reactionaries they're hysterical reactionaries always works.

Aaaand right on time, five years earlier.  Why did Wes go into the hospital and get sicker?  No wait, that's Jordan in the present, never mind.

10:40 - Ooh, talk radio looks pretty on a televised computer!

10:41 - A Foo List?  Good thing we have the Foo Fighters!

10:43 - Oh god, PLEASE let there be a resolution of SOMEthing now that Army guy's phone is ringing!

10:44 - Nooo, that wasn't a resolution either.

10:46 - Where's the Pacing Fairy when you need her?  Seriously, it's all soooo slooooow that I find myself drifting off with nary a care about these characters.

10:49 - Wow, Harriet's being real brave reminding us again that these characters are all poor, poor rich people!

10:50 - Danny Tripp, Action Something-or-other!

Wow, he walked out of the chapel.  Pretty good.

10:51 - Just two drunk guys talking... heh, Simon's on a roll again.  But really, don't write an apology speech when you've been drinking...

10:53 - Yes, true patriotism really is that fragile.  And yes, it's 7th grade social studies stuff.  I miss 7th grade social studies.

10:54 - Well, looks like there's gonna be a part IV.  I'm so not here for that one!  Seriously Lance, this is really tough.

10:55 - Mary's bad hair is the most real thing about this show so far.

10:56 - Ghoulish?  This whole storyline is ghoulish!

10:57 - She's. Not. His. Daughter.

10:58 - Danny on his knees was fairly predictable, but a very very weak ending.  Unless he was praying for a resolution, in which case I think we should all join him.  Won't you pray with me?

My father, who art in heaven and has been for the past few months, I know what you'd say.  "What are you wasting your time with this?"  Well, it's kinda fun, Dad.  Anyway, is there some way you could maybe get Matt and Danny back together again in the present time?  Or, you know, find me something else to watch?  Yeah, I know, the Yankees are playing again tomorrow, and at least baseball has a resolution as long as it's not an All-Star Game.  Anyway, off to watch The Daily Show, so y'all are on your own.  No, I have no ending either.  Y'all should be used to that after these last few shows...

Thank you, thank you, thank you, Pen-Elayne!  Wasn't she great, folks?  And how about the way she handled the scaffolding collapse at the 10:24 mark without missing a beat?  By the way, the painter's assistant's going to be fine.  Just had the wind knocked out of him.

Elayne, before you go, could you give that wall in the men's dressing room a second coat of callalilly?  Thanks.

We have to clear out a little early tonight, folks.  Usually the bar and the dance floor would remain open all night.  But the building inspector was in and he's claiming we have several code violations and we have to bri---go over some things with him.  Careful on your way out.  Those wires are live.

By the way, Betty's back.  She reports that the cops caught up with her and our former manager just outside Osceola.  She and her dad, our sous-chef, had a tearful reunion, as usual, and then they settled down to watch the last few innings of the Yankee game together, which made them happy because they're Red Sox fans.  Sox are now ten and a half up on the Yanks so as far as Betty and her dad are concerned tonight had a happy ending.

Not so those of us who watched Studio 60 who are now left to wonder if Sorkin could finish a walk across the room let alone a story line.

We'll find out next week what plots and subplots get closed and what ones will stay open forever or until he gets another new show to use to work out left over issues from his days on Studio 60 the way he's used Studio 60 to work out issues left over from The West Wing.

Goodnight and thanks again, Elayne!

Elayne?

Oh jeez.  Will somebody help her get that bucket of paint off her head?

Studio 60: Ladies and gentlemen, tonight's special musical guest, Miss...Peggy...Lee!

Studio 60: Stay tuned

Pen-Elayne will return tonight to live-blog the penultimate episode of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, 9:50 PM or so EST.  Surprise special musical guest will be here at 9:30 to warm things up.

Note to our patrons:  Studio 60 Live-blogging at Lance Mannion is under new management.  All new menu items, all new lower prices, same great service, same cozy atmosphere, same long lines outside the ladies rooms.  Sorry about that.

Because we all know Jack Bauer is real and 24 is a documentary

In his next speech, Justice Scalia will argue that goverment agents should be allowed to shoot any suspcious person at will because you can't always tell an actual human being from a Cylon so why take chances?

See digby.

Update:  See The VanityPress too.

The terrible loneliness of being free

In the opening sequences of Moscow on the Hudson, flashing back to his life in Russia, Robin Williams' character, circus musician Vladimir Ivanoff, remembers risking being late for work, putting his job and his upcoming, much looked forward to trip to New York City with the circus in jeopardy, to jump into a long line outside a store to buy...he's not sure what.  Toilet paper, he hopes.  Whatever they're selling, he knows that.

In the Soviet Union, you see a line, you get in it, because everything's so scarce, store shelves are usually so empty, what's available is usually so expensive, that odds are whatever is on sale at the end of the line, you need it.

Or you can use it.

What's at the end of this particular line are men's shoes.  Vladimir buys two pair, neither in his size, because there are none in his size, all the shoes are the same size, a size too small for most men.  Vladimir doesn't care.  He can sell the shoes at a profit or use them as bribes.

The privation, the corruption, the paranoia, the dullness, the way everybody lives on the borderline of poverty, how the consumer goods and the small luxuries that separate them from the truly poor are no compensations because they are ugly, badly made, cost too much in time and effort and rubles to obtain, how every relationship, friendships, family life, love affairs, marriage, is reduced to a business deal---we see a society and an economy horribly crippled by the fear and corruption and purposeful bureaucratic inefficiency necessary to keeping its own evil regime in power and our first thoughts are naturally, Three cheers for capitalism and How did we ever see this sorry nation as a threat to our way of life?

The answer to that second thought is that the Soviets had nuclear weapons and men as crazy and as soulless among their leadership as we had among ours.

Still, you wonder how our saner leaders didn't look at what was going on over there and think, We can outlast them, we can out sell them.

This isn't the place to get into the old containment vs confrontation debates or look at what a lot of our leaders were really looking for as an outcome to our rivalry with the Soviet Union---safe markets not new democracies.

As for the first thought, director Paul Mazursky more or less responds, Are you sure you want to cheer that enthusiastically?  Maybe you should wait and see.

Mazursky takes a long while to get Vladimir to the United States where we know he's going to defect and where we expect the real plot of the movie's going to unfold, testing our patience, because he wants to show us something else about life in the Soviet Union first.

The way people cling to each other.

Despite the corrupting influence of money, actually the lack of it, on relationships---a marriage proposal, even a sincere one inspired by love, is phrased in starkly economic terms with a list of material benefits that would result---and the fear that any person you know and are close to and trust could turn out to be a KGB stooge---at one point Vladimir is given a choice, spy on your best friend and inform on him, or your beloved grandfather could wind up in a "mental hospital"----the people grab hold of each other, literally, and hold tight, because their only joy in life and their only solace is love.

In Sartre's No Exit, Hell is other people.  In the Soviet Union, says Mazursky, all there is of heaven is other people.

With that established, he finally sends Vladimir to New York where he defects in Bloomingdales.

And for the first few scenes after he defects, the movie really does allow us, encourages us, to give three years for capitalism and the USA.

This really is a wonderful country.

Seeing it through Vladimir's eyes as he takes it all in for the first time choked me up.

God, I love this country!

But it is not a paradise, it is not heaven on earth, and it is not without its own forms of hell, even for the lucky like Vladimir.

First, there is just the overwhelming fact of freedom itself.  To be able to go where you want, do what you want, be what you want to be---all those choices, all those decisions, all those problems that follow and all the more choices and decisions that have to be made after the first ones!  Where do you start?  How do you start?  Why bother to start?

And having all that freedom to make choices doesn't necessarily mean you have the means to follow through.  In America you are free to want everything.  You can only have what you can afford.

Or what you know how to ask for.  One of Vladimir's friends on his first job in America, washing dishes, is another recent arrival to America, an astrophysicist who has to work in a kitchen because he doesn't speak English well-enough to get a teaching job.  He's worried that when he finally does master the language skills, his other skills as a scientist will have become out of date.

All those choices can be depressing too.  Just because it's not as bad as it was back in Moscow doesn't mean that it's not dispiriting.  Vladimir literally faints when he walks into a grocery store to buy coffee and faces an entire aisle full of fifty brands of coffee to choose from.

Not being able to choose is not as sad as having no choice, but the result is the same.  You go home empty-handed.

Freedom means being able to rely on yourself, to not have to ask for favors or make deals just to get through a day (Which inspires the question, how free are any of us?), and that means people don't need each other as desperately as they did back home.  Vladimir finds that all his new friendships are much looser than they were in Russia and likely to be temporary.

And the freedom to be your own self, to live your life your own way, to be the person you want to be, can make people jealous of themselves.  It can make them resist any claim you might make on them, even the most well-meaning and caring claims, even the claims of love and affection.  They will see it as an attempt to control them, as an attempt to steal from them a part of themselves.

On the day Vladimir's new American girlfriend, the Italian sales clerk under whose skirt he hid when he was fleeing his KGB handlers in Bloomingdales, played by Maria Conchita Alonso, becomes a US citizen she turns immediately cold and sullen.  She finds a far corner to be alone and away from her family at the party celebrating her citizenship.  She pulls away from Vladimir whenever he tries to hug her.   She provokes a fight.  When he storms off she looks triumphant.

It didn't help that he picked the moment she wanted most to be alone to propose and that he put his proposal in the old, Soviet-style way, as a matter of economic convenience to both of them, making her afraid that all he wanted out of her was a nicer apartment and his own path to citizenship smoothed out.  And she's terrified of her new freedom as well.  It has sunk in what it means to be able to call her life her own---she is on her own in a way she has no idea yet how to handle.

But what's really upsetting her is that now that she is truly her own person she doesn't want to share any of her new-found self with anybody else.  She wants to enjoy it all to herself.  She is, understandably, feeling extremely selfish---self-ish---and here's Vladimir trying to claim a major piece of her self away from her.

It isn't long before they break up.

This is how it goes with all of Vladimir's American connections.  All his new friendships turn out to be transient or illusory or unreliable in some other way.

The only friend who sticks with him is his lawyer, Orlando, merrily played by Alejandro Rey making the case with his infectious grin that as miserable as life can be here, anywhere, there is still always much to enjoy and love, and Orlando isn't sticking because he likes Vladimir, although he does, very much; he's sticking because he's his lawyer and he's being paid to stick.

The crisis Mazursky has brought Vladimir's story to is spiritual.  Freedom has come at soul-crushing price.  For Vladimir, being an American, being a New Yorker at any rate, means being all on his own, which is to say, being terribly lonely.

His best friends have wandered away, paying in their way the prices of their own freedoms.  The woman he loves wants nothing more to do with him.  He will probably never see his family in Russia ever again.  There are millions of people all around him but they are strangers and pretty much all of them are content, eager even, to remain strangers.

He is part of a crowd and apart from it.  And what he must do is find a way to live with himself as his own best company, figure out how to use his freedom to make himself happy...or at least not miserable.

Thus the last scene of the movie.  Vladimir, having found work as a musician again, sets up on a street corner to play his saxophone.  Most of the passersby ignore him, but a few pause, listen, applaud, drop some coins, make a connection, a temporary one, and move on, leaving him alone in the crowd, playing his music for himself, making himself happy by himself.

Moscow on the Hudson.  Directed by Paul Mazursky.  Written by Paul Mazursky and Leon Capetanos.  Starring Robin Williams, Maria Conchita Alonso, Alejandro Rey, Cleavant Derricks, and Elya Baskin.  Columbia Pictures.  1984.

How many cards did Rush get last Sunday?

Tell you what.  When Rush Limbaugh can get it up and keep it up long enough to actually father a child, then he can come to me and try to tell me how to raise my sons.

Stupid Salon link's playing tricks on people.  Ken Houghton thoughtfully provided the money quote from Greenwald in the comments here.

Groucho as a hero for our youth

 

clipped from kuusisto.typepad.com When I was 17 a friend's mother asked me if I had any heroes.  I named Groucho Marx.  My friend's mother was indignant and said that real heroes are people who make a difference like "Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr."   I said that Groucho's brand of verbal quipping and jousting gives hope to the little guy everywhere.  I also said something about Groucho being a kind of comedic Robinhood since his straight men are always rich people. Even in high school while undergoing a substantial bout of depression, I knew that comedy was a potent tool and that humor has a lot to do with self preservation.  Groucho was a rule breaker; an impostor as a college president; a farcical ruler of the mythic country of Freedonia; a stowaway; a fraudulent hotel manager in Florida; a phony impressario of the stage; on and on--he was the guy who was faking it in his every occupation and managing it by talking faster than everybody else.  He was the perfect hero for a teenager with a disability ---from Steve Kuusisto's post Of Comedy and Disability.

Their virtual money is worth more than the analog money in your wallet

See, when someone hits you over the head and steals your iPod, that's not as terrible a crime as the one you committed when you illegally downloaded last night's episode of How I Met Your Mother...

clipped from susiemadrak.com NBC/Universal general counsel Rick Cotton suggests that society wastes entirely too much money policing crimes like burglary, fraud, and bank-robbing when it should be doing something about piracy instead. “Our law enforcement resources are seriously misaligned,” Cotton said. “If you add up all the various kinds of property crimes in this country, everything from theft, to fraud, to burglary, bank-robbing, all of it, it costs the country $16 billion a year. But intellectual property crime runs to hundreds of billions [of dollars] a year.” Cotton’s comments come in Paul Stweeting’s report on Hollywood’s latest shenanigans on Capitol Hill.

I'm actually sympathetic to the music, television, and movie industry's feelings about piracy, although as Susie Madrak points out a lot of people who express these feelings are the same people who pretty much think the artists who make the music, TV shows, and movies ought to be about as well-compensated for their work as Scrooge felt about what he was paying Cratchitt before the ghosts showed up. But this idea that the theft of intellectual property is a more serious crime than robbing people at gunpoint is a good expression of the attitude ruining American businesses every day---nevermind the millions you made last year, the millions you think you could have made are the point, and if you didn't make those you as good as lost them...or they were as good as robbed from you at gunpoint.

Oh, and money, even theoretical money, is more important than people and the cops work for the rich not for all of us.

Kimono

The woman on the other side
     of the evergreens
a small boy is hidden in,
     I'm wearing
valleys, clear skies,
     thawing banks

narcissus and hollow reeds
     break through.
It means the world to him, this flat
     archaic fabric
no weather worries.
     Each time I bend,

brushing my hair, a bird
     has just dipped
through its sky out of
     sight. He thinks
I don't see him, my little man
     no more than seven

catching his lost stitch of breath. . .
     What he sees,
in my garden, is the style
     of the world
as she brushes her hair
     eternally beyond

the casual crumbling forms
     of branches. I bend
and the reeds are suddenly
     ravines. . .How soothing
it is, this enchanted gap, this tiny
     eternal

delay which is our knowing,
     our flesh.
How late it is, I think,
     bending,
in this world we have mis-
     taken. Late

for the green scrim to be
     such an open
door. And yet, even now, a small
     spirit accurate
as new ice is climbing
     into the gentle limbs

of an evergreen, the scent rubbing off
     on his elbows
and knees, his eyes a sacred store
     of dares,
to watch, as on the other side,
     just past

the abstract branches, something
     most whole
loosens her stays,
     pretending she's alone.

---by Jorie Graham