Lance Mannion

All the Mad Men and all the Mad Women are having epiphanies

Programming note: No live-blogging of Mad Men tonight at newcritics because of the holiday.  But I've cross-posted this over there so feel free to use it (at either place) as an open thread on tonight's episode, "Maidenform."

I was an altar boy from the time I was in fifth grade until just about halfway through my first year of high school, when getting up at six o'clock on a Sunday morning became as physically impossible for me as levitating.  During those four and a half years our parish had five or six young priests rotate through, none of them more than a half dozen years out of the seminary.  And by the time I hung up my cassock and surplice for good so had all but one of them.

Not all of those young men left to get married, but all of them were married not very long after they'd left the priesthood.

In the decade after Vatican II priests gave up their vocations by the drove, and fewer and fewer young men heard a calling at all.  The seminaries and the rectories became emptier and lonelier places.  Convents too, even more so.

Two weeks ago on Mad Men, in an episode titled "Three Sundays," Peggy Olsen developed a friendship with a new young priest at her parish that, as all Peggy's attempts at friendship with men seem to do, immediately overstepped the bounds.  Father Gill's collar didn't seem to inhibit or intimidate her any more than Pete Campbell's wedding ring or the fact that Don Draper was her boss.

Peggy isn't a seductress---at least I don't think she is; Peggy is a difficult character to read, and I'm not sure if it's the character who's opaque or Elizabeth Moss' performance.---but she is eager for male company and male approval.  This isn't surprising, given her ambition, the ad world is a male world, and Peggy will succeed only to the degree that men let her.  But it's also not surprising given the henhouse she grew up in, with both her fussing mother and her domineering sister clucking over her all the time.  The only man around is her brother-in-law, who when we meet him is prostrate on the couch, ostensibly from back pain, but really from a metaphor for his own weakness and irrelevance within the family circle.  Whether she's looking for a father figure or a surrogate brother or just a friend who is not like her mother and sister and who can see her as a grown woman is another open question; but whatever it is, with Pete, with Don, and now with Father Gill Peggy immediately has moved in too close, opened herself up too fast.  Draper, because he's wary of all intimacy anyway, pushed her away almost immediately.  Pete, because he's weak and selfish, waited until he'd had sex with her before he remembered what was right and proper.  For most of last week's episode, Father Gill seemed to be trying to have it both ways, looking for a way to become more intimate with her without giving in to the temptation to kiss her.

Peggy, who is in the most ambitious and driven of all the younger characters, can also be the most passive.  It's actually one of her strengths.  She rushes in where angels fear to tread but then she pulls up short and waits to take her cues from whatever devils she's barged in on.  She can out-wait anyone.  The next move is up to them.  She let Pete make the first move, and the last one, and she was willing to wait for Father Gill too.

Unfortunately for her, Father Gill had more willpower than Pete Campbell, and more to lose, and he turned out to be pretty good at the waiting game himself.  The two were headed for trouble, but neither one was in a hurry to get there, and while they were dawdling, Peggy's meddlesome sister had time to meddle.

Father Gill found out about Peggy's baby or, rather, what he found out was that Peggy hadn't told him about the baby.  She lied to him by omission but he probably could have understood and forgiven that if...the fact didn't make him face what he himself was doing.  Up to that point, Father Gill was probably still telling himself that all he was looking for in Peggy was a friend.  When he learned that Peggy hadn't always been the good Catholic girl he took her for he had to wonder if she was one yet.  If she had slept with one man outside of marriage, might she be looking to sleep with another, even if that other man was a priest?  And what if that man was more a man than he was a priest?

In their last scene together, Father Gill makes sure Peggy knows that he knows about the baby and he does it in a way that makes clear that from here on their relationship is going to be that of priest to young mother.

We'll see if that resolve of his lasts.  Colin Hanks, who plays Father Gill, is scheduled to appear in two more episodes.  I hope that producer Matthew Weiner won't be bringing him back just to have an affair with Peggy and that he will use Father Gill to try to explain what happened to those young men who used to be the priests I held the cruets and rang the bells and carried the crucifix for.

In other words, I'd like to see Weiner tell a very 1960s story.

But that's not my point here.  My real point begins with this.  I was surprised to read that Father Gill would be coming back at all.   His part in the story---Peggy's story---felt over and done with to me when he handed Peggy the Easter egg and told her to give it to "the little one."

Peggy is Mad Men's other great self re-inventor.  Don Draper has constructed a whole new identity to inhabit.  Peggy is at work on a similar project, she just has to go about it in a different way and for slightly different reasons.  The Dick Whitman Draper used to be was limited by his family's craziness.  Peggy is limited by her gender and the limited expectations people have of her because she's a woman, and that includes her family.  If Peggy had had the chance to "kill" Peggy Olsen the way Don "killed" Dick Whitman, she'd have done it, but she'd still have had the problem of being a woman in a man's world.  She'd also still have had the "problem" of having once had a nervous breakdown, that is, of having been and possibly still being crazy.

In ceasing to be Dick Whitman Don Draper could tell himself, Now I am free to be the real me, the person I was made to be.  (That he is not "free" as it turns out is another problem.)  But while Peggy is working her way to not being Peggy in the sense of not being the helpless and dependent woman-child people expect her to be, she cannot trust the real Peggy inside her the way Draper could trust---or thought he could trust---the real Don inside him.  So she has two problems that she can only solve by relying on other people, preferably strong men, to help her with.  Draper just has to tell people he's Don Draper and he's done the job of becoming Don Draper in their eyes.  Peggy needs them to help her be the Peggy she wants to be.  She needs them to let her have a career, and she needs them to take her seriously as a person, and for that to happen she has to enlist them in the re-creating of that person.

It's not enough that men like Draper and Father Gill believe her lie.  She needs them to believe in it enough to help her keep it going.  For this to work, they have to both help her fool herself and fool themselves.  Fool probably isn't the best word.  But she needs these men to tell her how to be an independent career woman and then she needs them to react to her as if they weren't the ones who told her how to be the person they're reacting to.

Draper is willing to go along with this because he understands what's driving her and because she's got talent.  Father Gill, however, doesn't know or understand and her talent is actually irrelevant to him.  That she could give him advice on how to punch up his sermons was the excuse he needed to cross the boundary that should have existed between a priest and a young single woman.  When he pulled up short and retreated back to the other side of that boundary and let her know he wouldn't be crossing over it again, at least not in this episode, he was telling Peggy that there was always going to be a limit to the extent she could expect other people to help her invent a new self for herself.

In the end, when she's handed that Easter egg---an ironic symbol of new life--she's forced to confront the fact that the self she's trying to escape and replace isn't going to disappear quietly.   It's a very crushing and lonely moment for her.  The Peggy she wants to escape, the Peggy she's afraid is her true self, is going to keep coming back to haunt her, if only to make it impossible for her to love honest and decent men like Father Gill, and that the only way she can have a man like Father Gill in her life is to make him dishonest, which is what she was trying to do.  Peggy is left alone to contemplate the fact that her new self may be, and may have to be, a bad person.

End of story.  Peggy's had an epiphany.

Watching the first season of Mad Men, I was frustrated by the show's writers' unwillingness to conclude their story arcs or to hurry them along.  Episode after episode appeared to set up crises that never came to a head and conflicts that had no pay-offs.  Plot threads didn't get tied up, they unraveled or, like the love affair between Paul and Joan, were dropped before they'd been followed any real distance and then picked up again well after they'd reached a conclusion.

Some of this is due to bad writing.  But by the last couple of episodes of the first season I'd begun to wonder if more of it was due to my own mistaken idea about what kind of TV show Mad Men is trying to be.

I kept thinking that because Matthew Weiner worked on The Sopranos, Mad Men was meant to be a show like The Sopranos, that is a novel for television.  But that model, which is also the Deadwood model, the Battlestar Galactica model, and---although I'm less sure this is the case the way this season's gone---the Weeds model.  The Wire followed a slightly different model, being more like a cycle of five short novels than like a single epic told over five seasons.  These shows told many stories but they were all offshoots and subplots to one encompassing story that was always intended to reach a conclusion.

But there are still other models for serious, adult drama on television.  One of those models is MASH and I think that might be the best one to start judging Mad Men against.

My thinking here may be colored by my conviction that Weiner pretty much shoved the MASH influence in our faces with Don Draper's Korean War flashblacks, which looked to have been not just filmed in the same hilly locations as MASH was but to have been shot in a way that recreated the look, the light, and the style of MASH in its first seasons.

I could, and probably will, spend a post on the MASH parallels and thematic echoings, starting with Don Draper as a kind of dark double for Hawkeye Pierce, but the main comparison I want to make now is the most banal---MASH wasn't a novel for television.  It was just a television show.  It finally did come to a conclusion but there was nothing novelistic in its ending the way it did.  Its eleven years worth of episodes were not written with that final episode in mind.  Just about every episode was written with only itself in mind.  As innovative as MASH was in other ways, it followed the model for TV shows of its day.  Every episode stood on its own, telling a story that had a beginning, a middle, and an end in the time allotted.

Actually, in MASH's case, episodes often told two or three or even four stories.  That was one of its innovations, multiple story arcs within a single episode.  Hill Street Blues, St Elsewhere, Barney Miller, Cheers, Seinfeld, all followed MASH's lead.  And this is what Mad Men seems to be doing and may have been doing all along.  The plot lines that won't complete themselves aren't narratives as much as they're motifs.  They are the givens that connect one episode, and stories within episodes, instead of a plot.  So Don is always hiding his identity and struggling not to let the normal life he's created for himself drown him, Pete is always on the make, Peggy is always trying to put her past behind her, Joan is always breaking in a new girl, and Sterling Cooper is always failing as an ad agency the way Hawkeye was always at war with the Army, Frank was always angling to take command, Klinger was always trying to get a Section 8, Margaret was always torn between her passions and her misguided sense of duty, and the war wouldn't stop and the wounded kept coming.

Every episode tells a short story that's connected to the other stories thematically more than narratively.  One story picks up from where another story left off, but not necessarily to continue it.

Mad Men, like MASH, isn't a novel for television.  It's a short story collection for television.

I keep coming back to literary models and influences for Mad Men, particularly to Richard Yates' novel Revolutionary Road.  But it's Yates' short stories that may have the greater relevance here, especially his collection Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, one of the two or three best short story collections in American literature.  (The other two are Lost in the City by Edward Jones and Hemingway's In Our Time.  Go ahead, fight me on this.)  The best short story collection, period, Joyce's Dubliners, may be another influence.  Mad Men may be Matthew Weiner's attempt to write Manhattanites.

So I'm going to stop waiting for Mad Men's story arc to move forward anymore, because I don't think there is one.  There are just this week's stories.   In "Three Sundays" we had the story of how a young woman determined to escape the self everybody expects her to be learns that to do that she'll have to erase her past in a way that may not be possible, but we also had the story of a man who would like nothing better than withdraw from his family watching in horror as his wife seems to be doing just that and learning that it's left to him then to hold the family together.  And in last week's episode, "The New Girl," in Pete and Trudy's visit to the fertility doctor we were told the story of how a young wife learns that her selfish, Peter Pan of a young man does in fact want to grow up, he just doesn't necessarily want to do it with her by his side and in Joan's attempt to teach the new girl Jane the ropes and Bobbie Bartlett's The Woman Who Came to Recover act, taking over Peggy's apartment for a few days after the car accident, we get the same story told two different ways---the story of a no longer as young as she needs to be woman who confronts a version of her younger self and learns that she doesn't much like the self she has become.

That nothing much dramatic will follow from any of these revelations is besides the point.  In real life people often learn lessons that they quickly forget or that they can't follow through on.  That the learning of these lessons within the shows isn't very dramatically presented is a problem. No great confrontations, no big speeches end these stories. Instead we get small gestures, soulful looks, meaningful poses.  I admire the writers' restraint, but it's risky having every episode finish with an epiphany rather than a catastrophe and relying on the audience's ability to read faces and body language.

Stunt casting

Updated---twice now---Saturday morning.

Second time in a week I got stiffed on the running mate news.

First, Obama forgets to text me about Biden.  And this afternoon the carrier pigeon John McCain sent out announcing it's Palin failed to show up.  I hope it just got lost.  There was a rather smug looking hawk sitting on a tree branch outside the window at lunch time.

As stunt casting goes, though, I think Sarah Palin's a pretty good stunt.  Just about anybody else McCain could have picked who wouldn't have been greeted with a giant yawn either had the good sense to take their name out of the hat a long time ago or was eliminated by McCain himself on the grounds that he doesn't share the limelight with anybody.  Palin made a good story all day, just because of the surprise factor alone.

Palin's an outsider.  That lets the Media play up the McCain as a maverick who likes other mavericks angle.

Her being a woman helps him mainly in that it allows the Media to re-hype their Obama has a woman problem story.  No Progressive Democratic woman in her right mind was or is going to vote for McCain---that doesn't mean there aren't Progressive Democratic women who won't vote for Obama, but protest vote options are still there:  They could not vote at all or they can vote for Cynthia McKinney.  "Where else are you going to go?" has an answer.  Just the answer didn't have to be McCain and it's still not going to be.  Palin is as bad on the issues as he is.  What his choosing a woman does is make him look like a big man to other men, particularly those in the Media, but also to men who were never going to vote Democratic, never were going to vote for Hillary, aren't going to vote for a black man, no way, no how, but who can now tell themselves that their feelings about Hillary weren't sexist, because look I'm voting for a woman for Vice-President, and their feelings about Obama aren't illiberal, because look I'm voting for a woman for Vice-President, I'm obviously all for equality.

Her lack of experience may appear to blunt the attack on Obama's, but Obama can't really attack her on that score, so I don't see why McCain can't just keep plugging away, and besides he's shameless.  Plus, he can make the case that he doesn't plan to die right away so she'll have time to learn on the job.

Like Hillary learned by being around Bill.

Palin is attractive, so the Media can treat her like a starlet at the same time they're pretending to treat her like a serious politician.  That'll make their fall.

Hanging out with a younger man would make McCain look old.  Hanging around with an attractive younger woman will make him look lucky to men whose minds work that way.

Biden will be tempted to rein himself in during their debate.  He can't eat her alive the way he would have any man because the talking heads will paint him as a bully.  Her lack of experience will give her the advantage that comes from low expectations.  If Biden doesn't reduce her to tears, she'll have won.

She's a character in her own right.  She has an interesting story of her own.  And did I mention she's young and attractive?  People will be interested in learning about her.  They'll actually tune into the Republican Convention, at least on the night she speaks.

And she has qualities that make her personally appealing to John McCain, the main one being she's a nobody and knows it.  She won't expect him to consult her, to defer to her, to take advice from her, or to give her much to do on the campaign trail or in office should he win.  She will leave McCain alone to confer and consult with the only person he appears to listen to, the man who will be his shadow Veep, Joe Lieberman.  Whatever you think of Lieberman, he has a real talent for playing Tom Hagen to McCain's Sonny Corleone.

By the middle of the campaign, Palin will be all but invisible.  By November people will need to look at their ballots to remind themselves of her name, which will be good for McCain, because I think by the end of the campaign people will need to be reminded who he is too.  If by some crazy chance McCain wins, Palin will have to find herself some hobbies.

Of course, she could wind up the first woman President, and wouldn't that be ironic?

But for now she's done the job she was chosen to do.  She's taken some of the spotlight from Obama and helped remind people the Republicans are going to have a convention too.

I mean, look, I'm writing about her!  You think I'd have a post up about Romney?

Updated to provide some Northern Exposure:  LGM's resident Alaskan, davenoon, takes some time off from his academic duties to offer a local perspective on Governor Palin.

Updated to show what a smart guy I am:  Me, last night:

Her lack of experience may appear to blunt the attack on Obama's, but Obama can't really attack her on that score, so I don't see why McCain can't just keep plugging away, and besides he's shameless.  Plus, he can make the case that he doesn't plan to die right away so she'll have time to learn on the job.

Top McCain aide in a quote I came across this morning:

"[Sarah Palin is] going to learn national security at the foot of the master for the next four years, and most doctors think that he'll be around at least that long," said Charlie Black, one of Mr. McCain's top advisers, making light of concerns about Mr. McCain's health, which Mr. McCain's doctors reported as excellent in May.

Of course, Steve Benen doesn't think this is the best tack for McCain to be taking.  "Vote for me because I plan to live until at least 2013 and by that time she ought to be up to speed."

Obama's speech

If only he didn't mumble...

Movies about movies, movies about New York, blogging about movies about movies, blogging about movies about New York...

Our favorite film blogger and southern belle of belle lettres, the Siren, has posted her contribution to Goatdog's Movies About Movies Blogathon.  The Siren's written about The Bad and the Beautiful starring Kirk Douglas as a manipulative monster of a movie studio exec and Lana Turner, Dick Powell, Gilbert Roland and others as doomed and self-destructive victims of Douglas' ego, all of whom may remind film buffs of a real-life Hollywood monster and his victims:

The game of "guess who THIS is" is quite fun and all but basically irrelevant, and Minnelli signals that in part by keeping the connections so flippin' obvious. Lana Turner's father-obsessed starlet stands in for Diana Barrymore, the Southern writer (Dick Powell) who hates Hollywood and wants to go home is an obvious take on Faulkner, the director (Barry Sullivan) plays Jacques Tourneur to Shields' Val Lewton on a movie called "Attack of the Cat Man"--I mean, with that last you wonder why they even changed the names. Aside from the Lewton echo the Shields character rings a bell, or more like a cathedral, for David O. Selznick, what with producing a large epic with a big death scene, even if it's set in Russia and not Georgia, and then moving on to Dick Powell's sexy Southern epic, The Proud Land (Faulkner would have thrown up, but never mind).

Go on over to her place to read her post and then follow the link to Goatdog's for more fun.  I especially enjoyed reading Bob at Forward to Yesterday's take on the Blake Edwards' S.O.B., a movie I'm sorry to hear Bob doesn't think quite holds up.  For some reason I can't explain to myself S.O.B. grabbed me by the funny bone and wouldn't let go.  I went to see it about six times when it was in the theaters, dragging friends along and demanding they love the movie as much as I did.  Nothing in Bob's post tells me what in God's name might have enthralled me, and, no, it wasn't the sight---a quick glimpse, really---of Julie Andrews' "boobies."  They were perfectly charming, but I'm sure I had other reasons for liking S.O.B. so much, and no it wasn't the sight of Rosanna Arquette's tits either.  Geez.  You people.  I think it was Robert Preston's one-liners, none of which were actually funny, he just made them funny.

Patient:  Will this work?

Preston (as a doctor about to stick a needle in the patient): Is Batman a transvestite?  Who knows?

And:

Pretty girl at a party:  What do you do?

Preston: I breed armadillos.

Pretty girl:  Is that satisfying work?

Preston:  Oh yes.  You know what they say.  Make an armadillo happy and the world is your oyster.

Pretty girl:  I think I have heard that.

Preston:  I used to breed oysters but it didn't have the same ring to it.  Make an oyster happy and the world is your armadillo.

Or maybe it was Julie Andrews' breasts.

At any rate, read Bob's post, read the Siren's, and keep in mind this:

Wednesday Night at the Movies is returning to newcritics in September!

The Siren has chosen our feature films and she'll be hosting the open threads, starting with Hitchcock's Rear Window on September 10.

All six of her chosen films are set in and about life in New York City, and the Siren's picked them with themes in mind.  Here's her schedule:

September 10: People-watching - Rear Window.
September 17: Ambition -- Sweet Smell of Success.
September 24: Drudgery (loneliness) - The Apartment
October 1:  Romance - Desperately Seeking Susan
October 8:  Resilience Double Feature - Serpico and 25th Hour

The Siren, always gracious, has graciously yielded the hosting duties for The Apartment to a fellow blogger who counts that Billy Wilder classic as one of his ten favorite movies of all time, and with this one I know why I love it.

Free Official Lance Mannion baseball cap to the first three readers who correctly guess what I already know I'm going to title my post.

Send your guesses by email.  Caps designed and embroidered by Uncle Merlin.  Colors may vary.

"Be there for my dad."

This was just...nice...real nice...

What this country needs besides a good five-cent cigar...

Long line at the video store the other night.  One of those somebody's credit card won't scan and there's only one register open, one clerk ringing everybody up, because her co-worker's on break hold ups, and I'm stuck at the end of it, behind a couple of college students.  Guy and a girl.  The guy has their movies and is waiting patiently.  The girl's pacing all about, wandering in and out of line, checking out the candy, roving as far as the magazine rack, never coming to a standstill in any one spot.  They're not a couple couple, just friends, and, it seems to me, friends of recent acquaintance, which I think is part of why she's so nervous and antsy.

He's black.  She's Asian.  But only his race matters here, and that's only because of what she's about to say and the asumption she's going to make.

"You decided who you're going to vote for yet?" she asks him.  She's just wandered back from the soda cooler so I don't know what's prompted the question.  He doesn't get a chance to answer.  She cuts him off quick, as if catching herself in a big mistake.  "Oh right.  Obama.  Duh."

"How about you?" he asks.  "You know who you'll vote for?"

"I'm thinking Obama.  I'm leaning his way.  But I don't know.  I've heard some good things about McCain.  But then I heard a lot of people don't like him."

In her pacing about she's gotten ahead of him so in looking back at him she's looking my way too and she catches the look on my face.  It makes her laugh.  "Oh no!" she says.  "Are you like a big McCain guy?"

I don't like to get involved in strangers' conversations, especially when they're talking politics, but she has asked me a direct question.  I try to sound very wise and disinterested.  "No.  But I think that anyone who's leaning towards Obama wouldn't want to vote for McCain.  He's very conservative."

"Oh?  I don't know.  I've just heard he's a good guy.  You know who I really think I'll vote for though?" she says to her friend, forgetting about me.  "The Green guy."

"What green guy?"

"You know.  The guy, he's like always running?"

"Nader?"

"Is that him?"

"Ralph Nader?"

"Is he for the Green Party?"

"I don't think so."

"Then who's the Green guy?"  She remembers I'm there and asks me. "You know who I'm talking about, right?"

"The Green Party's running a woman this year," I tell her.  "Cynthia McKinney."

"Really?"

"Really."

"Then that's not who I mean.  I mean, like the guy who's like, you know?  Kind of a hippie?"

By this point her friend is just staring at her, looking stunned.

"I've got no idea who you're talking about," he says.

"No?  Hmmm.  Well, whoever it is, that's who I want.  I think we need somebody like that.  You know?  Someone who's like all cool about things and everything.  Like if something happens, he'll just get all laid back and be real cool and like everything's fine, it's no big deal and shit?  That's what this country needs right now, I think."

That's the end of it.  They reach the register, check out their DVD's, and leave talking about where they'll stop on the way back to the dorm to pick up something to eat.

There's no moral to this story.  I'm drawing no conclusions.  That girl isn't representative of anything or anybody but herself and for all I know she wasn't even being herself.  I'm not sure she meant anything she said.  In fact, I suspect she was just talking out of nervousness.

What bothers me, though, is the possibility that she had heard some good things about McCain, the kind of things that would make her not see much difference between him and Obama and her idealized Green guy.

I'm also trying to imagine something happening and John McCain just getting all laid back and being real cool and like everything's fine, it's no big deal and shit?

John McCain, hippie Green guy.

Stand up!

Now this was a lot of fun.

Who were you in it for?

I want you to ask yourselves: Were you in this campaign just for me? Or were you in it for that young Marine and others like him? Were you in it for that mom struggling with cancer while raising her kids? Were you in it for that boy and his mom surviving on the minimum wage? Were you in it for all the people in this country who feel invisible?

---Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, August 26, 2008.

Crooks and Liars has the video and the entire transcript of what Pop Mannion calls the best speech she's ever given, No Way.  No How.  No McCain.

War heroes for President

Physical courage and mental toughness are neutral virtues.  Good guys and bad guys can have them equally.  The thug you would least want to meet in a dark alley may be the companion you'd most want to have helping you survive being shipwrecked on a desert island.

Surviving five and a half years of captivity and torture tells you nothing about the man who survived other than that he was brave enough and tough enough to have survived it...at the time.  Doesn't even tell you he could do it again.  Doesn't tell you if he could have lasted five more days let alone another five and a half years.

It doesn't tell you anything about how he'll conduct himself and his life once he's free.

Doesn't tell you if he'll be honest, or thoughtful, or temperate, or kind.  Doesn't tell you what he can do or what skills he has.  Doesn't tell you if he can count, if he can sell, if he can listen, if he can solve a plumbing problem or diagnose an illness or grow a flower or groom a dog.  As much as it might dispose yout to want to hire him, it doesn't tell you if you should.  It won't have made him a skilled surgeon, unless performing surgery was something he did while imprisoned.  It won't have made him a competent electrician, unless he spent the time he wasn't being tortured re-wiring houses near the prisoner of war camp.  It certainly won't have automatically qualified him to be President of the United States.

The record is full of war heroes who came home---well, actually, it is fuller of war heroes who didn't come home---full of war heroes who came home to go into politics, some successfully, some not so much.

The record is even more full of war heroes who came home to be janitors, insurance salesmen, grade school teachers, town drunks, bank robbers, and movie stars.

What most war heroes come home to do is to continue to be themselves, the selves they were or were on the way to becoming before they went off to war.  The only war heroes whose lives are defined by their heroism are the ones I mentioned two paragraphs up.  The ones who don't come home.

We haven't been in the habit of electing Presidents just because they were war heroes.  If we had, the walls of elementary school classrooms would be decorated with portraits of President Benedict Arnold, President Aaron Burr, and President John Paul Jones.

Even nice guy war heroes aren't automatically presidential timber.

Nobody dreamed of a President Alvin York after World War I or President Audie Murphy after World War II.

There are many ways to become war hero, most of them accidental, matters of being in the wrong place at the wrong time but having the right, instantaneous reaction.  When asked how he became a war hero, John Kennedy spoke for most war heroes.  I had no choice, he said.  They sunk my boat.

He didn't mention that his boat probably shouldn't have been where it was when it got sunk and its skipper should have had a lot of explaining to do.

PT-109's skipper was in the wrong place at the wrong time, but he had the right reaction, not just instantaneously, but over the course of several days.

And he was able to have that reaction because he wasn't the crewman who was killed in the collision, his bad back wasn't injured even worse than it was, and because he could swim very well.

A talent for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, no matter how right and instantaneous his reaction, is not a quality we want in a President.

Unfortunately, we have elected a number of men who have had that talent, at least in the sense of having their thinking focused on the wrong problems and wrong-headed suppositions.  They weren't all war heroes either.  But if they had been, their war records probably wouldn't have told us much about their potential for future wrong-headedness.

With just a couple of exceptions, Kennedy being one of them, our war hero Presidents had war records that demonstrated both exceptional leadership and impressive organizational and management skills and a talent for having their thinking in the right place at the right time and having the right reactions, starting with George Washington.

Jackson, Harrison, Taylor, and Grant were generals first, war heroes second.  Generals are supposed to be good at two things.  Leading and planning.

Eisenhower wasn't a war hero in a typical sense.  He never led troops into combat.  He never saw combat.  MacArthur was the fighting general, and imagine if he'd ever realized his dream of becoming President.

Eisenhower was always in management and planning.  In World War II, he had to be an executive, a politician, a diplomat, and a commander in chief.  For a short time he was in effect a Sub-President of the USA, Eurpopean Division.

MacArthur was our Viceroy in Japan.  He did a great job, but we wouldn't have wanted a President who thought like a viceroy, that is, like a minor king.  I know we're stuck with one at the moment, but we don't want him.

Sixty-five or more per cent of us don't, at any rate.

The "Real American" bombast and "He puts America first" bullshit of the McCain campaign---besides designed to call attention to and raise alarms about Barack Obama---he's black, he's different, he's black, he's a liberal, he's black, he has a funny name, he's an elitist, he's weird, he's a closet Muslim, he's black---is a brag on John McCain's war record.

Bragging on their war records is something politicians of all persuasions do.  Washington didn't need to, but every candidate for office since who has had any claim to being a war hero---and some who haven't---has done a fair share of bragging.  Burr did it.  Jackson did it.  William Henry Harrison practically renamed himself in order to do it.  Tippecanoe and Tyler too!  Zachary Taylor and Winfield Scott. Ulysses S. Grant.  James Garfield did it.  Teddy Roosevelt did it.  Boy, did he.  In fact, he made himself a war hero just to be able to do it.  Harry Truman.  Ike. JFK.  George McGovern.  George Herbert Walker Bush and Bob Dole and Al Gore and John Kerry all did it. 

All of them wanted voters to think that their once having had the bad luck to have been at the wrong place at the wrong time but having had the right reaction somehow made them more qualified to be President.

None of them, though, wanted voters to think that was their sole qualification, not even Teddy Roosevelt.

All of them wanted voters to be impressed, but impressed enough to pay attention to their other claims on the office.  They used their war records to help tell voters something about themselves, not to define themselves.

John Kennedy wanted to tell the generation of Americans coming of age in 1960 that he was one of them.  He'd served in the war along with them.  Nixon wanted to tell them the same thing when he bragged---by exaggerating---on his war record. 

George McGovern wanted to reassure voters that even though he was the anti-war candidate he was still a patriot and something of a tough guy.  John Kerry was doing the same thing.

None of them, not even Eisenhower thought their war record entitled them to the job, although Jackson and TR might have felt entitled to it just because.  But whatever general sense of entitlement marred their characters, they still felt they had to work for it.

Their war records were part of their biographies, an exciting part, but not the whole of it.

To learn the whole of it voters had to look at the whole of it.  They had to see what kind of men they were before they'd gone off to war and what kind of men and citizens and politicians and leaders they became after they came home.

John McCain was and is an averagely intelligent guy with a rather lazy attitude when it comes to ethical matters, a nasty sense of humor, and very little ability to control his impulses, his temper, or his mouth.  He has demonstrated a fitful urge to do the right things coupled with a bad habit of not following through and an unfortunate sort of vanity that allows him to think he has done those right things even when he has clearly not followed through.

As I've argued before, the Maverick and Commander is not a true maverick---a better description of what he is is loose cannon---but he has been enough of one that he hasn't been able to be much of a commander either.  He's not a leader, especially not within his own party, and never has been. 

One day, in the skies over Vietnam, he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.  For five and a half years after that he demonstrated the remarkable virtues of physical courage and mental toughness.  There were men in that prison who were braver and tougher, but that makes them even more remarkable, and it takes nothing away from McCain to say so.  For five and a half years, McCain endured heroically.

But what does his war record tell us about him as a potential President?  What does it tell us about him as the man he was before and the man he became afterwards?

Only this.  That John McCain was a better human being under duress than he's shown himself to be in the easier time of it he's had in life since.  Which is something that can be said of pretty much all of us.  We're better when the chips are down.

So I suppose that if you believe that the defining event of the next four years is going to be something that puts the whole country in the position of a prisoner of war in the Hanoi Hilton then John McCain's conduct while there is an important qualification for him to be President, although even so all it tells you is that he is brave enough and tough enough to survive it, assuming that a seventy-something year old man can be in the same physical and mental shape as his thirty year old self was.

He might survive it.  Doesn't mean you will.

And it would seem to me that what you'd really like to have, anyway, is a President who will get you out of that situation and not just help you survive it.  Even better would be a President who will keep you and him and all the rest of us from getting into that predicament in the first place.

John McCain's biography, apart from his war record, tells us that he is a politician with a habit of being mentally in the wrong place at the wrong time way too often and that the times he has been in the right place at the right time have been more often the result of opportunism or vanity than of careful thought and heartfelt conviction.

Which brings me to Wesley Clark.

I don't know the real reason Clark won't be speaking at the Democratic Convention.  Looks to me, glacing over the schedule, that there just wasn't room for him among all those governors---and have you looked at the list of all those governors who will be speaking?  It's heartening.  I think it gets forgotten that the big news about the election of 2006 wasn't just that the Democrats took back control of both houses of Congress.  They took control over most of the state houses and governor's mansions too.  The problem the Democrats are going to have in 2016 isn't finding a replacement for President Obama.  The problem's going to be deciding which one of half a dozen or more rising stars to settle on.

But on to Clark's absence from the speaker's podium.

Besides the lack of time and room, there's a good reason not to put him up there.

He told the truth about John McCain's war record and its place in McCain's biography.

Now I don't think that was a bad thing.  Nor do I think it was a mistake.  I think it's important for the Obama campaign to get that truth out there.  John McCain's entire claim on the Presidency is based on his having survived the Vietnam War.   So did several hundred thousand other guys, including Wesley Clark, whose military record, by the way, combines the best of MacArthur's and Eisenhower's, so if a war record is and ought to be the qualification for the job of President, then both Obama and McCain should step aside and let Clark take it on.  All the Media's fawning over McCain is rooted in their being impressed by his war record.  All that most of the country knows about John McCain is that he was a war hero and that because of it he will somehow make a good President.  That needs to be addressed and refuted.

But John McCain's fanboys and fangirls in the Media don't want to hear it.  And they don't intend to let voters hear it.

If Wesley Clark took the stage at the convention the story wouldn't be what his being there said about Barack Obama.  It wouldn't be the contrast between Clark's record and McCain's and how it shows what a record of real achievement as opposed to a record of accidental heroism looks like.  It certainly wouldn't be how Clark made the obvious point that having been a prisoner of war doesn't qualify you to be President of the United States and voters need to look at McCain's political record and the policies he proposes to enact should he be elected.

The story would be all about McCain and how Wes Clark, and by extension Barack Obama, dissed McCain's heroism.

Always remember one of the first rules of Insider Journalism:  Everything is bad news for the Democrats.

No matter how well this convention goes the yammerers and blowhards will find the dark cloud around the silver lining.

Right now that story is shaping up to be that Obama failed to unify the party.

The Insiders will find a few die-hard Clinton supporters who are still not on the bandwagon after Thursday night and that will prove it.  Once again, the Democrats are divided. 

Hillary's speech tonight might blunt some of that, but it won't squash it.

That's why the Obama campaign isn't thrilled about having a roll call vote.  It's not because they want to marginalize or insult Clinton and her supporters.  It's because they'd rather not give the Insiders the opportunity to call a good will gesture and an inspirational moment a disaster.

If Wes Clark were to speak, the story would be what it was, with the addtion that it proved that Obama couldn't control the story, that he let his own covention go off message, not to mention that it showed how elitist and out of touch he is because he just doesn't get how much regular Americans love and admire John McCain for what he went through.

As Atrios likes to remind us, our political discourse is controlled by idiots.

For four days, Barack Obama and the Democrats get the opportunity to talk over them and around them.  Best to make the most of it and save Clark for another day.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to hearing what Governor Patrick has to say.

And Governor Sibelius.

And Governeor Paterson.

And Governors Napolitano, Schweitzer, Manchin, Doyle, Strickland, Rendell, Culver...

Ted

For me, the best moment, the most powerful, the most inspiring, the most fun, and the most like him, came right at the beginning.

He essentially opened with a laugh.

Bland-thony and Elizabeth get married

All this week in the comic strip For Better or For Worse, Elizabeth Patterson is getting married to her junior high school sweetheart, Anthony.

All this week, all last week, all this month, all the past year---in fact, it's feeling to longtime fans that the strip's creator, Lynn Johnston, intends to make the wedding her sole subject from here on out, so exclusive and obsessive has the storyline become.

According to the blonde, who has followed this (mainly via The Comics Curmudgeon), fans have been baffled by Johnston's sentimental and insistent presentation of Anthony and Elizabeth's engagement and wedding as part of one of the great love stories of our time.  They don't understand why Elizabeth, who had been living an interesting and independent life as a teacher on an Indian reservation up by Hudson Bay, had to be yanked out of there, dragged back to her parents' dull suburban home, have her teaching career effectively taken away from her, be cut off from the two men who were in love with her, one a cop, the other a helicopter pilot, only to be married off in a blur to the boy she had sort of dated back when she was fourteen or so.

Not only did Johnston seem to be punishing Elizabeth by squashing her career and her soul and reducing her from self-sufficient young woman to just John and Elly's eldest daughter again, second fiddle and foil to their other, still lively and independent younger daughter, April, the budding rock star, but the boy Johnston was marrying her off to, Anthony Caine, is universally regarded, and reviled, among fans as one of the most boring characters Johnston has ever created.

To the degree that Anthony---Bland-thony as he's affectionately known---has a character, it is that of an asexual, masochistic milquetoast.

Anthony's only place in the comic strip up till recently has been wussily carrying a torch for Elizabeth and bleeding all over her about it whenever they've bumped into each other over the years, his come-on line being, basically, "Feel sorry for me because I still love the little girl you once were."

Not only is Anthony boring, sexless, ineffectual, childish, and, when you think about it, kind of sick, but when Johnston decided to bring him and Elizabeth together again, he was married.

Unhappily married, but married nonetheless.  And with a kid, to boot.

Johnston, however, treated his unhappiness as the root of his and Elizabeth's future happiness.  Despite having no reason to be interested, Elizabeth was irresistibly drawn to him out of pity.

She fell in love with him because she felt sorry for him---and for his little girl.

Johnston seems blind to the fact that she has set up Elizabeth and Anthony for domestic disaster, or would have if she were writing a novel instead of drawing a comic strip.  In real life, assuming that a real Elizabeth would be so foolish as to marry a man out of pity, it wouldn't take her very long to realize she'd made a big mistake.  He wake up call would be her wedding night when she found herself in bed with a stranger she had no erotic feelings for and whose feelings for her were pure sentimental rubbish.  If she didn't rush out to find a divorce attorney as soon as they got home, it would be because she'd run straight to the computer to fire off plaintively hinting emails to the cop and the helicopter pilot.

For Better or For Worse isn't a novel, of course---or even a soap opera in comic strip form like Rex Morgan and Mary Worth---but it has been novel-like enough over the years that touches of realism have graced its panels and the drawings have had the feeling of shadows cast by real people, and Johnston has often done her best to be true to life in the sense that nothing happens that couldn't happen in real life. 

As Nance says, Johnston used to be very tough-minded about life, tough-minded enough to kill the family dog.  The death of Farley ranks as one of the great series of strips in comics history.

Even when avoiding life's real pain and horror she'd acknowledged that it was there, that she was avoiding it.   But with Elizabeth and Anthony she's indulging in pure fantasy.

I would never have expected a storyline in which Elizabeth was disappointed by Anthony's impotence on their wedding night or one that had her cheating on him or running out on him after they were married.  I just would have expected one in which, if she had to meet up with Anthony again---and I doubt any fans would have been disappointed or even noticed if she hadn't---she was smart enough to recognize trouble when she saw it and put as much distance between her and Anthony as she could as fast as she could.

In fact, if I recall correctly, there was such a storyline, and Johnston revisited it to undo it, shutting her eyes to what she knew was the more realistic outcome of bringing them together the first time.

Maybe she's not closing her eyes as tightly as that.  I just remembered a strange series of strips in which Paul the cop showed up at Elizabeth's door to re-kindle their romance and Elizabeth shoots him down.  She has some high-minded reason for doing it, but she's also clearly disgusted by the idea that Paul wants to have sex with her.  Johnston, that storyline made me realize, had been very cagey and careful about keeping Elizabeth a virgin into her late twenties.  And now by marrying her off to the emasculated Anthony and ignoring the psychological implications and potential danger of the totally un-erotic basis of their romance, she's found a way to keep Elizabeth's virginity essentially intact after marriage.

Actually, Johnston has been pretty agile in denying a sex life to all three of the Patterson children.

There's a limit to what she's been able to show, naturally.  It's a family-oriented comic strip, after all.  But she's always let it be more than just implicit that John and Elly enjoyed a healthy and mutually satisfying sex life---John and Elly clearly dug each other in every way---although for a long time now that's been acknowledged mainly in jokes about how John keeps forgetting that that part of their married life is over and how he's not getting any and is not going to get any any time soon.  (Johnston even gave the poor guy the archetypal hobby of sexually frustrated but good and understanding husbands who've learned to sublimate like crazy---he's a model train nut.)  But still there's no sense that their three kids came into this world out of nowhere.

And even Jim, Elly's dad, now incapacitated by a stroke, is still allowed to remember that once upon a time he was a randy young man with a string of girlfriends.

But the Patterson kids have lived strangely sexless lives.  All their romances have been not much more than intimate, but not particularly intense, friendships, with no sign of physical urgency or even attraction involved.  April, I think, had a couple of close calls, but that's it, and that's how they were treated, as close calls.  Even when she liked her feelings, she was rescued from them, in a way.  It's not that I've been expecting to see them naked in bed with their lovers, a la Joannie Caucus and Rick Redfern in Doonesbury.  It's just that they all got through their teen years, and Michael and Elizabeth almost through their twenties without Johnston giving us any hints that the possibility of winding up naked in bed with a lover was part of their attraction to any potential lover.  Michael got married and became a father without ever having been close to the randy young man his grandfather was.

Deanna, the girl he married, a cipher almost blander than Anthony, is drawn in a way to suggest that she's beautiful, but that doesn't seem to matter to either her or Michael, and now Anthony and Elizabeth are even less interested in each other as bodies than Michael and Deanna are.  Even though Johnston has been lavishing attention on making Elizabeth a knock-out in her wedding gown, she's let Anthony's thinking nothing throughout the ceremony except sentimental nonsense.

I'm sure I've missed some important plot developments over the last few years.  I stopped following For Better or For Worse regularly when Johnston robbed Michael of his young manhood by rushing him into marriage with Deanna and making him a father as fast as she could after that.  It seemed to me that she lost interest in Michael as a character when she sent him off to college.  He supposedly wanted to be a journalist, but Johnston never bothered to show him thinking or acting like an aspiring journalist.  He wasn't an intellectual or a bohemian.  He was political.  He wasn't even a writer, not in the sense that he looked at life with an artistic and critical eye.  He didn't have any of the restlessness that all the journalists and writers I've known over the years have enjoyed or suffered from.  The girl he fell in love wasn't at all artistic, bohemian, intellectual, or even ambitious in her own right either.  She was just...there.  After graduation he didn't go to work at a newspaper or a magazine or a television station.  He was a free-lancer but never had to leave home to chase a story.  From the start, he worked at home, without any adult companionship, with no adult workplace related problems to deal with, with no outside demands on his time at all.  He's just sat at his desk with his children climbing into his lap and that's his life.  It didn't take long for me to realize that Lynn Johnston had given him her life when she was a young, budding cartoonist.  And that was the point.  She was using Michael to re-tell the story of her life, and since she'd already done that with her comic strip for years, Michael's story was redundant, so I stopped reading the strip every day.

I think she's doing the same thing again with Elizabeth, only taking it a step farther.  She had started out by telling her life story through the story of John and Elly, and now she's going to use Elizabeth, and Anthony, to re-tell the story of John and Elly.

By giving Elizabeth a ready-made family she's made Elizabeth what Elly was when the strip began, a young wife and mother with a toddler and a nice but bland and easily forgettable husband.  Elizabeth will probably be pregnant before the year is out and we'll be back to the very beginning of For Better or For Worse.  Johnston is starting all over again.

I'm not surprised.  In fact, I think I understand why she might have felt she had to.  This is her way of solving the problem she set herself up for as a cartoonist when she decided to allow her characters to age in real time.

Call this the Gasoline Alley Dilemma.

The tragedy of aging is that it's another way of saying dying.  Life is the slide into death.  If you have your characters age at a normal rate and your comic strip lasts long enough, some of them are going to get old enough to die of old age, if of nothing else.  Death is not all that funny.  So, either you let them die and let your strip not be all that funny for a while or you wind up with what was going on in Gasoline Alley where Walt and Skeezix were about a hundred and forty and a hundred and ten respectively, aren't they?

(How old are they really supposed to be?  This is a job for the Linkmeister!)

I think whoever's in charge of Gasoline Alley these days has finally been allowing characters to fade away, if not actually kick the bucket---although I hear Walt's wife Phyllis has died---but the other problem of having the main characters living on and on was solved long ago by the strip's having a large cast of characters and by bringing new characters onto the scene and letting their stories take front and center.  Walt and Phyllis, Skeezix and Nina, and now Clovia and Slim, slid into old age and into the background, remaining onstage to provide continuity, as younger characters took the limelight.  Over the years, though, there was always one character who was essentially Walt in his youth and the heart of the strip beat strong in him or her.  This and all the other new stories allowed fans to ignore the fact that time was passing and the original Walt ought to have entered the Guinness Book of Records by now.  The strip changed but did not change.

Johnston has always been good at introducing new characters, but they've mostly been ancillary.  Few that I can think of have taken on lives or storylines of their own.  She's created hundreds of bit players, but she's been content with only five main characters and a handful of supporting ones and hasn't shown any interest in expanding beyond that.  Thus setting up the problem.  John and Elly, Elly especially, are getting old.  And I don't just mean chronologically.  Johnston can't think of anything to do with them now that they aren't the parents anymore.  I'm guessing this is because that in her mind For Better or For Worse has always been about one thing, the comedy of raising children.  Gasoline Alley is about a whole town.  For Better or For Worse is about one family. Johnston has chosen to get back to basics simply by re-tooling.  Elly and John have become Elizabeth and Anthony.  Anthony even already looks like the young John.  Look at that jaw!

This explains why very few comic strips follow the Gasoline Alley model.  The most successful of those that have is Doonesbury, and Garry Trudeau fudges.  His characters' ages are fluid.  It's not quite clear how old the main characters are now.  Not as old as they should be if they were in college during Vietnam and Watergate, that's for sure.  They seem to be about fifty, with B.D. maybe just enough older that he could still have plausibly served in Vietnam and still be young enough to have been called up to go to Iraq.  But if Trudeau needs to, he'll lower their ages again or slow down the rate at which they are aging.  Still, the problem may have to be dealt with someday.

It's been just about forever since Doonesbury was only about college life, but that aspect of the strip has been revived through Alex and Zipper.  Zipper's relationship with his football coach, B.D., is reminiscent of Zonker's relationship with his quarterback, B.D. and it's enough to remind old fans of the good old days, which Trudeau has no desire to bring back.  He has enough characters on hand, enough in storage, and has shown the willingness and ability to introduce new ones and new storylines, that there's no danger of Doonesbury becoming about his main characters getting old.  Still, they will get older and eventually some of them will get old enough.

I don't know if Trudeau plans to keep at it long enough for it to become an issue, but he's already dealt with it by doing what it took Gasoline Alley forever to do---he's let characters die.

We probably won't see the strip where Zonker, his ponytail gone gray at last, goes out all alone for one final dip in Walden Puddle, the last member of the commune remaining.  Trudeau will probably lay down his pen before Mike and the gang can cash their first Social Security checks.  But I won't be surprised he has at least one of his original characters shuffle off their inky coil before he does.  I thought he'd done it with B.D. in Iraq.  I was afraid he hadn't survived the attack on his humvee.  And I still think it's going to be B.D.  B.D.'s not recovering from his PTSD.  He's been getting worse in some ways and I'm worried that that there's only one end to this for him, an Iraq War veteran's issue that Trudeau hasn't addressed yet but which I know he's not afraid to tackle.

Programming note: The Mad Men are meeting a new mad girl tonight

Live blogging of Mad Men is going on right now at newcritics.  NYCWeboy is leading the discussion.  James Wolcott is pouring the drinks.   Go here.

Tell 'em Mannion sent you.

Oh, yeah, there's going to be a Republican Vice-Presidential candidate too, isn't there?

John Casey left a comment on my Joe Biden as a new winter coat post from this morning promising I'm going to feel really dumb about what I wrote come the fall:

In the coming months, you will look back at this post, whack yourself right smartly in the middle of your forehead, and say, "Jeeeezzzz, how could I have got that so wrong; the guy is a stone cold trained political killer, and there are Republican carcasses all over the White House lawn."

Boy, I hope so!  I really hope so!

But I was already second-guessing myself before John wrote in.  See, I wrote that post in reaction to the gigantic let down Obama set us up for with all the fun and games with the secretiveness and the dropped hints and the text messaging the announcement in the middle of the night ploy and it took all day for it to dawn on me that Obama is not running his campaign with my feelings in mind.

All summer McCain and Obama have been playing chicken over their choices for VP, each waiting for the other to go first.  If the game of chicken lasted long enough, Obama was going to have to go first, and that's what happened.  But Obama found a way to win by going first.  He kept the Media attention on his choice all this past week without giving McCain the opportunity to upstage him.

McCain can't make his announcement next week.  There's no way he can force the attention away from the Democratic Convention unless he picks Hillary.  Which means that, basically, he has to announce his choice as part of the routine business of the Republican Convention.  Which means that either his Veep gets lost in the shuffle, or he (or she) upstages McCain himself.

Being upstaged is not something McCain allows.

So, what mattered this week wasn't who Obama's choice would or wouldn't be. In fact, I won't be surprised if we find out that it's been Biden all along.  What mattered was that that's what everybody was talking about.

Vehicle of Hope and Change

My neighbor's having a yard sale today and earlier this morning while she and her grand-daughters were out setting up shop I was on the front porch, on the phone, talking to the great McEwan about Obama's picking Joe Biden for his running mate---neither one of us is thrilled, you'll be less than surprised to learn---and while we were grousing back and forth this appeared on my neighbor's lawn:

"McEwan," I shouted into the phone, "We've been invaded!"

"Who's invaded you?" the McEwan asked in a blase voice.  She's used to my hysterics.

"The Amish!" I said.

"The Amish?  You've been invaded by the Amish?"  She sounded doubtful.  She lives in Indiana.  She knows from the Amish.  They rarely invade anywhere unless seriously provoked.  She was wondering what I had done, then, to provoke the Amish.

"Ok.  Maybe not the Amish in the sense that all the Yoders and Millers have stormed over here from Shipshewana."

"So, how many Amish invaders are we talking about?"

"How many does it take to drive a buggy?"

"Don't you mean how many does it take to screw in a light bulb?"

"I thought the Amish don't use light bulbs."

"Sigh.  Figure one driver per buggy.  How many buggies have invaded?"

"One."

"One?"

"One!"

"What you're telling me is that you've been invaded by one of the Amish?"

"Well...at least one!"

"Kelly McGillis washing her breasts in your barn again?  Get over that fantasy already, Mannion, it's so totally 1985."

"I'm not fantasizing.  Well, now I am.  And thanks for putting that image in my head.  As soon as we're done here I'm putting Witness in my Netflix queue.  Meanwhile, there's a real live Amish buggy sitting on my neighbor's front lawn."

I took the above photo and fired it off to her via email.

"Relax," she said when she looked at it.  "It's not the Amish.  That's the new Obama-Biden bandwagon."

"It is?"

"Sure," she said.  "Don't you recognize a Vehicle of Hope and Change when you see one?"

But Dick Cheney was a statesman

Biden.

It's like your parents told you they were going to give you a big surprise for your birthday, something you always wanted, and although you knew they couldn't have meant you were going to get the pony you always dreamed of you hoped that meant they weren't going to give you something boring like a new winter coat, maybe a new bike, at least, but as you counted down the days to your birthday they kept hinting and hinting that it really might be the pony and you couldn't help it, you began to think it would be the pony, then the morning of your birthday comes, and your mother wakes you up early to give you your present, she even tells you it's out in the backyard, and you jump out of bed and rush downstairs, telling yourself it's the bike not the pony, it's the bike not the pony, and you fly out the back door and find your dad...holding up the new winter coat.

Oh well.

Biden's not a bad choice for a Vice-President, or wouldn't be if Obama could have waited until after he was elected and picked his VP the same way and with the same sort of considerations in mind as he'll pick his Secretaries of State and Defense and Attorney General.  Biden is a winter coat, a warm one, one that will last, and you need a good winter coat.  As a running mate he'll probably be ok, although he and Obama together won't make the prettiest of pictures.

But as a generator of positive and excited news coverage?

I'm sure it's already the narrative among the Village Insiders that by choosing Biden Obama is showing that even he's not sure he's ready to lead.

(Updated late Saturday afternoon:  I was right.)

Of course when Dick Cheney appointed himself Grand Vizier that showed that George Bush was a smart guy who knew his own limitations and was modest enough to face up to them and choose a strong Vice-President who could give him the benefit of all his experience.

Dick Cheney was a statesman, remember?

As for that winter coat...well, it turns out your dad picked it out himself and he's all excited about it because he was so sure it was one you had your eye on and would love so now you have to pretend you weren't hoping for the pony or even a new bike and the winter coat's just exactly what you wanted all along.

Thanks, dad.  It's great.  Really.

Respect for vegetables or You can't beat a beet

Apparently I hurt a lot of feelings with my joke about not liking beets in my post about Patty Hearst the other day.

"I don't like beets," I wrote, "and I don't like anyone who does."

Now it's true that I don't like beets, never have, never will, but the bit about not liking anyone who does...well, I thought I was on safe ground there because it never occurred to me that there are people who actually like beets.

I knew there are people who serve and eat beets.  But I always figured they were all just doing what happened in the Mannion household when I was a kid and turnips or liver showed up on the dinner table.  Somebody's mother was convinced they were good for you and made them with your health and well-being in mind and not your gastronomical enjoyment.  Beets, like turnips and liver and getting grounded, were signs you were loved and cared for even if they all felt like the opposite.

I suppose I'm going to hear from fans of turnips and liver now.

Borscht is something different.  Like corned beef and cabbage, haggis, and grits, nobody eats the stuff because it tastes good.  They eat it because they loved their grandmothers and honor their memories.

There I go again.

I'm sorry.  I'm sorry to all you beet lovers too, especially you, Rana.  From here on out, I promise to try not to disrespect beets again.

But I have a problem.

I don't like vegetables generally.  In fact, I hate them.  And I'm glad I hate them, because if I liked them, I'd eat them, and I just hate them.

Ok, sometimes I do eat them.  I'm lucky.  The blonde is a very good cook and she can make vegetables not taste like vegetables.  On the other hand, back in the spring she joined a farm co-op and now goes out early every Saturday morning to pick up (and sometimes pick herself, the farmer puts you to work and makes you earn the right to buy his vegetables) our share of this week's harvest.  Every Saturday morning when I stumble into the kitchen for my first pot of coffee I'm confronted by the sight of a table loaded with an array of recently slaughtered vegetables laid out like the left overs from an alien autopsy.

Harder to take the look of all this...this...cellulose!...is the blonde's conviction that I want to hear all about what it is and how good it is for me.

What I'm saying is that from time to time I just have to express my disgust and dismay at the whole idea of any food that winds up on my plate mainly on the grounds that it's good for me.  Beets are...were...my favorite synechdoche for the Clean Your Plate, Young Man, There Are Children Starving in Africa School of Culinary Delight.

But now that I know I have so many beet fans among my readers I need a new vegetable to pick on.

One that's even more universally despised than I thought beets were.

I'm thinking lima beans, and there's something called bok choi that the blonde says I've tried but I can't imagine that's true because I would never eat anything with a name like the sound I'd make if it went down the wrong way.  But I'm open to suggestions.

Do Obamoids Dream of Electable Veeps?

That's it.  Title of this post's all I have to say about Obama's soon-to-be-announced choice for a running mate.  (Blade Running Mate.)  I've got no clue, no rooting interests, and no expectation that whoever it is will be able to justify all the hype and speculation and anticipation.  At this point anybody he chooses will be a let down, unless he goes with Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, Oprah, Paris Hilton, or God.

Michael Phelps is too young, unfortunately.

I'm half-hoping he picks Chuck Hagel just because the sound of ten thousand Progressives' heads exploding will make a more interesting noise than the nation-sized collective yawn that's going to greet whoever else it might be.

This being the case, in order to justify the joke I opened with, I'm making this an open thread...on Philip K. Dick. What's your favorite novel or short story by him?  Who's your favorite sci-fi author?  What's your favorite sci-fi book?  Do you enjoy science fiction?  Why or why not?

Socks and the City

"Don't mind me, I just did my laundry, is all."---Street vendor to pesky blogger aiming camera at him.  East 44th Street, somewhere between Lexington and Third, 7 PM last night.

Right click on photo to enlarge.

Patty vs. Tania

When you remember something, you don't remember the thing itself---you just remember the last time you remembered it.---John Barlow, songwriter for the Grateful Dead.

I'm not as old as I sometimes pretend to be here, nor am I as young as I sometimes hope folks will think.  ("Folks" being those of my readers named Gwyneth, Uma, Maggie, or Anne.)  What I am is about the right age to remember the Patty Hearst kidnapping and the great national melodrama that followed.  And you know what?

I don't remember it.

Not really. 

What I think I remember is Shana Alexander's book, Anyone's Daughter: The Times and Trials of Patty Hearst, which I read sometime during the Clinton Administration and which I liked, although I don't know how good or accurate an account it is.  But in reading the book I probably replaced all my own memories of what I read and saw on TV in 1974, '75, and '76 with what Alexander reported and I read in 1996.  All this is just to say that I remember if I thought or if anyone I knew thought she was "guilty" of the crimes she was forced by her kidnappers to take part in.

All I know is that at least since reading Anyone's Daughter I haven't thought she was guilty of anything except surviving and that I can't believe that anyone could have believed she was.

But they did.  Probably plenty of people still do.

It never fails to amaze me every time I'm reminded of it that Patty Hearst was not rescued, she was caught.

After the shootout in LA in which most of the members of the gang that had kidnapped her---the self-styled "revolutionary" Symbionese Liberation Army---died, Hearst didn't go running to the police or back home to her parents.  She went on the lam.

Not necessarily surprising since it had been a long time since the Law had stopped treating her as a victim and started hunting her as one of the gang and the LA Police had just shown they didn't care if they brought her in alive---they had good reason to think she was in the house they'd just shot up and burned to ashes along with everyone in it.

Hearst might have had good reason to believe she was safer running away from the cops than she'd have been trying to go to them for help.

But what Patty Hearst thought at the time is the great mystery at the center of her story.  Her contention, at least her lawyer's contention, is that she wasn't thinking anything at the time.  It was as if other people were doing her thinking for her.  She'd been brainwashed.  That's a way of saying that Patty Hearst had been washed away and someone, a criminal pretending to be a revolutionary calling herself Tania, had been put in her place.

The jury didn't buy it.

Hearst was caught, arrested, tried, and convicted.  She went to jail.  And now that strikes me as crazy.  It's as if she was found guilty of being her own kidnapper.   It seems so obvious that she was brainwashed or that she'd had some sort of psychotic break while her kidnappers held her---and tortured her---that I'm  astounded anyone ever thought that she had willingly joined the gang, let alone been in on the plan to have herself kidnapped and held for ransom.  But believe it they did.

And I might have too.  There was this to consider.

Hearst remained on the run for almost a year after the shoot-out.  She was with the two remaining members of the gang who apparently let her come and go as she pleased.  She was alone when she was arrested.

Why hadn't she "escaped" long before?

Now we know that she was tortured for weeks after the gang kidnapped her.  We know that their preferred method of torture was rape.  We also know things we may not have known then, things about the effects of torture, imprisonment, isolation, trauma, terror, on the human mind and spirit.  We now know how likely it was that Patty Hearst did snap.  We know that she could have been so terrorized and traumatized by what was done to her that she believed that the gang could do whatever they wanted to her, whenever they wanted, wherever she was, and so there was no point in even trying to get away, even after most of them were dead.  Yes, she stayed on the run for a year, but why hadn't she been caught long before that?  Why hadn't she been rescued?  Why hadn't her ultra-rich and influential parents been able to save her?  Had they really tried?  Did they really want her back?  Why hadn't the FBI or the police been able to find her?  The SLA wasn't a chapter of Mensa.  How were they able to elude the best law enforcement agencies in the world, unless those agencies weren't really trying to catch them.

Now we know how despair, depression, fear can wear down the strongest wills, break the most seemingly indomitable spirits.  Seems to me it's something we should have known then too.  But did we?

Do we?

We know this stuff.  But do we believe it?  Do we want to?  If something like what happened to Patty Hearst happened now, would a jury accept that a person could be one self one day and a completely different self the next?  Would a contemporary jury be any more willing to face the fact that we are not in as much control of who we are as we like think?

According to Shana Alexander, the jury who convicted Patty Hearst of bank robbery didn't want to send her to jail.  They thought she was guilty but they didn't want to hold her accountable.  What they wanted was for Patty to confess and express remorse.  What they wanted was for her to say what they wanted to believe about what had happened to her.  That she had been herself the whole time.  That she had been in her right mind.  That she had acted rationally, even if she was acting out of a rational fear for her life.

They were even willing to forgive her for joining the gang and for taking part in the robbery, which left one person dead, by the way, if only she'd admitted that she had made the decisions to do so.  They were willing to accept that she had been foolish, dumb, coldly calculating, scared to death, even childish to the point of doing everything she did to get back at her parents for whatever reason she might have to want to get back at them.

They wanted to hear that she'd had control over what she'd done and over who she was.

They didn't want to hear that she'd been brainwashed, which was the defense her lawyer, F. Lee Bailey, relied on. 

In a review in the Atlantic of a forthcoming book about the kidnapping and trial and their cultural import, Patty's Got A Gun, Caitlin Flanagan reports that it was evidence that Patty had seemingly fallen in love with one of the gang members who'd raped her that turned the jury against her.

They felt that no amount of brainwashing could have done that to her, made her love her rapist.  No matter what else she might have been compelled to do she could not have been so perverse.  Seems to me that the jurors were being perverse and using the most telling evidence that she had been brainwashed, or so traumatized that she was no longer thinking or feeling like her old self, as evidence that she hadn't been.  But the jury appears to have thought that her old self, her true self, could not have been changed, erased, fooled, or incapacitated to the point that it couldn't assert itself and reject that!  They believed that there was a limit to how thoroughly a person could be brainwashed and so either Patty was lying about having been raped or she hadn't really minded it.

To the jurors' credit, I guess, they decided she was lying.

What's clear is that jury thought Patty Hearst had an old self, and that this was her true self, and that that self could not be made to stop being itself.

It's not clear if they thought that her old self, her true self, was a criminal self, that the good Catholic girl and dutiful daughter she'd appeared to be before she was kidnapped was an act.  If you believe that we are who we are, that our self is what it is from birth to death, and that when it appears that someone has changed, that they are not the person, the self, that they'd been, then what has happened isn't really a change but a revelation.  The true them has decided to show itself for what it really was all along.  The seemingly bad man who does a great good deed is showing that he's really a good man.  The seemingly heroic one who suddenly collapses in fear and tears is showing himself up as the coward he's always been inside.   This is the stuff of melodrama.  But it's also a way of looking at human nature that I believe has some validity.  People don't change, their circumstances do, and having to react to something we've never had to react to before can make us appear to be a different sort of person.

The question is how to look at this apparent change.  Did we change our behavior to fit the circumstances, or did the circumstances change us to fit them?  Who or what is in control of who we are?  Ourselves or fate?

In Patty Hearst's case, the jury apparently decided that we are in control.

I hadn't started keeping notebooks yet back then and have no record of what I was thinking about Patty Hearst at the time, and I can't find any reference to Anyone's Daughter in my notebooks from twelve years ago, so I don't know if what I thought was changed by what I read twenty years later.   My guess is that it was.  My sense is that it wasn't.  My sense of who I was in 1974 is that I was pretty much like who I am now.  Which is ridiculous.  But that's the way we are, I think.  We can't remember ourselves.  We have a hard enough time remembering what we did.  In fact, we often don't, and I don't mean just that we forget things we did.  I mean that we remember doing things we didn't.  Memories are tricky things.  Some of them are actually tricks.  We can be fooled into thinking that something that was told to us happened to us.  The fooling can be done by ourselves, or it can be done from without.

And how do we know we are who we are if we are remembering ourselves all wrong?

The fact that memory is unreliable doesn't prove that there is no real us to remember.  But it is worryingly suggestive.  If all we have to go on is our memories of what we felt, what we thought, what we did before, and those memories can be changed, edited, added to, subtracted from, erased, simply forgotten, then it is possible that our self can be changed, edited, added to, subtracted from, erased, or simply forgotten too.   If I can be made to remember myself as a different kind of person than I "am," won't I start acting like that different kind of person and cease to be what I "am"?  If I am what I am and that's all that I am but what I am is only what I think I am that am I?

There'd seem to be a physical limit to our ability to stop being ourselves.  I don't like beets and I don't like anybody who does.  But the fact is that I haven't eaten beets since I was one or two.  One of my earliest memories is of being in a high chair in a restaurant and throwing the beets on my tray onto the floor in disgust.  I've refused to touch beets ever since.  But what if I could be persuaded that that never happened?  What if I forget that it did?  What if I could be made to "remember" that I like beets and someone served me some?  I might try them.  And if my taste buds haven't changed that much I might spit them right out.  We are bodies as well as minds---some might say we are bodies, period, mind being a biological effect.

Which means that an assault on the body can be an assault on the mind.  A shock to the body is a shock to the mind.  Change the body, change the mind.  We have a name for effect of this.  Post-traumatic stress.  I don't think people called it that in 1976 when Patty Hearst went on trial, but people knew it happened.  Patty Hearst's body had been brutally assaulted.  But the jury refused to believe that that assault resulted in a change in her mind.  They preferred to believe that the assault hadn't happened or that it hadn't been that awful.  Why?

Probably because they didn't want to admit that it could have happened to them.

George Will saw what happened to Patty Hearst as proving what had already been proven in the prisons and torture chambers of the Soviet Union, that the self is a very fragile thing.  The self can be broken and broken to pieces that, if they can be reassembled, can be reassembled into a completely different self.

I think this is something we'd rather not have to know about our selves, that we could stop having one, a self, and that it wouldn't take much to take it away from us.  I think this is a scarier thought than the fact that we will die.  It is the theme of all the great horror stories.  What passes for horror these days is just a fear of bloody death.  But in works like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Dracula, The Wolfman, the fear that they inspire is the fear of the total loss of self.  We are only barely in control of who we are, these stories and movies tell us.  We are only barely who we think we are.

The story of Patty Hearst is a horror story and I think it scared the jury.

Patty's Got A Gun: Patricia Hearst in 1970s America by William Graebner is available for pre-order from Amazon.

The goofiest scene in all the Star Wars movies

Saw The Clone Wars yesterday and while the Mannion boys were trying to talk themselves into believing they enjoyed it I was scratching my head over this:  Whose idea was it to model all the characters after the puppets in Team America?

Strange and I thought off-putting choice for the animation style, but the movie might have been better if the producers had actually used puppets.  You can make marionettes do a lot of interesting things, including have sex, it turns out.  (Thanks for that innovation, South Park guys.)  But, compared to CGI cartoons, the amount of leaping around while engaging in wholesale slaughter and mayhem they can manage is extremely limited.  Having to worry about their lead characters' strings getting tangled if the action sequences get too wild might have forced the filmmakers to focus on character and story instead of blowing things up.

The first hour or so of Clone Wars is a big noisy mess, much like the first hour of Revenge of the Sith.  It's like being trapped inside a video game controlled by somebody's cat walking back and forth over the console.  There's no logical consistency in the courses of the battles, in the plans of attack of the two armies, in the capabilities of the technology and weaponry, or in the thinking and motivations of any of the characters.  Guns that can reduce tanks to jumbled heaps of scrap metal can't shatter rock.  Characters say mutually contradicting things sequentially.  Obi-wan, Anakin, and Anakin's new apprentice bounce back and forth between being superheroes with powers and abilities far beyond mortal men or any Jedi we've seen in any of the live-action movies, even in the duel between Yoda and Darth Sidious, and just a couple of brave and clever guys and a junior high school girl who happen to be rather handy in a sword fight.  No battle actually ever ends because both sides have an endless supply of reinforcements and new material.  Not that this matters because very quickly it becomes clear that all the fighting and blowing things not only has no point or direction for its own sake, it is irrelevant---to the story of this cartoon and to the arc of the larger story of the live-action movies.

What little story The Clone Wars has on its own revolves around George Lucas' bizarre and persistent belief that we care about the details of the background politics of the Republic and that there is or could be an outcome to the Clone Wars worth rooting for.  But nothing Anakin, Obi-wan, Yoda, and the other Jedi do is worth rooting for because, win or lose, whatever they do helps the Emperor further his goal of destroying the Republic and wiping out the Jedi.  The filmmakers, though, insist on treating the kidnapping of Jabba the Hutt's baby son as something we need to care about.  Since in the grand scheme of things it doesn't matter whether or not Jabba allows the Republic to use the trade routes he controls, it doesn't matter whether or not Anakin rescues little Rotta the Hutt.  The movie tries to make us care by making Jabba a worried daddy and Rotta cute as a bug in a rug.  So now, thirty one years after Jabba sent Greedo to kill Han Solo, twenty-eight years after he had Bobba Fett bring home Han frozen in carbonite, twenty-five years after he tried to feed Luke to a Rancor and made a sex slave out of Princess Leia, we're meant to think of Hutts as sympathetic?

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, George Lucas decided that he would allow the novels, comic books, and video games that grew out of the movies to fill in all the holes and gaps he didn't fill in himself in his movies.  The Star Wars epic now includes a lot more than what's in the six films, just as the myth of the Trojan War includes a lot more than the Iliad and the Odyssey and the story of King Arthur far more than what's to be found in Mallory's Le Morte d'Arthur.  The Clone Wars does not add anything to that epic.

But it could have.

About a little more than half way through, The Clone Wars settles down and actually starts to tell a story with a plot, narrative direction, and (minimal) character development.  This story is the story of Anakin's attempt to return Jabba's son to him safe and sound while Count Dooku plots to prevent him.  But this is also the story of Anakin's return to Tatooine, which besides not being a garden spot in its own right---as Luke says of the place in the original movie, "If there's a bright center of the universe, you're in the spot that it's farthest from."---is the last place in the galaxy Anakin wants to re-visit.

Tatooine, as we all know, is where Luke Skywalker grew up the adopted son of a hardworking moisture farmer and his wife, but, for those of you who never bothered to see any of the "prequels," it's also where Anakin grew up the fatherless son of a slave.  Anakin left Tatooine to begin his Jedi training when he was ten, but he had to leave his mother behind and for some reason went ten years without seeing her or getting in touch with her, which broke her heart.  The last time Anakin went back was to witness her death, for which he blames himself, and to slaughter the Sandpeople who killed her in an insane fit of vengeful anger, and we all know where anger can take a Jedi when he lets it get the better of him.

Tatooine, then, is the site of Anakin's first great moral failure, the place where he just about went over to the Dark Side all on his own, without any help from Emperor Palpatine.  Coming "home" makes him understandably grumpy, but it ought to have been the cause of a more heroic psychological struggle and torment for him, and all it would have taken to dramatize this was an encounter with some Sandpeople and a chance meeting with one character from the first movie.

Luke's uncle, Owen Lars.

It's clear in the movie I'll always call Star Wars and think of as the first movie but which has been officially renamed A New Hope and which younger fans know as Episode IV that Uncle Owen holds a grudge against Luke's father, and this is without his knowing that Anakin Skywalker has become Darth Vader.  (How could he have known?  George Lucas didn't even know it at the time.)  What you can't know, unless you read the novelization of Episode II: Attack of the Clones is why Owen has it in for Anakin.

Owen blames Anakin for breaking their mother's heart.

Owen Lars and Anakin Skywalker are step-brothers.

Shortly after Anakin went off with Qui-gon Jinn to become a Jedi, Owen's father freed Anakin's mother from slavery and married her.  Owen was a boy at the time and he latched onto Shmi who latched onto him back.  They loved each other as mother and son.  Owen then grew up joining his mother every night as she sat outside staring up at the night sky, wondering where Anakin was and hoping he would come back to her.  It's no wonder that Owen learned to resent Anakin and all his Jedi friends as a pack of cold, heartless bastards who didn't care about the pain they caused lesser mortals, and it's no wonder he would have done his best to make sure that Luke didn't follow in Anakin's footsteps, following Obi-wan on "some damn fool idealistic crusade" and breaking Owen and Aunt Beru's hearts the way Anakin broke Shmi's.

This dynamic between the two "brothers," based on Anakin's guilt and Owen's resentment, is an important subtext to Luke's story, which makes it an important subtext to the story.  The only reason Luke is tempted to give in to the Dark Side is the same reason he doesn't give in.  Owen taught him to put other people's feelings and needs ahead of his own.  Owen taught him how not to become Anakin.  And this isn't dramatized at all in any of the movies.

It could have been worked into The Clone Wars easily enough.  But it could have been and should have worked into Episode II.  And this brings me to what I regard as the goofiest scene in all the Star Wars movies that does not involve an ewok, C-3PO, or Jar Jar Binks, and it occurs in Episode II.

It's Anakin's first scene after he murders the Sandpeople.  Padme finds him sulking in a workshop in the Lars homestead and makes the mistake of asking him what's wrong.  It's a mistake because he tells her.  He confesses to having "slaughtered them like animals," the entire tribe, men, women, and children.  Then he blames Obi-wan for what he's done, at least indirectly.  Anakin starts listing all the ways he feels Obi-wan has failed to respect him as if they explain why he killed all the Sandpeople and why he's right to feel it's not his own fault.

In other words, he confesses to being a mass murderer and then throws a self-pitying temper tantrum in which he refuses to take any responsibility for his own moral failure and Padme reacts...by not reacting.

Not as if she's been listening to him, at any rate.

It's as if she hadn't been paying attention at the crucial moment and only half-heard him and she doesn't want him to know.  She's aware that something's bothering him, but as far as she heard it might be that he's misplaced his lightsabre again or that he feels a headache coming on, the kind he used to get when he was growing up here and sand got up his nose.  A sympathetic response of some kind is in order, though, so she gives him a kind of general purpose "There, there" pat on the cheek and then waits for her next cue.  Since Anakin lets the matter drop, so does she and the scene ends without us finding out what she thinks about the fact that her boyfriend is a raging psychopath and petulant narcissist with very little impulse control and what amounts to superpowers.

The scene is goofy because of Padme's lack of reaction and the bad acting it elicits from Hayden Christiansen and Natalie Portman.  What made it maddening for me to watch, though, was that it was totally unnecessary.  Lucas had Anakin confessing to the wrong person.

Anakin wouldn't have told anyone, willingly, except maybe C-3PO.  Why would he want anyone to know he just did a premature Darth Vader?  But he might admit to what he'd done to someone who'd already guessed it, someone already inclined to think badly of him.

All Lucas needed to have done was have it not be Padme who finds Anakin at that point but Owen.

It would have been natural for the two young men to try to talk about their mutual loss and for the conversation would turn ugly quickly, with Owen unable to hide his anger at Anakin for the pain he caused their mother.  And Owen would likely have guessed right away what Anakin did to the Sandpeople, first because it'd have been something he'd have wanted to do himself, but second because it was something he wouldn't have done because Shmi herself wouldn't have wanted it, and doing things that would have disappointed Shmi is something Anakin does as a matter of course.  He'd have confronted Anakin---You killed them all, didn't you?---and Anakin would have shot back that he did, he was glad he did, and he'd do it again, and that would have settled everything between the "brothers."  Neither would have wanted to see the other again and Owen's whole relationship with Luke would have been foretold right then and there.  Owen would always be on the lookout for signs that Luke was at all like his father and jump all over him whenever he thought he saw one.

A scene like that is there but not there in the Star Wars story.  Something like it must have happened.  Shmi's two sons would have talked at some point during that visit, and it's unlikely they would have gotten along.  George Lucas is probably content with its existing in the subtext and if he's not, he likely figures that if it isn't there now it will turn up somewhere in one of the novels or comic books or in one of the two TV series that are coming down the pike, the cartoon based on The Clone Wars or the live-action series about Luke's boyhood on Tatooine.  But it could easily have turned up in The Clone Wars.  Anakin could have, should have, bumped into Owen and Beru along with all the Jawas he keeps shooing away.  But a scene like that is hard to work into a video game, I guess.

As it is, The Clone Wars doesn't add anything significant to the Star Wars universe except a new line of action figures and toys.

There are a few positive things about it though.  We see Anakin acting as a true hero, which is not something he gets to do in either Attack of the Clones or Revenge of the Sith.  In the first he's just a spoiled brat with surrogate daddy issues with Obi-wan; in the second, he's already a lost cause.  It's good to know that in Return of the Jedi Luke set out to save a soul actually worth saving.

And The Clone Wars goes a little way towards rescuing Padme from the role of helpless worrywart Lucas reduced her to in Revenge of the Sith, although unfortunately even as a cartoon she's still forced to serve as a display mannequin for the costume designers' ugliest and most ridiculous creations.

The best thing about The Clone Wars, however, is that it gives Christopher Lee, who does the voice work for the cartoon version of his character from Episodes II and III, far more to work with than he had in Revenge of the Sith---Count Dooku is more of a living character, and a more worthy adversary for the Jedi, in cartoon form than he was as the live-action version of himself we last saw him as.

I still think it would have been better all around if Lucas hadn't made him a Sith and allowed him to be the fallen idealist and hero we're told he once was, if instead of being a mere henchman for Darth Sidious, he'd been as much an unknowing puppet as any of the Jedi.

Programming note: Mad Man madness continues

Live-blogging of Mad Men resumes tonight over at newcritics at 10 PM EDT.  Mrs Peel is ready for you right here.

On religion in the public sphere

Some disjointed and not all that well-thought out thoughts on the subject:

One.  Blanket statements like "religion has no place in the public debate" are criticisms of the Civil Rights movement, Abolition, the anti-war movements of the 1950s and early 1960s, late 19th Century and early 20th Century Progressivism, Roosevelt's own feelings about the New Deal, the anti-death penalty movement, the prison reform movement, activism and politics in African-American neighborhoods and communities, and even the push for Independence in 1776.

Americans have always been and still are a God-bothering people and a God-bothered people.  Their feelings and thoughts about what makes a just society and how to bring it about are informed by and driven by their feelings and thoughts about what God wants them to do.  This doesn't make us a Christian nation or even a non-secular one.  It just makes us one with a lot of people in it who cannot separate an argument for doing the right thing from an argument about how to get right with the Lord.

They are not going to shut up about it because progressive bloggers don't like it.

Two.  No one should expect you to be persuaded by any argument that is based wholly or partly on their religious beliefs.   The difference between Martin Luther King and someone like Jerry Falwell ought to be too obvious to have to mention, but just as a start, King did not begin and end his arguments with God says what I say and you're going to hell if you don't do what I tell you God says.

Still, the number of atheistic, agnostic, pagan, Buddhist, wiccan, and otherwise non-mainstream religion practicing Progressive bloggers relative to the number of non-blogging Americans who keep the Sabbath by going to church, synagogue, or mosque is very, very, very small, so we should not be surprised that when politicians address their arguments to the public at large they don't tailor them to take into account our vanity and egos.  Especially when we're not even in the room.

Three.  A lot of what gets peddled as Christianity in the public sphere is pure snake-oil.  It's meant to bring the suckers into the tent and get them to open their wallets.  The Media falls for this all the time because most members of the Media don't give a damn and think the suckers should get what they deserve but also because their bosses are trying to sucker the same suckers into watching their news shows and buying their newspapers and magazines.  This doesn't mean that it's all snake-oil.

Four.  A lot of what Right Wing Christian pastors preach is just plain wrong.  Their arguments aren't even close to Christian.  They're based on willful misreadings of the Bible and plain ignorance on the subjects of their own religion and history.  There has been no shortage of conservative Christians writing books and articles about how Jesus wants us all to be rich.  (See also Three above.)

But in a debate between supposed men and women of God purporting to know what Jesus wants and people dismissing the words of Jesus as irrelevant people who want to know what Jesus says aren't going to listen to latter at all.

Five.  Progressives routinely and rightly stand up for and preach respect for the beliefs of religious minorities, but if they do it while sneering and scoffing at the religious beliefs of the majority they aren't fooling anyone.  Making fun of a belief in a white-bearded magician in the sky is implicitly making fun of a belief in Allah, Krishna, and the Great Spirit and believers of all kinds know it.  Dismissing mainstream religious beliefs as mere superstition and bigotry while standing up for the people who believe that rocks have magical healing powers and getting totally whacked out on mushrooms is the path to enlightenment expresses a cognitive dissonance that will strike most intelligent observers as indistinguishable from willfull stupidity or hypocrisy.

Six.  The Media tend to conflate the words "Evangelical" and "Christian" and use both to describe Right Wing Republicans Who Go to Church A Lot and they do it in a way that implies that the Right Wing Republicans Who Go to Church A Lot are representative of all Christians, including Catholics and more traditionally aligned Protestants.  That's their mistake, but we shouldn't make it ours.

Although many if not most Evangelicals attend non-affiliated churches, Evangelicalism isn't a separate form of Christianity like Lutheranism or Presbyterianism.  It's a variation practiced across the board.  And it's not a political monolith.  Although over the last 25 years most have tended to vote Republican, millions and millions of evangelicals have voted Democratic.  Evangelicalism is not inherently conservative.  In fact, it is inherently Progressive, and at one time the Progressive movement in this country was dominated by evangelical Christians, like William Jennings Bryan.

In trying to woo the votes of evangelicals, then, Barack Obama is not chasing Right Wing votes, although he may be trying to win over people who have previously voted Republican because they were under the impression that the Republican Party was the party of Christian values.  And he doesn't need to win over many to turn the tide of the election in any number of Red and Purple precincts and Congressional districts.

Plus, there are signs that, even among conservative evangelicals, younger evangelicals are not as conservative as their parents when it comes to the environment, gay and women's rights, and issues of social justice---in other words, they are nascent Progressives and there's an opportunity to win them over to the Democratic Party not just for this election but for good.

Seven.  Over the last 60 or more years, the Democratic Party's most loyal, active, and consistent constituency has been African-Americans and African-Americans are, generally, sincere and devout Christians---evangelical Christians too, many of them.

Black churches have always been centers of community activism.  Black Democrats do not tend to separate their religious beliefs from their political ones.

Barack Obama came of age politically working for and representing black neighborhoods and communities.  He is sincerely and devoutly religious himself.  It shouldn't be surprising that his rhetoric and his politics are informed by his beliefs, nor should it be surprising or troubling that he continues to address the very people who have always been the core of his political base and that their feelings and concerns mean more to him than the vanities and egos of Progressive bloggers.

On top of that, it is vital that he carry the Hispanic vote in the Southwest and Florida and while Hispanics are, generally, Catholics, evangelical Protestantism has been a growing force within the community.

Eight.  Therefore it ought not to be all that troubling or surprising that Obama has been attending the Forum on Faith and sounding very religious while he's there.

What bugs the hell out of me is that he let himself get photographed hugging John McCain.

Dorkiest thing on two wheels

The dorkiest thing on two wheels is a middle-aged man in a sweatshirt and jeans riding his bike uphill with a bright sun that makes it feel like eighty degrees beating down on him.

I swear, it was sixty degrees when I set out.

Oh well.  It was only three miles out and back to the bagel place and the road is all along the river and the river was the bright blue of the reflected sky and there was a great blue heron on a rock out in the water and the roadsides were blue and purple with chickory and New York asters except where they were yellow too with goldenrod and the bagels at the bagel place are always big and fresh and a small bottle of orange juice works wonders and I'm home now on the front porch with a fresh cup of coffee on the table beside me, admiring the play of light and shadow on the petals of the black-eyed Susans while I'm waiting for my cranberry bagel to cool, and I've recovered enough and am in a good enough mood that I hardly mind the noise from the neighbobor's lawn mower even though it's awful early on a Sunday morning to be out disturbing the peace just to lower the height of the grass in your front yard half an inch but knowing how hot the sun is already I can't say I blame him for wanting to get it done before the day really heats up and anyway his yard's not that close and his mower's not that loud and I can still hear the cicadas and the broken-bed spring squeak-squawk of some blue jays who are annoyed at something going on in the maple trees across the way and I'm rested and content and have half-forgiven myself for having been such a dork earlier and for being a dork now because if the dorkiest thing on two wheels was me huffing and puffling and sweating like a field hand on my bike, the dorkiest thing at a keyboard is the same dork describing his dorkiness on his blog in a string of run-on sentences and expecting people to read the whole post with interest and without getting really, really annoyed.

How's the weather where you are this morning?

Bermuda, Bahama, come on, pretty mama...

My favorite version of the song...

Vacations are elitist

That's the point.

You go on vacation to feel elitist and privileged, to feel, at least in small way and for a little while, what it's like to be rich.

You go on vacation to enjoy what it's like not to have to go to work everyday.

You go on vacation to play all day, eat well and play some more at night, and sleep like a log because you don't have to worry---or you can pretend not to have to worry---about where the money's coming to pay for it all.

It's a week or two or maybe just a long weekend of living like the rich and famous and that's why the business elites that run the country begrudge us our time off, dole out vacation days and vacation pay like drops of water from a canteen in a desert, and look for as many legal ways to deny their employees a life away from work as they can.  They'd rather spend more money bribing Congressman and state legislators than pay you a week's wages for no work because if you're enjoying even a fraction of the privileges that they do than how do they know that they've won?

Millions and millions of Americans can't afford to take vacations, even if their employers don't treat requests for time off as signs of laziness and ingratitude and grounds for termination, if not on the spot, then later, when they're in a bad mood and just tired of your face or your habit of expecting to be paid for every minute you're on the job.

Barack Obama is lucky he can take his family to Hawaii for a vacation of any length of time and I'd bet that if we weren't told by the likes of Cokie Roberts we should resent him for his luck instead of resenting our bosses for their stinginess and heartlessness very few people would think anything about it except, "Boy, would I like to go to Hawaii someday!"

And, you know what?  Plenty of people will get to go.  Thousands and thousands.  People who aren't rich.  Who aren't famous.  Who aren't in the least bit elitist.  People the natives call tourists.  They'll find a good rate for a flight out, a good rate on a hotel or a timeshare, they'll put in for their week or ten days, and they'll go.

They'll go and come back without knowing they visited a foreign clime.

You've probably heard by now that Cokie Roberts thinks Obama shouldn't have gone to Hawaii because going someplace foreign like Honolulu will look too elitist to the "regular" Americans who are the only people whose votes matter according to elite journalist-pundits like Roberts.

That's right, Hawaii, the dream vacation spot of millions of regular Americans from Boise to Allentown and Fargo to Fort Worth, home of Thomas Magnum, setting for an Elvis movie, graveyard of the USS Arizona, donor to the world of the quintessential Americanism, Book 'em, Dan-o, is foreign, even though it's peopled with regular Americans, because it's, you know, a state.

Where should the Obamas have gone instead?  Maybe the Wisconsin Dells like so many other Chicagoans.  Down the Jersey Shore.  Roberts suggested Myrtle Beach, probably because it's in the South and that makes its boardwalks more American than Ocean City's because the South is more a part of the real America as defined by elite journalist-pundits like Roberts than East Coast states like New Jersey---in the geography of our elite journalist-pundits the East Coast doesn't reach farther south than Cape May.

How about if they'd gone on a cruise?  Lots of regular Americans take cruises these days.  It's off-season in the Caribbean.  Nothing is more regular American than going on vacation when you can get an off-season rate.  Nah.  Those ships put in at foreign ports in exotic locales with Frenchy names.

Disney World!  That's it.  Most regular American vacation there is.  A week in the Magic Kingdom.  With a side-trip to Busch Gardens and SeaWorld!

Wouldn't have worked.  Wouldn't have mattered where they'd gone.

The Obamas could have gone to the Dells, the Shore, Myrtle Beach, Orlando, Aruba, Jamaica, Bermuda, Bahama, Key Largo, Montego, way down to Kokomo and if not Cokie Roberts then some other elite journalist or pundit would have sneered at his "mistake" and reported it as good news for John McCain.

Cokie Roberts didn't think Hawaii was "foreign" until Barack Obama went there.  It became foreign because Obama is taking his vacation there.  What Roberts "thinks" is that Obama himself is "foreign."  He's an elitist and elitists like him aren't really Americans.

And whatever an elitist like him does is proof of his elitism, even if it's something that millions of non-elite, "regular" Americans do all the time.  Drinking orange juice, eating salads, playing basketball, riding a bike, riding a bike while wearing a helmet---he's damned if he does, damned if he doesn't, by definition and default.

Going on vacation in his home state is elitist, but he'd have been just as elitist if he and Michelle had rented a Winnebago and taken the girls on a cross-country trip to from Valley Forge to Sequoia National Park, stopping to visit every national monument, landmark, and wonder of nature in between.  Photographs and video clips of the Obamas in front Mount Rushmore and the Grand Canyon would have become as suspect, "foreign," as Hawaii, dismissed as props in an Obama's inauthentic and elitist attempt to pass himself off as a regular American.

If Obama had gone to a motorcycle rally and volunteered Michelle for a beauty pageant in which contestants compete topless, he'd be condemned as condescending, phony, and misogynistic, but as it is he's condemned as condescending, phony, and misanthropic because he doesn't go to motorcycle rallies at all.

Attending motorcycle rallies and making a buffoon of yourself and a joke of your wife in front of crowds full of drunken idiots with more tattoos than teeth and more outstanding warrants than tattoos didn't used to be a "regular" American thing to do, or something that a Presidential candidate would have been expected to do.   Once upon a time it was something only yahoos and ra-has did.  It didn't become a "regular" American thing to do until the Media decided that Presidents had to be regular guys and that being a regular guy meant being a yahoo and a rah-ha of some form or another.  Regular Americans are Bible-thumping yahoos, anti-intellectual yahoos, sexist yahoos, cheap beer drinking yahoos, non-Hawaii vacationing yahoos, "Show us your tits"-yelling yahoos, Confederate flag-waving yahoos.

Regular Americans are people Republicans appeal to without even trying, because Republicans are regular Americans themselves or would be if they weren't burdened with all that money and handicapped by college educations and trapped in high-paying, high-status jobs on the East and West Coasts and in big cities in between or cursed with fathers who are former Presidents of the United States and grandfathers who were U.S. Senators or married to heiresses and forced to take their vacations in one of the eight homes her money and family connections bought for them, the poor benighted souls.  Regular Americans are people Democrats look down on and whose values Democrats sneer at and whose votes Democrats can never ever win, people whose hardscrabble, salt of the earth, modest lives and lifestyles Democrats just don't want to understand, people who don't include all the Union workers, schoolteachers, nurses, firefighters, military veterans, farmers, small business owners, retirees, mothers and fathers, grandparents, Wal-Mart shoppers and Wal-Mart greeters, cashiers, and stockboys who vote Democratic by the millions, apparently unaware that the Democrats despise them.

And when the elite pundits and journalists talk about Democrats they don't mean Red State Democrats like Evan Bayh and the two Nelsons.  They mean the likes of Russ Feingold, John Kerry, Ted Kennedy, and Barbara Boxer.   They mean Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, because, unlike, I'm sad to say, too many members of the progressive blogosphere, they've bothered to check out Clinton and Obama's voting records on economic and social issues.

They mean liberal Democrats.

The Media Elitists think Liberal Democrats are elitists because they're smart and don't bother to hide it.  Elitist is a code word for "superior" which is in itself a code for "making me feel less wonderful about myself than I usually feel."

The Media Elitists think Liberal Democrats are phonies and liars because they talk about issues and policies as if they actually care about that crap.  Liberal Democrats lack "authenticity" because the Media Elites' definition of authentic is anyone who shares their attitude towards issues---They don't matter.---policy details---Trivial bullshist only geeks waste their time worrying about.---and life in general---it's all about power and status and feeling wonderful about yourself if you happen to be a member of the Media Elite, and, by the way, don't forget the booze and the food and the babes.

The truth is that millions of Americans will never get to take a vacation in Hawaii.  They won't get to take a vacation at all, not this year, probably not next year, maybe one day, though.  For now they'll be happy if they can get the kids in summer camp for a week or take them to the town pool this afternoon or to the State Fair this weekend.  If they're really lucky, they'll get an extra day off and make it down to the Shore or up to the lake or out to the woods to fish a little, maybe camp overnight.

For millions of the lucky rest of us, those of us who do get a paid vacation, that means a week away, two if we're really lucky, or a bunch of long weekends, because the rest of our vacation time has to be saved for trips home for the holidays and the kids' school vacations and the days we have to take off after we've used up our ridiculously few and employer-begrudged and resented sick days and personal days.

It's thanks to liberals that most of us have any vacation time at all.  It's liberals who are fighting for more paid family leave, for new parents to have more time at home with their infants, for middle-aged children to be able to take time off to take care of sick children and sick parents and sick spouses without risking their jobs to do it.

It's liberals who want to raise the minimum wage and lower the cost of health care (ideally by having the government take over paying for it) so that people who can't afford to take nice vacations might at least be able to save some money to send their kids to college so that they can get jobs that will pay them enough that they will be able to afford nice vacations.

It's liberals who are protecting Social Security so that people who can afford to take vacations now can still afford to take them when they're older and retired and so that people who can't take the time off now will be able to get away now and then when they're not working anymore and all their time's their own---actually, so that there will come a day when they don't have to work anymore and they can call their time their own.

And it's Republicans who are standing in the way of all that and trying to take away what little is already there.

It's Republicans who long to take us back to the good old days, the days before Roosevelt, both Roosevelts, to the days before unions and Progressives and agitators and do-gooders of all sorts---liberals, one and all!---and we had a good hard-working country full of people putting in fourteen hour days, six days a week, with no paid vacations, no paid sick days, no health insurance of any kind, no expectation that their jobs would be waiting for them when they took time off for childbirth, illness, family crises of any sort, and no recourse if they were fired simply because a day came when they had to be human instead of a cog in some rich man's money-making machine.

And it's the Republicans who belong to the party of the "regular" Americans and the liberals who are elitists and have to worry about taking vacations in "foreign" places like Hawaii and be embarrassed about it when they do.

At least in the minds of the likes of elite pundits and journalists like Cokie Roberts.

But then elite pundits and journalists like Roberts aren't really pundits and journalists at all, are they?

They're apologists for the corporate business establishment that pays them the high salaries that allow them to afford their long vacations in such regular American vacation spots as the Hamptons, Nantucket, Palm Beach, Aruba, Jamaica, Bermuda, Bahama...

_____________________

Regular commenter, copyediting angel, and blogger extraordinaire, and hat-tip deserver for this post, the Linkmeister, sure had me fooled.  I always thought he was a regular American.  He's a Navy Veteran, a baseball fan, is good to his mother, loves his dog, loves Carl's Burgers, and in all ways has always struck me as being as American as apple pie and Chevrolet.  But he lives in Hawaii.  So I guess he's a furrener.  Had me fooled.  Had himself fooled.  He's still fooled.  He still thinks he's an American and he wrote Cokie Roberts a letter trying to prove it to her.