"You can't make policemen take the romantic view."
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In your next letter I wish you'd say where you are going and what you are doing; how are the plays, and after the plays what other pleasures you're pursuing:
taking cabs in the middle of the night, driving as if to save your soul where the road goes round and round the park and the meter glares like a moral owl,
and the trees look so queer and green standing alone in big black caves and suddenly you're in a different place where everything seems to happen in waves,
and most of the jokes you just can't catch, like dirty words rubbed off a slate, and the songs are loud but somehow dim and it gets so terribly late,
and coming out of the brownstone house to the gray sidewalk, the watered street, one side of the buildings rises with the sun like a glistening field of wheat.
—Wheat, not oats, dear. I'm afraid if it's wheat it's none of your sowing, nevertheless I'd like to know what you are doing and where you are going.
Three days after receiving $25 billion in federal bailout funds, Bank of America Corp. hosted a conference call with conservative activists and business officials to organize opposition to the U.S. labor community's top legislative priority.
Participants on the October 17 call -- including at least one representative from another bailout recipient, AIG -- were urged to persuade their clients to send "large contributions" to groups working against the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), as well as to vulnerable Senate Republicans, who could help block passage of the bill.
Bernie Marcus, the charismatic co-founder of Home Depot, led the call along with Rick Berman, an aggressive EFCA opponent and founder of the Center for Union Facts. Over the course of an hour, the two framed the legislation as an existential threat to American capitalism, or worse.
"This is the demise of a civilization," said Marcus. "This is how a civilization disappears. I am sitting here as an elder statesman and I'm watching this happen and I don't believe it."
Consider what Bernie Marcus is saying. A more unionized workforce will bring about the end of civilization. Since a unionized workforce is responsible for the great expansion of the middle class and the prosperity of the 1950s and 60s, you have to assume that according to him we did not have a civilized nation back then.
A civilized nation, then, is one with a small if not shrinking middle class and a mass of cowed and dependent wage slaves eeking out marginal livings on whatever guys like Bernie Marcus feel like paying them.
A civilized nation is one in which there are no strong unions, a nation in which workers have no bargaining power, no allies, no recourse, a nation in which they are totally at the mercies and whims of the owners and bosses and the other Bernie Marcuses of the world.
A civilized nation is not one in which ordinary men and women can count on a decent wage for a day's work and a few benefits like health care for themselves and their families, vacation days, sick days and a few extra days to stay home with a new baby, a child or spouse with the flu, or an ailing parent, not one where they labor in a safe and if not cheering then at least not soul-crushing workplace and can expect as their simple due a secure and comfortable retirement.
No, a civilized nation by his lights is one in which a chosen few get to live like kings and queens, comporting themselves as they see fit, following highly flexible rules they set for themselves and can ignore at their convenience, paying no price for their crimes and depredations, while getting to tell the rest of us how to behave and how to work and how to accept our lots without complaint or expectation of any other rewards besides the ones they deign to toss our way like scraps to the dogs, a nation in which they rake up piles and piles of money and cart it home in wheelbarrows while the rest of us are so desperate for work we'll take whatever we can get at whatever insulting wage they decide, begrudgingly, to pay, in which we're so terrified of losing our job that we'll cringe and fawn and work ourselves to exhaustion to please our unpleasable betters and then grovel and apologize and accept our punishments meekly when we we fail to be sufficiently slavish.
I've often thought that what the corporate rich want and are trying to bring about through the policies of their bought and paid for party of toadies and hired goons, the Republicans (they've put the Democrats on lay-away), is an American aristocracy.
What I ought to know by now is that they think we already have one and they are it and they are appalled and affronted that there are people who don't agree and don't plan to just go along with their princely and princessly dreams.
A civilized nation, to them, is one without unions because unions represent the uncivilized notion that employees have a right to share in the wealth generated by their own labor. Unions don't accept that all the money belongs by dint of God and nature to those the Almighty and the right genes put in charge. A civilized nation is one in which they own our labor and they'll generously allow us a small share of its fruits as long as we know and keep to our place.
A civilized nation is one in which there are human beings---them---and livestock---us.
A civilized nation is like what Europe was well into the 18th Century and Russia into the 20th. What they want is called feudalism and in the minds of people like Bernie Marcus we're all their vassals and serfs and in the possibility of increased unionization he sees the rabble rebelling and hears the blade of the guillotine dropping, as well he ought to and would, if this were a civilized nation.
Updated because the Vice-President backs me up: Little while ago the President announced his task force on shoring up the middle class is getting down to work and introduced Joe Biden, whom the President called "the Pride of Delaware," as head of the task force. In his opening remarks Biden stated flatly that there would be no middle class in this country if it weren't for the labor movement. According to the Vice-President, the decline of civilization that Bernie Marcus fears began over a hundred and fifty years ago.
Biden greeted the people in the room with the usual pleasant formalities but paid special attention to his friends from the Labor Unions.
"Welcome back to the White House," he said.
There were cheers and laughter, as there ought to have been, in a civilized nation.
Nevermind that the tax cuts for the rich, screw everyone else economic policies we and President Bush pursued for the last eight years caused this mess, if President Obama pursues the exact same tax cuts for the rich, screw everyone else policies, why, then, everything will come up roses and the nation shall be saved by the magic of the Invisible Hand.
John Updike's death isn't affecting me like Donald Westlake's or John Mortimer's or Studs Terkel's or Tony Hillerman's. Westlake and Mortimer were my literary models at a key moment of my life. Their styles and senses of humor got into my head and my writing. Their characters became my friends. Their books and stories are comforts as well as inspirations. Terkel was a hero. Hillerman just wrote books that I had a lot of fun reading.
Updike was...
Updike.
From the beginning. He was a last name. It was how I was introduced to him.
"Your assignment, class, is to read Updike's A&P."
"What are you reading, Dad?"
"Updike's new novel, Lance."
I read "A&P" in high school. I read Rabbit, Run my freshman year in college. It wasn't assigned. One day I decided I needed to read more Updike---"Who's the best American writer? Mailer? Roth? Updike?"---and I walked down to the local bookstore and bought it. I didn't feel particularly grown-up or sophisticated. I felt furtive and anxious and guilty. I was skipping a class I hadn't done the homework for and spending money I should have put towards paying my phone bill. Buying the book made me feel like I was running away from something only to run right smack into it. I read it in one sitting and realized that before I even knew his story I was feeling like Rabbit Angstrom.
I never got over that feeling and I think it kept me at a distance from Updike's fiction.
But it was a distance I've always had to close.
I think Updike never wrote a bad sentence but he wrote a lot of bad novels. He wrote many great short stories, a ton of wonderful essays, more bad poetry than good, and the Rabbit series, Roger's Version, and Month of Sundays, novels that spooked me and continue to haunt me.
As I said, I don't feel about Updike's death the same way I felt about those other writers'. I don't feel as personal a loss. I feel a loss to the community I live in. It's as if I was walking past a beautiful old Congregationalist church at the center of town that I attended irregularly and learned from the sexton weeping on the steps that the pastor had died and the bishop had decided to shutter the church forever.
Or...it's as if that church was a landmark in a very small self-circumscribed world and that I've walked over there expecting to attend the service and found the church and the piece of ground it occupied torn away, like a section from a map, and all is chaos and void where the church used to stand and the world now feels smaller and shakier, less solid and less real.
Is Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich about to be impeached on grounds of loopiness, obnoxiousness and a bad haircut? Apparently so. In defense of the Illinois state senators who seem to have already decided the governor's fate, however, the haircut really does border on the criminal.
Funny thing. Woodward forgot to put one key item on the list.
Early in your first term and then again just before you're up for re-election, try to get a highly regarded, powerful and influential editor at the Washington Post to write sycophantic, myth-building bestselling books about you based entirely on bald-faced lies by your toadies, henchmen, and court lackeys.
Actually, Woodward's list of commandments can be boiled down to a single golden rule:
Do not be like George W. Bush or Dick Cheney in any way.
All Woodward's points are fairly obvious, easy but important lessons drawn from the biographies of the best Presidents. (The Post requires registration. In case you don't have time, I put the list, without Woodward's commentary, at the bottom of this post.) They are things most of us already knew before 2000 and had learned again the hard way by 2004. Which is why so many of us never wanted George W. Bush to get anywhere near the White House and so looked forward to getting him out of there. The qualities and habits and methods Woodward says a successful President needs are qualities, habits, and methods George W. Bush---and Dick Cheney---were temperamentally averse to.
They are qualities, habits, and methods that Bush and Cheney shunned from the first day of their co-dependent Presidency.
And they are qualities, habits, and methods Bob Woodward told us they had, told us didn't matter, and ignored entirely as bases for judgment when he couldn't bring himself to tell us either of the first two things in his books, Bush at War and Plan of Attack, qualities, habits, and methods Woodward discovered they didn't have when it came time to write his next two books, State of Denial and The War Within, both of which were written too late to be of any use in judging whether or not Bush should be re-elected in 2004.
Funny thing, when he was writing The Price of Loyalty, Ron Suskind had no problem seeing and reporting that Bush and his gang not only lacked those qualities, habits, and methods but openly disdained them. But then he didn't rely solely on the word of liars, sycophants, and cringing careerists for his research.
And Richard Clarke knew it and warned us about in Against All Enemies .But then he was there.
___________________________
Updated to save you the trouble of registering at the Post right this minute: Woodward's to do and to don't list:
1. Presidents set the tone. Don't be passive or tolerate virulent divisions.
2. The president must insist that everyone speak out loud in front of the others, even -- or especially -- when there are vehement disagreements.
3.A president must do the homework to master the fundamental ideas and concepts behind his policies.
4. Presidents need to draw people out and make sure that bad news makes it to the Oval Office.
5. Presidents need to foster a culture of skepticism and doubt.
6. Presidents get contradictory data, and they need a rigorous way to sort it out.
7. Presidents must tell the public the hard truth, even if that means delivering very bad news.
8. Righteous motives are not enough for effective policy.
9. Presidents must insist on strategic thinking.
10. The president should embrace transparency. Some version of the behind-the-scenes story of what happened in his White House will always make it out to the public -- and everyone will be better off if that version is as accurate as possible.
I need some things explained to me. Slowly. And with pictures.
Not only do I not understand how we allowed ourselves to base on our economy on the endless buying and selling of things we do not need and do not make, how did it happen that business has redefined "loss" to mean "not making as many hundreds of millions of dollars in one quarter as we expected to make"?
Now, I understand that Caterpillar is looking ahead. They make construction equipment and construction of everything everywhere is down and likely to stay down for a while. Even if the President's infrastructure projects were all shovel ready and work could begin immediately, that wouldn't increase the demand for new bulldozers. Cutting back on production or at least scaling back on plans to increase production is sensible and prudent.
But laying off all those people? Is that really necessary?
Somehow I have the feeling that it's made necessary by something other than what Caterpillar actually does to make money, such as what people who aren't in manufacturing do to make money:
The company reported a fourth-quarter profit of $661 million, or $1.08 a share, compared with $975 million, or $1.50 a share, last year.
Sales rose 6 percent to $12.92 billion.
Analysts, on average, expected the Peoria, Illinois-based company to report a profit of $1.28 a share on sales of $11.97 billion...
"We knew Caterpillar was going to be a disaster." said Eli Lustgarten, an analyst at Longbow Research. "We just didn't know the magnitude of it. And it's ugly."
This is how it looks to me. Caterpiller had a worse year in 2008 than it had in 2007, but it still made money. The profit on its stock shares fell, but that was expected. What wasn't expected was that it would fall that much. Twenty whole cents more than was expected. And that's considered "a disaster"?
I don't get it.
I get that sales of stocks is one way a corporation builds up capital for investment. But it's not the only way. Caterpillar made money by selling construction equipment! Its stockholders didn't make as much money as they expected to. The stockholders' disappointment counts more than the sales force's successes?
This is what I need explained. How did we get an economy that's driven by the expectations of people who don't actually make, design, build, or do anything, they just sit around speculating on how much money they can make by investing in whatever looks most profitable to them today?
There doesn't seem to be any sense in the whole scheme of things that there will be good years and bad years, banner years and years when things weren't so hot but at least you put some money in the bank. There is only the expectation that every quarter should be more profitable than the last one, which is delusional, and will and has only led to a economy driven either by irrational exuberance or blind panic.
How is it that we developed an economy in which companies like Caterpillar have to please not just their customers, and not even primarily their customers, but a whole colony of greedy lemmings who know shit about the construction business and could care less?
Update: Someone in the know, speaking slowly and using illustrations, explained to me that most of IBM's layoffs are in a division that has been underperfoming because it sells and services old legacy systems---that is, mainframes. Which means that the job cuts are resulting from a change in the industry/technology/customer needs/business, and that I understand although I don't like it that IBM isn't offering laid-off workers jobs in their profitable divisions, because the stock market likes it when companies "streamline." So I'm back to my original point of confusion: How is it we've given ourselves an economy based on the whims of shareholders?
Slumdog Millionaire! It's got everything. Chills, thrills, laughter, tears. Good guys, bad guys, action, adventure, romance. The leads are young, talented, and attractive. The locales are exotic but the cinematography captures them as lived-in, alive, not as post cards or social studies text book illustrations. It doesn't look like any other movie. And it has a great soundtrack!
Plus, there's not much in the way of competition, at least to gauge by NYCweboy's rundown of the nominees over at newcritics, Oscar...By The Light Of Brangelina.
By the way, I knew what the final question was going to be right out of the gate.
In Dowd’s novel the reason Caroline Kennedy isn’t going to be New York’s next senator isn’t that Kennedy made a laughingstock out of herself with her startled rabbit performances every time she faced the public. No, the reason is that the nefarious Clintons done her in:
Paterson’s five weeks of dithering let the jealous vindictiveness of the Clintons and friends — still fuming over Caroline’s endorsement of Obama and Teddy’s blocking Hillary from a leading health care role in the Senate — poison the air. With his usual sense of entitlement and aggrievement, Bill Clinton of Arkansas did not want Caroline Kennedy of New York to have the seat that Hillary Clinton of Illinois held.
Save it for the screenplay, Maureen.
Some more fiction passing as reporting:
The 42-year-old Gillibrand, who has been in the House for only two years, is known as opportunistic and sharp- elbowed. Tracy Flick is her nickname among colleagues in the New York delegation, many of whom were M.I.A. at her Albany announcement.
Who calls her Tracy Flick? Who didn’t show? Dowd doesn’t say. My parents’ Congressman, Paul Tonko, who represents the district next door to Gillibrand’s, in other words a fellow upstater, was there. John Hall, another upstater, who represents a district just below, and he’s expressed his enthusiasm for Gillibrand.
Why did some of the no shows not show? Other things to do, some of them. They’re members of the United States Congress. They’re very busy people. I suppose some of them who didn’t show might not have had anything better to do, but sounds to me as though the ones Dowd means were downstate politicians who wanted the job and didn't get it and decided to stay home and sulk. I don’t know that’s the case, but I can write fiction too if I want to.
And before we call any more smart, hardworking, ambitious female politicians Tracy Flicks, can we all go watch the Election again? In the movie, Tracy Flick is vain, self-centered, and driven to succeed to an almost Nixonian degree, but she is also the hardest working student in the school, and the most involved, her school spirit is genuine, and her plans for student government are well thought out. She has a very unattractive sense of entitlement, but she has a point. If the choice is between her and the slackers around her, she is entitled to certain things because she has worked to earn them and worked well and they haven’t. She’s also honest, at least as a campaigner. And most important she is not the villain. Matthew Broderick’s character, teacher Jim McCallister, is. Tracy Flick isn’t nice. Jim McCallister is. But niceness is not the same as virtuousness. McCallister is driven to self-destruction by vanity, jealousy, and self-loathing. He makes the mistake of seeing Tracy Flick as a reflection of himself. He looks at her and sees a beautiful and vivacious young woman on her way to bigger and better things but he also sees in the mirror she represents a schlubby and dull no longer young man who is going nowhere fast and he hates it and sets out to shatter the mirror.
Anyone tempted to try to diminish and dismiss a successful younger woman whose best days may lay ahead of her by calling her a Tracy Flick has to be careful that the comparison doesn’t boomerang, because the point of a Tracy Flick is that she doesn’t exist except as a temptation to self-loathing for a jealous and spiteful middler whose best days are well behind her.
Julia thinks Gillibrand will be a stronger candidate in 2010 than I worried yesterday she’d be. She’s also provided some helpful maps for downstaters and out of staters who’ve argued that New York is too blue a blue state to be represented by someone as conservative as Gillibrand. She also wants to thank everyone for playing Pick My Senator.
Jane Hamsher reminds those who are disappointed that Caroline Kennedy won't be ascending to her martyred uncle's old Senate seat to worship not false idols.
Unlike other bailouts, pizza bailouts have oversight. But no transparency, because who wants to be able to see through their pizza? New Paltz, NY. Thursday. January 22, 2009.
Record is that her claims to be a conservative are based mainly on her pro-gun lobby posturing, voting against the Bailout, although some Liberals voted against it too and some conservatives voted for it, and considering what's come of it, voting against it has turned out to be the right thing to have done, and talking a lot about balanced budgets . Otherwise, it strikes me that her vote for the Lily Ledbetter Act is more indicative of her politics.
Gut reaction here is that by appointing her Governor Paterson has given the Republicans their best shot at pulling off a hat trick in 2010. Her upstate appeal is there, but limited. Democrats in Albany will embrace her as one of their own, but Democrats in Syracuse, Rochester, and Buffalo, while they might be mildly flattered that Paterson picked an upstater, aren't going to knock each other down in their rush to the polls to vote for someone from the sticks far off to their east and I can't see many upstate Republicans and Independents being all that excited just because, gosh and golly, she's an upstater too, just like us. Besides, if Paterson's own poll numbers upstate keep sinking, whatever upstate conservative support she might bring to the ticket, he loses for her. Then she has no base of support in New York City, Other Democrats are already talking about a primary challenge which would only be good for the Party if she loses, because if she bears a grudge afterwards there's not much she can do to sabotage the winner, but whoever loses to her will likely be a downstate machine pol who can deny her votes and money and positive press and down there they enjoy bearing grudges. Our old pal Chris the Cop wondered how I could possibly think choosing Caroline Kennedy would be a good idea---this was before Kennedy showed that she was just not up to the pressures of running for office, and, yes, that's a deliberate understatement---and my answer at the time was that she was the choice least likely to have Democrats at each other's throats come 2010. She was also the choice Michael Bloomberg was least likely to challenge if he was to decide it might be more fun to be a Senator instead of Mayor for Life. Meanwhile, back in her largely rural, longtime Republican district: Gillibrand won in 2006 because her incumbent opponent turned out to be a drunken wife-beater. Her re-election victory in 2008 was solid but then she was the incumbent and it was a Democratic year, advantages her would-be Democratic successor won't have. The Republicans could pick up her House seat, her Senate seat, and the governor's mansion. Not saying that's going to happen. Or that it's likely. Just that she looks to me like the weakest choice Paterson could have made. Seems that in 2010 both Paterson and Gillibrand will need Chuck Schumer and Andrew Cuomo to have long and strong coattails. I'm assuming that Cuomo bears no grudges for being passed over and doesn't challenge Paterson in a primary.
Fact is I don't know enough about what I'm talking about to talk any more about it. I'll work on that and get back to you.
Updated, officially: Because it's official. Gillibrand's our new senator.
Pop Mannion, who's actually tied into politics up that way, told me this morning that he thinks she'll work out all right. He thinks she's not as conservative as she has to let on and she'll move left once she's representing the whole state instead of that one district. He's worried about losing that district, too, but the odds are that it'll be lost anyway after the next re-districting.
That was Julia's take too, in an email exchange we had this morning. Hat tip to her, btw, for the link to the Marist polls.
Unless the aliens landed before noon Tuesday and he donned his old flight suit, jumped into the cockpit of an F-14 conveniently parked on the White House lawn, kept fueled up and with rockets armed for eight years for just such an emergency, and flew off into the skies to shoot down all the flying saucers by himself and I missed it, former President George W. Bush is going to be remembered mainly for four things.
Starting and failing to win a war of aggression against a nation that was no threat to us.
Playing air guitar while a great American city drowned, then leaving it to rot in the mud for three years.
Getting caught flat-footed by the greatest financial meltdown in the country's history since 1929, a meltdown in great part caused by his administration and Party's policies, practices, and neglect.
Reading a children's storybook while terrorists flew hijacked airplanes into the World Trade Center.
History books will note that Bush lied us and bullied us and frightened us into the War, that the only victims of Katrina he appeared to muster any compassion for were a rich Southern Senator and his own incompetent head of FEMA---"Heckuva job, Brownie."---that his "solution" to the economic collapse was to give away the Treasury to the crooks and fools who'd made the mess, that he'd been warned a month ahead of time that terrorists planned to hijack airplanes and use them to kill people. Historians will add other details, about torture, about alienating allies, about politicizing all aspects of government and turning the Justice Department into the legal arm of the Republican Party, about the attempt to hand over all our Social Security money to the same crooks and fools who wrecked our banking system. But in the popular imagination, George W. Bush will be the President who turned everything he touched to shit.
In the month or so before he left office, left town, and, let's hope, left us alone at last, squads of Bush League apologists took to the airwaves and the op-ed pages to try to persuade History to look kindly on their old boss and hero. It was irritating to listen to and read, but also amusing, because the only way most of them could find to go about making the case that Bush had been a successful President was by arguing that he hadn't actually been that bad.
The rest just made up a character named George Bush and told folk tales about a fictional Presidency.
But to the degree any of them were serious, they were forced to rely on one idea. History would prove that George W. Bush was right.
No, it won't. Like I said, History's already being written and it's not good news for Bush.
Even if the pages were still blank, though, think about what's being argued. That sometime, in the future, George W. Bush will turn out to have been a completely different person and President for the one we took him for.
In the future, George Bush is going to get yet another shot at getting it right.
He's going to be given one more second chance after a lifetime of second chances.
For a variety of reasons many Washington Media Insiders were heavily invested in the idea of Bush as a successful President and they never tired of assuring us that any day now he'd start acting like one.
David Broder was particularly fond of this pretty story.
This claque of journalists and pundits rooted overtly for Bush's transfiguration which they seemed convinced was inevitable, if it wasn't already happening right before their eyes. The day was coming soon when he would lead them up the mountain to blind them with his glory and there they would build tents for him and for Ronald Reagan on his right and Winston Churchill on his left.
They covered George Bush as a phoenix, reborn and brand new as President after every self-immolating screw-up and act of destruction. This is it, this time he'll turn it around. Every defeat was a victory in disguise, the re-defining moment.
All their hopes and expectations were based on the notion that people change.
Starting over is one of our national myths, an item of faith in the religion of America. Pack up and move. Go west, young man. Hit the gym. Change jobs. Get out of that awful marriage. Go back to school. Win the lottery. Quit smoking. Stop drinking. Give up gambling and running around. Find Jesus, and be born again.
Today is the first day of the rest of your life.
This was the basis of George Bush's whole political career. At age 40 or so, after a lifetime of failure, screw-ups, and disgrace, he'd put down the bottle, turned his life over to Jesus, and practically overnight become a new man. That as a new man he was hardly indistinguishable from the old one except that instead of trying to do anything for himself and making a hash of it he let smarter, more diligent, more determined and focused men use him as their tool. Nevermind that last part. The important part of the story is that he changed.
And having changed he was now ready and able to be the success he was born to be.
This idea, that people change, especially when God and Jesus take them by the hand, and that that change always leads to success and happiness, is so dear to so many Americans that they were willing to reward Bush for the great things he had not yet done on the grounds that of course now that he had changed he would do them. They made him Governor of Texas and then President of the United States, even though there was nothing in his past that suggested he'd be any good at either job and much that showed he would in fact be as bad as he turned out to be.
The past didn't matter. He'd changed. That which had been crooked had been made straight. That which was wanting had been numbered. All was not vanity and vexation and seeking after wind.
If he can do it, we can do it.
We elected George Bush President of the United States to reward ourselves for the changes we were going to make that would make us better, happier, richer, wiser, thinner, sexier, younger, stronger, cleaner, sober, worthier of love and therefore loved.
People change. Bush changed. We can change.
This is the central tenet of one of the great American religions. There's Football, there's Money, and then there's the Church of the Second Chance, which has many denominations and hundreds of forms of worship, rites, rituals, and practices. It is the religion of the self-help movement and the psycho-therapeutic industry. It has replaced Christianity in many of the mega-churches. Used to be you rose from the Mourner's Bench to testify. Now you attend workshops and form support groups. The point used to be saving one's soul for a better life to come. Now the point is saving one's sense of self-worth in the here and now, and considering how miserable, lonely, and self-loathing so many of us are, it's hard to argue that this isn't a good point for a religion to make.
People change. Bush changed. I can change.
Well, people do change. They kick bad habits and develop new, good ones. They change jobs and discover talents they never knew they had. They find satisfaction in tasks they'd never had reason to suspect they'd be any good at. They go back to school and learn new skills and new ideas and new methods. They move across country and make new friends, discover joys in scenery they'd never imagined was out there to enjoy, find the change in the weather has improved their health and mental well-being. They go to a doctor and come out with a prescription and within weeks their moods have evened out, their sadness has lifted, their anxiety is gone. They fall in love and discover that it's true, the whole world loves a lover, and they love the whole world in return.
They fall asleep misers and misanthropes on Christmas eve, secret, solitary, and self-contained as oysters, and wake up on Christmas morning as good a friend, as good a master or mistress, as good a man or woman as the good old City knows.
People change. But they transform. They don't transmutate.
The new persons they become are made out of the same stuff as the old persons they were.
And more often than not it's not the case that they have changed but that their circumstances have. They've been given an opportunity.
The apparently mediocre and deservedly obscure math teacher miserably going through the motions in a suburban high school where the principal's a blockhead, the students are without ambition, and the parents think schools exist to justify the hiring of a football coach takes a job in the inner city and a few years later is winning awards and receiving Christmas cards from former students beginning their graduate work at MIT and Cal Tech.
The drop-out from that teacher's old school enlists because there's nothing else to do and a few years later is commanding a company of Marines.
The washed-up quarterback working as a clerk in a grocery store gets a second look and a tryout and fifteen years later is leading his team to the Super Bowl.
But there's nothing magical about the apparent changes in these "new" people. If you look back, the teacher always knew his subject and had a talent for explaining it, just no one was listening to him. The Marine captain was always brave and a quick thinker and she had a way of getting people to follow her lead. Kurt Warner always had a good arm and a good eye.
The "changed" person who showed no signs before her transformation that she would become this "new" person is a rare, rare bird. And it's more likely in such a case that it's not that she didn't show any signs but that there was no one around her perceptive enough to spot them or that her circumstances before the change were so horrific that she wasn't able to be any kind of person at all, she was merely a reaction to or a reflection of the horror.
And a person can only change with a change of circumstances to the degree she has the talent or the skill or the wisdom or the discipline to take advantage of the change. A bad accountant can change accounting jobs as many times as he wants but if the problem is that he's innumerate he's not going to change himself in the process.
Change requires the person who wants to change to make smart choices about what to change into.
A man who does not take advice well, who is incurious, short-tempered, and impatient, who can't be bothered with minutia, nuance, and ambiguities, who needs to surround himself with flatterers and toadies and lackeys, who loses focus easily, who refuses to admit mistakes which means he can't correct them, who thinks that he is owed the job instead of having to earn it, is not going to change into a good President no matter how much he has "changed" by sobering up and turning to Jesus and no matter how many second chances he's given.
When people talked about Barack Obama's lack of experience as a disqualification for the Presidency, they were not looking at his biography. When other people talked about how Sarah Palin's lack of experience should not be a disqualification, because look at Barack Obama, they weren't looking at her biography.
The record of President Obama's life is the record of someone who has always been changing himself for the better, of someone who has worked exceptionally hard at whatever he's done, learned from every job he's undertaken how to do the next job, who has improved himself by leaps and bounds all his life. All Presidents have had to learn on the job. President Obama has a history of learning on the job extremely well.
The record of Sarah Palin's life, though, is the record of someone who has always managed to improve her situation while not doing very much to improve herself. It's the record of a vain and overly self-confident person who has just assumed she's deserving of and up to whatever job she's decided she wants. Look at her now and you see someone who didn't learn anything from the fall campaign except that people don't love her as much as she deserves to be loved. She has said she may run for President, she's probably going to run for the United States Senate, but she's not doing anything to prepare herself for either job. Instead she's busy teaching herself how to become a better celebrity and making headlines by whining and pitying herself in public.
The record of George Bush's life wasn't simply the record of a chronic fuck-up. It was the record of someone who learned nothing from his mistakes, of someone who did nothing different every time he was given a second chance. The myth of George W. Bush is the myth of a man who changed. But I'm not sure Bush himself ever thought for a moment he needed to change. It looks to me as though he thought of his drinking as an obstacle not a symptom of deep-rooted unhappiness or a sign of a bad or a weak character. I think he made the mistake of thinking the only problem he had was drinking and he thought of his drinking as if it was a form of temperamental asthma, a health problem that kept him from running that four-minute mile he knew he was capable of running if he could only find a cure and get up his wind. Once he quit, he thought, he was done. It never occurred to him that even if his lungs were up to it, his legs might not be, and he needed to go into training. Didn't help that he was surrounded by people who found it to their advantage to spot him a hundred yards in every race and move the finish line closer and bribe the judges and knobble the competition.
George Bush's record after he quit drinking is not the record of a man who stopped fucking up but of a man who stopped trying. As I said, Bush's successes after he got clean and sober were due to his putting himself in the hands of other people who succeeded for him without taking any of the credit.
George Bush did not change, but the story of his life could be told in a way that made it sound as if he did, and the American faith in change and our belief in a second chance is so strong that Bush's handlers and enablers hardly had to work to exploit it.
It was often said by his admirers that George Bush was authentic, that he was exactly what he appeared to be. But this was a vice not a virtue. He didn't have the character or the temperament for the job and he never tried to change that, and given that once in office he pursued policies that had proven countless times in the past to be worse than useless, there was never a real chance he would turn out to be a successful President. History will not give him another second chance.
Unless...
Maybe he learned something from all the time he spent working with President Obama in the last couple months. Maybe when he's out of office and away from Dick Cheney he'll be able to listen to his father, follow his example. Maybe he'll make friends with Bill Clinton too. He was never a good President, but maybe like Jimmy Carter he can become a good ex-President...
Sorry. Can't help myself. I'm an American. I believe in second chances. The religion of Change is my religion too.
__________________________________
I don't think History will be kind to Bush, but Will Bunch is worried that the attempts to rewrite it in Bush's favor will continue for a long time yet to come. Good reason to worry. Long after 60 per cent of the people had figured him out, plenty Media bobbleheads were still at it.
This time, they kept insisting, he'll be different.
Some of them stayed at it till the end.
He can still turn it all around. History will come to rescue his reputation. It's happened before. Look at Harry Truman.
A real understanding of history has never been required mental equipment for a job in the Washington Press Corps.
There are historical reasons for Truman's unpopularity when he left office, reasons that have no parallel in assessments of Bush's Presidency. And the reasons for Truman's late in life ascension to beloved elder statesmen are more biographical than historical. The case for Harry Truman was made by Harry Truman in Merle Miller's Plain Speaking . Truman turned out to be his own best advocate. Historians had already begun to revise their estimation of Truman, but Truman himself is the one who changed the popular conception of his Presidency.
He told his own story in a direct, simple but eloquent, and above all truthful fashion, and he changed people's minds.
Perhaps Laura will be able to speak up for George the way Harry was able to speak up for himself, but no one should be expecting any literary surprises from George W. Bush. Grant's Memoirs were only a surprise to people who hadn't read his letters and war dispatches or met with him for extended conversations.
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Ok, Nance has the picture. I'll give you the quote.
George: Just a minute — just a minute. Now, hold on, Mr. Potter. You're right when you say my father was no business man. I know that. Why he ever started this cheap, penny-ante Building and Loan, I'll never know. But neither you nor anybody else can say anything against his character, because his whole life was...Why, in the twenty-five years since he and Uncle Billy started this thing, he never once thought of himself. Isn't that right, Uncle Billy? He didn't save enough money to send Harry to school, let alone me. But he did help a few people get out of your slums, Mr. Potter. And what's wrong with that? Why...Here, you're all businessmen here. Doesn't it make them better citizens? Doesn't it make them better customers? You...you said...What'd you say just a minute ago?...They had to wait and save their money before they even ought to think of a decent home. Wait! Wait for what? Until their children grow up and leave them? Until they're so old and broken-down that they...Do you know how long it takes a working man to save five thousand dollars? Just remember this, Mr. Potter, that this rabble you're talking about...they do most of the working and paying and living and dying in this community. Well, is it too much to have them work and pay and live and die in a couple of decent rooms and a bath? Anyway, my father didn't think so. People were human beings to him, but to you, a warped frustrated old man, they're cattle. Well, in my book he died a much richer man than you'll ever be!
Potter: I'm not interested in your book. I'm talking about the Building and Loan.
George: I know very well what you're talking about. You're talking about something you can't get your fingers on, and it's galling you. That's what you're talking about, I know...Well, I've said too much. I...You're the Board here. You do what you want with this thing. Just one more thing, though. This town needs this measly one-horse institution if only to have some place where people can come without crawling to Potter.
Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age.
---more because of the follow-up later than for the chastisement of corporate and Wall Street greedheads---
For everywhere we look, there is work to be done.
The state of our economy calls for action: bold and swift. And we will act not only to create new jobs but to lay a new foundation for growth.
We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together.
We will restore science to its rightful place and wield technology's wonders to raise health care's quality and lower its costs.
We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age.
All this we can do. All this we will do.
Of course that was a tout for his stimulus package. But it's also a reminder of what work is and what it's for.
A nation's work, that is.
The Bush Leaguers did so much that was wrong---wrong in the sense of so wrong that if the world was just and God existed the lot of them would be going first to jail then to hell, but also wrong in that it was incorrect, misguided, foolish, a big mistake, dumb, and guaranteed to bring about failure and disaster---that it's hard to keep track of it all or decide which, after the invasion of Iraq, was the worst thing they did. Right now, I'm leaning towards their economic policy.
Because they had no economic policy.
What they had when they came into office was a gift list, immediate rewards to their pals and cronies. Massive tax cuts, de-regulation of everything they could get away with de-regulating, anything and everything the oil companies wanted, plus a gift card to be used at any time---a promise that whatever Big Business, Big Oil, and Big Money were up to, the Little Government That Couldn't would always look the other way.
This was more than a matter of the Government leaving the economy in the hands of the believers in the Invisible Hand. Under George W. Bush, the government got out of the economy pretty much altogether. It didn't just stop regulating, it stopped investing.
Governments invest by building things and by funding research and development.
The private sector builds things and funds research and development when it sees those things resulting in an immediate profit.
The Government does both because it sees the need now and the benefits in the future.
Where the government lays the groundwork, the private sector will follow or can be persuaded to follow.
By leaving the economy in the hands of the believers in the Invisible Hand, the Bush Leaguers left the economy to be run by the demand for immediate profit.
This was the most principled conservative thing they did, which tells us all we need to know about "principled conservativism."
The trouble was that the believers in the Invisible Hand had long ago discovered that the quickest way to profit in this day and age was through the buying and selling of toys and gizmos and lots of other useless crap.
I don't know when to date its beginning, but it's definitely been the case for the last thirty years that our economy has been based not on making things, not on actual work, even though we spend a lot of time supposedly at work, but on gobbling up things we don't need and didn't really have the money to afford.
The housing bubble was a part of this. People bought houses they just didn't need and couldn't afford. People who should have stayed renters bought Cape Cods. People who should have bought Cape Cods bought McMansions. People who shouldn't have bought McMansions, because they're a waste of space and energy and are mostly ugly, but who could afford them at least, bought second homes and "investment properties."
I'm not blaming people here, although the President did, indirectly and with a light and understanding touch.
There were con-artists at work in all this, but the point is that most people who bought houses during the bubble bought more square-footage than they needed, which is to say they bought a lot of nothing along with the amount of space they actually lived in.
On a smaller level, we filled up all that extra space with a lot of toys and gizmos. Wide-screen TVs, exercise machines, extra computers, video game consoles, the usual suspects. But also bigger and shinier necessary stuff---Refrigerators, dish washers, clothes dryers, cars---that by being bigger and shinier without bigness and shininess adding anything necessary to the machines' basic functions turned into toys and gizmos.
I'm not condemning any of these things in themselves or the owning of them. I'm not a Puritan. The bare necessities, the simple bare necessities, may be enough for Balloo the Bear to get by on, but life is more pleasant, more enjoyable, more, ahem, bear-able, for there being in it a few luxuries, harmless self-indulgences, and toys and gizmos that add nothing of immediate practical value but give comfort and solace and a sense of momentary peace.
But very few of these toys and gizmos were made here, so by gobbling them up we weren't helping our own economy produce, only spend. We weren't helping put the nation to work. And---this is the more important part and gets back to what the President said yesterday---the thing about useless crap is that it's useless, you don't have to use it, which means that you can get by without it.
On top of that, there's only so much of it we can fit into our lives. After a while, there's just no more room for it. We just run out of space. And we run out of time. It's great to have a wide-screen TV and 250 channels, but when do we get to watch it?
But even if we have the time and the space, at a certain point, we've just spent all we have to spend on this stuff. We run out of money.
Which is what has happened on a massive scale.
People don't have the money to spend, or feel like spending, on useless crap.
The elites in Washington didn't notice that the economy had gone south until their own stock portfolios and 401(k)s took the big hit last fall. But that hit just took a long time connecting. The blow was delivered years ago when lots of regular people started losing their jobs and lots of others couldn't find new ones or better ones and all the rest of the regular people got worried.
I'm not sure the elites in Washington yet understand the 2004 election was about the economy as well as about the War on Terror, which is why George Bush almost lost, and the 2006 election was as much about the economy as about the war, and the election of 2008 was about the economy more than anything else.
Whatever the reason, though, either because we couldn't afford it anymore, or we figured out we didn't need it, or we ran out of time and room, we cut way back on the buying of toys and gizmos and useless crap.
And so goodbye, Circuit City!
To be simplistic about it, which I have to be because I'm simple-minded. Circuit City is only a synecdoche for a big chunk of the Corporate Profiteer-driven economy. The believers in the Invisible Hand had decided that the country needed and wanted and would always need and want an endless supply of useless crap and more and more of it. Again, the housing bubble was part of this. The idiotic notion that housing prices would keep going up, coupled with the blockheaded decision that it didn't matter that people couldn't really afford to pay those ever-increasing prices, pumped lots of air into the bubble, but so did the fact, rather, the ignoring of the fact, that there are only so many people in the world. Apparently it never occurred to anybody it should have occurred to that people don't buy houses like they buy other toys and gizmos, to be used for a couple of years and then disposed of when they break. Once people buy a house, they're usually in it for a long, long time. Which is to say that when you've sold them a house, you've taken them out of the market as future customer. But houses kept getting built and put up for sale as if wherever you stuck a For Sale sign in the ground, whole armies of potential buyers would spring up, like soldiers from dragon's teeth, armed with pre-approved adjustable rate mortgages.
How many "neighborhoods" now standing empty were built on the assumption that if you built it they would come?
What I'm getting at that the whole economy, with so much of it based on the buying and selling of useless crap, was a kind of a bubble.
As much as we congratulated ourselves on our "productivity"---or rather were told by the Big Business elites and their apologists and cheerleaders in the Media and in Government to congratulate ourselves, in lieu of being rewarded for it with things like raises and benefits and job security---we weren't producing very much. We weren't working.
We were just consuming.
We, and I mean we as a nation run by the believers in the Invisible Hand, had become a nation of grasshoppers. Yesterday, the President said it's time we got back to the serious business of being ants.
In those parts of the address I quoted above, the President was announcing that the Government was going to get back into the economy. There is going to be an economic policy. The Government is going to invest again. It is going to fund research and development. It's going to build things. The Government is going to see that things are done because they are needed now and well benefit us later and not because they will profit some of us immediately.
There's a good argument to be made, and Krugman and others are making it, that the President's plans are all well in good but maybe a little too farsighted. Jobs will be created down the line, but we need jobs, lots of jobs, now. I tend to agree, but right now I just want to focus on the good part.
The President's plans are based on the idea that the point of it all is not profit, and it's not for us to be able to go back to buying more toys and gizmos and other useless crap.
The point is to put the nation back to doing real work, and for one reason. Emphasis added at the end of the quote coming up here:
Nor is the question before us whether the market is a force for good or ill. Its power to generate wealth and expand freedom is unmatched.
But this crisis has reminded us that without a watchful eye, the market can spin out of control. The nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous.
The success of our economy has always depended not just on the size of our gross domestic product, but on the reach of our prosperity; on the ability to extend opportunity to every willing heart -- not out of charity, but because it is the surest route to our common good.
Wasn't sure where to file it. Right now I've got it under Partisans, Pundits, and Pros, which maybe I should now change to Post-partisans, Pundits, and Pros.
...says my near-neighbor, Pete Seeger, and one of these days I'm going to have to do the neighborly thing and introduce myself.
You understand that by near I mean he lives across the river, twenty miles away as the crow flies, so it's not as though it's been that I could just drop in and ask to borrow a cup of sugar. The only reason I call Seeger a neighbor is that he keeps popping up in my local newspaper, saving the environment here, getting touted for a Nobel Peace Prize there. Sometimes I feel I have a better idea of his comings and goings than I do of my actual neighbors right here on the street.
For instance, I know where Seeger was Sunday, down in Washington, taking part in the concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. You know that too, don't you? But did you know that he was more excited performing at a local church on Monday? Said so in the paper:
Bruce Springsteen called Pete Seeger the other day and asked if he could share the stage with the venerable folk singer during the weekend's pre-inauguration celebrations.
Seeger said he'd be happy to — that it would be an honor. But, in recounting the story and telling his plans for the next few days, Seeger reserved his real enthusiasm for his scheduled performance with a group of Beacon schoolchildren at a Baptist church there during a daylong celebration of Martin Luther King's legacy on Monday.
Paper reported something else interesting. Seeger didn't want to sing "This Land Is Your Land."
"They want me to sing "This land is Your Land" in front of the Lincoln Memorial, but at these big rallies, a fast song, by the time the sound reaches people a quarter mile away, it's out of sync."
The only time singing in front of a massive rally worked for him was during the Moratorium in Washington in 1969. To demonstrate, he sang, at a leisurely pace, "All we are saying, is give peace a chance ... ."
Then he sang the chorus of a freedom song from the civil rights era, "Oh, Wallace, You Never Can Jail Us All." Then, trying to prove he was old, he sang a tune that goes "How do I know my youth is all spent? / My get-up-and-go has got up and went!"
If I'm reading Krugman correctly, and he's right---the latter far, far more likely than the former---what the banks are essentially asking is for the government to declare that the last ten years or so have more or less been a giant game of Monopoly played with house money and now that the game is over and they've lost, they want us to fork over a shitload of real money so that they can start playing a new game.
The banks want to pretend as though the last decade never happened and, according to Krugman, the feds, even the newly Obama-ized feds, seem inclined to go along with the charade.
Have I got this right? We're going to party like it's 1999 all over again?
Except, what do I mean be we, kemo sabe?
We don't get to pretend anything. We're still stuck in a busted economy with too much debt and not enough money and no sign the government really wants to help us.
If we're going to pay off the bank's losses, so that they can start losing money all over again, shouldn't we get something out of this, besides the chance to get shaken down and gouged all over again?
Can't we declare the last ten years null and void too?
In fact, wouldn't that be better all around, to put us all back where we were during the Clinton years, when we were flush enough to be good customers?
Because as far as I can see the big problem with letting the banks start over is that they'll be without something they had last time they began this game.
If by "the Surge worked" you mean it curtailed much of the violence and carnage unleashed by our unnecessary, badly planned, and undermanned invasion and the stupidity and ineptitude of our occupation, well, then, ok, it worked.
I can't see why you think that's much of an achievement to credit President Bush with though. He had the "courage," as you call it, to do something to stop his great mistake from getting worse?
And it's certainly no solace to the families of the tens and tens of thousands of Iraqis and the 4500 American troops who've died because of that mistake and hardly any comfort to the thousands who will die for as far as we can tell years to come, because, in case you didn't notice, Mr Beinhart, sir, by the "Surge worked" there's no way you can mean "ended the killing."
Basically, you are asking us to congratulate the President because partly by luck, partly by the efforts of others, and partly by the addition of troops he's managed to stop the house fire he started from spreading beyond the block and has even managed to put out the flames in houses a few doors down from the first one, and meanwhile that first house and the houses next door are still burning and people are trapped inside and he's still the one who started the fire and had no idea how to put it out.
If by "the Surge worked," though, you mean that it constitutes some sort of victory, that it amounted to a do-over for the War, and that by "working" it has justified the lying and the deceit and the fear-mongering that made the invasion possible, and fixed it so that all the death and mutilation and misery were "a small price" and "worth it," then that's just nuts.
But if by "worked" you mean you think it gives you sufficient enough intellectual cover to congratulate yourself on having been right about the War all along and what you want us to admit, really, is not that George Bush achieved something worthwhile, but that you aren't as big a tool and a fool as the record of your writing on the War proves you are, well, then, I'm sorry, I just can't bring myself to do it.
Setting the bar very low for J.J. Abrams' Star Trek.
I'm a fan of the original series, but I'm not a purist. If legends like Robin Hood and King Arthur can be rewritten and revised for new generations, then there's nothing sacred about a TV show, and I don't see any reason why the characters from the original series can't be treated like, well, characters. Basil Rathbone was my father's Sherlock Holmes, but he learned to appreciate Jeremy Brett, and Brett was my Holmes but I'm looking forward to seeing what Robert Downey Jr does with the part. William Shatner defined Jim Kirk, but Chris Pine might have something to add. There's no telling from a trailer or stills but, surprisingly, Pine looks more Kirk-like---Kirk-like, not Shatner-like---to me than Leonard Nimoy-lookalike Zachary Quinto looks like Spock. It's not just that Quinto looks so gosh darn young. It's that he looks young in the wrong way. Boyish. Little boyish. Like a kid in a contest-winning Halloween costume. Spock may have been young once, but he was never that kind of young. And Quinto doesn't look brainy enough. I can't see him winning a game of checkers let alone a game of three-dimensional chess. Pine, though, appears to have the right degree of humor and swagger.
Can't tell a lot about the other characters, except that Karl Urban seems to be doing a scarily exact impersonation of the late DeForest Kelly as McCoy, as if Kelly had managed to implant his katra in Urban's head before he died. Urban delivers a very Bones-esque line, not up there with "I'm a doctor, not a bricklayer," but close: "Space is disease and danger, wrapped in darkness and silence." As Scotty, Simon Pegg looks absolutely nothing like James Doohan and in the one line he has in the trailer his Scots burr sounds more like the Lucky Charms leprechaun's brogue. But it's a very Scotty-esque moment. The Enterprise appears to have gone through one of those rock the camera back and forth and have everybody on the bridge throw themselves out of their chairs while the sparks fly moments of near-destruction, the first of many the ship'll experience under Kirk's command, with the usual results---Scotty has to pull off another engineering miracle, and Scotty, who's apparently new to the Enterprise, is thrilled. "I like this ship! It's exciting!" By which he means he knows he's going to get a lot of opportunities to fix things.
The movie jumps around in time. We're going to see Kirk and Spock as boys and Spock as a teenager. But it's impossible to determine the movie's timeline from the trailer. I can't figure out when in their careers the main action is meant to be taking place. There appear to be departures from the series' established history. As far as we know from the original, Kirk was never on board the Enterprise until the day he took command. In the trailer it looks as though he's assigned to her at the age when the series has him as weapons officer aboard the Farragut. Captain Christopher Pike was a young man the series' first pilot episode. In the movie, he's in his fifties. That isn't a departure if we're to think that fifteen or more years passed between the day he and the young Spock landed on Talos IV and the accident that crippled him. But it appears that Spock is meant to be fresh from Starfleet Academy. That would mean the visit to the menagerie must have happened in the movie's time, oh, about last week. And the villain is a Romulan, and we know from the series no one from Starfleet had ever seen a Romulan before the Enterprise met up with one of their ships in Balance of Terror. Smallville has proven that the "official history" can be changed in ways that make a story truer to the spirit of the original than other more faithful re-tellings. It's even possible for a re-telling to improve upon the original, as Batman Begins and The Dark Knight have. Whether Abrams manages either trick depends on the script. I'll be ok with it if he makes a better Star Trek movie than The Final Frontier.
As I said. A low bar.
The movie looks like Star Trek, the Star Trek movies, at any rate, if not the original series, and why would it want to recapture that look anyway with its cheesy sets and goofy special effects? I'm prepared to enjoy it for what it's likely to be. I won't be surprised or too disappointed if it stinks, but I won't be shocked if it's good and turns out to be a successful re-boot.
But this is all based on the trailer and the photos and visits to the website and a couple of interviews with Chris Pine. So who knows?
There are, however, two things I think I see signs of in the trailer that worry me.
One is the apparent emphasis on Spock as a misfit and outsider. Of course, being an outsider is one of Spock's defining characteristics. He isn't at home anywhere except aboard the Enterprise and that's because of first Pike's and then Kirk's treating him as neither a Vulcan nor a human nor a mutt but as their friend and crewman.
As he was originally written, and as Leonard Nimoy started off playing him, Spock dealt with his outsiderness by trying to erase one cause of it. He insisted on his Vulcan-ness. This made him go awfully hard on himself. He would never let himself feel sorry for himself. That's a human thang, and he is not human. He may have actually appreciated McCoy's anti-Vulcan insults and prejudices because they were proof that he was being a good Vulcan. But while he never let up on himself, his father's critical voice always in his pointy ears, his sense of being neither one nor the the other himself often seemed to make him more open and tolerant of difference in others.
McCoy could never let go of his view of Spock as Vulcan, because as far as the large-hearted, overly-emotional McCoy was concerned, Spock's "cold-blooded logic" was a character flaw. To Kirk, though, Spock was always just Spock. When at Spock's funeral in The Wrath of Khan he called Spock's soul the most human he had ever known, he wasn't saying that Spock's biologically human side was his real self. He was struggling to express his feeling that Spock was the most completely formed individual he'd ever met---that Spock was what the best of us aspire to be.
As he grew older, that is, as we see him in the movies, Spock seems more and more to accept Kirk's view of himself. Not that he sees himself as some sort of saint. He just sees himself not as a Vulcan, not as a human, and not as a mutt. He sees himself as just Spock, for all that is worth or matters.
He's learned to ease up on himself, to accept his Spockness, which includes his Vulcan side. He's no less logical, no less disciplined, no less a good Vulcan. But he is more forgiving, even more tolerant, and he's learned the logic of eccentricity. He's learned that being a good Vulcan, and a good human, means being a good Spock, as weird and eccentric as that is. By the time he shows up on Next Generation he's reached the point where he's ready to re-define Vulcan, human, and Romulan natures at their best as eccentric individuality.
Probably I'm just thrown by Quinto's boyishness, but I don't see any signs in his Spock of this side of Spock, of either his self-discipline or his openness. All I see is a teenager who feels sorry for himself. Which isn't necessarily wrong. Vulcans are slow to age. They may be slow to mature too. Spock at thirty could still be an adolescent. What would bother me is if the movie asks us to identify with Spock the lonely outsider's self-pity, a real possibility considering the differences in sensibilities between the time when the original series was produced and now.
Star Trek the TV show was the product of an era of confident adulthood. If you judged us by how Hollywood portrays us now we live in a time of perpetual, sulky adolescence. In the 60s, true love and fame (which was a matter of popular respect, not of popularity) were the rewards for grown-ups who achieved their goals. These days true love and popularity are the goals.
Movies and TV shows often start out celebrating their main characters as outsiders and misfits, but by the end they've become the popular kids. This is achieved either by it turning out that the misfits and outsiders have super-powers---not literally, figuratively---they are able to do something wonderful that makes them more popular than the popular kids or by a redefining of popularity. You used to be the ideal, but now I am, so there.
What this would mean, if it's what's going on in the movie, is that Spock will turn out to be a good Starfleet officer not because he's smart, self-disciplined, logical, and open-minded, but because he's...different.
In other words, success and achievement aren't the rewards of hard-work. They're the natural outcome of you just being you.
But we'll see. On the one hand, Abrams produced Lost, not an advertisement for the self-esteem movement. On the other, he's responsible for Felicity, a quintessential depiction of teenage self-absorption.
What I'm a bit more worried about is what looks like an emphasis on Kirk as rebel and rule-breaker.
In the trailer, we see him as a kid, joy-riding in and wrecking a three-hundred year old Corvette and then speaking up defiantly to the cop who's chased him down. We see him as an adult, riding a motorcycle, Hollywood shorthand for "independent spirit." And we see him on board the Enterprise without his uniform shirt, which we know he didn't lose in a fight, because if he had he'd have lost the black undershirt too and we'd be seeing him bare-chested, a Kirk-Shatner habit neatly satirized in Galaxy Quest, still the third-best Star Trek movie. Maybe he's on board the Enterprise as a passenger, but I'm guessing he's out of uniform because he's either been demoted or kicked out of Starfleet.
He's temporarily in disgrace. We've seen Kirk in that condition, in his "future," in The Voyage Home. He wins his commission and his command back by saving Earth. But by that time he has a long record of saving not just Earth but the galaxy. At the time the new movie is set, Kirk has been an exemplary junior officer but saving whole planets and star systems is still in his future. Simply saving the Enterprise, even if he saved the galaxy while he was at it, might get him back into Starfleet's good graces, but it wouldn't earn him command of a Starship, unless somebody among the powers-that-be believed that was more typical of his behavior than landing himself in hot water and indicative of his potential, neither of which opinions career military types are likely to hold of an incorrigible rebel and rule-breaker.
In fact, such a character would be seen as a poor choice for a command post of any kind because rebels and rule-breakers usually make very poor leaders. (See McCain, John. Maverick.) Starfleet would have been willing to put up with the original Kirk's occasional foul-ups and lapses of judgment because his commanders would knew it wouldn't be long before he returned to form. But if his form is fouling-up and that's the secret of his success, he's a great captain because he's a rebel and a rule-breaker then to me that'll be just another variation on the theme of outsider and misfit as the true insider and more of the same old success is just desserts for those who are true to themselves and follow their hearts nonsense, and that'll make the movie another celebration of narcissism and perpetual adolescence.
But here's the thing.
Kirk is a rule-breaker and he does often succeed because he breaks the rules. The reason for this, however, isn't that rebels and mavericks make the best Starship commanders. The reason is that very often the rules aren't applicable to the situation because no one had encountered a situation like it before Kirk and the Enterprise got there.
Kirk does have a rebellious streak---he steals a whole goddamn starship!---but he's been very good at keeping it tamped down. Being a good Starfleet officer matters to him, and being a good officer means being willing to go by the book, at least sometimes. We know from characters in the original series who knew him at the Academy, his friends Ben Finney and Gary Mitchell, and his "personal devil" when he was a plebe, the bully Finnegan, that as a cadet Kirk was a bit of a stiff and a prig. Mitchell remembers him as "a stack of books with legs." Kirk describes himself back then as "postively grim." He wasn't a rule-breaker, he was a rule-minder. Hacking into and reprogramming the computer so he could defeat the Kobayashi Maru scenario wasn't an act of rebelliousness. He did it out of stubbornness and pride. He couldn't accept that there was really such a possibility as a no-win situation. For Kirk, every problem has a solution. It's how he thinks, in terms of problems and solutions. He's the son and brother of scientists, after all. In his own way, he is a scientist himself, a gatherer of knowledge for its own sake, amazed and enthralled by what's out there waiting to be discovered.
Kirk is an explorer.
Gene Roddenberry modeled Kirk, and Pike, on Horatio Hornblower and James Cook. Hornblower is a portrait of military man as intellectual, and Cook was the embodiment of scientist as adventurer. And that's Kirk, loyal soldier, adventurer, and intellectual. Quick. What's his hobby? Right. History. His favorite teachers at the academy were the scientists and the historians. And he can quote from Moby-Dick and Shakespeare. Kirk is also a talented engineer and a well-read amateur astrophysicist. He's not as brilliant as Scotty or Spock, but he can keep up when they explain things to him. The mother of his only child---the only one we're told about. I've always been sure that the galaxy is well-stocked with Kirk bastards, at least one of them with green skin.---is the inventor of the Genesis project. Another one of his former girlfriends was a doctor and another is a lawyer. Kirk did not chase dimwits and airheads. (Maybe that was Yeoman Rand's problem.) And his two best friends are a doctor and a Vulcan scientist.
Whatever other motivations Kirk had for joining Starfleet, one of the chief ones was to get out there and take a look around just to find out.
That's why the last line he ever says in his saga---I don't count Generations. That's not one of his movies, and besides it's goofy. Not as goofy as The Final Frontier, but close. Abrams' film shouldn't have much trouble beating it. Like I said, I'm setting a low bar.---his last line in The Undiscovered Country is so perfect. Responding to Chekhov's request for a heading for the Enterprise's last voyage under Kirk's command, Kirk sets this course:
"Second star to the right, and straight on till morning."
It's the course he's been steering his whole life.
"Let's just go and see what's out there."
Kirk the explorer, the TV series Kirk, might have stolen that Corvette---he'd have said "borrowed"---but how else was he going to find out how it worked or learn how fast it could go? The point wouldn't have been to go fast for speed's own sake, although he'd have enjoyed that. It would have been to figure out how to make the machine go fast.
This quality of mind, this habit of asking questions and then seeking the answers, would have been a qualification for command of a starship, because that was the mission, to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations...
This isn't an assignment that would have been given to any hide-bound, by-the-book blockhead. But it wouldn't have gone to anyone lacking in self-discipline and with a habit of losing his temper and making snap judgments based on what his heart tells him to do. Eccentric thinkers welcome. Rebels need not apply.
The trouble, from Starfleet's perspective, is that habits of questioning and of going to see it for oneself can lead to a habit of independent thinking. And another potential problem is that another qualification for the job would be the ability to make sound judgments and take the right action without having to wait for instruction or orders. Remember, that in the early episodes, the Enterprise was so far from home that communications to and from Starfleet took days and days to get back and forth. A more than usual degree of self-confidence, self-reliance, and independence of spirit would be required. A person like that, left to his own devices for long periods of time, might get very comfortable acting on his own authority and, especially if he was as good at the job as Kirk, grow to trust his own judgment over that of anyone else, especially that of desk officers way back of the Neutral Zone who'd never seen a phaser fired in anger, let alone a doomsday machine eat a whole planet. Even if he wasn't naturally geared that way, given an order he didn't like, a person like that might develop a strong rebellious streak on the spot.
And that's exactly what we saw happening to Kirk over the course of the series. In the first few episodes he's stolid, earnest, steadfast and true, a Boy Scout in space. Temperamentally, he's much more Horatio Hornblower than he is James Cook. Doesn't take many episdoes though before he starts acting more like Jack Sparrow than like either Hornblower or Cook. Kirk finds his inner pirate.
If the trailer is a true indication---big if, there---the movie Kirk is his inner pirate and he needs to start cultivating his inner Hornblower.
But that's not necessarily bad. Depends on how it's done, and if it's done. As I said, if the movie has it that Kirk succeeds because he's a pirate at heart, I won't be happy. But if the movie Kirk is on an intersecting course with the TV Kirk, if the pirate joins up with the scientist and the rebel melds with the good soldier, then he'll become the Kirk we know and it won't matter very much that he got there from the opposite direction.
As Kirk would see it, the point isn't what was back there, it's what's ahead.
"Second star to the right, and straight on till morning."
______________________
Captain's Log, supplemental:
Again, can't rely on the trailer, but it looks as though the movie Kirk has one definite thing in common with the TV Kirk. He gets a fair share of action in the sack. And it looks as though one of the women he goes to bed with is a shipmate, the Enterprise's communications officer.
Yep. It might be that we see Kirk and Uhura have a fling.
Which would explain a lot, wouldn't it?
Also, I am curious why Abrams decided to make Captain Pike decidedly middle-aged. I'm guessing to give Spock a father-figure instead of another big brother-figure. Maybe to give Kirk the rebel a father-figure to rebel against as well or, since Kirk's real father is a character in the movie and so is there to be rebelled against, a father-figure against whom not to rebel. In the series, Kirk did have a middle-aged man he looked up to and who was a mentor to him, but we don't meet him because he's already dead. The captain of the Farragut, and Kirk blames himself for his death.
Another thing, and this has to do with Zachary Quinto's boyishness as Spock. In the series it seemed implicit that Kirk and McCoy go way back, their friendship cemented long ago. I like to think that they met when Ensign Kirk needed a discreet doctor to cure him of his first case of space clap. But I think it was also the case that Spock hadn't met McCoy before Kirk assumed command of the Enterprise and brought his old friend aboard as his chief medical officer and that there's a kind of rivalry between them for the right to be thought of as Kirk's best friend.
The movie has it right that McCoy is older than Spock and Kirk. But if McCoy met Spock when Spock was barely more than a kid, it seems unlikely that Bones would have developed the habit of insulting Spock's Vulcan nature. It's one thing for one grown man to make sneering comments about another grown man's green blood and cold-hearted prizing of logic above feeling. It's another for an adult to make the same sort of comments to an insecure and lonely boy. So I'm hoping that the movie leaves that aspect of their relationship out or finds a more affectionate way for Bones to go about picking at Spock, as though McCoy started out trying to help Spock become more human, which he'd have thought of as helping him to become a better person, and over time, as Spock matured but didn't change, McCoy lost patience with him or gave up hope.
Trivia Question: Back to Pike as an older man. Besides Captain Garrovick of the Farragut, there was another older starship Captain who was Kirk's friend and mentor. Name him and the episode in which he appeared. Email your answers please. First ten people to answer correctly will win a tribble.
KHAN! I missed the news the other day. Ricardo Montalban, who played the Kirk's great Melville and Milton-quoting nemesis Khan Noonien Singh in one of the best of the old episodes, Space Seed, and the second-best of all the movies, Wrath of Khan, died Wednesday.
LONDON (AFP) – People who drink more than seven cups of coffee a day tend to hallucinate more than less caffeine-driven colleagues, according to a study published Wednesday.
Article also says we coffee-addicts are more likely to hear non-existent voices, as well.
Scientist says it's probably not a cause and effect thing. But I should look into it. And I will. Right after I have another cup of coffee.
my freshman year in college. It wasn't assigned. One day I decided I needed to read more Updike---"Who's the best American writer? Mailer? Roth? Updike?"---and I walked down to the local bookstore and bought it. I didn't feel particularly grown-up or sophisticated. I felt furtive and anxious and guilty. I was skipping a class I hadn't done the homework for and spending money I should have put towards paying my phone bill. Buying the book made me feel like I was running away from something only to run right smack into it. I read it in one sitting and realized that before I even knew his story I was feeling like Rabbit Angstrom.
, 
, and 
, novels that spooked me and continue to haunt me. 
, qualities, habits, and methods Woodward discovered they didn't have when it came time to write his next two books, 
, Ron Suskind had no problem seeing and reporting that Bush and his gang not only lacked those qualities, habits, and methods but openly disdained them. But then he didn't rely solely on the word of liars, sycophants, and cringing careerists for his research.
.But then he was there.
. Truman turned out to be his own best advocate. Historians had already begun to revise their estimation of Truman, but Truman himself is the one who changed the popular conception of his Presidency.
were only a surprise to people who hadn't read his letters and war dispatches or met with him for extended conversations.
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