Lance Mannion

The Archchancellor confronts quantum physics and beats it down

Mustrum Ridcully, chief wizard and Archcancellor of Unseen University, and the dwarf lothario and adventurer Casanunda have just solved a logic problem proposed by the young wizard Ponder Stibbons by offering a violent but logical answer, much to Ponder’s consternation.  Ridcully and Casanunda congratulate themselves on their plain thinking.

“Clever,” said Ridcully.  “Now that, Mr Stibbons, is logical thought.  You could learn a lot from this man---“

“Dwarf.”

“---sorry, dwarf.  He doesn’t go on about parasite universes all the time.”

“Parallel!” snapped Ponder, who had developed a very strong suspicion that Ridcully was getting it wrong on purpose.

“Which ones are the parasite ones, then?”

“There aren’t any!  I mean, there aren’t any, Archchancellor.  Parallel universes, I said.  Universes where things didn’t happen like---“  He hesitated.  “Well, you know that girl?”

“What girl?”

“The girl you wanted to marry?”

“How’d you know that?”

“You were talking about her just after lunch.”

“Was I?  More fool me.  Well, what about her?”

“Well…in a way, you did marry her,” said Ponder.

Ridcully shook his head.  “Nope.  Pretty certain I didn’t.  You remember that sort of thing.”

“Ah, but not in this universe.”

The Librarian opened one eye.

“You suggestin’ I nipped into some other universe to get married?” said Ridcully.

“No!  I mean, you got married in that universe but not in this universe,” said Ponder.

“Did I?  What?  A proper ceremony and everything?”

“Yes!”

“Hmm.”  Ridcully stroked his beard.  “You sure?”

“Certain, Archchancellor.”

“My word!  I never knew that.”

Ponder felt he was getting somewhere.

“So---“

“Yes?”

“Why don’t I remember it?”

Ponder was ready for this.

“Because the you in the other universe is different from the you here,” he said.  “It was a different you that got married.  He’s probably settled down somewhere.  He’s probably a great-grandad by now.”

“He never writes, I know that,” said Ridcully.  “And the bastard never invited me to the wedding.”

“Who?”

“Him.”

“But he’s you.”

“Is he?  Huh?  You’d think I’d think of me, wouldn’t you?  What a bastard!”

---from Lords and Ladies by Terry Pratchett.

Editor’s choice: Where we won the War we started by almost losing it

Originally posted March 16, 2010.

In her review of the HBO miniseries, The Pacific, The New Yorker television critic Nancy Franklin says that in the collective imagination World War II was fought almost entirely in Europe.  Americans seem to have practically forgotten the bloody island-hopping battles that the Marines and the Army fought to pave the way for the invasion of Japan, literally---pretty much the first thing we did after securing an island was build a landing strip for the bombers and cargo planes that would be taking off to bomb and then supply the next island.  Unlike what happened in Europe, we didn’t arrive so much as liberators but as construction crews.  Objectives were chosen on how useful they would be on the route from here to there.  Which is why Peleliu was a horrific mistake, practically a war crime committed against our own troops.  Nevermind that it was a victory.  It was out of the way.

But Peleliu and the rest of the campaign in the Pacific Theatre, Franklin says,

…[have] essentially been reduced to two events and one iconic image: the attack on Pearl Harbor, the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the photograph of marines raising the American flag on Mt. Suribachi, on Iwo Jima.

I’d add MacArthur returning to the Philippines, PT-109, and kamikazes.

I’m not sure how right Franklin is about the receding of the Pacific in our collective memories in relation to the War in Europe.  Right now I’d say the collective memory isn’t very focused on any part of any past war because the collective conscious, and conscience, is dealing with the fact that at the present moment we are at war.

And the Pacific was her father’s war.  He fought on Guadalcanal.  Naturally the war in the Pacific can’t be as vivid in the imaginations of people without a personal connection.   And for most Americans alive right now, the War, the whole War, in both theatres, is their grandfather’s and great-grandfather’s war.  That’s a way of saying that for most people it belongs to ghosts.

What that means is that few people can feel the War with the intensity Franklin feels it.  That doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t remember it.

But for the sake of argument, and for the sake of my having something to write about, I accept her point.   Put average Americans on the spot and demand they come up with five things they know about World War II and the odds are that all five will be about Europe, unless one is Pearl Harbor or Hiroshima.

Franklin suggests some reasons for this, but before I get to them I want to suggest a big one, maybe the biggest one, and get it out of the way.

For most of the people you ask one of the five things on the list is going to be the Holocaust.

Over time, as battles and place names and the stories of heroes have grown hazier in the imagination and even been dropped from the history books, the systematic murder of 10 million people in Europe has come more and more to define World War II in our minds.

Compared to that, what happened in the Pacific, except for what we did to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is going to seem as remote and routine an example of human folly as the Napoleonic Wars, of interest to historians and hobbyists but of no more importance than any other example of wholesale slaughter you can name.

That the camps were at the end of the roads so many of our troops in Europe were fighting their way down gives their battles a moral and psychological urgency that makes it easier---and maybe more comforting---to identify with those GIs than with the Marines in their apparently pointless hells on Okinawa, Tarawa, and Peleliu.

Back to Franklin.  She thinks that the problem with remembering the Pacific began during the war itself, and it had a lot to do with Americans’ Eurocentric thinking and imagination:

It’s not that the war in the Pacific hadn’t been written about or depicted on film; “Guadalcanal Diary,” for example, a war correspondent’s account of the battle that began in August of 1942, was published in 1943, before the Japanese had even finished evacuating the island, and the movie version came out later that year. Still, Americans in the forties were more likely to look toward Europe when thinking about the war; it was what they knew and understood, because it was where most of them were from. They didn’t have to look at a map to know where France was. Guadalcanal was a different story. Virtually no one had heard of it before 1942, and even some of the military higher-ups had trouble pronouncing it at first.

In short, Europe was home or if not home then the next parish over, while those bloody, godforesaken, ugly little rockpiles in the Pacific might as well have been on another planet.

They couldn’t feel as real to us even when the telegram arrived with the news that a son or a brother or a husband had died on one of them.

But I think there’s more to it than that.  (I’m sure Franklin does too but she had to get on with writing her review of The Pacific and I’ve got nothing else better to do at the moment.)  The two theatres were covered in the news very differently because they were fought very differently according to their different strategic goals.

Some of the island battles went on for days and days, some went on for weeks, and a few lasted for months, but in between those battles there were long lulls in the fighting while we prepared for the attack on the next island.  From what I’ve heard and read, boredom was the unifying factor among the troops stationed over there.  The War in the Pacific could disappear from the hometown newspapers and the news reels for weeks at a time.

The fighting in Europe was constant from the day Patton landed on Sicily until a few days before he rolled into Berlin.

It should be noted that at the outset Americans had reason to be glad not to be reminded of what was happening in the Pacific.  The war there began with a series of humiliating American defeats.  At Pearl Harbor and in the Solomons and the Philippines.  We started the war by almost losing it.

And four years later it wasn’t pleasant to think about how we ended it either.

Then there’s the fact that from 1942 through 1943 and on into 1944 the War in the Pacific was just that, in the Pacific.  It was a naval war or at least the most important battles, the ones that actually decided the outcome, were naval battles…and air battles.  Midway was fought and won by sailors and Navy pilots.

When looked at in that way, as a war between two great navies, the big bloody land battles on Tarawa, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa---the last two fought in the shadow of the the now inevitable victory in Europe, and in the shadow cast backwards from the future by the anticipated invasion of Japan, making them seem both like warm-ups and after-thoughts---were Naval operations.

This is why I’d say that although the first image of the war in the Pacific that ought to come to mind is of a terrified Marine trying to claw a foxhole out of volcanic rock it’s more likely to be of a kamikaze’s Zero shot down in the nick of time spinning into the ocean in the middle distance.

So the fighting in the Pacific was already being seen in long shot, when it was not being thought of as taking place off stage, while it was going on. 

It would be no wonder then that hazy images and memories would begin to fade faster.

But people, as a people, “remember” themselves through the stories they tell each other and Americans tell their stories mainly with movies and television.

In the 1940s and 50s and into the early 60s Hollywood turned out a bunch of great war movies set in the Pacific.  Sands of Iwo Jima.  Halls of Montezuma.  Heaven Knows Mr Allison.  Run Silent, Run Deep. They Were Expendable. Mister Roberts, a war movie, by the way, in which the main enemy on screen is boredom.  And, of course, From Here to Eternity, reinforcing Franklin’s point about the few specific things we remember about the war in the Pacific.

Something changed in the 60s though.  War movies in general became less popular, and I’ll get to why in a bit, although I’m sure you know.  The ones that did get made were mostly set in Europe. 

And on television there were two popular series set in World War II.  One was a serious and relatively realistic drama about soldiers fighting their way across France.  The other was a comic fantasy about a gang of sailors scheming to make money and have a good time on their little island paradise in the South Pacific and sometimes interrupting their partying to put out to sea in their PT boat to sink a Japanese ship or two.

On Combat the enemy was almost always seen up close and often appeared as main characters in the story.  On McHale’s Navy the enemy was largely invisible.  The only Japanese who appeared as a featured character was a prisoner of war who was happy to be out of harm’s way and had become a willing and enthusiastic member of McHale’s gang of con artists.

What I think had happened was that as the Japanese became more and more our friends and allies it became harder and harder to remember they were ever our enemies.  It became unpleasant to remember they were our enemies.  Remembering the War in the Pacific requires remembering hating the Japanese.

It also requires remembering our guilt for what we did to end the War.

But in Europe we were never at war with our friends the Germans.  Not in the same sense as we were at war with the Japanese.  We were at war with the Nazis.

It is still easy, and kind of satisfying, to hate Nazis.

Which brings me to one last and defining difference between the War in Europe and the War in the Pacific.

Adolph Hitler.

There is too much to say about Hitler’s evil here, so I’ll settle for this for now.  Hitler is simply a more fascinating character than Hirohito, Tojo, or any of the Japanese warlords and not just because of the immensity of his evil.

The war in Europe is the War Against Hitler and the War of the Holocaust and the war in the Pacific is, as I said, just another bloody war in comparison.

Now for my final thought.

Getting back to the stories we tell ourselves in the movies, in the 60s it became impossible to make a war movie that wasn’t in some way a commentary on the war that was being fought at the moment.

Set a war movie in the South Pacific, put your Marine heroes in the jungle up against an Asian enemy and, well, you didn’t have a movie about World War II.

And the same thing happens within our collective imagination.  We can’t think of the one without immediately jumping to thinking of the other.

In between World War II and now the United States fought two wars on that far side of the world, both against Asian adversaries.

Korea is sometimes lamented by its veterans as the forgotten war.

There’s no danger that anytime soon we’re going to forget Vietnam.

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Correction:  This post originally included an anecdote about how John Kennedy and his crew were on a mission to fight boredom when PT-109 was rammed and sunk.  Regular reader RalphH wrote in to correct me.  See his comment and follow this link to the Kennedy Library’s page on JFK’s wartime service and what happened to PT-109.

Follow the link to see the comments on the original post.

Editor’s Choice: “Buffalo Bill! The thrill of my life to have invented you!”

Originally posted February 25, 2010 as part of the Virtual Robert Altman Film Festival.

When I was a kid one of my favorite places to go was a theme park up near Lake George called Storytown USA.  It was the nearest thing we had to a local Disneyland, scaled way down of course, with rides and attractions based on fairy tales, fables, tall tales, legends, and, without their ever being actually named, TV shows and movies.

It was a modest place, but not chintzy.  What was there was done well, presented with pride and some dash, and clean, shiny, colorful, and fun.  But my favorite part was also the best part, Ghost Town!

Ghost Town was essentially the set of a TV western with probably as many “buildings” that were just false fronts.  But there were plenty of buildings you could go into, like the livery stable, the blacksmith’s, the saloon, the general store, and the jail, enough places to visit that you could feel as though you were wandering the wooden plank sidewalks of real town in the Old West.  It helped that several times a day masked bandits would ride into town and hold up the bank.  A posse, rounded up from the kids on hand, would help the law track down and capture one of the robbers.  Then members of his gang would sneak back into town and there’d be a jail break followed by a shoot out with the good guys that would include, depending on the bravery or recklessness of the college kids playing the bandits that summer, at least one bandit getting shot off the roof of the hotel.

In between the robberies and the gunfights there’d be shows on an outdoor stage built out from the side of the saloon.  The shows would feature “cowgirls” who did rope tricks, “cowboys” who played the guitar and sang, “scouts” who had knife throwing acts, and saloon girls who danced the can-can lifting their skirts high for the bored dads in the audience.  Frankly, I could never imagine getting so old that I would be bored by gunfights, rope tricks, and knife throwing acts that I would think it was a treat when those acts were interrupted by girls who couldn’t do rope tricks or throw knives.

I still haven’t gotten that old.

All of this was presided over by the town marshal, Wild Windy Bill McKay, who was a quick-draw artist and singing cowboy as well as a daring and resourceful upholder of law and order on the violent frontier.

Now, it was obvious to the most gullible kid that Windy Bill wasn’t a real cowboy.  No real cowboy had stars on his boots or wore red jeans and fringed shirts with multi-colored sleeves, except Roy Rogers when he wasn’t working around the ranch.

But even though we knew the truth we accepted it as fact that he spent his days doing exactly what we were watching and helping him do, chase bandits and shoot it out with bad guys.  Ghost Town, to our minds, was more dangerous than Dodge City, Tombstone, and Deadwood combined, and it would be a hundred times worse if it wasn’t for Windy Bill.

For all we knew and I still know Bill McKay had majored in accounting in college or spent years before coming to work at Storytown selling shoes.

But he presented himself as an authentic Western hero and legend and seemed confident that we wouldn’t doubt it and, son of a gun, we didn’t.

To us---to me anyway---for the time we moseyed the dusty streets of Ghost Town, Marshall Wild Windy Bill McKay was as real a lawman as Wyatt Earp and Wild Bill Hickcock.

The irony being, of course, that the Wyatt Earp and Wild Bill we knew and admired weren’t any more authentic than Wild Windy Bill McKay. 

All three of them were creations of a hundred years worth of work by dime novelists, playwrights, movie makers, producers of TV shows, and one William F. Cody.

Buffalo Bill.

What went on in Ghost Town borrowed heavily from Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, as in fact did every movie and TV western that came after him.  We “know” what an Indian attack and the cavalry riding to the rescue look like because of Buffalo Bill.  We “know” what a stage coach hold-up looks like because of Buffalo Bill.  We “know” what Custer’s Last Stand looked like because of Buffalo Bill.  We know what an authentic Western hero looks like and how he acts because of Buffalo Bill, and by the way even when he’s short and sporting a crew cut and spits tobacco sideways out of the corner of his mouth he still looks and acts like Buffalo Bill, tall, handsome, noble in bearing and in action and in thought.  No matter how far the anti-hero of a revisionist western departs from the image, the image is always with him.  It’s the shadow he casts except when he becomes the shadow cast by the image.

Buffalo Bill didn’t invent the tropes and cliches of the Western but he codified them, clarified them, and set the standards for their presentation.  He didn’t personally rewrite the history of the settlement of the American frontier to turn it into the set of self-congratulatory heroic legends and lies that stood in the place of truth in our collective memory for over a century.  But his revision of the rewrite brought it all together and because his shows were so “real” and so popular and so widely imitated his story of the Wild West became and has remained the most deeply believed, even by movie directors in the process of debunking it.

We may know it’s not true but we want it to be and the mo

st cynical and revisionist Westerns still express that wish.  Nobody can resist the charm and the will of Buffalo Bill.

This isn’t exactly the theme of Robert Altman’s Buffalo Bill and the Indians.  It’s more like the given.

For one thing, this theme, for it to be a theme, must include the fact of the audience’s complicity.  Wild Windy Bill McKay’s existence depended on our willingness to believe in it and our ability to convince ourselves that we did believe it.  There’s no audience complicity in Altman’s film because as far as the script and the camera bother to notice there is no audience. 

I mean an audience watching the performances by the members of Buffalo Bill’s troupe depicted in the movie.  But the same can be said of the audience watching the movie.  Altman, never one to play to his audience’s expectations, seems to have gone out of his way to ignore his audience entirely on this one.  He makes no attempt to draw us in, either into the story itself or into the Wild West show.  We don’t get to feel what it might have been like to watch these spectacles live.   He seems to take it for granted that because we’ve seen all these tricks and stunts a thousand times before we don’t care if we see them again.

Without the audience’s complicity in rewriting history to the point of erasing it and replacing it with myths, legends, and self-serving lies, there’s no real criticism of the process by which a people hide who they really are from themselves.

Which is fine, as long as you understand that Altman didn’t intend to make a movie that was about that.

He didn’t make a revisionist western.  He’d already made one of those.  McCabe and Mrs Miller.  Buffalo Bill and the Indians depends on our having seen that one and others like Little Big Man, Doc, The Wild Bunch, The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and note who starred in the last two.

But Buffalo Bill and the Indians is still about watching a performance.  It’s just that it’s about a single person watching a single person perform with the watcher and the watched being the same single person.  Buffalo Bill and the Indians is about Buffalo Bill watching himself being Buffalo Bill.

It’s about a man who has done things that ought to have made him legendary making his living off being not a legend but a fiction.  The Buffalo Bill who’s the star of the show, the reason people come to see the Wild West, has nothing in common with the young scout who earned the nickname Buffalo Bill.  Bill Cody knows he’s had real adventures that should be famous.  But his fortune, his show, his company of cowboys, Indians, trick shot artists, and their families and support staff depend on people paying money to see the phony Buffalo Bill, the one invented to sell dime novels and now tickets.  This is not somebody Bill Cody knows or even truly believes exists.  It’s no wonder then he’s never sure how to be this Buffalo Bill.  He’s always performing, constantly making it up, and it’s not easy.  He loses track of the plot.  He forgets his lines.  He continually finds himself in situations where there’s no way for him to know how “Buffalo Bill” should act or what “he” should say.  And he’s not smart enough or quick enough or cynical enough for the job.

Rather than try to keep it all straight in his head, he’s decided it’s easier to just give in and believe he is who he’s pretending to be.  He’s found that it helps if he never thinks about it and to that end he spends a lot of his time not thinking.

What we have then is the spectacle of one of the most grounded of movie stars playing a man floating through life on his own hot air.  One of the most self-skeptical of movie stars playing a pompous, self-infatuated windbag.  One of the smartest actors going playing someone who has made himself willfully dumb.  One of the coolest of leading men playing a buffoon.

Paul Newman’s performance as Buffalo Bill is a whole lot of fun to watch.

It’s also kind of sad, and I’m not sure all that sadness sticks only to the character.

But that’s something we can work out in the discussion, which is underway…now.

Friday morning update:  Thanks to Michael, Phil, and Bill for making last night’s discussion great.  Comment threads on these posts stay open so feel free to chip in anytime.

Next week’s a double-feature, Secret Honor and Streamers, but we’ll be focusing on how filming plays changed Altman’s style going into the 1990s.

And, remember, in two weeks we’ll be doing Popeye, but instead of a formal discussion I’ll be leading the live-blogging.  We’ll start the fun earlier that night, at 9 PM Eastern.  Mark your calendar and update your Netflix queue.

Follow the link to read the comments on the original post.

Editor’s choice: There were drifts up to the rooftops

Originally posted February 10, 2010.

On the way to the post office.  Around ten this morning.  Wednesday, February 10, 2010. Click to enlarge.

At the library the other day, talking with the librarians and another patron about the predicted storm on the way.  A whole foot, maybe two might get dumped on us.  The eldest librarian laughed.

“Two feet?  That’s nothing,” she said.

The other patron, a man I judged to be nearing eighty, agreed.

“Not like when I was a kid,” he said.  “I remember snowstorms, my father had to climb out the bedroom window and let himself down from the porch roof so he could shovel a path to the front door.  The snow was that high.”

The librarian is well into her sixties.  She remembered similar snowstorms from when she was a girl and a young woman.  She remembered her children jumping off the roof of the neighbor’s garage into the drifts below.  The drop wasn’t more than a few feet.

I had my own memories to add, of wading through snow drifts up to my waist, of the mountain of snow the plows built at the foot of our front yard after every snow storm because we were at the bottom of a cul de sac, of snow forts with walls high enough to stop invasions of Mongol hordes, with several rooms inside connected by long and perfectly rounded tunnels, of falling backwards into the snow to make snow angels and sinking so deep that the world around me was lost from view and all I could see was the gray sky straight overhead and the blue walls of my outline.

But I didn’t add them.  I was stopped by the sudden doubt that those memories were real or that they were even mine.

My memories of those mountains of snow in our yard, they look suspiciously like a snapshot in our family album.  And the snow forts as I remember them are impossibly elaborate and the tunnels go on forever with more branches than a gold mine in a Western.  And how did I make any headway through snow that was up to my waist?  I’d have had to have been a little steam engine.

And what specific snowstorms did I think I was remembering?  Was it just one that I’ve let fill in for all the storms that blew through the winters of my childhood?  Was it a combination of the best memories of all those winters?  Was what I was picturing in my head a work of art, images created and re-created out of things I had been told, read, seen in photographs and home movies?

I kept quiet because I was so full of self-doubt that the only thing I was sure of was that whatever I said would probably be a lie or as good as one.

It snowed when I was a kid.  I had a good time when it did.  That’s all I knew for certain.  Didn’t seem like it would do much to improve the conversation.

I shut my mouth and just listened to the old man and the librarian move on to stories of sledding down streets emptied of cars by the snow.

We’re having some snow today.  Nowhere near what was forecast, so far.  Maybe four inches, and it’s tapering off.  There’ll be no jumping off any roofs into the drifts.

But maybe I’ll go out and make a snow angel.

_______________

The old black dog comes in one evening
with the first few snowflakes on his back
and falls asleep, throwing his bad leg out
at our excitement. This is the night
when one of us gets to say, as if it were news,
that no two snowflakes are ever alike;
the night when each of us remembers something
snowier. The kitchen is a kindergarten
steamy with stories. The dog gets stiffly up
and limps away, seeking a quiet spot
at the heart of the house. Outside,
in silence, with diamonds in his fur,
the winter night curls round the legs of the trees,
sleepily blinking snowflakes from his lashes.

---First Snow by Ted Kooser

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M.A. Peel has found an eyewitness account of a long-ago blizzard.  Warning: a sock to the gut and a tear in the eye at the end.

Click on the link to see the comments on the original post.

Editor’s choice: Harry Potter and the Magical Scene That Could Have Saved The Half-Blood Prince

Originally posted January 3, 2010.

I’ve got to stop going to see certain movies at the drive-in.

Doesn’t matter how dark the night, how powerful the lamp in the projector, movies with palettes more monochromatic than most black and white films, movies like The Dark Knight and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, both of which I saw for the first time at the drive-in and both of which are nocturnes in gray and grayer grays brightened only by midnight blues and inky blacks and in the case of The Half-Blood Prince a few splashes of sunlight on tin yellows and dried-mud browns, turn to shadow plays on a cellar wall on the screen.

In short, I missed a whole lot of both films the first time that I caught when I watched them again on DVD.  What I missed of The Dark Knight turned out not to matter, because it was mostly just subtleties of movement in fight scenes and chase sequences.  But director David Yates has as much going on in the backgrounds and foregrounds and sidegrounds of The Half-Blood Prince as you’ll find going on behind and around any building in a model railroad layout.  He’s made sure that whatever’s happening front and center to Harry and his pals we’re aware that there’s something close to a busy normalcy continuing behind them and around them at Hogwarts, in Diagon Alley, on the various levels and platforms of the London underground.

When Harry and Dumbledore go to the village of Budleigh Babberton to recruit Horace Slughorn back to the faculty of Hogwarts, Yates makes us aware of the life that isn’t going there by showing all the empty spaces that ought to be busy with people going about their day to day lives.  It’s one of the eeriest shots in the movie.

Yates does a lot of work in miniature, like a model railroad builder or a designer of museum dioramas or a blogger and his sons assembling their Christmas village.

In one of my new favorite moments that I missed the details of at the drive-in, Yates has his camera move from Harry comforting a broken-hearted Hermione at the foot of a stairwell to following Ron and Lavender Brown up the stairs but not by having the camera go up the stairs with them.

He takes it outside the castle and draws it back from the walls to track their progress in an extreme long shot.  He shows us the lighted windows of the common room where the silhouettes of partiers play against the glowing panes.  Then he moves it slowly up the wall to a turret window where he catches Ron and Lavender hurrying up the stairs, then to a higher window where we see the two stop on a landing to lock up in some passionate snogging…

and then the camera moves right on past them, rising on up to another, gloomier turret with windows that aren’t glassed in where we see a brooding Draco Malfoy leaning on a railing, a tiny, slender figure in gray with a dab of snow white hair, the details of his face and body merely implied, as if we’re looking at a miniature…

and then the camera swoops, turns, and leaves him behind to pick up the snow-filled night sky, only to drop again and move downward, panning the rooftops and towers of the school as the night turns to a bleak and foggy dawn, and comes to rest at last, inside again, to present us with Ron and Harry on their way to their first class of the day.

It’s like watching a wonderful Bavarian cuckoo clock.

(You have to go here to watch the sequence, because, you know, “embedding disabled by request.”  Who does all this requesting and why does YouTube give in to them?)

The difference between the two movies, though, is that missing the details I missed in The Dark Knight at the drive-in didn’t take away from the plot or my understanding of the characters, while catching the ones I caught on the DVD of The Half-Blood Prince didn’t add to the plot or to the development of the characters.

They did add to the mood, so the movie’s a better cinematic experience than I knew.  But it doesn’t change the fact that Yates left gaping holes in his story, the biggest hole being the one that should have been filled by the Half-Blood Prince himself, and the only reason I can think of for his having done it is that he thought he needed to keep the Prince’s secret to the very end, as if three quarters of his target audience wouldn’t have already read not just this book, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, but the next and final book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, as well.

If you don’t know who the Half-Blood Prince is by now, it’s because you don’t care to know.

Yates might have been worried his movie was already too long, but there’s a lot of wasted film that could have been cut in favor of more character and plot development.   There’s too much quidditch, as usual.  Harry’s battle with the Inferi is interminable, as in fact is the whole sequence in the cave.  There’s a short scene of Harry showing up at Slughorn’s door after Slughorn has thrown him out of his rooms that merely restates what we just saw happen and is immediately repeated when Harry returns with a love potion-addled Ron in tow.  There are about six too many close-ups of Helena Bonham Carter overdoing it as Belatrix Lastrange.  Some judicious trimming and there’d have been time for at least one more visit to the Pensieve and more Tom Riddle and more Snape.

Presumably, Alan Rickman will get his due in the two parts of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, but Yates has underused him inexcusably in The Half-Blood Prince.

He definitely should have made room for the deleted scene below.

Oliver Mannion watched it first and called it to my attention.  The scene was intended to be the beginning of the build up to Dumbledore’s confrontation with Malfoy, Belatrix, and the other Death Eaters in the Astronomy Tower.  Oliver likes it because of the song Professor Flitwick’s choir sings.  He says it adds to the sense of coming tragedy.  I agree.  It’s a hauntingly beautiful song and something beautiful is about to happen although, technically, no one is supposed to recognize its beauty until the truth is revealed in The Deathly Hallows.

But Oliver and I both like something else in the deleted scene and wish Yates had left it in the movie for that too.

The look in Snape’s eyes.

In the movie as released the scene starts with Malfoy getting out of bed (and with a different musical background) and Snape appears in passing, shown from behind, in silhouette, in a long shot.

But the close up of Rickman in the deleted scene is gorgeous for all the grief Rickman puts in Snape’s eyes.  It’s a look that tells us everything, if we know what’s about to happen and why, and tells us something else entirely, if we don’t know, but either way, it’s a look that marks Snape as a tragic figure, and I don’t know why Yates would have wanted to hide that from anyone.

Here’s the scene.

_______________

You can watch watch Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince online right now or, you know, whenever.

Follow the link to read the comments on the original post.

Editor’s choice: Celebrating Little Christmas with my grandmother’s ghost

Originally posted January 6, 2010.

My grandmother, Mom Mannion’s mother, died January 3, 1996, fourteen years ago this past Sunday.  She’d be a hundred years old if she was still alive.  I don’t think she’d want me telling you that.  She considered her age nobody’s business, including her own.

Nanny was buried three days later on a sunny but bitterly cold morning with her four grandsons and two grandsons-in-law carrying her casket.  She’d have loved to have seen that, the six of us in the suits and ties she preferred we wear more often.  She swore that when we were dressed up and dressed right we were six of the handsomest men she’d ever known.  The handsomest man in her opinion had been her father who was so good-looking he was often asked to model clothes for local department stores and encouraged to go to Hollywood.  He shrugged it off and stayed in Albany where he sold insurance.

The day of her funeral, January 6, was the Feast of the Epiphany.  Little Christmas.  Her church, St Brigid’s, was still decorated for Christmas, of course, the wreaths and poinsettias still on the altar, the stable still on display, and when we brought her into church and escorted her up the aisle the processional hymn was “We Three Kings.”  She’d have gotten a kick out of that too.  If I didn’t know better, I’d suspect her of having planned it so that she’d be sung out of this world to the strains of Christmas carols.

If she didn’t plan it, she made it happen by willing herself through one more Christmas.

My grandmother loved Christmas.

The last time I saw her alive we were visiting my parents for Christmas and my nephew’s first birthday.  We being the blonde, two and a half year old Ken, and me.  Oliver was along for the ride, so to speak, as he was busy getting ready to get himself born a month later.  The night of my nephew’s party my grandmother didn’t feel up to going.  She blamed her bad back.  But her own baby sister had died the week before and her spirits were low.  We didn’t know it, or we wouldn’t admit it to ourselves, but her sister’s death had taken the heart out of her.  She had begun to fade.

Before leaving my parents’ house for the party I made a run to McDonald’s for the cheeseburger Nanny asked for for her dinner.  I stayed behind with her while she ate and she shared her fries with me.  We were watching a repeat of some Christmas special and when she was done eating she began to sing along with the carols.  When I left her she was singing The First Noel in her high sweet girlish voice.

She had put herself to bed by the time we got home and she was still asleep when we left to go back to our own house in Syracuse early the next morning.

Fourteen years fly by.

I went to Mass Sunday morning with the gang.  My idea, amazingly.  In fact, I forced everybody out the door and into the cold and snow to go.  I had formulated this plan a couple days before because the church was celebrating the Epiphany and I wanted to sing carols and look at the decorations one more time this holiday season.  I didn’t remember what day it was until we were getting ready to leave the house.

The processional hymn was what it always is for the Epiphany, what it was at my grandmother’s funeral.  We Three Kings.

“You ok, dad?” Ken leaned over to me to whisper.

Oliver looked up and looked worried.  “What’s wrong?”

Christmas day I wrote a post complaining that I didn’t like it that the three kings had elbowed their way into my one of my favorite Christmas carols, The First Noel.  That song is about the shepherds, about how the first people to get the good news about the birth of the Savior were the poor and the outcast.  The kings should stay out of it, I felt.  Besides, they have their own song.  Which I like, by the way.

But the kings are an integral part of the story, however I feel about their place in my favorite song.  Matthew didn’t call them kings, a fact you probably know.  He said they were astrologers.  Magi is the Greek for what they supposedly were.  Wise Men is the King James translation.  Tradition turned them into kings.  Tradition wanted us to know that a new kingdom was established with the birth of Jesus, one that supersedes all earthly ones, and all the kings of the earth must answer to God and bow down before him.  Tradition was letting us know, before there was a political system to put it into effect, that in the eyes of God all people, kings and shepherds, are equal---equal in what is expected of them, equally loved.  This is a good idea Tradition had.

It’s reason enough to celebrate the Feast of the Three Kings as a holy day right up there with Christmas itself.

But Tradition didn’t stop revising Matthew’s story there.  Matthew said the magi came from the east, but he didn’t say where in the east exactly.  Persia, maybe.  Babylon.  Tradition didn’t locate their starting point, but it did something better.  It colored their skins.  One white, one black, one yellow.

The three kings are from the east.  And the west.  And the north and the south.  They are from everywhere.  They are of everywhere.  They are every one of us.

Christianity is at heart---at the heart of its founder, at any rate---a very simple religion.  It has one commandment.

Love one another, as I have loved you.

That’s it.  That’s the rule, and that’s the good news, and, as we know, the good news, those tidings of great joy, was given to all people.

Christianity was meant to be the least exclusive of faiths, totally unselective.  Everybody was saved when Jesus was born.  Everybody was made Christian when they heard the good news.  Everybody is Christian when they follow that one rule, regardless of what they believe about the purported divinity of the man who preached it or even about his actual historical existence.

Leave it to human beings to find that one too easy and to complicate things to the point of madness.

By the way, Mr Hume, that rule isn’t original.  Jesus didn’t come up with it first.  It’s a precept of Buddhism, although it wasn’t original with Buddha either.  Still, there’s another tradition, less established, but very attractive.  That tradition says that before Jesus began his ministry in Israel he traveled to the east, into India, perhaps, and sought out and learned from the great teachers there, some of whom would have been Buddhists.

Maybe it’s from them, then, by way of Jesus, we got the good news.

At any rate, the three kings are all of us, all equal before God, all subject to his laws, which his son summed up in a single sentence.

This is why Christmas has to continue until the Feast of the Epiphany.  The kings have to come to the stable, not to bow down and deliver their gifts, but to get the Word.  They came to Bethlehem in order to go home and tell people what they saw and heard.  The gifts they brought to the manger were nothing.  The gift they were given to bring home is everything.

So let me say, speaking for all the Mannions and my grandmother, one last time this holiday season, Merry Christmas to you and yours!

Follow the link to see the comments on the original post.

The Oscars are despicable to Despicable Me!

Academy Award nominations out.  Despicable Me wuz robbed!

What’re your thoughts?

The Secret of My Hiatus

Technically, my hiatus is well underway and I shouldn’t be posting.  But, you know, my hiatus, my rules.

But this will be short.

It occurred to me after I announced that I was taking a break that that meant my advertisers would be taking a break along with me.  That’s not what they pay for.

It also occurred to me that if I wasn’t posting readers wouldn’t be reading and they might get to enjoying a break from me themselves.  They might develop a habit of not reading my stuff that it would be hard for them to shake when I returned to the shop and fired up the boilers.

Then I got an idea.  A wonderful, awful, Manniony idea.

Re-runs!

Carson used to do it.  Garry Trudeau does it.  Why not me?

So, while I’m taking a break from writing, I won’t be taking a break from posting.  I’ll be re-posting some of my favorite posts from last year under the heading Editor’s Choice.

I’m the editor.

I choose ‘em.

I’ve already posted two from January of 2010.

Somebody’s mother in the hurt locker and The Closet Casebook of Sherlock Holmes.

Another one’s going up this afternoon.

Please check them out and please continue to stop in from time to time to see what’s been going on and add your thoughts.  Even old posts need some comment love.  In fact, The Closet Casebook has already generated more comments on the re-posting than the original did.

And please look in on the advertisers from time to time. They get lonely too.

Thanks again for all your support and encouragement.  I’ll see you all soon.

Meanwhile, don’t forget, you’ve got homework.

Editor’s choice: The Closet Casebook of Sherlock Holmes

Originally posted January 8, 2010.

Have finally admitted to myself I won’t be writing a conventional review of Sherlock Holmes.  At least not before it comes out on DVD.  The reason isn’t the same as the reason I won’t be reviewing Avatar at all.  I didn’t miss the train on this one.  I was on board right from the first shots of the the black carriage rolling through the shadowy streets of London apparently in pursuit of a bowler-hatted thug barreling on through the dark ahead of it, shots pretty much lifted from the Johnny Depp adaptation of Alan Moore’s graphic novel, From Hell, which was pretty much lifted from a dozen or so Sherlock Holmes movies and stories, especially Murder By Decree, starring Christopher Plummer and James Mason as Holmes and Watson in pursuit of Jack the Ripper.

If I ever do get around to writing a review of Sherlock Holmes I think I will pair it with From Hell and point out that Robert Downey’s Holmes and Depp’s drug-addicted, clinically depressed detective chasing Jack the Ripper, Frederick Abberline, are counterbalancing reflections in the same distorting three-way mirror---it’s as if Basil Rathbone’s Holmes is looking into that mirror and seeing Downey in the right-hand glass, Depp in the left, and Jeremy Brett in the middle.

A comic neurotic, a tragic neurotic, and a realistic one that is a mixture of both.

No, I enjoyed Sherlock Holmes, pretty much start to finish.  But it’s just so slight that the farther away from it I get the vaguer it grows in my memory.

It’s a big noisy mess of a movie, but everything that’s wrong with it has nothing to do with its unfaithfulness to the Sherlock Holmes of Conan Doyle’s stories, and everything to do with director Guy Ritchie’s sloppiness and self-indulgence plus the fact that the script is lazy, incoherent, and only smart in some passages of dialogue that might very well have been ad-libbed on the set by Downey and Jude Law.

There’s no mystery for Holmes to solve, and there’s practically no attempt to work particular scenes into the plot and how could there be since there’s barely a plot to work anything into---what passes for a story is only an excuse for fight scenes, chases, explosions, and Robert Downey and Jude Law’s banter.  The problem with having Holmes enter a bare-knuckled cage match with a homicidal bruiser twice his size and beating him isn’t that Holmes wouldn’t or couldn’t manage this---Rathbone’s and Brett’s Sherlocks wouldn’t and couldn’t, but Conan Doyle’s most certainly could and probably did or at least he did things like it---it’s that the fight comes out of nowhere and leads nowhere when it wouldn’t have been difficult at all to fix it so that Holmes had to enter the ring in order to follow a clue or find one.

And what’s right about the movie hasn’t much to do with its cheeky iconoclasm towards fans’ more traditional, and dull, conceptions of Holmes and Watson, and pretty much everything to do with Downey and Law’s performance.  They are a perfect movie star pairing, like Redford and Newman, Gable and Tracy, Hope and Crosby, Cary Grant and Irene Dunne, and think about the implications of that last pair.

At any rate, I had a good time, although YMMV, but all my thoughts and feelings pretty much echo those of Eileen Jones in her review at The Exiled.

I also like M.A. Peel’s take.

But Jones raises a point about the movie’s ambiguity on the subject of Holmes’ sexual ambiguity. Her review, by the way, is headlined Sherlock Holmes Gets Queered.  Jones writes:

You can build whole interpretations of Holmes out of single traits and ticks described by Arthur Conan Doyle. Basil Rathbone did him keen and hawk-eyed, Jeremy Brett favored sniffy and precise, and Downey goes for Holmes as a brilliant wild card, driven and erratic, and so devoted to Watson he can’t bear to part with him. Much of the humor of the film involves Holmes’ attempts to break up Watson’s impending marriage, which threatens their happy bachelor home. Holmes was always a fairly non-heteronormative character, as the academics say, but this movie makes a big point of it. Is he homosexual? Bisexual? Pansexual? Or to paraphrase 30 Rock, is he “only gay for Watson”? You be the judge!

Now, Ritchie and Downey and Law have a good time playing on the question about Holmes’ sexuality and the nature of his relationship with Watson, but the funny thing is that I thought it was Watson we’re meant to suspect is actually the closeted gay man or at least he’s the one who is gay for his friend.

If Downey’s Holmes is gay for Law’s Watson, he’s robustly and obsessively straight for Rachel McAdams’ Irene Adler.

Law’s Watson, on the other hand, seems almost appalled at the idea that his wife-to-be, Mary Morstan (played by an almost asexual Kelly Reilly---she’s both prim and playful, but the only times she comes close to flirting it’s with Holmes, not Watson) is also his soon-to-be sexual partner.

Doyle’s Holmes is notoriously cold to women.  Movie and television adapters have made more out of his admiration for Irene Adler than Doyle intended.  In fact, Doyle, or Watson, at any rate, is adamant that there is nothing but admiration in his admiration.

To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman. I have seldom heard him mention her under any other name. In his eyes she eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex. It was not that he felt any emotion akin to love for Irene Adler. All emotions, and that one particularly, were abhorrent to his cold, precise but admirably balanced mind. He was, I take it, the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen, but as a lover he would have placed himself in a false position. He never spoke of the softer passions, save with a gibe and a sneer. They were admirable things for the observer--excellent for drawing the veil from men's motives and actions. But for the trained teasoner to admit such intrusions into his own delicate and finely adjusted temperament was to introduce a distracting factor which might throw a doubt upon all his mental results. Grit in a sensitive instrument, or a crack in one of his own high-power lenses, would not be more disturbing than a strong emotion in a nature such as his. And yet there was but one woman to him, and that woman was the late Irene Adler, of dubious and questionable memory.

On the other hand, when Doyle’s friend, the playwright and actor, William Gillette asked Doyle for permission to have Holmes fall in love in the play he was writing, Doyle told Gillette to go right ahead.

He also told Gillette it was fine with him if he killed Holmes on stage too.  Doyle had a love-hate relationship with the fictional monster he’d created.

But Doyle’s Holmes is cold towards everyone, including Watson, with whom he’s friends but not necessarily best friends---Watson has a full life outside of Baker Street and apart from Holmes---and they’re not all that intimate.  Even after having worked together and lived together for a while, it comes to a surprise to both of them that each man has a brother.

So it’s up to the actors playing them to measure the depth and define the nature of Holmes and Watson’s feelings for and about each other.

Clearly, in this movie, Holmes needs Watson in a way no other movie or TV Holmes has needed his Watson.  But that need, I think, is something other and more desperate and more intense than one based on sexual desire or even on friendship.

Downey’s Holmes is to a great degree a little boy lost playing at being a grown-up.  He’s that immature because his extraordinary talents and intelligence, not to mention his neuroses, eccentricities, and possible sensory integration disorder, have made it impossible for him to relate to any normal adults in his life.  He has never been able to follow the examples of his peers, since he has no peers, and therefore never learned how to act like a normal grown-up human being.  This leaves him both desperately lonely and more than a little afraid.

Watson is the only adult friend he has and the only normal human being who will put up with him.  He loves Watson as a brother but he needs Watson as a father, mother, teacher, guide, and protector.  Basically, Watson is Holmes’ only connection to that part of human life that is not out and out criminal or insane.

Of course he’s terrified at the prospect of Watson’s moving out and leaving him alone.  Holmes, the little boy, can’t imagine that it’s possible for a well-adjusted adult to have a family life and a professional life.

There may be some jealousy at work, but I think what Holmes is jealous of is Watson’s having things he can’t have himself, a normal family life and the love of a decent and non-criminally inclined adult woman.

Watson, on the other hand, seems more desperate to break away from Holmes than Holmes seems desperate to keep him.  Naturally, living with a demanding and totally solipsistic lunatic would drive anyone crazy and alternating fantasies of escape and murder would be totally understandable in even the most detached and tolerant of men (like Conan Doyle’s and most movie versions’ Watsons), but add to this Watson’s decided ambivalence about his engagement and his almost complete lack of sexual rapport with Mary, throw in the Greek nudes on the windowsill of his consulting room at Baker Street, and what we have is a portrait of a Victorian closet case trying like mad and failing to run away from his true feelings.

And then it turns out to be Mary herself who resolves the problems for both men, and she does it in a way that solves a couple of problems of her own.

It’s Mary who gives Watson “permission” to maintain his friendship with Holmes, the only catch is that she gets to develop her own friendship with the great detective.  Mary convinces Watson that he needs to stay partners with Holmes because Holmes would be lost without him (which is true) and because Watson has a responsibility to write up the stories of Holmes’ adventures.  She gives Watson an excuse---duty---to continue his friendship with Holmes.  But she intends to be a part of things, if by nothing more than helping Watson turn his notes into the stories we know, and thus she places herself as a shield between Watson and the object of his desire.

But as I said, as Kelly Reilly plays her, Mary feels more of a spark between herself and Holmes than between herself and her husband-to-be, and by allowing Watson his excuse she’s given herself one to remain close to the new object of her desire.  She’s arranged it so that she gets to keep her husband in her bed and to spend time around Sherlock Holmes.

Meanwhile, she’s given Holmes a big sister-figure to go along with the big brother-figure he’s depended on Watson to be, doubling both his protectors and his connections to normal adult life.

And so they all live happily ever after, at least until the sequel.

__________________

Meanwhile, back on Pandora.  I went to see Avatar expecting to get swept up in it and that just didn’t happen.  I don’t blame the movie.  I blame my own mood.  Our old pal Nancy Nall went expecting it to be a waste of an afternoon, but she got swept up.  Now she wants to see it again, in 3D, at an IMAX.

And just for the fun of it, my brother Larry Mannion sent this along.

Click here to see comments on the original post.

Editor's choice: Somebody's mother in the hurt locker

January 13, 2010.

Couple nights ago I got to talking to a woman in line behind me at the video store.

She was someone who looking at her you think here’s someone who’s had a bad day.  She was in her forties, on the thin side, sallow-skinned, with a pleasant but tired expression on a nice face that has to be described as care-worn.  Walker Evans would have liked to have photographed that face.  It was the face of a farm wife who having come outside to survey the damage from the recent dust storm is relieved to see the chicken coop isn’t buried as deeply as she expected it to be.

“Excuse me,” she said, “Do you know what the late fee policy here is?”  She was clutching three DVD cases in both hands.

“I don’t think they have late fees,” I said.

Her face brightened.  “That’d be nice.  These are really late.”

I didn’t tell her that if something’s really late the store makes you buy it.  She said, “My son checked them out a couple weeks ago and he forgot to bring them back before he shipped out.”

I knew what she meant right away but reflexively I repeated what she’d said.  “Shipped out?”

“Basic training.  He joined the Army.”

I said, “Oh,” because what else can you say.

“He’s in Tennessee.”

She said it like he was on the moon.

I said, “My niece’s boyfriend just finished basic.  He was in some godawful place in Georgia.”

She nodded knowingly.  “Fort Benning.”

“I think so.”

“My daughter did hers someplace in Missouri.  I can’t believe I can’t remember the name of it.  But it was three years ago.  She’s shipping out to Afghanistan next week.”

I winced.

She shrugged.

“Two of them?” I said.

“I can’t believe it,” she said.  “But it’s what they both wanted to do.”  It clearly wasn’t what she wanted for them, but she said, “Takes a special kind of courage,” not bragging, but with the resigned admiration of a mother who’s learned that kids will be who they are no matter who they’re parents think they should be and she was just glad that who her kids are are people she likes and is proud of.

“Takes a lot of courage on your part too, to let them go,” I said, thinking of my two sons and doubting I had her kind of courage.  She gave me a quick, sad look that said, "I didn’t let them."

I said, “Tell them thank you for us.”

“I will.  I definitely will.”

“And thank you too.”

She smiled but her eyes welled and I swear I saw her knees give a bit.  She caught herself.  I let her go ahead of me.  She didn’t have to pay any late fees.

To read the comments on the original post go here.

Homework with serial killers

You’ve got a book to read while I’m away.

I’ve got a book to read and review.

Electric Barracuda by Tim Dorsey.

See, there’s this serial killing vigilante named Serge, pronounced surge as in storm not Ser-gay as in Welcome to Vladivostok, Serge, which would be spelled Sergei anyway but that’s how I thought it was pronounced for years, Sergei.  But it’s not.  It’s Serge.  And he’s this serial killing vigilante cluttering up the Florida landscape with the bodies of bad people whose badness Serge has brought to a creatively violent end.

Sounds like Dexter, doesn’t he?

He was working this gig before Dexter though.  He’s not as neat as Dexter either or as guilt-ridden.  He doesn’t operate according to any code and has a lot of fun making interesting corpses as a result.  He also doesn’t operate in secret.  The cops are onto him.  And in Electric Barracuda they catch up to him at last, except that that doesn’t last.  He escapes.  He takes it on the lam.

He blogs about it.

You’ve gathered this is a comic crime novel?

Dorsey is doing a virtual book tour in February and March.  I’m not sure exactly how it works but on Wednesday, February 16 the tour lands here.  My part in this is to have a review posted the day before so there’s a comment section for Dorsey to make himself at home in.  He’ll answer questions, respond to criticism, recommend off the beaten track tourist attractions in Florida…

So, there’s your homework.  Show up here on the 16th and say hello.

If you’ve read the book or any of Dorsey’s other books starring Serge, you’ll have more to say than just hello, but hello is always a good start.

Here’s the webpage introducing the virtual book tour.  It includes a video featuring Dorsey and some friends pronouncing Serge’s name correctly.

Here’s Dorsey own website.  It includes a clever use of post cards on the front page.  Make sure you look inside Serge’s Top Secret Florida Box.

Electric Barracuda is available from Amazon.

Hiatus

I'm going to do something I haven't done in six plus years of blogging.

Take a break.

I'm not sure for how long.  At least a week, probably two, possibly longer.  We'll see.  I have things I have to deal with here. 

But even if it has to be longer I will be back for a couple of days in mid-February because this blog is part of a virtual book tour by the comic crime novelist Tim Dorsey.  I'm going to write a post about some time today, essentially giving you some homework.  So I guess the hiatus will actually begin tomorrow.  Please check back in for the post about the book tour.

Thanks to everybody for your encouragement and support.  Thanks for sticking with the blog.  I hope you'll all come back when I do.

PS.  The hiatus may not apply to Twittering.

 

 

If you'd prefer not to use PayPal, my snail mail address is PO Box 263, New Paltz, Ny. Please make checks payable to E. Reilly.`

The Problem

The problem is not a lack of civility.  The problem is not an occasional or even habitual reliance on violent rhetoric.

The problem is that for over fifty years now the Radical Right, which has taken over the Republican Party, has been obsessed with the idea that they are the only real Americans and the rest of us need to…not be here.

The new governor of Alabama, Robert Bentley, put it starkly:

Anybody here today who has not accepted Jesus Christ as their savior, I'm telling you, you're not my brother and you're not my sister…

The sanctimonious twit added that he wants to be a brother to those of us who have not accepted Jesus Christ as our personal savior, which is to say the majority of Americans, but by his bigoted, self-aggrandizing religion, that can only happen if we convert.

AP frames his remarks as offensive to non-Christians, which of course they are.

But here’s the thing.  Bentley and his fellow Right Wing Fundamentalists give themselves the power to define Christian and they define it an extremely narrow way that is basically “Us.”

Accepting Jesus Christ as your personal savior is not a Christian practice.  It is a practice peculiar to a particular kind of Christian, Evangelicals.

Catholics, Episcopalians, most Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and even many Baptists do not make being “saved,” something that Evangelicals believe only happens when a person has this very personal relationship with Jesus, the centerpiece of their faith.

One of the reasons for this is that it is presumptuous and arrogant.  It assumes that the mind of God is knowable to human beings.  And it follows from this that the person who thinks he knows what God---Jaysus---is thinking grants himself a superiority to everybody who doesn’t share the same special knowledge.

If you are not saved like me, you are damned.

You are as good as in hell already.  You are of the Devil’s Party.

Yes, what Bentley said is offensive to non-Christian.  But it’s important to keep in mind that by his lights everyone of us who does not think, believe, and practice what he thinks, believes, and practices is not a Christian!

And it’s also important to remember that they believe the United States is a Christian country.

They mean a Right Wing Fundamentalist Christian country.

Telling people they are not Christian is the same to them as telling us we are not Americans.

And this has been what the Right has been telling us and each other for decades. 

It doesn’t matter how civilly or uncivilly they put it.

They divide the country into Americans and Christians—themselves---and the rest of us, who should just go to hell.

Some notes from the last few Mannion Family Movie Nights

Last Friday.  January 14. The Other Guys:  Dwayne Johnson and Samuel L. Jackson, as a couple of violent, crazy, egomaniacal super-cops who are barely an exaggeration of the heroes of countless serious cop movies, are set up as the kind of “heroes” our real heroes, played by Will Farrell and Mark Wahlberg, are meant to be admired for not being.  Of course, the movie ends with Farrell and Wahlberg saving the day by being as violent, crazy, and egomaniacal as Johnson and Jackson.

Previous Friday. January 7.  The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.  A movie about a thousand year battle between good wizards and bad wizards that features a ten minute car chase through the streets of New York City.

Nicolas Cage and Alfred Molina play the dueling wizards but their witty dueling is generally given short shrift so we can focus on the nice nerd wins the love of the beautiful girl just by being a nice nerd subplot.

But if they get around to making the movie version of Gilligan’s Island soon, the producers should cast Jay Baruchel, who plays the nice nerd, as Gilligan.

And the Friday before that which was actually a Thursday because Friday was New Year’s Eve and I was working.  December 30, 2010.  Knight and Day.  I actually reviewed that when it was in the theaters and, to my surprise, liked it.

This week the planned feature is Despicable Me.  I’ve still got to hire me some minions.

Related me:  My post on the proposed Gilligan’s Island movie, Casting the Castaways.

Get Shorty

I like to kid myself that I don’t Twitter much.

Oh, sure, now and then I have some fun twittering a movie I’m watching late at night.  From time to time something in the news or in my life will cheese me off to the point that I’ve just got to let fly with 140 characters of ranting and raving.  But I don’t live on Twitter.

Apparently, I’m in denial.

I tweet enough to have caught the attention of at least one fellow Twitterer, MineApostasy, who has decided my twitters are worth a nomination for a Shorty Award.

Those of you who know my work only from this blog and happened to be drinking a beverage of some kind while reading this are now wiping off your computer screens after doing a classic Danny Thomas spit-take.

“A Shorty Award?  Lance Mannion?  A master of the 140 character Tweet?  The man needs 140 sentences to say hello!”

It’s the truth.

But so is the nomination.  Thanks MineApostasy.

Here’s my Twitter profile, in case you need to see it to believe it that I’m into the whole brevity thing sometimes.

Why I can’t review good movies

You know what’s frustrating, purely from a blogging perspective, I mean?

Watching a movie that you love from the first shot to the final credits.

How do you write a review of a movie that had that effect on you?

How do you build a review around a sob?

Really, how did anybody manage to write a review of The King’s Speech?

Ebert did it.

But he’s a heartless bastard.

I started to tear up as soon as I saw the pain and fear in Colin Firth’s eyes in the opening scene.  I never got better.

The movie did.

Better and better.

Maybe we can get a cloud review going here.  If you’ve seen The King’s Speech, please leave a thought or two or ten in the comments.

Meanwhile, if you want to read a full review, read that heartless bastard Roger Ebert’s.

Seating on the veranda will have to wait until spring

“A land of ice…

“Not winter because the presumes an autumn and perhaps one day a spring.  This is a land of ice, not just a time of ice.”---from Lords and Ladies by Terry Pratchett.

Mom and Pop Mannion took us out to dinner tonight.  Grandparents, parents, and two large-ish grandsons crowded into a booth by the front window and this was our view.  Eight PM, Saturday.  January 15, 2011.

A clean, well-caffeinated place

There’s cold, the kind that takes hold of you from the outside then eats its way to your core, taking over every last neuron along the way, leaving your whole body incapable of feeling or remembering any other sensation but the freezing misery of the moment.  And there’s cold, the kind that is friendly and jolly, practically company, with no other object than to put you in the best mood and most appreciative spirit to get warm again, as if in fact it’s doing you a favor in icing you up to make it feel that much more delicious when you finally get inside somewhere and start to thaw out.

The second kind of cold is often much colder than the first, but it’s usually dryer and works without wind and is often featured with clear skies, sunshine or a bright moon, and fresh snow.

Today it’s the second kind of cold.

Stopped in at the local coffee shop on my way home this morning.  In just the few yards from the parking lot to the door, the cold did its work.

The shop is small, ten paces from the door to the counter at most and maybe that wide from side windows to cupboards.  The ceiling is low.  The floors are bare wood.  The walls are wood too.  The owners keep the place neat and well-swept.  What’s brass gleams.  What’s chrome or silver winks.  What’s wood and can be polished is polished to a glow.  There isn’t a table or a corner or a length of shelf that couldn’t be photographed and put in the dictionary to illustrate the definitions of snug, cozy, homey, and---today---warm.

There were no other customers when I arrived.  The only other person there was the owners’ pretty college-aged daughter.  She had taken over two tables in the middle of the shop that she had pulled together and over which she had spread out her text books and notebooks.  She was wearing a bulky and oversized gray woolen shirt with red window pane plaid as a sweater and she looked…warm.

I thought, jealously, there’s the life, to be young and in school and pulling your weight by running the family business between classes and to have as your job and main responsibility to make iced-up strangers feel warm and at home for a few minutes while they drink a cup of coffee.

The Dude abides at Rancho Deluxe

During last night’s American Masters profile of Jeff Bridges on PBS, the smartest thing that was said about Bridges’ acting was said by Cybill Shepherd.

What she liked best about working with Bridges, which she’s done twice, in The Last Picture Show and Texasville, is that he doesn’t try to hit a home run in every scene.

Acting, Shepherd said, and I wish I had a transcript so I could get the quote word for word, is like a friendly game of tennis.  The object is to give the person playing on the other side of the net from you something to hit back.  Hit a home run and it’s impressive, but the ball’s gone, there’s nothing for your fellow actors to do but watch it fly out of the park.

I liked that because it describes an easy to overlook quality in not just Bridges’ work but in the work of most great movie actors---they give way to the other people they’re on screen.  It also describes the flaw in the work of a number of actors who for most of his career have overshadowed Bridges.

Bridges is roughly contemporaneous with Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, and Jack Nicholson.  They’re each a decade or so older but because he got going young and they became stars a little late---Bridges was twenty-two when The Last Picture Show came out in 1971.  Hoffman was famously, or notoriously, thirty when he was cast in The Graduate, four years earlier.---the four of them have been leading men for just about exactly the same amount of time. 

Nicholson, Pacino, and Hoffman are home run hitters.

It’s not that they never play tennis.  It’s just not what directors or audiences usually expect of them.

Bridges volleys beautifully.

After watching American Masters, I was naturally in the mood to watch Bridges do some volleying.  Netflix offers a bunch of his movies to watch instantly---Starman, The Fabulous Baker Boys, Against All Odds, The Big Lebowski---but I wasn’t up for anything deep, intense, heartfelt, profound, or, well, good.

So I watched Rancho Deluxe.

It’s a comic contemporary Western circa 1975 co-starring Sam Waterston, Slim Pickens, Henry Dean Stanton, Elizabeth Ashley, and Clifton James.

For your vicarious viewing pleasure, I twittered it.  For your convenience, I’m not sending you over to Twitter to read my Tweets.  I’m just going to post them right here.

The lazy man’s way to blog, which is a good way to honor the man who played the Dude, who, as Sam Elliot’s the Stranger informs us, is a lazy man, “Quite possibly the laziest in Los Angeles County, which would place him high in the runnin' for laziest worldwide.”

Here goes:

Opening with Waterston and Bridges in a pickup moving through Big Sky Country. Bridges being established as the dopey sidekick?

Was this Waterston's first big followup to The Great Gatsby? Was he considered the star on the rise?

Bridges' resume at this point almost all 2nd male leads. Last Picture Show, Fat City, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot.

Pretty scenery. Credits under the mountains. Screenplay by Thomas McGuane. That makes sense. Music and title song by...Jimmy Buffet?

Guess this was before Buffet started wasting away in Margaritaville.

Whoops. Movie interruption for milk run. Back in a few.

Back. Picked up some chocolate chips too. 2 for the price of 1. Can't beat that.

Are mountains in Montana really blue?

Sam having trouble getting the chain saw started. Why a chain saw? How else to butcher the steer they just shot?

Oh oh. Now our boys got Harry Dean Stanton after them.

Boys paying their rent with the beef. Landlady suspicious. Last month they paid with a sheep. Promise her next month it'll be hard cash.

Bridges has traded his cowboy hat for a polka dotted engineers cap like Judy Carne would have worn on Laugh In.

Roles are switching. Sam the sidekick now. Not dopey. Just a little bit crazy. He's an Indian. Choice is crazy or wise, I guess.

Jeff arrives at his would-be girlfriend's house wearing a red dog mask. Doesn’t impress her father. Did I say Waterston was the crazy one?

Sex and nudity! Love the 70s. Jeff seems baffled and embarrassed by intensity of Patti D'arbanville's orgasm.

Wow! She's still climaxing. Jeff going from baffled to frightened.

Elizabeth Ashley as rich rancher's flirty wife. Do rich ranchers have any other kind of wife?

Henry Dean Stanton knows better than to get involved with the boss' wife.

Clifton James as the rich rancher bored. Declares war on rustlers to give himself something to do. Our boys are the only rustlers around.

Appears our boys are going to go legit & use their rustling money to buy a stud bull at the fair. If Sam can stay focused.

He's into blue ribbon winning cabbages. Has a mind to go see a few heads. Heads of cabbage vs. head of cattle.

Of course they aren't going legit before going legit. They've just rustled Clifton James' prize winning bull.

They're holding the bull for ransom.

Ransom paid they return the bull. Well, they leave it in a hotel room for James to pick up.

Waterston taking his dad fishing in new boat he bought w/some of his share of the ransom. Outlaws are good to their parents.

Sam's dad on the pickup truck buying disease ruining the ppl of the state of Montana. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0073605/quotes?qt0210358

Ah, the surprise twist!  Jeff good to his parents too. Visiting them at their mansion. He's a rich kid getting his kicks rustling.

He has an ex-wife who's still crazy about him. He's not good to her. They had a life boredom and ennui. He loves her but hates her.

Done being good to their parents, the boys go to a honky tonk to play pool and Pong. Jimmy Buffet's singing there.

Henry Dean Stanton playing Pong with Jeff. He knows Jeff's one of the rustlers. Doesn't seem inclined to turn them in.

Jeff and Sam treat Henry Dean Stanton and partner to a night at a classy whorehouse. Madam proud she's improved quality w/o raising prices.

Nite w/prostitutes a bribe. Henry Dean Stanton and partner now in on it with Jeff and Sam.

Enter Slim Pickens as the toughest stock detective in the West. A former horse thief which is why he knows the criminal mind.

The rich rancher's wife misses their former life as beauty parlor owners in Schenectady.

A helicopter vs. pickup truck chase scene!

Slim: "I don't know what they shot this steer with but it blewed a hole in him you can throw a cat through."

A long pointless party scene in which we don't get to see Patti D'arbenville get naked again and have another extended orgasm.

I'm sure there's some important point in showing our boys shooting a new Caddy to pieces but I missed that part of the 70s.

Henry Dean Stanton in love with Slim Pickens' daughter who's played by an actress who could be Amy Adams' mother.

Slim Pickens has recurring dreams of ancient Egypt in which he is friends with the Pharaoh.

Running gag is that all these cowboys, ranchers, and rustlers had boring indoor jobs before they came west.

Henry Dean Stanton claims he was a hot comb model before he took up ranching and rustling.

Partner was in appliance repair.

They're all playing at being cowboys and outlaws.

Rich rancher yelling at his wife from the shower: 'I'm not a monster! I'm a goddamn property owner!'

He was mean to Slim Pickens because Pickens taking too long to capture rustlers. Everyone on Pickens' side.

Pickens on horseback now, after rustlers. "Time for this old reprobate to get to work!"

He rides up to the semi and draws his six shooter on our boys.

Did I miss it or was it a joke? Girl I thought was Pickens' daughter really his wife.

Movie ends with our boys in prison denims mounting horses to ride out to tend the Penitentiary ranch. The Rancho Deluxe of the title.

Jimmy Buffet singing as he heads off the Florida Keys. Credits roll. Movie done. Thanks for watching with me. Goodnight.

Winter in the Ramparts

The Disc rolled into winter.

Winter in the Ramtops could not honestly be described as a magical frosty wonderland, each twig laced with confections of brittle ice.  Winter in the Ramptops didn’t mess about; it was a gateway straight through to the primeval coldness that lived before the creation of the world.  Winter in the Ramtops was several yards of snow, the forests a mere collection of shadowy green tunnels under the drifts.  Winter meant the coming of the lazy wind, which couldn’t be bothered to blow around people and blew right through them instead.  The idea that Winter could actually be enjoyable would never have occurred to Ramtop people, who had eighteen different words for snow.*

*All of them, unfortunately, unprintable.

---from Wyrd Sisters by Terry Pratchett.

My Asperger’s Book

I don’t know how we got in the habit, but when young Ken was very small the blonde and I used to call a full moon, “Ken’s moon.”  I think it came from one of his favorite books.

Picture this now.  A little boy, barely three, standing by the living room window one night, his new baby brother bundled up in his car seat on the floor beside him.  There’s a full moon.  The little boy points it out to the baby.

“See that, Oliver?  That’s my moon!  That’s Ken’s moon!  Do you like it, Oliver?  You can have it.  It’s my moon, but you can have it, ok?”

If anybody ever says that one of the signs of Asperger’s is a lack of empathy, you tell them this story.

From time to time I will write something here along the lines of “I should write a book.”  And some helpful reader or another will respond, “Well, god damn it, Lance, you should.  Get to work.”  But I haven’t known what book to write.

Until now.  It dawned on me the other day that I’ve been writing it on and off for years.  It’s a book that should begin with these two posts:

He is not absent-minded.  He is just present-minded somewhere else.

And:

Asperger’s.

Is there an agent or an editor out there who’d be interested in memoir of raising a kid with Asperger’s or an author who might know of one?

A real, live boy or Pinocchio and WALL-E are now friends on Facebook

Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) tells his lawyer he didn’t steal the idea for Facebook from the Winkelvoss twins…Oh.  Wait…This isn’t a scene from The Social Network, is it?

David Fincher, the director of The Social Network, is not in the habit of making realistic movies.

When The Social Network, which comes out on DVD today, hit the the theaters last summer, there was some argument among critics and pundits here, there, and everywhere, over just how realistic a depiction of life at Harvard or among the new meritocracy or at the offices of Facebook in its earliest days or inside the head, heart, and soul of Mark Zuckerberg the movie presented, the underlying assumption, pro or con, being that a realistic depiction was the point.

It’s like saying the point was a realistic depiction of the lives of World War I veterans who age backwards.

Or the point is the realistic depiction of male bonding rituals among men who may in fact be each other’s imaginary friends.

Or the point is the realistic depiction of how the police conduct investigations during rainstorms of biblical intensity.

Fincher likes to tell fables in the form of contemporary folk tales.

The Social Network is the story of a young man so thoroughly controlled by his own obsessive –compulsive temperament that he is practically a puppet dancing on strings pulled by his own psyche who dreams of being a real, live boy like other real, live boys who seem freer of self-doubt and self-loathing, cooler, and happier than himself.

Fincher himself has compared The Social Network to Citizen Kane---as an act of storytelling, not as a work of genius---and it’s a good comparison, unless you think Citizen Kane was a docudrama about how not to run a newspaper empire.

“Mark Zuckerberg"---the character in the movie, not the real, live young man who created Facebook---is like Charles Foster Kane who is like Billy the Kid and Davy Crockett.  They are folkloric heroes who happen to share some qualities and history with actual human beings named Mark Zuckerberg, William Randolph Hearst, William H. Bonney, and David Crockett.

As I wrote in my review, The Social Network has a very old-fashioned moral.  Money and fame don’t buy happiness.  It’s the same moral as Citizen Kane’s. 

But the movies The Social Network called to mind when I was watching it were a pair of cartoons.

Pinocchio and WALL-E.

Mark Zuckerberg, who as played by a frighteningly deadpan Jesse Eisenberg has all the facial expression of the marionettes in Thunderbirds and Fireball XL-5, arrives at the beginning of the movie with the same amount of personal history and knowledge of how his new world at Harvard works as Pinocchio has of how his world works after the Blue Fairy waves her wand over him.  We meet Mark at the very inception of his dream to become what he thinks is a real, live boy.   But he has to travel through his movie without a Geppetto or a Jiminy Cricket to advise him.  No Blue Fairy ever comes to his aid or rescue.   He has only Sean Parker, a combination of the Fox and the Cat, to guide him, so it’s no wonder he finishes the movie a bigger jackass than when he begins.

At the start of his movie, we meet WALL-E, a plucky, hardworking little robot with a lovable if somewhat eccentric personality.

Of course he has a personality.  We’ve been taught by the movies to expect robots to have personalities.  R2-D2 and the little robots from Short Circuit and Flight of the Navigator that WALL-E not coincidentally resembles are his cinematic big brothers and we don’t wonder how WALL-E acquired his personality any more than we wonder how those other robots acquired theirs.  We take it as a given that whatever sentient beings built them programmed personalities into them and don’t worry about it.

But if we were to wonder about it---and I believe the makers of WALL-E mean us to, at least at the backs of our minds---the first ten minutes of the movie are actually devoted to showing us how WALL-E became himself.

It wasn’t because the sentient beings who built him programmed him to be who he is.  Those sentient beings, humans, built WALL-E to be a tool.  They gave him one specific and routinized job to do, pick up the trash.  If his original programmers wrote any flexibility into his operating system it was to give him---Them.  Our WALL-E was one of hundreds of WALL-Es of the same make and model.---the ability to sort.  The WALL-Es could separate the recyclables.

The WALL-Es were able to do this because they could make comparisons and classify things based on their similarities and differences, starting, presumably, with organic and inorganic.  Along the way and over the course of centuries, the ability to make comparisons between found objects became the job.  Our WALL-E added a line of code to his own programming and gave himself the command to find things in order to compare them.  He started to make associations.  This is like that, that is a little more like this than it is like that other that.  This fits with that.  That works with this.  In other words, he started in a rudimentary way to think.  And to learn.  He began to ask himself what the things he found were for.

He began classifying his finds not according to their similarities as materials for recycling but according to their use in order to use them.

His original programming may have told him to separate things that still functioned from things that were broken.  But now he is on the lookout for things that he can make work.

Work for what?

To make a life for himself.  To make the life he has made for himself better---more functional, more pleasant, more comfortable, and less lonely.

He has found a friend.  A cockroach.  I don’t think it’s a failure on the artists’ parts that the cockroach looks more like a cricket than like a roach.

It’s taken him several hundred years, but WALL-E has developed a soul.

And the thing about souls is that they yearn for connection with other souls.

WALL-E is ready for society and he has learned that the basis of a society is the mating of two souls.

Who then put on their Sunday clothes and join a crowd.

Enter Eve.

Eve is not as far along the self-programming path towards selfhood as WALL-E, but her primary function has been essentially the same as his, to sort and classify.  She’s been looking for signs that life is viable on Earth again.  She identifies a plant.  She also identifies WALL-E.

Eve has been in regular contact with human beings or at least with other robots that are in regular contact with human beings.  She has an idea of what a person is and she recognizes WALL-E as a person.

And in recognizing WALL-E as a person she recognizes herself as one too, since quite clearly she and WALL-E sort into the same category and if he’s a person and she is like him she must be a person too.

In WALL-E, love, compassion, sympathy are logical outcomes of the recognition of like-ness.

In The Social Network, Zuckerberg is always on the look out for likeness and always finding difference.  It’s ironic because Facebook is essentially a platform for identifying identifying and sorting like-ness.  But Zuckerberg can’t benefit from his own invention because a quirk in his own internal programming has him beginning all sorting jobs with the premise that a particular form of difference must always be found first and rejected.

That difference is actually a like-ness.  A like-ness to himself.

Whenever he encounters a like-ness to himself he pulls away.  Zuckerberg operates from the assumption that to be Zuckerberg or like Zuckerberg is to be uncool.  But it’s only through their like-ness to Zuckerberg, and his to them, that love, compassion, and sympathy can begin to blossom.

In the very first scene of the movie we see Zuckerberg rejecting himself as he perversely, compulsively irritates her into breaking up with him and the reason for what he’s doing is that she’s made the mistake of suggesting that he ought to be content with being who and what he is.  She likes him.  Which means she sees a like-ness between herself and him and when he recognizes himself in her he can’t help but react with contempt.

Zuckerberg would like to be a real, live boy, but whenever he is faced with the real, live boy he actually is, he veers off and goes looking somewhere else.

This is what keeps him constantly creating and innovating.  It’s what in fact makes him a genius programmer and successful businessman.  He is never content with the way things are.  But it’s also why he finishes the movie all alone, isolated from the social networks, virtual and analog, he’s built, unlike WALL-E and Eve, who finish their movie together as part of the society they helped to rebuild.

The Social Network is available on DVD and to watch online at Amazon.

Metaphors for the weak and frightened

The information out there so far suggests that Jared Loughner, the suspect in yesterday’s shootings and murders in Arizona, had been unraveling for a while in a sadly typical way that for many schizophrenics often ends in violence.

Absent the political obsessions, Loughner probably would have hurt people he knew instead of strangers.

But nothing I’ve read yet convinces me that Loughner needed or was even incited by the violent rhetoric of the Right Wing blowhards of the current moment.

His list of favorite books looks to me like the summer reading list of a high school sophomore rather than the systematic self-assigned homework of a college-aged budding political theorist or terrorist.

But if he was drawing political insights from Alice in Wonderland and Animal Farm, whatever those were, they were his own.

They were not taught to him by Sarah Palin or Glenn Beck or Michelle Bachmann or Rush Limbaugh.

Loughner seems to have been working his way towards his demented and violent conclusions all on his own, just as the Unabomber worked his way towards his and David Koresh and Arthur Bremer and others worked their ways towards theirs.  In fact, just as John Hinckley and Mark David Chapman worked their way towards theirs, with no help from Jodie Foster or John Lennon.  Demon-haunted people will find their own way towards hunting down their demons and if they’ve projected those demons onto people outside themselves those people will suffer.

So, it’s entirely possible that if he never heard a word from any member of the Tea Party, never visited the SarahPac website, and only listened to baseball games on the radio, Loughner still would have found his way to that Safeway Saturday.

So it’s reasonable for the Sarah “Reload” Palins and Sharron “Second Amendment” Angles and Michelle “Get Armed and Dangerous” Bachmanns to argue that they can’t be held directly responsible for what happened yesterday, even if Loughner was more inspired by their childish ranting and raving than appears.

The trouble is, it’s a little late for them to get “reasonable.”

Reasonable people---and responsible political leaders---would have asked themselves before they started reaching for the rhetorical gun racks what effect their words were going to have on the not necessarily reasonable people listening.

“They’re just metaphors!” isn’t an excuse because they know or they should know that the world is full of people who have trouble seeing the difference between metaphor and reality, for whom there is in fact no difference.

But beyond that, it doesn’t matter that certain words and phrases are metaphors because the feelings those words are meant to capture, incite, and exploit are real.  The hatred and anger and fear the Right has been stirring up for decades are real and they are intentional.

People tend to choose their words for the sound and not the sense.  They want what comes out of their mouths to express in the most direct way what they feel or what they want to feel.

What the Right wants to feel is tough.

What they feel is weak and afraid.

For the most part, with the Right, we’re dealing with people who have built their identities around the way things used to be.  In their hearts they live in a world that is already long gone, if it ever existed, an idealized America in which they are happy, secure, and the point.  Their America exists as expressions of themselves as good, decent, noble, heroic, and successful people.  It’s a country whose existence is denied to them every time they take an unblinkered look at the world as it really is.  They hate it.  What is there frightens them.  They want “their” country back.  And there’s nothing they can do to get it back, because you can’t save something that was never really there.

No wonder they feel weak and afraid.

So they talk to feel strong.

Feeling powerless, they worship power which they equate with dominance.  They need to imagine themselves frightening those that frighten them.

They are talking to buck themselves up, and since they are talking to themselves, it doesn’t occur to them that outsiders like Jared Loughner might be listening.

Loughner might have been listening more intently to the voices inside his own head, but other broken or breaking people might have their ears open to the angry voices outside.  The Right Wing blowhards might be off the hook in this specific case, but that’s an accident.  Generally, they have been and will be responsible for other shootings, other deaths.

Because even without immediately causing a shot to be fired or fuse to be lit, they cause violence upon the body politic with their words.  Even if they never make another reference to guns and ammo or the blood of patriots, they will continue to the nation harm by the violence of their feelings.

Their hatreds and their angers and their fears divide them from their fellow Americans.  They divide us all from each other by the essential Us Against Them-isms that has become the Right Wing’s reason for being.

According to the Right, there is a real America and they, the Real Americans, are the only ones who deserve to live in it and have a say in how it’s run.  And this real America is under attack.  That’s not a metaphor.  They mean it.  America is being attacked by enemies within and without.  These enemies are intent on stealing America from Americans or hellbent on destroying it if they can’t steal it.  Again, this is not a metaphor.  This is what they believe is happening.  This is what their leaders and media rabble rousers warn them with ever increasing urgency is happening.

This is the Right’s political reason for being, to rally Real Americans to fight off all those others who are their enemies.

When you start from that point, you don’t need the blood and gun metaphors.

When you start from that point, the metaphors stop being metaphors.

They are the next logical and necessary steps in the defense of the nation.

_____________________

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The quotable Matt Taibbi on the Lost America John Boehner cries for

From Rolling Stone:

It was good times in America for a while. A man could wait for his local congressman to get caught diddling a 16-year-old, make a run for his seat, and then spend the next 20 years getting hustled around the world on golf junkets and showered with campaign checks and apartments and corporate-jet flights, and nobody would utter so much as a peep of protest. Congress was an easy job for any man with a nice fairway stroke, a limited moral compass and a keen sense of bureaucratic loyalty; it was half an acting job and half clerical work, taking orders from industry captains and selling the resultant giveaway bills to your voters as principled blows for Adam Smith, the flag and the free-enterprise system. Back when America was still a feared international bully that was flush with borrowed Saudi and Chinese cash and could stand to blow a few hundred extra billion in public funds every year on budget-padding deals — back in the Bush years — John Boehner was the perfect candidate for congressional leadership, a lifetime company man who didn't give a shit about most Americans but could shed tears on national television on behalf of Jamie Dimon's bottom line.

Read the whole article, The Crying Shame of John Boehner.

Tearfully related:  Me on the lost America John Boehner has forgotten, There’s always tomorrow for dreams to come true…unless you’re a conservative, then all dreams will come true yesterday.