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Nurse Baker (breaking off their kiss, as if she’s suddenly remembered): I’m engaged to a pilot!
Hawkeye: So am I. I just hope it’s not the same one.
Got passed on the road yesterday by a pick-up with one of those evil pissing Calvin decals on the rear window. (I’ve often wondered why Bill Watterson hasn’t sued. Maybe he gets royalties.) It was a little pickup, a kind I don’t see much anymore. Seems no one drives anything smaller than a F-150 these days. I saw a 350 recently. Thing was as big as a tank. The driver was a very small woman. I didn’t see the driver of the truck that passed me. Compared to what I’m used to, and especially compared to my memory of the 350, the pick-up looked like a toy. The driver was aware of this. I know this because he, and as you’ll see it was almost certainly a he, had another decal in his rear window that called the truck a toy. It said:
MY OTHER TOY HAS TITS
I’ll bet it does. And I’ll bet it really is a toy and it’s inflatable.
Now there’s a babe magnet. With the Calvin decal? It’s like Sam Malone’s Corvette. Women see that in a parking lot and they say to themselves, “Well, I know who I’m having breakfast with tomorrow!”
Why do I think this guy would be scared silly at the prospect of having breakfast with a real live woman?
Good gravy.
Who taught him that the way to attract persons of the female persuasion is to offend as many of them as he can?
Who taught so many American men that the best and only pickup line they need is some variation of “Me want you. Hur-hur.”?
Maybe they pick it up when they’re fourteen from beer commercials which are either aimed at guys like the driver of the toy pick-up truck or make fun of guys like him while pretending to be aimed at them. By the way, have you noticed how fear of women is a theme of the second type of ads? I don’t think the guys being made fun of notice.
Been a long time, but I don’t remember this “technique” ever working back in my salad days. I remember watching in amusement as other guys tried it again and again and then I would shake my head in bewilderment when they whined about getting shot down. I couldn’t understand why it wasn’t obvious to them why basically grunting like cavemen and beating on their chests failed to charm.
Not that I was a young Sam Malone or Hawkeye Pierce myself, although I had aspirations. It was just that somewhere along the way I had learned that it was helpful if you actually talked to a girl first---I should say talked with---before inviting her to breakfast.
Frasier: Let’s face it, everybody. In America, in the 1990s, there are no heroes anymore.
Sam (bursting in the door): Hey, guys! I’d like you to meet my date.
Norm, Cliff, Frasier, and the gang (chanting): Sam-my! Sam-my!
I’ve never been taken with evolutionary psychology as a method for explaining all human behavior, but I did develop an evolutionary theory for what those guys were doing, even if they weren’t aware it. The purpose of the grunting and chest beating, I theorized, wasn’t to charm females of the species. It was to scare off other males. Once the competition was driven away, then the horny homonid could devote his attention and his energy towards charming a potential mate and convincing her that he was a worthy breakfast companion. I just figured that these guys hadn’t learned the second step or that there was a second step.
But the more time I spent in the field observing their behavior, the more I began to doubt my theory. I began to think that the reason they hadn’t learned about the next step was that there wasn’t supposed to be a next step. Charming females wasn’t the point. Getting invited to breakfast wasn’t the point. Driving off competition from other males wasn’t the point, in fact, the point was almost the opposite.
The point, my theory had it, was to show other males that you weren’t competition for them.
These guys weren’t trying to attract girls. They were trying to make themselves attractive to other guys. Not as potential mates. As potential members of the pack.
The object was for the beta males to demonstrate to the alpha male that they would support and cheer on the top dog but that they didn’t have any ambition to challenging the top dog themselves.
To put it in another, less pseudo-scientific way. These guys didn’t want to be Sam Malone. They already knew they weren’t and never would be. They were Norms and Cliffs who desperately needed Sammy to like them and let them be part of his gang because they knew they were helpless on their own.
Or, to take a more literary approach. In Romeo and Juliet: Mercutio is often assumed to be gay because of his expressed contempt for Romeo’s infatuations, first with (the unseen) Rosalind and then with Juliet. And for all I know or care maybe he is gay. But it’s far more important that he’s the alpha male of the gang whose only other members we see are Romeo and Benvolio but that probably includes a bunch of other young Veronese bullyboys and swells. As top dog, Mercutio would naturally try to discourage his gang from pursuing any relationships outside the pack but he would be especially suspicious and jealous of any of the other’s getting involved with women, either because that would threaten the cohesion of the pack---the poor smitten sot might wander off or his romantic and erotic success might incite jealousy among the others---or, since a perk of being the alpha male is first choice among potential mates, Romeo might represent a challenge to his alpha maleness.
It’s to Mercutio’s credit that when he realizes Romeo is seriously in love with Juliet he actually begins to enjoy his company more and treat him with more respect. He starts to see Romeo as his equal and likes that.
Unfortunately for everyone in the play, a challenge to Mercutio’s place as top dog comes along that he can’t tolerate or adapt to.
And it comes from a cat.
At any rate, it seemed to me, and seemed strange to me, that there were a lot of guys for whom it was more important to show off to other guys than share breakfast with a girl. And it still seems strange to me. I don’t know if it’s evolutionary, cultural, or economic, but for some reason the point of gestures like “My Other Toy Has Tits”---and there are all kinds of variations of that, most of them actual gestures---is to fit in among other guys. Both types of beer commercials, the ones that take these guys’ lusts seriously and the ones that make fun of them, recognize that the real point isn’t to get laid but to share a beer with the guys and both recognize that women are other to that experience. Women are either accessories to the beer sharing experience or a threat to it.
In the second type of ad it’s often implied that the guys, either the ones in the ads or the ones watching at home, are relieved when they’re shot down. I don’t know if this has to do with performance anxiety or fear that success would lead to their being driven from the pack.
It didn’t make sense to me that there were guys who preferred the beer-drinking company of other guys to breakfast with a girl. It still doesn’t. And I can’t help thinking that guys like the driver of that pick-up want to learn.
If they do, my first lesson would be this.
One semester back in college I had an idiot roommate who decorated the wall above his bed with centerfolds from Hustler. Not Playboy. Not even Penthouse. Hustler!
The wall above my bed was decorated with New Yorker covers and cartoons.
Yeah, I was a pretentious little snot back then.
But guess which one of us had more company for breakfast.
______________________
For the record. I do not mean any disrespect to pick-up trucks of any size or to their drivers. I still want a pick-up truck of my own.
According to digby, Congressweasel Paul Ryan, author of the Republican plan to kill Medicare while lowering taxes on the rich, is becoming a hero in his own mind. He’s begun comparing himself to Winston Churchill even, apparently in the belief that this is his finest hour, because standing up to (or, actually, running away from) a roomful of angry grandmothers while being sainted and lionized by the Washington D.C. establishment as the nation’s most Very Serious Person is somehow equivalent to rallying the people of London as the buzz bombs fall.
Of course, if Ryan were to out and out say, “Never have so many owed so much to so few,” he would mean that it’s time for the many of us who aren’t rich to hand over much of the little money we have to left to the few who are already so rich they can’t begin to spend what they’ve swindled, skimmed, and gouged from us over the last ten years.
It’s been pointed out again and again that the Ryan-Republican Budget doesn’t add up. But it doesn’t need to add up. It doesn’t need to add up any more than a bank robbery needs to add up. That’s because it’s simply a scheme to transfer more money into the hands of the wealthy. But taken at its face, it doesn’t add up because it can’t add up. It’s not dependent on math, it’s dependent on a belief in miracles, the main one being that in just a couple of years the United States will experience a surge of economic growth on a scale that has never occurred in history.
Another miracle will take place in ten years or so when the first vouchers are mailed out and just that act will cause the cost of medical care to plummet to levels where seniors won’t even need to spend all the money the vouchers represent.
It’s not surprising that when Ryan and the Republicans can’t get the math right in their economic planning, they can’t get it right in their political calculations either.
Ryan can’t understand why he is on his way to becoming the most reviled Republican politician not planning a bus tour or releasing a two hour vanity production of movie. And the decline in his reputation is a bit unfair, since Ryan is to the Republican leadership what Bugsy Siegal was to Meyer Lansky, a hatchetman and a front getting a little too full of himself. You have to give the guy credit for guts though. He is out there defending his Party’s plan to kill off Medicare and a whole lot of sick old people along with it. Like too many of us these days, Ryan is on Twitter. I know this because like too many of us I’m on Twitter. And Ryan’s been tweeting his defense. One of his recent tweets was:
Our budget ensures no changes for those 55 years old or older. But for future generations, we need real reform.
Let me repeat the *only* Americans who will be hurt by the Ryan Plan are the 79% who are currently under age 55.
That ten year span before the GOP plan wipes out Medicare isn’t there to give people under the age of 55 time to start saving up to pay for their hip replacements and cataract surgeries out of pocket in their old age. It’s there to give Republicans five elections in which they’d hoped not to have to deal with the wrath of angry seniors who suddenly can’t afford to go to the doctor.
It hasn’t worked out. They didn’t do the math. There are an awful lot of people under the age of 55, including about half the Baby Boomers, who can do the math and have figured out that ten years---or fifteen years or even twenty years---is not enough time to save up all the money they’re going to need if there’s no Medicare for them, even if they didn’t need that time to rebuild their 401ks or save something extra to cover what their Social Security won’t cover and pay off the mortgages on houses they won’t be able to sell at near what they paid for them and put their kids through college.
But it’s not just that 79 percent who are mad.
Among other all the other delusive aspects of Ryan’s plan, he and the Republican capos are figuring that there are a significant number of people over the age of 55 who, as long as they get their hip replacements paid for by the government, don’t give a damn what happens to their children and grandchildren.
“I got mine, you get yours” has been a guiding principle of the Nixonian-Newtian Republican Party for over 40 years, but now there are no Old Guard Rockefeller and Eisenhower Republicans left to mitigate against it, and the Party is in a fever to make that principle the basis of every single thing they do. What’s more, they assume that a majority of Americans think this is a good thing, that we want to live in a country where our neighbors will let us suffer and die as long as they get their checks from the Feds.
Last November’s election seemed to suggest the Republicans were right.
Maybe they were.
But I think that there are a lot more people who have lived their lives by the principles that it’s their responsibility to provide for their children and grandchildren and to help out their neighbors and try to leave the country a better place they found it.
Probably I’m biased because I know that my parents would gladly give up some of their benefits to ensure that their grandchildren will get to enjoy what they’ve enjoyed themselves and because I know that I and my brothers and sisters would give up ours to see it to that our parents don’t have to do that.
Maybe that’s what Ryan’s counting on, that those of us under 55 will agree to miserable, sick old ages of our own as long as our parents and grandparents aren’t miserable and sick.
Either Ryan and the Republicans think we’re a nation of assholes or they’re counting on us being a nation of saints and martyrs, and I can’t decide which would make them the bigger cynics.
But what they apparently haven’t counted on is that we are a nation of pragmatists who don’t think we need to be either assholes or saints and martyrs just to save rich people from having to pay what they’re currently paying in taxes. And we’re also aware that we have been sacrificing along the way by paying for our parents’ Medicare with our taxes in the expectation that our children will be doing the same for us.
Ryan and the Republicans are counting on us being too selfish or too reflexively generous or just plain too stupid to notice that his plan to end Medicare is part of the Republican plan to cut taxes even more for the rich.
The same thinking’s at work in House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s shakedown of the country using the entire population of Joplin, Missouri as hostages. Cantor is adamant that there be no help for the people of Joplin unless the money is offset with cuts in the budget elsewhere.
In effect, this is a demand that the rest of us agree that when our communities need government help to recover from a natural disaster people in other parts of the country will have to give up any help they’re getting.
Cantor is assuming one of two things.
Either that, if they don’t receive any Federal aid, the people of Joplin won’t blame Cantor and the Republicans (and their own craven idiot of a Tea Partier Congressman), they’ll blame the rest of us who happen to be represented in Congress by Democrats.
Or that the rest of us want to help the people of Joplin so much that we’ll agree to give up money that we might need to help our towns and cities deal with problems
Apparently, Cantor isn’t aware that helping communities dig out, dry out, and rebuild after natural disasters is one of the few things almost Americans agree the government should do. We may not agree about how much money we should spend keeping a school running during the year or what should go on in the classrooms when it is running. But we do agree that if that school gets flattened by a tornado the Feds should come in and help build a new school before we get back to arguing about the other things.
What’s more, we’ve already paid for this. It’s part of what we expect our taxes to go towards every year.
Cantor isn’t offering to cut our taxes while threatening to let Joplin rot under its own dust and rubble the way George Bush and his Republican Congress let New Orleans rot under the mud and the silt and the oil.
In fact, the Ryan-Republican budget very clearly raises taxes on the middle class and the working class.
So even if we were the nation of selfish cynics the Republicans are hoping we are---and have been encouraging us to be---there’s nothing in Cantor’s shakedown for us.
Cantor and the Republicans are offering us a deal the way the gangsters who come into your restaurant and note that it’s a beautiful place you have here, be a shame if something happened to it.
Cantor’s saying, “We’ll help your community the way we’ll help Joplin, by making you pay more while cutting the amount of aid some other community will get in the future.”
And we’re supposed to respond either, “We give in! Please don’t hurt the people of Joplin!” or “It’s a deal, as long as you’re sure we’re gonna get ours when the time comes.”
Cantor, Ryan, and the Republicans are betting we’re either all saints and martyrs or we’re all just like them.
I’m about a paragraph away from finishing a post about Paul Ryan and the Republican Plan to end Medicare. You’ll be surprised to learn I’m against the plan and I don’t like Paul Ryan and think he and all the Republicans in Congress are a gang of dastardly villains.
But as important as I think it is that you learn that, I don’t want to blog about it.
I want to blog about my trip around the world.
Unfortunately, I’m not taking a trip around the world at the moment.
Fortunately, author, editor, and admitted grumpy old man Richard Pollack is. And he’s been blogging about it. His blog is called You’re Only Old Once and this is his how he describes it:
In Which a Homebody of Some Standing Leaves the Comforting Embrace of New York City After Almost Half a Century and Sets Forth on a Global Expedition, With No Fixed Itinerary, No Deadline to Return, a Certain Anxiety, and One Intrepid Wife.
Right now, Pollak is in London after flying in from Istanbul. But if you want to begin at the beginning, the trip starts here, with Pollak’s apology to Dr Seuss.
Photo by Pollak’s intrepid wife, pianist Diane Walsh.
I don’t think the trailer gives a good sense of what The Fighter is like. It gives a good sense of what Amy Adams looks like in black bikini underwear. But it doesn’t really convey the pacing and the tone and the feel of the movie. It over-emphasizes the boxing, but that’s just good advertising. What it mainly misses is how terrifyingly great a performance Christian Bale delivers. Even if it did, though, you’d have to know to know that it’s also an uncannily dead-on performance.
A little while ago, I met a guy who grew up in Lowell, the Massachusetts mill town where the movie is set. You probably know it’s a true story. The two brothers, Mick Ward (played by Mark Wahlberg) and Dick Eklund (Bale) are still local heroes. This guy told me that what particularly impressed him about Bale was how he got Eklund’s fighting style down cold. Eklund used to fight holding his punching hand down by his side. This guy didn’t know the advantage of that and I’m not sure either. Ekland fought with only one hand to block with but then I’d think that the advantage might be that his opponent had had a harder time keeping an eye on what Eklund’s other hand was doing and anticipating where the next punch was coming from. But I’m no expert. Anyone here know?
As Phil Barron has said, Just because nobody you know got raptured doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
Lot of fun was had, lot of good jokes got made in the run-up to last weekend’s end of the world. Didn’t seem quite as funny afterwards when people began to count heads (or clothes that still had believers in them) and it turned out there were really a lot of people who not only expected to be Raptured but had been truly looking forward to it and were hearbroken to find themselves still here on earth.
It’s sad to contemplate how many lives aren’t worth continuing to live to the people living them.
I don’t understand the religion behind this, although I certainly can understand the despair. I grew up believing and among people who believed at least enough that they remembered to keep the Lord’s Day holy every week. Most people I knew kept it holy on Sundays, the rest kept it holy on the actual Sabbath. My family was Catholic, my best friends were Jewish. I went to Catholic school. I was an altar boy. My first job was as the Shabbos goy at the Orthodox synagogue my friend Chuck attended. Every Friday evening at sundown I walked up there, the rabbi met me at the door, and I went around turning off all the lights. Saturday morning I went back, took the key out of the mailbox, and turned all the lights back on. Part of my pay was permission to raid the refrigerator on days there was a bar mitzvah scheduled. Such desserts? I’m telling you. Most of the families on our street were Jewish or Catholic. But one of the houses was owned by the nearby Methodist Church and so there was always a minister and his family in our circle. The son of one of those ministers was a friend who went into the family business. Part of his ministry has been getting himself arrested while marching for causes that fall under the heading “Social Justice.”
My friend Chuck thought about becoming a rabbi but he went into the family business himself instead and became an ophthalmologist.
My mother’s aunt was a nun. There was a priest in the family, a monsignor, whose actual blood relation I never got sorted out---he was the cousin of a cousin, I think, but I’m still not sure on which side. But he officiated at all the weddings and was there for all the funerals up until his own.
I could begin my autobiography with the opening for a great joke, A priest, a minister, and a rabbi…
What I’m getting at is that I grew up among people who sincerely, devoutly, and whole-heartedly believed in God..and didn’t give Him much thought.
We said our prayers, went to church or synagogue or temple, celebrated our respective holy days with the proper rituals---the baby Jesus and Santa, the Eucharist and jelly beans---we kids were dutifully sent off to Sunday School or Hebrew School, that is, those of us who weren’t lucky enough to go to parochial school where we got our doses of religious ed daily and so didn’t have to give up free time after school or on weekends to have it drilled into us. But all of this was done routinely, almost automatically, with a minimum of fuss, worry, thought, or discussion, if you don’t count our whining about having to go to church every week and our parents “explaining” to us how for an hour we can put up with it as discussion. Even the nuns who taught at my school seemed more fervent about baseball than about teaching the Catechism. They never ended our school day early to break out the bible or start saying the rosary, but they’d do it to roll in a TV during the World Series. This is probably how I got the idea that I can’t shake to this day that God is a Mets fan. I imagine debates in theology classes beginning with the question, If God is a Mets fan, does this mean he is A.) a cruel and unjust God? B.) That He is not omnipotent? C.) He really is committed to this idea of free will and so He’s not going to step in and stop the Wilpons from trading Jose Reyes no matter how stupid and destructive that would be?
To say that we practiced our religion would almost be like saying our parents practiced their jobs or we practiced going to school or practiced playing Capture the Flag.
We believed and took our belief, and everyone else’s, for granted.
Nobody talked being born again. Nobody spoke of being saved. In fact, talk like that was considered rude. What business is it of yours if I’m saved? As for anyone who had the nerve to claim they were saved, well, that was a sure sign they probably weren’t or that they were setting themselves up for a fall. My first grade nun was full of stories about vain little girls whose beautiful hair would fall out and boastful little boys who fell from the tops of the lampposts they’d climbed to show off. Going about bragging about your personal relationship with Jesus would have been treated as a vanity like those little girls’ pride in their curly locks and those little boys’ pride in their monkeyshines. Tell people you had a personal relationship with Jesus and they’d think that Who you really a personal relationship with was Yourself of Whom you were thinking awfully highly.
So if there were any Born Agains or Fundamentalists in town, they had probably learned to be embarrassed to bring it up.
Of course, we were always polite to any Jehovah’s Witnesses or Mormons who came to the door.
Whatever we were, Catholic, Protestant, or Jewish, we all held as our first article of faith, Treat others the way you’d want to be treated yourself, which in practice was usually translated as Mind your own business and leave other people to mind theirs.
Nobody, but nobody, spent much time talking or even thinking about the End of the World.
I don’t remember any nun or priest mentioning the Book of Revelation. I do remember stories about what was going to happen before the Second Coming. There was going to be a big battle in heaven in which the angels led by St Michael would defeat the invading forces of Lucifer, but I don’t remember being taught this so much as told it, the way we were told stories about the martyrs and saints, with the adults telling the stories somehow giving the implication that we unconsciously picked up on that these stories were allegories and their lessons weren’t literal. At any rate, I don’t remember being disappointed or feeling betrayed when in the course of reading a Thor comic book I discovered that the battle of the angels sounded an awful lot like Ragnarok, the Norse myth of the end of the world.
I’m sure the nuns taught us all sorts of intellectual defenses against faith-challenging discoveries like this, but the main one and the one that stuck was that our faith didn’t require us to believe that all of this stuff was literally true.
Judgment Day was coming, the sheep would be separated from the goats, but it was a long way off, too far into the future for any of us to have to worry about it. What we had to worry about was getting through the present. The world would end, sure, but way before that happened, we would die, and when we did it better be after having led a good life. And that was the purpose of religion, to give us strength to get through the present while leading a good life, that is, while putting into practice that first article of faith, treating others as you would like to be treated yourself.
It gets down to this. Growing up, I didn’t know anyone who believed the Bible was literally true and that we were living in the End Times and that meant, in effect, that I didn’t believe that anybody really believed that stuff.
First off, if you were going to believe the Bible was literally true, you had to ask yourself, which one? My friend the now Rev. Skip and my friend Chuck the Orthodox ophthalmologist and my teachers, the baseball fan nuns, studied different Bibles. Skip’s bible was missing whole books from the Old Testament, Chuck’s bible wasn’t even called the Bible and it was written in Hebrew.
I went to college in Boston where the culture was even more Catholic, at a school where a great many of the students were Jewish. In Iowa City, where I went to grad school, things felt vaguely more Protestant but that was mostly a matter of the pizza being lousy and not being able to get a bagel at all.
It wasn’t until the blonde and I had moved to Indiana and we were settling in in Fort Wayne that it began to sink in that there were people, a lot of people, who did not take their religion or mine for granted. And these people were not only not embarrassed to talk about their religion, talking about it was an important part of practicing it. Generally, I was able to avoid talking about it with them, either by steering clear of them entirely or, when I got trapped into a conversation, by making it plain right off I was Catholic and from New York, which tended to shut things right down since I was clearly a hopeless case. The one God-botherer I couldn’t avoid regular contact with was a smug, self-righteous, hypocritical jerk whose religion was an excuse to sneer at people who weren’t, well, him. He wasn’t really interested in whether or not I was saved. He just wanted everyone to know he was. I was tempted to take him as typical until I remembered I knew a lot of smug, self-righteous, hypocritical liberals of every and no faith whose attitudes about their politics were pretty much the same as his about his faith.
So I didn’t get to really know any Born Agains or learn much about what they actually believed and why and how they were able to keep the faith in the face of so much evidence that they were wrong.
I did figure out that many of them didn’t think Judgment Day was as far off as I thought it was and that when they talked about preparing ye the way of the Lord they weren’t being allegorical. I don’t know how close they thought we were living to the End Times. It didn’t seem to be close enough to mark it on the calendar, but close enough that it might happen in their lifetime so we’d all better start getting ready. They weren’t talking about getting their souls ready to meet Jesus. They were talking about getting the world ready, the way you get the house ready for important and demanding guests coming in for the weekend. They expected Him a lot sooner than later and they believed there were certain things he wanted to find done for Him when He got here.
Still, I had a hard time believing they believed this at all, let alone that they were actually looking forward to it. I still have a hard time believing it. I think---find it easier to think---that the popularity of the Left Behind novels just proves that Fundamentalists like a rip-roaring action-adventure story full of fisticuffs and gunplay as much as we heathens, they just need to have the Good Lord’s seal of approval on anything they do that’s fun. Like Christian rock. It lets them enjoy all the sex and glamour and glitz and sense of rebellion and freedom while telling themselves they’re not, they’re really enjoying the feeling of God’s grace and doing the Lord’s work.
As much as they seem to be looking forward to the Second Coming, I can’t help suspecting that most of them are hoping Jesus will keep putting it off for a while longer. They’re happy to be alive and looking forward to staying that way for at least a few more decades.
That’s why I’m inclined to take it for granted that anyone who was actually looking forward to being raptured Saturday was really looking forward to escaping a life that had one way or another become an unbearable burden.
In the book I mentioned I’m reading the other day, Wendy McClure’s The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie, which I’m planning to review (Spoiler alert: I like it.), McClure recounts a weekend visit she made to a farm where the couple who owned it taught classes in old-fashioned and homespun skills like canning and weaving and shoeing horses. McClure was looking to get more of a feel of what it was like to live the life Laura Ingalls and her family lived on the frontier. But she soon discovered that the farm was actually something of a workshop for Christian survivalists who weren’t looking forward to being raptured but were preparing to survive the Tribulation. Among the other people visiting the farm that weekend, was a woman who’d come down with a church group from a small and dying town in Wisconsin. The woman was recently divorced and had been having trouble finding a full-time job to support herself and it’s sad to realize that here was someone who was looking forward to having to can her own peaches and sew her own clothes and get through the nights by the light of candles she’s dipped herself as an improvement over her life at it was now and that world couldn’t end any too soon for her.
Of course, my sympathy for such a person doesn’t extend into a sympathy for the religion she’s chosen for her comfort. For one thing, I don’t see it as providing any comfort only distraction. For another thing, it’s still a religion that teaches willful ignorance and active bigotry. And for a third thing, there’s the matter of just what it is they believe Jesus is expecting to have done before He deigns to come back. He’s given them a to-do list that includes the conversion of the Jews.
Converting the Jews isn’t simply annoying their Jewish friends and acquaintances with the question, Are you saved? It means turning Israel into a Christian nation which is going to happen, you know, after.
After what?
Armageddon in the Mideast.
There are a significant number of people who believe that it should be a goal of U.S. foreign policy to bring about World War III.
Most of these people vote Republican. Of course, most Republican politicians are canting hypocrites whose attitude towards their constituents’ faith is How can use this to get votes and money? But I don’t know which ones they are and how many of them there are. There are some who are in fact true believers. Sarah Palin is one of them. And the scary thing is, the ones who aren’t are either neo-cons themselves or allied with the neo-cons, and the neo-cons have their own Second Coming myth.
The neo-cons believe that apocalyptic war is inevitable. They’re also looking forward to it, not because they want the world to end, but because they believe we’ll win it. What they want is the second coming of the United States as the world power, a position we held for, what? A couple of years after the end of World War II? Whatever. The neo-cons want to live in a world in which the United States enjoys perpetual peace and prosperity by achieving complete world dominance. Once we get those pesky Iranians out of the way, we can take care of the Chinese. It’s almost ironic how they believe the way to perpetual peace is permanent war but that’s how it is. This, of course, is insane and it would strike most voters as insane if the Republicans actually ran on it as their foreign policy platform, which it is. But they can cloak it by appealing to the Fundamentalist Christians by demagoguing on Israel.
Whether we make fun of the disappointed Rapturists or feel sorry for them, we have to keep in mind that they are not in fact representative of Right Wing Christianism. For most of the Right Wingers the End Times are going to include things a lot more dangerous than just cars barreling down the road suddenly driverless.
This reminded me of something that happened to me when I was teaching in Indiana.
One day I was sitting in my office reading when a textbook salesman knocked at the door. I invited him and he while he was making his pitch his eyes were scanning my bookshelves with professional interest. But then he spotted a book and his whole tone and expression changed.
“Oh, I see you have a bible!” He wasn’t sounding like a salesman who saw an opportunity to sell some theological textbook in his catalog. He sounded like a believer who was thrilled he’d found a like-minded co-religionist.
Practically without thinking, though, I replied, “That’s so I can quote scripture for my own purposes.”
He smiled weakly, muttered a few hasty words of goodbye, and backed sheepishly out the door.
I’ve always thought of it as one of my better lines. But maybe I should have kept my mouth shut and let him talk.
The Wilder Life is as the subtitle suggests about McClure’s attempts to reconnect with the books that meant the most to her when she was a little girl, the Little House on the Prairie series by Laura Ingalls Wilder. In the course of re-reading Wilder’s books and biographies and critical studies and even a cookbook, McClure learns things she didn’t know about Laura Ingalls and her family and one of the things she learns is that the little house in the big woods wasn’t as deep in the woods as it seemed in the book named after it. The nearest town, which McClure had always imagined as a long, long way off from the Ingalls little house, was actually nearby. Laura and her family had neighbors and more than McClure would have thought.
What astonishes her, though, is that the town was a town.
In the book Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder…John E. Miller points out that the Chippewa River valley region where Laura’s family lived was home to a bustling lumber business district; he cites a local newspaper editorial, written a few years before Laura’s birth, that describes Pepin, the town only a few miles from the Ingallses’ log cabin, as having a “busy hum”: “The air was alive with the sounds and voices of intelligent and independent industry,” the editorial claimed. Miller thinks that was likely an exaggeration, too, but you can’t help but think that even if the industrious hum wasn’t that loud, Pa Ingalls and his family might have been close enough to hear it, so to speak, in between the sounds of the whispering trees and the howling wolves.
There was a school in the area close enough for Laura to walk to and Pa Ingalls was the treasurer for the local school district:
…so in between making bullets and tanning hides with brains, he must’ve found time every now and then to wipe the bear trap grease from his hands and attend some boring meeting like an 1870s soccer dad.
Even more astonishing was discovering that De Smet, the town in what’s now South Dakota that’s buried and battered by blizzard after blizzard during The Long Winter, had a roller rink!
“How,” McClure asks, “did the town progress so quickly from nearly starving to death to building teen hangouts?”
I’m only three chapters in, so maybe McClure answers that question later in her book, but if De Smet was like most frontier towns from the beginning of the white settlement of America, starting with Plymouth---Jamestown wasn’t founded as a town; it was a fort or, from the Indians’ point of view, a bandits’ lair.---it didn’t have to progress because the town itself was the progress.
The settling of the continent was a progressive process. The image from the movies of the settling of the west occurring as a lonely log or sod cabin is built in the wilderness with maybe a trading post a day’s walk away and the settlers fighting off Indians, wild animals, and starvation while waiting for the cavalry to arrive and civilization to catch up---that happened, here and there, but mostly in wilderness areas we now regard as the East.
Mainly, what happened, though, was that whole towns sprang up practically overnight. Daniel Boone did a lot of solitary exploring but then he came back to the woods to cut it down and found a town.
Looking at the iconic image of wagons rolling west, it’s easy to forget that wagon trains were in fact trains. They were doing what trains still do, carrying lots of passengers with all their attendant baggage and delivering goods. And when we picture those pioneers bumping along in their wagons, the sounds of pots and pans clanging in the beds behind them, we need to remember what else they were bringing with them besides cooking utensils and some bedding. They brought books and musical instruments---think of Pa Ingalls and his fiddle---and clocks and pictures to hang on the walls of their log cabins and sod huts once they got them built. They were also bringing themselves. That is, they were bringing their attitudes, customs, and habits and generally these were not the attitudes, customs, and habits of “pioneers.” The people we call pioneers had been born and raised and had lived most of their lives in towns and cities. There were of course countryfolk among all these townsfolk and cityfolk, but almost from the moment the Pilgrims set foot on Plymouth Rock, Century living in the country meant living close to town instead of in it, and countryfolk could hear that same hum, so to speak, that McClure was astonished to learn the Ingallses heard in between the sounds of the whispering trees and the howling wolves.
The pioneers were bringing civilization with them.
They didn’t settle themselves in the wilderness and then build civilization from scratch. It came with them, pre-fab.
It often happened like this, because along with everything else they brought with them they brought their religion and they brought children: As soon as they could, the settlers built a church and the church usually served as a schoolhouse until they could build a separate one. And around the church they built stores and offices. Not everyone who went west went west to farm. A lot of people went west to sell things, goods and services, to farmers. They were storekeepers and blacksmiths and lawyers and doctors and newspaper editors, all of whom brought the tools and rules of their trades with them. Things got social very quickly, and complicated. That meant hiring or appointing a minister and a teacher and a town police force, which may have included only one man, but he still had to be hired and paid. In order for the farmers to get to and from town and for people in town to get around, there had to be roads and those roads had to be kept relatively clear. There were all these wooden structures right up against each other, all lit and heated by flames. They were fire hazards and that meant they had to watched carefully. Do you remember the episode of Deadwood that revolved around appointing a fire marshal? A fire brigade had to be organized, just in case. Now who did all that? How did they do all that? Usually by committee. Essentially, then, one of the first things they did was put together a town board. That is, they formed a government.
Some people lit out for the territories like Huck, to escape being civilized. But most people went west in search of opportunity, the kind of opportunity that is made possible by being civilized. Even the most self-reliant, anti-social, temperamentally anarchistic, libertarian-minded farmer had to come into town from time to time to buy supplies.
What I’m saying is that it’s not really surprising that whole towns, some with roller rinks, sprang up very shortly after the first settlers felled their first tree or plowed their first furrow, because they needed towns in order to settle. And a town is almost by definition a government.
Which brings me to libertarianism and libertarians. Which is not a change of subject away from The Wilder Life, as you’ll see.
Generally, I don’t give much thought to libertarianism because I don’t think libertarians themselves give much thought to it. As far as I’ve ever been able to see, libertarian describes a temperamental aversion to certain ideas, one in particular, which I’ll get to, more than a philosophic attraction to any. The libertarians I know are either conservatives who think they’re too cool to be Republicans, hate anyone telling them how to behave, and don’t like be told they owe anything to anybody else or they are liberals who think they’re too cool to be Democrats, hate anybody telling them how to behave, and don’t like to be told they owe anything to anybody else.
That last point of agreement doesn’t mean that either type acts as if they don’t owe anything to anybody else. Most of them have strong senses of civic responsibility, duty, and obligation. It’s why they believe that a libertarian society would work. They would do all the pitching in that would be required if the government didn’t plow the roads and put out the fires. It’s just that they feel scolded when they’re told that they have to pitch in and that makes them cranky.
The libertarian ideal is predicated on the notion that if you leave people alone, their self-interest if not their innate decency will compel them to live together as if they had a government. You don’t need to enact lots of laws and impose lots of rules and regulations if people are going to act lawfully and follow the “rules” and regulate themselves on their own. In other words, societies are self-regulating. But as the most libertarian of the Founders was in the habit of saying, People were made for society and therefore they were made for government. Society and government are practically synonymous, because the first isn’t possible without the second. As I said, everywhere they settled, one of the first things the pioneers did was form a government. They didn’t wait around to find out if their neighbors were going to act as if they had a government. They just set to work setting one up, using as their models the governments they had seemingly left behind. Another way of putting this, is they brought government with them.
The thing about libertarians that I find alternately annoying and amusing is that virtually none of them live as self-reliant farmers far from towns they only come into when they absolutely have to. Most of them live in some of the most well-governed, well-ordered, well-regulated, civilized places on the planet. Suburbs.
Those who don’t, live in cities.
Rand Paul didn’t wander in from the hills. He was born in Pittsburgh. He grew up in Texas but in a city, a little city, but still a city of over 20,000 people. He went to college at Baylor University, a little city on its own of about 14,000 people, in Waco, Texas, population of about 125,000, then went on to medical school at Duke University, another little city of around 14,000, in Durham, North Carolina, a city of close to a quarter million people. He hung out his shingle in Bowling Green, Kentucky, a city of only 58,000 or so.
You can’t have that many people bumping up against each other without lots of rules and regulations just to control the traffic.
It’s not simply the case that Paul’s lived his whole life sheltered and protected by governments large and small. His life as it is wouldn’t have been possible except for those governments. He is a pure product of government. And this is the case for most self-proclaimed libertarians. Their lives wouldn’t be possible without not just government but without liberal government.
What libertarians hope for is that the democratic-republicans who found and run towns and cities create a solid, functioning, and unobtrusive government that the libertarians can then pretend isn’t there.
It gets down to this. It’s surprising that De Smet had a roller rink but not that much more surprising than the fact that it had a school Laura could play hooky from one day to go to the roller rink. Life on the frontier was only possible because there were towns like De Smet that could provide schooling for the children of the pioneers and support businesses that sold things the pioneers needed and among those things, the pioneers being civilized folk and civilized folk need to sustain their minds and spirits as well as their bodies, were recreation and entertainment.
Now. The connection between the Little House books and libertarianism doesn’t end there. It ends with an irony.
Here’s another surprising fact McClure turned up in the course of her research.
Laura Wilder’s daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, was a founder of the Libertarian Party.
Looking at the items the woman ahead of me at the convenience store has put on the counter, I’m thinking, “You know, there are times when I wish all it took to make my day a good one was a pack of cigarettes and a Red Bull.”
Then, thinking over what I’m thinking, I think, “God, what kind of life is it when the making of your day is a pack of cigarettes and a Red Bull?”
Then, thinking that over, I think, “Remember, Lance. Some days all it took to make your grandmother happy was a pack of Winstons and a glass of Genessee Cream Ale.”
The moral of this little tale I take to be, “Pay for your gas and your loaf of bread and go on about your business and leave other people to go on about theirs."
Do you think that Gingrich "honestly" thought he had a chance at the Republican nomination? Or is he just jockeying for his position on the right wing gravy train? Speaker's fees, well paid think tank sinecures, Regnery book deals, shell foundations and maybe a sweet sweet Faux News TV show ...
That pretty well sums up Newt Gingrich’s MO since he was run out of the Speaker’s chair in disgrace way back when. Actually, it pretty well sums up his MO since he first appeared on the national political scene. Newt has been a con artist, snake oil salesman, and mountebank from the get-go and it’s been maddening to watch how the Washington DC elite journalists and pundits have played along with him over the years. Since he left the House he has done nothing---not one blessed thing---that has made him anybody whose views should be consulted or taken seriously and yet it’s hard to think of anyone who has shown up more often on the TV bobblehead circuit having his views consulted and being taken seriously. John McCain? Joe Lieberman?
But I honestly have no idea what Newt honestly thinks. Specifically. It’s a good bet that whatever he’s thinking generally it has to do with how to advance the fortunes of Newt Gingrich. If he is making a serious run for the nomination, it’s almost certainly because he sees money in it.
The question is, if he really doesn’t expect that he can be nominated, let alone be elected President, why the groveling before whatever powers-that-be in the Republican Party who have decreed that there shall be no dissing of the Paul Ryan plan to end Medicare and bankrupt the nation? If he’s running just for the money and the attention, then why bother kowtowing? The money’s flowing, the attention’s focused. Why can’t Newt just let himself be Newt?
Here’s my guess.
Newt’s place on the gravy train and perpetual guest spot on the bobblehead circuit has been based on the pretense that he’s going to do something soon.
If he really was going to do something, he should have done it by now. He should have gotten back into political office at some level, as a Senator or a Governor, he should have accomplished things in that office---or at least have appeared to---and then he should have run for President long before now. In 2000 or 2008. Instead, he’s been happy to talk and make gestures like someone who seriously intends to do something and Beltway Insiders have pretended to believe he was serious about following up.
Or maybe they fooled themselves into believing he was.
But the act is getting old and stale. Newt himself is getting old. Young stars are on the rise. For a long time there were no other conservative blowhards as telegenic and as quotable as Newt. That’s changed. I’m not predicting it, but I won’t be surprised if in the not too distant future Paul Ryan takes Newt’s place as the go-to Republican bobblehead. We may never see a President Ryan or a Governor Ryan or a Senator Ryan. We may see an former Congressman Ryan. I don’t know. But I expect that whatever else we see, we’re going to see a lot of Ryan.
While most of the rest of the country is learning to hate him, Ryan is still a hero and a saint to an influential segment of the Beltway elite, and they will make sure he gets on the air and in the op-ed pages and all over the internet, just like Newt now, and the Insider Media will play right along, just as they’ve been doing with Newt.
And if it’s not Ryan, it’ll be someone else. Marco Rubio. Nikki Haley. There are plenty of contenders. The Right Wing bench is pretty deep at the moment. Whoever it is, it won’t be Newt anymore.
So here’s my guess. I’m guessing that Newt has decided he has to do something finally, in order to make it last, to keep the money flowing and the attention focused.
But it’s not enough for him to just run. He has to make a credible run. The whole charade has depended on people “believing” that Newt matters. It’s all up with him if his campaign disappears in a puff of smoke before a single ballot’s been cast. He has to last at least through Iowa and he needs make a showing there that can be spun as “respectable.” He can’t risk being this election season’s Fred Thompson or even a Republican Mike Gravel.
That’s why the instant drop to the knees after his “disatrous” appearance on Meet the Press. Somebody made it clear to him that if he didn’t come to Republican Jesus, it was all over before the shouting. It might not have worked.
There’s no reason for voters or the political movers and shakers on the state and local levels who still have a lot of say in who gets nominated to play along. They aren’t interested in ratings. They want to win elections. Unlike Newt, they want to do things. I’m not saying they want to do good things. But in their own eyes the things they want to do are good and worthy and important and they’re not going to tolerate any candidate they don’t believe will work to get those things done.
But that’s my guess. Like I said, I don’t know. I have no way of knowing. I’d think that if Newt was running for the “fun” of it, part of the fun would be saying what he thinks or what he wants the Media to think he thinks. But I don’t think he’s running just for the fun of it. That’s why I think he’s desperate to keep the candidacy alive. It’s hard to believe he believes he has any sort of real shot at the nomination. But again, who knows. Maybe his vanity and ego have finally gotten the better of him. Maybe what being President has been what he’s really wanted all along and he knows that this is his one and only shot.
Whatever he’s “honestly” thinking, though, there’s a delicious irony at work.
The point I was making last week is that it’s deplorable that the Republican Party has become so Right Wing and ideologically rigid that one of the Movement’s supposed heroes has to debase himself by cravenly promising he supports at economic agenda he knows to be pure lunacy, the product of a true believing dunderhead who can’t add or subtract.
But it’s impossible to sympathize with Newt. He’s being rejected and humiliated by the monster he created.
The modern Republican Party is to a great extent, Gingrich’s party. Not because of the man himself, but rather because of “Gingrichism” — his philosophy of how to conduct politics.
The essential nature of Gingrich’s insurgency in the House and his conduct as Speaker was the destruction of the informal institutions of American governance. By “informal institutions,” I mean those habits and customs outside of formal, written law that make democracy work. Some things are simply not done; everyone agrees to resist the temptation for political advantage in order to make the system work.
Gingrichism is the philosophy that all means short of illegality are fair game in the struggle for political power. He came to the fore in the House minority by personal attacks on other members’ patriotism; he stirred up the Republican base with the argument that the Democrats were not merely wrong, but evil and a threat to the Republic. As Speaker, he destroyed the existing committee structure and bill mark-ups, did away with Congressional institutions to educate members (such as the Office of Technology Assessment or the Administrative Conference of the United States), and centralized power in the leadership. When he did not get his way with Clinton, he cavalierly shut down the government. Not cowed by the political disaster that ensued, he used the House’s impeachment power for political purposes and put the House Oversight Committee in the hands of Dan Burton with the express mandate to harass and cripple political opponents. Gingrich broke institutions not by accident, but on purpose.
And if we examine the most malignant trends of the Republican Party over the last 15 years, many (although not all) of them represent this pattern of destroying institutions — and, importantly, any sense of impartiality, good faith, or nonpartisanship — for the purpose of achieving political power.
That’s Jonathan Zasloff responding to the Atlantic’s James Fallows’ argument that the Media should just ignore Newt. Zasloff goes on to say:
And that is why, in my view, we cannot ignore Gingrich even if his campaign is doomed to fail. His campaign, with all of its narcissism, mendacity, intellectual incoherence, and duplicity is the Republican Party in its purest, least adulterated form. By looking at Gingrich we are not avoiding how the Republicans will choose their issues, or even their candidate: we are looking at their methods, ideology, goals, and tactics in their ultimate nature.
Republicans are busily distancing themselves from Gingrich now, but they cannot. He is them. They are him. They see him every time they look in the mirror.
Unfortunately, this is not a scene from the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie and those are not the mermaids encountered by Captain Jack Sparrow.
These are the mermaids from On Stranger Tides.
Enough said?
This space was supposed to be filled with my review of the fourth installment of the Pirates of the Caribbean movie franchise. The Mannion Clan plan was to see it yesterday afternoon. One thing led to another, though, and we ended up not going. Much to my relief.
Over the weekend, I read two reviews of Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, neither of which made me want to see it any less than I already wanted to see it. I didn’t want to see the first two sequels either, although I had a good time at Dead Man’s Chest, probably because I went with a 10 year old wearing a bandana, an eye patch (turned up onto his forehead during the movie), a Pirates of the Caribbean t-shirt, and a plastic cutlass tucked into his belt---what Jack Sparrow would call his “effects”---who guided us to the drive-in consulting a compass that didn’t point north and once we’d dropped anchor watched the duller parts of the movie through a telescope.
But I hadn’t wanted to go. The first---now known as The Curse of the Black Pearl the same way as the original Star Wars is now known as A New Hope, that is, NOT---was a lot of fun, but as soon as I saw that the sequel had fish men as Captain Jack Sparrow’s main foes, my heart sank.
It was a clear sign that the filmmakers had missed their own boat.
Including the fish men, poor substitutes for the cursed and skeletonized crew of the Black Pearl from the first Pirates, meant that the folks at Dinsey thought that what we’d liked about the first movie was that it made our skin creep. It was as if they thought they’d based the first movie on the wrong ride at Disneyland and what we wanted was another movie inspired by the Haunted Mansion, forgetting that they’d already made that movie. They apparently thought of Pirates of the Caribbean as a ghost story. But the charm of the original was that it was at heart a real, old-fashioned pirate movie and Jack Sparrow---I’m sorry. Captain. Captain Jack Sparrow---was a real pirate.
How good a pirate? Well…
The supernatural element was there as an excuse for the CGI effects that were there to disguise the fact that Pirates of the Caribbean was an old-fashioned swashbuckler. The curse on the crew of the Black Pearl was symbolic. It puts into scary images the fact of their evil. Moonlight reveals them, it doesn’t transform them. When Elizabeth finds herself tossed about by the crew of living skeletons she’s seeing them for what they are and she has to face the fact that she is in a world’s end of trouble. Grown-ups know what she’s really being threatened with.
What do the fish men symbolize? Davy Jones’ crew’s fear of being wrapped in newspaper and sold with a side of french fries?
It’s easy to imagine the first Pirate movie with the curse removed and see how that could have resulted in pretty much the exact same movie. It’d still be the story of one possibly good pirate trying to regain command of his beloved ship while the bad pirates chase a treasure that the young romantic leads hold the key to finding, the difference being only that the bad pirates want to keep the treasure instead of return it. About all you’d need to do to make it work is find another way for the pirates to sneak aboard Norrington’s ship in the dead of night besides walking to it underwater.
The movie doesn’t revolve around the lifting of the curse. It revolves around a question about Jack Sparrow: whether or not he’d have been similarly cursed if Barbossa hadn’t led the mutiny and part of what makes Jack so intriguing as a character is the answer might very well be “yes.”
In other words, is Jack a hero or a villain or just a scalawag?
The movie wants to keep us wondering. How good a pirate is Jack and how bad a man? Late into the movie, we’re still meant to wonder.
Elizabeth: Whose side is Jack on?
Will: At the moment?
One of the reviews I read was Roger Ebert’s. The other was A.O. Scott’s in the New York Times. Both said more or less the same thing. The wind has gone out of the franchise’s sails and On Stranger Tides doesn’t raise any fresh breezes. They agreed on something else, though: One of the better things about this one is it’s missing the characters played by Keira Knightly and Orlando Bloom, Elizabeth and Will.
I can see how there’d be no place for them in On Stranger Tides. There was no place for them in the last two movies either. But then neither of those movies found a place for Chow Yun-Fat or Bill Nighy whom the filmmakers wasted entirely by burying him under a dozen layers of latex and CGI. Actually, they barely found a place for Jack Sparrow who was used more as a joke than as hero. But Ebert’s and Scott’s tones sounded as if they didn’t think Will and Elizabeth had a place in the first movie either. In fact, they are integral to the fun, not because of what they do particularly, although Will’s duel with Jack is as fun and as funny as any of the duels in Richard Lester’s The Three Musketeers, but because of where they stand in relation to Jack Sparrow.
At a wary distance.
Pirate movie conventions and the fact that Pirates of the Caribbean is a Disney movie mean that we know from the start that Jack is really a good guy and will do the right thing in the end. But in order for us to get into the spirit we need to suspend our disbelief and doubt that what we know is going to happen will definitely happen. There has to be the possibility that Jack is a pirate and not just a hero dressed up as a pirate. If we wanted to see that movie we can re-watch Captain Blood.
This is where Will and Elizabeth come in. The story needs good guys who believe that Jack is a bad guy. Norrington doesn’t serve this purpose. Just the opposite. Despite his being heroic in his own right, he’s an insufferable and humorless prig and a sure sign that Jack is a good guy is that somebody like Norrington is certain he isn’t. Elizabeth and Will, on the other hand, aren’t certain, either way. They are drawn to Jack by his charm and his wit and they develop a grudging respect for his swashbuckling skills, but they have a problem trusting him because he’s quick to use them for his own purposes. They suspect Jack is a villain---a real pirate---because that’s how he often acts towards them. Since they don’t know they’re in a movie, they have good reason to worry that Jack’s going to take the first chance he gets to hand them over to Barbossa and his crew and sail away in the Black Pearl without them. And since they’re a nice, attractive, heroic pair of lovers, we’re inclined to sympathize with their worries. At one level we know they’re wrong to worry, but still…what if they’re right?
The doubt is part of the fun and part of the adventure.
Another layer of doubt is added by the fact that the damsel in distress doesn’t need to fall in love with her rescuer. One of the conventions of pirate movies is that the girl falls in love with the pirate hero after he redeems himself in her eyes. Since Elizabeth’s heart is otherwise engaged and, no matter how much she might be attracted to Jack, which in this movie isn’t very, she’s not likely to switch her affections from Will, Jack isn’t required to redeem himself.
And Will’s presence---really Orlando Bloom’s---besides freeing Jack from the role of romantic hero, frees Johnny Depp to play Jack the way he plays Jack. Because Will/Bloom looks and acts more like the traditional hero of swashbuckler, Depp doesn’t have to. With Bloom swashbuckling alongside him, Depp can do his schtick without turning into a clown. Along with the mascara and the earrings, he’s wearing Orlando Bloom as Errol Flynn. It’s a lot like what happens in The Three Musketeers, speaking of that movie. Michael York was free to play up D’Artagnan’s boyish goofiness and country bumpkin gullibility because Oliver Reed was right there as Athos providing all the menace. How goofy and gullible and unthreatening could D’Artagnan be with this killer as his friend?
Elizabeth and Will serve another purpose. Because they’re there to provide the romantic subplot, the movie’s free not to bother with a romantic subplot for Jack. The screenwriters could leave him alone to focus on his quest to recapture the Black Pearl, and that helps make Pirates of the Caribbean a real pirate story, a realer pirate story even than Captain Blood, The Black Swan, and The Crimson Pirate. As every kid and kid at heart knows, there’s no mush in a real pirate story. That’s why there’s no love interest in Treasure Island. The point of a pirate story is finding the buried treasure and it’s just dopey when the “treasure” turns out to be something worthless like true love. Apologies to fans of The Princess Bride, which even though its hero is a pirate isn’t a pirate story.
The first movie hinges on the question of Jack’s heroism and if that question is answered, then Jack’s story is done. The place a sequel needed to start was with whatever answer you think Pirates of the Caribbean provided at the end. I think it answered, “Pirate.” So if there had to be a sequel, it should have been another straight-forward pirate movie. The makers of Dead Man’s Chest and At World’s End thought we wanted more of a theme park ride. It doesn’t sound like the makers of On Stranger Tides have made another theme park ride, but it doesn’t sound like they’ve made a real pirate movie either.
In fact, it sounds like they’ve made a sequel to the wrong franchise.
It sounds like they’ve turned Jack Sparrow into an 18th Century version of Indiana Jones.
Oh well. We’ll probably end up going to see it this coming weekend.
But just to be clear, if I wasn’t up top. This is a mermaid.
This is a starlet who spent a lot of time wearing green tights and probably still won’t see happen to her career what happened to Daryl Hannah’s after she played a mermaid.
But rather than weigh anchor on that note, let’s sail off on this. One of the greatest movie entrances ever!
Carey Mulligan is starring in a stage adaptation of Ingmar Bergman’s film, Through A Glass Darkly, at the Atlantic Theater Company
In the movie version of “Through a Glass Darkly,” Harriet Andersson’s descent into madness is slow and graceful. Ms. Mulligan, more volatile and complicated, sometimes seems more bipolar than schizophrenic, racketing from one mood swing to the next. “You have to find the reasons for why she is the way she is — apart from genetics and the specific medical reasons,” she explained. “Her argument is: I can stay in this world where I hurt people and make people unhappy and where I’m not loved and can’t love properly. Or I can go to this other world where I can be adored. So I sort of disregard the madness. I think she makes a reasonable argument for why she prefers the other side.”
Mr. Leveaux noted, laughing: “It’s not another ‘Hedda Gabler,’ fraught with ghosts’ It’s not a piece of theater people are accustomed to seeing. Without being evangelical about it, I think Carey likes to push the boundary of how women are going to be portrayed.” Both of them, he added, wanted to avoid imprisoning the play in a “carapace of Bergman affect,” which is why they tried to be more specific about the causes of Karin’s illness and to situate them in her relationships with her family. “Carey’s a stickler for truth,” he said. “You can hear when she gets the string to vibrate. That’s her great power, but we had to ground it in something fundamentally comprehensible.”
But this kind of acting takes a lot out of you, he added. “It’s costly, very costly,” he said, referring to how spent Ms. Mulligan seemed at the end of the first preview performance. “She’s not messing around out there. It’s a bit like playing one of the Greeks, except that you don’t get that release of yelling.”
Unfortunately, I don’t think I’m going to get a chance to see this one. What I really wish I could have seen was Mulligan in The Seagull three years ago:
She didn’t exactly steal the show from Kristin Scott Thomas’s grand and vulnerable Arkadina, but she brought such power and vitality to the part, suggesting both the youthfulness and the depth of Nina’s ambition, that she was a big reason many critics called it the best “Seagull” in generations. “You see maybe two or three Ninas like that in a lifetime,” said David Leveaux, the director of “Through a Glass Darkly.” “It’s like opening a window directly into the core of the writing.”
Photo of Mulligan on the set of Through a Glass Darkly by Fred R. Conrad, NYT. Photo of Mulligan and Peter Sarsgaard in The Seagull by Joan Marcus via Playbill.
Dick Cavett and his friend and one-time boss Johnny Carson. Once, when Cavett was a long time between gigs, he was a guest on The Tonight Show and Carson asked him what he was up to these days. Cavett said, “I’m working on an idea for a sitcom, Johnny. It’s a humorous version of Gilligan’s Island.” That little moment of bridled hilarity is one of many from Cavett’s new book Talk Show: Confrontations, Pointed Commentary, and Off-Screen Secrets.
I’m in the middle of reading too many books at once, as usual, and I’ve been up late at night a lot recently going back and forth from a mystery I’m not enjoying featuring an angry, angst-ridden detective, to a narrative history of New York City in the 1960s that does not focus on the ‘69 Mets, the Beatles playing Shea Stadium, the blackout of ‘66, or Pavarotti’s debut at the Met ---it’s all urban decay and racial strife and police corruption and the Black Panthers marching down the street with rifles on their shoulders---to a book on how we have no souls, there is no God, and we will die, to a biography of Socrates that doesn’t paint a golden picture of ancient Athens during the Golden Age, and then back to the angry detective. This sort of reading can wear down the spirit. One night---more like three in the morning---feeling especially worn down, I reached for a book I’d been saving for just such a moment of weariness. I let it fall open at random and was soon reading this:
As a sort of sweetener from the brutality of the above blowgun darts aimed at fellow human beings, let us close this subject---but only for now—with something a bit milder. It’s from the man who once complained to me, “I can’t insult anyone anymore.”
Mistakenly, I thought Groucho was being contrite. But no. It was that things he said when seriously angry, and meaning to wound and leave a scar, failed to injure. Instead, he got the reaction, “Oh, thank you, Groucho! Wait till I tell my friends what Groucho Marx said to me”
“It’s almost ruined my life,” Mr. Marx only partially jested.
The book was Talk Show: Confrontations, Pointed Commentary, and Off-Screen Secrets by Dick Cavett, and the effect was immediately soothing and comforting. Reading along, I forgot the woes and cares brought on by contemplating the ravages of plagues and wars in Hellenic Greece and the oblivion that awaits when the soul-less brain finally shorts out. I also forgot the loneliness that afflicts the three a.m. insomniac. In fact, I forgot I was alone.
Reading the essays collected in Talk Show made me feel like I was in good company, listening happily to some very smart and witty friends telling jokes, exchanging stories, discussing their work and their jobs and their careers, arguing good naturedly about matters big and small.
It was a lot like turning on the TV and coming across a talk show where the guests and the host are having such a pleasant time of it that you’re immediately drawn in and put at ease, as if welcomed into someone’s home and handed a drink. It was, I imagine, like watching Cavett’s talk show in its hey-day.
“Don’t do interviews,” Cavett’s hero, idol, friend, and mentor and favorite boss Jack Paar advised him in a phone call when Cavett was beginning his own talk show. Cavett didn’t follow, at first.
What could Jack mean? To do the whole show myself? Show movies? Read to the viewers. That exciting, nervous, famous voice continued: “I mean don’t just do interviews, pal. You know. ‘Interview’ smacks of Q-and-A and David Frost and his clipboard and ‘What’s your favorite color?’ and crap like ‘most embarrassing moments.’ Don’t do any of that. Make it a conversation.”
The light bulb blinked on.
In a way, it’s the whole secret. Conversation is when people simply talk; not take a test on the air with Q-and-A. It’s when something said spontaneously prompts a thought and a reply in someone else. When several people’s talk moves around a subject, changes directions, and produces spontaneous and entertaining comments and unexpected insights, and takes surprising turns.
That definitely describes what became the signature style of Cavett’s talk shows. But it’s also a good description of the style and flow of Talk Show. Cavett’s writing moves around subjects, changes directions, produces entertaining comments (some of them probably spontaneous; he implies he often writes pushing a deadline), and takes some surprising turns. And he doesn’t do the whole show alone. Cavett has a gift for bringing other people to life on the page. You can hear the famous voices as Cavett writes about them, Groucho’s, of course, Johnny Carson’s, Katharine Hepburn’s, William F. Buckley’s, John Wayne’s, Richard Burton’s, Richard Nixon’s---Nixon wasn’t a guest on the show but he figures prominently in several passages in this book--- Paul Newman’s. Newman’s voice maybe you didn’t know you knew, not the way you know those others’. You will after you read Cavett replaying it for you. But then he started his professional career as a comedy writer inventing jokes to be told by other comedians, and getting their voices right is the trick.
Writing for Groucho Marx, or Johnny Carson, or Jack Benny, or any comic with a strong, familiar voice requires being able to turn them on in your head, so that what comes out is in their words and nobody else’s. A misplaced or omitted certainly or at any rate or y’know will make the line wrong. For them. “You could have fooled me.” is less Groucho than “Well, you certainly could have fooled me.”
When Groucho guest-hosted The Tonight Show way back, the first laugh I got for him was an aside I wrote: “But enough of this bridled hilarity…” In Groucho’s voice it got a laugh well out of proportion to its merits.
Groucho, by the way, was, according to Cavett, “our major comic genius. That’s just a fact not an opinion.”
Sitting next to him, I was struck with the delightful fact that he heard his witty remarks and answers at the same time we did. I need to make this point clear. He didn’t think of funny things first and then say them. They were reflexive, almost unconscious responses, and it was fun to see his surprised enjoyment of them at the same moment as ours.
Cavett gets Groucho’s voice and all the others’ voices right, but he gets his own right too. His prose talks just like him.
Not all the pieces in Talk Show are about Cavett’s talk shows. There are reminiscences of his childhood in Nebraska and the early days of his career in show business. There’s a great one about his high school career as a magician when, he says, he was the richest he’s ever been. There are some that touch on current events---the essays were written over a three year period that includes the 2008 Presidential campaign and John McCain and Sarah Palin make irritating appearances; they irritated Cavett to the point that he couldn’t write about either one with any amusement. There are ghost stories and travel stories. There are meditations on sex, The Sopranos, death, and anger management or, more accurately, mismanagement. There are two pieces on Don Imus in which Cavett makes a fairly persuasive case that outraged liberals (like me) over-reacted to Imus’ insulting of the Rutgers University women’s basketball team and we may not have done the cause any favors by running him off the air the way we wished we could Rush Limbaugh. But of course the talk shows and their guests are at the center of the book and most of the pieces are about them in one way or another.
Cavett doesn’t rehash particular shows and only goes into detail in remembering a few particular interviews---or conversations. Shows either come up in the course of his writing about other things or he uses them to launch himself onto other subjects. Mostly, though, the shows are the reason for his being able to write about what he really wants to write about, the people who came on the show who were his friends or with whom he became friendly after they appeared as guests.
Cavett wants to tell us things about these famous people we would not have learned from watching them on his show. He wants us to know that Norman Mailer did not hold that infamous on-air argument with Gore Vidal, the one in which Cavett told Mailer to fold it five ways and put it where the moon don’t shine, against either Cavett or Vidal, that Mailer actually felt bad about what happened while it was happening. He wants us to know that before he went off his rocker, Bobby Fischer was a cheerful, decent, funny man. He wants us to know that Bill Buckley was a good friend and not just in the sense of being Cavett’s good friend but as in a good friend. He wants us to know that Richard Burton was kindly and humble and a loving family man, not necessarily a good husband and besides being a good father. Burton was a loving son and brother, perhaps happiest when in the company of his many relatives back home in Wales.
He wants us to know John Wayne played chess and played it pretty well.
According to a note on the copyright page, the essays in Talk Show “originally appeared, in slightly different form, on the Web site of The New York Times”. There’s a two word name for essays that appear on a web site. Blog posts. I’ve had the link on my blog roll for a couple of years. Cavett began posting for the Times in early 2007. He agreed to post weekly but it hasn’t quite worked out that way. Closer to every other week, with a week missed here, an extra added there. Still, it’s added up to a full book’s worth of material. The last essay/post in the book is dated April 9. 2010, but I can’t be sure if Talk Show includes every single post Cavett wrote over those three years. Some might have been left out, and a number of the longer “essays” in the book appear to be several sequential posts edited, for the most part seamlessly, together, but there’s no editor’s note to tell me one way or the other. Still, by my count, there are sixty-eight unnumbered chapters, plus the introduction. That dark night of the soul—or soulless, as the author of the brain book keeps insisting, to my middle of the night dismay---after racing through three essays of Talk Show, full of gratitude and relief, I shut the book. Not out of disappointment, disgust, anger, or boredom. Out of fear. I was afraid that if I didn’t make myself stop I would stay up all night and finish Talk Show in one sitting. I didn’t want to do that because I’d had an inspiration.
If I restrained myself and read only one chapter a night, skipping weekends, I could enjoy Cavett’s company for the next two months. Think of all the dark, lonely hours this would get me through.
My plan was working fine for a couple of weeks. Then a little more than halfway in I read this:
[Last week] I addressed a group of noble citizens whose job is aiding and counseling poor devils suffering from depression. CAVETT RETURNS HOME TO DISCUSS ‘THE WORST AGONY DEVISED FOR MAN’ read the next day’s headline in the Lincoln paper. depsite the subject matter, I got quite a lot of laughs. My credentials? Having been there myself.
The year before I had talked to a similar group of caregivers in Omaha in front of an audience that included what you’d think would be an entertainer’s nightmare: a hundred or more people in the throes of the disease. I expected no laughs.
<Snip>
Miraculously, I kept them laughing for perhaps and hour. clearly the fact that I knew about their plight from own experience had a lot---or maybe everything---to do with it.
I was able to say to them, I know that everyone here knows that feeling when people say to you, “Hey, shape up! Stop thinking about your troubles What’s to be depressed about? Go swimming or lay tennis and you’ll feel a lot better. Pull up your socks!” And how you, hearing this, would like nothing more than to remove one of those socks and choke them to death with it.
<Snip>
(Such inane advice of the “socks up” variety, by the way, can only be excused by the fact that if you’ve never had it you can never begin to imagine the depth of the ailment’s black despair. Another tip: Do not ask the victim what he has “to be depressed about.” The malady doesn’t care if you’re broke and alone or successful and surrounded by a loving family. It does its democratic dirty work to your brain chemistry regardless of your “position.”)
I didn’t know this about Cavett, that he suffered from depression.
As I mentioned, Cavett’s blog has been on my blog roll for a while so I’d read many of the posts that have promoted to essays for the book. But not all of them. I missed a bunch including the two in which he wrote about depression. Coming across them unexpectedly and as news in Talk Show changed my perception of the book and my feelings about it. I stopped reading it as light extemporania and started thinking of it as more of a memoir. He isn’t just writing about famous people he has known whom he’d like us to know better as people, no modifier.
There are things, it turns out, that Cavett wants us to know about himself.
Talk Show is not a memoir of depression. I wouldn’t call it a depressive’s book. But the fact of Cavett’s depression is a reminder of the fact of the man. This is a particular man’s book and it was written out of that man’s moods and experiences. Once I was alert to the fact that he has suffered from depression, I began to be on the lookout for other things he might be feeling. And I came to see that often what he might have been feeling as he wrote was sad and lonely.
Not depressed.
As Cavett was quick to remind one of his doctors, sadness and depression are different, with sadness not coming close in its debilitating effects on a person. Also, something else he points out, for some reason people are much better able to mask their depression than they are their sadness. He remembers Woody Allen asking him one time, in all seriousness, wanting to know, “How am I supposed to know you’re depressed?” Cavett had no answer, because you’re not supposed to know. With that in mind, you might wonder if the funniest, liveliest, breeziest pieces in the book were written when, to use one of Cavett’s own phrases for it, his “brain was busted.”
You might really wonder when you read his account of what happened the time he interviewed Lawrence Olivier with a busted brain.
But while Talk Show is far from a melancholy book, it is touched throughout by sadness. And how could it not be? Start making a list of all the people Cavett writes about with such affection who are dead. It’ll be a long one, and it’ll start with his wife, the actress Carrie Nye, who died of lung cancer five years ago, less than a year before Cavett began writing these pieces for the Times. It isn’t surprising that so many of his subjects are dead. Our interest in them has a lot to do with their being dead. We want to know about them because their reputations, their legends, and their bodies of work have lived on so long after them. And several---Newman, Buckley, Bobby Fischer---are in here because they’d just died and Cavett naturally took the occasion to eulogize his now absent friends. But the dead far outnumber the living in these pages and Talk Show is a book crowded with ghosts. For all I know Cavett has scores of friends and relatives still solidly walking the earth, but only a few show up here with any frequency, and Woody Allen seems to be keeping a wary distance, while Cavett and his best friend from his childhood and youth back in Nebraska see each other on rare occasions, and his old comedy writing friend David Lloyd has died since the last essay in the book was written. I can’t imagine that Cavett could have written about his departed without feeling their absence and that’s a lot of absence to feel. Once I became aware of that, Cavett began to seem a man alone with his ghosts.
I started reading Talk Show for the pleasure of the company, but I can’t get over the feeling that Cavett was writing in order to have some company for himself. Since he wrote them originally to be posted online, he in fact did have company. The posts have comment sections and Cavett is aware of his commenters and solicitous of their opinions and quite clearly grateful for their company.
All this meant for me, though, is that Talk Show no longer worked as a an antidote to the dead of night ennui and malaise caused by those other books. Which was too bad, but not too too bad, because it gave me permission to abandon my plan and read on through to the end in a couple more sittings.
I don’t have a clear memory of watching The Dick Cavett Show back when it was on. I’ve since seen many clips and watched most of the shows included in the DVD collections . But I didn’t watch it regularly when I was a kid, although I remember that when I did going into school the next morning feeling awfully impressed with myself and just bursting to spring one of Cavett’s or his guest’s witticisms on my friends. My parents would sometimes let me stay up to watch with them when Cavett had on a guest they were interested in, after they changed the channel from NBC when Johnny had finished his monologue. The only single show I remember vividly is the Mailer-Vidal dustup and it turns out that I don’t remember that as clearly as I thought. I’d forgotten the writer Janet Flanner was also a guest that night and Mailer offended her as well. The chapter about that night in Talk Show reminded me about Flanner but I still can’t “see” her there in my mind’s eye.
What I’m getting at is that although a lot of what’s in Talk Show is about things I might have seen, a lot of what’s in the book is new to me. I expect that if you’re older than I am and have a better memory and were a fan, much of the material is going to seem familiar, but I don’t think it will feel old-hat. As I said, Cavett doesn’t rehash the shows, he uses the memories as springboards.
If you weren’t a fan or were too young at the time to remember it well now or to have watched it at all then, reading Talk Show will probably make you wish you could watch some of those shows now and, fortunately, you can. Cavett helpfully includes the URLs so you can go online and find clips and even entire interviews from shows he refers to in the book.
I recommend you look up the shows featuring Richard Burton. In them you can see Cavett leading Burton into the sort of conversation Jack Paar recommended Cavett try to have with his guests instead of interviewing them.
The interview---conversation---starts out awkwardly. Neither Cavett nor Burton know where to begin or have an idea where to go with things. But Cavett is patient. He doesn’t reach for any tricks to make Burton talk. He waits out the occasional silences and eventually what he gets from Burton is not Burton’s stock in trade as a gifted raconteur, the hilarious tall tales of nights of heroic drinking with Peter O’Toole and Richard Harris and ribald stories of erotic misadventure. Cavett soon has Burton talking, warmly, about his childhood and his large, extended family back home in Wales. A clip from that show is below, but first here’s something Cavett wants you to know about Richard Burton:
He was ailing during those shows, but I didn’t know it and he didn’t show it. He had been praised in the “Camelot” he was then appearing in for his “economy of motion” — a phrase that recurred in the reviews. Swinging the heavy sword onstage with a slow-motion deliberateness was effective in the way Kurosawa’s ingeniously conceived slow-motion sinking to earth of a mortally wounded swordsman in “The Seven Samurai” — the dust slowly rising as he fell — was so inventive and effective. (And so flatteringly stolen in countless dramas and westerns thereafter.)
Few knew that Richard’s limited physical ability at the time accounted in large part for those effective slowed motions. His “choices,” as actors call them, were in part bred of pain. That “accomplishing the largest effect with the smallest effort” he referred to in our interview was not, in this case, entirely by choice. All this had been kept from public knowledge.
Shortly after the shows with him, I heard details about the illness from an actor friend of his. I think it was Richard Harris. A surgeon I knew, skirting medical ethics perhaps, filled me in: “The poor guy needs a bad operation.” (Maybe not his exact words. He probably used the popular medical euphemism, “procedure.” Sounds a lot more fun than “surgery” or “operation.”)
“Don’t you touch him!” I wanted to say. I asked what specifically needed to be done to Richard. It was then and there that I learned the chilling word “laminectomy.” When I admitted to being “unfamiliar” with the term (and why don’t we ever just say, “I don’t know that word”?), the sawbones dropped euphemism dramatically: “We go in through your neck and take out part of your back.”
If I didn’t pale, it felt like it.
“Camelot” finished its run, and Burton was in Los Angeles, preparing for his surgical ordeal. I learned he was in L.A. the same day I was about to leave there for New York, and called his agent, hoping to pass on good wishes. Coincidence strikes again.
She answered with, “Dick Cavett! I simply cannot believe it’s you calling!” She went on:
“Less than 20 seconds ago, I just finished showing the last of your four shows with Richard to a group of his brothers who’ve come over from Wales for the operation. Maybe 10 seconds ago. Your theme song is just fading from the screen.”
<Snip>
History shows, by the way, that the operation was a success and a pain-relieved Richard lived out the rest of his too-brief life span.
But before hanging up, I asked the agent if I could talk to one of the Burton brothers, wanting to see if he sounded like Richard. He didn’t, of course. The lilting Welsh accent I find so pleasing to the ear was, unlike Richard’s, unadulterated. He was a slyly amusing man and I laughed when he accused me of “calling from the next room,” because of the uncanny timing. And he got off on a laugh.
“Ya know somethin’, Mr. Cavett? We never knew Richard was so interestin’!”
Welcome to everyone dropping by from James Wolcott's blog. New posts above, including my review of Talk Show by Dick Cavett. Before you scroll down,though, I hope you don't mind if I ask a favor. It's crunch time around here, and if you can swing a small donation, it'd be much appreciated. Blog bills are due,the cars are acting up, summer camp has to be paid for. I'm sure you know how it is.
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Almost. The reason I’m not on his side is that he’s not on his side.
It has to be the most Orwellian moment in the history of American politics. Forced by pressure from the outraged Right, Newt has had to lie about what he meant when he criticized the GOP budget on Meet the Press and then try to make the case that this lie erases what he said on television.
Not just corrects it. Banishes it to another universe. It’s now a fiction, Newt declares, that he said what he said. Any use of the video from here on out is itself the lie, as if it was created by his enemies using a CGI Newt Gingrich.
Use the truth in any ads against him, and you’re a liar!
Now it appears that the conventional wisdom is that Newt’s candidacy is DOA. Not because of this lunacy. Not because of the lie. But because the Right Wing yahoos who are now the Republican base might not accept the lunacy as sanity and might not believe the lie.
Newt’s nearly irreparable mistake was to think he could run for the nomination as Newt Gingrich.
The damage was done when he went on television and said what he honestly thinks.
Of course it’s always been a question whether Newt honestly thinks anything. His chances for political survival rest on everyone understanding that Newt just says stuff. He doesn’t honestly mean any of it or most of it, at any rate. He spouts off for the sake of hearing himself praised as an intellectual and a man of vision and to sell his books. In short, if Newt is able to put this mess behind him it will be because everybody understands he’s a fake and a liar by reflex, and that honestly he is a Right Wing true believer and if he becomes President he’ll be a reliable corporate stooge.
Let’s be clear about what this means. The conventional wisdom holds that the Republican Party will willingly nominate someone they know to be a liar and a hypocrite as long as he is convincing and never steps out of character. This is in fact true. The Family Values charade of the last thirty years has been able to continue because Republicans would rather have a hypocrite who pushes for the “right” things in office than a truly decent and honest person who won’t. But the point is that the holders and promulgators of the conventional wisdom don’t see this as a problem.
The problem is with Newt and is Newt’s.
Newt should have known better. He must know how things are. And knowing that he should have…well? He should have what?
He should have decided not to run? He should have announced that although he would like to run President and thinks he could win and that he would be just what the doctor ordered for the country when he became President, but because the Party has committed itself to a “radical” economic policy that is nothing but “Right Wing social engineering” and that’s something he just cannot support, he would have no chance in hell of getting the nomination?
No, the conventional wisdom holds that he should have lied on Meet the Press.
Or at least obfuscated.
Again, of course, Newt has never had trouble lying or obfuscating, but still.
The conventional wisdom is that he should have lied because it was the politically smart thing to do.
As if the politically “smart” thing to do is the right thing to do.
Now, as a matter of practical politics, Newt has caused the Republicans a headache. All but four Republican Congresscritters voted for the GOP-Paul Ryan Send the Old Folks Out to Sea on an Ice Floe budget and all of them, including the four who didn’t vote for it, are going to have to run for re-election having to defend sending the old folks out to sea on ice floes.
The budget vote is already costing them in the polls. It could cost the Republicans their chance to take the Senate. It could even cost them their majority in the House. Last fall they won by scaring the old folks that the Democrats were going to cut Medicare and now they’ve got to go out and explain why they’ve voted to end it.
It’s not going to be easy and it won’t make things any easier if the candidate at the top of the ticket is on record as saying that sending the old folks out to sea on ice floes is a spectacularly dumb idea and not even a conservative dumb idea either.
But that’s not Newt’s fault.
Newt isn’t the problem. The problem is that the Party has gone off its rocker. It has committed itself to an economic policy based on meanness, greed, ideologically dictated wishful thinking, and bad math, not to mention that it’s wildly unpopular, and yet the Party faithful is demanding that anyone who wants the Presidential nomination must pretend that the budget doesn’t say what it says and won’t do what it will do and will do what it won’t, that is, balance the budget and the holders and promulgators of the conventional wisdom don’t see anything wrong with this picture.
The Republican Party wants to destroy our liberal democratic-republican, relatively free market capitalist system that spreads the wealth all around and replace it with an oligarchic system that concentrates all the wealth in the hands of the corporate rich.
Went with young Ken Mannion to an open house at the college he’s planning on attending this fall. Pretty little campus. The important thing is that Ken liked the look and feel of the place. He got to talk to several professors. One of them, a history professor, had a syllabus handy for a course he teaches on the exploration and settlement of the North Atlantic coast and Ken, whose favorite subject has always been history, was excited about that. And a communications professor he spoke with practically swooned at the sound of his voice. Ken has a beautiful voice, a deep, rich baritone. If he liked to sing, he’d be a second Robert Goulet. The professor oversees the campus radio station and she was ready to sign Ken up right there.
It was good to see him enjoying himself. Regular readers know that Ken hasn’t had an easy haul getting to this point. For the last four years, he’s been so focused on getting through high school one day at a time that he hadn’t been letting himself think much about college. By the way, he made the honor roll last quarter. Anyway, I was happy he was getting into it, but of course it’s all about me.
As I was trailing after Ken on the tour, chatting with the profs myself, listening to the student guides, peering into classrooms, reading the bulletin boards, picking up flyers and brochures that looked useful, a flood of memories came back, not just of my own college days, but of all my school days, from kindergarten through grad school. And they all led to one thought.
Did I do anything right?
I couldn’t think of a thing. It seemed to me that every move I made along the way was the wrong one, starting with hiding in the coat closet instead of joining in when we did square dancing in kindergarten. I was beating myself up for messing up kindergarten.
It got worse as the memories progressed. I don’t want to get into all the disastrous decisions I made in high school except to say they all didn’t involve girls, not even the most humiliating ones. As I remembered it, I applied to all the wrong colleges, wrote all the wrote things on my applications, asked all the wrong questions and took to heart all the wrong things when I visited campuses. In college, I took all the wrong courses, said nothing but the wrong thing to every professor, missed every opportunity I could have taken. You get the picture. By the time we were nearing the end of the tour, I was at the point where I had only one piece of advice to give Ken.
“Whatever I did, son,” I planned to say when I had the chance, “Do the opposite.”
But then one of the students leading the tour stopped us in our tracks. We were standing at the end of a path that led through a shady garden and opened on the campus green. The student gestured towards a stage out on the green.
“That’s where I’m going to be Saturday,” he told us proudly. “That’s where they’ll be handing me my diploma. I’m graduating.”
He paused while we clapped and cheered for him.
“Thank you. But what I want you to do is think about this. That’s where you’re going to be too. In a few years. You’ll be up there. And see this spot, where we’re standing. This is where you’ll be lining up in your cap and gown. And you know? You want to keep this in mind. Because there are going to be days. Like I had these days. When it won’t seem like it’s going to happen. When you don’t think you can do it. You have a hard test coming up. You’ve got all this work piling up. And when you have those days, I recommend you do what I did, and I had a lot of them. Find some spot on campus, like right here, and this is where I like to come, but some spot where you can be alone, and just think about the day when you’ll be up there, like I’m going to be. Finally!”
We clapped and cheered for him again, and then I heard a voice nearby, a deep, rich baritone---if Robert Goulet were alive, it could have been his voice---saying to the student, “That’s very good advice. You must have worked very hard. Congratulations.”
I looked around to see who was talking and it was this very tall, handsome, familiar-looking college kid.
Here’s the thing. For the last twelve years I’d been so focused on helping him get through school one day at a time that I’d never let myself think very much about college. When I did, it was mostly with terror and foreboding and a sense that time was going by way too fast and that it would run out before we could get done everything we needed to get done. I looked at Ken and I suddenly relaxed.
“I’m the father of a soon-to-be college student,” I said to myself, as if delivering the news. And for a second I was proud of myself. Then for a lot more than a second, for the rest of the night and continuing up through this moment, I was and am proud of him.
Young Ken Mannion having lunch in Union Square before going to see Double Falsehood at the Classic Stage Company. March 2011.
Updated with more singing and dancing and a special guest appearance by Clark Gable.
Humphrey Bogart being tough without a gun if you ignore the fact that there’s a .38 in Rick’s trenchcoat pocket, presumably pointed at Renault’s back, and in a couple of minutes he’s going to use it to shoot Major Strasser.
If you’re trying to argue that manly men aren’t as manly as they used to be back when men were manly and women were whatever it is you wish women were, and you quote comic book writer and specialist in homoerotic S & M Frank Miller as an expert on what is and what isn’t manly manliness, your argument’s in trouble.
In Tough without a Gun, a biography of Bogart, Stefan Kanfer is concerned that they don’t make screen idols like that any more. He doesn’t attribute this to the fact that their characters’ romantic socialism has suffered a death blow but wonders rather whether ‘the feminisation of America’ is one reason we now have Tom Cruise in place of Bogart. A variety of voices are cited. Sharon Waxman in the New York Times attributes the loss of ‘man’s men’ to what she believes (against a good deal of evidence) to be the entirely peaceful and cosseted existence everyone in the US has been living since the end of World War Two. She bemoans the loss of ‘the generation of actors who came out of the Depression or wartime, when hardship could be read in the faces of stars like Humphrey Bogart’. A columnist for Variety describes present-day actors as ‘fey’, ‘goofy’ and ‘boy-men’, and Frank Miller (director of The Spirit: ‘Rookie cop returns from the beyond as The Spirit’) believes that ‘Hollywood is great at producing male actors but sucks at producing men.’ Kanfer backs his columnists up with the opinion of Harvey C. Mansfield, ‘a conservative professor of government at Harvard’, whose book Manliness claims that American society has adopted ‘a practice of equality between the sexes that has never been known before in all human history’, so putting ‘the entire social structure … up for grabs’, as Kanfer summarises. According to Mansfield, manliness ‘restores order at moments when routine is not enough, when the plan fails, when the whole idea of rational control by modern science develops leaks’. And that’s why we’ve got Johnny Depp prancing around wearing earrings.
Never mind Miller, who, setting out to make the movie, apparently thought that what was wrong with Will Eisner’s conception of The Spirit was that there was too much color and the Spirit wasn’t tortured enough. There’s nobody in that list of “experts” who deserves to be taken seriously on the subject of manly manliness.
A “conservative” professor? You’re going to quote a conservative about what makes a real man when what passes for conservativism these days is a codification of male rage stemming from middle-aged men’s feelings of sexual inadequacy? Seriously. All you have to do is think for a minute about Glenn Beck’s graphically demonstrated revulsion at the image of a quite cute Meghan McCain semi-naked in a PSA for skin cancer and you realize how much of what motivates the Right Wing is embarrassment at an epidemic among the faithful of erectile dysfunction.
I was looking forward to reading (and reviewing) Tough Without a Gun. But I was expecting a biography of an interesting character not a treatise on the problem of masculinity in America that uses Bogart as a prime example of a quality we American men have lost to our misfortune. Presumably to the misfortune of the women in our lives, as well, although most laments about the decline of manliness don’t seem to be much concerned with what women want, need, or think. But I’m curious about what about Bogart we should be emulating. Sure, Bogart was cool, but that was because he was Bogart and being Bogart had a lot to do with being a movie star and being married to Lauren Bacall. Not achievable goals for any man who isn’t Humphrey Bogart.
Bogie's double-take after Baby leaves is priceless.
Being like Bogart doesn’t seem like much of a goal, though. Bogart’s iconic image is mostly a matter of affect or, as Captain Jack Sparrow might argue, of having the proper effects. The face, the voice, the snap-brim hat, the cigarette. Trying to be like Bogart would, I’d think, lead to posturing. That’s what happens in two movies about characters obsessed with being like Bogart, Godard’s Breathless (which Diski calls by its French title, A bout de souffle) and Woody Allen’s Play It Again, Sam. Bogart’s actual screen persona, if you take into account all his great roles, is a much more problematic character to be held up as a role model.
It’s a serious question, what’s happened to American men, when you go to a school board meeting and see fathers in the audience wearing baseball caps and cargo shorts. And the Tea Party’s fetishization of the Second Amendment makes you wonder if part of what is wrong with American men is that they don’t know how to be tough without their guns.
But if you move the discussion away from the generally political towards movies and then try to argue that the problem with American men as portrayed in the movies is that they don’t know how to be tough without a gun, you might have a case---although again Frank Miller shouldn’t be on your list of experts. Sin City, anyone?---but there are two problems to deal with here.
The first is that Bogart isn’t your best example of a movie star who knew how to be tough without a gun.
Bogart’s iconic image as a movie tough guy is based on two movies. Casablanca and The Big Sleep. If you just said to yourself, What about The Maltese Falcon, Lance? you should go back and watch it. Sam Spade is not Philip Marlowe traveling under a different name. Spade is hardboiled but he’s not all that tough. In important ways, he’s actually quite weak. At the end, when he tells Mary Astor she’s taking the fall, he’s not suddenly finding the moral or emotional toughness he’s lacked up till then. He’s simply recognized that she’s not worth going to jail for. And even so he’s still feeling weak. In fact, he pretty much tells her he’s turning her in because he’s weak and hates himself for it.
When Spade talks about what he owes his murdered partner, he’s not convincing. He hated Archer. Marlowe operates by a code that would have prevented him from partnering with a creep like Archer. Spade had no problem going into business with Archer and no problem with sleeping with Archer’s wife. Archer’s death is a mixed bag of news for him. He’s glad to be rid of the bum but he’s got a motive for wanting the bum dead. He needs to solve Archer’s murder so the cops can’t pin it on him. New York Times film critic A.O. Scott calls Spade the moral center of the movie because he’s “ethically grounded in his desire to know the truth.” Um, no. Spade is clear. He’s grounded in his desire not to go to jail for a murder he didn’t commit. And yet he’s still tempted to take the fall himself, and not out of gallantry, out of weakness. On top of this, he feels sorry for himself.
In the role of hero, Spade is an uneasy fit. That’s why John Huston was glad to get Bogart for the part. Up until The Maltese Falcon, Bogart was a bad guy in the eyes of movie audiences. The movie he starred in just before The Maltese Falcon was High Sierra (Huston wrote the script) in which he played a criminal who does the right thing in spite of himself. Mad Dog Earle and Sam Spade are spiritual cousins working different sides of the street. The tough thing Bogart did was play Spade straight without doing much to gloss over Spade’s weaknesses and borderline sociopathy.
If we didn’t have Casablanca, if George Raft had played Rick Blaine as was originally planned, if Howard Hawks hadn’t convinced the studio to let him make The Big Sleep, and we were left with the rest of Bogart’s best performances, Mad Dog Earle, Sam Spade, Fred C. Dobbs,Charlie Allnut, and Captain Queeg, to judge his career by, we’d know him the way we know Edward G. Robinson, as a great character actor who could carry off a leading role and go back and forth playing good guys and bad guys, but not as the iconic movie tough guy.
Bogart the icon is a combination of Rick Blaine and Philip Marlowe, and neither of those two characters were tough without a gun. Part of their toughness was that they knew how to handle a gun. Rick and Louie aren’t strolling off together at the end of Casablanca to open a wine and cheese shop. Guns and violence are factors of Bogart’s tough guy image, right along with booze and cigarettes.
Actually, one of the most thoughtful examinations of Bogart’s image and his appeal is Woody Allen’s Play it Again, Sam, and in that the spirit of Bogart, advising Woody’s character on how to deal with women, says, “I never knew a dame yet who didn’t understand a slap in the mouth or a slug from a .45.” That’s a joke at Woody’s own expense, because it shows how he’s missing the point, but it touches on an unattractive side of Bogart’s image, the anger and resentment and sense of disappointment not just where women are concerned, but when it comes to life in general. Bogart specialized in playing thwarted and defeated men and that includes Rick and Marlowe, with the difference being that those two didn’t seem to be harboring any self-pitying and vindictive desire to get some of their own back, although when we meet him Rick has given in somewhat to self-pity.
If you’re looking for the male movie star from Bogart’s era who was tough without a gun or tough without a gun most often, it’s Clark Gable.
Think about that. In Gone With the Wind, which is after all a war movie, how many times do you see Gable with a gun in his hand? Melanie kills more people on screen. The photo to the right is from a scene in which Rhett Butler’s a prisoner of war. He’s unarmed, of course, and he’s surrounded by other men with guns, and he’s still the toughest guy in the room.
Gable didn’t make many war movies, maybe because he was actually in the War. He made few westerns, and his most famous was a modern one that didn’t require him to carry a gun only Marilyn Monroe. He played a few gangsters but they were wily rogues whose crimes and schemes never seemed to result in any on screen violence and they reformed in the end. I can’t recall him ever playing a cop or a private eye. The only movies I can think of that had him carrying a gun as a regular accoutrement are Red Dust and its remake, Mogambo, and in those he was playing a big game hunter. After Rhett Butler, his most iconic role is Pete Warne, the newspaper reporter who takes to the road with runaway heiress Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night in which he was scandalously tough without a shirt.
You want to see tough without a gun? I’ll show you tough without a gun.
After Gable, the next toughest without a gun is Spencer Tracy.
Mannionville regular, El Jefe, suggested I link to a scene from Bad Day at Black Rock in which Tracy, playing a one-armed war vet, takes on a gang of racist thugs led by Robert Ryan and including Ernest Borgnine and Lee Marvin literally single-handed. Great movie. Good suggestion. Here’s the scene. Of course, there are those who would argue that Tracy was at his toughest when he was playing opposite Katharine Hepburn. He had to be or she’d have run him off the screen. You might remember, though, that in a scene from Adam’s Rib, Tracy pulls a gun a Hepburn.
Which brings me to the next question for anyone who wants to make the case that manly manliness in the movies has gone the way of the fedora. Even if Bogart is the iconic movie tough guy, does that make him the epitome of manliness? What about Gable and Tracy? What about Cary Grant and Gary Cooper? Or Errol Flynn? Or Jimmy Stewart, Henry Fonda, James Cagney, William Powell, Joel McCrea, Frederic March…
And then, when their time had begun to pass, these stars were replaced by Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, Gregory Peck, Robert Mitchum, Glenn Ford, and William Holden. You could add Gene Kelly to the list too. Why not them?
If you mean that Bogart is representative of a type of manliness that disappeared from the movies and from America at some point since his and his contemporaries’ primes, you have to explain why the following are not manly: Marlon Brando, Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, Sean Connery, Sidney Poitier, Warren Beatty, James Garner, Clint Eastwood, George Segal, Robert Redford, James Caan, and Gene Hackman.
The emergence of Jack Nicholson, Dustin Hoffman, and Al Pacino complicates things, but no more than the fact that Robinson and Paul Muni were stars in their days. And while they were carving their own niches as character actors playing roles that could have gone to more conventional leading men, they didn’t prevent Robert De Niro, Nick Nolte, Harrison Ford, Mel Gibson, Jeff Bridges, Kevin Costner, Tom Hanks, and Denzel Washington from having careers.
If you are talking about now, as in the first decade of the 21st Century, in comparison to then, as in all the other decades that came before now, then you have to explain why George Clooney, Liam Neeson, Russell Crowe, Brad Pitt, Christian Bale, Samuel L. Jackson, Will Smith, Matt Damon, Mark Wahlberg, and Nicolas Cage don’t measure up.
Right off the bat, you can point out that none of them has played a character as iconic as Rick Blaine or Rhett Butler. (Bale has played an established icon, but that’s different.) But while Bogart’s and Gable’s status as iconic movie stars is based on their having played those iconic characters, that’s not all there is to it. All their movie roles figure into it. And many of those other stars have become iconic without having played a particular role that defines them in our imaginations. What they were able to do was make the characters they played in a few great movies epitomes of themselves or, rather, of the selves we imagined they were. It’s a circular argument, too. Were these movies great because of their performances or do we think of their performances as great because they are features of these great movies? Whichever way you go with it, I think you need to be careful if you then go on to argue that today’s stars don’t measure up because you don’t think any of them has made movies that have become iconic.
I’ve made this point before and I’m sure I’ll make it again. When we talk about the movies we love and why we love them---discussions that, after we’ve reached a certain age, usually include, spoken or unspoken, the lament that “they” don’t make them like that anymore---what we’re really talking about is how great it was to be young and see our lives as containing the possibility of as much love, sex, and adventure as the movies. Humphrey Bogart doesn’t hold the place in my heart and imagination that he does just because I recognized his greatness. He holds those places because I saw Casablanca for the first time when I was a teenager. I didn’t think of Rick Blaine or Bogie as dream versions of the self I wished I was. I saw them as plausible role models for the kind of adult I thought I could become. Middle-aged and elderly adults, even the most devoted film buffs and incisive critics among us, aren’t the ones who can judge whether current stars and and their movies are great in the way we thought certain movie stars and movies were great when we were young.
It means something that movies that were made when my parents were children mattered so much to adolescents and young adults coming upon them a generation later and that a generation after that some of those movies are still winning over young hearts and imaginations. But in order to predict that a movie will last it has to have already lasted some time. In other words, we need to give these guys and their movies that time. There are already more movies from the 80s and 90s that just a short clip or a line of dialog from will cause me a thrill than I wouldn’t have thought likely back when I first saw them. For the point of this post, though, the question is do those iconic moments contain an ideal of manliness or an ideal that’s as worthy as Bogart’s and his cohort’s.
Is “I’ll be back” as manly as “I came to Casablanca for the waters”? Not even close.
But maybe you noticed that Arnold isn’t on my list of stars from that era.
Pure snobbery on my part.
As tempting as it might be, before I made the case that the Terminator and Rambo represented the debased ideal of masculinity indicative of Reagan’s America, I’d wonder what it meant that the truly dominant ideal of masculinity in the movies of the time was a permanent boyishness represented by the stardom of Matthew Broderick, Michael J. Fox, and Tom Cruise---all of whom I also left off my list---and the brief flashes in the pan made by members of the Brat Pack.
And before I started to get into that, I’d need to take a step back and take a deep breath and remind myself that movies are a business. The first thing a movie has to do is make money and it does that by drawing an audience. Which means that who’s up on the screen depends on who’s in the seats.
According to Diski, Kanfer takes this into account.
Kanfer…isn’t sure that loss of American virility due to an increase in women’s rights is a sufficient answer to the question of why there is no more Bogart. The full answer, he believes, requires a look at Hollywood’s post-television obsession with demographics. The economic power-shift to the young meant that movies began to be aimed at getting them into the cinemas. Older people stayed at home watching the telly, and a recent survey suggests that while 54 per cent of 14-17-year-olds have been to the movies in the past month, only 24 per cent of over-fifties have…Adults don’t go to the movies because they can’t find ‘emotional and aesthetic satisfaction’.
Diski says Kanfer sees this as a chicken and the egg problem. Are movies not made to give grown-up emotional and aesthetic satisfaction because grown-ups don’t go to the movies or do grown-ups not go to the movies because those kinds of grown-up movies don’t get made. But it’s not. We know which came first. Television. The movie industry has been competing with the gravitational pull of the couch and the TV set for sixty-odd years. That’s why the big shift to color. That’s why Cinemascope. That’s why sex and nudity and bloody violence. What happened in the 80s---or post Star Wars---is that some clever marketing agent figured out that you didn’t need to lure everyone back to the theaters. You could make a lot of money by going after a particular demographic and getting them to come to your movie over and over again. It doesn’t matter if five people see your movie or one person sees your movie five times. And then they identified who that gullible segment was.
It’s a lot easier to draw in adolescent boys and adolescently-minded young men. They have lower standards and TV can’t give them the thing they want most from the movies, the massive adrenaline rush that comes from watching a twenty foot high, thirty foot wide fireball explode with the attendant bone-rattling, gut-grabbing Dolby Surround Sound effects.
Kanfer sees that, bemoans it, and apparently stops there. He doesn’t get into what it means that television has become the medium providing grown-ups with the kind of emotional and aesthetic satisfaction the movies used to provide. Conventional wisdom has it that it’s only the middle-aged and the old folks who aren’t going to the movies and are staying home to watch television instead. But it’s not just the middle-aged and the elderly who are staying home. Right from the beginning, audiences of all ages and genders started staying home to watch television because right from the beginning television started doing certain things as well as and even better than the movies for free. The first of these things was make people laugh. But the next was the detective story.
Why are there no heirs of Philip Marlowe in the movies? Because they’re all on TV. They’ve been there since the 50s.
If you go back over my lists of movie star tough guys, there’s one name that might jump out at you.
James Garner.
Garner was a bone fide movie star. And, by the way, I’m convinced his Philip Marlowe was a better Marlowe than Bogart’s. But his iconic status is mainly due to television, and particularly The Rockford Files.
The question of Jim Rockford’s toughness was always an open one, particularly in Rockford’s own mind. Having a gun didn’t help. What made Rockford tough was his ability to roll with the punches, both the ones the bad guys threw at him and the ones life did. If that’s not a Bogart as Marlowe-like toughness, I don’t know what is.
You can argue that none of the other TV detectives, from Peter Gunn through Joe Mannix and Thomas Magnum and Frank Pembleton and Lennie Briscoe on up to the current crop---Michael Westen,Christopher Chance,Raylan Givens,Richard Castle---are fit to shine Marlowe’s wingtips, but you can’t say they or the actors playing them or the writers creating them don’t try. Now Raylan may owe more to Marshall Matt Dillon and Gary Cooper and Clint Eastwood and Castle to Cary Grant and William Powell, but they along with all the others still owe debts to Bogie and Marlowe that the characters, the actors, and the writers openly acknowledge.
It’s not that nobody in Hollywood knows what Bogart (the icon) stands for. It’s that none of the actors are Bogart.
You just can’t talk about Hollywood’s and America’s ideals of masculinity without taking television into account.
It goes beyond the TV detectives too. You have to explain or explain away Matt Dillon, Jim Kirk, Sam Malone, Don Draper and even Tony Soprano. Also, pick a character, any male character, from Battlestar Galactica, although I advise starting with Admiral Adama.
And, ok, you can skip Gaeta. And don’t bother with the jokes about Starbuck.
The thing to note about BSG and The Sopranos and Mad Men and Cheers and Star Trek and Castle, Justified, Human Target, Burn Notice, and The Rockford Files is that the audiences for those shows weren’t and aren’t exclusively the middle-aged and the elderly. It’s also important to note that those audiences are far from exclusively male as well. While we’re on this point, and speaking of pure snobbery, not mine this time, certain critics’, the main audience for Game of Thrones is not just fifteen to twenty year old males. Conservative types can try to blame women for what they see as the degradation of the ideal of masculinity in the movies and in the country at large but they can only do it by ignoring the fact that women aren’t the intended audience for most movies these days while they are a significant part of the intended audiences for these TV shows. According to Diski, Kanfer doesn’t blame women. But you ignore them as an audience if you ignore television as a cultural force greater than movies.
The questions how to be manly, how to be masculine are juvenile ones anyway. The grown-up question is how to be a man. Which is to say, how does a male person go about becoming an adult? Speaking of pure snobbery again, and again not mine but certain critics, it’s a mistake to dismiss all superhero movies as if they’re merely run of the mill action-adventure movies aimed at the most immature 15 to 20 year old boys. Actually, I think it’s a mistake to dismiss all action-adventure movies just because they happen to be aimed primarily at 15 to 20 year old boys, but that’s another post, Superhero movies---Batman Begins, the first two Spider-man movies, Thor, and especially the first Iron Man---are concerned with the question of how to be a man, that is, as I said, how to be a responsible and decent adult. And they work their way towards the same conclusion, that it’s a matter of not relying on your superpowers or in other words it’s a matter of being tough without a gun.
At any rate, there are still a lot of movies out there, and you can find in them evidence for any cultural, social, political, or aesthetic argument you want to make. While the screens are full of perpetual adolescents and the projected fantasies of adolescent males imagining themselves as empowered adolescents, there are still male movie stars whose careers are based on their playing grown-ups.
And I’ve found it very interesting---and emotionally and aesthetically satisfying---to watch several stars who started out their careers as adolescents (and in one case as a pre-adolescent) establishing themselves as grown-up movie stars by playing grown-ups.
Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr., Johnny Depp, and Leonardo DiCaprio. And to tell you the truth I think DiCaprio has been doing the best job of it, despite having the biggest handicap, that baby-face of his. We’ll see which of his movies will last after they’ve lasted a little while more, but he’s put together a pretty good string, starting with Catch Me If You Can. Gangs of New York, The Aviator, The Departed, Blood Diamond, Inception. Martin Scorsese has had a lot to do with it, but not exclusively.
Somebody else can deal with how odd it is that Johnny Depp had to put on mascara and earrings in order to be taken seriously as a tough guy.
______________________
For the purposes of this discussion, I left a lot of big stars and great actors off my lists. I didn’t include the song and dance men, like Fred Astaire and Bing Crosby and Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra, or the comedians from Bob Hope to Woody Allen to Robin Williams to Will Ferrell and, sigh, Adam Sandler, or the light leading men, Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis, or the oddballs, and among them I include Montgomery Clift and James Dean. It’s not that questions of masculinity and toughness are irrelevant to their movies. It’s that those questions are pretty much besides the point when considering their status as icons or, in the cases of Dean and Clift, way too complicated. But there’s one name that ought to be conspicuous by its absence.
John Wayne.
I left him out because he would throw the whole discussion off balance. He’s just too big a subject.
B.D. made it. Melissa made it. Toggle’s making it. If Garry Trudeau is going to continue to be true to the story he’s telling about our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, the odds have to catch up with someone sometime.
If you follow Doonesbury, you know that Ray Hightower, B.D.’s old army buddy who is a top sergeant recently redeployed from Iraq to Afghanistan, has been in an aid station all week, having been blown up yet again while leading a patrol. By Ray’s own count, he’s been blown up 17 times, but he’s a little fuzzy about things and probably can’t remember the exact number. However many times, it’s been often enough for his troops to have nicknamed him “Boomer.”
B.D. has gotten his old life back. Except for hinted at nightmares and phantom and real pains from his amputated leg, he seems to have put the war behind him. In fact, Trudeau may be done with his story entirely. B.D. seems to moving into the background to make way for his daughter Sam and his surrogate son Toggle to become major characters, the way Mike has stepped aside for Alex and Rick and Joanie for Jeff. Melissa hasn’t put what happened to her behind her, but she has reclaimed her career. And Toggle is on his way towards building a pretty decent life for himself that may include somewhere down the line marriage to Alex and the beginning of the third generation of Doonesbury characters.
And although each of their stories is a “soldier’s home” story, they are personal stories, with each character having had to deal with his or her own physical and psychic wounds.
It may be that what Trudeau’s planning to do with Ray is tell a more generalized “soldier’s home” tale, looking at the economic and social problems our returning troops have to deal with. Or maybe Trudeau will use Ray to look at the problem of the signature wound of these wars, head trauma, in a way he didn’t or hasn’t yet done with Toggle. Maybe Ray and Toggle will end up in therapy together.
But based on how it’s been set up so far what Trudeau appears to be on his way towards telling is the story of an angry and violent and traumatized man coming “home” to a life that holds no place for him.
They do very good work at that veteran’s center B.D. and Melissa and Toggle have passed through. But not everyone who comes home is a survivor.
Trudeau has never allowed tragedy to enter his comedic universe, but his comedy has always depended on our knowing that the tragic is out there.
And real life makes its presence felt.
Andy died. Dick and Lacey Davenport died. Mike’s mother just passed.
Please, pal, run next year and lose so the way's clear for me in 2016, I don't want to face you in the primaries.
The Republicans have a perfectly respectable potential nominee in Mitt Romney, but apparently Party leaders and insiders are worried and are desperately looking around for an alternative. Like Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels.
The problem is that in order for Romney to get the nomination he’ll have to convince a significant number of Right Wing yahoos that he’s not a Morman and not only was he never governor of Massachusetts, he’s never even heard of the place, and he’s been having an awkward time of it trying to do that. What the GOP needs is a candidate like Romney, someone who is relatively moderate (for a Republican), reasonably sane, a senator or governor from an important state, but who has never accomplished anything.
Someone who can sell himself purely on personality without having a record that can come back and bite him.
That’s New Jersey governor Chris Christie.
Christie hasn’t done anything that the yahoos can complain about. He hasn’t done anything much that would make them think of him as one of their own, either, but he can blame that on the Democrats in the state legislature. Meanwhile, he has done a lot of chickenshit stuff that has pissed off a lot of liberals, so that’s in his favor. Romney didn’t go out of his way to offend Democrats and liberals in Massachusetts, although I’m sure if he’d known at the time he needed to if he was to have any hope of being President someday he’d have TP’d Barney Frank’s house. But no way will Christie run this time out. He and most savvy Republican politicians have already conceded the election to President Obama. If it starts to look as though there’s a chance the President could lose, Mike Huckabee will jump in. Huckabee might jump in anyway. If Christie has any idea of being President someday---and I don’t know if he does---his best shot is 2016.
The other Romney-like not-Romneys---Florida Senator Marco Rubio, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley---are in the same boat.
So why not just sit back and let Romney lose?
Well, if you care about your party’s future, there’s the real possibility he might not get nominated.
He is just not convincing as a born-again Right Winger.
But there’s also the possibility that he will get the nomination but without convincing the Right Wing yahoos he’s one of them while convincing Independents that he is or that he might as well be.
The Party’s goal in 2012 isn’t to win the Presidency. It’s to maintain the Republican majority in the House and take the Senate. To do that, they need to have the faithful turn out. But this time around they can’t count on winning just by turning out the base. The Democrats’ base is going to be energized, too, mainly by having President Obama at the top of the ticket, but also because Democrats are appalled and infuriated by what the Republicans have been up to in Washington and in the states. Plenty of Independents are appalled and infuriated too. The Republicans need someone at the top of the ticket who will help lower down. Their nominee has to be someone the yahoos can tolerate but who won’t scare off Independents.
Under no other conditions would anybody be talking about Mitch Daniels as a possible President.
He’s short. (That’s him on the left in the picture.) He’s going bald. He’s 62 years old and not a particularly youthful 62. He’s gray and I’m not talking about his hair color. He’s a governor of a fairly populous state, but not an important state. Nobody thinks Indiana is a key to the nation. In 1992, Arkansas mattered because it’s a southern state and being from the South means something. But Indiana doesn’t matter as a Midwestern state even if it meant something to be from the Midwest. Not even Midwesterners think that. There are states that carry weight in and of themselves. New York. California. Texas. Florida. And to lesser degrees, Ohio, Massachusetts, maybe New Jersey. But other states carry weight because they are part of a region---part of one of two regions, the South and the West. Being from New England is pretty much the same as being from the Midwest. Of all the lackluster states in the Union, though, Indiana has to be in the running for the most lacking in any sort of luster. It’s not even really a farm state. It’s a state of insurance agents who sell policies to farmers. And Mitch Daniels is its perfect representative.
Even under current circumstances, nominating Daniels would be risky. The yahoos might tolerate him, Independents might not be scared of him, but everybody, everybody, would be bored by him. He’s not the Republican Mike Dukakis, but he’s close.
He can be counted on to lose gracefully, though, in a way that won’t poison the Party in voters’ minds come 2016.
But Romney can be counted on to do that, too, I think.
So here’s why, if I was a Republican, I’d be pushing for Daniels to throw his hat in the ring.
Given the clown and freak show the Party has become, it’s in the GOP’s interest for the race for the nomination to appear to be between Romney and Daniels. These are the two you want holding center stage at every debate. You want the country thinking that the Republicans are a party of grown-up, responsible executives and not the party of the likes of Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Michelle Bachman, or---and, although I think she’s past it, she still can’t be counted out---Sarah Palin. You want people to forget there was even the slimmest chance that the Party could have nominated Donald Trump.
But that’s me.
The real reason some of these Republican heavyweights want Daniels instead of Romney might very well be that he could win.
Imagine that.
Suppose the country’s in such rough shape come November 2012---and the Republicans in Congress and in some swing state state houses are working to see that it will be---that Romney actually defeats the President.
That’s it for President Christie. Bye-bye President Walker.
There’s an even bigger horror to contemplate.
Suppose if he wins, President Romney remembers how much he liked being Governor Romney.
The biggest mistake Romney made in his health care slide show presentation the other day was letting on that he actually worries about people who don’t have health insurance.
A Republican who cares what happens to any of them?
Chris Hemsworth as Thor prepares to bring the mighty while Tom Hiddleston as Loki practices his best trick of achieving a Linus Van Pelt level of sincerity in a scene from the new movie based on the Marvel Comics adventures of the Norse thunder god.
Not enough Loki making mischief. Not enough Don Blake doing good deeds---serving one plate of pancakes shouldn’t be enough to earn your way back into Asgard. And not enough Kat Dennings.
As the Norse trickster god Loki, the Mighty Thor’s not as mighty but a lot slipperier brother, Tom Hiddleston comes close to walking away with the movie. If he’d been given a little more to do, audiences might even have forgotten Anthony Hopkins was in it, never mind Natalie Portman. But I think director Kenneth Branagh and his team of screenwriters should have taken the risk. Compared to the first Iron Man, which so far is the best of the series of movies based on the Marvel Comics heroes who will eventually assemble together as The Avengers, Thor, the movie, is somewhat lacking in a sense of humor and a sense of fun. That’s in keeping with the spirit of the comic books when I was a kid. That’s no longer the case, I’ve been informed by current fans, especially since the addition of Thor’s merry band of swashbuckling sidekicks, the Warriors Three, who, happily, are in the movie, making merry, buckling their swashes, and providing some of the fun and humor. And I’d better be clear. Thor isn’t humorless or without fun. I just think there could have been more and Hiddleston and Loki represent an opportunity missed.
Branagh and company count too much on our knowing Loki’s role in the myths. We’re told Loki’s a trickster and we believe it because Hiddleston looks like he’s capable of all kinds of mischief, with his best trick his ability to look as sincere as Peanuts’ Linus about to tell us what Christmas is all about. I would have liked to hear him deliver a speech on the true meaning of Yule. But maybe the filmmakers were afraid a couple more witty speeches and a couple more scenes of Loki reaching into his bag of tricks for the sheer mischief of it and the movie would have had to have been re-titled Loki.
As I said, I think they should have risked it and I think they’d have gotten away with it, because, good as Hiddleston is, I don’t think he could have taken the movie away from its star, Chris Hemsworth.
Hemsworth handles the mighty-ing well, with the requisite amount of thundering and storming and hammer-throwing. What’s surprising is how well he handles the charming.
Charming? Thor? Definitely not in keeping with the spirit of the comics when I was a kid. But, again, my in-house experts inform me, things have changed. Still, a charming thunder god is a novelty to us old-timers.
We expect Thor to be a natural when it comes to battling frost giants and---after he’s lost his hammer and his divine powers---mixing it up with agents from S.H.I.E.L.D. We don’t expect him to be a natural at whipping up a batch of pancakes and graciously playing waiter to set of mortals who are pretty clear that they don’t believe he’s a god and think he’s a nutcase. We don’t expect him to understand and sympathize with a young scientist’s devotion to her vocation or share her enthusiasm for her theories or be able to follow her thinking and even help her solve some problems. We don’t expect him to be able to do the science and the math and have fun while he’s at it. And we don’t expect him to treat her middle-aged mentor with kindness and respect and to understand that the man’s irritation and resentment and suspicion are signs of his fatherly concern and affection or see him instinctively make an effort to draw some of the older scientist’s fatherly feelings towards himself.
Hemsworth handles all this, including the plate of pancakes, with intelligence and wit and infectious good-humor, and even when he’s not fighting he moves with an old-fashioned movie star’s grace. You can think Errol Flynn but you should and can also think Cary Grant, Clark Gable, and Gary Cooper as well. Hemsworth has more than a touch of the swashbuckler and acrobat and he’s got a bit of the roguish song and dance man in him and some cool cowboy to boot.
If you’ve read the comic books or seen the trailer, you know the set-up, but even if you don’t I’m not spoiling anything by telling you that through his “arrogance and stupidity" the vain and rash young thunder god nearly starts a war up in Asgard, the Norse gods’ home and the Vikings’ heaven. To punish him, Odin, Thor’s father and Asgard’s king, (Hopkins, pulling the same trick he pulled in The Mask of Zorro of coming across as cooler and deadlier than the movie’s actual young hero), strips Thor of his godhood (Basically, he takes away his superpowers.) and exiles him to earth where he will have to learn humility, self-restraint, and how to use his head and consult his heart before acting if he’s to earn his way back into heaven.
Thor’s time on earth include some of my favorite scenes in the movie, but I wish there’d been a little more done with them, not just for the fun of it, but because Thor seems to have too easy a time of it learning his lessons.
The movie suggests that Thor has the heart and the decency to adapt himself to his situation, that is, he knows how to be polite, he knows how to put people---and presumably gods, elves, and dwarfs too---at their ease. He’s been to Midgard (earth, to us non-ancient Scandinavian pagans) any number of times and it might have been fun and amusing to know when, where, and why. Whenever it was, it wasn’t recently, and wherever it was it wasn’t the United States. Thor likes humans and has insight into what makes us tick, but he isn’t well versed in the manners and mores of 21st Century America. He has a few things to learn about how to deal with the traffic---obey the lights and use the crosswalks---and the proper way to compliment the coffee at the local diner and ask for another mug---hint, you shouldn’t literally need another mug---and that pet stores aren’t stocked to equip banished Norse deities who need to ride heroically to the rescue at a moment’s notice---few pet stores sell giant eagles large enough to carry a six-foot seven inch thunder god.
But Thor needs to learn that a side of himself he takes for granted to the point of forgetting it’s there is actually his best side. That’s where Don Blake could have come in.
Old school fans of the comic will remember that Odin didn’t just make Thor human, he made him live as a human and as a particular human, a doctor named Don Blake. The movie makes an inside joke out of that. Time and plot constraints meant that the movie couldn’t delve deeply into that part of Thor’s origin story. But more could have been done with the Don Blake idea. It goes without saying that Thor is a great warrior, even without his hammer and superpowers, but in order to become a superhero and mankind’s protector, he needs to learn how to be protective.
Of course, Thor feels kindly and protective towards the young scientist. For one thing, she’s played by Natalie Portman and who wouldn’t feel kindly and protective towards Natalie Portman (besides Darren Aronofsky)? But she’s also the love interest. And it follows that Thor would feel kindly and protective towards her friends. What we should see is Thor feeling kindly and protective towards strangers.
It wouldn’t have taken much to show that, just a couple of scenes of Thor not just pretending he’s a doctor named Don Blake but actually having to act as if he is Doctor Don Blake. I don’t think they’d have needed to take it so far as to show Thor delivering a baby, but a we should get the idea that Thor has to spend some time as Don Blake doing good deeds and getting to like it, both doing the good deeds and being a decent human being.
What Thor finally does to win back his godhood is fairly convincing, on the mythological level. It would have had more of a pay off on the dramatic level if we’d seen him working towards redemption in a more human way so that his moment of truth, while a win for him as a god, is a loss for him as a man, and a loss for us too. As much as we want Thor back as Thor, we should miss having him around as Don Blake.
Ok, so not enough Loki making mischief, not enough Thor as Don Blake. Now about not enough Kat Dennings.
As Darcy Lewis, the young scientist’s less than helpful student assistant (Older scientist: “I thought you’re a science major.” Darcy, with an unspoken duh at the end: “Political science.”) Dennings is adorable and funny. She’s smart about not being smart. Darcy’s not a ditz, but she’s lazy. She’s paying attention with only half her mind. The rest is…elsewhere. Nowhere in particular, just otherwise engaged. The part of her that’s here would rather not be. Darcy’s a character it must have been tempting to go to for easy laughs, and I guess it’s good Branagh resisted. It’s probably better to have just not enough of her than just a little too much.
In her short interactions with Hemsworth, Thor treats Darcy with kindness and amusement and with the kind of adult respect she has to grow up a little more to actually deserve, and Dennings lets us see that really does need to grow up and that she might actually manage to do it…someday.
And she wears her glasses very well, in a way that makes you jealous of whoever’s going get to be the one who takes them off for her.
But the best thing she does is give Natalie Portman something to play off of.
Portman is the clear favorite to replace Julie Roberts as America’s movie sweetheart. But that puts her in danger of having happen to her what happened to Roberts. Roberts is a good actress whose fans and directors stopped expecting to act. They were happy if all she did was smile her way winsomely through a movie and too often that’s all she did. Portman does a lot of winsome smiling in Thor, most of it around Hemsworth. It’s around Denning that she gets to act.
As Jane Foster (originally Don Blake’s nurse in the comic books, an astrophysicist here), Portman stars as her first bone fide grown-up. Her doctor character in No Strings Attached is really some screenwriter’s wistful memory of the theater major he couldn’t get up the nerve to ask out back in college and her ballerina in Black Swan is most definitely a daughter. Jane is a fully-fledged, independent, self-reliant, competent adult. Portman doesn’t have to strain to pull this off or reach for any actor’s tricks to make us forget the manic pixie side of her. She can even smile winsomely whenever a winsome smile is called for. All she has to do is field whatever Dennings tosses at her and lob it back gently. As worked out together by Portman and Dennings, grown-ups are the people who teach the Darcys of the world how to be grown-ups, mainly by example, but also by expecting them to act like grown-ups while at the same time being quick to understand and forgive them when they don’t.
A grown-up, as Portman plays one, is kind and patient and protective towards those who aren’t yet as grown-up as she is, which makes Jane as good an example for Thor as she is for Darcy.
Thor is the fourth in the series of movies that will center around next year’s The Avengers. The other three are Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, and Iron Man 2. The fifth, Captain America: The First Avenger, comes out in July. As I said, Iron Man is the best so far and the best by a long shot. But Thor is a solid second. It’s intelligently and heartfeltingly directed by Branagh, who seems to have been inspired more by King Lear and his own film adaptation of Henry V than by the comic book or the myths. But he maintains a light touch and doesn’t try to oversell the high drama or the potentially tragic. Thor is a well-made and exciting action-adventure movie whose hero happens to have superpowers, and what makes it good is that Branagh never forgets that all the fighting and chasing and blowing things up, along with all the attendant special effects, are meant to serve the story, not the other way round. (I especially liked it that he gets the required embedded ad for the video game out of the way in the first twenty minutes instead of using it for the movie’s climactic battle, which is what happens in The Incredible Hulk and Iron Man II, turning the endings of both those movies into great big noisy messes.) Branagh keeps his focus, and ours, on his actors and their characters.
And he doesn’t just rely on the fine work of his leads. Branagh gives the whole of his attention to his talented and likable supporting cast too.
Stellan Skarsgard plays Jane’s mentor and surrogate father with the a nice mix of paternal indulgence and professional detachment. He’s affectionate without getting sentimental, irritable without losing sacrificing any of the affection. Ray Stevenson, Tadanobu Asano, and Josh Dallas as the Warriors Three, along with Jaime Alexander as the warrior goddess Sif (in the myths an enigma, in the comic books Thor’s lady love, here more of a spunky kid sister), make a formidable team, playing with and off each other nicely. Colm Feore sparkles icily with wicked intelligence through god knows how many layers of make-up and cgi as the king of the frost giants. And Idris Elba is suitably stentorian and immovable as Heimdall, the guardian of the Rainbow Bridge of Asgard where the booming heavens roar and we behold in breathless wonder…whoops. Sorry. Got carried away there.
Only Rene Russo, as Thor’s mother, the goddess Frigga, isn’t given much to do. So that’s one more thing there’s not enough of, Russo swinging her sword and slicing and dicing frost giants.
Special mention has to go to Clark Gregg in his third go-round as S.H.I.E.L.D Agent Coulson whose job here is the same as it was in the two Iron Man movies, which is to keep a spoiled brat superhero in line. Superheroes don’t impress Coulson. They’re amateurs. If it weren’t unprofessional, he’d let himself get irritated by their childish and selfish misbehavior. But he’s good at keeping his feelings under wraps and settles for talking to them with a stern patience as if after enough repetition it will sink in that they’ve all got some serious work to do and while showing off one’s superpowers is fun in the proper time and place, now isn’t that time and this isn’t the place.
Coulson gets of a good zinger at (an offscreen) Tony Stark/Iron Man’s expense that pretty much sums up Coulson’s feelings. In Iron Man 2, Gregg established that Coulson’s ideal superhero is Captain America, and it’s too bad Gregg wasn’t in The Incredible Hulk and can’t be in the Captain America movie, unless it’s as Coulson’s grandfather---it’s set during World War II---because Gregg is now the connection tying the first four movies to Captain America by being, essentially, Cap’s representative. Captain America is, after Spider-man, who is his own show anyway and so maybe shouldn’t count, the Marvel superhero. The point of the Avengers as a team is that it brings together Marvel’s most arrogant, self-centered, and go-it-alone heroes---Iron Man, Ant-Man, Thor, and, sometimes, the Hulk---to make them all better heroes and better people/gods/monsters by their having to follow Cap’s lead and example.
Which brings me to poor Chris Evans who’s playing Captain America in the series.
Evans was going to have a hard enough time holding his place on screen next Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man.
Now he’s not only got to deal with Downey, he’ll have Chris Hemsworth charismaticking all over the screen. If Evans can still make himself the star of The Avengers, as he should be if they’re doing the movies right, he’s mightier than Thor, more invincible than Iron Man, and more incredible than the Hulk.
Viewers’ advisory: As fans of the movies have learned, you need to stay all the way through the credits!
3D vs 2D and Mannion vs. Ebert: We saw Thor in 3D. We had no choice. I don’t like 3D. It gives me a headache and adds nothing to most movies. So I was going to recommend you see it in 2D if you can. But Roger Ebert saw it in 2D and he hated it! It’s like he saw a completely different movie. Weird.
Not exactly Bulfinch but handy all the same: MTV has posted a guide to all things Thor. Be warned. Major spoilers.
Also: Wev McEwan has a few choice things to say about certain people’s problem with the casting of Elba as Heimdall, and a few things to say that I should have said about Dennings and Portman’s scenes together, and she agrees that Branagh wasted Rene Russo in her Thor Thread.
Real life astrophysicist Adam Frank blogs about the convergence of myth and science in Thor in a post for NPR.
And, because I brought it up and I don’t want to be the only one with it stuck in my head---
I’m reading Walter Mosley’s The Long Fall. It’s the first in his new series of detective novels featuring Leonid McGill. I hope Mosley’s not done with Easy Rawlins, but he seems to have put Rawlins aside for now to focus on McGill. McGill is not Easy or easy, not in mind, body, or spirit. He’s a tense, angry, unhappy man who isn’t at his ease anywhere, but especially not on airplanes. So why, then, does he fly from his home turf, New York City, to Albany, New York?
McGill says he’s made tips to Albany fairly regularly. Then he should know that flying is the least efficient way to travel from the City to the state capital. Albany is about 150 miles up the Thruway. You can drive it in a little over two hours. Even if you can book a flight from LaGuardia in the morning that’s leaving in the afternoon, which is what McGill does, the time you have to wait, the time spent getting to the airport, picking up your boarding pass, getting on the plane, waiting for the plane to take off, in the air---McGill has to take what he calls a “puddle jumper” that takes eighty-two minutes to fly from LaGuardia---waiting to disembark, and getting your rental car and then driving from the airport into downtown Albany can easily add up to more than the time it would take to just drive there. Maybe McGill doesn’t own a car. But wouldn’t it be a fairly simple matter for him to rent one?
It’s be even simpler to take the train.
McGill, by the way, isn’t rich, a client isn’t paying his fare, and yet he not only buys a ticket for an airplane, he calls for a limo to take him to airport. Amtrak wouldn’t just be more convenient, it would be a whole lot cheaper.
It makes no sense for McGill to fly and as far as I can tell the only reason he does is so that Mosley can describe how uncomfortable he is aboard the plane.
That bugs me.
But there’s more to it.
When McGill drives into Albany in his rented SUV, he doesn’t notice or note for us that he notices the defining feature of downtown Albany.
Albany’s the state capital, but McGill cruises through downtown without mentioning the hundreds of state workers who pretty much make up the whole of the population during the day or noting that that part of town is set up pretty much exclusively to serve them. Plot requirements and the conventions of the genre send McGill into a seedy part of down and to a bar where he gets into a fight, but you’d think for purposes of verisimilitude, Mosley would have at least given a passing nod to the fact that Albany is more than an airport and one seedy bar and that to get from the airport to that seedy bar he had to drive past a lot of other bars, restaurants, shops, and offices that weren’t seedy. Just the opposite, as a matter of fact.
By the way, it’s a redneck bar and a patron picks the fight with McGill because McGill’s black. It’s not that Albany doesn’t have its share of racists or that I doubt that they have their own watering holes or that, although I think it’s unlikely, I don’t believe a white patron would just up and start a fight with a black stranger who accidentally wandered in. It’s that A.) the fight serves no purpose and the only reason Mosley put it in was that he realized he’d gotten pretty far into his story without anything violent happening to McGill and B.) the bar as Mosley describes it could be anywhere in the United States. There’s no reason for Mosley to have sent McGill to Albany for that scene, as opposed to Schenectady, Syracuse, Rochester, or Buffalo, or, for that matter, Chicago, Topeka, Denver, or Walla-Walla, Washington, not to mention Brooklyn, the Bronx, or Queens, or, to take it even further, Floral Park, Flushing, or Far Rockaway.
Mosley doesn’t make use of Albany as a place, just as someplace else and this makes me feel like he’s not really trying.
Oh, and there’s this. McGill/Mosley says the seedy bar is on the north side of town where the businesses are being “crushed by mall culture.” Albany doesn’t have much of a north side. It’s mainly laid out east to west, fanning outward from the Hudson River. You don’t have to go very many blocks north from downtown before you’re not in Albany anymore, you’re in a rundown factory town called Menands and for all intents and purposes the part of Albany that can be called its north side is part of Menands and it used to be a lot like it, a working class residential neighborhood. People lived there because that’s where their jobs were. It went down hill long before the rise of “mall culture” and its slide was due to factories in the area shutting down. Whatever businesses that are there now are either ones that are benefiting from the spill of the growing prosperity downtown or ones that are serving the needs of what’s left of the old neighborhood that forty years of “mall culture” haven’t been able to meet.
Not only do I not buy that McGill’s in Albany, I don’t believe Mosley’s ever been there himself. As far as I’m concerned, this is fatal weakness. One of the pleasures of detective novels is the way the writer uses a realistic setting to make the action seem realistic too.
Big deal, right? I should put the book aside and move onto something else. My problem is that reason I’m reading The Long Fall and had planned to move onto the next book in the series, Known to Evil, is I was going to review the newest one, When the Thrill Is Gone is Gone. I was looking forward to it, in fact. I’m a big fan of the Easy Rawlins books so I had high hopes for McGill.
Has anybody read The Long Fall or either of the other two? Am I wrong? Should I keep going?
Another question for you. What detective novelists do you think are really good when it comes to describing a real place?
__________________
Just want to make it clear, it’s not that Albany doesn’t do seedy. My complaint is that the seediness Mosley describes is generic not specific to Albany. I took this picture back in March when we were up there for the art show that included a painting by Young Ken Mannion. Pretty seedy neighborhood, huh? But it’s not on the “north side.” It’s downtown, tucked up right against the Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller Plaza, but hidden by a parking garage and the Times Union Center sports arena. If McGill had found his way here, then I would have been ready to believe anything Mosley wanted to tell me about Albany.
“Well, then, Lance, where is it?” you ask. Or don’t. I’m pretending you do for the sake of getting this post rolling and it would help if you make believe along with me. “Well, then, Lance,” you ask, “Where is it?”
I’ve mentioned a number of times over the years how this blog grew out of my longtime practice of keeping a notebook. I’ve made a point of mentioning it, in fact, partly to emphasize what I think I’m up to here. The blog is a notebook. There’s nothing finished here. No single post, no matter how long or essayic, is a done deal. Every post is in a way a continuation of the last one and an introduction to the next, because they’re all about the same thing: What’s on Lance’s mind at the moment. I call them notebooks because I do keep notes in them. Buy bread. Mom’s b’day Sat. Dr appt 3:30. But most of the entries are longer, contain complete thoughts, and tell stories, if only stories of a single sentence. I could, if I was more comfortable with the word, call my notebooks journals, and nobody keeps journals. They keep a journal. The reason for the singular is that no matter how many pages you use up to do it and no matter how many days, months, or years those pages cover, it’s all one story, the story of what was on the writer’s mind at the moment as he worked his way towards…something.
I’m working my way towards something. I’m not sure what. Enlightenment? Wisdom? An abatement of loneliness? A cure for insomnia? The respect of strong men and the affection of beautiful women? A six-figure book deal?
All of those, probably, but mainly I’m working my way to my next post.
Actually, I’m usually more focused on working my way to the next sentence.
But what’s on my mind right now isn’t the art or philosophy or psychology of keeping a notebook.
I still carry a notebook wherever I go, even when I’m also traveling with my netbook. And I’ll write in the notebook while the netbook’s up and running and Windows Live Writer’s open on the screen. Sometimes what I’m doing is making notes for the post I’m writing at the moment, scribbling stuff down as I go as I try to keep up with my own thoughts. Sometimes I’m making notes for another post that I may or may not get to typing up later. I work out of my notebooks but usually what I’m working from is bits and pieces, single words meant to trigger ideas, snatches of thoughts, phrases, occasionally whole sentences and even paragraphs. Now and then I’ll actually write what amounts to a whole post and all I need to do when I type it up is rearrange things. But as you can see from the photos I don’t always stick to writing in a notebook.
Every now and then, I’ll write out a whole post on some scrap paper. I usually resort to this, as opposed to methodically and diligently setting out to do it, when my head’s full of ideas and I’m in a rush to empty them out onto the page. And I need to hurry. If I’ve got a whole paragraph or, as regularly happens, a whole post already composed in my mind, there’s a real risk that I’ll have forgotten large chunks of what I planned to write before I’ve typed it all out. I’m just not that fast a typist. And one of the things that slows me down is I have a problem sitting still.
I like to move around when I write. I go from chair to chair and from room to room and it’s easier to leave the netbook in one spot and stop off to type up what I’ve written in the kitchen on my way to the family room. Another problem, though, is that I’m just not comfortable working in the posture that’s best for typing. I do some of my best writing bent over close to a table with my my chin on my fist. Otherwise, I like to sit back in a chair with my ankle up on my knee and it’s risky trying to bang away at a keyboard wobbling precariously on the other knee. And from time to time I just have to stretch out on my stomach on the bed or the floor.
On the floor, Lance? let’s pretend again you’re asking, Really? At your age?
Yep. It’s good for my back and it makes me feel like the young Abe Lincoln working away on a slate in front of the fire in his family’s log cabin.
Now. My reason for telling you all this is to make it clear that a lot of times when I say I’m writing a post, I’m writing a post.
On paper, with a pen.
There’s no virtue in this. It’s a habit, not a principle. Writing a post out by hand first doesn’t necessarily mean the published post will be a better written post than one I’ve typed up in one mad flail at the keyboard. It helps because it means I’ve had a chance to think things through at least twice. It forces me to revise and edit. But I mainly do it for the reasons I said, I can spit out an idea faster and I’m more comfortable while doing it, but it’s also the case that’s how I learned to write, which is to say, that’s how I learned to think things through, while moving a pen across a piece of paper.
I taught myself how to type in grade school but it wasn’t until long after I’d move on to computers that I taught myself to compose while typing. Throughout high school I had the bad habit of doing my homework, including writing essays, in study halls before classes. I could write very fast but they didn’t let me bring my typewriter to school. And I wrote all my short stories and plays and movie scripts late at night after my family had gone to bed and whenever I used the typewriter, even if I working down in the basement, Mom or Pop Mannion would appear at the top of the stairs to tell me to cut out the racket, people were trying to sleep and what was I doing up anyway, didn’t I know it was a school night?
Typing, then, was for a long time a second step in the process or even a third or a fourth or a fifth, depending on how many drafts I wrote out by hand. Even when I’d typed out a draft or, later, printed one out, I’d cover it over with handwritten corrections and revisions before setting to work to revise it on a new typewritten page or on the screen.
Which brings me at last to my real point.
My handwriting is atrocious!
Really. It’s bloody awful.
I mean, seriously, can you read this?
Never mind. I shouldn’t even ask you to try.
My old pal Nance has asked me to stop sending her post cards because trying to read them gives her a headache. Wev McEwen still likes me to send them because she gets a kick out of trying to decipher them and then letting me know what sort of nonsense I appear to have scratched out.
The sad thing is that I used to have beautiful handwriting. Both my printing and my cursive were exemplary. I got A’s in penmanship. Of course, I went to a Catholic school and even when our kids were going Catholic schools were still teaching penmanship. That stopped for them when we moved here and they started attending public school. Oliver was only in second grade at the time, which probably explains why his handwriting is so much worse than his brother’s. What’s curious to me is that public schools---a lot of them, anyway---stopped teaching penmanship long before personal computers became ubiquitous. I don’t understand why. It’s not as though all these little kids had started lugging their Smith-Coronas to school. Both our guys can type pretty well. But they still have to hand write their answers on tests and exams. Oliver’s teachers complain that they have a hard time reading his printing, but they should direct their complaints to their colleagues in the elementary school. They say---the big THEY who say everything, not Oliver’s teachers---they say that being able to handwrite anything is an outmoded skill. I suppose someday it might be. But that day hasn’t arrived. Besides exams, there are still forms to fill out, envelopes to address. Post cards and paper greeting cards are on their way to becoming artifacts from the past, I know, but some people still send them. It’s not hard to imagine a world when nothing has to be written down, although the paperless office still hasn’t arrived, has it? There was a report going around last month that the last typewriter factory had closed, but that turned out not to be true.
I don’t know what happened to my handwriting. It started to deteriorate when I was in my late twenties which, probably not coincidentally, was when I became addicted to email. As long as nobody but me has to read it, I guess it doesn’t matter how much worse it gets. I probably won’t ever give up my paper notebooks but I’ve been looking forward to the day when somebody comes up with a smart and reliable handwriting recognition software. A tablet computer that I can actually write on would be a dream toy for me.
I still like to send post cards and greeting cards and I like to receive them too and if you want to make my day sometime, drop me a line. My snail mail address is right up there in the sidebar.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go type up my next post.
Maybe you think fifty-two’s a little old for a boxer looking for his first shot at a pro fight. Dewey Bozella disagrees.
Twice a week, Bozella applies headgear and the gloves and steps into the ring to spar. Just one pro fight. OK, maybe two ... "He was one of the best middleweights in the state,'' says [his trainer, Ray Rivera], who is working on getting Bozella a fight.
"You gotta understand, for 20-something years I haven't abused my body,'' he says. "I got a young body. I would love to win some bulljive belt and say 'Sayonara.' That would be the epitome of my life.''
Even so. Fifty-two? But then Bozella’s making up for lost time. He’s had to start late because fifty was a little old to be getting out of prison after doing twenty-six years hard for a crime he didn’t commit.
He had just turned 18 when he was taken into custody soon after the murder. He was set free when a grand jury issued a "no bill,'' meaning no reasonable cause to believe he had committed the murder. But Bozella's fight for his innocence had just begun.
The case was reopened in 1983 and he was convicted and sentenced to 20-to-life. The conviction was reversed in 1989 on the basis of a Batson violation — jurors dismissed without a valid reason — and Bozella got a second trial in '90. The result, however, was the same: 20-to-life.
Key trial witnesses repeatedly changed their stories over the 13 years leading to the second trial and testified against Bozella after securing sparkling deals from prosecution. The only forensic evidence connecting anyone to the crime was the fingerprint of a man named Donald Wise, who was later convicted of committing a nearly identical murder of another elderly woman in the same neighborhood.
<Snip.>
Bozella could have taken a plea bargain before the 1990 trial. He said he was offered a 7-to-14-year sentence. Or, time served if he copped to manslaughter. He could have walked out of the courtroom, he said, if he signed a piece of paper admitting to the crime. Why not? Why risk another couple decades, maybe a lifetime, behind bars?
"Because,'' Bozella says, his eyes widening, "I was innocent!''
For how Bozella turned his life around in prison, he he became a boxer, how he earned his high school diploma, and his college degree, and his master’s, how he met his wife, how he fought again and again to prove his innocence, how he got out at last, read all of Kevin Gleason’s story, Boxer looking for just 1 more shot, in the Times Herald-Record.
The hook for this story is that Dan Rush, the director of Everything Must Go, did something coolly counterintuitive by casting Will Ferrell as his lead, as if Ferrell had never played it straight before. It’s been a while, though, so I can see it might be hard to recall his work playing something like real human beings in Stranger Than Fiction,Winter Passing, and Melinda and Melinda.
(The links in the last sentence are to Roger Ebert’s reviews. He gave three and a half stars to all three.)
But for me this is more intriguing:
[Rush] eventually decided to break [into filmmaking] by directing commercials, assembling a spec reel and shopping it around. His work tended toward the comedic. In one spot Mr. Rush shot for the reel two men share adjacent urinals as one leans in closer and closer, gazing down rapturously at the other man’s ... Swatch watch.
Mr. Rush went on to land clients like Sony and Bell Atlantic. (His first job was one of those inescapable James Earl Jones spots in the ’90s.) As his reputation grew, he began receiving scripts for feature-length comedies. He found most of them “dumb,” though, and commercials paid well, so his dream of making movies remained unfulfilled.
I wish the reporter had dug into this. It sounds like Rush has been turning down chances to direct feature films. Who does that?
Well, someone who wants to make good movies as opposed to someone who wants to be someone who makes movies. Rush appears to have decided that he didn’t want to pay his dues doing the usual sort of Hollywood hack work. He was already doing hack work and making a good living and developing a respectable reputation while he was at it. Directing a movie can take a year, even two, out of your life. Devote two years to seeing a piece of crap to the screen and then take the hit when it bombs? Get stuck making a stupid commercial and you can shrug it off, knowing that next week you’ll have moved onto something else. By the time it airs, even you might have forgotten you directed it. Still, it’s hard to believe he could have turned down the offers. That takes a lot of willpower and courage.
Either Rush was supremely confident he was going to get his chance to make the kind of movies he wanted to make or he didn’t care if he never did. What I would like to know is, if he didn’t care, was it because he, you know, didn’t care? Or was it because he’s serious-enough of mind and purpose to believe that if the choice was going to be between continuing to do what he was doing and being able to take pride and satisfaction from that or becoming a complete hack, then there really was no choice for him.
Which would suggest that he believes that what a lot of people would regard as success, he regards as a form of failure.
Who knows, maybe it a couple of years we’ll see his name up on the screen as the director of Hangover III: Lost in Poughkeepsie. But I really hope Everything Must Go is good.
Not just for Rush’s sake.
It might give Ferrell second thoughts about a Step Brothers II.
The Floor of Heaven is a history of the gold rush as seen through the eyes of three men who were there, two of them to get rich, although only one of those two by digging for gold, and one to put in jail men like the other man who got rich by stealing from the men who did the digging. That third man was Charlie Siringo, a Pinkerton agent, who became famous as “The Cowboy Detective,” although very little of his detective work over a long and successful career as a lawman involved any cowboying.
The man who got rich by digging for gold was George Carmack, whose strike at Bonanza Creek set off the stampede to the Klondike.
The man who got rich by stealing was Jeff “Soapy” Smith, a gambler, con artist, violent thug, gang leader and criminal mastermind with ambitions to make himself a respectable citizen. I’d call Smith a real-life Al Swearengen, except that Al Swearengen was a real-life Al Swearengen.
Quick summary: In the mid-1890s, the three men head north to Alaska. Siringo, who has a gift for undercover work, is out to solve the mysterious robbery at a gold mine. Carmack, whose lifelong ambition is to find the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow his father wasted his life chasing, sets out as a prospector but comes close to settling for a life as an Indian chief. And Smith, on the run from the law, sees in Alaska’s wide-open and virturally unpoliced frontier all kinds of opportunities for a man of his particular talents to make easy money. Eventually, the trio’s separate paths to adventure intersect, with guns drawn on all sides.
The Floor of Heaven is, as advertised above, a rip-roaring tale of high adventure featuring cowboys, Indians, outlaws, robbery, murder, and million dollar gold strikes told with verve, humor, and charm by Blum, a contributing editor for Vanity Fair, a former New York Times reporter twice nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and the author of other true tales of adventure and mystery, including the Edgar Award winning American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, and the Birth of Hollywood and The Brigade: An Epic Story of Vengeance, Salvation, and WWII.
The hero of The Floor of Heaven is Charlie Siringo. This is partly due to the fact that Siringo was a heroic character. But it’s also due to his having made a second career for himself as a writer of rip-roaring tales of high adventure that happened to be true and featured himself as the main character. All three men, Siringo, Carmack, and Smith left copious written records of their lives, but Siringo wasn’t only the more talented writer, he was the more interesting human being, as well as the most decent. All three were intelligent, brave, and energetic, but Carmack and Smith were both emotional drifters; on the one hand they were ambitious, on the other they didn’t care. They weren’t so much driven as pulled forward by their dreams, and when you get right down to it, their dreams, although grand in scale, were fairly trite and dull. They wanted to get rich and without having to work hard to do it. Carmack did work hard, and it’s actually amazing how hard and how much he put himself through physically, but he didn’t expect to have to work hard for long. Any day now, he was going to find the mother lode and then he’d be done with it. Smith kept himself busy with schemes to get rich without doing any honest work, but while some criminals are fascinating in their criminality, Smith’s mind seems to have been mostly elsewhere. He and Carmack lived in their dreams, so when Blum has to bring one or the other of them front and center in his narrative and we are made to see things happening from their points of view, there’s a certain fading of focus, a lack of clarity and immediacy. Carmack and Smith just weren’t paying close enough attention.
Siringo, however, was all attention. He wouldn’t have survived as an undercover detective otherwise. He didn’t just see everything clearly, he took it all in, in detail, and if he couldn’t see its immediate importance, he filed it away as potentially useful. The result is that he’s given Blum more to work with when the point of view shifts to Siringo’s. But it’s also the case that he was a good-natured, outward-looking, and open-hearted human being. He liked people, even the ones he was out to put in jail, and he was interested in what made them tick. These are qualities that helped make him a good detective, but they also made him a livelier and more entertaining writer. Plus, he led an adventurous and exciting life. So it’s not surprising that things perk up mightily whenever Siringo takes over the story.
We meet him as a young cowboy, top hand on a cattle drive that has just rolled into Dodge and getting into a bar fight, that he loses, with the sometime lawman, sometime gambler Bat Masterson, Wyatt Earp’s friend and first boss. We follow him into the company of Pat Garrett and a target-shooting contest with Billy the Kid and from that adventure he and we move on to his courtship of the beautiful, dark-eyed Mamie Lloyd and his decision as a married man and new father to settle down and leave off riding the range for steady work as a small businessman. He opens a cigar shop, that does well, an ice cream and oyster parlor, that does better, but he starts to grow restless. Siringo was ambitious too, but not for money. He wanted work that made the most of his talents and brains. He was a successful shopkeeper but the work didn’t engage his full attention or need all his considerable energy. He talked his way into a job with the Pinkerton Detective Agency, helped clean out their corrupted and incompetent Denver office, and took on his first undercover assignment, infiltrating a gang of outlaws in order to track down a murderer. Then Mamie suddenly got sick and died and Siringo went into an emotional tailspin that he attempted to pull himself out of by taking an assignment in the far north. He went undercover again to solve a series of robberies at a gold mine and it was while working this case that he first met up with George Carmack, whom he initially suspected of being in on the robberies. But he figures out who the real robbers are, realizes they’ve already hightailed it, and sets out in pursuit, which requires him to become not so much a cowboy detective as a sailor detective. He searches for the thieves up and down the coast of the Alaskan panhandle, plying the waters in an overloaded and less than seaworthy canoe. Along the way he shoots it out with a whale.
Hand to God.
Eventually, he crosses paths again with Carmack and with Soapy Smith.
Blum has chosen to tell his story in the limited third person. When the action shifts from one of the main characters to another, the point of view shifts too and we see things strictly through that character’s eyes. Although he had plenty of other sources, his main sources were his three main characters and it appears that long stretches of his narrative are rewritings, paraphrases, and summaries of their writings. It’s hard to say how good a writer Siringo was because Blum rarely quotes directly from his, or either of the other’s, writing, but it’s clear he knew how to structure a story and if he wasn’t a particularly introspective man he was a sharply observant one. He understood that people told you a lot about themselves by gesture and habit as well as by word and, since he defined himself to himself by what he did more than by what he thought and felt and then redefined himself by writing about what he did, we get a pretty good sense of him as a person and of the people he dealt with. I suspect that his impressions of George Carmack are more reliable than Carmack’s own impressions of himself. But then Carmack seems to have been careful not to have formed any definitive impressions of himself.
Carmack left behind a voluminous personal correspondence and an autobiography (that went unpublished in his lifetime), but he had a habit of sentimentalizing, romanticizing, and idealizing his feelings. He wasn’t just ambitious to be rich. He dreamed of being a certain kind of rich and successful man, and in the letters he wrote as a young man he took pains to present himself as if he was steadily on his way to becoming that sort of man and---although, again, I can’t be sure because as I said Blum rarely gives us direct quotes---if in his autobiography he was more honest about what sort of young man he’d actually been, naive, often foolish, floundering, lost in his own dreams, he was still prone to romanticize and sentimentalize his adventures. In short, Carmack doesn’t come across as the most reliable source on the subject of George Carmack. And since he was something of a loner and inclined to keep an emotional distance between himself and other people---possibly because he was afraid that they're versions of reality would impinge on his dreams---he doesn’t come across as the most reliable source on the subject of the people he dealt with either, even those he most cared about. Consequently, when other characters enter his sections of the story, they tend towards caricature and Carmack’s interactions with them play like the melodramas that were popular on the music hall stages of the period and that would soon provide the plots of countless silent movies and then talkies and then TV westerns, which is ironic since it was Siringo who wound up in Hollywood and whose exploits provided the plots for countless movies.
I have to point out that this isn’t actually a flaw in The Floor of Heaven. In fact, it’s part of its charm. It’s a reminder of how the reality of the Wild West, of which Alaska was the last frontier, blended with the legend and that the truth could be more outrageous and exciting than the fiction. Plus, in a roundabout way it gives us insight into Carmack as a character that Carmack couldn’t relate honestly and directly about himself.
And, despite his self-romanticizing dreaminess, Carmack was smart and practical and perceptive in his way. He knew what he was doing when it came to prospecting. He could hunt and he could fish and he could use an ax and a saw. Blum relies on him to tell us how things got done on the Alaskan frontier and to show us what the place was like---big, beautiful, empty---how the land lay---not flat---how the weather was---generally cold---and how the people lived. Through him his eyes Blum shows us how to survive an Alaskan winter, how to build a snug cabin, how to catch a salmon, how a few men went about digging out a million dollar mine. In one of the book’s most thrilling sequences, we follow Carmack up the dangerous mountain pass that was the most direct route into Yukon from the American side and which over time as the rush sent thousands up the trail became lined with the bones and rotting carcasses of overworked pack animals and every step of the way marked a spot where someone who had tried the ascent ahead of you had collapsed in exhaustion, pain, or despair. And if his life wasn’t as full of incident as Siringo’s, he had his share of adventures.
He started out in life as practically an indentured servant to his brother in law, tending sheep in the mountains of California. During the long, lonely hours he consoled himself by composing bad poetry and dreaming of gold. He joined the Marines to get away and the Marines sent him to Alaska. Up there he determined that Alaska was where he was going to strike it rich, and as I said, although he was a dreamer and prone to losing himself inside his dreams, he was also practical and smart. He decided that before he’d go stampeding out into the wilderness hunting for gold he’d learn how to survive out there first and he picked as his teachers the people that knew the place best, the Indians. He ingratiated himself with the Tlingits who lived around his Marine camp and got to know them and their ways so well that he was more comfortable among them than among his fellow white men. Later, on his second go-round in Alaska, after having deserted from the Marines, when his luck was running so bad that he temporarily gave up his dreams of finding gold, he lived with other Indians, a tribe of Tagish, who adopted him as one of their own. He took and Indian wife, they had a child, he went on a vision quest (and had an actual vision), and tried to satisfy himself with ambitions of becoming a chief of the tribe.
Then one day his old dreams of gold returned. He picked up his shovel and ax and pan again and set out. Led by his instincts and trusting his knowledge gained from past experience, he wandered up a tributary of the Klondike River, dipped his pan in the running water, and came up with something shiny and yellow. He named the creek Bonanza Creek and set to work. It wasn’t long before he knew he had found it, the true mother lode. Word got out, thousands headed for the Klondike, the gold rush was on, but Carmack was already a rich man and growing richer with each shovelful of dirt he dug.
That’s when he caught the attention of Soapy Smith.
Smith had come to Alaska because the once Wild West of the lower forty-eight had finally become to civilized to tolerate his presence. He had run out of places to run to when too much law and order made it impossible for him to do business anymore. He was an organizational genius, though, and in each new town where he’d set up shop, he’d quickly assemble a gang of thieves and thugs with a variety of criminal skills and talents, buy himself political influence, pocket a lawman or two or three, open up a saloon and a whorehouse, take control of a large share of the local gambling, and soon be at work fleecing all and sundry. He repeated the pattern twice in Alaska and he was pretty much running the town of Skagway when George Carmack struck it lucky.
You can see what I mean about Smith being a real-life version of Deadwood’s Al Swearengen, and for all I know he really was like the character so brilliantly played by Ian McShane. Smith must have been possessed of a dark intelligence and he was a dangerous man, capable of terrible violence when angered. But it’s hard to say from Floor of Heaven what he was really like, which isn’t a failure of talent as a writer on Blum’s part but the result of a structural weakness in the organization of the story and Blum’s chosing to tell his tale in the limited third person. Siringo and Carmack wrote enough and wrote well-enough to give Blum plenty of material to develop their points of view. Smith didn’t write an autobiography. He wrote many letters to his wife whom he kept out of the way back in Kansas, but there was a lot about himself and his life out west and up north he couldn’t tell her, partly out of fear that a letter might go astray and wound up in the hands of the law, but partly out of a game of pretend he and his wife were playing with each other.
Smith apparently dreamed of the day when he’d have earned enough money from his criminal enterprises that he could afford to go completely legit. He longed to be a respectable and upstanding citizen and he and his wife often wrote to each other as if that day had already arrived. The Jeff Smith who appears in many of the letters, then, is a fabrication and a rather banal and dull character to boot. But what’s really disappointing about this phony is that he doesn’t know any of the details of Soapy Smith’s crimes and depredations and he wasn’t intimately acquainted with members of Soapy’s gang, which is too bad because it would have been interesting to have a peek into the individual personalities of men with names like Slim-Jim Foster, Old Man Tripp, the Moonfaced Kid, Fatty Green, Kid Jimmy Fresh, Yank Fewclothes, and Yeah Mow Hopkins.
Smith routinely made the papers, but the journalism of the times favored sensationalism over insight and facts were what reporters and editors needed them to be to fit their stories, if you can imagine that. A character named Soapy Smith would make headlines, but neither journalists nor their readers cared how how closely that character resembled the real person it was based on. The things he did were thrilling in that they stoked readers’ fears or inflamed their imaginations. Why he did what he did was easy enough to explain. He was a villain and a scoundrel. What else did you need to know?
While Siringo’s and Carmack’s adventures would make a good movie or movies---and Floor of Heaven has been optioned by Fox 2000---the parts of the book focusing on Smith seem to be straight out of the movies, background and set up to Dodge City or Destry Rides Again, and rather than coming across as the main player in his own story, Smith often seems at a loss, going through the motions, while waiting for Errol Flynn or Jimmy Stewart to stride onto the scene and kick start the plot into motion. Unfortunately, since this is history not the movies, the hero doesn’t appear to confront the villain until the final act.
But it’s not just with Smith that Blum’s narrative strategy causes a problem. As I said, Carmack, while observant and perceptive, was not particularly insightful, but Siringo, despite his talents as an observer and reporter of his own life, isn’t necessarily always reliable. Smith, of course, couldn’t sign his own name without working a lie into it. But Siringo wasn’t under any compunction to be a hundred percent truthful. He was writing for an audience that wanted rip-roaring tales of adventure not introspective memoirs and they appreciated writers who didn’t let the facts get in the way of a good story. There’s reason to wonder if from time to time Siringo gave into the temptation to embellish, so it might have been helpful if Blum hadn’t been so wedded to the limited third person and allowed himself to break away now and again to quote outside sources that could have told us things Siringo and the others couldn’t have known or supported some of their more astonishing adventures.
There’s another problem in that I don’t know whom to blame when Blum’s writing starts to take on the flavor of the dime novels of the period. I suspect that while he was trying to convey the sense of Siringo’s character as Siringo portrayed it himself Blum allowed himself to be infected by Siringo’s prose style. Since Siringo was working within the conventions of the bestsellers of the day, he probably felt he had to make himself sound like what his readers thought a real cowboy sounded like. The result is occasional eruptions of corniness that the writers of Gunsmoke would have been embarrassed to work into dialog for Festus. People don’t think or feel or believe they have to do something as often as they are “of a mind” to do it. They rarely guess, figure, conclude, decide, deduce, or reflect. They “reckon”. Siringo doesn’t reach for his gun or his pistol or his revolver or his weapon; it’s always his “Big Colt.” Blum grows way too fond of this locution to the point that he might just as well have started calling the gun “Ol’ Betsy.” In the course of just a few pages we read that someone has no “hankering” for gold and someone else wants no “truck” with Indians. There’s “plumb foolishness” all about, folks who fall into conversation get to “jawing,” things cost “a pretty penny,” and fifty bars of gold weigh “near on” three hundred pounds. You can’t help feeling that a durn tootin’ is going to “roll into town” any minute. It never does, although durn makes its way onto a page by its lonesome and we are bushwacked by a tarnation. I kept wishing for signs that along with all his other research Blum had read the works of two great writers from the period who happened to be in Alaska around the time as Carmack and Siringo and Smith and chronicled their own adventures, one in his fiction and one as a continuation of his nature writing, Jack London and John Muir. He also might have benefited from watching episodes of Deadwood. All the wild and prodigious and wonderfully creative cursing on the show was there to disguise the fact that the characters all spoke their own unique and lyrical versions of great Nineteenth Century prose and poetry, proving week in and week out they were the contemporaries of Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Stephen Crane, and Henry James, whose works they might have read along with if not instead of the novels of Ned Buntline. For a flavor of how people in the second half of the 19th Century actually thought and wrote, it would be better just to strip the c-words out of any of Al Swearengen’s speeches.
None of this amounts to a fatal flaw nor should it or will it get in the way of an overall enjoyment of the book. It’s just a reminder of how rich and varied the literary history---fiction and non-fiction---of the West is. Anyway, if I want to read John Muir or Jack London, I can read John Muir and Jack London. As a matter of fact, I did. I had a lot of fun reading Klondike Tales and Travels in Alaska alongside The Floor of Heaven. Blum’s book is a welcome addition to that section of my bookshelf. A rip-roaring tale of high adventure that happens to be true and highly entertaining as well.
In the early morning, he woke up stiff and aching. He came out of his ten, his boots crunching against the fresh layer of of ground frost, and for the first time he had a good look at the mountain he intended to climb that day. The camp lay in a broad basin, and from this perspective the Chilkoot stood out from the surrounding peaks. It seemed to rise higher and more steeply, and the sunlight glinted with harsh menace off the green-iced glaciers that fortified its walls. It would be impossible to cross, George suddenly moaned to himself. He’d barely taken a single step, but the muscles in his thighs and calves were still throbbing from yesterday’s ordeal. Yet how could he dare to give up, to turn around and go back? But would that be any less of an embarrassment than surrendering half-way up the mountain? Or, worse, falling to his death, his body lost forever, shrouded each passing year by snow and more snow?
Then George saw the Indians hoisting their huge sacks---one hundred pounds each!---onto their backs. And they Day brothers, too, had lit their cob pipes and were raring to head off. George knew he could not be the only one to quit. He was, he chastised himself, too close to his lifelong goal to give up. So in a tremendous burst of will, he lifted his pack to his back, adjusted the leather shoulder straps, and joined the others.
It was four miles uphill to the summit, and George had not gotten far before it became clear to him that he was locked in a battle to the death: Either he would cross the Chilkoot into the Canadian Yukon or he’d die trying. Even if he didn’t have the heart, it was no longer possible to turn back.
The snow was thick underfoot. Icy boulders as big as street cars needed to be traversed. The wind shrieked. A mammoth overhanging glacier reflected the sunlight like a prism, dazzling hues of turquoise, sapphire, and rose bouncing off walls of sheer ice, blinding him, while the huge glacier itself seemed poised to come crashing down at any moment. He sweated under his heavy coat. His socks dripped rivulets of ice. His pack ground down hard on his back as if he were carrying the broad trunk of one of the sturdy evergreens he’d only days before admired. After two miles, the line of bone-weary men reached a flat-ledged slope. The Indians lowered the packs from their backs. It was a signal to rest.
George could now see the pass’s white-tipped summit. It was tantalizingly close. Nevertheless, he decided he could walk no father.
He was right. When the line moved forward for the final ascent, he found himself bent over, climbing in an awkward hunched fashion rather than walking upright. A snow-covered rock slide blocked the trail, and the only way up the increasingly steep path was to pull himself over one icy boulder after another. His legs were cramping. His fingers were numb. In his wet, slick boots, footholds were slippery and brief. By the time he found the muscle and ingenuity and the will to get over the rock slide, all pride belonged to another life. Crawling on all fours like a beaten animal, George reached the summit…
, which I’m planning to review (Spoiler alert: I like it.), McClure recounts a weekend visit she made to a farm where the couple who owned it taught classes in old-fashioned and homespun skills like canning and weaving and shoeing horses. McClure was looking to get more of a feel of what it was like to live the life Laura Ingalls and her family lived on the frontier. But she soon discovered that the farm was actually something of a workshop for Christian survivalists who weren’t looking forward to being raptured but were preparing to survive the Tribulation. Among the other people visiting the farm that weekend, was a woman who’d come down with a church group from a small and dying town in Wisconsin. The woman was recently divorced and had been having trouble finding a full-time job to support herself and it’s sad to realize that here was someone who was looking forward to having to can her own peaches and sew her own clothes and get through the nights by the light of candles she’s dipped herself as an improvement over her life at it was now and that world couldn’t end any too soon for her.
series by Laura Ingalls Wilder. In the course of re-reading Wilder’s books and biographies and critical studies and even a cookbook, McClure learns things she didn’t know about Laura Ingalls and her family and one of the things she learns is that the 
wasn’t as deep in the woods as it seemed in the book named after it. The nearest town, which McClure had always imagined as a long, long way off from the Ingalls little house, was actually nearby. Laura and her family had neighbors and more than McClure would have thought.
, had a roller rink!
.
. But I didn’t watch it regularly when I was a kid, although I remember that when I did going into school the next morning feeling awfully impressed with myself and just bursting to spring one of Cavett’s or his guest’s witticisms on my friends. My parents would sometimes let me stay up to watch with them when Cavett had on a guest they were interested in, after they changed the channel from NBC when Johnny had finished his monologue. The only single show I remember vividly is the Mailer-Vidal dustup and it turns out that I don’t remember that as clearly as I thought. I’d forgotten the writer Janet Flanner was also a guest that night and Mailer offended her as well. The chapter about that night in Talk Show reminded me about Flanner but I still can’t “see” her there in my mind’s eye.
from Amazon.
. But I was expecting a biography of an interesting character not a treatise on the problem of masculinity in America that uses Bogart as a prime example of a quality we American men have lost to our misfortune. Presumably to the misfortune of the women in our lives, as well, although most laments about the decline of manliness don’t seem to be much concerned with what women want, need, or think. But I’m curious about what about Bogart we should be emulating. Sure, Bogart was cool, but that was because he was Bogart and being Bogart had a lot to do with being a movie star and being married to Lauren Bacall. Not achievable goals for any man who isn’t Humphrey Bogart.
. It’s the first in his new series of detective novels featuring Leonid McGill. I hope Mosley’s not done with Easy Rawlins, but he seems to have put Rawlins aside for now to focus on McGill. McGill is not Easy or easy, not in mind, body, or spirit. He’s a tense, angry, unhappy man who isn’t at his ease anywhere, but especially not on airplanes. So why, then, does he fly from his home turf, New York City, to Albany, New York?
, is I was going to review the newest one, 
is Gone. I was looking forward to it, in fact. I’m a big fan of the Easy Rawlins books so I had high hopes for McGill.
by Howard Blum has given me a renewed respect for the HBO’s 
and 
.
and 
alongside The Floor of Heaven. Blum’s book is a welcome addition to that section of my bookshelf. A rip-roaring tale of high adventure that happens to be true and highly entertaining as well.
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