Lance Mannion

Caution: Genius at Work

Charismatic cult leader and con artist Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and his closest disciples including his wife Peggy (Amy Adams) and newest recruit Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix) in a rare moment of mutual self-doubt in Paul Thomas Anderson’s maddeningly ambiguous and new movie The Master.

If there’s a movie critics’ code, it’s more like…guidelines.  And one of the guidelines is this: If you call a movie a work of genius, you’re probably right, but you’re also indentifying what’s wrong with it.

The Master is a work of genius.

Relentlessly, unremittingly, 65mm frame projected at 70mm by 65mm frame projected at 70mm, from beginning to end, it’s stamped with director Paul Thomas Anderson’s genius.

Every shot is meticulously composed, beautifully photographed, visually precise, tonally exact.  Every scene is structurally flawless and perfectly paced.  Not a line or gesture is misplaced or lost.

It’s exhausting.

And annoying as all get out.

There’s so much to look at, so much to think about, so much to admire and wonder at, so much brilliance on display that it’s maddeningly hard to sit back and just enjoy the movie while getting caught up in the story.  Getting caught up actually means getting wrapped up in trying to figure out what the hell is going on.

It’s not that there's no story.  It's that large sections of the story take place off screen. We rarely see characters go from point A to point B. We're presented with point B after point B with an occasional leap ahead to point G and and a jump back to point D or maybe at last to a point A.  The consequences of decisions made and actions taken in those unseen points A play out in the points B.  The consequences of decisions made and actions taken in the points B play out in the points A or, often, and as far as we know, don’t play out, because we never hear about them or see the fallout dramatized in away we can be sure is a consewuence of what did or did not happen.  It’s as if what we're seeing are scenes brought back second-hand by a disinterested observer who keeps wandering into that story and returning with the equivalent of news footage that he shows us without commentary. The narrative that contains these scenes and connects them isn't even implied. It has to be inferred.

Here’s how we’re introduced to the main character in the first fifteen minutes or so of the film:

At the end of World War II, Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix) leaves the Navy, apparently a basket case, having, possibly, suffered…something while serving aboard a what? Destroyer? Freighter? Admiral's yacht? We don’t get to see the whole ship. Whatever it is, it carries torpedoes but doesn’t seem to have guns.  Maybe we’re not seeing only one ship. Did Quell serve aboard several ships? Is that important?  Possibly. What does seem important is that he has spent some time in a psych ward and has to see several shrinks before he’s mustered out.  Is he crazy?  How crazy? What made him crazy?  Was it something in his childhood?  Was it the war?  Was it drinking torpedo fuel in celebration of VJ Day, and, boy, wasn’t that scene beautifully composed and photographed?  Surely Anderson will tell us or…maybe not.  At any rate, reentering civilian life Quell somehow lands a job as a photographer in a department store.   He seems to be good at the job but he loses it when for no apparent reason he decides to antagonize a customer who looks so much like Philip Seymour Hoffman that at first I thought it was Philip Seymour Hoffman and this was Anderson's version of a meet cute. But it wasn’t him. Just a character that looks like his character and what is the point of that? We’re not told. It’s left to us to figure out for ourselves, except that we’re not given time.  The next thing we know Quell is hurrying from the store, having quit or been fired---it’s not shown which---with his girlfriend who immediately disappears from the movie when the scene changes to Quell working on a farm picking cabbages…where?  Somewhere in California, it looks like...supplementing his income by making moonshine---Quell is a mad scientist of an amateur distiller, whipping up cocktails out of whatever he can lay his hands on that might contain alcohol, torpedo fuel, darkroom chemicals, cleaning fluid, battery acid---until he has to run for his life from some Filipino migrant workers who think he's deliberately poisoned an old man with his homemade hooch.  He runs and he runs and he runs across a dusty field and then runs, apparently non-stop, all the way from wherever the farm is to the waterfront in San Francisco where he arrives just in time to leap from a pier onto a yacht as it steams out into the harbor and towards the Golden Gate Bridge and a gorgeously photographed sunset. There’s a party on the upper deck, people are dancing under Chinese lanterns, and Quell rushes up a flight of stairs as if he’s a guest arriving late. But the next we see him, it’s morning and he’s waking up in a cabin below, hung over, with no memory of how he got there, no memory of having applied for the job he now, apparently, holds as a member of the yacht’s crew, no memory of the pretty young woman standing at the foot of his bunk with a smile that suggests she has very clear memories of him that are going to keep her in company on many a lonely night to come. Or maybe she’s just kind and friendly and finds Quell likable and amusing.  She doesn’t say.  And anyway she’s not there to explain anything, only to take Quell to see him.  Lancaster Dodd.  The Master.  Who apparently knows all about Quell without ever having met him before---in this life.

Five years have passed.

All this is presented straight-forwardly, naturalistically, as if this is just the way the world is and without Quell showing any sign he’s aware that none of it makes the least bit of sense.

Quell is crazy. It’s hard to say how crazy. But he is definitely far from rational.  He’s intelligent, sensitive, and wants to be a good man but he has no self-control. He’s a puppet to his inner demons and driven every which way by instinct and impulse.  And he has severely emotionally crippling mommy issues that have rendered him pliant, guilt-ridden, and desperate for approval and, as if they’re the same thing, punishment.  And this is how a madman like Freddie Quell would experience his life, as disjointed, random, lacking meaning or direction.  The camera’s point of view is not subjective.  If anything it’s clinically objective.  Which fits, if we assume Quell doesn’t know he’s nuts and has no idea that he’s not seeing things as they really are.  And this tension between the incoherence of the narrative and the pitiless coherence of the visuals that express it but don’t explain it is a stroke of genius.  You could write a doctoral thesis on this aspect of The Master alone.

But how many people go to the movies in hopes of finding a subject for their dissertation?

And that’s the way the whole movie goes.  One sequence after another relieving the anxieties of future Ph.D.’s while leaving the majority of the audience asking themselves, Will there be a quiz?

Or even, Is the movie a quiz?  Should I have studied?  And studied what exactly?

The previous films of Paul Thomas Anderson, perhaps.  Along with Boogie Nights, Magnolia, and There Will Be Blood, the Master can be thought of as a chapter in Anderson’s ongoing cinematic history of the United States told through the lives of various pure products of America who have, as William Carlos Williams said such pure products do, gone crazy.

There’s another dissertation.

You could also have studied Anderson’s influences, chiefly here, Citizen Kane.  The Master is a retelling of Citizen Kane but as if Welles had decided to make Joseph Cotton’s character the main character but told Cotton to play it as if he was Everett Sloane doing Mr Bernstein suffering from a migraine and a hangover and after six nights of sleeping on a bad mattress, trying to do an impersonation of Popeye the Sailor Man.

I’m not kidding about Popeye. As Quell, Phoenix goes through much of the movie with one eye squinked shut, his nose hooking over his twisted lip and toothless smile, talking out of the side of his mouth in a croaking mumble.  He even stands with his hands on the back of his hips, hunched slightly forward, with his chin cocked, the way Popeye sometimes did in the Fleischer cartoons.  In addition he has reduced himself to skin and bone, somehow taken several inches of his height, and willed every touch of leading man handsomeness out of his face. Often he looks like a young Darren McGavin. Other times he looks more like Abraham Lincoln than Daniel Day-Lewis in Spielberg’s upcoming biopic.  It’s a very weird physical performance, considering Quell is supposed to be irresistible to young women.

In contrast, Philip Seymour Hoffman’s performance as Lancaster Dodd is relaxed, smooth, and almost totally without gimmick.  It’s the most natural portrayal of a completely artificial man you’ll probably ever see.  The founder of a quasi-religion and self-help movement vaguely resembling Scientology, Dodd is an obvious fraud, such an obvious fraud, in fact, that it’s hard to believe anyone, even a madman like Quell, would buy the snake oil he’s selling.  But he’s also such a genial and charming rogue and is enjoying his own con game so much that people can’t help wanting to join the fun.  Nobody, not even Dodd, knows what’s going to happen next. Brought back from a hypnotic “trance” in which Dodd has supposedly placed her in order for her to re-experience a past life, one of his dupes or disciples---same difference---eagerly prompts him for the right responses to his questions as if she’s afraid she might spoil the game by making up the wrong answer. Dodd’s own son tells Quell that Dodd is making it up as he goes. But that’s part of the fun.

But along with the fun and games, Dodd is making something else up as he goes or, rather, somebody.  Himself.

It’s more than that Dodd is caught up in his own con to the point of forgetting it is a con.  He is the con.  That is, the object of the whole charade is to create the persona of Lancaster Dodd.  Dodd calls his movement the Cause.  But the Cause is the cause of his existence.  It brings him to life.  We don’t know what would happen to him without it, if people stopped believing in the Cause and in him, except that he would cease to be Lancaster Dodd, and whatever not being Lancaster Dodd is, Hoffman lets us see that it’s horrible enough to terrify him in moments of doubt and repellent enough that the slightest doubt on the part of any disciple enrages him.

The possibility that he’ll revert to whatever it was he was enrages and repels his wife Peggy too (played by Amy Adams with a frightening chilliness I’ve never seen from her before).  Of course if he reverts, she’ll revert along with him, and that makes her all the more determined to control him, keep him going, and drive Quell from their inner circle.  If this was a fairy tale, we’d discover that the Dodds are a pair of enchanted toads desperately afraid that the magic allowing them to pass as human would wear off any second and Quell would be the Jack who comes along to steal their gold and break the spell. 

Of course it’s not magic that keeps Dodd Dodd.  It’s a combination of will and ego. Dodd’s ego is so great that it encompasses everybody who gets close to him.  Whole crowds can be trapped within it.  It’s a very nice trap.  More of a house than a cage, and Dodd treats his prisoners as guests and sees himself as their host, and as host he’s obliged to show them a good time. But Quell is a threat because the whole basis of a self-help movement is that it helps, and while Dodd’s other disciples are willing to pretend they’re being helped, Quell really needs help and may be beyond it even when offered by traditional and legitimate sources.  If the Cause can’t cure Quell, then maybe everyone will realize or have to admit that the Cause isn’t a cure at all.  What really worries Peggy is that her husband is beginning that he can do it, that he can save Quell.  More worrisome is that Dodd might actually want to save Quell because he likes him. And even more worrisome still is that Quell is the only one who doesn’t know Dodd’s a fraud and that Dodd is being tempted to abandon the family who only pretends to believe in him and replace them with the true believer.

I think.

All of the above should be read as qualified by “I think.”

This is what I think is going on in The Master.  And it’s what I think now that I’m thinking about it in order to write this review.  It’s not what I thought when I was watching the movie.

What I thought when I was watching the movie was, What the…?????

All my reviews are qualified by “I think.”  But I can usually refer back to the movie or the book or the TV show I’m reviewing and point to a specific scene or a line of dialog or a shot or a passage that caused me to think what I think. I'll have evidence I can point to to support my interpretation.

Not the case here. 

I feel like I'm making it up as I go, desperately replaying the movie in my head and asking myself, is that was what was happening in that scene? Is that what that line meant? Is that why Anderson placed that shot there? Am I remembering any of this correctly?

Maybe I should go back and watch it again?

Good movies should bear repeated viewings. But they shouldn't need to be seen more than once for the audience to get them, let alone enjoy them. You should go back and watch a movie again for the fun of it, not to double-check your work to make sure you didn't get an answer wrong.

While I was watching The Master, frustrated and confused and developing a headache from trying to figure out just what I was watching, I kept telling myself, This is all from Quell's point of view, right? That's why it doesn't seem to make sense, because it doesn't make sense to him?

But then the skeptic inside me began to take over.

I don’t think that’s it, he said, I think that it's not just Dodd who's making it up as he's going along, it's Anderson too! The whole movie is a work of improvisation. He's not a genius. He's a madman who's fooled his cast and crew into thinking he's a genius and playing along.

But the perpetual grad student in me objected.

No, that can't be right. The movie is too well- crafted.  There's obviously a great deal of thought behind every shot, every scene, every line. The Master is a commentary on cults, remember. Anderson is showing us how it works. This is what it is like to have a con artist like Dodd playing with our heads. He'd keep us off balance like this!  He'd withhold crucial information. He'd have us totally confused but have us expecting that pretty soon it will all come together and then we'll understand!

Or, replied the skeptic, He's put us in the position of the woman waking up from her trance.

How so? asked the grad student naively.

Well, said the skeptic, She wants the experience to have been real. She wants the Cause to work.  She wants Dodd to be what he pretends to be, what she's paying him to be. She's one of his patrons, right? Her money's riding on him being the Master.

I guess.

So, even though she knows she wasn't really hypnotized, that she didn't travel back in time, and that she was probably just dreaming, she tries to pretend the experience was real. She gives the answers or at least tries to give the answers she thinks he wants her to give. But there are no right answers, because he's making it all up. But he's clever enough to know that she's more likely to convince herself that her own answers are correct than simply accept any answers he feeds her.

So you're saying Dodd's manipulated her into helping him make it up?

Yep.

And that's what Anderson's done to us, manipulated us into helping him make The Master mean something?

It's what I'm thinking.

But that's...that's...

Yes?

That's...

Go ahead, say it.

Genius!

The Master, written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, starring Joaquin Phoenix, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, and Laura Dern. Now in theaters.

If you live in our neck of the woods, The Master’s playing at the Downing Film Center in Newburgh through Thursday, October 4th. Advanced ticket purchase recommended.

Caution: Blogger at Work

Finishing up my review of The Master.  Should have it posted in about an hour.  Figure it’ll take two more cups of coffee. Nine-fifteen, Saturday morning, September 29, 2012.

In which I find myself seeing eye to eye with George W. Bush’s former speechwriter

I’ve long believed that people’s political views are more an expression of temperament than reasoned thought.  We’re all a blend of liberal and conservative flavors and how liberal and how conservative we are depends on how much of each got poured into us at birth and what life has added to the mix or drained from it since.  I’ve got enough conservative in me to make me worry about what I’ll be like when I’m old and cranky.

Older and crankier.

David Frum, former speechwriter for George W. Bush speechwriter and now conservative blogger at the Daily Beast, has a good helping of liberal in him for as stanch a Republican as he insists he still is.  The story goes that he let this side of himself show once too often and it got him frog-marched from the American Enterprise Institute. Frum himself denies that’s what happened.  It was a simple salary dispute. He wanted one and AEI decided they did want to pay it.  Whatever the case, it seems since he’s been blogging he’s felt freer to let his freak flag fly and while it’s more often the case that when I read his stuff I’m not out and out appalled, from time to time, and those times aren’t rare, I find myself nodding in agreement and even occasionally shouting out, “Yes! David! My man!”

Now, here’s the thing.  Having a liberal streak doesn’t mean you necessarily endorse liberal policies.  Nor does having a conservative streak mean you necessarily endorse conservative ones.  It’s simply that you can see the other side’s point.  But there’s more to it.  It also means that you can see how a liberal policy can lead to a conservative goal or vice versa.  An example of the former is same-sex marriage.  Andrew Sullivan makes this argument forcefully and often.  An example of the latter is Obamacare.  It works like this.

The vast majority of us share two broad goals, defending the status quo and expanding opportunity, the status quo being a generally well-ordered, safe, and comfortable society, in which we’re reasonably free to shoot our mouths off, go where we want, and spend what money we have as we see fit, and expanding opportunity means giving ourselves and our fellow citizens more of stake in maintaining the status quo by letting more of us share in more of the benefits of living in this well-ordered, safe, and comfortable society, although that often requires changing the status quo.

Simply put, conservatives are more inclined to defend the status quo, even if that means denying some people some opportunity, while liberals tend to want to increase opportunity even if that means disrupting some aspect of the status quo if not the whole of it.  The point is that the interests of conservatives and liberals are often the same.

So, yes, Obamacare preserves the health insurance industry and gives insurance companies a huge infusion of cash, but everybody’s insured, so everybody shares in the order, safety, comfort, and freedom provided by the status quo, which gives everybody a stake in preserving the status quo.

You can see where this is going, right?  Most self-styled conservatives these days can’t.  Many progressives can and they don’t like it.

The object of liberalism is to create more conservatives.

It should be obvious to conservatives that the fewer people with a stake in preserving the status quo the more people you'll have with reason to disrupt it. It is obvious to some conservatives. It just used to be obvious to most conservatives. In order to give more people a stake in defending the status quo, increase people's opportunities to enjoy the benefits of the status quo.

Conservatives used to see the good in spreading the wealth---in redistribution. Although Republicans have always been fond of their millionaires, they used to be almost as fond of the middle and working class. The object of economic progress wasn’t just to create and coddle millionaires. The object was to give more people the same stake in maintaining the status quo that millionaires have.  Conservatives, generally, think---or thought---this was best done on the local level and by encouraging private enterprise. But it's why there are conservatives who support expanding civil rights, strong public schools, and even--- a shocker---progressive taxation. (That's where the 47 percent comes in, Mitt.) The point is that sometimes the best way to be a good conservative is to be liberal, and once upon a time most conservatives understood that.

Here's how liberalism and conservatism are mixed up in me.  As a straight, white, middle class American male, I have always benefited from the status quo.  But being a kind, decent-hearted, well-meaning, and generous guy, I want everybody to have what I have; however, being a selfish, self-protective, and greedy guy too, I figure that the more people who have what I have, the more people I'll have on my side if somebody tries to take it all away.

At the moment, the people who are trying to take it away are rich Right Wing corporatists and their political henchmen like Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan.  Seeing this doesn't make me a liberal. You don't have to be a liberal to see that Romney and Ryan are threats to the status quo.

Defending the status quo by default means defending established privilege and more and more over the course of the last several generations the conservatism of the Republican Party has degenerated into an angry defense of privilege alone.  Any and all privilege.  White privilege. Male privilege. The privileges that come from having been born straight, Christian, and a citizen.  The privileges that come from being rich.  Especially the privileges that come from being rich.  The corporatist Right and the Religious Right and the Tea Party Right are united in a common defense of their privileges and don’t give a damn about expanding opportunity.  In fact, they look at expanded opportunities as a form of theft.  They see life as a zero-sum endeavor.

“Whenever you get something, I lose something.  However your opportunity expands, mine contracts.  Whatever you have, you’ve taken from me.”

The corporatists, the Christianists, and the Tea Party types have as their common goal a taking back of America, by which they mean a taking away of opportunity from those they perceive as having robbed them of their privileges.

This isn’t conservative.  It’s reactionary.  It’s destructive.  And it’s just plain mean.

David Frum sees that and it bothers him. In fact, it infuriates him.  And it’s the basis for my finding myself in agreement with him from time to time.

It’s why, from time to time, he can sound like a liberal…because he is being liberal.

Take for example his set of tweets last week on why he thinks Romney is losing, which includes this:

(4) How do you message: I'm doing away w[ith] Medicaid over the next 10 yrs, Medicare after that, to finance a cut in the top rate of tax to 28%?

And ends with:

(10) But voters do care about the q[uestion]: what will this presidency do for me? And "dick you over" is not a winning answer

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

______________________

Neither my liberalism nor Frum’s conservatism are all that adulterated, so although I often find myself nodding in agreement, it’s usually the case that I see his point not that we’re seeing eye to eye.  But one thing we do see eye to eye on, it turns out, is Charles Dickens’ novel Hard Times.

Couple weeks back, in my post Shake every hand, kiss every baby, I mentioned, more or less in passing, how the “self-made” entrepreneurs who paraded up on the stage at the Republican Convention to congratulate themselves on their self-reliance and go-getterism and whine about how the President doesn’t appreciate their wonderfulness reminded me of Josiah Bounderby, the mill owner and banker in Hard Times who likes to boast about how he worked his way up from rags to riches all on his own while leaving out the part of his life story in which his mother beggared herself scrimping and saving to put him through school and give him his start in business.

Frum was reminded of Bounderby too and he’s devoted a whole post to the comparison and to Hard Times which he calls “a brilliant anticipation of this summer's debate over ‘you didn't build that’” and “reply to the still-recurring fantasy of ‘Going Galt’.”

Second Run Movie Review: The Romance of Tony Stark

We’ve got our feature for Mannion Family Movie Night!  The Avengers is out on DVD and available for streaming today! Here’s my review from May.

Thor, Iron Man, and Captain America square off in The Avengers in accordance with the rule that no superheroes can meet for the first time without getting into a fight so that fans have more fuel for their endless debates over who would win in a matchup.

This is what you get when you let a former English professor write movie reviews.

Within the cycle of movies of which The Avengers is the latest installment, Tony Stark---Iron Man---fills the role Lancelot fills in the King Arthur stories.

I warned you.

The Avengers isn’t a retelling of the Knights of the Round Table.  For one thing, there’s no King Arthur. (If anyone wants to make the case that Nick Fury plays that role, feel free. I think it’s a reach. Try Merlin instead.)  And I'm not making a direct comparison of their personalities.  Stark is no Lancelot. If he has a counterpart among any of the Knights of the Roundtable, it's Gawain. Gawain is vain, boastful, selfish, self-indulgent, a showoff and happy to think he can do it all on his own.  He's also the second best of Arthur's knights. He was the best until Lancelot showed up. Fans can argue the actual ranking of the Avengers vis-a-vis each other. What matters is that Gawain wasn't inclined to admit to his demotion and Stark would disagree with you if you didn't rank Iron Man first. A lot of his best lines in the movie are cheap shots at the other heroes' expenses meant to let them know he's not impressed by them or their powers.

(The only other Avenger who even roughly has an Arthurian double is Captain America. He's like Galahad whose strength was as the strength of ten because his heart was pure. The super-soldier serum worked as it did on Steve Rogers because he had a good heart.)

Still, the comparison to Lancelot holds in that like Lancelot Iron Man is the hero around whose story the other heroes' stories are centered.

“I am Iron Man,” Stark declares at the end of his first movie.  But as we learn in Iron Man 2, he’s not. Iron Man is just a robot Stark pilots from within.  And for the robot to do its job it almost doesn’t matter who’s wearing the metal suit.  What matters is if Stark can make the suit into a skin, that is, into an extension of himself.  And a lot has to change for that to happen.  Every one of Lancelot’s adventures is crucial to the overall story of the Knights of the Round Table because the fate of Camelot depends on Lancelot remaining the exemplary knight he is while constantly confronted with the temptation to be just a man.  Every one of Iron Man’s adventures is crucial to the ongoing story of the Avengers because the fates of the Avengers and the world depend on Stark becoming a knight in shining armor, and he’s having a hard time with that.

Ok. Before taking this analogy any further…

I liked it.  It’s fun.  I had a good time. The Avengers is a good superhero movie.

It’s not a good movie the way Spider-Man 2 and Batman Begins are good movies.  Rio Bravo is a good movie. Rio Lobo is a good Western. The Dirty Dozen is a good war movie.  The Guns of Navarone is a good movie.  The Avengers is a good superhero movie.  The best in this particular series of superhero movies after the first Iron Man.

Part of what makes it good is that it is very much a piece of that series.  Director Joss Whedon, who also wrote the screenplay, has clearly studied and liked and taken to heart the previous movies in the series and he deftly weaves together narrative and thematic threads from Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man 2, Thor, and Captain America: The First Avenger into one taut strand, pulls that strand smoothly through the movie, then quickly unravels it and spools the threads out towards the next movies in the series.  The Avengers sets up Captain America 2, Thor 2, and Iron Man 3.  (It doesn’t directly set up The Avengers 2.  That’s coming but it will have to pick up the threads from those sequels and do its part in continuing the series.) As Whedon has apparently learned from his long career in television and as a writer of comic books, everything doesn’t depend on single episode or issue.  The job of any particular episode or issue, in fact, is to get the audience excited about what’s coming next so they’ll tune in next week or buy next month’s issue.  For all the spectacle and mayhem that goes with bringing together Earth’s Mightiest Heroes and setting them up to fight off an invading alien army in the streets of New York City while landmarks like Grand Central Station are destroyed around them, The Avengers is a movie with an admirably modest ambition.

Moving the story along.

There’s a kick in watching the Avengers assemble for the first time and in listening to our favorites banter and argue. The dialog is sharp and snappy.  The jokes are funny.  The suspense level is high.  Whedon makes us worry about every character.  But the main reason for seeing The Avengers is the same reason why when you’re reading a book and you finish Chapter 10 you move on to Chapter 11 instead of skipping ahead to Chapter 12.  It’s a fun and exciting chapter and, if you’re all caught up with your reading, a gratifying one that will have you nodding in appreciation and saying to yourself, “So that’s where they were going with that!” and “Of course! I should have seen that coming!” and even “Wow, I wasn’t expecting that at all!”  But that’s the thing.  All those reactions depend on your having done the homework.

You don’t need to be a fan of the comic books to enjoy The Avengers, but I don’t see how anyone who hasn’t seen the other movies in the series will be able to follow this one or find a reason to care about many of the characters or the story.  Whedon is used to playing to an audience that includes lots of people who missed last week’s episode, so maybe I missed all the ways he slipped in to help viewers just tuning in catch up. But it seems to me that if you haven’t seen Iron Man 2, you won’t know why Tony Stark is a problem for the other heroes and himself.  If you haven’t seen Iron Man, Iron Man 2, and Thor you won’t know why Agent Coulson matters or appreciate Clark Gregg’s performance in the part.  If you haven’t seen Thor, you may think Tom Hiddleston is a bad actor instead of a great one.  If you haven’t seen Captain America you won’t know why Cap is so forlorn or appreciate the subtext in his and Stark’s instant dislike of each other.  And if you haven’t seen The Incredible Hulk, you might not get Bruce Banner’s best joke.

Note: I’m not warning anybody away from The Avengers.  I’m just saying if you’re thinking of going and really want to get the most of it, watch at least a couple of the other movies.  They’re good and good for you.

I’m also saying that The Avengers isn’t a good movie in and of itself because it depends so much on those other movies.  Which is not a bad thing, just something to keep in mind when you’re telling friends how AWESOME it is.

And it is AWESOME.  With the above caveats.

Of course the star attractions are the stars, both the real life ones and the ones from the comic books they play. Robert Downey Jr, Chris Evans, Chris Hemsworth, and Mark Ruffalo, Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, and the Hulk.

Evans does what he had to do going in, hold his own against Downey and Hemsworth while playing a much duller character and then make that dullness as compelling as Stark's naughty boy charm and Thor's swashbuckling sex appeal. Evans doesn't have Cap fight for his authority - if anything he has him doubting it. Cap's sense of himself is tied to what he sees as his place in the world, but his world is seventy years in the past. When the time is right, he assumes it, without fuss but with confidence. Events conspire to re-create a need and therefore a place for Captain America and Cap steps right in and suddenly Iron Man, Thor, Hulk, and the entire New York City police force are gladly taking orders from him. Evans is a modest enough and secure enough actor to let the movie come to him.

If you haven't seen Thor, you might not feel as I did that Chris Hemsworth is underused.  Whatever those of you who did see it might have thought of Thor the movie, I think you have to admit Hemsworth was terrific as Thor the god of thunder.  He established himself as a star and swashbuckling leading man in the tradition of not just Douglas Fairbanks and Errol Flynn but Gene Kelly---how else would you describe Kelly's dancing style besides swashbuckling? What is his D'Artagnan doing while dueling if not dancing?---and Harrison Ford.  In fact, if Steven Spielberg and George Lucas are truly intent on continuing with another Indiana Jones movie, they should consider doing a total reboot starring Hemsworth.

Thor's main job as part of the Avengers---and I mean the team as portrayed in the movie, not the whole movie itself---is to bring the mighty when the mighty's most needed. But the movie takes his mightiness as a given and his role in the story is to provide kindly approval of Cap, of Stark, and of human beings in general and show sympathetic disapproval of Loki.  Tom Hiddleston's Loki isn't dismissible as another cackling movie super villain because Hemsworth's Thor doesn't see him that way.

I would have liked to have seen a little more of this side of Thor in scenes with Evans and Downey. I'm also disappointed that Whedon didn't put him together with either Cobie Smulders or Scarlett Johansson. It would have been fun watching him charm them nearly out of their catsuits. And a scene between Hemsworth, Downey, and Paltrow in which Pepper Potts swoons for Thor while Stark drives himself nuts trying not to show how jealous he is would have been a real hoot.

Can't have everything, and one thing The Avengers has that I didn't expect was Mark Ruffalo's brilliantly understated take on Bruce Banner and the Hulk.

The Incredible Hulk is the weakest in the series, but it’s still a pretty good superhero movie. I thought its major flaw was the coldness and detachment of Edward Norton’s Bruce Banner.  Norton overemphasized Banner’s efforts to remain calm in order to keep himself from Hulking out.  Ruffalo’s Banner isn’t calm.  He’s ferociously, strenuously, and exhaustingly repressed.  He’s in the habit of referring to the Hulk as “the other guy,” but Ruffalo says the words with an ironic sneer in his voice and a look of fear in his eyes that let us know Banner is terrified and, even more wrenching, growing resigned to the fact that it’s Banner who’s the other guy and that the Hulk is the real him and the moment is closing in when the Hulk will assert himself for good.

When he reveals his “secret” to Cap in one of the movie’s most rousing lines, it’s one of those satisfying “I knew it!” moments.

The breakout character, however, is Black Widow.  Can't say Scarlett Johansson brings anything special to the role besides an impressive deadpanning of her dominatrix persona and the ability to wear her catsuit with insouciance. But Natasha Romanoff---as far as I recall, she's only referred to as Black Widow once and then by an enemy spymaster who's using the code name that's the only name he has for her---turns out to have a superpower.

She thinks faster than a speeding bullet.

Literally.

Johansson doesn’t bring anything special to the part, but that’s not to say she brings nothing.  Intense and concentrated intelligence blazes out of her eyes as hot and almost as visibly as Superman’s heat vision.  She makes us realize that all Black Widow’s backflips, spin and scissor kicks, headbutts, karate chops, throat punches, and two-gun pistol shooting on the slide aren’t reflexive.  They’re plotted.  If The Avengers was a Guy Ritchie movie we’d see her in slow-motion set-ups, carefully assessing each opponent and planning her particular lines of attack.  The bad guys aren’t being out-fought as much as out-thought.  And this holds true when she’s not in a physical fight.

In mental duels, she out-thinks two of the smartest characters in the movie.

Still, I felt a little as though she was being forced into a leading role and forced at me.  Black Widow is a sidekick---my son thinks “sidekick” is a disparagement of her awesomeness. I should say she’s a first lieutenant to the hero-kings---and there is no other female character of note.  I'm not counting Gwyneth Paltrow's extended cameo.  As SHIELD agent Maria Hill, Smulders seems to be only on hand to wear the catsuit in case Johansson decides not to sign up for The Avengers 2.

At first glance it might seem that as Nick Fury Samuel L. Jackson hasn't been given much more to do but glower and growl and wear his black leather trench coat with a coolness that will make you desperate to own one yourself even though you know in your heart you will never be anywhere near that cool.  But as Stark warns, Fury is the spy's spy. He serves his country by lying and manipulation.  Jackson makes us see the sinister side of Fury's nature. He's not just Mace Windu with an eye patch.  He has more than a touch of Darth Sidious and Darth Vader to make you want to rethink that black trench coat. You never worry about which side of the Force he's on. You just wonder if there's anyone he doesn't think of as a tool or a weapon to be used.

Like I said, you don't have to be a fan of the comic books to enjoy the movie, but if you're not I can't see how you won't be thoroughly baffled by the apparently wasted presence of Jeremy  Renner as Hawkeye (or even know he's called Hawkeye) for about two thirds the way through. Then he starts bringing the archery awesome and you'll be too busy thinking to yourself “I need to get a bow and arrow!” to care about his backstory.

But, getting down to it, I still see The Avengers as Robert Downey’s movie and the story being moved along as Iron Man’s story.

Of the big three, Iron Man, Captain America, and Thor, Iron Man is the unfinished character.  Captain America just needed to get his chance and in his movie he got it. Thor has learned his most important lesson. But when last we left Tony Stark at the end of Iron Man 2, he was still not a hero.  Iron Man and Tony Stark were separate entities and Nick Fury had decided he could go without the former if the former could only be had with the latter.

He’s still an open question and I’m not giving anything away by telling you that The Avengers leaves that question open.

Downey and Ruffalo have a couple of wonderful and funny scenes together in which Stark and Banner play dueling geniuses on their virtual drawing boards.  Hemsworth’s not the only one of the stars who can dance, so to speak.  In the exuberant physicality of what is essentially a comic song and dance act, Downey and Ruffalo reminded me of Gene Kelly and Donald O’Connor or, maybe more aptly, Hugh Jackman and Neal Patrick Harris at last year’s Tony Awards.  What we’re watching is a partnership and a rivalry.

Stark has been drawn to Banner in an openly admiring and affectionate way we’ve never seen him drawn to any other character including Pepper Potts---mostly we’ve seen him deliberately annoying people in order to push them away.  In Banner he finds a potential soulmate capable of playing with him on his level, someone who shares his passion for science and can keep up.

But as they work together to solve a problem, Stark can’t resist turning it into a competition. 

At first it seems as though he’s only trying to distract Banner by teasing him and peppering him with one-liners.  But then what he’s doing becomes more sinister and dangerous.  He’s trying to provoke him.  If Banner has to concentrate on keeping his cool, he won’t be able to focus on the problem.  But it gets worse.

He’s curious.

He wants to see Banner Hulk out.

It’s the pure scientist in him getting the better of him.  He can’t help seeing another human being as a potential science experiment.

Which is insane.  Never mind for the moment that the fate of the earth is at stake.  Trapping himself in a small room with the Hulk when he’s not wearing his armor is a really, really, really bad idea.

But that’s Stark.  He’s rash. He’s impulsive. He’s reckless. He’s thoughtless.  He’s immature.  And he’s selfish.

And this is why I say that the whole series (so far) has been basically The Romance of Tony Stark and that’s likely going to be a main theme as the series moves forward.

Whatever the ostensible plots and whoever the villains, Thor 2 is going to be about Thor being awesome while searching for his lost love and Captain America 2 will be about Steve Rogers trying to find a place for himself in the 21st century besides being Captain America.  But Iron Man 3 will be about whether or not Stark’s going to screw up again and how and how bad and how much of the result of that will carry over into The Avengers  2.

To get back to the Knights of the Round Table analogy, the one way Stark is most like Lancelot is that in both their romances everything depends on how the hero responds to his chief temptation which for Lancelot and Tony Stark is the temptation to put self before duty.  For Lancelot that temptation comes in the form of his love for Guinevere.  For Stark it's straightforwardly his ego.

Every tale of Lancelot foreshadows Lancelot’s ultimate failure and the breaking of the Round Table and the destruction of Camelot.  Every one of Iron Man’s adventures (so far) foreshadows Stark’s potential failure to be the hero he and the world need him to be.

Again, I don’t think I’m giving anything away by telling you that in The Avengers we learn that if he has to Stark can overcome the temptation and be Iron Man and not just Iron Man's pilot, a billionaire, genius, playboy, philanthropist in a metal suit. It doesn't tell us that he is past temptation.

It’s a hilarious moment and a key one when Stark recognizes similarities between himself and Loki.  But we’re left to wonder what he’s going to do with this newfound self-awareness.

The romance is unfinished.  The comedy or the tragedy is still to be played out.  The story continues.

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Important note to moviegoers:  Stay through the credits.  All the credits.  Sit tight in your seat until you think the lights are about to come on.

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Readers beware: I’ve been trying not to give too much away in the posts, but I’m not enforcing a no spoiler zone in the comments.  The discussion down there is wide-open so don’t venture in unless you’ve seen the movie or don’t mind.  On the other hand, if you’re commenting, try to keep in mind that some people might wander in on the conversation by mistake.  Be as indirect and circumspect as you can.  And for gods’ sake, whatever you do, don’t give away the final scene!

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If you don’t have time to watch the other movies in the series first, maybe you’ll find this post of mine comparing the Iron Man, Thor, and Captain America movies helpful.

If you do have time to do some catching up, Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man 2, Thor, and Captain America: The First Avengerare available to watch instantly at Amazon. Iron Man 2 is also streaming on Netflix.

The Avengers, written and directed by Josh Whedon, starring Robert Downey Jr, Chris Evans, Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo, Scarlett Johansson, Jeremy Renner, Tom Hiddleston, Clark Gregg, Stellan Skarsgard, Cobie Smulders, and Samuel L. Jackson, now available on DVD and to watch instantly from Amazon.

A case of critical whiplash

Here are a few notes I made to myself about how not to write a thriller while reading Lou Berney’s new thriller, Whiplash River.

Not that I’m planning to write a thriller.  And not that if I wrote one it would as entertaining as Berney’s a bit overstuffed but generally fun, cheerfully and unabashedly Elmore Leonard-influenced story of a former car thief and wheelman turned restauranteur dragged into a long con by a dapper old man of mystery while on the run from three separate sets of killers intent on making him dead in the most unpleasant ways possible.

It’s just that I couldn’t help reading Whiplash River with a divided mind.Seemed like every time Berney was just getting a scene up to speed, he slammed on the brakes and brought things to a screeching halt for some unnecessary exposition and then, without warning, he’d punch the accelerator and off we’d go again, nose practically in the air, only to skid to another stop a page later for another expository pit stop.  It gave me a case of critical whiplash, particularly in the early going. Being jarred in and out of the story like that caused me to keep taking my eyes off the road and all that time at the pumps for plot fill-ups gave me too much time to think about the driving instead of looking forward to the trip ahead.

And then, halfway through, the story breaks itself rather neatly in two and Berney effectively starts over with a new novel with some of the same characters, the first part of the book reduced to a very long prologue.

At any rate, here are my notes: 

If your first scene is several pages of exposition mainly explaining how your hero got his nickname and your second scene is your hero breaking up a knife fight in a restaurant kitchen between the prep chef and a waiter while putting out a grease fire at the same time, then your second scene is your first scene and your first scene is a few lines of dialog in your fifth or sixth scene.

If your hero is spending his time after something violent or threatening or comic or baffling that just happened to him thinking about what just happened to him in a way that pretty much just recaps what just happened, hit the backspace key and hold it down until you’ve deleted at least three sentences and then start in on making the next violent, threatening, comic, or baffling thing happen.

If you’re not planning to introduce your love interest until halfway through the novel, work her backstory in as you write your way towards her entrance or else you’re going to have to interrupt yourself in the middle of the chase to spend several pages telling us what is most likely an old, old story: They met, they were in love, it ended badly, they both still carry a torch.

While you’re at it, don’t fall in love with your leading female character.

Don’t introduce a second female character and fall in love with her too.

Don’t let on you’re having fun picturing which actresses you’d like to play your female leads and imagining them speaking your dialog.  It’s distracting not least because it will cause your readers to start playing the casting game along with you, and, by the way, Emma Stone and Angelina Jolie.

Also, if you’re holding off on revealing the MacGuffin that’s driving your plot, make sure it’s a truly weird and unique item or a completely understandable one, like a painting, a diamond, a top secret soft drink recipe, either way, something your readers might be tempted to steal as opposed to something you have to keep reminding them is worth a lot of money to the right sort of buyer. Don’t make it a banal piece of historical trivia that happens to be A.) real and easily Googled and B.) currently on display in a museum in New York City and not in the condition it’s going to be when you’re through with it.  If you insist on using that particular artifact, think about what the National Treasure movies did with similar artifacts, which was not make them ends in themselves.

Now, obviously, it sounds like I only learned negative lessons from Whiplash River.  Even if that was the case, though, please don’t get the idea I only have negative things to say.  The Elmore Leonard influence is a very good thing, as are the comparisons coming up to Carl Hiaasen and Donald Westlake.  But, as it happens, I drew one very important positive lesson from the book.  It’s actually not something new.  It’s just something I like being reminded of.

There are three ways to go with a thriller.  You can write what’s essentially a horror story.  You can tell a morality tale.  You can make it a comedy.  It seems like most contemporary thrillers---books and movies---are horror stories. The bad guys are monsters, inhumanly evil, irresistible, relentless, and possessed of an almost supernatural ability to cause harm and get away with it.  John D. McDonald, Raymond Chandler, and Robert B. Parker told morality tales. Most of the crimes in their novels arise from decent people’s moral failings rather than from the intrusion of an outside evil. Whiplash River is a comedy, cheerfully amoral and with a cast of lunatics, not sinners or monsters. Issues of right and wrong, good and evil are left out of the mix or pushed into the background by characters’ more immediate concerns, like “How did I get myself into this mess and how am I going to get out of it.”  Characters aren’t motivated by their vices so much as by their obsessions and manias. Troubles don’t come because of moral lapses but because human beings just have a natural tendency to goof up.

Elmore Leonard is Berney’s obvious influence, but there’s more than a nod towards Carl Hiaasen here too.  Berney’s humor, though, isn’t as mordant or borderline sadistic as Leonard’s can be or as blackly farcical as Hiaasen’s.  Actually, in its more screwball comedy, Whiplash River reminded me of Donald Westlake’s comic crime novels, particularly the Dortmunder series. Berney’s protagonist, Shake Bouchon, is not as smart as Dortmunder and he lacks Dortmunder’s instinct for self-preservation, but like Dortmunder he is, to paraphrase Westlake himself, a man upon whom the sun shines only when he needs complete darkness.

Shake---and as I hinted up top, Berney spends too much time in his first scene explaining how Shake came to be called Shake, and it turns out not to be an interesting or important story---is having a bad week.

His beachside restaurant in Belize isn’t doing a landmark business.  The boss of the local drug cartel who loaned Shake the money to open the place is not happy that Shake has fallen behind in his payments.  An FBI agent has flown down from the States intent on coercing Shake into testifying against some Armenian mobsters Shake did a few jobs for back in California.  And to top off his troubles, a ski-masked thug shows up during what passes for the dinner rush and tries to kill one of Shake’s few customers, shooting up the dining room in the process.

Since dead customers tend to bring down the ratings in the online travel guides, Shake reflexively tackles the thug and after a less than heroic struggle chases him from the scene with a broken nose.

The thug turns out to be part of a team of rookie killers for hire on their first hit, and his partner is his ferocious, vindictive, psychopathic, and fiercely loyal freckle-faced girlfriend who immediately decides that Shake has to pay for breaking her beloved’s nose and, incidentally, getting in the way of their doing the job they were paid to do.  For the sake of love and professional pride, Shake has to die, painfully.

It’s a question, though, who’s going to cause Shake the more trouble, the freckle-faced assassin or the customer whose life Shake has saved.

Harry Quinn is, he claims, a semi-retired CIA operative who, if he’s to be believed, had a hand in every important Agency mission from the Nixon Administration on up into George W. Bush’s first term and who, take his word for it, still gets called in from time to time to help out his old colleagues and even, and this Shake is willing to believe, old enemies.  The grateful Quinn, feeling he owes Shake a life-debt, wants to repay him by bringing him in on a scheme Quinn promises will pay off in millions of dollars.  Shake is inclined to say thanks, but no thanks, wisely figuring that Quinn is not someone to trust with his physical or financial well-being.

But then Shake’s restaurant blows up.  The freckle-faced assassin tries to shoot him dead on the beach.  The drug kingpin decides to write of his losses and Shake along with them.  And the FBI agent gives Shake a choice: rat on the Armenians or…well, actually, there isn’t an or.

Shake needs to get out of Belize in a hurry.  But his only ride is Quinn and Quinn demands Shake’s help with his scheme as the price of the ticket.

That’s a lot going on for one novel, and we’re still only halfway through.

Shake realizes he and Quinn are going to need some help.  He doesn’t feel smart enough or ruthless enough himself and even if the money Quinn expects his scheme to net is real, Quinn himself doesn’t seem wholly grounded in reality.  Shake decides to enlist an ex-girlfriend, a brilliant and ruthless grifter turned brilliant and ruthless hedge-fund manager.

Berney doesn’t get heavy handed with the irony.  He leaves it up to us to decide if managing a hedge fund is a legalized con game.  It’s simply the case that skills and talents are neutral attributes.  Gina Clement has skills and talents that make her very good at manipulating people and playing the odds, and she’s decided to use her powers for (a relative and more lucrative) good and not for (life and limb-risking) evil anymore.  But when Shake and Quinn show up at her office with their proposition, she isn’t in the mood to hear it.  She’s mad at Shake.  Their relationship ended badly.  Gina had a longstanding rule regarding her love life. Men don’t dump Gina Clement.  Gina Clement dumps them.  Shake broke the rule.

Then it occurs to her that, besides offering her the chance to have more fun than she’s had in a long time, throwing in with Shake and Quinn will give her ample opportunities to punish Shake for his sins.

From here, the scene shifts to Cairo and Whiplash River II gets underway.

Berney’s dialog is sharp, clever, and idiolectic---everybody talks like themselves and not like extensions of the narrator, although I have one more note for myself here:  Don’t have your characters think what they could and would just as likely have said out loud.  The action scenes are clean, neat, coherent, exciting, and funny.  Shake is a congenial and likeable protagonist.  Gina is appealing in her criminal brilliance, romantic perversity, and, predictable, soft-heartedness.  She and Shake make a sexy couple, a felonious Beatrice and Benedick expending as much mental effort on trying to con each other about their feelings as on conning their mark out of the MacGuffin.  Quinn is a hoot and a half, and there are a number of standout supporting and minor characters, my favorite being Meg, the freckle-faced assassin, a little Tasmanian devil with a gun spinning in and out of scenes on the strength of pure, vengeful rage.

I said Whiplash River breaks in half, turning itself into its own prequel and sequel.  But another way to look at it is it’s as if Berney has given us back to back episodes of a TV series with an ongoing story arc that carries through the stand-alone plots of individual episodes, like Justified, or Leverage, or Burn Notice.  In fact, and I mean this as a major compliment, Whiplash River is a lot like Burn Notice, with Shake as Michael Westen’s less together, less driven, less dangerous but at heart just as romantic cousin and Gina as Fi’s more cerebral, cooler-headed, less pyromaniacal but just as emotionally and sexually manipulative little sister.

Sadly, there isn't a character comparable to Sam Axe.
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Read an excerpt.

Whiplash River, by Lou Berney, published by William Morrow, is available from Amazon as a paperback original and for kindle.

Soullessfulness

Every time I come across some happy-go-lucky atheist cheerfully going on about how science is on the verge of explaining away the existence of God and how it will soon be proved that life, the universe, and everything are just the predictable results of a giant, eternal, meaningless, purposeless, self-replicating science experiment, I think:

“That person has no soul!”

But then, atheists say the same about me, so we’re even.

Over the past few centuries, science can be said to have gradually chipped away at the traditional grounds for believing in God. Much of what once seemed mysterious — the existence of humanity, the life-bearing perfection of Earth, the workings of the universe — can now be explained by biology, astronomy, physics and other domains of science.

Although cosmic mysteries remain, Sean Carroll, a theoretical cosmologist at the California Institute of Technology, says there's good reason to think science will ultimately arrive at a complete understanding of the universe that leaves no grounds for God whatsoever.

Carroll argues that God's sphere of influence has shrunk drastically in modern times, as physics and cosmology have expanded in their ability to explain the origin and evolution of the universe. "As we learn more about the universe, there's less and less need to look outside it for help," he told Life's Little Mysteries.

Read all of Natalie Wolchover’s interview with Sean Carroll at Life’s Little Mysteries.

By the way, Sean is an old friend of this blog, he’s one of my favorite science bloggers, and I heartily recommend his book From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time.  He writes very well for a guy with no soul.

No appetite for The Hunger Games

Feature for Mannion Family Movie Night is The Hunger Games. I'm wary. Plot has always sounded like an episode of Star Trek to me. "The crew of the Enterprise visit a famine-ridden planet where the children are forced to hunt each other in a contest thst decides whose family will starve to death. While Kirk tries to decide which way he will violate the prime directive this week, Chekhov is drawn to one of the contestants, a bow and arrow wielding blonde who swears she was not the model for the heroine of a Pixar movie released to general disappointment one summer back on 21st Century Earth."

I'm going to spend the whole movie waiting for Kirk and Spock to beam in.

Fans of the books and the movie in the house---that is all the other Mannions in the house---promise me it's much better than I'm making it sound to myself, and anyway it's more like an episode of ST:TNG.

Actually, it's really the case that I'm just not a fan of dystopian science fiction.  It goes back to having had Brave New World and Fahrenheit 451 shoved at me during the same year in high school.  I think we had to read We in the same class but that might have been the next year for my Russian novel class for which we also had to read Darkness at Noon and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. (By the time we got to The Brothers Karamazov, I was ready to greet Dostoevsky as the Russian P.G.Wodehouse. On my own time, I was reading William Faulkner for the laughs.). Thrown in along the way were Animal Farm and 1984, the Ur-sci-fi adventure, The Odyssey, The Snows of Kilimanjaro, To Build a Fire, The Pearl, Night Flight, and the grimmest of the lot, Jane Eyre, whose final “Dear Reader, I married him” struck me as the last line of a suicide note.  Midway through my senior year I was convinced my English teachers were all trying to tell me something, which was Life stinks, then you die in utter despair.

Pizza's here. Time to go watch. I hope Worf trains Katniss well. But it better not turn out that the whole thing takes place inside the Holodeck.

Updated from District 12, Saturday morning: Ok, I was a bit misinformed about some details of the plot.  Still, it was pretty darn dystopic.  On the other hand, it was well done and once the chase got going, very exciting.  Woody Harrelson is fun. Jennifer Lawrence is learning how to do a lot with her deadpan pout.  And I stopped waiting for Kirk and Spock to arrive to save the day about half way through.

An Unexpected Journey

Can. Not. Wait.  Lots to look forward to, but what I’m liking so far is that Bilbo is clearly Jackson’s true hero Hobbit, way cooler than Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin, which is as it should be.

“The working poor haven’t abdicated responsibility for their lives. They’re drowning in it…”

The quotable Ezra Klein on Romney and the 47 percent:

Still, for my money, the worst of Romney’s comments were these: “My job is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”

When he said this, Romney didn’t just write off half the country behind closed doors. He also confirmed the worst suspicions about who he is: an entitled rich guy with no understanding of how people who aren’t rich actually live.

The thing about not having much money is you have to take much more responsibility for your life. You can’t pay people to watch your kids or clean your house or fix your meals. You can’t necessarily afford a car or a washing machine or a home in a good school district…. [Romney] is a guy who sold his dad’s stock to pay for college, who built an elevator to ensure easier access to his multiple cars, and who was able to support his wife’s decision to be a stay-at-home mom. That’s great! That’s the dream. The problem is that he doesn’t seem to realize how difficult it is to focus on college when you’re also working full time, how much planning it takes to reliably commute to work without a car, or the agonizing choices faced by families in which both parents work and a child falls ill. The working poor haven’t abdicated responsibility for their lives. They’re drowning in it….

Read the whole post, What Mitt Romney Doesn’t Get About Responsibility, at Bloomberg.

Via Brad DeLong.

With incense!

For non-Catholics who might not know, the Society is the Society of Jesus—-the Jesuits. Here’s the quotable Charlie Pierce on Paul Ryan and the Jesuits:

A long while ago, I warned Paul Ryan about screwing with the Society. The Society has been at this politics thing for close to 500 years. The Society is very good at it. They were not afraid of kings, nor of Japanese emperors, nor khans of the deserts, nor of popes back when the popes had real armies. The Society, like nuns, will fk your shit up. With incense. You think the Society’s going to shy away from a two-bit zombie-eyed granny-starver from Janesville?

Read the whole post at Esquire.

“Every month when he pays his bills, Jim Bandy becomes a philosopher.”

Just found out Louis Simpson died last week.  He was one of my favorite contemporary poets and this is one of my favorite poems by him, How to Live On Long Island:

Lilco, $75.17;
Mastercard, $157.89;
Sunmark Industries, $94.03...

Jim is paying his bills.
He writes out a check
and edges it into the envelope
provided by the company.
They always make them too small.

The print in the little box
in the top right hand corner informs him:
"The Post Office will not deliver
mail without proper postage."
They seem to know that the public
is composed of thieves and half-wits.

He seals the last envelope,
licks a stamp, sticks in on,
and with a feeling of virtue,
a necessary task accomplished,
takes the checks out to the mailbox.

It's a cool, clear night in Fall,
lights flickering through the leaves.
He thinks, all these families
with their situation comedies:
husbands writing checks,
wives studying fund-raising,
children locked in their rooms
listening to the music that appeals to them,
remind me of...fireflies
that shine for a night and die.

Of all these similar houses
what shall be left? Not even stones.
One could almost understand the pharaohs
with their pyramids and obelisks.
Every month when he pays his bills
Jim Bandy becomes a philosopher.
The rest of the time he's OK.

Jim has a hobby: fishing.
Last year he flew to Alaska.
Cold the salmon stream,
dark the Douglas firs,
and the pure stars are cold.

A bear came out of the forest.
Jim had two salmon...he threw one
but the bear kept coming.
He threw the other...it stopped.

The fish that are most memorable
he mounts, with a brass plate
giving the name and place and date:
Chinook Salmon, Red Salmon,
Brown Trout, Grouper,
Hammerhead Shark.

They do a lot of drinking in Alaska.
He saw thirty or forty lying drunk
in the street. And on the plane...

They cannot stand living in Alaska,
and he cannot stand Long Island
without flying to Alaska.

Glengarry Glen Mitt

The video clips of Mitt Romney delivering what James Wolcott compares to Alec Baldwin’s big speech in the movie version of Glengarry Glen Ross is being parsed and parsed again sixteen ways from Sunday all over the internet today, with most of the parsing focused on why the 47 percent of the country Mitt dismisses as takers aren’t taking or if they are it’s because they really need to.  It'll need Bill Clinton to sell this as a Democratic campaign theme and he’s probably gearing up to do it already. But right now it’s just wonkery that makes us liberals feel smart and morally superior while eliciting sneers from the Right, who eat hating on the poor and the needy up with a spoon.

It boils down to Mitt thinks half the people in this country are lazy bums, an appalling sentiment but half the people in this country agree!  More than half.  (I’m reminding myself of Bertie Wooster’s observation that half the people in the country don’t know how the other three-quarters live.)  More than half the people in the country think the other three-quarters are lazy bums.  Sometimes.  Even good liberals think it.  The lazy bums think it.  A trip to the mall, a drive down the highway, a visit to the doctor’s office, dinner out at a restaurant, a wait in line at the post office or the bank, anywhere you go where you have to deal with other human beings will confirm it.  It’s amazing how many people expect the rest of the world to cater to them. 

I’m kidding.  Half-kidding.  But all kidding aside.  This will help bring out the Democratic vote (I think) and turn around some independents by turning their stomachs (I hope), but good luck persuading any Republicans that Mitt was including them as targets of his contempt.  More likely it will encourage them to be more enthusiastic in expressing the contempt they share with Mitt for…those people.

One of the more pernicious things about “movement conservatism” has been its appeal to the worst in people by encouraging them to distrust and despise their fellow Americans. And one of the more depressing things about it has been how eagerly so many people have been to do so.

If only millionaires voted Republicans, the GOP would poll lower than the Greens and LaRouchites.  Non-millionaires vote Republican for many reasons, one of which is that they don’t like the government giving “their” money to people who don’t work or don’t work as hard as they do.  In a similar vein, they don’t like that “others” are getting help they’re not getting even though they could use it too.  Others don’t think anybody, including themselves, should get help from the government.  They see it as charity and they don’t want charity.  “I can solve this myself.”  it’s what the nuns called “false pride” but it’s how they honestly feel. 

But, finally, a lot of non-millionaires---mostly men, I suspect---vote Republican in order to feel like millionaires or, rather, in order not to feel like losers. The reverence for wealth as a sign of God’s and Nature’s favor was brought here by the Puritans (who, weirdly, evolved into Massachusetts liberals within a couple centuries of the Mayflower’s dropping anchor), but it has been central to Republicanism since the Robber Barons took over the party and began driving out the Theodore Roosevelts and Bob La Follettes who were Lincoln’s true heirs.  And it became the guiding principle in the ‘80s when grown men began to say things like “He who dies with the most toys wins” as if it was a self-evident truth and a good thing.  People who are on their way to dying with no toys, instead of thinking maybe there’s something wrong with valuing a human life only by how much money a person makes, start to wonder if they are “losers” and reject that possibility emphatically by intensifying their identification with the “winners.”  And along with voting for the winners’ tribunes, this means intensifying their hatred of the designated “losers”.  The “Not Me’s!”  The “No Way Am I One of Thems!”  Those non-millionaires are cheering right along with the millionaires for Mitt today.

Which gets at what’s reprehensible about Mitt---one of the things that’s reprehensible about him.  He sees the world in purely economic terms.  To him, people are economic units not spiritual beings and individuals only matter to the degree they create wealth.  Those who don’t create wealth or create enough of it are, in Randian terms, moochers and parasites, takers not makers, or, to put in in a straight-forwardly materialistic Romney-ian way, people are costs to be controlled.

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it.

What is that but an itemization of expenditures?

But he’s not just telling his audience to see the 47 percent as economic units that don’t pay off on any investment.  He’s selling himself as an economic unit.  “Vote for me! Give to me! And I’ll pay out like gangbusters!”

If it looks like I'm going to win, the markets will be happy. If it looks like the president's going to win, the markets should not be terribly happy. It depends of course which markets you're talking about, which types of commodities and so forth, but my own view is that if we win on November 6th, there will be a great deal of optimism about the future of this country. We'll see capital come back and we'll see—without actually doing anything—we'll actually get a boost in the economy.

He’s really offering no other reason to vote him.  He’ll be the Confidence Fairy-in-Chief.

In fact, he’s pretty much promising to do nothing as President except sit in the Oval Office and watch CNBC and giggle as the Dow Jones climbs to 36,000.

And this is where I think the videos will cost him.  Besides disgusting Democrats and Independents and, maybe, a few Republicans who are inclined to agree with the sentiments but recoil at hearing them expressed so nakedly, inelegantly, and cruelly---they won’t like hearing themselves echoed by the banker foreclosing on the widow’s ranch---Mitt is revealing himself to people who are only just beginning to pay attention to the campaign and to the political press corps, who should already know but have been assiduously pretending some other Mitt Romney has been running, that not only does he have no real plans for being President, he doesn’t know or care what it means to be President.

He hasn’t given a thought to what the country needs from a President, only to what we will get if we elect him---the wonderfulness that just comes naturally from having Mitt run things.  Bain. The Olympics. That state whose name he'd rather not mention.  The United States of America.  All we need is him.

And not only does this add to and reinforce the perception that he is just a self-infatuated, self-flattering, self-congratulating rich jerk who divides the world neatly into, as Charles Pierce says, himself and his wonderful family and the Help, that he is in fact a guy who likes to fire people and doesn’t care about the very poor or, for that matter, the not very rich, but coming on top of his reckless and destructive blundering on Libya last week, it makes it even clearer that this man has no business asking us to trust him with the Presidency.

A lot more people are looking at Barack Obama and thinking, You know, he’s pretty good at this job, maybe we should keep him.

And then they’re looking at Mitt and shaking their heads and saying to themselves, “Definitely. Not. A. President.”

And that’s how I expect he’s going to get covered from here on out.

_____________________________

You’ve probably already read David Corn’s scoop at Mother Jones and looked at the clips, but in case you haven’t here’s the link:  SECRET VIDEO: Romney Tells Millionaire Donors What He REALLY Thinks of Obama Voters.

Updated before I’ve even had a chance to post this: Jonathan Chait beat me to the punch with similar thoughts this morning at New York Magazine, The Real Romney Captured on Tape Turns Out to Be a Sneering Plutocrat.

And, naturally, Charles Pierce is way ahead of me too: The Worst Thing Romney Has Said About Americans Yet.

Smartypants liberals

One of Mom Mannion’s favorite expressions when I was growing up was “There’s no fool like an educated fool.”

I always took that as a warning to her college-bound children not to get too full of ourselves and I heeded it about as well as any teenager heeds any warning from their parents.  But I also thought she was both teasing and warning Pop Mannion too.  My mother didn’t go to college.  My father has a Ph.D.

But Pop is no educated fool.  He knows whom he married and why and what’s good for him.  I’ve never known him to be full of himself around my mother, around us, around his students, around anybody, including the many educated fools, he had to deal with when he was in politics.

Here’s an important thing about Pop Mannion the politician. Besides knowing enough to listen to my mother, he was a builder and a fixer and a problem-solver.  But he was not a reformer.

Reformers of both parties set out to explain to voters just what medicine they’re going to have to take and why they should take it and be grateful for it even if they don’t like it and don’t think they need it.

Reformers, for the most part, are the type of people Mom Mannion had in mind when she warned us about becoming educated fools.

This one seems to have blown over in a hurry. No surprise, since it was Rick Santorum talking and at the moment few people care what Rick Santorum’s thinking about anything and here’s hoping even fewer care as time goes by.  But over the weekend at the Values Voter Summit he said:

"We will never have the elite, smart people on our side…”

Reads like self-parody, doesn’t it?  But know what? If your first and only response is to laugh, you’re probably one of Mom Mannion’s educated fools.

Read and watch the whole thing.

Santorum didn’t say smart.  He said “smart.”  It was an insult.  He wasn’t talking about people who are smart.  He was talking about people who think they’re so much smarter than everybody else.

Smartypants liberals.

And, he didn’t have to add out loud because his audience was ahead of him on it, We know how “smart” they are.

Liberals and liberal-minded conservatives (Yes, there are such people. As all us educated fools know, liberal has several meanings.) have often decried the anti-intellectualism of the Right.  And that is something to be decried.  But it shouldn’t be confused with the anti-intellectuals-ism that’s a longstanding American tradition born of frustration at having to deal with “reformers” waving their degrees in our faces as they barge into our lives to tell us they know what’s good for us and we need to listen up as they lay out their plans for improving our lives, whether we think they need improving or not.

An irony of this Presidential election is that that’s supposed to be the knock on President Obama, that he’s a smartypants liberal who thinks he’s so smart he can tell the rest of us how to manage our lives, but it’s Mitt who’s coming across to voters that way.  But then Mitt is a product of the school of scientific management.  An educated fool deluxe with two Hah-vud degrees to prove it.

Paul Ryan’s another dispenser of strong medicine he has no intention of prescribing for himself.

But the truth is liberals do seem to have the market cornered on educated foolery.

Try this.  James Warren writing at the Atlantic about the Chicago teachers strike and trying to sound sympathetic while measuring out a big dose of castor oil for parents who want to keep their local elementary school open, partly because they know and like the teachers there:

It's a dynamic at play whenever the under-performing Chicago system, which is beset by huge deficits, tries to close or consolidates schools. The school board usually gets its way but not before a very public uproar. Even parents at what are clearly low quality, poorly performing schools rise to protest. There's a bond that blinds them to larger realities but ties them to that neighborhood building without any air conditioning.

My italics up there.

Blind to larger realities here means, “Sentimentally attached to their neighborhood schools in a way they wouldn’t be if they knew what’s good for them, which they should because we reformers are here to tell them what’s good for them.”

Imagine, parents being loyal to a neighborhood school and thinking, in their blindness to larger realities:

Couldn’t we just put in air conditioning here instead of bussing my kids across town to some huge but fancy reformer-approved education factory where I won’t be able to reach them if they get sick or where it will be a big problem for me to visit if I need to meet with their teachers and hard to get to their games and their concerts and their plays and where if I do manage to get there I will be lost in a sea of strangers instead of at home among my friends and neighbors?

Warren’s condescension would be bad enough on its own, but it comes in the middle of his writing sympathetically about one of those parents who happens to have died recently from pancreatic cancer.

I’d like Warren to go to the funeral and deliver the eulogy:

“While she was active, involved, and an asset to her community, let us not forget, she was nevertheless blind to larger realities…”

You can hear Mom Mannion saying it, can’t you?

“No fool…”

That toast is toast

Art the Wonder Dog eyes him some Wonder Bread. Sent by Uncle Merlin moments ago.  8:30 Sunday morning.  September 16, 2012.

PS. Latest report: The toast has been gobbled.

How mothers were inadvertently responsible for the invention of sports

The blonde has been having a bit of a rough time of it physically this summer. Nothing serious, but a number of little things that keep knocking stuffing out of her. So she's been sleeping in on the weekends, trying to catch up on her rest and it’s been falling to me to drive out to our CSA farm to pick up the roots and tubers, leaves and grasses that are the staples of our weekly share.

I don’t mind and I'm not complaining.  It’s a pleasant enough chore. But I do mind the way the other members make it clear they don’t welcome my company.  Well, not all the other members. Just the core subset.

The moms.

I should be used to this. I’ve been dealing with it since the boys were little.  There are places and situations that moms claim as their domain and men are not welcome unless they're with a mom and relegated to holding packages or minding the kids while the mom takes care of the important business.  Anywhere or in any situation where mothers run the show---playgrounds, supermarkets, shoe stores, doctors’ waiting rooms, the spaces outside schools where parents wait to pick up their kids---men without women, even dads with kids in tow, are greeted with cold indifference if not outright hostility.

This is true of every cohort.  Farm moms, Soccer moms, hippie moms, whole earth moms, New Age moms, doctors’ wives’ moms, Yuppie Moms, self-proclaimed feminist moms.

At the farm, it’s routine for me to be elbowed aside as I’m reaching for our allotted bunch of carrots or to have to jump back when I’m about to weigh this week's share of kale to make room for a mother determined to dump her tomatoes on the scale ahead of me.  I’m sure that in some cases it’s a maternal sense of entitlement, but most of the time I swear they don’t even see me.

I’m usually pretty skeptical about evolutionary explanations for contemporary human behavior, but it’s easy to imagine how this might have come about.  Long, long ago, while the men were off doing whatever it was the men did and  the women were combing the bushes and understory for nuts and berries, and incidentally inventing agriculture in the process, the appearance of a solitary male stranger on the scene almost certainly meant trouble.

Women learned to defend themselves and the children by tribe-ing up.

And that’s what you still do.  Tribe-up to drive off us interlopers.

Ok, you say, what about men?  Men are very good at tribe-ing up themselves. 

I admit that tribe-ing up is what it looks like.  But what it really is is we’re trying to keep ourselves amused while waiting for you to get done with the shopping.

This has been going on for millennia.  For ages, men sat on rocks at the far edges of the savannah where they were out of the women’s way, reading the newspapers and keeping half an eye out for sabertooth tigers, bored out of their skulls, until one day a giant black monolith descended from the sky, Also sprach Zarathrustra blared from an unseen source in the heavens, and the men were enlightened.

One of the men said:

“This is boring!  Let’s do something!”

“What do you want to do?”

“Why don’t we go hunt a mastodon?”

“Are you out of your mind?”

“Got a better suggestion?”

“We could grab a beer.”

“We need to invent beer.”

“We can do that.”

“Good.  Let’s hunt a mastodon. then go invent beer.”

“Can we watch the game while we drink the beer?”

“If we invent sports first.”

“It’s a plan. Stan.”

“What happens if the women notice we’re gone?”

“They won’t.  Don’t worry.”

That night, in one of the first instances of great minds all thinking alike, the woman in the village, each on her own, invented the couch.

Not. A. President.

It's tough to run for president against an incumbent, even when the economy is in rough shape.

Your problem is that while you're out on the campaign trail promising voters what you will do as President months and months down the line to solve problems affecting their lives at the moment, your opponent is back at work in the White House busy solving those problems right now.

You may have good reasons to think he's not in fact solving them or not solving them as well as you would, but it's tricky to say that.  You don't want to sound like you’re rooting for the President to fail.

Which---be honest with yourself---at some  deep, ugly, ignoble level you are.

You can't help it. Your success depends on his failure or at least on his being perceived to be failing.

One of the smart things Bill Clinton did when he ran against George Herbert Walker Bush was to make the future the focus of the campaign. Don't stop thinking about tomorrow. Building a bridge to the the 21st Century. Grow the economy. A clunking phrase but an optimistic one. Growth is all about looking forward. Clinton wasn't asking voters to judge Bush on what he had done. What he had done yesterday wouldn't matter tomorrow, yesterday's gone, yesterday's gone.  Bush began to look like yesterday's President. Voters couldn’t help noticing that he was an old man of 66 and Clinton was 20 years younger. It helped Clinton that Bush in himself and in his achievements embodied an era that had ended on his watch.

Clinton was able to praise the President for what he had done, thank him for his service to the nation, and make the case that it was time for him to step aside.  He put Bush in the position of having to argue that the past mattered more than the future, a tough sell Bush himself didn't appear to buy.

Back in 1972, George McGovern's whole campaign was pretty much predicated on his promise to end the war in Vietnam. But then Nixon did that. Then he negotiated detente with the Soviet Union and opened up China. There were good reasons why he shouldn't have been reelected but replacing him with a peace candidate no longer seemed that urgent.  McGovern became the candidate from the past, running as if it was still 1968.

Mitt Romney has McGovern's problem. I'm not predicting he's as doomed to as resounding a defeat. But his campaign has been based---had been based---on one salient idea, that Barack Obama had failed to fix the economy.

What Mitt failed at was asking himself what he would do if what he was telling voters was the one big problem got fixed. 

Of course he didn't think it would get fixed.  He and the folks at Mitt Corp were convinced it couldn't be fixed by this President.  It could only be made worse. In fact they were banking on it to get worse.

Their Republican allies in Congress were working to make it worse.

Mitt was helped along in this line of thinking by the Village Press Corps which had itself convinced that President Obama couldn’t get re-elected unless the economy showed clear signs it was recovering and then constructed a definition of recovering that was pretty much recovered.  Things wouldn't be better until the economy was booming again or at least restored to where it was in August of 2008.

But Mitt appears not to have asked himself the bigger question. What would he do while the President was busy being the President?  Presidents have to do more than watch the nation’s bottom line. Suppose a crisis came along?  Suppose the eyes of the nation the eyes of the whole world were turned on the president of the United States? Suppose for days or even weeks on end nobody cares what you think or even remembers you exist?

If you've asked yourself this question, the correct answer is you be a good citizen, support the President, wait for the crisis to pass, then point out the mistakes or the things you feel he should have done differently.  But while you are waiting you don't have to stand there like a block of wood. You practice being President. You practice looking like a President. You practice sounding and acting like a President. Because if people do take their eyes of the actual President to look at you it will be to ask themselves what it would be like during a crisis to see you up there dealing with it.

But besides this requiring patience, tact, self-discipline, and a degree of humility, it requires you to have asked yourself the existential question, What will I be when I am President?

If the answer comes back, Boss of the World, give it up right there.

The question breaks down into a lot of smaller questions.  What do you plan to do when you’re President? How will you get it done? Who will you have to work with?  How will you get them to go along with you?  What if they don’t?  What if you can’t get done what you want to get done or all you want to get done?  What if there’s a crisis?  How would you handle this disaster, that sudden problem, the rise of those enemies, the loss of those allies?  How will you rally people to your side?  What is your side?  Your party’s or your country’s or the world’s?  How do you want people to see you as President? What do you want history to say about you?

Why do you want to be President anyway?

Mitt’s thoughtless, reckless, selfish behavior over the last few days suggest that he’s never asked himself any of these questions.

He didn’t wait.  He couldn’t wait. He couldn’t use the time to practice being President.  All he could do, all he could think to do, was promote himself at the expense of the nation’s interest.

Which is not what we look for Presidents to do.

What it appears to come down to is that Mitt has no idea what it means to be President.  He seems to think it’s a straight-forward managerial position, no different than running Bain or the Olympics (“Governor of Massachusetts? When was I ever governor of Massachusetts?”) and that the only qualification Mitt needs for the job or any job is that he be Mitt.

Not. A. President.

Updated already: Mike the Mad Biologist on the intellectual bubble in which Mitt Corp operates, How ‘Epistemic Closure’ Led to Romney’s Gaffe.

Updated again after careful reflection:  John Scalzi explains to Mitt why You Never Go Full McCain.

Photo of George H.W. Bush, Ross Perot, and Bill Clinton at one of their debates during the 1992 Presidential campaign courtesy of the BBC.

How do you evaluate for this?

“There is, thank God, no teacher meter, and there never is going to be one.  A teacher’s major contribution may pop out anonymously in the life of some ex-student’s grandchild.”---Wendell Berry.

There is simply no teacher meter that would have told anyone at the time that the teachers at Erik Loomis’ struggling high school in a dying mill town were in the process of producing Erik Loomis---Sorry. That’s Professor Loomis:

So how did I become an academic? I guess I’m not sure. My parents of course, who were not going to let my brother or I go into the mills. But a lot of it had to do with the awesome teachers I had. Sure we had some terrible teachers. My AP Lit course was a freaking joke. We had spelling tests in it. To my knowledge, no one actually took the AP Lit test. The building itself was more of a prison than a school. There were like 4 tiny windows in the entire school.

On the other hand, I am amazed at the commitment the majority of my teachers had. Think of what they had to deal with every day. I knew girls who got pregnant at 14. Who knows what happened to them. I knew people who had done every drug known to humankind by 15. God knows if they are still alive. There were stabbings outside my school. 2 or 3 years after I left they finally put in metal detectors and upped the police presence. There were growing racial tensions too as a burgeoning immigrant population from Mexico began attending the school.

How did anyone get a good education?

Because for at least part of our day, we had great teachers.

Read all of Erik’s post, Why I Support Public School Teachers at Lawyers, Guns & Money.

Paperback Writer: Paradise as another roadside attraction

One of my favorite books from last year, Brook Wilensky-Lanford’s Paradise Lust: Searching for the Garden of Eden, is now out in paperback.  Here’s my review from November.

Now the Lord God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed. And the Lord God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground – trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food. In the middle of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

It’s 11 a.m, Monday, November 14, 2011, nearly an entire year into the second decade of the 21st Century.  Do you know where your favorite Garden of Eden is?

Mine’s in Florida.  Liberty County.  Up in the Panhandle, not far from Tallahassee.  The amazing thing about it is that nobody knew it was there until sometime in the 1940s when Elvy Edison Callaway realized he owned  a piece of it.

As Brook Wilensky-Lanford explains in her book, Paradise Lust, an entertaining, amusing, and informative collection of interlocking essays about seekers and discovers of the Garden of Eden, now available in paperback from Grove Press, Paradise has been definitively located in a variety of places outside Sunday School stories and the imaginations and dreams of true believers.

Around 1900, the Reverend Edmund Landon West revealed that the Garden of Eden was in southern Ohio, the spot marked by the---what else?---Serpent Mound.  A decade or so earlier, William Warren, the first president of Boston University, proved that the Garden of Eden had been up above the North Pole when the world was warmer and the Arctic was not a sea of ice.  Tse Tsan Tai, a Chinese intellectual, businessman, and politician wrote a book in 1914 making the case that Eden had been in central China but all traces of Paradise had been wiped out in a flood caused by the sinking of Atlantis. Among other things the angel Moroni told Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, was the news that the site of Eden was Independence, Missouri.

The explorer and adventurer Thor Heyerdahl didn’t believe Eden was an actual place, necessarily, but more of a happy state of mind possessed by the earliest humans that allowed them to see and experience life in a simpler, wiser, saner way than their 20th Century descendents and when he went looking for Paradise, his searches were more existential than theological or geographical.

Elvy Edison Callaway was a lawyer and politician, a native of Alabama, a lapsed Baptist, and an admirer of Clarence Darrow, who accepted the theory of evolution as established scientific fact and yet believed the the biblical story of creation was historical truth, more or less.  A devout skeptic for most of his adult life, Callaway “reasoned” his way back to religion in late middle-age.

Callaway didn’t have to struggle too hard to reconcile his bible and his Darwin.  All it took was the realization that God had created man twice.  In separate creations, he caused a species of human beings to evolve just as the scientists had it, although somewhere in the Appalachian Mountains instead of Africa, and then he blew breath into a pile of dust in Florida.  This explains Cain’s wife, by the way, as well as the spouses of Adam and Eve’s other children.  The difference between the two sets of humans is that the evolved ones didn’t have souls.

The photo up top shows Eden as it was in the 1930s. It also shows a survey crew for the Civilian Conservation Corps. Callaway would have bristled at that picture.  He hated Franklin Roosevelt, hated the New Deal. He was a libertarian with political views indistinguishable from Ron Paul’s.  But this was the site of the Garden of Eden, he was sure of it.  These days it’s known as the Apalachicola Bluffs and Ravines Preserve.  The Nature Conservancy looks after it, not an angel with a fiery sword.  Callaway believed in the Garden.  He did not believe in the angel or rather he did not believe that the angel was stationed at the gates of Eden to keep people out.  He did not believe God intended to keep people out.  He believed God wanted us to return, for a small admission price, a dollar-ten.

The angel was there to protect the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil---which Callaway had identified as the Florida yew tree---from communists.

Something else Callaway didn’t believe.  He didn’t believe the story of Adam and Eve was the story of the Fall of Man.  He believed it was the story of the liberation of men and women.

As Wilensky-Lanford explains, Callaway rejected the notion of Original Sin and along with it the idea that Eve---Mother Eve, as he liked to call her---had cursed humanity through her giving in to the serpent’s temptation.

Just the opposite.  Mother Eve had given us a gift through the heroic sacrifice of her personal immortality.  

Callaway was against a lot of things: Prohibition, welfare, labor and farm regulation, Roosevelt, the abandonment of the gold standard, World War I, World War II, and communism.  But if there was one thing he had always advocated…it was women’s liberation.  He was pro-women’s suffrage, pro-women’s education, pro-birth control, and against women being pressured into shotgun weddings by an ignorant church.  So now, here in Liberty County, Florida, he could hardly stand by the traditional scapegoating of eve as the original sinner, tempter of men, and bringer of curses.

Despite the threads of reaction woven into his Libertarian politics, Callaway was in many ways a progressive thinker and his myth of Eden was not the story of a fall but a manual for a climb to self and societal improvement. 

These days, in the United States, at least, the belief that the story of Adam and Eve is true and the Garden of Eden was a real place that could be located on a map is associated with the sort of fundamentalist Christianity that is the very opposite of progressive: anti-intellectual, anti-science, anti-modern, backwards-looking and not at all forward-thinking, thoroughly reactionary.  The people who believe Eden existed and was as described in Genesis are the people who believe the earth is only a few thousand years old and want “Intelligent Design” taught in public school science classes. 

They are the people for whom the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky was built, who take their children there to see the animatronic cavemen living side by side with dinosaurs and are reassured at having that problem cleared up.

Traditionally, the story of Adam and Eve is a myth of a fall and a loss, a myth humankind endlessly re-enacts.  This is implicit in the jeremiads of every conservative priest and preacher explaining the degeneracy of the times.  We have fallen away, the fall and the loss are all but irrevocable; our only way back to Eden, Paradise, Heaven is through God’s grace which He is very reluctant to bestow.

What’s at first bewildering, then bemusing, then intriguing is that few of the men and women Wilensky-Lanford writes about can be pegged as that sort of Christian.  Wilensky-Lanford’s own bewilderment began when she learned that her great-uncle, a doctor who taught at Columbia University, not only believed that the Garden of Eden was a real place but had planned to search for it by plane with a pilot friend of his:

When I first heard the rumor that my great-uncle---WASP, professor, New York City allergist---had been searching for the literal Garden of Eden in the 1950s, the cognitive dissonance was immediate.  That’s because I had grown up during Scopes II: The Culture Wars. I associated people who thought the Book of Genesis was a map to the real world with minimal education and ultra-conservative politics.  I thought those people, the Christian conservatives, they must believe the Garden of Eden is a real place.  They think they know where it is.  Not my family.  I didn’t realize then that religious life in America hadn’t been so polarized.  My uncle could see both sides.  In his offices at Columbia University, he dreamed of Eden; in the pews of his Presbyterian church, he dreamed of science.

Not only are the people we meet in Paradise a heterodox collection of idiosyncratic believers, many of them were progressive and forward-thinking.  They believed in their bibles, although not necessarily literally, they accepted and trusted science, and while they may have despaired at the sorrows and sins of humankind in the present, they were optimistic about the future.  They expected things to get better.

And for many of them a path to that better future was through the Garden of Eden.  Paradise was not lost in the past or beckoning from the after-life.  It was spiritually, intellectually, and emotionally accessible here and now.

For them, the story of Adam and Eve was not about a fall.  We weren’t driven from the Garden, we had merely wandered out of it and forgotten the route back.  A return to Eden was a metaphor for getting back to first principles.

So Callaway’s Eden is a guide to the equality of men and women and individual liberation.  Tse Tsan Tai used his Central Asian Eden to preach against war, militarism, and imperialism.  For William and Lena Sadler, both doctors and scientists, the return to Eden wasn’t a myth, it was what was happening all through the first half of the of the 20th Century.  The return was explicitly the advances in science and technology that was turning this world into a paradise.  This isn’t surprising, considering that the Sadlers believed that Adam and Eve were scientists themselves, biologists from another planet who came here---the Garden of Eden is where they landed and set up their field camp---as advanced scouts for an extraterrestrial exploration and benign colonization of Earth that was ongoing.

Ok, the Sadlers were a bit more eccentric than Wilensky-Lanford’s other protagonists.  You might think they were a bit more than “a bit” more eccentric after you read (in one of my favorite chapters in Paradise Lust) about they “communicated” with the visitors from outer space and the quasi-religion they founded based upon those extraterrestrial communications, but the point is that their myth is still a progressive myth; in it, Adam and Eve were reformers who came here “to promote cooperation, biologic uplift, and consensus building.”

And while the Sadlers may have been eccentric they weren’t nuts and their communications with aliens didn’t get in the way of their having not just successful but illustrious careers in their fields.  Lena Sadler, just to pluck one item from her impressive CV, was one of the founders of the American Women’s Medical Association.  William Sadler was a professor of psychiatry at the Post-Graduate Medical School of Chicago.

In the meantime, while the Sadlers were contacting the alien explorers, Thor Heyerdahl was exploring---re-exploring---the paths of earthling adventurers who carried Eden around with them in the form of a culture that was happier and more caring and cooperative and less acquisitive, materialistic, and self-aggrandizing than what he saw working itself out in the present day of World War II and Cold War Europe and the United States.  Unlike Callaway’s and the Sadlers’, Heyerdahl’s personal myth of the Garden of Eden included a fall, or at least a falling away, and loss, a but a different, opposite loss than depicted in the Bible---Adam and Eve’s sin, of course, as eating the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge; Heyerdahl believed that our ancestors possessed a special knowledge that had become lost to us.  Heyerdahl’s great sailing adventures, starting with the Kon-Tiki, weren’t just about proving that ancient peoples could have traveled the great distance from an unlikely there to an improbable there.  He wanted to show that they had made those voyages regularly and that they carried this knowledge with them and shared it wherever they went.  It was the knowledge of how human beings could live in harmony with nature and each other.

Paradise Lust is a kind of group biography that could be titled Eminent Cranks and Crackpots, but Wilensky-Lanford has a lot more on her plate.  In the course of these essays, she writes with verve, humor, and persuasive confidence about many subjects, moving from theology to geology to cartography, archeology and anthropology, literary theory, cultural history, botany, hydro-engineering, and boat building.  There were times when I felt I was reading Stephen Jay Gould, other times when I felt more like it was John McPhee.  Still, the personalities dominate, and I was mostly reminded, again and again, of Virginia Woolf’s biographical essays, which, by the way, I think rank among Woolf’s best stuff. Wilenksy-Lanford brings all these people to colorful life, writing always with sympathy, affection, objectivity, respect, and an understanding of how they fit in their time and place.

Wilenksy-Lanford’s sympathy, objectivity, and patience are tested in her visit to the Creation Museum.  Up above I mentioned how Elvy Callaway turned his patch of Eden into a Florida roadside attraction.  But at least after you paid him his dollar and ten cents admission fee, you got to walk the paths that Adam and Eve trod when the place was theirs.  You were in direct contact with if not the Lord then the good Lord’s own creation and there was in that the possibility of a real spiritual experience.  But for all its state of the art design and special effects, the Creation Museum seems intended to cut off contact with anything spiritual because it is designed to cut off discussion.  Real museums inspire questions and wonder.  The Creation Museum heads them off at the pass.

As ideas about the Garden of Eden go, I found this empty, invisible Eden disappointing. Mongolia, Ohio, the North Pole---these locations, however far-fetched were human. They represented possibility, even in the face of disaster.  Tse Tsan Tsai’s country was on the chopping block in the midst of World War I, but he still held out the Garden of Eden as a dream of world peace.  Thor Heyerdahl was convinced that man had ruined Eden, yet he still worked for world cooperation and environmental stewardship.  William Warren believed in original sin, but he loved the northern lights of his abandoned Polar Eden; at the very least, it could be a good source of electricity.  The Creation Museum brought to mind another “C,” coldness.

What was at the heart of the Creation Museum’s religion?  Its prescriptions all involved things Christians should fight against: sex outside marriage, the theory of evolution, the reality of climate change.  But what did Christians fight for?

Because it’s meant to be a place for Christian parents to take their kid to divert them (and themselves) from asking those questions, the Creation Museum is just a diversion, another roadside attraction, a place to go because the kids are bored and everybody you know has gone so why not?

If this was the only point to Wilensky-Lanford’s writing about the place, it would have provided the one irritable chapter in an otherwise extremely good-natured book.  But she uses her visit to the Creation Museum as a springboard for a profile of the one living seeker after Eden (besides herself) in Paradise Lust.

Lee Meadows is a professor of science education at the University of Alabama. He’s a believer.  He’s always been a believer.  He grew up a fundamentalist Christian in Mississippi thinking that every word of the Bible’s story of creation was true.  He also grew up fascinated by science.  He was like Wilensky-Lanford’s great-uncle. He could see both sides. In church, he dreamed of science. In the classroom, he dreamed of Eden.  In college, he figured out there was a way to dream of both.

What he’s up to these days is trying to help public school teachers in the South teach evolution to their fundamentalist Christian students.

Meadows wanted kids to have the same liberating moment he had had in college: the freedom to look at science and religion next to each other and not necessarily have to make them match. That was tricky. Kids inevitably saw conflict between what their church told them and what they learned in school…Meadows believed that if teachers could get them to understand the evidence for, and the process of, evolution---well, that was a start.

“There are kids---and I know because I was one---who struggled just to understand the evidence.” Meadows clearly relished the challenge of overcoming that struggle. “If you can get a kid to see that there’s this amazing blue whale that came from a creature in the marshes of the Middle East, if they can get that, that’s good stuff.”

Neither Meadows himself or Wilensky-Lanford reaches for the obvious joke.  But I’m happy to.  To fundamentalists, this makes Meadows the snake in the Garden.

To Wilensky-Lanford, this makes Meadows another idealist mapping a way back to Eden. 

The marshes in the Middle East Meadows refers to?  Those are in Iraq, in an area known until recently as Mesopotamia, long thought by most scholars and believers to have been the actual location of the Garden of Eden, if there actually was one.  In the years before World War I, the area and its many waterways were mapped by the British military engineering genius, William Worrocks, who later oversaw the construction of canals and dams that reclaimed the marshes and turned them into farmland, that is turned them back into what Worrocks assumed they were in Biblical times.  Along the way, Worrocks located, positively, the exact site of the Garden of Eden.

But that’s another story---which Wilensky-Lanford is happy to tell and one you’ll be happy to read.

Meanwhile, what Meadows is implying is that “in the beginning,” God created evolution.

Paradise Lust: Searching for the Garden of Eden by Brook Wilensky-Lanford, published by Grove Press, is also available from Amazon in hardback and for kindle.

Meaning it

“Obama grabs babies and lifts them up on almost a daily basis. About time he got a taste or his own medicine.”  New York Magazine editor Dan Amira on Twitter.

This is what I was talking about the other day, the kind of thing you have to do if you run for office.  And like I said, you don’t have to like it, you just have to mean it.

Somehow, though, I think the President likes it and means it.

The President got hugged while campaigning in Florida, but as any good reporter will tell you, there’s always a local angle.  Jeremiah Horrigan found it for our local paper, the Times Herald-Record:

He was in his sweats, swinging away on a driving range Sunday when he got an excited call from the manager of his pizzeria.

"The president's coming here, in like 18 minutes!" the manager said.

"The president of what?" a mystified Scott Van Duzer wanted to know.

As all the world now knows, the president whom Van Duzer immediately ran off to greet was the president of the United States, Barack Obama.

You could say, as most already have, that Van Duzer's greeting was an uplifting experience for President Obama: after high-fiving him, he gave the president an exuberant bear hug and lifted him off the floor of Van Duzer's Big Apple Pizza and Pasta Italian Restaurant.

<snip>

But who, you might reasonably wonder, is Scott Van Duzer? The short answer is he's a local boy — he was born in Cornwall and lived there until he was 7.

Read the whole story, Ex-Cornwall man surprises Obama with big bear-hug.  (Registration suggested but not required.)

You may have heard that vindictive Right Wingers with too much time on their hands decided to try to punish Van Duzer for the sin of liking it that the President of the United States visited his pizza joint by hate-spamming Big Apple’s Yelp entry.

Fortunately, sane and decent-hearted people have been coming to the rescue. At the Atlantic wire, Adam Clark Estes reports that The Boycott Against Obama's Bear-Hugging Buddy Is Failing Miserably.

Both photos by Doug Mills of the New York Times.

Ignoring the polls for reasons of mental and spiritual well-being

I don’t watch the daily polls and I don’t like anybody who does.

Ok.  I don’t like it when anybody does.  My Twitter feed is full of poll obsessives who alternately drive themselves nuts and launch themselves into states of giddy euphoria as they watch the polls go up and down. People seem to think that any minute now a new poll’s going to come along that will decide things once and for all right now so we can all relax and stop worrying about November.  I’ve actually unfollowed a number of people I like and admire as bloggers and twitterers because of their poll watching compulsions.  Months before an election I don’t need to know.  And I don’t need to spend the months before an election alternately driving myself nuts and launching myself into states of giddy euphoria over politics!  I’ve got too much else to make me crazy and even a few other and better reasons to be euphoric.

Plus, there’s some arrogance at work.

I don’t feel I need to watch the polls because I’ve predicted the outcome of every Presidential election since I was a kid long before the second Tuesday in November.  Every election has been decided in my mind by late spring.  The only one that fooled me a bit was 2000.  I thought Gore would win it a little more handily.

So I’ve been trying to ignore the polls, even when they’ve been good news for the President, which, the last few days, they certainly have been. 

That shouldn’t be a surprise.  Two things have been at work.  The first is that it’s been a theme of Mitt Romney’s life that the more people get to know him the less they like him.  It goes way back.  It’s the subtext of the bullying and assault of that kid in prep school.  Mitt was doing it to try to get the other students to like him.  I don’t know why he’s had this effect on people.  Probably lots of different reasons.  I used to like him.  Sort of.  When he ran against Ted Kennedy.  Massachusetts is kind of our second home state and I followed that race.  I didn’t want him to win.  But while I wouldn’t have voted for him against Ted I might have voted for him if he’d been running against some other Democrat.  Massachusetts has produced some pretty lousy Democrats and I don’t mean of the Republican-lite variety.  I mean corrupt, stupid, inept, or otherwise useless.  Mitt didn’t strike me as so bad next to some of them.  I didn’t like him as much when he was governor though.  I liked him less when he ran for President in 2008.  I couldn’t put my finger on why.  But this time out I positively loathe the guy and I can tell you why.  I have told you why, in about a dozen posts.  Boils down to this.  To him people are costs to be controlled.  He’s the first person to run for President on a major party line who believes human beings are a problem.

If that’s what people are picking up on, it’s no wonder nobody likes him.

And virtually nobody does.

That’s one thing that has been consistent in the polls.  People do not like him.  Even people who plan to vote for him.  This has been a point pundits and analysts in the Village media have studiously ignored, because they’ve been wedded to the idea that the President is doomed and if they included Mitt’s personal approval in their analyses they would be predicting that the American people are bent on putting a man they don’t like in the White House.

When has that ever happened?

Nope.  Liberals didn’t like Nixon.  Most people did.  My grandmother loved him.

But my feeling---and that’s all it is, my feeling, not a prediction---that the President is on his way to re-election isn’t just based on Mitt’s being unlikeable and his convention giving more people the opportunity to learn not to like him.

I also expected the President’s convention to be just that---the President’s convention. 

I expected that the more people saw of the President outside of the filter of Village Conventional Wisdom, the more they would remember that we don’t need a new President.  We already have a pretty good one.  I’m not talking about his effectiveness at getting this or that bill passed.  I’m talking about his ability to be the many things we need our Presidents to be, all of which add up to giving us confidence that he is in command.

And if you think being in command means being able to make political opponents drop to their knees and beg for mercy with just a frown, you have watched too many episodes of The West Wing.

Even George Washington couldn’t do that.

FDR couldn’t even do it to his political allies.

Being in command or, rather, giving the people confidence that the President is in command, means giving them the confidence that the day to day running of the country is being taken care of and that if something happens, if there’s a crisis, the President will act swiftly, decisively, and competently to put things back to right.  Again, this isn’t a matter of doing the right thing by anyone’s ideological lights or by Paul Krugman’s lights (bright and focused as they so often are).  It’s more a matter of the passengers trusting that when the car spins out on the ice the driver isn’t going to panic and steer us off a cliff.

And this has been the basis of my “predictions” of who is going to be President.  The guy who gives the impression of being the better driver wins.  The re-election of George W. Bush would seem to refute this, but there are always other factors at work as well, and one of them is that Americans tend to like their Presidents and it takes a lot of work on the part of one to make them dislike him.  Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter worked at it.

W. didn’t.  Well, he didn’t work at anything. But people still liked him until Katrina hit and he proved that he wasn’t in command, and then it was too late.

What happened at the Democratic Convention is that people were reminded that we have a President.  Bill Clinton tore Mitt Romney to pieces but after starting with the point that Barack Obama is Bill’s idea of a good President.  From there on, everything he said about Mitt was an implicit or explicit comparison between Mitt and the President.  And then, Thursday night, the President took the stage.

He didn’t come out as that hopey-changey guy from 2008.  He emphatically put that guy in the past.  He stood there as the President of the United States. 

And a lot of people’s hearts swelled with pride.

I think the debates will accelerate both these trends, that the more people see of Mitt the less they will like him and the more they see of the President the more they will accept it and like it that he is the President.

That’s what I think.  I’m not predicting.  I’m just saying what I think and why.  I think the President will be re-elected because he is the President.

The Village talk about the polls has been all about what a tight race it is, but the focus has been on the polls of likely voters and, for reasons of prudence, those polls have been based on a very strict and limiting definition of likely.  The talk, though, hasn’t been simply a matter of prudence.  It’s been colored by a number of assumptions.  One is that that even though the President has generally been up a few points even among likely voters, because his lead is within the margin of error, the error will correct in Mitt’s favor.  The other assumption is that the President is running against history.

Here’s the CW in a nutshell: “Obama’s in deep trouble because no modern President has won re-election with economic numbers as bad as the numbers the President has had to deal with.”

“Modern” means since World War II, so how many incumbent Presidents are we talking about?

Two.

Jimmy Carter and George Herbert Walker Bush.

I’m not including Gerald Ford because he’s a special case.

How many other un-elected Vice Presidents who became President because the sitting President resigned in disgrace and left town one step ahead of the law and who then pardoned that disgraced President ran for what wasn’t in fact re-election but election for the first time?

But here’s the thing.

They’re all special cases.

Jimmy Carter and George Herbert Walker Bush were running for re-election when the unemployment numbers were bad but not as bad as they are now, true.  But weren’t other things going on too?

Off the top of my head I can think of a few things that might have hurt Carter beside unemployment.

A thirteen percent inflation rate.

Lines at the gas stations.

Ayatollah Khomeini.

Ted Kennedy.

Ronald Reagan.

The world’s biggest, meanest, fastest-swimming rabbit.

My mother would add one more.

He stopped smiling.

I could write a whole post about how this all adds up to people having the sense that Carter wasn’t in command.  Maybe I will.  For now, though, the point is that it’s not just the economy, stupid.

By the way, the sign Carville put up in campaign headquarters was “The economy, stupid” not “It’s the economy”.  It was a reminder to anyone talking to the press to stay on message.  Keep the focus on the economy because that was President Bush’s main weakness.  Mitt Corp went off message.  Probably because they realized that the economy wasn’t going to be as much of a weakness for the President as they hoped it would be and panicked. But that’s yet another post.

So, that’s what I think has been happening.  I also think that as the election gets closer more people are going to move into the likely voter category and more of them will be people who plan to vote for the President.

But we’re still two months out.  All kinds of things can happen.  Even if the trend continues in the President’s favor he’s still going to need every vote he can get.

One more point.

It’s not enough that the President gets re-elected.

We need to take back the House and hold the Senate and I haven’t seen polls showing that either is guaranteed.

But then, like I said, I’m trying to ignore the polls.

A nation of of little would-be Mitts on the make

We were watching The Statue of Liberty, one of Ken Burns’ early documentaries, the other night, and one of Burns’ trademark secondary narrators was Vartan Gregorian, now the President of the Carnegie Corporation, at the time (1985) President of the New York Public Library, at various times before and in between a professor, dean, and president at a number of prestigious colleges and universities, all his life a Christian Armenian born in Iran, and since he was twenty-two, when he came here to study at Stanford University, a resident of the United States.  I presume that somewhere along the way he became an American citizen but his biography at Wikipedia doesn’t say when he did or even if he ever did.  Doesn’t matter.  The point is that the Statue of Liberty as the symbol of the United States as a nation of immigrants has a special meaning to him, and during the course of the film, in answer to a question we don’t hear asked but which is apparently along the lines of What is the greatest threat to individual liberty? he says:

Ignorance is the first threat to liberty.  The second is to treat ourselves as economic units rather than as spiritual beings.

Given the subject of the film and what he did with the liberty afforded him by his coming to America, which was to get a world-class college education and the devote his life as a scholar, thinker, and administrator to helping countless others get their educations, I took it that Gregorian was reacting to the idea that people immigrated to the United States just to make money and that the American Dream is simply to get rich.

I also thought, He’s predicting the rise of Mitt Romney! How’d he know?

But here’s the thing.  He wasn’t predicting the rise of Mitt Romney.  He was watching it.  Watching the rise of a thousand young Mitt-a-likes, at any rate.  Reagan was President.  Greed was good.  I Got Mine, You Get Yours and He Who Dies With the Most Toys Win were vying to replace E pluribus unum as the national motto.  Instead of Out of the many, one, we were becoming a nation of ones, Number Ones, each looking out for itself.

In Mitt Romney, Republicans have given us the first major Presidential nominee who sees the United States purely as an economic enterprise and all its citizens as economic units.

To him, America is all about success which as far as he seems to believe or care is synonymous with getting rich.  This makes him the ideal candidate for the Republican Party these days.  Never mind the Tea Party.  It’s still the corporatist party, the party of rich people infatuated with themselves as “wealth-creators", which is really their way of pointing out that they have bundles of it and you don’t.  The supposedly Christian party believes in nothing so strongly as storing up treasure on earth.  Everything else, every good in life, follows from that, from getting rich, from having the money to buy whatever you need and want.  And if you don’t have that money, you don’t get to have it, any of it, even if you desperately, desperately need it to keep yourself and your family healthy, sheltered, clothed, and fed.

That was the theme of the Republican Convention.  We Built It…We Own It.  (Clint finished the thought for them.)  Yesterday I said I wanted to turn a Mitt Snit into a meme.  His whole convention was a Mitt Snit.  Thousands of people got together to express their collective indignation at the President’s suggestion that they owed even a bit of their success to anybody or anything else especially government aid.  That they were holding this self-pity fest in a venue that government picked up 62 percent of the tab for while a hurricane was bearing down on them and if it hadn’t veered to the west and had struck Tampa they’d have been screaming for the Feds to come bail them out, literally and figuratively, were ironies entirely lost.  Speaker after speaker took to the podium to brag about their successes as self-starting, self-reliant, self-sufficient entrepreneurs, including, risibly, one whose business was started entirely with the help of government loans and survived on government contracts.

There were several messages behind this, not the least insistent of which was that the Republican Party is the party of hard-working, enterprising wealth-creators in contrast with the Democratic Party, the party of Welfare-dependent layabouts, slackers, moochers, and takers.  But it was also a come on for the lottery: Vote for Mitt, Vote Republican, and You Can Be Rich Too.   Ultimately, though, it was a reduction of the American Dream into a get rich quick scheme and it divided the nation into Those Who Have It and Those Who Don’t and since Those Who Don’t were invisible at the convention, the final message was that only Those Who Have It count.

The whole point of life is to make piles of dough and the United States exists mainly for the care and feeding of millionaires.

This was so blatant and so fundamentally not just un-American but inhuman that folks at The American Conservative noticed and were appalled.

Reacting to Paul Ryan’s speech, which besides the lies included his cramped, Ayn Randian-warped vision of America as a nation of predators, sharpers, and speculators eyeing the main chance, Scott Galupo wrote:

In Ryan’s intellectual bubble, there are job creators and entrepreneurs on one side and parasites on the other. There is no account of the vast gray expanse of janitors, waitresses, hotel front-desk clerks, nurses, highway maintenance workers, airport baggage handlers, and taxi drivers. They work hard, but at the end of the day, what can they be said to have “built”?

And Samuel Goldman, noting that “most Americans are not entrepreneurs or business owners” followed up with:

We heard a great deal last night about what a President Romney would do about America’s enemies, at least as John McCain and Condoleeza Rice understand them. We also heard something about Romney’s dedication to freedom, although without much explanation of what that means. But we heard almost nothing about what another Republican administration offers Americans who work jobs rather than “creating” them.

It’s part of the so-called American dream, as Sen. Paul put it, that “any among us can become the next Thomas Edison, the next Henry Ford, the next Ronald Reagan…” Another part is that those who don’t reach the towering heights of achievement can hope for stable lives that include a reasonable measure of comfort. Republicans once endorsed this rather modest ambition. Does anyone believe they care about it now?

A theme of the Burns documentary is that we are a nation of outcasts coming together to help each other make a place---a home---for ourselves in the world.  In his Wikipedia entry, Gregorian is quoted reflecting on the all help he got when he first arrived here:

In Palo Alto, an Armenian family adopted me for all Sunday meals and holidays. All of this reinforced my conviction that diasporas are not ghettos—rather they are connecting bridges to larger communities, be it Jewish, be it Irish, be it Chinese, Armenian, Indian, and so forth. I never realized that until then…

At the Republican Convention, the theme was that we don’t need bridges, literal or metaphorical, because there are no communities that need connecting.  We’re all on our own in a land of opportunists, each of us a little would-be Mitt on the make.

Read Goldman’s whole post at The American Conservative, We Are Not All Entrepreneurs.

Shake every hand, kiss every baby

Welcome to all of you coming over from Andrew Sullivan's place, and thank you very much to Andrew for sending you here. Comments are always welcome, but they're moderated, by me, and I'm going to be out and about all day so I may not get to yours until late. But I promise yours will get posted, although please check out my comment policy.

A sure-fire way to send Mitt Romney into a snit---and, by the way I hope to make that into a meme, A Mitt Snit---is to suggest that his family name, fortune, and connections had anything to do with his success.  He did it all on his own, gosh darn it, and how dare you suggest otherwise! You just hate success! Mitt's not the only rich guy prone to such snits. It's practically a fetish with certain rich assholes that we plebes accept they did it all on their own, with no help from anyone, especially not from the lowly likes of us.  This is not a new or particularly American type.  Josiah Bounderby---and to Brits his name says it all---a factory owner in Dickens' Hard Times gasses on and on through most of the novel about his self-made fortune, setting himself up for others as the example of self-reliance and hard work, only to have it revealed at the end that his poor, widowed mother had been supporting him for years before he struck it lucky.  Mitt Romney was born with many advantages. He made the most of those advantages by working hard and being smart. I happen to think what he did at Bain was the equivalent of captaining a pirate ship, but there's no denying that at least from the crew's point of view he was an intelligent and masterful skipper, and  it's not taking away from his intelligence or his skill to point out that he was given the boat.

He had advantages and those advantages gave him a head start in business and in politics where he was able to start near the top with the first office he tried for. You could even argue that after he lost he had to take a step backwards and settle for being governor. United States Senator is often the next step up from Governor for the majority of governors who have no shot at becoming President.

For anyone who wants to point out that Ted Kennedy had even greater advantages when he first ran for the Senate, yep, he sure did. But he acknowledged them. In fact, whatever you think of the Kennedys, you have to admire the way they've practically made Most People Weren't Born as Lucky as Us the family motto.

But because Mitt was able to start near the top, he was spared having to go through anything like this:

The South Dakota Democratic Party did not constitute much of a platform. Republicans captured 90 percent of state elections between  1889 and 1967. Still, McGovern did not lack for faith, idealism, and a sense of practicality. He saw that if he ever sought elected office he would need an organization behind him, taking it upon himself to build the requisite infrastructure. As one Democratic official noted, George McGovern was not so much rebuilding the Democratic Party in South Dakota as establishing the George McGovern Party. By 1956, after installing party chairmen in every county, McGovern deemed himself ready to run for Congress, targeting Harold Lovre of the First Congressional District, who was armed with four terms in the House and a track record of staggering margins of victory. But McGovern recognized and capitalized on two fundamental traits of the region's voters. first, South Dakotans demanded staunch anticommunist and pro-agriculture stances. The three pillars of the state's economy were corn, wheat, and cattle. Second, he understood that South Dakotans valued a sense of personal connection with their public officials, the perception of at least compassion for their conditions. In other words, the voters seemed to care more about the man than about his politics. As candidate, McGovern resolved to project the impression of principle, rootedness, and neighborly interest. Though naturally uncomfortable with the superficiality of the campaign handshake, McGovern eventually conceded that there was no better way of establishing that personal connection with voters. While Eleanor minded the campaign office with only one other volunteer, McGovern traversed the thirty-eight thousand square miles of South Dakota territory east of the Missouri River that composed the district, shaking hands with as many people as he could, at as many picnics and church dinners as possible. George Cunningham, the former President of the fledgling South Dakota Young Democrats who had recently finished army service, accompanied McGovern on his travels, and they sold campaign buttons at each stop to finance their journey to the next town on their itinerary.

That's from The Eighteen-Day Running Mate: McGovern, Eagleton, and a Campaign in Crisis by Joshua M. Glasser, a so far very interesting and well-reported book (I'm about two-thirds in), although I'd like to ask Glasser about his choice of phrasing there, "the superficiality of the campaign handshake." I don't think there's anything superficial about shaking hands with voters on the campaign trail. That's my point, in fact. A candidate better learn the habit of literally and sincerely reaching out to voters. McGovern apparently did. I'm not sure Mitt has.

That's how you win a down-ticket election. You get out there and you shake as many hands, kiss as many babies, ring as many doorbells as there are minutes in the day every day.  Ideally, before the campaign's over you'll have met every voter and asked them for their vote personally.  Of course the higher up the ladder, the larger the constituency, and the more that ideal becomes an impossibility. So you're forced to do a lot of it by proxy.  Instead of meeting voters one at a time, you meet them in crowds. Instead of showing up on their doorsteps, you show up on their TVs and computer screens and mobile devices. You spend more time with big donors than with small business owners. And what used to be a matter of just doing your job, going out to listen to constituents tell you their troubles and ask for your help, becomes a photo op.

If you worked your way up the political ladder, and you know what's good for you, you remember what the point was and you keep in mind who deserves your attention when you're out on the stump. And when you stop standing in front of the crowd and dive into it instead, all the old skills come back.

This is where Mitt's advantages turn into disadvantages.

Mitt never learned those skills.

Maybe I should say he's never had to practice them as much as most politicians.

He clearly doesn't know instinctively what to do when he has to deal with voters one to one. He's awkward and uncomfortable and prone to gaffes. I don't mean what the press corps would prefer to call gaffes, all his deliberate and calculated lies. I mean what happens when his apparently instinctive goofiness gets the better of him.  He says and does stupid things, like forgetting to thank the owners of a diner he's taken over and trashed for a photo op. In another mood, in another post, making a different point I'd probably say this is a sign that he's an arrogant elitist who can't be bothered to muster up ordinary sympathy for the Help.  And maybe it is or it's part of it.  But I don't know that it is or how much of it it is. I am, however, pretty sure that much of it is simply lack of practice.

Campaigning for the Senate and then for Governor, Mitt didn't have to shake as many hands, kiss as many babies, or ring as many doorbells as George McGovern had to in just his first campaign for Congress.

I'm not comparing Mitt to just McGovern or to Barack Obama or to the Kennedys. I'm comparing him to most other Republican politicians who worked their ways up from city council to state assembly to US Congress.

I noted it during the primaries. Mitt was running an elitist TV and photo op campaign, just as if it was the general election, while Rick Santorum was running as a democrat. Small d democrat. Mitt's implicit message was Vote for Me Because I'm a Leader! Santorum's was Please Vote for Me and I’ll Be Your Guy in the White House. It was ironic because the only truly democratic thing about him was the sweater vest, but he knew how to ask for votes.

When he ran for the Senate, Mitt gave Ted a scare, at first. He was able to do that because of his advantages. He arrived in town with money and a powerful name, and he didn't have to build a party organization for himself by himself.  It was there and eager to help him because he already had money and powerful name.  Of course, Ted had money and an even more powerful name. But he had something else, a different kind of advantage, one he had earned by making the most of the advantages he was born with--- a personal connection with the people of Massachusetts that went back thirty years. Thirty years of church suppers and union local picnics. Thirty years of shaking hands and kissing babies. If he hadn't shaken every voter's hand it was only because he hadn't gotten to the newest-born ones to kiss them yet. When Jack Kennedy first ran for Congress, he knew he wasn’t a natural at door-to-door, church picnic-to-church picnic politicking and that he needed to learn how to do it. He had a great teacher, a former mayor of Boston, his grandfather, John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald.  Bobby like Mitt, was able to start nearer the top.  He wasn’t a natural either.  He learned a lot from running his brother’s campaign for President, but there was something else going on between Bobby and the voters, between Bobby and people, something that was in one way scary but in another way sublime. Whatever that was, it transcended ordinary politicking and required more---from him and out of him---than a talent for shaking hands and kissing babies.  Ted, however, was a natural.  When he was born, the first thing he did was shake the doctor's hand. Then he kissed all the other babies in the nursery.  Whenever he came home to campaign, it was like coming back to the old neighborhood to catch up with the old gang.  Americans love their royalty but they want their princes and princesses to be able to stand up at the pancake breakfast and lead the crowd in a rousing, off key rendition of Sweet Adeline, and not make it seem like they're doing it as a favor or just for the cameras.

This ain't easy.

It takes practice.

And discipline.

And patience.

And humility.

It's helpful if you're born with the right temperament and the talent, but it's a skill you can learn, a habit of mind and heart you can acquire.  You don't have to like it. But you have to mean it.

It hasn't come up as much this campaign, that I've seen, at any rate, but one of the Republicans' regular lines of attack on the President has been to call him a Chicago politician. They mean that he is corrupt, allied with thugs, willing to do anything to win. They mean he is a mirror image of themselves, of course. Whatever the Right says we're doing, they're doing. But the point is they're right about the importance of Obama’s roots in Chicago politics, just wrong about what that's meant.  Obama came up through the ranks shaking hands and kissing babies as a part of doing his job.  He's still very good at that part of doing his job as a democratic small d again politician. Maybe not in Bill Clinton's league, but who is?  Every now and then someone in the Village press corps will pipe up with the observation that Obama doesn't like people. I don't see it myself. What I suspect is that these Village pundits have intuited that the President doesn’t like a certain type of people, Village pundits.  Apparently he doesn’t enjoy the company of billionaire assholes either. Go figure. But whenever I see him out there shaking hands and kissing babies and asking people for their votes and listening to their troubles and complaints, it sure looks to me like he likes them. I don't know how deeply he enjoys it. But he means it.

You know who's even better at it?  Michelle.  I’m not sure how much she enjoys it either. But she really, really means it.

You won't catch her saying "You people." Her word for “you people” is "us."

Mitt went down to Louisiana over the weekend to get his picture taken looking concerned. That's what you do. The President is going down today to get his picture taken looking concerned. But there was a story that came out of Mitt's visit on HuffPo headlined Mitt To Flood Victim: “Go Home And Call 211.” It sounds like he blew her off, and many liberals in my Twitter feed were quick to tweet the link, presumably because they wanted to alert the world to what a heartless jerk Mitt can be.  But that means they didn't read the story.

Gasp! You mean people assume things about stories on the web without reading them, Lance?

Yes, I'm afraid it's true.

The flood victim had lost her house and didn’t know what to do.  It was graceless of Mitt to tell someone who’d just told him she’d lost her home to go home, but he didn't blow her off and she didn't feel blown off.  He was helping her by telling her the best way he knew for her to find help. What the story doesn't say is if he followed through the way he should have.  It would have been a little too dramatic if he'd whipped out his cell phone and called 211 himself right then and there. He could have turned to his aides and asked one of them to do it. But he was with Bobby Jindal. Jindal's the governor. Helping constituents is his job. Mitt should have handed the woman off to Jindal who should have handed her off to one of his aides who should have made the call and asked if the woman needed a ride and promised to have someone from the governor's office go out to her drowned neighborhood to see what needs to be done.

This wouldn't be in keeping with the GOP's current message---You're On Your Own!---but it would  have been reflexive on the part of most politicians, including many Republicans.  This is the job. It's self-serving, of course. But it's still what you're elected to do.   It's how it works.

At any rate, it's how it looked to me when I was growing up and watching Pop Mannion do it.

What I learned from watching Pop us that it ain't easy. It takes practice. And not everyone has what it takes to master it.  Me, for instance.  When I was young and could have taken advantage of my advantage---being Pop's son---I didn't have the patience, I didn't have the discipline, and I didn't have the humility. And I knew it. My sister Linda has all three. Which is why she has an office in the town hall Pop built.
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By the way, I’m assuming you’re going to follow the links and read the stories, but to save you the trouble of having to scroll back up, here they are again:

Cafe Owner After Hosting Romney Event: "I felt like it was a mocking"

Mitt Romney To Flood Victim: “Go Home And Call 211”.

Romneydent for President!

George Washington, businessman.

Sometimes I think the reason Mitt lies so relentlessly and shamelessly is that he thinks we should all know better than to take anything he says as anything more than advertising. To him, it's all sloganeering and were not expected to believe it, just pay attention to it long enough to take note of the product being sold.  Lies like Obama Gutted Welfare Reform are just his versions of New and Improved or Now With 30 % Fewer Calories.  None of it means anything.  None of it is meant to tell us anything about what the product actually does. In this case the product doesn't do anything. The product is simply Mitt himself. What were all supposed to rush out to buy is the wonderfulness of having President Mitt.  Be the first on your block to own the 2013 model!

I don't know. He can't be thinking about what he's saying, not beyond its effectiveness in selling the product. If he gave it a second's real thought he wouldn't have disqualified his own running mate and just about everyone who's held or even run for the job from becoming President.

We have never had a true businessman as President.  There have been a few who at one point or another in their lives ran a business. That few includes the farmers and most of those farmers were plantation owners, which would seem to make owning slaves a qualification for the job, something, sadly, many of the founders probably believed.  Then there was the guy who ran a ranch.  He didn't get rich at it. In fact, he nearly bankrupted himself, and the main lesson he seems to have learned from the business was that he was not a businessman. Theodore Roosevelt was never very good with money.  I suppose you could include the lawyers like Lincoln who had their own firms. Lincoln also owned a grocery for a short while when he was young. He was sort of the early 19th century equivalent of the owner of the local 7-Eleven franchise. I don't think that's the kind of business experience Mitt has in mind.  Nixon clerked in his father's store when he was a kid.  Grant nearly ran his father’s leather goods business into the ground.  Andrew Johnson had a tailor shop. Warren G. Harding was a newspaperman, owner and publisher of the Marion (Ohio) Daily Star, although his wife appears to deserve a lot of the credit for making the paper a successful business.

Herbert Hoover was very successful in business. Hard to see what good that did him as President.

Then there's George W. Bush, our first MBA President, whose most famous---infamous---business decision was to trade Sammy Sosa.

When you get right down to it, no President had the kind of business career Mitt had, and if you take his words at face value, Mitt is making the case that Mitt is better qualified for the job than Washington, Lincoln, both Roosevelts, and Ronald Reagan. Not only has Mitt disqualified Paul Ryan from the Presidency, he's disqualified the other rising stars Republicans will be counting on in 2016, Marco Rubio, Chris Christie, and Bobby Jindal.  If Mitt got his Constitutional amendment the next GOP ticket would have to be Rand Paul and Nikki Haley.

Now, of course the only one Mitt intends to disqualify is Barack Obama, and you could say that all Mitt's arguing here is that running Bain gave him experience and required skills that make him better suited to handling economic issues.  That's a reasonable argument. It ignores the fact that the President has to handle a lot more than economic issues, being leader of the free world and all. Mitt thinks Russia is our biggest threat, on the days when he doesn't think it's Iran, and it's hard to see how his decision not to shutter Staples would help him deal with either one of them.  Whenever the case for a CEO president gets made, the talk is about managing a budget, meeting a payroll, keeping track of farflung employees, making the tough decisions (I.e. Firing people). But what it boils down to is executive experience. And as it happens I agree that executive experience is an important qualification, one of several, not the only one, but a significant one. And judging by the number of governors who have become President, voters seem to think so too. 

It's too bad Mitt was never a governor, then he'd really have a case.

It's a fact that Barack Obama had no significant executive experience. But neither did John McCain.  Didn't keep Romney from stumping for McCain.

To really make the point about how his executive experience makes him better qualified to be Chief Executive than the guy who has been the Chief Executive for the last four years, though, Mitt would have to talk specifically about what he did as an executive. He really would like his Right Wing base to forget that he was governor of Massachusetts and he really, really doesn’t want anybody to know what Bain did.  That's a problem. If his only real qualification, according to himself, is his experience as a business executive but he can't tell you about the kinds of executive decisions he made as a businessman because then you'd really hate him, how can he argue he's the best man for the job?

Lie about it, of course.

I didn't know until Mitt said it at the convention that Bain was a small business dedicated to helping other small businesses grow.

All politicians turn their life experiences into qualifications for whatever office they're running for. Remember that Jimmy Carter, besides being a governor, asked us to vote for him because was also a peanut farmer and a nuclear engineer.  Young politicians turn their lack of experience into a qualification.  And at a basic level it's all true. The first qualification for any office in a democracy is being able to represent your constituents, which usually means being in some meaningful ways representative of them. This is why politicians running for office--- a tautology Republicans pretend doesn't exist. They like to brag on how they're above politics or outside politics or better than politics or in one way or another not in politics.  Politics is a contemptible activity only Democrats engage in.  But as soon as you throw your hat in the ring, you're a politician, like it or not---boast about the most ordinary and banal aspects of their lives, how they're married with kids, how they go to church every Sunday, how they worked at McDonalds in high school, that they're sports fans, that they listen to rock and roll on their iPods, that they went out for pizza the other night.

This is why many politicians strain to make distinctions between themselves and their opponents designed to make the case that their opponents aren't representative of the voters, that they're out of touch, not one of us, un-American.  And it's not false equivalence to say that Democrats do it too.  What is the point of bringing up the Cayman Island and Swiss bank accounts? What is the whole thrust of the attacks on Bain? Why are we demanding to see the tax returns?

To show that Mitt isn't one of us.

The difference is that the Republicans attempt to show that Obama isn't one of us by  simply and brazenly pointing to the color of his skin.

Obama is, in his usual circumspect way, calling Mitt a rich asshole. Mitt in his craven, sideways, you can't prove it way is saying the President is a you know what and you know how they are.

That difference is everything.

Mitt isn't one of us, not least because of his willingness to tell racists and bigots that they're right, black people and brown people and women and gays are not true Americans.  Mitt even knows he's not one of us or rather not particularly representative of the vast majority of the people he needs to vote for him.  But he has to try to make the case that he is beyond "At least I'm white."  So he emphasizes what a great family man he is and how he's a faithful churchgoer. One thing he's done that is moderately clever is to tell folks Well, maybe I'm not like you, but vote for me and I promise I'll do things that will help make you rich like me, although he didn't think that one up. It's been a standard part of the Republican pitch for at least a hundred and twenty years.  Beyond that, though, Mitt has nothing.

Like its been said many times and many ways and by many more people than me, Mitt needs the Right Wing base to forget about his truly qualifying experience as a chief executive but he doesn't dare get into the details of his experience at Bain.  What's an ambitious weasel to do then except lie?

But how can a supposedly moral man, especially one who is a paragon of his church, as Mitt boasts he is, justify being a craven, lying weasel?

Well, all kinds of ways. Human beings are very adept at rationalizing their bad behavior to the point of persuading themselves that it isn't bad behavior at all. It's even the very best of good behavior.

But for the moment I'm going with the idea that Mitt has convinced himself it's all just good advertising.  Sure, he's promising that a vote for him is a vote for whiter teeth, fresher breath, and a brighter smile, but we all know there's really not much difference between toothpastes and only the suckers are truly fooled. The point is to sell the product and that's the name of the game, isn't it? That's all that matters in the end, that more people buy Romneydent than the other leading toothpaste.

It's all about selling the product, and since there's no real difference between the brands, what does it really matter what you do or say to make the sale? A lot of political journalists and pundits see it that way, so why shouldn't Mitt?

Look at the justification for the despicable welfare ads even after other Republicans have admitted they're deceitful, divisive, and racist.

Mitt Corp has no intention of pulling them because they're "effective".  And a significant cohort in the lamestream Media just shrug and some even applaud.

So what happens in 2016 if the Democrats run Mark Warner against Paul Ryan? Here's a guy who not only has business experience---founding and running a company that actually did things as opposed to undoing things---but having been a governor he has real chief executive experience as well.  Will Mitt have to tell Ryan, Sorry, buddy, he has it and you don't?

Of course not.

The Republicans will just dream up some new slogans.

Vote Ryan, because he knows how to flip a burger!

Vote Ryan, because costing his running mate Florida taught him all he needs to know.

Vote Ryan, because when you get right down to it, isn't all you want in a President a set of rock-hard abs?

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Related reading: About that guy who owned a ranch?  Here’s my review of Theodore Roosevelt in the Badlands, Roger L. DiSilivestro’s book about TR’s time out West, The adventures of that Cowboy in the White House back when he was a real cowboy in a bunkhouse.

Image: Life of Washington---The Famer by Junius Brutus Stearns courtesy of the Library of Congress via the University of Delaware.