Lance Mannion

Theresa Marie Schiavo 1963-2005

"She was quiet," childhood friend Sue Pickwell, who was a bridesmaid at Schiavo's wedding, told the Washington Post. "She didn't like the limelight. How ironic is that?"

Friends described her as a sweet, fun girl who giggled a lot, liked to hang out at the mall, watch Starsky and Hutch on TV and travel to Disney World.

Unhappy with her weight and thick glasses, Terri Schindler avoided school dances. She graduated from a Catholic high school in 1981 and met her future husband, Michael Schiavo, in a sociology class at Bucks County Community College.

Michael was the first man who paid any attention to her, friends said. They were married on Nov. 10, 1984, when she was 20, in her childhood church, and went to Disney World on their honeymoon...

"You know what Terri would say right now?" her childhood best friend, Diane Meyer, told the Miami Herald. "She would say, 'All this for me?"'

"Terri never dreamed of saving the world, whether through her living or through her death. She just wanted to be your common, everyday, happy woman."

She's gone.

What happened to Nate?

The three women working the deli counter at the supermarket were discussing a delivery man they were all friendly with.

First deli clerk:  Where's Nate been lately?

Second deli clerk:  Nate?

First deli clerk:  Nate.  What's happened to him?  I haven't seen him around.

Second deli clerk:  Nate?

First deli clerk:  Nate.  Where's he been?

Second deli clerk:  You want to know where Nate is?

First deli clerk:  I miss him.

Second deli clerk:  You don't know about Nate?

Third deli clerk:  She doesn't know where Nate is? (To first deli clerk.) You don't know where Nate is?

First deli clerk:    Where is he?

Second deli clerk:  He violated his parole or something.  He's locked up.

First deli clerk:  He's where?

Second deli clerk:  He's locked up.  They locked him up.  He'll be locked up for a few months or something, a little while, I'm not sure.

Third deli clerk:  Not a little while.  A long while.  A looooooong while.

First deli clerk:  He's in jail?

Third deli clerk (turning it into a song):  Locked up, locked up, they locked him up, and threwwww away the key.

Second deli clerk:  So he's not with the company anymore.

First deli clerk:  Hmmmm.  (Thinks it over.)  Huh.  (Thinks some more while she slices a half of pound of roast beef for me.)  How about that. (A little more thought and then she comes to a conclusion.) Well, it just goes to show you.

But the other two women had wandered away out of earshot, the second deli clerk to wash her hands at a sink in back and the third deli clerk to do something in the walk in cooler, so the first deli clerk shrugged and stopped talking and I never got to hear what it just goes to show.

Spring post card

March 30, 2005. Temperature 61 degrees.  Maybe, just maybe, it's spring...

 

Morning Gazette, Special Schiavo Edition

Somebody linked to my Terri Schiavo post in the comments section of a blog I can't identify.   The blogger's using Haloscan and there's no title or address to tell me where the comments are coming from.  But a lot of traffic is coming over from there and I'm grateful for the link---thanks Semper Fubar---and everybody who's here after following the link is very welcome.

Whatever blog it is, there's a very lively discussion going on, mostly focusing on Jesse Jackson's setting up a booth at the carnival outside the hospice caring for Terri Schiavo.  Can't get you to the blog itself, but I can get you to the comments:

http://www.haloscan.com/comments/katsiva/111212847670249361/

(The beauty of the web upadate:  Shakespeare's Sister has figured out the comments are from AMERICAblog, which is great.  John Aravosis is one of my blogging heroes and I'm proud to be able to welcome some of his readers.  The post the comments belong to is here, but a whole lot of other things are going on over on John's page you should check out.

Thanks also to LondonLee and Denis DeKat for helping out here.)

Jesse Jackson is a showboat, an egomaniac, a hypocrite, and something of a mountebank, but he is usually on the side of the angels.  Scoundrels can be heroes.  Until Percival and Galahad showed up, Sir Gawaine was King Arthur's second greatest knight, rivaling Launcelot in courage, gallantry, and prowess.  And virtuous and decent-hearted men can be villains just by choosing the wrong side in a fight.  Jackson uses what would otherwise be character flaws---his vanity and his snake oil salesmanship---as tools to do good, more often than not.

This time out, Jesse has picked the wrong side, but white liberals need to remind themselves that the Democrats' most faithful and most steadfast supporters, African-Americans, are on the whole social conservatives!   

And I'd like to think that one of the reasons Jackson is there is to rescue the Schindlers from the likes of Randall Terry and the Right Wing money machine that has adopted and coopted them.

Mark Kleinman doubts it.  He lumps Jackson in with a lot of other clowns and camera hogs and con artists who've been drawn to this circus.

Meanwhile:

PZ Myers has a new hero.  He watched a doctor,  a real doctor, a neurologist who actually examined Terri Schiavo, on Joe Scarborough and cheered as the doctor tore apart Scarborough and Lisa Daniels, who pretending to be journalists, were arguing that Terri Schiavo is somehow  defying the laws of biology and managing to to achieve consciousness without that part of her brain where consciousness resides.

(More:  MediaMatters has a transcript.  Dr Cranford is heroic, Scarborough weasels and lies, and Lisa Daniels has probably prompted the dean of whatever journalism school she attended to write her a letter requesting she return her degree.  It's stunning.)

Fred Clark, the slacktivist, takes a thoughtful look at how the seemingly very nice people supporting the Schindlers in their desperate attempts to "save" Terri are, through their very niceness, can "wind up having a very nasty effect on the world around them."  (Via Suburban Guerrilla.)

Attorney Bill Altreuter, at Outside Counsel, remembers a case he handled that addressed the issue of consciousness in an incapacitated body, that of a young man who shot out the prefrontal lobe of his brain in a gun accident.

Bill also answers people in the save Terri crowd who ask the already answered and answered and answered again question, Who is to decide what Terri would have wanted?

Jason Chervokas tells the story of his father-in-law's death and the painful decisions that his family had to make and concludes:

...as much as I despise the nattering, self-serving, hogwash of the Republican leadership, I nurture a special contempt for religious leaders who teach that the court-ordered force feeding of a woman who will never think again is a celebration of life.

A peaceful, honest, natural death, as painful as it may be, is part of life's cycle. Interminable stasis, lying on a table, sustained by machinery is something else entirely.

Also, in my Schiavo post I noted that the priest who told his miracle story at Easter Mass neglected to mention the doubt that had been cast on the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin.  In the comments, Mac Magillucuddy reports that doubt has been cast on that doubt.

The normally mild-mannered and reasonable to a fault Jack Shannon lets go of the reins for a moment to take on the growing "tyranny of the minority," as the Religious Right insists more and more that the rest of us sinners convert to their way of thinking.

Watching the fundamentalists early on I thought that reason would prevail.  Foolish of me.  Reason never wins when confronting fundamentalism.  Anyone with an expectation that a reasonable dialog is possible is bound to be disappointed.

There's no reasoning with them, says Jack, because what they want to bring about is the end of Reason.  They've been working on:

A conscious, well-planned, well-financed effort to conform the reality of that vast center of the citizenry to whatever that fundamentalist minority of Americans thinks that reality should be...

And Shakespeare's Sister, who last week admitted to being on the brink of compassion fatigue when it came to the Schindlers, has not only succumb but has completely blown her stack at Terri's parents and others, including Jesse Jackson.

There is no Terri to save

Priest saying the mass Easter Sunday at Old Mother and Father Blonde's church was giving a pretty decent sermon. Nothing grand. It wasn't a rhetorical masterpiece and it contained no original ideas or even complex ones. But it was thoughtful, well-written, coherent, and he delivered it well. But just at the point where I thought and all the parents of squirmy little kids prayed he was wrapping up he got a second wind and began to tell a story he called The Miracle of Lanciano.

Seems that a ways back, thirteen hundred years ago or so, a priest in the Italian town of Lanciano was having a crisis of faith. But he went about performing his priestly duties out of loyalty to his congregation and a sense of obligation to be true to his vows. Then one day, as he was saying mass, he looked down at the host on the altar and saw that it had become ringed with real human flesh! And then he looked down into the chalice and saw that the wine had turned to real human blood!

A miracle!  His faith was restored. (The priest saying our mass didn't say whether or not that priest had ever heard the story of Doubting Thomas.)  But God wasn't done.

The host and the blood never changed back into mere bread and wine. Never. For centuries they have preserved themselves in that church and if you go there today you can see them.

This is a new one on me.

I was an enthusiastic consumer of miracle stories and tales of the saints when I was a little kid, but I missed hearing about Lanciano until the other day.

It gets better.  Our priest told us that the blood and that slice of miraculous cold cuts were examined by scientists in 1970.  "Real scientists, including non-Catholics and non-believers."  Their tests proved that the flesh was real human tissue---heart tissue!---and the blood was real human blood, type AB in fact, the same type as found in the Shroud of Turin!

(The priest didn't mention that other scientists have since examined the Shoud and concluded it's a fake.)

I swear, in all the years of church going I've put in, and I was an altar boy, I'd never heard a priest tell one of those fairy tales from the pulpit.

I know it happens. I've known priests who believe this stuff.  But this was the first time I remember hearing a priest talk like this to an audience that wasn't made up of children.

The nuns told us these stories all the time. The nun I had in first grade specialized in the grisliest tales of the martyrs. But the priests at our church aimed their sermons at an audience of adults, many of whom, they knew, were scientists at General Electric. When they wanted a laugh they told a joke or talked about money.

I guess I'd just been lucky at all the other churches I attended since and with all the other priests whose sermons I've sat through. (Mother and Father Blonde tell me that I wasn't happy with this guy's sermon last Easter either, but I don't remember it and they say I only complained that he spoke too long.)  But somehow I managed to get through until this Sunday thinking, not that all priests themselves were smarter than this but they were at least smart enough to know that most of their congregations live in the 21st century and so they should leave the medieval hocus pocus out of their homilies if they want to be taken seriously.

Obviously this guy, who, my Mother Blonde tells me, had his own crisis of faith when he was young and was brought back to the church by his experiences working with Mother Teresa, doesn't worry about that, and his fairy tale wouldn't have bothered me so much except that I was pretty sure where he was headed with this talk about miracles.

Terri Schiavo.

I decided it was a good time to go outside to stretch my legs.

I walked around the church parking lot for a good 10 minutes, enough time I thought for him to finish up and get on with the mass.  Turned out to be just enough time as he had just wrapped up when I returned to our pew.

But I was wrong about him bringing up Terri Schiavo in his sermon.

He saved her for the Prayer of the Faithful.

He stepped on the lecter's lines in order to ask us all to pray for Terri who "today is being denied the Eucharist."

I don't have much useful to add to the argument.  Probably you've read more than I have and know more I do.  If you need to read more or want to catch up, Lindsay Beyerstein has been on a mission and you can't do better than to start with her efforts at Majikthise and work your way out from there.   Mark Kleinman has also been prolific on the subect, taking a slightly different tack, but heading for the same port, and you can start almost anywhere on his page, here, for instance.

All I've got to offer is my anger and my two cents worth of opinion.

Everybody is creeped out by different things in this horror show.  My particular disgust is triggered by the sight of all the priests who have gathered about Terri Schiavo's parents.

I'm not going to get into here my contempt for the men in dresses.  I'll just say that most of these guys had their chance to defend a whole lot of innocent lives in the past and they failed to do it and it's stomach-turning to see them out there trying to make up for their sins by encouraging the Schindlers in their hopeless and wrong-headed attempts to "save" their daughter.

"We are Terri's voice. Right now, Terri is fighting for her life," the Rev. Patrick Mahoney angrily shouted Sunday, his face reddening. He pledged to protest outside the White House on Monday.

"Everyone is willing to write this woman's obituary except one person. And that's Terri Schiavo herself," Paul O'Donnell, a Roman Catholic Franciscan monk and a family spokesman, said outside the hospice Monday.

The Schindlers are routinely described as devout Catholics. I've known a lot of devout Catholics. I used to be one. And I can tell you the Schindlers aren't devout. They're way beyond devout. They're not devout Catholics. They're crazy Catholics.

I don't know if they've been driven crazy by their grief and their desperation or if they were crazy in their Catholicism before they lost their daughter.  Maybe a story has been done about this, but I doubt it.  As Wolcott has pointed out, the news media refuses to examine the pathologies of the religious and because they prefer the dramatic to the quiet and thoughtful, and modest, they routinely portray the self-dramatizing crazies and loonies as the real believers while ignoring all the rest of us.

The Schindlers look to me like the kind of family who causes trouble in every parish---the gung holier than thou types who are never satisfied with the pastor's orthodoxy and who are always trying to present themselves as the hearts and souls of the church and who think that everybody else in the parish ought to defer to them because they have the bishop's and God's ears.  These families come in two forms of dysfunction, mother-crazy and father-crazy.

There are the families who have arranged themselves to defer to and humor the mother's neuroses. Imagine if you had Peggy Noonan for a mother.

And there are families who have been arranged in such a way by the father to give him complete control over everybody's thinking. The Schindlers look to me like this kind of family, but I don't know if they always were or if it's a result of the crisis they've been suffering (and prolonging for themselves) for 14 years.

However it came about, the Schindlers' beliefs are not Catholic anymore.  They've invented their own little religion.  It's the cult of Terri, and if they had honest spiritual advisors they'd have been told that they long ago left the Church behind and had entered the territory of hersey and blasphemy.

They'd also have been told that their daughter died 14 years ago.

Brain dead is a legalistic term. Persistent vegetative state is a medical term. Neither term describes what has really happened to Terri Schiavo.

She died.

Fourteen years ago when she collapsed and the part of her brain that contained her mind turned to mush.

Without a brain a body is not a person. Without a brain the body ceases to contain a person. Without a brain the person is not in a persistent vegetative state.  The person is not brain dead.  The person is dead.  Terri Schavio does not exist.  What is in that bed, what is being kept animated or what will be starved to death is something Terri Schavio walked around in for a while.  The part of that thing that used to contain her, that used to be her, was turned to pudding and has been pudding for 14 years.  It has shown no sign of miraculously reassembling itself.  If you believe in an immortal soul, you still have to accept that the soul needs the brain in order to be a part of this life. If a bullet had done to her brain what her heart failure did, the rest of her body would probably have died of shock, but even if it hadn't nobody looking at the wound would doubt that Terri had been killed.

Terri Schiavo's body is as effectively not her as if she had been decapitated.

I understand why her parents can't face this fact. (Although my sympathy for the Schindlers goes only so far. Shakespeare's Sister, bringing together posts from The Mahablog and Emma at The American Street, explains how Terri's parents can inspire "compassion fatigue." ) I can understand why lots of other people don't want to face it either.  None of us wants to admit that our lives are that fragile.  That our minds, our selves, are dependent on a whole lot of little biological machines haphazardly and imperfectly working together and that one little misfire can trigger the end of us.

None of us wants to die, all of us want to believe in miracles, it's human to hope that we can conquer death.  Taking out the feeding tube, letting that body die, is admitting that death triumphs and miracles don't happen.

So I can understand why people, even people who think that Michael Schiavo is in the right here and it is time to let Terri's body join the rest of her, speak as though there is still a Terri inside that body.  It's not Terri we're all trying to save, it's ourselves.

I do not, however, understand how anybody looking at the body in that bed sees a live human being, let alone sees Terri Schiavo.

To me what is in that bed looks less sentient than the animatronic figures at Disney World.  Whatever "intelligence" there is to be found in the eyes, in the smile---that ghastly grimace---appears less than can be found in a doll's.  What it looks like to me is a corpse.  Every still photograph of her looks like an autopsy photo. 

I haven't seen any of the videos, fortunately, but I suspect that if I did what I would see would look like a body on a mortuary slab hooked up to a car battery and irregularly jolted with electricity---which is essentially what's happening, except that the battery happens to be within the body.

I don't understand how anybody calling themselves a doctor could look at those pictures or videos and not be reminded of their first days in gross anatomy class.

I don't even understand how her family can look down at that bed and see Terri.

This was Terri Schiavo.

Anyone who sees that vital and intelligent woman in that bed is imagining things.

I suspect that what people who aren't her family are looking at is not the body in the bed but the loving mother bending over it, and their sympathy is not with Terri Schiavo so much as with the heartbroken Mrs Schindler.

Someone should have saved Mrs Schindler.

The best someones to have done that were the priests she trusted. Maybe some of them tried, and that's why the Schindlers have turned for help to secular kooks and con artists like Randall Terry.

But I know that there are a lot of priests down there like the one I heard Easter Sunday and they've been filling the Schindlers' heads with thoughts of miracles.

I am not a good Catholic. But I am still just enough of one that I can't stop believing, if only a little bit.

But just a little bit.

And I certainly don't believe in an omnipotent and all-knowing God.

There's an old argument that begins with the question, "If God can do anything, can he make a rock that's too big for him to lift?"

My answer is, "Yes, and in fact he did.  We call it the universe."

God appears to have created a world in which he has no power.

All the power to change things, fix things, save things resides in us.

Wherever God is, however God goes about the business of being God, he/she/it/they can only do it through us. Some people say that through us God performs miracles.  I believe that working through us God is limited to being able to do only what we can do. He has only human hands and a human brain as his tools. What we can't do, he can't do.

If God could have saved Terri he'd have done it by now.  For eight years, Michael Schiavo let him try through the only means God has, the hands of Terri's doctors.  Eight years!

The Right is lying again about what Liberals believe. That's what they do best. Lie. And they know they're lying. They know that Liberals don't want to "kill" Terri Schiavo. They know we are defending her right to have made decisions about her own medical care and defending her husband's rights to act as her husband. They know that if Liberals ran the Government we wouldn't have convened a special session to pass unconstitutional legislation "for the relief of Terri Schiavo's parents."  We'd be passing legislation to undo all the damage they've done to health care for everybody.

They know that they're the ones who want to make it impossible for the families of future Terri Schiavos to sue so that they can obtain the money to keep their Terris alive for 14 years while doctors do everything they can to bring them back.  They know they're the ones voting for cuts in Medicare so that people with diseases that will kill them but which could be cured or ameliorated can't afford treatment and so even if they wish to struggle on they have no choice but to die. They know that their president signed legislation that allows hospitals to decide to pull the plugs on patients who are, unlike Terri, conscious, still alive, but dying, because they're families can't afford to pay for any more treatment.

They know they're the ones voting to cut funding for treatment of brain-injured soldiers returning from Iraq!

They know, and they still lie.

They should be hit over the heads with their lies all the time and it's disgusting how the Congressional Democratic leadership has surrendered so completely on the issue.

(Update:  Susan at Suburban Guerrilla has  posted a cartoon by Scott Bateman that makes the above points beautifully clear.  Everybody should memorize what it says.)

But I am still most disgusted with the priests who are preaching a belief in miracles.

This seems to me a great heresy or blasphemy. God does not do conjuring tricks. He gave human beings brains and opposable thumbs and he set us to work on the job of saving and caring for ourselves.

God's greatest gift to us is science.

And rather than put our faith in science, which is to say, in God, the priests want us to put our faith in magic.

By the way, Terri Shiavo was not denied communion on Sunday.

New (blue) kid on the (red) block

Lori, a favorite commenter here at Club Mannion, has, a bit nervously, started her own blog, Blue Girl in a Red State.  She's off to a fine start with this post reacting to the pompous ass Joe Scarborough's interview with Terri Schiavo's sanctimonious twit of a brother.

Lori, who from now on shall be known as Blue Girl, passes along some interesting news that I hadn't heard anywhere else about George W. Greer, the conservative, Republican, Christian judge in charge of the Schiavo case whom the Save Terri's Mindless Body From a Decent Burial crowd despise as the epitome of godless liberal judicial activism.

Greer was roommates with Jim Morrison in college.   Greer didn't much like Morrison, according to Blue Girl, but who did.

And Greer has stopped attending his church because of the reactions of some of his fellow Baptists to his rulings in the Schiavo case.

I don't imagine this is going to turn Greer into a Democrat, but I'll bet Jeb Bush is going to have to work awful hard for his vote in 2008.

Tom DeLay and the Bush Leaguers have set out to destroy all possible sources of opposition, and have so far done a good job on the Congressional Democrats, the news media, and the intelligence community.  Hollywood is wavering, but academia seems to be standing firm---at least the President of Columbia is, reports Roy Edroso.  But I'm hopeful that their new assault on the judiciary will backfire on them the way things blew up in Joe McCarthy's face when he turned his attacks on the United States Army, which, by the way, is still pretty high on the GOP hit list.  They don't like anybody, do they?  Especially anybody who is smart and good at their jobs and has the gall to make them look bad.  They'll be turning on the churches next.

At any rate, please go give Blue Girl a nice big welcome to the web.

The Easter Bunny managed to find us anyway

I hope those of you who celebrated the day had a happy Easter and those of you who didn't had a happy weekend.

We were on the road, visiting Nana Blonde and Grandaddy Blonde.

Some notes from the visit.

The Jersey Turnpike is the dullest stretch of road I've ever driven, not counting the parts of it that induce sheer, heart-stopping terror.  It's straight, there's nothing to look at it, it's busy, and the rest stops are crummy.

Heading south, the crummiest rest stop is the Molly Pitcher Service Area.   There should be a law against putting a Roy Rogers, a Nathan's, and an Arthur Treacher's Fish and Chips all together with no other choices.

The crummiest rest stop as you head north is the Woodrow Wilson Service Area, which is just plain filthy.

If you want to see what the Earth will look like when the Borg are finally finished colonizing us, drive Route 202 between the King of Prussia Mall and Devon.   It's a three mile concrete chute.  The walls of the chute are so high most of the way that you cannot see what sort of landscape you're driving through which makes you feel as though you are driving on the moon.  But some thoughtful Borg engineer believed he could make up for the lack of scenery by having silhouettes of trees etched into the sound barriers along the way.

This particular stretch of road seems to have been designed not just with the idea of moving cars along most efficiently---cars not driven by anyone who actually has any business in the area and who may want to get off the road at some point---but with the additional purposes of blighting the landscape and crushing the souls of anyone who has to travel on it or look at it from the ground, and confirms Garrison Keillor's definition of engineers:  "Merciless men bent on the eradication of beauty."

There's a very nice Barnes and Noble at the Devon end of this horror though, and you don't have to drive 202 to get there from King of Prussia.  You can take 23 through Valley Forge, which I never remember to do on the way out but always make sure to do on the way back, and if you do this at 11 o'clock at night after the Barnes and Noble has closed and the baristas in the cafe have kicked you out with your coffee, you better drive slowly because the roadsides all the way through the park are lined with browsing deer, whose fur turns an eerie smoky gray in the moonlight.

Every time I look at the chocolate cup cakes in the B and N cafe I think, boy those look delicious, and every time I give in and have one I'm disappointed.

The first chapter of Garth Nix's Mister Monday reminds me very much in tone and vision of Terry Pratchett's Thief of Time, but that's ok because I really liked Thief of Time and Nix has his own story going and I think I'll read all of Mister Monday myself before I give it to the 11 year old.

The barista who served me my disappointing cup cake and the coffee I wound up drinking as I drove slowly past the deer in Valley Forge highly recommends the other books in Nix's Keys to the Kingdom series, of which Mister Monday is the first, but she is even more enthusiastic about Nix's Abhorsen Trilogy and the Old Kingdom Series.

She was about 19 or 20, which means it's a good bet that one of the first "big" chapter book she'd have read was the first Harry Potter.  Is somebody tracking the reading habits of her cohort?  I imagine them moving from Potter through Philip Pullman's Dark Materials on to Jonathan Strange & Mr Norell and think they might be changing the face of fiction again.   I know some writers and editors argue that the future is in mysteries and thrillers, but maybe it's in fantasy.

It sure isn't in what passes for realism.  I will read every book by Garth Nix before I read a word of Happy Baby, no matter how much Maud Newton raves about it.

Maud was right about Jonathan Ames and Wake Up, Sir!, though, so maybe I should reconsider.

The 9 year old was up at 4 in the morning Easter sunday, ready to hunt for his basket.  I was already awake with routine insomnia.  I tried to persuade him to go back to bed.  He said:

"Dad, let me explain to you some facts about kids.  On holidays we're too excited to sleep, but on most of them we can go back to bed.  But on the major holidays, like Christmas and Easter, we're just too excited.  That's just a fact."

Good Friday, three p.m.

My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring?

   O my God, I cry in the day time, but thou hearest not; and in the night season, and am not silent.

   But thou art holy, O thou that inhabitest the praises of Israel.

   Our fathers trusted in thee: they trusted, and thou didst deliver them.

   They cried unto thee, and were delivered: they trusted in thee, and were not confounded.

   But I am a worm, and no man; a reproach of men, and despised of the people.

   All they that see me laugh me to scorn: they shoot out the lip, they shake the head, saying,

   He trusted on the LORD that he would deliver him: let him deliver him, seeing he delighted in him.

   But thou art he that took me out of the womb: thou didst make me hope when I was upon my mother's breasts.

   I was cast upon thee from the womb: thou art my God from my mother's belly.

   Be not far from me; for trouble is near; for there is none to help.

   Many bulls have compassed me: strong bulls of Bashan have beset me round.

   They gaped upon me with their mouths, as a ravening and a roaring lion.

   I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint: my heart is like wax; it is melted in the midst of my bowels.

   My strength is dried up like a potsherd; and my tongue cleaveth to my jaws; and thou hast brought me into the dust of death.

   For dogs have compassed me: the assembly of the wicked have inclosed me: they pierced my hands and my feet.

   I may tell all my bones: they look and stare upon me.

   They part my garments among them, and cast lots upon my vesture.

                                                                  ---Psalm 22:1-18

The not so tragic muse

I was thinking of following up my post on Stargate SG-1 with my long-contemplated disquisition on Qui-gon Jinn: The Essential Man. But then Mrs Norman Maine made another one of her welcome and too infrequent appearances in my comments section to snap me out of it.

"You are spending, way, WAY too much time and bandwidth thinking this stuff through," she wrote.

She should know.  She spends way too much time thinking about these kinds of things herself, which she admits, although her over-thinking focuses on Bertie Wooster and Lord Peter Wimsey.  Mrs Maine is a far classier and more sophisticated nerd than I am.

But her well-intentioned warning, while stopping me before I nerd-ed again, had the unfortunate effect of sending me into a spiral of self-doubt and self-loathing that threatened to bring on an attack of blogger's block.

Suddenly I realized that without Star Wars and Stargate and Star Trek I didn't have anything else to think about, that there was nothing else I wanted to think about. I sunk into a slough of despond. I closed the bar early and retreated to a back table with a bottle of bourbon.

"Say it, Sam," I ordered my piano player.

"What's that, Mr Lance?"

"You know what I'm talking about. You said it for her, you can say it for me. If she can take it, so can I. Say it."

And he did, softly.

"Space...the final frontier...these are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise..."

Then my eyes teared up, my vision swam, mercifully the booze kicked in, and I dropped my head and slept, dreaming of Paris.

What happened to me?  I used to be a grown up. I used to be able to think about important things, art, music, literature, philosophy and the meaning of Life as taught by philosophers who weren't three feet high, green, and prone to invert their sentence structures.

Then she walked in.

Our Girl in Chicago.

At About Last Night OGIC put up a post about Henry James as a sly humorist.

...James isn't famed for making people laugh, but when he's guarding his turf an evil sense of humor can rear its toothy head. For example, in the sections of his famous "Art of Fiction" essay where he is responding directly to Walter Besant's lecture of the same name, James is hilariously withering...

From there OGIC goes on to give an example of the Master cutting up in Death of the Lion.

My first thought after reading about how the author of Wings of the Dove, The Golden Bowl, and Turn of the Screw was a comic as well as an ironic realist was, "There's no telling where some people will find their their yuks," and I remembered my old teacher, Leslie Epstein, saying to me once, "The Russians think Dostoevsky's a gas."

But my second thought was, Wait, I know this!  I know James is funny!  I find him funny!  I love Henry James! Well, I used to. Back when I was a literate and sophisticated nerd. I've read and re-read many of his novels and short stories and I know he's funny, especially in his short stories, but even in his novels.  Not Wings of the Dove, maybe, although Kate Croy's early scene with her no good father has moments.  But Washington Square, The Bostonians, What Masie Knew, even Portrait of a Lady, even The Golden Bowl have characters and scenes and passages and lines of dialogue as funny as any in Dickens.  Most of James' novels were comedies, after all, although they were comedies in the same way Shakespeare's problem comedies were comedies---they don't all end with a laugh and happy marriage.

But it was not just Dickens and Shakespeare I was reminded of when I read James. I suddenly remembered a short story called A New England Winter that contains--and you'll like this Mrs Maine---lines I think P.G. Wodehouse cribbed from when he was thinking up Bertie Wooster and his pals at the Drones Club.

Florimond Daintry had stayed at home for three days after his arrival; he had sat close to the fire, in his slippers, every now and then casting a glance over his shoulders at the hard white world which seemed to glare at him from the other side of the window-panes. He was very much afraid of the cold, and he was not in a hurry to go out and meet it. He had met it, on disembarking in New York, in the shape of a wave of frozen air, which had travelled from some remote point in the West (he was told), on purpose, apparently, to smite him in the face. That portion of his organism tingled yet with it, though the gasping, bewildered look which sat upon his features during the first few hours had quite left it.

In the little artistic circle in which he moved in Paris, Florimond Daintry was thought to have a great deal of eye. His power of rendering was questioned, his execution had been called pretentious and feeble; but a conviction had somehow been diffused that he saw things with extraordinary intensity. No one could tell better than he what to paint, and what not to paint, even though his interpretations were sometimes rather too sketchy. It will have been guessed that he was an impressionist; and it must be admitted that this was the character in which he proceeded on his visit to Miss Daintry. He was constantly shutting one eye, to see the better with the other, making a little telescope by curving one of his hands together, waving these members in the air with vague pictorial gestures, pointing at things which, when people turned to follow his direction, seemed to mock the vulgar vision by eluding it.

He was of course very conscious of his eye; and his effort to cultivate it was both intuitive and deliberate. He spoke of it freely, as he might have done of a valuable watch or a horse.

A little bit of tweaking, a little relaxing of the formal diction, and Florimond could take his place right along side some of Wodehouse's artistically pretentious young men. Like the poet Rockmettler Todd:

Constitutionally the laziest young devil in America, he had hit on a walk in life which enabled him to go the limit in that direction.  He was a poet.  At least, he wrote poems when he did anything; but most of his time, as far as I could make out, he spent in a sort of trance.  He told me once that he could sit on a fence, watching a worm and wondering what on earth it was up to, for hours at a stretch.

He had his scheme of life worked out to a fine point.  About once a month he would take three days writing a few poems; the other three hundred and twenty-nine days of the year he rested.  I didn't know there was enough money in poetry to support a fellow, even in the way in which Rocky lived; but it seems that, if you stick to exhortations to young men to lead the strenuous life and don't shove in any rhymes, American editors fight for the stuff.

Or Corky Corcoran, the painter:

I'm bound to say New York's a most sprightly place to be exiled in. Everybody was awfully good to me, and there seemed to be plenty of things going on:  so, take it for all in all, I didn't undergo any frightful hardships.  Blokes introduced me to blokes, and so on and so forth, and it wasn't long before I knew squads of the right sort, some of who rolled in the stuff in houses up by the Park, and others who lived with the gas turned down mostly around Washington Square---artists and writers and so forth. Brainy coves.

Corky, the bird I am about to treat of, was one of the artists.  A portrait painter, he called himself, but as a matter of fact his score up to date had been nil.  You see, the catch about portrait painting---I've looked into the thing a bit---is that you can't start painting portraits till people come along and ask you to, and they won't come and ask you to until you've painted a lot first.  This makes it kind of difficult, not to say tough, for the ambitious youngster.

Or Bertie Wooster's novelist pal, Boko Fittleworth:

Well, I could readily understand Boko falling in love at first sight with Nobby, of course, for she is a girl liberally endowed with oomph.  But how she could have fallen in love at first sight with Boko beat me.  The first sight of Boko reveals to the beholder an object with a face like an intellectual parrot.  Furthermore, as is the case with so many of the younger literati, he dresses like a tramp cyclist, affecting turtleneck sweaters and grey flannel bags with a patch on the knee and conveying a sort of general suggestion of having been left out in the rain overnight in an ash can.

So, once upon a time, I was able to think about other things.  In fact, I thought way, WAY too much about them. Not only did I see foreshadowings of Wodehouse in James, I could compare and contrast their work, to Wodehouse's advantage!

I could even bring Zola into the act.

This is from a letter I wrote to a writer friend back when. I'd just finished reading James' The Tragic Muse and my recommendation to her was to:

Steer clear of it. There's too much really good stuff by James to bother with what was essentially a long letter to himself saying, Buck up, Hank, and keep writing, nevermind the slow sales and the maddening successes of the lady novelists!

What really bugged me about the book was that it's a story about actresses and painters---young actresses and young painters---in which no one has sex or even takes their clothes off. I know James could be a little prissy but come on, he wasn't a prude. I moved on to a novella, A London Life, and he's got as many people hopping in and out of as many different beds as Georges Feydeau. So it all happens offstage? It happens. In the Tragic Muse the artists all behave like a...

I was going to say a gang of exceptionally saintly Buddhist monks in a Tibetan temple, but the Dali Lama's more worldly and sensual than James made Miriam Root and Nick Dormer.

Just for the contrast I picked up Zola's The Masterpiece, his book about painters, and voila! Takes Emile a page and a half to get the heroine out of her clothes, and in three pages the hero's sketching her nude. Of course he does it with an amount of contrivance that would make a Hollywood screenwriter blush for shame.

I don't need sex and nudity, I just need to know that the young artists in question are capable of both. All of James' artists are a bloodless crew and all of them are old no matter what age he makes them. (I've never read Roderick Random, though.) In this regard P.G. Wodehouse is actually more realistic than James. All his young writers and painters and playwrights are having a high old time, mixing it up regularly with actresses and chorus girls, staying up until dawn, guzzling champagne and bootleg whiskey till the cows come home. James' artists retire by nine, taking nothing more stimulating than a mug of warm milk and an improving book with them to bed.

In everything critical I've read on Wodehouse---which is not much, since fortunately there isn't much---the critic being critical always seems to feel a need to instruct me that Wodehouse's world is not a realistic one. (Usually there's also a footnote explaining that the moon is not made of green cheese and the stork does not deliver babies.) And one of the proofs the critic offers to show that Blandings and the Drones Club are not real places is that no one has sex.

Besides this being a showing up of the critics' own prurience (which is really just an ingrown Puritanism) it's also a display of their literal-mindedness. Wodehouse's young lovers are alive to each other's sexual attractiveness and they are robust in their demonstrations and declarations of desire (even the milksops), they just are never explicit. For them it goes without saying. But because they don't talk about it the critics think it's not there. Which brings me to a real point: despite TV and movies, despite a five hundred year tradition of theater going and realistic painting, despite glossy magazines and advertising, I think the crowd of people that has collected around books in the last 70 years or so is a singularly non-visually oriented collection of human beings. In a nutshell: I think there are an awful lot of readers and writers of serious fiction who can't PICTURE what the characters are doing. So when Boko folds Nobby in his arms or Florence Craye turns sideways to Bertie they don't see what's happening or the goods that are on display.

Probably I'll still get around to my thesis on why the Star Wars universe falls apart when Qui-gon dies. But it won't be today. Today, thanks to OGIC's influence, I feel almost smart again.

Not brilliant. But smart enough to take on this news from Shakespeare's Sister. Turns out that, 135 years after he died, Alexandre Dumas is coming out with a new novel.

A frank, fearless young novelist in love

"I'm sorry for that boy," said Aunt Dahlia.

"For Blair Eggleston?  Why?"

"He's in love with Honoria Glossop."

"What!" I cried.  She amazed me.  I wouldn't have thought it could be done.

"And is too timid to tell her so.  It's often that way with these frank, fearless young novelists.  They're devils on paper, but put them up against a girl who doesn't come out of their fountain pen and their feet get as cold as a dachsund's nose.  You'd think when you read his novels, that Blair Eggleston was a menace to the sex and ought to be kept on a chain in the interest of pure womanhood, but is he?  No, sir.  He's just a rabbit.  I don't know if he has ever actually found himself in an incense-scented boudoir alone with a girl with sensual lips and dark smouldering eyes, but if he did, I'll bet he would take a chair as far away from her as possible and ask her if she had read any good books lately."

                        ---from "Jeeves and the Greasy Bird" by P.G. Wodehouse

My faithful correspondents

Like you I get a lot of mail from friendly strangers worried about my financial well-being, my sexual potency, my struggles to find prescription drugs without prescriptions, low interest credit cards, and married women looking for romantic companionship.  Most of them I delete without a moment's thought, well, except for the one's about the lonely-hearted married women, I give them a moment's thought before trashing their pleas for soulmates content to know them only via their webcams.  Most Spam is so obvious about what it is that I can't believe that anybody actually looks at the messages and I suspect that the real point of it isn't to drum up business, it's to see how many people the spammers can annoy on a given day.

But there are a few that really seem to try and I almost respect them for it.  Besides hesitating before deleting the horny housewives spam, I also pause at the ones with interesting addresses.  I get whole bunches from "people" with rather unusual names, and I wonder who thinks these up?  Here are some I've gotten enough of a kick out of lately that I've actually thought about reading their email to see if their messages are as amusing as their noms d'spam:

Deterrence Q. Attended
Thermostat F. Scepters
Rubbished O. Redecorated
Adjudicates F. Backpeddling

Disembark F. Fan
Aphasics M. Brando
Quantities E. Mislays

Robyn S. Undervalues

Smoldered E. Pimply
Technician U. Festooning
Endurance A. Hoodlum
Turpentine H. Rheum

Concepcion I. Metcalf

Asthma I. Chrome

I like it that everybody gets a middle initial.  A nice touch.

Endurance A. Hoodlum intrigues me.  She sounds like a Puritan gangbanger, a Pilgrim biker chick who came off the Mayflower wearing a leather jacket and a ring in her nose.

Robyn S. Undervalues sells real estate, specializing in blockbusting and shady mortgage deals.  Turpentine H. Rheum is a banker who forecloses on elderly widows and ties their nubile daughters to the railroad tracks.   Quantities E. Mislays works in shipping and receiving.

Who came up with these?  They sound like the pseudonyms W.C. Fields used to invent for himself when he wrote the screenplays for his movies.

Mahatma Kane Jeeves
Otis Criblecoblis

I know these are computer generated.  Somebody wrote an algorithm that searches through dictionaries and telephone books plucking out and combining words randomly.  But I like to imagine some actual person, a graduate student in English literature at some college in India or Taiwan paying for his education with an outsourced job and staying up late at night reading the dictionary and cracking himself up as he invents these "American" names.

Hick V. Oversimplification
Midair S. Morality
Herzl O. Attending
Inhibitions A. Alchemy
Careening T. Breached

Inhibitions A. Alchemy?  Hmmm.  Married lady, I'll bet.  Wonder if she's looking for a soulmate.

Way past time for another Wodehouse

He was a long, stripy policeman, who flowed out of his uniform at odd spots, as if Nature, setting out to make a constable, had had a good deal of material left over which she had not liked to throw away but hardly seemed able to fit into the general scheme.

                                                           ---P.G. Wodehouse

Star Trek, Star Wars, Stargate

The 9 year old and the 11 year old are long time fans of Star Trek.  That's Star Trek with a period.  They like Next Generation ok, but they're not smitten.  Voyager, Deep Space Nine, Enterprise---forget them.

They love Star Wars too, but they aren't full fledged geeks yet and don't debate the relative merits of the two universes, although the 9 year old is clear about the differences.  Star Wars is fantasy.   Star Trek is realistic.

If you want a quick thumbnail understanding of the two Mannion boys, just keep in mind that the 11 year old is Obi Wan, and the 9 year old is Jim Kirk.  On his bad days, the 11 year old slips a little toward Anakin.  On his bad days, the 9 year old slips a little toward Spock.  An 11 year old Anakin is a lot easier to deal with sometimes than a 9 year old Spock.

Lately, thanks to their Uncle Merlin's influence, they've both become big fans of Stargate SG-1.  Their mother and father have joined the fan club right along with them.

We're only just getting to the end of Season One and Uncle Merlin assures me there's a long, wild ride ahead and I've only got a glimmer of all that's going on.

Couple of things though.

I get a kick out of Colonel O'Neill's sense of humor, but I get an even bigger kick out of the way the show's surrounded him with characters who never get his jokes.

Amanda Tapping as Captain Carter passes my Sharon Gless test.  Gless played Cagney on Cagney and Lacey and she was the first and still to my mind the best actress I've seen play a tough lady cop.  Tyne Daley was second, of course, second to do it, second best at it.  S. Epatha Merkerson, Lt. Van Buren on Law and Order, is a very close third.   Most actresses try to play tough by acting like actors acting tough.  They lower their voices, they bark, they growl, they stand ramrod straight when they're still and they strut when they have to move, and basically they provide a lesson for actors on how not to act tough.  Nobody remembers that John Wayne's usual posture was relaxed.  It's been too long since I've seen an episode of Cagney and Lacey, so I can't be sure if I'm remembering Gless's performance well enough to describe it.  (When will C and L come out on DVD?)  But my feeling was always that Gless never tried to give Cagney power.  She understood that a cop's power and authority come with the job and the conditions under which most people encounter cops.  A cop with a partner holding a gun on a perp does not need to muscle the mook into the cuffs.  Gless knew that and she, and Tyne Daley, knew that when they pointed a gun at someone the gun was a pretty good encouragement for that someone to stop moving and that it was the gun that scared them not the cop shouting freeze so they didn't have to put all their energy into shouting it.

On SG-1, Tapping plays a tough lady soldier, which is trickier than playing a lady cop, because she's always in fatigues and combat boots and can't show she's a girl by wearing a dress now and then or flashing some cleavage.  If she were to act tough by acting like a man acting tough she would disappear inside her camos.  There'd be four men on the mission and the pretty one would be Michael Shanks. 

Tapping doesn't try to play through her uniform and she sure doesn't give in to it.  She seems to have decided to play Carter as a tomboy.  She's always a girl trying to keep up with her big brothers and is content to be along for the fun without having to prove she's one of the guys.  There's no way Carter could be tougher than O'Neill, the super soldier, or Teal'c, the superhuman Jaffa warrior, anyway, so Tapping doesn't try to out-macho them.  She doesn't come across as weak, though, partly because she's helped by the presence of Shanks' Daniel Jackson.  Jackson is a scientist not a soldier and Shanks plays him that way.  Like Christopher Reeve, whom he resembles a bit, Shanks is big and beautiful but very graceful and he plays mild mannered well.  Next to him, Carter is Superman.  This frees Tapping up immeasurably.

But Tapping also seems to have taken Gless lessons.  Carter is tough, but Tapping knows that it's her training and, even more so, her weapons that make her tough.  She knows that she doesn't have to project the power in any situation, her guns and bombs do that for her.  On top of this, she has made Carter's proficiency with weapons and in martial arts a sign of her essential geekiness.  Carter is a scientist, first and foremost.  She had to learn how to shoot a rifle as part of her military training, but she's in the military because it's the best place she's found to do science.  She has become good with weapons because they're machines and the tools of her trade and she's into tools and machines.

When Carter starts explaining the damage a bomb she's set will do, she doesn't assume unto herself the power of the bomb.  She is simply talking numbers and talking numbers is something she's very good at and enjoys.  (It's also something O'Neill dislikes about her so when she is at her most competent she is often also at her most insecure because she's worried she's annoying O'Neill.)  She's a geek before she is a girl and that keeps her a girl when she's acting tough.

O'Neill doesn't like numbers and he doesn't like scientists, but apparently he doesn't like them because a love of science and a head for numbers are sides of himself he doesn't like, the way Sam Malone doesn't like the side of himself that is "graceful."  But O'Neill can't shake his inner geek.   He's a Super-soldier but he's played by Richard Dean Anderson---MacGyver, the geek's geek, and Anderson, who is one of the show's producers, and the writers take care to remind us of that. There are regular MacGyver in-jokes.  O'Neill's sense of humor is the McGyver in him trying to get out.

So what Stargate has at its center, then, is the same thing Star Trek had at its center---a trio of geeks out saving the universe.  Kirk was a science nerd and history buff and an A student at Starfleet Academy and in his way he was as a big a geek as Spock and  McCoy.   With O'Neill, Carter, Jackson, and Teal'c, SG-1 is like Star Trek would have been if Kirk, Spock, and McCoy went on every mission with Worf from Next Generation.

Besides the cast, the other thing I like about SG-1 is that it was made by adults who aren't just remembering what it was like to be 8 years old and love Star Trek.  It's made by adults who are remembering also what it was like to be 12 and to start seeing plot holes and logic failures in what used to be your favorite sci-fi movies and TV shows.

For instance.

Last night we watched "Mirror, Mirror," one of the best Star Treks ever.  When you're a kid you see it and you think, wow, how cool, a universe that's the exact opposite of ours, where the Federation is evil and Captain Kirk is a villain and Spock has a beard!  If you think about it in any depth you think, That must mean the Klingons are good!  Boy, it would have been neat if they showed them.

But you watch it again when you're a little older and this time you have some questions.  Ok, that universe is a perfect mirror of ours and everything that happens here is paralleled in that universe so closely that the two Enterprises are in orbit around the same planet an the same instant and the barbaric Kirk and his landing party and our Kirk and his landing party are beaming up at the exact same instant through identical ion storms, so---how come the planet they were on isn't opposite too?  In our universe the people down there are peaceful, friendly, and uninterested in the Federation's wealth and power.  So how come in the other universe they're not warlike, hostile, and greedy?   And if people in the two universes are living mirrored lives so that everybody who's on the first Enterprise has a counterpart on the second Enterprise at the exact same stage in their careers, and we know that as soon as the barbarian Kirk gets back to his Enterprise he'll have Chekhov executed and then Spock will assassinate him, doesn't that mean that our Kirk and our Chekhov ought to die at the same moment too, if not in the same way?

But we know they don't.  They live on through two more seasons, a cartoon series, and six movies.  What happened?  Did the crossover break the mirror?

And how did the two landing parties switch clothes anyway?

SG-1's writers, so far, have anticipated questions like that and they build the answers into the dialogue.  They've also remembered to head off nitpicky questions, like:

How do they always know what kind of greeting they're going to get on the other side of the Stargate and what the weather will be like and if the gate on the other end is even open.

Answer:  they send robot probes ahead of them on every mission.

Or: How come they never run out of bullets or that marvelous explosive C-4?  How do they come up with every tool they need when they need it?

Answer: they take a little supply wagon with them every time.

With Star Wars, I can't get rid of the feeling that the logical incoherance of old sci fi movies is what George Lucas thinks was great about them.

The other day the boys watched the bonus disk that comes with the Star Wars Trilogy.  Lots how they made it stuff, with George Lucas appearing in most of it.  There's a format.  The narrator tells us in awestruck tones about the vision and the genius of George Lucas and then Lucas himself appears coming across as modest, unassuming, far more interested in talking about his movies than himself and always giving credit to the various special effects wizards and artists who helped him bring the movies to the screen.

I don't think the mild-manneredness or the modesty are phony.  But humilty is not incompatible with a large ego.  In fact, that's why humility is a virtue.  You have practice it and the bigger your ego the more virtue there is in your humility.  Lucas knows he didn't do it all on his own and he's happy to give credit where he believes credit is due.

I just think that he gives people the wrong kind of credit.

I noticed this when he was telling the interviewer about how the great illustrator Ralph McQuarrie's concept art helped him sell his, Lucas's, vision of Star Wars to the suits at 20th Century Fox.  Lucas was grateful to McQuarrie, but he didn't seem to realize that McQuarrie had done the actual work of creating the look of the Star Wars world.  He seemed to think of McQuarrie as the artistic equivalent of a stenographer and what McQuarrie produced as the equivalent of taking dictation.   It didn't occur to him that along with influencing the studio execs' images of what the movie would look like, McQuarrie was influencing Lucas's own.

In other words Lucas appreciates everybody who works for him as extensions of himself.  He doesn't really see them as artists in their own rights and especially doesn't see that in many cases they are far better artists than he is.

So he doesn't learn from them.

I don't think he knows how much of the first two Star Wars movies he owes to not just the artists, model builders, costume designers, set designer, cinematographer, and special effects technicians but to Alec Guinness, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Mark Hamill, Frank Oz, and (yes, Trish Wilson) Peter Cushing.

I think Lucas' inability to learn from the people he works with explains why as Lucas has asserted more and more control over every aspect of the movies. each movie since Empire Strikes Back has been sillier than the one before. Not being able to learn from his actors has especially hurt him.  In the new movies he has assembled a much more talented collection of actors:  Liam Neeson, Ewan McGregor, Natalie Portman, Samuel L. Jackson, Christopher Lee, Ian McDiarmid, Jimmy Smits.  I even think Hayden Christensen's doing a good job.  And he's wasted them.  Every one of them.  Worse, he's made Natalie Portman look bad.

He made her whiny!

Well, at least we know where Luke gets it from.

Big heads, a post card with artistic ambitions

Monumental sculptures by Philip Grausman.  Yellow Bird Gallery.  Newburgh, NY.   February 2005.

Notes from the Drones Club

The other day, at the end of my post about Barbara Bush joining her son on the back of his carnival wagon to help him sell his Social Security snake oil to the rubes, I expressed a bit of hope that the media was finally beginning to actually report the news on President Bush instead of merely relaying the White House's talking points.

My reason for hoping was the AP story on the Mother and Son comedy routine---and if the sight of the two of them together put you in mind of the villainous Ratchett and his vicious, scheming, smothering mother in Robots then you and I think too much alike and you should get help before it's too late for you too---In the story AP reported the fact that Bush is failing to convince people to accept his "plan" above the warm and fuzzy Mom and Son cross talk act.

You see the import there.  Somebody in the Washington press corps reporting that Bush was failing at something!

I wasn't thinking that the cowardly lions of the media had finally found their courage.  I was thinking that maybe they were going into their circling buzzards mode.  It's difficult to remember, especially after the Death of a Hero treatment they gave his funeral, but the press began to get tough on Reagan in his last term.  Reagan's popularity began to wane and the buzzards swooped in.

Just as after six years of treating him as something worse than Nixon culminating in the Impeachment charade, which the press aided and abetted, when it was clear that Clinton had not only survived but come out of the ordeal more popular than any other President ever, the media turned deferential.  They took out their scorn on Al Gore.

So, I thought, maybe it's finally dawned on them that Bush, who has never been truly and generally popular, is losing even more support and now he might be weak enough that they feel safe enough to pounce.

But then the Linkmeister showed up in the comments section to tell me to wake up and smell the coffee and he left this link to a post by Digby reacting to a stunningly blockheaded column by Dana Milbank of the Washington Post.

Over at the Sideshow, Avedon Carol has also responded to Milbank's column, eloquently, angrily, and at length.

Milbank has been one of the few bright lights not just at the Post---New slogan: We're not really a Republican mouthpiece, we only pretend to be one above the fold---but among the Inside the Beltway club members.  It doesn't take much to be a renegade inside the Beltway, of course.  It's just a matter of while the other club members sit contentedly in their big armchairs by the fire, smoking their Havanas and sipping 20 year old Scotch and tut tutting over what boobs and rubes the Democrats are and marveling over Karl Rove's genius, Milbank occasionally strolls into the club bar and asks the hired help what they think of Bush's economic plan, then wanders back to his place by the fire to tell his fellow club members, to their astonishment, that good old Isaac behind the bar thinks we ought to take a look at this thing he calls "the Deficit" and another thing he calls "The War in Iraq."

His reports are always met with some polite coughing and a quick change of the subject back to what a cad and a scoundrel that Bill Clinton was, and Milbank shrugs and picks up his cigar and Scotch and resumes his quiet place by the fire.

Milbank's column is one of those shrugs.

Basically, he expresses his dismay at the temerity of a bunch of rank amateurs (bloggers) daring to criticize their professional betters.  "God gosh," Milbank says with mild annoyance, "You people need to do something about your anger."

"While it is true that we professionals might be a tad more aggressive towards the Republicans, it seems to me that you all ought to get your own houses in order before you start criticizing that of which you know less than nothing.  Besides, the Democrats are just as guilty as the Republicans and as far as I can see there is not a whit's worth of difference between you liberal bloggers and the chaps at Powerline and the Corner.  In fact, since you all are much smarter than they are and better bred, you should know to act better than they do, therefore, even if you aren't as egregious as they are, your slip ups are more reprehensible.  The peasants can't help behaving like peasants, which is why it's best to just ignore them.  But when one of the noblesse act up, well, that just isn't done."

Then besides writing as if Democrats' efforts to get themselves elected are as gauche as Republican efforts to seize unprecedented power and silence all opposition and as if liberal bloggers' attempts to get the media to cover Bush with the same critical eye they turned on Clinton are as destructive as Right Wing bloggers' assault on the very notion of a free and independent press, Milbank sighs heavily and suggests that the only alternative to the timid objectivity the Washington press corps practices now is a totally partisan and, Milbank suggests, completely fictitionalized accounting of events.

(Michael at Reading A1 remembers that there was a time when there was only a partisan press---the first 150 years of the United States---and he doesn't think that a return to those days would be any bad thing.  Thanks to the Suburban Guerrilla for the link.)

Digby's response is a rugged but rueful, So be it!

As it stands, we have a Republican alternate version of reality and a mainstream press that is apparently impotent to take it on with any real zeal. I don't know what else to do but create our own discourse that hopefully provides the flaccid media with another point of view that they can then flog with equal fervor. I hope that our discourse is more honest and more true, but I cannot guarantee it. All I know is that we have to pull on the other end of the ideological rope or we are all going to be dragged off the cliff together.

Avendon Carol's reaction is to grab Milbank by the knot of his rep tie and shake him until the ice cubes leap from his highball glass and his back teeth rattle.

We object to the fact that we have to read the entire newspaper to find facts - real, documented facts - while administration/RNC spin finds its way into front-page headlines. We object, for example, to the fact that the headline for the story on the NORC count of the 2000 election claims that Bush won the election when the 43rd graf makes clear that this is not the case. We object to headlines that indicate that the Clintons were responsible for shady business deals in Arkansas when anyone who actually reads up on these things knows they were simply the victims of an associate who had a breakdown and ended up embezzling from them. We object to the fact that, to this very day, falsehoods about Gore and the Clintons and previous Democratic convention speakers (Casey was NOT prevented from speaking because he was anti-abortion; he was prevented from speaking because he refused to endorse the Democratic ticket) are still treated as FACTS by mainstream media.

We don't just read left-wing resources. We find that we have to read damn-near everything to find out what's going on. That makes it impossible to rely on our local newspapers, because we know that the facts come out in dribs and drabs in newspapers and magazines all over the nation - indeed, all over the world. Why should we have to rely on the Guardian to find out what the United States is doing?  Why aren't these things on the front page of The Washington Post and The New York Times?  Why are some stories - legitimate, important stories - left to Salon and The New Yorker, rather than covered by the major papers?  Why is it that I can find the right-wing spin in The Washington Post but don't even find out what the liberal response is until I read The Nation?

Damn.

I guess if somebody like Milbank is still missing the point so completely, if one of the few Beltway Insiders who tries to do his job persists in thinking that the only problem with the Washington press corps is its liberal critics, then Linkmeister is right, my optimism that things may be changing is naive.

 

Evening gazette, all arts edition

Music, movies, books, and comic strips.

The Bitch is Back.

Michael Berube on Elton John.  Yes, that's right.  Michael Berube.  Elton John.  And Goodbye Yellow Brick Road as catastrophic moment in the history of a promising rock and roller.  32 years behind the curve but hipper than now.

The Man in Black.

Lindsay Beyerstein listens hard to a song she dislikes re-defined by the Man she loves.  (She does so.  Proof's on her t-shirt.)  The song's "If I Give My Soul" by Billy Joe Shaver, "a maudlin song about another sinner coming to Jesus," says the blogger in black, "Shaver implies that of course Jesus would do this sinner's laundry (or its metaphorical equivalent), all the guy has to do is ask."

But Cash turns the song inside out and upside down until it's not about a man's salvation.  It's about his damnation.

"Cash sees the singer as a truly tragic figure--a man who desperately wants to atone for his sins but who doesn't understand that the same shallow, manipulative nature that ruined his life will also damn his immortal soul."

The lady has back

In the wake of the Oscars, zhakora at 2/10 reflects on the talent of the woman who'd have won for Best Actress if zhakora had her way and it was a just and perfect world---Kate Winslet, whom zhakora's admired since Heavenly Creatures.  She has words in praise for some other actresses she believes have earned more attention than they've gotten.

Russell Crowe is a hack

That's what George at A Girl and a Gun concludes, after a dismaying look at GQ's list of the best movie actors of our time.  Johnny Depp and Nicolas Cage don't impress him either.  Don't even ask about Leonardo DiCaprio.  Tony Leung, though, now there, says George, is an actor!   And he has a list of some others, many of whom American audiences won't be familiar with, to their loss.

American Stars and Bars (You didn't think all these subheads were going to rhyme, did you?)

Bill Altreuter has read a biography of Neil Young and he thinks it's worth your time to read it too.   Shakey by Jimmy McDonough.  It's not a perfect book, Bill concludes.  No discography.  No attention given to the critical response to Young's work.  And Bill thinks the biographer himself couldn't keep up with Young's wild life and grew exhausted and collapsed three quarters of the way through.  But Young himself is an irresistable character and force of nature.  Like a hurricane, so to speak.

Gonna party like it's 1999

The crew at Lawyers, Guns and Money have been busy, but they've found time to make lists, lots of lists, about the best movies of arbitrarily chosen chunks of time.  Most recently Rob and Scott picked what they think were the best movies of the 1990s.  Doesn't appear Dave's chipped in his two cents on this one yet.  Here's Scott's list.  Here's Rob's. 

But Redbeard at Vague Nihlism focuses on one year, 1999, making his case that the best movies of that decade came out just before the millennium turned.  As Rob says, he makes a good case.

There you go.  If all that isn't enough for you, and I'm sure it isn't, you're a blog reader, you wouldn't be one if your appetite for the truth that is beauty and the beauty that is truth that only blogs provide wasn't insatiatiable, Neddie Jingo rhapsodizes on Pogo and Coturnix  and Chase review Robots.

Irish eyes right! Fo'ard! March!

All over Christendom today was Palm Sunday but here at home it was St Patrick's Day all over again.

We're a little town but we love a big parade and today we held our St Paddy's Day Parade.  It's not a grand affair.  A few marching bands, some homemade floats, the high school varsity football team, who got a big cheer because they played out a gridiron version of Hoosiers last fall, going all the way to the Class A State Championships despite having starting offensive and defensive lines with a collective weight that if you shoved them all onto an elevator together would still be within the elevator's capacity.  Some more floats, people with their dogs wearing green hats---the people and the dogs---some bikers on Harleys.  The Girl Scouts and the Cub Scouts, the 9 year old marched with his den.  The village fire department and the departments from some of the nearby towns show up and drive a truck or two down the street with their lights flashing.  This afternoon one of the departments had to leave the parade and rush off on a call back in their town.

And of course there are bagpipers.

Some of you without a Celtic heritage might wonder at that.  Bagpipers?  It's an Irish holdiay, not a Scottish one.

Bagpipes were Irish before they were Scottish.  As our neighbor back in Syracuse, a musician and professional Irishman, liked to say, "We gave the Scots the pipes."

Then he'd add, "And they can keep 'em."

The photographs up there and down below are from last year's parade.  I need to get a good digital camera.  Last year was our first spring in our new hometown and we didn't know about the St Patrick's Day Parade.  We came home from church to find...we couldn't come home. Not directly.  We had to take a long way around and park away from our house.  Our street was blocked off and all up and down it were people getting ready to march in the parade, bands practicing---an hour of When Irish Eyes and The Wearing of the Green over and over again---riders on floats making last minute touch ups to their costumes and props---there was a fire truck blocking our driveway and parked right in front of that were a float and the pick up that was to haul it along the parade route.  The float was full of children dressed either as wild Irish roses the sweetest flowers that grow or sheep, which don't figure in any famous songs that I'm aware of but do provide the wool for very warm sweaters.  Mothers were walking up and down the float gluing cotton fluff to the sheep to make them look woolier.  It was a breezy day and as much fluff was whipped from their hands as they managed to stick to their kids.  All the rest of the spring we were picking it out of our bushes.

It's a tradition that marchers and riders on the floats toss candy to the kids in the crowds watching the parade.  The County Republicans march in the parade too.  (The blonde overheard one old very Irish looking man growl, "And where are the damn Democrats?  Can't we get ourselves out to march too?"  I'll try to do something about that next year.)  The Republicans don't throw candy.

Guess what they throw.

I'll give you a hint.  What's the symbol of the GOP?

Yep.  The elephants throw peanuts.

"Oh look," I said, "They're pushing their Social Security plan again."

Nobody laughed.

It's not funny.

Palm Sunday

When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne.   Before him will be gathered all the nations, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats.   And he will place the sheep on his right, but the goats on the left.   Then the King will say to those on his right, 'Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.  For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.'

Then the righteous will answer him, saying, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink?  And when did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you?  And when did we see you sick or in prison and visit you?'

And the King will answer them, 'Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.'

                                                                          ---Matthew: 25:31-40

Like mother, like son

The other day, down in Florida, the President was out on the phony campaign trail, lying about his plans for Social Security to an audience of  chosen lackeys, flunkeys, and stooges when all of a sudden his dear old mother appeared on the stage with him.

Mom, the president exclaimed, what are you doing here? as surprised as David Letterman when Regis Philbin makes a "surprise" visit to the set.

The President and Barbara Bush exchanged a little bit of banter and as cheap political theater goes it was almost charming.  Would have been more charming if the President hadn't muffed his lines.

MRS. BUSH: You're supposed to ask me why I'm here.

THE PRESIDENT: Okay. First of all, I now know why I'm getting white hair. (Laughter.)

MRS. BUSH: I'm here because when else can I see my two oldest boys? (Laughter and applause.)

THE PRESIDENT: How about a little better answer than that, will you?

MRS. BUSH: That's reason number one.

THE PRESIDENT: Now, wait, it's not, how can I see my two better boys, it's how can I tell my two better boys in person what to do, is what you're really trying to say.

The President blew his cue and had to be prompted by his mother and he said better boys when he probably meant to say oldest boys, but that's the beauty of live theater.

Now both Eli of Left I on the News and Holden at First Draft see in the President's lines evidence of his essential creepiness.  Holden thinks Bush was making fun of his dear old white-haired mother's white hair and both think that refering to himself and Jeb as Barbara's better boys shows a unforgivable lack of brotherly love and proves what a vicious megalomaniac he is.

(Thanks to Avedon Carol for the link to Eli and thanks to Eli for the link to Holden.)

But they're treating the moment as if it was what it pretended to be, spontaneous and unscripted.  It was a carefully staged comedy routine written by the President's speech writers and approved by Karl Rove.  It was hokey and it was, because it was part of a general effort to mislead, a bit of staged lying, but it was standard political theater and all that happened was that Bush muffed his lines.  The word better got in there from his use of it in his previous line, "How about a better answer than that?"

It's not as if we've never heard him get tongue tied, lose track of a thought in mid-sentence, and malaprop his way into political comedy immortality.  Glib, the man is not.

Holden and Eli think Bush was deliberately badmouthing his two younger brothers, Neil and Marvin.  I think he just went up in his lines, but if it was something else it was a simple Freudian slip and, face it, you can't fault the President of the United States of America for thinking that he and his brother the Governor of Florida are the better brothers compared to those two screw-ups and thieves, and, in Neil's case, sexual predator.

And I think the white hair line was meant to imply that the President is scared of his mother.

There's plenty of evidence that Bush is not as nice a fella as his devoted fans think he is.  We don't have to go psychoanalyzing every word that comes out of his mouth to add to it.  This is what the Right does, assume bad behavior and bad faith on all our parts and then see evidence of it in every little thing we do.  Oh, look, he ordered swiss cheese on his sandwich!  What an effete snob!  Oh, they liked Million Dollar Baby!  They're for euthenasia as well as baby killing!

While we're at it, I like to take cheap shots at the President too, but again he gives us enough ammo without our having to make fun of his looks and call him things like "Chimpy."  First off, he doesn't look like a chimp, not any more than the rest of us do, which is to say we all look like what we are, hairless apes.  From time to time, a photograph emphasizes Bush's resemblance to our primate cousins and it's funny, but I think you'd better be a whole lot more photogenic before you even think about ridiculing him on that score.

Second off, most of his fans and even a lot of people who don't particularly care for him think he's a good looking guy.  In fact, I think his looks are why he's president and not his brother...or John Kerry.

Third, making fun of somebody's looks as if their physiognomy reveals their assumed bad character is what they do.  Remember who called whom Lurch?

But all that is an aside.  The real travesty that happened on that stage wasn't that Bush picked on his no good little brothers, or even poked fun at his mother.

It was what Barbara Bush was there to do, help her son pretend to be jess folks in order to sell the real jess folks their own economic ruin.

Bush the uniter is out there trying to sell his plan to destroy Social Security by dividing.  He's trying to turn the old against the young by assuring people in retirement now or entering it soon he's not going to cut anybody's benefits in the short run.  That's a long term goal.  This isn't working.   America's old people don't want to save themselves at the expense of their children and grandchildren.  But Bush began this sideshow by declaring that people born before 1950 didn't have anything to fear but fear itself, as long as they didn't care about anybody but themselves.

Barbara Bush stood up to pretend to be an average grandmother who did care about others.

"Your father and I have 17 grandchildren," she told the President, "All born after 1950. And we want to know, is someone going to do something about it?"  Who's worrying about their retirement benefits, she made believe she wanted to know.

Is there a Bush grandchild who doesn't have a trust fund?

If the President was a honest man he would have said---well, if he was an honest man he wouldn't be out there trying to destroy Social Security, but if he was honest about what he was up to, he'd have said, Mom, your grandchildren wouldn't be collecting a dime of Social Security even if the system was raking in the dough like a Las Vegas casino or Microsoft.   We're rich!  Who are you planning to disinherit?

He might have also pointed out that all her grandchildren were born well after 1950.  Twenty five years and more.  Her grandchildren won't be retiring for a good 30 or 40 years yet, after the Baby Boomers---her sons' generation---has started dying off and the "crisis" caused by their retiring has begun to abate because as dead people the Boomers won't be collecting benefits.

And he might have added that a very simple way of saving Social Security would be to raise taxes on rich folks like her grandchildren instead of trying to fix it so that they and all the other trust fund babies in America never have to kick in a penny for the privilege of living here and profiting off the hard work of everybody else.

He might have, but there was no chance that he would.  So it would have been nice if the media covering this charade had done it.

The New York Times hinted at it.   "In doing her part, Mrs. Bush left out any mention of whether Social Security figured in the family's monthly finances."

The AP story that ran in our paper didn't even hint.  It didn't report that the President goofed up his lines either.

“How about a little better answer than that, will you?” said Bush, following with a joke that she agreed to come only to tell her boys what to do in person.

But AP did report something more important and they did it pretty high up in the story too.  The italics are mine:

The emphasis on addressing seniors’ worries reflects a clear concern in the White House about the president’s six-week sales campaign. Polls show growing opposition to – and thus, continued wariness among congressional Republicans about – Bush’s plans even as he travels the country pitching them.

With luck this is a trend.  The media will start reporting the facts at the beginnings of stories before they report Bush's lies and fantasies and Americans might start getting the news instead of propaganda.

Bach in the day or Beantown, coffee bean, and Bean-thoven nostalgia

Most mornings when I walk the boys to school I go empty-handed.  This morning, for some reason, I carried a mug of coffee.  Usually I don't bother.  I have a cup before we set out.  I have one when we get back.  I'm an addict, but I'm not that bad yet I need to chain drink the stuff.  But I think I know what happened today.

I was possessed by the ghost of a Lance Mannion past.

I was listening to a webcast of Classics in the Morning from WGBH in Boston, the first time I've done that.  Once upon a time I worked in a bookstore in downtown Boston.   Every morning the manager tuned the radio to WGBH and we worked until lunch with classical music playing in the background.  In the afternoons it got busy and too noisy in the store to hear ourselves think, so we turned it off until closing.   To me Boston in the morning always has a soundtrack by Mozart.

Now, about the coffee.  I had a tiny studio in a brownstone on Beacon Street, a couple blocks down from Arlington, so I was very close to the Public Garden, and incidentally to the bar that they used as the exterior for Cheers, the Bull and Finch, and every morning I set out to walk to work across the Public Garden, past the swan boats, and across the Common, carrying a mug of coffee.

It was about a mile but I don't know how it happened---it never mattered when I set off, I was always 5 minutes late for work.  Exactly 5 minutes.  Every day.  Drove my boss crazy.

For a lot of reasons, one of which was the way my boss looked after I drove her crazy but another more important of which was that daily walk across the Garden with my steaming mug of coffee, that was one of the happiest years of my life.

So I guess what happened today is that listening to WGBH sort of hypnotized me into thinking I was 22 years old again and late for work.

Music has charms etc.

The guys were five minutes late for class.

There's no seat more comfortable than a bean bag chair in Beantown.