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Hollywood and the Constitution

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Last night, my wife and I decided to watch the latest movie delivered by our elf friends at Netflix, Jack Reacher.  Perfectly competent Tom Cruise thriller.  Suspenseful, well put together, lean and mean and pretty exciting.  It’s been interesting to watch how Tom Cruise has taken control of his own career, producing as well as starring in films specifically taylored to his gifts as an actor.  For a man in his early fifties, he looks tremendous, moves with a great economy of motion, and conveys a kind of terse intelligent intensity.  And for my wife and I, it made for an enjoyable evening home alone.

Anyway, the story involves a lone crazy shooter scenario, in which an Army sniper apparently guns down five random people in Pittsburgh.  An opening montage shows, without dialogue, good cops putting together the clues, and arresting a former Army Ranger named Barr (Joseph Sikora).  The evidence is overpowering against him, and instead of a defense, he writes down a name, Jack Reacher (Cruise).  His defense attorney, Helen (Rosamund Pike), her DA father (Richard Jenkins) have no idea who Jack Reacher even is, until he walks into their attorney conference.  He’s a former Ranger himself, a prosecutor of war crimes, and he knows all about Barr, who he had previously prosecuted in Iraq.  Reacher’s immediate thought is that Barr probably did what he’s accused of, and he’s fine with Barr getting the death penalty, but Helen persuades him to take another look at the evidence.  He eventually concludes that Barr’s been framed, and as the film progresses, he goes after the real shooter, who he learns has been hired by a Russian mobster businessman, the Zec, a wonderfully creepy Werner Herzog.  (In fact the film is basically worth watching just to see Werner Herzog act.)

Okay, so, but, Reacher has no evidence for any of this.  All the evidence points to Barr, and nothing in the film changes that.  Yes, he gets the actual shooter to even admit it to him, but Jack Reacher is basically an off-the-grid drifter do-gooder martial arts expert/attorney.  Not somebody whose testimony is going to hold up in any court.  So Reacher knows who-dun-it, also who didn’t do it, and he can’t prove any of it.  So he kills all the bad guys.  Just shoots ‘em in cold blood.  (To be fair, they’re busy shooting at him for a lot of it).  Rescues the girl. (Rosamund Pike is terrific, by the way, a performance with emotional resonance far beyond that required by this frankly pretty generic thriller).  And we’re fine with it.  We’re fine with Jack Reacher, (well, Tom Cruise) playing judge, jury and executioner. I certainly was, watching the movie last night.  Because he knows who the bad guys are, obviously–I mean, geez, it’s Werner Herzog, he’s obviously evil to the core–and since our poor pathetic criminal justice system clearly can’t cope with a guy like that, justice has to be done somehow.  So bang bang bang.  Done.

Bear in mind, this is a movie I quite liked. And why not like it?  How different is this from a whole bunch of other thrillers?  How much time gathering evidence and taking depositions and building a case does John McClane spend in the Die-Hard movies?  All (gulp) six of them?  I mean, it’s Bruce Willis–of course he can be trusted to get the bad guys.  How punctilious is Liam Neeson in the Taken movies about chains of evidence and international coordination?  (To be fair, in the first Taken movie, he does try to involve the French police, only to learn that they’re in cahoots with the bad guys.)  How many thrillers, how many cop shows, how many action flicks show cops, uh, not bothering much with due process?  Actually, a TV cop show like, I don’t know, Law and Order, did a pretty job showing police procedures.  Though they did manage to close every frickin’ case.

So, change of subject, back to reality.  On September 30, 2011, an American citizen living in Yemen, Anwar_al-Awlaki was killed by a drone attack.  Two weeks later, his son, sixteen year old Denver-born teenager, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, also living in Yemen, was similarly killed.  Both were killed as terrorists, without due process, without having been charged with a crime.

And yes, al-Awlaki was a member of Al Qaeda, and a recruiter for terrorism.  There doesn’t seem to be much question about that.  And so you can say, well, he was an enemy to the United States, and a dangerous man devoted to the destruction of our country.  Someone who supported and possibly even planned terrorist attacks against our country.  And we’re in a war on terror and on terrorists.  Of course we have the right to kill him.

But we are a nation of laws.  And we are governed by a constitution. And there is nothing in the constitution that gives the President of the United States the power to kill an American citizen living on foreign soil (living in a country with whom the United States is at peace) without due process.  Was al-Awlaki guilty of treason?  Well, Article 3 Section 3 is quite specific about the grounds for a treason prosecution.

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.

Yes, the President is Commander-in-chief.  Absolutely.  Read Article 2 Section 2.  Nothing in there about ordering the deaths of American citizens without due process.

Our constitutional obligation, if the CIA did in fact have evidence of al-Awlaki’s treason, was to ask Yemen to extradite him to the US for trial.  And then try him.  And yes, I know that’s complicated ten different ways.  And I know we’re at war with Al-Qaeda, whatever ‘at war’ means with an international organization.  I totally get that it’s way way easier to just send a drone strike.

But we can’t. Or rather, yes, obviously we can, but we shouldn’t, and we can’t do it legally.  Anymore than Jack Reacher can just shoot the bad guy in a movie.  It was interesting to me to see the reaction of the Rosamund Pike character to Reacher killing the Zec.  She’s an attorney, a member of the Pennsylvania bar. She’s just watched her paid consultant (I guess that would basically be Reacher’s relationship to her) kill a suspect in cold blood.  She’s an officer of the court.  She has a professional obligation to arrest Reacher, to testify against him, to cooperate with a police investigation into murder and the subsequent capture and arrest of the killer.  She didn’t do any of that in the movie, obviously, because it’s a movie, and as such, a fantasy.  But due process means something.  The law means something.  Ignoring it, pretending that this or that situation is somehow beyond a legal remedy, that’s a terrible indictment of us and our society.

I love this exchange, from Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons.  It’s a conversation between Sir Thomas More and his son-in-law William Roper.

Roper: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!

More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?

Roper: Yes, I’d cut down every law in England to do that!

More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!

I’d give the Devil benefit of law.  Yes.  And, okay, maybe Al Qaeda is the Devil, and maybe the plans of al-Awlaki are indeed devilish, Satanic, just as Werner Herzog is pure evil in Jack Reacher.  Pure evil, a murderer, a man who orders the deaths of four innocents so he can kill the one person he wants dead, someone holding up a business acquisition he wants to have happen.  We still have to take him to court.  For our own protection, to live in a nation ruled by laws.

Two final points. Robert Duvall is in Jack Reacher, playing an elderly rifle range owner. A crusty conservative, he agrees to help Reacher kill the baddies, and provides covering sniper fire as Reacher moves in on them.  I am on record on being in favor of gun control. But I have family members who are gun owners, and who fiercely defend their Second Amendment freedoms.  Those same family members love the Constitution.  They would not, under any circumstances, join a vigilante in a frontal attack on possibly bad guys, an attack of at best dubious legality. I found the whole movie, and especially the portrayal of the Robert Duvall character, an insult to my gun-loving friends and their principled support for the Second Amendment.

And finally this: Anwar al-Awlaki and his son (and I haven’t even talked about the killing of his son) were men who held certain beliefs, men, apparently, of strong views.  If we can believe the news reports on al-Awlaki’s beliefs, they seem to have believed that the United States of America is evil, is an insult to the God they worship.  They believe that the United States is an affront to their religion, and that America should be therefore brought to its knees.  According to my reading of the Constitution, those are opinions they are allowed to hold.  Americans are allowed, constitutionally, to not believe in America. American citizens are protected in their right to believe that the United States of America is evil, and should be destroyed.

They are not allowed to do anything about it.  They are not allowed to actively work to murder, or to attack US possessions or institutions.  Americans are not, in short, allowed to perform acts of treason. But we are allowed to hold treasonous opinions.  That’s how confident our Framers were about the nation they created.

Recently, Michele Bachman has made some silly noise about impeaching President Obama for this IRS nonsense.  She’s also welcome to her opinion, as I am welcome to consider her a dimwit.  At the same time, I think there do exist grounds to impeach President Obama.  For ordering the murder of American citizens without due process.  I consider those actions high crimes and misdemeanors.  We elected a President, a chief executive, a commander-in-chief.  We did not elect Jack Reacher.  Hollywood fantasies have their place in American culture.  They have no legitimate place in American jurisprudence.

 

Granite Flats: A Review

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BYU-TV has national ambitions, unlike KBYU, which is BYU’s public television station. BYU-TV wants to go national, be available on cable.  My folks in Indiana get it, for example, through their local cable company–that’s where they watch General Conference.  And so BYU-TV created their first fictional series, an 8-episode, hour-long TV drama, Granite Flats, which concluded its first season on Sunday.

My wife and I figured we’d watch it, give it a chance.  It wasn’t terrible.  It’s also not very good, though not good in what strike me as interesting ways. If I had to describe it, it would be a cross between The Andy Griffith Show and Twilight Zone, written by a big fan of the Encylopedia Brown books.  With, occasionally, just a hint of Twin Peaks.

It’s set in the late ’50s-early ’60s, soon enough after the Korean War that those memories are still raw for some of the characters.  Granite Flats is a town in some unspecified state, probably in the West.  Beth (Annie Tedesco), a nurse, has moved there with her 12-year old son, Arthur (Jonathan Morgan Heit), following the death of her husband, a military test pilot. Arthur befriends two other kids, Madeline (Malia Taylor), and Timmy (Charlie Plummer).  The kids are all science nerds, and they eventually decide to form a kind of kid detective agency.  They’re like a cross between Encylopedia Brown and Harry, Ron and Hermione, with Arthur (the outsider) as Harry, and Madeline as Hermione (bookworm brainy girl).

Granite Flats seems to be, at times, small town America, nice shops, a central Church.  But it’s also apparently a military town, with a local military base and hospital.  There doesn’t seem to be a non-military hospital in town, for example, though there pretty much would have to be.  Anyway,  Beth works at the hospital, where she becomes friends with a mysterious patient, Frank Quincy (Scott Christopher), who seems to suffer from really strange momentary lapses in memory.

Meanwhile, Timmy’s father, John Sanders (Richard Gunn) is the Granite Flats chief of police, where he interacts somewhat uneasily with the head of military police, Slim (Brandon Molale). And when a mysterious explosion at the base kills a private, an NCO, Sergeant Hershel Jenkins (Peter Murnick) appears to be responsible, and in fact confesses to having committed murder.  Sergeant Jenkins soon-to-be orphaned son, Wallace (Ethan Ross Wills), is informally adopted by another hospital nurse, Regina (Jessica Wright).

But in fact, the deadly explosion seems to be related to an event witnessed by Arthur, in which some mysterious celestial object flew over the town, shredding some kind of debris.  And the kids decide to investigate it, even inventing a home-made metal detector.  And they find all kinds of misshapen metallic objects along the flight path of the whatever-it-is.  Which Timmy then tells his police chief Dad about, who then expands the search.  And why are FBI agents skulking about town?  What’s going on?

So basically, the show follows four main stories.  1) The three kids and their detective activities.  2) the chief of police, the metal objects he finds, and the FBI’s interest in him and them, 3) Sergeant Jenkins, in prison, insisting he committed (and be executed for) a murder we’re pretty sure he didn’t commit, and 4) Beth’s relationship with Frank Quincy of the strange memory lapses.  I would add 3a) Regina’s relationship with Wallace, this poor sad kid with the father in prison and school reputation as a bully.  Also, all these characters profit variously from the advice and counsel of Pastor Todd (Mitchell Fink), a kindly young clergyman who refers to God as ‘the Guy Upstairs’ and consoles his parishioners with his famously terrible lemonade.

Re-reading this description, it seems like there’s a lot of interesting dramatic stuff going on, and that it could be a compelling and enjoyable TV series.  But it doesn’t really work very well, and I think know why.

In their advertising for the show, folks at BYU-TV kept saying that they wanted to make a family-friendly TV series.  And that’s fine, that’s a laudable goal, I suppose. The LDS critique of contemporary popular culture is that it’s too sexy, too violent, too profane.  The lament is, ‘why can’t we go back to the time when good entertainment didn’t have all that sex and violence?’  This show is an attempt to do just that.  But it seems defined by what’s essentially a negative aesthetic.  By insisting on creating an entertainment that doesn’t have certain elements, they haven’t really defined what they want to do instead. As a result, the show seems peculiarly undramatic.

To take the story thread with the kids, for example.  When we meet the kids, they’re fascinated by this flying object that soared over their town shredding debris.  They build a metal detector, they define its flight path by the stuff they find, they map out the direction it came from and they identify where it might have landed, and they go looking for it.  That’s all really interesting stuff.  But it’s as though the producers or writers then went ‘wait a minute, why are these kids traipsing around unsupervised.  That doesn’t show Good Family Values.  They should tell their parents and turn over their investigation to grown-ups.’  Which is exactly what happens–Timmy tells his Dad, and the kids stop looking for UFOs.

The kids go from there to solving the mystery of a missing cat (completely uninteresting), the mystery of a missing baseball mitt (totally uninteresting), and then, wow: they learn that someone’s been embezzling cash from the local hardware store.  Hey, my wife and I thought, not bad, they’re actually solving a crime.  It wasn’t a great mystery–my wife and I figured out who-dun-it in about four seconds.  But it was pretty engaging for a few minutes there. They solve it, kudos all around. Then one of the kids’ classmates asks if they’ll help her figure out the identity of her secret admirer.  It’s as though the writers went, “oh my gosh!  The kids’ story-line is dangerously close to becoming dramatically compelling!  I know, we’ll bring in this lame secret admirer thing.  Whew!  Crisis averted!”

Same thing with the FBI story thread.  Chief Sanders has this collection of twisted metallic debris, and then one day, the FBI steal it from his cupboard, and take him to an abandoned warehouse or something.  He’s sitting in a chair across a table from a head FBI honcho, the room illuminated by a single light bulb.  He’s interrogated.  It’s all very tense and dramatic.  Well, we obviously couldn’t have that.  So the head FBI guy affably says “hey, here’s what’s going on, let’s work together on this,” and from that point on, he and the chief are best buds. Again, it’s like someone went ‘conflict?  We can’t have dramatic conflict!?!?!’

Same with the Sergeant Jenkins story thread.  He’s in prison, charged with a murder he did not commit, facing the death penalty.  Slim, his jailor, won’t let the chief even come see him.  Jenkins has, in fact confessed to the murder.  He’s been given a lawyer, the worst, most weasely and incompetent lawyer ever (can’t figure out from IMDB who played him).  So, okay, there’s some real dramatic potential there.  Maybe they’ll have a powerful and interesting trial scene or something.  Nope.  Instead the chief talks to his FBI friend, who tells the judge about the mysterious flying object (a spy satellite, it turns out, though why is it Soviet in origin?), who drops all the charges.  Jenkins is in danger of his life!  And then pfft.  The whole conflict goes way.

Oh, and Sergeant Jenkins’ confession? To a crime he didn’t commit?  Turns out all that came from his guilt over men he commanded who died in Korea.  He ‘wants to die.’  The scene where he admits to that could have been interestingly dramatic too, so the show makes sure to zip through it as quickly as possible.

I mentioned Twin Peaks, and the show has a little of that going on too, but I don’t know how intentional it is.  It has some of Twin Peaks’ slow pace, awkwardly long and pointless conversations, the way the camera lingers on some otherwise innocuous object in a room.  But I don’t know if that’s an attempt at Lynchian weirdness, or just not-great direction.  They never seem to know when to end scenes, for example, all the cuts being either a half-second too fast or too slow.

And the research seems off, though of course I may be wrong.  But Beth’s husband (and Frank) both seem to have come from ‘Edwards’ which makes sense.  Edwards Air Force base in the Mohave is famously where test pilots field-test new aircraft.  If Beth’s husband was actually a test pilot, Edwards is where he’d have been stationed.  But ‘Edwards’ is consistently referred to as an Army base.  The local base in town is an Army base, as is the hospital.

It is true that Edwards was once the Muroc Army Air Field, but the Air Force took it over and changed the name in 1949, well before the period of this TV series.  Also, the FBI chief honcho guy is played by an African-American actor.  Which would be fine today.  But under J. Edgar Hoover, it was a national disgrace how few African-American agents there were, and there were no supervisors.  Minor anachronisms, I know, but they bugged me.

It was sort of fun playing ‘catch the continuity errors.’  Or arguing with my wife over which is the worst actor in the cast.  And it’s always fun to see a show shot in Utah, and seeing local actor friends get work.  It was fun watching my old friend Colleen Baum get arrested for embezzlement, for example.  But I wish there were more local actors in the show.  Most of the actors in this show were jobbed in from LA, and that seemed to me a shame.  It’s not just civic pride to insist that Utah actors are as good as actors anywhere–it’s simply my professional experience, in a lifetime spent doing theatre.

I don’t know if there’s going to be a second season of Granite Flats.  I suspect there might be.  The first season ended with a cliff-hanger, after all, and we still have room to suspect that all may not be well in Granite Flats.  Of course, based on the first season, I suspect they’ll find a way to squander the dramatic opportunities they’ve set up for themselves.  But I’ll watch at least the first episode.  It’s a show I keep rooting for, even when it disappoints.

 

Disability

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I am physically disabled.  And because I am medically disabled, I am eligible for, and receive, Social Security disability benefits.  Which is why this story hit me so hard.

It is not always possible to tell if someone is disabled by just looking at them. Sometimes, perfectly healthy looking folks can actually be dealing with very serious illnesses.   You see some guy parking in a disabled parking spot, and when he gets out of the car, he looks okay.  You think, ‘what’s his deal?  Cheater!’  We judge.  And when it comes to our tax dollars, we can tend to judge with particular harshness.  So we think, why are perfectly healthy (looking) people sitting around all day doing nothing on my dime?  Jesus would not have told us not to judge people if it wasn’t a sin human beings are particularly fond of.

Around seven million people receive Social Security disability benefits annually.  And it’s possible that a few of those recipients are undeserving.  I found this story on the interwebs, expressing a fairly typical outrage over how much money deadbeats are costing the government.  By golly, if we could catch all the disability cheats, we could basically . . . cut the deficit by some tiny fraction of one percent.

And that’s the thing: I just doubt all that many people cheat. The Social Security Administration estimates that fewer than one percent of disability benefits receive them inappropriately, and my guess is that even those cases aren’t about cheaters, but more about seriously sick people who have gotten marginally better.

I can tell you from personal experience that the application process for disability benefits is a rigorous one.  The paperwork wasn’t onerous, but it was detailed, and the paperwork my doctors had to fill out was equally daunting.  I’m not saying the process is needlessly bureaucratic or filled with endless amounts of red tape. That was not the case.  I thought it managed to walk a fine line between efficiency and thoroughness.  But I also have reason to believe that my case wasn’t terribly border-liney.

But we don’t like it when deadbeats get away with it.  We really get ticked off.  That’s why Ronald Reagan got so much political mileage from stories about Cadillac-driving welfare cheats.  The fact that those stories were fictional was irrelevant; we really hate the idea of our tax dollars supporting lazy bums. We’re sure it happens a lot–undeserving poor people mooching off hard-working Americans.  We probably even have anecdotal evidence of that kind of indolent malfeasance: ‘I knew someone once who. . . .’

And, you know, it’s quite possible that some conservative critiques of welfare have some truth to them.  I don’t doubt that, for some people, welfare can become a lifestyle, that poverty can become generational.  I don’t doubt that some kinds of welfare foster dependency.  But the statistics suggest that most food stamp recipients, for example, only receive them for a few months–that they do what they’re supposed to, provide a short time safety net for folks trying to get back on their feet.  In fact, the best evidence suggests that welfare dependency does exist, but that it’s nowhere as pervasive as we think.

Most people would rather work.  I sure as heck would.  I loved my job (most of it), and would go back in a second, if I was physically able to.  And I’ve gotten to know quite a few disabled people lately, and I don’t know a single one who wouldn’t much prefer to have a job.

So Great Britain, with an economy tanking due to, frankly, bad economic theories put into practice, decided to go after disability cheats.  Prime Minister David Cameron declared that hundreds of thousands of Brits were ripping off the system, pretending to be ill when they really were capable of working.

So they outsourced the nasty job of kicking people off disability.  They hired a French firm to sift through the disability rolls,with the obvious intent of kicking people off.

And seriously sick people, including (anecdotal evidence, to be sure), a guy examined two days after having a stroke, were declared ineligible, lost their benefits.

Because it’s all relative, isn’t it?  We can’t tell how much pain someone is in from just looking at them, can we?  We don’t know what kind of job someone might be capable of doing.

Can you work?  Could you hold down a job?  I can walk, a little.  I only need my wheelchair some days.  And I do work–I write, hours every day.  I get paid for some of it (and every time I get paid, my benefits are correspondingly reduced).  I can cook dinner, and do.  I can do some things.

So now, as austerity continues to fail in Great Britain, as it increases misery and does nothing positive in regards to employment, as spending cuts lead to more misery and more suffering, while the economy continues to languish, American conservatives remain unaccountably enamored by it.  And this is next, I think. Cutting spending means looking for waste and misapplied spending.  It would not surprise me to see the Social Security Disability Insurance Trust Fund come under scrutiny.

Some conservatives are already calling for it. Jonah Goldberg wrote about it in April.  His proposal; have every disability benefit recipient report to a government appointed doctor for an examination, and a up or down spot judgment about eligibility.  The point, of course, is to save money.  By cracking down on sick people.

But see, that’s the thing about austerity, as an economic principle.  It carries with it the possibility of that kind of foolishness, that sort of mean-spirited judgment. It’s time, pre-emptively, to oppose it.  Sick people aren’t cheating for the most part, and the few who might be aren’t costing enough to be worth spending a lot time catching.  And that guy in the parking lot, the guy with the handicapped parking sticker who appears, as far as you can see, to be perfectly healthy? You have no idea what kind of pain he might be in, what invisible ailments have made his life a torment. And Jesus doesn’t like it when you judge that guy.

 

 

 

F-Bomb defiance

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The last two movies my wife and I have watched have been exactly the same movie, except that one of them was terrible and the other was really awfully good.  In the new Red Dawn (which we Netflixed because my wife has a crush on Chris Hemsworth), a rag-tag group of American insurgents fight against terrible odds against the technologically superior forces of the (snicker) North Koreans.  In Oblivion, a rag-tag group of American insurgents fight against terrible odds against the technologically superior forces of Melissa Leo (or, you know, space aliens using Melissa Leo’s voice and presence).

Oblivion‘s better than that.  I thought it was one of the better sci-fi action flicks that I’ve seen in awhile.  It was thoughtful and smart and although afflicted by massive plot holes and leaps in logic, you don’t really notice them much while you’re watching it.  Tom Cruise may be a loon, but he’s a fine actor, and looks great, and it made for a very satisfying night at the movies.

But, here’s the point I want to make, and it requires a pretty massive spoiler alert, so if you haven’t seen Oblivion, stop reading and go see the movie and then get back to me, but there’s a moment in both movies I want to talk about. Both movies are rated PG-13.  Both, therefore, get one F-bomb to play with.  And both drop their F-bomb at an identical moment in the plot.

In Red Dawn (the plot for which I’m also going to ruin for you, but I feel less bad about it, ’cause, get real, it’s not like you’re going to see the durn thing), the bad guy is Captain Cho, who the technologically superior (snicker) North Koreans have put in charge of their invading forces in Portland, where the movie’s set.  (Cho is played by Will Yun Lee, who is from, like, Arlington Virginia.  Hey, it’s a gig).  And of course, he has to have a final big fight scene with Chris Hemsworth.  And at the climactic moment of the fight, Hemsworth gets to drop his F-bomb. “F-you,” he says, or something similar.  So okay, in Oblivion, same thing–final confrontation with Melissa Leo, and what does Tom Cruise say?  Same thing, right before he destroys the Death Star. 

I found it interesting.  The same thing happens in Stephen King’s The Stand, where our rag-tag bunch of patriots have it out with the baddies in Vegas; same last line.  And while I can’t remember which movies it’s in, I know I’ve seen it other places as well.

It’s interesting how the F-word, once essentially a verb suggesting a kind of violent sexuality, has now become a word suggesting plucky defiance, a cheeky response to oppression.  Of course, the F- word has lots of other meanings–it’s plenty versatile, as taboo words tend to become.  But of course meaning depends on context, and in the context of PG-13 action films, it’s a positive thing. Sort of uniquely American, even.  As we patriotically give the figurative finger to our oppressors.

Of course, that’s also sort of a silly stance for us to take, given that we Americans possess the greatest military the world has ever seen, with military expenditures taking up a preposterously huge part of our budget, despite the fact that like the next twenty countries in terms of military expenditures are also allies.  In what sense is America a nation of underdogs?  We’re much more bullies than bullied.

And to give Red Dawn its due, that point does get mentioned.  Chris Hemsworth is an Iraq war veteran, and he says to his high-school-aged-army ‘in Iraq, we were the occupying force, and the insurgents were fighting us–here, we have to fight like the mujaheddin, we’re the bad guys, we have to fight a guerrilla war.’  Red Dawn does plug into what we might describe as a kind of Tea Party/conservative/Christian right paranoia, in which traditional American values are endangered, and we few patriots are left to fight the encroaching forces of, whatever, Kenyan socialism.  That stance, of course, is as ridiculous as the idea that the North Koreans could conquer Portland because of their (snicker) technological superiority. But whatever.  Why begrudge Tea Partiers their own action movie?

But we like underdogs.  Nobody wants to root for the Yankees; we prefer the plucky underdog Red Sox.  We loathe the Lakers–go Jazz!  We liked Rocky over Apollo, the Karate Kid over his tormentors, Hickory High over all those big-time schools in Hoosiers. Right now, the NBA playoffs are going on, and although I like basketball, I can’t get that interested; Miami has the best team and the best player, and they’re going to win.  It’s depressing.  So, in their first game against the Bulls (who had, like, their best four players out with injuries), when Joachim Noah, the Bulls emotional leader said ‘F-you’ to Lebron James (caught on camera; you couldn’t hear him say it, but it was clear enough), I got . . . interested in the series. And the Bulls won .  . . one game. And lost the next four. The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, saith the Preacher in Ecclesiastes, but generally that’s the way to bet.  And we know that, we know that powerful forces usually do actually win over less powerful ones, no matter how gritty and endearingly courageous the underdogs might be.  None of that really matters.  In reality, the rich beat the poor, big beats little, corporations usually do win.  Which is why we like movies (fantasies) where the opposite happens.  And why movie-makers go to fantastic lengths to make sure the heroes are underdogs, even when it doesn’t actually make sense.

There’s a terrific ‘F-you’ TV commercial on right now.  This skinny little kid, with the world’s awesomest Mom, is bullied by kids who steal his football.  But our skinny hero happens to know a kid weightlifter, a kid welder, a kid bear wrestler (!), a kid fire-fighter.  And the final line of the commercial, “touch or. .  .” “Tackle!” is the F-you moment.  Heck, yes, we’ll play you for the ball.  By the way, our right tackle wrestles bears.

And yes, I know some people find the F-word offensive.  I get that.  And yes, there’s absolutely a morality of language.  The Ten Commandments forbid ‘taking the Lord’s name in vain.’  A sin of language.  Or ‘bearing false witness.’ A sin of language.  But those sins are also sins of context, as must be the case with anything involving language, where we’re always invoking, reflecting, creating culture. I’m a playwright, and if my characters need to drop an F-bomb, I write it. And don’t feel like I’ve thereby sinned.

And sometimes, when facing implacable institutions, all-powerful bureaucracies, entrenched enemies with their castles and their moats, the F word is a battle cry, a shout of courageous defiance.  My grandmother was fond of a poem, which she turned into a needle-point sampler: “it may not be classic, it might be profane, but we mortals have need of it, time and again. And you’ll find you’re recover from life’s greatest slam, if you never say ‘die,’ say ‘damn.’”  As language has shifted and changed from her day, we might rewrite it as follows: ‘when you find that you need all your grit, all your pluck, never say die, say. . . . ‘

 

 

17th of May

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Today is the seventeenth of May, a very big day for those of us with Norwegian ancestry.  Syttende Mai, in Norwegian.  May 17 is the Norwegian Constitution Day.  Sometimes Norwegian Americans call it the ‘Norwegian 4th of July.’  May 17, the day Norway declared itself an independent nation, free from Danish rule.

I didn’t know much about the history of the Riksforsamlingen, the Norwegian Constitutional Assembly of 1814.  I’ve been to Eidsvoll, the town where the Assembly met.  When I was a kid, my Dad took our family there. A museum about politics, I remember, with all these paintings of guys in 19th century garb.  Boring.  It was one of those historical sites your parents drag you to when you’re a kid.  (Which, later in life, you really appreciate more, and vow to drag your own kids there someday.)  So this morning, I thought I should learn more about my heritage and history and did one of those Wikipedia search things, where you bounce from link to link and it just gets more and more fascinating.

Eidsvold, for example.  (They changed the spelling of the place in 1905, to today’s Eidsvoll).  Leading Norwegians met there in 1814, tasked with writing a constitution.  And they did it in, like, a month!  I know a lot about the American constitution, the ferocious debates and compromises.  But the Norwegians, heck, they did theirs in, like, five weeks.  Starting on April 10 (my birthday!), they finished their work by May 17.  When the US constitutional convention finished, the other delegates asked Benjamin Franklin to give a final speech, in which he said, basically, ‘look, we all know what we wrote isn’t very good, but it’s the best we could do, given our differences.’  Not the Norwegians. They had done great work, and knew it. This is my favorite part of Eidsvold: when the delegates finished, they all held hands and vowed: “United and loyal until the mountains of Dovre crumble!” I love that.

Here’s the history: for 400 years, Norway was under Danish rule.  Denmark, however, bet on the wrong horse in the Napoleonic wars.  So when Napoleon lost, the Brits forced Denmark to sign the Treaty of Kiel.  Norway was transferred from Danish to Swedish rule without Norwegians having any say over it.  The Danish Prince serving as Norwegian governor was outraged, and called for Norwegian independence: thus Eidsvold.

One might expect that a declaration of independence might lead to war, and that’s exactly what happened.  The Norwegian/Swedish war of 1814 was as mean as internecine wars can be. Nasty stuff. It made for a very tough couple of weeks, I’ll tell you.  Yep, that’s how long it lasted: Sweden invaded Norway on July 26, 1814, and badly outnumbered Norwegian forces battled ‘em to a standstill.  By August 9, both sides agreed to a cease-fire, and peace negotiations began, in Moss (where my Dad was born!), and concluded by August 14.

There’s something maybe a little bit comical about a civil war/war of independence lasting two weeks.  It feels a bit like a chess match, where white opens by advancing a pawn, and black goes “hmm, can’t beat that,” and offers a draw.  But actually, the two sides didn’t have a lot to fight about.  What made the most sense was to have two independent nations under a single king. Norway essentially had autonomy, except for foreign policy, which the Swedes ran.

It gets better.  Norway had gained its independence from Denmark in the Treaty of Kiel.  At the time, the governor of Norway was Prince Christian Frederick, who was also the Danish crown prince.  And he became the strongest advocate for Norwegian independence!  So when Norway agreed to accept a Swedish king, poor old Christian Frederick had to go back to Denmark and be Crown Prince again.  And eventually, king of Denmark.  Later, in 1905, when Norway decided to go completely independent, with its own king and foreign policy, they (I love this) had an election!  They elected a king!  The guy they elected, A Danish prince who became King Haakon VII, had impeccable credentials, from the House of Schelsvig/Holstein/Sonderberg/Glucksberg, and, as a junior Danish prince, wasn’t ever going to be king otherwise.  And he turned out to be a tremendous king.

His grandson, Harald, is the current king. And I love this too, his daughter, Martha Louise, fourth in the line of succession, decided she didn’t want to be a Princess anymore.  She’s wonderfully loopy; a licensed physio-therapist-turned-entertainer, into holistic medicine, plus she says she can talk to animals and angels, plus she writes children’s books, plus she does a lot of charity work for disabled children. She’s not a royal princess anymore–just got out of the family business, mostly, though she’ll occasionally agree to attend public events.

I love this stuff.  There’s something irretrievably goofy about contemporary Scandinavian history.  I love the fact, that possibly the most popular museum in Sweden is the Vasa museum.  The Vasa was this great seventeenth century warship, symbol of Swedish military might, back in the 1620s when Sweden genuinely was a significant European power.  10 August, 1628, the Vasa, Sweden’s greatest warship, was launched amidst all sorts of pomp and ceremony.  It sailed out into a major Stockholm harbor shipping lane, and sank ten minutes after being launched.  Royally screwed up shipping navigation for the next two hundred years.

In WWII, Norwegians genuinely showed their mettle–the Norwegian Underground fought with great courage and determination, and by destroying a German heavy water shipment, put a real crimp in Hitler’s attempts to build an atomic bomb.  Here’s a link to the trailer for a terrific Norwegian film about the Underground, Max Manus, for example.  But Norway is generally a wonderfully peaceful place.

That’s nowhere clearer than on the Seventeenth of May.  It’s a wonderful holiday in Norway, with lots of flags and children waving flags and flag parades. Some folks dress up in traditional garb, and that’s really lovely, all the Norwegian women in their bunads.

One of my favorite parts involve the russ parties and celebrations.  Norwegian kids graduate from the equivalent of high school on or around May 17, and traditionally, they stay awake the entire night, partying.  It’s called the russfeiring.  They wear a hat, a ‘russ’ cap, and they get pins for their hats depending on the kinds of mischief they manage to get up to.  If they can keep a teacher up all night by ringing his doorbell: that’s a pin.  If they actually stay up all night, that’s a pin.  You’ll be shocked, shocked, to learn that a lot of the russ pin awards involve drinking games. But I remember, for example, some really imaginative and pretty funny acts of semi-vandalism–comical sayings painted on town statues, that kind of thing.

And the seventeenth of May parades (including the big one down Karl Johansgate in Oslo), end with the singing of the Norwegian national anthem, ja vi elsker dette landet.  The text is by the great playwright and novelist Bjornstjerne Bjornson, and it’s lovely.  None of this martial American flag worshipping.

Yes, we love this, our country
as it rises forth,
rugged, weathered, above the sea,
with thousands of our homes.
Love it, love it and think
of our father and mother
and the saga night that blesses our earth with dreams. And the saga night, that blesses our earth with dreams.

It then goes on, verse after verse, heralding the Norwegian Viking past, which it reimagines as a continuous fight for freedom.  It mentions the two week war fought with Sweden.  And then, this stirring peroration:

Norwegian men in house and cabin,
thank your great God!
The country He wished to protect,
no matter how dark it seemed.
Our fathers fought

And our mothers wept

and God quietly granted us

Our sacred freedom.

It’s a beautifully celebratory day for a compassionate and peace-loving people.  I wish I were in Norway today, in Tromso and Moss and Oslo and Porsgrunn and Lillehammer, the places I know and love.  I wish I could wave my flag, and sing ja vi elsker.  Meanwhile, if you know any Norwegians, give ‘em a hug.  This is their day.

 

Hail the cell phone smasher!

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A friend of mine sent this link to Facebook. And I had a new hero.  Kevin Williamson, smasher of cell phones, kudos!  Very well done indeed sir!  I genuflect in your general direction!

And yet.  Why do we (okay, I) celebrate this guy?  For committing, what?  Theft.  Destruction of property.  I went shopping last night, was having a bad leg day and so brought my cane.  Well, what if that had offended someone? What if some fellow shopper had seen me limping around Shopko with my cane, become outraged, ripped the cane from my quivering hands, broken it over his knee?  ‘Walk, you frickin’ gimp!  Be a man!’ I imagine him shouting.  Wouldn’t I find his behavior outrageous.  Heck, wouldn’t I call the cops on the jerk?

But in a theater, stealing a phone (an expensive one, I imagine), and flinging it against a wall (certainly a disruptive act) is something we applaud.  I applaud. I think it’s awesome.  I think they should give the dude a medal.  I think he should get theatre tickets for free, for life, everywhere.  His is a brand of vigilantism I applaud.  While generally wagging a disapproving finger at essentially every other kind of vigilantism there is.

‘Cause you just don’t do that.  The word theatre comes from the latin, theatrum, which means, theatre.  So you can see how holy it is.  I mean, come on, latin.  A theatre is a sacred place, and the performances that take place there are sacraments and talking on a cell phone during a performance is really just like farting in Church.  Loudly, on purpose.  And then giggling and saying to your friend something like “dude, light a match, I just cut a good one.”  Or your friend goes, “dude, did you just fart?” and you respond, “hey, you know the rule, whoever smelt it, dealt it.”  And then he does a choking thing, and says something like “it’s not so much the smell, it’s the burning in my eyes!”  And then you both fall down giggling on the bench there. In Church.  During services.  Both of you.  That’s what talking on a cell phone in a theater is like.  Just like that. And maybe it’s cute and little okay when you’re five.  But at twenty-five, or fifty-five?  Unforgiveable.

Little kids get a dispensation.  In fact, the great joy of doing children’s theatre is the audience interaction.  Kids are amazing audiences.  Completely honest. A kid, in a theater during a boring performance won’t just shift in his chair or rustle a program.  He’ll say, very loudly, “I’m bored!”  Sometimes in a grown-up play, an actor may get away with a weak transition or a moment that’s less than totally honest.  Audiences are polite, after all.  Boy, not in a theatre with kids. They’re brutal.  Wonderfully, magnificently, brutal.

I wrote a play a few years ago, called Coughlaugh.  It was an experiment in audience/actor interaction.  The premise of the play is that the actors did absolutely nothing unless prompted by an involuntary sound from the audience.  If someone coughed, the actors performed one action, if someone rustled a program, they did another action.  And after the fifth repetition of the ‘cough’ action, they did a different one.  The idea was to implicate the audience in the performance.  It actually got kind of Pavlovian.  And the actor actions got more and more violent, so audiences became implicated in violence; that was also part of it.  We did it a couple of times. Some audiences dug it; others really were bothered by it.  The point, of course, is very John Cage–whatever happens in a theater is part of the performance.  Which is why cell phones are so obnoxious and jarring.

Part of my loathing of audience misconduct is history.  For years, the only movie theater in Provo that my wife and I could afford to go to was Movies 8, a second-run dollar theater. (Though my son, who worked there, likes to point out that tickets were actually $1.50.)

Movies 8 was the epicenter for audience rudeness in the Western hemisphere.  Because movies there were cheap, folks didn’t seem to feel any constraints whatever.  I remember a couple who brought children aged 3 and 5 to see Jurassic Park.   Two terrified youngsters howling in terror, while Mum and Dad placated them with honey-nut cheerios, and . . . stayed.  Enjoying a movie they’d ruined for everyone else.

Let’s play guess the movie!  From two rows behind us, an elderly and hard-of-hearing gentleman provided this commentary:  “That kid’s a what?  A robot?  How do you know he’s a robot?  He don’t look like a robot?  You sure he’s a robot?  What about that other guy?  He’s a robot too?  Are you sure?  Why they hell would they make a movie about a kid who’s a robot?”  50 points to first correct guess.

But, see, at Movies 8, this kind of outrageous movie commentary was de rigueur.  Cell phones, man, they were the least of the distractions you had to negotiate.  For one thing, for every movie, regarding of subject matter, approach or rating, the audience had a significant kiddie contingent.  Newlyweds (and newlybreds) are poor, and for entertainment found a buck and a half ticket price congenial.  So kids got dragged to everything.  And sacrament meeting rules applied–some folks were pretty conscientious about taking crying kids out, and some folks seriously weren’t.

And even beyond the children at inappropriate movies, Movies 8 audiences were generally rude.  Talking, chatting, commenting on the movie.  Popcorn fights.  Loud random noises, and then adolescent laughter at the fact that they’d made a loud random noise in a theater. Running around during the show.  Climbing over you in repeated trips to concessions/bathrooms.  And cell phones.  Always, always, with the phones.

And that’s at movies.  Distractions seem fifty times more egregious at live theatre performances.  Part of it, of course, has to do with live-ness.  Those are real people up there, performing their hearts out.  To disrupt their performance feels rude.  Ruder.  Every theater I know has a protocol for cell phones, a pre-show announcement of some kind, and most theaters try to word it cleverly or engagingly.  So when someone puts their own momentary need to interact electronically over the needs of the many folks gathered together in a theater, that’s rudeness compounded.  And I start to feel okay with audience members taking the law into their own hands.

Confession time: I’ve been guilty too.  Of cell phone malfeasance.  I mean, when I was a little kid, and saw my father sing the role of Scarpia in Tosca, and shrieked inopportunely ‘that lady just stabbed my Daddy!” I was what, five?  Forgiveable, even, apparently, a little cute (though my Mom was mortified).  But for a grown-up to interrupt a live theatre performance, that’s a totally different thing.  And I did it.  Just once, but the memory still scars.

I was attending a play (a really good one) in Salt Lake.  And I’d just gotten a new phone, and didn’t know how it worked.  But it had a music function–I could play tunes on it.  And pushing one particular button was how you accessed that function.  Which, five minutes into the show, I scooched around in my chair and accidentally did.  And couldn’t figure out how to turn it off.  For four whole minutes.

So to anyone else in that house that night, know that I still burn with shame, and feel terrible about ruining your evening, and know I did a bad thing and promise it will never happen again.  Ever.  And if Mr. Kevin Williamson wants to destroy my phone, I’ll let him. He can even come to my home, and I will hand it over.

And I promise. Never, ever, again.

 

 

Second term blues

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So, President Obama’s second term in office is off to a booming start, I’d say.  An encouraging jobs report. An economy that continues to recover.  One foreign military commitment essentially over and another winding down.  It’s true that two second-term legislative priorities, gun control and an immigration bill are stalled in Congress, but certainly progress has been made on both fronts.  Everything’s looking tea and crumpets for this President.  Tickety boo.  Copasetic.

I am, of course, kidding. We’re in the middle of the worst week of the Obama presidency, and it’s only Wednesday.  On Sunday, more shocking revelations on Benghazi.  The fabled ‘talking points,’ turns out, were not simply produced by the ‘intelligence community.’  Someone in the White House tinkered with them, softened words like ‘terrorist’ into words like ‘extremist.’  This was absolute red meat for conservatives, who have been insisting all along that the Benghazi ‘cover-up’ was initiated in the White House.  Then, turns out, the IRS (everyone’s favorite government agency) had been targeting conservative groups, giving special scrutiny to their 501 (c) (4) applications.  Also, Monday, we learn that the Justice Department had secretly obtained two months worth of phone records for Associated Press reporters and editors.  Finally, the President is hosting British Prime Minister David Cameron, a man who is currently less popular in Britain then President Obama is in Provo.

Second terms are tough. Nixon’s second term was destroyed by Watergate, Clinton’s by impeachment.  Reagan’s second term was defined by the Iran Contra affair, while George W. Bush’s saw the complete meltdown on the world economy.  Grover Cleveland’s second term saw the Panic of ’93, while even George Washington’s second term was marred by the massively unpopular Jay treaty.  So here we go, right on schedule, the sounds of Beyonce’s lip-synced national anthem barely fading. Scandal and disgrace. (In fact, isn’t that where it all went wrong?  Isn’t this really Beyonce’s fault?)

So let’s take a look, in descending order of importance, the big three scandals of this week, in reverse order of how we learned about them.  For starters, the AP phone number thing.

This link takes you to AP’s story on the scandal.  How’s that for irony?  But folks, this is serious stuff. The Justice Department has stone-walled the press on this, which is both entirely predictable and completely the wrong thing to do.  That’s the first law of scandals–get your story out there first.  Be the one to break it.  Take control of the narrative.  And that’s exactly and precisely what Justice has failed to do.

Bottom line: the federal government may not conduct special surveillance on news reporters doing their job.  It was wrong when Nixon went after the Washington Post during Watergate, and it’s wrong now.  It violates the spirit and letter of the first and fourth amendments.  Whoever in Justice authorized this needs to be fired, immediately and without hesitation.  I also think Attorney General Eric Holder needs to resign or be fired, whether or not he approved it or even knew about it.  Even if he learned of this the way the rest of us did, by watching the news, he’s clearly guilty of having mismanaged the Justice Department, if subordinates could possibly consider this a good idea. And if President Obama knew about it or approved it, this is an impeachable offense.  I like this President, I voted for him and I supported his re-election financially.  But you don’t spy on reporters.

We don’t know what this was about, but anything this colossally stupid and wrong-headed and fundamentally unconstitutional has to have originated with the War on Terror.  The AP story I linked to above speculated that “the U.S. attorney in Washington is conducting a criminal investigation into who may have provided information contained in a May 7, 2012, AP story about a foiled terror plot,” and speculates that this probe may be related to that investigation.  That makes sense to me. I don’t doubt that Justice would very much like to know AP’s sources for that leak and that story.  But they don’t get to bug reporters’ phones.

So that’s the big one; the major story of this week. And I’m glad that it came out. Way too much of the War on Terror operates in what can only be called legal and constitutional gray areas. President Obama knows this; hence his obvious discomfort with the detention of terror suspects at Guantanamo.  The President knows perfectly well that the United States can’t legally or constitutionally hold detainees there forever.  He wants to close the base–has said so many times.  But he hasn’t actually closed it, mostly because, I suspect, he doesn’t have the faintest idea what to do with the detainees.  Just letting them go seems, uh, irresponsible.  So charge them with something and try them criminally?  That’s probably the right answer, but what evidence, by now, hasn’t been corrupted?

So it’s an awful mess.  And of course, Presidents must feel tremendous pressure to do something, to keep Americans safe.  But the way to defeat terrorism isn’t to kill or capture all possible terrorists.  That’s a Sisyphean impossibility.  The way to defeat terrorism is to refuse to be terrorized.  The way to defeat terrorism is with a little David Ortiz. Props, Papi.  F yeah.

Above all, we cannot abandon our deepest and truest values, and especially those enshrined in the Bill of Rights.  I’m a liberal and a Democrat, and I voted for President Obama, and I desperately hope this scandal doesn’t go that high, to the White House.  If it does, he needs to go.  So this scandal really is genuinely a big deal, far and away the most troubling of the big three that broke this week.

Okay, second scandal, the IRS targeting conservative groups applying for 501 (c) (4) status.  I read about this scandal with a comfortingly familiar sense of deja vu.  It was comfortingly familiar.  Used to be Greenpeace and the ACLU that got this kind of attention. Now it’s groups with ‘Tea Party’ in their name.

Look, I don’t think political advocacy groups should be eligible for 501 (c) (4) status at all.  ‘Social welfare’ organizations are eligible, but ‘political advocacy groups’ are not.  It reminds me of when I was a student at BYU, and the Honor code prohibited girls from wearing ‘jeans’ but allowed them to wear ‘denim slacks.’  The line is so nebulous, IRS decisions are always going to be seem arbitrary.  Apparently, the problem at the IRS is that inadequately supervised employees decided to give special scrutiny to groups with ‘tea party’ or ‘patriot’ in their title, but not groups with ‘progressive’ or ‘progress.’  This story points out that the IRS wasn’t particularly consistent even there, but yeah, they approved groups like Progress Florida, but applications from groups like T.E.A. (Taxed Enough Already) languished.

I would say that the IRS commissioner should be fired over this, but there isn’t one–the Republicans in the Senate have filibustered a vote on the President’s nominee for the job.  Love that irony.  Meanwhile, yeah, this is inappropriate. There should be an investigation, and probably someone at the IRS should lose his/her job.  I would suggest that Congress revisit 501 (c) (4) guidelines.  But this Congress?  Anyone have any confidence that they’d not just make things worse?

Finally, Benghazi.  Yes, it looks like someone in the White House altered the talking points Susan Rice used when she appeared on Sunday talk shows after the Benghazi attacks.  As a result. . . . viewers of those shows were slightly (emphasis on slightly) less informed for a few days than they might have been otherwise. Stripped of all the usual conservative argle-bargle, this remains a non-scandal.  It is, predictably, the one Fox News has focused on the most.

 

Bums

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One place they gather is just outside the Maceys parking lot.  Maceys is where I do most of our grocery shopping, and the entrance onto State Street is narrow enough that traffic backs up there.  They give you time to see them, with their cardboard signs.  ‘Homeless Please Help.’  Friday, it was a family, multi-generational, multi-racial.  The youngest looked about twenty; he was tall, had something wrong with his left leg, gimped over. He was on my right, passenger side, had to lean into the car for the money.  I gave him three dollars, all I had in small denominations.  “Thanks, man,” he said.

Something about homelessness; language reverts to a sixties usage and idiom.  Adding ‘man’ to every sentence.  “Here you go, man.”  “Wish it were more, man.” “Thanks, man.”  And yesterday, outside Bed Bath and Beyond, from the short toothless elderly African American guy I gave a few quarters to, “God bless you, my brother.”  It’s heavy, man, thinking about homelessness. Groovy to give. The sound track is Tracy Chapman and “Fast Car” and Jimi with Highway Chile and Tull with “Aqualung.” It all feels very tie-dye and patchouli oil.  Like, man, the first time we cared about our brothers, you dig?

I wonder how they decide who gets which spot.  The corner of State and Bulldog seems like a bad place to panhandle.  Cars move too stop–there’s not a good place to stand.  But they were there too, Friday. I’d broken a twenty and had a few bills for the Native American-looking woman, there with a daughter.  But the car behind me honked when I stopped to give it to her.  Impatient, maybe angry.

My wife and I have agreed; if we can give ‘em a few bucks, we try to.  We don’t always.  And I’m stingy about it.  I’ll give a couple of bucks, or a few quarters, but if I have a ten or a twenty, it stays in my pocket.  My charity has serious limitations.

We shouldn’t encourage bums, you hear.  This is their job, panhandling, and a lucrative one.  You’d be shocked how much they make at it too!  Instead of just getting a real job, and doing real work, for an honest wage. Don’t be a sucker.  They work on the sympathies of soft-headed liberals/Christians/doo-gooders. And if you give them money, they’ll just use it to get drunk.

I don’t care about any of that.  Maybe some of them will get drunk. Or high.  I don’t care.  I see a family with children.  The kids look hungry.  I see an old guy, defeated by life, hanging on.  I see a battered face, I see worn jeans and a filthy jacket and a backpack.  A shopping cart, filled with junk.  I see some of the worst shoes ever.  Limping, like the shoes, crappy as they are, also don’t fit.

They don’t seem to hang out by Harmons.  We don’t shop at Harmons, much. It’s a lot nicer grocery store, with more organic veggies, with expensive cheeses, with fancy breads and muffins. Not many processed foods.  We shop there occasionally.  They offer a service where they bag your groceries and then take them to a loading area, where you can park and they load ‘em in your car.  Harmon’s is north east Orem, closer to the nicer neighborhoods in Lindon and up in the river bottoms and foothills.  You don’t see a lot of panhandlers there, outside Harmons.  Rich folks equal slim pickins, I suspect.

And I wonder what it’s like in the northwest valley, up by Alpine and Lehi and Cedar Hills and Saratoga Springs.  I once knew a guy who was a bishop in an Alpine ward.  He said that from time to time, it was his duty, as bishop, to tell people who had moved in, ‘we think you probably move.  We think you can’t afford to live here.’  Those wards, where Youth Conference involved trips to Cancun or Wahweap.  I wonder where they shop for groceries.  I wonder if panhandlers haunt their parking lots.  Maybe so.  Maybe it makes sense for them.

But in Provo, outside Macey’s or the Fresh Market on Center Street.  They’re always there. And I bet the real poor-people grocer, Reams, I bet that place is crowded with homeless beggars.  The people who shop at Reams, where you have to bag your own groceries, those are the people who know how fragile the line is between them an poverty. They may have less, but you can bet they give more.

And here I am, judging.  In fact, it’s hard to see any part of homelessness that doesn’t get all caught up in judging, in self-righteousness, in feeling superior.  We judge the homeless, assume their failures are entirely their fault, that they’re homeless because of recklessness or profligacy or self-indulgence or addiction.  (What’s that great Mitch Hedberg line? ‘Alcoholism is the one disease people get mad at you for getting’).  We try to think of ways to help them on our terms.  ‘I’ll buy you breakfast?,’ we consider saying, instead of giving cash they’ll just drink up.  But breakfast, at least he’s getting a decent meal.  Or we think, ‘what if I offered him a job? I bet he’d turn it down.  He’s a bum because he likes being a bum.’  We think that.

We like to judge beggars.  But then, when we hand the guy a couple of bucks, we like to judge the people in all the other cars that don’t give him anything.  I just did it, judging folks who shop at Harmon’s.  We judge those who give more than we do, and those who give less than we do, and we judge ourselves too–’why didn’t I give more (or less).’

And yet, it’s precisely when dealing with the poor that we’re not actually supposed to judge at all:

And also, ye yourselves will succor those that stand in need of your succor; ye will administer of your substance unto him that standeth in need; and ye will not suffer that the beggar putteth up his petition to you in vain, and turn him out to perish. Perhaps thou shalt say: The man has brought upon himself his misery; therefore I will stay my hand, and will not give unto him of my food, nor impart unto him of my substance that he may not suffer, for his punishments are just—But I say unto you, O man, whosoever doeth this the same hath great cause to repent; and except he repenteth of that which he hath done he perisheth forever, and hath no interest in the kingdom of God.  For behold, are we not all beggars? Do we not all depend upon the same Being, even God, for all the substance which we have? (Mosiah 4: 16-19)

And I’m not even going to get into the whole ‘the government should help more/no it shouldn’t, government programs just foster dependency’ debate.  I know both sides of that argument, and perhaps there’s some merit to both. It does seem to me to be getting worse. And I know which arguments we’re not allowed to make, as Christians.  We’re not allowed to say ‘it’s his fault.  He gets nothing from me.’  We’re not even allowed to think it.

So my wife and I do what we can, give a little each time, wish it were more.  Look into the faces of the poor, and see defeated eyes, rheumy eyes, crazy eyes.  See reflected desperation or anger or mental illness.  See our Heavenly Father’s children, down and out, down and falling, down to nothing in the richest country the world has ever seen.  So we give.

 

 

The Great Gatsby: A review

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It’s terrific.  Let me get that out of the way; it’s a wonderful movie. The new Baz Luhrman movie, The Great Gatsby is deeply moving and powerful, not just Moulin Rouge set in Jazz Age New York.

As I watched the closing credits, I overheard this conversation from a woman seated behind me.  She said, “It was so stupid.  They didn’t have rap music back a hundred years ago or whatever.  And they shoulda got a good actor to play that Gatsby guy.  Like, I don’t know, Shia LaBeouf.”

There’s buzz about this film, and it’s mostly not good. 48% on Rotten Tomatoes. But I’ve read a lot of the negative reviews, and consider them about as insightful as the comments of the Shia LaBeouf lady. I’ve seen Gatsby compared to the Elizabeth Taylor Cleopatra for example. Seen it touted as a classic Hollywood disaster.  I can only say that they didn’t see the same movie I saw last night.

The main complaint I’ve heard is one you often hear about Baz Luhrman films: all style, no substance. Yes, he can do excess, he can do the big musical dance number, with writhing bodies and swooping cameras and garish lighting.  But can he tell a story, can he deliver believable human characters and make us care about them.

I suppose it’s fair to say that if you liked Moulin Rouge, you probably will like Gatsby, and if you hated Moulin Rouge you won’t much like Gatsby.  And yes, I really loved Moulin Rouge.  But Moulin Rouge is way more over-the-top than Gatsby.  What I don’t understand is critics who found Gatsby empty, who complain that they didn’t feel anything at the end.  I don’t mind admitting; I was a puddle.  I wept at the end.

And so many reviewers also insist that Luhrman’s not true to the spirit of the novel.  The Great Gatsby, they insist, is too important and powerful a novel to be given the Baz Luhrman treatment.  To which I would say this: we’ve seen a reverential Great Gatsby.  It had Robert Redford and Mia Farrow and was a movie so listless it just died.  F. Scott Fitzgerald was about energy.  His novel moves with the orgiastic excess of the Jazz Age.  The nightmarish party sequences Nick Carroway (Tobey Maguire) wanders through, lost and bewildered and excited and fascinated and titillated: pure Fitzgerald.

And why not use Jay-Z’s music there?  Why not make that connection aurally explicit, between the gin-fueled superabundance of the Jazz Age, and the coke-fueled excess of party scenes today?  Jay-Z’s a producer on the film, so why not let his rap comment on Nick’s self-destruction?

And those early party scenes are crucial, as establishing shots for what will come next.  But what I admire about the movie is, in fact, its restraint.  Luhrman clearly loves this great novel, and understands that at its heart, it’s basically a deeply tragic love story.

And that’s why Leonardo DiCaprio is so perfect as Jay Gatsby.  He can play Gatsby’s confidence, his quiet, easy off-hand competence.  But he also gives us layers, the insecurity that underlies the confidence, and the moral compromises that formed him.  When Nick says to him, ‘you can’t re-create the past,’ he responds, in one of the novel and film’s classic lines, ‘of course you can!’  But Gatsby isn’t actually re-creating the past.  He’s burying it.  He’s inventing an entirely new past, as he reinvents himself.

The film wouldn’t work without an actress capable of meeting DiCaprio’s brilliance in the role, and with Carey Mulligan, as Daisy Buchanan, Luhrman shows his gift for pitch-perfect casting.  She’s luminously vulnerable in the role. Daisy’s motivations are complex, both in the novel and the film.  It’s not as simple as leaving her cheating husband for the love of her life.  Mulligan gets it. The major dramatic question, of course, is ‘will Daisy leave her husband and marry Gatsby.’  And Joel Edgerton’s Tom Buchanan is splendidly vile.  Why wouldn’t she want to leave him? Because it’s not that easy.

It’s a movie about love, in all its variety.  There’s Gatsby’s (how to describe it?) confident desperation, self-assured neediness.  It’s not enough that Daisy declare her love for him.  She has to add something; publicly state that she has never loved Tom.  We wonder why she doesn’t just say it. But she knows things about Gatsby’s actual past.  Where did his money come from?  Will she be safe with a man whose fortune is built on criminality?

And when Tom (who is thuggish, but by no means unintelligent) goads Gatsby enough, we see that undercurrent of violence beneath Gatsby’s urbane exterior, and she’s frightened again.  (It’s DiCaprio’s finest moment, in a superb performance).  There’s Daisy’s love, confused and vulnerable, torn between her philandering husband and the various Gatsbys that reveal themselves. There’s Tom Buchanan’s love, brutal and loathsome, but maybe more real that Gatsby’s fantastic history.  There’s the elemental, inchoate, inarticulate, desperate love of George Wilson (the ever amazing Jason Clarke), married to the cutie-patootie party girl Myrtle (Isla Fisher), whose sordid affair with Tom Buchanan ends in such terrible tragedy.  And finally, there’s the love Nick Carroway has for Gatsby. In a lot of ways, it’s the most honest love in the whole movie, the masculine, straight friendship between Gatsby (who finally finds, in Nick, the one friend he can genuinely trust), and Nick, who sees in Jay Gatsby everything he wants to become.

It’s an intoxicating movie, not just because of Baz Luhrman’s dab hand with cinematic excess, but because, half-way through, he trusts these marvelous actors and that marvelous story and takes the time to let all the complicated emotions and competing objectives play themselves out.

And, yes, The Great Gatsby is also a political novel, with Gatsby as the living embodiment of the American Dream, with all the compromises and short cuts and moral ambiguity that implies.  It’s about the ultimate American success story, and the dark side of that success.  The politics aren’t front-and-center (in the novel or the film), but class issues and race issues remain in the background, quietly festering.

Anyway, it’s a brilliant movie.  Afterwards, my wife and I went out for ice cream with some friends, including their teenaged daughters.  They loved it too.  So, really, this is one where it might be best to ignore the critics. (Except, you know, me.)  It’s a remarkable film.

 

More Benghazi hearings. Yay.

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Like Fred Krueger, Jason or Rasputin, Benghazi keeps crawling back to terrorize us.  Yesterday’s hearings marked the ninth time Congress has held hearings on Benghazi.  The public reaction was, again, a yawn.  Jon Stewart, as usual, got to the heart of why this nation-wide apathy.

It doesn’t matter.  That’s what Secretary Clinton said about it when asked, and she’s right.  It doesn’t matter. What?  Outrageous!  Four brave patriotic Americans died!  How can that not matter?  So let’s be clear about what matters and what doesn’t.

Four men died. A US ambassador, a lifelong diplomat, Chris Stevens, died.  That’s a terrible tragedy, and it deserves to be thoroughly investigated.  And I think pretty well everyone agrees what the focus of that investigation should be.  We want to know exactly what happened.  We want to know who-dun-it, and how to catch them.  We want to know what specific, concrete steps can be undertaken to increase embassy security.  We want, maybe, to look at possible military responses to a US mission under siege.  Relevant questions might be ‘is the US Diplomatic Security Service properly funded and trained?’ Or, ‘why doesn’t the Africa sub-command have a on-call Marine detachment that can be quickly flown to trouble spots?’  Or my favorite, ‘why didn’t the safe room in the Benghazi compound come equipped with gas masks?’

Serious errors were made.  Those errors may be correctable.  Security experts should investigate.

And in fact, that’s happened.  Benghazi has been thoroughly investigated.  The Accountability Review Board Report is available on-line.  It’s hardly a whitewash.

Systemic failures and leadership and management deficiencies at senior levels within two bureaus of the State Department (the “Department”) resulted in a Special Mission security posture that was inadequate for Benghazi and grossly inadequate to deal with the attack that took place.

The full report is available on-line, and it’s scathing.  Serious mistakes were made.  Security was inadequate.

So yesterday, Gregory Hicks testified before Darrel Issa’s House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.  He essentially corroborated the ARBR report, adding extra, painful details.  He argued, for example, that additional Special Forces could have supplemented the forces that did show up, from Tripoli. I watched Hicks’ testimony.  Powerful stuff. It added a little to our understanding of the event.  I was struck, yet again, at what a miserable screw-up the whole thing was.

But not a conspiracy. Not a cover-up.  Not (get real) impeachable.

The focus of House Republicans has consistently been misplaced.  On the Sunday talk shows, a few days after the Benghazi attacks, Susan Rice said that a terrorist attack rose spontaneously from a protest over the anti-Islamic video on Youtube.  She was simply reflecting the talking points prepared for her, but those talking points were incorrect.  The video had nothing to do with Benghazi.  It was a carefully planned terrorist attack.  Everyone agrees on that point.

But my gosh, the outrage!  The talking points have become the entire narrative for conservatives.  It’s a cover-up!  Worse than Watergate! It’s really remarkable.

Let’s be clear: the incorrect talking points had no real-world impact on events.  Ambassador Rice said a few things wrong to George Stephanopolous.  It meant that people who watch This Week were slightly less informed for a day or two.  No terrorists went free.  No other embassies were attacked.  It meant nothing.  It’s completely unimportant.

Today, the news is all about a ‘smoking gun’ email, apparently, that shows that the White House National Security office was involved in editing the talking points.  They replaced ‘terrorist’ with ‘extremist,’ for example.  So this feeds into the whole ‘cover-up’ narrative.

See, what’s supposed to have happened is that the White House was afraid that a highly public terrorist attack would hurt President Obama’s election chances.  It would make him look weak on terror.  It would undercut a Democratic argument: ‘President Obama had Osama bin Laden killed, and therefore made American safer.’ It would show that Al Qaeda was still an active threat.  So the talking points were softened, for political reasons.

And I suppose all that is possible, though there’s no evidence that either President Obama or Secretary Clinton was involved.  (‘Plausible deniability!’)  So here’s why I think that argument is  honestly kind of silly.

First of all, the politics of it don’t make sense.  If President Obama was afraid to talk about resurgent terrorism, then why did he use the ‘T’ word in his own remarks the day after the attacks?  Generally, when Americans are attacked by terrorists, the President’s approval numbers go up.  It’s pretty much always a plus for sitting presidents.  A guy standing up resolutely against terrorists is the kind of image voters love.  In his Rose Garden remarks, the President looked, well, Presidential.

More to the point, we need to see the entire event in context.  Conservatives love to mock the ‘video protest’ argument, but the reality is, there was a video, it was preposterously offensive, and there were riots in Egypt over it.  Those riots spread to Tunisia, to Tripoli, and throughout the region. That’s why the talking points talked about video protests.  The State Department had been on alert for days precisely over video protests elsewhere.

It’s basic human nature to focus on one emergency at a time. We all do it.  So, for example, in the coverage of the Boston bombings, we kept hearing about how another bomb had also gone off in the Kennedy Library.  It turned out that a fire alarm had gone off there, but it wasn’t connected to the bombings in any way, and wasn’t actually any big deal.  But with everyone focused on bombings during the Boston Marathon, it makes sense that a report of an incident elsewhere would be conflated with the thing we were all worried about.

At State, whether or not Benghazi had anything to do with video protests, the emergency caused by the protest was still on-going at the time that the talking points were being prepared. State was trying to calm things down.  ‘Extremist’ is a softer word than ‘terrorist.’ Softening the talking points for diplomatic reasons makes much more sense than altering them for political reasons.

In any event, it still doesn’t matter.  Secretary Clinton’s testimony remains the best and final word on the talking points aspect of the controversy.  Getting the story straight for a TV show was almost certainly everyone’s lowest priority.  And anyway, what does it matter?  What matters is catching bad guys, and improving embassy security going forward.  These recent House Benghazi hearings will do nothing to accomplish either objective.