2005-09-16

Smiley Of The B.D.A.

Probably only readers of John le Carré will appreciate the odd juxtaposition that bit me in a comment thread over at Henley’s and prevented me from working on anything else until I had purged it.  Updates, if any, will be posted to the Archival entry.

2005-09-13

If You Can Keep It

Mark Schmitt brilliantly captures the unique threat that the Bushies pose to our democracy.  All Americans would do well to remember that while there is much to admire in our Constitution, laws, and democratic traditions, they alone are insufficient to guarantee incorrupt government.

I just completed The Secret Man, Bob Woodward’s memoir of his relationship with W. Mark Felt, the granddaddy of all anonymous sources, Deep Throat.  The book provides the final refutation of the myth of the investigative reporter as guardian of democracy; Felt was just another Washington player (with anti-Constitutional hobbies of his own) who used Woodward to damage a White House that Felt regarded as a rival and usurper of the prerogatives of Hoover’s FBI.  Following the Watergate resignations, convictions and pardons, Woodward never again exposed a source to as much peril as he did Felt, nor did he write anything that would have jeopardized the access to power that flowed from his newfound celebrity.

The domination of the American political scene by two large parties is an artifact of our first-past-the-post electoral system.  Ostensibly, the intent of this system is to encourage candidates and parties to moderated their positions to appeal to as large a majority as possible.  Two "big-tent" parties also permit crossover votes in Congress, including the ballyhooed "collegiality" of the Senate, where the longer election cycle results in greater bipartisan cooperation.

The Rove Republicans, however, are no longer playing by these unwritten rules, and they have changed many of the written rules.  By scorning and, indeed, actively suppressing the swing vote while relying on a perpetually outraged and energized base, the Bushies are rejecting decades- if not centuries-old American democratic tradition.  In fact, they are behaving precisely like a party in a democracy governed by proportional representation.

If we cannot rely on either an independent press or the (small-r) republican spirit of our representatives to preserve our pluralistic democracy, perhaps we should change the rules to accommodate the Bushies’ monolithic partisanship.  Let’s toss out the Electoral Collage, as well as the 435 congressional districts.  The president/vice-president shall be elected by a straight plurality of all national votes, and the seats in the House of Representatives shall be apportioned by proportional representation (the states can keep the Senate as is).  Then let the Bushies try to build a coalition without an over-represented FatherHomeland or their beloved Southern strategy.

2005-09-08

Are You Ready For The Summer (To End)?

Our retrospective on the career of Bill Murray continues with a look at Meatballs.  With Oscar heading off to school and our camping gear slowly disappearing into the attic, I was easy prey when I spotted the DVD for $10.

Meatballs was the second entry in a series of Ivan Reitman-Harold Ramis collaborations, including Animal House, Stripes, and Ghostbusters.  It was also the first Bill Murray vehicle, yet it transcends the type-casting that dogged Murray over his first decade in filmmaking.  Murray’s early characters were typically slackers/scoundrels that hammed it up and then redeemed themselves in the final act.  While Murray’s Tripper in Meatballs has many clownish moments, he is in no need of redemption; for everyone around him, he is the source of wisdom (although he needs to humbly and happily earn the favors of the formidable Roxanne).  The film focuses on Tripper’s patronage of Wudy the Wabbit*, but in fact Tripper is responsible for the welfare of everyone at Camp NorthStar; he is the most grown-up person in the film.

In hindsight, it is clear that Murray had always been instinctively aware of the delicate balance between comedy and gravity, and that his more recent triumphs are best understood as the fruition of his talents.  But it neither Murray’s performance nor his transcendence of the limitations of the (pre-)teen comedy genre that endears Meatballs to me.  Proximally, while I never saw it in the theaters (my family moved from Tucson to Seattle in the summer of 1979, a rather traumatic displacement for me), I must have seen it a couple dozen times on Showtime, surpassed perhaps only by my uncounted viewings of Star Trek II: The Wrath of (Sili)Khan.

Despite not having seen the film in Tucson, for me Meatballs very specifically evokes what it was like to be ten years old and alone, whether away at camp, attending a new school, or moving to a new city.  Ten is an age when one learns that there are different kinds of friends, and that it pays to be selective.  For many kids, it is also when they are first exposed to older teenagers who are not simply surrogate parents but confidants who will give them the inside skinny on growing up.  For all their foibles, heedless hair, and unfortunate clothing, the counselors-in-training at Camp NorthStar look exactly like the teenagers I looked up to in 1978-9.  The film is also severely dated by the wretched montage-ballads, but I must confess that these days, when confronted by images of plastic aviator glasses and Castro-district-shorts set to swoony lyrics, there is no other word to describe my reaction than nostalgia.

Of course, I never attended anything like Camp NorthStar; who sends their kids away for the entire summer?  These are supposed to be the poor kids?  I went to camp a week at a time, both in the Chiricahua Mountains and on the shores of Puget Sound, at most twice but usually once in a single summer.  It was church camp, but that didn’t seem to make a large difference to either the campers or the counselors appointed to watch over us.  Even after such a short duration, there were always tears on the last day (which returned unbidden last month when we picked Oscar up from his day care for the last time).

I suppose I’m obliged to make the Old Fart™ observation that they don’t make movies like Meatballs anymore.  A year after it was released, Jason Vorhees hit the theaters and forever changed the way cinema regards summer camp.  More significantly, teen comedies are now either too ironic or too gross to pause to celebrate the fleeting fellowship between 17-year-olds who give up part of their precious summer to adjudicate pillow fights between 8-year-olds.  "If you make one good friend a summer, you’re doing pretty well."  How’d you make out this summer?

Meatballs also inaugurated my ill-starred identification with Chris Makepeace, as I can trace my habit of early rising to Rudy’s magical discovery of Tripper’s jogging regimen.  This fascination would result in a latent anti-urbanism after My Bodyguard, and end in temple-pounding tears with Mazes and Monsters.

2005-09-06

Aren't They Cute?

While I’m sure some would argue that I’ve already filled my niche for Quirky Obscure Sport Familiarity, I have to admit to being frequently tempted to follow the CFL; it's like college ball without the recruiting scandals.

2005-09-05

Confidence

The appalling spectacle in the wake of Hurricane Katrina has exposed many unpleasant realities about our nation, few of which should surprise anyone.  But perhaps the most alarming revelation is the stunningly poor response by FEMA and the Department of Defence Against the Dark Arts Homeland Security.  From the cronyism of Michael D. Brown to the inattention of Michael Chertoff, the Federal agencies charged with catastrophe prevention, mitigation, and relief were woefully unprepared for a large-scale emergency that not only could have been but in fact was predictedMultiple times.

As even the press have realized, this failure goes beyond extreme conditions, incompetence, and red tape.  Some may be inclined to attribute it to the institutionalization of our national, "I got mine, fuck you and yours" ethos.  Others see the fruition of the campaign of hostility towards government itself.  But it is clear to me that the images and sounds of last week most strikingly revealed the great fraud that the Bush Administration has perpetrated upon the American public: that after 9/11, whatever else you might think of George W. Bush and his policies, he will use all the powers and resources of the government to protect the American people.  The fear and chaos of 9/11 drove many Americans to suspend their judgment of Bush for the promise that he put their security first and would not suffer it to be compromised for any reason.  For those who care to look, this promise can now be seen to have been a base, venal lie.

In the weeks after 9/11, the public was cautioned against scam artists posing as charitable organizations, soliciting donations that would never reach the victims and their families.  From the criminal neglect of FEMA to the Kafkaesque reorganization of Homeland Security to the hostile indifference to post-invasion planning for Iraq, the Bushies have made a big pitch for security while hastily erecting the thinnest possible scrim between the American people and whatever peril awaits them.  Meanwhile, the national debt has exploded, the middle class has shrunk, and now we’re repealing the estate tax.  As political grifters go, Rove, Bush, and Cheney are masters of the long con.

2005-09-02

Governing Best, Governing Least

Critics of the Global War On Terror™ have often chided Bush for squandering post-9/11 national unity by not asking Americans to make sacrifices.  I hope such critics are happy now.