Strength...with friends and family

I hope I will have the fortitude and strength she has if/when this happens.

Reason's The Onion

One topic that is bond to come up as a prompt for some essay is the rise of entertainment in the news. I can see it now; Daily Show this and Colbert that. I know these are valid examples, yet I don't believe any has been taken on in a worth wild fashion. But an example that can, and will, be used is the satiric newspaper The Onion, written up in Reason Magazine by Greg Beato. Billed as the "America's Finest News Source" it is an apologetically crude and hilarious paper. In print or online there is an interesting story behind the print. It is one of the few newspapers to have grown 60% in the past three years and boasts a subscription of over 700,000 a week, more than The Denver Post.
The story here might be the downright honesty in the newspaper. It's offensive headlines and mocking stories have never backed down and delivers week jabs to otherwise sacred cows. Reason argues that it is not anything high tech. While cable news shows have news crawls, flashy segways between stories, and endless video, The Onion provides little in the way of technology. There is no user feedback, few sections and few pictures. Yet the stories are consistently entertaining and compelling. What it supplies is something that must be glossed over in cable news, "candor, irreverence, and a willingness to offend."
There is one argument that is left open in this article, which is humor the enemy of seriousness? For now, yes. Humor is what gets a person to read the news, not understand it. It draws them to it and allows them to stay, not to understand. Jon Stewart might be credited with drawing a new generation to government, but there is nothing that says he has made them understand more, or that they didn't understand in the first place. If he has, it is because he has always had an agenda.

On Heroism

A recent article in The New Atlantis caught my eye on heroism, which soon lost me on Modernism. James Bowman's piece, Heroism, Modernism, and the Utopian Impulse talked about the complexity of heros. While important to oppose evil, heroes can trample the group mentality but that law and order is a utopian myth without them.

Bowman points to a book about Flight 93, the hijacked plane that crashed into a field in Pennsylvannia. Can all the passengers aboard that plane be considered heroes? No so according to some passengers families. The families of the most notorizable passengers whom resisted their captors say it does disservice to the truth to claim that others are equal to those who struggle and acted more heroically. The hero is a figure, a lone figure who stands up amonst a crowd to do what others may be capable of but notheless do not have the foresite to do so.

This reminds me of a piece a while back in the New York Observer piece that trailed the 2004 election as well as the hit movie The Incredibles. It's Super Bush comtemplates that Republicans appear more like the heros of televison today than their more liberal counterparts. The Incredibles movie follows a family of superheros forced into hiding in suburbia to raise a family, depressing job and potbelly. But their is still a draw to fight crime, which lures the family out of hiding. Take that with the GOP in 2004, seen as the superheros in exile. Cheney and Rumsfeld growing older as they see the world crumble under Clinton, awaiting the day when they can reclaim their seat in the Pentagon or a new desk in the Exectutive branch. Superheros were seen as those unwilling to use their power, but did so out of a calling, if not outcry for their heroics.

So here is where we have come. Superheros , or just simply heros, are those like Todd Beamer or Jeremy Glick who are mild-manner and rise to the occasion like Superman, or Spiderman. Yet now in a politically correct world we cannot view them as anything more. All passengers are heros, Beamer and all those aboard. I would say right here yes, but does that mean we cannot single out a few? Must we downplay the contributions of a few so much that Todd Beamer should be forgotten as just one of the many on Flight 93? Do the superheros contributions mean so little or belittle so many that they must go into hiding?


Here is a good part of the Observer piece.

"That's how a lot of liberals feel," Mr. Pollack explained. "A lot of those are archetypes that came out of the 60's: the Incredible Hulk, Fantastic Four, the X-Men. Things have changed a lot in comics. Spider-Man is a good archetype for a liberal hero-he wants to give up his powers, he wants them back, he's conflicted, he's trying to hold down a job, he wants the girl. Whereas a conservative superhero just wants to fight evil."

Sounds much like liberals today; unwilling to fight, conflicted on whether to do so, preoccupied with other issues like global warming. Whereas Republicans today are widely seen as just wanting to fight evil, maybe wanting to do so at the beginning of his administration. Hillary Clinton meet Spiderman, Rudy, meet Mr. Incredible.

But I digress from the original Bowman piece. What is happening culturally is the same as the Incredibles also. Political correctness and the victim culture get the best of the hero as an ambulance chaser gets a hold of a train derailment victim to sue Mr. Incredible. Neck brace and all, he claims that by being too powerful, he has injured the innocent. Despite the fact that he would be dead without him, it is the feelings that count. Thus the demise of the hero's career and conservatism. Is post-modernism liberalism?

Cook's Parade of Inequaility

The the September 2006 issue of The Atlantic (yes, I get my magazines from the library) there is a piece by Atlantic editor Clive Cook about Jan Pen's 1971 book Income Distribution. As the exciting title may suggest, it is about the disproportionate distribution of wealth in Britain, or really applicable to any Western country.

Imagine an hour long parade were every participant's height is proportional to their height. If we were to begin with the lowest income first we would find people upside-down in debt and then microscopic. This would continue with dwarf sized people for most of the festivities. Only towards the end would you find average height individuals only to be followed at the last microseconds by giants of unimaginable proportions. So why the disparity?

The claim is made that after the second World War, income rose disproportionately as income went up, favoring the wealthy. Over thirty years median income rose just 11 percent while top income rose 617 percent. Labor's share of income is not trending up or down. What has changed is how much of their share goes to the top income brackets. This can be explained, apparently, through productivity.

Productivity is the single most important indicator of prosperity. So high earners are taking home the labor's share of productivity, and thus wages. America has a much more dispersed productivity, unknown why to me, which means that hairdressers and mechanics share in their prosperity more so than in other countries.

Interesting piece, and not the most interesting even in the whole issue.

The Second Circle

I look for narrative in movies. What is it about the camera angles, or the dialog, or the progression of the story that adds to the narrative? I want to understand how the authors uses his tools, whether they be a camera and actors, or words to construct a narrative. I think that is why I didn't care of the movie, The Bourne Ultimatum, it lacked a sufficient narrative. Maybe it was the fact that I didn't see the first two in the trilogy, but I thought the story progressed little and felt that a high-pace substituted for a plot.

I just finished the movie The Second Circle (1990) by Aleksandr Sokurov. Yes, I to discuss movies here. The story takes place after the death of a man's father to cancer and his subsequent preparations of his funeral. There are many questions this brings up.

Why does the movie rely on so many long shots? I feel that the scenes convey more despair when they linger on long, quiet shots of the squarer that he and his father endured. What kind of relationship did the father and son have? That is probably the plot of the story. The son struggles through the entire story to bury his father. He cannot bear to cremate the man nor bear the site of his lifeless body. A shot of the son opening his father's eyes does not convey a sense of joy or relief. There is mostly silence in the movie, and we a left to hear the sounds of the son walking in his poor shack, fighting with others over his father's remains.

What was the fighting with the undertaker about when preparing his father's body for his coffin? I noticed that the son was very delicate and caring about his father as he gave him the shoes off his own feet. The undertaker was overly abusive to the son; verbally and physically. Why wash the father's body in the snow? That was another long shot; a man washing a dead man's body in the cold snow. It gave a chilling effect to see that the man had to soap or water, and that they had to restore to flushing the dead remains with snow.

I didn't see much direct contact between the son and father. While his father's remains were being prepared, he looked away. Was it disbelief? Did he open his father's eyes to make sure he was really gone? The constant snow, the lack of any other family and dark colors allowed for a sustained belief of isolation and darkness. The long shots of the body told the father was not going to awake ever again. His death is as perminent was the long winters; of his poverty.

Scheuer's Imperial Hubris

The book I have just started is Michael Scheuer's Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War On Terror. I've seen Dr. Scheuer speak about his area of expertise, Bin Laden, for a while now. I choose to pick up his book because I believe he has credibility on this issue and speaks sincerity to his experience.

Dr. Scheuer argues that we must view the threat from bin Laden and Islamists through there eyes. He contends that Muslims see high ranking American citizens who speak critically of Islam as speaking for America. America's policies to install pro-Western democracies that favor Christianity usually does so at the cost of partitioning a Muslim country. He argues that in an attempt to limit funding of terrorists and teaching anti-Western sentiments, America is interfering with core Islamic beliefs to give to charity and teach without interference.

America's support for oppressive regimes is another reason for animosity. US policy supports Hindu India, Catholic Filipinos, Orthadox Christians in Russia, ex-communist Uzbeks, Chinese communists, and apostate (a person who forsakes his religion) al-Sauds. Apostate states would include Kuwait, UAE, Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. For other Muslim countries, the United States and the United Nations often imposes economic and military sanctions like condemning Pakistan for building a nuclear weapon while condoning Israel and India for the same offense. Western oil companies designs on Middle East oil is another point of suspicion.

Now with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the occupation of Muslim lands is the most poignant abomination. This is seen as no surprise since the partitioning of east Timor and the backing of Israel on controversial territory.

McGuane's "Twenty-Fish Days"

Thomas McGuane's "Twenty-Fish Days" from Sports Afield to the 1997 Best American Essays describes an ideal fishing trip. Painting every paragraph as a memorable, picturesque pause in time, McGuane gives an alluring account of his pastime. I wish he gave more.
I found nothing about this piece to be memorable. The was uneventful and boring. His style of writing elicits no feelings but only a narrative, constrained by his own predictability.
I wonder how this piece got into this book, and even so, into Sports Afield. It is a splendid account of fishing, but does Sports Afield really want another piece that gives this pastime no dimensions?
I will read this piece again and am hoping, if not expect, that it will captivate me unlike my first time.

New Book: 1997 Best American Essays

One of the books I am reading currently is the 1997 Best American Essays, edited by Ian Frazier. I have a number in the Best American series. They can be found at Goodwill.

The N Word by Jabari Asim: Chapter One

Having already been enticed into reading Mr. Asim's book The N Word: Who can say it, who shouldn't and why from a CSPAN interview, I was ready for a frank history and cultural analysis of America's most reviled epitaph.

The first chapter begins by recounting a part of the great American drama the OJ Simpson trail. The prosecution believed that such a word would affend the jury, half being African-American. The defense believed it would only characterize the atomsphere of the debate. From there it goes to say the history of the N word goes back far beyond America to the 1500's. The N word originated from teh latin word Niger. It's use was used as a neutral term only to be used as an insult later on.

Notes on my Mother

Hilton Als and Daryl Turner. Photo by Valda Zalga

Hilton Als identifies with his mother. The Barbados-American writer of The New Yorker writes in a 1997 New Yorker article "Notes on my Mother" about growing up black and gay.
Als uses the experience of his mother to identify his own struggle. He notes how his mother had a dislike of gay barbados boys, as he was one, calling them"auntie men." Which must be hard, since growing up without a father and four sisters he lacks any type of father in his life.


Noticing how he constructed the first paragraph, he opens by saying, "Until the end, my mother never discussed her way of being." A very open ended way to start. He continues by going through everything he never knew, and covers most of it in the body. He ends by talking about his siblings and how that distance he felt affect them. I must now know why that "bond" that was so "deep and mysterious" between his parents affected him.

I feel a shift in the next paragraph when he adds how she also never knew about homosexuality. He would cross-dress in her clothes in admiration.

He feels admiration, but distance?
How did his relationship with his mother affect his homosexualty?

Als wore his sister's clothes to relieve pressure he felt from being different from them. And yet this was a problematic situation because it brought pride and anger. Acutully for the same reason, that he identified with women, and with a Negress.

His mother obviously did not like other gay men from Barabados, yet why was it different with her son. Was it because he was her son?

There is more talk about his mother identity. She called herself a negress not to reconcile with her British colonial roots but felt herself as an American, even dropping her accent.

Along with her wish to become an American, she is defined by her ill-health. She is always suicidal, but polite. Her health defines her as her only accomplishment. She realized that the day she felt replaced by a younger, stronger girlfriend to her husband.

This is really an ode to his mother, and yet it is filled with her struggles; her health, her jobs, and her tragic love to his father.

It is through a weakness, or curiosity, of Als identity, that he becomes more of who he is. He is not a jew, but a writer. His mother nursed his writer, listening to him lie. He was inspired by her love of reading.

As he realtes to his sisters, he is enamered by the intelligence, style, and education of his sister. But his closeness is futile, because it was what he was not, a black man, that they wanted to identify themselves with.