I don't believe in owning movies, but, of course, I do own movies and all five seasons of The Wire. . I play the DVD's while pedaling away on my exercise bicycle or running on the treadmill, doing my hamster thing.
I recite the dialogue along with The Wire, I've watched the episodes so often. And Band of Brothers ,
but I cannot speak all those lines, which is okay, because the dialogue is not as important there. Those are the mainstays.
Then there's Infamous which is fascinating because the actor playing Truman Capote really channels him and I can suspend disbelief and think I'm really watching Capote as he creates In Cold Blood which is, as Capote explains to Harper "Nell" Lee, is a nonfiction novel. She does not understand what he means by this non sequitur , but I do, implicitly.
There's also Dances with Wolves, Full Metal Jacket, and Apocalypse Now, which I watch less often because they are fiction masquerading as non fiction, and it is the false parts of these fictions which has begun to ruin each of these for me.
Then there are two works of fiction, which I accept as showing a type of truth very much like The Wire ,
sort of the flip side of the non fiction novel, the fictional documentary. These are fiction which frees the author from the legal and journalistic difficulties and limitations imposed on the non fiction author, so the author can simply state the truth as he knows it without having to footnote or reference.
And then there is fiction as truth which is not borne of direct experience, but of imagined experience set against a background of lived experience, and these are Master and Commander (Russell Crowe) and what is for my money, the most romantic movie ever made, The Last of the Mohicans (Daniel Day Lewis.)
In Master and Commander,
there is a splendid scene in which the captain of the English ship, Lucky Jack, continues to instruct the midshipmen on the use of a sextant as the French warship bears down on his own ship from his stern, the cannon balls splashing all around, and the midshipmen are, understandably distracted, but the captain continues to turn them back to their task of learning, despite the furious distractions. The midshipmen cannot help but look back over their shoulders, but their captain insists they continue to sight through their sextants, straight ahead, eyes to the bow. That was a scene I have lived in the hospital, as patients were arresting and resuscitations were launched but the professor of medicine would say, they've got that in hand, what we are learning here is so important we cannot be distracted. It's the way masters impart their precious lode of learning to puppies and the way they convey the importance of that work. There is a truth in that fiction which is pure enough.
There's a sort of psychological verisimilitude in The Last of the Mohicans,
which rises from fiction to truth in the scene in which Cora, the tough minded woman straight from the mother ship, just in from England, confronts the deerslayer hero, demanding to know why he had not stopped to bury the slaughtered family they had found and left in place. He explains they were being tracked by warriors who would have picked up their trail by a tell tale burial, and then he gestures to the stars spread out above them and says, that is the best memorial for that family, the sky they had looked upon, knowing they were neither subject nor servant to any king or any master. He says he understands she cannot know what he's talking about or be much moved by it, but that's the way it is out here in this land she cannot hope to fathom. And she replies, quite calmly and completely the master of her own mind, she understands completely, and in fact has never been moved as much by any other place or culture.
She is not trying to impress him, or seduce him or even connect with him. She is simply setting him straight, and calling him for his arrogance to think only he and his people could appreciate this land, the free life and the strong gravity all this exerts on the people living in this New World. She says you may think you know me for a pampered and superficial female, but I'm quite strong enough and perceptive enough to grasp all this. End of discussion, now let's get past this. It's a statement of such power and passion you can only hope some day you will meet a woman like that, and if you are lucky, maybe you already have, but that's the woman you want.
There is a truth there about what makes a woman desirable, magnetic and important which no essay or psychological analysis or philosophical treatise could ever approach. It's all there, simply stated in a few lines of dialogue following thirty minutes of breath taking action.
Then there are those stories where the author loses you, because he's more concerned about the marketing than the truth. You never ever have that sense with The Wire, but you see it in Dances with Wolves .
Here you have Lt. Dunbar narrating the line about the noble savage, the people who live in perfect harmony with their environment, killing only as many buffalo as they need and not damaging the herd while the white man slaughters the herds, rapes the land and destroys the environment.
As we learn in S.C. Gywnne's Empire of the Summer Moon,
the plains Indians, especially the Comanches, but likey also the Lakota Sioux who Dunbar runs with, were savage, but not what most of us would call noble. They used rape, mutilation, enslavement as their preferred methods of intimidation and domination. While they may have lived in harmony with nature, they regarded white people and all enemies as less than the animals they killed. They tortured other people, they only killed animals. So that work of fiction becomes hard to watch once you know its flaws and you lose faith in the authors.
Flaws of sentimentality despoil the truthiness of Band of Brothers where Richard Winters is depicted as tormented by guilt over having shot a young German soldier, a SS soldier no less, and he cannot get it out of his mind. Richard Winters was appalled by this depiction and said he never regretted killing a single German. Fortunately, there's enough unvarnished truth in the rest of the episodes to carry you by the Stephen Speilberg goo, but it's a close thing. Truth is a perishable commodity and once the fruit gets a rotten spot, the whole thing is in danger of going bad.
As for Full Metal Jacket and Apocalypse Now they rely on that suspension of disbelief--you know they are just fiction but you know there is a strong element of truth in the depiction of the psychology of institutional killing. The language, the Marine phrases, which are the lingua franca of the movie, signal if the authors know the language this well, they were probably there, they lived the experience they are writing about, even if specific situations are imagined, and you can trust what they are saying about the culture of lean mean fighting machine marines who are all bravado and very little real toughness. The sniper girl they finally manage to kill is tougher than the whole bunch of them together. Theirs is a phony toughness; hers is the real thing.
The narrator of Apocalypse Now tells you enough you already know is true to keep your faith in him, even if you know the story is fiction. But the Playboy bunnies and the French woman on the plantation are thrown in for marketing and that shatters the feeling of truthiness and you lose faith pretty quickly. Thankfully, these women made the director's cut but not the movie as it was shown in the movie houses.
So truth lately has become transcendent for me. Don't ask me why.
I suppose it has something to do with Christine O'Donnell and Sharron Angle, for whom truth does not seem very important. They are looking for an effect, for marketing effect, for the wow power of saying something they expect you to react to rather than for the simple statement of truth which does not care how you respond.
Neither of them is Cora. They care too much for what you think and not enough about the truth.
Just when I was getting really depressed about the Sharron Angles, the Christine O'Donnells, the Kelley Ayottes sweeping aside their Democratic opponents, just when I thought our Country could not look any worse, I turned on C-SPAN-2 watched Prime Minister's Questions.
If you want to know what real despair is, just watch those English politicians go at each other and then think of what political exchanges in America are like, and you will want to slit your wrists and jump out the window.
When did we acquire all the mutants? Why can the Brits, who don't even have a constitution, do democracy so well when all we can do is dumb ourselves down even dumber than before?
But then, a ray of light. What followed that hour of erudite, spirited, funny and substantive exchange in the British Parliament, was our very own American President, speaking to a rally in Columbus, Ohio.
If only Obama were running against Sharron Angle in Nevada, or Christine in Delaware, or even Kelley Ayotte, here in New Hampshire. He would sweep the floor with them.
I know the pundits are saying all the Dems have to run away from Obama because he's so unpopular now, and he is a stain on them. But he has finally re emerged as the guy who can speak the truth and expose the scoundrels. Given 'em Hell Harry Truman was a piker compared to Obama in full.
He says the Republicans are counting on amnesia. They put us into the worst recession since the Great Depression, massive unemployment, unregulated banks who were so busy lining the pockets of their board of directors and CEO's they didn't care what they did to the country, and they didn't care if insurance companies raped their customers or what the credit card companies did and the Republican response was give tax breaks to millionaires and let's go back to trickle down, and let's get the rich richer so they can give jobs to the middle class they've been starving out for decades.
Whew! So why didn't he say that before? And why isn't that speech playing every night during all the baseball play off games and during every football game and in every bar room and airport lounge?
What have the Democrats been thinking?
You got a star. All they got is John Boehner and a bunch of women in bright colored dresses.
The candidates debate. Christine O'Donnell in Delaware and Sharron Angle in Nevada vs. who?
Harry Reid and Chris Coons.
Where do the Democrats get these whimps?
It's no news Harry Reid sounds and looks like the anemic priest of a small, forgotten parish, which deserves and desires obscurity, and his little wisp of a mumbling voice. It's not his fault he's a frail, kyphotic old man, but there's no way he ought to be the leader of the Democrats in the Senate. He's simply too spent and gasping to lead anyone.
So Sharron throws a punch to his gut--You live in the Ritz Carleton and I live in a middle class neighborhood in Reno, and he cannot slip the punch and, worse yet, he cannot even counter punch.
Then she accuses him of being on the take--How'd you get so rich coming to the Senate poor and now you're a millionaire? And the best he can do is whimper about that being a low blow.
For anyone who has watched the news for the past year and seen Harry Reid approach the podium with all the force of a kitten and deliver his near whisper of a response to the thunder from the right, you just have to ask--are we really sad to see the Democrats getting swept from the field?
Now Christine, is a different matter, and more of the same. She is the perfect example of Shakespeare's, "In speech, there is logic." That's a phrase I did not understand and my father had to explain it: Simply saying something, that something takes on a reality. You can say, 'The sky is red," and people will nod. You can say, "Every wrong with this country is the Democrats' fault," and people will nod. If it's a lie, it doesn't matter, as long as you stick to it, keep repeating it.
Or, as that wonderful philosopher from The Wire, Slim Charles, tells Avon Barksdale, the drug kingpin, who has got into a war with a rival drug lord and is now realizing the pretext was all wrong. "That's the thing about war: Once you in it, you in it. If it's a lie, then you fight on that lie."
Now Christine can calmly explain why she likes the idea the people who donate to her campaign can remain anonymous. You see, it's like this, people who contribute to me are contributing to an unpopular cause, so they get harassed. This allows them to send me money with worrying about recriminations from their fellow citizens."
So, it's scoundrel time again.
But does the Amherst educated Chris Coons, blow her out of the water?
Does he says, oh, for example, "So, what Ms. O'Donnell is saying is that people who support her should not have to show the courage of their own convictions. If their motivation is to injure the strength of this country, of the United States Senate, then they should be able to do this with perfect impunity. Good Lord, we do not allow United States citizens to make contributions to Swiss bank accounts anonymously because we know that secrecy can be used to hide pernicious behavior, can launder money from drug sales. And now Ms. O'Donnell is arguing for the laundering of money, the turning of possibly ill got gains into political clout, at worst, and at best her stance is she wants to allow the fat cats in the Republican party, who have never wanted to admit they use their money to keep everyone else down, she wants to protect these closet oligarchs from exposure."
No, he whimpers.
And when they try to do a Katie Couric on Ms. O'Donnell, by asking whether or not she can name a single Supreme Court decision, she slides by with a smiling endorsement of her hero, Clarence Thomas, well, whatever he says, I'm for that and I'm against those he voted against.
Shouldn't be hard to top that, right? But is Mr. Coons prepared? Nope, he can't think of a Supreme Court decision either, except the one they've asked about earlier having to do with allowing for secret campaign donations.
What about Bong Hits for Jesus? Or if you cannot come up with a case, at least say, look, when I can predict how John Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas will vote on any given case with social implications--Well, Thomas is easy, he just dittos Scalia--but when I can do that, is there any doubt this is a court with a social agenda, doing just what conservatives like Rush Limbaugh have always complained about--legislating from the bench?
These two women are angry, and they don't care much whether or not what they say is a distortion or makes any real sense. All you have to do is pinion them.
But these two men, Democrats sans balls have either been listening to advisers who tell them never to appear angry, or they are so bereft of testosterone maybe they should not be sent to the Senate after all.
The fact is, the one Democrat with balls who comes to mind is Barney Frank. I'd have preferred to see him on stage with either of those Republican beauties.
Can you not just see him listening to Sharron Angle ranting on about how the Senate has no business creating jobs--that's up to the private sector? And can't you just see Barney Frank, erupting with one of his, "On what planet do you spend the majority of your time?" Are you not the lovely lady who wants to privatize Medicare and eviscerate Social Security? Do you really want to deny children health insurance coverage because of pre existing conditions? Do you really want to throw a kid, just out of college, still looking for a job, to the wolves of the insurance industry who won't give him health insurance? That's what you call, "Obamacare." What you want is no care, except, of course for people like you, you who have government health insurance.
That's what Barney Frank would have done to Sharron Angle.
Well, maybe this upcoming election is something which will help the country, ultimately. You'll sweep out the mice among the Democrats.
Unfortunately, we'll have a bunch of Republican Senators, Angle, O'Donnell, and don't forget Ayotte of New Hampshire, who'll be voting on Supreme Court nominations and they'll be putting more Scalia's in place, guys who'll be there doing their nasty best to keep those in power in power, for the next two decades.And they'll be giving the millionaires their tax breaks so they can dominate the national life and discourse and buy whichever Senator or Congressman they wish, confident of the secrecy of that buy.
And if you thought the Supreme Court could not affect national politics, being a group of learned professors of law who simply stroke their chins and look august in their black robes, remember who put George Bush in the White House in 2004 and who put the money in the campaigns of the lovely ladies of the Senate.
Watching the Christine O'Donnell debate was excrutiating if you, like me, wanted to see the monster unmasked.
In fact, it was a little like watching O'Bama try to deal with the slings and arrows thrown his way during the Presidential debates--you wanted to see him throw a few of his own, but he simply seemed incapable of anger and you wanted some anger.
But Obama really didn't have to say anything because the economy was tanking and all he had to do was no harm.
In the O'Donnell debate, she was the voice of rage and all she had to do was to say she was angry and what her hapless opponent had to do was to show why he was angry back at her, but again, like Obama, he struck me as meek and weak and never really got the point that you have to be a little angry right now at all the people who are angry.
I've been taught not to respond to anger from my patients with anger. The soft answer turneth away wrath. The patients are frightened, angry and have a right to be; as the physician, you are in a position of power and should be parental and not get angry.
That, of course, is wrong. If a patient is abusive and angry, I get angry and put them in their place. And that often makes me feel better, makes them feel better and makes their family members, who are sitting in the exam room, the audience, understand who is and ought to be in command.
Christine O'Donnell responding to the question about whether or not the contributors to campaigns ought to be identified or allowed to conceal their contributions in anonymity said her contributors have been harrassed and ought to be protected. Chris Coons never said, "No, they ought to have the courage of their convictions. If they are for you, they ought to take the heat for being for you." But he hardly responded at all.
Then came the question about don't ask don't tell. Christine O'Donnell is prepared for this, as both candidates should be: She says if the military says it's okay, okay, but the military not the courts or legislature should be calling this shot. So then Wolf says, but the Chief of the Joint Chiefs says it's okay. She's been prepared for this, as any candidate should be: Well, she'd like to hear it's okay from the head of the Navy, the head of the Army. Then she adds, the military already has rules governing behavior: No adultery, no sex between commanders and subordinates.
There is the perfect opening to jab through: Are you saying that a declaratio of homosexual preference is the same as committing adultery? Is adultery not a moral failure? Is homosexuality a moral failure?
But Chris Coons sits there like some dumb kid who can't think of a thing to say.
Very frustrating.
Is Chris Coons the best the state of Delaware can produce to deal with a slick demagogue?
If the Democrats get voted out, it's because they weren't smart enough to stay in.
National Public Radio can be really astonishing, every now and then. Today, they were interviewing young twenty something Wall Street bankers in a bar. Now, one of the things I learned about New York City bars is they are a strange blend of the public and the private.
Bars in New York City are where you can say things you really, actually believe, but cannot say in polite, politic or intellectually mixed company. And you can shout it out, generally over the din of surrounding customers who are trying to do pretty much the same thing.
So, whoever these NPR reporters are, they have clearly decided it would be interesting to hear what certain people, namely these Wall Street banker up and comings, think. The reporters had asked questions, apparently before I tuned in, about what these bankers think about the Obama idea of taxing the rich more than the poor. The bankers, young as they are, apparently meet the definition of rich and they are appalled they have been singled out for special treatment.
They work for banks as employees, so they do not try to voice that tired old canard so many Republican spokesmen mouth--that if you tax the billionaires and some millionaires, they will simply take their balls home and refuse to play, that is, the "job generators" the "small businessmen" who are billionaires, will will just fold their arms, pout and stop creating new jobs just to spite President Obama and all those who sail with him.
No, what these young bankers say is they deserve their wealth and nobody should take any of it away from them.
But, the reporters press on, if not for the bank bail out you'd be out of work, on some unemployment line, and not rich at all. So the government, in a very real sense, gave you your job or at the very least preserved it for you and now you're making millions in bonuses and whatnot.
No, the bankers replied, we are rich because we were smart enough to become bankers and smart to enough to stay bankers. We were smart enough to know the government would have no choice but to bail us out.
They really said that.
Then again, it is a bar, where people are liquored up, back stage and can speak the truth.
The reporters press on: But you got your jobs because you went to the right schools and got educated, some of you in public schools before you went to the Ivy League, and were it not for all that infrastructure, you could not possibly enjoy the wealth you enjoy today and look forward to in the future. And if the government giveth, does the government not have a right to taketh away?
No. The bankers laughed and started talking very slowly, as if to a very slow witted child. You see, I am smarter than other people, which is why I am rich. That is what makes it right.
But what about the bailout.
I saw it coming.
This is all redolent of that old line about the psychic who sued the CT scan people because the machine stripped her of her psychic powers when she had a CT scan of her head. But, if you were psychic, then couldn't you know, couldn't you see into the future and know that would happen? But then, again, you could also see this million dollar law suit. Same progression of thought.
It is all an echo of that old divine right of kings. Dieu et mon Droit, on the royal crest of England, which some people take quite literally as God and my right (hand) but which likely really meant, God is my right, i.e God provides me with the right to rule, to be wealthy while my subjects live in poverty.
The really curious thing is not that there are people who can rationalize this way--people will always convince themselves whatever is good for them personally is ordained by God, or is right in any number of ways.
What's really amazing is so many people sitting in mobile homes believe them. It's the "What's the Matter with Kansas?" thing. You've got people struggling, get foreclosed, watching their end of the economic ship inundated with waves washing them overboard and they look up to the bridge overhead, where the Captain is dining with rich people in dinner dress and saying, "Oh, this is as it should be. Someday, when I'm rich, I'll be happy about these rules."
Go figure.
Then again, this is a country which elected a demented man twice, and then followed that with a retarded one. Sorry, he was mentally challenged. No, sorry, he was special. All those rich people are special.
Stop reading if you've heard all this before, but being a volunteer, working in the soup kitchen down in the ghetto, wearing a pink jacket and ushering people around the hospital, ushering at the local community theater, are things typically done by well meaning souls who should simply stop doing this.
Volunteering or "Giving back to the community" is also very big among professional football and baseball players. Another way of looking at what they are doing is saying, I am paid millions of dollars a year for an activity which entertains, but provides no service essential to the survival of the community, so I'll give a limited amount of time to something really worthwhile, like visiting kids in a hosptial. Now, you will object and you will say, like the arts, sports are essential to the spirit and the soul of the community, and these people are so highly paid because they are so exceptionally talented, and all that may be true, but the work they do could stop tomorrow and society would continue to function. On those snow days, when only "essential personnel" are told to report to work, they don't mean professional athletes. Pro athletes are fluff, from a sociological point of view, unless you are a Republican and still believe in trickle down economics, in which case Mike Tyson is a small business owner who deserves to be spared the estate tax.
Volunteering, in the nineteenth and early twentieth century was also a way for the really rich to salve their consciences, those who actually had a conscience, when beset with the question: Why should I have so much when others have so little? So if you were Lady Astor or Electra Vanderbilt, you could spend a morning at the soup kitchen and then go home and change into riding jodhpurs and feels completely absolved. You could live in your estates and host your dinners and feel you'd paid your dues. You were the deserving rich and the rest of them were the undeserving poor.
But this is not really the basis for my objection to volunteers, many of whom come from the middle classes now, and are not rich. They are simply old and retired or they are housewives with a little time on their hands. And they have been told by their President (usually by Republican presients) and by their pastors to volunteer and go out and do good works. Very Christ like. Work with the poor.
But name any job worth doing, whether it's in a soup kitchen, a hospital or a theater and I will show you a job which is worth being paid to do. Volunteers simply take work away from somebody who could use the job and the money more than they do.
Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and that crack pot crowd are always nattering on about the flood of immigrants arriving to take you job. That ingratiates the terrified masses to the right wing blow hards, who, don't you know, are for saving what belongs to you and me. But they never say, hey, there's plenty of jobs out there which the well off steal from the poor by doing for free. Would you be as happy if the waitress was a volunteer? Or how about if the cop was a volunteer?
What about the volunteer fireman? Well, okay, in a rural community where everyone is employed and it's all the local fire department can do to buy a truck, maybe.
But for the most part, if it's a job worth doing, it's a job somebody should be paid for.
S.C. Gwynne's book about the fall of the Comanches in the second half of the nineteenth century needs an editor, but notwithstanding its repetitiveness,
there is quite a lot of illuminating cultural anthropology going on between its covers, and not a little debunking.
This is particularly difficult for someone like me, who never got over boyhood fantasies about Indians--among my top five favorite movies are Last of the Mohicans (Daniel Day Lewis), Dances with Wolves and Little Big Man. And this book destroys the image of the noble Indian, living in harmony with nature, kind hearted and misunderstood by the white man, who destroyed the Indians in a spasm of arrogance and racism.
Actually, it was worse than that, in one sense: It turns out three of the authentic heroes of the Civil War, Sherman, Sheridan and Grant looked dispassionately at the Comanches (who were the key to the control of the West) and applied the same scorched earth principles to them as these generals applied to the South during the war.
The generals first looked at what made the Indians what they were, how they lived their lives, what they valued and then methodically set about destroying it. It turned out to be not all that complicated: The Indians were nomadic carnivores who depended on the buffalo. Destroy all the buffalo, and you destroy the Indian way of life. So they brought in the most ruthless, pitiless destroyers that century and this continent have ever seen and presided over the destruction of millions of buffalo.
The buffalo hunters got buffalo hides to sell and the white man's government got the great plains rid of Indians who lived on buffalo. It was as effective as burning Atlanta. Only in the case of the plains Indians, there was no city to burn. The plains Indians were nomadic and could pack up their tent cities at a moment's notice and move on. But kill the buffalo and you kill the Comanche way of life.
Not that that way of life was pristine and warm and fuzzy.
Comanches dealt with interlopers into their territory much as the Taliban does today. Cut off noses, scalps, ears. Rape, disembowel. They were most unpleasant. But these depredations had the desired effect--in Texas, the white man retreated back eastward whenever the Comanche went on the war path.
The Comanches were very effective and ruthless terrorists. They actually had no word for "surrender." You got into a fight with Comanches, they took no prisoners. Well, actually, occasionally, they did, but only prisoners who were no threat to them, like women and children.
What Comanches liked were horses. They took lots of horses. They were such good horsemen they put the United States Calvary, the Texas Rangers and every other white man's armed militia to shame. They actually had technological superiority over the white units in plains warfare, until a few white men, like Jack Hays and Ranald Mackensie studied them and figured out the secret of their tactical success.
Which brings me to Afghanistan.
Historical analogies are pretty tenuous, I realize. History is one long argument. On the other hand, history does present lessons, military history in particular.
And this is the lesson I got from reading about the defeat of the Comanches: Unless and until we are willing to do what the generals did to the Comanches, we are not likely to have much success against the Afghan Comanches.
Of course, there are big differences--the Taliban are not quite as willing or able to live on the land as the Comanches were, one suspects.
But, from our point of view there is the major difference: The white Americans were there to stay, when it came to Comanche lands. They wanted to take the land and stay there. But white Americans have no desire to stay on Afghanistan's mountains and dirt plateaus. We want to get the hell out.
And there are no buffalo for us to slaughter in Afghanistan. We can burn poppy fields, but they grow back the next year. Maybe, if we looked for the modern equivalent of the buffalo hunters--men who would swoop in and gather up all the poppy fields and kill anyone who tried to stop them, we might have an effective tactic.
But then we've have to allow these guys the economic incentive the buffalo hunters had: You can sell the cash crop.
Somehow, I just don't see it.
