A Deplorable Comment

Trump worshippers adoring their despicable deity 

Most of the comments I get on blog posts are in emails or phone calls or texts or on Facebook when I repost blog entires there. The process of commenting on Blogger is enough hassle that most people don't do it.  

Last week I got a comment from "Deplorable Joe Voter." He was commenting on a post I wrote in 2015 about an Ancient Greek phrase that has become a mantra for gun lovers who believe themselves to be soldiers of freedom.

That phrase is Μολων Λαβε--attributed to King Leonidas leader of the 300 Spartans who faced 100,000 Greeks at Thermopylae. The claim is rubbish.  I wrote about the phrase and its right-wing popularity here in 2015.

The post has had more than 1,700 views, one of the more popular posts I have written. Deplorable Joe Voter commented:  

It's interesting that you feel the need to prove to the world that you're a moron. Job well done. 

Since Joe self labelled with "deplorable" I looked it up:  

Deplorable comes from the French word déplorer meaning "to give up as hopeless," meaning something is so bad, there is no hope of improvement. 

That would be my view of anyone who would worship Trump. But it is surprising that someone would own a label bestowed by Hillary Clinton in 2016 nearly a decade later.  

Thomas Jefferson: The First Draft of History

 

Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence

In 1776 Thomas Jefferson wrote the first draft of a new history of the world. In that document, later revised by the Continental Congress, Jefferson called for the abolition of slavery. Here is the first draft. 

Jefferson's call for the end of slavery did not survive the revisions by the delegates, but it was clear to Jefferson and many, if not enough, of the founders that the end of slavery was necessary to truly throw off tyranny.  

Last year I read  Jon Meacham's biography of Jefferson. If you are interested in the life of the second President, Meacham's biography is excellent.  It includes this cheeky quote from our 35th President:

In a famous toast at a White House dinner in honor of 49 Nobel Prize winners, President John F. Kennedy said, 

“I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.” 

I wrote more about Meacham's biography here.

Reading about Jefferson was part of trying to understand how the country began and how we got to the place we are now in on the 247th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

I also read First Principles by Thomas Ricks about what the founders learned  from Ancient Greek and Roman cultures about government and how they used it to shape America. 

David McCullough's amazing book 1776 was also part of my reading about Jefferson and the founders.  It could be a novel it is so fast paced. It is the best history book I have read in a long time. 

When a friend asked what five people in all of history I would want to have dinner with, Jefferson was on the list.

The cultural critic Neil Postman wrote about the effect the American founders have had on world culture since 1776.  There is a long quote from the book in this post about the symbols of revolution in the late 20th Century.  When the Soviet empire fell apart, the words of the Declaration of Independence were heard across Eastern Europe.

As we approach the 250th  anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, I am hoping the spirit and brilliance of the founders can hold us together despite so many millions of Americans clamoring for tyranny.  One Nation Under God, for as long as we can keep it.

Water Buffaloes: Army and Flintstones at Conflicting Conferences

A protester talking to Gabe Gutierrez of NBC News outside the Marriott Philadelphia

This morning I was at a protest at the Marriott Hotel between City Hall and the Convention Center in Philadelphia.  The entrance was surrounded fencing to keep the protesters away.  The Moms for Liberty conference we were protesting was not the only event at the hotel this weekend.   

In adjoining ballrooms with just a partition separating them in some cases, The Federation of Jewish Men's Clubs is holding its annual meeting.  Somehow the 650 Moms for Liberty attendees and the 400 FJMC conference goers got booked at the same time. The FJMC was not pleased. The Philadelphia Inquirer wrote a feature article today about the conferences booked together with opposing politics.  Here is the article.

A Moms for Liberty chapter recently apologized for quoting Hitler in a newsletter. That story is here. The FJMC has Holocaust survivors among its members.  

Late this morning I was at the fence near the entrance and saw Dave (above) and asked about his shirt.  I asked him if he had ever drank from an Army water buffalo. The trailers that haul water for soldiers to war zones. 

Dave said he never drank from a water buffalo, his shirt was for the Water Buffalo Lodge from the Flintstones.

 

Dave and I laughed about the conference planners and the hotel booking these two groups on the same weekend in the same conference space and not seeing a problem.  these two groups, we agreed, are as different as Army water buffaloes and the Water Buffalo Lodge.

Dave was very good natured about the security hassles in and out of the hotel. "These meetings can be kind of dull," he said. "It's much more exciting with cops around the entrance and protesters chanting every day."   

 

Protesting an Anti-Abortion Rally on Independence Mall

 

On June 24 on Independence Mall in Philadelphia, a Catholic Group celebrated the one-year anniversary of their victory in overturning Roe v. Wade. Every week since the decision, Republican legislatures across the country have made abortion more difficult or illegal.  

I joined the group protesting the rally. 

During the protest, I talked to some of the people at the anti-abortion rally who came over to our protest.  The first guy I talked to was a Augustinian monk who was handing out literature.  

He asked why I was in favor of abortion. I told him that growing up in a Catholic town made me pro-choice before abortion was legal. I remembered the Catholic boys and their elaborate plans to seduce girls. When they were successful, the girls became sluts. And if a girl got pregnant she either had an illegal abortion or went into seclusion to have the baby and give it up for adoption.  

The monk agreed it was very sad that men are supposed to be in charge of everything in life, and yet women are supposed to be responsible for male virtue.

Next I talked to two 16-year-old boys from a Catholic school who were at the rally.  They asked why I was pro-abortion. I told them the same thing. Both believed that Hookup culture was the cause of abortions. They did not seem to know that married women have abortions because they don't want more children. 

The taller one, Nick, asked if I did not think the country would be better if we all obeyed the Ten Commandments. I asked him if he wanted compliance to be compelled.  Did he want something like Sharia Law? Who did he imagine would enforce the ten commandments.  When Moses came down the mountain the commandments were supposed to be voluntary--God's people obeying God's law.  

And then I could remind them that when Moses showed up, 3,000 children of Israel were hooking up around a golden calf.  

When I can, I like to talk with the other side.  Maybe it made some difference. 

"Living," a Movie About Dying Written by Kazuo Ishiguro

Is there a better short story in the world than Leo Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilych?  If there is, I never read it.  

When my favorite living writer, Kazuo Ishiguro, wrote the screenplay for a retelling of Ivan Ilych, I very much wanted to see it. 

Sir Kazuo Ishiguro, winner of the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature

The beginning of the movie Living was wonderful. I could not think of a better way to portray the character of a middle manager in an endless bureaucracy than the character Rodney Williams. He shuffles paperwork at the head of a circle of desks where his half-dozen minions do the same.

When that complacent middle manager confronts mortality, his attempts at actually living life are charming failures.  

At the end of the movie, after Williams dies, the movie is even more deliciously perfect, portraying how the bureaucracy swallows the souls of those who fill in the space left in the hierarchy.  

Between every beginning and end is a middle. The middle left me vaguely unhappy. Then I talked to two of the most insightful people I know and they were of opposite minds about the main character's actions in the months before his death.  

Then I was more unhappy. Could both be right? 

One says, "Yes, Williams actions make sense. He tried to live life outside his work. Then he decided to do something good in the world he knew best." 

The other, a modern stoic, says, "He was selfish and avoided involvement for all of his life. Our habits define us. He would, like Ivan Ilych, simply become more self-involved when he received the terminal diagnosis."

In the middle of the movie, Williams decides to help three women build a playground in an area wrecked by bombing in World War II. The movie is set in London in 1953. Williams takes the folder from his "Hold" basket and navigates the paper through the labyrinth of approvals necessary to get the project underway. When another bureaucrat says he will look into the matter, Williams sits in the middle of the office and says he will wait as long as necessary.  

Williams wins. The playground is built. The community loves and honors him. But the world is unchanged. Watch the movie to see how deliciously the bureaucracy reasserts its inherent inertia.

If you do watch the movie, read the novella The Death of Ivan Ilych. If I have any coherent views about the moment of death and the afterlife, I got them from this story and from The Great Divorce, a novella by C.S.Lewis. 

  

Blackberry: The Movie--A Nerd Fest and Tragedy

 In 2001 my career moved from the corporate world to non-profits. Had I remained in corporate, I would have had a Blackberry--the smartphone with a keyboard that dominated the market from 2003 to the introduction of the iPhone in 2008. 

Then it was gone.  

"Blackberry" tells the story of the rise of a group of nerds in debt for a million dollars to dominance in the billion-dollar cell phone industry and then crashing back to earth.

The movie opens in 1996 with the two friends who lead Research in Motion, the company that made Blackberry devices, pitching their idea.  They failed.  Their nerdiness jumps from the screen.

The picture above is how they were dressed to pitch the guy who would become their CEO.  He is every stereotype of corporate shark, and more.  

The characters are so over the top they are fun to watch. The nerds behind the development of the Blackberry are the most fun to watch.  It's a great movie.

 

After watching "Succession" on HBO, I watched "Generation Kill" for maybe the third or fourth time since it debuted in 2008.  In Succession, Alexander Skarsgard (left) was a villain. In Generation Kill he is the moral center of the drama.   

Below is a review of the series from The Guardian newspaper (UK) from 2008.  

Generation Kill is a narrow view of the war itself, following one platoon. But it is a universal view of American soldiers since the end of the draft--the small all-volunteer slice of the country who serve in military.

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Generation Kill: An Iraq drama with a difference from the makers of The Wire

There's been no shortage of films and TV dramas depicting the horror of the 'war on terror' - with varying degrees of success. Generation Kill, which debuts in the UK in the new year, promises to tell it like it is

Sarah Hughes

Wed 23 Jul 2008

Is it possible to make a believable TV series about the Iraq war that people will want to tune in to?

In the case of Generation Kill, the new seven-part mini-series, the mere fact that is was penned by the co-creators of The Wire, David Simon and Ed Burns, will surely help.

The drama, which comes to the UK early next year on FX, has received largely positive reviews in the US in addition to garnering respectable, if not overwhelming, ratings.

Assassin, the platoon commander

We have been here before, of course. In 2005, the award-winning writer and producer, Steven Bochco, gave us Over There, which pulled few punches in its depiction of the casual horror of war but which was also criticised for a narrow vision, one which rarely lifted its focus away from the gun and the hands that held it.

Tony Marchant's 2007 British drama The Mark Of Cain was more interesting than Over There, but arguably more flawed. Marchant's tale of squaddies gone wrong in the Iraqi badlands was a ripped-from-the-headlines story of abuse and the corruption of power, which, despite some excellent acting and a strong script, rather collapsed in on itself after a torrid 90 minutes, when we found out that, as ever, the posh men at the top of the heap were ultimately to blame.

Godfather, the battalion commander

Nor has the ongoing conflict fared much better on film. In the past couple of years, audiences have largely chosen not to see the worthy Rendition, the dull Lions for Lambs, the self-important In The Valley of Elah, the polemical Redacted and the flawed-albeit-interesting Stop-Loss.

So can Generation Kill challenge convention and give us a good Iraq war drama or is it the case, as Bochco has argued, that this war is too immediate, its wounds too raw and recent, for anyone to want to watch?

Ray Person, the clown

The answer is complicated. On the one hand, Generation Kill is, to my mind anyway, the best Iraq war drama by some distance. On the other, that still might not be enough to convince people to tune in.

War, and this war in particular, remains a hard sell and it's doubtful that Generation Kill can challenge that wisdom. Which is a shame, because to miss out on this is to miss out one of the year's most powerful dramas.

As they did in The Wire, Simon and Burns thrust us instantly into a detailed, flawed world with its own immaculately realised customs, codes and language. It is a world where the soldiers are not simply heroes, but nor are they, as many both here and the US might have it, merely villains. Instead we are shown their day-to-day lives, their actions and arguments and asked to make our own judgment.

It's grown-up television that, in contrast to The Mark of Cain or Redacted doesn't shove its message down the audience's throat all the while screaming: "See, see, do you appreciate the awfulness of what's happening here?"

Yes, there are echoes of other dramas, including hints of Jarhead and Three Kings in the marines' dislocation, in the sense that for some of them this is war by way of Grand Theft Auto, flash, fast and furious. There are echoes too of the finest post-Vietnam drama of them all, Peter Kosminsky and Leigh Jackson's harrowing Warriors from 1999, which showed the terrible fallout of war on a British platoon working as peacekeepers in the former Yugoslavia.

Generation Kill, so far at least, lacks the unflinching vision that so marked Warriors out, but it has something that may yet turn out to be more interesting going for it - unlike almost every other war drama there is no particular sense that Generation Kill is building towards anything.

Instead, Simon and Burns (and by extension Evan Wright, whose Rolling Stone columns and book it is adapted from) appear to be saying this is a job; this is what these people do; this is how they act; there will be good days and bad days; terrible things may well happen but, then again, they may not. Some people do, after all, get through wars without much more than a scratch.

There will be those who complain that, by taking this attitude, the writers are ignoring the wider implications of Iraq, of everything that happened before and has happened since. But Simon and Burns are not attempting to lecture us, or even particularly to entertain us (although one of Generation Kill's biggest plusses is that it is frequently hysterically, darkly, funny). Instead, they seem intent on showing us, as they did with inner city Baltimore, that this is life, this is how people are living, look at it, think about it and later, when alone, make up your own mind where you stand.