One statistic settles the argument.  Eighty percent of journalists vote Democratic.  Imagine a world where eighty percent of journalists voted Republican…imagine a world, my liberal friends, where eighty percent of the news is…Fox News.

Pretend, now, if you dare, that journalists’ personal political views don’t matter.  That they’re capable of objectivity.  You don’t believe this for a moment about Fox News — why do you imagine it to be true about every other news outlet?  Because liberal reporters are so much more rational, reasonable, so evolved?  Give me, as it were, a friggin’ break.

As Exhibit Number…Infinity, because there are pretty near infinite examples every gosh-darn day, I present:  Occupy Wall Street.  Have a look at almost any video from the recent protests.  Choose at random, take a true sampling.  However — and this is key — pay no attention to what the reporters might be saying.  Turn down the sound.  Look only at what the protesters are doing.

Now go back and do the same for the Tea Party protests from 2009/2010.

I ask you, which is the more civil group?

The Tea Party never destroyed cars, never smashed windows, never shut down businesses.  Never started fires, never rioted, never clashed with police.  Never inflicted a single casualty.

And yet, after Tuscon, were we not told that the Tea Party was responsible — directly responsible — for the incivility in our national discourse?

I wonder what would happen if, for instance, one of the Republican candidates were to be shot by some lone gunman.  Would the Occupiers be blamed?  Couldn’t you draw just as straight a line between some random gunman’s assault on a Republican candidate and Jared Loughner’s assault on Gabby Giffords?  Of course you couldn’t.  And no one would.  No one could possibly be that stupid.

Except a whole lot of people, including just about every Democrat, right up to and including President Obama, were precisely that stupid.  And who cheerled the entire affair?

Our wondrous media.

I get more discouraged, it seems, every day.  Politics is a terribly disheartening hobby.  At least, I tell myself, this isn’t the media universe of my youth, when just about the only correctives to the liberal spin were George Will on This Week and half the panel on The McLaughlin Group.  Bernie Goldberg said recently, with regard to this very topic, that the media types he knows are simply incapable of the self-analysis it would require to comprehend just how biased they truly are…which I suppose explains how they can be so biased in the first place.  Where’s the need to discover the truth when you already know what the truth is?

Eighty percent.  You think eighty percent of Pravda‘s staff voted Communist?

Madadayo (1993) — Kurosawa’s final film, and among his least accessible.  The story is based on that of a hero of Kurosawa’s, Hyakken Uchida, a scholar and author.  The film follows Uchida’s long retirement, beginning just prior to World War II, and the lives of several of his pupils, who continue to, for lack of a better phrase, worship at their professor’s feet.  The film, it must be said, is almost painfully slow, with long sequences at Uchida’s “Maahda kai?” parties that are really nothing more than opportunities for further hero-worship…the pupils drink to excess, they fawn over their professor, and the professor occasionally makes a cute remark or relates a telling anecdote.  ”Maahda kai?” means “Are you ready?” — i.e., ready to die — and Uchida always answers, confidently, “Madadayo!”, meaning, “Not yet!”  Between these sequences, Uchida lives out a life of quiet serenity in the company of his long-suffering wife (played by Kurosawa stalwart Kyōko Kagawa), his one great crisis coming when his beloved cat inexplicably, and irretrievably, disappears.  Madadayo is obviously the work of a man facing the end of his life, and one can imagine Kurosawa, like Uchida, declaring “Madadayo!” as he downs a massive glass of beer…but in a film that’s 134 minutes long, I found Uchida to be, right up to the end, a distant, uni-dimensional figure.  We’re only allowed to observe, never to participate, in his life.  Even the moment when his defenses — or Kurosawa’s — might come crashing down, when Uchida loses his cat, his response is to…collapse in on himself.  We are still kept at a remove.  Only at the very end, when we’re given a brief glimpse of what is presumably Uchida’s final dream, do we get a brief glimpse of the man himself — ironically, as a child, in a field, answering “Madadayo!” to his siblings, or cousins, or friends, who are calling “Maahda kai?” as they play a game of hide-and-seek.  Kurosawa saves this beautiful, poignant moment for the film’s last few minutes; we could have used more of its type during the previous 130.

Rhapsody in August (1991) — A controversial film, because of its depiction of an elderly widow whose husband was killed by the Nagasaki bomb in 1945.  The controversy arose because of Kurosawa’s complete exclusion of the reasons why the bomb was dropped; in particular, that the Japanese started the war, and were certainly guilty of their share of atrocities.  Still, Kurosawa’s approach is defensible on these grounds:  what does an uneducated, unworldly Japanese woman care about the reasons why the bomb was dropped?  She cares only that it was dropped, and that it took away her husband…a wound from which she has never recovered.  The plot is an interesting one, although it’s treated somewhat perfunctorily — her reluctance to believe that the man her children are visiting in Hawaii is her long-lost brother could have led to further complications, and does lead to some clever detective work by her grandchildren, but really the only reason the long-lost brother exists is to reinforce Kurosawa’s theme:  the Americans dropped the bomb.  Richard Gere’s painfully self-righteous performance as the long-lost brother’s son — the grandmother’s nephew — is about as convincing as any other performance by Richard Gere, and the scene wherein the survivors of the bomb march in to tend to the memorial on the school grounds is made all the more ludicrous by his presence.  Whatever else this film is, subtle it ain’t.  Still — still.  What redeems this film is its final scene.  A storm has come, and its clouds push the grandmother back to that August day in 1945…”Grandma’s clock is running backward,” as one of the kids puts it.  She fears that her husband has forgotten his umbrella.  She takes it to him, running through the storm.  The children, and their parents, run after her.  It’s a remarkable sequence.  The umbrella breaks, in the wind, yet still the woman holds it up, like a flag, like a banner, as she hurries through the pouring rain.  There aren’t many images in the history of cinema that can rival this one for sheer emotional power.  The futility of life — the hope of life — the finality of life.  The scene can’t remedy the weaknesses of the rest of the film, but my God, after a finish like that, who remembers the rest of the film?

Red Beard (1965) — Kurosawa’s final film with Toshiro Mifune, and in other ways a watershed, as well; Kurosawa would go through a long period of decline and despair that would see his output diminish radically and wouldn’t end, one could argue, until Kagemusha in 1980, or perhaps even Ran in 1985.  But what a way to go out…Red Beard is not among the greatest of Kurosawa’s films (Ikiru, The Seven Samurai, Rashomon), but it is among the best of the next rank down.  The story is so simple as to be laughable:  a haughty young doctor learns the ways of the world from an elder mentor.  A story that’s as old as stories…but in Kurosawa’s hands it’s done marvelously well.   Yūzō Kayama plays the haughty young doctor, Yasumoto, and Mifune plays the mentor, Dr. Niide, or Akahige…in English, Red Beard, which, though one can hardly judge in black and white, we’re told Niide has.  The film is almost picaresque in structure, with Yasumoto’s experiences with villagers, fellow doctors, Niide, and in particular a young girl named Otoyo, whom he and Dr. Niide rescue from a brothel and whom Yasumoto subsequently nurses back to mental and physical health, providing the path for Yasumoto’s gradual transformation from overbearingly immature popinjay to wise, mature, fully integrated doctor.  The story of Sahachi, a kindly old gent who makes a deathbed confession after a corpse is discovered in his back yard, is especially compelling and especially heartbreaking…but so is Otoyo’s reciprocal nursing of Yasumoto when he contracts a severe illness, and so is Otoyo’s befriending of a destitute young boy whose parents eventually feed the family rat poison rather than face further poverty (the scene with the clinic’s helper women, and then Otoyo, calling down a well — which “leads to the center of the earth” — for the boy’s soul to return would draw tears from a stone), and so is the final, chokingly restrained, but ultimately freeing, sequence of Yasumoto’s wedding.  Red Beard is a long film, more than three hours, but, like The Seven Samurai, it goes by in a hurry.  Its one flaw is the character of Dr. Niide, who is too much the saint, and at times is relegated to too small a role in Yasumoto’s development.  Even the one occasion where Niide shows what he considers to be weakness — when he fends off his would-be assailants during the rescue of Otoyo from the brothel — is a moment where anyone with half a brain is cheering for the guy.  Beating the stuffing out of a group of guys who were about to beat the stuffing out of you does not fall under the category of “overreaction.”  Mifune’s performance is pitch-perfect, and it made me realize what it was that Kurosawa saw in him, all those years; indeed, simply by the weird chance order in which I’ve watched Kurosawa’s films, I’d come to see Mifune as something of a one-note overreacher, given his performances in The Seven Samurai, Rashomon, and Throne of Blood.  But with Red Beard, and even moreso with High and Low and The Bad Sleep Well, the next two films on this list, I’ve come to see Mifune as the gifted actor he was, every bit the consummate partner in Kurosawa’s amazing run of films from the late 40′s through Red Beard in 1965.  Whatever the reasons for the two men’s parting, they weren’ good enough.

High and Low (1963) — One of Toshiro Mifune’s finest performances, as businessman Kingo Gondo, whose chauffeur’s son is kidnapped — mistakenly; the kidnapper had meant to take Gondo’s son — and then must face the question of whether to pay the ransom on his chauffeur’s behalf.  Based on an Ed McBain 87th Precinct novel, it’s a fascinating notion, i.e. it doesn’t necessarily matter whom you kidnap.  Mifune, with pencil-thin moustache and close-cropped hair, inhabits the role of Gondo perfectly — he’s thoroughly believable as a high-powered executive, and his torment at the decision he must make is palpable.  His wife, played by Kyōko Kagawa, is the voice of his conscience, but one gets the idea that Gondo would have come to his eventual conclusion even without her gentle chiding.  The first hour or so of the film takes place entirely in the Gondo’s living room, as they wait for the kidnapper to call, and these scenes are models of Kurosawa’s art.  The angles — the positioning of the actors — the lighting — it’s all so cleverly done that you don’t even notice how cleverly it had to be done, given the limitations of a single set for nearly an hour of film.  From that point the story spreads outward, first in a classic sequence (filmed in real-time) on a high-speed train, as the ransom is paid, and then into the city of Yokohama, as the police track and finally trap the kidnapper.  The investigation takes up much of the rest of the film, with Tatsuya Nakadai’s Chief Detective Tokura directing operations from a crowded, stuffy police station that reminds you both how far, and how little, police procedures have come in fifty years.  The physical evidence would likely have been collected and analyzed much quicker nowadays, but the same amount of shoe leather would likely have been shorn in the questioning, the searching, the surveilling, and the tailing.  The film presents all of these in somewhat clinical detail, though we’re never allowed to forget that Gondo’s financial future depends on finding the kidnapper in time — and because of the enormous sacrifice he’s made, we care, and care deeply.  We want his money returned to him.  Here’s one rich guy in a movie who we’re actually encouraged to feel deserves his fortune.  The kidnapper, by contrast, is presented as a relative cipher, until the very last scene, when he explains his motive:  envy.  He could see Gondo’s house, high up on its hill, from where he lived in the slums below…this final scene between Takeuchi, the kidnapper (played by Tsutomu Yamazaki), and Gondo occurs in prison, with each on one side of a glass partition, their faces reflecting, each in the other.  Kurosawa is showing us how thin the line is, between High and Low (or, as in the original Japanese title, between Heaven and Hell), but I found this ending — Takeuchi lets out an animal howl and is led from the room toward his imminent execution — oddly unsatisfying.  On the Criterion Collection’s DVD, there’s a segment from It Is Wonderful To Create, a documentary series on Kurosawa’s films, in which it’s revealed that the original ending had Detective Tokura shaking Gondo’s hand, after Gondo’s visit with Tekeuchi, and feeling the calluses Gondo has developed, from having once again to work with his hands (the ransom money having been retrieved too late to save his position with the National Shoe Company).  I can see why Kurosawa went with the ending he did, but I’m not sure I agree.  Still, he’s Akira Kurosawa and I’m some guy writing about Akira Kurosawa.  High and Low is a great film, perhaps not on a par with the greatest of Kurosawa’s films, but, like Red Beard, far up the scale.

The Bad Sleep Well (1960) — I never thought I’d find a Kurosawa film I liked more than Ikiru, but this might just be it.  But for very, very different reasons.  Ikiru is a meditation; The Bad Sleep Well is an indictment.  Mifune is again on extraordinary display here, as Nishi, a man whose methodical scheme of revenge against the corrupt corporate executives responsible for the death of his father goes so far as to include his marrying — and, to his chagrin, falling for — the crippled daughter of the chief villain of his father’s demise, Vice President Iwabuchi (played by Masayuki Mori).  The film opens with their wedding, a famous sequence in which a gaggle of reporters fill us in on the backstory and which ends with the delivery of a wedding cake in the shape of the building from the seventh floor of which Nishi’s father jumped to his death.  Mifune’s performance is quiet and controlled — he doesn’t even speak for the first half-hour of the film — but he is a dominating presence.  Kurosawa and his screenwriters borrowed heavily from Shakespeare’s Hamlet for The Bad Sleep Well, though there is no Gertrude in this film; only Hamlet, and Claudius (Iwabuchi), and Ophelia (the ubiquitous Kyōko Kagawa), and Laertes (played by Tatsuya Mihashi), and in this version Ophelia and Laertes are the children not of Polonius, but of Claudius.  Mifune’s scheme unfolds with calculated precision, from his suborning of the accountant Wada (Kamatari Fujiwara) to his gradual deconstruction of Shirai (Kō Nishimura), the second of the corporation’s evil troika (the first being Iwabuchi; the third is Moriyama, played the great Takashi Shimura), to his kidnapping and imprisonment of Moriyama…but it is, predictably, Iwabuchi’s daughter Yoshiko, the Ophelia of the piece, who most directly, though unwittingly, derails her husband’s revenge.  There’s a great scene where she’s been brought to the bombed-out ruin that serves as Nishi’s hideout, at which he’s keeping Moriyama, and Kurosawa frames her and her husband on either side of an enormous beam of wood that acts almost as a split-screen separator; if there was any doubt where this story was headed, that image removes it.  Because Nishi (whose real name, it turns out, is Itakura) is as doomed as Hamlet was — but, unfortunately, Kurosawa doesn’t allow his parallels to Shakespeare to continue to the bitter, bloody end, and I think the film would have been stronger if he had.  Nishi’s destruction takes place entirely off-screen, reported to us by the Horatio character, Itakura (whose real name is Nishi, he with whom Itakura traded identities to carry out his deception; played by Takeshi Katô).  Yoshiko’s mind snaps.  Her brother Tatsuo shows her to their father, Iwabuchi, who makes a half-hearted attempt to stop them from deserting him forever, but is more beholden to the unseen masters who pull his strings.  Iwabuchi and Moriyama, it is implied, have gotten away with it.  The Bad may need a Nembutal, but they will indeed Sleep Well.  Fair enough, and necessary for Kurosawa’s insistence that corruption in Japan continues unabated, but the film does suffer from this anti-climax; an actual climax could have lifted it even higher.  Kurosawa steers Nishi off of Hamlet’s self-destructive path (“I guess I don’t hate them enough,” he says of Iwabuchi and company) just when Hamlet himself would have doubled down.  Nishi’s death, as indicated, is more a matter of Yoshiko’s blind faith in her father’s essential goodness than of Nishi’s rush to revenge himself.  In fact Nishi’s plan had come to fruition, and would have worked, but for…Yoshiko’s naivete.  Ending aside, however, The Bad Sleep Well is classic Kurosawa, and elevates my respect for Toshiro Mifune to a Takashi Shimura-like level.  I really am sorry that I didn’t see this film, and High and Low, and Red Beard, sooner in my tour of Kurosawa’s films.  I’d have understood what the fuss was all about.

The Hidden Fortress (1958) — Another strong performance from Mifune, a warmup of sorts for Akahige, with a similar measure of reserve and reluctance, a feeling of power kept firmly under control.  This film also, alas, features two of the most obnoxiously annoying characters in the annals of storytelling:  Matashichi and Tahei (played by Kamatari Fujiwara and Minoru Chiaki, respectively, both of them Kurosawa stock players).  I must confess to a total (or near-total, anyway) absence of knowledge regarding Japanese comedic types, so perhaps these two aren’t so egregious as they appear to my Western eyes…but good Lord, it wasn’t ten minutes before I was desperately wishing the horsemen who kill the fleeing soldier at the start of the film had done away with these two idiots while they were at it.  More pathetic characters, I’ve not witnessed — greedy, selfish, ungrateful, disloyal, whiny, and utterly amoral.  (It was like looking in a mirror!  No, two mirrors!  –Just kidding.)  Generally these sorts of characters aren’t given such a starring role, and if they are, they’re given some semblance of a redeeming quality…but the only redeeming quality about these two is that you know the movie has to end sometime.  They spoil, for me, what is an otherwise excellent tale, with Mifune as General Makabe accompanying Princess Yuki (and two hundred pieces of gold) on her dangerous trek through enemy territory.  There are some great moments:  Mifune’s duel with General Takodoro (a wonderful performance by Susumu Fujita), the Fire Festival at which Makabe, Yuki, Matashichi, Tahei, and the farmer’s daughter they’ve picked up along the way (played by Toshiko Higuchi) all join in a fatalistically celebratory dance, the song sung by those festival-goers later being refrained by the Princess as she awaits her execution, and then by Takodoro as he makes his fateful decision to rescue Makabe and the Princess and make himself a traitor.  If Matashichi and Tahei had been played less broadly, less frustratingly, the film would have been much more palatable — I understand the point Kurosawa was making, between the grasping avarice of these two maroons and the quiet dignity of Makabe, but that point could easily have been made more subtly, less nails-on-a-chalkboard-ly.  The Hidden Fortress would probably not have been among Kurosawa’s greatest films even without these twin stupidities, but still, as an action/adventure film it’s fine fare, a good story told well.  My partner said I should have just fast-forwarded through the scenes with Matashichi and Tahei…I told him I could never do such a thing, out of respect for Kurosawa.  Putting up with those two for 139 minutes?  Now that’s true love.

Then it struck me that this is what every American malcontent, of whatever political stripe, has always thought.  ”The country’s going to Hell in a handbasket.”

One of the least attractive of American attributes is our complete lack of a sense of history — probably attributable to our relatively brief existence as a nation.  We don’t remember what happened last week, much less last election cycle, much less last decade.  We react to everything as if it’s the first and only time it’s ever happened…but with that good old American undercurrent of blasé cynicism, as if to say, “First time it’s happened, but I can’t say I’m surprised.”

Which ties in with the least attractive American attribute (least attractive to me, at any rate):  the utter inconsistency of nearly every one of our politicians.  I’d call it “hypocrisy,” but hypocrisy implies a kind of malice, and I don’t think the inconsistencies of politicians are born from malice — except insofar as the two parties hate one another and thus everything can be traced back to malice — but rather from narrow-mindedness, tunnel-visioned-ness, and a complete lack of, in this case, a sense of their own history.

As an example.  Iraq vs. Libya.  Liberals are entirely inconsistent about Obama’s Libya policy.  If Bush had done what Obama did — refusing even to get Congressional approval for military action — the left would have gone, in a word, nuts.  Protests daily on the White House lawn.  Commentators up in arms.  ”Impeach Bush!” signs on the nightly news.  (Incidentally, liberal crowing about Obama’s “success” in Libya is extraordinarily short-sighted; if the Middle East has taught anyone anything during its many millennia, it’s:  the story’s never over.  Tomorrow will bring some fresh Hell.)

Conservatives, on the other hand, are entirely inconsistent, as well.  ”What are we replacing Qadafi with?” they ask.  ”We better be sure the new government isn’t worse than Qadafi!”  In the first place, one can never — and I do mean never — tell in which direction a revolution will turn.  The French Revolution was much-praised, in its early stages; as was the Russian.  Some members of the Carter Administration were quite vocal in their support of the Ayatollah, prior to the hostage-taking.  The U.S. can, and should, influence events to the best of its abilities, but predicating our support of a revolution against a terrorist madman on whether that revolution will turn out like the American, or by contrast the Iranian, is never to support freedom-fighters anywhere.  Who can tell the future?  In the second place, I did not hear these sorts of questions asked about Iraq.  Not by conservatives.  They were asked — properly, fairly — by liberals.  Who are not now asking them about Libya.  Inconsistency abounds.

Likewise with economics.  If a Republican president were presiding over the past few years, we’d have heard endless tales of woe, from the media, from the Democrats, about the poor, the middle-class, how everyone everywhere is struggling and people are dying in the streets from malnutrition and general despair.  Instead we’ve heard endless tales of recovery, always right around the corner.  How things are continually looking up.  This from the same folks who found 5% unemployment too high during Bush’s two terms.

Republican inconsistency is no less egregious.  Wall Street is cited as a leading indicator of economic health, until it soars while the country falters; then, suddenly, the Dow Jones doesn’t mean a thing.  It could climb to 20,000, wouldn’t indicate a strengthening economy.

Well, I’m sorry, but what was true yesterday is still true today.  What you said yesterday can’t conveniently transmogrify from day to day, depending on the latest polls, the latest numbers, the latest trends.

Is this asking too much?  Of course it is.  Politicians are what they are.  People.  ”People,” as Jerry Seinfeld put it.  ”They’re the worst.”

But let’s not forget that we’re not the first generation — nor will we be the last — to despise its Congress, to think of its leaders as weak, ineffectual, incompetent.  This is America.  Where we’re perpetually headed to Hell in a handbasket.  But never do arrive.

The Maltese Falcon (1941) — Sad to say I waited until I was…however old I am…before watching this, the seminal noir, the seminal John Huston, the seminal Bogart.  Of course its reputation preceded it and couldn’t help but color my impressions…but what interested, and startled, me most about the film was, until its last ten minutes or so, its breezy tone.  Bogart as Sam Spade has such a nonchalant way about him, such a playful, devil-may-care bonhomie that it’s hard to believe he ever felt anything sincere for the femme fatale, Bridgid O’Shaughnessy (played by Mary Astor).  The ending, in which Spade gives Ms. O’Shaughnessy the severest of dressing-downs and then hands her over to the police, thereby rings unfortunately false.  There’s a moment, during the long climactic scene in Spade’s apartment, when all the principals have gathered and are waiting for the Falcon to be delivered, when Spade sits down and Brigid’s hand automatically reaches for his — he takes it and clasps it in what seems an authentically intimate gesture.  But it’s entirely out of place in this film — or, at least, entirely out of character for the Sam Spade we’ve seen so far, who’s been as skilled a manipulator of events as the Fat Man or, for that matter, Brigid herself.  The Sam Spade we’re presented with is a man with certain scruples, yes, but also a man who’s not above, for instance, cheating with his partner’s wife…or throwing her over (in the wake of her husband’s murder, no less) as soon as a pretty (and younger) girl enters the picture.  Spade is clearly no Rick Blaine.  Yet the movie, at the end, wants us to feel that he is…that he has been all along.  That Brigid’s betrayal has devastated him.  But hasn’t he known about her betrayal for quite some time?  The film never makes it clear when Spade figures out that it was Brigid who killed Miles Archer, but it had to have been before that climactic scene…before that intimate clasp of hands.  So the film plays a trick on the viewer — for surely, if Spade knew what was coming, he’d not have allowed such intimacies.  Unless, that is, he was playing Brigid along…but then how does one explain his (apparently) genuine distress in the film’s final few minutes?  We can either have a Sam Spade who knew Brigid was a murderer and steered her toward her own undoing, or we can have a Sam Spade who didn’t know she killed his partner and who truly loved her.  But we can’t have both.  I’m picking apart the logic of the conclusion, which to some extent diminishes the film for me, but there’s no denying that Huston directed masterfully — that famous scene of Sydney Greenstreet from floor-level is breathtaking — and that Bogart used the film to solidify the persona that would last him right up through In A Lonely Place nine years later.  The performances are all top-notch, with Greenstreet standing out as the Fat Man and Peter Lorre skulking (and fake-fellating) his way through another slippery role.  My one other criticism of the film, along the same lines as the ending, would be not in Greenstreet’s performance, but in the character of the Fat Man — on the commentary track of the DVD I watched, Eric Lax called him “an Everest of menace,” but again, as presented, the Fat Man is something of a bumbler and a stumbler…I mean, the very fact that he’s been pursuing the Falcon for seventeen years tells us something about his ineptitude; and the fact that he hires (if that’s the word for it) a “gunsel” like Wilmer (played by Elisha Cook, Jr., or “Icepick,” to those of my generation) and associates with a foppish creep like Joel Cairo (Lorre) tells us even more.  The Fat Man isn’t so much an Everest of menace as a molehill of incompetence…exemplified by the scene in which he lamely, and desperately, scratches at the Falcon, discovering it’s a fake.  And then his fey, almost girlish, wave goodbye as he exits Spade’s apartment…this is not menace.  This is a guy having a great time with his obsession, not-so-secretly happy that he’ll need to devote yet more time to his endless search.  Which, to repeat, is fine, if that’s who the Fat Man is.  But the film wants it both ways.  Mountain of menace; misguided teddy bear.  We can have — the Fat Man can be — one or the other.  But not both.

Tokyo Sonata (2008) — Not being an expert (or even a layman) on Japanese culture, there’s probably much of this film that I misunderstood, misinterpreted, or just plain missed…particularly in the distinct sense of shame that must redound to a Japanese man who loses his job and takes up a position as a mall janitor to pay the bills.  My one moment of extreme confusion came when Ryūhei Sasaki (played by Teruyuki Kagawa) is discovered at the mall, in his red janitor’s jumpsuit, by his wife Megumi (Kyōko Koizumi) — she knows he’s lost his job, he knows she knows he’s lost his job…and yet he runs off in excoriated embarrassment.  He doesn’t stop running until he’s hit by a van and left for dead by the hit-and-run driver.  Is working as a janitor in a mall that much more shaming than what his wife already knows about him, i.e., he lost his job and lied about it for (presumably) months?  Maybe it’s a Japanese thing.  At any rate, the film overall is quite bleak, redeemed only at the end by a note of grace that, regrettably, is out of step with the rest of the story.  The Sasakis’ younger child, Kenji, has turned out to be a musical prodigy, whose piano performance of Debussy’s “Clair de Lune” at an audition for a music school is flawless and heartbreaking.  The trouble with this is twofold.  One, Kenji took up the piano solely — solely — because, while walking home from school one day, he spied a lovely young music teacher at her lessons.  In order to spend more time with her, he repurposed his lunch money into payment for piano lessons.  Then, miraculously, Kenji turns out to be…a musical prodigy.  The chances of a kid who steals his lunch money to buy piano lessons just so he can make time with the piano teacher turning out to be a musical prodigy are, approximately, infinity to one against.  But we can perhaps forgive this as what I call “movie logic” — you either go with it or you don’t, and if you don’t, you’re not going to go along with anything else about the movie, either.  But Kenji’s being a prodigy is also deeply at odds with the rest of the film — the Sasakis are a seriously average family, a father who’s a middle manager, a housewife whose greatest ambition is to own (and drive) a convertible, a ne’er-do-well older son who eventually joins the military to escape his life…these are the sorts of people that surround us, that make up the vast bulk of humanity, that we ourselves may even be, though we’d hate to admit it.  Then along comes Kenji and he is…a musical genius?  I think the film would have done much better to give us a Kenji who’s skilled, who has some aptitude, but is by no means a once-in-a-lifetime talent — his final performance could have been flawed, imperfect, but heartfelt and true.  This Kenji would have persevered, despite his father’s disapproval, despite his own musical limitations, to put on a performance that, while inexact, would have been far more believable.  And far more in keeping with the film’s theme — one that’s close to my own heart:  How do you let the past go?  How do you begin again?  I’m criticizing, as with Falcon, the very heart of the film, but there is, as with Falcon, much here to appreciate.  The director, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, has an eye that at times reminded me of the great Ozu, with its stillness, and the even greater original Kurosawa, with its precise framing of shots.  The acting is superb, particularly Koizumi as the wife.  She has but one instant where the barriers break down; the rest of the film she’s controlled, quiet, almost in the background.  Tokyo Sonata is not, but could easily have been, a masterpiece.  (One other piece of business that confused me:  twice in the film the father is asked what his skills are, how he can help the company first for which he works, later at which he’s interviewing, and in both cases he seems bizarrely unwilling — as opposed to unable — to answer the question.  Is this not a question that gets asked in interviews in Japan?  If so, why is he asked it twice?  If not, why is he so flummoxed by it?  Is it not a fairly basic question to ask and answer?  In the later scene he winds up singing karaoke — the interviewer humiliating him horribly — rather than respond to this simple query.  Maybe it’s another Japanese thing.)

Rope (1948) — Hitchcock’s attempt to film a play, and present it in real-time.  Every word ever written about Rope declaims upon its defects, many of which are inherent in the strategy Hitchcock chose, from the awkwardness of the zoom-in-to-a-person’s-back-then-zoom-out-again as cover for the reel changes to the static, stagebound feel of the thing; so I’ll instead consider Rope‘s good points.  First, the acting:  John Dall is excellent as the sociopathic Brandon, as is Joan Chandler as Janet, the corpse’s fiancée, as is Cedric Hardwicke, in a seriously understated performance, as Mr. Kentley, the corpse’s father.  Jimmy Stewart is serviceable, but not great, as Rupert Cadell; I blame this wholly on the script, which demands the character undergo an unconvincing transformation from a charmingly semi-Nietzschean professor to a mentor outraged that two of his students should have taken his words so literally.  Second, the set design:  the work that must have gone into this film, I can only imagine.  Moving walls, chairs, tables out of the way so the camera can move fluidly from one room to another, then sliding those walls, chairs, tables back into place as the camera glides back into its original position…and the set itself is something of a marvel, with that enormous window looking out on a patently false cityscape — clouds on wires in the sky, little puffs of chimney smoke — and an oddly convincing ability to project, variously, a sense of claustrophobia or agoraphobia, depending on the scene.  Third, the plot:  brilliantly conceived, but poorly executed.  The notion of translating Leopold & Loeb into Shaw & Morgan is clever and worthwhile, and there are some fantastic bits that result — dinner on the chest in which the body is hidden, the rope used by Brandon to tie together Mr. Kentley’s books, and, most especially, the scene in which Rupert tries on a hat and finds that it’s too small…brilliantly staged by Hitchcock, and brilliantly simple, and believable, as the device whereby Brandon and Phillip are ultimately undone.  It’s a shame these crunchy bits weren’t in service of a more cohesive whole, but I doubt a truly cohesive whole could have been made, in 1948.  Or gotten past the censors, at any rate.  Rupert would have had to have admired his proteges, rather than decrying them; he would have had to involved himself in the crime somehow.  That film could readily be made, in 2011.  (In fact it probably has, and I just haven’t seen it yet.)  Rope is not among Hitchcock’s best work, but it’s an intriguing “stunt,” as he called it, and doesn’t entirely deserve its low reputation.

One of Ayckbourn’s main claims to fame — and the reason many high-minded critics unfairly dismiss him — is his unending experimentation with theatrical form, from setting to character to time.  One of his first big successes, How The Other Half Loves, features a single set that serves as two separate living rooms, with action simultaneously occurring in both, neither set of characters aware of the others, but moving in the same space.  The Norman Conquests are three separate plays featuring the same set of characters and occurring over a single weekend; they can be seen and enjoyed separately, but together form a chronicle of one man’s roller-coaster relationships with three semi-related women.  House and Garden are two plays featuring the same set of characters, but are meant to be played simultaneously in two separate venues — in other words, one set of actors juggling back-and-forth from one venue’s stage to the other.  Communicating Doors and Time of My Life do interesting things with the concept of time, Doors featuring time-traveling from 2014 to 1994 to 1974 and Time of My Life featuring a couple’s birthday dinner at a restaurant counterpoised with action moving both backward and forward in time, showing both how we got here and where we go from here.  Perhaps my favorite of Ayckbourn’s plays, Things We Do For Love, features a set that contains the ceiling of the first floor of an apartment building, the entire apartment above it, and the floor of the apartment above that.  My other favorite, Henceforward…, has two actresses playing a human and a robot in the first act, and then in the second, ingeniously, switching to play a robot and a human, respectively.  What may be Ayckbourn’s most infamous experiment is Sisterly Feelings, which has, literally, four versions, the one version of which the audience will see being entirely determined by a character’s coin flip.  (I’m sure the answer to this must be Yes, but I wonder if the audience was informed — aside from extra-show publicity — that this coin flip was quite real, and quite determinative.  I mean, if i saw a character flip a coin in a play, I would simply assume it was part of the story, its outcome predetermined.)

Ayckbourn’s brand of showmanship drives critics around the bend, but he always deploys it in service of his plot, his theme, his comedy.  You may debate his success in doing so — no playwright is perfect — but in general I find his flights of theatricality to be extremely effective and more than slightly imaginative.  I suppose anyone who’d written 70 plays would start to look around for new ways of doing things, but Ayckbourn has been pushing the boundaries from the very beginning, and is still doing so today.  Which is not to say he doesn’t have his lapses.  A play like Woman in Mind, while a worthy attempt to show a woman’s descent into madness, comes off as nothing that hasn’t been done better by, for one very famous example, Tennessee Williams.  (But even in Woman in Mind, Ayckbourn’s creative juices are in full roil:  the conceit is that we, the audience, see only what the main character sees, including her hallucinations and other misperceptions of reality.)  And he does, at times, tread a path he’s trod before — Time of My Life incorporates some of the fiscal double-dealings that the earlier A Small Family Business handled so adroitly, and Just Between Ourselves anticipates Woman in Mind‘s woman-in-mental-decline, and his mid-70′s comedies Absurd Person Singular, Bedroom Farce, and Absent Friends (ironically available in a single volume called Three Plays) are so alike in style and substance that it’s hard to recall what happened in which play.

But as I say, in general Ayckbourn is a delight, not least because he shares — or at least his work shares — a tragic vision of the human condition.  People are people, and will always be people…this is the essence of comedy, the essence of drama.  We go to see ourselves reflected; to feel, for a moment, that at least we are not they; and then to remember that of course we are they, and they are we.  Ayckbourn understands this.  His plays are brilliantly crafted mirrors.

*A word I can never think of without hearing Professor Peter Schickele’s voice.

It took us a while to figure out that we were talking about two different Gods.  The Mormon conception of God is not the one I grew up with — the Christian/Catholic conception of God.  My conception of God (I should say, the conception with which I’m familiar; I don’t proscribe to any theory of God personally) is contained in, as we used to call them, “The Three O’s,” or, “The Three Omnis”:  omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent.  For purposes of this discussion, it’s omnipotent that matters — a God who is truly omnipotent can do anything He wants.  Matthew’s repeated example was, “Could God create something that both exists and doesn’t exist at the same time?”  I replied, “Sure, He’s omnipotent.  He transcends all rules of logic and causality.  If He is truly omnipotent.”

Well, we went back and forth on this before, as I say, realizing that my definition of “omnipotence” is not the same as Matthew’s.  For me omnipotence means what it says:  unlimited in power.  Not beholden to any rules but those He chooses to follow.  Which He can un-choose to follow two seconds later, if He likes.  For Matthew — and apparently all, or most, Mormons — omnipotence means…well, I’m still not entirely clear what it means, or why they would use the word “omnipotence” to mean “something less than omnipotence,” but that’s what they believe.  Their God cannot, for example, create something that both exists and doesn’t exist.  He also cannot create a universe in which happiness exists, but sadness doesn’t.

(A brief aside:  I haven’t done enough reading to know whether this specific example (i.e., God can’t create a universe in which there’s happiness but no sadness; by extension, God can’t create anything without at the same time creating its opposite) is one that Mormon doctrine dictates, or just one that Matthew believes in rather strongly.  He kept arguing this point as if it were self-evident, an immutable law of space and time, that happiness cannot exist without sadness — that you can’t know what happiness is if you’ve never felt sadness — and I was just as adamant in arguing, That’s a fact not remotely in evidence.  Of course this universe has both happiness and sadness — but to say that any conceivable universe has to have both in order to have either?  That’s just silly.)

What brought all this about, of course, was my questioning Matthew’s belief system, to try to figure out — as I always do with those who have faith in a higher power — why he believes what he does.  I’d like to think I do this in a respectful, if probing, manner, but sometimes I reach my limits and just have to laugh.  For instance, Mormons believe in, count them, three Heavens — the worthiest will go to the highest Heaven, and the least-worthy will go to the lowest Heaven.  The good news is that no one will go to Hell; we’re all going to end up in one of the three Heavens.  The kicker, however, is this:  everyone in their respective Heavens will believe they are in the best of all possible Heavens.  In other words, those in Heaven 1 (for our purposes let’s call that where the least-worthy go) will be just as happy, content, joyful — however one defines “eternally blissful” — as those in Heavens 2 or 3.

The logic behind this is mystifying.  First of all, if everyone’s going to be convinced he or she is in the best of all possible Heavens anyway, why not have just the one Heaven?  Second of all, how do those in Heaven 1 not know of the existence of Heavens 2 and 3?  Supposedly those in the higher Heavens will be able to visit those in the lower Heavens, but not vice-versa…so your brother Jack, who was a much better person than you, visits from Heaven 3, and when he leaves you decide you might want to go visit him, but you can’t find him anywhere.  Since you have full access to your earthly memories — not to mention whatever knowledge and wisdom you’ve gained posthumously — you recall that in Mormon theology there are three Heavens…and you think to yourself, Hey, Jack must be in a different Heaven.  (Since you believe you’re in the best of all possible Heavens, you’ll probably assume — even though you know full well Jack was a better guy than you — that he ended up in Heaven 1 or 2, while you’re in Heaven 3.)  At this point do you not feel a twinge of sadness?  You can’t go visit your brother…plus which, the possibility that you’re in a lower Heaven will undoubtedly cross your mind, and the moment it does, don’t you feel a slight twinge of envy?  Bitterness, perhaps?  That he gets Heaven 3 and you only get Heaven 1?

Matthew explains away these discrepancies and contradictions by saying these are not “spiritual” emotions.  In Heaven we will feel only “spiritual” emotions.  Um…okay.  The faithful, I have found, have an answer for everything.  Which is almost always not an answer at all, but rather — a matter of faith.  Which I don’t have, and never will.  At least, not until (as Mormon doctrine teaches) I die, and my spirit, communing with the spirits of everyone else who’s ever lived and died, has a second chance to convert to Mormonism.  (Joy, that even after death we’ll have to live with the specter of missionaries ringing our doorbells.)

God is such a fascinating topic.  The notion that God might be finite is utterly alien to me…and begs the question, why worship a God who’s basically just middle management?  Shouldn’t we be worshiping the CEO?  Matthew kept calling God “all-powerful,” but then readily admitted that when he says “all-powerful” what he means is “mostly-powerful.”  Which strikes me as linguistically, theologically, and argumentatively unfair — if you don’t mean “all-powerful,” then don’t say “all-powerful.”  I suspect Mormons don’t really want this publicized too awfully much, that their God is not the God of “The Three O’s”…because that’s the God most Americans instinctively believe in, the God who is, unquestionably, all-powerful.

I honestly do hope there is life after death — because I would love the opportunity to know just What, or Who, God is.  And I would love to hear His explanations for…well, for everything.  And I would relish the opportunity to look Him in His big giant eye and say, Who do You think You are, anyhow?  I guarantee you, He’ll blink first.

1) Caylee, the victim, was found with duct tape attached to her mouth.  Someone please explain to me why, if Caylee died accidentally, it was necessary to place duct tape over her mouth.  Because whoever did so was afraid she’d come back to life?

2) Casey did not report Caylee missing for 31 days.  This in and of itself is more than enough to convict, for it evinces, as loudly and clearly as a confession, consciousness of guilt.  Nobody waits 31 days to report their child missing.  Nobody.  Full stop.  End of story.  Guilty.

Yet somehow this woman — like O.J. — was found innocent.  In O.J.’s case you had a kind of perfect storm of an inept prosecution, an inept judge, and an inept jury; which were not enough to overcome what was, at best, a desperate, grasping, self-contradicting defense.  Bugliosi is thoroughly damning of the incompetence displayed on all sides, but particularly the prosecution, whose demeanor can only be described as “shellshocked,” from start to finish — their inability to perform in even a mediocre fashion is shocking, and the piss-poor manner in which they presented their case is only slightly less galling than the mountain of evidence they didn’t present.  Two blatant examples:  the Bronco chase, which is as conclusive evidence of guilt as is 2), above, in the Anthony case (innocent people do not act this way); and O.J.’s jailhouse outburst to Rosey Grier, as good as a confession to the crime.

Bugliosi’s working thesis is that incompetence is rampant in society, far more rampant than we give it credit for.  O.J.’s “Dream Team,” for instance, contained only two lawyers who’d ever tried a criminal case before a jury:  Johnnie Cochran, who so far as anyone could tell had tried but one case, which he lost, and F. Lee Bailey, who hadn’t tried a major case (defending Patty Hearst, also a loss) in twenty years.  But the media bought into the notion that Simpson, a rich man, would of course have “the best lawyers money could buy” — apparently most of the press never even delved much into the backgrounds of this “Dream Team” before declaring them as such.  Incompetence abounding.  Of course one would expect this of the media, but the prosecutors, the defense, the judge — the number of errors made on all sides is alarming, disheartening, and helps (somewhat) to explain how the jury could have come to such a counterfactual verdict.

(Judge Ito, for God’s sake, invited both prosecution and defense into his office to view a clip of the “Dancing Itos” from Jay Leno’s Tonight Show.  The man should have been thrown off the bench right then and there.)

I did not, for the record, watch all of the Anthony trial.  I did not even watch much of the Anthony trial.  But the facts presented above are more than enough for any clear-thinking person to find her guilty.  Whether the prosecution in this case was as poor as that in the Simpson trial, I can’t say — but I can say, based on the jurors who’ve spoken out, that they had little or no understanding of the concept of reasonable doubt.  There are infinite possibilities with any crime — even a person who confesses could, conceivably, be covering for someone else, so why should we trust his confession?  But we must look at the evidence presented, not the evidence imagined; I can concoct fourteen thousand different ways Caylee may have been killed by someone else, but it all comes back to, if someone else killed Caylee, why did Casey Anthony keep quiet about her daughter’s absence for 31 days?  It cannot be explained away, and it is a fact.  Every alternate theory runs aground on either point 1) or point 2), above.  And anyway, we should not be examining theories – that is for a defense lawyer, clutching at straws – we should be examining facts.  Call it the “CSI effect,” call it a lack of desire to “be judgmental,” call it an inability to hold a person accountable for their actions — whatever you call it, we drift into dangerous territory when we refuse to look at what’s right in front of us.

Simpson did not, in the end, get away with it.  He’s now in jail, for a separate crime, and recent reports have him reaching out to Oprah to “confess” to the murders — but they weren’t murders, apparently, they were  killings in, who would have guessed, self-defense.  Alas, there exist those who will believe this latest lie, as well.  But anyone who’s not a thorough moron will now have to admit that O.J. was, as was evident from the beginning, guilty as sin.  I wonder if, when Casey Anthony “admits” to the crime, somewhere down the road, those who defend her will admit they were mistaken all along?

I doubt it.  They’ll be too busy commenting on the next big trial.

The argument from conservatives seems to be, The Republicans didn’t realize how much leverage they had.  Perhaps they didn’t.  But many of them — and this was evident in the comments over the past few weeks of, for instance, Brit Hume and Charles Krauthammer — live with the horrific memory of 1995, when they were certain (in the aftermath of the 1994 landslide) the country was on their side, but, as it turned out, a few closed buildings and missed checks were quite enough to change, with great rapidity, the public’s mind.  Obama is no Clinton, and Boehner is no Gingrich, and these are very different times; but once burned, twice shy, as it were…the Republican leadership, I’m convinced, was never going to allow this crisis to stretch past August 2nd.

A wise strategy, in my opinion, for once the deadline had come and gone, Obama would have held all the cards — he could direct money when and where he wished, and when called on it, he could always say, If it weren’t for the Republicans I wouldn’t have to be choosing when and where to direct money.  I don’t for a moment believe he’d have gotten away with it as Clinton did, but why take the chance?  The man is on the ropes, at this point all but a certain loser next year, so why commit an unforced error?  Let the economy remain Obama’s.  Don’t let him drag Republicans into sharing the blame.

(Which is not to say that I believe there’d have been a cataclysm tomorrow if there’d been no deal, but rather that, no matter what bad news may have hit from tomorrow forward, Obama would have blamed Republicans for it — and the media, lapdogs that they are, would have parroted the rhetoric, and a narrative would have been established that this economy is now just as much owned by the Republicans as by Obama.  You may refer to this as “negotiating from fear,” but I prefer to think of it as “living in the real world.”)

I understand the continuing frustration conservatives feel, that what amount to meager cuts are being portrayed as massive, and that nothing much is done in this deal about entitlements, but, to repeat an earlier post, you fix this problem by electing more conservatives.  The election of 2010 was not a referendum on the question, “Do conservatives get everything they want right now?”  It was a Congressional election, in which conservatives did amazingly well — and compared to where this country was two years ago, legislatively speaking, the election did indeed cause a complete about-face.  This is progress.  It’s not the end of the journey, but for God’s sake, people, have just a tiny dollop of patience, would you?  Some of us are behaving like spoiled children.  Eyes wide open, that’s the conservative way, dammit.

Incidentally, the liberal reaction to this deal has been laughably over-the-top.  Paul Krugman had a column up within nanoseconds spouting his usual brand of spend-spend-spend-SPEND-SPEND! (you could hardly do better than to pattern your political and economic philosophy on the dictum of, “The opposite of whatever Paul Krugman thinks”), and other New York Times columnists were just as apoplectic, if not moreso.  If they’re all agin it, as my grandmother would have said, I’m all fer it.  Which is not always the wisest of courses to take, but honestly, if liberals are that upset about it, doesn’t what we’ve accomplished come awfully close to what’s commonly called winning?

I’m always reminded of a conversation I had when I was a teenager, probably 14 or 15, while driving with my mother and grandmother.  I was so full of myself back then (how things have changed) that when my grandmother brought up the example of a relative of ours (a distant one, whom I’d never met) who’d also wanted to be a writer but hadn’t found any success at it, I made a fate-tempting comment to the effect of, “He can’t be all that good, or he’d have been published by now.”  If that’s not the sort of comment to cause the gods to stand up and take notice, I don’t know what is.  I have always suspected that in that moment of inane hubris, I cursed myself to a life of always-trying, never-succeeding.  Of course this is extremely convenient, as it puts the onus on the gods, or the universe, or fate, or whatever, and not squarely on my shoulders, where it belongs.  Am I any good at this?  How can I be, when I keep trying but keep failing?

What brought on this latest crisis of confidence was a meeting of the Playwrights’ Center of San Francisco last Thursday evening.  You take ten pages of your play and they get read by actors in front of a small group of other playwrights (also there to have their scenes read) who then comment (as can the actors, if they wish) on your work.  This was my third Scene Night, as they’re called, and it was the first time my pages did not go over with any great degree of…well…enthusiasm.  At first I blamed it on the actors, who…um…shall we say, vary in their abilities; and a script like mine, I’d like to think, requires a certain skill and subtlety in its presentation.  But then I realized that I was getting bored, too, sitting there listening to my own work — the Prologue to Ismene, a scene chock-full of exposition and backstory that I thought I’d presented humorously, elegantly, charmingly.  But no, turns out, just boringly.

This reminds me of the great crisis of confidence I went through about 15 months ago, when I gave a screenplay of mine, in which I had enormous faith, to a fellow screenwriter, and he proceeded to filet it like a trout.  What was so discouraging was that I had felt the piece was so good — just as I’d have sworn the Prologue to Ismene was wonderful, marvelous, excellent, etc.  Which is not to say I’m Shakespeare reborn, but simply to say that I had faith that these works were good — that they accomplished what they set out to do, which for me in every instance is to entertain.  I may have (hell, don’t have) any other gift as a writer, but I’ve always felt confident I can, at least, be entertaining.  To sit and listen to a dead silence when lines that I find hilarious, or at worse chuckle-worthy, get no response?  That is painful, and while the actors did little enough with their parts, I can’t deny that when it comes to Ismene, I’m probably just too close to the work.  I know her history, and I know why the traumas I put her through in the course of the script resonate with her past, but no one else (lucky for them) is me…no one else is going to care in quite the way I care.  I will have to rethink the Prologue, at the very least; and more than likely the entire play.

I relate all this, embarrassing and humiliating as it is, to show just how brittle the creative ego can be — after all, my first two Scene Nights went quite well, with the actors and other writers being quite complimentary.  Do I expect everything I write to be a smash hit?  Well, yes; that’s the point.  At least, yes, a smash hit, if I think it’s good — because otherwise I start to believe I’m a rotten judge of my own work, and down that road madness (deeper madness, in my case) lies.

I also perceive an alarming parallel between myself and the actors…all of whom, I assume, are not experiencing the sort of success they would prefer, either.  And for certain of them, it’s not hard to see why — they just aren’t that good.  Am I them?  Are they me?  Are we all fooling ourselves?

What’s there to say, but…ack.

As an example, politics.  It frustrates the holy hell out of me, and yet I follow it with something bordering on passion.  Almost every day the Democrats make some idiotic statement, or do some ridiculous thing, that drives my blood pressure well beyond the reach of medication — and yet the next day there I am, back at it, reading/watching the news, ready for another bout of clinical depression.  This latest conflict, over raising the debt ceiling, is so asinine that it hurts my eyeballs to look at it:  Obama and the Democrats ran up spending to record levels (and don’t give me any of this crap about Bush and his two wars, for in what way does that mitigate Obama’s record spending?) and now they argue they’re the responsible ones when it comes to debts and deficits.  This is like giving a morphine addict control of his morphine drip.  Nothing good will result.  The difference is, when the morphine addict overdoses and dies, only his family and friends are affected; when the U.S. o.d.’s on debt, we’re all going to suffer.

I saw Joe Trippi (once Howard Dean’s campaign manager) on Fox News today and he said (I paraphrase), “All the Republicans want to do is cut spending and cut taxes.  That’s not going to create jobs.”  Um…well, no, it won’t create more government jobs — if we’re lucky it’ll get rid of a few — but it will certainly stimulate the private sector to do a wee bit more hiring.  Trippi is a liberal, naturally, and for liberals The Government = The Economy.  It really does seem to be that simple.  They prattle on about the private sector, but their policies are entirely geared toward the care and feeding of the Federal government.  Nowhere is this more evident than in their absolute unwillingness to tackle the debt issue with any seriousness.  They bring up the ratings agencies’ (and why are we paying attention to these folks, anyway?  Aren’t they majorly responsible for the 2008 meltdown?) threats to downgrade our credit rating as if the debt ceiling were the problem, and not the debt itself…of course they have to spin the issue, because they’re the ones who ran up the debt in the first place, but no, it’s not their fault if our borrowing so much money should cause our credit rating to suffer.  How, honestly, can anyone take these people seriously?

Meanwhile the president goes on television for the 873rd time this week (when will his advisers learn that the more Obama speaks, the less people listen?  Nothing speaks to this man’s outsized ego moreso than his continuing belief that his personality and rhetoric are capable of changing hearts and minds) to decry the coming apocalypse, yet he himself has offered not one word — one letter — one punctuation mark — of his own plan to resolve the crisis.  Does not simple logic tell us that either a) he doesn’t believe the apocalypse is truly on the way or b) he doesn’t care if it eventuates?  My guess is a bit of both; he knows the apocalypse he’s described is entirely avoidable even without a rise in the debt limit, and he’s also betting that, should a government shutdown occur, 1995 will repeat itself and the Republicans will reap the whirlwind.  In other words, the best you can say for Obama is that he’s a gambling man, so long as it’s with other people’s money.  (We really should amend the Constitution with a provision that any elected official ought to have to have made a payroll at some point in their career.)

As I’ve written here before, we would all do well to remember that the Founding Fathers started this Great Experiment of ours* over a tax on tea.**  Democrats could stand to do some soul-searching and ask themselves just whose side they’re on — George Washington’s, or George III’s?  The modern Tea Party is very aptly named — they are firmly in line with the Founders’ ideals of limited government, low taxes, and opportunity for all.

But as I said in yesterday’s post, perhaps I am missing something.  Logic has not led to happiness.  Is that the secret?  Let go your brain, and act on instinct?  If so, I’m doomed to misery.  My brain, sad to say, is all I got.

* And let us not forget that it is an experiment; and as such could yet fail.

** Yes, the price of tea actually went down in the Colonies as a result of the Tea Act, but the colonists were fighting for a principle, i.e. no taxation without representation.  That they were more willing to fight for this principle than go along with a scheme that benefited them, but violated this principle, sets them apart from just about every politician currently living.