The big news this week was the President signing the repeal of the U.S. military's don't ask, don't tell policy. Long overdue and good news that was. Less reported were two stories that particularly caught my attention. One was a new Gallup poll that shows that 78% of Americans doubt the theory of evolution; the other was the number of Americans trying to get into the military who couldn't pass the entrance exam.
According to the Gallup poll, fully 40% of respondents believe that our planet was created by a supernatural being less than 10,000 years ago. I would sincerely wish that we were just being punked by the pollsters but, living in the South as I do, I'm actually a little surprised that the number isn't higher. I guess the East Coast elites skew the numbers downward a bit. My thoughts on this particular matter just give me a feeling of general malaise and I really don't even want to talk about it. It's all part of a bigger issue.
I'm sure it goes back much further but, having been there for it, I know that much of the "stupid chic" movement gained steam during the Reagan administration. To this point it has culminated in a few grotesque exaggerations in the form of Sarah Palin, Glen Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and Michele Bachmann (who will ironically be on the incoming U.S. House Intelligence Committee). The basis for stupid chic is that anything coming from the left-wing media or collegiate intelligentsia is counter to the health of this country and contrary to the wishes of God Almighty regardless of whether it makes sense or not. These people, quite literally, just say crap like victims of Tourette's and their viewing, reading, and listening public take it all as a call to arms.
I gritted my teeth for eight years as the Ivy League educated president of our country mispronounced the word nuclear. Kind of a small point but it shows a general lack of the kind of curiosity that defines intelligence. When it was pointed out to me after years of eating it that "sherbert" was actually sherbet with only one "r", I changed the way I pronounced it because I realized I had been wrong. I'm not sure what kind of brain can hear something said to it repeatedly and regurgitate it back pronounced differently but it's not one I want running my country. But it's arguments such as the one I've just made that brand me as an "elitist". The argument is basically that people like me use our East Coast-style book learning to push an agenda that's, at its core, un-American.
America in the world view of the right-wing is a place of rugged individualism where books are a kind of evil used by the left to propagate a godless and socialist society anathema to the world view of the founding fathers. For some reason, along the way, it became widely believed among the right that learning too much was an old European thing that we shook off when we declared our independence. I'm not certain what it is we're doing as a country that makes us different than the "Old Europe" vilified by Donald Rumsfeld. America certainly resembles any good old European aristocracy in my estimation.
I'd like to say that I'm jaded enough to believe that the American political and business aristocracy is just successfully keeping the populace undereducated and, thus, more pliable. You know, thump a drum and invade Iraq, that sort of thing. However, I honestly don't think it's intentional. I think the political right's attacks on the left have to center on the questioning of the source of their beliefs in order to make their own arguments. You have to argue against science and against education and facts. When large portions of society have to believe that truth is fiction in order to follow a political message, this is what you get. The old school belief that you don't question the priest and the Church hierarchy because they're a conduit for God's message to his flock has been extended to include the modern-day messengers; their message must be accepted on faith because they're the ones representing the full will and intent of the Creator, the one who wants America to be a shining beacon on a hill for all the world to see, a capitalist lighthouse guiding the rest of the world to safe harbor.
Now, here's where I fly my little conservative flag. Much of the distrust of the "Eastern Elite" comes from the outlandish changes they've brought to our system of public education. From the '60s onward, what is being taught in public schools has changed dramatically. Just as the religious right wing thinks education should include creationist rhetoric and Jesus talk (excluding the anti-wealth bit), the left has visions of an educational system in which kids are taught the value of believing that everybody is the same and pushing an agenda also backed, ironically, by the Chambers of Commerce where Latino students are taught classes in Spanish. After all, it doesn't matter if they can speak English when they're mowing our lawns, washing our dishes, picking our fruit, and watching our children. The result of the tug of war over education is a bunch of kids who know absolutely nothing. They question why they should know it anyway. They can't read well or write well, they have little cognitive ability, know little about government or economics, but still come out believing that, as Americans, they have some sort of divine right to take part in society and be successful.
To suggest programs where students learn trades or skills appropriate for their intellectual level is stripping them of the right to realize their full potential as Americans though, in the current system of public education, most students graduate ill-informed and qualified for little.
The result, in the past five years, 25% of people trying to join the U.S. military could not pass the entrance exam. The exam is designed to test basic math, science, and reading skills. This isn't a high school test. To qualify for military service, you must have graduated high school or passed the GED. This isn't like "Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader" where contestants are several years removed from having to answer questions like those on this test; these are almost all recent high school graduates. I took a practice test and scored 83% because I'm horrible at algebra. Actually I scored 50% on that portion of the test that included algebra and geometry but aced the basic math section. This after not having been in school for longer than these current high school grads have been alive. I was amused to see that one of the vocabulary words was Yiddish but basically the test was pretty damned easy. I would encourage readers to take the test just for fun if the time is there.
I'm very happy for the repeal of DADT. I guess you'd call me a homophile if I might coin the word. I've known gay people all my life and don't think of them any differently than I do straights. Maybe I've even more trusting of gays because I know so many horrible straight people.
As glad as I am for the repeal though, the news of the military testing scores should have been the major news story of the week. It's part of the reason America has lost so many high tech jobs, why our populace is involved to such a small degree in the political process, and, if not corrected, will continue to be the single most critical dilemma facing us in the future.
Populist rants from a little blue dot in deep red Alabama.
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
Monday, December 20, 2010
What's Wrong With France and the Equality of Animals
I am, to a degree, patriotic. I enjoy being American and I take my civic responsibilities seriously. I follow politics and, unlike the majority of Americans, I know who the current Chief Justice of the Supreme Court is (it's John Roberts by the way). However, I do a lot of thinking and questioning when I hear people say things along the lines of "our democracy isn't perfect but it's the best system of government in the world." I'm paraphrasing but I hear sentiments like that all the time on MSNBC from people like Joe Scarbrough and Chris Matthews. I'm sure it's said frequently on Fox News as well.
In the months after 9/11 when our country was rounding up allies to be counted in the war against international terrorism and for the impending invasion of Iraq, France balked. This led to freedom fries and an intense hatred for all things French except for Cartier, Michelin, and any other luxury items. This hatred has abated somewhat since France elected a conservative and since the average American's memory doesn't account for that many news cycles. That's not really where I'm going with this though. Yes, at the video store in which I work, there are still very conservative customers who unquestioningly poo poo anything French for the same reasons I wouldn't have anything to do with Ted Nugent; it's purely political. These same people won't have anything to do with George Clooney or The Dixie Chicks.
The issue at which I'm looking is, ironically, the French concept of chauvinism. Patriotism is one thing; I don't see anything wrong with loving your country and wanting your country to be successful and powerful. Hopefully, as a patriot, you wouldn't lash out at others who want to try to improve the system where they see fault. Chauvinism is the love of country to the extreme of "my country right or wrong". The term comes from the name of a soldier in Napoleon's army, who may actually have been fictitious, named Nicholas Chauvin. He was the kind of soldier who would slaughter an infant if an officer told him to because the officer represented his country. It would be impossible for him to conceive of his country doing wrong or being on the wrong side of the argument in anything. His patriotism was to the extreme where to question his government in any matter would make him a traitor.
This feeling was obvious through much of the aftermath of 9/11 in America. It's still alive and well in certain elements of the Tea Party and on Fox News and other right wing media outlets. If you question the actions of our government, unless it's questioning Obama, then you might be a terrorist. But, again, that's not really what I'm after here.
You'll frequently hear people say that America's is the best system of government, best workforce, best legal system, best creative minds, best colleges, best healthcare system. You're not meant to question this; it's all rhetorical. Rarely is a balanced comparison given in which the statement is proven or even argued successfully. So, I frequently ask myself this question, "What if I were French?". Seriously, other than food, scenery, language, etc., if I were French, how would my standard of life be different?
I'm honestly not sure of that answer. I know that the French healthcare system was called "best performing system in the world in terms of availability and organization of health care providers (by comparison, the US ranked number 37)," according to the Wikipedia entry attributed to the World Health Organization. Of course that's the UN which is the Devil where I live. I know that in America I can't afford health insurance so I haven't had a physical in years.
I know that America has the highest rate of incarceration in the world. I know that O.J. was acquitted of the murder of his ex-wife and her boyfriend. I know that French people enjoy a pretty high standard of living as do we in America. I guess the matter of freedom, personal freedom, comes into play. So I have to ask myself what freedoms I enjoy in the U.S. would I not be able to enjoy in France? I honestly don't know. I think everything I'm doing right now I could do there as well. I don't think I could own an assault rifle in France but I don't own one here either. I think that, being relatively poor, I would have better healthcare over there. I might not have access to Popeye's fried chicken though! Since I'm diabetic, however, that luxury really isn't available to me here either. Of course, here, I recently had to stop taking my insulin because I can't afford it. Thanks to WalMart though I can still afford to buy my Metformin pills. I might not be able to enjoy going to the WalMart in France.
So, as far as personal freedoms go, I started to think about my first amendment rights as an American. Those rights aren't always in effect. I'll provide an example of this. When I lived in the Atlanta suburb of Alpharetta I worked at a Starbucks near the Country Club of the South. This is a very exclusive gated and guarded community of homes all well in excess of $1 million in value. This is where Bobby and Whitney lived. This is home to athletes, CEOs, organized crime figures, etc. They were my customers. The parking lot would see its share of Bentleys, Lamborghinis, Porches, Mercedes, Maybachs and the lot. Georgia is a "right-to-work" state. You can look that up on Wiki but it basically means that employees can be fired without reason. I also lived in the area and shopped at the Kroger that was also frequented by my Starbucks customers. Let's say I'm at the store and one of my customers, we'll use one of my Russian mafia customers for this example, comes up to me and wants to talk about football. I say to this person, "you know, I'm sorry, but I have huge problems with the way you make your money, you know, the human trafficking and prostitution and all that, and would prefer not to speak with you outside of our customer/employee relationship at Starbucks." If that person mentioned that to my boss at Starbucks I could be fired without reason given or a reason could easily be trumped up if absolutely necessary.
Basically, working in retail as I do now as well, I have to be careful with my words and actions outside the workplace. My wife had to sign a social media clause for her job and this is standard procedure in many places in America now. You can actually be held to account for what you say outside the workplace. It's generally accepted that you can't behave any way you want at the workplace. Now, I have to be cautious even in my own home typing as I'm doing now.
Here's another little bit of irony. I just saw a list of the fastest production cars in the world that are supposedly street-legal in the U.S. Number one on that list is a French made number: the Bugatti Veyron 16.4. The car is capable of speeds in excess of 250 m.p.h. That's almost 4 times the highest speed limit anywhere in America. The car costs in excess of $1 million and reportedly you have to send the car to France to have the tires replaced at a cost of $70,000. So, in America I have the freedom to buy a car that can break the law by close to a factor of four.
Here's the rub; in the U.S. most penalties associated with speeding are set fines. Let's say I'm in my Bugatti in the state of New York and I'm only doing 100 m.p.h. If I get pulled over by the police and can't get my attorney or country club buddy to fix the ticket for me the fine would be up to $600. We won't go into the hit to my insurance, just pure, simple math. If I can afford a Bugatti I'll say I'm making like $100,000 a week at least. That means that the $600 fine is less than 1% of my weekly income. Now let's say that I do the same thing in my Jeep and I make $300 a week. That makes the fine 200% of my weekly income. If I'm living paycheck to paycheck like most Americans, there are many other things that will have to be put off in order to pay the fine meaning additional late fees and that sort of thing. The punitive element here is exponential. Both drivers in question were doing the exact same thing wrong but the punishments are dramatically different. For me the collateral damage is immense. For the Bugatti driver it's barely a scrape.
I'm sure this scenario is similar in the U.S. and in France as is the scenario of me brushing off a wealthy customer outside the workplace. So again, I ask, what am I free to do here that I wouldn't be free to do in France? To me it seems that the whole world is basically divided along the lines of wealth and class. If I'm wealthy then I have freedom to spare. If I'm poor then my liberties are severely limited. All of the talk of America being the best at this and that is merely a distraction. It's rallying people around the flag so they don't worry about the real problems facing them like financial inequality and the curtailing of liberties.
If you haven't read Animal Farm by George Orwell then you should. It's an excellent read and it also speaks to the argument of inequality in language that anybody, even Glen Beck or Sarah Palin, would have trouble disputing. The best quote from the book is this: "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others." Animal Farm was written to question what was happening in the Stalinist Soviet Union but, I ask you, in America or France today, are some animals more equal than others? I don't think it's unpatriotic to ask.
In the months after 9/11 when our country was rounding up allies to be counted in the war against international terrorism and for the impending invasion of Iraq, France balked. This led to freedom fries and an intense hatred for all things French except for Cartier, Michelin, and any other luxury items. This hatred has abated somewhat since France elected a conservative and since the average American's memory doesn't account for that many news cycles. That's not really where I'm going with this though. Yes, at the video store in which I work, there are still very conservative customers who unquestioningly poo poo anything French for the same reasons I wouldn't have anything to do with Ted Nugent; it's purely political. These same people won't have anything to do with George Clooney or The Dixie Chicks.
The issue at which I'm looking is, ironically, the French concept of chauvinism. Patriotism is one thing; I don't see anything wrong with loving your country and wanting your country to be successful and powerful. Hopefully, as a patriot, you wouldn't lash out at others who want to try to improve the system where they see fault. Chauvinism is the love of country to the extreme of "my country right or wrong". The term comes from the name of a soldier in Napoleon's army, who may actually have been fictitious, named Nicholas Chauvin. He was the kind of soldier who would slaughter an infant if an officer told him to because the officer represented his country. It would be impossible for him to conceive of his country doing wrong or being on the wrong side of the argument in anything. His patriotism was to the extreme where to question his government in any matter would make him a traitor.
This feeling was obvious through much of the aftermath of 9/11 in America. It's still alive and well in certain elements of the Tea Party and on Fox News and other right wing media outlets. If you question the actions of our government, unless it's questioning Obama, then you might be a terrorist. But, again, that's not really what I'm after here.
You'll frequently hear people say that America's is the best system of government, best workforce, best legal system, best creative minds, best colleges, best healthcare system. You're not meant to question this; it's all rhetorical. Rarely is a balanced comparison given in which the statement is proven or even argued successfully. So, I frequently ask myself this question, "What if I were French?". Seriously, other than food, scenery, language, etc., if I were French, how would my standard of life be different?
I'm honestly not sure of that answer. I know that the French healthcare system was called "best performing system in the world in terms of availability and organization of health care providers (by comparison, the US ranked number 37)," according to the Wikipedia entry attributed to the World Health Organization. Of course that's the UN which is the Devil where I live. I know that in America I can't afford health insurance so I haven't had a physical in years.
I know that America has the highest rate of incarceration in the world. I know that O.J. was acquitted of the murder of his ex-wife and her boyfriend. I know that French people enjoy a pretty high standard of living as do we in America. I guess the matter of freedom, personal freedom, comes into play. So I have to ask myself what freedoms I enjoy in the U.S. would I not be able to enjoy in France? I honestly don't know. I think everything I'm doing right now I could do there as well. I don't think I could own an assault rifle in France but I don't own one here either. I think that, being relatively poor, I would have better healthcare over there. I might not have access to Popeye's fried chicken though! Since I'm diabetic, however, that luxury really isn't available to me here either. Of course, here, I recently had to stop taking my insulin because I can't afford it. Thanks to WalMart though I can still afford to buy my Metformin pills. I might not be able to enjoy going to the WalMart in France.
So, as far as personal freedoms go, I started to think about my first amendment rights as an American. Those rights aren't always in effect. I'll provide an example of this. When I lived in the Atlanta suburb of Alpharetta I worked at a Starbucks near the Country Club of the South. This is a very exclusive gated and guarded community of homes all well in excess of $1 million in value. This is where Bobby and Whitney lived. This is home to athletes, CEOs, organized crime figures, etc. They were my customers. The parking lot would see its share of Bentleys, Lamborghinis, Porches, Mercedes, Maybachs and the lot. Georgia is a "right-to-work" state. You can look that up on Wiki but it basically means that employees can be fired without reason. I also lived in the area and shopped at the Kroger that was also frequented by my Starbucks customers. Let's say I'm at the store and one of my customers, we'll use one of my Russian mafia customers for this example, comes up to me and wants to talk about football. I say to this person, "you know, I'm sorry, but I have huge problems with the way you make your money, you know, the human trafficking and prostitution and all that, and would prefer not to speak with you outside of our customer/employee relationship at Starbucks." If that person mentioned that to my boss at Starbucks I could be fired without reason given or a reason could easily be trumped up if absolutely necessary.
Basically, working in retail as I do now as well, I have to be careful with my words and actions outside the workplace. My wife had to sign a social media clause for her job and this is standard procedure in many places in America now. You can actually be held to account for what you say outside the workplace. It's generally accepted that you can't behave any way you want at the workplace. Now, I have to be cautious even in my own home typing as I'm doing now.
Here's another little bit of irony. I just saw a list of the fastest production cars in the world that are supposedly street-legal in the U.S. Number one on that list is a French made number: the Bugatti Veyron 16.4. The car is capable of speeds in excess of 250 m.p.h. That's almost 4 times the highest speed limit anywhere in America. The car costs in excess of $1 million and reportedly you have to send the car to France to have the tires replaced at a cost of $70,000. So, in America I have the freedom to buy a car that can break the law by close to a factor of four.
Here's the rub; in the U.S. most penalties associated with speeding are set fines. Let's say I'm in my Bugatti in the state of New York and I'm only doing 100 m.p.h. If I get pulled over by the police and can't get my attorney or country club buddy to fix the ticket for me the fine would be up to $600. We won't go into the hit to my insurance, just pure, simple math. If I can afford a Bugatti I'll say I'm making like $100,000 a week at least. That means that the $600 fine is less than 1% of my weekly income. Now let's say that I do the same thing in my Jeep and I make $300 a week. That makes the fine 200% of my weekly income. If I'm living paycheck to paycheck like most Americans, there are many other things that will have to be put off in order to pay the fine meaning additional late fees and that sort of thing. The punitive element here is exponential. Both drivers in question were doing the exact same thing wrong but the punishments are dramatically different. For me the collateral damage is immense. For the Bugatti driver it's barely a scrape.
I'm sure this scenario is similar in the U.S. and in France as is the scenario of me brushing off a wealthy customer outside the workplace. So again, I ask, what am I free to do here that I wouldn't be free to do in France? To me it seems that the whole world is basically divided along the lines of wealth and class. If I'm wealthy then I have freedom to spare. If I'm poor then my liberties are severely limited. All of the talk of America being the best at this and that is merely a distraction. It's rallying people around the flag so they don't worry about the real problems facing them like financial inequality and the curtailing of liberties.
If you haven't read Animal Farm by George Orwell then you should. It's an excellent read and it also speaks to the argument of inequality in language that anybody, even Glen Beck or Sarah Palin, would have trouble disputing. The best quote from the book is this: "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others." Animal Farm was written to question what was happening in the Stalinist Soviet Union but, I ask you, in America or France today, are some animals more equal than others? I don't think it's unpatriotic to ask.
Saturday, December 18, 2010
The Wall Street Cancer - Hey Kool-Aid! Pt. 1
I've been meaning to get around to the Wall Street topic; what has been going on there for the past three decades is a central theme for my ultimate, decline of America, topic. So I watched "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps" a few nights ago and that prompted me to get on with it. We'll get things rolling with a brief review of the movie.
The first "Wall Street" movie from 1987 was a good one. I remember going to it on a date and coming out of the theater wanting to make some money, lots of it. The plot was easy to follow with the main theme being insider trading, greed, and corruption at the New York Stock Exchange. It was all about being sneaky and making enough money to buy the Sharper Image catalog in its entirety. The new one is a much more convoluted affair. Oliver Stone is heavy-handed to the point where you wonder if Michael Moore wasn't involved in the writing of the script. I love Michael Moore and I admire his work but I was looking for story.
I already know how insane the whole Wall Street thing is. The main drag on the script though is that insider trading is incredibly easy to understand. Somebody with insider knowledge gives you a tip and you act on it to your gain. These days? It's all credit default swaps and packaged derivatives and leverage and, well, you know the deal; nobody even knows what's being done in the current financial market. Ultimately though the new Wall Street movie is about get back, revenge, and that works as a story to a point. As a movie it's just okay; as a documentary it's overacted. It does serve as a valuable reminder that our country got screwed and the screwing is still going on. Like a woman who has been slipped a date-rape drug, we're still being raped but we're dozing while the deed is being done.
Even after the $700 billion bailout of this country's largest financial institutions, things are going full steam in Manhattan. In the past year these same firms paid out a record $160 billion in bonuses. Seriously, these are the people who took our economy to the brink of complete collapse and the machine is just rolling along like nothing ever happened. They've paid off our politicians and absolutely nothing of note has been done to dampen that good old Wall Street spirit. No regulations worth mentioning, no real consequence to their actions, nothing but a bailout at the public expense.
One thing I do like about "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps" is that Gordon Gekko keeps mentioning how people have been "drinking the Kool-Aid". I use this expression all the time but I think it's lost on some younger people and those who are rather inattentive to the news. It refers to the Jonestown cult in Guyana who committed mass suicide by drinking poisoned Kool-Aid (actually the generic Flavor Aid but that doesn't sound as cool). The followers of Jim Jones had fallen for his doomsday scenario hook, line, and sinker and thus the phrase has come into modern usage for any instance where people believe something despite obvious evidence against their belief.
I remember vividly back in 2002 when my wife and I were moving to the Atlanta area and looking for a place to live; you'd drive along a street and see a neighborhood where half the houses had "for sale" signs out front while two new subdivisions were being built across the street. I realized at the time that the situation was obviously untenable. It's just basic economics that, if you are having trouble selling your widgets, you don't increase production by a factor of ten to make up for demand you only hope will come. At the time the belief that real estate NEVER lost value was like the Ten Commandments. It was well-understood that real estate was the most solid investment you could make. The people doing the house buying that was going on were people who couldn't afford it being backed by sub-prime mortgages and speculators looking to do some flipping. The real demand was just a ghost.
After 9/11, when interest rates had bottomed out, it got cheaper to finance the building of new homes. An increase in housing starts was the barometer of a strong economy. The main cost associated with building was labor and we started to see a huge wave of illegal immigrants from Mexico and Central America being brought in to take care of that. Houses and subdivisions were going up at an absurd and unjustified rate. Well, at least it was absurd and unjustified unless you were drinking the real estate Kool-Aid; I wasn't. Not that I'm beating myself up for not speaking out; I did. But, I don't have a degree and know little about economics. All I could do was tell you that, for a fact, 2+2 does not equal 5. Easy sell, that argument, right? Not so. It went on, unabated, for years. As lending institutions leveraged themselves to unheard of ratios and mortgages and sub-prime mortgages were rolled up into neat little balls and sold all over the place like chewing gum, it went on until it could go on no longer.
America is currently littered with completed, half-finished, and barely started subdivisions that are like ghost towns. I mean literally, it's like the old westerns where you come across a little town and nobody lives there; tumbleweeds are blowing down the street. We still have a homeless problem in this country but that's another topic for another day. What I mean to illustrate is what happens when we're sold a bill of goods by Wall Street and it's backed by nothing, when our country and our government drinks the Kool-Aid. It's not like we have a choice, mind you. With our system in its current state, the gentlemen serving the Kool-Aid are the ones writing the laws on how it should be dispensed. They're the ones lobbying and putting money behind candidates from the Tea Party to the progressives. It's like choosing which street corner at which you'll be robbed. You'll be robbed either way you go but maybe the scenery is better at Main and Maple.
I personally don't think there's a way out. The big banks and financial institutions will keep going until it's gone, in this country in its current form at least. For conservatives, regulation is a dirty word and for liberals who favor regulation we keep being given candidates like Obama and Clinton who can't afford or are unwilling to go up against the money; maybe they're even in collusion with the money like a Manchurian candidate. The average person is simply given a false choice to vote for "change" or vote for "change" since both parties run on that word at face value. Yet we keep getting the status quo.
I honestly hope, for the future of our country, that Sarah Palin wins the election in 2012 and Republicans and Tea Partiers are firmly in charge of both houses of congress. When nothing happens to change the system and nothing gets better and we don't get trickled down upon, maybe, maybe then people will really start to wake up to the darkness behind our current system. For that to happen though, they'll have to start drinking coffee, not Kool-Aid.
Unfortunately, I think the only thing that could bring this rape to a halt is an actual revolution on the order of the French Revolution of 1789, not the American Revolution where a landed gentry wrote the rules. But money doesn't really go away, and, as is obvious in modern day France, the oil rises back to the top. It's just a matter of keeping the electorate high on promises and diversions.
I'm guessing that war with Iran or North Korea will be our next little diversion. Works like a charm as history tells us. The problem is that Iran and North Korea are not legitimate threats, China is. But the companies and banks who run our government have much invested in China and they're not terribly patriotic anyway.
I have no idea what the New America will look like but, I promise you, it will be dramatically different in less than fifty years. The rate at which we're being sold off is rapid, unabated, and, unless something truly dramatic happens to rein it in, this car will driven until the wheels fall off.
I'll predict that the American public will be asked to make some painful cut-backs in the coming months in order to whittle away at the huge deficit we're currently facing. We'll be asked to tighten our belts while Wall Street continues on its merry way. They're not willing to make any changes to the way they do business and won't be expected to.
I'll continue this topic in my next or in a future blog; there's still much I'd like to say about the housing market, how the stock market works, and regarding capitalism in general. For now, I would recommend "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps" as an urgent reminder.
The first "Wall Street" movie from 1987 was a good one. I remember going to it on a date and coming out of the theater wanting to make some money, lots of it. The plot was easy to follow with the main theme being insider trading, greed, and corruption at the New York Stock Exchange. It was all about being sneaky and making enough money to buy the Sharper Image catalog in its entirety. The new one is a much more convoluted affair. Oliver Stone is heavy-handed to the point where you wonder if Michael Moore wasn't involved in the writing of the script. I love Michael Moore and I admire his work but I was looking for story.
I already know how insane the whole Wall Street thing is. The main drag on the script though is that insider trading is incredibly easy to understand. Somebody with insider knowledge gives you a tip and you act on it to your gain. These days? It's all credit default swaps and packaged derivatives and leverage and, well, you know the deal; nobody even knows what's being done in the current financial market. Ultimately though the new Wall Street movie is about get back, revenge, and that works as a story to a point. As a movie it's just okay; as a documentary it's overacted. It does serve as a valuable reminder that our country got screwed and the screwing is still going on. Like a woman who has been slipped a date-rape drug, we're still being raped but we're dozing while the deed is being done.
Even after the $700 billion bailout of this country's largest financial institutions, things are going full steam in Manhattan. In the past year these same firms paid out a record $160 billion in bonuses. Seriously, these are the people who took our economy to the brink of complete collapse and the machine is just rolling along like nothing ever happened. They've paid off our politicians and absolutely nothing of note has been done to dampen that good old Wall Street spirit. No regulations worth mentioning, no real consequence to their actions, nothing but a bailout at the public expense.
One thing I do like about "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps" is that Gordon Gekko keeps mentioning how people have been "drinking the Kool-Aid". I use this expression all the time but I think it's lost on some younger people and those who are rather inattentive to the news. It refers to the Jonestown cult in Guyana who committed mass suicide by drinking poisoned Kool-Aid (actually the generic Flavor Aid but that doesn't sound as cool). The followers of Jim Jones had fallen for his doomsday scenario hook, line, and sinker and thus the phrase has come into modern usage for any instance where people believe something despite obvious evidence against their belief.
I remember vividly back in 2002 when my wife and I were moving to the Atlanta area and looking for a place to live; you'd drive along a street and see a neighborhood where half the houses had "for sale" signs out front while two new subdivisions were being built across the street. I realized at the time that the situation was obviously untenable. It's just basic economics that, if you are having trouble selling your widgets, you don't increase production by a factor of ten to make up for demand you only hope will come. At the time the belief that real estate NEVER lost value was like the Ten Commandments. It was well-understood that real estate was the most solid investment you could make. The people doing the house buying that was going on were people who couldn't afford it being backed by sub-prime mortgages and speculators looking to do some flipping. The real demand was just a ghost.
After 9/11, when interest rates had bottomed out, it got cheaper to finance the building of new homes. An increase in housing starts was the barometer of a strong economy. The main cost associated with building was labor and we started to see a huge wave of illegal immigrants from Mexico and Central America being brought in to take care of that. Houses and subdivisions were going up at an absurd and unjustified rate. Well, at least it was absurd and unjustified unless you were drinking the real estate Kool-Aid; I wasn't. Not that I'm beating myself up for not speaking out; I did. But, I don't have a degree and know little about economics. All I could do was tell you that, for a fact, 2+2 does not equal 5. Easy sell, that argument, right? Not so. It went on, unabated, for years. As lending institutions leveraged themselves to unheard of ratios and mortgages and sub-prime mortgages were rolled up into neat little balls and sold all over the place like chewing gum, it went on until it could go on no longer.
America is currently littered with completed, half-finished, and barely started subdivisions that are like ghost towns. I mean literally, it's like the old westerns where you come across a little town and nobody lives there; tumbleweeds are blowing down the street. We still have a homeless problem in this country but that's another topic for another day. What I mean to illustrate is what happens when we're sold a bill of goods by Wall Street and it's backed by nothing, when our country and our government drinks the Kool-Aid. It's not like we have a choice, mind you. With our system in its current state, the gentlemen serving the Kool-Aid are the ones writing the laws on how it should be dispensed. They're the ones lobbying and putting money behind candidates from the Tea Party to the progressives. It's like choosing which street corner at which you'll be robbed. You'll be robbed either way you go but maybe the scenery is better at Main and Maple.
I personally don't think there's a way out. The big banks and financial institutions will keep going until it's gone, in this country in its current form at least. For conservatives, regulation is a dirty word and for liberals who favor regulation we keep being given candidates like Obama and Clinton who can't afford or are unwilling to go up against the money; maybe they're even in collusion with the money like a Manchurian candidate. The average person is simply given a false choice to vote for "change" or vote for "change" since both parties run on that word at face value. Yet we keep getting the status quo.
I honestly hope, for the future of our country, that Sarah Palin wins the election in 2012 and Republicans and Tea Partiers are firmly in charge of both houses of congress. When nothing happens to change the system and nothing gets better and we don't get trickled down upon, maybe, maybe then people will really start to wake up to the darkness behind our current system. For that to happen though, they'll have to start drinking coffee, not Kool-Aid.
Unfortunately, I think the only thing that could bring this rape to a halt is an actual revolution on the order of the French Revolution of 1789, not the American Revolution where a landed gentry wrote the rules. But money doesn't really go away, and, as is obvious in modern day France, the oil rises back to the top. It's just a matter of keeping the electorate high on promises and diversions.
I'm guessing that war with Iran or North Korea will be our next little diversion. Works like a charm as history tells us. The problem is that Iran and North Korea are not legitimate threats, China is. But the companies and banks who run our government have much invested in China and they're not terribly patriotic anyway.
I have no idea what the New America will look like but, I promise you, it will be dramatically different in less than fifty years. The rate at which we're being sold off is rapid, unabated, and, unless something truly dramatic happens to rein it in, this car will driven until the wheels fall off.
I'll predict that the American public will be asked to make some painful cut-backs in the coming months in order to whittle away at the huge deficit we're currently facing. We'll be asked to tighten our belts while Wall Street continues on its merry way. They're not willing to make any changes to the way they do business and won't be expected to.
I'll continue this topic in my next or in a future blog; there's still much I'd like to say about the housing market, how the stock market works, and regarding capitalism in general. For now, I would recommend "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps" as an urgent reminder.
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Business is The Business of America
I watch a lot of reality TV, mostly shows on Bravo, maybe because Bravo shows look amazing in HD and take full advantage of 5.1 sound set-ups. In addition to looking and sounding amazing, the reality TV I watch gives me a chance to revel in the good and bad of people behaving like themselves. Sometimes it's a triumph and sometimes it's a train wreck.
One of the shows I watch is Tabitha's Salon Takeover. Of course I'm bald which makes it rather strange that I watch the show. The thing is though, it could just as easily be Tabitha's Garage Takeover, or Tabitha's Bait Shop Takeover. The show focuses on the owners of small businesses, salons in this case, and the things they're doing wrong and how it can be fixed by somebody who has been successful in the field.
This past Tuesday night the salon in question was Christopher Hill Salon in Brentwood, a tony section of Los Angeles, that, given it's prime location, should be generating kaboodles of income. That is, if the owners knew what they were doing. The owners were a married couple, a husband with considerable business experience and his wife, a very bitchy Asian lady with an MBA, cum laude as she frequently points out, from Southern Cal and who had worked as a consultant in corporate America. Neither owner had any experience at all in owning their own business or any salon experience either.
I won't go into all the particulars of how things turned out but the end result was that the wife was the problem. They had bought a salon with an existing stable of very good stylists but had run things into the ground through poor management and a basic lack of experience. The wife had zero people skills and salon turnover was well beyond what it should be because everybody questioned the business and leadership skills of the owners. They were $300,000 in debt and in danger of losing their house which they had mortgaged to keep the business afloat. After Tabitha fixed things up like she always does and came back after six weeks for her usual check in, things had reverted back to the way there were when she got there and the wife who had agreed to step aside was back in charge and seven people had left or been fired.
At any rate, the show and the wife got me thinking about the word "business". My wife has a business degree that allowed her to get a foot in the door of some insurance companies in Atlanta where she was allowed to butt her head against the glass ceiling many women face and also allowed her to watch the rampant nepotism in corporate America where the friends and nephews of the big wigs get positions and advancement without merit.
Business is a funny word. Business schools are ubiquitous, physically and virtually. America churns out more business school graduates and MBAs than, I would guess, every other country in the world combined. I'm not sure what it means but I guess you graduate knowing how to "do business". That's pretty vague. Supposedly you get a big boost in income over somebody who doesn't have a degree. I guess I'd have to do a lot of research to find out what percentage of small businesses and successful small businesses are started by somebody with a business degree of some description. Basically though, it would seem that, you learn on the job like you would in just about any vocation. The difference is that, should you have a degree, you can demonstrate to an employer that you had the diligence to complete a course of study. You don't really have a demonstrable skill-set; you do have a piece of paper showing that you have an understanding of basic business concepts.
The wife at the salon in question seemed to be of the impression that an MBA imparted her with some special powers akin to being bitten by a radioactive spider or like the graduates of Hogwarts who have been given a magic wand and a familiar. She thought that the concept was the fact: successfully completing a business course means success in business. If this were true America would be a much better place to be sure. There would be little, if any, poor investments. Most poor investments are the result of overlooking obvious leaps of logic. Once such leap would be to believe that it's not necessary to know anything about salons to run a successful salon. That might be the case if one were to hire a manager with salon experience. The wife in question, however, thought that her MBA carried with it the requisite skills to manage anything as long as it was a "business".
This is that sort of "build it and they will come" philosophy that has dug America into a hole that I seriously doubt it will be able to dig back out of. You can look all around the area in which I live, Baldwin County, Alabama, and see the failed businesses and the empty or unfinished subdivisions that are the result of that philosophy. All are the result of people with money to invest being talked out of their money by somebody with a slick brochure or Power Point presentation. The myriad, out-of-business chicken finger franchisees and the quaint, empty subdivisions with "sales person on site" signs tell a sad tale. The vast majority of investments are poor investments. Having a business degree isn't like getting magical powers. American business has become something of a shell game or Ponzi scheme in which things aren't manufactured anymore. Money is invested, churned around, sent overseas and back, packaged and repackaged in various schemes to skirt regulations and laws, and the people making money are the ones handling the money and controlling the political process designed to regulate it. It's the people loaning money to the small businesses who fail who are successful not the small businesses themselves.
America isn't producing much in the way of goods anymore. We import much more than we export. China is producing stuff; we're producing business degrees. All of this is so important because of the tax breaks we've just extended to the wealthiest Americans. In theory, they will invest this extra money in the economy and it will all trickle down on the average American. The problem is that most investments are bad ones like the salon owners at Christopher Hill Salon. All of that tax break money they've invested will end up with the bankers who financed their ill-fated venture, the bank will own the house they mortgaged to pay for it, and they'll become part of the financial class to which I belong while the financiers continue to put distance between themselves and serfs like me.
One of the shows I watch is Tabitha's Salon Takeover. Of course I'm bald which makes it rather strange that I watch the show. The thing is though, it could just as easily be Tabitha's Garage Takeover, or Tabitha's Bait Shop Takeover. The show focuses on the owners of small businesses, salons in this case, and the things they're doing wrong and how it can be fixed by somebody who has been successful in the field.
This past Tuesday night the salon in question was Christopher Hill Salon in Brentwood, a tony section of Los Angeles, that, given it's prime location, should be generating kaboodles of income. That is, if the owners knew what they were doing. The owners were a married couple, a husband with considerable business experience and his wife, a very bitchy Asian lady with an MBA, cum laude as she frequently points out, from Southern Cal and who had worked as a consultant in corporate America. Neither owner had any experience at all in owning their own business or any salon experience either.
I won't go into all the particulars of how things turned out but the end result was that the wife was the problem. They had bought a salon with an existing stable of very good stylists but had run things into the ground through poor management and a basic lack of experience. The wife had zero people skills and salon turnover was well beyond what it should be because everybody questioned the business and leadership skills of the owners. They were $300,000 in debt and in danger of losing their house which they had mortgaged to keep the business afloat. After Tabitha fixed things up like she always does and came back after six weeks for her usual check in, things had reverted back to the way there were when she got there and the wife who had agreed to step aside was back in charge and seven people had left or been fired.
At any rate, the show and the wife got me thinking about the word "business". My wife has a business degree that allowed her to get a foot in the door of some insurance companies in Atlanta where she was allowed to butt her head against the glass ceiling many women face and also allowed her to watch the rampant nepotism in corporate America where the friends and nephews of the big wigs get positions and advancement without merit.
Business is a funny word. Business schools are ubiquitous, physically and virtually. America churns out more business school graduates and MBAs than, I would guess, every other country in the world combined. I'm not sure what it means but I guess you graduate knowing how to "do business". That's pretty vague. Supposedly you get a big boost in income over somebody who doesn't have a degree. I guess I'd have to do a lot of research to find out what percentage of small businesses and successful small businesses are started by somebody with a business degree of some description. Basically though, it would seem that, you learn on the job like you would in just about any vocation. The difference is that, should you have a degree, you can demonstrate to an employer that you had the diligence to complete a course of study. You don't really have a demonstrable skill-set; you do have a piece of paper showing that you have an understanding of basic business concepts.
The wife at the salon in question seemed to be of the impression that an MBA imparted her with some special powers akin to being bitten by a radioactive spider or like the graduates of Hogwarts who have been given a magic wand and a familiar. She thought that the concept was the fact: successfully completing a business course means success in business. If this were true America would be a much better place to be sure. There would be little, if any, poor investments. Most poor investments are the result of overlooking obvious leaps of logic. Once such leap would be to believe that it's not necessary to know anything about salons to run a successful salon. That might be the case if one were to hire a manager with salon experience. The wife in question, however, thought that her MBA carried with it the requisite skills to manage anything as long as it was a "business".
This is that sort of "build it and they will come" philosophy that has dug America into a hole that I seriously doubt it will be able to dig back out of. You can look all around the area in which I live, Baldwin County, Alabama, and see the failed businesses and the empty or unfinished subdivisions that are the result of that philosophy. All are the result of people with money to invest being talked out of their money by somebody with a slick brochure or Power Point presentation. The myriad, out-of-business chicken finger franchisees and the quaint, empty subdivisions with "sales person on site" signs tell a sad tale. The vast majority of investments are poor investments. Having a business degree isn't like getting magical powers. American business has become something of a shell game or Ponzi scheme in which things aren't manufactured anymore. Money is invested, churned around, sent overseas and back, packaged and repackaged in various schemes to skirt regulations and laws, and the people making money are the ones handling the money and controlling the political process designed to regulate it. It's the people loaning money to the small businesses who fail who are successful not the small businesses themselves.
America isn't producing much in the way of goods anymore. We import much more than we export. China is producing stuff; we're producing business degrees. All of this is so important because of the tax breaks we've just extended to the wealthiest Americans. In theory, they will invest this extra money in the economy and it will all trickle down on the average American. The problem is that most investments are bad ones like the salon owners at Christopher Hill Salon. All of that tax break money they've invested will end up with the bankers who financed their ill-fated venture, the bank will own the house they mortgaged to pay for it, and they'll become part of the financial class to which I belong while the financiers continue to put distance between themselves and serfs like me.
Monday, December 13, 2010
The New American Jesus - Mammonalicious!
The new Jesus … the distinctly, American Jesus … the Jesus who bestows some believers with wealth, with material comfort, with, well, stuff, that is the topic for this day's blog. I'll preface the whole thing with a very important statement: I'm not a Christian. I do believe that Jesus existed although I don't believe that the Bible is an infallible document that accurately states his beliefs or actions. That's not really important here though. What is important is that people who do believe in the infallibility of the scripture and who profess to be followers of Jesus do believe that the red letter bits in the King James Version are quotes and are the infallible words of Jesus who was serving as a conduit to deliver the word of God to whoever might listen.
Prosperity theology is very much an American thing. It's been covered well in the news and in books. (Here's an excellent article regarding the trend from a 2006 Time Magazine article here. I don't mean to belabor the topic, but the recent debate on taxation of the wealthy, CEO bonuses, Wall Street shell games, mortgage meltdowns, etc. makes me want to recall the debate and lay out some basic facts about the teachings of Jesus as documented in the King James Version of the Bible. I'm not sure of the actual figures but I would assume that the majority if not all of the Republicans in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives adhere to something akin to prosperity theology and they're the ones pushing so hard to keep taxes low on the wealthiest Americans; so bearing that in mind, please indulge me.
If you weren't familiar with the Bible or with the actual teachings of Jesus you would probably think that he spent a great deal of red letter discourse on the topics of homosexuality, abortion, drugs, low taxes, and the spread of democracy in addition to the most important fight waged by Christians in America which is the war to keep Christ in Christmas. In fact, at least from what we know, he never addressed homosexuality directly and we're not sure what his birthday was or if he cared. Whatever abortions were done in his day were not addressed though it could easily be assumed that he would condemn the practice. He did in fact address taxes and I'll discuss that here. Actually, a large part of the teachings of Jesus was directed specifically at denial of the things of the world in favor of focusing on the after-life in Heaven. The doctrine of prosperity theology isn't just a little off; it doesn't bend a few things here and there. It actively skips over the things that contradict it and is in fact completely at odds with the actual teachings of Jesus as we know them.
Let's start with taxes. Jesus did have something to say about taxes. When cornered on the topic in the 20th chapter of Luke he said, “Shew me a penny. Whose image and superscription hath it? They answered and said, Caesar's. And he said unto them, Render therefore unto Caesar the things which be Caesar's, and unto God the things which be God's.” The reason he was being asked about paying taxes to Caesar is because the Jewish community thought it was wrong that their money be used to fund the pagan government of the Romans. It's purely speculation but, and I feel well-founded to say that, if Jesus were in front of John Boehner right now, and Boehner questioned him about taxes, he would point out the signature on the dollar bill belonging to the Secretary of the Treasury and say that the money wasn't Boehner's to be concerned with. In fact he might elaborate that John Boehner would be better served concerning himself with the kingdom of Heaven than with such worldly concerns.
From every thing we can tell about Jesus through the Bible he would appear to be a mendicant, maybe something akin to what the Buddhists call a bikshu. A bikshu travels from town to town and can only have a robe, needle and thread, and a bowl. The needle and thread is to mend the robe if it's needed and the bowl is for begging food. Similarly, Jesus speaks at length in the 12th chapter of Luke about the lifestyle of the mendicant. He says that lilies and birds have no jobs or possessions but they are looked after by the abundance of the Earth. In the same chapter he goes on to say that you shouldn't store up treasures on earth but, rather, store up treasures in Heaven. He speaks against covetousness and the desire for worldly possessions and says, “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” Doesn't really seem like the kind of teaching that would lead you to by a Hummer or Escalade for your weekly jaunt to church though the parking lot of the prosperity churched I lived near in Alpharetta, GA, Mount Pisgah, had a parking lot full of them on Sundays.
There is a very well-known bit of scripture in which a wealthy man approaches Jesus and asks how he can gain entry to Heaven. Jesus tells him “How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of God! For it is easier for a camel to go through a needle's eye, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.” There has been a ton of discussion and dissection of this brief exchange. Prosperity theologians have changed things so that the Eye of the Needle was supposedly a small opening in the wall around the city of Jerusalem and a camel had to kneel down to get through it. Well, obviously, the translation here doesn't use the proper noun to suggest that this was an actual place with a proper name. There is further confusion about the translation from the original Aramaic; actually this makes more sense to me. The word in the original script is apparently gamla which can mean either camel or rope. It would seem to be more fitting if the intended meaning was the rope because a rope is made up of many strands. If unwound to just one strand it may well fit into a needle's eye. Likewise, as is obviously Jesus' intent in the passage, if you pare yourself down from the many things you've accumulated in life, maybe you can make it. In other words, you can't take it with you.
I could literally go on for pages with scriptures quoted. Jesus went on to say “blessed are the poor”. Well, here's the full text from Luke and you decide how Jesus felt about the rich and the poor in the Beatitudes from the 6th chapter of Luke: “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who hunger now, for you will be satisfied. Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh. Blessed are you when people hate you, when they exclude you and insult you and reject your name as evil, because of the Son of Man. Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, because great is your reward in heaven. For that is how their ancestors treated the prophets. But woe to you who are rich, for you have already received your comfort. Woe to you who are well fed now, for you will go hungry. Woe to you who laugh now, for you will mourn and weep. Woe to you when everyone speaks well of you, for that is how their ancestors treated the false prophets.”
Much of the defense of material wealth is found in the Old Testament as is the denunciation of homosexuality and of laying with animals and eating of pork. I'm not sure why homosexuality is still denounced so fervently while kosher diets aren't much more popular. It all comes from the book of Leviticus, once considered to be THE LAW.
At any rate, I did myself a great service a while back by going through and actually reading the Bible. I guess a large number of people who call themselves Christians and go to church on Sundays hear bits of it here and there. I know many of them question the parts that are a little uncomfortable or confusing when they've heard that belief in God means material satisfaction like the stuff about giving away your material belongings and not storing up treasures on earth. Surely they get pat little responses so that they don't worry their little heads about this sort of thing. Now, I certainly wouldn't be able to follow the teachings of Jesus. I love nice, shiny, bright, new things. It's the same reason I don't call myself a Buddhist although I firmly believe in the teachings of the Buddha. I know what troubles come about chasing after the things of the world yet chase I do. The important thing is that I realize that I can't really call myself a Buddhist and continue to chase the mammon, or material wealth. Jesus says in Matthew 6:24 “No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.” Certainly, it would appear, that most of our politicians spend a great deal of time serving mammon.
Prosperity theology is very much an American thing. It's been covered well in the news and in books. (Here's an excellent article regarding the trend from a 2006 Time Magazine article here. I don't mean to belabor the topic, but the recent debate on taxation of the wealthy, CEO bonuses, Wall Street shell games, mortgage meltdowns, etc. makes me want to recall the debate and lay out some basic facts about the teachings of Jesus as documented in the King James Version of the Bible. I'm not sure of the actual figures but I would assume that the majority if not all of the Republicans in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives adhere to something akin to prosperity theology and they're the ones pushing so hard to keep taxes low on the wealthiest Americans; so bearing that in mind, please indulge me.
If you weren't familiar with the Bible or with the actual teachings of Jesus you would probably think that he spent a great deal of red letter discourse on the topics of homosexuality, abortion, drugs, low taxes, and the spread of democracy in addition to the most important fight waged by Christians in America which is the war to keep Christ in Christmas. In fact, at least from what we know, he never addressed homosexuality directly and we're not sure what his birthday was or if he cared. Whatever abortions were done in his day were not addressed though it could easily be assumed that he would condemn the practice. He did in fact address taxes and I'll discuss that here. Actually, a large part of the teachings of Jesus was directed specifically at denial of the things of the world in favor of focusing on the after-life in Heaven. The doctrine of prosperity theology isn't just a little off; it doesn't bend a few things here and there. It actively skips over the things that contradict it and is in fact completely at odds with the actual teachings of Jesus as we know them.
Let's start with taxes. Jesus did have something to say about taxes. When cornered on the topic in the 20th chapter of Luke he said, “Shew me a penny. Whose image and superscription hath it? They answered and said, Caesar's. And he said unto them, Render therefore unto Caesar the things which be Caesar's, and unto God the things which be God's.” The reason he was being asked about paying taxes to Caesar is because the Jewish community thought it was wrong that their money be used to fund the pagan government of the Romans. It's purely speculation but, and I feel well-founded to say that, if Jesus were in front of John Boehner right now, and Boehner questioned him about taxes, he would point out the signature on the dollar bill belonging to the Secretary of the Treasury and say that the money wasn't Boehner's to be concerned with. In fact he might elaborate that John Boehner would be better served concerning himself with the kingdom of Heaven than with such worldly concerns.
From every thing we can tell about Jesus through the Bible he would appear to be a mendicant, maybe something akin to what the Buddhists call a bikshu. A bikshu travels from town to town and can only have a robe, needle and thread, and a bowl. The needle and thread is to mend the robe if it's needed and the bowl is for begging food. Similarly, Jesus speaks at length in the 12th chapter of Luke about the lifestyle of the mendicant. He says that lilies and birds have no jobs or possessions but they are looked after by the abundance of the Earth. In the same chapter he goes on to say that you shouldn't store up treasures on earth but, rather, store up treasures in Heaven. He speaks against covetousness and the desire for worldly possessions and says, “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” Doesn't really seem like the kind of teaching that would lead you to by a Hummer or Escalade for your weekly jaunt to church though the parking lot of the prosperity churched I lived near in Alpharetta, GA, Mount Pisgah, had a parking lot full of them on Sundays.
There is a very well-known bit of scripture in which a wealthy man approaches Jesus and asks how he can gain entry to Heaven. Jesus tells him “How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of God! For it is easier for a camel to go through a needle's eye, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.” There has been a ton of discussion and dissection of this brief exchange. Prosperity theologians have changed things so that the Eye of the Needle was supposedly a small opening in the wall around the city of Jerusalem and a camel had to kneel down to get through it. Well, obviously, the translation here doesn't use the proper noun to suggest that this was an actual place with a proper name. There is further confusion about the translation from the original Aramaic; actually this makes more sense to me. The word in the original script is apparently gamla which can mean either camel or rope. It would seem to be more fitting if the intended meaning was the rope because a rope is made up of many strands. If unwound to just one strand it may well fit into a needle's eye. Likewise, as is obviously Jesus' intent in the passage, if you pare yourself down from the many things you've accumulated in life, maybe you can make it. In other words, you can't take it with you.
I could literally go on for pages with scriptures quoted. Jesus went on to say “blessed are the poor”. Well, here's the full text from Luke and you decide how Jesus felt about the rich and the poor in the Beatitudes from the 6th chapter of Luke: “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who hunger now, for you will be satisfied. Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh. Blessed are you when people hate you, when they exclude you and insult you and reject your name as evil, because of the Son of Man. Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, because great is your reward in heaven. For that is how their ancestors treated the prophets. But woe to you who are rich, for you have already received your comfort. Woe to you who are well fed now, for you will go hungry. Woe to you who laugh now, for you will mourn and weep. Woe to you when everyone speaks well of you, for that is how their ancestors treated the false prophets.”
Much of the defense of material wealth is found in the Old Testament as is the denunciation of homosexuality and of laying with animals and eating of pork. I'm not sure why homosexuality is still denounced so fervently while kosher diets aren't much more popular. It all comes from the book of Leviticus, once considered to be THE LAW.
At any rate, I did myself a great service a while back by going through and actually reading the Bible. I guess a large number of people who call themselves Christians and go to church on Sundays hear bits of it here and there. I know many of them question the parts that are a little uncomfortable or confusing when they've heard that belief in God means material satisfaction like the stuff about giving away your material belongings and not storing up treasures on earth. Surely they get pat little responses so that they don't worry their little heads about this sort of thing. Now, I certainly wouldn't be able to follow the teachings of Jesus. I love nice, shiny, bright, new things. It's the same reason I don't call myself a Buddhist although I firmly believe in the teachings of the Buddha. I know what troubles come about chasing after the things of the world yet chase I do. The important thing is that I realize that I can't really call myself a Buddhist and continue to chase the mammon, or material wealth. Jesus says in Matthew 6:24 “No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.” Certainly, it would appear, that most of our politicians spend a great deal of time serving mammon.
Friday, December 10, 2010
Misery, Inc. - The Nightmare Before Christmas
Most of you who know me personally know that I am involved with a website called ThePublicRecord.com. It's generally a place online where people all over the world have the chance to collaborate on musical projects with each other and with established artists. Recently, however, a side-project popped up involving the metalcore band Black Veil Brides. The contest involved finding a girl to appear in a video the band was scheduled to shoot for the song "Carolyn" and the contest winner would be flown out to LA to portray the title character in the video. Let me preface the following by saying that I think the contest was very cool and a good move for the Public Record website.
Black Veil Brides is a band with a heavy Hot Topic following, meaning that their followers can find just about everything that they need to be a hardcore fan in any one of the stores in the Hot Topic chain: make-up, t-shirts, shoes, posters, CDs, etc. There's a synergy at play here that is something of a music marketing holy grail. If you're a band that fits whatever the current vogue genre is and you can get on with a Hot Topic tour then your fans are exposed to the fans of similar bands and it's like one big happy money fest. The current, er, hot topic, is sort of a mish-mash of early Mötley Crüe and Tim Burton's "Nightmare Before Christmas" (the movie title is foreshadowing, btw) with heavy, gothy make-up, and usually parent-friendly "metal" music in the detuned, crunchy guitar style.
The primary audience for bands like this is girls. Young girls, say 13-18. Now, heavy metal in general has always been the province of younger, disaffected males. Think Black Sabbath through Metallica. The audiences are typically devoid of girls save the ones who want to "meet the band" and girlfriends who have been dragged along by their hair. In my day there was a very similar fan/band relationship akin to what the Black Veil Brides enjoy but the band in question was The Cure. Robert Smith spoke to the young, isolated, depressed, young girls of America like nobody else. He told them that they were part of something bigger. They were never alone because they had him. The big difference is that, in Robert Smith's case, this wasn't intentional. It was accidental that he became the thing that caused thousands of teen and pre-teen hearts to go pitter-patter. Maybe it was something akin to the senior citizens I see all around my community driving vehicles that were designed specifically to be sold to young, hip urbanites. Robert Smith totally missed his target to his economic advantage.
Bands like Black Veil Brides are designed to sell to a certain audience and they nail it. Something like The Monkees or The Back Street Boys. It's just a pure marketing ploy. I'm not going to say that the guys aren't into the music they're making or that they aren't making well-written and well-crafted songs because that's simply not the case. It's just a different kind of pop that's designed to sell to young girls. There's certainly a precedent there.
Where the nightmare before Christmas thing comes in is when the band chose a winner. I watched many of the videos submitted for this contest. The vast majority were from girls in the 14-17 year-old range with parental consent sitting in front of their webcam in the private bedroom of their quaint, white, suburban, middle-class home surrounded by Black Veil Brides (BVB) posters and possibly wearing make-up inspired by band front-man, Andy Six. The majority of the videos touched on one central theme: the girl is a misfit who is hated at her school and is picked on for being "different"; the only thing that is saving her from a total meltdown or possible suicide is the music of BVB and the lyrics of Andy Six who speaks to her in her language. The voice tells her that everything is alright. It tells her that she is not alone after all. There is at least one person in this cold, dark world who feels her pain and who is there for her with the immediacy of a flick of a power button on her iPod.
The girl who won the contest is a thirteen year-old from San Francisco who is a die-hard BVB fan, or a member of the BVB Army as they say (yeah, just like the KISS Army when I was a kid). The problem is that she appeared really HAPPY in her video! She seemed well-balanced. She wasn't wearing any make-up. She smiled. She laughed. She seemed full of energy and, well, like a very hopeful person with a bright future. She's been acting and modeling since she was four. This caused some pretty big waves in the community. Additionally, in her video, she made mention of the fact that she didn't share the "misery" of many of her fellow soldiers and then, as her cat did something crazy off-camera, she laughed! This was taken by some to be her laughing at the pain of other members of the Army. So some claws came out. Many thought that the girl who should portray Carolyn should have a necessary amount of misery under her belt. She should have had to fight the demons of suburban isolation and have the scars to show for it.
There was a backlash against the "haters" and many white, teen, suburban girls dropped many an F-bomb in defense of or in protest against the decision the band had made. Meanwhile, this cute little girl in San Francisco is having to weigh just what has happened to her and having to try to figure out why she shouldn't be a happy person.
Middle-class, suburban angst is nothing new. I was part of that club when I was coming of age. In the early '80s I was a punk. I was all Ramones and Dead Kennedys and Sex Pistols. There was no internet and no Hot Topic though. I had to work hard to pull off the clothes and the look. I had to go to New Orleans to find my music. I had to walk to school up hill both ways in the snow. The point is that I was trying to stand out. Same thing these girls are doing. The difference is that when I was picked on or bullied, I expected it. That was the point. I was trying to get a rise out of everybody. Gradually people began to accept me and my strangeness because I was also always happy. I was gregarious. I was eventually voted most outgoing my senior year in high school. It was just damned hard to not like me because I was likable. There were still some who didn't like me because I kind of put a mirror up to their conformity but, ultimately it didn't really matter. It was all just a difference in music, clothes, and politics.
The thing that hurts me about these young girls is that, like many middle-class suburbanites, they don't really have a very strong relationship with their parents. These are parents of my generation who are self-absorbed. They have their eyes on the prize and many have had children because their friends were having children and it just seemed like the thing to do. Maybe that's always been the case. The difference is that, in my day, if you were with your parents you were actually WITH them. You spoke to each other when you were driving, when you were watching TV, etc. A lot of kids didn't have TVs in their own room and there were literally NO computers. Everybody in the house shared the same phone line. Parents knew who their kids were talking to. They knew who they were hanging out with. These days parents and their children are only physically together. Mom is on the cellphone while the kids are plugged in to their iPod and/or texting their BFFs or watching a DVD in the back seat of an SUV the size of a Manhattan studio apartment. When they're at home the kids are in their own little rec room with DVD players and gaming consoles and their own phones and the internet. It really has become a type of isolation. Everybody indulges themselves, focuses on themselves, segregates themselves within their own homes.
A lot of the BVB Army lives in a search for more pain and the kind of "misery" afforded them by a chain store that allows them to separate themselves from the pack at school. They willingly put up barriers between themselves and their peers. They unwittingly put up barriers between themselves and their parents who literally don't know what they're doing. The parents are of a culture of giving to your kids, not raising them, not parenting them, not sacrificing anything of yourself in the process. You indulge yourself, you indulge your children, and they just grow up and make a life with all of the things you've given them materially.
A couple of years ago I was teaching private guitar lessons to some very wealthy families' kids in the tony Buckhead area of Atlanta. Many of the kids I taught went to one of four or five private high schools in the area with yearly tuitions in the $25,000 range. Most were good kids but it never ceased to amaze me that most of them had stay-at-home moms AND nannies or au pairs or something along those lines. The reason was because the mothers were doing their own thing, living their own lives in addition to being a titular parent. This has always been the case for the super-wealthy but it's increasingly true for families that would be considered middle-class by any measure in America. What needs to happen is that these families need to take the time to give their children some real love, real guidance, and give them some genuine perspective on what real misery is. Unfortunately misery today is a lifestyle that you can go to the mall and purchase.
On a side note I'd like to say that it's funny that there has been sniping in the BVB community that the girl who won the contest is "already a model", as if she's already gotten her shot and won in the game of life. I don't think they understand that being a model almost always means that your parents have given money to somebody who in turn has gotten them some modeling gigs. Typically anybody can be a model. Typically the money put in never comes close to the money gained. Watch any episode of Toddlers and Tiaras (love that show) if you don't believe me. Most of the girls who entered this contest were VERY pretty and could easily go into modeling if they and their parents so chose.
At any rate, here's the winning video and I hope she has a good time.
Black Veil Brides is a band with a heavy Hot Topic following, meaning that their followers can find just about everything that they need to be a hardcore fan in any one of the stores in the Hot Topic chain: make-up, t-shirts, shoes, posters, CDs, etc. There's a synergy at play here that is something of a music marketing holy grail. If you're a band that fits whatever the current vogue genre is and you can get on with a Hot Topic tour then your fans are exposed to the fans of similar bands and it's like one big happy money fest. The current, er, hot topic, is sort of a mish-mash of early Mötley Crüe and Tim Burton's "Nightmare Before Christmas" (the movie title is foreshadowing, btw) with heavy, gothy make-up, and usually parent-friendly "metal" music in the detuned, crunchy guitar style.
The primary audience for bands like this is girls. Young girls, say 13-18. Now, heavy metal in general has always been the province of younger, disaffected males. Think Black Sabbath through Metallica. The audiences are typically devoid of girls save the ones who want to "meet the band" and girlfriends who have been dragged along by their hair. In my day there was a very similar fan/band relationship akin to what the Black Veil Brides enjoy but the band in question was The Cure. Robert Smith spoke to the young, isolated, depressed, young girls of America like nobody else. He told them that they were part of something bigger. They were never alone because they had him. The big difference is that, in Robert Smith's case, this wasn't intentional. It was accidental that he became the thing that caused thousands of teen and pre-teen hearts to go pitter-patter. Maybe it was something akin to the senior citizens I see all around my community driving vehicles that were designed specifically to be sold to young, hip urbanites. Robert Smith totally missed his target to his economic advantage.
Bands like Black Veil Brides are designed to sell to a certain audience and they nail it. Something like The Monkees or The Back Street Boys. It's just a pure marketing ploy. I'm not going to say that the guys aren't into the music they're making or that they aren't making well-written and well-crafted songs because that's simply not the case. It's just a different kind of pop that's designed to sell to young girls. There's certainly a precedent there.
Where the nightmare before Christmas thing comes in is when the band chose a winner. I watched many of the videos submitted for this contest. The vast majority were from girls in the 14-17 year-old range with parental consent sitting in front of their webcam in the private bedroom of their quaint, white, suburban, middle-class home surrounded by Black Veil Brides (BVB) posters and possibly wearing make-up inspired by band front-man, Andy Six. The majority of the videos touched on one central theme: the girl is a misfit who is hated at her school and is picked on for being "different"; the only thing that is saving her from a total meltdown or possible suicide is the music of BVB and the lyrics of Andy Six who speaks to her in her language. The voice tells her that everything is alright. It tells her that she is not alone after all. There is at least one person in this cold, dark world who feels her pain and who is there for her with the immediacy of a flick of a power button on her iPod.
The girl who won the contest is a thirteen year-old from San Francisco who is a die-hard BVB fan, or a member of the BVB Army as they say (yeah, just like the KISS Army when I was a kid). The problem is that she appeared really HAPPY in her video! She seemed well-balanced. She wasn't wearing any make-up. She smiled. She laughed. She seemed full of energy and, well, like a very hopeful person with a bright future. She's been acting and modeling since she was four. This caused some pretty big waves in the community. Additionally, in her video, she made mention of the fact that she didn't share the "misery" of many of her fellow soldiers and then, as her cat did something crazy off-camera, she laughed! This was taken by some to be her laughing at the pain of other members of the Army. So some claws came out. Many thought that the girl who should portray Carolyn should have a necessary amount of misery under her belt. She should have had to fight the demons of suburban isolation and have the scars to show for it.
There was a backlash against the "haters" and many white, teen, suburban girls dropped many an F-bomb in defense of or in protest against the decision the band had made. Meanwhile, this cute little girl in San Francisco is having to weigh just what has happened to her and having to try to figure out why she shouldn't be a happy person.
Middle-class, suburban angst is nothing new. I was part of that club when I was coming of age. In the early '80s I was a punk. I was all Ramones and Dead Kennedys and Sex Pistols. There was no internet and no Hot Topic though. I had to work hard to pull off the clothes and the look. I had to go to New Orleans to find my music. I had to walk to school up hill both ways in the snow. The point is that I was trying to stand out. Same thing these girls are doing. The difference is that when I was picked on or bullied, I expected it. That was the point. I was trying to get a rise out of everybody. Gradually people began to accept me and my strangeness because I was also always happy. I was gregarious. I was eventually voted most outgoing my senior year in high school. It was just damned hard to not like me because I was likable. There were still some who didn't like me because I kind of put a mirror up to their conformity but, ultimately it didn't really matter. It was all just a difference in music, clothes, and politics.
The thing that hurts me about these young girls is that, like many middle-class suburbanites, they don't really have a very strong relationship with their parents. These are parents of my generation who are self-absorbed. They have their eyes on the prize and many have had children because their friends were having children and it just seemed like the thing to do. Maybe that's always been the case. The difference is that, in my day, if you were with your parents you were actually WITH them. You spoke to each other when you were driving, when you were watching TV, etc. A lot of kids didn't have TVs in their own room and there were literally NO computers. Everybody in the house shared the same phone line. Parents knew who their kids were talking to. They knew who they were hanging out with. These days parents and their children are only physically together. Mom is on the cellphone while the kids are plugged in to their iPod and/or texting their BFFs or watching a DVD in the back seat of an SUV the size of a Manhattan studio apartment. When they're at home the kids are in their own little rec room with DVD players and gaming consoles and their own phones and the internet. It really has become a type of isolation. Everybody indulges themselves, focuses on themselves, segregates themselves within their own homes.
A lot of the BVB Army lives in a search for more pain and the kind of "misery" afforded them by a chain store that allows them to separate themselves from the pack at school. They willingly put up barriers between themselves and their peers. They unwittingly put up barriers between themselves and their parents who literally don't know what they're doing. The parents are of a culture of giving to your kids, not raising them, not parenting them, not sacrificing anything of yourself in the process. You indulge yourself, you indulge your children, and they just grow up and make a life with all of the things you've given them materially.
A couple of years ago I was teaching private guitar lessons to some very wealthy families' kids in the tony Buckhead area of Atlanta. Many of the kids I taught went to one of four or five private high schools in the area with yearly tuitions in the $25,000 range. Most were good kids but it never ceased to amaze me that most of them had stay-at-home moms AND nannies or au pairs or something along those lines. The reason was because the mothers were doing their own thing, living their own lives in addition to being a titular parent. This has always been the case for the super-wealthy but it's increasingly true for families that would be considered middle-class by any measure in America. What needs to happen is that these families need to take the time to give their children some real love, real guidance, and give them some genuine perspective on what real misery is. Unfortunately misery today is a lifestyle that you can go to the mall and purchase.
On a side note I'd like to say that it's funny that there has been sniping in the BVB community that the girl who won the contest is "already a model", as if she's already gotten her shot and won in the game of life. I don't think they understand that being a model almost always means that your parents have given money to somebody who in turn has gotten them some modeling gigs. Typically anybody can be a model. Typically the money put in never comes close to the money gained. Watch any episode of Toddlers and Tiaras (love that show) if you don't believe me. Most of the girls who entered this contest were VERY pretty and could easily go into modeling if they and their parents so chose.
At any rate, here's the winning video and I hope she has a good time.
Wednesday, December 8, 2010
Movie Reviews: Cyrus and The A-Team
In general, the theme of this blog will deal with the decline of America as a world superpower and how we're handling it. However, I also work at a video store where I get ten free rentals a week and I'm an avid movie watcher. I don't go to theaters since that has become a frustrating experience for me with the prices and annoying movie-goers distracting me from the films themselves. The last good place I had to go see movies was when I was living in Atlanta and could go to the Tara, a four-plex that showed indie films and films with limited US distribution. So, you'll be getting some movie reviews from this blog but they'll be coming around the time of the DVD releases. I have to add that I'm a smiley addict when I'm typing on the web and when I'm texting but I've made a rule not to use them on this blog. So far it's a little hard-going.
So, the first movie I'll be addressing this week is Cyrus starring John C. Reilly, Johah Hill, and Marisa Tomei. I had forgotten about this one until it showed up in the store but remember seeing the trailers before its US release and it had all the markings of a film I would love. I'm a HUGE John C. Reilly fan going back to Magnolia and have always enjoyed his ensuing comedic efforts. The promos made it look like the typical movie you'd expect from both Reilly and Jonah Hill and that turned out to not be the case. Turns out this one is more of a dramedy with a pronounced indie feel. I wasn't disappointed; the film was heavy on character development and really pulled me in, but it was more of a slow-burn in the comedy department, more akin to ordering a good four star pad thai and getting a really good one star pad thai. You still love it but you wanted the BURN. Marisa Tomei is still hot and still a brilliant actor but you have to wonder if she'd really be desperate enough to fall for the John C. Reilly character. My main problem with this one, and one of my biggest gripes with a lot of movies these days, is the freaking shaky-hand camera crap. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaky_camera
I know there was a time where the effect of the viewer's perspective being an unsteady hand-held camera held a certain cachet; I enjoyed it in films like Cloverfield and Saving Private Ryan, but I've grown so weary of the overuse of this effect that it's become a major distraction for me. It seems that any film that wants to come off as gritty or indie or intense has to use this effect. It's a crutch a director uses when they don't feel the acting or story-line are carrying the movie I guess? Maybe it's just a default technique employed by directors who are unsure of their abilities? At any rate, it's trite, it's clichéd, and it's time has passed.
Now for The A-Team. Wow! I was expecting so little from this one and I came out the other end realizing I had really enjoyed it. I watch a lot of films so that I can know what I'm talking about when offering help to my customers. Yeah, I actually feel that I have a responsibility to my customers like that. I never liked the original A-Team TV show so that colored my expectations to a great degree, but this turned out to be a well-shot, well-written, and generally, well-acted job. There were some nice plot twists that were far from the hackneyed story-telling of the original. Bradley Cooper was thoroughly enjoyable in the role of Face and Sharlto Copley was a scene stealer as Murdock. You'll remember Copley from District 9; his range of accents and caricatures carries several of the film's funnier scenes. I would recommend this one but here's my gripe: Liam Neeson as Hannibal.
Neeson looks the part and I love him as an actor. The problem is that he can't carry an American accent consistently and the tiniest of Irish brogues keeps creeping in just enough to jar you back to reality and make you remember that you're watching an Irishman portraying the role set in stone by the late George Peppard. Same thing gets me every time they cast Ewan McGregor as an American. The latter happens with amazing regularity for some inexplicable reason. I'm sure it's something akin to what British audiences must have felt having to listen to Dick Van Dyke do a horrible Cockney accent in Disney's Mary Poppins. I understand the Dick Van Dyke thing to a degree because the role demanded a Vaudeillian-style actor with the ability to do extensive physical comedy and have great dancing chops. I'm not sure why Liam Neeson had to be picked over an American actor for the Hannibal role. I'm never sure why Ewan McGregor is asked to play American roles. Don't get me wrong; I've liked him in many movies, namely Roman Polanski's Ghostwriter. He just can't pull off the accent. I hope they'll stop asking him to try.
Oh, and Quinton 'Rampage' Jackson in the role made popular by Mr. T is a huge miss. Sure he has some of the physical attributes, but the cat can't act. His role was written well though so it doesn't end up being a deal-breaker.
Final analysis: Cyrus - 3 out of 5, A-Team - 3.5 out of 5.
So, the first movie I'll be addressing this week is Cyrus starring John C. Reilly, Johah Hill, and Marisa Tomei. I had forgotten about this one until it showed up in the store but remember seeing the trailers before its US release and it had all the markings of a film I would love. I'm a HUGE John C. Reilly fan going back to Magnolia and have always enjoyed his ensuing comedic efforts. The promos made it look like the typical movie you'd expect from both Reilly and Jonah Hill and that turned out to not be the case. Turns out this one is more of a dramedy with a pronounced indie feel. I wasn't disappointed; the film was heavy on character development and really pulled me in, but it was more of a slow-burn in the comedy department, more akin to ordering a good four star pad thai and getting a really good one star pad thai. You still love it but you wanted the BURN. Marisa Tomei is still hot and still a brilliant actor but you have to wonder if she'd really be desperate enough to fall for the John C. Reilly character. My main problem with this one, and one of my biggest gripes with a lot of movies these days, is the freaking shaky-hand camera crap. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaky_camera
I know there was a time where the effect of the viewer's perspective being an unsteady hand-held camera held a certain cachet; I enjoyed it in films like Cloverfield and Saving Private Ryan, but I've grown so weary of the overuse of this effect that it's become a major distraction for me. It seems that any film that wants to come off as gritty or indie or intense has to use this effect. It's a crutch a director uses when they don't feel the acting or story-line are carrying the movie I guess? Maybe it's just a default technique employed by directors who are unsure of their abilities? At any rate, it's trite, it's clichéd, and it's time has passed.
Now for The A-Team. Wow! I was expecting so little from this one and I came out the other end realizing I had really enjoyed it. I watch a lot of films so that I can know what I'm talking about when offering help to my customers. Yeah, I actually feel that I have a responsibility to my customers like that. I never liked the original A-Team TV show so that colored my expectations to a great degree, but this turned out to be a well-shot, well-written, and generally, well-acted job. There were some nice plot twists that were far from the hackneyed story-telling of the original. Bradley Cooper was thoroughly enjoyable in the role of Face and Sharlto Copley was a scene stealer as Murdock. You'll remember Copley from District 9; his range of accents and caricatures carries several of the film's funnier scenes. I would recommend this one but here's my gripe: Liam Neeson as Hannibal.
Neeson looks the part and I love him as an actor. The problem is that he can't carry an American accent consistently and the tiniest of Irish brogues keeps creeping in just enough to jar you back to reality and make you remember that you're watching an Irishman portraying the role set in stone by the late George Peppard. Same thing gets me every time they cast Ewan McGregor as an American. The latter happens with amazing regularity for some inexplicable reason. I'm sure it's something akin to what British audiences must have felt having to listen to Dick Van Dyke do a horrible Cockney accent in Disney's Mary Poppins. I understand the Dick Van Dyke thing to a degree because the role demanded a Vaudeillian-style actor with the ability to do extensive physical comedy and have great dancing chops. I'm not sure why Liam Neeson had to be picked over an American actor for the Hannibal role. I'm never sure why Ewan McGregor is asked to play American roles. Don't get me wrong; I've liked him in many movies, namely Roman Polanski's Ghostwriter. He just can't pull off the accent. I hope they'll stop asking him to try.
Oh, and Quinton 'Rampage' Jackson in the role made popular by Mr. T is a huge miss. Sure he has some of the physical attributes, but the cat can't act. His role was written well though so it doesn't end up being a deal-breaker.
Final analysis: Cyrus - 3 out of 5, A-Team - 3.5 out of 5.
AP and Spelling/Grammar Errors
Yeah, okay so this is a lame start to my blog but something that just sends me into a bat$hit frenzy. I don't follow everything the Associated Press posts online or everything they put out for wire reports but I keep finding spelling errors and grammatical errors in their stories. Last week was a story where the freaking headline was "Fed ID's companies that used crisis aid programs". Yes, ID apostrophe -s. Today I'm reading a story about a Japanese satellite that missed Venus and the article says the satellite may have "flown passed" the planet. Of course this should have read "flown past".
Instances like this burn me most because I didn't graduate college but got two and a half years into a degree in English. I'm sure I wouldn't be hired by AP or any other news gathering agency where some rudimentary grasp of the English language would be expected of its writers. The greater problem here is that these stories are making it to the web. Apparently there is no editor checking the pieces over or the editor checking them over doesn't catch the errors. The latter error wouldn't be caught by a spell checker. So this brings up the question of whether we're too reliant on software to handle issues like this even in a business like journalism.
The AP doesn't put out enough stories in a day to justify anything slipping past (not passed) a second set of eyes at some point. I'd gladly hire myself out to proofread if they need a proofreader.
Trust me; I'll delve into more important issues in this blog but much of what you'll read will be little gripes like this. I think the underlying issue here is that people are getting through American colleges and universities with a general lack of some pretty basic knowledge. It's been several years since I was in high school or college and I know for a fact that neither one of these errors would have escaped some red ink and a little message about correct usage. Is there a substitute for this method employed now? Has grammar gone the way of history and political studies? Is grammar not a prerequisite for advanced journalism courses? I honestly want to know how you get a job working for the AP when you make stupid mistakes like these. Unfortunately the writers of both stories give their bylines but I could find no bio on either one to find out where they got their degrees.
Here are both stories: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101202/ap_on_bi_ge/us_fed_crisis_lending_17#mwpphu-container and http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101208/ap_on_sc/as_japan_venus_probe
I seriously promise more provocative material to come.
Instances like this burn me most because I didn't graduate college but got two and a half years into a degree in English. I'm sure I wouldn't be hired by AP or any other news gathering agency where some rudimentary grasp of the English language would be expected of its writers. The greater problem here is that these stories are making it to the web. Apparently there is no editor checking the pieces over or the editor checking them over doesn't catch the errors. The latter error wouldn't be caught by a spell checker. So this brings up the question of whether we're too reliant on software to handle issues like this even in a business like journalism.
The AP doesn't put out enough stories in a day to justify anything slipping past (not passed) a second set of eyes at some point. I'd gladly hire myself out to proofread if they need a proofreader.
Trust me; I'll delve into more important issues in this blog but much of what you'll read will be little gripes like this. I think the underlying issue here is that people are getting through American colleges and universities with a general lack of some pretty basic knowledge. It's been several years since I was in high school or college and I know for a fact that neither one of these errors would have escaped some red ink and a little message about correct usage. Is there a substitute for this method employed now? Has grammar gone the way of history and political studies? Is grammar not a prerequisite for advanced journalism courses? I honestly want to know how you get a job working for the AP when you make stupid mistakes like these. Unfortunately the writers of both stories give their bylines but I could find no bio on either one to find out where they got their degrees.
Here are both stories: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101202/ap_on_bi_ge/us_fed_crisis_lending_17#mwpphu-container and http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101208/ap_on_sc/as_japan_venus_probe
I seriously promise more provocative material to come.
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