Lose Yourself

So the soap opera is told and unfolds, I suppose it's old partna'

But the beat goes on, da da dum de da da.

Eminem, Lose Yourself

One of the interesting things about social media is that you learn how diverse your field of acquaintances actually is.  Quite frankly, this can be a bit annoying and sometimes even disturbing, and in those moments you are tempted to use that "block" or maybe even (gasp) "unfriend" someone.  As a general rule, I do not block or unfriend people for disagreeing with my particular ideological bent, which would be hypocrisy of unfortunate scale.  I reserve my ultimate social media sanction for people who become abusive, thankfully I have never experienced anything beyond a nasty email.

Of late, among my diverse political and religious acquaintances I have read the following dichotomous opinions, some of which I characterize for simplicity's sake:

1. The Media versus The Republican Candidates.  I admit, that "debate" on CNBC last week was pretty badly done.  And I admit that I am regularly disappointed with how our news media handles things, but pointing out fabrications and other misleading statements or even unmasking outright misrepresentation of the facts, does not constitute a media bias.  That stuff is actually the media functioning the way it is supposed to.  If you doubt that the squawking from Trump, Carson et al is misplaced, you need to notice that they are now doing it to Fox News.  Let me just say that when Fox News calls BS on a Republican that must be some particularly vile prevarication.
2. The University of Missouri versus itself.  So Mizzou is close to Ferguson, and Mizzou has had some problems of late with the old racism thing.  The administration of the University did not do much about the problems with the racism thing, a student went on hunger strike at the beginning of November, the Football team joined in the growing protest, the faculty were about to, and the President of the University resigned in the midst of the turmoil, and will be followed by the Chancellor.  The longer story of Mizzou sheds some light on how "The System" responds to valid protest: not very well.  It also makes a point about how athletes, coaches and other players can shine a spotlight on an issue because of the money and visibility surrounding the games we play.  More on how a hunger strike by a college student doesn't draw the amount of attention that missing a football game does some other time.  The thing that really set me off with regard to this was an article that I knew I shouldn't have read in the first place, from a VERY conservative person, from a VERY conservative publication which was trying to make the point that the black (and whites who are supporting them) students at Mizzou were essentially wrong for protesting and costing the poor President and Chancellor their jobs.  It actually referred to the students as "fascist," which, I'm guessing is an attempt to portray them as spoiled or entitled little dictators who want to run off their "opposition."  Except for the fact that fascism implies, in any reasonable sense, the rule of a totalitarian state or dictator (Mussolini in Italy, Franco in Spain, Castro in Cuba).  Calling a kid on a hunger strike, the faculty walking out, or the football team not playing a fascist activity is getting the power dynamic of fascism exactly backwards, in other words that's just not how it works, but someone wanted to feel justified in their bias so very strongly that just spit out something they considered to be a vile insult.

All of this brought to mind Mr. Marshall Mathers, aka Eminem, and the story he told in the movie 8 Mile about his beginnings as a white rapper in the impoverished edges of Detroit.  The movie centers around his attempts to break into the world of Hip Hop/Rap music.  The movie demonstrates that, indeed, white people do experience prejudice in some circumstances, but let's be clear, his whiteness has made Eminem actually more relevant as an artist than not.  Because he crosses the boundary and actually uses his "weakness" as a strength.  Which is actually the central premise of the song Lose Yourself, which was the theme and center of the movie narrative.

A poor white kid is trying to work his way to a record contract through participating in "Rap Battles," which, I know sounds a little contrived, but just imagine slam poetry set to music, or just imagine a political campaign set to music and compressed into 90 seconds.  The goal of a battle is to slam your opponent, to make him look bad, to generate more applause for you than for him. Eminem, as a skinny, poor white kid from a trailer park at 8 mile is at a decided disadvantage, because everything in his life is an absolute mess.  He freezes up when he gets on stage to play the insult game, because he knows he's got so many holes in his own life.

So what he does is admit that he's got all of these flaws, he does not focus on tearing down his opponent, he simply writes a song that builds up everyone who hears it.  And the radio friendly edit was, for quite a while, a rallying song for sports teams and car companies alike.

The moral of the story, I suppose you might call it a moral, is that the way to transcend toxic, insult obsessed, negativity, is to focus on building out of the wreckage, rather than on constructing an ivory tower.

Right now our country is full of people jousting at windmills and ignoring the real giants.  Some of us (probably fewer than you actually think) get our panties in a bunch about some plain red coffee cups and a "war on Christmas," and then a whole bunch of other people (probably more than you realize) get our panties in a reflexive bunch about how silly it is to get your panties in a bunch about a freaking coffee cup.  We are so worried about our right to claim victimhood that people will buy into the notion that a university president was victimized by the student body because he didn't respond well to the fact that the students were being victimized by racist incidents on his watch.

We are trying to out victim each other.  Sure I might have lied, but it's very rude of you to point that out.  Sure my policies and ideas have big enough holes to fly a 747 through and more contradictions than the Bible, but that doesn't give you the right to call me a wingnut.

The problem with this approach is that we have real problems: racism, injustice, inequality, violence, just flat out brokenness, and we're never going to be able to hit those targets until we stop focusing simply on kneecapping our opponents, and clinging to our status as a victim.  You have to move past that, lose yourself, gain something greater. I actually think Jesus and Eminem agree on that one, go figure.

The Doctor Is In

I was wondering when this would happen.  I wasn't really getting antsy yet, because I have a history with the Doctor.  I can appreciate the old show: the terrible, laughable "special effects" and the impossibly campy dialogue.  I have learned to deal with regeneration, which means watching a character you have come to love change into a different character, which is supposed to be the same character but not.  I have to say, when Ten changed into Eleven, I wasn't sure I would get over it, but Matt Smith won my heart with his speeches, like the Rings of Akhaten, and with that damn Van Gogh episode that freaking makes me cry.
I know better than to jump to conclusions, but to tell you the truth Peter Capaldi as the Twelfth Doctor was leaving me a little flat sometimes.  I mean I know he's a good actor, and there was that thing about the "attack eyebrows," in his first real episode. But I think, sort of like Clara, I didn't really trust him.  To tell you the truth, I found myself wishing that they had cast Michelle Gomez as the first female Doctor, instead of as his nemesis, the Master (now Missy, short for Mistress).  But really, I think that's just because really good villains are always more fun than heroes, especially grumpy, old, Scottish heroes.
I think the writers of the show have been messing with our emotions, because they can.  I think they're doing something rather skillful, and maybe a little bit beyond what you would expect from a show that centers around a time travelling police box and it's mad scientist pilot.  They're letting the character of the doctor grow and adapt, and actually really be regenerated.  They have learned, I think that you can't really go around just repeating the same character with different actors (think Becky from Roseanne, that was just weird).
We have seen the Doctor evolve from 9 through 12. And we have even seen the John Hurt "War Doctor" who doesn't get counted in the official roster, but it is this character that is really at the center of the changes, it is the experience of the Time War, which we mostly only hear about in the canon of the show, that changes the Doctor.  It changes Ten from a warrior into someone who can love, it changes Eleven from a madman with a box always on the run into a man who settles in to fight his long last battle in the defense of Trenzalore, and it points us towards Twelve, a more mature, less whimsical, but also at times conflicted Doctor, who "saves people" and worlds even, from themselves if need be.
It's a complicated story to tell to be sure.  We have been doing a lot of the leg work with Capaldi over the past season and a half, and I know it was wearing a lot of fans out a little.  I was starting to hear complaints from the fandom about this "new" Doctor.
Until Saturday, when Twelve arrived as Time Lord in Full. I won't go into too much detail about the plot, because spoilers, and probably because if you're not a Whovian, you just won't understand too much to explain, but let's just say there's going to be a war started with two characters pushing buttons on boxes at opposite ends of a table.  The Doctor is trying to talk them out of it.  He starts with the futility of violence and the necessity of forgiveness and the way that violent cycles never end, and if you're at all a fan, you start to get that tingly feeling, like you know he's about to break out of the funk you have both been in for a while.  The argument is crowned with this:

This is a scale model of war. Every war ever fought right there in front of you. Because it's always the same. When you fire that first shot, no matter how right you feel, you have no idea who's going to die. You don't know who's children are going to scream and burn. How many hearts will be broken! How many lives shattered! How much blood will spill until everybody does what they're always going to have to do from the very beginning -- sit down and talk! Listen to me, listen. I just -- I just want you to think. Do you know what thinking is? It's just a fancy word for changing your mind.

I could give you more, but I don't want to spend the whole morning typing out dialogue, and actually I hope you'll invest an hour into watching The Zygon Inversion, because this speech is something we need to hear.  In a story, truth is speaking to us, truth about war and the stupidity thereof.  This is one of those moments when truth is not contained by mere reality.  The futility of violence an power is on full display, on a timey-wimey TV show.
Would it win you to Doctor Who if you don't like Sci-Fi? Probably not.
Would it convince a War Monger to change their ways? Probably not.
But all the same I believe that we need to tell stories like this, even if they take a little longer to unfurl and may try the patience of the fans.  When you get to a moment like this, it is so worth it.

The Wages of Sin

I'm getting a little burnt out on politics, which I suppose is a problem when we've only just begun the madness of the 2016 election.  I suppose what I'm about to talk about could be seen as political, but it really shouldn't be.  In fact, the politicization of this issue has made it seem contentious and intractable, when in fact it should be common sense.  What I'm talking about here is wages, what we get paid for the work that we do.
It is an economic reality that money, ever since we came off the gold standard, is a commodity whose value is highly relative.  For instance, every old guy you talk to will tell you how when he was a teenager his first job paid him like $0.25 an hour or some other small number that sounds absurd to us who are used to thinking in terms of a quarter as a nearly disposable slab of metal that won't even buy a candy bar.  However, think about the fact that in the 1950s you could purchase a brand new Chevrolet or Ford sedan for less than $2000, and the average yearly income was somewhere between $3000 and $4000.  People who bought homes in the 1960's in suburban areas near large cities in the east could expect to pay around $30,000, no I didn't leave off a zero.  By 1970, average wages, and I emphasize average, had nearly doubled, and of course the cost of things tended to go with them.  However, as this research indicates real wages, that is wages adjusted for inflation, have been shamefully stagnant.
I'm above my pay grade with the math of what has happened in the past forty years, but let's just say there have been changes in the culture that have made what we experience as the cost of living even more difficult to manage on "average wages."  There are things we "need" to pay for that a 1950's family was blissfully unaware of, for instance: cable, internet, cell phone and for most of us a second family car, not to mention the skyrocketing cost of insurance and healthcare that would probably make 1950's financial planners soil themselves.  And before you say that cell phones and internet access are luxuries, please attempt to do without them for a month and then tell me about how "frivolous" those expenses are.
I want to get past the economic stuff though and talk about the philosophical and spiritual consequences that the current situation has to our culture.  I read a bit, and in my reading I notice something about characters in books from the past.  Apparently it used to be sort of a given that you could "make a living," if you just buckled down and worked hard. I'm not just talking about feeding, clothing and housing yourself and/or your family.  A living could be made as a grocery clerk, a farmer, a tradesman, a mechanic or a janitor. You could always "climb the ladder" into management and executive positions, you could put in overtime and show ingenuity and initiative to "get ahead," but there was a certain baseline standard of living that was expected.  Blue collar jobs were not despised and the wages paid for said jobs were not an introit to the welfare line.
Women were not generally expected to work outside the home (yes, I know not all of them liked that idea, we can deal with gender equality some other time), and a single full time paycheck was enough for a couple or a small family to "get by."  Success meant doing better than just getting by, but failure usually meant just falling back to the basics, not catastrophic.
I will use my own personal case as an example.  We moved into the Washington D.C. metro area and we bought a house.  My salary at the church is sufficient to cover the basic expenses of life for a family of four, but it would be a pinch, not because I'm paid poorly, but because the cost of living in this area is high.  My current salary in rural Pennsylvania, our previous location, would be a monkey with an entirely different suit. What is wrong with this picture?  Well not that much at the moment, Michele works, and we "get by" but let's say something happened to one of us, and one income went away.  Let's say that one of us wanted to make some sort of change, get more education or try a different career path, sorry charlie, that's going to create too much insecurity.  We become addicted and enslaved to the status quo.
The consequence of this is a feeling like you're walking across a room with no floor, as long as you step on the rafters and keep your balance everything is fine, but you are terribly risk averse.  You do not tend to innovate or take chances on doing something remarkable.
It's fine once you get into a comfortable place like we are, but it is not, I think, ideal for the young, or for the people who might really drive us forward in the future.  The American Dream of growing and prospering more and more has vanished under our noses.  External costs and mistakes of the past are coming back to haunt us, and I think that has a chilling effect on the whole culture.
This is why I think the serious work of establishing a real living wage standard across this nation is vital, and should be a priority of Republican and Democrat alike.  Those who can and do work at full capacity should not have to worry about being able to make rent or put food on the table.  A government that does not provide for that reality is failing in the modern world.  I guess I agree with Franklin D. Roosevelt (Democrat) and Dwight Eisenhower (Republican) in their visions for a society that provides a safety net, and maybe even better, a nice solid floor to stand on.

A Horror Story

It was dark, I was warm in my bed when my Father shook me awake and told me to get dressed quickly.
"Where are we going Abba?" I asked.
"Just do as you're told," he said with a voice that I was not used to hearing, and which scared me into silence.  "Put some extra clothes in this, and hurry up, dress warm, it is cold." He threw a duffle bag on the floor and I began to pack quickly.
We didn't have a lot of things in our little apartment, but I had some toys, books and a warm place to sleep.  I could hear Father speaking to my sister and Mother with that same stern voice, there was no laughter in it, my Father used to laugh often, but lately not so much.  I saw my Mother in their room as I passed, she had a duffle bag too, and she was crying.  She looked away from me quickly, but I could see the fear and the tears on her face.  As I came into the front room of the apartment, I could hear men yelling in the street and strange cracking sounds in the distance.  I did not know what gunfire sounded like... yet.
The next few hours seem like a blur of a bad dream, all jumbled together.  We walked and ran, each of us carrying our duffle bags, trying to stay far away from the cracking sounds and the occasional explosions.  We had to turn and change course many times in order to get through the town without running into the fighting.  By the time we made it out of the town, I didn't even know which way home was, and somehow I knew that home was not going to be there for us anymore.
We walked for the rest of the night, many others were with us on the road, some of whom I knew, many were strangers.  My little sister cried a lot, but I did not, I am eleven and I am learning to be a man.  I kept looking at my Father, I wanted nothing more than to see him smile and tell me that things would be okay, but he didn't, I know now that he couldn't.
In the gray light of dawn we found some men with clipboards and a truck, and I heard them tell my Father that the truck would take us to the refugee camp.  I did not know what a refugee was, I certainly did not know it was me.
By the time we saw the camp, we were further from my home than I had ever been in my life.  There were so many white tents, and it looked like a safe place.  We were eventually directed to one of those tents by another man with a clipboard.  The tent had nothing but some cots and blankets and a metal cabinet with a lock.  We were going to learn that things needed to be locked up all the time.  We were going to learn that there was never enough of anything in the camp, not enough food, not enough toilets, not enough shower or water or soap.  My Mother and Father had whispered arguments every day and my sister and I pretended not to hear them.
Father was trying to get in touch with his brother in Turkey, if he could just get in touch with Salaam, they could go and live safely until this trouble passed.  My Mother half sobbed, "this trouble is never going to end."
That thought terrified me.  I went out and found a place to hide behind our tent, and I let myself cry.
That is when my Father found me.  At first I was ashamed because I was crying, but I could tell he was not ashamed of me or for me.  I saw the light in his eyes again, it was not laughter, but it was something other than darkness.  He sat down in the dirt next to me and put his arm around my shoulders.  He didn't say anything, he just sat there with me until the crying was done.  We went back inside.
Eventually we made it out of the camp and got to where my Uncle lived.  We were lucky.  My Uncle Salaam can help us and make sure we were allowed to stay as long as we need.  I don't know what happened to all those people who left with us, my schoolmates, or the people in the camp.  I don't know if I will ever see my town again, but I know I have heard my Father laugh again, and that is all I need for now.

Turning, and Turning, The Widening Gyre

Let's talk ideas and ideals.  As a self proclaimed moderate (all moderates are pretty much self proclaimed) I find myself sympathizing more these days with liberal positions on many issues (I know, not a surprise if you read this blog with any regularity).  I think this is a product of the fact that I have decided, for reasons of faith, that justice and caring for the least of these must be a work of humanity at all levels, not just in individual relationships.  At some point I stopped believing that charity was enough, and came to believe with a deep conviction that unless we work to reform the corrupt, unequal and violent systems of the world, we are just putting a band-aid on the broken neck of our society.
Once I had been convicted that the status quo was not okay, holding conservative positions became difficult to say the least.  I no longer believe that politicians and corporations are the best people to make ethical decisions that can and will effect the commonwealth of humanity.  Money is a problem, lust for power is a problem, the desire and will of the haves to protect what their position and status leads to the oppression of the have-nots. And there is little you can do to talk someone into giving away power and security once they have it.
And so you get what we had here last week: defenders of the status quo calling for change, but only proposing new wrinkles in the same greedhead free market mularky that has been plaguing us since Ronnie Ray-gun was soothing us with his dulcet Hollywood voice and presidential demeanor, which is to say pretty much my whole life.  Democrats are as guilty of it as Republicans, Bill Clinton famously said, "It's the economy stupid."
Blame the "mainstream" media, both sides do.  But understand that the media is just a consumer-governed commodity these days.  Fox News can peddle their Righty-tighty political punditry and MSNBC can peddle their lefty-loosey version, and they can shout angrily at each other and engage in gotcha moment after gotcha moment, and most of us have to resort to watching Jon Stewart laugh them off stage.
But alas Mr. Stewart has ridden off into the sunset (actually just to New Jersey) to run a farm for abused animals (seriously, that's what he's doing now, look it up).  A couple of years ago, Stewart, in a moment of brutal honesty, talked about how when The Daily Show started, they would take things politicians said out of context and make funny or crude jokes about it, but at some point they realized (and I think were genuinely surprised by the fact) that they didn't even have to do that, they could just basically repeat what was actually said and roll their eyes and it was funny.
What happened?  How is it that the court jester became the Walter Cronkite of the twenty-first century?  HBO ran a series called The Newsroom, in which Jeff Daniels plays Will McAvoy, cable news anchor and troubled soul, who keeps trying to do news the "right" way.  The McAvoy character seems like a contradiction in today's media climate.  Daniels does a fine job in portraying the rather dicey situation modern journalists inhabit.  Your personal preferences and foibles are always under scrutiny, misinformation abounds and speed is everything, but more troubling than any of that is the simple fact that the straight news just doesn't pull the ratings.  The fictional ACN news department is basically only viable because someone influential has the clout to keep it off the chopping block despite all the red ink it bled all over the corporate balance sheets.
Want to know why those CNBC moderators were as worthless as ice skates on a pig, understand what they're paid to do: grab ratings by appealing to the lowest common denominator.  It's not new, the Weekly World News and the National Enquirer have been at it for decades.  The best journalists know to stay far away from the idiot box, and I personally thank the good Lord above that the internet allows me to read news again.  I can got directly to AP or Reuters, I can read commentary from the NY Times or the Washington Post with the click of a mouse, most critically of all, I can fact check... everything.  Which can be a lot of work, but unfortunately you can't really trust that people are just going to tell the truth
The center has not held, because the center relies on sober analysis and dispassionate weighing of merits.  Eisenhower Republicans and Kennedy Democrats are things of the past, and Walter Cronkite wouldn't even last a season on cable news.  The funny thing is, if you talk to real people, the center is alive and well.  There are enough people out there who can honestly think through a complicated idea like the healthcare, gun control, or racism and realize that we need to do some things different.  Most of us realize that poverty and crime and the whole justice system are problems that need fixing, we may disagree on the methods and strategies for fixing them, but we need to work together regardless of those differences.
You wouldn't even think that's a possibility from watching what passes for the national news these days, and cable news?  Let's just say, nope.  Let's get our news elsewhere, what do you say?  I've been doing it for a while, and if anything I feel better informed.  I can really tell I've kicked the TV news habit when I watch things like the debates and see their shenanigans, that's why I shout at my TV.  Try it, no Fox News, no MSNBC, if you have to watch some news go to PBS for Lehrer. There's plenty of sources.  I hear you can even get old-timey things called newspapers and, you know, read.
See if that doesn't change the way you think and feel about things.
Stop letting the alarmists and the fearmongers try to sell you their wares, you will have enough going in your head in a while.

A Brief Analysis

I watched the Republican debate last night.  I want you to know that I did so at great risk to my personal well-being.  Let me just get the obvious out of the way: I am a recovering conservative, which means watching the Republican debate is a bit like a 15 year AA vet going to Mardi Gras.  I remember the reasons why I used to think the way of Reagan and Bush the elder, and even Bob Dole in his failed attempt at derailing Slick Willy Clinton, was the best way forward for this great nation of ours.  What I have come to believe is flawed is the central premise of conservatism as it exists in the nation right now.  That premise is, as clearly as I can make it out, that the individual person is the only clearly inviolable and sovereign entity in our society.  This can be given a context of personal responsibility and positive collective action by those who are willing to walk that walk, or it can be reduced to an extremely short sighted (to the point of naivety) selfishness.  Before last night, I was not sure there was any example of the most positive aspect of that philosophy, today I suspect there might be, but I'm still not a hundred percent sure.  So let's walk through a (sort of) brief cast of characters.  I'm going to go in ascending order of functional adulthood, leading up to the one I would pick if you put a gun to my head.

Let's start with the stooges.

Ben Carson:  I am not implying that Carson is unintelligent, in fact, he may be the most intelligent person on the stage.  After all I would hope that someone who is capable of performing brain surgery would be pretty sharp. But intelligence is not enough for the job that we're talking about here.  Carson seems pretty lost when it comes time to actually defend some of his nutty ideas.  And I say nutty ideas even by the standards of the other people on the stage.  All of the serious politicians on the stage look at Ben as though he is sort of benighted, and I'm not sure they're wrong, at least politically he doesn't seem to have much of a clue. A while ago, I'm pretty sure I would have ranked Carson above Trump and Fiorina, but not now, his lack of a clue has become too obvious.

Carly Fiorina: Ms. Fiorina has made some noise in the early going.  I'm assuming because people were so enamored with the idea of trotting a female candidate out against Hillary-zilla that they didn't pay any attention to what she actually thought.  Not the first time someone's gender overshadowed the content of their minds, usually it just works the other way around.  Fiorina's critique of "big government" seemed forced, and her attempt at siding with the middle class against the big money interests seemed disingenuous to say the least (former HP CEO).  I don't think Fiorina realizes that the stakes are ratcheting up at this phase and people are actually going to start thinking about the statements she makes and the claims she tosses out there.  Which leads me to...

The Donald:  I know it kind of surprised me when he wasn't the first or even the second name I typed under the category of stooges.  Trump makes vague promises of grand plans, but provides zero evidence or logic or even a framework of a plan.  Trump uses the phrase, "many things," way too often to be trusted, and he is patently unwilling to provide us with any evidence as to what these "many things" are.  I get the distinct impression that Trump is used to being able to buffalo and obfuscate his way around difficult things like reason.  He does seem to be learning to turn the crazy down just a little bit and seem a tad more like an actual person than a cartoon character.  He's still ahead in the polls, but I think the real politicians are going to get a bead on him pretty soon.

My next category is the Idealogues:

Ted Cruz: Cruz is probably the most dangerous assassin on this list.  Cruz can make his particular brand of toxicity sound sensible and reasonable. He rarely raises his voice or gets emotional.  He keeps his anger under control and is therefore not prone to the sputtering gaffs that can derail an entire campaign (Howard Dean anyone? John McCain even?)  Cruz is a ruthless guy though, he will cut throats to get what he wants.  He is, in short, Richard M. Nixon.  The idea of President Cruz, quite frankly scares me more than President Trump, and not just because of my progressive leanings.  Cruz scares the old, conservative me, because he's so inflexible and calculating. He is absolutely sure that he is right, and that friends and neighbors makes him muy peligroso.

Mike Huckabee: Mike is a preacher, he gives a good sermon, he paints some powerful pictures.  Last night he talked about walking through the charred ruins of America with his two boys, and he wasn't talking about California after the wildfires.  He talked about fighting "The Clinton Machine" for his entire life, and finally he suggested that we solve our healthcare crisis by "simply" curing Diabetes, heart disease, cancer and Alzheimers.  (facepalm) Shucks Mike, why didn't Barack Obama think up that idea?  Let's just stop people from getting sick and then we don't have to worry about health insurance!  Brilliant.  Actually, as a preacher you ought to remember a story about a guy who was able to cure diseases with a word and make everything all better, they crucified him.

Rand Paul: I would almost let Paul into the next category, except for the fact that his ideas are shaky, and he seems to believe them pretty deeply.  But I have some sympathy for Paul, because it would appear that he is at least trying to be a grown up, which as you know, I admire in my politicians.  A few times last night Paul said, "you're going to  have to raise the age," with regard to medicare and social security, and he does seem to understand that fixing things is going to require sacrifice.  This in and of itself is important, because at the bottom of this list there are jesters and clowns who think that snapping their fingers and turning loose the dogs of the free market are like magic solutions to all of problems.  Paul seems to firmly believe that (regulated) free markets are actually better at finding solutions to the big problems, as long as there is a profit motive.  That remains to be seen.

Which brings me to my final category, Legitimate Candidates:

Marco Rubio: Rubio has a big problem: he is too young and he comes across as a bit of a Momma's boy.  His ideas are pretty much the stock Republican dogma of the past fifty years, and he has some real alpha males to fight off if he wants to get to the top.  For some reason, and this is a highly subjective judgment, I just don't like him very much.  He's sort of smarmy and I'm pretty sure Ted Cruz gives him wedgies after gym class.

Jeb Bush: All I really have to say is, please not another Bush.  Jeb seems to have magically developed a severe disdain for government, which would make me question why he wants to run one.  Except I don't really believe anything he says.  The Bush machine is working him like a puppet, and the scary thing is that machine just may have enough gas in it for one more run.  They did get W elected twice, so I'm not writing anything off yet.

Chris Christie: God help me, I like Chris Christie, and I'm not really sure why.  What I think I admire about him is his ability to have moments of clarity.  He can say things that I disagree with, but at least I can see his logic.  He can be funny and disarming, but at the same time you know you can't really trust him.  He has enough independent thinking ability to be a Cowboy fan as the Governor of New Jersey.  I'm not saying being a Cowboy fan is good, merely that it shows a good amount of chutzpah and a willingness to go against the grain.  In short, Christie is like that friend who you think is kind of fun to be around, but whom you also know would totally stab you in the back if it suited his purposes, in other words, he's a politician from New Jersey. Christie is a serious candidate because he is like Billy Clinton, teflon, nothing sticks to him, at least not for long.  He keeps popping back up, and the sheer force of his personality makes us take him back. Caveat Emptor.

John Kasich: If I had to, I could vote for Kasich.  He's a serious man, who has a serious political track record. His ideas creep close enough to a moderate position to at least not make me throw up in my mouth a little.  He also recognizes how screwy and crooked the whole political process is right now. He seems as cranky and angry at the gubmint as some of the others, but there seems to be a middle ground for him between the way things are now and let's blow it up as a reform strategy.  In short, I suppose he is the grown up I was looking for on this side of the aisle. He still seems to have a hostility issue with the media and the idea of government, which makes me wonder if he really could handle the job, but unlike a lot of the others, the more I listen to him the less crazy.  In the rather terrible format of a debate between 10 people, with three moderators who ended up being far too involved and deserving of some of the invective that the candidates launched their way, it's hard to really look sane (Think the Mad Hatter's tea party). I think Kasich actually is, or would be in a general election where he doesn't have to pander quite so much.

Goodness, that was exhausting.  Which leads me to one really solid conclusion: ten candidates is too much.  The GOP needs to weed out some of the mess for this garden to grow.

The Horror

Have you ever considered any real freedoms?

Freedom from the opinion of others... even the opinions of yourself.

-Colonel Kurtz, Apocalypse Now

It worries me a little when Marlon Brando's Colonel Kurtz begins to seem sane.  You need to know that Apocalypse Now is one of my favorite movies, and it is a favorite because it combines the rather insightful exploration of the human psyche from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, with some really great acting by Duvall, Sheen, Hopper, and especially a truly menacing and bald Marlon Brando.  One of the things that elevates the performance it gives us something that we rarely see in movies: ambiguity.  Kurtz is certainly unhinged, he's brutal, he is certifiably off of the deep end and in the grip of some pretty full blown psychosis, but he's also kinda sort of right about a lot of stuff, particularly the darkness and violence of war.

Brando was a nightmare to work with at this phase of his career, he made irrational requests and by all accounts got a little bit too in character when it came to playing a genocidal maniac hiding in a jungle ruin.  Making Apocalypse Now, reported sent both Francis Ford Coppola (director) and Martin Sheen (Captain Willard) into a state of nervous breakdown.  What they produced, however, stands up as one of the true works of prophetic art in cinema, and by that I don't just mean a good movie.  There are lots of good movies that tell a good story and maybe even have a bit of an edge to them, but what I mean for the purposes of this classification is a movie that challenges the audience to see something about themselves that they probably would rather not see.  War movies have a certain gravitas in this area and Apocalypse Now opened the door on our collective experience in Southeast Asia and led to other films which plumbed the depths of the soul of this American Empire (Full Metal Jacket, Platoon), but even those powerful films were sort of second tier reflections on violence and basically just reiterate the truth that war is hell.

It also does something else that, I think, is a quality of prophetic art: it provokes a strong feeling.  Either you love it or you hate it.  There's not a lot of middle ground.  I have watched it many times, and I always come away with a feeling of having been somewhere dangerous.  But I know people who have watched it and just felt confused and maybe even a little offended.

Other movies that provoke similar reactions are Citizen Kane, by Orson Welles, and Blue Velvet, by David Lynch.  They are doing remarkable things in telling a visual story, but they also run a high risk of alienating a good part of the audience.  I think really good art, whether it's painting, writing, music or cinema, ought to occasionally take that risk.  When it avoids that risk it runs towards insipidity, which is the affliction of a lot of popular music, television and movies.

Like it or not, art is a commercial venture.  I almost wrote that art has become a commercial venture, but then I remembered that it has sort of always been that way.  After all, the old joke is that most truly innovative and brilliant artists (think Van Gogh) were unappreciated during their lives.  While that is not as true as we sometimes think (for instance Basquiat had a few years of commercial success before kicking off at 27), there is always a bit of a tug of war between making "pure" art and art which is marketable.

A few years ago, my daughter, flush with the thrill of having scribbled enthusiastically for a while, thought she would like to be an artist when she grows up.  As her father, I am suitably impressed with her artistry, I think the things she makes are beautiful, and I will encourage her in any way I can.  She may even have the sort of eccentricity it takes to actually be an artist some day, but unfortunately I know she is probably going to need a day job.  As one who dabbles in writing, I have somewhere an inclination that I would like to do it more.  I see some very bad writing littering the bestseller lists.  E.L. James, Nicholas Sparks, Stephenie Meyer and her sparkly vampires, all make obscene amounts of money for writing terrible novels that have had the good fortune of becoming popular.

And no, I'm not a snob, I understand that not everyone can be Steinbeck or Fitzgerald, I understand the need to read things for fun, I have read Harry Potter, as well as The Hunger Games, as an adult, for fun.  But I question the system that encourages the cynical production of formulaic tripe, which is essentially pornography, and I'm not just talking about Fifty Shades.  Let's take the prolific Mr. Sparks, who has, thanks to my wife, wasted at least a dozen hours of my life by telling the same story over and over again: boy meets girl, boy and or girl have problems, and maybe even die, but love is great anyway, and even death can't stop a happy ending.  Add scenic, romantic setting, comic relief, two attractive young actors gazing intently into each other's eyes, steamy love scene that still manages a PG-13 rating, blend, serve and roll around in the piles of cash that people will shovel into your driveway.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you pop culture...