Things That Go Aieeeeee in the Night

 

    I remember about ten years ago- two movies that came out around the same time. The Blair Witch Project and The Sixth Sense were decidedly different films, but both were out-of-left-field smashes and both held the promise that, perhaps, the next decade of horror movies wouldn't be bloated FX whores like the remake of The Haunting, but would build on atmosphere and character the way The Sixth Sense did, or go Blair Witch's route of plugging into our most basic fears.

    How justified was this promise? Let's put it this way, it's ten years later and the term "torture porn" is now part of the everyday lexicon.

    A few weeks ago a local library held a screening of a documentary charting the evolution of the American horror movie, and far too charitable it was to the current state of affairs. I think of the best horror movies I've seen this decade, movies like The Descent and Let the Right One In and there's hardly a yankee entry in the bunch (Sam Raimi's Drag Me to Hell a lonely exception). With the exception of putting out a gargantuan string of Saw movies, the American horror set nowadays seems devoted to one of two things: remaking every title from the glory (and not-so-glorious) days, and taking the exceptional ideas from other countries (read Japanese ghost horror like The Ring and The Grudge or the Spanish mega-hit REC) and de-foreign-izing them for American audiences. It can be said that if there's one thing American horror finds scarier than pale faced ghosts and zombies, it's subtitles.

    This is why it's very surreptitious that ten years after Blair Witch and The Sixth Sense we get Paranormal Activity. This is a movie that's definitely reading from Blair Witch's playbook: made on the cheap (a rumored eleven grand), released small and carried into multiplexes on the shoulders of excited hype and word of mouth. Both are faux-video shot documentaries about people fooling with things they shouldn't, and both use their fear of the mundane to great effect.

    But if Paranormal Activity is a return to the lovely art form of insurgent filmmaking, it doesn't share the same detached-from-fantasy mojo that made Blair Witch so damned palatable. Paranormal is a sight to see- I would recommend anyone who wants to feel their pulse skip not to miss it- but it's also a bit on the rack. It wants to have its shriek cake and eat it, too, dressing itself up in the kind of reality-based cinema verite style that sucked us into Blair Witch's mythology, while also hanging on to the desire to indulge in age-old scary movie standards. None of this is done badly, but it undercut's Paranormal Activity's chance to really connect with the kind of subdued terror one feels when they hear that creak in the middle of the night and wonders if it's really the house settling.

    It features two characters: Micah and Katie, living in an expansive San Diego home (the setting is real-life director Oren Peli's pad, part of his gestalt-therapy reason for making the film) when bizarre things begin to happen at night. This doesn't come as a surprise to at least one of them- Katie has been occasionally plagued by supernatural "visitations" since she was a child. Thinking this is a cool way to break into Youtube famedom, Micah buys an expensive video camera to document what happens at night as the couple sleep. As the scene cards label Night #1 and Night #5, we listen, at first, to random noises coming from downstairs which then evolve into a door suddenly swinging closed, a picture getting smashed, etc… The pacing of the movie is strictly build-up. At night, the fast-forward slows before something happens, giving us a good period of time to twist in the wind wondering what tidbit of spookiness we're expected to witness next. During the day, tempers get frayed down to the live wire as Micah's overly cool exterior gets worn down by the proceedings and Katie's resentment that her boyfriend's cavalier attitude may actually be encouraging the spirit flares.

    As I said, from a technical standpoint, Paranormal Activity is near-flawless. There isn't a single moment, particularly a fright scene, that telegraphs what's going to happen next, and Peli's pace makes no single event enough of a release that we don't slide into the denouement like a tightly-wound wire. The acting by an almost-unheard of cast (actress Katie Featherston has a couple low-budget shock titles under her belt) is dutiful, although the characters they play don't always register. Micah comes off, at times, as particularly glib and superior and also suffers from the biggest reality-vexing quagmire of these kinds of movies: that when the fit hits the shan, wouldn't even the most self-absorbed person just put down the damned camera?

    Story-wise, the movie is a bit of a disappointment. Its liberties are not exactly out of bounds, but the core conceit of the film- that Micah and Katie's unwelcome guest is not some reality TV-show spectre but rather a malevolent entity who has the hots for Katie- feels like a script tool. This is especially true of the ending, a change suggested by DreamWorks chief Steven Spielberg which, yes, is scary, but also for good slices-and-dices the oh-my-God-this-is-really-happening mystique Paranormal Activity tries to set up for itself.

    Is it worth going to see? Definitely. Will it influence how horror movies are made in the future? I doubt it, although if it takes even one future filmmaker who was considering making the next Hostel and sets him or her down a different road, then it will be worth it. As it is, Paranormal Activity is a curiosity, a distraction, although one best enjoyed with the lights on.

    

I Don’t Believe in Government

I don't believe in government.

I don't believe the government should be getting into the health insurance business. But since free market companies have no interest in finding a solution for 15 million uninsured Americans, and countless more who are either under-insured or who will lose their insurance the moment they get sick, I guess they'll have to.

I don't believe the government should regulate an American's right to bear arms. But when, every day, over a thousand people use a gun to inflict violence on innocent people, I guess we need to make sure they don't fall into the wrong hands.

I don't believe government should use tax payer money to pay for free school lunches and breakfasts. But since every day more and more children are coming to school with nothing to eat, either because their parents couldn't afford food or were too irresponsible to provide it, I guess it's better than letting them go hungry.

I don't believe government should be the ones exploring the moon. But since I can't trust a private company to do it without defiling its surface with billboards and advertisements, I guess we'll have to trust NASA.

I don't believe government should be able to dictate what is and is not a "non-denominational prayer." But since majority faiths have shown themselves all too willing to use their beliefs to bully "minority" believers in the public forum, I guess it's the best they can do.

I don't believe in government. I agree with people when they say "government is not the answer." The problem is, nowadays, neither is anything else. At least it's trying to tackle the tough issues that we, the media, the free market, the average citizen, have washed our hands of. At least it's trying to do something where no one else is.

And the Winner (Still) Is…

    What do a bat-man and a robot have in common?

    Apparently both have enough champions some rules are about to be changed on their behalf. This week, the Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Masters of the Universe behind the whole Oscar hoo-ha, decided the model of nominating five movies for its Best Picture award is outdated and has upped the ante to, no, not six. Not seven. Ten. Ten movies this year will be graced as Best Picture nominees. This isn't completely unheard of- it was done a couple of times in the Thirties, however the five-film-formula has held steady ever since.

    Popularly, most people put the reasoning with the uproar from last year's contest when The Dark Knight and Wall-E were snubbed from top prize consideration. Now my own feelings about this are pretty complex. I liked The Dark Knight, but when I heard the Best Picture talk in late summer of last year I thought, "No. Good movie, not a great one." But by February when the lot of Best Picture nominees had been announced, I felt a palpable apathy. It was easier to admire Slumdog Millionaire than to like it. Frost/Nixon took a fiery topic and awkwardly tried to mold it into a Rocky clone. And I admired the workmanship of Benjamin Button, but from a director as fiercly creative as David Fincher, it was a let down. In short, The Dark Knight arguments suddenly made sense, because if it had been included it would have been the only one of the lot I could have gotten myself excited about.

    But would it have won? No, there's the reason why the Academy's decision is, at best, short-sighted and at worst reflects a fundamental lack of self-understanding. The more strident cynics have argued the only benefit sought and received from this change goes to the studios and independent film companies who can now label more titles in their catalog as Best Picture nominees. Defenders say this gives movies that would normally not thought to fit in the narrow presupposition of what a Best Picture should be a chance. This is a mistake, because widening the field doesn't do anything to change the biases or limited modes of thinking that go into selecting these films. I can't even remember a year in which I've felt there was such a glut of remarkable movies that the Academy's top 5 would be bursting at the seams, and there's also the fact that what constitutes my top favorites isn't necessarily, and in fact proves rarely, in line with what Academy voters think.

    The Oscars have always had to walk a tightrope- wanting to be a serious reward for cinematic artistic endeavor on one hand, and a commercially-accessible institution on the other. As a result, the "Best Picture" rarely is. Look at any year, then look at the top 10 lists of major critics and you'll often find that even if the Best Picture film is even on the list, it's often beat out by several other titles for the upper tier slots. So Best Picture really isn't the best movie of the year- it's the best of what's popular. Box office numbers don't really play a part in choosing a winner, but failure to reach a wide audience is anathema since it means that a winner may potentially face a lack of relevance to the mass movie-going population. This middle ground puts the Oscars in unusual straits. If it wanted pure artistic credibility its nominees would be a far more interesting lot and would more accurately reflect what is felt to be the "best" of the year among scholars, film professionals, and critics, but the institution as a whole would lose out in wide public appeal and the opportunity to demand four hours of network programming on a Sunday night. Go the other way, make it about public opinion and nothing else, like the People's Choice Awards, and you get a show that may attract viewers, but whose awards carry little weight in the industry.

    This dodging between artistic and popular has often boxed Oscar into patterns of behavior that, supposedly, this widening of the Best Picture category is supposed to remedy. The argument goes that The Dark Knight and Wall-E didn't make the cut because mass-market, escapist movies have strikes against them when they go before the Academy. Give me a moment to laugh while I ask, what then were Gladiator, Titanic, and Forrest Gump? If what was probably the best written, best directed, best acted popcorn movie in years, as well as an animated film that often rivaled Kubrick and Spielberg in its vision couldn't break into a top slot of mediocre movies, what does that mean? It means that in its pursuit to be all things to all people, the Oscars are more about finding the appearance of a great movie, than finding a great movie in and of itself. The five Best Picture nominees this year ran a gamut of an uplifting rags to riches story, a historical fantasy, and a political drama, themes seemingly chiseled into Oscar's mantra. If the category would have been widened, The Dark Knight might have found a slot, but more as a salve to more populist voters. Will ten movies to pick from radically change the outcome of future contests? Yes- if only because one cant' deny adding Ralph Nader to the mix in the 2000 presidential election impacted its outcome, just not in Nader's favor.

    It's a bit overly hopeful to think the additional five nominees are going to have much of an effect save for watering down the respect a nomination can bring. Deeper lines of misthinking dictate why certain movies aren't able to break into this rank. Just like The Dark Knight and Wall-E, if there had been ten rather than five nomination slots this year, Sam Mendes' Revolutionary Road might have found a place, but this, the only drama I saw this year that actually stuck in my gut, wouldn't have done much for its chances. Go back to last year. My favorite movie was David Fincher's true crime epic Zodiac, a movie that earned some of the best reviews of Fincher's career (even better than he would get from Benjamin Button) but flamed out hard in theaters. Zodiac was such a flop it would be hard to picture it making an Academy top 10 as opposed to a top 5 despite it landing on many critics end of the year favorites lists. In 2006 Paul Greengrass' searing chronicle of September 11^th, United 93, failed to make the Best Picture cut, but landed Greengrass a Best Director nomination, a sign the Academy wants to give an artistic nod to a movie not popular enough or too controversial to make a run for Best Picture.

    Maybe the cynics are right and this move is much like the "everyone gets a trophy!" attitude in little league, that we're going to reward movies, now ten of them, for just showing up. What it isn't going to do is reorientate the Academy in regards to who it decides to reward, its preconceived notions are too entrenched to be uprooted by something this superficial. Five slots narrows the field, which is what an award is supposed to do. There will always be many (me included) whose favorites end up on the killing floor, but this can be appreciated if the competition takes less visible qualities to heart. Besides, this is supposed to be a horse race, and you can't make a horse race out of a stampede.

If You Think I’m Going to Give Your ^$&*#! Movie a Good Review, Then *%#@! You!

    There's a reason why writers hate Amazon. Oh, trust me, overall we think it's fantastic with the selling of the books and the mathematically improbable sales ranking list that many a greenhorn scribe has lost their freaking mind trying to track their own work on. But if you want to find on topic to make your typical cozie matron shrill up and spit fire, talk about reader reviews. At times, Amazon resembles a shopping mall during Xmas- one in which the security guards have been given pink slips and where roving gangs of twelve-year-olds spray paint graffiti on the nearest Banana Republic before dropping their trousers in the Foto Friends kiosk.

    The problem specifically are people who live to give bad reviews to a product for imbecilic reasons such as:

1. I hate the author.
   
2. I only like genre X, so any work that is not genre X has made a major failing of not living to my expectations.
   
3. I really hate the author.
   
4. So-called "book" required me to "read." Not available in easy "osmosis" form.
   
5. I really liked the book; truly a literary feat that will stand the test of time. But the cover art sucked.
   
6. Did I mention I hate the author?
   

The curious thing is that many a writer, at least the ones who don't frolic in vaults full of money like Stephen King or Nicholas Sparks, actually spends time wondering why this is- why when people read a good book they often have to be prompted to saying anything positive on an online forum, while they'll stay in a burning building just a few moments longer to drop a few more metaphorical and superlative stink bombs ("Your book sucks only slightly less than Osama bin Laden. And that's on a good day."). This shouldn't be a mystery- particularly to people who write. We're writers- we like mixing up drama. We enjoy taking the hopes and dreams of people and loading them into a blender with a banana and ice and making an ennui smoothie. It's what we do.

For a period of a couple of years I regularly posted movie reviews on my website. Regular has now become few and far between, but there was one force of nature I was, and still am, aware of: it was a lot more fun to a bad review than a good one. Seriously. I look at some of the movies I lauded "A" or "A+" grades onto and I look at some of the most difficult reviews I ever had to spew out. I look at some of the movies I handed, decapitated, on an "F" silver platter and I see where I was in the zone. Trust me, like the Merchant of Venice we want our pound of flesh when we've been insulted, robbed, and bludgeoned on the head, which anyone who has seen it knows Catwoman is very effective at doing. We want to praise great work, but have trouble finding the words, but there's no limit to the words ascribed to the dog poo pile in the corner.

In that vein, when it comes to movies it feels like all of 2008 I've been walking behind a St. Bernard who was recently fed chili. I can think of, and probably count on one hand, the number of great movies I've seen this year. The smattering of good-to-OK ones gets lost in the fog.

But the bad ones? They've been hanging around like the Ghost of Christmas Past whose home just got foreclosed.

For example, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Steven Spielberg, the bit-empty showman who finally grew up to make masterworks like Schindler's List and Munich reminded us that while there might be one great story in each and every one of us, the black hole from which we pull the stinkers is limitless. To be honest, I had to grow to like the Indiana Jones movies- Raiders of the Lost Ark is still on my list as one of the Most Overrated Movies of All Time (repeat this again with your voice in a cool echo). But Kingdom acted less like an Indiana Jones movie and more like one of its knock-offs, probably indistinguishable from any future Friedberg and Seltzer-inspired spoof named Adventure Movie. We know Mr. Get Off My Plane! Harrison Ford hasn't been into playing the lovable type lately, but the crotchety hum-drumness was only one step from having Indiana Jones shouting at kids to get off his lawn.

Then there were the strange bedfellows; this was the year that got me thinking about everything Nicholas Sparks and the Saw movies have in common. This year brought us Saw V, although it might make for less work for Lionsgate typesetters if they just called every sequel from now on Saw X (the X not standing for the Roman numeral ten, but the algebraic variable, since any number can be placed in it without changing the result). I was never into the series- the first two were curious but mediocre shock flicks, but I threw up my hands (along with my lunch) around the time of Saw III. It wasn't as much that I had a problem with the quality of the movie (although I did), but along with the unrepentant gore and really twisted morality message, it became obvious that you couldn't watch another movie in the franchise and expect anything but the same set-up and execution as in the others. It was the same kind of reaction I had watching Nights in Rodanthe, a movie that was originally on my list as one of the year's worst, but to be perfectly fair I couldn't talk about it in terms except the universal adjectives that attach themselves to Sparks' work (pat, saccharine, cloying, etc…). It just became obvious that, The Notebook aside, I couldn't expect anything more in a Sparks adaptation beyond what I got in Message in a Bottle… woman on the outs with love meets impossibly sensitive and caring man. They make love, pretend to hurt each other's feelings, then nature takes over because nothing says romance like someone buying the farm, right? Sparks seems to pull his characters out of a farm where they got all those red-shirted crewmembers in Star Trek, the nameless members of the landing party who you knew were never going to see the Enterprise again.

Proving that box office business is more about the marathon than the sprint was Twilight, based on tweeny novels by Stephanie Meyer. The predictions of monster business opening weekend came true, only for this Titanic for the iCarly set to get buried in following weeks by John Travolta and an animated dog. To be fair, Twilight wasn't "bad" in the same way a lot of the movies I'm mentioning are, but I can't think of a better example since Pirates of the Caribbean of a film that was concocted and guided by marketing analysts in suits who added scenes for no other reason than to bow to a demographic. The irony is that the movie's score, by Coen Brothers' favorite Carter Burwell, is one of the year's best and is unusual and clever in every way the movie safe and non-threatening. No wonder Burwell almost got fired from the picture.

A note to video game publishers: if you want to stop giving credibility to Roger Ebert's "games are not art" theory, then stop selling the rights to them to hacks- or at least sell them to people who actually get it. Comic book movies went through this period before actually grown-up fans got their hands on them to make Spider-Man and Iron Man. The only notable (or notorious) game example is Max Payne, Mark Wahlberg's hey-I-can-be-even-more-wooden-than-that follow-up to The Happening. Directed by Omen mangler John Moore, Payne committed so many sins holy water seemed more appropriate than a review. It looked great, but it didn't even try to emulate the game's own emulation and take on Dashell and Chandler detective noir, subsisting instead on a diet of bored looks, tired dialogue, and no soul.

If all of this is the turd pile, what would be its K2? Let's just say I've seen remakes that veered off from the original. But it's a rare moon when a remake veers off, then circles back around to spit in the original's face. There are a lot of things about The Day the Earth Stood Still that could be fuel for complaint- Keanu Reeves, the injection of an environmental message rather than one of world peace, Keanu Reeves again. I didn't worry too much about these things because this movie is the kind of disaster in which the smaller errors actually make everything seem relevant, like we might feel better if those were the worst things that could be seen.

I have no special knowledge or insight, but I could almost picture how this went down. A greenhorn director like Scott Derrickson gets approached by a studio to direct this year's I Am Legend. New directors aren't quite ready for this kind major release, but they're also easier to bully, too. Derrickson, who made the respectable if utterly confused The Exorcism of Emily Rose, takes and takes from the original and giving nothing back in return. Day alternates wildly between its half-hearted message (war bad, environment good) and its completely f&#*ed up moral compass. It isn't that the movie has none, but it freely, and with abandon, alternates between a self-serving "do no harm" banner to then killing of millions of people to justify an inflated FX budget to service a story that, at its heart, could be adapted to a stage production by a particularly shrewd director. Derrickson may or may not prove himself later, but he sold his soul on this one, resulting in the film's insulting evangelizing and almost criminal product placement. And by the time the mega robot Gort proved to be something other than a robot, I wondered if anyone connected to this had any emotional ties to the original beyond a Netflix rental.

And on and on (notice I didn't even get to Speed Racer). I could have written a blog fawning over Frost/Nixon and The Dark Knight, but as the Joker would have said, "What would be the fun of that?" I'll admit- I like writing bad reviews, and I don't think I'm the only one. Maybe, as writers, we're really that cruel at heart. Or maybe, as writers, we're our own worst critic 95% of the time, and we like talking about that other 5% that makes us feel just a little bit superior.

 

 

Freedomland

     Over the years, I’ve lost certain tenants of my faith in the fight to understand the world I live in, and the people I live with, more completely.  But when it comes down to it, whether a person is devout or has strayed, there are only a few key things they need to remember.  First is that all around us are entitled to love unconditionally.
     The second, and this comes right from the Catechism, is that the ends do not justify the means.
     Never.
     Ever.
     So I was surprised this morning to open up my paper to find Max Boot from the Council on Foreign Relations labeling me an “agitator” and an “absolutist.”
     Okay, fair enough, he wasn’t pointing me out specifically, but there was definitely a “and you know who you are” tone to his editorial.
     Boot’s Los Angeles Times piece is basically a super-sized advocate of the National Security Agency’s domestic spying program that’s been in play since September of 2001.  The program has managed to stay under the radar for several years, until word came out the NSA, without legislative or judicial review, was eavesdropping on domestic phone calls either to or from suspected terrorists or those with ties to the same.  The episode raised not only uncomfortable questions about the primacy of the 4th amendment, particularly at wartime, but also, given the NSA’s choice to circumvent the FISA court’s domain on super-sensitive legal matters, whether the power of the executive branch could supersede the restrictions placed on it by the other two branches under the rationale of national security.
     The questions were never adequately answered, particularly when the President’s reasoning, when stripped of the legalese boiled down to “because I said so.”
     Now, like a Hudson River floater, the issue has surfaced again with the announcement in an article in USA Today that the NSA has collected trillions of phone records in a massive database in an effort to “filter” patterns that might point to possible terrorist chatter.  President Bush immediately came to the program’s defense (again), arguing that the NSA’s actions are not “data mining.”  Apparently he didn’t get the brief stating that scouring data for patterns is precisely the definition of data mining.
     It’s been hard lately to find defenders of these programs outside the circles who receive their paychecks from the federal government or Fox News, but Boot’s article claims that in a time of war, “the biggest advantage we have comes from our electronic wizardry.”
     Actually, this isn’t completely true- Boot claims more than this.  In fact, he gives a practical menu of reasons why the NSA program is a good idea.  If one doesn’t work, try the next one on for size.
     After he’s done lambasting people like me for actually caring about such a concept as civil rights, he goes for the benign approach.  The data is just numbers.  The data is just phone numbers and times and dates which, despite the enormity of the collective volume, reveal little personal information, particularly information that couldn’t already be secured from a credit bureau or credit card company by a dutiful private investigator.
     All well and good, except for this- if the data is this free of context, then what good is it as an intelligence gathering tool?  I don’t pretend to be educated in surveillance and cryptology, but even those who have are stumped at what masses of phone records, divorced from other intelligence, provides in the way of reliable information.
     Of course, that’s probably the point- the “where there’s smoke there’s fire” principle.  After two separate revelations about the NSA’s actions, is there anyone out there that thinks they haven’t just seen the tip of the iceberg?  Collecting random phone data seems nonsensical, unless you couple it to the question of what else the NSA is doing that hasn’t become a headline yet.
     The downside of all of these actions, Boot says, is dismissible “silliness.”  He paints groups like the Democratic Party and the ACLU who are up in arms over these revelations as Chicken Littles who are going around shouting not that the sky is falling, but that if there were a sky, it might hypothetically fall.
     Granted- much to the contrary of the bloggers of the ferocious ultra-left, the United States has not turned into an oligarchical police state.  The very fact that this controversy has stirred up passions in print and on the airwaves as opposed to sudden mass jailings and riots on the streets does speak to how well the American Character is holding under enormous strain.
     Boot’s defense is a facetious one, though, like defending a child who has been caught running with scissors because he didn’t hurt himself this time.  I live in a military town, never went to an Ivy League school (there was plenty of crab grass, though), and have never identified myself as part of what I consider the “fashionable left,” those in Hollywood and the entertainment biz who have taken up the left-wing saber more because it’s the “thing” now, rather than out of any deep-seated belief.  I do keep a close circle of friends and have yet to meet anyone who did not place a value on national safety and security.  However, all of us so-called “absolutists” have recognized that there are certain actions that can be culled into the basket of security and yet compromise it at the same time.  We could all be safe from muggers if there was a curfew prohibiting people from going out after dark.  We could have fewer car wrecks and save some gas if people were only allowed to drive every other day.  The reason why these are not sensible solutions is because smart people recognize them for what they are- substituting one form of shackles for another.
      The 4th amendment of the Constitution was designed by men who, much to the chagrin of people like Boot, saw the possible vindictive and overzealous nature of a government pursuing justice as more than a “hypothetical” possibility.  The neo-conservative line that Boot subscribes to, once the “it ain’t so bad” justification fails, move right on to expedience.  In a time when the country is at war with small groups of people who have the means to kill more than small groups have ever had in the past, notions of the 4th amendment and FISA are outdated and even disruptive to the pursuit of justice.  Which do you value more?  Your safety or your freedom?
     There’s a lapse of thought in believing that safeguards put in place by the Framers and those who would follow in their footsteps were ever meant to be conducive to government practices.  Of course they are difficult, of course they are frustrating- that’s the point.  A system of security and justice that voluntarily takes the high road creates a pure breed of justice unlike any seen in the history of the world.  I find it particularly distressing that I find myself in the same argument with people who want to limit my freedom so I can have more freedom (these are also the same people who tell me the government will have more money if I pay less taxes.  Go figure.).  Boot at least goes a step beyond, granting lip service to the possibility that such unfettered power exercised by the federal government can lead to abuse, but doesn’t seem any more inspired on how to solve that little glitch other than to say that anyone who does abuse their power will be thrown in jail and that will be that.  Yes, Mr. Boot, I’m sure Valerie Plame is very happy to hear that.
     I’ve never alluded to, or even pretended to be, a perfect Catholic, however there are some age-old ideals that I believe in.  First is that everyone deserves my respect, even when I fail in this regard miserably.  Second is that the reasons for doing things are never even half as important as how they are done.  Mr. Boot wants to keep America safe, and on that fact we see eye-to-eye.  What I refuse to believe, however, is that this requires a pull-out-the-stops approach.  In two-hundred years, we have fallen as a country.  We’ve fallen in our determination, our grit, and our morals.  We’ve also fallen in our belief in the system itself, to the point where legal cases are made that certain power restrictions can be ignored because they’re too much of a fuss.  In this new kill-the-patient-to-kill-the-disease world we’ve created, the time honored words of Thomas Jefferson, “We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness,” would have to be given the addendum, “as long as it’s convenient.”

       

Good Night, President Bartlett, and Good Luck

     There was no way it could have continued without a constitutional amendment.  Today, NBC announced that it would be ending the presidency of Josiah Barlett with the series finale of its seven-season-running, award-winning drama The West Wing.  Many figured it would eventually come to this- the premise of the show, to showcase the trials of a Democratic president and his devoted senior staff, would only last the TV equivalent of eight years, or the two presidential administrations allowed by law.  Either reflecting reality or a hope to continue the show after it was no longer feasible to have Martin Sheen play the engaging Bartlett, this last season has been devoted to the rat race between White House wanna-bes: Republican Arnold Vinick (Alan Alda) and Democrat Matt Santos (Jimmy Smits).
     But alas, there will be no Santos or Vinick presidency in TV land come next September.  It all ends here.
     Truth be told, I haven’t watched The West Wing in about two years.  I tried to hang in there with the start of the fifth season in 2003, after the loss of Rob Lowe and writer/creator Aaron Sorkin walked away in a very public feud with producer John Wells.  But I wasn’t strong enough.  It wasn’t the same show I had fallen in love with in 1999, so I walked away.  I didn’t watch it when it hit a critical rebound in its sixth season.  I didn’t watch it this year when Chief of Staff Leo McGarry (John Spencer) suffered a heart attack (in a tragic irony, to be followed this month by the death of Spencer from a real coronary).  I didn’t watch it when they moved the show to Sunday which, more than anything else, probably sealed its doom.
     I haven’t really watched it in two years- which didn’t stop the lump in my throat when I heard the news.
     I normally wouldn’t get any more emotional about a television show than I would about missing a particular commercial that features a dancing cat.  Fans of The Sopranos may want to welt me for this, but The West Wing was by and far the most revolutionary thing to happen to television in the last decade (possibly even more so than Tivo).  To understand you have to go back to the beginning.  I have the first four seasons of The West Wing on DVD, but season one is my most prized possession.  That one incredible year encompasses everything that is grand and possible about fine drama, all of this only magnified by the incredible risk Sorkin and NBC ran.  The most obvious challenge would be the show’s scope- being centered on the executive branch of the United States government and the Commander in Chief of the armed forces is an awfully large bill for a prime-time drama, even if it was one of the stars of NBC’s fall line-up.  There was also the danger of producing a show on politics designed for mass consumption.  It’s been done before in both TV and movies, usually by tackling milquetoast “non-issues” that wouldn’t be controversial to anyone but a small segment of the population (“Hey- think we’ll get in trouble if our character says he’s against crime?”).
     The West Wing, though, was a political animal, and rather than scare people off, for its first two years it was probably the best thing to ever happen to the democratic system.  In its first season alone it tackled everything from terrorism to flag burning to the death penalty, a full-plate of hot-button issues lesser shows would have saved sparingly for “sweeps” episodes, if they even had the gumption to do them at all.  For a time, it seemed whatever the members of the Bartlett administration wanted to talk about, be it gun control or the census, people wanted to talk about in the real-life sphere of politics.  “We’re gonna raise the level of public debate in this country,” Leo McGarry says in Let Bartlett Be Bartlett, and they did.  The show even spawned jokes that, with the 2000 elections looming, people wished they nominate the fictional Bartlett for the job.  This isn’t surprising.  The character of “Jeb” Bartlett didn’t make The West Wing a one-man show, but he was easily its rock.  In the era of Carl Rove where everything and anything is spin, it was refreshing to see a group of leaders making choices based on a solid moral compass.
     The West Wing was also never ashamed of being a “liberal” show that usually (and convincingly) argued the left-wing point of view.  However, the show never (at least in the years I watched it) devolved into a rant.  Okay, sometimes its attempt to be balanced were ham-handed, such as the introduction of Ainsley Hayes, the young, blonde, and attractive Republican lawyer hired by McGarry in season two and then who mysteriously vanished until it was announced late in season four that someone had to be hired to fill her position.  The West Wing found great success with audiences of a mainstream or liberal political bend, but it hardly alienated conservatives, either.  Some admired the shows repeated themes about the importance of family or national security (especially after September 11, which seemed to set the third season onto a more saber-rattling note).  Others saw past the politics and admired The West Wing for its impeccable writing, sharp sense of humor, fantastic acting, acknowledging that while, yes; it did have an agenda, at least played fair.
     It was never perfect.  First, Sorkin had the annoying tendency to pick up plot threads, carry them for a few episodes, and then forget about them (for example, nothing ever came out of Sam’s relationship with a call girl in the first season).  Season three became a little more hit and miss as it tried to juggle Bartlett running for re-election while being investigated for covering up his diagnosis of multiple sclerosis, an escalating crisis with a fictional Middle Eastern dictatorship, and press secretary C.J. Cregg (Allison Janney) receiving death threats from a stalker, all of which came to a head in a season finally that cribbed a little too much from The Godfather: Part III.  If Sorkin and his producers had trouble with anything, it was finding correct proportions.  The MS scandal ran way too long, was wrapped up way to snuggly, and the re-election (against a hilariously blatant George W. Bush send up) never generated the juice it should have.  By season four, cracks were appearing.  Rob Lowe, as the daffy Deputy Director of Communications Sam Seaborn, made preparations to leave the show, bitter at what he felt was a diminishing role.  Sorkin and Wells were prepping to part company, and the plotting showed symptoms that someone wasn’t really minding the switch.  Too much was made of Tobey Ziegler (Richard Schiff)’s attempts to woo his ex-wife, while Bartlett’s youngest daughter, who had previously been involved with the President’s personal assistant, Charlie Young (Dule Hill), began dating an arrogant French expatriate in a plot twist that was as creative as last week’s gum.  That season ended with Zoey Barlett being kidnapped by Islamic terrorists, a move whose numbskullery was only eclipsed by how it was resolved in the beginning of season five.
     None of this matters, though.  Warts and all, The West Wing took us through a seven year ride through experimental mainstream television with tightly wound scripts that impressed with both their intelligence and unabashed sense of humor and vibrant characters who easily passed the fourth wall test (meaning: would you want to know these people in real life?).  I still embrace my favorite episodes: Crackpots and These Women, the famous first “block of cheese” episode, In Excelsis Deo, which has become a Christmas tradition for me, and Someone’s Going to Emergency, Someone’s Gong to Jail where the case of an accused spy sharply mirrors Sam difficulties with his father.  I could go on and on.
     It is probably best that NBC is making this move- it is a matter of personal opinion of where the quality of The West Wing rests right now, however it simply wouldn’t be the same without Jeb Bartlett.  Other presidents will come and go, but The West Wing gave us a look at politics that was, at the same time, realistic, optimistic, and inspiring.  We’re sorry to see it go- there was nothing else quite like it.  That’s it, Ms. Landingham, we’re done for today.  Close the door- and turn out the lights on your way out.

Quality of Character in the Aftermath

     There is a perspective to take today as we watch some small streams of hope reach the ghost town that is New Orleans; as voices harsh and unyielding fly by demanding to know what when wrong and, more importantly, who to blame.  Why wasn’t the city prepared?  Why had no one anticipated that the levees that held back Lake Poncetrain would crack, devastating a city that not even the mighty British army could plunder in 1812?
     Why hadn’t the thousands of people who found hellish refuge in the Superdome been forced out, by gunpoint in necessary, before the disaster hit?
     It’s a cliché to say we all now benefit from hindsight.  In the days before Hurricane Katrina hit, television weather personalities were pulling no verbal punches in describing how damaging a storm with 100+ mile per hour winds would be on a city that sits eight feet below sea level.  But it seemed then, even with all the hyped gloom and doom, that no one had any idea of just how big a calamity Katrina would be, and in the autumn hours when Katrina’s path shifted just enough to give everyone a sigh of relief that would prove as laughably ironic as it would false, most people, including myself, relegated themselves to the comfortable thoughts that this would be nothing more than your average (or perhaps slightly more severe than that) Gulf Coast strike.
     No, I hadn’t preoccupied myself wondering if New Orleans had done everything it could to soften the tragedy that was only days away.
     In politics, where there is both no shortage of mud and no shortage of people to fling it, targets have been selected all the way up and down the line from the mayor of New Orleans to the governor of Louisiana to the President of the United States.
     I’m not an incredibly educated man, and I certainly had no grasp of what was to come, so I feel a little justified that the bitching about what had or had not been done before Katrina came knocking down our Cajun backdoor reeks of amateurish Monday-morning quarterbacking.
     However, while many, including defenders of President Bush, have been arguing this point ad nauseum for weeks now, don’t think it lets anyone off the hook.
     While the actions immediately before Katrina’s strike can reasonably be fed into a debate of mismanagement, negligence, or just plain bad luck, the actions after Katrina had done her havoc and moved on are very evident- and very embarrassing.
     Those who have tried to play down the criticism against Bush make quite a few common sense points.  Of course, Katrina was the not the result of Bush’s foreign or domestic policies.  Nor, as leader of the executive branch of the federal government, is it his responsibility to override state and local matters such as hurricane preparedness and evacuations.
     I’ll give Bush all of this and argue he was as blindsided by Katrina’s fury as the rest of us.  But the fact that he failed in one key aspect of the crisis is undeniable- and unforgivable.
     He failed to act like he even gave a damn.
     The mediums of the late 20th Century have played a funny game not only on the ways we communicate, but our values in communication.  In a situation like this- a major U.S. city just about destroyed through what could be called “an act of God” and the majority of its underprivileged citizens either left stranded, dying, or to devolve into lawless mobs, what would have been the best way to react?  I’m not suggesting that Bush should have flown down to New Orleans as soon as the gales subsided.  Quite the opposite- a man who requires a major law enforcement shift from whatever city he visits would best have stayed away.  What few elements of police, fire department, and the National Guard that remained had enough on their shoulders already.
     And this is my point.  When did we get to the point when we equated location for truth?  Bush could have done an effective job at calming the nation (don’t doubt it- we felt a fear similar to which we felt on 9/11- after all, a major American city had just been decimated) from D.C., from the White House.  After Pearl Harbor, FDR didn’t have travel to Hawaii to communicate the horror of that “day of infamy.”  When nuclear missiles were spotted in Cuba, Kennedy didn’t have to travel to the tip of Florida to express the new danger we all faced.
     Each man had his own way of making menace seem real to the American public, but also reassure them that no threat stood taller to the will and experience of those who had been elected to lead them.
     In the immediate hours- and then days- after Katrina there was a weak silence coming from the White House.  Sure, the name got batted around, but more than one person observed that Bush seemed more preoccupied with getting John Roberts to fill the vacant Chief Justice seat left by the late William Rehnquist than rallying the American people in the midst of the greatest national tragedy since the attacks on New York and the Pentagon.
     Where was the leadership?  Where was someone to instill our faith that the American spirit would not let one of its daughters suffer and die so easily?  Where was the strong and compassionate voice to tell us that those who had been left behind would now be looked after as if they were our own kin?  Where was someone to encourage us to, once again, exhibit the best of ourselves when the country as a whole needed it the most?
     I’m not going to suggest that the abysmal response sits on Bush’s conscience alone.  The day after 9/11, Congress reconvened to pass an unheard of block of legislation- everything from new defense and appropriations bills to relief for families of the victims.  When a judge ordered Terry Schiavo’s feeding tube removed, Republicans returned from vacation on a Sunday to draft bills to reverse the process.
     Congress eventually did reconvene.  It waited until the end of its scheduled vacation- four full days after Katrina had come and gone.
      Why?  Simple.  There was no political capital.  With Schiavo, conservatives could add one more little footnote of their pandering resume to the reactionary wing of the Religious Right.  With 9/11, no one, red or blue state, wanted to appear to be lethargic or apathetic in the midst of an attack on our sovereign soil.  Those who survived Katrina’s devastation only to inhabit a city flooded by its own sewage, foraging for food, and trying to stay alive in a scenario where all observable bounds of law and order had disintegrated, might have been better off if all of it had been the result of a terrorist attack.  At least then no one in our government would have spared time or expense in responding to the situation, if only so they could later issue a campaign flier boasting how they are pitching in during the “war on terror.”
     During a television address Thursday night, Bush took full responsibility for the insufficient government response to the disaster.  This was a minor miracle for an administration whose game plan has been to deny that a train is coming even when it’s five feet away.  But here, the critical mass of embarrassment could not be overcome.  As stories leaked out about FEMA’s disembowelment and “repurposing” to simply be another “we must be vigilant” anti-terrorism agency the political waters began rising faster than the flood waters of Lake Poncetrain.  Even more sickening was the blatant, (and much to the chagrin of the Bush administration) unspinnable incompetence of FEMA director Michael Brown.  In an a moment so painfully ridiculous it could have been a header sketch on Saturday Night Live, Nightline anchor Ted Koppel exposed Brown’s ignorance of events when he got the FEMA director to admit that he had had no knowledge of survivors waiting for rescue in the New Orleans Civic Center, even when most media outlets had been reporting of conditions there for over three days.
     Brown, a former college buddy of Bush, revealed a long standing and stinking truism in the Bush administration- that party (and personal) loyalty is far more valued than experience and competence.  Bush finally came to his senses, ousting Brown and installing R. David Paulison, a former firefighter who has had almost three decades of experience in managing the response to disasters.  But like every stroke or measure in this game, it has proven to be far too little, far too late.
     Bush’s decision to accept responsibility was a curious twist in a dynasty that has been loathe to discuss any degree of complexity or aberration in the practices it keeps.  This has resulted in a curious disconnect from reality.  Bush has often (and glibly, as if he is proud of it), claimed that he doesn’t read the newspaper- he prefers to get his information strictly from aides and advisors.  In one light, this makes sense- I mean, who the hell wants our foreign policy based on the op-ed ravings of The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal?  But for a president, the media serves as not a source of information, but a window to the people he is leading.  Newspapers and the nightly news are fantastic ways to sample the issues people are talking about and the way they see the world.  A president, especially one who has done everything but write ballads about his so-called “simple” nature and his connection to the ordinary people, ignores this window at his own peril, especially when he is surrounded by aides who feel more comfortable simply telling him what he wants to hear.  The last president to be so alienated, so isolated from the mainstream was Richard Nixon, who also boasted that he never read the newspaper.
     Those who have tried to defend Bush have made the argument: So, he isn’t a great speaker?  Isn’t that a minor quality for a man who has to lead the free world?  Uh- no.  A president is more than a commander-in-chief- he is a statesman who takes it upon himself to negotiate, warn, or cajole other heads of state in a delicate verbal dance whose stakes would put the fear of God in lesser men.  And, the President is our leader, our caretaker, the one who we turn to when our nation encounters dark days.  He’s the one who tells us we have nothing to fear but fear it self, or to encourage us to ask what we may do for our country.  We saw none of this after Katrina- no measure of character worthy of man holding the highest office in the land.  Sure, Bush went south to hug refugees who were being graciously sheltered by an African-American church.  This doesn’t show he cares.  This shows that he knows that the Republican party desperately needs to make a play for the African-America vote.
     No, Bush did not cause Hurricane Katrina to strike New Orleans.  No, there isn’t anything (save perhaps leaving FEMA alone to do its job) he could have done to prepare for the unthinkable.  His biggest transgression was to be an absentee landlord.  After we got the first pictures of the jewel of the Old South underwater, we turned, confused and scared, to the man who we have been trained since birth to look to when things look their worst.
     And the response we got was, “I’ll get back to you when my vacation is over.”