August 24, 2020--Trump Keynoters

To be responsible, I've been planning to watch as much of the Republican convention as I did the Democrats. Well, almost as much. OK, half an hour a night.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I've been hoping that Clint Eastwood would return and again, as he did in 2016, talk to his chair. Anticipating that would keep me awake well into primetime.

To prevent Clint from showing up uninvited and doing something unhinged (that role is reserved exclusively for the commander in chief), a leftwing conspiracy theorist reports Eastwood is being held in a cell in Guantanamo.

My plans for this week are unravelling because of who will be on the program. Desperate to demonstrate the GOP has at least some diversity--the speakers will include six party loyalists, including presidential aspirant and former ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley (a woman); African-American South Carolina senator Tim Scott; Mike Pence; and Iowa Senator Joni Ernst who is likely to lose in November. 

Balancing the ticket will be Trump, who is planning to speak all four nights, and five other Trumps, including his adult children, from Don Jr. to the semi-estranged Tiffany.

On the other hand I was sad to hear that Trump's sister the judge will not be there nor will his niece.

You expect me to stay up to midnight with his lineup? So much for responsibility. There's a limit to what I'm willing to do for the sake of responsibility. I flunked that test long ago (car, cat, tree).

A friend said she'd watch the whole thing if they gave her the peroxide concession.

It was not disclosed if the Trump kids will be vaccinated on stage.

January 20, 2017--Trump's Second Thoughts

Trying to get with the program, last night I forced myself to watch some of the concert at the Lincoln Memorial that honored Donald J. Trump's ascendancy to the presidency--the Make America Great Again Welcome! concert.

Reading the expressions on the Trumps' faces--especially wife Melanie, daughter Ivanka, and son-in-law Jared--it felt as if they were already miserable to no longer be in New York City. I could imagine Ivanka thinking, "What did I get myself into. Political Purgatory. No 21 Club, no Cafe Carlyle, no friends to hang out with. I can already feel myself getting bored with Washington and I've been here for only three hours! For the next four years it's going to be schmoozing with Mitch McConnell and having to smile when listening to the Marine Band playing nothing but John Philip Sousa marches. If I have to listen to endless versions of God Bless America and that grizzled Lee Greenwood singing that awful God Bless the U.S.A., with my father pretending to mouth the words, I think I'll puke."

I could see poor Jared thinking, "No Bon Jovi, No Beyonce, no Bono, and of course the Boss stayed home. All boycotting. To tell you the truth, I too should have faked a headache and stayed with the kids in Blair House and watched reruns of Shark Tank. And then tomorrow, help me, I have to get through the Inauguration itself. I just hope my father-in-law didn't ask Jon Voight to serve again as MC for that. Unless Clint Eastwood shows up. At least Jon Voight didn't talk to a chair. If this is what's going to serve as entertainment for the next four years--and now he's already talking about 2020--with my Second Amendment rights protected, I'll have to shoot myself. Toby Keith?  I went to Harvard for God's sake."

By then I was switching between Shark Tank and the Australian Open so I spared forcing myself to feel empathetic to Melania, who at least has a great pre-nup and is going right back to NYC after she can get out of her 4-inch heels. She plans to live there. She says only until the kid finishes the school term. But I'm taking bets that this weekend is the last one she'll be spending in DC. Good for her. When I spotted her later last night at an event where Trump gave a version of his stand-up schtick to a group of donors who are now in love with him, Melania was huddled with 150-year-old gossip columnist Cindy Adams, a New York pal. For her at least, I felt good. Smart girl. She'll be back at Mortimer's by Saturday and have the Trump triplex to herself. Best of all, she won't have to listen to Donald talking back to his Twitter feed at 5 o'clock in the morning.

February 3, 2105--Sniping

We finally got around to seeing Clint Eastwood's Western, American Sniper.

This is not a typo, since Sniper is more a conventional Western of the sort Clint used to make than a traditional war movie.

In full Manichean mode, Eastwood is in familiar territory with forces of good confronting and overcoming, if somewhat ambiguously, evil. Good guy against bad guys.

It is also a biopic about Chris Kyle, the American sniper who during four tours of duty in Iraq is credited with at least 160 "kills." He is a Rambo figure. As Sly Stallone's Rambo single-handedly took on and defeated our stealthy enemies in Vietnam (a war we otherwise in real life were losing) Kyle takes on al-Qaeda fighters and through sniping and pitched firefights wipes out dozens of them though in real life they were and are winning.

Superheroes Rambo and Kyle help reconcile us to defeat by providing an alternate reality--that what we see on TV and read about in the papers is less real than what is on the big screen. Thus perpetuating the illusion that America has never lost a war.

One has to wonder why Sniper is doing so incredibly well at the box office, having already taken in more than $200 million. The highest grossing "war" movie of all time. What about it is appealing to Americans' consciousness?

The film puts on vivid and overwhelming display American exceptionalism, showing a self-made, unencumbered man taking on the world's evil forces. And, in a cool 2015-version of winning, prevails.

Eastwood and Stallone in their eras of American self-doubt have made careers out of such films.

But ironically, since I am certain this was not Eastwood's intent--he is a well-known conservative hawk--Sniper is more than anything a powerful antiwar movie.

Kyle is represented as heroic and undoubtedly deserves to be (sorry Michael Moore), but his heroism is not worthy of the situation--the Iraq War--in which it plays out. The war on the ground, in which Kyle and his comrades are unremittingly exemplary, is not worth the human cost. On either side. Even the heroic are drawn into the blood and gore, the purposeless and waste, and, yes, the evil that wars of this kind are.

In Sniper, in Western terms,  good outcomes prevail--more bad than good guys are killed, the principal evil-doer, Mustafa, an al-Qaeda sniper who was a Syrian Olympic marksman, is shot by Kyle after he kills three or four American soldiers; but in the end, as represented in Sniper, it means nothing, amounts to nothing.

Though our boys kill more of the elusive enemy than in turn get killed and maimed, as we are shown at the end of the film's climatic battle, which ends without a clear sense of outcome, as Kyle and his comrades withdraw from the field of battle more and more al-Qaeda fighters are shown to be streaming in.

With that, with his kills tallied, though the war will continue--it continues to this day (al-Qaeda has become ISIS)--Kyle decides it's time to go home.

And then when he does, he appears to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder but, as could only happen in a Rambo or Eastwood movie, is "cured" in less than 15 minutes of film time. At first shown sitting alone at a bar nursing a beer and brooding, after spending a few minutes with a VA psychologist, who takes him on a walk down the hospital corridor where he meets cheerful veteran amputees, Kyle is back to himself and is ready to return to his wife and children, where he is soon shot by another returning veteran, who presumably has a more enduring case of PTSD.

This, of course, is not shown on screen and thus is another way Eastwood attempts to sanitize and camouflage the reality of war's horrors. In Westerns, for the same reason, the good guys are never killed on screen. They head for the sunset.

With all this absurdity and horror to obscure and cover up, how could anyone claim that what we have been up to in Vietnam and more recently Iraq makes any sense or has any clear purpose? Including Clint.

January 21, 2015--Heroes

I half agree with Michael Moore.

He stepped in it over the weekend when he tweeted, in reference to the Clint Eastwood movie, American Sniper, that snipers are "cowards" and not "heroes."

He wrote--

My uncle killed by sniper in WW2. We were taught snipers were cowards. Will shot you in the back. Snipers aren't heroes.

I haven't as yet seen the film so I am not sure if Chris Kyle, a real-life Navy SEAL who was credited with more than 160 "kills," shot anyone in the back or if the movie even made that distinction.

Shooting someone in the back to me wouldn't make someone a coward any more than a solider killing someone during a war with an explosive grenade or with a rocket launched from a drone guided to its target remotely from the security of an operations bunkers thousands of miles from the field of battle is a coward.

War in all its forms is evil--though it may at rare times be a necessary evil (WWII comes to mind), and so applying "rules" to war to me has always had the tincture of an oxymoron about it.

But I suppose rules of war may keep people from using chemical, biological, or atomic weapons and require that POWs be held and treated humanely. I have always believed, though, that any restraints combatants apply while otherwise blowing each other to pieces (often including innocents) is because they do not want the same tortuous things done to them if the tables were turned, which often happens in all forms of warfare.

So almost all that occurs is not cowardice but more because soldiers are doing their awful job or get carried along in the flow of things. As a result, moral judgements need to be applied extra-judiciously.

On the other hand, again not having seen the movie, I doubt if director Eastwood or actor Bradley Cooper present Kyle as much of a hero.

If they do, this could be a good corrective by Moore as to what it means to be a hero and to all the overpraising we have become prone to in so many aspects of our lives--from calling all our troops heroes (politicians do this uncontrollably) to representing every poop or scribble one of our kids produces as if no one ever did anything that amazing and miraculous.

True heroism is a very special and rare quality. It should be reserved for acts of courage and sacrifice, not for anything and everything one of our soldiers does in the daily course of serving in the military.

I know this is not just a product of otherwise rampant cultural hyperbole. It is also a reaction to the ways in which soldiers who were drafted to fight in Vietnam were treated--shabbily at best--when they returned from fighting. Even genuine heroes were shamelessly spat upon.

We are being careful this time to show respect for our troop volunteers while they are fighting and when they return. But not all of them are heroes and almost none of them are cowards. Before Michael Moore uses that label maybe he should sign up and see how he does.

December 18, 2014--Shame On SONY

If a North Korean filmmaker (an oxymoron) were to make a satirical film about a plot to assassinate Barack Obama, it wouldn't make us feel very good, would it. But would we be making threats to blow up movie theaters where it was being shown? And would we put pressure on the film company that made the movie to pull it from distribution? Though we would hate the film's premise and would not rush to see it if it were available here, we so revere human rights that we would resist the temptation to ban it from public display. In fact, if there was the temptation to do so, there are many organizations in America that would defend the filmmaker's right to free speech, no matter how offensive.

A version of that just happened in the United States.

SONY pictures for some oblivious reason agreed to make The Interview, a silly film about how a celebrity journalist and his producer land an interview with North Korea's supreme leader Kim Jong-un and subsequently are recruited by the CIA to kill him.

Presumably someone in North Korea, an individual or more likely a state-supported operative, outraged about the film, hacked into SONY's computer network and has been selectively releasing to the press gossipy e-mails between top executives that reveal them to be mean-spirited (attacking one of their own most successful stars--Angelina Jolie) and full of racist feelings about President Obama (wondering which movie about African Americans would most appeal to him).

Further, the hacker or his handlers are also making threats against movie distributers, saying that if they show the The Interview they will bring down upon them wrath equal to that of 9/11.

In turn, owners of movie chains (Regal and others) asked SONY not to release the film. SONY, feeling they had no good options, agreed to do so, and as I write this are saying that though they regret "having" to pull the film do not want to put moviegoers at risk.

No one yet is talking about how this will encourage hackers to act more audaciously. Including, I assume, threatening mayhem about any movie or TV show they find to be objectionable or upsetting. Or, any book or TV show or public event that deals with controversial or, to them, disturbing issues.

Homeland, the Showtime series that depicts many Muslims to be violent terrorists could easily be a hacker's next target.  American Sniper, a film by Clint Eastwood about to be released will undoubtedly upset some in Iraq because the main character, Chris Kyle, an actual person, was a Navy SEAL who as a sniper killed more Iraqis than anyone else--between 160 confirmed "kills" and nearly another 100 "likelies."

Or other disgruntled groups could threaten to blow up the New York Times building because it published a series of articles critical of the C.I.A. and the corruption of top Chinese leaders.

On Christmas Day, when The Interview was to open, though its plot sounded totally sophomoric, I was planning to hold my nose and go as a way of symbolically saying that I do not believe in preemptive-capitulation and that our Constitution is stronger than unattributed or unverified threats and more important than what SONY executives said about Angelina Jolie.

We can't submit to threats and live in a world of fear, especially when our basic rights and freedoms are attacked.

Instead, via Showtime On Demand, on Christmas Day I will tune into the last two episodes of Homeland, unless by then they too are withdrawn. If they are, I'll just get drunk.