Eric The Blue

Netflix: Brothers

Stars Tobey Maguire, sufferer of post-traumatic stress disorder after an ordeal in an Afghan prison camp; Natalie Portman, his adorable wife; Jake Gyllenhaal, his ex-con brother; and Sam Shepard, his father, who prefers the soldier to the retired armed robber.  With all that star power it would seem unnecessary to lean on the young daughters of the troubled couple to tug at our heart strings. 

According to Roger Ebert, the film "avoids temptations toward melodrama," which makes it sound as though it isn't even in melodrama's zip code.  But I remember a scene in which the damaged soldier tosses some dishes around the kitchen before holding a gun to his own head in the presence of his brother, wife, and the police.  Special effects slow down time, and it appears he may very well shoot himself, but then, through the oozy sounds and stretchy photography, he hears his brother's calls, and the vertiginous effects subside as he puts down his gun.  In a phrase favored by the demurrers of my household:

I'm just sayin'.

Barbara Ehrenreich speaks

I found this on Wendell Hiller's Facebook wall.  Check it out.  Barbara Ehrenreich is, or ought to be, a national treasure.  Years ago I came across an essay of hers, "Cancerland," which, rereading it now, suggests that dopey, misplaced optimism has been on her mind for quite awhile.  It's available online here or in Best American Essays of 2002, selected by Stephen Jay Gould, who was himself the author of a memorable personal essay on cancer that I discussed here. 

All these people who insist that getting cancer was a good thing for them, that it made them realize what's truly important in life, and all of that yackety-yack: they should have made the discovery before they got sick. 

Election prospects; also, scheming against Bachmann

One week till election day.  According to Nate Silver, the Republicans have an 80% chance of winning back the House, while Democrats have an 84% chance of retaining their majority in the Senate.  A few embarrassing crackpots--Sharron Angle in Nevada, Rand Paul in Kentucky, Ken Buck in Colorado--are at least slight favorites to win Senate seats. 

Here in Minnesota, the outlook is not as discouraging.  Mark Dayton appears  positioned to win the governor's race.  If, as seems likely, the DFL incumbents win their races for secretary of state, attorney general, and auditor, it will be a clean sweep of the statewide races.  Why is Minnesota bucking the trend?  Well, it helps that the Republican standard-bearer, their endorsed candidate for governor, Tom Emmer, is erratic, extreme, ill-informed, and loose-tongued.  He reminds me of something Sam Nunn said when asked, on the occasion of Newt Gingrich being elevated to Speaker of the House, whether he had any advice for his fellow Georgian. "I think he should keep a higher percentage of his thoughts unexpressed," Nunn said.

But Emmer isn't more ridiculous than Angle or Paul or Buck.  It is tempting to suggest that in Keillorville we have a lower tolerance for manifest nutters, but that would not account for Michele Bachmann, who is as crazy as they come.  Silver gives her a 98% chance of being re-elected.  It's not a case of having weak opponents.  Elwyn Tinklenberg, who lost to her two years ago, is a sensible, very moderate Democrat,  a seminary graduate, former Methodist clergyman, former state commissioner of transportation. He was endorsed by both the DFL and the Independence Party, and was also the beneficiary of a flood of campaign cash after Bachmann told Chris Matthews, on Hardball, that Barack Obama likely harbors un-American views and that the media should "take a great look at the views of the people in Congress and find out are they pro-America, or anti-America."  Bachmann won by three points.  This year's foe, Tarryl Clark, a state legislator, has raised tons of money (though less than Bachmann) and has waged an energetic campaign, but is going to fall short, too.  

For those of us embarrassed to be from a state represented by Bachmann, the best hope may be the results of the 2010 census, and the prospect of redistricting.   The current alignment around the Twin Cities appears designed to maximize Republican representation.  Of the five districts, two are almost entirely within the city limits of Minneapolis and St. Paul, and these are overwhelmingly Democratic.  The other three carve up the suburban and ex-urban area and are all represented by Republicans.  If the districts were instead pie-shaped, narrowing as they converged on the urban core, we would have more competetive races and, quite possibly, zero Republicans instead of three.*  Certainly we would not have to worry about being identified on national news shows as the home state of Rep. Michele Bachmann.

If Minnesota loses a congressional district, the map will have to be redrawn in one manner or another, and there is a good chance Bachmann would find herself without a place to run--or, if she did run, without a district in which she can win. 

 

*In the last two presidential elections, the Democratic candidate has received, on average, 55% of the vote in these five districts.  It isn't easy to take this area and draw lines in such a way as to create five districts of equal population, three of which favor Republicans--but that is what we have.

Mad Men, Season 4

Thanks to Netflix, we've zoomed into 1965, present time on Mad Men, and the result is that our Netflix moments have been pooled and then leased to AMC on Sunday evenings.  It's better than thinking about going to work on Monday.  On the other hand, when you're a couple seasons behind with a DVD in hand you can put off thinking about going to work in the morning till it's almost time to go.

Having insides made of tissue, I thought the volume of alcohol consumed by Don Draper in Seasons 1, 2 and 3 was enough to render implausible his satisfactory work-a-day functioning, not to mention the after-hours meandering and philandering.  But what do I know?  In Season 4, he picks up the pace before, in the last episode, climbing out of the bottle to get engaged to his secretary, who is hot and half his age.  Does that sound familiar?  His partner Roger Sterling pulled the same stunt, and now, a couple seasons later, the mist is out of Roger's eyes and he finds himself married to a woman who's been written out of the script.

Betty, Don's ex, is missing from whole episodes as well.  She's going down, down, down.  Personally, I think it is condign punishment for marrying a Republican operative.  She lies in bed, unhappy and alone, in a scene "balanced" by one in which Don and his secretary gaze deep, deep into the eyes of the other.  No wonder Betty looks so sad!  Meanwhile, Peggy and Joan and Dr. Faye Miller, the spurned psychologist, are not amused by Don's triumph.  I say: "Hang in there, ladies." Don, too, is apt to be de-misted.  "It is the future generation that presses into being by means of these exuberant feelings and supersensible soap bubbles of ours."

Star Tribune endorses Horner for governor

The Star Tribune endorsed Tom Horner for governor yesterday.  The editorial board must really like him.  They endorsed him a few weeks ago, too.  Their point back then was that, while it was too early to endorse anyone, it was time for people to start paying attention, and they made it clear that Horner was the one we were to start noticing.  Now, today, they have officially endorsed him, one week farther out from the election than their preference is usually announced.  Their theory is that thousands upon thousands must know that Horner is best but are worried about wasting their vote, since in polls he is running far behind DFLer Mark Dayton and Republican Tom Emmer.  Horner needs an extra week, between the boost their endorsement gives him and the election, for all right-minded people to talk to all the ditzes who worry about wasting their vote on someone who can't win.

Sounds like an argument for ranked choice voting, but where is the argument for Horner?  The editorial itself is a procession of cliches.  It adopts Dayton's talking points about Emmer (he's a right-wing flame-thrower), Emmer's talking points about Dayton (he's a flaming liberal who wants only to "soak the rich"), and Horner's talking points about himself (he's the affable, serious, sensible alternative).  I can't imagine why the editorial is so long because that is really all there is to the thing.

I've just read it again, because I was genuinely curious about what could have filled up so much space.  The wind.  There is nothing that might properly be called analysis, and no evidence of human thought.  What is the point of this paragraph?

Horner's plan for erasing the big budget deficit that's been forecast for 2012-13 is sound--and while not as complete as it will need to be next January, it compares favorably with the ideas advanced by both Dayton and Emmer.

This seems to say that, on the single weightiest issue facing the state, Horner's ideas aren't any sketchier, or worse, than those of his principal opponents.  Is that a reason to endorse him--twice?  The idea of Dayton's with which Horner's plan "compares favorably" is that top earners should not pay to the state a lower percentage of their income than do cops and school teachers.  The editorial anticipates this objection and strikes the following blow:

But Horner also sees that there are less destructive ways to stabilize state finances than to give Minnesota one of the nation's highest top-bracket personal income tax rates, as Dayton aims to do. 

When I say there is no analysis, and no evidence of human thought, I mean, among other things, that the author, or authors, feel no need to back up such a claim--to say why it would be "destructive" to make the highest earners pay in at the same rate as the rest of us.  Here is a sentence that captures, in a stroke, the emptiness of the editorial:

[Horner has] attracted an impressive list of bipartisan endorsements from thoughtful Minnesotans, buttressing his claim to be a uniter and a problem-solver.

Horner is so great that he has to be endorsed twice before a normal gubernatorial candidate would be endorsed once.  Yet all that can be said in his favor is that he is "bipartisan" (cliche #1), a "uniter" (cliche #2), and a "problem-solver" (cliche #3).  Why should we believe it?  The answer to that is the biggest cliche of all--the unnamed "thoughtful Minnesotans" to whom this thoughtless editorial appeals. 

Minn Post has more.

Lydia Davis, Glenn Gould & Mary Tyler Moore

Having finished Freedom, by Jonathan Franzen, my haphazard reading habits have caused me to pick up The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, which more than caffeine has aroused my nervous system during midmorning, work-day coffee breaks.  Davis's "fictions" have been called crosses between stories, prose poems, and philosophic aphorisms.  In an interview, she has said that she likes Beckett for   "the plain, Anglo-Saxon vocabulary; the intelligence; the challenge to my intelligence; the humor that undercut what might have been a heavy message; and the self-consciousness about language."  These are characteristics that one recognizes in Davis's work, too.  And another one that she did not mention, the bleak outlook. 

In a story called "Glenn Gould," the narrator, a stay-at-home mother, makes a point of watching "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" whenever possible.  It seems odd that one of my favorite TV shows plays a part in the last two books I've read.  Franzen's teen-aged Patty Emerson, watching at her home in Westchester County, New York, is by way of this show introduced to my hometown of Minneapolis, and to escape her affluent but damaged family of origin she accepts an athletic scholarship to the University of Minnesota.  Davis's character, describing the attractions of the show, says: "I want to stay in that other place, that other city that is a real city but one I have never visited."

One feels that the language, here and almost everywhere in Davis's work, is charged and allusive.  The "other place," "that other city that is a real city but one I have never visited," is not really or just Minneapolis, Minnesota.  It's where sane, grounded, decent, intelligent, mostly contented Mary Richards, the character played by Mary Tyler Moore, makes her home.  That's the place the narrator hasn't been.  She gives the impression that she regards "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" as a guilty pleasure and is therefore pleased to learn, in a letter from her friend Mitch, that Glenn Gould, the great pianist she admires, is also a fan.  In the course of the brief story (though, at nine pages, it's one of Davis's longer ones), some of the pianist's characteristics are mentioned, and the movement is from the elevated ("intelligent," "high standards," "articulate") to the ominous ("hypochondriac," "excessively careful of his hands," "was fond of a certain rather ugly female pop singer").  Also, there is this:

Glenn Gould did not have children.  He was not married.

The narrator is married and has a child.  There is nothing in the story to indicate that either is a source of much satisfaction.  The husband is barely in the story.  When they eat dinner, they sometimes have little to talk about, so she will tell him about something funny from the last episode.  Then, "I can see that he is ready to laugh even before I tell it, though so often, in the case of other subjects, he is not terribly interested in what I say to him, especially when he sees that I am becoming enthusiastic."

The sentence proceeds, clause by clause, to that final one: especially when he sees that I am becoming enthusiastic.  That is all there is about the husband.  Her friend who tells her that Glenn Gould watches "Mary Tyler Moore" is Mitch but the husband is not named.  One of the things the narrator mentions about Glenn Gould is that he "was able to be selfish without hurting anyone."  To the narrator, it seems like a trait worth mentioning.

Katherine Kersten changes the subject

I leave the coupon-clipping to Amanda, so my last stop with the Sunday paper was the editorial page, where yesterday columnist Katherine Kersten continued her tireless defense of The American Family.  You know what that means.  Don't let the funny boys and girls marry!

You can read it here.  Allow your eye to alight at random on passages exhibiting the columnist's learning.  For example:

Though [Tom Emmer's opponents] may be loath to admit it, marriage has been a male/female institution--across the globe and throughout history--for a simple reason, rooted in biology.  Sex between men and women creates babies.  It's the only kind of sex that does.

Thank you, Ms. Kersten!  Those of us with no intention of voting for Emmer are taking notes.  Please tell us more.

Marriage is a "conjugal" concept, based on the sexual complementarity of men and women.  It channels the powerful male/female sex drive to positive ends, to ensure that children will--whenever possible--have the love, support and guidance of both their mother and father.  By linking fathers to their children, marriage strengthens an otherwise tenuous bond that is vital for both children's and society's well-being.

I confess that to me all this is perfectly incoherent.  Is "conjugal" in quotation marks because even Kersten suspects she doesn't know what she's talking about?  It seems that quotes might more logically have enclosed "sexual complementarity," a phrase with no distinct meaning.  (Does she mean to suggest that homosexuals have a hard time getting their parts to fit together?)  If marriage links fathers to their children, then why do the parents of so many children split up?  Would children left behind with only one heterosexual parent have been even worse off with a committed homosexual couple (who nevertheless must not be permitted to enjoy the way in which marriage links parents to their children)? If it's all about the children, should young heterosexual couples who intend to marry be required to give proof of their fertility?  Should post-menopausal women be barred from marrying? What about a woman who has had a hysterectomy?  It seems she is as unlikely as a lesbian to conceive.

At the end of her column, Kersten says she's got some questions for people like me.  Why, for example, limit marriage to two people--"[i]f love and commitment are sufficient for two, why not three or more?"  These kinds of arguments are invariably attempts to change the subject.  "You must oppose x if you oppose y" depends upon there being some logical connection between "x" and "y."  But "homosexual" and "polygamist" are not analogous classifications. 

Hurdling ahead, Kersten closes in the manner of a card player laying the ace of trumps:

And how can we logically limit marriage to people in a sexual relationship?  If marriage is simply about caring adults, why shouldn't a grandmother and daughter raising a child together have its benefits?  Going forward, on what grounds can we discriminate against people simply because they don't have sex together?

There is no law requiring married people to have sex with each other.  (Does Kersten think there should be?)  There are, however, laws prohibiting people from marrying their children.  Since those aren't the ones anyone wants changed, it appears we are facing another attempt to change the subject. 

Twins lose, sportswriters pile on

Having scanned the columns given over to the biography of Tom Emmer, I turned next to the sports pages.  What a lot of bitterness is there on display!  The Minnesota Twins, as you know if you are a fan, were this season champions of the American League Central Division, a pretty regular achievement for the team over the past decade or so.  Just as regular is their early exit from the playoffs, usually courtesy of the New York Yankees, who last night dispatched the Twins for the third consecutive game, thereby ending their season on another sour note.  It was the Twins' twelfth consecutive loss in a playoff game. 

The analyses of Jim Souhan and LaVelle Neal, the sportswriters who cover the team regularly for the local rag, make it sound as if the Twins' defeat, at the hand of the Yankees, is to be attributed not to athletic but to moral failings.  As the headline over Souhan's column says, the "Twins gave it their worst."  The absence of any clutch hitting shows a lack of heart.  According to Souhan, the "most symbolic moment" occurred in the fourth inning when, after Denard Span hit a lead-off single, Orlando Hudson swung at the first pitch and grounded into a double play.  Had Hudson's crisply hit grounder found a hole, the Twins would probably still have lost, and Souhan would then have been obliged to discover a different "most symbolic moment." 

What should Hudson have done?  Souhan says he needed to "grind through an at-bat, putting pressure on [Yankee pitcher Phil] Hughes with [the Twins' best hiiter Joe] Mauer waiting on deck."  Neal's take on this tragic ground ball is arguably even more ridiculous: "With Span being held at first by Mark Teixeira and a big hole between first and second, Orlando Hudson grounded into a 6-4-3 double play at a time when it's acceptable to pull an outside pitch into the hole." 

It's obviously an easy game from press row.  Neal might as well have blandly observed that it would have been "acceptable" for Hudson to ignite a big rally with a two-run homer.  In that case, the sportswriters from New York could have composed stories about how the inexperienced Hughes became rattled soon as the Twins broke through with a couple of runs.  Lacking maturity, he began to press, and the Twins took advantage to knock him out and win the game.  Even if the Yankees end up surviving the Twins, Hughes has proven that he cannot be counted upon in the clutch, and the Yankees' pitching woes make it very difficult to see how they can defend their 2009 world championship.

It's in the nature of athletic competition that one team wins and another loses.  If a batter hits a home run, some pitcher served it up; and if a Yankee succeeds, a Twin must fail.  It's the easiest thing in the world to gob spit on whomever has failed most recently, and it seems to me that, working against deadline, sportswriters don't even attempt to resist temptation.

The Sunday paper profiles Tom Emmer

I've spent the morning in the kitchen with the Sunday newspaper and my coffee cup.

First up was the long, front-page feature story on Tom Emmer, the GOP candidate for governor of our state.  (I'd link to it were it not behind a subscriber wall.)  He appears to me a recognizable type, a kind of cousin to Sarah Palin, who endorsed him back in the primary season.   The details of their biographies delineate characters who are neither the best  nor the brightest.  Emmer wanted to go to Notre Dame, but his application was turned down, whereupon he enrolled at Boston College and went out for hockey.  When after one year he failed to earn a scholarship, he left for the University of Alaska--Fairbanks.  He played hockey there, graduated, came back to the Twin Cities, where, after graduating from William Mitchell College of Law, he joined a law firm that he eventually left when his colleagues, having assessed his performance, declined to make him a partner.  Meanwhile, he'd gotten married, had a bunch of kids, picked up a couple of DUIs, and won election to the state legislature from a very conservative district in the western exurbia of the Twin Cities.  His legislative record is that of a right-wing ideologue--he's championed the chemical castration of sex offenders and state nullification of federal law--with the notable exception of drunk-driving legislation, where his views are curiously more in line with those of the ACLU.  No one has ever accused him of having studied too much.  In the current campaign, for instance, he has proposed that family members of fallen soldiers should receive state money to pursue their educations.  The problem was that the current governor had three years ago signed such a measure into law.  It was part of an education bill that Emmer voted against.

Palin and Emmer both frequently call their critics "elitists."  They both also talk a lot about how government should get out of the way so that the abilities and hard work of ordinary Americans can be rewarded.  There is perhaps some tension between these two rhetorical themes.  Sometimes hard work and high aptitude yield straight-A's, Ivy-league degrees, mastery of complicated subjects, and skepticism regarding the right-wing agenda.  Such people are "elitists."  Sarah Palin resents Katie Couric because Couric is the kind of girl who does her homework.  Emmer, when pressed recently by a journalist for details on his state budget plan, shot back: "I'm not running to be the accountant."  Knowing about things, being up-to-speed on the details--it's for elitists, and he just wants to be governor.

Power Line champions The Buckley Rule

The Power Line philosophers have been sparring with some of their readers over the question of whom real conservatives should support when right-nutters run in Republican primaries against "establishment Republicans"--the scare quotes here indicating that in the right-nutter lexicon the phrase is a euphemism for "Traitors to the One True Cause."

In contrast to Rush Limbaugh and others, the philosophers have promulgated the "Buckley Rule," named for William F. Buckley, Jr., founder and long-serving editor of National Review, who held  that in a Republican primary NR subscribers should cast their ballots for the most rightward candidate with a decent chance of winning the general election.  The philosophers angered many of their readers by suggesting that the Buckley Rule was a reason not to choose Christine O'Donnell, a right-nutter, over establishment favorite Mike Castle in Delaware's Republican primary election for U.S. Senate.

Although they aren't as crazy as some of their readers, I would not go so far as to say that the philosophers' embrace of the Buckley Rule makes them exemplars of hard-headed good sense.  They are saved from voting for O'Donnell only by their conclusion that the people of Delaware are more sensible than they are.  The Buckley Rule places a considerable burden upon those who would be governed by it.  They must be crazy enough to vote for a manifest crackpot.  They must also be lucid enough to realize when the good sense of the rest of the voting population precludes the possibility of their favored crackpot prevailing in the general election.

Eric the Blue goes on a trip, rents a car

Back from St. Augustine, Florida, where a friend of Amanda's was married last Friday evening.  The author of a travel guide Amanda brought along called St. Augustine her favorite Florida destination before deploying the adjective "chic."  If that is so it must be because the rest of the habitable part of the state is filled with wide streets lined with every imaginable franchise restaurant and chain store.  At 4:00, the restaurants are full of senior citizens eating the early bird special.  Compared to that, St. Augustine, which sports art galleries and boutiques near its quaint inns, and shabby-appearing housing away from the destinations noted in travel guides, qualifies I guess as "chic."

I don't travel very much and was highly annoyed by our experience renting a car at the Orlando airport.  The agent, an unctuous flatterer, began his routine designed to screw us out of money by asking where we were headed.  Ah, St. Augustine, very beautiful, he loves it there!  Full of crapola, just like the author of the travel guide.  Would we like to pre-pay for the tolls along Florida's highways between Orlando and St. Augustine?  We don't know, tell us more.  Well, it costs ten dollars, and then we don't have to stop to pay at the toll stations.  Tell us one more thing: how much does one have to pay in tolls to drive from Orlando to St. Augustine?  "A little more than five dollars, one way."  That seemed a little too convenient.  We declined, and later paid $3.50 in tolls to get to St. Augustine, and $3.50 more to get back to the Orlando airport.

Quoting a price of $2.63 per gallon, he also asked whether we'd like to buy gasoline from the car rental company.  The trick here is that you pay $2.63 times the capacity of the tank in the car you're renting.  Since $2.63 per gallon is the going rate, you come out even if you use the whole tank--and behind if you don't.  Our experience suggests that driving from the Orlando airport to St. Augustine and then back to the Orlando airport takes about three-fourths of a Chevrolet Cobalt's tank.  No wonder they want you to buy gasoline from them!  What you pay for, but don't use, they'll sell to their next customer, too!

I almost forgot to mention the gambits that are easiest to see through, the insurance they want you to buy and, of course, the upgrade to a bigger car.

I hate all these songs of praise one hears for the vaunted "private sector."  Political conservatives tend to whisper the phrase--"private sector"--as if the words themselves are too holy to pronounce out loud.  Is it too much to expect that companies make money without cheating their customers and telling them lies--and complaining bitterly if they are as a consequence subjected to government oversight?  And the car rental game is a square deal compared, say, to the financial industry.  It's all crooked and rigged and we are asked to worship it. 

And what is with "The Department of Homeland Security"?  It seems we have honored our former mortal enemy by adopting the old Soviet practice of assigning bloated, ridiculous names to our government bureaus.  Travelling around in our country does not make me feel good about it.