Eric The Blue

At the movies: Nebraska

The one-word geographical title, a reference to the Midwest, may remind you of Fargo, which Nebraska resembles also in its depiction of stolid, unintentionally hilarious denizens of that mythic area known quadrennially as The Heartland.  Where is it?  In this movie, it goes from Billings, Montana, to Lincoln, Nebraska, by way of Wyoming and South Dakota, with the action occurring mainly at a stopover at a small, fictitious Nebraska town called Hawthorne. 

On the evidence of the film, red-state America isn't looking very good.  The vistas are like the sea, the towns beat up and dilapidated, and the people like gargoyles with double-digit IQs.  I say "like gargoyles," thereby suggesting a certain implausibility--a fair criticism, I think, though it's true that I remember as a boy listening to the boyfriends of my mother's girl cousins brag about having driven from this town to that one in an impossibly short period of time. 

The characters in the film would fall for the plot but I'm not sure the rest of us should.  It involves an old alcoholic, played by Bruce Dern, who's determined to get to Lincoln to trade in a coupon for a million-dollar sweepstakes prize.  He becomes a local celebrity when the four-state odyssey lands in his hometown ("Hawthorne"), where the celebration of his good fortune trudges obliviously past his sons' reports that their confused old man hasn't won anything so that it can be spoiled instead by the local dullards' slowly developing schemes for extorting a piece of the prize for themselves.

But the thin plot seems mostly a pretext for the road trip and a chance for the camera to dwell on the open, empty land and the signs in the ravaged towns, their expressions of distress accented by missing letters and broken lights.  Shot in black and white, directed by Alexander Payne (Election, About Schmidt, Sideways), and starring, besides Dern, June Squibb as the old man's sharp-tongued wife and SNL's Will Forte as their earnest, down-on-his-luck son.

 

John Hinderaker's world gone mad

Power Line's John Hinderaker offered up for Christmas three items of evidence showing that "we are living in a world gone mad."  He opens with the controversy surrounding the Duck Dynasty star's views on homosexuality:

The biggest news story of the last week was about Phil Robertson, a TV reality star who gave an interview to GQ. The interviewer eagerly solicited Robertson’s views on homosexuality, which turned out to be middle of the road. Robertson said that 1) the Bible disapproves of homosexual conduct, along with lots of other sins, and 2) he personally thinks women have a lot more to offer than gay men.

I'm not sure this captures the flavor of Robertson's remarks.  It leaves out, for instance, the notion that homosexuality is a kind of gateway sin leading to bestiality.  That's "middle of the road"?  But it's Christmas.  Let us follow the lead of Virginia Cannon and hope--pray, if so inclined--that Robertson, who preaches in his church, will undergo a change of heart like many others, including the formerly right-wing clergyman who was recently defrocked by the Methodist church for officiating at his son's same-sex wedding.  If I were a right-wing blogger--there's a hypothetical!--I'd stop flogging this horse.  It's not hard to see which side is winning, and why.

Hinderaker continues with exhibit 2:

A similarly crazy episode occurred a week or so earlier, when Fox News’s Megyn Kelly, probably the smartest reporter on cable news, made the offhand observation that Santa Claus and Jesus are both white. Here, too, faux outrage was the order of the day. Numerous commentators weighed in on behalf of black Santas, and some seriously tried to claim that Jesus wasn’t white. 

This is crazy, says Hinderaker, in part because "the real St. Nicholas was a Greek who came from what is now Turkey" and, anyway, "I have never heard of anyone objecting to black, Latin, Asian, or Native American Santas."  

Except, I guess, for the smartest reporter on cable news.

Exhibit 3 concerns Justine Sacco, the native South African who lost her job with a PR firm after tweeting: "Going to Africa.  Hope I don't get AIDS.  Just kidding.  I'm white!"  The case of Ms Sacco, who without evidence is described by Hinderaker as "a cookie-cutter liberal," is final proof of the world's madness. Naturally, it follows that all patriots should be packing:

Here’s the thing: saying what you think isn’t that hard. We do it all the time. Lefties can call you a “racist,” try to get you fired, or threaten you with violence. But are we men, or are we Pajama Boys? Here on the right, we are still men. (That includes our women, of course, most emphatically.) In reality, the leftists are almost always impotent to carry out their threats. And, if it comes to that, I am generally carrying; you should be, too. The Second Amendment defends the First. So screw them: we have a right to free speech, as long as we claim it, and use it.

Merry Christmas.

The bluster and manly swagger: does it not seem a little outsized for the "madness" that either is or isn't described?  I'm not sure, but it appears to me that Hinderaker is saying that Sacco, had she been a "conservative" instead of a "cookie-cutter liberal," would have shot the person who fired her and--what?  End of problem? 

Possibly madmen are particularly susceptible to thinking the world has gone mad.

The coming midterm election

I see that some political prognosticator puts the Dems' chance of retaking the House in 2014 at 1%.  It's probably less than that.  Remember that, in 2012, Democratic candidates for US House won about a million more votes than did Republicans.  But this million-vote "victory" resulted in a 234-201 Republican advantage in representation.  Something approaching a national landslide is required for Democrats to win control of the US House.

Congressional boundaries plainly are drawn in a way that favors Republicans.  Here in the metro area of Minneapolis-St. Paul, for instance, there are five congressional districts, three represented by Republicans, two by Democrats.  But there are more Democrats than Republicans in the region covered by these five districts.  In the last election, both Obama and the five Democratic candidates running for US House received about 55% of the votes cast in the region.  But a 55-45 split in favor of the Dems resulted in a 3-2 Republican advantage in actual representation.

It's a similar story across the country, especially in large states with a fairly even split between the two parties.  In the last election, Obama won 52% of the vote in Pennsylvania, but Republicans won 13 of 18 congressional races.  In Michigan, Obama won 54% of the vote, but Republicans won 9 of 14 House races.  Florida:  Obama won with 50%, but Republicans won 17 of 27 congressional races.  Virginia: Obama, 51%; Republicans, 8 of 11 House seats.  Ohio: Obama, 51%; Republicans, 12 of 16 House seats. 

It's not that Republican candidates for Congress are so much better than their presidential nominee.  God no! Mitt Romney was a poor candidate but Michele Bachmann is a laughingstock--and she's not the only one. The chasm between public opinion in a state and the makeup of the state's congressional delegation is mostly a result of careful boundary drawing between districts. 

So what's my point? 

First, it's not really news that the Democrats have no chance of winning back the House.  In the ebb and flow of the political tides, the Dems are currently a bit down, and, as I said, a national route in their favor would be required for them to win a congressional majority.  Second, if all we did was count votes, instead of drawing lines around people before counting their votes, Republican prospects would be a helluva lot worse than they are.  Third, American democracy is in need of reform--and I don't mean the kind that makes it harder for people to vote, which has the desired effect of making Congress even less representative of national opinion than it already is. 

Wherein I come to a sweeping conclusion after observing who uses public transportation

 

Over at the New Yorker blog, you can view photographs of Pope Francis "through the years"; my favorite, which shows him commuting on the Buenos Aires subway in 2008, when he was a Cardinal and the Archbishop of Buenos Aires, is above.  The current pope appears to have more in common with the "nuns on the bus" than with, say, the Archbishop of the Twin Cities Diocese, who ought to be arrested and prosecuted for obstruction of justice.

I like a big shot who uses public transportation, and I'm not the only one.  Richard Feynman, about whom I wrote here, reported in one of the autobiographical vignettes collected in What Do You Care What Other People Think? that he knew a certain general and fellow member of the commission investigating the Challenger disaster was a good fellow when he (the general) broke away from the first meeting to catch a train back to the Pentagon. 

My advice:

When someone arrives in a limo, take everything they say with half a salt shaker.  But pay attention to the speech acts of anyone who takes the bus.

 

 

Funereal

Today I was as usual thinking about death and a funny story a friend once told me flew into my head. 

I used to play softball for a team sponsored by a funeral home. Consequently, I got to know several funeral directors--the ones who liked to play ball.  I had never thought about it before, but sometimes people die in their houses, and they don't just beam themselves over to the embalming room.   Someone from the funeral home goes and gets them.  The story concerns one time when the family member placing the call had warned that the decedent was "a big fellow."  So they sent out not one but two funeral directors, a couple of strong, able-bodied guys from the softball team.  Arriving at the residence, they discovered some complicating factors.  For one thing, it was an old house, and the "big fellow" was in an upstairs bedroom.  For another, he weighed over 400 pounds.  To get to the bedroom, you climbed about ten stairs to a landing, then turned 180 degrees and went up about five more steps.  I'm not going to resist making the obvious joke about how the descent  was toilsome due to 400 pounds of "dead" weight.  The turn: very awkward, especially considering that making it brought them into sight of the family members seated in the living room at the bottom of the steps.  My friends tried to disguise the fact that they were using the bannister to slide the corpse along.  Nothing helped, however.  They bumped and thumped their way down, adjusting their grips a few times and not even pretending to be gentle. 

If you take up mortuary science in school, do you know what the first course you take is called--a prerequisite for all the more advanced ones?  Freshman Decomposition. 

For some reason, this "discussion" puts me in mind of a poem by Robert Frost.  Ants are a curious race.

At the theatre: Frozen

We all saw Frozen, the new Disney animated film, this evening.  It features Norwegian royalty, including an ice queen with wintry powers, and warns about the perils of having a frozen heart.  I felt like my whole approach to life was under attack and that everyone else in the family loved it.  Well, I loved it myself, actually.  Maybe the story is a little thin--a plot twist concerning the revelation that a prince's pursuit of a princess is mercenary feels like an on-the-run adjustment--but who cares?  It's visually gaudy and the songs are great. 

Great man dies, Powerline readers weigh in

Curious about what the Powerline philosophers might have to say about the passing of one of the great men of our time--and maybe, so long as I was polluting my eyeballs, studying their take on the pope's economic views as well--I punched in their URL so that you won't have to. 

The sum total of their response to Mandela's death was penned by Steven Hayward.  It's quite brief, and I don't want to link to it, so I shall set down the whole thing:

News is crossing the wire in the last few minutes of the passing today of Nelson Mandela, at the age of 95.  I never quite knew exactly what to make of Mandela.  During his long years in prison, when his clearly loathsome wife Winnie and the African National Congress were openly pro-Communist, I naturally feared the worst.  But around the time Mandela was released I happened to make the acquaintance of Leon Louw, one of South Africa’s leading (perhaps only) libertarian intellectuals.  Leon noted, among other things, that Apartheid was essentially just another form of centralized socialism.  About Mandela he said to reserve judgment, and that he was optimistic about Mandela’s future.

I started to think Leon was on to something when one of the first things Mandela did after gaining his freedom was divorce Winnie.  I’m not a close student of South African affairs, but there was certainly a marked contrast between Mandela’s stewardship of the transition to full democratic rule there and the course of events in most other African nations such as Zimbabwe, which seem to follow the rule “One man, one vote–once.”  RIP.

Yes, it's hard to know what to make of Mandela.  On the one hand, he was a Commie with a "loathsome" wife; on the other, I know a guy, a "libertarian intellectual," who said judgment should be reserved.  After all, we can't rally behind apartheid, which to the discerning eye of a libertarian intellectual is too much like "centralized socialism." 

Mr Hayward's readers aren't as puzzled as he.  The very first comment:

It takes minimal research to establish that Mandela was a communist terrorist. He headed an organization which targeted non-combatants with bombs in public places. White guilt / liberalism etc is short of black saints so Mandela's happy face is a convenient image. FWIW I'd be delighted to see Clarence Thomas or Thomas Sowell or Ben Carson as president, but sanctifying bogus heroes fails in the long run.

Eleven Powerline readers "liked" that.  There's more:

Mandela was an Israel-loathing anti-Semite, a champion of the "Palestinian" terror entity, and a slanderer of the Jews. Read his note to Thomas Friedman, in which he bashes Israel for its defensive measures but has not one word of criticism for the Islamofascists who plot daily to murder Jews. And in which, like Arafat and other Jew-hating terrorists, he demands a "right of return" and, in essence, the obliteration of the Jewish state. I don't really care how he "rests."

Alas, it gets worse.  Real men aren't shy about being racial bigots:

Ultimately, the question is what South Africa has become after the radical change. The general idea of Apartheid was to keep the savages from encroaching on the European derivative population. The Mandela idea was to let every man be free. Now that every man is free, not only are white European-derivatives the subject of lawlessness and corruption, murder, etc., but so are the blacks. Mandela, the Communist, is a hero for this change? That just goes to show you what a lot of P.R. can do.

You perceive now there is division within the wing-nut faction.  To some, apartheid was too much like "centralized socialism."  To others, its bad name may be attributed to PR slanders. A real rainbow coalition.

Regarding the pope's Marxist economic views: nothing.  John Hinderaker, however, has a post concerning how absurd it is that President Obama now complains about economic inequality.  The argument has to do with the following table showing (Hinderaker's words) "the average annual inflation-adjusted GDP growth percentages during the last five presidential administrations":

Ronald Reagan (1981-1988): 3.4%
George H.W. Bush (1989-1992): 2.2%
Bill Clinton (1993-2000): 3.9%
George W. Bush (2001-2008): 2.0%
Barack Obama (2009-2012): 0.8%

Let us put aside such obvious objections as the fact that it's easier to drive into the ditch than to get out once you're in it--especially when the bad driver persists in working against you.  If we accept the argument on its own simple terms, a wee bit of arithmetic reveals that, during Democratic administrations, the economy has been growing at an average annual rate of 2.87% while during Republican administrations the figure is 2.6%.  This is the Powerline argument for Republicans?