Commentaries

DECEMBER 10th, 2007

Have You Thought About This? by A. Tangle

The Odd Threat of “ Brokeback Mountain” January 24th, 2006

The President Who Fiddled While New Orleans Sank September 23rd, 2005

The President Who Fiddled While New Orleans Sank

September 23rd, 2005

The tragedy of New Orleans has unfolded more publicly than any other national disaster in American history. We must read history for details of the Revolution and the War of 1812. Matthew Brady brought photo journalism to the Civil War; Vietnam and the Gulf Wars came into our living rooms on replay TV. The natural disasters – Galveston, San Francisco – were brought to us by wire. Not this time.

Hurricane Katrina approached New Orleans as we watched the weathermen track its course, and after it had demolished the city and a collective sigh of relief had been heaved at its departure, the levees broke and the damage soared right in front of us - live. During the week that the city was ignored by all but the press, we learned from local, state, and federal governments in their own spoken words that they did not recognize what had happened. Rarely has the media better conveyed official ineptitude.

By Thursday night we had learned that George Bush’s aides had to make a DVD to bring his attention to the destroyed city because he had not wanted to watch the calamity unfold on television. Apparently he does not like to be distracted by unreliable news sources. He prefers one page memos from his aides. For four days the president neither saw nor grasped the image of people trapped and dying in their attics as they crawled skyward to escape the water. And when finally he came, he dribbled out an appalling array of clichés and even a tasteless joke about his wild younger days in New Orleans. Without compassion, he stood transparent, naked of all the qualities he needed before an audience of millions.

Partisanship began to infect the air even before the water had begun to sink. This was a bi-partisan tragedy, but the politicians stayed mired in their positions. The president failed the country by not leading; the liberals rushed to make it an issue of race; the conservatives rushed to the defense. And the people saw through the whole thing on national television where they watched a prolonged parade of human political failures. But it may be that American citizens are too smart this time. They saw the corruption, the weakness. They saw volunteer firemen from New York return home because no one would accept their help.

We listened to days of drivel. Where is our leadership? Two weeks after the storm, the disgraceful vacuum persists. George Bush is flying back and forth looking for a heroic moment and failing still. Why has he not appointed a recognizable person to lead the effort? Clinton? Guiliani? Kean? But no. It appears Karl Rove has ridden his white steed once more to rescue the man who would be king.

The Odd Threat of “ Brokeback Mountain ”

January 24th, 2006

After a Yale student told me some of her male classmates are refusing to see “ Brokeback Mountain ,” I decided to ask the question of a few men whose minds are notably open on controversial subjects. “Are you going?” From all of them, various versions of “Not on your life.” Why? “I’m threatened,” each replied when pushed.

And I hadn’t even thought this was a controversial subject. The story, beautifully filmed and acted, is a story about love. The fact that it is a nearly flawless film means that any discussion is not about the movie itself, but about love between two men. “Would you see it if it were about women?” Yes. “Would you see it if it were about cross dressers or gay stereotypes?” Yes. Are men threatened because the love in this story is between two masculine men who they fear under other circumstances might be themselves?

Is it fair to say that a strain of bi-sexual feeling exists in most people and that the macho standard to which American men must hew has been built so solidly by our Puritan heritage and our strong man culture that men cannot even invite into their minds the thought that two men might actually love each other both physically and emotionally?

Think for a minute about the whaling ships of New England that left their home ports and stayed away for three years or more. What about the emotional and sexual needs of both those men on the ships and the women they left at home. Three years, give or take a few ports of call. Think too about the early west where ranchers, miners, and explorers were herding, searching, and scouting for months on end. Is this simply a subject that was seldom discussed or written about in the old days?

“ Brokeback Mountain ” is set in the heart of our mythic masculine west. We even have a man in the White House who hooks his thumbs in the waistband of his jeans, just to the sides of the big western belt buckle, bottomed by cowboy boots, topped by a Stetson. In an interview last week, Mr. Bush said he had not seen the movie. This time around, the wonderful western Stetson is used as partial cover for the emotions of a man who is surprised at the feelings that have taken him so by surprise.

Larry David (New York Times, January 1, 2006) makes fun of the question but in the guise of humor, he too is saying it’s a threat. Making himself out to be a comically susceptible fellow, he tells us lightheartedly that he’s too vulnerable to see it. Men are even avoiding talking about it by saying it’s a “chick flick.” No one should be criticized for not wanting to see a particular movie. But the reasons for that make for a great discussion in our current culture.

The Wyoming of this film is where Matthew Shepard was strung on a fence and left to die. It’s interesting, isn’t it, to realize how easy it is to dismiss his killers as red neck drunks and yet to see, on the other hand, that the most sensitive and educated of men still have trouble watching a movie of one man’s love for another.

Have You Thought About This?

by A. Tangle

We talk to each other on telephones that reach every corner of the globe with the touch of a button; we send and print photographs with the touch of another. We unlock our car doors from down the block. And how do we buy our food? Consider.

1) Drive to the grocery store. Park. After choosing a cart, walk up and down eight or so aisles – unless it’s Whole Foods and then you negotiate the maze. Grab the things you bought last week – soap, paper towels, rice, fruit, meat, vegetables. You know what you want. After all most of you have been doing this for decades.

2) Pull your choices off the shelves and drop them in the basket until it is full mostly of hard goods – still nothing for dinner – and so you then hunt for dinner wondering if the mind can bear one more day in this lifetime of deciding what to have for dinner.

3) Approach the checkout stand and lift each item out of the basket onto the conveyor belt.

4) Put items one by one into bags.

5) Put bags back into the basket.

6) Roll cart to car. Take each bag out of the basket and put it in the trunk. Drive home.

7) Carry the bags, as many as possible into the house. It is permissible to use plastic bags in violation of green rules because so many can be hung from your fingers at once.

8) Unload all the items onto the counter. Put them into the food closet or the refrigerator – one by one.

Focus hard for a minute on the part where you take everything out of the cart for checkout and then put everything back in the cart and then out again and into the car and then into the house. That’s a national embarrassment.

I give a great deal of thought to this enervating, boring, diminishing process. It is a repetitive, wasteful system, nearly humiliating in its power to reduce a woman to a robot the moment she walks through the Entrance door. It makes us ordinary. It deprives us of our uniqueness. If you really want to raise your temperature, consider that the reason this system never improves is that we, the customers, are providing all that free labor for the store. Why should they improve it? The newest wrinkle is that the cashier can’t bag at all because she might get Carpel Tunnel Syndrome, and she’s indispensable. She’s on the payroll.

I want to be able to order the groceries online or by phone, and I would like to be able to add “Please send also the entrée of the day.” I refuse to believe for one minute that someone can’t devise a way for me to get soap and paper towels from the store shelf to my house without park, roll, load, unload, bag, load, roll, unload, load. And they say we’re almost able to go to Mars.

Is This Possible?
by A. Tangle

Wearing the comic title of “Inspector General of Homeland Security,” a man whose actual name is Mark Skinner came on the TV news this week to answer questions about a problem that has arisen with nearly 11,000 motor homes (don’t call them trailers) that have no place to go. FEMA bought them – each 80’ long and wide-bodied – to serve as housing for the people who lost their homes to Katrina. Each trailer is fully furnished and includes a plasma TV. The whole lot cost FEMA $431 million dollars.

Why is the Hope Municipal Airport in Hope, Arkansas covered with acre after acre of these spanking new, unoccupied trailers? Because it was discovered that they can’t be taken to New Orleans to be used as temporary housing for the homeless because there is a law that says they are too heavy to be safely parked on ground in a floodplain. They might sink into the mud under their own weight in the floodplain that is New Orleans. If you raise them on some kind of foundation they become “permanent housing” that nobody wants and that also happens to be against the law.

And so they sit in Hope where FEMA pays $25,000 each month to park them in a soft field next to the airport runways. What to do? Since they are beginning to sink even in Hope, Inspector General Skinner suggests this solution: the government will pay between six and eleven million dollars to spread gravel under the trailers in order to save them. To save them for what? If the law says they can’t go to New Orleans, and they are sinking in Hope, why exactly are we going to spend taxpayer money to create a gravel field under unused trailers that aren’t going anywhere. What to do? It has been suggested that the city of Hope may decide to sell them to the public for one dollar each.

At that point Mr. Skinner, the Inspector General of Homeland Security, fell into one of those sudden silences that makes you think you’ve lost power to your TV. The embarrassing lapse ended only when the interviewer broke in to try to edge him toward some kind of answer. Since there isn’t one, Mr. Skinner just sat there staring blankly out of the TV set into the eyes of the millions of tax payers whose money is going to be used to build a bed of gravel to ensure the safety of thousands of trailers that will probably turn to rust in the city of Hope.

DECEMBER 10th, 2007

            The perspective now developing on the last eight years has created a fury in parts of the electorate that surpasses even the anger generated by Richard Nixon and his multiple felonies or Lyndon Johnson and the Vietnam War.

            We are trapped in the fifth year of a war started by a president and vice-president who lied to the American people about why it was necessary while linking it in an unconscionable way to 9/11 – an extension and justification of sorts of their newly minted War on Terror. George Bush and Dick Cheney wanted to invade Iraq. Now, five years later we are still blowing up bridges and buildings in that country and then rebuilding them with American companies hired at taxpayers’ expense. Why are we still in Iraq? Because civil war will break out if we leave? This war will end in a bloodbath of our creation whenever we leave. To bring democracy to Iraq? It is a concept so alien to the Middle East that is an embarrassment every time George Bush even mentions it.

           Our country, untouched by the hideous cost of this war in lives and resources, goes merrily on living in a toxic culture that has spawned a profusion of luxury goods – houses at $15,000,000, handbags at $29,000 – a market catering to obscenely paid corporate executives, entertainers, hedge fund managers, and international visitors. Don’t dare answer that those salaries are simply what the market will bear and that whatever the market will bear is fair. Eighteen year old kids are dying every day in a war that has come to resemble Vietnam in all its horrible detail. We lost 50,000 soldiers in Vietnam. Why did the country stir then and not now? Because there was a draft, and the students figured out that they did not want to die to protect the ego of their president. They brought America the rebellion it deserved at that moment. Why are we fighting these wars 10,000 miles from our shores? What for? Someone please tell me….and don’t say “for democracy.”

           Now we, who are only in our 200th plus year of a democratic experiment, are edging up to a vitally important election year while candidates from both parties try to be all things to all people. There has not yet been an authentic note, excepting perhaps, John McCain’s statement that America must not demean itself by torturing captives.

          These candidates, robots in dark suits, spout variations of the party line telling the collective what they think we want to hear. They take pot shots at each other instead of talking about how to fix a broken America. Let them tell us instead what they think about an exit strategy from Iraq, Supreme Court appointments, global warming, the healthcare scandal, the national debt, and dependence on foreign oil. Let them tell us who they really are. And then we can choose the one who is authentic.