I know, I’m terrible/wonderful.

Terrible, because I don’t update.  Wonderful, for you, because you get a relief from being harassed about reading my writing.  Nobody likes to be made subject to self-congratulation!  But alas, your brief respite is quite over.

I’m at the PDX airport, staring out the window at the last distant ridge I’ll see until Christmas.  Speaking of Portland, would you like to know how God punishes His children when they complain to much about the weather He divinely permits?  By specially arranging for your supposed “relief vacation” site to experience a freak heat-wave and actually climb to about 10 degrees higher than the city you just left.  So watch it.  The thing is to shut up and learn something from your discomfort.  Since I haven’t learned that trick yet, the discomfort is rising.

And sue me (Suomi?) for incorrigibility if you will, but I’m thinking Finland for my next break.  Anyone?  While we still have polar ice caps?  :p  (Yes, I forced a bilingual pun into this paragraph.  Yes, I am a massive dork).

If anyone out there is not so riddled with ennui as to be still following the election, what do you think?  I’m starting to have trouble distinguishing between the two candidates, which honestly makes choosing less consequential AND less exciting at the same time.  It made sense for Barack and Hillary to have the same substance with different accidents … but Barack and John?  Weird.  Guys, the American public might actaully respond to a little distinctiveness, a little opinion.  To me, these candidates are like a guy trying to make his date pick her own surprise Valentine’s day venue.  Somehow he thinks the deferentiality will make her happy, but in fact it’s stupid, tactless, and spineless.  Cowboy up and pick the damn restaurant!

Overall, it just reinforces something that I’ve been realizing lately, to my surprise and horror: Bush’s ratings may be free-falling into the Abyss, but his doctrine is going to be the rule for a long time to come.  I want to cite the popularity of John McCain, whose chanting “bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran” to the tune of the Beach Boys’ “Barbara Ann” should be proof enough that his foreign policy is at least as bad as that of the Bush Administration.  And then the absolute spinelessness of the Democrats in Congress, whose proceedings begin to resemble a BDSM encounter without a safe-word.

Activist courts a menace?  They may be our only hope on the human rights plane.  Boumidene is pretty much the only good human rights news I’ve heard in the last seven years.

Now, in better news, I’m about to begin teaching orientation tomorrow.  Not that orientation is, per se, very exciting.  But teaching rather is, I think.  So yes.  Any of you who are teachers and have tips, send them my way!

Okay, it’s just about time to board the plane … time to be squished into 11-inch seats for the next five hours!

Dear U.S. of A …

Well, it’s your birthday again, the big 232.  Sorry I didn’t write earlier; I was at work.  Yeah, on the Fourth.  Nope, no extra holiday pay.  It kinda sucks.  

Anyway, I know how you worry all the time, so I’ll just say it right off: YES, I still love you.  Yes, I’ve not been the best guy — we’ve already been over the times I’ve said some mean things about you in front of my friends, the fling with Italy, a couple of one-night stands with Canada.  I’m not really sorry; after all, you’re getting awfully fat, and there’s a lot you could learn from Italy and Canada (and a lot they could learn from you – let’s be fair here).  But we’ve been over all of this. 

On the bright side, America, you do look amazing for your age, and listen, you’ve had the same government for all these centuries.  That’s more than we can say for just about anybody out there, friend or foe.  Your people are still freer than just about anybody, especially in the speech department, as the recent hate-speech trial of Mark Steyn has shown us (come on, Canada).  We’ll have to just overlook those couple of citizens (and a friendly software guy visiting from Canada) who happened to have the same names as terrorists and got stashed in secret prisons for a couple years.  Let’s face it, they aren’t typical.  But how many times do I have to tell you, just because someone’s named “Mohammad” or “Hussein” doesn’t mean he’s an Islamofascist Axis of Evil Mujahedeen?  Just like you keep saying everyone named “Britney” is a ditz.  You can’t say stuff like that, and I don’t care how many airheaded Britneys you know.  Got it?

You mentioned me giving you the “silent treatment” in your last letter, but I’m not going to apologize for that either.  I think I should’ve done it more, especially four years ago when you served up one of the worst electoral Catch-22s ever.  I still can’t believe I took the path of least resistance and voted for Bush.  Look where that’s gotten us.  Listen, I don’t want to have to give you the silent treatment again.  I liked Barack Hussein Obama quite a bit.  Is it you who’s forcing him to waffle on all his distinctives, or is that his own damn idea?  

Listen, 232 is old enough to hear a little tough love.  I don’t mean to be cruel.  I really only have two things to advise you on.  Number one: don’t be afraid to think outside the box a little.  Yeah, we might need to drill a little for some offshore oil, but seriously, we can get free of our addiction to Hummers and smoldering heaps of coal.  We can give tax breaks to green jobs, and to working people who need them most because their wages never keep up with these prices.  We don’t have to react the *exact* same way to every rogue state.  Sanctions, saber-rattling.  Saber-rattling, sanctions.  Maybe we could give a little more money to artists and universities and things that can help make everybody’s lives better, and a little less to corporate tax-breaks and all that supply-side hogwash.  Maybe we could think about offering paid maternity leave to all women, and health insurance to all children, kind of like every other G8 country, and, oh, you know, Pakistan.  Maybe not tomorrow.  But think about it.  If Norway beat us to the idea by a couple decades, it can’t be that horrendously difficult.

Here’s the second thing: please try to think way back to when you were little, and these States were just a huge crazy experiment, a kind of strange new blend of an Enlightenment utopia and the New Jerusalem, mixed in with a huge dose of common sense.  That’s what we’re supposed to be celebrating tonight, right?  Even if all the rednecks with the fireworks never read the Declaration of Independence, it’s still the point.  So think way back and tell me: what did patriotism mean back then?  Did it mean fighting in a war or having the biggest army?  Saying certain words and waving certain symbols?  (See this very thought-provoking article in Slate).  Or was it the idea of freedom from tyranny?  From things like taxes we have no say over, like getting soldiers billeted in our houses without compensation, like getting tangled up in French-and-Indian Wars that have nothing to do with us?  Wasn’t it something to do with a just government with checks and balances?  Weren’t you guys really terrified of the president, even forbidding us to call him (or her) “Your Excellency” because of that whole imperial tendency?  The whole idea of having a place where you can speak out and not have to worry about getting put on a “list” or having your mail opened or getting “disappeared” in the middle of the night by goons?  

The people you’ve put in charge of you for the past half-century, for the most part, think that patriotism is about having the biggest army, kicking some ass overseas, and storming hills.  Now, we’ve stormed some impressive hills in our history when we had to to do things like, oh, save the world from fascism.  But that’s what we have to do, not what we’re all about.  What we’re about is freedom: freedom to speak, assemble, bear arms, read, make love, live, pursue happiness.  Guantanamo and the Patriot Act notwithstanding, you’re doing a great job of that.  Just don’t let the other guys – the Machiavellians who want us to be all about threats and guns and torture and whatever else is “necessary” – win out, okay?  At least promise me that, and I don’t care if it’s the Republicans or the Democrats who win (see me sometime after work – I’ve got some great ideas for third or fourth parties).

And just in case you think I’m being a little harsh, listen: I’ll always love you to death.  I’m telling you this because of that, not for any other reason.  Hey, finish your cake.  You can work it off tomorrow riding your bike somewhere.  Hey, did I mention these gas prices are killing us?

Happy birthday!

Love,

Robert

An inconvenient movie?

Well, despite the ghastly reviews, I went to see The Happening, the sixth feature by thriller director / guru wannabe M. Night Shyamalan.  Last time I gave him the benefit of the doubt, contra the critics, I was horribly disappointed by the stilted, weird, anti-climactic Lady in the Water.  So let’s just say that my expectations weren’t very high at all.  

Actually, though, it wasn’t so bad after all, at least not to me; then again, I don’t have very exacting requirements for much “plot” in the movies I enjoy, and I think the lack of dense plotting and a “twist” were part of what irked critics most.  So don’t trust me, necessarily, unless you enjoy the sorts of things that I do.

For me, the best part of Shyamalan’s films has usually been the shooting: he’s willing to give long, patient shots that build suspense slowly, in a kind of Hitchcockian way, something most MTV-generation directors simply don’t have the attention spans to pull off.  For this feature, he teams up again with long-term collaborator Tak Fujimoto, and once again, most of the shots are classy and suspenseful, in a sort of art-horror way that I like.  However, the death of one character is blatantly foreshadowed by means of a cheap slow-mo shot of him driving away in a car that is worthy of a 1980s sentimental music video.  Most unfortunate, but it was the only major technical gaffe I noticed.

I may be wrong, but I think that the acting problems that some critics noticed are mostly script problems — Shyamalan writes all of his own movies, which has worked for some, but in this director’s case, not so much.  It’s as though he doesn’t stop to think about how people really talk, instead focusing on the “message” he wants to get across.  So there always has to be a big “conversation” (“Do you believe in … signs?”) in which someone ponderously just happens to start discussing spirituality, the unknown … you know, a more intimidating Eckhart Tolle or something.  This time, it’s a high-school student talking about forces of nature that will never be explained, which in a movie with the most vague title since 1982’s The Thing, is all too predictable.

So if Zooey Deschanel does little more than act confused throughout the whole movie, it’s at least partly the stilted script’s fault.  She also does the Mel Gibson “let me open my eyes as widely as possible for dramatic effect” thing (viz. Gibson’s Hamlet) — but let’s face it, her eyes are objectively a lot cuter than Mel Gibson’s.  Mark Wahlberg, who is becoming one of my favorite actors, is more than adequate as a leading man, but is also sort of forced into just “acting confused” for a lot of the time.  Maybe just a horror film convention (“Oh my god, where is it?  I think it’s in the … bushes!).  They both shine, though, in the few humorous moments and the “we’re gonna die so let’s renew our flagging love for each other through a speaking tube” scene.  Better than it sounds on paper.

Enough of that.  A lot has been made of the first R-rating this director has garnered, but I’m not sure what the big deal is.  Yes, there are a few gruesome suicides.  But they’re only shown for a few seconds each and are absolutely nothing on anything in, say, the work of Tarantino.  It’s a horror movie, guys.  

And then the inevitable brouhaha about environmentalism.  Again, I’m not sure why this is a big deal.  Wasn’t there a big global-warming blockbuster just a few years back?  And then Al Gore’s really quite excellent An Inconvenient Truth got an Oscar, something that the Shyamalan thriller is certainly not going to do.  It seems like a rather small blip on the climate-change radar screen.  And although the idea is seems rather silly to me — plants have been lying down and taking it from us for centuries, and no doubt will continue to do so — a movie in which plants get their comeuppance seems pretty timely to me, actually, and that counts whether you’re a climate-change believer or not.  Even the most fundamentalist conservative can’t really think that blacktopping the planet and belching smoke into the formerly blue sky is actually what was intended, by God or nature.

So basically, go and see it if you’re bored.  I give the whole package a B-, and advise Shyamalan to come see me in the writing center before attempting any more “naturalistic” dialogue …