Make America the 1950s Again

I don’t have the patience or expertise to prepare and offer a detailed political analysis such as those I sometimes (not very often) read on other blogs. Besides, once the comments start filling up at those sites, every possible permutation is trotted out, muddying the initial or preferred interpretation with alternatives that make at least as much sense. They’re interesting brainstorming sessions, but I have to wonder what is accomplished.

My own back-of-the-envelope analysis is much simpler and probably no closer to (or farther from) being correct, what with everything being open to dispute. So the new POTUS was born in 1946, which puts the bulk of his boyhood in the 1950s, overlapping with the Eisenhower Administration. That period has lots of attributes, but the most significant (IMO), which would impact an adolescent, was the U.S. economy launching into the stratosphere, largely on the back of the manufacturing sector (e.g., automobiles, airplanes, TVs, etc.), and creating the American middle class. The interstate highway system also dates from that decade. Secondarily, there was a strong but misplaced sense of American moral leadership (one might also say authority or superiority), since we took (too much) credit for winning WWII.

However, it wasn’t great for everyone. Racism, misogyny, and other forms of bigotry were open and virulent. Still, if one was lucky to be a white, middle-class male, things were arguably about as good as they would get, which many remember rather fondly, either through rose-colored glasses or otherwise. POTUS as a boy wasn’t middle class, but the culture around him supported a worldview that he embodies even now. He’s also never been an industrialist, but he is a real estate developer (some would say slumlord) and media figure, and his models are taken from the 1950s.

The decade of my boyhood was the 1970s, which were the Nixon, Ford, and Carter Administrations. Everyone could sense the wheels were already coming off the bus, and white male entitlement was far diminished from previous decades. The Rust Belt was already a thing. Like children from the 1950s forward, however, I spent a lot of time in front of the TV. Much of it was goofy fun such as Gilligan’s Island, The Brady Bunch, and interestingly enough, Happy Days. It was innocent stuff. What are the chances that, as a boy plopped in front of the TV, POTUS would have seen the show below (excerpted) and taken special notice considering that the character shares his surname?

Snopes confirms that this a real episode from the TV show Trackdown. Not nearly as innocent as the shows I watched. The coincidences that the character is a con man, promises to build a wall, and claims to be the only person who can save the town are eerie, to say the least. Could that TV show be lodged in the back of POTUS’ brain, along with so many other boyhood memories, misremembered and revised the way memory tends to do?

Some have said that the great economic expansion of the 1950s and 60s was an anomaly. A constellation of conditions configured to produce an historical effect, a Golden Era by some reckonings, that cannot be repeated. We simply cannot return to an industrial or manufacturing economy that had once (arguably) made America great. And besides, the attempt would accelerate the collapse of the ecosystem, which is already in free fall. Yet that appears to be the intention of POTUS, whose early regression to childhood is a threat to us all.

Fool Rushes In

So the deed is done: the winning candidate has been duly delivered and solemnly sworn in as President of the United States. As I expected, he wasted no time and repaired to the Oval Office immediately after the inauguration (before the inaugural ball!) to sign an executive order aimed at the Affordable Care Act (a/k/a Obamacare), presumably to “ease the burden” as the legislative branch gets underway repealing and replacing the ACA. My only surprise is that he didn’t have a stack of similar executive orders awaiting signature at the very first opportunity. Of course, the president had not held back in the weeks up to the inauguration from issuing intemperate statements, or for that matter, indulging in his favorite form of attack: tweet storms against his detractors (lots of those). The culmination (on the very short term at least — it’s still only the weekend) may well have been the inaugural address itself, where the president announced that American interests come first (when has that ever not been the case?), which is being interpreted by many around the globe as a declaration of preemptive war.

The convention with each new presidential administration is to focus on the first hundred days. Back in November 2016, just after the election, National Public Radio (NPR) fact-checked the outline for the first hundred days provided by the campaign at the end of October 2016. With history speeding by, it’s unclear what portion of those plans have survived. Time will tell, of course, and I don’t expect it will take long — surely nowhere near 100 days.

So what is the difference between fulfilling one’s destiny and meeting one’s fate? The latter has a rather unsavory character to it, like the implied curse of the granted genie’s wish. The former smells vaguely of success. Both have a distinctly tragic whiff of inevitability. Either way, this new president appears to be hurrying headlong to effect changes promised during his campaign. If any wisdom is to be gathered at this most unpredictable moment, perhaps it should be a line offered today by fellow blogger the South Roane Agrarian (which may have in turn been stolen from the British version of House of Cards): “Beware of old men in a hurry.”

Aside: I was going to call this post “Fools Rush In,” but I already have one with that title and the slight revision above seems more accurate, at least until the bandwagon fills up.

Addendum: Seems I was partially right. There was a stack of executive orders ready to sign. However, they’ve been metered out over the course of the week rather than dumped in the hours shortly after the inauguration. What sort of calculation is behind that is pure conjecture. I might point out, though, that attention is riveted on the new president and will never subside, so there is no need, as in television, to keep priming the pump.

Reality Check

I pause periodically to contemplate deep time, ancient history, and other subjects that lie beyond most human conceptual abilities. Sure, we sorta get the idea of a very long ago past out there in the recesses or on the margins, just like we get the idea of U.S. sovereign debt now approaching $20 trillion. Problem is, numbers lose coherence when they mount up too high. Scales differ widely with respect to time and currency. Thus, we can still think reasonably about human history back to roughly 6,000 years ago, but 20,000 years ago or more draws a blank. We can also think about how $1 million might have utility, but $1 billion and $1 trillion are phantoms that appear only on ledgers and contracts and in the news (typically mergers and acquisitions). If deep time or deep debt feel like they don’t exist except as conceptual categories, try wrapping your head around the deep state , which in the U.S. is understood to be a surprisingly large rogue’s gallery of plutocrats, kleptocrats, and oligarchs drawn from the military-industrial-corporate complex, the intelligence community, and Wall Street. It exists but does so far enough outside the frame of reference most of us share that it effectively functions in the shadow of daylight where it can’t be seen for all the glare. Players are plain enough to the eye as they board their private jets to attend annual meetings of the World Economic Forum in Davos-Klosters, Switzerland, or two years ago the Jackson Hole [Economic] Summit in Jackson Hole, WY, in connection with the American Principles Project, whatever that is. They also enjoy plausible deniability precisely because most of us don’t really believe self-appointed masters of the universe can or should exist.

Another example of a really bad trip down the rabbit hole, what I might call deep cynicism (and a place I rarely allow myself to go), appeared earlier this month at Gin and Tacos (on my blogroll):

The way they [conservatives] see it, half the kids coming out of public schools today are basically illiterate. To them, this is fine. We have enough competition for the kinds of jobs a college degree is supposed to qualify one for as it is. Our options are to pump a ton of money into public schools and maybe see some incremental improvement in outcomes, or we can just create a system that selects out the half-decent students for a real education and future and then warehouse the rest until they’re no longer minors and they’re ready for the prison-poverty-violence cycle [add military] to Hoover them up. Vouchers and Charter Schools are not, to the conservative mind, a better way to educate kids well. They are a cheaper way to educate them poorly. What matters is that it costs less to people like six-figure income earners and home owners. Those people can afford to send their kids to a decent school anyway. Public education, to their way of thinking, used to be about educating people just enough that they could provide blue collar or service industry labor. Now that we have too much of that, a public high school is just a waiting room for prison. So why throw money into it? They don’t think education “works” anyway; people are born Good or Bad, Talented or Useless. So it only makes sense to find the cheapest possible way to process the students who were written off before they reached middle school. If charter schools manage to save 1% of them, great. If not, well, then they’re no worse than public schools. And they’re cheaper! Did I mention that they’re cheaper?

There’s more. I provided only the main paragraph. I wish I could reveal that the author is being arch or ironic, but there is no evidence of that. I also wish I could refute him, but there is similarly no useful evidence for that. Rather, the explanation he provides is a reality check that fits the experience of wide swaths of the American public, namely, that “public high school is just a waiting room for prison” (soon and again, debtor’s prison) and that it’s designed to be just that because it’s cheaper than actually educating people. Those truly interesting in being educated will take care of it themselves. Plus, there’s additional money to be made operating prisons.

Deep cynicism is a sort of radical awareness that stares balefully at the truth and refuses to blink or pretend. A psychologist might call it the reality principle; a scientist might aver that it relies unflinchingly on objective evidence; a philosopher might call it strict epistemology. To get through life, however, most of us deny abundant evidence presented to us daily in favor of dreams and fantasies that assemble into the dominant paradigm. That paradigm includes the notions that evil doesn’t really exist, that we’re basically good people who care about each other, and that our opportunities and fates are not, on the whole, established long before we begin the journey.

Review: Rogue One

I see plenty of movies over the course of a year but had not been to a theater since The Force Awakens came out slightly over a year ago. The reason is simple: it costs too much. With ticket prices nearing $15 and what for me had been obligatory popcorn and soda (too much of both the way they’re bundled and sold — ask anyone desperately holding back their pee until the credits roll!), the endeavor climbed to nearly $30 just for one person. Never mind that movie budgets now top $100 million routinely; the movie-going experience simply isn’t worth $30 a pop. Opening weekend crowds (and costumes)? Fuggedaboudit! Instead, I view films at home on DVD (phooey on Blueray) or via a streaming service. Although I admit I’m missing out on being part of an audience, which offers the possibility of being carried away on a wave of crowd emotion, I’m perfectly happy watching at home, especially considering most films are forgettable fluff (or worse) and filmmakers seem to have forgotten how to shape and tell good stories. So a friend dragged me out to see Rogue One, somewhat late after its opening by most standards. Seeing Star Wars and other franchise installments now feels like an obligation just to stay culturally relevant. Seriously, soon enough it will be Fast & Furious Infinitum. We went to a newly built theater with individual recliners and waiters (no concession stands). Are film-goers no longer satisfied by popcorn and Milk Duds? No way would I order an $80 bottle of wine to go with Rogue One. It’s meant to be a premium experience, with everything served to you in the recliner, and accordingly, charges premium prices. Too bad most films don’t warrant such treatment. All this is preliminary to the actual review, of course.

I had learned quite a bit about Rogue One prior to seeing it, not really caring about spoilers, and was pleasantly surprised it wasn’t as bad as some complain. Rogue One brings in all the usual Star Wars hallmarks: storm troopers, the Force, X-Wings and TIE Fighters, ray guns and light sabers, the Death Star, and familiar characters such as Grand Moff Tarkin, Darth Vader, Princess Leia, etc. Setting a story within the Star Wars universe makes most of that unavoidable, though some specific instances did feel like gratuitous fan service, such as the 3-second (if that) appearance of C3PO and R2D2. The appearance of things and characters I already knew about didn’t feel to me like an extra thrill, but how much I needed to already know about Star Wars just to make sense of Rogue One was a notable weakness. Thus, one could call Rogue One a side story, but it was by no means a stand-alone story. Indeed, characters old and new were given such slipshod introductions (or none at all!) that they functioned basically as chess pieces moved around to drive the game forward. Good luck divining their characteristic movements and motivations. Was there another unseen character manipulating everyone? The Emperor? Who knows? Who cares! It was all a gigantic, faceless, pawn sacrifice. When at last the main rebels died, there was no grief or righteousness over having at least accomplished their putative mission. Turns out the story was all about effects, not emotional involvement. And that’s how I felt: uninvolved. It was a fireworks display ending with a pointless though clichéd grand finale. Except I guess that watching a bunch of fake stuff fake blow up was the fake point.

About what passed for a story: the Rebellion learns (somehow?!) that they face total annihilation from a new superweapon called the Death Star. (Can’t remember whether that term was actually used in the film.) While the decision of leadership is to scatter and flee, a plucky band of rebels within the rebellion insist on flinging themselves against the enemy without a plan except to improvise once on site, whereupon leadership decides irrationally to do the same. The lack of strategy is straight out of The Return of the King, distracting the enemy from the true mission objective, but the visual style is more like the opening of Saving Private Ryan, which is to say, full, straight-on bombardment and invasion. Visual callbacks to WWII infantry uniforms and formations couldn’t be more out of place. To call these elements charmless is to give them too much credit. Rather, they’re hackneyed. However, they probably fit well enough within the Saturday-morning cartoon, newsreel, swashbuckler sensibility that informed the original Star Wars films from the 1970s. Problem is, those 1970s kids are grown and want something with greater gravitas than live-action space opera. Newer Star Wars audiences are stuck in permanent adolescence because of what cinema has become, with its superhero franchises and cynical money grabs.

As a teenager when the first trilogy came out, I wanted more of the mystical element — the Force — than I wanted aerial battles, sword fights, or chase scenes. The goofy robots, reluctant heroes, and bizarre aliens were fun, but they were balanced by serious, steady leadership (the Jedi) and a couple really bad-ass villains. While it’s known George Lucas had the entire character arc of Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader in mind from the start, it’s also fair to say that no one quite knew in Episode 4 just how iconic Vader the villain would become, which is why his story became the centerpiece of the first two trilogies (how many more to come?). However, Anakin/Vader struggled with the light/dark sides of the Force, which resonated with anyone familiar with the angel/demon nomenclature of Christianity. When the Force was misguidedly explained away as Midi-clorians (science, not mysticism), well, the bottom dropped out of the Star Wars universe. At that point, it became a grand WWII analogue populated by American GIs and Nazis — with some weird Medievalism and sci-fi elements thrown in — except that the wrong side develops the superweapon. Rogue One makes that criticism even more manifest, though it’s fairly plain to see throughout the Star Wars films.

Let me single out one actor for praise: Ben Mendelsohn as Orson Krennic. It’s hard for me to decide whether he chews the scenery, upstaging Darth Vader as a villain in the one scene they share, or he’s among a growing gallery of underactors whose flat line delivery and blandness invites viewers to project upon them characterization telegraphed through other mechanisms (costuming, music, plot). Either way, I find him oddly compelling and memorable, unlike the foolish, throwaway, sacrificial band of rebellious rebels against the rebellion and empire alike. Having seen Ben Mendelsohn in other roles, he possesses an unusual screen magnetism that reminds me of Sean Connery. He tends to play losers and villains and be a little one-note (not a bag of tricks but just one trick), but he is riveting on-screen for the right reasons compared to, say, the ookiness of the two gratuitous CGI characters in Rogue One.

So Rogue One is a modestly enjoyable and ephemeral romp through the Star Wars universe. It delivers and yet fails to deliver, which about as charitable as I can be.