Author Archives: Mr. MacGregor

Bring on “The Purge”

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I love me a good sci-fi/thriller/horror movie. They are the sage fools of film. By being outlandish in concept they get to reveal the underlying pathologies of the era in a way a “serious” work could not. “The Fly” was one of the best films of the 80s. It explored everything — crack/heroin/meth, AIDS, and, yes Virginia, abortion (gasp!) — without directly mentioning a one of them (except for maybe abortion; she was trying to abort a pupa though. I mean c’mon!). And The Fly dissolves a guy’s foot with his vomit and then sucks up the foot’n'vomit glop. It’s nice to have an Other.

Better still is the dystopia. Unless there are zombies. Zombies are boring. But a good sci-fi dystopia should reveal the underlying humanity of the characters against the backdrop of whatever Big Change has organized the future into something unrecognizable. This underlying unreality should provide the opening to tell us something about society today. And if it’s a great movie, it will tell us or, like “The Fly”, at least explore things we know but perhaps don’t care to think about.

So, it is with great eagerness that I await “The Purge”. Here’s the set up: In the 2020s America is prosperous, safe and happy because for one night a year all crime is legal and all emergency services are suspended. We The People regulate ourselves in a bloody free-for-all. One typical but wealthy family is holed up for Purge Night, but the young boy lets in a man who is being chased by Purgers, and his assailants come looking for him.

“The Purge” is being marketed as a political film. The start of the trailer heralds the joyous statistics of the future like a campaign commercial (unemployment at 1%, crime at an all time low) and most of the last third of the trailer is scored by a direful rendition of “America the Beautiful” sung by creepy kidlets. The fake website for the film includes the platform of the “New Founders of America” that have created the Purge. Methinks the film has a point to make.

What separates America from other first-world democracies is that we hate each other. Indeed, we have always hated each other. Our history is bloody and since Watergate if not WWII the only time our political system accomplishes much is in a crisis or through a legislative strongman like LBJ. We combine third world tribalism with more-or-less first world infrastructure and institutions (at least on paper). And, lets face it, we have purged. Ask the Native Americans, the slaves in the Old South, or the child laborers of the Robber Baron era. Most of us were Purged during the Great Economic Collapse. I consider myself one of the lucky ones and my pay has been frozen for three years while my condo is worth about 2/3rds of what I bought it for. Meanwhile, the wealthiest have gotten wealthier and the remaining big banks have gotten bigger, having purged their competition. I’m alive and healthy, but my wallet was assuredly Purged.

Is there a better picture for what lies beneath the United States than controlled violence and mayhem? Perhaps “The Purge” will be a modern “Young Goodman Brown,” but instead of finding out that our townspeople are secretly sexy, maypole frolicking witches as Hawthorne’s hero did, we find that are fellow citizens really are ready to act on their mutual hatred.

Or…. Maybe “The Purge” will be twenty minutes of interesting set up, followed by 70 minutes of home-invasion (The safe space. Violated!) thrills with, maybe, a decent denouement. It wouldn’t be the first time a shitty movie had an intriguing trailer.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lekx_ZlqyWk

In Which Thomas Friedman Accidently Reveals the Lingering Angst of the Fear Years

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Thomas Friedman is the direct middleman of the NY Times’ Axis-Of-Centrist-Pseuds. To his right is Affirmative Action poster boy David Brooks (would his skills really merit NY Times columnist-dom if he wasn’t a “conservative”) who tried to concisely argue right-wing boilerplate early in his career, only to get picked apart by the Times’ letter writers. Brooks has since enveloped himself in arm chair human interaction “science” and become the slow lovechild of William Safire and Malcolm Gladwell. To Freidman’s left is Maureen Dowd whose modus operandi is to parallel the popular movie or TV of the moment with the latest DC palace intrigue — the sort of PoMo jab that would have been clever in a Freshman composition class at one of those New England colleges that starts with a “B” if it were 1983.

But it is T-Fried himself that is the Centrist Pseuds Centrist Pseud. It is he that will  declare that, look guys, we would get real about global warming and globalization if only there was a “centrist” compromise on the debt and the next six months will be crucial to the outcome of the war in Iraq because I talked to this cab driver in India and the Internet! Not all of T-Fieds ideas are wrong, but he is a bloviator who likes to point out how serious and important big THINGS are without contributing new thoughts or having any actual responsibility for any outcomes. He likes to pretend he’s at the table when the crucial decisions are made. No wonder he wound up being amongst the most egregious and pathetic of the Iraq War II Bush Patsies.

So it was startling and frustrating to read his column shortly after the Boston Marathon bombings, but before the perpetrators and their motives were known. “Fortunately,” spake T-Fried, “we don’t frighten easily anymore. You could feel it in the country on Tuesday morning. We’ve been through 9/11. We probably overreacted then, but never again. We tracked down Osama bin Laden with police and intelligence work, and we’ll do the same in this case.”

To which I responded, “Wait a minute Home Slice. YOU may have ‘probably’ over-reacted to 9/11, but I sure as hell didn’t.” Moreover, T-Fried you sure weren’t part of any police work to track him down. Indeed, I believe your advice was “give war a chance.”

Now, obviously I am not part of the “we” that captured and killed bin Laden. But The Friedster is right about the other “we” that “probably” (meaning “actually”) over-reacted to 9/11. I was against Iraq War II and not a cheerleader like Friedman. But Iraq War II was still perpetrated in my name.

Being part of this “we” is likely harder for those that were for Iraq War II or generally pro-Bush, but then changed their minds later. Bush went from amongst the most popular to the least popular presidents in American history over his eight years. But Bush didn’t change. If you went from support to despise, as millions of Americans assuredly did, then you must admit that at best you were duped and at worst your passions were manipulated to overwhelm your reason. Blowhards like Friedman aided and abetted this by puffing up the irrationalization for the war and not pushing back against the dictate that being anti-war/Bush was being anti-American. But at the end of the day the bombs were dropped, the innocents were slaughtered, the WMDs were never found and Iraq War II searched for a meaning like a forlorn hermit crab stalking a shell-less beach, as the casualties mounted.

WE definitely did overreact to 9/11, even if Thomas Friedman is probably too much a douche to admit it, and we all have to own that no matter how much we regret it.

 

The Fear Years, Slowly….

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The Fear Years: That miserable epoch from the terrorist attacks of 9/11/01 to Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, about September 1, 2005. In those four years a not-really-elected President started a disastrous war of choice, enacted tax cuts and economic policy that would destroy the economy, and oversaw any number of medium bore policy scandals that fester on as flesh wounds to this day. To oppose any of these ideas, to oppose the Man himself, was said to oppose the Country itself, or to be “with the terrorists” as the “President” Himself put it.

Fear was a condition, a means and an end. The condition of Fear — stoked by the immaculate timing of the the M&M-hued terror “alerts” — created a need to believe in and never critisize the Leader as he found a means to “fight” terror by invading Iraq, the result of which was a seemingly endless conflict that required countless treasure to assure success, or else the terrorists would win in the end.

While this mania waned it did not truly end until Katrina proved that the Bush Regime was too incompetent to even respond to a predicted natural disaster. An electorate that consisted of largely the same people that “elected” Bush twice installed a Democratic Congress in 2006 (over Bush’s declaration that to do so would mean that the terrorists would win) and elected Obama — who seemed, on the surface, to be the antithesis of Bush — in 2008.

It was as if the 2006 repudiation and the 2008 arrival of a “redeemer” would reverse the Fear Years. But that isn’t so. The disasters of the Fear Years still linger over the country. The recent Rachel Maddow documentary on the venal build up to the war in Iraq, and the sinister conflation of Saddam with al Qaeda, is jarring because in its simple factual way it forces the viewer to confront the the mendacity of the time.

Far more effective than the Maddow piece is the last two episodes of the Showtime series “Oliver Stone’s: Untold History of the United States.” “Untold” is the greatest voice-over history documentary ever made. That is not to say that I agree with all of its points. The hero of “Untold” is Henry Wallace, FDRs penultimate vice-president who was removed from the ticket in favor of Harry Truman by Democratic Party bosses at the 1944 Democratic Convention. Stone is convinced that Wallace’s humanism as President after FDR’s death would have crafted a different and better Post-WWII world than Truman’s militarism. Such “what if” speculation is fun, but meaningless. The same militant forces that prevailed upon Truman would have been there with Wallace too. Had he opposed them, perhaps they would have aligned themselves completely with the Republicans and we may have been treated to Reactionary Movement conservatives in power in the 50s and 60s instead of the 80s, 90s and 00s. Or maybe not, who knows and who can know? “Untold” also focuses most of its attention on Foreign Policy. It praises JFK for usurping his generals after the Cuban Missile Crisis and lambasts LBJ for escalating the Vietnam War, but doesn’t mention that it took LBJs legislative genius to pass JFKs program, and then some.

That said, what makes “Untold” so effective is Stone’s artistic genius for images. “Untold” consists of mostly 2 to 7 second visual clips, overspersed with Stone’s narration and emotive, cinematic music. Where there are not visuals, Stone isn’t afraid to offer representation in the form of movies, or even have actors mimic real figures while reading quotes that were unrecorded. The result is a psycahdelic stream-of-visual-consciousness that moves history out of the frontal cortex (where the Maddow documentary presided) into the older, visceral regions of the brain.

It is the willingness to mix emotions and argument that make “Untold” the most effective readily available analysis of Bush II and the Fear Years. In one brilliant sequence, “Untold” flashes through images of the great Coup D’etat of the 2000 election. The GOP putsch in Florida, Jeb Bush, Kathryn Harris, the Supreme Court, Bush’s rainy inaugural. The music is a stringy, blues version of the national anthem played at a pace so slow that it becomes an elegy. “It started with the 2000 election itself,” Stone intones. “The most scandalous in U.S. history. Wounding, perhaps fatally, the notion of democracy in this country…. Behooving the shenanigans of a banana republic the US Supreme Court intervened to stop a recount of the votes…”

It’s there, in all its stupidity and agony. Condoleeza Rice’s “nobody could’ve predicted…”. Bush’s “either you’re with us or you’re with the terrorists” (“Imagine any citizen in any country of the world being told by a man like this, ‘you’re either with us or against us.’”). The Patriot Act. Wire Tapping. Gitmo. Torture. “WMDs”. “The smoking gun in the form of a mushroom cloud”. Conflating Iraq with al qaeda. (“The descent into unreality was dizzying.”) The parade of ex-generals selling the war on TV while being employed by defense contractors.

“Untold” hits the mark, but it doesn’t linger quite long enough before moving on to harsh Obama for maintaining a similar military complex to Bush, even as he wound down the Bush Wars. Whether the recognition is intellectual or emotional, as an American you own the Fear Years. Even if you opposed the war. Unlike distant genocides like the settlement of the West or abstract ignoble actions abroad, Iraq War II was sanctioned by the populace. IT happened here. “Untold” and Maddow’s documentary make the case, but ten years on the ephemeral zietgiest of the polity is still largely in denial.

The Athletical is Political

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Note to all well-heeled, big wheel sports owners: Never let Mitt Romney in your team/athlete’s locker room before a match. It will turn out poorly.

“Bob Arum, the fight’s promoter, was a staunch Romney supporter. He told Yahoo! Sports “I think it’s great to have him here.”

Romney visited Pacquiao’s dressing room about two hours before Pacquiao walked to the ring. According to Pacquiao publicist Fred Sternburg, Romney extended his hand to Pacquiao and said, “Hi Manny. I ran for president and lost.”

http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/boxing/mitt-romney-gets-front-row-seat-manny-pacquiao-031002224–box.html

1980, 2004 and 2012

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In the summer Team Mittens posited that this would be a 1980-like election. Jimmy Carter was actually ahead for most of that campaign until the first debate. Somehow, by repeating, “there you go again” Ronald Reagan passed a fundamental plausibility test as President and thereby gave people the “okay” to dump Carter, which they were inclined to do anyway.

The Romneyians were somewhat correct. Mittens underperformed relative to Obama’s negatives up until the Debacle in Denver. Obama’s ambien-oriented performance garnered Romney the plausibility cred far more than Romney’s usually pile of verbal dung. Obama won the two debates he actually participated in.

But the damage was done. Just like in 1980, Mittens picked up anti-incumbent voters that weren’t sure about the challenger. The difference was that Carter was never really that popular — he barely defeated Gerald Ford even with Ford’s pardon of Nixon wrung around Ford’s neck. Also, “things” were largely getting worse at that point, whereas “things” are getting better too slowly now.

The challenger’s debate bounce, however, is just one more case where 2012 is turning out like 2004. Just as then a vulnerable incumbent largely outmaneuvered a flawed challenger, until the debate. Kerry cornered Bush over his obfuscations and misinformations aobut Iraq, whereas Obama was caught napping, but whatever. Team Bush won most of the news cycles after the debates and got an empty net goal when bin Laden cut an tape on election eve that created a worthy fugue with Bush’s fearmongering.

Similarly, this year Obama had won enough news cycles to reverse the momentum. Super Storm Sandy gave him the opportunity to lead. Mittens was pushed off the page, performed an absurd plastic “storm relief” event, and has resorted to lower tactics ever since. Sandy was beneficial to Obama both for the accolades from Christy, but also because it was a real event and made the churlishness of the right-wing dialogue against Obama appear silly.

Sandy has appeared to accelerate the slow drift towards the president nationally and in the swing states. Obama has the momentum heading into election day.

So, the election comes down to these three questions.

1.) Are the polls, in aggregate and general, using an incorrect likely voter screen that is too favorable for Obama?

This seems unlikely to me. Obama does worse after each LV screen, so they are already weeding out some of his support. It seems unlikely that they would not be restrictive enough, particularly in light of Team Obama’s ground game and their ability to get in early votes.

2.) Who are the Republican early voters?

Presumably, expanded ability to perform the franchise helps Democrats because more Democrats are of groups that are less likely to turn out. That is why Conservatron Secretaries of State have been trying to limit early voting. Team Mittens is doing better than Bush Patsy McCain did in getting early votes in (albeit basically by by default). Republicans are generally more likely to vote, but there must be some flaky Republicans. So is Team Romney increasing its margins or simply shifting people that would’ve voted on election day to an earlier day? Too early to tell, but numerically Team Obama is doing about as good or better than they did with early voting two years ago.

3.) Will voter suppression help the Conservatrons steal the election (again)?

Vote suppression is what is most sickening about the Republican Party. But I digress. Team Obama has tried to shift more early voting to absentee voting in Florida and has redoubled its ground game in Ohio. Still, there is no doubt that Team Obama would prefer, and would benefit, from the more reasonable early voting allowances of 2008. Will the votes shaved off of Obama’s margin under the 2012 rules allow the Conservatrons to “win”?

Overall, I don’t think so. Polling aggregates and models are modes of the day and are better than my own gut. In fact, they have influenced my gut. But here is how I’m calling it based just on my grey matter anyway:

Popular Vote: Obama 50.5%, Romney 49.1%

EVs, Obama 332, Romney 206

Of the swing states Obama wins: NH, PA, VA, FLA, OH, WI, IA, CO, NV. Romney wins NC.

Obama has been leading in most FLA polls towards the close, but the presumption is that FLA is a relatively red states so that Romney will win. My guess, is that seeing Obama handle Hurricane Sandy may have meant a bit more in FLA and NC, as those states are frequently hurricaned. It will be close in FLA and the voter suppression efforts of the governor may flip it for Romney, but I’m going to test the aggregate of the more recent polling.

NC is another interesting state. Most have Romeny favored there, but Obama has likely built up a decent lead with early voting. It is not as large as last time, because Romeny is actally trying unlike McCain, but numerically more people (and likely) Democrats have voted early than four years ago. Obama is getting his people to the polls, are there enough Republicans on election day to make up the difference. Obama has a similar advantage in Iowa, and Nevada may already almost be in the bag.

A final thought on the map, is that Romney has to win NC, VA, and FLA to begin to have any chance. That’s tough row to hoe when you are leading in one, about tied in the other, and behind in the third. If Romney wins that trifecta and then loses NH, then he has no non-Ohio path to 270. NH is relatively small, so if it’s called early that will be interesting for the rest of the night. If Romney hits the trifecta and wins Ohio then he only needs one more state to win, and then Colorado get interesting and scary. Still, that’s a tough bank shot — Obama only has to win one of those five states to get to 270.

Harry Reid

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You get the sense that he gave the Republicans every last chance that he could. That he’s an over-temperate person. Finally, he couldn’t help but conclude that they were not playing honestly — at all — he just reached a point where he just said, “fuck it!” I like it.

Is America Ready for its First Douche Bag President?

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Mitt Romney is a Douche Bag.

Usually, I refrain from uncut ad hominem attacks, but fealty to high-minded discourse should not get in the way of calling a demonstrated douche a douche. And Mitt Romney is a douche bag. Terrorizing some poor classmate with long hair in your prep school is a douche move. Needlessly dissing the UK’s ability to pull off the summer Olympics and harshing Londoners desire to get into the Olympic spirit is douchey — especially when you refuse to see your wife’s hobby horse “Rafalca” (Rafalca sounds sort like a failed Renaissance figure. The Billy Preston or Syd Barret to Leonardo, Donatello, Raphael and Michaelangelo — not quite Ninja Turtle worthy) do it’s weird tax deductible dressage waltzes. Insulting the Palestinians by saying they have an inferior economic culture comparable to the Israelis — while simultaneously tossing a “Shylock” libel towards the Jews for being *so* clever with finances — is a douche move (albeit with the possible merit of improving Middle East peace prospects by giving the Israelis and Palestinians a common enemy). Finally, being a multi-millionaire that refuses to disclose multiple years of tax returns, unlike every other modern Presidential candidate, even as you perform weird James Bond villain multi-national tax write off schemes is pure douchification.

Romney’s gaffes are different than the gaffes of chuckleheads like Generalissimo Bush. Bush’s gaffes were dumbass gaffes. Romney’s gaffes are mean gaffes. Hateful gaffes. They are the hectoring, curt putdowns of a bully too dense to realize the stench of his own obnoxiousness. Also known as, a Douche Bag.

So, why is Romney such a douche bag? Why was he such a mammoth douche on a foreign trip when all he had to do was mumble dull platitudes? Why is he an epic douche when elections are still popularity contests, he wants to be president, and tout les mondes destestes les douches?

The usually worthless Maureen Dowd has hypothesized that Romney inhabits a bubble wherein he is considered a kind, good man by his flunkies no many how many dogs he straps to the roof of the car and no matter how many jobs he eviscerates. That is part of the equation, but most prominent politicians are millionaires (although not as rich as Mittens and likely not born into such privilege) and most of them are not douches. JFK was fabulously rich, but he was not a douche. Just to be bipartisan®, I disagree with most of George Bush the First’s Presidency, but Herbert Walker the WWII paratrooper is not a douche.

No, the primary reason for Mitt Romeny’s douche baggery is obvious. It has been staring us in the face from the first: Mitt Romney does not drink alcohol and he never has.

Everyone is always trying to drink less and regrets the consequences of drinking too much. If drinking less is good then drinking none, ever, is better, right? Yet for something that is “bad” there are still packed bars and refrigerators swollen with fermented grain throughout the world. There are at least three breweries within a quarter mile radius of my home. People have been voting with their feet in favor of alcohol consumption since the dawn, and likely pre-dawn, of civilization. Booze is both Hogarth’s “Beer Street” and “Gin Lane,” but most people manage to stick to Beer Street.

There are many positive aspects of Beer Street drinking, but one of the primary ones is communication. Remember that dude you thought was a hopeless twerp your freshman year of high school that you chilled with at the kegger senior year? How about the random person at the bar you exchanged life stories with over several cans of Old German? Or the office adversary who is at least a “good guy to have beers with”? The person from a completely different culture that became your friend over Jager shots in College? Even the worthy political conversation that you had with an opposite-minded true believer at the corner tavern? Alcohol-lubed social interactions are the means which Americans, and most everyone else, lets down their guard to learn about dissimilar folks. In so doing, one also learns basic social graces of discovering more about someone without offending them — to probe without jabbing your finger on their bruises. This is the fundamental lesson in tact that the sheltered, cruel and dry Mittens has never undertaken. And it shows in each awkward “common guy” interaction he squanders and in each unnecessary douche bag utterance.

A teetotaler need not be a douche. Jimmy Carter was not a douche. But the mix of being born into power, possessing overwhelming wealth and having his taint ever-licked in his crony bubble along with the inability to perform bar stool chit-chat with others has rendered Mittens a major douche bag.

America is ready for its first Mormon President. Is America ready for its first Douche Bag President?

I hope not.

LiBOR Mules

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So we have yet another financial scandal involving astronomical sums of money and the manipulation of dense Bankster inside baseball operations and a post-hoc need to “do something about it”. In this case “it” is the LIBOR scandal in which banks banks lied about their borrowing costs during the Great Economic Collapse of 2008 to appear more solvent and manipulate interest rates and provide insider information to one another on financial deal making. In response, some “cost of doing business” money will likely be extracted from the banks and the status quo financial system will fester on fundamentally as it has.

But what about the financial scams that are unknown to the public?

Banking crises are becoming the new borderland drug bust. On occasion federal agents will “get ‘em” and parade piles of guns, laundry baskets of cash, Hefty sacks filled with marijuana, and enough bricks of cocaine to build a modest adobe house in front of the cameras to prove that The System is Working. Meanwhile, scores of other unseen mules zip the same stuff through, below, around and above the border to eager clientele in America. In the same vein, sleepy bank regulators eventually claim that they “got ‘em” — even as the next High Finance rip off is being perpetrated, unseen and unknown.

Either way, society takes it up the nose: voluntary white powder through a $100 bill, or involuntary $100 bills with no white powder.