An Olio
a miscellany of thoughts

December 31, 2005

 

Top Ten?

In recent years the top ten movies of the year lists have rarely included many of the films I thought were worth seeing, let alone being selected as some of the best. This year, the top ten movies of 2005 lists that I've read or seen on film-related television shows especially baffle me.

Most lists do not include the head-and-shoulders-above-all-others best documentary, March of the Penguins.

Most do not include Capote, with Phillip Seymour Hoffman's astounding performance in the title role, which should garner him the best actor Oscar.

Most do not include North Country, a gritty based-on-a-true-story film featuring Charlize Theron's Oscar-worthy turn.

Most do not include my choice for best picture of the year, Ron Howard's Cinderella Man.

All of the above are deserving of Oscars in their categories, but they probably won't win. Why? My take on it is that in the past 20 years or so, the Oscars (with some exceptions) have increasingly gone to the actors/directors/producers who are popular with the public and Hollywood's "A-listers" (a joke in itself) and/or a trendy-icon-of-the moment.

It's telling that some of the "best of" lists include movies that were better in the original version and need not have been remade, such as King Kong and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. It shows that moviemakers' lack of creativty and imagination also extends to those who generate the lists.

 

The Year of the Sheep

Excerpts from Garrison Keillor's 1/1/06 column in the Minneapolis Star Tribune:

"The moment for personal reform has come, the dawn of a new year, and my resolutions are as follows:

(1) If you see something, say something. (Sign on the New York City subway.)

(2) Don't project. (Advice given by a friend when I was stewing about ominous things lurking in the future.)

(3) Be appropriate. (Sign in a grade-school classroom in Seward, Neb.)....

Scripture tells us that we are like sheep, and as usual God is right on the mark. We grazing animals bumble around as coyotes or cougars never would do. They are targeted to go straight for the kill, like the guys on AM talk radio who go after Bill and Hillary for three hours a day Monday through Friday and rip them to pieces. They have been at this for 12 years. Loners in radio studios talking to loners in cars....

Sitting here in the neighborhood coffeehouse, among the strivers at their laptops, the old guys playing chess, the UPS men on break, the lady doing the crossword (ed.-- that would be me!), one does not think about greatness. One enjoys the simple creaturely pleasure of being among one's own kind."

December 25, 2005

 

December 25

Today's New York Times editorial:

You don't really have to be in the mood for the Fourth of July. No one ever talks about having that Memorial Day spirit. Even Thanksgiving can be distilled, without too much disrespect. But Christmas is something different. Feeling is the point of it, somewhere under all that shopping. To think of Scrooge is to think of his conversion, the cartwheeling of his emotions after his long night of the soul. But the more interesting part of the story is his dogged resistance to feeling the way everyone thinks he's supposed to feel - about death, about charity, about prize turkeys hanging at the poulterer's.

Most of us know how we want to feel this time of year, whatever holiday we are celebrating. We want to feel safe, loving and well loved, well fed, openhanded, and able to be moved by the powerful but very humble stories that gather in this season. We would like to feel that there is a kind of innocence, not in our hearts, since our hearts are such complicated places, but in the very gestures and rituals of late December. We would like to feel that we are returning to something unchanged, some still spot in a spinning world. Whether you believe with an absolute literalism or with a more analogic faith, whether you believe at all, whether you are Christian or Jewish or Muslim or merely human, the word we would like to feel most profoundly now is Peace.

It's easy enough to be cynical about the things we would like to feel here at the dark end of the year, to dismiss them out of hand as if they were only the battery-powered, sugar-coated, marzipan dreams of a child's holiday. Life is too tough, too embattled for such sentimentality. That is Scrooge's point exactly: no use pretending the world isn't exactly the way it is. One of the reasons we love to hear the story of an old crank like Scrooge is that he seems to embody this cracked old world, made whole in one night by regret and repentance.

One night will not do it, nor will one day. Peace does not simply appear in the sky overhead or lie embodied one morning in a manger. We come into this season knowing how we want it to make us feel, and we are usually disappointed because humans never cease to be human. But we are right to remember how we would like to feel. We are right to long for peace and good will.

December 18, 2005

 

Words of Wisdom

Joe Klein's column in this week's Time magazine begins with words said by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1910. It is one of my favorite quotes; for years I carried a copy in my wallet.

"It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again ... who spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly ."

 

Persons of the Year

Time's Persons of the Year 2005: The Good Samaritans

"For being shrewd about doing good, for rewiring politics and re-engineering justice, for making mercy smarter and hope strategic and then daring the rest of us to follow, Bill and Melinda Gates and Bono are TIME's Persons of the Year." Details: Time Magazine.

I think these are good choices and I'm looking forward to reading the issue.

December 16, 2005

 

Dingell's Jingle

Washington, DC - Congressman John D. Dingell recited the following poem on the floor of the US House of Representatives concerning House Resolution 579, which expressed the sense of the House of Representatives that the symbols and traditions of Christmas should be protected:

‘Twas the week before Christmas and all through the House

No bills were passed ‘bout which Fox News could grouse;

Tax cuts for the wealthy were passed with great cheer,

So vacations in St. Barts soon would be near;

Katrina kids were nestled all snug in motel beds,

While visions of school and home danced in their heads;

In Iraq our soldiers needed supplies and a plan,

Plus nuclear weapons were being built in Iran;

Gas prices shot up, consumer confidence fell;

Americans feared we were on a fast track to, well...

Wait--- we need a distraction--- something divisive and wily;

A fabrication straight from the mouth of O’Reilly

We can pretend that Christmas is under attack

Hold a vote to save it--- then pat ourselves on the back;

Silent Night, First Noel, Away in the Manger

Wake up Congress, they’re in no danger!

This time of year we see Christmas everywhere we go,

From churches, to homes, to schools, and yes, even Costco;

What we have is an attempt to divide and destroy,

When this is the season to unite us with joy

At Christmas time we’re taught to unite,

We don’t need a made-up reason to fight

So on O’Reilly, on Hannity, on Coulter, and those right wing blogs;

You should just sit back, relax, have a few egg nogs!

‘Tis the holiday season: enjoy it a pinch

With all our real problems, do we honestly need another Grinch?

So to my friends and my colleagues I say with delight,

A merry Christmas to all,

and to Bill O’Reilly, Happy Holidays.

December 10, 2005

 

RIP Sen. Eugene McCarthy

I am saddened by this news. My fellow Minnesotan Sen. McCarthy was one if the greatest political figures in this country, and so much more.

Former Minnesota Sen. Eugene McCarthy Dies at 89

04:35 PM CST on Saturday, December 10, 2005

Associated Press

WASHINGTON — Former Minnesota Sen. Eugene J. McCarthy, whose insurgent campaign toppled a sitting president in 1968 and forced the Democratic Party to take seriously his message against the Vietnam War, died Saturday. He was 89.

McCarthy died in his sleep at assisted living home in the Georgetown neighborhood where he had lived for the past few years, said his son, Michael.

Eugene McCarthy challenged President Lyndon B. Johnson for the 1968 Democratic nomination during growing debate over the Vietnam War. The challenge led to Johnson's withdrawal from the race.

The former college professor, who ran for president five times in all, was in some ways an atypical politician, a man with a witty, erudite speaking style who wrote poetry in his spare time and was the author of several books.

“He was thoughtful and he was principled and he was compassionate and he had a good sense of humor,” his son said.

When Eugene McCarthy ran for president in 1992, he explained his decision to leave the seclusion of his home in rural Woodville, Va., for the campaign trail by quoting Plutarch, the ancient Greek historian: “They are wrong who think that politics is like an ocean voyage or military campaign, something to be done with some particular end in view.”

McCarthy got less than 1 percent of the vote in 1992 in New Hampshire, the state where he helped change history 24 years earlier.

Helped by his legion of idealistic young volunteers known as “clean-for-Gene kids,” McCarthy got 42 percent of the vote in the state's 1968 Democratic primary. That showing embarrassed Johnson into withdrawing from the race and throwing his support to his vice president, Hubert H. Humphrey.

Sen. Robert Kennedy of New York also decided to seek the nomination, but was assassinated in June 1968. McCarthy and his followers went to the party convention in Chicago, where fellow Minnesotan Humphrey won the nomination amid bitter strife both on the convention floor and in the streets.

Humphrey went on to narrowly lose the general election to Richard Nixon. The racial, social and political tensions within the Democratic Party in 1968 have continued to affect presidential politics ever since.

“It was a tragic year for the Democratic Party and for responsible politics, in a way,” McCarthy said in a 1988 interview.

“There were already forces at work that might have torn the party apart anyway — the growing women's movement, the growing demands for greater racial equality, an inability to incorporate all the demands of a new generation.

“But in 1968, the party became a kind of unrelated bloc of factions ... each refusing accommodation with another, each wanting control at the expense of all the others.”
Although he supported the Korean War, McCarthy said he opposed the Vietnam War because “as it went on, you could tell the people running it didn't know what was going on.”

In recent years, McCarthy was critical of campaign finance reform, winning him an unlikely award from the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2000.

In an interview when he got the award, McCarthy said that money helped him in the 1968 race. “We had a few big contributors,” he said. “And that's true of any liberal movement. In the American Revolution, they didn't get matching funds from George III.”

After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, McCarthy said the United States was partly to blame for ignoring the plight of Palestinians.

“You let a thing like that fester for 45 years, you have to expect something like this to happen,” he said in an interview at the time. “No one at the White House has shown any concern for the Palestinians.”

In a 2004 biography, Eugene McCarthy: The Rise and Fall of Postwar American Liberalism, British historian Dominic Sandbrook painted an unflattering portrait of McCarthy, calling him lazy and jealous, among other things. McCarthy, Sandbrook wrote, “willfully courted the reputation of frivolous maverick.”

In McCarthy's 1998 book, No-Fault Politics, editor Keith C. Burris described McCarthy in the introduction as “a Catholic committed to social justice but a skeptic about reform, about do-gooders, about the power of the state and the competence of government, and about the liberal reliance upon material cures for social problems.”

McCarthy was born March 29, 1916, in Watkins, a central Minnesota town of about 750. He earned degrees from St. John's University in Collegeville, Minn., and the University of Minnesota.

He was a teacher, a civilian War Department employee and college economics and sociology instructor before turning to politics. He once spent a year in a monastery.
He was elected to the House in 1948. Ten years later he was elected to the Senate and re-elected in 1964. McCarthy left the Senate in 1970 and devoted much of his time to writing poetry, essays and books.

With a sardonic sense of humor, McCarthy needled whatever establishment was in power. In 1980 he endorsed Republican Ronald Reagan with the argument that anyone was better than incumbent Jimmy Carter, a Democrat.

On his 85th birthday in 2001, McCarthy told the Star Tribune of Minneapolis that President Bush was an amateur and said he could not even bear to watch his inauguration.

In an interview a month before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, McCarthy compared the Bush administration with the characters in the William Golding novel “Lord of the Flies,” in which a group of boys stranded on an island turn to savagery.

“The bullies are running it,” McCarthy said. “Bush is bullying everything.”

McCarthy was an advocate for a third-party movement, arguing there was no real difference between Republicans and Democrats.

In 2000, he wrote a political satire called An American Bestiary, illustrated by Chris Millis, in which high-level advisers are portrayed as park pigeons — “they strut and waddle” — and reporters are compared with black birds who flock together.

He blamed the media for deciding who is and is not a serious candidate and suggested he should have kept his 1992 candidacy a secret, since announcing it publicly did no good.

McCarthy also ran for president in 1972, 1976 and 1988.

For McCarthy, the 1950s and 1960s were the Democratic Party's high points because it pushed the Civil Rights Act through Congress and championed national health insurance programs such as Medicare and Medicaid.

“I think he probably would consider his work in civil rights legislation in the 1960s to be his greatest contribution,” his son said Saturday.

The bad times, Eugene McCarthy said, began with America's increased involvement in the Vietnam War and the simultaneous failure of some of Johnson's Great Society social programs.

Instead of giving people a chance to earn a living, McCarthy said, the Great Society “became affirmative action and more welfare. It was an admission the New Deal had failed or fallen.”

In recent years McCarthy had lived at Georgetown Retirement Residence, an assisted living center in Washington. He and his wife, Abigail, separated after the 1968 election. She died in 2001.

Survivors include daughters Ellen and Margaret and six grandchildren, Michael McCarthy said.

A private burial is planned for next week and a memorial service in Washington will be scheduled, Michael McCarthy said.