What Have We Done?

I saw "The Social Network" a couple of days ago and I
was flabbergasted, appalled, so Goddam upset that poor
Maggie, my friend and companion, raised her hand at the
post-movie dinner to fend off my terrible tantrum. What
have we done? What has happened to our struggles against
heartlessness, against sexism, racism and careless
invective......where is the poetry of life in that mean-spirited
amoral generation of jerks. And that aint just a facncy turn of phrase,
poetry requires stopping and thinking......requires, as Wordsworth
tells us, "emotion stuided in tranquility"---- not a collection of
greedy, blowhard smart kids using their considerable intellect
to savage one another. Nothing wrong with the writing, nothing
wrong with the direction, the acting (it might gather in a bunch
of Oscars).....but it has been put to the service of
dehumanized brats who would use the remarkable new digital
treasures to blow apart every value we've so carefully looked
after since the Sixties. Nothing wrong with Facebook, by the
way. Nothing except it's ugly authors. Just take the treatment
of women----these guys are the American Taliban. Diminished,
used, even prostituted.....the women in the film all (except for a
brief Erica moment) are abused, chattelled and dismissed.
The rapid-fire dialogue skims the surface without wit or insight.
All right, I'm 80, and I don't "get it". But I can't leave it
alone.......Harvard, for God's sake....have we lost our best
University? My mother smelled this coming....she sent me
to Antioch. Does anyone care?


Ol Val

Tough Day

It's the night the Massachusetts election and it's time
to look things over. I don't think the burden of this
belongs on Ms. Oakley....who is indeed a hapless politician
and was almost reduced to one of those little wooden solidiers
with the red and blue uniforms and the awkward step as she
walked up to shake hands over a police barrier. It ain't her. It's us.
We've lost some of our bearings. We've forgotten our history
again. The tea partiers, the know
nothings...the fringes are always there. Hell, even the founding
fathers had their Aaron Burr. They lurk in the sun of their
nuttiness, paint graffiti on Obama's face and on the country's
monuments. It's part of the American game.

But this time the game (because of the cloture rule) had a deadly
risk. And something deeper than the usual mid-term bounce is
involved. We lost in Massachusetts!

We've got a black president and that means we have a
very small amount of slack. The American racial estrangement
gets suppressed just so long....and comes bouncing back at the least
crack.....we are, as my mother used to say, walking on thin ice.
Everything is twice as hard.....diplomacy, the economy, serious
legislation...everything is reflected through the racial prism. The least
mistake, a wrong sentence, a distracted candidate like Martha
Coakley...can do us in. Obama's decency, pragmatism and measured
policy isn't enough. He's got to lead....lead....lead....he got to be twice
the president that a comparable white man or woman would be. He
and his programs have to be so visible and aggressive and (this is
important) brave they blot out everything else. He needs a horse.