Seniors Need Love Too

Title: Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand

Rating: 5 Stars

This is a lovely drawing room romantic comedy that would have done Jane Austen proud. What makes this different is that the protagonist isn’t some young woman on the cusp of womanhood taking her first tentative steps to a mature love. Nope. The protagonist is a 68 year old retired military man that finds himself falling in love with the 58 year old local shop owner.

Major Ernest Pettigrew is a very proper English gentleman. There is a right way and a wrong way to do everything, and honor dictates that he must always do it the right way. When the world does not rise to meet his expectations, you can expect him to become exasperated and to make some rather acerbic comments. Although his wife has passed away a couple of years ago, he still misses her. He has an adult son named Roger. Unfortunately, Roger is pretty much a disappointment. Laughing in his father’s face at the thought of following his father’s military career, Roger has embarked on a career in finance. Instead of honor and glory, Roger is focused upon appearances and material gain.

When we first need Major Ernest Pettigrew, he is in a daze. He’s just learned that his younger brother, Bertie, has passed away. Slightly stunned, he answers the door wearing an inappropriate gown (gasp!). Standing there is Mrs Jasmini Ali, the 58 year old, fairly recently widowed, Pakistani owner of the local shop. Although there on another errand, she sees that the Major is distressed. She spends some time consoling him (and this being an English novel, she does so by making him tea).

From this act of kindness, the two of them begin to develop a deeper relationship. Being English, this involves taking walks together and discussing Kipling. Their affection for each other is obvious. However, since this is a romantic comedy, there must be a nearly insurmountable number of obstacles preventing their happiness.

The Major’s father, at his death, split up a set of shotguns by giving each of his sons one, with the understanding that the set would be reunited again when one of them dies. These are highly prized guns that were awarded by the Maharajah to the Major’s father for an act of bravery when he was in India. The Major is quite proud of his father’s guns and wants to keep them in the family. In the meantime, his brother’s widow wants to sell her husband’s gun and give the money to her daughter. Roger wants the Major to sell his gun to help Roger buy a cottage.

Mrs Ali has her own set of problems. Being a recent widow, her deceased husband’s family is trying to take over the business and shunt her aside. There are other family difficulties involving a young woman that has given birth outside of marriage and the young man that loves her but is being pressured by his family to shun her.

There are also the people in the village. As one of the relatively few eligible bachelors of a mature age, the villagers do not at all approve of the Major consorting with a Pakistani woman. They are, for the most part, proper and polite, but their disapproval is made manifest. Similarly, Mrs Ali’s extended Pakistani family wants nothing to do with the Major.

Will all of these difficulties be overcome? Will love triumph? What do you think?

This really is a wonderful book. The writing seems to just lightly traipse across the page. All of the characters, but especially Major Pettigrew and Mrs Ali, are wonderfully drawn. Many times the dialog made me laugh out loud. I just thoroughly enjoyed reading it.

This really did feel like Jane Austen woke up in the year 2010 and decided to write one of her signature works. Instead of focusing on an 18 year old ingenue, she just decided to write about the mature love of two people, having given up on ever experiencing it again, yet finding it one last time.

Living A Noir Life

Over the past couple of years, I’ve been working my way through the David Goodis oeuvre. Some time ago I’d written that I consider him to be one of the great noir authors, in the same league as Chandler and Hammett. I still stand by that. He’s different from them in that he’s more straight noir as opposed to hard boiled crime (his books don’t usually feature some world-weary gum shoe solving a femme fatale centered mystery). Even so, his books are an unsparing look at the dark underbelly of large American cities in the post war period.

I haven’t come close to reading his entire output. He wrote around twenty novels and I’ve now read five. I have detected a pattern that I’ve found interesting. As I read more, this pattern might now hold out, but right now I find it interesting. Here’s a quick synopsis of the five novels that I’ve read.

Dark Passage: It was written in 1946 and set in San Francisco. Parry, a clerk at an investment house, has been falsely convicted of murdering his wife and has been sentenced to San Quentin. He manages to escape. It then begins to be a desperate search for him to use his freedom to prove his innocence before the authorities can hunt him down and throw him back into prison. He proves his innocence but it’s useless when the actual murderer fakes her own murder via suicide to implicate him. He’s now permanently on the run and has to leave the country. However, while he was out he meets a wealthy young woman determined to help him. Even as he’s running away, they make tentative plans to meet in a town in Peru. This counts as a happy ending in noir.

Nightfall: It was written in 1947 and set in Manhattan. A recently returned veteran of World War II named Vanning is heading to a new job. Seeing an overturned car, he stops to help. The occupants of the car are bank robbers. They kidnap him and take his car. They check into a hotel. In a truly nonsensical plot twist, the robbers leave him in the room with a gun and a satchel full of money. He attempts to run. Another member of the gang tries to kill him. Instead, Vanning gets the drop on him and shoots the other guy dead. He drops the gun and runs off with the satchel. Somehow, while in some dense woods, he loses the satchel and later, can’t remember where or when he lost it. Now both the gang (that thinks he has the money) as well as the police (that think he’s both a bank robber and a murderer) are after him. He ends up in Manhattan where both groups catch up to him. Luckily, the police officer is kind of an expert in Freudian psychology (?!) and so actually believes his cockamamie story of forgetting where he left the $300,000 in bank money. By the time that the story is over, all gang members are dead, Vanning remembers where he’s left the money (so can return it back to the bank to avoid charges) and wins the girl. A bring shining happy ending for a noir novel!

Cassidy’s Girl: It was written in 1951 and set in Philadelphia. Cassidy was once a very successful airline pilot. Many years ago, while flying on a commercial flight, his plane crashed and nearly everyone died. Even though the crash was not his fault, as the surviving pilot he bore the brunt of the blame. Now, years later, he’s living in the slums of Philadelphia. He’s a bus driver. He’s a hardcore alcoholic with a physically abusive, philandering wife. He himself is having an affair with a woman that is drinking herself to death. While driving his route, a person, who’s been having an affair with his wife, manages to cause an accident in which several people on his bus die. Everyone is after him. At the end, he’s still alive. However, there is no redemption. There is no fresh start. There is no undying love. He’s back drinking and staying with his abusive, philandering wife.

Street of No Return: It was written in 1954 and set in Philadelphia. Set in the actual skid row of Philadelphia (with parts of it set in an even worse part known as the Hellhole), it features the homeless drunk Whitey. Outside of alcohol, Whitey is barely aware of the outside world. That is until he sees someone he thinks he remembers. As he follows him, he happens into a race riot. He comes to the aid of a dying police officer. Seeing him with a dead cop, other cops assume that he’s the killer. He’s taken down to the police station. Afraid that he’s about to be killed by the police, he escapes. He manages to fall in with a Puerto Rican crowd. We begin to hear his back story. Years before, he was once an up and coming singer. He and a woman fall in love. This becomes tragic when her current paramour, a crime figure, orders him to stay away. He refuses and he is savagely beaten. Most seriously, his throat is so damaged that he can only whisper. With his chance of love lost and with his singing career ruined, he descends into an alcoholic skid row haze. The person that he followed (that was the cause of his misadventures) once lived with his love. By the end, he has managed to stop the race riots and avoid the murder charge, but his love is once again forever gone and he’s reduced to drinking with his fellow drunks on skid row. That will be his future.

Down There (also known as Shoot the Piano Player): It was written in 1956 and is set again in the underbelly of Philadelphia. Eddie Lynn is a piano player in a dive bar. He seems content to just play for peanuts and to live in poverty. He seems to be barely aware of his surroundings. Things get upset when his brother, a career criminal, comes to him desperate for help. Also, Lena, the waitress at the bar, begins to exhibit an interest in Lynn. Again, we learn that Lynn has a back story. Years earlier, Lynn was a piano playing prodigy. He appeared to be destined for great things. He was also happily married. His career highlight was playing Carnegie Hall. Afterwards, he learned that, as a condition of scheduling that concert, his manager coerced Lynn’s wife into having sex with him. The shame caused his wife to commit suicide. This led Lynn to give up on life and put him on the track that has led to him playing piano in a seedy bar. Now with his brother and a possible love interest, he can no longer be the passive piano player. In true noir fashion, it does not end well for him.

Do you see two distinct patterns here? Before 1950, Goodis’ noir is pretty conventional. You have basically a good man that, due to conditions out of his control, ends up in a bad spot. He struggles, not always successfully, but ultimately does manage to extricate himself, in a fashion, from the situation. He even ends up with the girl.

Now look at those novels after 1950. In all three cases, the protagonist once had a position of responsibility or even fame / celebrity (pilot, singer, pianist). A great tragedy has brought them all down to nearly the lowest possible level. Events then conspire to even put that at risk. There’s not going to be any great redeeming love affair. If they’re lucky, they might be able to regain their previous, miserable existence. Also, all of these stories took place in Philadelphia.

What happened to Goodis during those years? Well, Goodis was a successful high school student and college student. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Goodis wrote for pulp fiction magazines. He wrote an astounding five million words during this period. In 1946, his novel, Dark Passage, was serialized for The Saturday Evening Post.

This was his big break. Hollywood beckoned him. Signed to a long term contract, he began to write a series of movie treatments. Despite all of his efforts, only one screenplay of his was ever made into a film. Apparently, he also got married (a marriage that he never really acknowledged) in Los Angeles.

Washed out of Hollywood, by 1950 he was back in Philadelphia, living with his parents and his schizophrenic brother. Apparently he spent his nights inhabiting the very seedy bars and clubs that he would memorialize in his later novels. In 1967, at the age of 49, he died of a stroke while shoveling snow. Possibly not coincidentally, days earlier Goodis had been beaten while resisting a robbery.

Could those years in Hollywood, that must have started off so seemingly brightly but eventually faded into mediocrity, have been so bruising to his psyche that it colored his later writing? His later protagonists are all men who fell after achieving significant success. Did Goodis interpret his own time in Hollywood as failure? Having tried and failed in Hollywood, was he now driven to populate his novels with failures now hiding from life in the dregs of Philadelphia streets? Did his one attempt at marriage convince him that love is not possible?

Like I said earlier, it could be that I just happened to choose novels that seem to suggest that as a theme crossing Goodis’ later work. I could easily be mistaken. Right now, it seems to be an interesting proposition.

Scamp or Villain?

Title: Suspicion

Rating: 4 Stars

It’s been a while since I’d dipped into Hitchcock’s body of work. One of his classics that I haven’t watched yet is 1941’s Suspicion.

Lina McLaidlaw (Joan Fontaine) is a virginal, priggish, young woman. Johnny Aysgarth (Cary Grant) is a slightly disreputable playboy man about town.

When they meet, Johnny turns on the charm. It’s effective, but Lina manages to fend him off. It’s only after she overhears her parents saying that Lina is going to become a spinster that she lets Johnny know that she reciprocates his feelings. They immediately fall deeply into love with each other. Knowing that her parents would disapprove of her ending up with such a bounder, they elope.

When they finally come back from a glamorous honeymoon hitting all of Europe’s most romantic destinations, Johnny shows Lina the gorgeous house that he has arranged for them. It’s only at that point that Lina realizes that Johnny has absolutely no idea how he will pay for any of it. He doesn’t work and can’t even imagine what kind of work that he’d be capable of. He’s an inveterate gambler.

Apparently bending to her will, he agrees to get a job and to give up gambling. It soon becomes apparent that he’s not up to living the straight and narrow. Lina’s finds out that he’s been fired because of embezzlement. If he doesn’t pay back the money that he’s stolen, he will be reported to the police. In the meantime, Johnny’s trying to coerce his best friend to risk his investment funds in an ill conceived real investment scheme. Lina, to Johnny’s fury, manages to scotch that scheme. Later, that same best friend dies under mysterious circumstances that seems to implicate Johnny.

All the while, Johnny is pestering Lina’s good friend that happens to be a mystery writer about the usage of untraceable poisons. When Lina collapses due to stress, Johnny very solicitously offers her a glass of milk. Wary, she doesn’t drink it but is later enticed to go with a drive with him. As he speeds ever so fast and ever so close to the sheer cliff edge, is Johnny about to kill her?

First thing to know is that the novel upon which the film is based is actually quite clear that Johnny is, in fact, a murderer. Hitchcock’s story was that that was also his wish, but the studio, wanting to protect the valuable property of Cary Grant, refused to allow him to play the role of the charming murderer. An argument can be made that this requirement actually made for a richer film. Grant’s Johnny is, without a doubt, a charming unscrupulous liar but we are left in doubt regarding whether or not he’s a murderer. He has a convincing story to tell for each lie that Lina catches him in. Even at the end (spoiler alert for an 80 year old film), after he apparently nearly throws her out of the car, he has a completely convincing story for his actions. In fact, his story is so convincing that Lina apologizes for the accusation and begs him to take her back. At the end, they’re apparently reconciled, but really, what does the future hold for Lina?

Lina is definitely the 1940s Tammy Wynette Stand By Your Man. She’s the template for the naive, innocent woman who gives her whole heart to a completely undeserving man. She has a moment where she decides to leave him but quickly changes her mind and tears up the note. Joan Fontaine won a best actress Academy award for her performance. I kind of found that a bit amusing because it seemed as if she did most of her acting with her pencil thin eyebrows. She conveyed a broad range of emotions with the most subtle raising of one. It’s interesting that Fontaine is the only actor to have won an Oscar in a Hitchcock film.

It might not be the first time in film, but it would seem to be a pretty early cinematic example of negging. On their first walk together, Johnny mocks Lina’s hair style. His ‘affectionate’ pet name for her is Monkey Face. After they marry, when challenged by her, Johnny’s go to response is to mock her intelligence or her lack of experience. Like I said, Tammy Wynette has nothing on Lina’s devotion and duty to her husband.

The other Hitchcock film that seems closest in theme to this one was Shadow of A Doubt. In that film, a teenage young girl meets her uncle. She immediately idolizes him. Over time, though, she begins to suspect him of murder. She herself begins to experience a mysterious set of accidents. Ultimately, she learns the truth of him. They struggle while on a moving train and he falls off to his death.

In both cases, there is a naive woman that immediately falls for a charming, possibly murderous con man. Are these films saying something about Hitchcock’s thoughts on women? Does he think that they’re naive and susceptible to a handsome man with surface charms?

Because Survival Is Insufficient

Title: Station Eleven

Rating: 5 Stars

For obvious reasons, for the last two years I’ve been dipping into dystopian novels, especially those with a bias towards having a pandemic cause. In the past two years, I see that I’ve read Lawrence Wright’s technology / science heavy The End of October, Colson Whitehead’s zombie Zone One, the pod people of Jack Finney’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Ben Winter’s police procedural during end times The Last Policeman,  Hanna Jameson’s trapped hotel guests in The Last, and the great French existentialist classic, Albert Camus’ The Plague . I’m not sure if it’s healthy for me to be doing this or not. Maybe it’s helping me find some meaning in what we’ve been going through.

I’ve enjoyed, if I can say that, reading all of them. Even so, Station Eleven is my clear favorite.

A noted actor dies onstage while performing as Lear. That same night, a pandemic, the Georgia Flu, lands in North America with a vengeance. Within a matter of weeks, over 99 percent of the world’s population is dead. Civilization has collapsed. There is no electricity. There is no internet. After the gas spoils with age, there is no motorized transportation.

Multiple stories unfold in a nonlinear manner. There is the story of the times before the plague. It’s centered around the actor Arthur Leander. It tells his story of his rise to fame and celebrity, his three ex-wives, and his son.

Another story revolves around when the plague hits and its immediate aftermath. This is centered around Jeevan Chaudhary, a relatively young man trying to find his way. After previous jobs including paparazzi and media journalist (including minor encounters with Leander), he is now in training to be a paramedic. He’s in the audience when Leander suffers his heart attack onstage. He tries and fails to save Leander. Later that night, a doctor friend at the local hospital calls him, coughing, to tell him to vacate the city immediately. He can’t because of his paralyzed brother. He stays with his brother as they obsessively watch the news as the world collapses around him. Running out of food and water, his brother, not wanting to be a hindrance, takes his own life. Chaudhary then sets out alone, wondering if he’s the last person on earth.

The third story takes place some twenty years later. This part centers around Kirsten. She was a child actor in the play that Leander died in. Twenty years later, she only has vague memories of the time before the pandemic. She can barely remember working lights and air conditioning.

The ensuing years have toughened her. Her brother kept her alive in the early years, memories of which she has blacked out. Now, she’s an expert with a knife. She has two knife tattoos, signifying the lives that she’s taken.

Even so, she has not lost her artistic side. Many years previously a traveling symphony came to the little town in which she was living. The symphony’s slogan is “Because survival is insufficient”. In addition to music, they also perform Shakespeare. She joins with the symphony and has been with them ever since.

Now twenty years later, the symphony is in danger. A dangerous prophet appears to be in pursuit of them. Members of the symphony are mysteriously disappearing. When Kirsten and a companion return from a fishing expedition, the symphony convoy itself has disappeared.

Will Kirsten be reunited with the traveling symphony? Who is the prophet? Is there any hope that civilization can be sustained? Is there hope for the future?

First, let me get this out of the way. This is the best novel that I’ve read in years. I was just enthralled by it. I ended up reading in about two days.

Mandel’s rendering of the immediate aftermath of the pandemic, and even more so, the period twenty years later, feel spot on.

In the immediate aftermath, some try to carry on civilization as if nothing happened. There’s still television news, although it degrades over time until finally there’s just a camera pointing at an empty sound stage. Roads are completely impassible due to stalled cars. Every person you encounter can mean you harm.

Twenty years later, there’s no Mad Max army of deranged desperadoes, because there’s no gas. There are still violent, dangerous people in the world, but twenty years later, bullets are so valuable that they are used almost exclusively for hunting. Children are being born in the aftermath. Now, some of them are teenagers. They can’t even begin to imagine how planes were able to fly, how you were able to talk to anyone anywhere in the world, how nearly any question could be answered by a interconnected device that can fit in your pocket. All that they can see of the past are the rusted, degrading husks of cars, planes, and houses.

All of these stories are beautifully told. Given the aftermath and it’s tremendous impact upon civilization, the interlinkages between the stories somewhat strains credulity. Even so, doing so gave the novel a satisfying sense of closure and structure.

I even found moments of dark comedy. One man, twenty years later, recalls his last voice mail. It was “Let’s touch base with Nancy, and then we should reach out to Bob and circle back next week. I’ll shoot Larry an email.” Twenty years on, the sheer idiocy of this stream of corporate cliches sickens him. He brings it up constantly to those who will listen to him. The phrase shooting of an email seems particularly egregious to him. Having this little one off scene in the novel was very amusing.

The characters and their stories were all compelling. I’ve omitted several major characters that play significant roles in the novel. There’s a whole sub plot involving a snow globe and a bound limited edition graphic comic set that also links the various threads together.

This is one of the finest constructed and engaging novels that I’ve read.  A Station Eleven HBO series has been recently released. I was so enthralled with the novel that I’m struggling with whether or not I want to potentially spoil my novel experience by watching it.

Regardless, I know for a fact that I’m going to have to go back and read all of Mandel’s work.

When A Party Goes Rogue

A year ago yesterday, a group of Americans tried to thwart the will of the American people. As I’ve written  before, the vote wasn’t really even that close. Nothing at all like the 2000 election and the fiasco in Florida. Biden won the national vote by seven million votes. Even the states that were close (Pennsylvania, where I now live, being one of them) weren’t that close. Recounts were done when there were no need for recounts. Multiple election audits were performed. Dozens of unsuccessful lawsuits were filed. A very few instances of individual election fraud were found. Hilariously enough, it was usually people trying to vote twice for Trump. No national election was ever under so intense a microscope. Even after all of that, absolutely nothing changed in the results.

Yet, tens of millions of people refused to believe the results. Thousands, encouraged by media looking to profit off of them and by a President whose ego just can’t contain the thought of losing, gathered in our nation’s Capital. Told by the President to fight like hell, they precisely did that. Despite their Blue Lives Matter beliefs, they overran, beat, and injured police officers in their drive to stop the electoral count. It’s scary to contemplate what would have happened if they encountered Nancy Pelosi, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or even Mitt Romney, when he luckily, at a run, zigged instead of zagged and barely escaped the mob.

I remember watching it in a state of disbelief. How could one political party, here in the USA, even contemplate, with barely the thinnest of fig leaf of excuses,  overturning the popular will of the people?

Would you be shocked to learn that it wasn’t the first time? Let me take you back to the election of 1800.

This was the first real presidential election that was dominated by parties. John Adams, the sitting President, was of the Federalist party. Thomas Jefferson led the Democratic-Republican party. If you think partisan strife is bitter now, check out this election. Hard core partisan newspaper men and pamphleteers stoked the fear and rage of their readers. Federalist partisans said that if Jefferson was elected, that everyone should hide their family bibles because Jefferson will send out troops to confiscate them. Democratic-Republicans countered with the claim that, if Adams was reelected, he would turn the country over to the English. To reiterate, these claims were made about Adams and Jefferson, two of our founding father giants.

Well, in 1800, Jefferson won a clear victory. It was a repudiation of the Federalist party, and soon it would cease to exist.

There was just one problem. When the electoral college met, each member cast two votes. This was conceived before there were political parties, so the thinking was that the two people who received the most votes would serve as President / Vice President. This being the first real election with political parties, Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr ran as a ticket. There was a clear understanding that Jefferson was to be the President and Burr the Vice President. However, the geniuses of the Democrat-Republican electors each cast one vote for Jefferson and one vote for Burr. Thus, when the electoral votes were counted, both Jefferson and Burr got 73 votes.

What happens when no candidate has a majority of votes in the electoral college? The election is thrown to the House of Representatives to decide.

The problem here is that the incumbent House was still composed of a majority of Federalist lawmakers. They would be removed when the next session is started, but until then, they were still in charge. Despite the fact that everyone in the country knew who was supposed to be President, these Federalists so hated Jefferson that they attempted to thwart the will of the people by selecting someone else. They saw Burr as the lesser of two evils and accordingly chose him. Burr, faced with the sudden possibility of falling into the Presidency, stayed mum during all of this.

Jefferson needed nine states to vote for him but could only get up to eight. This went on for thirty-five ballots.

What saved our country from such a debacle? Andrew Hamilton.

Hamilton was the founder of the Federalist party. He and Jefferson had intense disagreements while serving in Washington’s cabinet. If anyone would be horrified by the election of Jefferson, it would have been Hamilton.

However.

Even though Hamilton had severe political disagreements with Jefferson, he had a burning personal hatred of Burr. Both coming out of New York politics, they loathed each other. This loathing would later have fatal consequences for Hamilton when the two of them dueled at Weehawken.

Hamilton actively convinced his fellow Federalists to choose Jefferson. He said it was better to elect a man with wrong principles than one with none (meow!).

His strategy worked. He convinced enough Federalists to stop supporting Burr that Jefferson was able to win ten states and thus the Presidency.

There you go. Two serious constitutional crises that could have led to dire consequences. In one case, Hamilton’s personal hatred overrode his political calculations. In the other, after four years of lapdog subservience, Mike Pence somehow discovered a backbone and stood up to Trump when it really mattered.

Taxation By Citation

Title: Profit and Punishment

Rating: 4 Stars

By nonfiction standards, this is a relatively slight book, coming in at around 190 pages. I thought it would take me only a day or two to read. Instead, it took twice as long. Not because it was difficult to read, but I would end up getting so infuriated with what I was reading that I had to take periodic breaks.

I hold positions that most would consider, depending upon your political hue, progressive or liberal or godless card carrying communist bent on overthrowing civilization. Even so, I understand that many, in fact, tens of millions of people hold different positions. All of those people can’t be evil and/or stupid. So, even though I disagree, I understand that many people hold conservative opinions that are at odds with me. I understand that there are legitimate political opinions that disagree with certain liberal ideas like, say, a graduated income tax. OK, maybe you think that a surgeon shouldn’t pay a higher income tax rate than a fast food worker. However, I don’t know anyone who thinks that the fast food worker should have a heavier tax burden than the surgeon, right?

Well, welcome to the United States of America.

Two really bad things happened simultaneously in our country. First, there was the rise of the likes of Grover Nordquist and his fetishist hatred of taxes. By now, any member of the Republican party has to swear off tax increases if they want to have a political career. Secondly, politicians of all stripes have discovered the electability virtues of being tough on crime. This has caused a huge increase in numbers of being arrested, convicted, and sentenced.

There’s a problem. All of these new arrests require more deputies, prosecutors, judges, jails, and prisons. Well, especially in conservative states, you can’t raise taxes if you want to keep your political career. Even after you strip other state priorities like education to the bone (which states like Oklahoma definitely have), there is still a funding shortfall.

What to do? What to do?

The solution that such municipalities came up with was fees. Now, a fee is completely different than a tax. Sure, it’s the government compelling a citizen to give it money, but it’s totally different. It’s even spelled differently.

Here’s an example. A woman needed to go to another state on a medical emergency. Knowing that her car couldn’t make it, she bought her ex-boyfriend’s car for $400. She made the trip. On her return back, she was pulled over by the police for a cracked windshield that had been repaired. The officer acknowledged that it was repaired, so no longer had a reason to continue. Instead, he asked to search the car. Since she’s only had the car for a weekend and not really knowing her rights, she acquiesced. There were no drugs in the car but a pipe with pot residue was found and she was arrested. Her public defender advised her to plead ‘no contest’ to make it go away.

In so doing, here is the list of fees that she was assessed:

• $100 court assessment
• $100 victims’ compensation fund
• $40 a month probation cost
• $100 mental health fee
• $100 trauma care assistance fund
• $25 for Oklahoma court information system
• $15 to district attorney council
• $10 for courthouse security
• $6 for the law library
• $5 for sheriff’s service
• $27.50 to the county clerk
• $17 for a collections fee

Since she faced two counts, she was charged each of these fees twice.

Now, I ask you, if you had to scrape together $400 to buy an ex boyfriend’s car just because you’re going on a long car trip, what is the likelihood that you’re going to come up with money to pay for all of this?

Not exactly a spoiler, but the fact is that you won’t. No problem, the court will put you on a payment plan. What that means is that every month, until you somehow miraculously pay it off, you have to stand in front of a judge and make some token payment and explain why you can’t pay it all off.

What happens if you’re sick or you forget or you have to work or your car breaks down and you don’t make it to the court house? Well, then the judge makes out an arrest warrant. Next time you get pulled over for any old reason, they’ll run your name, see that you have a warrant, and will take you to jail.

In case that’s not bad enough, the small, more rural municipalities will actually charge you a fee for each day that you stay in jail. If you’re of low income, then you won’t be able to make bail. It could take days to get a public defender assigned to you. It could take days for the lawyer to then visit you. Meanwhile, the bill is growing. In the interim, you might have already lost your job. You might have even lost your children. Even if you’re innocent, there’s a real good chance that you’ll take the guilty plea just to get out of prison and try to reassemble your life. In fact, the judicial system is so overwhelmed with defendants that it actually counts on them pleading out. Public defenders that actually fight for their clients get bad reputations and are reported to the bar for discipline.

Just in case you’re not infuriated, consider the case of a woman arrested for shoplifting a $8 tube of mascara from Walmart. By the time her ordeal was done, she’d spent a year in a moldering jail and was assessed a fee of over $15K. Yes, a year in jail and $15,000 for a tube of mascara.

This is nothing more than a 21st century debtors’ prison. There’s no other way to look at it, and it’s all being driven by the need for revenue. There are e-mails from judges telling police to go out and arrest people so that fees can be assessed. They make pretty explicit threats that by not doing so, the police departments will lose funding. Some sheriffs’ retirement funds are being funded by these fees. Some municipalities get 75% of their budget from the assessment of these fees.

The sad thing is that it doesn’t really work. The people that get entrapped in these schemes are quite literally the one group of people that can’t pay them. In some cases, the cost of collection outweighs the fees collected. Police officers that should be out, oh, I don’t know, fighting crime, are serving as the muscle for debt collections. It would be so much more effective just to levy a tax for the services that the government provides.

Messenger admits, to make his message more palatable to his Missouri readers (he works for a Missouri newspaper), that his early examples of people suffering this fate were all white. Messenger got most of his cases from rural Missouri, which is overwhelmingly poor and white.

Over policing is an even more serious problem for people of color. Statistically it’s true, but if you need an example, look no further than Philandro Castile. He was the black man who was pulled over, voluntarily told the police officer that there was a firearm in his car, and was almost immediately shot and killed as a result. From the age of nineteen to thirty-two, he was pulled over forty-six times. He had over $6000 in fines at his death. If you’re not a person of color, how many times in your life have you been pulled over? For a short period of time, my job was to drive. Even so, in forty years of driving, I’ve been pulled over less than five times. I really doubt that I’m that much of a better driver than Castile was.

The title of this blog says it all. These fees are nothing more than a tax on low income people that can’t extricate themselves from the judicial industrial complex.

The very people that should feel protected by our legal system are victimized by it.

A Harlem Love Letter

Title: Harlem Shuffle

Rating: 4 Stars

I’ve said this before (in fact, fairly recently), but I’m amazed at Colson Whitehead’s range. He does not allow himself to be limited by genre. He’s written a zombie novel, a magic realism antebellum novel, a grim novel about a black children’s reformatory, a novel about philosophical differences between two schools of elevator inspectors (yes, seriously), and a non-fiction book about playing in the world series of poker. And that’s just the books that I’ve read.

In Harlem Shuffle, he changes it up yet again.This novel, set in 1950s / 1960s Harlem, is a crime genre.

The novel centers around Ray Carney. His father was a notorious hard criminal. Carney is trying a different path. When we first meet him, he’s just started a furniture store. He, his wife, and a daughter (soon to be joined by a son) live in an apartment with no windows to the outside and adjacent to train tracks. Although not wanting to be a career criminal like his father, he does supplement his business by serving as a middleman for property thieves. They sell to him and he has other contacts (eg for radios or jewelry) that he can offload the stolen material to. He’s just barely scraping by.

In the first story, set in 1959, Carney’s cousin Freddie tries to rope him into a robbery of the safe deposit boxes at the famed Hotel Theresa in Harlem. Carney was raised with Freddie and they’re very close. However, Freddie was always full of trouble and got Carney into all kinds of scrapes as they were growing up.

Knowing Freddie’s history, Carney refuses. Unfortunately, Freddie tells the other guys that Carney’s in. To keep Freddie out of trouble with the others, he agrees to join them. They do rob the safe deposits but one of the deposit holders turns out to be a major crime figure in Harlem. The word goes out that the robbers will be severely dealt with when caught. Carney is now fighting to stay alive.

In the second story, set in 1961, Carney has moved up. He’s still in the same apartment, but the furniture store has expanded. In fact he’s up for membership at the Dumas Club. This is essentially the equivalent of the Kiwanis Club for black businessmen. His father-in-law, who thinks of him as trash, is also a member of the club, so gaining membership would be a major coup for Carney. He talks to the biggest player in the club, Wilfred Duke. Duke mentions that paying him a $500 bribe would gain Carney the membership. Carney manages to scrape together the $500. Even so, he is denied membership. Carney tries to get his money back from Duke, but unsurprisingly that is not forthcoming and Duke becomes insulting and threatening. Now channeling his criminal father, Carney burns with revenge. This part is the story of his plotting and vengeance on Duke.

In the third story, set in 1964, Carney is even more successful. He’s moved into his dream apartment on Riverside Drive. There has just been some Harlem riots due to the police killing of a black child, so the streets are still seething. After having disappeared for some time, a rough looking Freddie shows up at Carney’s store one night with a satchel and asks him to hold it. Freddie disappears again and Carney finds Freddie’s partner, a dissipated scion of the very wealthy and powerful Van Wyck family, dead of an apparent overdose. Nervous, Carney opens the satchel and discovers some legal papers and a huge immaculate gem. For some reason, members of the Van Wyck family really want that satchel and are willing to do anything to get it. This is a level of power that Carney has never experienced before. Will he be able to get rid of the satchel’s contents without coming to harm?

So, how was the novel? It seems that Colson Whitehead is incapable of writing a boring book. I haven’t seen any discussions, but I can only guess that Whitehead did a significant amount of research to bring the Harlem of that time period to life. He does an excellent job painting a picture of the scene.

His characters are compelling. He weaves together both historical and fictional characters. You find yourself rooting for Carney. He ends up in situations where he’s clearly out of his depth, but his intelligence and understanding of his neighborhood saves him. Freddie is that broken friend that many of us have that just can’t seem to fly straight, despite his best efforts. One of his crew that Carney leans on for heavy work, Pepper, has a glowering, threatening presence.

The only issue that I had with it is in the genre itself. In a crime genre, you really need to feel that the protagonist is in serious peril. Even though Carney does encounter threatening situations, I never really felt the sense that he was in real danger. You just knew that he was going to be able to think his way through it. That seemed to lower the stakes a bit.

Having said that, if you want a talented author drawing a picture of mid century life in Harlem, this is the book for you.

Chicken Little Was A Libtard

Title: Don’t Look Up

Rating: 5 Stars

It all starts off when doctoral candidate in astronomy Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence)  was doing some analysis on stars in the universe. She notices a large, previously unknown comet. This stirs up all kinds of excitement on her team. Her mentor, Dr Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio), steps in and helps to plot its course.

Much to their shock, it is heading to  Earth with a near certain probability of collision. It’s a larger object than the one that struck the planet and killed off the dinosaurs. The collision will happen in a little over six months. In a panic, they call NASA. They end up meeting with Dr Teddy Oglethrope (Rob Morgan), in charge of defending our planet from such events. He immediately recognizes the significance of what they’re presenting to him and orders them to Washington to consult with the President.

Here things begin to take a turn. President Janie Orlean (Meryl Streep) and her chief of staff, who just happens coincidentally to be her son, Jason (Jonah Hill), have bigger fish to fry than a world ending event. Mid terms are coming up. They have a Supreme Court justice appointment that is in trouble due to nude photos. They just can’t be bothered with this right now.

Desperate to get the info out, the three decide to leak to the press. Unfortunately, the strain gets to be too much for Dibiasky and she freaks out during a live interview, hurting her credibility and becoming an instant meme. Mindy does much better and becomes a media sensation.

Later circumstances have changed and the President decides to launch a shuttle to try to alter the course of the comet. Unfortunately, eccentric tech billionaire Peter Isherwill (Mark Rylance) finds out that the comet is composed of trillions of dollars of rare material and manages to convince the President to cancel the shuttle mission shortly after liftoff. Isherwill believes that he has a way to break up the comet into smaller chunks and have them land in the oceans to be harvested.

Meanwhile the clock is ticking. People doubt that the comet exists. They doubt that, even if it does exist, that it will cause much damage. They call the highly skilled and highly experienced scientists alarmists.

The comet appears in the night sky. Even though it is now available to the naked eye, the President launches a campaign to not look up. What you can’t see can’t hurt you.

As the clock ticks down, will Isherwill’s plan save the planet? Or are we witnessing the end of the human experiment?

Believe it or not, this is a comedy. Granted it is very dark. However, considering what we’re currently going through, there probably isn’t going to be a better film that sums up this point in history.

This film must make today’s epidemiologists and virologists feel seen. Just like the astronomers here, these people have spent their entire lives understanding contagious disease. For the first time in 100 years, they had their chance to lend the world their expertise. Instead, they have been demonized. Prominent news organizations accuse them of being fascists. Some states have restricted their public health duties. People dying of COVID refuse to acknowledge it even as they are placed on ventilators.

If not the epidemiologists, how about the climate scientists? For decades they have been warning of climate change. Models that they created decades ago to show the consequences of climate change that were at that time accused of being alarmist have proved to understate the seriousness of climate change. Ferocious weather events that rarely happened now seem to be occurring regularly. Even now though, tens of millions of Americans are skeptics or accuse these scientists of having some secret political agenda. Meanwhile, every year gets just a little bit hotter.

Let’s not forget about Stop the Steal. President Biden received seven million more votes than ex-President Trump. The deciding states weren’t really even that close. Some states have recounted their votes three times with no change. Sixty lawsuits have been filed and have been thrown out. There is no evidence of fraud. To election experts, fraud occurring at the level of the Trump accusations is nearly unthinkably impossible. There is not a single credible expert on American voting that believes otherwise. However, there are still news organizations actively pushing out the narrative. Some sixty percent of Republicans believe that Biden stole the election. That is tens of millions of people believing something that is completely irrational.

All of the sudden, telling people to just “Don’t Look Up” to ignore the reality of an impending comet does not seem to be that much of a stretch.

If there’s a problem with the film, it is that our world is so messed up that it’s hard to get in front of it with satire. Think of President Orlean and her idiot son Chief of Staff. Streep and Hill both play their characters broadly for comic effect, but nothing they do seems that unthinkable after we’ve just had four years of Donald Trump and his children. It barely even raises an eyebrow.

In a similar manner, the film satirizes the feel good news interview team with Jack Bremmer (Tyler Perry) and Brie Evantree (Cate Blanchett). Both Perry and Blanchett do good work, but is what they’re doing really any all that different than Fox and Friends? It does skewer the news’ misogyny by having Evantree having multiple masters degrees and speaking multiple languages but still relegating her to the low cut blonde bimbo news interviewer role.

Silicon Valley and its worship of billionaire tech founders do not come out looking good either.  No mere mortals are supposed to make eye contact with Isherwell as he stumbles and mutters his prognostications. His plan is outlandish and untested, yet the government accepts it without a murmur. It goes without saying that, as his plans fall apart, he has created a separate plan just for himself and an anointed few. I know that people might make comparisons to Bezos, Musk, and Branson, but I think of Peter Thiel and his plans to ‘seastead’ as an escape from climate change.

As I watched it, the film that I felt that it was most connected to was Network. I say this not just because both Lawrence and DiCaprio have their “I’m mad as hell” live television moment. Network took current trends at that time and projected them just a bit further and more extreme. People were shocked that that could be the future of entertainment. Now, 45 years later, Network, if anything, seems quaint in its predictions.

A decade or two down the line, will we be saying the same about Don’t Look Up? As we sit in some Midwestern state, having given up on the coastal states and the Southwest due to climate disasters and as we listen to President for Life Ivanka Trump, will we hearken back to this more innocent era?

The Glory Of The Stiff Upper Lip

Title: The Remains of the Day

Rating: 5 Stars

The is the story of Mr Stevens, a long time, very proper butler of a large English manor. At the point that the story begins, it’s been a couple of years since Lord Darlington, the previous owner of Darlington Hall, has passed away. It is now owned by an American but it’s a mere shadow of itself. Once having dozens of staff in residence, now only a small skeleton staff is used for minimal maintenance.

Miss Kenton was once the housekeeper at Darlington Hall. Having been twenty years married, she has long since left. However, a recent note from Miss Kenton to Mr Stevens hints that she might want to come back. This leads Mr Stevens to take a car trip to visit her to see if she’s interested. The trip, spanning a day or two, inspires a flood of memories to come rushing back to Mr Stevens.

The main unexpected thing about the novel is that I found it amusing. Mr Stevens is really quite insufferable. He takes himself far too seriously. Mr Stevens really does seem to think that being a butler is one of the most important and difficult jobs to undertake. It’s told in the first person, so you get into his mind as he discusses the myriad nuances, subtleties, and complexities of what it takes to be a first rate butler. His inflated self importance of the job verges on ridiculous and I was quite amused by it.

Mr Stevens believes that the most important property of being a butler is dignity. As he defines it, the butler must remain inscrutable under all circumstances. He holds up his father, when he was in his prime, as such an example of dignity. Unfortunately, his father has lost a step or two due to age and is now serving in a junior position in the hall. One night, during a crucial, very hectic dinner in which (Mr Stevens thinks) the future of European peace is at stake and he believes that his buttling skills might be a critical factor, his father is taken severely ill. Under supreme duress, Mr Stevens manages to pull off his butler duties with nary a hitch even as his father dies upstairs unattended by him. He considers that a high point of his butler career and as such is the essence of dignity.

As the drive unfolds, you begin to realize that all is not golden in Mr Stevens’ life. Although he is still a butler of a great house, he is discovering that he is increasingly making minor mistakes in his duties. Although he tells himself that no one probably even noticed, it is clear that, despite his protestations to the contrary, that he is getting worried that he’s no longer up to the job.

Also, over time we begin to understand that Lord Darlington, the man who Mr Stevens had loyally and gladly served to the sacrifice of nearly everything else in his life, was deeply flawed. Although well intentioned, Lord Darlington was proven to be hopelessly naive in affairs of state and allowed himself to be manipulated in the service of the Nazi party. At one point, in the 1930s he apparently tried to arrange for the English king to meet Hitler. Of course, after WWII, when this comes out, Lord Darlington is disgraced. Therefore, by dint of association, Mr Stevens also feels himself besmirched. This shows up during the trip when he denies working for or even knowing of Darlington. Considering that serving Lord Darlington was what defined his sense of self, this demonstrates how wounded Mr Stevens is by this.

A third thing that unfolds is his relationship with Miss Kenton. The fact that he continually refers to her by her maiden name might give a clue about his feelings. Although they started off on the wrong foot,  over the many years that they worked together, they established a close working relationship. Although they kept it strictly formal, they seemed to have established a growing intimacy. When Miss Kenton received her proposal, it’s obvious that she wanted Mr Stevens to respond emotionally. This he was (and still is) incapable of doing. Years later, when she writes to him, he reads through the lines that she had feelings for him. His sense of loss devastates him (even if he can’t express that sentiment even to himself).

Despite his surface emotional implacability, the sense of loss that he feels as his skills diminishes, as his life work supporting Lord Darlington now seems somewhat empty, and as he realizes the loss of his one shot at love, is leaving him cast adrift. He only partially recovers by a man telling him to always look forward and not to dwell on his past. He has metaphorically passed the morning and afternoon of his life. He must now find enjoyment in the evening, in the remains of the day.

It could be that I just have a weakness for English comedy of manners in which everyone is severely stunted by emotional repression and speak in a high brow nearly sterile manner but has a cauldron of feelings boiling beneath the surface, but I really did enjoy reading The Remains of the Day. I had the same feeling reading this as I did when I read Austen’s Emma.