A Set Of Real American Tales

Title: Fight Like Hell

Rating: 5 Stars

There are multiple heritage months. There is Black history month in February. March is Women’s History Month. Latinx Heritage month is September. LQBTQ+ History month comes in October.

Notice that there is no White history month. The reason of course, is that, even now, the default perspective of Western history is white. Essentially, there is no special need for a white history month because every month is white history month.

All of that is well and good, but having a month specific to a group seems to imply that they’re not deserving of an entire year.  It implies that people have to look around and dig up historically interesting people, as if it wasn’t for their ethnicity or their sex that they’d somehow be undeserving of being recognized. By shining a spotlight on these ‘special’ groups, we are somehow taking away time from more significant history figures that happen to be white.

A book like this puts this idea to shame. It’s a history of the labor movement. It primarily consists of a short series of biographies of significant figures in the labor movement. What stands out among these biographies is their diversity. You have Black, Native American, Asian (and by Asian, I mean Asians spanning from Chinese to Filipino to Vietnamese), gay, trans, and disabled people making significant contributions to the labor movement.

If the labor movement seems somehow historically insignificant, just think about it a little. Nearly all of us have or have had jobs. Do you like your 8 hour work day? Do you like having a comfortable wage? Do you like your weekends? Do you like your healthcare? Do you like your social security?  At one time, the average job had none of these. Labor rights activists were on the forefront of all of these advances. An argument can be made that these accomplishments have had a more significant impact upon daily life than wars and other more historically sexy events.

The first thing that I noticed while reading this book was that wherever people work, there are always people that are unwilling to accept the miserable status quo and willing to fight for change. Whether it be farm workers, garment workers, miners, factory workers, disabled workers, sex workers, or prison laborers, there are always people, despite facing nearly always insurmountable odds and seemingly impossible hurdles, willing to stand up and fight for whatever little gains that are possible.

I’d guess that I’ve read more history than most, but I’d never heard of most of the people in this book. Even those that I’d heard of, I found myself astonished at what I read here.

Take Frances Perkins. I knew of her as FDR’s Labor Secretary. She was the first woman to ever hold a cabinet post. I’m sure that somewhere in my primary school education I’d learned that. Since then, I hadn’t learned anything else about her. I had no idea that she was gay. Even more interesting, I had no idea what her inspiration was for her lifelong advocacy for labor. It turns out that she personally witnessed the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist fire. For those unaware, this was a fire in 1911 that killed 146 people, mostly women. The fire happened at a poorly ventilated garment factory. To reduce theft and minimize employee breaks, all doors were locked. The factory was located on the 8th, 9th and 10th floors. In desperation, many people leaped to their death. Apparently Perkins arrived at the scene and saw young women jumping out of windows to avoid dying by fire. Witnessing this event changed the course of her life.

Of people that I’d never heard of, Lucy Parsons was quite interesting. She was born enslaved in Virginia. After the Civil War, she eventually made her way to Chicago. Fair skinned, she was able to pass as white, and in so doing, proved to be a fiery and charismatic speaker for labor rights. She married Albert Parsons, himself a prominent figure in the anarchist movement. In 1886, during a gathering at Haymarket Square, a bomb exploded, police started randomly firing into the crowd, and eleven were killed and seventy wounded. In the resulting witch hunt, Albert Parsons was one of four people that were convicted and executed, despite there being no evidence of the anarchists involvement with the bomb. Undeterred, Lucy Parsons determined to avenge her husband’s death through labor advocacy.

In this history, there are probably around a hundred other people like Parsons that I’d never heard of that had compelling biographies. Any one of them would be a compelling story for students to learn about.

These tales of people willing to fight for their rights even as the most powerful of forces try to shut them down are the real American stories. Our American history is a mosaic and any one fragment of it should be celebrated.

Nevertheless, She Persisted

Title: The Woman They Could Not Silence

Rating: 5 Stars

Narrative history is a genre that I often enjoy reading. Too often I end up disappointed. Maybe the event in question just isn’t that interesting. Or maybe it’s hard for me to relate the events from that time to my present day. Or maybe it’s on a subject that I already knew enough about that it didn’t really break that much new ground for me. Or maybe there’s not enough reference material to justify a whole book so it feels a bit thin. Or maybe the writer is really good at research and is a bit clumsy as a writer.

It’s actually pretty rare when a narrative history hits on all cylinders. When it does, reading it is exhilarating.  It’s as if you’re reading an action packed, drama filled novel full of cliffhangers, except that you know that it’s all true.

This is what The Woman They Could Not Silence was for me. It’s the story of Elizabeth Packard. As a historical figure, she was completely unknown to me.

Born in 1816, as a young woman, she married the much older Theophilus Packard. It appeared that she was bound to live the anonymous life of the ordinary woman in the 19th century. She had six children. She was a dutiful, obedient wife that understood her role was to take care of the home and hearth and let herself be ruled by her cold and domineering husband.

This was her life until around 1860. Here, her life takes an interesting turn. Theophilus was a pastor in a church that taught something known as the New Doctrine. Abolition was considered an important part of the New Doctrine.

Cyrus McCormick was one of the richest men in the country. He founded the company that later became part of International Harvester.  He saw that slavery could rip the country apart. He tried to avert it by essentially coopting local churches. He would provide them with funds as long as they taught the Old Doctrine, which accepted slavery. Theophilus, under pressure from his deacon, accordingly began to teach the Old Doctrine.

Doing so apparently broke something inside of Elizabeth. No longer content to the quiet, compliant wife, she began to speak up in bible study advocating the New Doctrine. Even worse, since she was a much more charismatic speaker than Theophilus, he found himself on the losing end of these arguments. He ordered her to stop. Instead she began to write treatises supporting her position.

It reached the point where Theophilus locked Elizabeth in a room in their house. This still did not break her. Finally, in April of 1860, several strong men showed up at their house and carried her bodily to a train. They arrived at Jacksonville, Illinois. There Theophilus took her to the Jacksonville Insane Asylum and involuntarily committed her.

Yes, because Elizabeth was no longer willing to be the compliant, seen but not heard wife, he was able to have her declared insane. It only took notes from two psychiatrists. At that time, psychiatrists believed that there was no value in interviewing the person accused of being insane. All it took was for Theophilus to contact some psychiatrists, say that she was insane, and then upon his word the psychiatrists would agree that she was insane.

Understandably shocked, knowing that she was not insane, she thought that she’d be released in a manner of days. Instead, she spent three years there.

While there, she met many other women in similar situations of being thought insane just because they weren’t sufficiently compliant wives. She also witnessed the severe mistreatment of many of the women committed. Some were put into tubs and then shoved completely under water. They’d come up throwing up water and then they’d be dunked again. This would continue until the patient became helpless and passive. Women were put in straightjackets, not for any therapeutic reason but as a form of punishment. Women were beaten and drug around by their hair by the guards. When Elizabeth first arrived, her ward was filthy with pools of urine. The women stood around in filthy garments.

Here’s the thing. Elizabeth Packard was an indomitable force with an iron will. After 45 years of being a meek woman, she’d had enough.

First things first. She cleaned up her ward and personally bathed each woman in it. By her sheer force of personality the guards started helping her maintain proper order.

Andrew McFarland was the head of the asylum. At first appearing to be sensitively sympathetic to Elizabeth’s plight, he continually told her that she was not insane and should be released at any time. Actually, he was convinced that she was insane and had no plans to release her.

Once she began to turn things around in one ward, he’d transfer her to an even worse ward. He confiscated all of her writing materials. Undaunted, she’d find pencil nubs and would write on scraps of paper that she’d carefully hide.

Finally, after three years, she was released. She ran back to her home only to find that Theophilus, in a fit of pique, had packed up and moved with their children to Massachusetts.

As a dependent woman she had no rights or power. She resolved to be independent. Taking some of her writing from her time at the asylum, she wrote a book. Using essentially a then innovative form of crowdfunding, she managed to collect enough money to self publish her book. She then traveled extensively selling it. Her book went through several editions and inspired her to write other books that were also successful. She became financially independent.

Not content with just winning her freedom, she resolved to free the women still kept at the asylum. As part of her travels, she worked to get laws passed that ensured that no woman could be committed based just upon the words of her husband. A jury trial would be required for commitment.  Laws were not only passed in Illinois but in several other states that she traveled to.

Ultimately, after some seven years and many other trials, she ultimately was able to be reunited with her children. She lived separate from Theophilus but did allow him to visit the children.

Thinking that she’d finally accomplished her goal of being reunited with her children, she settled down to relax and live the life of a quiet mother taking care of her home. However, with so many women’s rights yet to be won, she simply couldn’t rest. For the rest of her long life, she led many battles for equality.

Elizabeth Packard is truly an inspiring story. Starting from a place where she literally had no rights and was considered in many ways nothing more than an adjunct to her husband, she was able to fight and win substantial gains. Although her story was amazing to learn about, it makes me sad to realize how many other exceptional women never had the chance to shine like Packard did. How many women that could have led great lives ended up being incarcerated in an asylum because they had the audacity of independent thought?

Now here we are in 2022. Even though we’ve seen progress like #metoo, the recent Supreme Court ruling on abortion and the immediate rollback of women’s rights in many states shows that the fight for women equality is never ending.

There will always be a need for women like Elizabeth Packard.

Samurai Star Wars

Title: The Hidden Fortress

Rating: 4 Stars

It really is amazing how influential Akira Kurosawa was. I’d previously discussed the fact that A Fistful of Dollars was, to put it charitably, an homage (less charitably, an absolute ripoff) of Yojimbo. Seven Samurai directly inspired The Magnificent Seven. Rashomon, with its telling of the same story from multiple points of view, was groundbreaking. Famed American, Italian, Indian, and European directors were all inspired by his work.

Even so, maybe this was generally known to others, but I had no idea that The Hidden Fortress was George Lucas’ inspiration for Star Wars. The Stars Wars screenplay went through multiple rewrites, but the genesis of the idea came from The Hidden Fortress. To think that science fiction characters C-3PO, R2-D2, Princess Leia, Darth Vader, and Obi-Wan Kenobi were brought into being from an old samurai film seems astonishing.

The film starts with two peasants, Tahei and Matashichi (C-3PO and R2-D2), who leave their village to make their fortune as soldiers. They are immediately captured and set to work as gravediggers. They suffer hardship at nearly every step. Although friends, they constantly bicker and selfishly try to gain the advantage over the other.

They stumble upon a stick with a piece of gold hidden in it. It is part of the secret gold cache from the recently defeated Akizuki clan. A famed general of that clan, Rokurota (Obi-Wan), on the run protecting the gold and the Akizuki princess (Leia), decides to include the two peasants in a plan to get the gold and the princess to a safer province.

This begins a long journey. They encounter many threats. Several times the actions of the two peasants almost lead the whole expedition to ruin. Rokurota engages in many fights, including one while galloping full speed on horseback and an extended duel with another samurai named Tadokoro (Vader) from a warring clan.

As to be expected, all ends well. The princess is restored to her throne with her loyal general by her side. The two peasants are given a small reward of gold. After all of their adventures, they are happy to have it and return back to their village just a little bit richer and still best friends.

As you can see, the Star Wars plot is quite divergent from The Hidden Fortress, although the inspiration for the major characters is clear.

Beyond its inspiration to one of the highest grossing films of all time (and one of the most culturally influential, for good and ill), on its own it’s a fun film to watch. Tahei and Matashichi are great fun. One tall and one short, they are a great comedy team. When they’re down and are facing pain or even death, they swear eternal fealty to one another. Once one gets the upper hand, it’s every man for himself. When he first meets them, Rokurota plans to kill them. Their natural ingenuity impresses him. Although their hijinks cause him no end of trouble, you get the feeling that he secretly enjoys their presence.

Rokurota is played by the legendary Toshiro Mifune. Kurosawa’s favorite actor, he appears in some sixteen of his films. You always know what you’re getting with Mifune. Bold, blustery, heroic, Rokurota is nearly operatic in his emotional expressions. He fights with a fierce, steely glare but belly laughs when he’s happy. I don’t know what the stunt man situation was in 1950s Japanese films, but Rokurota’s fight with another samurai while both were on horses galloping at full speed was thrilling. Holding onto the horse with his legs, he was wildly swinging his sword with both arms.

This balance between comedy, drama, and action is probably my favorite thing about this film. I don’t know if this was true, but the story is that the previous Kurosawa films were a bit more somber and were not financially successful. He wanted to make sure that his next film was a box office hit.

He succeeded. It was his most successful film until Yojimbo, released in 1961. Sixty years later, it still holds up as a fun film to watch.

A City In A Death Spiral

Title: We Own This City

Rating: 5 Stars

A year or two ago, I read I Got A Monster. It was the story of Wayne Jenkins and the Gun Trace Task Force in Baltimore. They had a reputation as hard charging cops making major progress in getting guns off of the streets of Baltimore. In actuality, the task force was engaging in massive amounts of corruption, including stealing money from suspects and, arguably even worse, stealing their drugs and giving them to other people to sell. My Goodreads tagline for the book was: what happens when the largest criminal enterprise in your city is the police?

The HBO series is based on another book that also describes the corruption of this task force. I have not read it, but I have to say that the series is substantially better than the book that I read. One of the complaints that I usually have with a television series based upon a book is its length. More often than not, a two hour film adapted from a book is not sufficient. A television series (Netflix, Amazon, or HBO) usually consists of at least eight episodes and is often ten. While two hours is not enough, eight to ten hours seems too much. To meet this commitment, it seems as if the film makers feel obligated to pad the content. Extraneous characters or plot elements are added. The same plot points are hammered into the ground.

This series is different. Yes, it is eight episodes, each of which is about an hour long. However, they’ve done interesting things with the expanded format. The lens is no longer just focused on the task force. They’ve broadened it to include the work undertaken by the Federal Civil Rights Commission to build a policing consent decree. It examines the root causes of the intractable crime rate in Baltimore. It shows how helpless seemingly powerful individuals like the mayor and the police chief are, no matter how well meaning they are, in trying to get the crime rate under control.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that this series brings such a complex, multi-layer view of crime in Baltimore. After all it was written and developed by George Pelecanos and David Simon. Simon is most famous as the creator of The Wire, the most amazing deconstruction of a city and crime that I’ve ever watched. Not only that, but he also wrote Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets. That turned into the long running series Homicide: Life on the Street. All were set in Baltimore. Pelecanos, a detective fiction writer himself, also wrote for The Wire.

The gung-ho, charismatic Wayne Jenkins (Jon Bernthal) is the center of the series. Told in a nonlinear manner, we see him as an eager newly minted police officer getting his first field training. The first thing his training officer tells him is to ignore everything that he learned at the academy. From nearly his first day, he is taught the brutality and cash grabbing practices of being a Baltimore police officer. He’s a fast learner. You later see him being a training officer telling a young green police officer to ignore everything that he learned at the academy. The system is in place and is well entrenched.

This system is destructive to the social order. Since the police seemingly arrest and harass the citizens at will, the people see the police as an invading force. Murders go unsolved because no one will talk to the police. Some of the police are so notorious for lying that prosecutors won’t even call them to the stand because they know that they will be impugned. The prosecutors keep an actual list of such police officers and will dismiss charges if the officer’s testimony is required for the conviction. Even worse, it’s hard to even find a jury for  atrial. So many citizens of Baltimore have been victims of the police where the police has stolen, abused, or lied to them, that they won’t believe anything that any police officer has to say.

A lot of times, it won’t even go to trial. The Baltimore police spread out and arrest citizens on the flimsiest of charges. Immediately after booking, a prosecuting attorney will meet with each arrestee, and based upon a cursory examination, will immediately free them if they sign an agreement not to sue the city of Baltimore. It truly is just a revolving door.

It’s not just a few bad apples. The entire policing system is set up this way. Police act like an occupying force upon a ralcitrant citizenry. You see nothing of the protect and serve ethos. It is more like subjugate and conquer.

This brings new meaning to the idea of defunding the police. Having the police be the first responder for everything doesn’t really make sense. In the case of a mental health crisis, is having a person with a gun with minimal mental heath training the first person that you want on the scene? If someone is going 45 in a 35 zone or has a taillight out, should a person with a gun be the one to handle the situation? How often does introducing a person with a gun actually dangerously escalate the situation?

Watching a series like this makes me think differently about defunding the police. The so-called War on Drugs has fundamentally changed our society. Therefore, it seems that a more drastic re-structuring of our entire judicial system is in order. How can we do that unless we commit ourselves to a complete re-structuring of our entire society as well? How do you even get started on that?

It’s not a happy watch. In fact, you are left with a feeling of helplessness. However, to even get a start on trying to get big city violent crime under control, you have to understand the reality of the situation on the ground. This series goes a long way in describing that reality.

A Future We Want?

Title: Minority Report

Rating: 4 Stars

I’m going to do something that I don’t do very often. Over a week ago, I watched Minority Report. I don’t like writing about something so much later after I finished it, but the film has been sticking in my mind, so I need to do this to get it out of my headspace.

Minority Report, released in 2002, is based upon a Philip K Dick story. Set in the year 2054, murders have essentially been eliminated in Washington DC by a Precrime unit. This unit uses three so-called precogs, apparently diminished capacity humans kept in a pool that, linked together, can predict future murders. They do so just far enough in advance that the Precrime unit can leap into action and prevent the actual murder. The murderer (who, remember, has not actually committed any crimes yet) are then led away and sentenced essentially to purgatory, kept in a state of eternal suspended animation.

All goes well until one day the precogs predict the murder of a person and that the murderer is one John Anderton. Anderton (Tom Cruise) happens to be the head of the Precrime unit and he has never heard of, let alone met, the soon to be murder victim. However, the precogs are never wrong, so now instead of being the hunter of potential murderers, he is now the hunted.

Fearing to get caught and trying to find out what’s going on (who is the man that he’s supposed to kill?) this is a vigorous action film in which Cruise has all kinds of opportunities to do his signature running. It rises above the typical fugitive action hero on the run film trope by ruminating upon the nature of the inevitability of the future, free will, and the idea of preemptive justice.

There’s a couple of reasons why this film stuck in my head. First of all, it was released in 2002. 9/11 happened in 2001. Given the nature of the film business, I’m sure that this film was in the works well before 9/11, but releasing it in the aftermath of 9/11 is significant to me.

Directed by Steven Spielberg, interestingly enough this isn’t the only film of his that was inspired by 9/11. It’s not even the only such film by him that also starred Tom Cruise. The War of the Worlds remake, in 2005, is the story of an alien invasion where cities are devastated and Tom Cruise desperately tries to protect his previously estranged family. Amazingly enough, in the same year, Spielberg also released Munich (this time without Cruz). This was the story of the Mossad’s revenge assassinations in retaliation for the PLO attack on Israeli athletes at the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich.

Tom Cruise also couldn’t leave the 9/11 theme well enough alone. In 2007, he starred in the film Lions for Lambs. Playing an ambitious senator, he proposes a plan to achieve success in the war in Afghanistan. A second plot follows two idealistic university students who decide to enlist in the military and fight in Afghanistan to serve their country.

It’s interesting to me that the most prominent American director and the most prominent American actor, both together and separately, tried to work through, cinematically, the emotional impact and tremendous changes that the 9/11 attacks on America wrought.

Here, Cruise’s career is reaching a fulcrum. At this stage, he’s nearing forty. He’s past the young, cute action hero and he’s really making some interesting career choices. It is around this time that he’s starring in Vanilla Sky, Collateral, Magnolia, and Eyes Wide Shut. It seems clear that he’s trying to transition to a different type of actor (akin to something like Brad Pitt actually was able to do).

However, in 2005, Cruise started to receive negative notoriety. There was the infamous couch jumping incident on Oprah Winfrey. His Scientology beliefs came to the forefront. There was a strange interview with Matt Lauer (there’s a name that I didn’t think I’d write again) where his Scientology based disgust of psychiatry and psychiatric drugs comes out rather, ahem, intensely.

In the aftermath of all of this, Cruise’s star dimmed appreciably. Seemingly as a result, he pivoted again away from making such interesting, challenging films and put himself back into action hero mode. Since then, it’s been a bunch of Mission Impossible films, a couple of Jack Reacher films, and of course, the new Top Gun. Don’t get me wrong. I enjoyed many of those films. It just makes me a little sad that he stepped away from more interesting roles.

Regarding the film itself, especially now that we are in the year 2022, it’s ideas still resonate. Does it make sense to stop a crime that you know is going to be committed, even if it involves mass surveillance, surrender of privacy, and preemptive justice?

One of the noted quotes from the time of 9/11 was Secretary of State Condi Rice justifying the aggressive military and law enforcement response that was being taken as a way to prevent a ‘mushroom shaped cloud’. The intent was clearly that preemptive actions were required to prevent the next future unimaginably worse event. This laid down a pattern of aggressive law enforcement that follows us to this day. Massive amounts of military equipment was supplied to local law enforcement agencies. Today, in many cities, no knock warrants are served by a heavily armed group of SWAT police officers. Innocent people have been killed with no warning.

I remember the post 9/11 FBI infiltrations of terrorist cells. In several cases, the infiltration actually caused the terrorist group to move from loud, toxic, but ultimately actionless rhetoric to an actual plan of action, at which point the FBI would swoop in and arrest the group. Usually the case would be thrown out because it was shown that the groups would never have even planned the action if it wasn’t for the FBI instigating them. Like some weird Heisenberg uncertainty principle, the act of infiltrating a group to learn its intentions resulted in its intentions changing.

We’re also now, both locally and nationally, in the middle of muddling through a discussion of policing. Policing has a pretty sad history in our country. In many places, the first semi law enforcement personnel were slave catchers. Fast forward a couple of hundred years, systemic racism is still an ongoing problem throughout the entire justice system.

What if we could use technology to replace routine police judgement? Many fatal police encounters occur at routine traffic stops. What if we used surveillance technology to remove the human factor? Streets could be monitored and action for violators could be automatically taken. On the one hand, that would remove the systemic racism of police officers (although it’s unclear if even the automated system could be designed free of systemic racist biases) but would open up our society to a tremendous loss of privacy. Do we want to become like China with their social credit system?

I don’t even pretend to have answers to any of this mess that I just wrote. The fact that a twenty year old film (and an action film at that), over a week later, is still inspiring such thoughts in my head tells me that this is a pretty great film indeed.

The 4 Horsemen Of The American Apocalypse

It’s kind of amazing to live in the United States in the year 2022. Our power is unparalleled. No one can touch our military. Although on the surface, China’s getting close, no one can really touch our economic power. Without a doubt no one can touch our cultural impact upon the world.

We are the one indispensable nation. We are considered primarily responsible for what is called The Long Peace (also called, more explicitly, The Pax Americana). Since 1945, there has not been a major war fought between any great powers. Economically, the US has had the largest GDP since 1890. Even if China ultimately catches up, it does so with four times the US population.

All things must come to an end (just ask previous dominant powers like the UK, France, Spain, and yes, even the Netherlands (the Dutch had it going big for a while)). What could topple us? The conventional answer is China. It’s nearly inevitable that their GDP will surpass the US. They are heavily investing in their military. They are stretching their muscles diplomatically. Those that feel this way should read Beckley’s Unrivalled (I wrote about it here). Much about their economic and military growth is a mirage. Increasingly, with Xi’s hardening policies and his apparent plan to assume dictatorship for life, I think that it’s increasingly unlikely that China will rise to a level that will truly threaten the US.

No, especially over the last couple of years, I’ve come to the conclusion that it will be the US that will bring itself down. There are problems festering that a 200 year old consumer based democracy is just unequipped to handle.  Any one of those problems could prove fatal to a struggling behemoth. The fact that all four are occurring simultaneously leaves me with bad feelings about our future.

I call these problems the 4 Horsemen of the American Apocalypse. I know, it’s pretty dramatic. However, witnessing the end of the greatest power to ever bestride this planet is a pretty dramatic event.

Authoritarianism

Growing up, I would have never guessed that this would be a challenge. Every single one of us in the US educational system was taught the virtues of democracy and the evils of authoritarianism. I would have thought that the idea of majority vote would be a part of our national DNA.

Now, I’ve found out that there are literally tens of millions of Americans that truly don’t really care how their guy (and let’s face it, it’s always going to be a guy with this group) gets into power as long as he gets into power.

If the January 6 hearings show anything, it’s that people in power knew that they’d lost the popular vote and really didn’t seem to care. They were willing to go to great lengths to overturn the results that clearly showed them losing.

In so doing, they’ve now managed to convince, again, tens of millions of voters that our voting systems are corrupt, despite there being zero evidence. In an election where 150 million votes were cast and one candidate won the popular vote by eight million, the number of invalid votes probably number in the hundreds. That’s an absurdly clean election result.

Here we are now, nearly two years after the result, and there are many people still not willing to accept the President. There are legislatures that, in the name of nonexistent electoral fraud, are making it even harder for people to vote, especially those people that disagree with them. People that are opposed to fair elections are running for positions that will give them responsibility over those elections.

This is nothing more than an attempt by a minority group of people to impose their will upon the majority. If this continues, I don’t see any future other than mass civil disturbance.

Climate Change

It’s not surprising that climate change could be an existential threat to the US. It’s a relatively slow moving catastrophe that politicians elected on short election cycles are ill equipped attack. Attacking climate change will have a major impact upon large companies with deep pockets very motivated to fend off these attacks. The solutions are broad in scope and will require decades to fully implement (which again is not a strength of democracies with short election cycles).

Even so, there is no doubting that the Southwest is running out of water. They’re in the middle of the largest drought in 1200 years. We have large cities containing millions that were built in deserts. Crucial lakes providing water to these cities are dangerously close to dying. What happens when we run out of water? What happens to Texas? Arizona? California? Will we just have to write off major parts of those states as unlivable? What are the economic consequences of doing so?

Life on the coasts will get harder. We have already seen multiple storms of a century in the last couple of years. We’ve seen Florida, Texas, and Puerto Rico devastated by hurricanes. Major cities on the coastline are in danger. New York City is having to build a new sea wall.

Obviously, this problem is not unique to the US. In fact, countries such as India are in even more danger. Still, over the next decades, I see this as having a major effect on the US.

Income Inequality

The top 10% of the richest people in the US now own something like 75% of the wealth. Depending upon how you look at it, it’s either about equivalent to how it was in the 1920s or even worse. The US has never been a classless society but now the classes are pronounced. The number one predictor of a person’s net worth is the net worth of their parents.

Whoever has the money runs the government. Hence, even as the rich continue to get richer, you see changes in tax laws that benefit them even more. You can point to other causes as well. The dramatic decline of unions has led to a hollowing out of the middle class in manufacturing towns. The rise of the gig economy has led workers to low paying jobs with no benefits. Globalization destroyed millions of jobs. The rise of monolithic corporations has reduced competition for labor.

All of this has led us to a situation where the economic American dream of a house, family, and eventual retirement seems to be lost for a huge percentage of our population. This disaffection can lead to disillusionment with the system, facilitating the rise of authoritarianism, or mass civil unrest for its own sake.

Racism / Sexism

Of course, we can’t not talk about the 400 year old problems of our country. You can list any issue, whether it be healthcare, housing, employment, victims of violence, arrest, or imprisonment, and you can count on the fact that people of color get the short end of the stick. As I titled one of my blog posts, this is not a bug but a feature.

The situation is same for women. The recently overturn of Roe demonstrates this. If the proponents of the overturn were truly pro-life, they would be out front sponsoring bills for such items as healthcare, family leave, or child care. The fact that they are not only not sponsoring such bills but actively opposing them tells you that they are pro-control, not pro-life. The very women (poor, women of color) that they despise for not having the self control to have children only when they can ‘afford it’ are precisely the same women that they will force to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term, forcing the woman and her child to a lifetime of poverty.

The predominantly white men that thought that their guy lost the Presidential election stormed the Capitol building and, if found, would have hung Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi. Given centuries of abuse and neglect, how long will it be before the people that have truly been oppressed by our government violently rise up against it? What will happen then?

If you’d told me, even twenty years ago, that I might live to see the end of the United States, as least as we currently know it, I would have thought you were a demented conspiracy theorist.

Now, I fear for our future.

Happy Independence Day everyone!

Agatha Christie This Ain’t

Title: Death In Her Hands

Rating: 4 Stars

The story starts out simply enough. It’s the first person narrative of a 72 year old woman named Vesta. Recently widowed, she has moved across country for a new start. Walking in the woods around her house with her dog Charlie, she encounters a note. The note says “Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn’t me. Here is her dead body”. There is no dead body.

Vesta decides to solve this mystery. Considering the fact that she is not a detective, that she is new to town and knows no one, that not only does she not have a computer but she doesn’t even have a landline, the approach that she takes is unorthodox.

She uses her imagination. She develops a mental picture of Magda, picturing her as a young woman from Belarus who came here to work for the summer but overstayed her visa and is now living in someone’s basement. She imagines another character named Blake, a young (teenage) man that lives in the house that is secretly in love with her. She imagines a black spirit named Ghod. She develops complete and complex back stories for each person that she imagines.

Things get a bit disturbing when the characters that she imagines appear to be coming to life. She comes across the woman that is renting a basement room. She has a son that Vesta assumes is Blake. A police officer named Ghod pulls her over and is rude to her.

What is going on? Is there a murder? Are the people that Vesta meets involved with the murder? Is it all in her head?

We’re definitely in Moshfegh territory. Her protagonists are primarily eccentric women at odds with their surroundings (Eileen, My Year of Rest and Relaxation).

Eventually, the mystery becomes less important than the character of Vesta. As the novel progresses, we learn that her marriage to her husband, Walter, was not a particularly happy one. A noted epistemologist, he passive-aggressively insulted Vesta constantly. He commented negatively on her physical appearance as well as her intelligence. She later found a list of students that he seduced. In her marriage she felt suppressed and trapped.

Now on her own, she’s free. Epistemology is the study of knowledge. Vesta thinks of her husband’s work as sitting around thinking up ideas. In the mystery of Magda, Vesta does precisely the same thing. Out of nothing, she constructs a reality. Free at last of her husband, she can practice her own epistemology.

The novel can be thought of as a meta-narrative on the act of writing a novel. Moshfegh, under the guise of writing a mystery novel, actually deconstructs the process of writing a mystery novel. Vesta researches how to solve a mystery and, in the process of doing so, constructs the elements of a mystery novel. Being suppressed by her overbearing husband for decades, Vesta, at the age of 72, is at long last able to exercise her creativity.

Although it’s a fairly slim novel (at around 260 pages), it took me a while to get through. I found it interesting, but it wasn’t particularly engaging. There is virtually no action. Told in the first person, we live in Vesta’s head as she slowly constructs her alternate reality.

I enjoyed reading it, but I don’t rank it among Moshfegh’s best work. To this day, I still think that her short story collection, Homesick for Another World, is her strongest work. If you’re wondering if Moshfegh might be your cup of tea, I’d start with that.

Sly Coulda Been A Contender

Title: Cop Land

Rating: 4 Stars

The first thing that strikes you about this 1997 film is its cast. It’s staggering. It stars Sylvester Stallone as the beaten down Sheriff Freddy Heflin. Harvey Keitel is the swaggering cop Ray Donlan. Robert De Niro is Tilden, the internal affairs cop after Donlan. Ray Liotta is the corrupt cop with a burgeoning conscience Figgsy.

Those are the headliners. In addition, there is Robert Patrick (of Terminator 2 fame) as Donlan’s right hand man. Michael Rappaport is Superboy, a hero cop now in trouble. Janeane Garofalo is one of Heflin’s deputies. Noah Emmerich (the FBI agent from The Americans) is another deputy. John Spencer (from West Wing) makes an appearance. Cathy Moriarty is Donlan’s wife. Edie Falco (from The Sopranos) is with the bomb squad. Frank Vincent (from The Sopranos and Scorsese films) has a small role. Deborah Harry (from Blondie) has an even smaller role. Even Tony Sirico (Paulie Walnuts from The Sopranos) appears (if only in a picture).

Like I said, this is a staggering cast. Considering that this film was made before The Sopranos, whoever did the casting did an amazing job.

Donlan is an NYPD officer. Apparently NYPD officers are supposed to live in the city, but some time ago Donlan worked out an angle where, as long as he worked part time for the Transit Authority, he could live in Garrison, a small town across the river in New Jersey. Several of his fellow officers have also taken advantage of the same loophole. Garrison is now largely a town of NYPD police officers.  They pretty much run it with impunity.

Heflin is the sheriff of Garrison. As a young man, he jumped into a river and saved a woman trapped in a car. Celebrated as a hero, due to his actions he lost hearing in one ear. Being deaf in one ear thwarted his dreams of being an NYPD officer himself. It’s clear that being the sheriff was just a sop that was given to him. Even though he is the sheriff, there is no question that the NYPD officers living there run the town.

From the onset of the film, it’s clear that, while he’s not particularly happy in his role, he’s become accustomed to it. Always deferential to the NYPD officers, they treat him as if he’s little more than their mascot. He willingly takes it as part of the dues of the job.

Things start to fall apart when the heroic young NYPD officer nicknamed Superboy gets into trouble while crossing the bridge. Thinking that the occupants in another car were pointing a gun at him and mistaking a blown tire for a gun shot, he shoots the occupants dead. It turns out that there were no weapons in the car. To keep Superboy out of trouble, Donlan fakes his suicide. Later, Donlan realizes that, with all of the publicity around his death, he has to kill Superboy.

At the same time, the IA officer Tilden has been collecting information on Donlan and the rest of the officers living at Garrison. They are in cahoots with organized crime in the drug trade.

Into all of this steps Heflin. On the one hand, he’s always been subservient to the NYPD officers. He owes his job to them and in their own condescending way they do look out for him. On the other hand, he has seen that Superboy is still alive. He’s seen the evidence that Tilden has been collecting against them. He begins to feel that it is his turn now to take a stand and bring these men that he considers benefactors and friends to justice.

Although there are a lot of heavy hitters in the cast, the film rests upon Stallone’s shoulders. Made in 1997, he was in a career lull. Several years past action films like Cliffhanger and nearly ten years past Rocky 5 and Rambo III, it looked like his career was in its twilight. Here he sheds nearly all of his action hero persona. In his clumsiness and slowness, his moves are nearly bovine. His eyes seem to be permanently sad and resigned. Even in the final action scenes, he seems to be moving sluggishly, if determinedly. Stallone here is making a play to be a character actor and it was a brave choice of Stallone’s to go up against such a formidable cast. He acquits himself admirably.

You get the idea that the director was making a film in the spirit of a Scorsese feature. Unfortunately, the plot has too much going on so it becomes a bit of a mess. There’s an unrequited love story. There’s an arson for profit that results in an innocent’s death. The core idea of a hero cop willingly faking his suicide and, I don’t know, going into some underground relocation seems to be a stretch. The parts didn’t really jell.

While the film didn’t quite live up to its glorious cast, it was still entertaining and worth watching.

Thomas Edison In The Library With A Wrench

Title: The Man Who Invented Motion Pictures

Rating: 3 Stars

Occasionally when I write a review, I’ll say that I’m not being fair. Usually it’s because it’s a film or a book that probably is better than I think, but for whatever reason it just doesn’t do it for me. This time, it’s the opposite situation. I think that I’m being generous with my rating.

The book, in my opinion, is a bit of a mess. On the one hand it’s a biography of an early film pioneer named Louis Le Prince. It’s apparent that there wasn’t really enough material to warrant an entire biography. Therefore, the author branches out and brings in additional information about other film pioneers. At the center of the story is a mystery. Le Prince disappeared without a trace in 1890. This mystery is still unsolved. Fischer does not bring any new information on this front. He basically simply states his opinion without a tremendous amount of evidence. So, we have a biography somewhat thin of facts, a pretty shallow look at the early inventors of motion picture, and a mystery that is unconvincedly solved.

Let’s start with the pioneers. Having an interest in cinema, I found this the most compelling. First there is Eadweard Muybridge. An interesting character that, among other things, shot and killed his wife’s lover and got off with a verdict of justifiable homicide (ie he had it coming to him), he was an early photographer that was hired by Leland Stanford (of railroad robber baron / Stanford University fame). An avid horseman, Stanford was interested in proving whether or not a horse at full gallop always had at least one hoof on the ground. Muybridge was able to set up a series of cameras that took a series of pictures that simulated horse movement. He later investigated the movement of other animals, including such actions as naked humans leapfrogging each other (yes, you read that right and if you carefully google, you can find it).

You might have heard of the Lumiere brothers. Their work directly inspired Georges Melies, who among other things, created the first science fiction film (A Trip to the Moon).

And then, of course, there’s Thomas Edison. To this day, more people than not probably think of Thomas Edison as the inventor of motion pictures. This is actually quite far from the truth. When I was young, Edison was considered the prototypical self-made American inventor. Nowadays, his reputation has taken a beating. First of all, there’s the whole Tesla vs Edison controversy. There’s his heavy handed way of dealing with competition (eg creating the first electric chair as a way to advertise how dangerous the competing alternating current was compared to his direct current (alternating current ended up carrying the day)).

Here his reputation takes an even harder hit. Apparently, he was famous for claiming to have perfected inventions that were scarcely even working as a way to discourage competing innovation. He filed numerous ‘caveats’ at the US Patent Office. Serving as a precursor to an actual patent, he would later use them to prove that he was first, even after someone beat him to the actual invention. Given his genius reputation, he was able to get away with shady practices like this.

This comes out even more with motion pictures. Besides his usual filing of caveats, it turns out that he was barely involved in the invention at all. Thinking that it had no practical applicability, the work was left to a man in his employ named W.L.K. Dickson. Although Dickson did the work, even the work that he did was derivative of work performed by earlier inventors. Once the commercial applicability of motion pictures became apparent, Edison leaped back into the fray and ended up with essentially a postdated patent that allowed him to drive the other film makers out of business. He destroyed the European film industry. In fact, to escape Edison’s legal shadow, the fact that patents were enforced so poorly in California was what directly led to the film industry being established in Hollywood.

And then there’s Louis Le Prince. Forgotten today, he was little more than a one man shop obsessively working on developing a motion picture camera and projector. Thinking that this was going to be his ticket to fame and obsessed with others stealing his ideas, he worked in secrecy (which proved to be problematic for his widow in later court patent cases). In 1888, well before the other inventors, he created the first real motion picture film. It’s called Roundhoy Garden Scene and it’s available on youTube here. There are other films where you can see his son play something like an accordion and a bridge scene in the city of Leeds. It’s fascinating to me that now, in the year 2022, you can see the very first moving picture fragment from the year 1888.

In 1890, Le Prince, after visiting his older brother in France, was getting ready to go back to England and then voyage back to the US, where his wife and children were waiting for him. He’d completed the camera and projector and planned to come back, show off his accomplishments, and make his fortune.

His older brother saw him off on the train and Louis was never heard from again. A missing persons investigation found nothing. His wife had to wait seven years for him to be declared dead before she could legally defend his patents. By then, it was much too late. She had no money and no chance against the money and power of Edison. She believed, until she died, that Edison somehow arranged for his murder. Tragedy followed the family. After trying and failing to win their patent case, Le Prince’s eldest son, Adolphe, killed himself with a shotgun. Later, another son, Fernand, was found wandering the same area, wielding a shotgun (possibly the same shotgun), yelling about strange spirits. He was confined to a mental institution for the rest of his life.

Regarding Le Prince’s fate, there are several theories. One was that he was despondent and committed suicide, although his letters and time spent with his brother’s family discounts that. Another is that he ran away due to accusations of homosexuality, but that’s even thinner. A beaten corpse was found near the Seine that resembled Le Prince. However, the corpse was found some four weeks after he was reported missing and, although close, there were some physical differences.

The theory that Fischer lands on is that his older brother did it. It was known that his older brother owed Louis money and had no way to pay it. He was the only one that witnessed Louis actually getting on the train. He was the one that planted the idea that his brother was despondent. He discouraged the widow from coming to France to help find Louis. Finally, he told the widow that a missing persons investigation was under way when there is no evidence of one. Admittedly, it’s all a bit suspicious, but 130 years later, it’s all very murky.

Although I love to think that somehow one of our American heroes, Thomas Edison, had a hand in the murder of some random inventor, other than a widow’s bitter anger, there is no evidence for that theory.

As you can see, even if these are all separate strands kind of haphazardly strewn throughout one work, I found all of them to be interesting. Even if the book doesn’t warrant a great rating, the subject matter does.