"First Man" and the Stupidity of Outrage Culture

I saw the new Neil Armstrong biopic, First Man, this afternoon. It’s a fairly entertaining piece of Oscar bait with good performances from Ryan Gosling as Armstrong, Claire Foy as his wife Janet, and a solid supporting cast all around as well as some genuinely exciting moments and breathtaking visuals. It’s also overlong by at least 30 minutes and is hampered by the unfortunate use of handheld shaky-cam by cinematographer Linus Sandgren, who shot director Damien Chazelle’s previous film La La Land in a more classical style. I had to move to the way back of the theatre so that I didn’t get sick during the show. (Chazelle seems to be one of those directors like Paul Greengrass and Kathryn Bigelow who believe that any movie based on true historical events must be shot in a manner that gives its audience motion sickness. Having the camera swim around like a drunken fish apparently lends a sense of “realism” that classically-shot historical films don’t. I guess according to that logic, Lawrence of Arabia and Patton would be even better if the audience got vertigo while watching them. But that’s a different rant for a different time.)

As entertaining as First Man is, it also appears to be the hotbed of two of the stupidest controversies from opposite ends of our current political landscape. If you’re wondering to yourself how a biopic of the first man to ever walk on the moon could ever be controversial, then congratulations! You’re a sensible person who doesn’t read too much into things, unlike some of the overly outraged twits who are polluting America’s political discourse with triviality and nonsense.

On the right side of the equations, conservatives are outraged because the movie omits the iconic scene of Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin (played by Corey Stoll) planting the American flag on the moon. Never mind the fact that the flag is still shown on the lunar module and images of it appear frequently throughout the film. (An earlier scene features one of Armstrong’s sons proudly raising the flag on the family porch.) Because one image of Americana does not appear in the film, that means it is clearly godless, anti-American commie propaganda. Even our clueless dunce of a current president felt the need to add his unwanted two cents: "It's unfortunate. It's almost like they're embarrassed at the achievement coming from America, I think it's a terrible thing. When you think of Neil Armstrong and when you think of the landing on the moon, you think about the American flag. For that reason, I wouldn't even want to watch the movie.”

That’s fine, Donnie. I’m sure all of the scientific and technical jargon used by the NASA scientists throughout the film would just make your tiny, peanut-sized brain hurt anyway. Also, all of the female characters keep their clothes on, which is completely at odds at your sleazy, prurient interests. Seriously though, when did blind flag worship become a prerequisite for loving your country? We’ve all undoubtedly seen that embarrassing picture of the imbecile-in-chief hugging the American flag like Linus from Peanuts cuddling his blankie. I’d be more impressed if he had as much respect for the Constitution as he did for a giant symbolic piece of cloth. To quote the late, great Molly Ivins: “I prefer someone who burns the flag and then wraps themselves up in the Constitution over someone who burns the Constitution and then wraps themselves up in the flag.”

If insufficient flag-waving is the movie’s biggest flaw for viewers on the right, then a lack of color and diversity is the biggest problem for viewers on the left, some of whom are incensed that the filmmakers had the nerve to make a movie about a white man’s accomplishments without addressing any social problems affecting minorities at the time. The New Yorker’s Richard Brody has called it a “right-wing fetish object” and The Mary Sue’s Kate Gardener writes that "I’m glad they decided against making it a story of American exceptionalism, but as with most historical films, they decide to focus mostly on white men." Umm…maybe because the historical events in question concerned mostly white men? The sad fact is that in the 1960s, NASA and other cultural institutions weren’t as well-integrated and ethnically diverse as they are now. To pretend otherwise and to add a token minority face where none existed would be to distort historical accuracy for the sake of cultural sensitivity.  

So there you have it, folks. First Man can’t simply be enjoyed as an entertaining biopic about one of America’s greatest heroes. It must be molded into fitting into our own personal political agendas. It’s not patriotic enough for some viewers and too jingoistic for others. It’s a right-wing screed and a liberal polemic. It’s a floor wax and a dessert topping! Meanwhile, in the real world, climate change is threatening to wipe out our very existence, Hurricane Michael had devastated much of the east coast, Saudi Arabian journalist Jamal Khashoggi was murdered by extremists, and our country is being led by a shiftless dipshit of a president would rather suck up to pop stars than address any of the problems that are truly facing the country. Aren’t you glad you got upset over a movie?

Breaking Up with Books Is OK

As an avid reader, I try to make it a habit not to give up on a book. After all, some books are slow going at the start, only to gradually pick up momentum along the way and grow into a richly rewarding experience. I try to adhere to what I call "the 100-page" rule. If I read for 100 pages or more and nothing interesting happens, it's pretty much a given that nothing interesting is going to happen. There have been some exceptions to this rule, such as Stephen King's uncut edition of The Stand which had me going for about  half of its 1000+ pages, before I finally got overwhelmed by all of the endless characters and subplots and just straight-up quit. Every now and then, a book will compel me to read it from cover to cover, despite the fact that it's not really interesting me, just so I can say that I've read it.

Last week, I finished Ursula K. LeGuin's sci-fi magnum opus, The Dispossessed. 385 tedious and unrewarding pages later, I'm not sure why I did.

This may well be the most boring science fiction book every written, and one of the most boring books ever published in any genre. We follow our hero, the anarchist Shevek from birth to roughly age 40 as he attempts to broker peace between the poverty-stricken socialist government of the planet Annares and the wealthy, capitalistic society of the planet Urras. Along the way, he does a lot of exciting things like devise a complex mathematical theory, write a lot of papers, and talk endlessly about physics and political philosophy. (I know! Riveting, right?) And dear God, do LeGuin's characters love to talk. They go on and on, bloviating for paragraphs on end about religion and politics. (A warning to readers: any novel that is almost 400 pages long but has only 13 chapters is a big red flag.) There is an interesting moment toward the end of the novel where Shevek joins an uprising of labor workers on Urras that is violently suppressed by the government, but LeGuin, perhaps fearing her readers would get too much excitement out of this story, quickly steers the ship back to Boringville.

And after all this, what important lesson has Shevek the brilliant mathematician and anarchist learned? That both socialist and capitalist systems are inherently flawed! Wow. Thanks for that brilliant bit of insight. It's nothing I haven't heard from any undergrad poly-sci major between hits from a bong and repeated listenings of  Bob Marley's Legend.

I'm not trying to be mean. I wanted to like this book. I really did. I want to like the recently-deceased Ms. LeGuin, who seemed like a fairly cool, ass-kicking feminist writer. Maybe her other books are worth checking out, but I'm not in a rush to check any of them out anytime soon. Perhaps the problem is with me. I just don't care enough about physics or mathematics to want to read a novel about them. Maybe when I crack open a sci-fi novel, I expect an exciting story and exciting characters, not a pseudo-profound political screed puffed up with balloon juice. Perhaps this type of book is not for me. Perhaps, like a bad relationship, it's OK to cut your losses early on instead of feeling like you've just wasted your time.

"But, Eric," you think, "I saw on your Facebook page that you quoted a line from this book." Well, yes, that's true. I did like that line, and felt it had significance in the dangerous times we're currently living in. I liked some of the dialogue and writing, but the entire book, as a whole, just didn't do it for me. And if that upsets you, let me quote another great line from a beloved "classic" that I can't stand:

"Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn."

Thoughts and Prayers

Are you offended by something I wrote?
Well, I'm offended by the way that you vote
You can't stop blaming Hillary for Benghazi
So you pick the guy endorsed by a Nazi

Big orange clown in a ratty blonde wig
Charm of a serpent, class of a pig
We try to move on, but we just can't forget
This whole country's playing Russian roulette

But we're sending all our thoughts and prayers
It's just a nice way of saying that no one cares

30 million dollars from the NRA
How many more children have to pay?
Too many bodies in too few years
Blood money dries up a whole lot of tears

And you don't get to hide under your riches
And call protesting athletes "sons of bitches"
And you don't get to hide under your steeple
And call neo-Nazis "very fine people"

But we're sending all our thoughts and prayers
It's just a nice way of saying that no one cares

And I don't think it's too outrageous
To say we shouldn't put children in cages
And I don't think it's too much to say
We shouldn't take their mommy and daddy away

It doesn't make America great
To give in to anger and corruption and hate
You don't know why you feel so alone
So you blame somebody with a darker skin tone

But we're sending all our thoughts and prayers
It's just a nice way of saying that no one cares

(c) 2018 Kid Tripper Music. All rights reserved. (So don't steal it!)

I Won't Be a Good German

I don't remember exactly how old I was when I first become aware of who Donald Trump was. It was probably sometime when I was a kid in the late '80s, watching him being interviewed for Entertainment Tonight or some other fluff TV program. Even then, I sensed there was something shifty and untrustworthy about him. I learned a little more in my pre-teens when I read a collection of Bloom County comics entitled Happy Trails! in which creator Berkeley Breathed decided to send off Opus and friends with a story line in which Trump bought up the titular town which he intended to turn into parking lots. A few years earlier, the same strip ridiculed him by having him injured by a falling anchor from his yacht and transplanting his brain into the body of the insane Bill D. Cat. It was these early strips that cemented in my mind my early opinion of Trump as an obnoxious rich idiot from New York who owned a lot of crap and inexplicably managed to attract beautiful women. He was, by and large, a joke and a horse's ass and aside from a few cameo appearances in movies and TV shows --like Home Alone 2, which I thought was the funniest film of all time when I was twelve. Hey, give me a break. Your tastes weren't that refined back then, either.-- fairly easy to ignore. As long as he remained holed up in one of his towers in Manhattan and didn't intrude on my life in any way, he was completely insignificant to me. He was a clown and a buffoon and not worth giving a second though to.

I don't recall the exact moment when I started to actively hate him, but it was probably sometime around 2004, when his TV show The Apprentice first aired. I'm not a fan of reality TV, so I didn't watch any episodes, but I knew the premise well enough. A group of prospective employees perform menial tasks for him and throughout the course of a season, each one is fired until a winner is chosen and gets to be the Donald's personal apprentice. Each episode ended with him giving someone the ax and declaring, in his inimitable Queens accent, "You're fired".  It was pretty much the same premise as Survivor, but in a corporate office setting. I couldn't for the life of me understand why anyone would compete to work for such a megalomaniac asshole, and I still don't. I didn't see the appeal of a grotesquely rich prick abusing and humiliating those in a lower economic bracket each week. I imagine that firing employees at most jobs is a difficult task for the employer who has to do so, and that they struggle with the ethics of putting a human being out of work. Not so for the Donald. For him, it was a simple as ordering coffee at your local Starbucks. It was then that I realized that he was a complete sociopath with no empathy for his fellow man and no concern with anything other than his own greed and colossal ego. But again, he was someone I could ignore just by not watching his stupid TV program. I mean, it wasn't like he was ever going to be elected President of the United States or anything like that, right?

Fast forward to present day. The man who was once just an annoying TV star is now the leader of the free world. And how does he represent his country on the world stage? By alienating our allies and appeasing our enemies. By calling benign Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau "weak and dishonest" and praising murderous North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un as "strong" and " a good negotiator". (I guess negotiations are pretty easy when all you have to do is kill those who oppose your policies). By separating immigrant children from their parents and caging them up like animals. (Whether they're here legally or not, no child deserves to be treated that way. I wouldn't treat a dog that way, much less a human child.) And the ones who support this kind of behavior are the same ones who have the gall to call themselves "pro-life Christians" and not see a single trace of irony in those words. And if you call them out on it, they'll bring up Benghazi or Hillary's e-mails or how "Obummer" was gonna take all their precious, precious guns away (which is something he never actually did, nor was he ever intending to do). They can't find any way to defend their president because they know he's indefensible, so they just bring up the ones who aren't currently in charge, because that's the only ammunition they have.

"But, Eric", you think, "why do you have to be so negative? Why can't you focus on all the good that is happening? Why can't you just keep singing and dancing at the Kit-Kat Klub, and ignore that silly little  man with the thin mustache? He's not affecting you personally in any way. Why can't you just be a good German and keep on having a good time?"

Because these are dire times we're living in and I refuse to stay silent. I refuse to be complacent  when I see cruelty and injustice all around me. I refuse to normalize the abnormal. I refuse to believe that just because something doesn't affect me on a personal level that it's not worth speaking out against.

I refuse to be a good German.

Depression Doesn't Discriminate

If the recent suicides of Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain have taught us anything, it's that depression doesn't discriminate and that immense wealth and fame are not miracle cures for the demons that are living in some people's minds. Depression doesn't care if you have millions of dollars in your bank account or if you have close to nothing. It doesn't care if you've been on hundreds of magazine covers or if nobody even knows that you exist. It doesn't care if you're a high-profile celebrity or a Wal-Mart greeter, a beloved chef or a fry cook at McDonald's. It sinks its hooks into everyone it can get, and nobody is immune. If anything positive has come from these sad news stories, it's the knowledge that anybody who is suffering is not alone and that we can all learn how to help one another.

I realize these are pretty dark times we live in. The world sometimes seems like an overturned porta-john at the county fair. This country's current commander-in-chief is a sub-literate dunce and petty tyrant who beclowns the office of the presidency on a daily basis. His appalling behavior at the G-7 Summit is just the latest in a long list of embarrassing incidents that makes us looks worse in the eyes of our nation's allies. (I mean, seriously. How do you manage to piss off Canada?)  Immigrant children are being taken away from their parents and placed in cages like dogs. Teenagers who survived a horrible mass shooting are being harassed by gun-worshipers who feel the need to own weapons of warfare to fill some void in their lives. Everything seems like the Bizarro version of how it should be. 

But, as terrible as things may seem, just try to hold on. Seek peace and comfort in what you enjoy. Talk a walk through the Metroparks, ride your bike, write a song, read a book. Binge-watch your favorite show, if that's what makes you happy. But don't forget to take your meds or see your doctor also. Life can be shitty, but it can also be great, too. Stay strong, stay healthy, and most importantly, stay alive. And if you need help, go here: https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/ or call 1-800-273-8255. You matter.