Republican Debate Nov 10,2015

One expects imbecilities and outright lies from politicians running for office, but not so much undisguised meanness and desire to hurt people. Many of the conservatives we saw seemed moved by nothing as much as hatred.  Women, young people, blacks, immigrants, gays, liberals, teachers -- the list could go on for pages.  The impression I had was that there was a wish to see the lives of millions and millions of their fellow citizens made miserable.
--Charles Simic on the Republican debates, The New York Review of Books.

Last night's debate was a combination of voodoo economics, Clinton and Obama bashing, and saber rattling.  In other words, more of the same.

Chris Christie gave up defending his record to claim repeatedly that he was the only one who could beat Clinton.

Carly Fiorina kept constantly saying "take our government back!" by returning to free market healthcare.

Ben Carson seemed half-asleep most of the time and said he did not mind being vetted, but please vet everyone else, too.

Trump said "let's make America great again" by deporting all illegal immigrants.

Rick Santorum almost made sense when he suggested better jobs for those not going to college, but did not want to raise the minimum wage; none of the other candidates wanted to raise it either.

Bobby Jindal said he was the only one who can stop, and even reverse, our current path to socialism.

Mike Huckabee wants to do away with the income tax altogether and replace it with a sales tax, or what he called a "fair tax."

Marco Rubio wants more welders and "less" philosophers (presumably he meant "fewer", though like many of the candidates he had some trouble with syntax).  Rubio also said that in 35 of 50 states childcare costs more than college, something he wants to change by giving more tax credits to families.  The idea of subsidized daycare I'm sure never occurred to him.

John Kasich wants everyone to live up to their "God-given" potential and was the only participant to use the argumentum ad auctoritatem, i.e, Michael Novak.

Ted Cruz wants to raise the retirement age, without mentioning that this could be harmful to blue-collar workers.

Jeb Bush seemed flustered throughout and was concerned about the Russian presence in Syria.  He wants to have a "free fly zone," though he was no better at explaining what that was and how it worked than were some of the other candidates in explaining Dodd-Frank, inveighed against almost as much as Obamacare.

Rand Paul did make a good point that if you want to increase the military, as everyone does but him, you will need a way to pay for it.

Few of the candidates responded directly to the questions, preferring to talk about cronyism in Washington and severe unemployment.  Once again no one asked about unions or talked about them, even though the decline of unions correlates directly with the increase in inequality.

Stephen Colbert and the Late Show

Last night I watched Stephen Colbert's The Late Show and was appalled at what I saw and heard:  primitive jokes and inane conversation.  You may wonder why I tuned into a show that seems to appeal to inebriated high school students who watch while they eat their meatball subs and drink beer.  I did so last night because The New York Times said that author Karl Ove Knausgaard was going to be on. Knausgaard did not appear; instead they had Bryan Cranston talking about his new movie, Trumbo, as he and Colbert seemed to know nothing about the Hollywood Ten or even in what decade WW II took place!  So they quickly switched to more primitive humor, about looking at the stars and thinking about God, humor that would have been considered too primitive for Abbot and Costello!  Colbert seems as witless as they come and his musical guest, one Shamir, was as primitive musically as Colbert's "jokes" about Guinness and Mexican restaurants. 

I should have known that an intelligent writer such as the neurotic Knausgaard would not feel comfortable in this crude setting, which included a tour of New Orleans bars and streets with The Late Show's musical director, Jon Baptiste, which told us exactly nothing and included additional unfunny jokes. Whatever happened to intelligent discourse?  Even Johnny Carson had an opera singer on occasionally and Ed Sullivan had ballet dancers.  David Susskind had "Open End," where he would talk with writers and artists.  Perhaps I am an old fart, but it seems to me that the audience for these current late night shows (I also sat through Jimmy Fallon's show once) don't have enough intelligence to realize that their intelligence is being insulted!

Cable TV and What I Am Watching These Days.

Last week the cable guy came --we have Time-Warner -- and gave us a new box.  The box we had for several years could no longer get a picture from HBO or Showtime and the cable guy said it was just the start of the box's failure.  The new box will now record twice as much on the DVR as the old box, which somewhat makes up for the fact I can no longer record on VHS tapes (of which I threw out many, mostly unwatched, when we moved two years ago).  Previously when I ran out of room on the DVR I would record those movies (mostly) on VHS tapes and then delete them.  When I could no longer do that (for reasons that were never truly explained to my satisfaction) I had the dilemma of deleting or watching when I may not have been in the mood for that particular film.  Why have cable at all I am sometimes asked.  Mainly for Turner Classic Movies, I reply.  For one who loves classical films it would be a difficult channel to do without, for Turner shows movies uncut, uninterrupted and in the proper aspect ratio,  It also shows many classical films that are otherwise unavailable.  Someone recently asked me if it wasn't the case that all of the movies on Turner were available on DVD.  Would that it were so!  I did a count on a random month and determined that 80% of what Turner shows is not available on tape or DVD!  Sure, most of Hitchcock is available on DVD, but for those of us who love Borzage, Ulmer, Joseph H. Lewis, Frank Tashlin and many other relatively unheralded geniuses of classical film it is an entirely different matter.

My 17-year-old son Gideon and my wife Susan have little interest in TV, though Susan does like the movies of John Ford and Raoul Walsh and watches them with me, as well as using her limited time to watch more obscure movies by Val Lewton and others who make impressive films in sixty to seventy-five minutes.  And we do allow our four-year-old to watch an hour of TV a day; she has moved from Scooby-Doo to Sofia the First to, currently, Looney Toons, recorded from Boomerang.  Many of these are mediocre. of course (we always watch with her) but some by Chuck Jones and Friz Freleng are quite brilliant indeed.

I do watch some shows that are not movies.  Currently these include:

On broad cast TV:  The Good Wife and Blindspot.  The Good Wife, produced by Michelle King and Robert King, stars a low-key Julianne Margulies as a lawyer with a politician husband, with a complex Perry-Mason-style approach.  Blindspot, created by Martin Gero, is the kind of secret conspiracy programmer for which I have a weakness, i.e, I wouldn't recommend to others the way I would The Good Wife.

Showtime:  The Affair and Homeland.  The  Affair, produced by Sarah Treem and Hagai Levi (who did the fascinating In Treatment for HBO) is an effectively class-conscious melodrama about love and money, though it does include some irritating time-jumping, as too many shows these days do.  Homeland is produced by Alex Gansa and Howard Gordon, who did 24; one season of Homeland is equivalent in plot to one episode of 24.  This is not necessarily a bad thing, and Mandy Patinkin and Clair Danes are both effective, each neurotic in their own way.  Still, there is too much mysterious plotting, even for a spy drama.

HBO:  The Leftovers.  I had read Tom Perrota's original book but the first season lost me along the way, though the episodes that focused on individual grief were powerful.  This season Damon Lidelof, who sent us over a cliff with the originally promising Lost, is leading the league in obscurity, which he seems to confuse with profundity, though he is no Antonioni. The theme song, by Iris Dement, is quite wonderful.

Republcan "Debates" Oct 28, 2015

The reason I put "debate" in quotation marks is because there is very little disagreement among the Republican contenders:  Pataki accepts that abortion is legal, Rand Paul does not want to build up the military the way the other candidates do, and that is about it for dissent from the party line:  tax less, spend less (except for the military, where more needs to be spent), bomb the hell out of those who we think are out to get us.  The candidates also don't like Hillary Clinton, who Bobby Jindal says "would take us down the road to socialism" (he didn't need to say he thought that would be a bad thing; he has been complaining about the left and socialists continuously).  Ted Cruz at one point said that listening to the Democratic debate was like listening to a debate between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks, though I wonder how much of the audience understood that remark. 

Each candidate tried to emphasize either their experience in government ("I balanced the budget") or outside it ("I made difficult decisions"), while trying to portray themselves as tougher than any of the other candidates.  Lindsey Graham did the most saber-rattling and each candidate had some voodoo economic scheme, most of which relied on dubious and disproven supply-side ideas.  Everyone praised the working class, often giving their own personal histories of deprivation, but once again there was nobody to defend -- or even mention -- unions, collective bargaining being one of the most successful ways to raise wages.

Ted Cruz complained that the moderators would not let them discuss the issues.  What issues?  Everyone wants to be rid of Obamacare, for instance, but no one had any suggestions about how to make sure that the people who need healthcare get it.  My favorite comment in the debate was from the self-styled populist Rick Santorum, who said that Obamacare was designed to drive small insurance companies out of business, demonizing large insurance companies and then insisting that that proved we need single-payer healthcare!   Would that it were so.  I think we started on the road to a single-payer system with Medicare and we will get there eventually, long after every other country has it.

With all the militarism in this debate I am only slightly surprised that none of the candidates suggested reinstituting the draft.  That they are correctly afraid of the risk of doing this is, to me, an indication that most voters are not as fond of wars as the candidates, especially younger voters who would have to do the fighting.

The strangest question in the debate was asked of all the participants:  do you think the day after the Super Bowl should be a national holiday?  I did not understand that question at all, unless it was meant to suggest that everyone is hung over that day, which doesn't seem like a reason to have a holiday.

Democratic Party Debate Oct 13,2015

I don't have too much to say about the Democratic debates.  All of the candidates seem to be decent people, each one trying to emphasize at least one aspect that makes them unique:  Webb with his military service, Chafee with the fact that he has never been associated with any scandal, O' Malley with his support of renewable energy, Clinton with being female (I also was annoyed by Clinton's constant references to the potential of every child's "God-given" talent.  Suppose one does not believe in God?), Sanders with his anti-billionaire populism. My vote, on the issues, goes to Sanders.  He is the only candidate advocating a single-payer healthcare system, free college tuition for public colleges, expanded social security and the importance of privacy.  He was attacked for being a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War, which is actually to his credit, and voted against the war in Iraq,  i.e., he doesn't believe in useless,destructive and stupid wars. It was suggested that, as a senator from a rural state, he is not as much of a supporter of gun control as he should be but he did make an important point about that:  many people who need to see mental health specialists do not do so because either they cannot afford it or their insurance will not pay for it.

I was slightly disappointed that with all the references to inequality there was no reference whatsoever to labor unions, whose shrinking size and power correlates with O'Malley's repeated statement that 70% of us are making the same or less than we were ten years ago.  Nor was there any reference to art or books of any kind; Clinton repeatedly referred to experts but never identified them. Perhaps it is too much to expect busy politicians to read books or go to the opera and ballet performances, though I think they could benefit enormously by doing so.

Linda Chavez on Donald Trump

As an addendum to my comments on the Republican debates I want to recommend "Donald Trump's America" by Linda Chavez in the October issue of Commentary.  Chavez gives us a much-needed history lesson, pointing out:
     The anti-immigrant rancor that is fueling Trump's popularity is nothing new in American history.  A populist backlash has accompanied every wave of large-scale immigration, whether we are talking about German and Irish immigrants in the 19th century  or Jews, Italians, Poles, and other Southern and Eastern Europeans in the early 20th century.

The same concerns were directed at earlier immigrants --crime, stealing jobs, lack of assimilation --that are now directed at today's immigrants from Latin America. One reason for the rapid assimilation of these earlier groups, especially in the second generation, is that everyone born here is an American citizen, and now Trump wants to revoke that birthright!

Trump also wants to deport all illegal immigrants, something that would take up to twenty years to accomplish and would cost more than $400 billion dollars, not to mention the havoc it would wreak with families.  Trump probably does not even know that this has been tried before:  during the Great Depression more than 400,000 Mexicans were deported, using tyrannical and unconstitutional methods.  What we most need to do is find a pathway to citizenship or legal status for illegal immigrants, nearly two-thirds of whom have lived here for more than ten years.

Republican Debates Sept. 16, 2015

The Republican debate on Sept. 16 was a sorry sight of hypocrisy and demagoguery.  The only candidates that showed any sense of intelligence or dignity were Rand Paul and George Pataki, staking out their libertarian and liberal Republican positions, respectively.  Rand Paul stated that the invasion of Iraq made things even worse and Pataki stating that we should follow laws on which the Supreme Court has ruled.  All the other candidates tried to outdo each other in how much they would beef up the military and bomb the hell out of anyone who doesn't "respect" us.  At one point the question was raised about birthright -- should everyone born here be a citizen -- since few other countries allow this, but no one said we should have single-payer healthcare because everyone else does!  Obamacare received much criticism but no one suggested an alternative that would help those without health insurance.  (My own feeling is that we will have single-payer healthcare eventually, especially now that Medicare is generally accepted.)

Medicare was originally demonized as "socialized medicine" and it was mordantly amusing to hear Bobby Jindal rail against the Democrats because they had a "socialist" running for President, making it sound like something akin to a child molester. Most of the other candidates repeatedly referred to themselves as conservatives, with Obama and Hilary Clinton as "left-wingers."  And the specter of communism was not far away, as references were made to Putin backing Syria as a way of re-establishing "the evil empire."  Rick Santorum was the only one attempting to establish himself as a populist, without using that word (most of the audience would probably not know the term), supporting an increased minimum wage and concern for the working class.  Scott Walker of the Progressive state of Wisconsin said he thought increasing the minimum age was not the answer, but rather more education to allow people to get better jobs.  That was okay as far as it went, except that Walker had engineered a drastic reduction in the budget for the University of Wisconsin. Education was only mentioned once, with a passing reference to "the common core," otherwise it was totally absent from the debate, and of course no one even mentioned Obama's plan to make community college free.  Also not mentioned, and I blame this on the CNN softball questioning, were labor unions.  Many of the candidates have bragged about their union-busting successes , though the evidence strongly indicates a relationship between the decline in unions and stagnant salaries, all those suffering people living, as Marco Rubio put it,  " from paycheck to paycheck."  No one had any suggestions for what could be done about this.

I was also amused that most of the candidates introduced themselves by making reference to their long marriages and their children, probably an indirect attack on Trump and his multiple wives. The old Republican term "family values" was never mentioned.  There was also no mention of the controversial National Endowment for the Arts and no mention of literature, music, painting, dance, etc.

It was interesting, and probably a coincidence, that PBS broadcast its documentary "Walt Disney" on the two days before the most recent debate.  Neil Genzlinger mentioned, in his review in The New York Times, Disney's "staid, white-washed view of America" (the film was written by Mark Zwonitzer and directed by Sarah Colt).  The Republican candidates seem to want such a world, which those of us who grew up in small towns know never existed and never will.  Though Vietnam was not mentioned in the debate it seems that many people did not learn anything from that destructive war.  Rand Paul gets credit for at least saying that war is a last resort, not a first, and should be declared by Congress and not the President.