1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 98: When it rains; The final insult

Here is the IMDb’s description of Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep (1978):

Set in the Watts area of Los Angeles, a slaughterhouse worker must suspend his emotions to continue working at a job he finds repugnant, and then he finds he has little sensitivity for the family he works so hard to support.

I saw the movie almost twenty years ago. I gained little from it, which was my fault. I might have payed closer attention to Roger Ebert’s review.

It also might have helped to have been familiar with two of Burnett’s later, smaller pictures: When It Rains (1995; 13 m.) and The Final Insult (1997; 55 m.). The lead actor in both short movies is Ayuko Babu. Los Angeles is the setting.

Three elements of The Killer of Sheep are present, to a greater or lesser degree, in both shorter movies: the episodic nature of the storytelling, the judicious use of music, and the blending of “acted” and “candid” footage.

When It Rains is the most accessible of the trio. The plot is simple. A woman and her daughter are evicted from their apartment. The woman tracks down a jazz musician (Babu) and asks for help. The jazz musician talks to the landlord, who refuses to budge. (He is “crazed,” the jazz musician mutters, perhaps slightly unreasonably.) The jazz musician goes around to various acquaintances to raise funds “for a Sister.” Most refuse. A kindly scrapyard worker gives a few dollars. This money is subsequently – and humorously – lost. Reconciliation with the landlord, when achieved, is not financial; it occurs because the jazz musician is able to find common cultural ground with the landlord. It’s not enough that all of the characters are Black; they have to like the same music. The jazz musician reflects that he was fortunate not to have been seen carrying a hip-hop record.

In The Final Insult, Babu plays a banker who advises business owners to hire temporary workers in order to avoid paying taxes and employee benefits. At the end of his shift, the banker goes to his car. This is where he resides. He may have a job and wear a white shirt and a tie, but he is homeless (or quasi-homeless). The car is not in good shape. The banker is one breakdown from disaster.

Blended with this story are interviews with and “candid” footage of real homeless people of various racial and class backgrounds. The point of these grueling passages, I guess, is to show that homelessness is no joke.

When It Rains is about the threat of homelessness, but it’s easy to watch because it’s funny.

The Final Insult contains passages of poetry and piquant irony. But these are swamped by the prosaic bitterness of real people’s sufferings.

The banker is not a real person, as Jonathan Rosenbaum points out. His misadventures become more fanciful as the movie goes on. I don’t believe the banker is meant to invoke our sympathy. He is “most of us” – but we are unlikely to admit it. He symbolizes a transitional status. He is a prosperous person fallen on hard times who retains a bourgeois attitude. An automobile user, he is, for the time being, insulated from the horror of forced pedestrianism in a traffic-heavy society. Other homeless people react angrily when, after he loses this insulation, he calls for revolution.

Intriguingly, the theme of finding common ground through music is revisited. Another homeless character – a (possibly educated) white man – sings Korean ballads at a bus stop to a group of Korean women. They are charmed. How do you know this music?, they ask. From listening to records, he says. The man also sings Italian opera songs, and he can speak Spanish.

But although this man’s encounters are uniformly positive, they provide no lasting material relief. He remains homeless. The question is whether positivity and human connection can be enough. The movie doesn’t say.

Open-ended and loosely structured, the two short movies do manage to say a good deal. One is pleasing; the other is a downright slog. Considering them together is more enlightening than considering them apart.

More Arendt

… which I’m sure you were itching to read this morning.

But first, an item of local interest: a graduate of nearby Goshen College is the author of the Library of America’s latest “story of the week.”

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

From Origins, chapter 7:

It took the Boers several decades to understand that [British] imperialism was nothing to be afraid of, since it would neither develop the country as Australia and Canada had been developed, nor draw profits from the country at large, being quite content with a high turnover of investments in one specific field [gold mining]. Imperialism therefore was willing to abandon the so-called laws of capitalist production and their egalitarian tendencies, so long as profits from specific investments were safe. This led eventually to the abolition of the law of mere profitableness and South Africa became the first example of a phenomenon that occurs whenever the mob becomes the dominant factor in the alliance between mob and capital.

In one respect, the most important one, the Boers remained the undisputed masters of the country: whenever rational labor and production policies came into conflict with race considerations, the latter won. Profit motives were sacrificed time and again to the demands of a race society, frequently at a terrible price. The rentability of the railroads was destroyed overnight when the government dismissed 17,000 Bantu employees and paid white wages that amounted to 200 per cent more; expenses for municipal government became prohibitive when native municipal employees were replaced with whites; the Color Bar Bill finally excluded all black workers from mechanical jobs and forced industrial enterprise to a tremendous increase of production costs. The race world of the Boers had nobody to fear any more, least of all white labor, whose trade unions complained bitterly that the Color Bar Bill did not go far enough.

The racism described here is race-rule. Boer clans subsisted by forcing native tribes to farm for them. They didn’t want this arrangement upset by the development of industry or bureaucracy. (They got their wish.)

“Mob” in Arendt refers to the agglomeration of misfits: people excluded from the workings of a polity: people fulfilling no communal organizational or economic function. Mere hoarders of wealth; speculators; subsistence farmers; unemployed workers (the individualistic ones, not those moved by solidarity).

As separatist farmers, Boer clans belonged to the mob. So did people involved in the gold rush: investors as well as individual miners. Rich and poor.

Mob-rule occurs when such people use politics to prevent the development of “normal” governance and commerce. For example: Jews

settled down permanently into a unique position for a white group. [Footnote: “Jews constituted roughly one-third of the total immigration to South Africa in the twenties, and … in sharp contrast to all other categories of uitlanders, settled there permanently; their share in the annual emigration is less than a per cent.”] They neither belonged to the “lifeblood” of Africa nor to the “poor white trash.” Instead they started almost immediately to build up those industries and professions which according to South African opinion are “secondary” because they are not connected with gold. Jews became manufacturers of furniture and clothes, shopkeepers and members of the professions, physicians, lawyers, and journalists. In other words, no matter how well they thought they were adjusted to the mob conditions of the country and its race attitude, Jews had broken its most important pattern by introducing into South African economy a factor of normalcy and productivity, with the result that when Mr. Malan introduced into Parliament a bill to expel all Jews from the Union he had the enthusiastic support of all poor whites and of the whole Afrikander population.

The timeless lesson is that it behooves the most speculative and exploitative businessmen – captains of mostly useless industries (extraction of ornamental minerals, space exploration, gambling, luxurious transportation and housing) – to maintain a dysfunctional society: to lord it over desperate, disconnected, disaffected workers and voters. Plodding but sound officials and workers who bring order to chaos are best eliminated. Energetic immigrants who do so are best kept out. You can see how this describes our own moment.

As I read, I’m tempted to draw analogies between past and present, almost to treat Arendt as an oracle. Of course I don’t know enough to judge whether she gets the past right. And the analogies that suggest themselves in certain moods seem farfetched in others. How closely can Obama really be likened to Arendt’s Disraeli? I don’t know.

February’s poems

Happy St. Valentine’s Day. Samuel and Daniel are with grandparents. Karin & I – accompanied by sleeping Abel – romantically gorged at the local diner (I ordered Mexican food and pancakes). We knew it’d be a quiet venue; there were just a handful of couples. But all races and persuasions were represented, including people with MAGA hats.

Afterward, I remarked to Karin how nicely everyone got along. “They all ignored each other,” she said.

Then I realized, not everyone shares my idea of “getting along.”

Back at home, we read love poems to each other.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

“Forget-Me-Not,” by William McGonagall:

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

A gallant knight and his betroth’d bride,

Were walking one day by a river side,

They talk’d of love, and they talk’d of war,

And how very foolish lovers are.

At length the bride to the knight did say,

“There have been many young ladies led astray

By believing in all their lovers said,

And you are false to me I am afraid.”

“No, Ellen, I was never false to thee,

I never gave thee cause to doubt me;

I have always lov’d thee and do still,

And no other woman your place shall fill.”

“Dear Edwin, it may be true, but I am in doubt,

But there’s some beautiful flowers here about,

Growing on the other side of the river,

But how to get one, I cannot discover.”

“Dear Ellen, they seem beautiful indeed,

But of them, dear, take no heed;

Because they are on the other side,

Besides, the river is deep and wide.”

“Dear Edwin, as I doubt your love to be untrue,

I ask one favour now from you:

Go! fetch me a flower from across the river,

Which will prove you love me more than ever.”

“Dear Ellen! I will try and fetch you a flower

If it lies within my power

To prove that I am true to you,

And what more can your Edwin do?”

So he leap’d into the river wide,

And swam across to the other side,

To fetch a flower for his young bride,

Who watched him eagerly on the other side.

So he pluck’d a flower right merrily

Which seemed to fill his heart with glee,

That it would please his lovely bride;

But, alas! he never got to the other side.

For when he tried to swim across,

All power of his body he did loss,

But before he sank in the river wide,

He flung the flowers to his lovely bride.

And he cried, “Oh, heaven! hard is my lot,

My dearest Ellen! Forget me not:

For I was ever true to you,

My dearest Ellen! I bid thee adieu!”

Then she wrung her hands in wild despair,

Until her cries did rend the air;

And she cried, “Edwin, dear, hard is out lot,

But I’ll name this flower Forget-me-not.

“And I’ll remember thee while I live,

And to no other man my hand I’ll give,

And I will place my affection on this little flower,

And it will solace me in a lonely hour.”

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

“May Colvin,” from The Oxford Book of Ballads (ed. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch):

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

False Sir John a-wooing came

To a maid of beauty fair;

May Colvin was this lady’s name,

Her father’s only heir.

He woo’d her but, he woo’d her ben [Editor’s note: both in the outer and inner rooms],

He woo’d her in the ha’;

Until he got the lady’s consent

To mount and ride awa’.

“Go fetch me some of your father’s gold,

And some of your mother’s fee,

And I’ll carry you into the north land,

And there I’ll marry thee.”

She’s gane to her father’s coffers

Where all his money lay,

And she’s taken the red, and she’s left the white,

And so lightly she’s tripp’d away.

She’s gane to her father’s stable

Where all the steeds did stand,

And she’s taken the best, and she’s left the warst

That was in her father’s land.

She’s mounted on a milk-white steed,

And he on a dapple-grey,

And on they rade to a lonesome part,

A rock beside the sea.

“Loup [leap] off the steed,” says false Sir John,

“Your bridal bed you see;

Seven ladies I have drownèd here,

And the eight’ one you shall be.

“Cast off, cast off your silks so fine

And lay them on a stone,

For they are too fine and costly

To rot in the salt sea foam.

“Cast off, cast off your silken stays,

For and your broider’d shoon,

For they are too fine and costly

To rot in the salt sea foam.

“Cast off, cast off your Holland smock

That’s border’d with the lawn,

For it is too fine and costly

To rot in the salt sea foam,” –

“O turn about, thou false Sir John,

And look to the leaf o’ the tree;

For it never became a gentleman

A naked woman to see.”

He turn’d himself straight round about

To look to the leaf o’ the tree;

She’s twined her arms about his waist

And thrown him into the sea.

“O hold a grip o’ me, May Colvin,

For fear that I should drown;

I’ll take you home to your father’s bower

And safe I’ll set you down.”

“No help, no help, thou false Sir John,

No help, no pity thee!

For you lie not in a caulder bed

Than you thought to lay me.”

She mounted on her milk-white steed,

And led the dapple-grey,

And she rode till she reach’d her father’s gate,

At the breakin’ o’ the day.

Up then spake the pretty parrot,

“May Colvin, where have you been?

What has become o’ false Sir John

That went with you yestreen?” –

“O hold your tongue, my pretty parrot!

Nor tell no tales o’ me;

Your cage shall be made o’ the beaten gold

And the spokes o’ ivorie.”

Up then spake her father dear,

In the bed-chamber where he lay:

“What ails the pretty parrot,

That prattles so long ere day?” –

“There came a cat to my cage, master,

I thought ’t would have worried me;

And I was calling to May Colvin

To take the cat from me.”

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Can you feel it

No school for Samuel: MLK Jr. Day, then two “snow days” (temps below zero °F). And he has a stomach bug. He’s lain on the sofa, except to puke. It’s been our day’s work to keep Daniel from harassing him.

During one glorious moment, Samuel ran to the toilet to puke, but Daniel was sitting there already, doing his business, so Samuel puked on Daniel. I was so proud of them both for going where they were supposed to go. We tossed Daniel into the shower.

Abel has done some puking, but that’s normal.

More about the weather. I’ve made a list of books about natural/​ecological disasters, for this coming reading year (it begins in May). One book per month. Some, I’ve already read portions of. The list also is inspired by the SoCal fires.

• Maclean, Young Men and Fire
• Stewart, Storm
• Egan, The Worst Hard Time
• Hughes, In Hazard
• Steinberg, Acts of God
• Krakauer, Into Thin Air
• Grunwald, The Swamp
• Stewart, Fire
• Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts
• Hughes, A High Wind in Jamaica
• Jacobsen, Nuclear War
• Weisman, The World Without Us

This is a manly list. The only woman on it is Jacobsen. Then again, these last couple of years I’ve read the “Little House” books, which feature fire, blizzards, locusts, and tornadoes; Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God; and short disasterpieces by Didion.

One might complain that some of these disasters aren’t so “natural,” that humans are to blame for them. I agree. So would van Inwagen, who minimizes the distinction between natural and freely chosen evil. And so would various authors on the list (especially, I gather, Steinberg and Davis). But the point isn’t to allocate responsibility; it’s to imagine stuff and people getting burned up, or blown or washed away. There’s grandeur and pathos in these disasters. My former tutee at IUSB, an old Black woman, recalled how a tornado hit South Bend and she and the other children were dismissed from school to go die at home. They ran to their houses, into the wind. That’s like something out of Their Eyes Were Watching God, a colleague said, not a little incredulously, when I told him. Yes, exactly.

Recreation and parks

John-Paul: “Karin, what should I blog about?”

Karin: “How good Howard Park is.”

It is good. It has a splash pad, a large playground, an ice-skating rink (in wintertime), valleys, hills, and a view of the river. It was redeveloped a few years ago, but we only recently began taking the boys there.

It’s also next to a trendy restaurant with loud live music. Acoustic covers of Savage Garden: that sort of thing. Alas.

The other day, we took the boys up a hill next to the park and across a footbridge to look out over the river. There were homeless people on the other side, resting. One guy – the coolest-looking one – lifted up his palm as if to say: Hey, man.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Another time, we went to a rather desolate park closer to our house. It borders a desolate apartment complex.

We were the only people there until an SUV pulled up and a little Hispanic boy got out. His mother (I assume that’s who she was) stayed in the SUV. The little boy played by himself. I was pushing Daniel on a swing. The little boy walked over and gestured as if he wanted me to lift him onto a swing. I peered over toward the mother. She wasn’t visible; the SUV was behind some play equipment. I lifted the boy onto the swing. He sat forlornly. He couldn’t get going. After a while, I pushed him and he swung for a bit. Then I helped him off and he went back to the SUV. It drove away.

Then some youths ambled over and asked Karin for dollars to buy sodas. She gave them some. She’s soft that way.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

We all walked to Kroger today (that, too, is recreation) and, while we were in the checkout line, a pretty, young, Black woman with classic basketball shoes opened her box of Outshine popsicles and gave one to each of her children and one to Samuel. Then, as she was leaving, she noticed Daniel. I didn’t know you had two children, she said. She went out to the parking lot, came back inside (we were still checking out), bought another box of popsicles, and gave one popsicle to Daniel.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 64: L.A. Confidential

My “anchor” year is 1996, but now I’m casting a wider net. 1997 is well within what I consider to be a “golden” period of moviemaking – which, like other golden eras, hearkens back to previous ones. The English Patient (1996) hearkens back to David Lean; L.A. Confidential (1997) hearkens back to Chinatown, which itself hearkens to older crime dramas – the greatest of which, for me, is The Big Heat.

The Big Heat, Chinatown, L.A. Confidential. Three dramas about police or ex-police who have a special zeal for protecting women, and who end up hurting those women in one way or another.

That sounds as if the women were passive. They aren’t. Arguably, the most forceful and complex character in each of these movies is a woman. In L.A. Confidential, it’s Lynn Bracken (Kim Basinger), a prostitute who specializes in reminding men of Veronica Lake; meanwhile, she loves those she is able to love.

But these movies are mainly about the men who try to save the women – foolishly, perhaps.

The “protector” in L.A. Confidential is Bud White (Russell Crowe). Rescuing domestic abuse victims and sex workers is his avocation. His temper often gets the better of him. His captain, Dudley Smith (James Cromwell), keeps him around to intimidate and beat confessions out of criminals. This is the 1950s. Los Angeles is growing. Mobsters from out of town try to move in, but the police keep them in check.

It’s the corrupt local bigwigs, cloaked in respectability, accumulating wealth and power in tandem with the city, who run the scene.

Bud seems like a brute, but he’s smart. He follows leads and quietly makes progress on tricky cases. The movie also follows two other smart police officers. Jack Vincennes (Kevin Spacey) is running a side-hustle, sharing information with the tabloids. They get the scoops; he gets the collars and the publicity. Edmund Exley (Guy Pearce) is a careerist “boy scout” – upright but ruthless, and loyal to none but himself. His colleagues initially doubt that he has the stomach to perform the necessary brutalities. By the end, he’s laid out more bodies than anyone else.

The death toll is high, what with one mass murder, a few gunfights, and many assassinations. There are a lot of beatings, too, and an off-camera rape. People speak nastily enough to make each other cry. All of this taxes and ennervates the viewer. The movie isn’t shy about how morally compromised, even downright awful, these police are; but it revels in the exhibition. It invites the viewer to share in the thrill of pumping a shotgun or getting an interrogee to squirm. More than Chinatown, in which the spectacle descends into tragedy and then sordidness, or The Big Heat, which seethes with irony, L.A. Confidential helps us to understand the visceral attraction of policing that mixes sadism, cynicism, and self-righteousness.

Each protagonist is asked why he became a cop. Jack Vincennes can’t remember. Edmund Exley wants to catch the guys who don’t get caught: in other words, he wants to outsmart people. The hotheaded Bud White, the noblest of the three, simply responds to woundedness, inflicting it upon the wounders and rescuing the wounded. He breaks the most rules – while following orders, as often as not – but he takes the job more seriously than the others do. He also relishes it the least.

The best line is uttered by Lynn Bracken when she says goodbye to Exley, who has just climbed a few more rungs up the ladder: “Some men get the world. Others get ex-hookers and a trip to Arizona.” Ex-hookers and Arizona is the better choice.

I don’t know how closely this movie resembles real policing. I just have other movies to compare it to.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 63: Secrets & lies

Is this the best movie of 1996? I think so. It has as much heart as Shine and as much cinematic virtuosity as Fargo. Secrets & Lies is a high-wire act, a controlled outpouring of uncontrolled emotion and verbiage with close-ups of tears, glares, and twitches.

When serious acting so outrageously violates the “less is more” principle, it has to be very, very skillful to come off as well as it does here.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Hortense’s adoptive parents have died. Hortense (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), a young optometrist, makes an appointment with a social worker (the great Lesley Manville, one of director Mike Leigh’s regular actors). If you want to contact your birth family, the social worker tells Hortense, consider using our agency: We’re professionals.

The social worker is full of words but also, somehow, distant. She’s an energetic bureaucrat going through the motions.

Hortense chooses to find her birth family on her own.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

One discovery surprises her. Although Hortense is black, the birth records show that her mother is white. Of course, as a matter of genetics, that’s not unheard of, and Hortense and the other characters accept it readily enough.

What shocks Hortense’s biological family is that Hortense should exist at all. The mother, Cynthia (the spectacular Brenda Blethyn), kept quiet about her first child, whom, as a teenager, she gave away without having seen.

Hortense easily finds Cynthia, who still lives in the same grubby East London house where she grew up. She’s had a hard life, working in a factory and raising a second daughter – who is white – the scowling street-sweeper Roxanne (Claire Rushbrook). Cynthia also cared for her father, now deceased, and her younger brother, the gentle, affable Maurice (Timothy Spall).

Cynthia often quarrels with Roxanne but seldom sees Maurice, who has moved with his class-anxious wife, Monica (Phyllis Logan), into a large house in a richer part of town. Maurice has “made good.” He runs a small but prosperous photography studio. He shoots weddings and portraits. He often plays peacemaker with his subjects, as he has been forced to do for Monica, Cynthia, and Roxanne.

He exudes goodness. So does Hortense. Either would make a worthy hero. Arguably, however, the hero of this story is the least reasonable person: the lonely, volatile Cynthia. She may be difficult to live with, but she has given her all.

It took many viewings for me to decide that Cynthia is the hero.

A Mike Leigh protagonist is multifaceted. He or she might seem wonderful upon one viewing and beyond-the-pale awful the next time. Or vice versa.

Who is the hero of the Book of Ruth? (God, of course; but which of the humans?)

Is it the young titular character, who bravely throws in her lot with her griefstricken second mother? Is it the hospitable Boaz?

Or is it old Naomi? She doesn’t just rest in the unexpected love of her new daughter. Instead, she sets up a proper home for Ruth by contriving – perhaps rather desperately and comically – to fully incorporate her into the family.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

As in Fargo, there’s one memorable sequence in Secrets & Lies that bears a significance that isn’t immediately obvious.

Maurice photographs a beautiful young woman in his studio. A hideous scar runs across one side of her face. She is a car crash victim. The photographs are for her insurers – she has lost her job as a beauty consultant – and also, perhaps, for use in a lawsuit. The woman is consumed by bitterness.

Someone always draws the short straw, Maurice reflects (and not for the first time).

As soon as the woman leaves, a disheveled man crosses the street and walks into the studio. He is the previous owner. Years ago, he sold the business to Maurice and moved to Australia, where he failed to establish himself. Now he has returned. He, too, is bitter.

There but for the grace of God go I, Maurice reflects.

These two characters have no influence on what happens between Hortense and her new family. Why are they in the movie? The implicit contrast is with Cynthia, who also “drew the short straw.” Like these people, she is lonely and sad and desperate. But she isn’t consumed. She’s still able to love and to be loved, and that’s what saves her and her family.

Not that they don’t have bitterness or meanness to overcome. The movie is called “secrets and lies,” after all. There is the secret of Hortense, Cynthia’s first child; and Monica and Maurice have a secret of their own.

I’m not doing justice to this rich movie.

P.S. When I first saw it, as a teenager in a Quito cinema, the color looked washed out – as in the above image. It looked washed out every time I saw the movie on VHS or DVD. Now the color is vibrant. It seems to have been touched up for the movie’s re-release through Criterion. The movie is beautiful to look at; it’s not only a balm for the soul.

A new niece; the “little house” books; the Hardy boys

The time has come to salute our new niece, Belladonna “Bella” Jean Louise. She was born to Brianna – who now goes by “Atticus” (“Atti”) – and to “Atti’s” partner, “Ike.”

Karin went to Michigan yesterday and visited the child and her parents.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Samuel pulled Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books off the shelf and spread them out across the floor. Which of them do you think caught his attention? That’s right: Farmer Boy. The only one in the series about little Almanzo Wilder. The only one about a boy.

The only one I’ve read, as it happens.

Karin tells me that when she was a little girl, she read all of the series *except* Farmer Boy. “That one is dumb,” her mom advised her.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I had the opposite limitation. I tried, when I was younger, to read some Nancy Drew books. I failed. But I succeeded in devouring dozens of Hardy Boys mysteries.

Now, after some thirty years, I’m rereading one of my old favorites: While the Clock Ticked (the eleventh novel in the series). Samuel and Daniel will be reading The Hardy Boys before long, I expect, and I’d like to be conversant in that literature.

The pacing is breakneck. There’s an amusing scene in which Frank and Joe attend a party with their girlfriends for all of five minutes before they rush off again to pursue a lead.

The police are implausibly nice. They’d like nothing better than to share information with the teenaged sleuths. Frank and Joe’s friend group ticks the important boxes, race-wise. In just a couple of pages, the Italian-American “chum,” the Jewish-American “chum,” and the Irish-American “chum” all are introduced. (Introduced, but never developed as characters.) Nowadays, other races than these are the beneficiaries of token inclusion; but a similar diversity principle seems to have guided the great mercenary children’s writings of 1932.

Then, of course, there’s Chet Morton, a rounder character in more ways than one. The chums go hiking in the woods, and Chet keeps pleading with them to stop so they can all eat their sandwiches. This is where the book provides character development and comical relief.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Back to Laura Ingalls. I picked up Little House in the Big Woods, also published in 1932, and read the first chapter. Its prose is plain but descriptively exquisite; I wouldn’t be surprised if it were a direct influence upon that of Nobel winner Alice Munro. (I’m especially reminded of her story “Boys and Girls.”) A lot happens in the big woods, but it happens out of view. The children wake up to see dead deer hanging from the trees. Pa kills the family’s pig; Laura stays indoors and listens while it squeals. Predators lurk outside the house.

The taste for this more atmospheric sort of writing comes later in life, I think. First comes a hunger for stories like The Hardy Boys, stories for one-track-minded readers. Not all children, but many children, are like greyhounds chasing a mechanical rabbit.

How to hide an empire

I said I’d review this book if I ever got to finish it. Well, I’ve finished it.

How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States, by Daniel Immerwahr.

Better-written than most history books (and by a scholar, not a mere journalist). Nice, light touch. Frequently funny. This is a merciful quality, since reading about many of these events made me feel like throwing up.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

It’s unusual for an historian to get away with writing the phrase “In a delicious historical irony.”

It comes near the end of the guano chapter, in a digression upon the German-Jewish chemist Fritz Haber. “By inventing ammonia synthesis” – the basis of high-yield farming – Haber “became arguably the single most consequential organism on the planet.”

Nicely put, I thought, but only slightly pertinent to U.S. imperialism.

By the time I’d read the chapter’s last sentence, I was willing to forgive Immerwahr his digression.

And, it turns out, chemical synthesis is a crucial ingredient of today’s scaled-back imperialistic strategy.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Before I continue discussing the book’s content, I need to say more about its style, which I admire but am irked by. It’s probably the most accomplished specimen I’ve seen of what I call “Young Scholars’ Writing.” By “Young Scholars,” I mean people my age or a little older or younger (it’s hard to be a superb scholar without being at least middle-aged). This writing is learned but studiously un-magisterial and un-avuncular – it’s studiously casual, in other words. It sounds like magazine writing: you could find it in The New Yorker or n+1. (See this representative piece by Immerwahr in n+1; his website has other magazine links.)

The prose is peppered with contractions and throwaway pop-culture references, the sort that erudite, hip up-and-comers would pride themselves on identifying. Recounting the U.S.’s colonization of the Philippines, Immerwahr says:

Building a road to Baguio would became an obsession of the colonial state. The steep slopes and regular landslides turned it into an all-consuming Werner Herzog-style man vs. nature affair.

The offhand allusion to Herzog is wonderful – compact, vivid, precise. In making it, though, Immerwahr signals that he is “preaching to the choir.” He isn’t writing to convert jingoists to anti-imperialism, or even to inform jingoists of the facts about imperialism. He doesn’t expect jingoists to read the book at all. To an old-fogey-minded person like me, that is disturbing.

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All right, I’ll try to set aside my own neuroses. What the book does brilliantly is to inform the anti-imperialist general reader of even more facts about imperialism. Out-of-the-way facts. There is nearly nothing about, e.g., the annexing of Florida and Texas. Theodore Roosevelt, the man, is discussed, but there’s surprisingly little about the U.S.’s early meddling in Cuba (the notorious Platt Amendment is briefly mentioned but not named). Of course, Cuba never was U.S. territory; but then neither were Liverpool (U.K.) or Australia, and they get coverage. There is a lot about the U.S.’s heavy-handed rule over and simultaneous neglect of such places as the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and the Aleutian, Hawaiian, and other Pacific islands; and there’s a whole chapter on the annexation of unpopulated “guano islands.” (And then, near the end, there’s another, James Bond-themed chapter about these and other islands.) The emphasis is on regions outside the “logo map,” the map of the contiguous forty-eight states. There is much discussion of maps. Reading the book is like going to one of those websites with topsy-turvy or weirdly-distorted maps that highlight neglected features of the world.

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A back-cover blurb says:

There are many histories of American expansionism. How to Hide an Empire renders them all obsolete. It is brilliantly conceived, utterly original, and immensely entertaining – simultaneously vivid, sardonic, and deadly serious.

This blurb is not something to fault Immerwahr for, but it also bothers me. It suggests that it’s a virtue of historical scholarship to render other histories obsolete or at least seriously deficient, as if the goal were one-upmanship. Go ahead, look at new books and scan the introductions and blurbs. It’s as if these scholars were laboring to lure people over to the newest, hippest thing – which is ironic when the subject is the past. (Besides, by the time of the writing, the hip idea usually isn’t new: we in the target audience are well aware that People Were More Racist, Sexist, etc. than Most of Us Imagined.)

Anyway, what the blurb says is false. This book doesn’t make other histories of U.S. expansionism obsolete. As I’ve noted, it doesn’t try to tell us much about, e.g., the acquisition of Florida and Texas. For all the nice points it makes about the influence of U.S. military bases upon, e.g., the Japanese economy, it says next to nothing about whether there was similar influence upon the South Korean economy. I could go on.

The book is, however, immensely entertaining. A lot of the vignettes are awesome.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 48: Lone star

Before there was No Country for Old Men … before there was Hell or High Water … there was Lone Star, in which a thoughtful Texan sheriff goes around asking questions. Not philosophical questions about death or evil or moral responsibility – though there’s some of that, too – but about relationships that are more comfortably left unscrutinized.

The movie isn’t very interested in its bad guy. He is a corrupt, sadistic former sheriff (Kris Kristofferson) whose bones and badge are found during the opening scene, in the desert, by a couple of clownish metal scavengers who are not so unlike the gravediggers in Hamlet. And the movie is only slightly more interested in who killed the bad guy. Mostly it just shows what life is like for the ordinary people who live in fictional Rio County just north of the Mexico-U.S. border. (Supposedly, Del Rio, Texas, is in the vicinity.) These people include Hispanic and Anglo Texans, illegal and legal Mexican immigrants, and a few Indians. Also, due to the presence of an Army base, more Blacks reside in Rio County than is typical in this part of the state.

These groups all keep their identities strictly separate, at least in theory; in practice, the locals are intermixed and interdependent. Flashbacks show how the bad old Anglo police used to frequent the Mexican restaurants … while loudly complaining about Mexican food … while happily scarfing it down … while collecting extortion payments and bribes packed in with the tortillas. In the movie’s present day, the Anglo–Hispanic dealings are more polite but just as clandestine. Hispanic businessmen handpick Anglo officials for the public to employ: preferably, ones who’ll support a bid to build a lucrative new prison. More overtly, Anglos and Hispanics on the school board squabble over how to teach Texas history. One of the most likable characters – a high school teacher (Elizabeth Peña) – is criticized by all parties because she wants to tell a complicated story about the past. By the movie’s end, the complications of the past will have made her own happiness impossible. “Forget the Alamo,” she says, bitterly. “Forget them all.”

So, this movie is all social commentary, and it’s pretty straightforward and unadorned, unlike, e.g., Robert Altman’s Nashville. There’s nothing visually or rhythmically distinctive about Lone Star. Just lots of characters and conversations. These, often, are wryly insightful. The two “clowns” I mentioned earlier perform this exchange:

I never thought I’d see that a buddy of mine would be dating a woman with three bars on her shoulder. [The woman in question works for the Army.]

I think it’s beyond what you’d call dating.

You’re gonna get married?

Maybe.

You met her family? Think her family’s gonna be OK that you’re a white guy? [She is Black.]

They think any woman over thirty who isn’t married is a lesbian. She figures, they’ll be so relieved that I’m a man …

Yeah, it’s always heartwarming to see a prejudice defeated by a deeper prejudice.

And there’s a brilliant little discussion, which I won’t quote, between two Black soldiers – a colonel and a private – about why a poor, young, Black woman would wish to join and remain in the Army.

A lot of this is interesting; and yet, arguably, it’s lamentable that for all the emphasis on locality, the insights aren’t specific to South Texas. John Sayles, the writer-director, sets his movies all over the map (New York City, New Jersey, Florida, Louisiana, Chicago, Ireland, etc.). Lone Star isn’t alone in inhabiting a regionally realistic place that isn’t a real place; most conspicuously, City of Hope, filmed in Cincinatti, is set in an unspecified city in New Jersey. Contrast this with one of Sayles’s first movies, The Brother From Another Planet, in which it actually matters that a particular scene is set on a particular New York subway line. Brother is less tightly constructed than Lone Star but, scene-by-scene, more compelling. Or so I recall. One might also criticize Lone Star’s casting. The main Anglo characters are played by Texans (Kristofferson, Matthew McConaughey) or by people with Texan heritage (Chris Cooper); but the main Mexican-American roles are filled by a Cuban-American (Peña) and a puertorriqueña (Míriam Colón). Good as they are, their un-Mexicanness would be distracting to some viewers. The movie’s “authenticity” extends only so far, and it is racially unequal. But maybe I’m judging too harshly, especially considering how movies were cast in the 1990s.

Besides, to dwell very closely on the actors’ appearance, speech, etc., is to miss one of the movie’s main points, which is that in Texas – and, more generally, in the USA – Anglos and Hispanics are more interconnected, in all sorts of ways, than most observers can tell just by looking. I was reminded of this classic commercial by Aeroméxico:

See also: Carey McWilliams, North from Mexico: The Spanish-Speaking People of the United States; and Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States.

R.I.P. Joan Didion

Today, in her honor, I read “The Getty” and “Quiet Days in Malibu” from The White Album. The second item, especially, is moving.

I expect that the Library of America will soon exhibit another piece by Didion as a Story of the Week.

We have a mouse in our mud-room. I saw it dart behind a box. Jasper and Ziva rushed past their food and sniffed at the mouse but didn’t catch it. Later, Karin went into the mud-room and the mouse stared at her with its little brown face. We’d been using the mud-room to store cat food and other non-perishables; now, we must rethink this arrangement.

’Twas the night before Christmas / and all through the house / not a creature was stirring / not even a mouse.

Well, it depends on whether you count the mud-room as a part of the house.

We went to a Christmas Eve party and one of my uncles gave another of his biennial talks about the perils of the hantavirus. Don’t sweep up or vacuum after a mouse, he said. Use a wet cloth. Unlikely as it is that we’ll contract this virus, I figure the advice is worth posting because, who knows, it may save a life. One’s words might do tremendous good down the road. I told this to another of my uncles, who was lamenting that a paper he’d presented had involved a lot of work for a negligible result.

At least I didn’t get beaten up, he said. A group of Caribbean Christian brothers and sisters had been praying and fasting so that that wouldn’t happen.

His paper, which he gave at an evangelical theologians’ conference, argued for racial reparations.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 45: Kansas City

To get Robert Altman’s Kansas City, you have to get its references to 1930s pop culture:

• Amos ’n’ Andy (the radio show)
• Blondie (the daily comic strip)
• Jean Harlow (the actress)

… and, probably, various musicians I can’t identify. The movie is intercut with footage of virtuoso jazz performances, more or less in the way that Nashville has lots of country music. Only, the jazz in Kansas City is all played in the same nightclub.

The pop culture references are hardly obscure, but I’m insufficiently familiar with them. Harlow, especially, was influential; but of her movies, I’ve only seen City Lights (and I had no idea she was in it). Those who wish for a thematic overview of Kansas City had better consult Roger Ebert, who describes Jennifer Jason Leigh’s performance as a kind of jazz riff on Harlow.

The plot is fairly straightforward, although, as in other movies directed by Altman, there are several linked stories. The main story involves the kidnapping of Carolyn (Miranda Richardson), a politician’s wife, by a thief’s wife named Blondie (Leigh). Blondie’s speech, mannerisms, and appearance are copied from the movies she watches. In one amusing sequence, Blondie takes Carolyn to the cinema to view a Jean Harlow picture. Later they debate whether Harlow is “cheap” (low-class). Blondie is shocked that Carolyn should think so.

Blondie: “Her father was a dentist, Dr. Carpenter.”

Carolyn: “Dentist? Doctor? Carpenter?”

Carolyn is pretty loopy because she uses laudanum. Ebert focuses on Leigh’s performance, but I was equally taken with Richardson. She is playing one of Altman’s recurring types, a woman who makes herself seem dumber than she is.

When Blondie first enters Carolyn’s house, Carolyn is in her nightgown, with white cream all over her face. This is intercut with a flashback in which Johnny (Dermot Mulroney), Blondie’s husband, commits a robbery wearing blackface. He provokes the ire of the local Black crime boss, Seldom Seen (Harry Belafonte). Seen has Johnny captured and brought to his club. There, all night and the next day, he subjects Johnny to a lecture that is menacing, grimly humorous, and poignant, all at the same time. Meanwhile, they are serenaded by Seen’s army of jazz musicians.

Seen has a great deal to say about race relations. How well does Johnny listen? Late in the movie, he makes an appeal to Seen that is calculated to flatter; instead, it betrays that his attitude is fundamentally the same as when he put on blackface to rob one of Seen’s customers.

Seen talks and talks. He talks because he is powerful. On the other hand, several Black women in the movie say little but imply a great deal. “Nobody ever asks me,” one of them has to keep telling Blondie when Blondie tries to swear her to secrecy.

As in every Altman movie, social commentary is sprinkled in deftly, with plenty of neat little jokes and sight gags. One of Altman’s favorite techniques is to end a scene by zooming in upon a meaningful prop. And, as in Nashville, the social commentary has music to go along with it.

Samuel loved the jazz. He sat in his highchair eating his breakfast, kicking along with the music.

Meanwhile, in Ecuador …

On Sunday, Ecuadorians voted.

Andrés Arauz is the candidate of the correístas, the followers of that notorious ex-president, Rafael Correa. Arauz received the most votes of all the candidates, but not enough to win outright. A runoff election on April 11 will determine who becomes the new president.

Arauz’s opponent – Sunday’s runner-up – is TBD.

There are two contenders. One is Yaku Pérez, of Pachakutik (the indigenist party). The other is the 2017 runner-up, the banker Guillermo Lasso, who trails Pérez by less than one percentage point.

(Only the top two vote-getters will qualify for the next round. The rules are explained here.)

El Universo’s map of results shows the election playing out along ethnic lines. Pérez leads in virtually every province that has a large percentage of indigenous voters. Elsewhere, Arauz leads. Lasso is ahead only in Pichincha (the capital) and in sparsely populated Galápagos.

(Votes, not provinces, are what matter. Looking at provinces just helps us to understand regional and demographic trends.)

My hunch is that if Lasso were edged out, his supporters wouldn’t turn to Pérez in large enough numbers for Pérez to surge past Arauz in the next round (though Lasso himself would endorse Pérez over Arauz). Similarly, should Pérez fail to qualify for the runoff, his voters wouldn’t likely favor Lasso enough for Arauz to be defeated.

I have left thirty percent of the voters unaccounted for: those who didn’t choose any of the top three candidates. There is reason to think that those favoring Xavier Hervas, the next highest vote-getter, would migrate to Pérez (Hervas’s fellow lefty). Even so, I believe that Arauz will win in the second round.

I’m not at all optimistic about the correístas’ ability to govern. In the past, they have practiced gross patronage. Their economic strategy has been to take oil from indigenous peoples’ lands in order to pay for handouts and public works (and white elephants).

Anti-correístas, though, are in the curious position of having to promote aspects of both the free-market agenda (Lasso’s) and the ecologically-minded, “plurinationalist” agenda (Pérez’s) over that of Arauz, who is arguably the centrist among the three candidates. This is because any joint effort to defeat the correístas will have to bring opposite sides together.

Meanwhile, the international press seems not to have as much to say as in 2017. My mother did send this rather bizarre story from The Guardian detailing the connections between a smear campaign, birdsong, and Colombian guerrilleros. And this report from CNN gives a sense of the appeal of Pérez, the election’s dark horse.

Church outdoors and indoors

We went to parking-lot church again. The weather was cooler than last week, and Karin and Samuel and I were shaded under a canopy. This time, I was able to pay attention to the sermon.

Then, during the closing hymn, someone drove a truck into the parking lot and frighteningly charged and vroomed and skidded around the worshipers. Thankfully, it wasn’t an anti-religious terrorist. It was just one of the churchgoers’ relations, bringing her her purse.

There are some unique drawbacks to parking-lot church.

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Meanwhile, at home, we’ve been enjoying the video of the “UK Blessing.” It debuted a month ago, and it’s my favorite thing that has come out of the quarantining period. Samuel has heard it enough times now that when I sing it to him, he stops and looks at me, a little awestruck.

(I’m especially pleased to see Salvationists in the video.)

I can’t but be encouraged by the show of unity of these Christians of different ages and colors and credal flavors – and deeply saddened, as political and racial tensions run high again in the United States.

It would have been good if the quarantining had been an occasion for repentance and reconciliation. Alas, in this country, the opportunity seems to have been wasted.

Karin’s birthday; tomorrow’s World Cup qualifier; this year’s philosophical job listings

For her birthday, I went with Karin to a stir-fry restaurant at the mall. I also bought her this spiffy coloring book:

Its pages, colored, should look like this:

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Tomorrow is the do-or-die game in Chile. I’d say, “Please pray for Ecuador to win.” But does Ecuador deserve to qualify for this World Cup?

Arguably, no.

However, the Chileans certainly don’t deserve to qualify for this World Cup.

Please pray for Ecuador to win.

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It’s job-listing season for philosophy departments. Despite my hard work this year, it again looks as though my dissertation won’t have progressed far enough for me to be a viable candidate.

Were I to finish the current draft by the end of this month, job-wise it’d still be too late.

I can dream, though.

One job is at a Wesleyan liberal arts college in lovely, rural, upstate New York. It involves helping to “build a program” with one or two other professors. Translation: I could teach in several different subfields outside of my own area of specialization. That’s something I’d very much like to do.

Several other jobs look good because of the nearby mountain scenery. (Actually, there are very few such jobs.)

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This year, even more than usual, political philosophers and moralists are in high demand. This trend is to my advantage.

In especial demand are philosophers who moralize about race. I believe that race is a very important topic. But this recent philosophical emphasis on race leaves me uneasy: it has a whiff of fashionableness about it. In other words, I doubt that the attention now bestowed upon race is a manifestation of good faith.

Still, if I do think of anything worthwhile to say about race, I’ll try to write it in a paper.

Faux pas

What’s better to watch? (I asked Karin). The Super Bowl, or the Oscars?

The Super Bowl, said Karin, but only because of the comeback ending.

But then the Best Picture winner was announced.

Moonlight won *only after* La La Land had been declared the winner.

Everybody from La La Land was rejoicing upon the stage. Then it was discovered that the presenters had looked into the wrong envelope.

It was one of the most astounding things I’d seen on TV.

Often criticized for neglecting black subjects and filmmakers, the “Academy” had lined up more black award nominees than ever before. Yet somehow it managed to dim the shining moment that belonged to Moonlight, a black filmmakers’ movie.

The true winners looked confused and hurt as they came up to the stage.

The presenters, before opening the wrong envelope, had chided Donald Trump. They’d delivered a sermonette on the importance of The Truth.

I’m glad The Truth eventually wriggled out.

The blunder may not have been anyone’s fault. But it had the symbolic trappings of a most egregious offense, a slip committed by the entire U.S. white mainstream. It looked as if La La Land, a self-celebrating Hollywood musical – a jazz musical by whites – had been in the “Academy’s” heart all along, and Moonlight had not been.

Pity. Up until that fatal moment, it’d been a good show.

Portage

On the 3A and the 3B, the Portage Avenue routes, the bus makes many stops. Some are planned; others occur when necessary, e.g. when there’s too much swearing. “Profanity is not acceptable,” says the driver into his microphone.

Grizzled men protest their innocence.

“My bad,” says an old lady. “I said fuck.”

The bus starts up again; the bantering is resumed; the bus stops. “If you continue using that language,” says the driver, “I’ll throw you off the bus.” The crowd giggles. Camaraderie.

Two men sit down next to me. “Relax,” says one. “It’s OK to be seated next to a black man.” (On the bus I’m not unused to this sort of challenge.) I glare. They laugh. “Just messin’,” they say. We fist-bump.

“I don’t care if you make fun of me,” I tell them. They pretend not to hear.

“What are you reading?” they ask. I show them An Experiment in Love by Hilary Mantel, who’s twice won the Man Booker.

Solemnly, they nod. Respect.

Some drivers are less patient than others, and so I always make sure to thank them; this has put me into their good graces. Still, it’s not surprising that the driver who’s kindest to me is another puny white guy. When I disembark, I thank him, and he warmly says: “Take care.”

As I step out onto the pavement, I have a vision: a banquet hall (a warehouse) with many tables at which are seated the passengers and drivers. I hear my name called out: I’m summoned to the podium. I’ve been chosen as the MVP. The MVP of riding the bus.