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Welcome to Loserland

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Cage ’em up and let ’em ride outside the minivan—on top!

A scant two weeks ago, I still had some qualms about the outcome of the 2012 Presidential Election. Now that all is over but the shouting—and that primarily from the losers and their diehard followers—it’s interesting to see how Obama’s two victims, McCain and Romney, have fared since then.

Romney showed us that he was not about to give “gifts” to anyone but members of his rarefied socio-economic class. He blamed Obama for promising gifts to Hurricane victims, students loaded down with debt, and Hispanic families. In other words, he blamed the President for trying to help out Americans who did not own a string of polo ponies, enjoy firing people or sending their jobs to China, or installing car elevators in their La Jolla McMansions.

McCain, on the other hand, has continued to show himself to be a mercurial old sod in trying to turn the Benghazi affair into a major Democratic liability. Now this Libya fracas occurred on the first day of my vacation this year; so Martine and I didn’t follow the media frenzy that usually accompanies this sort of thing. Two things are pretty clear, however: First, it was a terrorist act; and second, the Republicans had previously cut the budget for the protection of our embassies abroad. (That second thing was the real scandal, if there can be said to be one.)

If McCain or Romney were elected President, that would indeed have been a scandal. Thankfully, even if only by the skinniest of margins, the American voters are still better than that.

A New Kind of Spam

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A New Kind of Spam That Caught Me Off Guard

In the last three months since I started posting at WordPress, I’ve discovered a new kind of Spam. At least WordPress labels it as Spam, and I go along with it. For every two legitimate comments I get, there are three generally favorable but wildly nonspecific comments that seem to be associated with commercial ventures on the Internet. My  guess is that it’s a plot to get a more favorable ranking for their own websites with Google.

Some few are “helpful,” such as those offering to help me get more visitors to my own little website here at Tarnmoor.Com. Curiously, my anti-malware program usually blocks their websites, so I can only assume they are helpful only in the sense that a pickpocket will attempt to lull you into a false sense of security.

So if you have some general comment of praise without mentioning any specifics to show that you’ve actually read what I’ve written, your comment may well be deleted by me as possible Spam.

It’s such a complicated world in which I have to be so ruthless with so many (over 160 to date) favorable comments completely out of the blue.

You see, I don’t really want thousands of visitors a day to my website. I have nothing to sell. I do, however, have some sort of compulsion to express myself. That’s why I posted for over a year on Blog.Com, a Portuguese blog host whose total membership could probably fit into a telephone booth. (You remember those, don’t you?)

 

“A Sickly Moment of Dark Surprise”

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Unexpected

It is a curious thing, the death of a loved one. We all know that our time in this world is limited, and that eventually all of us will end up underneath some sheet, never to wake up. And yet it is always a surprise when it happens to someone we know. It is like walking up the stairs to your bedroom in the dark, and thinking there is one more stair than there is. Your foot falls down, through the air, and there is a sickly moment of dark surprise as you try and readjust the way you thought of things.—Lemony Snicket, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can’t Avoid

Secesh

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Now These Self-Proclaimed Patriots Want To Secede?

I find all this talk of Right Wing Conservatives wanting to secede from the United States rather funny. What would a country of pasty-faced, beer-bellied angry white males in their fifties and sixties be like? For one thing, the GNP would be zero, unless spluttering outrage can be assume a monetary value. There would be no services to speak of. Let’s go down the list:

  • Military: These guys are just too old, sorry.
  • Healthcare: None. Ain’t that socialistic?
  • Fire and Police: Maybe some old-time police kinda like Andy Griffith. Firefighting is too strenuous for these gomers.
  • Foreign Policy: “We don’t hold with no furriners!”
  • Immigration: “Meet ’em at the border with a hail of bullets!”
  • Postal Service: “Nope, too much walking hurts my corns.”
  • Taxes: “We ain’t no Communists! So, nossir!”
  • Elections: “Whatever Rush, Sean, and Glenn say is jake with us.”

And so it goes. Maybe instead of seceding, they should just find another country that is more amenable to their way of life. Possibly North Korea or Somalia.

 

 

 

“Altogether Too Reflective”

Søren Kierkegaard

I am well aware that as a human being I am very far from being a paradigm; if anything, I am a sample human being. With a fair degree of accuracy, I give the temperature of every mood and passion, and when I am generating my own inwardness, I understand these words: homo sum, nil humani a me alienum puto [I am a human being, I hold that nothing human is alien to me]. But humanly no one can model himself on me, and historically I am even less a prototype for any human being. If anything, I am someone who could be needed in a crisis, as a guinea pig that life uses to feel its way. A person half as reflective as I would be able to be of significance for many people, but precisely because I am altogether reflective I have none at all. As soon as I am outside my religious understanding, I feel as an insect with which children are playing must feel, because life seems to have dealt with me so unmercifully; as soon as I am inside my religious understanding, I understand that precisely this has absolute meaning for me. Hence, that which in one case is a dreadful jest is in another sense the most profound earnestness. Earnestness is basically not something simple, a simplex, but is a compositum [compound], for true earnestness is the unity of jest and earnestness. —Søren Kierkegaard, Stages on Life’s Way

 

The Bludgeon

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German POW Surrendering to Russian Defender at Stalingrad

For us, it was the last “Good War.” For the Russians, it was “The Great Patriotic War,” in which 20-30 million soldiers and civilians died defending the Rodina, or Fatherland. I am currently reading David M. Glantz and Jonathan M. House’s When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler.

I’m not going to say we had it easy on the Western Front: There’s a lot we don’t know and perhaps never will know about some of the horrors of the Sicilian and Italian campaigns, as well as D-Day and its aftermath in France, Belgium, and Germany. (If you can, see John Huston’s WW2 documentaries, especially The Battle of San Pietro.) But there was something particularly horrible in the way that the two great 20th century dictators, Hitler and Stalin, moved great numbers of men and materiel across the Russian steppe as if it were a chessboard:

The superb German fighting machine was defeated by more than distance. The German rapier, designed to end conflict cleanly and efficiently, was dulled by repeated and often clumsy blows from a simple, dull, but very large Soviet bludgeon. That bludgeon took the form of successive waves of newly mobilized armies, each taking its toll of the invaders before shattering and being replaced by the next wave.

Stalin had a huge supply of manpower at his beck and call. Once the Nazis invaded Russia during Operation Barbarossa, their forces kept getting farther and farther from their source of supply, while, at the same time, the Russian supply lines were getting shorter and shorter as the battle zone neared Moscow, Leningrad, and Stalingrad.

It was not just a matter of manpower, however.The Russians were developing new tanks that could take on the best that the Panzer divisions could throw against them, new fighters and bombers that harassed the rapidly dwindling Luftwaffe, and bringing terrifying new weapons such as the Katyusha rocket launchers that helped to turn the tide against the hapless Germans, who were stuck fighting a two-front war once the Americans and British invaded North Africa, Italy, and France.

We don’t think much about the Eastern Front. After all, we weren’t there. And we were taught that the real show was in Western Europe. The Germans knew, though, that it was in Russia that the coffin nails were pounded into the Thousand-Year Reich. Hitler wound up blowing his brains out, while Stalin died in bed.

No, we don’t like to credit the Russians for their victory; but they deserved it. They certainly gave up enough to achieve it.

 

 

Best American Films By Year, Part One

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Lobby Card for Josef Von Sternberg’s The Scarlet Empress (1934)

One day, my friend Lee Sanders and I started chatting about our favorite American films. From a capacious bag full of various literature, Lee whipped out a list of “The Best American Films of the Year,” spanning the years 1915 through 1977.  Now, for the most part, Lee and I see eye-to-eye. Where we don’t, I propose my own alternative. Where two films are listed for a particular year, the first one is Lee’s; the second, mine:

1915 – The Birth of a Nation (D. W. Griffith)
1916 – Intolerance (D. W. Griffith)
1917 – Straight Shooting (John Ford)
1918 – The Whispering Chorus (Cecil B. DeMille); Shoulder Arms (Charles Chaplin)
1919 – Broken Blossoms (D. W. Griffith)
1920 – Way Down East (D. W. Griffith); The Last of the Mohicans (Maurice Tourneur)

1921 – Dream Street (D. W. Griffith); The Kid (Charles Chaplin)
1922 – Robin Hood (Allan Dwan)
1923 – The White Rose  (D. W. Griffith); Our Hospitality (Buster Keaton)
1924 – He Who Gets Slapped (Victor Seastrom)
1925 – Seven Chances (Buster Keaton)
1926 – The General (Buster Keaton)
1927 – Sunrise (F. W. Murnau)
1928 – The Docks of New York (Josef Von Sternberg)
1929 – Lady of the Pavements (D. W. Griffith); The Love Parade (Ernst Lubitsch)

1931 – Dishonored (Josef Von Sternberg)
1932 – Trouble in Paradise (Ernst Lubitsch)
1933 – Design for Living (Ernst Lubitsch)
1934 – The Scarlet Empress (Josef Von Sternberg)
1935 – Barbary Coast (Howard Hawks); The Devil Is a Woman (Josef Von Sternberg)
1936 – The Road to Glory (Howard Hawks)
1937 – Make Way for Tomorrow (Leo McCarey)
1938 – Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks)
1939 – Stagecoach (John Ford)
1940 – His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks)

That’s all for the first installment. My differences with Lee in the above listings relate more to his love of D. W. Griffith’s later melodramas. I will continue in a week or so with the remainder of the list.

Any comments? We old film freaks used to call this activity “trading bubble gum cards.”

“Like Beads on a String”

Kurt Vonnegut

The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.

When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in the particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is “So it goes.”—Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five

Living With the Mau Mau

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Mau Mau Terrorists in Kenya

Things change. I remember during the 1950s reading horror stories of the Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya. There were ghastly tales of what the Kikuyu were doing to British settlers. Around the same time, the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 was taking place. I still remember reading—was it in The Reader’s Digest?—of the Communist Secret Police (the dread AVO) taking captured Budapest prisoners and grinding their living bodies into hamburger meat. For themselves? To feed to their pets?

Not too much time passed before Jomo “Burning Spear” Kenyatta, one of the leaders of the Mau Mau, was named President of an independent Kenya in 1964. Then, after the Hungarian Revolution was ground into goulash by the Russian Tanks of Nikita Khruschchev, Hungarian President János Kádar developed a reputation as being one of the most enlightened Communist satellite leaders—without in any way sacrificing his Marxist/Leninist credentials.

We are perhaps facing a similar situation with the changes wrought by the Arab Spring. Groups that had been associated with terrorism may perhaps turn out to be our Middle East allies of tomorrow:

Amid chaos and uncertainty, the Islamists alone offer a familiar, authentic vision for the future. They might fail or falter, but who will pick up the mantle? Liberal forces have a weak lineage, slim popular support, and hardly any organizational weight. Remnants of the old regime are familiar with the ways of power yet they seem drained and exhausted. If instability spreads, if economic distress deepens, they could benefit from a wave of nostalgia. But they face long odds, bereft of an argument other than that things used to be bad, but now are worse.

These are the observations of Hussein Agha and Robert Malley writing in the November 8, 2012, issue of The New York Review of Books in their excellent article “This Is Not a Revolution.”

 

Watering the Forests of the Northeast

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Forest in Maine

To return for a moment to my recent vacation, one thing I forgot to tell you was that I had forgotten to pack one of my diabetes medications, namely the Metformin HCL. One result was that, even taking insulin, my glucose reading was running rather high (in the 300s). Apparently, when that happens, I have to urinate frequently, about every thirty to forty-five minutes.

While Martine was driving toward the end of our vacation, I felt as if I had to stop by every other tree in the forests of New Brunswick and Maine to water it. That got particularly difficult when there was a chain-link fence separating me from the trees, making it difficult to disguise my actions from other motorists.

That last day from Bar Harbor, Maine, to Manchester, New Hampshire, was definitely the worst. Not only did I have to have Martine stop the car ten to twenty times, but there was a driving rainstorm once we passed Augusta.

Somehow I survived. As soon as we returned to Los Angeles, I started on the Metformin at once. Within a few days, the readings had declined to an acceptable level; and I no longer had to evaluate the cover possibilities of nearby trees.

I can tell you, I left a part of myself in the Northeast,