SUNSET AND BIRDHOUSE

Each sunset is lovely
In its own way,
Except when the sky
Is all colored in gray.

The birdhouse collapsed
On three sides of four.
There it rests as a ruin
For me to abhor.

My neighbor says no
He will not take it down,
And there it still stands
Awaiting my frown.

My best view of sunset
The house must include,
And I sit here and ponder
Why neighbor's so rude.

AIR FORCE - THE MOVIE

This afternoon I happened upon one of the first propaganda movies made after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, the film titled Air Force. I clicked on TCM and the movie had just started, so I saw it in its entirety. Howard Hawks directed and John Garfield, John Ridgely, Gig Young, Arthur Kennedy, and Harry Carey starred, all names I recognize from the olden times. All things considered, that the film is intended to boost the morale of the people in the US and the members of the military, the story is believable and engrossing, and the actors give strong performances.

As I read the reviews of the DVD on Amazon, I was greatly amused by one reviewer's comment that no great movie stars were in the film. Maybe one has to be old to remember, but John Garfield was a great movie star.

Garfield tried to enlist in the Army when the war started, but he was turned down because of a heart condition resulting from a bout with scarlet fever. After the war, he was hauled before Joe McCarthy's HUAC during Hollywood's involvement in the Red Scare and refused to name names. The actor died at the age of 39 from his heart condition, possibly aggravated by the stress of his testimony before the committee, which was followed by threats of being charged with perjury.

After the film was over, I thought about the number of deaths of members of our military and those of our allies fighting the Nazis in World War II, and how we will soon have a man who formerly ran a white supremacist, antisemitic news site working in the White House with President-elect Trump. I nearly cried. How can this be?

HE NEEDS MORE TIME

Following his meeting last week with President-elect Donald Trump, President Obama decided he needed to spend more time than a president typically would guiding Trump's transition to the White House, according to a Sunday Wall Street Journal report.

At the meeting, Trump seemed surprised by the duties of the president, and his staff seemed unaware that the entire administration staff had to be replaced...

The level of ignorance is astonishing. This example may seem of minor importance, but, for me, it's a metaphor that signals the future functioning of the Trump presidency.

President Obama will attempt to give Trump and his top aides more schooling on the operations of the Oval Office and the West Wing, not because he will enjoy doing so, but out of concern for the people of the country.

RIP LEONARD COHEN

As if I wasn't sad enough... A little over a week ago I posted the following on Facebook:

Leonard and I have a close relationship, only he doesn't know it. I love his poetry, songs, and voice, even when he sings in his gravelly old man's voice, speaking more than singing the lyrics.

We have a lot in common: We are contemporaries, born in the same year in September, only three days apart. He has back trouble and is more or less "confined to barracks", as he says, and as I am. Except for the fact that he is male and a genius poet, song writer, lyricist, and singer, we are just the same. See?

Leonard's final album You Want It Darker arrived a few days ago. I didn't want it darker, and I especially didn't want it darker this way, but I love the sad, haunting album. Leonard is gone, but his music lives on.

From Rolling Stone:

"My father passed away peacefully at his home in Los Angeles with the knowledge that he had completed what he felt was one of his greatest records," Cohen's son Adam wrote in a statement to Rolling Stone. "He was writing up until his last moments with his unique brand of humor."

As we grew old together, the resonance of Leonard's songs grew ever greater and deeper over the years.

From Cohen's 2012 album Old Ideas.

Photo from Wikimedia Commons. 

WORDS THAT DON'T GO AWAY

From Digby at Hullabaloo:

Trump tweeted the following four years ago when he thought Obama was going to win the electoral college and Mitt Romney was going to win the popular vote. He's deleted them, but every Donald Trump tweet has been preserved.

Trump won the election in the Electoral College with with fewer votes than Clinton, but he is, without doubt, the winner of having made the most statements that may come back to bite him in the ass. Not that it will matter, because he will carry on as though he never said or tweeted the words.

ELECTION 2016

Top aides to Hillary Clinton believe the press and FBI Director James Comey contributed to her surprise election night loss, according to a Hill report out Thursday.

In a private conference call with supporters, Clinton campaign chair John Podesta, communications director Jennifer Palmieri and other senior staffers struggled to explain how their well-oiled campaign machine ultimately failed.

Voter suppression, Comey, media bothsiderism, and the media banging away at Clinton emails, (State Dept. and Wikileaks), and, in comparison, ignoring Trump's many scandals all played a part, but honest self-examination would indicate that the DNC is a troglodyte and needs an overhaul starting at the top.

When African-Americans in Louisiana, who turned out in lower numbers than previous elections, were asked why, their response was that neither Clinton nor Kaine were a presence in the state, so they felt the two didn't care about Louisiana.

Local Democrats worked hard and did their best, but they received scant support from national Democratic organizations such as the DNC, the DSC, and the DCCC.  Even if blacks had voted in higher numbers, Trump would probably have won the electoral votes in the state, but that does not negate the fact that Democrats, win or lose, need an ongoing 50-state strategy, starting now.  A political party that wants to be a national party does not have the liberty to write off even deeply red states. To build a national party, Democrats must have a presence in every state, as Howard Dean told us over and over and tried to do when he was head of the DNC.  Alas, he was thrown out for a scream.

Photo from Wikimedia Commons.

Correction: Howard Dean offered his resignation as Chairman of the DNC after Barack Obama was elected in 2008, because the president traditionally appoints the DNC chair, not because of the scream.  In 2004, Dean was a candidate for president.  The scream was an attempt to rally his supporters after his loss of the Iowa caucus that he had expected to win. Wide media coverage of the scream was followed by loss of support from party insiders, and John Kerry ultimately became the Democratic nominee.

MUD - THE MOVIE

Yesterday, I watched the movie "Mud", which I enjoyed very much.  The indie film is a coming of age story in the style of Twain's Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn of two 14 year old boys, Ellis (Tye Sheridan) and Neckbone (Jacob Lofland), who live on or near the Arkansas River in Arkansas.  On a small island in the river, the boys meet a stranger, Mud (Matthew McConaughey), who's living in a boat stuck up in a tree that Ellis and Neckbone hoped to claim for themselves.  Mud convinces the boys to bring him food, because he has no money.  The boys later discover that Mud is on the run and can't go into town.

As the boys are drawn deeper and deeper into the relationship with Mud when his requests escalate beyond food, tension rises as the viewer suspects that no good will come from the boys' association with him.  The young actors are superb and completely believable. McConaughey's performance is somewhat mannered, which actually works in this instance, since Mud is a con man. Reese Witherspoon performs well as Mud's girlfriend, Juniper, as does the always excellent Sam Shepard as the father substitue in Mud's life.

Writer and director Jeff Nichols grew up in Arkansas and fought hard to have the movie filmed on location in the state.  The scenes filmed on the river and the island are gorgeous.

Picture from Wikipedia.

"FAIR GAME" - THE FILM

Saturday night, I started to watch Fair Game, the 2010 movie based on Valerie Plame's memoir of the same title that tells the story of the events that led to Plame's outing as a covert CIA officer in a column in the Washington Post by Robert Novak.  Novak attributed the leak to two senior officials in the Bush administration.

Plame's husband, Joe Wilson, had served as a diplomat and ambassador in several countries in Africa. In 2002, at the request of the CIA, Wilson traveled to Niger to investigate a claim that the government had sold yellowcake, a refined form of uranium, to the Iraqis.  In his report to the CIA after he returned, Wilson concluded that documents upon which the claim was based were forgeries and, after speaking to several government officials in Niger, that no such sale ever took place.

In January, 2003, George W Bush claimed in his State of the Union speech, "The British government has learned that the government of Saddam Hussein recently sought  significant quantities of uranium from Africa."  When Wilson learned he was one of the supposed sources for the yellowcake claim, he wrote an op-ed in the New York Times, titled What I Didn't Find in Africa, rebutting the claim and undermining the Bush administration's case for the invasion of Iraq earlier in the year.

As the story unfolded, my feelings of despair during the run up to the Iraq war and the immediate aftermath came flooding back.  When the real-life filmed scenes of the bombing in Iraq appeared on the screen, I stopped the film, because I knew I would not sleep at all if I continued to watch.

Sunday morning, I watched the rest of the movie from were I'd left off.  Though I fully realized at the time that the invasion of Iraq was launched on the basis of lies, I remember being shocked and incredulous that people in the Cheney/Bush maladministration would destroy the lives and reputations of two faithful public servants.  The Wilsons believe that the purpose of Plame's outing was to discredit Joe and the information in the op-ed in the NYT.  The attacks took a toll on the personal lives of Plame and Wilson that cannot be overstated.

Launching a war on lies and deception is the larger evil, and the tragic consequences of the unnecessary invasion continue today.  Why then did I find the attacks on Plame and Wilson so shocking at the time?  In hindsight, I think the revelations of the Plame/Wilson affair confirmed my worst fears about the Cheney/Bush maladministration in a way that made the ugliness of the larger picture of the Bush years easier to comprehend and all the more distressing.

Naomi Watts and Sean Penn are utterly believable as Plame and Wilson.  I loved Sam Sheppard in his brief appearance as Sam Plame, Valerie's father.

After I told Tom about the movie, he wanted to watch it, and, since my viewing was interrupted, I wanted to see the film again without interruption before I mailed the DVD back to Netflix.  We watched together - for me this time with more detachment and somewhat less distress.  When fictional movies are disturbing, I always tell myself it's only a movie, but Fair Game is the story of the lives of real people that I watched play out in the news not so very many years ago, years that I would not wish to relive under any circumstances.

"CAROL", THE MOVIE

A couple of weeks ago, I watched Carol, a wonderful, slow-paced film that focuses on relationships and conversations.  I know people who hate this sort of movie, in which "hardly anything happens", but so long as they're done well, as Carol is by director, Todd Haynes, and the actors, I enjoy them. Haynes has no fear of pauses in action and dialogue that allow the presence and facial expressions of the actors to speak.  The slow pace of the film makes the brief scenes of violence all the more shocking.

The film is set in New York City in the early 1950s during the formative years of my late teens, a time I remember well.  Cate Blanchett wears 50s fashion chic beautifully, as though she owns them, and is a joy to watch. Blanchett and Rooney Mara perform beautifully as Carol Aird, a woman in her late 30s, married to a successful businessman, and Therese Belivet, a young woman in her early 20s, who works in a department store as she pursues her passion for photography.  The two women meet and fall in love.  Carol and her husband, Harge, have a young daughter, which greatly complicates the story set in a time when attitudes toward lesbian and gay relationships were nearly universally hostile. Couples of the same sex paid a terrible price for their love in those days.

Scenes in the movie are heartbreakingly sad, but rather than wanting to turn away, such is the excellence of entire production that I was drawn further and further into the lives of the characters.  For me, a suspension of disbelief is vital to my enjoyment of a movie, and Haynes and the actors succeeded far above and beyond meeting my standards. Altogether gripping for a film filled with silences, in which "hardly anything happens".  I will watch this one again.

The screenplay by Phyllis Nagy is taken from the novel, The Price of Salt (also known as Carol), by Patricia Highsmith.

Edit: I forgot to mention Carol's and and Therese's "Thelma and Louise" type road trip out west; the cinematography is stunning.

DEAD PEOPLE WILL NO LONGER PAY TAXES SAYS TRUMP

Yesterday, Donald Trump gave an economic policy speech in Detroit in his subdued persona, speaking from a teleprompter. He offered a replay of the old, failed GOP trickle down economics, which results in great benefits to corporations and the very rich, but, from past experience, we know that very little benefit trickles down to people who need it most.  In the greatest exercise of self control I've seen, Trump did not strike back at several protesters who were quickly removed from the venue, though if looks could kill....

Trump spoke to a group of corporate executives at the Detroit Economic Club, who probably approved of his message. If Trump's goal was in any way aimed at attracting the votes of ordinary people, living in an economy that is struggling to recover from bankruptcy in 2013, his promise to repeal the "death tax" stood out as particularly ironic. The estate tax affects only a very small number of people in the entire country.

Though I assume Trump was also speaking to the wider world, his supporters among working class white men could hardly have been moved by the promise, unless they greatly misunderstand how few people actually pay the "death tax".

The Tax Policy Center estimates that some 10,800 individuals dying in 2015 will leave estates large enough to require filing an estate tax return (estates with a gross value under $5.43 million need not file this return in 2015). After allowing for deductions and credits, 5,330 estates will owe tax. Nearly 85 percent of these taxable estates will come from the top 10 percent of income earners and over 40 percent will come from the top 1 percent alone.