Art prefiguring life imitating art imitating life …

I’ve had to essentially abandon blogging in the near term.  Too much professional writing to do. That said, I couldn’t resist posting this West Wing / Obama mashup.  Yes, it’s early days in the Obama Presidency, but allow me this one moment.  I remember when I heard about plans for the West Wing and I thought ‘a television series about the White House’ will never work. Boy, was I wrong. What would we have done without an ‘acting President’ and his team during those years reminding us that there is a better angel of our nature?

Understanding the financial crisis

In August 2007, I attended a talk at the Greenbelt Festival, in Cheltenham (UK) by Ann Pettifor titled “The coming first-world debt crisis.” Over a year before the bottom fell out, Ms. Pettifor predicted the chaos-to-come. I recall that she insisted that victims of predatory-lending should not be evicted from their homes. Her presentation was incredibly prescient evoke considerable debate during Q&A.

There’s plenty of commentary and blogging about the growing financial crisis going on, and I’m no economist, but a friend recently drew my attention to an excellent audio primer offered up by This American Life, and I would like to recommend it.  If that episode is any account, then the new Planet Money blog by some of the same commentators should also be helpful.

Why we fight

I have been showing the documentary Why We Fight in my class this week, and I was pleased to discover this afternoon that you can watch the whole thing online. The film covers the long history of U.S. militarism and imperial projects that have been undertaken by our government but also stresses the ways in which militarism is embedded in our culture. That said, Why We Fight is perhaps most important for its exposure of the military-industrial-thinktank/university complex, since most Americans are not fully aware of the long-standing institutions and systems that predispose us and channel our militarism.

You can also view Iraq For Sale: The War Profiteers

If a song could be president

As we near election time, it only seems appropriate to give a little air time to Linford Detweiler and Karen Bergquist (Over the Rhine) to provide a little vision.

St. Paul City Attorney drops charges against journalists

The St. Paul City Attorney’s office has opted not to pursue the misdemeanor charges against Amy Goodman, Sharif Abdel Kouddous and Nicole Salazar.

Experience and Prudence

David Brooks is just a remarkable columnist. His recent piece on McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin is typically insightful and he avoids polemics. He suggests that Palin is not ready, and he compares Bush and Palin, as I have done elsewhere. However, he addresses the whole issue by commenting more on what good governance requires (experience and prudence) than on what Palin lacks.

Its also worth noting that in another life, Brooks could easily have been a social scientist.  He is that rare conservative who is fascinated with human behavior, and he is not afraid to follow the science where it leads and take it into consideration. Consequently, he’s prepared to offer comments like this:

David Brooks

“Geneticists have shown that our behavior is influenced by our ancestors and the exigencies of the past. Behavioral economists have shown the limits of the classical economic model, which assumes that individuals are efficient, rational, utility-maximizing creatures. Psychologists have shown that we are organized by our attachments. Sociologists have shown the power of social networks to affect individual behavior. What emerges is not a picture of self-creating individuals gloriously free from one another, but of autonomous creatures deeply interconnected with one another. Recent Republican Party doctrine has emphasized the power of the individual, but underestimates the importance of connections, relationships, institutions and social filaments that organize personal choices and make individuals what they are.”

Update on Democracy Now arrests

You can get today’s latest update on the arrest of Amy Goodman and her Democracy Now colleagues. In short the felony charges have been dropped, but the misdemeanor charges remain.  I blogged about this in an earlier post, and I am posting the YouTube videos here.

Amy Goodman Arrest (when she arrived on the scene to inquire about the earlier arrest of two of her colleagues — see below)

Nicole Salazar Arrest

The power of satire

Saturday Night Live may have its ups and downs, but there are those magical moments when you are watching and you know you’ve seen a comedic moment that will go down in history.  Tina Fey and Amy Poehler’s opening sketch portraying a press conference by Sarah Palin and Hilary Clinton certainly qualified.

Tina Fey and Amy Poehler as Sarah Palin and Hilary Clinton

I also stumbled across this blog entry (with lots of pictures) about the large No Palin protest in Anchorage.

The Phelps formula

(Note: This post was written on Friday, September 12 but published on Sunday, September 14 after Obama canceled his SNL appearance.)

Can I offer a few words of advice to Democrats that probably won’t be comforting?  Journalists have been attaching the word “fret” to Democrats, and frankly I’m hearing some of it among my Democratic friends.

My advice is: don’t panic! Stay focused, but don’t panic.  Watching the olympics this summer, I was fascinated not only by the amazing physical fitness and agility of these world class athletes, but the level of mental discipline that is required. It hardly mattered which sport you were watching. Each athlete was trying to get in and stay in his or her personal mental “zone.” It turns out that speed is a function of a fine balance of adrenaline and relaxation. Performing in front of millions of people supplies the adrenaline, but the athlete’s muscles also have to remain limber and loose before and during competition. In the heat of a tight race, the fight or flight response (either one) must be instructing muscles to tighten, but too much uncontrolled tension in the muscles cuts down on performance. I’m no sports psychologist, but I expect the champions are the ones with the mental discipline to stay loose and relaxed even as they are straining hard to catch up or win.

Democrats, sure, this should be an easy race, but we, the judges (to continue the Olympic metaphor), the American public, haven’t been at our best over the past decade.  So, you’re going to have to win this one in the home stretch, which is why Barack needs to have a little chat with Michael Phelps when they both appear on Saturday Night Live tomorrow night. Michael, remind him about how you stayed cool in that 100-meter butterfly event against Čavić and won by a fingernail.

This kind of advice is probably going to come as little comfort to Democrats, who have in recent years lost (in 2004, which was slightly different than the 2000 “selection”) when they were pitted against another under-prepared, over-confident, conservative evangelical, frontier-state governor (only that time the governor was running at the head of the ticket).

I don’t have a solution to the “Palin problem.” As long as we continue to select Presidents on the basis of their personality and our fears as opposed to candidates’ intelligence and expertise, it will always be possible to find ourselves in the same spot in which we find ourselves today.

Just remember, panic will just slow you down.

“Its a human drama thing.”

Friends who have known me for at least the past ten years are already chuckling as they see the picture in this post. That’s because I’ve probably made them watch this gem of a documentary, Hands on a Hard Body. My birthday just passed, and my wonderful wife found a rare DVD copy on Ebay.

If I’m not mistaken, Matthew McConaughey, bankrolled this project for a long-time friend who set up his gear at a car dealership in Longview, TX to record the slowest gladitorial event in history. Twenty-five contestants place their hands on a customized Nissan Hard Body truck, and the last one standing with his/her hand on the truck wins it.

When you stand back from this documentary and get philosophical, there is plenty of opportunity for commentary on our car-centric culture. You only have to take note of the desperation for wheels that motivates many of the contestants. But, this isn’t about winning a flash sports car. The contestants rarely comment on how nice the truck looks or how they want to impress their friends. They want to sell the thing and pay their bills or use it to move hay to the horses out in the pasture. This is Texas after all. As one of the contestants says, “A truck is a force. A truck makes money.”

From an artistic standpoint, it is hard to imagine a script that is more poignant and funny than what these very real and ordinary people in an extraordinary situation offer us off the tip of their tongues. There is a genuine earnestness that actors could never achieve as they share their faith, hopes, desires, and frustrations. Studio interviews with the contestants are masterfully edited throughout, and the makers of the film deserve enormous credit for their storytelling skills. They had a rich and motley cast to work with.

My father has often said, in partial jest, that one of the reasons Dr. Zhivago is a great film lies in the fact that, like much great art, “it’s wall to wall human suffering.” That’s pretty much true of “Hands” from the opening to the closing credits, but with one or two exceptions, the contestants are models of good sportsmanship regardless.

“Hands” is so dang compelling because it somehow manages to capture so many dramatic, narrative, and social features in one low-budget package: the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat, the struggle of the every man, the jester who actually dispenses the wisdom (it will be obvious when you see it, though this jester seems humbly unaware of his profundity), youthful enthusiasm vs. maturity and experience, sportsmanship, the beautiful awkwardness of religious fervor, and the love of a man for his … wife (you thought I was going to say truck, didn’t you).

At one point early in the film, the jester figure describes the contest as a kind of gladatorial event at which the crowd wants to see contestants fail. “Don’t they realize that we’re suffering, that we’re hurting, and you know, you feel like they’re kind of blood-thirsty, in a way. And I mean, they’re there to see the spectacle, and it seems so absurd, very absurd, and you have to realize later, hey, you know, its a human drama thing, and its more than just a contest, and its more than just winning a truck.” It is indeed.