Robert Wagner, in Escro

"The life in me abolished the death of things."-- The Ring and The Book

Yes, I sometimes forget just to whom I am posting, certainly not to Oliveira. People follows a time honored tradition older than journalism itself: The need to be amazed by a freak show conjoined to the distortions of glamour, but in the case of Natalie Wood, her theatrical depth always on the verge of overwhelming pathos, her performances remain a specter for which I have no cognizant explanation, except for the fact that her death was a senior year headline. What Redford's character does to her emotionally in Tennessee's carefully contrived melodrama opens some raw wounds, Sundance liberal be damned. She was drinking and fell off a boat. She was on a boat, drinking, she and Robert had a fight, and merry widow tossed her overboard, not that there is any evidence to hover over Wagner's old age. Her character Alva was pressured into sex trafficking and is destroyed by her own desperation for magical innocence, in the covert hovering of homosexual penetrations into familial viciousness, and died in such a fashion it reverberates. We believe things have changed since those times, that fresh meat is not a commodity, but have they? What Rampell delineates at the bottom of the economic workforce barely scratches the surface, but we're demonizing what we enjoy about the convenience of processed food. I patronize McDonald's once in a blue moon-- but escape this juggernaut no less than anyone else who frequent short order establisshments. Golden Lake, Dunkin Donuts, something more upscale when I head to Delancy Plaza, even grocery chains have converted to prepackaged meals.

What I am suggesting is we do not often enough step back to see what polarizes us into idiotic points of advocacy. Restaurant franchises operate on the caveat of instant gratification, not decent hands on customer service. What isn't microwaved is short grilled, in the past, crewed by adolescents never intending such labor becoming a living wage, not in the developed world. Those who remain on the front lines, the farmers who harvest crops, manage livestock, can only push manufacturing technologies so far; the rest of us are basically obsolete, even the CEO five times up the food chain. Alva is a passive anachronism, but in another sense she returns to the future, the last exploitable resource, our terminal diseases.