Closing Scene

Hateful and spineless, raped and robbed, mangled and witless, they were as good as we are, you can say that again!-- Celine

When we see Jessica Tandy's aggressive pace on her walker as Dan Aykroyd and Morgan Freeman flank her, attempting forcible engagement, it is realistic enough, for the time in which Driving Miss Daisy was made and satirized since, but where camera lenses trick viewers is within frames of skillful artifice we barely notice-- not in Tandy's rebuff of Aykroyd, but in the depopulated background around Tandy while Freeman feeds her. Life does offer these candy cane holistic moments of redemption in decline. Nursing homes and hospices are chaotic, crowded places over run with Foley catheters and urine capture bags. None of us should have to die this way, in essence pointing to nature's mercy with the Syrian toddler.

The ocean wiped out horrific possibilities.

Grendel's Ram in Contention

"The old ram stands down looking over rockslides, stupidly."-- John Gardner, Grendel, p2

What Jennifer argues in her latest Right Turn entry, whose headline was changed, I believe, from the more inflammatory "France goes to war," to the lower decibel of "fallout," since Hollande is a Socialist in the tradition of Mitterrand, and no doubt had the Foreign Secretary call the Grahams who remain on staff with a scold, is that the neocon response to bin Laden's "great blow" was the right tack, despite the fact that thirteen years in Kabul seems to have simply degraded the Taliban into more traditional narco terrorists with whom the CIA loves to waltz, which is not very hawkish. I do not necessarily disagree with Jennifer or The Post on Obama's retrenchment after Bush Administration debacles. My argument is that delicacy to Islamic sensitivity, and Western effeminate dress after centuries of civilizing the natives at the point of a bayonet, is not going to pacify hardliners who supersede Hammurabi, who purportedly was source text for Mosaic law. 

I am always against bad process, and the invasion of Iraq in 2003 should have led to George W Bush's impeachment, regardless of how well or how badly the Pentagon handled the draw down under our sadly failed Harvard Law president. We cannot occupy multiple fronts indefinitely, even if we are the strongest nuclear power. Americans were once and briefly united after the 9/11 attacks, and if you want tradition, well, successful war presidents unite the country. Congress should have declared war on Al Qaeda. The UN Security Council should have made a deal with the major powers, dissolved Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sudan, Yemen, Somalia. set up zones of occupation, and if those with the tactical force had the guts to do that, whatever the price of going that route, we would not be watching North Africa and the Far East join the long standing enemies of Israel in an implosion. 

This all started in 79 with Khomeini and his Iranian revolution. The Ayatollah broadcast his Persian call to arms from Paris, and world leaders held their dicks in their hands, to channel old man Morgan, while the fanatical Imam toppled the Shah. Jimmy might have saved the fellow citizens he served some dignity by exporting Billy Carter as an American radical. The Saudis did the same thing prior to Osama's rise in prominence and bear some of the blame for contemporary tremors.

Jennifer cites John Yoo, attempting to rehabilitate a rationalizing legal hardliner, by having him universalize NATO's Article 5. I doubt this makes Hollande happy. I watched extensive press coverage of the neutralization of the Kouachi brothers and their associate, and then Hollande's entry and subsequent gathering of ministers in the Presidential Palace. The informality of the European bureaucrat anesthetizes sensibility, and briefly entertained the idea of sending Marine Le Pen my resume. Perhaps I should do it on a lark. Why didn't Turkish authorities detain Boumeddiene? The corruption of ionized interests will always be with us, but this too, smells of bad faith.

In essence, Jennifer's urgency for the Obama Administration to reignite Bush's battle lines is misguided, because war takes commitment, national unity. We lost that after Truman fired MacArthur.

Linus, Helium Wrapped

The flaw in Million Dollar Baby is the ubiquity of Morgan Freeman's character. Mr. Eastwood could have picked another narrator from which we absorb the bonding between the central characters. Freeman was powerfully cast in Gone Baby Gone, but "Scrap" waters down an otherwise powerful dramatic arc in Clint's seminal work, and Baby is the kind of film which challenges preconceptions, the kind of film that speaks for itself about human will and dignity that serves admirably without the silly political gamesmanship that diminishes the actor's stature, the last of its kind from the old studio system Clint knew how to milk, merging almost perfectly the anti-federal mandate agenda with the tragedy of defeated aspiration. GBG is a weaker, more diluted film, but I bookend it with Baby because both have the ingredients of what could be great films about the tanglewood between our physical frailty, aggregate lack of value coupled with our extraordinary accident of evolution.

This is as far as I can go this morning. For those of you who read "On the P & Q," the woman is hired but will not last very long. She made the exact grimace of economic necessity envisioned by my overwhelmed stress. Frontline will not receive Vatican sanction, but I bless them. "The Suicide Plan" is exactly the kind of exposure of the American  underbelly that matters to me, (and this underbelly is what Affleck wades into with a scorch playing the minute detective) I have criticized PBS for its documentary voyeurism on dying, but in this segment, the video journalists stuck to the story; no doubt did some of us a service.

I have found my inner terrorist. I'd recommend it.