Movies and monotheism are strange bedfellows. It takes big-time hypocrisy to make their shotgun marriage work. As for advertising and monotheism, the word hypocrisy doesn’t cover that stretch.

Thou shalt have no other gods before me, except your favorite actors, most gorgeous models and boorish celebs. And as for graven images, well, I guess the models are a bit more graven than the actors, and plastic hadn’t been invented when the Ten Commandments were written.

Muslim fundamentalists have probably savored this conundrum more than their Christian counterparts. Hell, they don’t even want you to notice the girl in the street, much less worship her.

I’m not worried about the shotgun marriage of movies and monotheism. You can divorce a bad idea. It’s the hypocrisy it takes to insist no one concealed any guns at the wedding that worries me.

Paganism has always been such a compelling idea that monotheists have to commit periodic genocide to keep it under control, so it’s pretty clever of the film industry to have smuggled it in the back door on celluloid reels.

I don’t want to give the fundamentalists any ideas. But I’m not too worried about that either, because ideas and fundamentalism are fundamentally inimical. But if they care to get het up about something besides gay marriage, family values and the beauty of women, I recommend alcohol. It’s a helluva big killer, and I suspect it lurks between the lines of many of our laws, especially the ones that never stood a chance of working.

Look at any pagan culture’s pantheon and you’ll find updated versions in our media. How many Dianas and Artemises, how many Apollos and Hercules have you enjoyed while munching popcorn? How many nymphs, dryads and muses on the slick pages of magazines?

We’re as pagan as we’ve ever been, and at least some of the fiery breath we feel from the Muslim world derives from Muslims having always taken idolatry more seriously than Christians. They have their own bio-hazardous brands of hypocrisy, but savoring ours might help us understand theirs better.

A more desirable cultural ambience would be one in which we enjoy celebrities without idolizing them and ideas without canonizing them.

—DM

Why is the press held in ill repute? I’m sure you have your ideas. One of mine is that it’s because the press is often so contemptuous. Nobody likes a smart-ass, but the press likes its own smart-asses too much.

There are many reasons newspapers are losing readers—the rise of the Internet, the shortsightedness of greedy corporate owners, for starters. And just maybe their cynicism and pretension to omniscience.

There are many ways to express an opinion, but all too often journalists opt for the ostentation of the smart-ass.

I once asked a movie reviewer colleague how a twenty-one inch demolition job on a movie could be justified. My own preference was to ignore bad movies and books, but that’s hard to do when the producers and publishers are advertising in your paper. My colleague complained that I was being cantankerous. He’d gotten under my skin, so I replied that this kind of review was ugly exhibitionism. It’s much harder to praise than demean.

Recently The New York Times’ TV guide summarized the 1993 film Untamed Heart as “harmless,” echoing a similarly dismissive review the year the film was released by critic Vincent Canby. What a curiously cynical (smart-ass) comment! Harmless? From what, from whom do we need protection? Why should a lovely film about two truly innocent people, a waitress played by Marisa Tomei (inset) and a busboy played by Christian Slater, be characterized as harmless except by someone too jaded to be so privileged as to pass on anybody’s creative endeavor?

And yet I have heard this very word used again and again. My wife once heard one colleague describe another as harmless. Meaning what? That we should be on guard against each other? That harmless means no threat to our ambitions? No threat to our perceived position in the world? What a curious and surpassingly ugly way of viewing fellow human beings, weighing them for their threat potential, viewing life as risk management.

I am pained to mention Canby ((July 27, 1924 – September 15, 2000) while complaining of this style of criticism because he was a fair and generous film critic whose work I welcomed as an editor. His original critique of Untamed Heart, while not snotty, was uncharacteristically world-weary, and I eagerly exempt him from my indictment of smart-ass critics.

But nonetheless I often marveled as an editor why a newspaper would give a full column of type to some twerp indulging his own verbal exhibitionism at the expense of someone’s creative effort. It especially galled me when the news hole was restrictive and more than eighty percent of the day’s report ended up in the trash.

It seems a pity to have to accept that we live in a society that adjudges
a peaceful nation or a portrayal of innocence as harmless. Untamed Heart is about simple decency, love in unexpected places and people, and nobility of soul. But the great New York Times, our paper of record, in agate type has dismissed it as “harmless,” saying far more about the times and The Times than it does about a modest film meant to encourage the beleaguered soul.

—DM

This is the transcript of Hot Copy, No. 37, my regular podcast for The Student Operated Press:

Because journalism has been so often a court of last resort in our society we have been beguiled into looking away from its most tawdry aspects, the tawdriest being that when it comes to money the public is bamboozled.

Yes, media owners can make the case that they must make money to thrive and accordingly they must act like every other sensible business. And they do make that argument. But journalism also enjoys special First Amendment privileges, because the Founding Fathers believed the republic would founder without an honest and protected Fourth Estate.

So when the media focus more on celebrity behavior than the issues that determine the quality of the lives we lead—you can argue that bad celebrity behavior diminishes that quality—we have to ask ourselves what’s up with that. (more…)

In my lifetime we have whisked through an age of psychiatry into an age of triviality. Perhaps our journey through the age of psychiatry scared us into the age of triviality. Our numerous trivial excursions, our addiction to games, celebrities and consuming suggests a flight from the world whose doors were pried open by Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung and others.

Perhaps the journey into self-knowledge struck us as too harrowing, too dangerous. Perhaps that’s why we choose to elect adolescent leaders—I think the new word is adultescent—who can’t tell the difference between a wishy-washy intellect and the spirit of inquiry. Perhaps we’re in full flight from the confident strides in evolution that people like Jung held out to us. (more…)

It’s often said Americans’ favorite fast food is the burger. I don’t believe it. I think it’s herring, red herring. I think the electorate these days hardly ever sees a diversionary tactic it doesn’t want to swallow in a single gulp.

You name it, the mythological connection between Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and 9/11, single-payer national health care as socialized medicine, Social Security going bankrupt, gay marriage, right to life, family values, support the troops—all tactics to blind us to the simple fact that the gap between the rich and poor is growing every day, the middle class is disappearing, the government has been stolen by corporados, our elections are corrupted, and the republic is being turned into an imperium.

Some of these red herrings are whoppers, pure and simple, such as the Saddam-9/11 connection and national health care as socialized medicine. Other red herrings contain a truth twisted to suit politics. For example, the Social Security System will go bankrupt only if we fail to raise the current $97,000 annual income to which Social Security tax is applied. The slogan, support the troops, has been twisted to mean that you can’t support them if you disagree with President Bush’s war policies.

Other red herrings are legitimate issues in their own right, such as gay marriage, right to life and family values. They’re red herrings because they’re used to whip up a frenzy in certain political bases while blinding the members of those bases to the fact that their economic futures and their civil rights are being abridged. It’s like bumping into a busy man on the street to distract him from the fact you’re picking his pocket.

I think we love red herrings for the same reason we love fast food in general—it’s quick and easy. True, we get fat and sick, but that’s later. Meanwhile, lies and half-truths taste better than truth. Besides, we don’t taste the food, we taste what we put on it, and in the case of politics, the salt and fat is spin.

We can’t keep on wolfing down fast food and stay healthy, and the republic can’t keep on swallowing red herrings and stay healthy.

—DM

—

I’m too cold this afternoon to draw any metaphysical conclusions, but my fingers are limber enough to report a strange occurrence. I dragged my cranky body to a photo shoot Monday. I needed a portrait of the old crank for Far From Algiers, my book of poetry which last July won Kent State University’s Wick Prize. The only photo I had was dated and a bit posed.

Jim (J. Gerard) Smith, the photographer, is justly celebrated and a lovely human being too, so I was looking forward to seeing him, but I felt that no matter what I did I would produce what my wife Marilyn refers to as my “ayatollah scowl.” I prefer to think of it as my osprey look, you know, that look ospreys give sailors when the sailors steer too close to osprey nests on pilings.

Well, osprey or ayatollah, I was definitely giving Jim that look. My smiles were like stale cookies, and I could imagine readers thinking, Who wants to read anything by a guy who looks like that? (I myself will read anything by an osprey and nothing by an ayatollah).

Then Jim had an idea. He brought out a plate of glass and soon had Marilyn spraying it with a mix of water and glycerine. Behind this glass my face relaxed, dropped its guard, and began to look like my poems. The best ones, anyway. The pointillistic face in the video was hardly the face that had been grimacing for more than an hour. It looked like the person I know myself to be, not the pained severity we had been looking at.

The experience prompted me to contemplate how often in encounters the face we project, or the face being read by another, belongs to a set of thoughts and emotions irrelevant to the moment. We’re not prepared for the moment at hand; our faces are somewhere else, and yet we’re stuck with the way we’re perceived at that moment.

Something about distancing myself from Jim behind glycerine and water had stripped away my guardedness. I sat there steeped in an odd feeling that I understood this process. As best as I can make of it, it’s like that moment when you’ve written a poem or half a poem and you realize it’s okay but not honest enough. It’s guarded. So you cross out lines and then stanzas and you sit there waiting for the real poem to happen. When Far From Algiers is published in August perhaps you’ll see what I mean. Perhaps I’ll see what I mean.

—DM

An extraordinary phenomenon in which a hostage begins to identify with and grow sympathetic to their captor. Named for an episode that occurred in Stockholm in August, 1973 when an armed Swedish robber took some bank workers captive, held them for six days and stole their hearts.

Does this definition of Stockholm Syndrome sound familiar? Could it be that the American electorate exhibits this symptom—a puzzling identification with the people doing them wrong?

Consider the facts. The unions which helped create the middle class by securing better wages, more benefits and job security, are almost broken. The debt-ridden middle class, which is constantly prodded to buy more to support our consumer economy, is disappearing. Our prosperity is being exported.

And again and again the voters have elected people from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush who have sworn to them that by enabling the rich to get richer  the wealth will trickle down to the rest of us, by cutting the taxes of the rich the rest of us will benefit.

Have we? (more…)

How is it that the nation that rescued the world from fascist thugs and kept the red wolf at bay is now regarded in Europe as a rogue nation, the most dangerous and reckless nation in the world?

How is it that while we demonize North Korea, Iran and Venezuela, the Europeans tell pollsters we ‘re the demons?

I think the answer may lie in a debate we’re not having. We’ve come to see democracy and capitalism as synonymous, but it may be that only a certain kind of capitalism, the kind we don’t have, is compatible with democracy.

I think the corporados who are gleeful about the growing gap between the rich and the poor—gleeful that they don’t have a smart and well-off middle class to contend with—are driving an agenda that is not wholly good for the American republic.

They regard our superb military as a business support group. They regard our government as a convenient disguise for what is in effect a corporate oligarchy. They don’t give a fig for civil rights, medical care, education, or the pursuit of happiness. They have a slaveholder’s mentality.

Did we prevail over godless communism for such godless capitalism?

Didn’t we suppose that we would all in some way share the prosperity?

In the 1970s some thirty-five percent of our labor force was unionized, but even then some of us noticed that in labor-management disputes the press never raised the question of defining a moral profit margin. I think that omission foreshadowed the kind of greed-driven public policy we are pursuing today.

Google is a fine gauge of the Zeitgeist. When you Google “profit margin” you come up with all kinds of technical definitions, but you don’t come up with our mouthy preachers and politicians talking about how much of the profit should be shared with wage earners. Preacher and politician alike go on and on about abortion, homosexuality and family values, but why isn’t sharing the nation’s wealth one of those values? I’m not talking about communism, I’m talking about human decency. I’m talking about finding ways for all of us to have decent lives, not just inside traders and mortgage con artists. Where is the moral indignation about screwing the middle class and the poor?

If our definition of a corporate profit margin is “all the corporate officers can get and to hell with the shareholders, the employees and the environment,” then democracy as we have envisioned it all these years is not compatible with the kind of capitalism we practice. If the corporate officials get everything and the shareholders and employees get less and less, we will have surrendered the republican ideal to piratical capitalism.

If that is what Teddy Roosevelt knew and what Dwight Eisenhower warned us against, why have the lies about trickle-down prosperity fooled us? The only thing that is trickling down is injustice and fraud.

—DM

“There should be an end to the occupation that began in 1967. The agreement must establish Palestine as a homeland for the Palestinian people, just as Israel is a homeland for the Jewish people. These negotiations must ensure that Israel has secure, recognized, and defensible borders. And they must ensure that the state of Palestine is viable, contiguous, sovereign, and independent.”

—President Bush, Jan. 7, 2008

This space has never lost an opportunity to criticize President Bush, but he has now started his last year in office by taking the most important forward step in foreign policy in decades, and it should be well noted. He has told Israel, the sacred cow of American politics, to get off its intransigence, return the land it took from the Arabs in 1967 and accept a viable Palestinian state, emphasis on viable.

The President’s critics may argue that in the waning months of his administration this was a less than courageous stand to take, but I would argue that that there is no way to detract from its courage. Not one major seeker after the presidency has had the guts to confront this long-festering issue, so beholden are American politicians to the Israel lobby. Let’s see if tomorrow the deaf talking heads on the Sunday “news” shows have the chutzpah to examine this presidential landmark.

Our toleration of Israeli belligerence and land-grabbing has poisoned our relations with the Muslim world and has been contrary to our best interests. We have refused to craft a policy that both supports Israel, as indeed we should, and yet refuses to support her imperialist tendencies, which are not shared by a majority of her own population.

We have adhered to this folly because our evangelical apocalyptos regard Israel as an instrument of the end time, not because they have any love of Jews, but because Israel is as useful to their fundamentalist view as the Jews were useful to the Nazis as scapegoats. Jews who deceive themselves about this do Israel no favors, and they certainly do the United States no favors.

The President’s comments have earned no kudos in the Arab press, but sensible Arabs will mark their importance. The candidates running for office are hoping they can get away with ignoring them. A sensible electorate would insist they face up to this ongoing foreign policy nightmare, from which the President has now given us some hope of awakening.

Whatever else history may say about George W. Bush, it must say he has now stood up against a squalid record of political cowardice and self-destructiveness. Let’s hope his successor has the stamina and wisdom to stay the course he has set.

—DM

My stepfather, Dominick, wasn’t a moviegoer, but he loved opera and some said he sang like Caruso. He came to the United States from Sicily before World War I and soon found himself singing in the mansions of wealthy “swells” on Fifth Avenue. When he died in 1959 he knew Italian-Americans were making names for themselves in all walks of life, including the movies, but he would have been surprised by the fame that was to come to so many Italian-Americans in filmdom.

Dominick lived in a time, and I grew up in a time, when “foreign-sounding” names were still being “Americanized,” which is not unlike saying they were being sanitized.

Things have changed, but not as much as one might expect considering our demographics. If you look at the people we send to Washington you would think we are still ethnically an overwhelmingly North European nation, but we’re not. We’re much more diverse than that, and if our elections are not showing that, we ought to think long and hard about what is wrong with them. Why, for example, should a notably homogeneous state like Iowa have such an influence on our nominating process? (more…)