All posts by Steve Stern

Strong Tea parties and weak tea

Politics

Protest-5934

A day or so ago, I got an email requesting that I sign an online petition. Like most people, I suspect, I get these alot . It seems so much like petitioning  the choir that I often just delete them and move on. But, I read an interesting article in The Economist that started me thinking about that petition and other ones like it. The article shows the results of Tea Party rallies over April 15th, 2010.

new research suggests that the people whom left-wing pundits once dismissed as “teabaggers” made a big difference in the mid-term elections of 2010, when Republicans recaptured the House of Representatives….When it rained, attendance at rallies halved….Dry rallies created momentum…and the rallies a year later were twice as large. Such enthusiasm translated into a 7% rise in the Republican vote in 2010, compared with wet areas. If the Tea Party merely expressed voters’ frustrations rather than inflaming them, one would expect no difference between wet and dry districts. The authors conclude that protests can indeed shape policy.

In a way, this is what I expect, it is why I walked precincts for Obama and turned out for Occupy protests. But, often, when I am doing that, my mind tells me that what I am doing is not going to change anybody’s mind and I didn’t walk as many precincts as I had time for, I didn’t go to most of the Occupy and Move-On protests I was invited to, and I haven’t signed most of the petitions I believe in.

It is nice to see that rallies have effects, and scary because it means that not doing anything has an effect, even if it is negative. Liberals seem to concentrate on Presidential elections and Conservatives on local and down ticket elections. I think the conservatives are right. Having a school Board that is in agreement with  their basic beliefs is more germane to their daily lives than having a President that is. We Liberals scream like scalded cats when the School Board wants to buy books that say Intelligent Design is a real theory but the best way to stop that is to get people on the School Board that don’t believe in that nonsense in the first place.

The article ended with Watery tea may be weak, but the strong stuff makes lawmakers sit up and take notice, which reminded me that Courtney Gonzales brought over some green tea on Christmas Eve and showed us how to make it weak. I – we – think of tea as a way to administer caffeine but  for hundreds if not thousands of years, it has been a way to make water safe to drink.

To stretch my ramblings on The Economist’s article a little further, I would say that the same is true in politics. The strong tea of presidential politics gets the headlines but it is the weak tea of down ticket politics that, eventually, makes the water safe to drink. It is state and local policies that determine if family planning clinics stay open and determine the boundaries of electoral districts. It is easy for me to fall back on the belief that politics is a way to shock the system into change every four years, but I am starting to believe that politics is the almost daily work of signing protests, the daily work of trying to be heard.

Occupy-5923

 

Michael Schumacher

Uncategorized

Schumacher skiing

 

When Howard Dunaier emailed me about Michael Schumacher – the most successful Formula One driver of all time – getting hurt in a skiing accident, the day before New Year’s Eve, I think he was more upset than I was. At the time, I really didn’t have much of an emotional reaction and I still don’t. I am not sure why. There is no doubt that Schumacher is one of the world’s best athletes – even if you don’t believe that driving a car is an athletic endeavor, it is hard not to be impressed by his making a Billion dollars by doing it – but, for me, he has always been easier to admire than love.

As an aside. I said for me because I don’t know Schumacher – of course I have never met him, I haven’t even seen him drive in person – and all my reactions to him are my reactions, my projections. I don’t want to say for me in every paragraph below but please be aware that it is there. End aside.

Stirling Moss, probably the greatest race driver never to win a championship, said, To achieve anything, you must be prepared to dabble on the boundary of disaster. Schumacher, who won seven Formula One World Championships, almost never seemed to be dabbling on that edge. Sure, he  had great desire, speed, racecraft, and is relentlessly  fit, but his work ethic and ability to build a team around him are what set him apart. He was too invulnerable to be a warm and fuzzy, a lovable, kind of guy. He seemed unemotional, but nobody can drive as well as he did in his prime without being emotional and Schumacher, in the moment, over the years, he has done some very emotional, very dangerous, and very stupid things.

By all accounts, the way he skied on the day of the accident was not one of them. But, I am sure that Michael Schumacher does not ski like a normal 44-year-old man. Either way, he fell nine days ago and nobody is yet willing to say he is going to live. That, in itself, is pretty unusual. They have placed him in an artificial comma and have – somehow – reduced his temperature to below normal. I think that is also unusual for this period of time, so it does not look  very good.

In the strange way that life works, that has made Michael seem very vulnerable, for the first time.

 

 

 

Well, I guess it is Governmental Transparency

Politics

US-intelligence-seal-Nothing-Is-Beyond-Our-Reach

Close to a couple of weeks ago, the National Reconnaissance Office – that’s NRO to the cognoscenti –  launched a new spy satellite.  The NRO was founded in 1961 – but the government didn’t get around to telling anybody until 1992 – and, according to its website,  is in charge of designing, building, launching, and maintaining… America’s spy satellites. The logo for the latest spy satellite is a malevolent octopus humping the earth. For the dense among us, they provided the tag line Nothing is beyond our reach.

At first look, it seemed sort of off-putting – Christopher Soghoian, a senior policy analyst for the ACLU, tweeted, You may want to downplay the massive dragnet spying thing right now. This logo isn’t helping. and that is a mean looking octopus – but I think he is wrong and the logo is brilliant. In its own way, the Defense department – I think the NRO must work for Defense, they wouldn’t be under State would they?  – is doing the same thing as Edward Snowden. The logo is designed to stop terrorists more than to catch them.

The thing that stops me from driving faster than traffic on The 280 coming back from San Francisco at 11:30 Saturday night is that I don’t want to get a ticket and, going into San Francisco at 5:30, I saw several black and white Highway Patrol cars that, I am worried, are still around. Edward Snowden is like the guy flashing his lights at me, saying Slow down, there is a cop ahead. The logo is like painting the Highway Patrol cars black and white so I will know they are at work. The presence of the Highway Patrol stops me from speeding and the presence of NRO satellites keeps terrorists from using emails. Sure, not all the terrorist, but most.

A holiday of Muslim movies

Americana, Politics, Religion

The SiegeFor no particular reason, except that this is the way the Universe works some times, we saw three movies about Muslims over the weekend.

The first one was The Siege, made before 9-11, about a fictional Iraqi terrorist group and the countries over-reaction to the carnage they cause. Denzel Washington plays a New York based FBI agent and Tony Shalhoub is his Arab- American partner. In the movie – and, I believe, in real life – the terrorist are reacting to what we are doing in the Middle East. In this case, we think the chain of events started when a a secrete American “extraction team” kidnapped a Shiite cleric. Annette Bening – the very same, overwhelmingly attractive, Annette Bening that charmed President Andrew Shepherd – plays a CIA agent who set up a Shiite terrorist operation to oppose Saddam Hussein’s regime that set-up the kidnapping. It wasn’t a great movie.

The second movie was much better. It was the The Reluctant Fundamentalist by the Indian director, Mira Nair (Salaam Bombay!, Mississippi Masala, Monsoon Wedding).  The Reluctant Fundamentalist bridges 9-11 and is about a very smart, very secular, Pakistani who is living in New York as a successful management consultant. When 9-11 hits, he goes from being “king of the world” to pariah. Not so much in terms of his friends but in terms of the America he loves.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist

The last movie was The Past by Asghar Farhadi – the Iranian who directed A Separation, nominated for an Academy Award – and is playing now. It is directed by an Iranian and stars Ali Mosaffa, another Iranian, who has come back to Paris to be divorced by his French wife, played by Bérénice Bejo,  but it is not about Muslims, it is about people and it is superb.
The Past

A couple of weeks ago, I got in a conversation with a friend about religion. That is not a big surprise, two of my favorite conversation topics are religion and politics and it is two of my friend’s favorites as well. He is – if not a baptised, at least a confirmed – atheist. I knew my friend found all religions troubling, but he surprised me by saying that Islam is the worst by far. That those qualities that make it the worst religion, are built it. As an aside, I would classify myself as pro-religion. I believe in The Wonder, A Divine, Love, but I find it very hard to understand, let alone believe in, an anthropomorphic god.  I find it borderline insane that anybody thinks there is a god who created the Universe with its billions of galaxies, of which we are in a tiny corner of one, and then cares about how we have sex; but I also think religion can comfort and can be a force for compassion and good. If pushed, I would say I am an agnostic with Buddhist leanings. End aside.

The first two of these movies touch on what it is to live in a world in which good people, smart people, even compassionate people, think your religion is one of hate and terror. To live with people’s assumption that you are not the same as them at a very basic level. All three movies deal with the deeper question of not completely belonging. Not belonging in the sense of not being accepted. Not because of anything the characters have done, but of not being accepted because of who they are.

At one point in The Past, a friend of Ahmad’s – the Iranian who came back to Paris to be divorced – says You were not made for this place, you do not belong here. And he doesn’t which is why he left his wife and her two kids to go back to Iran. Changez Khan, the reluctant fundamentalist, wants to stay, he is very good at getting rich the American way, but he is driven out by full body searches at airports, stares in restaurants, and the burden of being the other. Agent Frank Haddad in The Siege, wants to quit the FBI when his son is jailed in a round-up of young Muslim men.

These three movies tell the collective story of Muslims between worlds. In a way, it is the classic immigrant story but it is also the story of a minority that has been identified with the enemy. When I read about Bernie Madoff ripping off investors, my first reaction is Oh shit! not another Jew. I am sure that when most Muslims read about some asshole blowing people up at the Boston Marathon, they say something like, Oh shit! not another Muslim, why can’t it be another Timothy McVeigh?  In their case, in 2014, the consequences can be much more serious and that makes me feel sad.

 

Seeing “her” @ the end of the year

Film

X-mas-

I feel like I have been away for weeks but it is really only been a greatly extended Christmas (away being defined as not making a blog post). Christmas is a get-together-with-friends-and-family day and — it would seem by the movie openings — a Go-to-a-movie Day. One of the things my sister, Paula, and I share is a love for movies, not always the same movies, but pretty close. So one of the things we did while she was here, for a couple of days, after she had Christmas in San Diego, was go to see her. It was our Christmas Celebration together (one of my most memorable Thanksgivings with Paula was seeing Paris is Burning at the Guild in Albuquerque).

I went in to her thinking it would be good and walked out thinking that it is the best movie I have seen this year. her is soft, gently surreal, and visually stunning.  It is, maybe, the best relationship movie since Annie Hall.

I don’t know why I should have been so surprised, it is a Spike Jonze movie, after all. The same Spike Jonze that gave us Being John Malkovich and Adaptation., but Charlie Kaufman, the writer of those movies, got most of the credit rather than Jonez. Part of my problem is that  Jonze played the dumb, goofball, Conrad Vig in David Russell’s Three Kings and I still haven’t been able to shake that image even though it has been 14 years now. However, Spike Jonze both wrote and directed her and he is – finally – getting the credit.

The movie takes place in a past-future Los Angeles. What I mean by past-future, is that it seems more like a future imagined in the 60’s rather than imagined today. It is not the Blade Runner future or the Elysium future, it is the 2001 future with a very nice  HAL 9000 that is the OS in a wood and brass thingy that Joaquin Phoenix, as Theodor, carries like a cell phone (although nobody seems to use them as phones). Theodor is listlessly going through life in a limbo period after his wife left him and filed for divorce, but before signing the papers that finalize it. Scarlett Johansson is her – Samantha, the nice HAL 9000 is OS1 – and the perfect, custom-made for him, girlfriend with whom Theodor falls in love.

Amy Adams is also in the movie, as Amy, and is Theodor’s best friend. She is so soft and best friendish that she doesn’t seem like the same actor that played Sydney Prosser in American Hustle. She doesn’t even seem like she is the same height or age. I think that Amy Adams does not get the acting credit she should. Meryl Streep played the good Julia in Julie & Julia and got great reviews while Amy Adams played the bad Julie and got pretty much ignored. I think Julie was the harder part, the less likable part, played better.

Back at her, the conceit of the movie is that the love is played straight by everybody in the movie. My sister was creeped out by that but I got sucked in (although I felt a little bit of the kind of edginess I get when I watch somebody driving – in a movie – and they look away from the road for a time I consider to be too long). her was a great way to end a year of watching movies. It seemed to me to be mostly a mediocre year that ended with a burst of fantastic movies. It started with Side Effects which I really liked, wandered down into the forgettable Star Treck into Darkness and Pacific Rim– although This is the End was a super summer movie – and then came back with Gravity, American Hustle, and her.