Category Archives: Americana

Sally Ride RIP

Americana, Psychological Musings

Dr. Ride died from pancreatic cancer last Monday. She was only 61 and is survived by her partner of 27 years, Tam O’Shaughnessy. The fact that she was gay came as a big shock to me. Not that I have spent much time thinking about Sally Ride in the last twenty years.

I was hyper-interested to the space program when it started in 1959 with Mercury and read everything I could on it. But the presentation by the news was so un-factfilled, that it was hard to stay attentive. Project Gemini was more of the same and going to the moon, in its own way, more of the same. In Wernher von Braun’s books, the moon lander would take off from Earth orbit but Apollo had the moon lander take off from a Moon orbit; I never did find out why (and I tried). And the astronauts were so so white bread, so bloodless, so flag-lapel-pin-American, so characterless, that they were not interesting.

Then I read The Right Stuff  by Tom Wolfe and the astronauts were brought to life as flawed, crazy – in a good way – over achieving test pilots. They were fascinating and it makes me wonder why they were presented as so boring. It seems to me that the only time public figures aren’t presented as boring is when the press is getting ready to hang them. By all accounts – made after her death – Dr. Sally Ride was an equally fascinating astronaut and it is too bad that she had to hide who she was and it is sort of nice that she was able to.

May she rest in peace.

A couple of random thoughts on the Colorado shooting

Americana, Current Affairs, Psychological Musings

I keep thinking about the Colorado shootings. It makes my heart ache. All the victims: the people who got killed, the people who got shot and will live, the people who were there and escaped – using the term very loosely because nobody who was there escaped – the people who had to go to the hospital or morgue to identify some child or loved one, Holmes’ parents. All victims of a man who spent alot of time and energy to destroy lives.

I keep asking myself, Why would anybody do this? I guess that it is the obvious question, I guess that it is the questions almost every asks, it certainly is the question the police are asking. Yea, sure, he is nuts, but then I hold the position that anybody who kills somebody is nuts. But being nuts just begs the question, Why did he think he was doing it? I can understand the guys who flew into the World Trade Center; I have never been that dedicated to anything, but I can understand it it. I can even sort of understand Columbine or Virginia Tech, But this is incomprehensible to me.

This was not a suicide: this was not somebody so unhappy they wanted to take their life and then added as many people as they could. James Holmes – does anybody call him Jim? – went out and bought some guns and also bought body armor to protect himself as much as possible, he then went out and shot as many – totally random – people as he could. He seemed to want to live through this. He then told the police that he had booby-trapped his apartment.  Why would anybody do that?

Ever since Charles Whitman climbed up the Texas Tower, we hear the same thing, “He was really shy, really quiet, but really nice and sweet.” I read somewhere that you can tell how likely someone is to have road-rage by the number of bumper stickers they have on the back of their car. But I think that the scary people are the ones who are shy, quiet, and sweet.

As an aside, the even more scary people are like Luke O’Dell of the National Association for Gun Rights who took the opportunity to say  “Potentially, if there had been a law-abiding citizen who had been able to carry in the theater, it’s possible the death toll would have been less.” Scary because they are trying to change public policy and – in many places – seceding. Imagine that nightmare, a shootout in a dark movie theater between several idiots as a way to cut the carnage. End aside.

 

Sorkin and nostalgia

Americana, Television

I want to be clear at the start by saying that almost everything I think about Aaron Sorkin is probably colored by the movie, The Social Network, which is an hatchet job on Mark Zuckerberg.  In defending  The Social Network Sorkin said “I don’t want my fidelity to be to the truth; I want it to be to storytelling”. I do want to acknowledge that it was good story telling, but it was fraudulent storytelling. Worse, it was fraudulent story telling about a real person – many real people, actually, especially Priscilla Chan who Zuckerberg is now married to – who is still alive.

As a liberal, I very much enjoyed The West Wing. Everybody was so right, as in correct, and so brilliant – especially President Josiah Bartlett – and they were so busy and quick witted. It all seemed so real. Of course it wasn’t, we didn’t have President Bartlett, we had President George Bush the Younger. When Studio 60 came on the air, I expected it to be great and I was very disappointed. It was pretty much the same fast talking gang but I was no longer particularly interested in them.

I saw some bad reviews of The Newsroom, but I still was looking forward to seeing it for all the reasons I liked The West Wing (and we have a subscription to HBO, so What the hell). The Pilot was very Sorkinesque – including the fraudulent part of Sorkin – with quick talking, witty, brainy people and maybe I should have loved it, but I didn’t. It replayed the BP Gulf oil spill and then played it in the same over the top way the press actually did play it, all the while inferring that the real news people didn’t cover it right. He is right, they didn’t cover it right because they covered it in the same breathless way that Sorkin pretends to.

Like Sorkin, they covered the oil spill as the worst ecological disaster in the history of mankind. And it wasn’t. But there is a real ecological disaster going on here and that is the degradation of the Louisiana coastline. The real newspeople aren’t covering that very much because it is not dramatic enough and Sorkin doesn’t even pretend to cover it.

But my biggest complaint is Sorkin’s nostalgia for the old timey news guys. Supposedly, they  were better at covering the news. One character – the wise old man, I guess – says We just decided to referring to covering the news with integrity which becomes the title of the episode, We Just Decided To. These are the newpeople who didn’t cover the deplorable conditions for blacks in the south for almost 100 years. They didn’t cover the lynchings, the reign of terror, until it was jammed down their collective throats. They didn’t cover President John Kennedy banging every woman in sight including many underage girls. Yes, they did cover the disintegration of the Vietnam War, but not as well as the disintegration of the Iraq war was covered.

The old timey newsmen were company men and the company was the white establishment. There is more information available, to even the most casual observer, today than ever before. More news and more real facts. In many areas, like the BP oil spill, the cable news channels probably dwell too much. Sure, it is harder to get information on the ecological disaster of the Louisiana coastline degradation than it should be, but nobody covered that 50 years ago at all. And this was when the Army Corps of Engineers was actively hurting it. My personal anger is that nobody covered the destruction of Glenn Canyon, one of the most beautiful places on earth, except to exalt Lake Powell. People who knew the area were screaming and the press ignored them while writing fawning articles about the Army Corps of Engineers.

I suspect that Sorkin didn’t set out to do  a hatchet job on Zuckerberg, he was just collateral damage in Sorkin trying to go after the web in his haste to glorify the good old days.

Why some people – at least me (I, ?) – get mad at the government

Americana, Politics

Michele Leohart is an administrator in the DEA and, maybe, she is stoned and that is her excuse for her ridiculous answers. But I doubt it, I think the real reason is the Washington culture that actually prevents honesty and introspection. In this case, thanks to Congressman Jared Polis for doing what our Congresspeople should actually be doing.