This morning, I heard somebody on the radio talk about fossilized hubris, but then I realized that was not what they said. It was only what I heard, connecting audio dots that weren’t there. Now I have fallen in love with that term, even if it is imaginary. It reminds me of the ruins of an old Mississippi plantation that Michele and I visited in 2008. The plantation had been captured by the Union during General U. S. Grant’s Vicksburg campaign and that campaign has been on my mind because it started about 150 years ago, in April 1863.
Michele and I went to Vicksburg in 2008 to see some Civil War Battlefields in which Grant had been the Union commander. Grant chose to not to attack the citadel of Vicksburg directly, instead going down river to a location near the, now, abandoned plantation. Standing on the parapets of Vicksburg – The Gibraltar of the West – overlooking the Mississippi, it was easy to see why.
Later, standing in the empty, quiet, ruins of the Plantation, sweating in the late spring sun, and surrounded by what would be called jungle anywhere else, we could feel how difficult even that road of attack must have been. But, standing in the abandoned ruins, the year that Barack Obama, a black man, would be elected President of the United States – in 2008 – was a very good feeling. It was like standing in fossilized hubris.
“Fuck Saddam, we’re taking him out.” President George Bush to three U.S. Senators in March 2002.
“The Iraqi regime . . . possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons. It is seeking nuclear weapons. We know that the regime has produced thousands of tons of chemical agents, including mustard gas, sarin nerve gas, VX nerve gas.” President George Bush
“My belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.” Vice President Dick Cheney.
“[Saddam] is a threat. He’s a murderer and a thug. There’s no doubt we can do this. We’re stronger; he’s weaker. You’re looking at a couple weeks of bombing and then I’d be astonished if this campaign took more than a week. Astonished,” Bill Clinton
“Five days or five months, but it certainly isn’t going to last longer.” Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense
“Sunni Islamist insurgents linked to al Qaeda are regaining ground in Iraq, invigorated by the war next door in Syria and have stepped up attacks on Shi’ite targets in an attempt to provoke a wider sectarian confrontation…After Operation Iraqi Freedom promised to liberate the Iraqi people, Iraq has struggled with a decade that drove the country into sectarian mayhem which killed tens of thousands and the turmoil of a young democracy emerging out of dictatorship. Since the last election in 2010, Maliki’s Sunni and Kurdish critics have accused him of consolidating his own authority, abusing his control of the security forces to pressure foes and failing to live up to a power-sharing deal.” Reuters
“At least 56 killed in Baghdad attacks. Twelve bombs explode in Shia areas on tenth anniversary of US-led invasion of country.” The Guardian
Total United States causalities: 4,487 dead, 31,965 wounded.
First, the unequal wealth and income distribution in the good ol’ United States. As the chart above shows, it is much worse than most people think (my personal experience is that everybody thinks they are middle class, a couple of weeks ago, I have a guy making $500,000 a year complain about Obama wanting to increase his taxes when he is really only middle class). The realty is that somewhere between 1.3 million to 1.4 million households – that is about 1% of the total population – have about 80% to 85% of of the total wealth in the United States.
In term of income, the 1% earns something like 18% to 19% of the entire income earned in the United States. That is a huge amount of money per household and it is pretty hard to spend it all – not being part of it, I can’t say for sure, but how much toothpaste can one person buy? – without buying hyper luxuries like supercars. And that is just for the United States; there are lots of Russian oligarchs and oil-rich Saudis who also might like a supercar. It turns out that the actual pool of people who can afford to pay $2 million – over even $20 million – for a car is pretty large.
(As an aside, when I went to the McLaren dealer last September where – so far – they don’t have supercars, they told me that most of their buyers paid cash and already had a Ferrari. End aside.)
I do want to point out that I am against this inequitable wealth distribution on general principals, even if it were not bad for the country. But, as bad as it is for the country, it is good for supercars.
Last week was the Geneva Auto Show and Ferrari, Lamborghini, and McLaren, among other lesser known marquis, used the opportunity to unveil their new supercars. Because this large, hyper-rich, class is relatively new, the concept of supercars is also new, even the name supercar is new. Sure, there have always been high performance cars; cars that are more agile and faster than their litter mates and they have always costed more, but not that much more.
When the Ferrari GTO – as close to a supercar as there was in the early 60’s – was made, it cost about $18,000 compared to about $2,000 for a Chevy. Today that Chevy would be about 8 to 15 times as much at $16,000 to $30,000 and a normal Ferrari is about $225,000. The new LaFerrari, Ferrari’s new supercar shown above – with a 6.3 liter V-12 and and electric booster motor (making it an hybrid, I guess) putting out about 950 horsepower to give it o-60 mph times in under 3.0 seconds and a top speed in excess of 217 mph – has a waiting list of about 700 and the price has not been released (but is expected to be north of $2,000,000).
Meanwhile, the new Lamborghini supercar, the Venenos, with similar specs – but without the electric, hybrid, motors – will sell for about $3,900,000. (The McLaren seems cheap at only about $1,000,000.) It is easy to say that these are nutty numbers, but the cars are not only selling, people are waiting in line (of course it is a allegorical line, at these prices, the future owners send somebody else to put their name on a list, somewhere).
These cars are called supercars because they truly are staggering capable, stunning to look at, and – relativity – exclusive. But, in the real world, what can anybody do with them. Going 100 miles per hour on any California public road – except, of course, an empty road in the Mojave – is pretty hard for longer than 30 second bursts (and, then, only by risking a major ticket). There are places in Nevada where driving very fast is possible but 200 miles per hour – even there – would be a good case for insanity.
At first, it seems that their only purpose is as wealth indicators – and people who are staggeringly wealthy do need to have some way to differentiate themselves from the hoi polloi – however, I suggest that another, greater purpose, is as eye candy for the rest of us. Even if we never see them in real life, just looking at the pictures and videos of these cars causes wonder and amazement to a geaarhead.
To my eye, the Lambo looks a little too much like the Batmobile and the LaFerrari is – by far – the better looking. The Ferrari, with its F16 fighterjet canopy, looks graceful as well as blindingly fast so I have included a promotional video.
In the movie, Skyfall, James Bond ends up – I guess he doesn’t actually end up there because it is in the middle of the movie – on an abandoned island off the coast of Macau. The island, at first, does not seem like it can be real but as the scene(s?) go on, it just looks too good to be fake. As it turns out, the island is real. It is an abandoned island off the coast of Japan named Hashima Island. It was originally built – bought and colonized – by Mitsubishi, in 1890, to house workers working on nearby underwater coal mines (and I don’t want to even imagine how that must have worked). Later, as Japan moved away from coal, Mitsubishi abandoned its island leaving me to wonder how the James Bond people ever found it.
Maybe they had a scene on an abandoned island and went searching for one, or, maybe, the local Chamber of Commerce is peddling the island as a great place to shoot a picture. I like to think that I have a pretty good knowledge knowledge of the world but it shocks me to find out that an island like Hashima exists and I have never even heard of it. I had no idea that it existed or that the Japanese mined coal – underwater! – near Nagasaki.
One of the best people to find great locations like this was George Lucas and Star Wars was filled with real locations, from Golden Canyon in Death Valley to Ksar Hadada in Tunisia to Temple IV at Tikal in Guatemala.
I have been to Death Valley – duh! I have probably bee more times than I have been anywhere else away from home – and I have been to Tikal twice but, in 1977 I had never heard of Tikal and I hadn’t heard of Ksar Hadada until about an hour ago (although, at sometime in the distant past, I did know that some scenes were shot in Tunisia which is how I found Ksar Hadada).
On the otherhand, faking the use of exotic places is probably more usual than actually using them. Southern California is an incredibly varied place, both in terrine and culture. As an aside, the California Title 24 building standards which set building standards to cut back on energy consumption is based on 16 climate zones found around the state. All 16 zones are found in Los Angeles County, from Coastal to Above Timber line. End aside.
Justified, one of Michele and my favorite programs, which realistically takes place in Harlan County Tennessee, is filmed in its entirety in and around Los Angeles County (except for the opening credits). The story line is culturally Harlan County but the terrine is SoCal.
Michele and I just finished watching Parade’s End on HBO (on demand). After a somewhat long courtship – first two hour episodes – when we made the mistake of expecting something like The Age of Innocence, we have fallen in love with it. OK, that may be a little too dramatic, but we both liked it and, increasingly, identified with and against different characters. The hero – protagonist may be a better word – Christopher Tietjens, seems to be an extra uptight Englishman, at first, but we begin to realize that he is trapped in a world that he has been born into. He may be the only one still following the rules but that doesn’t make it any easier for him to breakaway even as he see the problem, saying at one point, Everybody thinks me a fool. I am starting to come around to their opinion.
Because Parade’s End takes place in the same time approximately the same location, and seems to deal with the same issues as Downton Abby, we expected the two to be similar. But they aren’t. Parade’s End is much slower than Downton Abby at first, but it gains in power and sucked us in. The characters are about three times deeper, probably because the story, adapted for TV by Tom Stoppard, is from a series of books, by Ford Madox Ford, that were written based on his real experiences before and during the war. In this England, the sense of noblesse oblige is dying out and all that is left is the overbearing restrictions of a society that is trying to resist the changing world.
A sort of weird thing about HBO is that its series are often made to shock with lots of nudity and swearing, think The Sopranos, or Deadwood, or The Wire, and the movies are subtle to the extreme, think The Tuskegee Airmen or Everyday People. Parade’s End, as a mini series, seems to be in the middle, especially compared to Downton Abby, but it does lean towards the subtle. Because I like Parade’s End better than Downton Abby, I want to say Check it out if only for the costumes and the gorgeous Rebecca Hall, but it is not for everyone. I keep remembering a friend’s comment about liking Aliens, the second Alien movie directed by Cameron, better than Alien – the first Alien movie directed by Ridley Scott which was my favorite – and thinking He must be nuts. But I have come to accept that some people are Alien people and some people are Aliens people and the same is probably true about Parade’s End and Downton Abby.
