Watching Downton Abby and thinking about Tocqueville and the Golden Globes

Americana, California, Film

Michele and I are now watching Downton Abby and I am struck by the sense of noblesse oblige that the  the aristocratic Crawley family carry. They are responsible for the people working for them, for their well being, for their jobs. Because everybody’s place in the world of Downton, both high and low, are preserved in amber – in amber light, atleast –  by their birth, all the change seems to come from the outside. Improvement is not judged in change but in the perfection of the accepted status quo. The aristocratic patriarchs are noble because, in a way, that is their job. As an aside, in a similar way, Kate Middleton’s only real job is to provide an heir.

As I remember it – and I might not be remembering correctly as it has been about 52 years since I read Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America which I had a hard time reading, even then – Tocqueville, while thinking that democracy was the future and that the aristocrats would fade away, didn’t think it was all a plus. In general he thought that the drive for equality was a good thing, even if problematical, but that it reduced everybody to just grubbing for money. He was in America during the Andrew Jackson era and thought America had lost – or, maybe more accurately, never had – a sense of noblesse oblige. 

As an Northern Californian, I was taught to think of Southern Californians – especially Hollywood people – as being superficial with no sense of the noblesse oblige that we superior Northern Californians had. All they cared about was making money and looking good – and that often involved boob implants –  and they had no respect for the past or tradition (after all Los Angeles was just a collection of mud huts when San Francisco was having a World’s Fair). I think that there is some truth to this, but it neglects to cop to the otherside of that coin which is that Southern California, especially Hollywood, is probably the biggest meritocracy on earth.

Watching the Golden Globes and I am not struck by any sense of noblesse oblige but I am struck by the diversity of the party goers, nominees, and winners. I first met Ben Aflect – so to speak – as the townie in Good Will Hunting who urged Matt Damon to get out of town. I know that is not exactly who he is was? – sort of – but to see the change from that lost kid in Boston to best director at the Gold Globes is to see somebody who got there on merit. The same goes for  Quentin Tarantino, a highschool dropout from Torrance, who won best screenplay for Django Unchained. Sure it helps if you are gorgeous, especially if you are a woman, and Hollywood – all of Southern California, really – is obsessed with beauty but, as shallow as it is, it is much better than being fixated on a person’s grandparents as a measure of worth as is the case in Downton Abbey and San Francisco when I was growing up.

 

 

 

 

 

Gay marriage in the Marines

Americana, Politics, Uncategorized

According to Time Magazine, The Marines’ top legal officer has told all Marine lawyers that the corps will not support Marine spouses’ clubs that discriminate against same-sex couples….The Marines made clear discrimination isn’t an option they’ll entertain. End of discussion.

I think that most people – intellectually – know that the military is not a democracy, but I don’t think that most people really – emotionally – understand that, in the military, you do as you are told. It is not like a job, where you can leave if you don’t want to do what they tell you to do. In the military, basically, you do it or you go to jail. Of course it makes sense, many people would decline if hitting the beach first on D-Day were an option, but in runs deeper than that.

My first day in the Army started at 5 AM with a Sergeant – who I later learned wasn’t really a Sergeant but a National Guard Reservist Private First Class acting as a Sergeant –  waking us up by banging on a metal garbage can with a stick and screaming Get the fuck up. Of course we did, scared shitless,  and it made sense for us to get up. But, sitting here and knowing that he really wasn’t a Sergeant, I am pretty sure that – after the first couple of times, atleast – he didn’t really want to get up, at what ever time it took, to get us up at 5 AM.

Everywhere I went in the Army – until I became a Sergeant and the rules imposed on me changed – standard getting up time was 5:30 AM to get to work at 8 AM which was usually only a couple of hundred feet from where we slept. Nobody said being at work at 8 AM is the goal and do what you have to to be on time, the goal was getting up when we were told to. We could complain, and we often did, but we got up.

After three years in the Army, I went back to college at Claremont in Southern California. At the time, Claremont had a policy – regime? program? – that required graduating seniors to pass two major tests to graduate. One was a one day test in our major and the other was a complicated, general, Comprehensive Test in which we were give a list of five books to read – and a week to do so –  and three days to answer the general question that constituted the test. The – hopefully – graduated seniors thought that it was unfair to pass every class four four years and then be washed out by failing an arbitrary, essay,  test. This being the 60’s, the seniors held a meeting to vote on protesting the Comprehensive Test by not taking it.

There were about an half dozen vets in the Senior Class. We were all older and we all knew the “reality of the real world”. We vets all spoke against and voted against the protest and the rest of the class voted for the protest. I was sure that Claremont would just say Fuck You, Get Out if we didn’t take the test. If this had been the Army, they would have put us in the Stockade but this wasn’t the Army so I figured they just wouldn’t graduate us. My mindset was an Army mindset, if somebody orders you to Jump, the only permissible answer is Yes, Sir! How high? End of discussion.

So, in 1948, when President Harry Truman ordered the military to desegregate, the military desegregated – grumbling and slowly because much of the military culture was Southern – and it was fully integrated by the Korean War. When I was in the Army in El Paso during the early 60’s, I could have a beer with a black guy in my local on-base enlisted club but not in town. I was not in El Paso when the civilian world caught up with the military but I expect to be around to see the the civilian world catch up with the Marines. It will be very nice to see.

 

The death of an old Army buddy

Americana, Psychological Musings, Uncategorized

I learned today that Jerry McFetridge died almost a year ago. I knew him as Brit McFetridge when we were together, in the Army – on a HAWK missile site – in Korea during 1963 and, possibly, 1964.  It makes me sad. Much sadder than I would have expected if I had thought about it a couple of hours ago. I am not sure why.

We were next door neighbors while we were in Korea. Next door neighbors in the Army – in this case, at least – means that we had bunk beds next to each other in the Fire Control and Radar Quonset Hut. In those days, individuals were sent to existing units overseas – and in the Korea which was considered a war zone even though nobody was shooting  – and our time in country overlapped. He rotated1 into Korea before me and, therefore, rotated out before me and while we were there together, we were good friends. In the sort of strange way that sometimes happens in a seminar, or the military, or on a sports team when the the only real connection is the shared activity.

Except in this case, we had almost the same interests. According to his obituary, Mr. McFetridge was remembered by friends as a hardworking, loyal and fun-loving man who enjoyed outdoor adventures. He paddled Western river rapids, backpacked along the Pacific Crest Trail and hiked the Annapurna mountains in Nepal. He traveled to Italy and Mexico, and he recently was preparing for a bike trip across Vietnam. I remember him as the guy in the picture above but, of course, he had really become the guy below.

I am not sure how I can miss a guy I haven’t seen in 45 years and who I really don’t know, but I do. It makes me sad. Rest in peace, Britt.
1. Rotated in is Army talk for He went to Korea.

My favorite news story this year…so far

Americana, Around home, Psychological Musings

The Palo Alto Daily Post reported that an Albanian couple and their daughter were arrested for shop lifting from – at? – the Nordstrom store in the Stanford Shopping Center. Apparently, when they were apprehended leaving the store, they tried to throw the merchandize back into the store and then they ran in different directions.

I know almost nothing about Albania except where it roughly is and that, over the last half century, a goodly number of Albanians have migrated to the – then – Serbian province of Kosovo (which always seemed to me as a place to migrate from). In my imagination, Albania is a poor country that looks like the picture above with the natives dressing in well-worn Western European clothing – much like people in the Caucuses – rather than colorful peasant clothing like Guatemalan huipiles. In 2011, Albania was named as a great travel destination by the Lonely Planet, so maybe it really looks like the picture below.

Either way, the the Barjaba family, of whom the patriarch is the chief executive of the Socialist Party of Albania and the Dean of the School of Political Sciences at the Mediterranean University of Albania, were engaged in a little informal wealth redistribution while visiting Palo Alto – which has to be richer than anyplace in Albania – to see their daughter who is at Stanford taking graduate courses in Democracy and The Rule of Law.

 

Lincoln, Django Unchained, and the Civil War

Americana, Film

Ultimately slavery denied human beings the capability of being human. Walton Goggins

As an aside, I am not a Civil War buff, per se, but I am a admirer of General U. S. Grant – that may be an understatement, OK, that is an understatement – and, because I have a pretty good idea of Grant’s journey through life, especially the years when he went from disgraced Army captain to Commanding General of the largest military in the world, I have a middling knowledge of the Civil War and the despicable sin of slavery so I have eagerly awaited both Lincoln and Django Unchained. End aside.

Michele and I saw Lincoln about a couple of weeks ago and then we saw Django Unchained about a week ago (and then I saw Django again with Malcolm Pearson). Lincoln and Django Unchained seem so different but ultimately they are similar in that they are both radical takes on the Civil War. Radical in that they expose the Civil War as being about slavery. Up until now, the Civil War of the Hollywood collective memory presented each side as being equal in honor. These movies say No, the Civil War was about slavery (and Django actually says No! NO! the Civil War was about slavery. SLAVERY!). It shouldn’t have been so hard or taken so long, after all, the founding documents of the Confederacy start out with We . . . [are] dissolving a union with non-slaveholding confederates and seeking a confederation with slaveholding states, but, under the guise of fairness, the Hollywood Civil War has been presented as a sort of misunderstanding between brothers.

That has changed with both these movies. and it is more than about time. But, putting aside their common radicalness, they are very different movies. Lincoln is a small movie with almost an indie vibe – it could have been a stage-play made into a movie – pretending to be a big movie and Django Unchained is a big movie pretending to be B movie. To my sensibility  Django is the richer, more complicated, movie.

(Spoiler alert, if you have no idea who won the Civil War or have no idea of the theme of Django Unchained – and the title does, sort of, give it away – you might want to skip this.)

In the story arc of the movie, Lincoln doesn’t really change, he starts out as the Great Emancipator and ends as the Great Emancipator. Way before the war, Lincoln made it clear that he detested slavery, saying – among lots of similar statements – I have always hated slavery, I think as much as any abolitionist. But it was not as simple as that and, as he also said, My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. By concentrating on a couple months towards the end of the war, the movie clouds that issue and, sort of, ignores the huge shift about the morality of slavery that went on in the North during the war. All that said, the movie is Spielberg at his best (which is to say, his most restrained).

In Lincoln, Lincoln is the great white father freeing the slaves and the slaves are passive pawns; none of the black people in the movie seem to have any agency in their own freedom except in an opening sequence showing a battle between black Union troops and Confederates. Still, black freedom is presented as a gift from above. There are some nice bits, however. One that struck me was a scene when southern embassaries come across the lines to meet with Lincoln and their northern honor guard is composed of black troops. I don’t know if this is accurate, but it is something that Grant might very well have done and it is a nice visual (and, with somewhat over 180,000 black troops in the northern army, it could have easily happened).

In Django Unchained, Django ultimately,  frees himself. I can not think of another movie in which this happens: always, the black guy is saved by the white guy. (Hummm… maybe I am wrong here, maybe Beverly Hills Cop would qualify and In the Heat of the Night). In Tarantino’s story, Django goes from being a helpless slave to being the most powerful man in the movie. The change is slow and subtle, but powerful. Throughout the movie, the south is shown as a society that is built – in all its institutions, large and small – around slavery. It is easy to see the helplessness – and hopelessness – of being a slave; the day to day terror. It is easy to see that there is no way out, that escape is fantasy, that slaves do as they are told or they die a painful death. The story arc is Django being unchained – duh! – but it is also about, maybe more about, Django growing into his humanhood.

I liked Django Unchained immensely and my only regret is that its violence will keep some people away. I know that much of the violence is needed to establish the horrors of the slave society and, while the violence against the slaves is sometimes hard to look at, it is necessary to both, set the tone of the slave’s absolute helplessness, and establish the horror of the day to day denial of their humanity – as well as set up the orgy of violence at the end – but it is too bad that there isn’t a G rated version because the movie deserves to be seen by a wide audience.