The Boorishness Of The American Movie Patron

I dare the innocent reader to attend any movie in any movie theater in America and not be bothered by some boor talking during the movie. In fact, it is no longer the boor who stands out, but the movie patron who is silent and respectful during a movie who is in the minority. A lone voice in the wilderness (in the dulcimer tones of Baby Fatt) cries out "What's wrong America? Whither have thy manners fled?"

I blame much of the oafishness that accrues to modern America to the self-esteem movement. For a generation now baby boomers have been reassuring themselves--and, even worse, teaching their spawn--that no matter what one does one is a good person. Got drunk and burned the house down? Not to worry, you were just dealing with an addiction problem but deep down you're just swell. Molested the altar boy? No matter, you were just acting out the abuse you suffered as a child, but you're still a good person worthy of love and respect.

What a bunch of poppycock. Teaching people that they have worth no matter what they do frees them of shame and guilt, and have no doubt as to the importance of shame and guilt in maintaining our delicate social contract. Freeing an entire generation of louts from any sense of shame and guilt results in what we have now in America: a generation of sociopaths--of used-car salesmen and petty criminals and businessmen and politicians and reality-television stars and wanna be reality-television stars--all of whom are convinced first and foremost of their unique and unassailable worthiness.

So is it any surprise that when these oafs show up to watch a movie they feel no hesitancy whatsoever in voicing every idiot thought that happens to run their heads? From asking for a plot explanation to verbalizing recognition of a minor character actor, they let no excuse for letting their fellow patrons hear their voice go unrequited. They have no sensitivity at all to the fact that there might be patrons who want to concentrate on the dialogue on the screen--they simply could not care less about the wants or feelings of any one else in the world. Their sense of entitlement obscures any recognition of the thoughts or feelings of others.

Well, here's two words for my fellow Americans: shut up! When I pay to see a movie--even a bad movie (and believe me I've seen them all, or so it seems)--I want to see the movie in peace, which means without your idiot drivel. Would you walk into a church somewhere during services and start to comment loudly on the sermon? Well, for Baby Fatt the cinema is my church, it's where I go to enjoy a sense of the transcendent, of the enormity of the world and my little place in it. Leave me alone already.

While I'm at it here are some other simple rules of movie-house etiquette: Don't just put your cell phone on vibrate, don't bring it into the theater at all! Don't bring young children to a movie that's made for adults (they just get bored and make noise). Don't rattle your sack of smuggled-in cheap candy or pop the top on the warm can of soda you snuck in after the movie starts. Be nice to the people around you--who knows, you might find that you like it.

Come on America, show some respect. For a change.

Christmas In The Land Of Enchantment

Growing up in West Texas Christmas was always something less than joyous. People in the Big Country followed a hard-hearted, neo-Calvinist strain of Protestantism that allowed for celebration only if it were yoked tightly to shame. We were exhorted to "remember the reason for the season" and there was much decrying the commercialization of the holiday season--not that there's anything wrong with decrying commercialization of anything, but tying it to Christmas always gave the holiday an edge of negativity.

There was no alcohol allowed, of course (lest you be damned straight to hell, never mind any mention in the Bible regarding Jesus and wine), and so any drinking was done, necessarily, in secret. And if you and your significant other were of the same gender, or lived together without benefit of marriage, or were of different races--or even different denominations--you were expected to remain very much on the down-low for the entirety of your Christmas visit (having long ago moved away in order to escape such insanity).

All of which had the result of making Christmas a time for a drive-by visit with family and old friends. In and out quickly in order to minimize the damage to one's psyche from the shame and negativity the locals took for granted. It's much different in the Land of Enchantment.

Here, people take plenty of time off before and after the holidays in order to get ready and to spend time with family and friends. Folks in NM may have less money than the people across the border in Texas, but they seem to get more out of it. And while people here are very religious, it is without the self-righteous meanness of spirit that so many Texans seem to love to show off.

Molly Ivins once called New Mexicans "the world's most pragmatic Catholics", by which she meant that while very faithful--very faithful--to their mother church, it is faith without the severe judgmentalism that accrues to so many hardline Protestant denominations. Christmas Eve mass is standing room only--better get their early if you want to get a seat. People are hugely loyal to their local parish, and parents scrimp and save to send their kids to Catholic school. If one prefers the mass at The Shrine of Saint Bernadette's of Lourdes, for instance, then while one might go with a friend to mass at The Church of the Risen Savior occasionally, one would never stray far from Saint Bernadette's. Suffice it to say Baby Fatt is not religious, but no one ever questions a person about his or her faith here--it's a strictly personal matter that is not a polite subject for conversation (as opposed to the hectoring to which one is often subject in small town West Texas). I just wait until mass is over, and then show up for the after-party.

After the mass everyone heads to the nearest matriarch's house for a huge feast of New Mexican food: tamales, big bowls of posole (with red chili of course), tortillas and biscochitos, and plenty of cold Coronas to wash it all down. People who want to drink or smoke do so with enthusiasm, with nary a sideways look of reproach--"do you want another cerveza Mijo?" The next day it's back to Mom's again for a full day of feasting, gifting, and revelry. There are dogs and children everywhere, and everyone gets to be as loud as they want. Gay couples, or interracial couples, or whatever couples are as welcomed as anyone else is. So long as no one is in jail, it's a great Christmas.

In Texas I learned to dread Christmas. Life among fundamentalists is bruising to the soul. The cognitive dissonance between what Jesus taught (love) and how right-wing christians behave (intolerance) wears one down. It's depressing, and you just want to get back to the city as soon as you can.

In the Land of Enchantment I actually look forward to the holidays. Time away from work, hanging out with the Sweetie, enjoying friends, the best food in the world, and plenty of beer. As they say in mi chante, "Panza llena, corazon contento" (full belly, happy heart).

I couldn't agree more.

Memo To Progressives: Hold Your Water

Is there anything more loathsome than the self-righteous whining of progressives? "Waaa...Obama sent troops to Afghanistan, waaaa....Obama didn't fight for a public option, waaa...waaa" and so on ad nauseum. I'm sick of it already, so just shut up and hold your water.

Progressives are offended that Obama is more like Bill Clinton and less like Jesus Christ than they had imagined him to be. They are shocked--shocked!--that the politician whom they elected to the highest political office in the land turned out to be a politician. They are beside themselves with fury and indignation that their dreams of bringing about a Scandinavian-style democratic-socialist state in the old US of A have been pushed aside for the sake of political expediency.

These folks have no idea what life is really like in the "great flyover", where the hometown newspapers spin every national story to stoke fear of big gu'ment and resentment of coastal elites, and gun stores are doing a land-office business. Out here in the "heartland" (though my own metaphor would involve a different part of the anatomy--specifically part of the digestive tract) people are frightened by change, particularly by large-scale change undertaken by the government. They fear taxes and bureaucrats, and they resent being lectured by people who think they know best what working people really need.

I predict that Barack Obama will go down as one of the most consequential presidents in American history. He has presided over a sea change in politics and society when compared to the Bush years--and the dark age of Reaganism--the preceded him. He has admitted into political discourse the idea that the world is not Manichean--it is not divided into black and white, darkness and light--but rather is complex and full of greys. His speech at the Nobel prize ceremony was a sophisticated and realistic assessment of the world as it really is--just as was his speech on race during the campaign. Yes, he's just a politician, and I for one quit making the mistake long ago of having any sort of faith or trust in politicians (progressives have only themselves to blame for their delusions of salvation) but I'm extraordinarily proud to have a political leader of the character and intelligence of Obama. The fact that he's pissed off so many on the extremes of both the right and the left demonstrate to me a keenness of understanding and a sophistication of action that I think will hold up remarkably well in the rearview mirror of history.

So let me breakdown the realities of the progressives' latest cause for umbrage: the healthcare reform debate. We were never going to have a single-payer system, nor was there every any meaningful chance whatsoever that we would have some sort of "robust" public option. The reason is quite simple--the American people would not have supported these things, and had Democrats been able to pass them anyway the result would have been that the Dems would have been voted out of power for an entire generation.

About ten years ago as part of my job I participated in a forum on the problem of the uninsured. One of the speakers was a former cabinet secretary from an upper midwest state (I cannot remember his name) who had been instrumental in significantly expanding his state's Medicaid program to encompass working families who earned well above the poverty level. Everyone at this forum was deeply concerned about the massive number of uninsured people in our country. We were all progressives who were obsessed with the idea of universal health coverage.

In a drinking session after the forum I asked him, as a politician, when he thought America would finally go to a single-payer health insurance system. His answer was realistic and totally disheartening. He said America would never go to a single-payer system because Americans are by and large suspicious of massive government welfare programs. He said that he thought that America would bring about universal coverage--he predicted it would be in about a decade (in other words about now)--but that the form it would take would be a mishmash of mandates requiring individuals to purchase coverage and small business to provide it (most of the uninsured work full time but work for businesses that do not provide insurance benefits), along with subsidies for working families to purchase benefits and an expansion of Medicaid to cover more poor people. He predicted exactly what is happening in Congress right now.

Fundamentally, he stated that because of American attitudes about government and business any healthcare reform would preserve the for-profit insurance industry, because Americans are for the most part comfortable with for-profit systems and any politician voting to overturn the insurance industry's stake in healthcare would pay for it dearly at the polls (imagine the commercials). Reflecting upon it later I thought that what he had said made perfect--if depressing--sense.

Progressives who now advocate killing the healthcare reform bill are selfish in extremis. Most of these folks who advocate killing the reform bill or, in the event that it passes, refusing to follow any mandates to purchase health insurance, already have good jobs and plenty of insurance. They have no idea what it's like to be working for an hourly wage and without any health benefits. When I saw that pompous ass of the left, Keith Olbermann, urge people to refuse to follow any mandates to purchase health insurance, I thought well that's easy enough for him to say, he makes four million dollars a year (plus benefits). He's got the best insurance of all: cold hard cash. But how dare he urge working people to forgo health insurance in order to prove their ideological purity. How utterly selfish and evil.

What's important is that healthcare reform pass--in however impure a form it may be--because once it's passed it can be expanded and improved upon (just like Social Security and Medicare have been). Getting it passed will go down as one of the most momentous--progressive--events in legislative history.

One more thing before I end this rant. To that idiot dolt spawned of mediocrity who left a comment on my Facebook post that "Obama=Bush": how dare you! Here's a little thought experiment for you--what if McCain-Palin controlled the Executive branch, and Boehner-McConnell controlled Congress? Let me enlighten you.

Rather than a massive government stimulus (including, yes, bailing out the banks and Wall Street) the response to the economic catastrophe would have been to cut taxes on the rich while still bailing out banks and Wall Street (in other words, working people would have gotten nothing). Rather than unemployment of ten percent, we would have seen unemployment of twenty percent or more. The Great Recession would have been the Great Depression II.

Rather than drawing down in Iraq while trying to do what is necessary to eventually get out of Afghanistan, we would be preparing for war with Iran. And instead of debating healthcare reform and climate change, Congress would be taking care of whatever items appeared on the list provided to it by the Chamber of Commerce, none of which would benefit working people one iota.

Most of all, rather than a thoughtful, reflective president who allowed for cognitive uncertainty and advocated for open-hearted inclusiveness, the leader of our nation would be a simple-minded, mean-spirited old ideologue furthering the aims of the military-industrial complex. For working people it would have been a continuation of the disaster of the Bush years: an utter catastrophe.

If progressives have an enemy it is not Barack Obama, it is the American people. If progressives want change they can believe in, they should concentrate on organizing the working people of the "great flyover" rather than trying to tear down the best president they're likely to have in their lifetimes. If progressives can convince working people to support single-payer healthcare and other massive government-run programs (that would, admittedly, improve the lives of working Americans) then the politicians will follow. Don't blame Obama for your own lack of success in convincing Americans of the superiority of your views. Quit your whining, hold your water, and get to work.

Why Tiger Doesn't Matter (Hint: Sport Is Not A Metaphor)

Of all the many facile attempts at philosophizing that disgust me, one of the most disgusting is the assertion that sports are somehow a metaphor for life. No, a sport is a game, nothing more. It is not a metaphor for life or death or anything else. There is no value whatsoever to the playing of a game once the game has ended.

If one plays a physical game which one finds to be enjoyable and of benefit with regard to exercise, great, but the "meaning" of the game stops there. Likewise, if one plays a mental game (chess for instance, a game at which Baby Fatt is most terrible but which is quite enjoyable--the original video game) then, again, it has value to the degree it provides mental stimulation, but once the game is over, so ends the value.

It is stupid to suggest that games such as football or baseball or golf have some sort of meaning that can be extrapolated or read into life. No, these are just silly games. Games that involve men in strange dress chasing balls with sticks or tackling one another or trying to put balls into holes. While these games may have psychodynamic value (i.e., they can be seen as sublimated violence and homoeroticism made necessary by an evolved social contract that no longer allows blood games of the sort the Romans enjoyed), they have no larger meaning with regard to the place of man in the cosmos. Life is not a game, it is a daily struggle for survival and meaning that is, at bottom, nasty, brutish and short, as Hobbes suggested.

The struggle of the Dallas Cowboys to make the playoffs has absolutely no meaning with regard to how one succeeds at work, or in one's relationships, or in any other area of one's life. The Chicago Cub's inability to win the World Series means absolutely nothing outside of the fact that they are unable to win the world series.

The only person who I think ever got close to using games as a metaphor in a way that actually had some meaning was Heraclitus, the pre-Socratic philosopher sometimes referred to as "the dark philosopher". Heraclitus said "Time is a child playing a game of draughts; the kingship is in the hands of a child" (Walter Kaufmann translation). In other words don't think of god as if he were some magisterial benevolent father-figure, deeply concerned about the world; think of him as a child playing a game the results of which he doesn't really care about. Or as Shakespeare put it in King Lear: "As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods, they kill us for their sport." That's life, my brothers and sisters, better make the best of it while you can.

But football or baseball? No meaning whatsoever. Golf? Rich guys despoiling vast swaths of nature in order to chase a ball with a stick.

Which brings us to the "tragedy" of Tiger Woods. Tiger Woods has no meaning at all in my life, and if he has meaning in any one's life then that person is an idiot. It's great that he has a job that involves making obscene amounts of money for playing an inconsequential game (though what it says about those who reward such a thing is not flattering) but I could not care less about his life, or his sport, or the meaning any of it is posited to have outside the realm of old guys who chase balls with sticks. If others want to care about his current domestic drama, or his place in "sports history", then fine, but I cannot imagine a greater waste of one's time or mind or spirit.

Sports: a lazy person's excuse for meaning.

Solving the Obama Conundrum

Progressives everywhere are wallowing in agitated condescension toward Obama's recently announced Afghanistan strategy. They rend their garments and cry to the heavens "forgive him Lord, he knows not what he does!". How, they tut tut, can Obama propose to escalate a war when he promised to bring our nation's wars to an end?

First of all he never promised any such thing. He was quite specific throughout the campaign regarding Afghanistan. While he decried the Iraq war as the wrong war, he stated over and over again that Afghanistan was the right war and that it should be fought to win. If some progressives deluded themselves into thinking that he was some way left-of-center comrade in peace, they have only themselves to blame.

More importantly is what the newly announced strategy reveals about Obama the politician (and please, my fellow progressives, please spare us your righteous indignation when finally realizing--gasp--that someone you voted for is just another politician, and not the second coming of Ghandi or Jesus--neither one of whom could have gotten himself elected dog catcher in any municipality in America). What the newly revealed strategy reveals is that Obama is an extremely wise politician who has studied history and is determined not to repeat the mistakes of LBJ.

LBJ is the stuff of greek tragedy. He was intelligent and ruthless and understood politics as well as any scholar. He knew--as the ongoing release of his White House tapes continues to show--that Vietnam was going to be the ruination of his presidency, and also that he had no choice but to escalate the war. Now, before everyone gets out their knives for Baby Fatt--why of course he had a choice, Baby Fatt, he always had a choice!--let me explain what I mean.

Please remember that the Kennedy-Johnson ticket was elected in 1960 in no small part by accusing the Republicans of being soft on communism (i.e., the so-called 'missile gap'). Kennedy promised to be tougher on the communists than Nixon had been (during the Eisenhower administration) or could be as president (revisionist progressives forget this fact at their peril). Once Kennedy began to escalate the American involvement in Vietnam, Johnson was locked in a box (and please spare me any conspiracy theories about how Kennedy had ultimately planned go get us out of Vietnam--first of all, there's know way of knowing; secondly it's a moot point because of his mistake in considering Dallas to be part of the civilized world).

Johnson knew this from the outset of his presidency. He knew--his White House tapes continue to confirm this--that there was no way to win in Vietnam because its government was corrupt and its people were tired of colonialism and wanted all foreign occupiers out of their country (see David Halberstam's biography of Ho Chi Minh--Ho for an excellent analysis of how the Vietnamese felt about America). But he also knew that if he withdrew the Republicans--supported by the hawks in his own party, who were very much in the majority--would excoriate him for being soft on communism. He was damned either way, and so was his presidency.

Which brings us to the Obama conundrum. What Obama's Afghanistan policy suggests is that he's attempting to find a way out of the LBJ problem. He's escalating the war in the short term in order--I predict--to de-escalate it in the long term. When is the "long term"? It begins approximately one year from the 2012 presidential election. Coincidence? Nah.

In other words what Obama's doing is trying to make as many gains in Afghanistan for now, but whether or not his strategy is successful, he'll begin to draw down forces as the 2012 election approaches. This is why the Republicans are howling about his specification of a time line, and in a sense they are correct in their criticism.

They are correct in pointing out that setting a timeline (and again, it's no coincidence that the time-line in his newly announced strategy expires approximately one year out of the 2012 election) gives notice to the Taliban that all they have to do is wait for the timeline to expire before escalating their own attempts to re-take the country. But Obama is wily as a fox in setting the timeline (which is the real reason the Republicans are howling) because by 2011 he will be able to say that he allowed the military an opportunity to defeat the Taliban--if they are successful, then so much the better, if not, then it's time to call it a day and retreat. Recent polling--which shows Americans to be increasingly isolationistic--strongly suggests that Obama is likely to be supported in either outcome come 2012. The timeline allows Obama to escape an LBJ-like quagmire.

Either way the wingnuts will howl, but I suspect that most folks will see that Obama made a reasonable attempt to deal realistically with the situation he inherited, and will re-elect him in 2012 (which is the real goal of his strategy). The part of the LBJ dilemma that he is not likely to escape is that the wars to which the Bush administration committed us--backed, remember, by an overwhelming majority of Americans at the time--are likely to severely constrain a progressive domestic agenda for another generation. This would be true even if Dennis Kucinich were president.

The cost of the war in Iraq alone is a trillion dollars and climbing. Just as Vietnam suffocated Johnson's Great Society programs, so will Iraq and Afghanistan choke off any effort for the kind of massive spending on infrastructure that America sorely needs.

The Republicans knew and planned this from the very beginning of the war in Iraq (the planning for which actually began before 9-11). It's a strategy the Republicans call "starving the beast", and it works wonders for keeping Democrats from carrying out a progressive policy agenda. Reagan did it when he exploded defense spending in the 80's, and Bush did the same by going to war in Iraq. The more the Republicans can spend on war when they control the government, the less the Democrats can spend on America when they control the government.

It's a strategy that's as brilliant as it is evil, but Obama and the Democrats (and the progressives and all of America) are its victims, not its progenitors. Overall, Obama's Afghanistan strategy makes a lot of sense for now (and we'll see come 2012 if it makes sense in hindsight), but he also didn't have a lot of choice. At least he was intelligent enough to come up with a reasonable solution to the LBJ dilemma.

Meanwhile, progressive should remove their hair shirts--their mortification smacks of what Freudians term "moral masochism". It can also be quite itchy.

The Stupidity of Self Esteem

One of the worst developments for civilization began in the last half of the twentieth century and revolved around an attempt to make people feel better about themselves. While such an attempt might have been, generally speaking, laudable--a realization that the social hierarchies and child-rearing practices of the past had produced generation after generation of psychologically damaged people--the form it came to take turned out to be insidious: the self-esteem movement.

The self-esteem movement (think of books from the 70's such as I'm OK, You're Ok) sought to reassure people that they were not to blame for their neuroses; rather, their parents were. In punishing misbehavior parents instilled in children the message that children were bad, bad, bad. Once internalized these negative messages went on to poison later relationships, causing, for instance, people to act out cycles of guilt and shame in adult relationships, and leading to such ill effects as addictions and dysfunctional families.

The cure was determined to be the need to make people feel good about themselves, to cast out the negative shaming messages from their childhoods. Thus were born various popular therapies (e.g., Transactional Analysis) aimed at restoring the innate sense of self worth that all people are born with. With regard to children just being born, there was a concerted attempt--in families and in schools--to tend to and nurture children's own self regard.

And so it came to pass that a generation of children was raised by parents who were obsessed with making sure their child felt good about him or her self. If little Johnny set fire to the cat, he was told that it's not nice to set fire to a cat but, more importantly, that does not mean that little Johnny is a bad boy--he's a very very good boy whom his parents love oh so much. In other words, while little Johnny might do a bad thing, he can never be a bad person, because deep down inside he's just swell. God forbid he should internalize the message of shame and guilt that accrues to being told that only an evil little shit would set fire to a cat.

And that's the problem with attending to someone's self-esteem: it absolves them of responsibility. What do you get if you raise someone with the message that no matter what he does he is a good person? You get a sociopath, someone who knows no shame and feels no guilt no matter how much harm he visits upon others. You get a politician or businessman or criminal. You get someone who cares about no one but himself. You get a toxin eating at the heart of our civilization.

Forget self esteem, what people need is a sense of self responsibility. We are each responsible for all of our actions and behaviors, and there is nothing that can excuse us from that responsibility. When a child does something wrong, it should be punished and told in no uncertain terms that it did a bad thing. When adults act out and do stupid things, they too should be punished.

Morality is not about feeling good about yourself, it's about doing what is right because it is right. The only way a culture or civilization can survive is through a collective affirmation of right and wrong, and that affirmation cannot allow for the sociopathy that results from worshipping at the altar of self esteem.

Do you feel good about yourself? I really couldn't care less. What's important is whether or not you have behaved in a manner that is responsible (i.e., in a manner that has caused no harm to others). If not, then you're just another evil little shit.