Meals From The Marketplace

            The big weekend is just about upon us.  No, not the Super Bowl.  We already had that one.  The Oscars.  The Academy Awards.  That gaudiest of all gaudy award shows that allows all of us to feel like we are better judges of great cinema than the 6,000 or so members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences who actually get to vote for the Best Picture of the Year.

            And, of course, more often than not, we’re right and they’re wrong.  After “Slumdog Millionaire” won in 2009 (over a truly memorable film like “Milk”), the bosses at the Academy (i.e., the studio execs) decided to increase the list of nominated films from the traditional five to ten.  The result last year was a tad embarrassing, with the likes of “The Blind Side” getting recognition it certainly didn’t deserve on artistic merit.

            This year’s list of nominees contains nothing comparably mediocre, although even ten wasn’t enough to earn recognition for several gems.  As in past years, I’ll offer my assessment of those nominated and suggest some that are equally as good, if not better.

            To get started, let’s talk documentaries.  A strong case could be made for at least three this year to have been included in a list of the ten best. 

            The three are “Restrepo,” the brutally honest depiction of the war in Afghanistan from the perspective of the grunts who are fighting it (and dying in it); “Inside Job,” the true story of the economic meltdown of 2008, told with the kind of matter-of-fact candor that denies all but the most skilled deniers the ability to deny the truth; and “Exit Through the Gift Shop,” the insanely creative exploration of street art that becomes an exploration of just what qualifies as art at the same time that it raises questions as to whether it’s a documentary or a spoof.

            Of the three, “Job” is probably the best and could well be the best film of the year, but the other two are close behind, “Restrepo” for its graphic view of the reality of a preposterous war, and “Gift Shop” for its inventiveness and genius.

            And then there is the current offering from Mike Leigh, “Another Year,” which garnered only one nomination (for original screenplay), when it certainly should have been recognized as one of the best films (if not the best film) of the year.  If you haven’t seen this beauty, do so at once or be forever cast as a weak excuse for a cinema buff.

            As for the ten films that actually were nominated, here’s the way I rank them, starting with number 10, with the understanding, as always, that others will disagree for any number of reasons, not the least of which is the entirely subjective aspect of any attempt to rank works of art.

10.  “Winter’s Bone” presented the life of one young woman in the backwoods of the Ozarks as she attempted to find her father.  The story was in the search, not in the resolution, which took some of the sting out of what could have been a better movie, but was still a very good one.

9.   “127 Hours” is better than anyone probably thought it would be when they sucked it up and went to see it (the self-amputation scene alone could easily have kept many away), and for director Danny Boyle, it’s definitely a step up from “Slumdog.”

8.  “True Grit” is fun and beautifully shot (and the Coen Brothers are great film-makers), but it’s a remake of a western that wasn’t exactly crying out for another interpretation.  Not the stuff of best picture awards, unless the award goes to the film that made the most money.  Oh, wait, that is a major criteria, isn’t it?

7.  “Toy Story 3” focused on the toys that the college-bound kid who used to play with them left behind, but it was really about all of us, from the recently grown up to those who gave up their childhood toys eons ago, only to realize they are always with us.  As an animated film, it’s an amazing accomplishment.

6.  “Inception” was the summer hit and is this year’s “Avatar.”  It’s probably a better film than “Avatar,” but it doesn’t have nearly the philosophical underpinning that director Christopher Nolan probably thought he had included in it.

5.  “The Kids Are All Right” presented a gay couple with adolescent children seeking their biological father.  It was topical, funny, sad, and joyful, and it went where no mainstream film had gone before.  Thus, it merits serious consideration as a best picture nominee.

4.  “The Fighter” is a terrific film that is a lot more about human relationships in general and family relationships in particular than it is about boxing.  It speaks in the same spirit as the original “Rocky” and could well stand the test of time as an equally admired film.

3.  “Black Swan” is a powerful film, a film that takes chances, a film that achieves an artistic vision, a film that shakes, and doesn’t let go of, its viewer.  It’s a triumph and will probably be the most remembered of the year’s nominees for pure artistic achievement.

2.  “The King’s Speech” is a winner on all counts.  It tells its story of the king who couldn’t speak and yet had to speak and of the teacher who helped him overcome his impediment so he could speak, and it’s all wrapped in the history of the onset of World War II.  Great stuff on all counts.

1.   “The Social Network” is my best picture of the year.  It tells the story of the founding of Facebook intelligently in portraying all of its main characters as the people they probably are, and it presents the complete lack of anything remotely similar to a soul in the central character, whose genius dehumanizes him.

             So, “Social Network” it is for me, although any of the top five would be acceptable, and, in truth, “Black Swan” would be the most satisfying, since it would be the least expected. 

           Now, the envelope please.

            In the hilarious film spoof of the free-love movement of the 1960s, “A Guide to the Married Man,” a married man, played by Walter Matthau, seeks guidance from a true womanizer, played by Robert Morse.  The story revolves around Matthau’s burning desire to get some action outside of his marriage, with Morse more than happy to “educate” him.

            The education takes place in the form of lessons offered by Morse on how to cheat and not let your wife catch on.  In a succession of scenes, Morse recounts how his buddies have dealt with wives who suspected their husbands were being unfaithful.

            In one of the most intentionally preposterous of these scenes, Morse’s friend, played in the scene by Joey Bishop, is caught by his wife while he is in bed with his paramour, in flagrante delicto, as it were.  While the wife stands at the bedroom door, dumbfounded, Bishop and his lover proceed, quite calmly, to get out of bed, get dressed, and make up the bed.  Then, as the lover takes her purse and exits the room, Bishop lights a pipe and sits in an easy chair reading a book.

            The wife, still in semi-shock, finally says something coherent, like, “Jerry, how could you?” to which Bishop replies, “What?” as in “what are you talking about?”

            It’s the big lie, of course, the biggest possible, with the evidence having only moments before been there, right before her eyes.  But now, as the wife gasps in disbelief, everything seems normal, her husband is acting normal, and … what did she really just see?

            Of course, we’re talking about a movie, a comedy that is intended to elicit laughs, and in this case, it most assuredly does.  The lesson for Matthau is to deny, deny, deny.  Never admit to the alleged wrong-doing/cheating, even when literally caught in the act.

            But movies that are intended to make the audience laugh are decidedly different from real life, especially when the real life is not at all comical, but instead is a tragedy that could have been avoided.

            And with that introduction, let’s review the current equivalent of the Bishop scene being played by the Republican Party and its paramours.  We, the American people, might be considered the wife in the story.  We’ve just discovered that our politicians and their big business “lovers” have been playing fast and loose with our economy.  They have relaxed financial regulations and reduced government oversight responsibility and have allowed the economy to crash suddenly and precipitously.

            And it all became inescapably apparent, just like it had for Joey Bishop’s wife, right before our eyes, just two and a half years ago.  Everyone saw it, lived through it, is living through it, and everyone with any sense at all knows what caused it.  It was a case of pure, unadulterated human greed, spawned from the heights of the biggest financial institutions and passed on down, as in a pyramid scheme, to the most unsophisticated and unsuspecting over-their-heads homebuyers and pension fund managers.

            The financial/economic collapse was caused by inadequate government regulation of the financial industry.  There were other causes, too, to be sure, but that one reality cannot be denied.  The federal government dropped the ball by encouraging the creation of paper that passed for, but wasn’t, money.  These “derivatives” in all their ugly forms, created a house of cards that was all too easy to topple.

            Of course, that reality flies in the face of the free market economic philosophy that has been espoused by the Republican Party since at least the administration of Ronald Reagan.  Actually that philosophy was very much in vogue with Republicans back in the “roaring” 1920s, when an unregulated stock market suddenly burst, leading to the greatest economic depression the country has ever known.

            Franklin Roosevelt’s administration (and World War II) saved the country then.  Barack Obama and a hope and a prayer are trying to save it now.

            But the Republicans and the wealthy barons they serve are playing the Joey Bishop role just as he did in that silly movie scene.  In spite of undeniable evidence that sub-prime mortgages were pushed by the major financial houses, and that paper (worthless paper) was passed along just as in a worthless ponzi scheme from one company to the next, all in the absence of any meaningful government oversight or a regulatory process that would have restricted it, the Republican Party is pushing yet again for greater DE-regulation (caps intended) of the financial industry that controls the nation’s economy.

            In the bogus argument it has thus created, Barack Obama is a crazed, power-hungry liberal, seeking to destroy all major industries, if not the American way of life.  Sadly, Obama has essentially buckled to the pressure, the half-loaf of a finance reform bill passed last year just as likely to allow greater abuse as to prevent it.  And once again, the mantra of “over-regulation” and “excessive government interference” is heard from the elected Republicans in Congress.

            And then there is the Tea Party, which is quickly and none-too-quietly, becoming the de facto Republican Party.  Its adherents are convinced that Obama and the Democrats are outright socialists, which is more Joey Bishop nonsense, of course, but just like the wife in the movie, many Americans are having trouble believing what their eyes have all too recently seen.

            Obama saved the financial markets and returned them to their largely unregulated state; he saved the auto industry, allowing it to return to its privately-owned and -run pre-collapse condition, and he is trying to save the real estate industry, by making it easier for folks who can’t afford their homes to renegotiate their mortgages, thereby returning those homes to marketable units.

            Ah, but none of those steps allow the free market to do its thing, unfettered and unregulated, so he must be a socialist. 

            It must be fun to be a Tea Party member.  You just say the least true thing and because you say it with a touch of anger that resonates with the American people, you get to control the dialogue.  It’s almost like being Joey Bishop in that movie. 

            “What?  What are you talking about?”

            Ronald Reagan would have been 100 this past week.  The media folks have made a big deal of the anniversary of his birth, with a major special on HBO and even a PBS close-up of his second wife, Nancy, who still survives, seven years after her husband’s death.  Conservatives treated the event with all the reverence of a high holy day.  To them, Reagan was as close to a deity as living humans are likely to see.

            But I come not to praise the man but to bury his myth. 

            Reagan’s biography is well known to most, but just to summarize it briefly, he was born and raised in rural Illinois and attended a small college there.  Upon graduating, he moved to nearby Iowa where he tried to break into radio as an announcer.  But he had bigger dreams, and in 1937 he moved to Los Angeles, there to be discovered by the major studios, which used him frequently as the lead in “B” movies, thereby making him a star of sorts.  He was never confused with Jimmy Stewart or Henry Fonda, but he was ambitious, and he used the talent he had to gain a few nice roles among the 50 or so he racked up in a career that spanned almost 30 years.

            Along the way, he gained popularity with his peers, serving as president of the union that represents movie actors, the Screen Actors Guild.  He was, at the time, a Democrat, in the mold of Franklin D. Roosevelt.  But by 1962, he had “seen the light,” as it were; he switched parties that year and in 1964 delivered what was probably the best speech in that year’s presidential campaign in favor of the Republican candidate, Barry Goldwater.

            Two years later, Reagan was elected governor of California.  He served two terms, mouthing conservative philosophies while proving very pragmatic in adopting non-conservative policies when his state needed him to.

            He engaged in a short-lived run for his party’s presidential nomination in 1968, made a much more serious run at it in 1976, and finally secured the nod in 1980.  He beat the incumbent president, a hostage-hampered Jimmy Carter, and then won a landslide victory for re-election in ’84. 

            Reagan may have never achieved the near sainthood status he now holds (among the conservatives and ultra-conservatives who so worship him) had he not survived an assassination attempt early in his first term.  That he did was in many ways the making of his presidency, for he seemed to emerge from that episode with an enhanced commitment to implement the philosophy he so ardently believed in.

            It was the same philosophy that Americans had roundly rejected just sixteen years earlier when Goldwater had decried “moderation in the pursuit of justice” and had exalted “extremism in the defense of liberty” on his way to a landslide loss to Lyndon Johnson. 

            But in the intervening years, the country had been beaten up (and had beaten itself up) in near revolutionary ways.  The Viet Nam War had been a disaster; the Civil Rights movement had been a fierce, angry struggle; the Watergate scandal had been shameful; the gas shortages had been scary; and the Iranian hostage crisis had been humiliating.

            By 1980, the country was desperate for happy times, and Reagan jumped all over that feeling.  In doing so, he spoiled the country, which apart from everything else he did, is the ultimate blight on his presidency.

            Reagan told the country that all the tough medicine that had been accepted for generations was unnecessary.  Taxes were bad; regulations were bad; restrictions on business were bad; even unions were bad when they made excessive salary demands or, God forbid, went on strike.  Freedom from all of those things was good.  In fact, as if he had discovered some new holy grail of democracy, he declared that freedom in all things was good.

            The mantra was so simple and so easy to take that Americans fell for it hook, line, and sinker, especially when, thanks to an extremely aggressive monetary policy initiated by the Federal Reserve under Paul Volcker, the economy, which had been a disaster when Reagan took office, finally started to return to something approaching bearable towards the end of his first term.

            Meanwhile, Reagan also preached incessantly about the “evil empire” that was the Soviet Union.  Although that irrationally-constituted country was already failing economically and would soon crumble politically, Reagan was convinced it could be brought down by the mere existence of a rejuvenated U.S. military structure.  And, seemingly as a necessary complement to his anti-Soviet military build-up, he told the country and the world that America was not going to allow anyone to push it around. 

            All of those messages had the same effect on Americans.  They made them forget the problems of the last sixteen years and start thinking about how great their country was.

            Parents spoil their children when they tell them they can be great without having to work at it, and that was exactly what Reagan was selling.  Taxes aren’t necessary, he said; in fact, using a crazy theory espoused by an economic extremist (Arthur Laffer), he preached that lower taxes would actually produce more revenue.  (They didn’t.)  He also claimed that the economy would function best if businesses were freed of regulations and were no longer bothered with excessive union demands.  (It didn’t.)

            And the country would be respected more and troubled less if it acted tough, tossing around its military weight (or threatening to) whenever it didn’t like the look in the other country’s eyes.  (It wasn’t.)

            Of course, Reagan picked his battles carefully.  His only two real military incursions were a short-lived war to liberate Grenada (a farcical show of force if ever there was one) and a bombing raid on Libya (to teach its dictator, Muammar Khadafy, not to mess with the U.S.).

            And then, in his second term, perhaps already suffering with early Alzheimer’s, he allowed a rogue government in his own administration to arrange an arms-for-hostages deal that nearly led to his impeachment.  (In truth, it should have at least resulted in a major Congressional inquiry, but Democrat Tip O’Neill, then Speaker of the House, would have none of it, and the matter was swept under the rug.)

            Everything Ronald Reagan pushed on the American people had the effect of spoiling them, and in doing so, he laid the groundwork for much of what has bedeviled the United States over the 22 years since his presidency ended.  He created the aversion to taxes that has resulted in massive deficits and reduced the standard of living for most Americans.  He ushered in a period of de-regulation that led to the ultimate economic meltdown the country is still trying to recover from.  He made the rich and super-rich all that much richer, while making life tougher for everyone else.  He gave the green light to the mega-corporations to feather their own nests without fear of oversight. 

            He cemented the American foreign policy that now sees the country fighting three wars, two of which have no end in sight (Afghanistan and “terrorism”) while a third (Iraq) awaits full U.S. withdrawal with bated breath.  He concocted a nuclear defense plan, the infamous nuclear umbrella, aka the Strategic Defense Initiative, that has cost the country billions and still makes absolutely no scientific sense. 

            In short, he told Americans what they wanted to hear and did it all with an actor’s gift for selling a tale and making it believable.  He spoiled his people, convincing them that they could have anything they wanted just because they lived in the greatest country in the world.  He paved the path of the country’s descent to mediocrity and merits nothing but condemnation for it.  He was a better actor than we realized but a far worse president than many Americans now think.

            Oh, and he was also an avowed believer in astrology.

           Foreign policy is a tough business, especially when you are the world’s only real superpower. 

           If the policy makers in Washington didn’t understand that fact before the upheavals in Tunisia and Egypt rocked the world this week and last, they surely must at least be thinking on it now.  What’s a country supposed to do to protect its interests?

           The conservative pundit, Ross Douthat, summarized that thought in a piercingly adroit New York Times OpEd column earlier this week. 

           “We have theories,” Mr. Douthat wrote, “and expect the facts to fall into line behind them.  …  But,” he noted, “history makes fools of us all.  We make deals with dictators, and reap the whirlwind of terrorism.  We promote democracy, and watch Islamists gain power from Iraq to Palestine.  We leap into humanitarian interventions, and get bloodied in Somalia.  We stay out, and watch genocide engulf Rwanda.  We intervene in Afghanistan and then depart, then watch the Taliban take over.  We intervene in Afghanistan and stay, and end up trapped there, with no end in sight.

           “Sooner or later,” he concludes, “the theories always fail.  The world is too complicated for them, and too tragic.”

           U.S. foreign policy has been overly aggressive and single-minded in its pursuit of American interests for over 60 years, and the negative results are all too apparent in the initially awkward and uncertain responses of the Obama administration to the sudden rebellion against authoritarian rule that we are now witnessing in Egypt. 

           It has always been thought that America’s interests would best be served by some kind of meaningful peace in the Middle East vis-à-vis Israel and its neighbors.  Thus, when Egypt’s Anwar Sadat sought a rapprochement with Israel in 1978, after two wars (in ’67 and ’73) that easily could have spread beyond the region, the United States sought to facilitate a lasting peace between the two countries. 

           The peace treaty signed by Sadat and Menachim Begin at Camp David in 1978 was a crowning achievement for U.S. foreign policy and the administration of Jimmy Carter.  But three years later, Sadat was assassinated by militants in his own elite military forces, and the cause of peace was set back severely.

           Meanwhile, the Soviet Union, still perceived by U.S. policy makers to be engaged in imperialistic expansionism, invaded Afghanistan, a country few Americans even knew existed at the time, in an effort to maintain a pro-Soviet Marxist government there. 

           Viewing the invasion as more evidence of Soviet “evil-empire” intentions (“We will bury you,” Premier Nikita Khrushchev had vowed two decades earlier), the U.S. reacted aggressively, tacitly supporting the Afghan freedom fighters, who happened to include a young rebel named Osama bin Ladin.

           In the meantime, in Iran, the people revolted against the repressive government of its monarch, who had held power against a fundamentalist insurgency thanks to U.S. (CIA) support twenty-six years earlier.  In his place, an aged prelate, Ayotollah Khomeini, installed an Islamic theocracy that was immediately perceived as a threat to U.S. interests. 

           Within two years, following the ultimate release of U.S. embassy personnel who had been taken hostage in the initial days of the revolution, the Iran regime was at war with neighboring Iraq, where another U.S.-created dictator, this one named Saddam Hussein, was intent on domination of the region.  The U.S. covertly supported Hussein, who used poison gas in his attacks on the Iranians.  The war lasted for eight years and only ended when both sides essentially ran out of troops.

           By then, the Soviets, now ruled by a relative visionary named Mikhail Gorbachev, had withdrawn in defeat from Afghanistan, leaving in power another theocracy, this one run by Islamic extremists known as the Taliban.  The Soviet Union fell apart early in the next decade, imploding of its own weight when it could no longer support its empire with corrupt and dictatorially-imposed socialist rule.

           And then, undoubtedly feeling emboldened by tacit U.S. approval of his tactics in the war against Iran, Saddam Hussein invaded neighboring Kuwait, which, he claimed, was historically a province of Iraq. 

           The United States reacted with typical American aggressiveness in demanding Hussein’s immediate withdrawal from the sovereign state that just happened to be a major oil producing country.  When Saddam refused, Gulf War I began, and in prosecuting it, the United States established a significant U.S. presence in Saudi Arabia, which was now home to that young Afghan freedom fighter, Osama bin Ladin.

           Throughout this period, Anwar Sadat’s successor, Hosni Mubarak had created a veritable dictatorship for himself.  His regime had received billions in aid from the United States, part of the American pledge to honor Egypt’s 1978 peace agreement with Israel, and he had used that support to build a police state that was heavy on repression and brutality.  Along the way, his government grew increasingly corrupt, further inflaming the passions of young militants who joined forces with bin Ladin’s newly formed al Qaeda.

           On September 11, 2001, the foreign policy decisions that had created al Qaeda experienced the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil in the country’s history.

           Less than two months later, another aggressive foreign policy decision led to the initiation of the war in Afghanistan, and just another eighteen months later, more aggressiveness (this one breaking new ground with a “preventive war”) led to an invasion of a sovereign state that had itself invaded a sovereign state in violation of international law a decade earlier.

           One supposed purpose of that war was to unleash the forces of democracy in the entire region, as the U.S. president boldly declared in explaining his decision to his citizens and the world.

           The democratic forces of which he spoke are now unleashed.  To be sure, the war in Iraq did not unleash them.  That war has created a messy quasi-democracy that has hardly been a model for anything other than how not to invade a country.

           The one in Afghanistan is even more of a disaster.  The “democracy” there is nothing more than a puppet regime of the U.S. that is corrupt to the core.

           And now, whether the United States foreign policy apparatus favors it or not, another form of democracy will seek to establish itself in Egypt.  And who knows what tomorrow may bring.

           The world is, indeed, too complicated. And too tragic.