Call Western Union

I am appalled at the criticism of Green Book as Best Picture. First of all, this category rarely recognizes the actual best movie. Second, movies are not meant to provide deep social commentary or reflect the aspirations of this interest group or that. They are entertainment. Third, as with music and comedy, mileage may vary.

This is not rocket surgery. Movies are not philosophical treatises on humanity. They reflect what one ensemble of artists feel and see. What the critics, particularly in the black community, miss is that movies are made for a general audience – and for profit. The awards are based on voting by members of the industry, and the complaints seem to suggest that the Academy should pick members at random to fill out racial and gender quotas. Again, it is an industry award, with no meaning beyond that, just like a doohickey industry award for best thingamabob.

Yes, it is a feel-good movie that suggests that at least in one case – based on a true story though obviously not pinpoint accurate – a white and a black worked together and came out enriched.What do the critics want – like that bozo Justin Chang of the LA Times -- that a story written by the family of a white person be produced to show a “black perspective?” Do they want "feel bad" movies? The Shirley family, which may well be upset for some financial reason, complained they weren’t consulted and the movie is inaccurate. No movie is accurate. Movie-making fiction, not journalism or history. Feature films are not documentaries. The Shirleys could have produced a movie but did not. The Vallelonga family did. More power to them.

As Sam Goldwyn purportedly said, “If you have a message, call Western Union.” Movies are not about satisfying the needs of advocates. They are about telling stories. They are about making you enjoy the two hours in a theater watching them. On that score, Green Book and Vice were the best movies that this viewer saw in the past year. What would have Spike Lee and other professional victims said if the winner had been The Favourite – a nicely costumed mishmash of ugly people doing ugly things for no purpose and without any historical accuracy.

Green Book is a legitimate Best Picture because it has everything you want in a movie – good script, good acting, good sense of time and place, some comedy, some educational value, some point.

And before anyone tells me that Green Book is not Best Picture, explain to me: Shape of Water, Gladiator, Titanic, Kramer vs. Kramer, Shakespeare in Love, and, yes, Driving Miss Daisy, which beat out Do the Right Thing.

If namby-pamby loony liberal snowflakes don’t like what they are seeing from Hollywood, chill and watch Netflix.

And yet ... and yet

Reading just one inside page of the Washington Post reminds me of why I subscribe but one day a week, and that for the crossword puzzle.

For decades, the Post has appealed to its dwindling advertisers by catering stories to rich guilty liberals. The story today is about college early admissions, but only to top schools, and how they supposedly help the wealthy and widen inequality. The story doesn’t make clear to me why that is, since low-income students have help with financial aid and affirmative action programs, but what gets to me is it focuses on twins who live in the District of Columbia – that’s a good angle about inequality – but, wait,  hey go to an expensive private school in Maryland! (Oh, reader demographics!) And they won early admission. But they feel bad for their classmates who didn’t!

Maybe there is an important educational issue here, though I doubt it, but who the Tlaib cares? People do what they need to do, take advantage of what they have, and life moves on.

Moving down, I read the obit of Southwest Air founder Herb Kelleher, otherwise well written, but telling us right off: “He once arm-wrestled an executive from another company to settle a legal dispute and never hid his fondness for cigarettes and bourbon. Yet he was considered a visionary business leader …”

Yet? Yet? What does arm-wrestling or unhealthy personal habits have to do with business acumen?

At least the Post  gave me warning with a circus headline not to read its masturbatory salute to itself on the 50^th anniversary of the Style section – from the beginning, a frothing stew of New Journalism #memostly accounts of the rich and powerful, including its own writers from the execrable Sally Quinn to the current puke-inducing self-loving of Hank Stuever.

(Hypocrisy disclosure: I am a frequent contributor to a Style humor column but the section has been moved over the year to virtual invisibility.)

Obama's Short-Sighted Long View

“In the long run, we are all dead” – John Maynard Keynes

Barack Obama, it is said by wise pundits, is remarkable and praiseworthy for always taking the long view. I think his long view, including normalizing the Trump transition, is disastrous and will forever brand his presidency with the word “feckless.” I don’t think he gives a feck about anything except his own legacy.

Yes, there have been achievements, mostly on the economy and human/civil rights. Health care? He blew it by letting Republicans he foolishly believed were human beings strangle Obamacare in the crib and then claim it wasn’t working. In foreign affairs, I believe he made the Middle East a lot worse than it should have been. He watched almost silently as Russia got away with murder. 

He did nothing, zero, to strengthen the Democratic Party, which resulted in congressional, statehouse, and judicial takeovers by the evil empire of Republicans. Despite popular support for himself, for Hillary Clinton, and for most of the progressive agenda, Obama, like so many Democrats before him, tossed away power in the false hope of compromise and national unity with people who didn’t want it and laughed at him while he chased the chimera.

Nothing epitomizes Obama’s political failure as much as his analysis at his last press conference today of why Trump won. “I mean, there are a whole bunch of folks who voted for the president-elect because they feel forgotten and disenfranchised. They feel as if they’re being looked down on. They feel as if their kids aren’t going to have the same opportunities as they did.”

My, my, my! Who forgot and disenfranchised them, Mr. President? Every single damnable Republican since Nixon. 

They seduced the ignorant, impoverished racists of America by taking their votes for granted and stealing their lunch money in exchange for beating down minorities. Obama, like so many Democrats before him, was terrified of standing up for progressive principles, even as a majority the people would have supported them. The “long view” Democrats have been afraid of their own shadow since before Nixon, scared that they might be called names.

Of course, the Trump chumps are looked down upon, but it isn’t Democrats who look down upon them. It is Republicans, and every single economic and political analysis of any value has proven this time and time again. It is the same playbook that Southern Democrats used. So it matters not what the name of the party is. It is the lowbrow, self-hating, uneducated, racist, cousin-marrying underbelly of America themselves who are inaugurating a president who promises to lift them just one small rung above people of color. Their kids will never have opportunity so long as they keep voting for political swindlers.

This optimistic, positive, “long view” of America doesn’t quite work when in the short view democracy and people die. It is truly ironic that had Obama actually been a Democrat, he could have served out his post-presidency on the Supreme Court, where he could have done some good. Now, whatever Obama does as a private citizen will advance no progressive agenda; only his own.

Let's Blame the Victim This Time

I have read both that left-wing scold Thomas Frank’s “Listen, Liberal” screed and J.D. Vance’s autobiographical “Hillbilly Elegy,” both of which excoriate left-wing elites for ignoring the pain of hillbillies, blue collar worker and white working class. Vance, however, despite his redneck upbringing and subsequent Yale law degree (he now works for Trump enabler Peter Thiel) was honest. Much of the problem is that these people (mainly Scots-Irish) are very much responsible for their own circumstances. They have been trouble for several hundred years, and wallow in their checkered ancestry.

They resent “outsiders” -- like Northerners, blacks, Hispanics, educated people etc., but turn to an elitist who double crosses them by pretending to be an outsider. They are strung out on meth, they lie in bed when they don’t feel like showing up for work, disdain school, and get government handouts while blaming minorities for taking “their” livelihoods.

These hillbilly redneck racist dropouts who voted for Trump may not be able to tame the Wall Street or media Jews (and anti-Semitism is what is really behind a lot of this), but they certainly have had plenty of opportunities they bypassed for getting an education and saving money rather than bowling, boozing, and having multiple marriages and affairs. And that, friends, is the only thing that binds them to Trump – cavalier sex and financial irresponsibility.

So, I would ask the liberal and Democratic pundits who blame themselves for ignoring the white working class to shut up and actually, this time, blame the “victim.”

I was strongly opposed to Sanders on grounds of governing competence and temperament. But now, in weighing whether he could have beaten Trump, I realize that he was a terrible campaign strategist, too.  He SHOULD have cared about her “damn emails.” Doing so would either have defeated her or inoculated her.

Hillary won more votes than Trump but in the wrong places,  so “we” ARE in the majority, and maybe we should divide up and move to swing states. In the meantime, the evil that lives after us is named “white working class.”

I Really Wish He WERE a Carpenter

Now that the Nats season is over, I would like to unload on the most sickening aspect of the team – lead TV announcer Bob Carpenter. There is not a cliché he hasn’t overused, not  a poor play that he hasn’t made an excuse for, and not an unctuous word undelivered. As a game show host he would be mediocre. As a baseball announcer, he makes me glad I am losing my hearing.

I naively believed that to be a journalist, as I was, you had to have a pretty good command of spelling and grammar to get a job and then you could improve your writing. I believed that in broadcasting, you had to at least be able to speak correctly to get a job and then add whatever personality flourishes you wished. Local television news and the Internet have disabused me of both myths. And baseball color analysts, like F.P. “he should of went” Santangelo, seem to be hired BECAUSE they do not know grammar.

However, my point here – and I wish to ask any linguists reading this if I am wrong – is that Carpenter deviates so much from normal inflection as to make me even more insane. The articulation crime is the repeated emphasis on the wrong word in a multi-word phrase. For instance:

“The clean-UP hitter”

“A road TRIP”

“A home STAND”

“A home run to start the NIGHT”

“Seven base RUNNERS”

“A good rbi GUY”

“He had elbow PROBLEMS”

“A real crowd PLEASER”

“The on deck CIRCLE”

“The New York Police DEPARTMENT”

“A big power HITTER”

“From the Chicago AREA”

“The one major holdOVER”

“A pitch-OUT”

“The box OFFICE” … ad nauseam. 

This pox on broadcasting also has a peculiar and annoying tic, shared by Barack Obama, of hissing the final “s” on plurals or possessives ending with a “z” sound. As in “boyce and girlce” “runs the basessss,” “Alcatrassss Island.” 

Carpenter is from St. Louis, where I recognize that the “aw” sound is pronounced as “ah” as in the “shartstop” position. But does being from St. Louis mean you must emphasize the wrong word in a pair that everyone else knows how to articulate? It is as grating as in the Washington-Baltimore-redneck use of “ice CREAM,” “CEment” and “DE-troit.”