As I mentioned a few posts ago, I have been making my way through some old almanacs, and finding it both fun and educational (these have often gone together in my life, and I find it something of a pity that the union is not more widely shared). Anyway, in the 1879 edition of the American Almanac there is a feature added as against those from before the Civil War. There is a day calendar on which is inscribed noteworthy anniversaries. Most are the sorts of things one would expect: the day when the constitution was ratified in 1789; the day when Martin Luther nailed his papers to a Church door in Wittenburg in 1517; the day when California was admitted to the union; and so on and so forth. Rather a lot of the anniversaries, however, record the dates of birth and/or death of famous people. So if one goes through and extracts just these names, one has a handy list of personages that the editors of the American Almanac more of less presumed would be recognized by reasonably educated Americans of that day.
So I did this, and to my surprise, there were a fair number I had never heard of. I will come back to this matter in a subsequent post; I shall, indeed, tell you, dear reader, how many names there were in the calendar, and I will list those I found the most obscure. Indeed, I may list them all. This throws some interesting light on what constituted fame in those days. For example, in the entire list there is not a single professional athlete. This is because there was no such a thing as a professional athlete in 1879. Does that just take you right out, or what? Clearly, we're not in that Kansas anymore.....
But for now, I want to make reference to just one name I did not recognize, even if by so doing I reveal my appalling ignorance to all my readers (both of them......). One name came up twice, and it was just one name. The name was "Rachel." In 1820, the Almanac says (erroneously, I think: All the biographies say 1821) she was born, and in 1858 she died. (The exact days, I hope you will agree, don't matter much anymore.)
Rachel who?, I wondered.
It did not take very long to find out, and I confess that I had an inkling of what I would find simply because of one other listing: the date of the birth of Jenny Lind. Jenny Lind, I knew (and many will know), was the best known singer of the 19th century, at least in the United States and probably Britain as well. She was, we would say today, an entertainer, though in those times female artists had a good deal more status than that conveyed by the word "entertainer". Goddess is more like it, I think. Anyway, I suspected that a woman called after only her first name, at a time when very, very few women are mentioned at all in such lists, was probably some sort of famous entertainer as well. Right I was.
To make a fairly long story short, this "Rachel" was Eliza Rachel Felix, a Jewish girl born to a large family in, of all places, Switzerland. Her parents took the family to Paris where Rachel's older sister Sophia (Sarah) sang at cafes and Rachel, then age 4, collected the coins. Before long, Rachel developed some talents of her own, the sisters were discovered, subsidized into the music conservatory, and Rachel emerged as the most talented and transformative female tragedian of the day. Rather than simply stand on stage rigid as a ramrod and deliver her lines, Rachel humanized her roles. She was animated, vivid, different. She became a star. Parts were written for her. She went to London for the 1841-42 season and conquered all, a total sensation. Her fame spread, and she traveled to America in 1855, specifically (for some unknown reason) to Charleston, South Carolina. Alas, by then the tuberculosis that took her life three years later had already sharply curtailed her energy and artistic powers. And so the queen of tragedy was herself the victim of a tragic death.
The Almanac from 1859, as it happens, also recorded Rachel's death in its "foreign obituary" section. And there what seemed to me a cryptic remark appeared. After praising her peerless artistic talents, the editors wrote that aside from her theatrical skills, her life was not commendable -- or words to that effect. Whatever did that mean? I found out later: Rachel gave birth to two daughters, but never married. She was the mistress of an illegitimate child of none other than Napoleon, and she was the mistress of other men, too. This was pretty scandalous for the time, even in France. In America it was, as the Almanac entry showed, literally unprintable.
Now in 1855, when Rachel came to America, already a great Transatlantic star, Adah Isaacs Menken was only 20 years old. She was in New Orleans, not all that far from Charleston. Did she go to Charleston to see Rachel? I don't know; it seems impossible that an aspiring entertainer, and another Jewess to boot, would not have known about Rachel's visit.
Adah Isaacs Menken was America's first celebrity, in the sense that, as David Kirby explained it in the pages of The American Interest, she was the first performer to deliberately conflate her private personality with her stage personality, thus laying the groundwork for the career strategy of, say, Madonna. And what a personality it was. Adah Menken became famous--some would say, and did then say, infamous--for her performance of an adapted Byron poem called Mazeppa. In her act she donned a flesh-toned body suit, a leotard of the day, and strapped herself to a horse that walked up a steep ramp. Some people fainted when they saw this.
Menken was married four times, if I remember right. When she hit her stride of fame, she also went to Europe as Rachel had come to America. She befriended Dickens, was the mistress of the elder Dumas, and scandalized her way across both shores of the Atlantic. Is it possible that she was influenced by the famous Rachel? Seems to me it was impossible that she was not. Alas, Menken too died at a very young age, also of tuberculosis.
One can only imagine what proper Methodist and Congregationalist matrons thought of Jewish woman in those days, with the like of Rachel and Menken being the most famous among them.
So when, just the other day, my daughter's boyfriend, Ben Margolis, sent me an article proclaiming that Jewish women were now considered "hot stuff" by gentile men--"The Rise of the Hot Jewish Girl", by Christopher Noxon, in an online magazine called Details--I was not surprised. I though of Rachel and Adah Isaacs Menken and said, "So, what's new?" But Noxon informed his readers that a porn star named Joanna Angel was raised in an Orthodox home. If this is really true, it is a rarity, if not something genuinely new.
There was a photo. Joanna Angel is hot, no doubt about it. My oh my, I thought, what will the Methodist matrons think now? Same thing they thought 150 years ago, I guess. Le meme chose...., Rachel.
Thursday, February 18, 2010
Sunday, February 14, 2010
Curmudgeon alert: Power lines and salt
Consider today's post in the nature of a blowing-off-steam item, a getting-it-off-one's-chest sort of thing. I thought if I waited a few days it would just go away; alas, it didn't.
The main target of today's rant is the imbecility, the total lack of imagination, of the so-called 5th estate, particularly of the local variety. I know well that anecdotes ain't data. But they ain't nothing either, so here are two of them, introduced by a brief prolegomenon.
Now, during the recent Snowmegeddon here in the Washington area, a term coined, I am led to believe, by the President himself (more of him in a moment), the local news types have had a lot of air time to fill and not a lot to fill it with, since it sort of follows that when the weather derails normal business and professional activities, there are not a lot of those activities to talk about. So they filled it with stories about the weather, and their favorite sub-species of those stories: stories about the press getting stories about the weather.
Well, what the heck, why not?: Everyone loves stories about the weather, the network types know, because the viewer is in a sense part of the story, or implicitly assumes himself to be. Nothing wrong with manipulating superficial mass narcissism for fun and profit, right?
It's a matter of taste, I suppose. But, as I have said, two little episodes reveal how irritating this can be.
In episode one, a local anchor was interviewing the head of PEPCO, the local electrical utility. A lot of people lost power during the storms, as always happens when there are even halfway serious storms around here, and just about everywhere else in the United States, too. So this senior local anchor has the Big Guy on a phone interview, and the interview goes on for a long time by network TV standards--something on the order to seven to ten minutes. And it never occurs to the anchor to ask the Big Guy why all these damned power lines are still strung up in the air after all these years. If they had been buried, as they are in most civilized countries, this wouldn't happen to us every damned time the wind fixes to blow hard.
Now, I know, this is a complicated subject. It costs more up-front to bury the lines, and burying the lines does not obviate all maintenance and system costs. And I know, too, that we're often talking great distances here, and that helps to explain why we still so often stick our lines up in the air while the countries of Western Europe, for example, do not.
Helps to explain, but in fact does not wholly explain. It is also explained by derangements of federalism, our inability to plan as we once did, the venality of developers and corruption of local government, and more besides. All that said, if President Obama is looking for a major project that could create decent jobs, and that would do a world of good economically, aesthetically and even in terms of national security, he would vow to have all of our power and communications networks underground by the end of the decade. (Better still, we could use innovation to decentralize our power and communications grids to a considerable extent, saving even more money and grief, but that's probably two generations away.)
I know, as I say, that this is a complicated technical issue. We have lots of legacy infrastructure to deal with, and doing that is both expensive and generates turf spats among government jurisdictions, utilities and businesses. But we don't even know the actual numbers here of what a national project to modernize our systems would cost in the shorter run and save in the longer run. Repairing miles and miles of downed wires is expensive; it is part of the whole-system costs of the way we do things, but these costs are rarely if ever figured into our assessments. Lots of engineers have used models to make estimates of costs to do fractions of the job, but no one, as far as I know, has ever systematically worked up a plan to examine scaled-up costs and financing.
Of course, if we had in this country a Department of Infrastructure, or something like it, where we did anything like serious planning about our transportation and communication systems, maybe someone would have thought to do this. No one has, because we have no such capacity. We have a Department of Transportation, but long-term planning seems not to be among its duties. We have the FCC, but ditto as far as I can tell. And as far as I can tell, there is no place in the U.S. government that relates the disparate parts of this infrastructure to a whole.
It's way past time we do this. Until we do, I am not inclined to be the slightest bit sympathetic when wails of complaint rise after major storms, and so many people lose power--which is not just an inconvenience for many people, but a life-and-death ordeal when elderly or ill people lose heat and the ability to communicate for days on end. This is our own damned fault. Stupidity, laziness and corruption (yes, unfortunately, that's part of the problem, too) have their wages. We're still paying them.
Second episode, from the selfsame day: a weather anchor fretting about the possibility that we might run out of salt for the roads. The news showed a huge truck being loaded at the port of Baltimore with salt imported from Chile and Mexico. And so I learned that we buy this product from abroad; an interesting fact in its own right, seeing as how the state of Utah is full of the stuff. But the weather anchor never asked the simple question: What happens to all this salt when the snow and ice melts and the spring rains come? What does it do to the soil and the water, and all the life that depends on both? Never asked; never raised.
We used to use sand and ash to treat the roads, much less pressure on the environment; how come we don't do this anymore? Maybe there's a good answer, but I don't know what it is, since not one of our genius local TV journalists has seemed ever to ask. I am not asking for anything so exalted as "investigative journalism", which seems to have pretty much disappeared. I'm just hoping for a scintilla of ordinary curiosity, fortified with just a smidgen of imagination. It'll never happen, I know. Pfrzghtwskzczxuuumph......
The main target of today's rant is the imbecility, the total lack of imagination, of the so-called 5th estate, particularly of the local variety. I know well that anecdotes ain't data. But they ain't nothing either, so here are two of them, introduced by a brief prolegomenon.
Now, during the recent Snowmegeddon here in the Washington area, a term coined, I am led to believe, by the President himself (more of him in a moment), the local news types have had a lot of air time to fill and not a lot to fill it with, since it sort of follows that when the weather derails normal business and professional activities, there are not a lot of those activities to talk about. So they filled it with stories about the weather, and their favorite sub-species of those stories: stories about the press getting stories about the weather.
Well, what the heck, why not?: Everyone loves stories about the weather, the network types know, because the viewer is in a sense part of the story, or implicitly assumes himself to be. Nothing wrong with manipulating superficial mass narcissism for fun and profit, right?
It's a matter of taste, I suppose. But, as I have said, two little episodes reveal how irritating this can be.
In episode one, a local anchor was interviewing the head of PEPCO, the local electrical utility. A lot of people lost power during the storms, as always happens when there are even halfway serious storms around here, and just about everywhere else in the United States, too. So this senior local anchor has the Big Guy on a phone interview, and the interview goes on for a long time by network TV standards--something on the order to seven to ten minutes. And it never occurs to the anchor to ask the Big Guy why all these damned power lines are still strung up in the air after all these years. If they had been buried, as they are in most civilized countries, this wouldn't happen to us every damned time the wind fixes to blow hard.
Now, I know, this is a complicated subject. It costs more up-front to bury the lines, and burying the lines does not obviate all maintenance and system costs. And I know, too, that we're often talking great distances here, and that helps to explain why we still so often stick our lines up in the air while the countries of Western Europe, for example, do not.
Helps to explain, but in fact does not wholly explain. It is also explained by derangements of federalism, our inability to plan as we once did, the venality of developers and corruption of local government, and more besides. All that said, if President Obama is looking for a major project that could create decent jobs, and that would do a world of good economically, aesthetically and even in terms of national security, he would vow to have all of our power and communications networks underground by the end of the decade. (Better still, we could use innovation to decentralize our power and communications grids to a considerable extent, saving even more money and grief, but that's probably two generations away.)
I know, as I say, that this is a complicated technical issue. We have lots of legacy infrastructure to deal with, and doing that is both expensive and generates turf spats among government jurisdictions, utilities and businesses. But we don't even know the actual numbers here of what a national project to modernize our systems would cost in the shorter run and save in the longer run. Repairing miles and miles of downed wires is expensive; it is part of the whole-system costs of the way we do things, but these costs are rarely if ever figured into our assessments. Lots of engineers have used models to make estimates of costs to do fractions of the job, but no one, as far as I know, has ever systematically worked up a plan to examine scaled-up costs and financing.
Of course, if we had in this country a Department of Infrastructure, or something like it, where we did anything like serious planning about our transportation and communication systems, maybe someone would have thought to do this. No one has, because we have no such capacity. We have a Department of Transportation, but long-term planning seems not to be among its duties. We have the FCC, but ditto as far as I can tell. And as far as I can tell, there is no place in the U.S. government that relates the disparate parts of this infrastructure to a whole.
It's way past time we do this. Until we do, I am not inclined to be the slightest bit sympathetic when wails of complaint rise after major storms, and so many people lose power--which is not just an inconvenience for many people, but a life-and-death ordeal when elderly or ill people lose heat and the ability to communicate for days on end. This is our own damned fault. Stupidity, laziness and corruption (yes, unfortunately, that's part of the problem, too) have their wages. We're still paying them.
Second episode, from the selfsame day: a weather anchor fretting about the possibility that we might run out of salt for the roads. The news showed a huge truck being loaded at the port of Baltimore with salt imported from Chile and Mexico. And so I learned that we buy this product from abroad; an interesting fact in its own right, seeing as how the state of Utah is full of the stuff. But the weather anchor never asked the simple question: What happens to all this salt when the snow and ice melts and the spring rains come? What does it do to the soil and the water, and all the life that depends on both? Never asked; never raised.
We used to use sand and ash to treat the roads, much less pressure on the environment; how come we don't do this anymore? Maybe there's a good answer, but I don't know what it is, since not one of our genius local TV journalists has seemed ever to ask. I am not asking for anything so exalted as "investigative journalism", which seems to have pretty much disappeared. I'm just hoping for a scintilla of ordinary curiosity, fortified with just a smidgen of imagination. It'll never happen, I know. Pfrzghtwskzczxuuumph......
Thursday, February 4, 2010
Et tu, Denmark?!
I've been reading through a sizable collection of old American (and a few British) Almanacs lately, a trove of stuff my wife recovered some 30 years ago from the dumpster behind the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, where she used to work (in the education department, not in the dumpster, of course). The FI Librarians, for some reason, tossed them out. We are both veteran dumpster divers, and it was a no-brainer to save these. There are about 50 of them altogether, stretching from 1828 to around 1887. The years 1838-1859 are pretty complete for the American Almanac.
Over the years I have taken them out, one here and there at random, now and again for no particular reason. But now I decided to go through them systematically, just for the heck of it. It has been a very rewarding little evening's activity, I must say--lots more fun than watching the idiot box, and less demanding on my fingers and brain than trying to get the right sounds out of my old F-4 mandolin. I have learned a lot. It's like finding little treasures lying about on the rug, that quite apart from the tactile pleasure of reading through books so old that anyone who had anything to do with them when they were new, whether as author, publisher, binder, merchant or reader, has been dead for more than a century.
I've learned, for example, about the origins of Groundhog's Day (see post of January 26, below....or above, or wherever and however it works on a blog). I've learned who created the Julian Calendar (no, not someone named Julian -- but someone named Joseph Scalinger, in the 16th century) and why. I've learned, or re-learned, how American presidents were elected before around 1824 -- NOT by any popular vote..... I've learned a lot about the American economy, largely from the census data of 1840. From the 1842 edition, which was published in late 1841 of course, one notes that the big news is the death of President Harrison. Also a series of bank failures, particularly in Pennsylvania. There were no bail-outs. And President Tyler subsequently vetoed legislation aiming to create a new national bank. Someone should go study this stuff; one gets the feeling it's not entirely irrelevant to some of today's concerns.
I've learned more about how deeply racist the country was, too, from sketches of various then-contemporary incidents -- about Elijah Parrish Lovejoy and his press in Illinois; Lucretia Mott and the burning of Pennsylvania Hall; and race riots--Irishmen-led anti-black pogroms, really--in Cincinnati. The Almanac from 1860 has a pretty interesting account of what happened at Harper's Ferry on October 16-18, 1859. It says nothing about John Brown's motives. It does mention that the Governor of Virginia called upon the citizens of the state not to wander far from home on the day of Brown's hanging in December, to protect their property. Earlier Almanacs, like the 1842 item, suggest why: The number of white people and free "colored" just about equaled (not quite) the number of slaves in the Old Dominion. (One learns, too, that some free colored people also owned slaves, but we're not supposed to know or talk about that.....)
But last night I learned something I never knew about at all. I was perusing the data on world population (it had yet to reach one billion in 1841) and noticed an entry for Danish colonies in Africa. That stopped me short; I never knew there were any Danish colonies in Africa. There were, and in southern India as well. They go back to the 17th century, and were very much involved with the slave trade before it was made illegal. So that subject comes around again....
They were small and ultimately unsuccessful efforts, these Danish outposts. The Danes ultimately sold most of their holding to the British in the middle of the 19th century, just as they sold the Virgin Islands to the United States during World War I. Their African holdings were centered in what is today Ghana. It turns out that a fort of sorts the Danes built in 1811 or thereabouts is used still today, as the official residence of the Ghanaian president! I did not know that. Now I do, and you do, too.
Tonight I'll go through 1844 and 1845 I guess. And if it really snows a lot this weekend, as predicted, heck, I may make it all the way to the Hayes Administration. Such fun....
Over the years I have taken them out, one here and there at random, now and again for no particular reason. But now I decided to go through them systematically, just for the heck of it. It has been a very rewarding little evening's activity, I must say--lots more fun than watching the idiot box, and less demanding on my fingers and brain than trying to get the right sounds out of my old F-4 mandolin. I have learned a lot. It's like finding little treasures lying about on the rug, that quite apart from the tactile pleasure of reading through books so old that anyone who had anything to do with them when they were new, whether as author, publisher, binder, merchant or reader, has been dead for more than a century.
I've learned, for example, about the origins of Groundhog's Day (see post of January 26, below....or above, or wherever and however it works on a blog). I've learned who created the Julian Calendar (no, not someone named Julian -- but someone named Joseph Scalinger, in the 16th century) and why. I've learned, or re-learned, how American presidents were elected before around 1824 -- NOT by any popular vote..... I've learned a lot about the American economy, largely from the census data of 1840. From the 1842 edition, which was published in late 1841 of course, one notes that the big news is the death of President Harrison. Also a series of bank failures, particularly in Pennsylvania. There were no bail-outs. And President Tyler subsequently vetoed legislation aiming to create a new national bank. Someone should go study this stuff; one gets the feeling it's not entirely irrelevant to some of today's concerns.
I've learned more about how deeply racist the country was, too, from sketches of various then-contemporary incidents -- about Elijah Parrish Lovejoy and his press in Illinois; Lucretia Mott and the burning of Pennsylvania Hall; and race riots--Irishmen-led anti-black pogroms, really--in Cincinnati. The Almanac from 1860 has a pretty interesting account of what happened at Harper's Ferry on October 16-18, 1859. It says nothing about John Brown's motives. It does mention that the Governor of Virginia called upon the citizens of the state not to wander far from home on the day of Brown's hanging in December, to protect their property. Earlier Almanacs, like the 1842 item, suggest why: The number of white people and free "colored" just about equaled (not quite) the number of slaves in the Old Dominion. (One learns, too, that some free colored people also owned slaves, but we're not supposed to know or talk about that.....)
But last night I learned something I never knew about at all. I was perusing the data on world population (it had yet to reach one billion in 1841) and noticed an entry for Danish colonies in Africa. That stopped me short; I never knew there were any Danish colonies in Africa. There were, and in southern India as well. They go back to the 17th century, and were very much involved with the slave trade before it was made illegal. So that subject comes around again....
They were small and ultimately unsuccessful efforts, these Danish outposts. The Danes ultimately sold most of their holding to the British in the middle of the 19th century, just as they sold the Virgin Islands to the United States during World War I. Their African holdings were centered in what is today Ghana. It turns out that a fort of sorts the Danes built in 1811 or thereabouts is used still today, as the official residence of the Ghanaian president! I did not know that. Now I do, and you do, too.
Tonight I'll go through 1844 and 1845 I guess. And if it really snows a lot this weekend, as predicted, heck, I may make it all the way to the Hayes Administration. Such fun....
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Baking: Not Easy
I suggest that the President take up baking. Here is why: It seems like a simple thing to do--you decide what you want to make, you collect the ingredients you need, you get out your pans and blender and measuring devices, and you just follow the less-than-rocket-science level of difficulty directions. But it isn't simple at all. The recipe is written in a kind of code that requires experience to decipher. If you can't decipher it, you will screw up -- not a lot, maybe just one small step of the process. But in baking, that's all it takes to make a mess of the project.
So baking is humbling. It's a one-strike-you're-out kind of enterprise, a zero tolerance for error domain. And humility in the face of challenge is a healthy thing. It counsels caution, patience, attention to detail and appreciation for the known masters of the trade, from whom one may learn a great deal, if one knows how.
As a rule of observation, I'd say that the President, like most people, is humble about some things and not others. With a politician, however, it's hard to tell, because politicians, for good reason, have to be concerned about their optic -- how they appear. if they appear too cocksure (in America, at least), people don't like that. We're still Jeffersonian at heart in many ways. On the other hand, if they seem too uncertain or, worse, in a malaise, the American people like that even less. They want leaders who lead. So in trying to strike the right balance, a politician has to always second-guess what the public traffic will bear, and this makes it hard for any of us to know the real feel within a man like Barack Obama, or George Bush, or Bill Clinton, or Ronald Reagan, and so on.
I think the President is humble about a lot, because it follows from his appreciation, so evident in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, of Reinhold Niebuhr. It shows in other ways, too--particularly his inclination to analysis, to hard work, when it comes to dealing with public policy problems. People who are not humble in that way, like George W. Bush, trust their gut and think that's enough. You do have to trust your gut, but that's NOT enough. President Obama is not apparently humble about other things; sometimes he seems to strut his intelligence -- but again, that could be just optic management. I don't know the man, so I don't know the answer--and that's the only way, I think, anyone can know it.
Anyway, baking helps a person find the balance between self-confidence and humility, because even very good cooks, like me, can be terrible bakers, like me. Once every so many years, I try to bake something, and pretty much fail. Not fail abjectly, but fail all the same in getting whatever it is--strudel, a pie crust, a jelly roll, and so on--to some out like it's supposed to come out. I tried again this morning -- a 1-2-3-4 Yellow Cake recipe from Joy of Cooking. Because I did not clean off the blender whirrers well enough before trying to whip the egg whites into soft peaks, the cake did not rise properly. That's just one little detail, and the recipe does not remind one to do this, either. But screwing up one little detail is all it takes to mess up a process requiring, oh, about 15 or 20 steps. Maybe more.
Same goes for public policy. If you're trying to do something even halfway hard, and most big things we want to do are way more than halfway hard, all you have to do is mess up one thing -- have one duck not in its row -- and the implementation will either not go as intended, or will fail outright. Say, a war. Say a war in Iraq. Or even a war in Afghanistan. Obviously, one thing all recipes have is enough steps to get you to a successful conclusion. It doesn't say "Mission Accomplished" anywhere in Joy of Cooking, as far as I know, and I've read pretty much the whole thing over the years. Nor does it mention "Phase IV." But, pretty clearly, before you can consider any policy a success, you have to define what the thing is supposed to look like in the end. No baker ever won praise for making it through three-quarters or even seven-eighths of a recipe. No policymaker should either.
The next time a President goes though a 94-day review trying to respond to a resource request from a commanding general, or goes about making strategy for a change in a proper way, it would be a good idea to try the 1-2-3-4 Yellow Cake recipe some evening in the White House kitchen. You can learn a lot from screwing up a cake. Really; even if you can roast a duck.
So baking is humbling. It's a one-strike-you're-out kind of enterprise, a zero tolerance for error domain. And humility in the face of challenge is a healthy thing. It counsels caution, patience, attention to detail and appreciation for the known masters of the trade, from whom one may learn a great deal, if one knows how.
As a rule of observation, I'd say that the President, like most people, is humble about some things and not others. With a politician, however, it's hard to tell, because politicians, for good reason, have to be concerned about their optic -- how they appear. if they appear too cocksure (in America, at least), people don't like that. We're still Jeffersonian at heart in many ways. On the other hand, if they seem too uncertain or, worse, in a malaise, the American people like that even less. They want leaders who lead. So in trying to strike the right balance, a politician has to always second-guess what the public traffic will bear, and this makes it hard for any of us to know the real feel within a man like Barack Obama, or George Bush, or Bill Clinton, or Ronald Reagan, and so on.
I think the President is humble about a lot, because it follows from his appreciation, so evident in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, of Reinhold Niebuhr. It shows in other ways, too--particularly his inclination to analysis, to hard work, when it comes to dealing with public policy problems. People who are not humble in that way, like George W. Bush, trust their gut and think that's enough. You do have to trust your gut, but that's NOT enough. President Obama is not apparently humble about other things; sometimes he seems to strut his intelligence -- but again, that could be just optic management. I don't know the man, so I don't know the answer--and that's the only way, I think, anyone can know it.
Anyway, baking helps a person find the balance between self-confidence and humility, because even very good cooks, like me, can be terrible bakers, like me. Once every so many years, I try to bake something, and pretty much fail. Not fail abjectly, but fail all the same in getting whatever it is--strudel, a pie crust, a jelly roll, and so on--to some out like it's supposed to come out. I tried again this morning -- a 1-2-3-4 Yellow Cake recipe from Joy of Cooking. Because I did not clean off the blender whirrers well enough before trying to whip the egg whites into soft peaks, the cake did not rise properly. That's just one little detail, and the recipe does not remind one to do this, either. But screwing up one little detail is all it takes to mess up a process requiring, oh, about 15 or 20 steps. Maybe more.
Same goes for public policy. If you're trying to do something even halfway hard, and most big things we want to do are way more than halfway hard, all you have to do is mess up one thing -- have one duck not in its row -- and the implementation will either not go as intended, or will fail outright. Say, a war. Say a war in Iraq. Or even a war in Afghanistan. Obviously, one thing all recipes have is enough steps to get you to a successful conclusion. It doesn't say "Mission Accomplished" anywhere in Joy of Cooking, as far as I know, and I've read pretty much the whole thing over the years. Nor does it mention "Phase IV." But, pretty clearly, before you can consider any policy a success, you have to define what the thing is supposed to look like in the end. No baker ever won praise for making it through three-quarters or even seven-eighths of a recipe. No policymaker should either.
The next time a President goes though a 94-day review trying to respond to a resource request from a commanding general, or goes about making strategy for a change in a proper way, it would be a good idea to try the 1-2-3-4 Yellow Cake recipe some evening in the White House kitchen. You can learn a lot from screwing up a cake. Really; even if you can roast a duck.
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Groundhog's Day: Prepare Now!
Groundhog's Day is coming soon -- February 2 -- and it's not too early to start getting ready. This important day now transcends the doings of Punxsutawney Phil up there in Pennsylvania; it has become a day of truly national, nay, global significance. This is, of course, because of the global warming scare. If we cannot trust the IPCC anymore, what with its predicting the melting of the Himalayan glaciers and other absurdities--and we can't--then we're going to have to make do with a groundhog or two (or three, or four....Lord knows there are a mess of `em.)
As it happens, the science of Groundhog's Day is deeply grounded. As you make preparations for the American, or Pennsylvanian, tradition of Groundhog's Day, know for a certainty that it did not just fall out of the sky. It has a history that, apparently, few Americans today know anything about. So I'll just tell you a little of it.
It turns out that, as with so many American folk traditions, Groundhog's Day goes back to the Old Country, otherwise known for practical purposes as Europe, but really meaning most of the time Britain. February 2 is a significant date in the Church calendar (at least in the Anglican calendar, if not also the Catholic one): It's called Candlemas day, which is, according to Church tradition, the day of Jesus' christening.
Now, if you're about to object that there could not have been such a Christening before there was such a thing as Christianity, just save your breath. Logic will get you nowhere when it comes to a religious hierarchy determined to smooth out all the rumpled linens of historical reality, projecting a narrative backwards to accommodate the needs of the present. Happens all the time.
Here is how the British Almanac of 1828, an original copy of which I have open before me at my desk, at page 10, describes the matter, and you will see right away the connection between Candlemas and Groundhog's Day:
"If Candlemas day be fair and bright
Winter will have another flight;
But if Candlemas day be clouds and rain
Winter is gone and will not come again."
In other words, if Phil sees his shadow ("fair and bright" as the poem has it), we're in for it; if not ("clouds and rain"), then not.
As the quote shows, many days we today in America rarely take heed of were believed to be predictive of this and that. We have no secular American equivalent for St. Vincent's Day, let alone the conversion of St. Paul. For some reason, however, Candlemas day, translated into Groundhog's Day, with a substitution, I guess, of Phil for Divine intercession, has stayed with us. Go figure.
It is also worth noting that the authors of the British Almanac for the year 1828, while scoring the superstitions of olden days, retained rather more far-fetched notions than they themselves understood. There is a section of the book in which medical advice is tendered season by season, month by month. A lot of it is common sense born of experience, but the advice about bleeding and leeches, well, that has not stood the test of time and the advance of medical science. They probably complained about its cost even then.
Happy Groundhog's Day!!
As it happens, the science of Groundhog's Day is deeply grounded. As you make preparations for the American, or Pennsylvanian, tradition of Groundhog's Day, know for a certainty that it did not just fall out of the sky. It has a history that, apparently, few Americans today know anything about. So I'll just tell you a little of it.
It turns out that, as with so many American folk traditions, Groundhog's Day goes back to the Old Country, otherwise known for practical purposes as Europe, but really meaning most of the time Britain. February 2 is a significant date in the Church calendar (at least in the Anglican calendar, if not also the Catholic one): It's called Candlemas day, which is, according to Church tradition, the day of Jesus' christening.
Now, if you're about to object that there could not have been such a Christening before there was such a thing as Christianity, just save your breath. Logic will get you nowhere when it comes to a religious hierarchy determined to smooth out all the rumpled linens of historical reality, projecting a narrative backwards to accommodate the needs of the present. Happens all the time.
Here is how the British Almanac of 1828, an original copy of which I have open before me at my desk, at page 10, describes the matter, and you will see right away the connection between Candlemas and Groundhog's Day:
Our ancestors had a great many ridiculous notions about the possibility of prognosticating the future condition of the weather, from the state of the atmosphere on certain festival days. The festival of the Circumcision (January 1) was thus supposed to afford evidence of the weather to be expected in the coming year. For St. Vincent's Day (January 22) . . . . The Conversion of St. Paul (January 25) was . . . . Candlemas day (February 2) supplied another of these irrational inferences from the weather of one day to that of a distance period:
"If Candlemas day be fair and bright
Winter will have another flight;
But if Candlemas day be clouds and rain
Winter is gone and will not come again."
In other words, if Phil sees his shadow ("fair and bright" as the poem has it), we're in for it; if not ("clouds and rain"), then not.
As the quote shows, many days we today in America rarely take heed of were believed to be predictive of this and that. We have no secular American equivalent for St. Vincent's Day, let alone the conversion of St. Paul. For some reason, however, Candlemas day, translated into Groundhog's Day, with a substitution, I guess, of Phil for Divine intercession, has stayed with us. Go figure.
It is also worth noting that the authors of the British Almanac for the year 1828, while scoring the superstitions of olden days, retained rather more far-fetched notions than they themselves understood. There is a section of the book in which medical advice is tendered season by season, month by month. A lot of it is common sense born of experience, but the advice about bleeding and leeches, well, that has not stood the test of time and the advance of medical science. They probably complained about its cost even then.
Happy Groundhog's Day!!
Monday, January 25, 2010
All Made Up and Everywhere on the Go
Perhaps it’s just me, but does anyone else notice ever more women applying make-up on trains, subways and buses? And does anyone else find this rude?
Why rude? We all know that urban dwellers must get used to the anonymity of crowds or else go a little batty. That means learning to ignore whole classes of behavior (people talking to their shoes, for example) and behavior in ways one would never think to behave in other circumstances. We observe an implicit contract in crowds whereby I’m not rude in failing to say hello to the people I pass each day walking between Dupont Circle and Rhode Island Avenue, and they aren’t rude not to say hello to me. It’s quite enough that we’ve reached a stage in social evolution where we no longer assume all strangers to be threats—real progress, the anthropologists tell us, as human affairs go.
But the acquired ability to mutually ignore one another in crowded settings only works because it’s non-discriminatory: We could care less about each other equally. When a woman dons make-up in a subway car, however, she says, in effect: “I care what some others think about my looks, and so take some trouble to make myself attractive, but you’re not among those I care about. Indeed, I care so little that I think nothing of making you an involuntary witness to a preparation designed for the benefit of others.” That’s discriminatory, therefore rude.
Of course, the proliferation of public make-up artists pales besides the most egregious current form of public rudeness: cell phone chatter breaking out in confined spaces. But this isn’t arguable: There is broad, though obviously not yet universal, agreement about not inflicting half a cell phone conversation on innocent bystanders (or bysitters, if you’re fortunate enough to get a seat) who are trying to read, work a sudoku puzzle or decide what to do about lunch. The cell phone crisis probably explains why, when I’ve expressed consternation over female make-up artists acting out in public, some have brusquely dismissed my complaint.
“What do you care?” says my reality-check of a wife, who never applies make-up in public (and rarely does so in private, for that matter). “You don’t know them, they don’t know you, and what difference does it make compared to that horrible man on the bus yakking all the time on his cell phone about his damned show dogs?” (There is such a horrible man, it’s true.)
But, I tell her, one form of rudeness does not excuse another. I’m not just picking on women either. If I saw a man intently styling his hair on a subway car, I’d think the same thing. If I saw a fellow pull out tools to give himself a manicure on the bus, I’d move as far from him as possible. If I saw a dude click on an electric razor to trim his mustache on an airplane, I’d probably lock myself in the little excuse for a toilet they have in economy class and stay there until we landed.
None of this ever happens, however. I’ve never seen a guy do any of these things. We men may surreptitiously inspect a nostril now and again while we’re out and about, or maybe scratch something. But the closest we, here in Washington at least, ever come to putting on make-up in public is a rapid sun-screen slather on our nose and neck around the swimming pool, or maybe while watching the Washington Nationals baseball club from the bleachers during a day game.
As with any form of rudeness, women applying make-up in public spaces comes in different degrees of offense. There are three such degrees.
By far the most common violation concerns lipstick. In a standard third-degree offense, a woman will open her purse, pull out a shiny cylindrical harquebus and a small compact, flip open the mirror on the compact and set to painting. This operation is mostly unexceptional, except at the end when the woman will usually sit back a bit from the mirror, lift her head ever so slightly, mash her lips together and then seem to pucker up and gently kiss the air in front of her. All the while she is peering into the little mirror as if saying to herself, urging hope to vanquish uncertainty, “Oh, you gorgeous dame, you.”
I suppose this maneuver is supposed to even out the lipstick at the top of the lips and at the corners of the mouth. But it looks slightly balmy, as any mildly lascivious self-regarding pantomime is bound to do.
As a rule, a lipstick artist can finish her work in only two or three minutes. Get caught up in some book and you miss the whole thing. But if you don’t miss it, this is rude—though it can also be mildly entertaining, depending on the woman, if your taste runs to John Waters films.
Beyond mere lipstick is the application of powder and sometimes rouge. The compact comes out again, but so does a flat round pad about the size of a silver dollar pancake that the woman uses to apply some powdery substance to, as best I can tell, every skin surface she can locate from the neck up. The act itself resembles auto-massage, and the expression on the transgressor’s face—especially as the application of the substance in question requires the soft closing of the eyes as the pad approaches them—is unmistakably sensual. With lipstick application thrown in, a second-degree powder violation can exceed four or even five minutes in duration. So this is very rude.
The first-degree offense is the full make-up monty. Beyond lipstick and powder it entails eye shadow, eye-liner, mascara applied on the eyelashes with a kooky-looking little brush and—yes, I once actually saw this on Amtrak (more of which below)—eyebrow plucking! On the train I have also seen women painting their fingernails; the odor is enough to melt the icing off your breakfast Danish.
The full make-up monty can take up to and sometimes beyond fifteen minutes on a serious commute, during which time a determined make-up woman manages to pretend that no one else is anywhere near her. It is, of course, very, very rude.
Aside from its duration, the rudeness of public make-up offenses varies with propinquity to the transgressor. If I’m sitting right next to a make-up artist on a train or bus, that feels much ruder than if the offender is three seats away on the other side of the aisle. But what happened last month on a train from Washington to New York was by far the most egregious episode I have ever encountered: a full make-up monty at 19 inches and closing.
I boarded the 10:10 headed for Penn Station, and was alone until a young woman—no wedding ring, probably on the not-yet side of thirty years—sat down next to me at the BWI airport stop. Then, somewhere north of Baltimore, she began her make-up session, a rare full monty lacking only the pungency of fingernail polish. Her order of battle was impressive, as was her gear. She hauled out a black leather make-up kit larger than a construction worker’s lunchbox, inside of which was a colorfully diverse collection of frankly I-don’t-know-what. The inside top of the kit contained an inset mirror, so both her hands were free to work.
And work she did, whipping out one specialized tool after another. She was serious yet graceful as her art unfurled, all the way into and out of Philadelphia. And then—the coup d’grace—she plucked her eyebrows. Not a lot of them, mind you, but any is altogether too many at close quarters on Amtrak.
I didn’t say a word. I wanted to, but then I might have been rude. (What would John Waters have done?) By the time she finished we were nearly in New Jersey. She left the train at Newark.
The point? Just this: If you are a woman who paints and puckers in public spaces, please consider that putting on make-up is all of a part with dressing, and so ought to remain a private matter from start to finish. You wouldn’t think of putting on your blouse or your stockings in a subway car or a bus, would you? So why your lipstick or mascara?
There was a time when the only women who painted themselves in public did it on street corners and in bars. It was considered a naughtily sexy thing to do, which was in fact closely related to its most common actual purpose. But at least it had a purpose. The purpose of public making-up now seems to be no purpose at all, except perhaps to save time in mostly absentminded fits of multi-tasking. We all sympathize: It’s always been hard to be a working woman, it’s not gotten any easier and time is the most precious gift of all. Still…..
The postmodern variety of generic rudeness started, I suspect, with the abomination of call-waiting, which encouraged one human exchange to be blithely interrupted by the mere prospect of another. But that’s another story. For now, just a plaint to all you make-up offenders out there: Please don’t paint and powder in public. Consider that this is a case, perhaps, where beauty is in the eye of the non-beholder.
Why rude? We all know that urban dwellers must get used to the anonymity of crowds or else go a little batty. That means learning to ignore whole classes of behavior (people talking to their shoes, for example) and behavior in ways one would never think to behave in other circumstances. We observe an implicit contract in crowds whereby I’m not rude in failing to say hello to the people I pass each day walking between Dupont Circle and Rhode Island Avenue, and they aren’t rude not to say hello to me. It’s quite enough that we’ve reached a stage in social evolution where we no longer assume all strangers to be threats—real progress, the anthropologists tell us, as human affairs go.
But the acquired ability to mutually ignore one another in crowded settings only works because it’s non-discriminatory: We could care less about each other equally. When a woman dons make-up in a subway car, however, she says, in effect: “I care what some others think about my looks, and so take some trouble to make myself attractive, but you’re not among those I care about. Indeed, I care so little that I think nothing of making you an involuntary witness to a preparation designed for the benefit of others.” That’s discriminatory, therefore rude.
Of course, the proliferation of public make-up artists pales besides the most egregious current form of public rudeness: cell phone chatter breaking out in confined spaces. But this isn’t arguable: There is broad, though obviously not yet universal, agreement about not inflicting half a cell phone conversation on innocent bystanders (or bysitters, if you’re fortunate enough to get a seat) who are trying to read, work a sudoku puzzle or decide what to do about lunch. The cell phone crisis probably explains why, when I’ve expressed consternation over female make-up artists acting out in public, some have brusquely dismissed my complaint.
“What do you care?” says my reality-check of a wife, who never applies make-up in public (and rarely does so in private, for that matter). “You don’t know them, they don’t know you, and what difference does it make compared to that horrible man on the bus yakking all the time on his cell phone about his damned show dogs?” (There is such a horrible man, it’s true.)
But, I tell her, one form of rudeness does not excuse another. I’m not just picking on women either. If I saw a man intently styling his hair on a subway car, I’d think the same thing. If I saw a fellow pull out tools to give himself a manicure on the bus, I’d move as far from him as possible. If I saw a dude click on an electric razor to trim his mustache on an airplane, I’d probably lock myself in the little excuse for a toilet they have in economy class and stay there until we landed.
None of this ever happens, however. I’ve never seen a guy do any of these things. We men may surreptitiously inspect a nostril now and again while we’re out and about, or maybe scratch something. But the closest we, here in Washington at least, ever come to putting on make-up in public is a rapid sun-screen slather on our nose and neck around the swimming pool, or maybe while watching the Washington Nationals baseball club from the bleachers during a day game.
As with any form of rudeness, women applying make-up in public spaces comes in different degrees of offense. There are three such degrees.
By far the most common violation concerns lipstick. In a standard third-degree offense, a woman will open her purse, pull out a shiny cylindrical harquebus and a small compact, flip open the mirror on the compact and set to painting. This operation is mostly unexceptional, except at the end when the woman will usually sit back a bit from the mirror, lift her head ever so slightly, mash her lips together and then seem to pucker up and gently kiss the air in front of her. All the while she is peering into the little mirror as if saying to herself, urging hope to vanquish uncertainty, “Oh, you gorgeous dame, you.”
I suppose this maneuver is supposed to even out the lipstick at the top of the lips and at the corners of the mouth. But it looks slightly balmy, as any mildly lascivious self-regarding pantomime is bound to do.
As a rule, a lipstick artist can finish her work in only two or three minutes. Get caught up in some book and you miss the whole thing. But if you don’t miss it, this is rude—though it can also be mildly entertaining, depending on the woman, if your taste runs to John Waters films.
Beyond mere lipstick is the application of powder and sometimes rouge. The compact comes out again, but so does a flat round pad about the size of a silver dollar pancake that the woman uses to apply some powdery substance to, as best I can tell, every skin surface she can locate from the neck up. The act itself resembles auto-massage, and the expression on the transgressor’s face—especially as the application of the substance in question requires the soft closing of the eyes as the pad approaches them—is unmistakably sensual. With lipstick application thrown in, a second-degree powder violation can exceed four or even five minutes in duration. So this is very rude.
The first-degree offense is the full make-up monty. Beyond lipstick and powder it entails eye shadow, eye-liner, mascara applied on the eyelashes with a kooky-looking little brush and—yes, I once actually saw this on Amtrak (more of which below)—eyebrow plucking! On the train I have also seen women painting their fingernails; the odor is enough to melt the icing off your breakfast Danish.
The full make-up monty can take up to and sometimes beyond fifteen minutes on a serious commute, during which time a determined make-up woman manages to pretend that no one else is anywhere near her. It is, of course, very, very rude.
Aside from its duration, the rudeness of public make-up offenses varies with propinquity to the transgressor. If I’m sitting right next to a make-up artist on a train or bus, that feels much ruder than if the offender is three seats away on the other side of the aisle. But what happened last month on a train from Washington to New York was by far the most egregious episode I have ever encountered: a full make-up monty at 19 inches and closing.
I boarded the 10:10 headed for Penn Station, and was alone until a young woman—no wedding ring, probably on the not-yet side of thirty years—sat down next to me at the BWI airport stop. Then, somewhere north of Baltimore, she began her make-up session, a rare full monty lacking only the pungency of fingernail polish. Her order of battle was impressive, as was her gear. She hauled out a black leather make-up kit larger than a construction worker’s lunchbox, inside of which was a colorfully diverse collection of frankly I-don’t-know-what. The inside top of the kit contained an inset mirror, so both her hands were free to work.
And work she did, whipping out one specialized tool after another. She was serious yet graceful as her art unfurled, all the way into and out of Philadelphia. And then—the coup d’grace—she plucked her eyebrows. Not a lot of them, mind you, but any is altogether too many at close quarters on Amtrak.
I didn’t say a word. I wanted to, but then I might have been rude. (What would John Waters have done?) By the time she finished we were nearly in New Jersey. She left the train at Newark.
The point? Just this: If you are a woman who paints and puckers in public spaces, please consider that putting on make-up is all of a part with dressing, and so ought to remain a private matter from start to finish. You wouldn’t think of putting on your blouse or your stockings in a subway car or a bus, would you? So why your lipstick or mascara?
There was a time when the only women who painted themselves in public did it on street corners and in bars. It was considered a naughtily sexy thing to do, which was in fact closely related to its most common actual purpose. But at least it had a purpose. The purpose of public making-up now seems to be no purpose at all, except perhaps to save time in mostly absentminded fits of multi-tasking. We all sympathize: It’s always been hard to be a working woman, it’s not gotten any easier and time is the most precious gift of all. Still…..
The postmodern variety of generic rudeness started, I suspect, with the abomination of call-waiting, which encouraged one human exchange to be blithely interrupted by the mere prospect of another. But that’s another story. For now, just a plaint to all you make-up offenders out there: Please don’t paint and powder in public. Consider that this is a case, perhaps, where beauty is in the eye of the non-beholder.
Friday, January 1, 2010
Avatar
I was blown away by D. Cameron's "Avatar", as most everyone has been. I was so wowified by the kinetic art that dominates the movie that it took days for it to dawn on me what a lousy and even offensive movie it is. As to the technological dimension, I am sure that this movie will become a cultural icon. Its "distance" in technological progress from "Star Wars" and "Jurassic Park" is about as far, in a far shorter time expanse, as the distance from "Star Wars" back to "Fantasia."
But here is the essence, at least as it seems to me: The movie depicts humanity as technologically precocious, intellectually mediocre and morally degenerate; but that is a statement which just happens to perfectly fit the film, too, rendering it an unintended parody of itself.
The film is, as I have said, technologically precocious and genuinely a form of kinetic art--much, much better, I would say, than those silly mooey-eyed mass-produced little girls and kitties and doggies of the 1970s to which the depiction of the natives in the film has been compared. But it is intellectually mediocre. The vocabulary in the dialogue reaches maybe to an 8th grade level; it contains no wit and has no literary center. The plot is banal; it's just a war film, essentially Cowboys and Indians in space. (The natives fight with bows and arrows, you know.) Pretty much nothing happens that isn't telegraphed, sledgehammer-like, at least ten minutes beforehand.
And morally, the movie is close to if not flatly degenerate. The fact that a white guy, a crippled U.S. Marine no less, has to be the one to save the noble savages, who are depicted as a cross between Gandhi and the Cherokee, is sort of offensive. The natives thus come off like eight foot tall blue pets, who can talk. Neat. But all they do as a collective is strut and chant; they seem to have inter-generational responsibility thrust upon them from the inner mystique of planet Pandora, but they do nothing obvious to exercise or earn it. It short, they are depicted as morally conscious but without moral agency, which is kind of absurd. (It sort of reminds me of our recent discussions about counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, where our guys high and low seem to consult with everyone about what to do except the Afghans.)
I am tempted to suggest that the movie is an unwitting parody of itself for a reason: It is an early 21st century commercial American artifact. In other words, if America today as a civilization is itself technologically precocious, intellectually mediocre and morally degenerate in this advanced stage of the Third Plutocracy of the United States, then how could we expect its high-financed entertainment products to reflect anything different?
Darn, there I've gone and given in to temptation again.
But here is the essence, at least as it seems to me: The movie depicts humanity as technologically precocious, intellectually mediocre and morally degenerate; but that is a statement which just happens to perfectly fit the film, too, rendering it an unintended parody of itself.
The film is, as I have said, technologically precocious and genuinely a form of kinetic art--much, much better, I would say, than those silly mooey-eyed mass-produced little girls and kitties and doggies of the 1970s to which the depiction of the natives in the film has been compared. But it is intellectually mediocre. The vocabulary in the dialogue reaches maybe to an 8th grade level; it contains no wit and has no literary center. The plot is banal; it's just a war film, essentially Cowboys and Indians in space. (The natives fight with bows and arrows, you know.) Pretty much nothing happens that isn't telegraphed, sledgehammer-like, at least ten minutes beforehand.
And morally, the movie is close to if not flatly degenerate. The fact that a white guy, a crippled U.S. Marine no less, has to be the one to save the noble savages, who are depicted as a cross between Gandhi and the Cherokee, is sort of offensive. The natives thus come off like eight foot tall blue pets, who can talk. Neat. But all they do as a collective is strut and chant; they seem to have inter-generational responsibility thrust upon them from the inner mystique of planet Pandora, but they do nothing obvious to exercise or earn it. It short, they are depicted as morally conscious but without moral agency, which is kind of absurd. (It sort of reminds me of our recent discussions about counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, where our guys high and low seem to consult with everyone about what to do except the Afghans.)
I am tempted to suggest that the movie is an unwitting parody of itself for a reason: It is an early 21st century commercial American artifact. In other words, if America today as a civilization is itself technologically precocious, intellectually mediocre and morally degenerate in this advanced stage of the Third Plutocracy of the United States, then how could we expect its high-financed entertainment products to reflect anything different?
Darn, there I've gone and given in to temptation again.
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