Lost in Space

I’m going to the movies pretty soon to see Pandorum. I’ve read several abbreviated reviews which were quite favorable, including one which invoked the sacred name of “Alien” in comparison. Alien and its successor, Aliens, are quite possible the two best monster movies starring the same monster since Frankenstein and Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman. Ridley Scott and James Cameron know how to make a movie, each in their own special way, and the first two films of the Alien series are breathtaking examples of meaningless cinema genius at its best.

Alien still stands as one of the most agonizing exercises in creeping dread since final exams, and it is a miracle of visual misdirection and a torturous xenophobic strip-tease where our deepest fears are revealed to us in tiny little pieces such that even when the whole bag is finally dumped right on the table in front of us, we still can’t quite grasp what we’re seeing. Experiencing the movie Alien was one of those ironic epiphanies when my feeble mind made a deep, fundamental connection to truth. I realized that Darwin was correct in his suppositions about the origin of species, since there are extremely few wriggling, squirming, multi-appended hard-shelled creatures which pose any sort of threat to a modern human. My visceral anxiety about this lurking, growing reptilian arthropod hunting the crew of the Nostromo had to be wired into my brain, the vestiges of a time when our ancestors were often selected for survival based upon the extent to which they were scared shitless by things that crept around in the dark. Aliens, conversely, is a rollercoaster ride through a carnival funhouse with a heavyweight bout thrown in for good measure. The strength of women, the wisdom of children and our pervasive underestimation of all things non-human fit nicely into an updated tale of a Neolithic clan hunting the things that are hunting them. James Cameron spins a timeless yarn of heroes and cowards, betrayal and justice, and the ultimate failure of a nuclear reactor’s cooling system. There is very little real nutritional value in Aliens, but there is little nutritional value in crack, and it is still pretty stimulating and addictive.

I have been warned that Pandorum is a complex tale with many unanticipated turns, the enjoyment of which might be diminished by premature knowledge of plot details. I have to admit that I have shamelessly enjoyed many clever plot twists over the years, even in The Crying Game, but a movie that can only be enjoyed if you don’t know what the hell is going on is not a movie with any staying power. A good analogy is the beginning of an intimate physical relationship; the mystery of it certainly heightens the anticipation, but if it turns out that there is nothing there actually worth anticipating, then you probably shouldn’t get a joint checking account. Really good movies work on enough levels that you can memorize the credits ands still enjoy it. Ron Howard did an outstanding job of this with Apollo 13; most people with a high-school education knew exactly how everything would end up, but I was still biting my fingernails waiting for the Command Module to emerge from the clouds.

Anyway, I will see Pandorum soon. I just love stories of isolated groups of regular folks far from home battling the unknown for reasons only they would understand, and no place is farther from home than space, and no people are more isolated and more subject to the caprices of the unanticipated than those brave and foolish souls who chose to push the limits of human understanding, whether across to the next valley or to the next solar system. Inevitably, as our descendants push back the boundaries of our ignorance, they will encounter things which are way more bizarre, frightening and fucking awesome than anything our imaginations can currently conceive. I envy them.

He's Dead, Jim

This is hardly of interest to the general public, but my 14 year old son played his first high-school junior varsity football game last week. He is the left offensive tackle, as he is big and slow like me. He is however, far from slow-witted and he has a talent for ironic rhetorical flourish that even I am envious of. Anyway, where I’m going with this is that football is a physical game, and sometimes people get hurt; sometimes badly hurt. My 16 year old son was hit by a car while riding his bike in a race several weeks ago. Of course, he was not wearing a helmet, despite being admonished repeatedly by both parents to do so (the State of Florida does not require helmets if you are at least 16). Fortunately the car was going pretty slow, but he did sustain a nasty gash to the head and a moderately severe concussion and was in the emergency room for observation for several hours. This little adventure resulted in over $9,000 in charges for medical treatment.

I recount this family trivia as a segue into some brief observations the whole sordid American extortion racket known as healthcare. I use such dismal terms to describe the process of treating American’s ills because the threat of premature death is a powerful motivator for most people, a motivator which can be exploited by the profit-minded, and the illusion that we can live unhealthy lives and still be healthy people (promoted largely by the medical industry) has taken hold to the extent that the average person has no idea how much of their wealth evaporates with every piece of fried chicken they eat.

Now I am not one of those paranoid Liberals that sees a soulless predator lurking behind every corporate logo; however, I am one of those paranoid Liberals who sees systems that become more than the sum of their parts and understands that good and decent people can do really wretched things, especially when they don’t understand what they’re doing. Just like the American economic and political systems work largely to the benefit of individuals by the ironic virtue of being more preeminent and ungovernable than those individuals themselves, the American healthcare system often works to the detriment of individuals by the less than ironic virtue of being a profit-driven industry. The system has become the sum of the myriad decisions made by thousands of individual corporate employees acting largely without coordination or strategic analysis, resulting in the incredibly expensive chaos we all mostly now take for granted.

Before somebody drops the “S” word, I am not yet advocating socialized medicine, at least not in our lifetimes, and clearly there is no moral failure associated with working hard and taking risks in order to profit from an investment, but certain services have been typically provided by the government in America, such as law enforcement, fire suppression, potable water, sanitary sewer and all our lovely parks, and these are not profit driven enterprises. These are things which, in civilized nations, are deemed to be the right of every citizen to enjoy, even if by virtue of economic status some citizens are actually asked to pay more than their fair share for such services. The Conservatives who bemoan the failure of every element of government still continue to drive to work on the roads the government built, take a crap in the toilet which, post flush, the government assumes responsibility for, use currency printed and regulated by the government and scare old people about losing the government-run healthcare they already have. They also take every opportunity to praise, and, I might add, employ, the Armed Forces of the United States, which is one of the largest government-run enterprises in human history.

So, government probably can do a few things right, and the idea that some of the basic amenities of civilization are actually rights of citizenship is not so foreign to our culture; so why is there such pandemonium at the thought that we should find some way to ensure that all our citizens have some basic level of effective medical care available to them and why has the idea that the massive healthcare/industrial complex should contribute a little of their hundreds of billions of dollars in resources to achieve this become such a flash point? What the hell is wrong with this country?

Every time I go to the doctor, she tells me I am a ticking time-bomb of accumulated bad habits and I should change my ways. I always agree and then continue to fail to be the better person I should be, but if the doctor refused to see me and I swelled up and lost vision in one eye, I probably wouldn’t really be terribly outraged. However, when my rebellious, smart-mouthed son was sitting in that hospital bed with a solidly thumped brain as a result of his own irresponsibility, I was getting ready to throw some furniture to get some immediate attention. Anybody who has ever cared about anyone knows that watching a loved-one suffer and die is the greatest pain a human can experience (just watch The Dark Knight). The pain felt by our children is far more difficult to accept than the genetically programmed horror of our own demise, perhaps because at some level we understand we will not be left to miss ourselves.

So this is what we are debating; should we try to make as much quality health care available to as many of our citizens as practically possible, or should we simply work to ensure that the Hospital Corporation of America continues to reap record profits each and every year? Should we love our neighbors as we love ourselves or should we just say may the devil take the hind-most? Should millions of Americans be at risk to watch their friends and family members weaken and slip away just so a precious few can indulge an obscene bacchanalia of hypocrisy and greed? Why do we even have to ask this question?

In Cold Blood

It’s a pretty sad thing, but I Googled “Texas Executes Innocent Man” and got 81,600 web pages. I had started to try and find some information about Cameron Todd Willingham, a Texas man executed in 2004 for starting a fire that killed his three children. It now appears that Mr. Willingham was pretty clearly innocently and was essentially murdered by the ignorant, hayseed douche-bags that run the justice system in Texas. Of course, I have reached this conclusion after reading a sum total of four articles related to the case, but the arguments seem compelling, as well as fitting nicely with my preconceived notions about how worthless most Texans are. The point is, while I didn’t read all 81,600 web pages, I suspect there are probably at least a couple of people executed by the State of Texas who could be argued to have been legitimately innocent.

I am not the only person who finds the Texas justice system to be particularly flawed, and many of the other critics actually have some intellectual credibility. The Innocence Project, a function of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University, which has to date successfully exonerated 241 persons erroneously convicted of crimes, including 17 who served time on death row, has issued a statement which categorically concludes that the evidence upon which Willingham was convicted was not just insufficient for conviction, but actually proves he did not set the fire that killed his children. Willingham was convicted based upon the testimony of alleged arson experts and the word of a jailhouse snitch who claimed Willingham had confessed to him during pretrial detention. Subsequent analysis of the forensic evidence, much of it prior to Willingham’s execution, demonstrated appalling incompetence on the part of the fire investigators and a generally perverse reluctance on the part of the prosecution to be persuaded by reason.

Let me state for the record, that I am not opposed in principle to the concept of murderers and other egregious scum paying for their intolerable actions with their lives. There are a lot of people without whom this world would be a much better place for the rest of us and I’m not completely convinced that there is a whole lot of difference between shooting a rabid fox and electrocuting some of the people within, and perhaps outside of, our numerous prison systems. The real issue from my perspective is upon what, or whom, shall this power of life and death be bestowed? What individuals or institutions have the acumen and objectivity to ensure to a metaphysical certainty that a mistake is not going to be made in terminating a fellow human’s life? Could that be twelve average Texans? Could it be a judge elected by average Texans? Could it be a Texas prosecutor whose future professional and political prospects are tied directly to conviction rate? Would you want your life in the hands of these people if you were falsely accused of a heinous crime? Can people who believe in astrology in greater numbers than accept evolution be trusted with anything important?

I continue to find it ironic that people who typically trust the government least in all things seem to be the most ardent suportors of the state depriving citizens of their lives. It occurs to me that a whole lot of us are just sour, hateful people who have allowed our own envy, resentment and frustration at the imperfections of ourselves and others to color the way we view public policy issues. The United States is one of the few industrialized, Western nations that even still has a death penalty and yet we continue to have the highest murder rates of any “civilized” nation and we incarcerate a percentage of our population more reminisant of Communist China or the old Soviet Union. Clearly whatever we are doing with respect to crime and punishment isn’t working very well, and continuing to execute people while accepting the inherent risk of the morally objectionable prospect of offing an innocent citizen by mistake, when this approach doesn’t contribute to the welfare of our society, just doesn’t make any sense.

As with almost all controversial issues in our society there is often complexity that cannot even be properly generalized in 1000 words, let alone comprehensively explored. However, I am sure that was not what was on the mind of Cameron Todd Willingham on February 17, 2004 as he was being led to the death chamber. Willingham was far from a perfect man, but he wasn’t much worse than most of the rest of us if the truth be told, and even people who are a little rough around the edges might take exception to being accused of burning their three little girls alive. As he approached his final moments, among the fear and anger and regret there may also have been a sense that the world had lost its moral center, that people no longer cared about truth, but only sought the most convenient blame, that no one involved in his life took seriously their responsibilities to objectivity and fairness, that people were willing to accept just about any ridiculous crap as long as they weren’t troubled by intellectual effort, that he was less than human to the blood-thirsty masses yearning for a brief respite from the grinding boredom of their lives and that the State of Texas sucked. And he would have been right.

Look Out for that Axe Eugene

History is replete with ironies, if you know where to find them. Google is a pretty good place to start; you can find a lot of history by searching the web, but the irony you usually have to decipher for yourself. Searching for ironies in history can be very liberating. Like the madness of conspiracy theorists who can perceive certainty in the most insubstantial of coincidences, I can string together wholly unrelated personalities and occurrences to form a coherent schematic of human progress. Or perhaps not, depending on how relaxed your standard of logic may be, but here is an interesting tale about September 1st.

Since it is September 1, 2009 today, it was exactly 556 years ago near what is now Cordoba, Spain, the great Spanish general Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba was born. At the time of his birth, much of southern Spain was ruled by Moorish Sultans from North Africa, which distressed the Pope to no end. Not only were his beautiful churches being used as mosques, but the infidel Moslems were not paying their Pope fan club dues in a timely manner. The poor subjects of the Moorish usurpers had to suffer through with Greek philosophy, Moorish architecture, running water, honest government and Moroccan restaurants, while the God-fearing Spanish had the holy Catholic wonders of small pox and the Inquisition. It is little wonder that at an early age Fernández de Córdoba vowed to free his fellow Spaniards from the oppressive tyranny of their hash-smoking rulers.

Being of noble birth, but lacking in substantial cash reserves, Fernández de Córdoba chose a career of military service over a life in the church, perhaps because he was not attracted to children. He rapidly rose through the ranks under the tutelage of his elder brother, and was soon a part of the court of Isabella, the future Queen of Spain. He was instrumental in Spanish success in evicting the haughty and overly-cultured Moors from Granada and acquired a reputation for personal courage and sartorial splendor. The campaign to liberate Granada was a war of sieges and static defense and Fernández de Córdoba gained renown as a master of trench warfare. He was also credited with a pedantic and boring view of war where destruction of the enemy in the field was given priority over looting and raping, and where a trained, standing army was recognized as superior to an illiterate rabble of disgruntled peasants. Pretty shrewd, that Fernández de Córdoba.

Moving on then, on September 1, 1864, the City of Atlanta finally fell to advancing Union armies under the command of William Tecumseh Sherman following a nearly four-month campaign against the outnumbered forces of General Joseph E. Johnston. Johnson, like Fernández de Córdoba, was a master of static defense and had delayed Sherman and extended his vulnerable supply lines from Chattanooga to Atlanta without significant losses to his own forces. Sherman had slowly, but perhaps impatiently, maneuvered Johnston out of each succeeding impenetrable set of fortifications throughout northern Georgia, but his losses were mounting, and an increasing number of troops were required to protect the rail lines against marauding Southern cavalry and thieving hobos. In the one instance where Sherman perhaps lost his patience, he was given a bloody nose by Johnston at the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain. Incidentally, the site of the battle is now a National Battlefield Park with miles of lovely trails where hordes of transplanted Yankee yuppies go to jog so that they can maintain the physique necessary to go to Atlanta’s numerous nightclubs and induce other transplanted Yankee yuppies to fornicate with them. Who knows what Sherman would think of this?

As General Johnston prepared to sacrifice the City of Atlanta (which was, and remains perhaps, a lost cause) with the aim of preserving his army in the field to fight another day (remember Fernández de Córdoba?), he was sacked by Confederate President Jefferson Davis, who apparently preferred to lose both Atlanta and his only viable forces in the deep South. Johnston was replaced by an imbecile by the name of John Bell Hood, an adopted Texan from Kentucky who was quite possibly his own father. Hood promptly miscalculated and attacked Sherman near Jonesborough, Georgia, was repulsed with heavy losses, and escaped with what was left of his battered army to Tennessee where he was beaten several more times before he went to Mississippi and quit. Sherman finally abandoned his rail-fed supply line and marched through Georgia stealing everything the hobos hadn’t gotten first, earning the general ire of the populace and the praise of President Lincoln. He made it to Savannah, Georgia by Christmas and promptly stole all the Christmas presents. Hood got a military base in Texas named after him.

Also on September 1st, 70 years ago today, the somewhat official beginning of World War II was launched with the German invasion of Poland. The first of approximately 1,500,000 German soldiers began crossing the border into Poland in the early morning accompanied by massive air assaults which principally succeeded in killing women and children, although realistically, said women and children were probably more of a threat to the Germans than the enthusiastic Polish cavalry. France and Britain declared war on Germany and promptly suspended mail service to Berlin in retaliation. When the Soviet Union, ever the champion of workers everywhere, stylishly stabbed Poland in the back and launched their own invasion on September 17, 1939, France and Britain conveniently forgot to declare war on them.

The German campaign was a watershed event in the history of warfare with precise coordination of ground, air and naval forces and a speed and ferocity of attack not previously seen. The German “Blitzkrieg” was the forerunner of virtually all large-scale modern military actions and decisively ended the age of the trench once and for all, with the exception of Third-World countries with no expensive weapons and no sanitary sewer. The Germans later demonstrated their considerable skill at fortification busting in Belgium and France and were later on the receiving end of it when Patton smashed through the Siegfried Line and Zhukov beat the hell out of tweens and old men on his way through the very Polish lands the Germans had seized in 1939. Fernández de Córdoba would no doubt have been proud.

On September 1, 1983, the selfsame Soviet Union shot down a Korean Passenger jet, the ironically numbered Flight 007, with 269 ill-fated souls on board. The Soviets, still ever the champion of workers everywhere, initially claimed the flight was spying, but later pretty much conceded that they had fucked up and killed all those folks by accident. Among the dead was Georgia Congressman Larry McDonald, who was a cousin of General Patton and a certified lunatic. Congressman McDonald was a founding member of the John Birch Society, which was (or is maybe) a group of delusional rednecks who foresaw and feared the imposition of a socialist world government at the expense of American gun enthusiasts and anti-abortionists, sort of like Sarah Palin, who, by the way, can see Russia from her house. Spooky, huh? Anyway, I suppose it is in bad taste and ultimately counter-productive to take pleasure in the death of any human, no matter how ignorant and ill-founded their politics, but I suppose it may be ok to hope that Congressman McDonald died quickly, if unfortunately not quickly enough.

So September 1st comes and goes year after year and faithfully comprises .237 percent of our lives, a small but invaluable piece of our existence. There are 365 other such pieces, give or take, and each holds its own unique treasure of wonders and sadness. While the supply of these days is theoretically infinite, we all know that they disappear like Coney Island hotdogs on the Fourth of July, and ultimately are similarly disposed of. Historical irony or no, we are distracted from the moaning of the ghosts by the ticking of the clock.