What is the Difference?

I have been wondering lately, especially after the U.S. Republican candidate Mr. Romney's recent appearance on "Meet the Press", why is his party so repugnant to me.

It is not really policy, or at least implementable policy.  As Romney admitted, he would keep the parts of President Obama's Medical Insurance Program (otherwise known as Obamacare) that made sense.  After all, he said reasonably, the cost of medical care is really out of control.  This comment must have infuriated the Libertarian faction - and the 1% must be fuming.  Imagine paying for someone's troubles.

As well, Romney mentioned that it was not feasible to attack the debt issue in the next four years.  It would hurt the economy too much.  Duh!

So it is not policy that is the difference.  Rather it is the stench of racism, of xenophobia and misogyny, that emanates from the fringes of the party (one hopes at least) that is the problem.

The Big Tent Republican Party is a fantasy.  The reality of its arrogance and lack of empathy is astounding.

The Wizard of Washington

Opening Scene:

Mitt and Paul are on stage in a conference center in Tampa, basking in applause.  A ferocious wind starts blowing,

Mitt:  What's happening?

Paul:  I don't know.

The storm rages about the two politicians, lifting them into the air, sending them twirling and spinning through space and time for a good long while.  Finally, they land in a lush green field.

Mitt:  What is this place?  Where are we?

He notices a small dog running around and through his legs.

Mitt:  Get this darn dog away from me.  Tie it up, for JC's sake.

Dog:  Mitt, it's me Paul.  Yip, yip yip.

Mitt:  Oh my Paul,  What has happened to you?  You used to be taller and more photogenic.  Where are we, Paul?

Paul:  I don't know, but if there's minimal goverment interference, it could be a capitalist paradise!

A magnificent figure clad in white appears before them.  It is a stupendous sight, although a little creepy in that the figure has two heads.

Mitt:  We must have entered the Celestial Temple.  Or is that an elder of the LDS?  or is that Donny and Marie?

Figure:  We are the Good Witch of the Republican Party (Libertarian faction).  Also known as the Koch brothers, multi-billionaires and funders of various SuperPACS.

Paul: I prostate myself before my heroes!  Yip, yip, yip.

Mitt:  Oh good witch, how do we return to Tampa so I can be crowned President?

Good Witch:  You must follow the Yellow Brick Road.  It was paved with our money and the blood, sweat and tears of good God-fearing Americans.  We have left various multi-millions donations for you along the way - so don't get lost.  And remember the money belongs to the SuperPacs so it cannot be directly aligned with your campaign (nudge nudge wink wink)

Mitt (awkwardly trying to wink back):  Right.  Thanks.

Paul:  Yip, yip, yip.

The pair walk down the Yellow Brick Road for a bit, then Mitt sees a scarecrow in a nearby field.

Scarecrow:  Help!  Help! Get me down.

Mitt:  Is that you Sarah Palin?  What are you doing in there?

Sarah:  I'm scaring the crows...

Mitt:  How do you do that?

Sarah:  Usually, I just say the first thing that comes into my head.

Mitt:  That would work.  Here, let me help you down.

Paul:  I think you're going to regret this Mitt.  Yip, yip, yip.

Mitt:  I can't just leave her here.  It's not the Christian thing to do.

Sarah:  I wish I could figure out how to get myself down.  Oh if I only had a brain.

Paul: I could not have said that any better.

Mitt helps Sarah down out of the field and the three continue down the path.  A little while later, they encounter what appears to be a figure in rusted armour blocking the road.

Paul:  Don't tell ne it's another goverment program subsidising obsolete knights or something.  We need to cut, Mitt, cut, cut cut.  Yip, yip, yip.

Mitt:  Karl?  Karl Rove?  Is that you?

Karl:  Mmmmph!

Mitt:  I think his mouth is rusted over.  Do anyone have any oil?

Sarah:  Drill, drill, drill!

The good witch appears from west, points to an oil can beside the road, then disappears.

Paul:  Thank god for SuperPacs!  Yip, yip, yip.

Mitt grabs the oil can and begins to lubricate Karl's various stiff parts.

Sarah:  This is kind of risque.  I can't look.

She turns away but keeps leering back to watch.  Finally, Karl's lips are limber enough to talk.

Karl:  Thank the Republican Party.  I thought I was doomed when that rain storm caught me flat-footed.  (he looks sad and introspective for a moment).  Sometimes, I wish I had a heart.

Paul:  Karl, you got the Shrub elected.  Twice!  And you masterminded the SuperPAC concept.  What could you possibly need a heart for?

Karl:  Oh yeah right.

The four merrily continue on their way.  They see a figure hiding, crouched behind a bush.

Figure: ROAR!  I am the voice of the Republican Party!

Mitt:  Rush.  Rush Limbaugh, is that you?

A man in a lion suit emerges from behind the bush, brushing off leaves from his chest.  He takes a fighting stances and waves his fists in the air.

Rush:  Put em up.  Put em up.

Mitt:  What are you doing Rush!  We are your friends.

Rush:  Right.  But I need a controversy for rating's week.  Who is that woman there?  Is that the whore who wants free contraceptives?  Give me a piece of her.  Course, next thing you know, she'l be wanting the right to determine the fate of her own body!  HA! HA! HA!

Mitt:  You know, Rush, women have rights too, I think.  Isn't that right Karl?

Karl:  Well within limits. They do need to cook, clean and raise the children, remember.

 Sarah: Something is not quite right there, Karl,  Now where is that brain of mine?

Rush (looking sad and pensive):  Sometimes I wish I was really brave, had some true courage of conviction, instead of just being a big bully all the time!

Paul:  Who are you kidding now?  Yip, yip, yip.

The motley crew of five continue down the road.  A figure in black appears out the sky.  It is the Wicked Witch of the Liberal East.  It is Barack Obama, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.

Barack:  Stop there.  Mitt, I want those shoes.

Mitt (looking down at his shoes):  My shoes?  I just had them polished.

Rush:  Put em up, Obama,

Paul:  Let's debate the budget details again, Barack.  It gets me all excited. Yip, yip, yip.

Karl:  Hah hah.  Our SuperPAC is bigger than yours.

Sarah.  Our drills are bigger than yours.

Barack.  See you clowns in November.

Karl (whispering):  Let's throw a bucket of negative advertising on this guy...

Obama goes up in flames.

All Together (chanting):  Burn! Burn! Burn!

Sarah:  Ooh!   This is somewhat disturbing.

Karl:  Ok, let' s go to next scene right now.

Further down the road, they encounter a town full of little people.

Mitt: Who or what are these?

Paul: I think they are the 99%.  Let's cut Medicaid on these Munchkins.

Karl:  C'mon quick. Let's go another way.

Mitt:  No. No.  I want to get to know them.   (he strides forward)  Little people, hello,  where are you from?  Lithuania, I'm sure.  Anyway, I am Mitt Romney and I approve this message,  Obama is burnt toast (no pun intended) and I promise to lower taxes for the rich and cut all goverment services except the military.  This will somehow create jobs, reduce the debt, and give you all access to great television programs, processed food and cheap goods made in China. (he bows to the cheering of the multitudes).

Eventually they reach the Emerald City of Washington.  As they fight through the lobbyist contigent, they enter the castle of the mighty wizard.

Mitt:  Great wizard of Washington, we need to get back to Tampa so I can be crowned President.  Can you help us?

Sarah:  What about my brain?

Karl:  And my heart?

Rush:  And my courage?

Mitt: Screw those things.  They're not important.  I need to get back to Tampa (stamps his feet).

The curtain is pulled back to reveal the wizard.  It looks a lot like Ronald Reagan ressurected.

Ronald:  Mitt, I have Air Force One warming up.  Hop on and I'll fly you back,

Mitt:  C'mon Paul let's get on the plane.

Paul:  No, we need to cut this governmnent waste..  No more Air Force One.  Sorry.

Mitt: What do you mean? No more Air Force One, are you kidding me?

Paul jumps our of Mitt's arms and runs away.  The plane starts moving up the runway,

Ron:  Hurry up, Mitt.

Mitt looks at the plane, then back at Paul forlornly.

Karl:  The shoes, Mitt, the shoes,  I understand what Obama wanted.  Click the heels three times and you can have everything you want.

Mitt:  Screw the shoe mysticism, Karl,  I'm taking the plane.

Mitt runs up the stairs into the plane.  The door closed and it takes off.

Paul:  No.  Oh Mitt no!

Sarah: I guess the bromance is over.

Karl:  Wait 'til he finds out the airport in Tampa is closed...


The End

Two out of the 1%

The November 28, 2011 New Yorker presents two juxtaposing profiles of talented, ambitious, and very successful men.

Mark Thiel is an entrepreneur turned Silicon Valley venture capitalist and Wall Street Hedge Fund manager. He cofounded Paypal (which he sold and made heaps of money) , then started the Venture Capital firm which most famously funded a startup called Facebook . Thiel negotiated an 8% share in Facebook from that, which is worth a bit, though he complains that the actor who played his character in "The Social Network" made him look older. His hedge fund managed billions of dollars, his net worth soared into the nine figure range (at least until the 2008 crash); Thiel was the epitome of the American Dream, a self-made billionaire, a Libertarian who distrusts government and thinks taxes are counter productive.

JR is an "art star", an artist whose works will sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars. He is fr om France. born of immigrant parents in the suburbs now famous for the recent riots. JR's anti-establishment roots stem back to his graffiti-tagging adolescence, though it is now expressed through a combination of photography and audacity. He rose to fame in 2008, when he travelled to a hillside slum (favela) in Rio de Janeiro, and pasted giant photographs of its residents' "eyes" on the sides of the shacks. These eyes look down on the rest of the city, both rich and poor, proclaiming the existence of these people who had been ignored for so long. JR has since gone to similar guerrilla art projects in other desolate neighbourhoods of Sudan, Cambodia, and India. He is a recent winner of the TED award, a $100,000 prize designed to help the recipient achieve "one wish that can change the world".

Both Thiel and JR share a worldview that is suspicious of authority, of the "elites" that run the world (or at least plunder the vast majority of its resources); however, this worldview is expressed in opposite ways. Thiel's libertarian beliefs stems from a contrarian streak which leads him to oppose the common wisdom, or in at least one case, common sense. His hedge fund was especially devastated by the 2008 financial crash, as he refused to pull out the stock market as it crumbled. Thiel stubbornly refused to believe what everyone else couldn't help but see, and continued to invest. And then he finally changed course , too late, shorting his positions just as the tepid recovery took hold. Thiel's reputation as a "golden boy of finance" inevitably suffered as a result, yet his model of the world didn't change. If anything, his contrariness has multiplied. He funded the Thiel awards, a series of $100,000 grants to would-be entrepreneurs under 20 years of age - in his view, the educational institutions of the U.S. work to stifle technological creativity. He has poured investment money to increasingly utopian projects, such as research into robotics, nanotechnology, and lifespan extension. Of course, Thiel's version of utopia revolves around automation, luxury and living forever. A fantastic dream for the rich, but even he's not sure how it will relate to the 'common man'. In fact, he knows it will lead to fewer jobs, fewer opportunities - simply a more dire version of the present - except for the elite he supposedly despises...

JR's anti-authoritarian inclinations are more populist in nature. His art is a means to bring culture to the world, especially the developing parts of it, to give a voice to people who are too often ignored. And he doesn't seem to be doing for the money or the fame. He strictly avoids any hint of corporate sponsorship and directs the media to interview the subjects of his art, not himself. JR has donated the $100,000 TED award to a charity, and is selling pieces of his own art to fund his next project, "Inside Out", an ambitious venture where he asks people to send him their photographs. He will then return a poster ready for pasting. It is an project that does not revolve around JR's art or ego, that seeks to involve the entire world (or at least a part of the world that would be interested).

And so, we have these portraits of two persons who seek to "change the world". As JR mentions in his TED talk, business (and money) change the world all the time - but not always for the better.

I'll end with a provocative quote from the New Yorker article on Thiel: "The libertarian worship of individual freedom and contempt for social convention, comes easiest to people who have never really had to grow up."

The Kingdom of Infinite Space by Raymond Tallis

It was the title that seduced me. "The Kingdom of Infinite Space" - subtitled "A portrait of your head". Yet it was not the exploration of the mind-brain duality that I'd presumed. No, the book is unfortunately more of a novelty act - a treatise on the head that attempts to ignore the brain as much as humanly possible. This leaves the reader dealing with a polemic of the various inputs and outputs of the heads. Sounds, sights, touches, tastes and smells vie for attention with mucus, saliva, ear wax, and tears. All that was missing was an ode to a pimple.

Mr. Tallis is also an earnest philosopher who shyly disguises his thoughts behind silly chapter titles like "A first truly philosophical digression" or the like. Combined with his penchant for incomprehensible (to me) Briticisms and unavoidable "heady" puns, it becomes hard to take his writing seriously. Apart from a semi-passionate (and thus semi-entertaining) rant left for the last chapter on the "location of thought", this book truly headed off in mostly wrong directions.

The Visitor

The Visitor is a small indie film that adeptly examines the theme suggested by its spare title from a couple of different levels. There is the college professor who has given up on living, he's merely visiting his life. And then there's the refugees in the U.S.A., hoping for a chance at a better life, but relegated to a surreal limbo-like existence, outside of the official bureaucracy.

Richard Jenkins stars as the barely alive college professor - inspired casting given his experience as the spiritual dad in the classic tv series, Six Feet Under. What kind of actor, by the way, takes a role in a series where his character is killed off in the first scene? Okay, granted, his ghostly presence made regular on-screen returns, but still.

Unknown to the professor, a refugee couple have rented out his Manhattan apartment (we never find out why exactly he maintains an apartment in NYC which he rarely visits - something to do with his late wife, we presume). The professor shows up for a conference. Surprise! Surprise! But he lets the couple stay. Tarek is from Syria - a musician specializing in African drum - a form of music that captivates the professor and gradually re-invigorates the professor's life - that and a visit from the Tarek's mother.

To its credit, the movie does not engage in any heavy-handed proselytism of the evils of the refugee process. It simply presents the refugees as people - and lets the circumstance and treatment speak for itself. "Everything changed after 9-11," one character remarks. Perhaps, but there has to be a better way to address the plight of these human beings.

Doubt

The film, Doubt, based on the play of the same name written by John Patrick Shanley, tackles a controversial topic by shrouding it in layers of uncertainty and, of course, doubt. The storyline contrasts the dagger of suspicion against the presumption of innocence. Yet, by choosing such a button-pushing subject, the purported sexual abuse of an altar boy by a Catholic priest, the author casts illumination on his theme, while simultaneously introducing complexities that deflect from the central issue. Questions of race and motherhood, spreading an implication that the boy - and thereby accusing all such victims - brought the abuse upon himself.

"It's his character," the mother defends and lashes out in the same breath, "just leave it alone, let him graduate in six months."

This melodrama - unbelievable and socially unacceptable, yet tugging at threads of race and impoverished hope - highlights another problem with this story. It is a not a piece of fiction for fans of subtle intricate plots - no, the archetypes are front and center, the contrasts obvious, the dialogue rising to a crescendo at the end of every scene. The cold wind blows through doors and windows left ajar, a disapproving god chilling the hearts of his wayward servants, lost and full of doubt.

On the positive side, this filmic adaptation of the original play is visually stunning, making the most of the change in medium. And the acting is stellar - Meryl Streep inhabits the role of the morally superior nun with headstrong certainty (at least until the final scene), while Philip Seymour Hoffman portrays the priest with a believable combination of sanctimony and not-quite-innocent vulnerability.

Burn after Reading

Finally, an intelligent comedy that engenders some real laughs. Burn after Reading is a dark, sarcastic take on the internal workings of the CIA. Created from the warped minds of the Coen brothers, the film alternates between absurdist reality and out-of-control hilarity. Imagine the movie Get Smart if the Coen brothers had been given control. J.K. Simmons is perfectly cast as the incredulous upper management type (e.g. the Chief), while John Malkovitch rages as the intellectually pompous (and alcoholic) ex-agent whose firing triggers the ridiculously simple plot. The only false step is provided by Brad Pitt whose over-the-top portrayal of a semi-moronic fitness instructor reminded me too much of his tick-ridden psych inmate from the classic Twelve Monkees.