When Is a Terrorist Invisible? When he's White

Who’s a “terrorist?” Some middle-aged white guy who uses his assault rifle to murder a dozen people in a school? No, no, no! That’s not a terrorist!

A terrorist is somebody who has a name that sounds brown. And here's how the fascist propagandists at Fox News work that particular trick.

Urning Laughs With "Leaving Iowa"

The cast of "Leaving Iowa:" l to r,  Halbe, Piescinski, Bennett, Mattingly, Mason and Ramsey.

Bart Rettberg, Mike Finney and I saw the Charleston Community Theatre-Tarble Arts Center production of Leaving Iowa.

Director Cathy Sheagren has chosen herself an excellent cast in Matt Mattingly, Tim Mason, Victoria Bennett, Leah Piescinski, Earl Halbe and Faith Ramsey. Tim Clue and Spike Manton’s comedy, about a writer’s prosaic odyssey with his dad’s long-lost funeral urn, is the familiar stuff of family sitcoms. Mattingly and Mason bring reality to the zaniness with their characteristic naturalism, while Halbe brings a lot of laughs with his Don Knotts-like bits.

The Avengers: An Anthem to Courage

Alan Silvestri's soundtrack for the 2012 film "The Avengers" is featured in the link

To stir the spirit, lift the chin and put steel up the spine, click here.

"The Equalizer:" Style Without Surprises

Denzel Washington as the Zen-ish assassin-saint Robert McCall in "The Equalizer"

Bart, Mike and I went to see The Equalizer, a thriller based on the well-regarded Edward Woodward TV series from the 1980s about Robert McCall, a retired spy who relieves himself of some unspoken guilt by evening the odds for endangered underdogs .

Call this one “Jason Bourne meets Larry Crowne.” It’s stylishly filmed, explicitly violent and a tad too predictable. Denzel Washington is interesting, though, as a kind of assassin-saint whose enclosed, Zen-like existence includes a spartan apartment, an under-the-radar job at a Home Depot-like store and a stillness and inner balance that the bad guys are unwise to upset. 

Chloë Grace Moretz is appealing as the vulnerable young prostitute McCall protects and Antoine Fuqua’s intelligent direction keeps the eye engaged. Still, nothing in the film quite equals the frisson that the utterly convincing Woodward would inspire when he'd say, with clipped, English precision, "We have a problem, you and I. And you're not going to like what I do about it. Not One. Little. Bit."

Happiness Is Within

Photo by Cam Simpson

In modern society most of us don't want to be in touch with ourselves; we want to be in touch with other things like religion, sports, politics, a book - we want to forget ourselves. Anytime we have leisure, we want to invite something else to enter us, opening ourselves to the television and telling the television to come and colonize us.

Many people think excitement is happiness.... But when you are excited you are not peaceful. True happiness is based on peace. When we are mindful, deeply in touch with the present moment, our understanding of what is going on deepens, and we begin to be filled with acceptance, joy, peace and love.

— Thich Nhat Hanh

On the Path

Mindfulness means being aware of how you're deploying your attention and making decisions about it, and not letting the tweet or the buzzing of your BlackBerry call your attention.
— Howard Rheingold

'Mad Men' Then, Sad Men Now

Jon Hamm as Don Draper in "Mad Men"

“Real wages have fallen since Don Draper’s heyday, especially for American men and double-especially for the middle-class and working-class white men who were once the bulwarks of the mid-century model of adulthood,” wrote Andrew O’Hehir. “We now live in a culture … of diminished expectations and permanent underemployment, where many or most young people will never be as affluent as their parents. Lifetime job security is an antediluvian delusion, and in many metropolitan areas home ownership is out of reach for all but the rich. It’s just as useless to object to those changes as it is to complain about grownups reading Harry Potter books, but certainly those things were the essential underpinnings of classic adulthood, and without them it’s no surprise to see the old order fading away.” 
“(T)o use Scott’s schema, the old-style masculine adult clearly thought of himself as productive first and foremost, even if (like Don Draper) he was actually a species of cultural parasite. The consumer, on the other hand, is a distinctly childlike figure, a dependent who demands pleasurable stimulus 24/7 from the comforting and/or imprisoning info-bubble around him. ‘The elevation of every individual’s inarguable likes and dislikes over formal critical discourse, the unassailable ascendancy of the fan, has made children of us all,’ Scott writes. ‘We have our favorite toys, books, movies, video games, songs, and we are as apt to turn to them for comfort as for challenge or enlightenment.’”
This same infantilization-by-market is a reason why adult American males now treat real guns as if they were toy guns.