WriteWithFire

OUR MISS NOONAN

August 9, 2009AD

Hopes dashed eternal...

In her Saturday WSJ piece, "You Are Terrifying Us," Peggy Noonan launches several graphs of common sense. It's almost as if she had once written for a prominent Republican president.

The spontaneous outpouring of anger and fear over the health care (insurance) reform bill continues to be dismissed as organized propaganda by the White House and the media. Writes Miss Noonan, "People are not automatons. They show up only if they care."

Meanwhile Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi inuends about nazi imagery at rallies (actually the international sign for banning with a swastika has been spotted -- directed at the ironfisted resolve of the Congress and White House to push this bill through by Labor Day). Baroness Boxer of the American House of Lords adds on HARDBALL that these well organized demonstrations (now that dissent is no longer patriotic) aim exclusively to "hurt the president." Miss Noonan asks rightly when did this become about the President?

It is almost as if Miss Noonan was -- a year or so late -- beginning to stand up to the attacks on middle class concerns, middle class values, middle class entitlement to participation in the political process. That is a middleclassism not inherently evil as the President's former pastor once ranted.

As I read sentence after sentence I could almost hear President Reagan himself speaking these Noonan lines as he had so many times before.

Miss Noonan even acknowledges the tactics of the Congress and White House to put enemies of the bill on notice -- and record. The most revealing being flag@whitehouse.gov -- email in what your coworkers, friends, parishoners and parents are saying. Obama wants to know. And he's taking names. It just may have been the kind of thing Nixon would have done if he'd had the technology.

To anyone who has done time in unions or law school or the media -- all three for me -- none of this would be surprising. It shouldn't be surprising to anyone who has bothered to inform herself on how things work in American institutions -- for decades now.

Miss Noonan's anxieties calm in the last and fifth column of her Saturday morning essay.

The Democrats, writes Miss Noonan, should think about "backing off." When they have had the higher ground, have the Democrats ever done that? She begs for time and consideration to be given to the one thousand page bill. As if the Democrats would do that ordinarily but since so many are suffering we have to do it now. Rep. John Conyers, the pride of Michigan's delegation, gloated on camera that he would waste no time reading the bill, even if he had two lawyers and the weeks to do it. How much clearer can the Democrat's agenda be to Miss Noonan?

In her My Little Pony world of unfailing sweetness and reason, she thinks the Democrats care what they look like; that they want to look deliberate and thoughtful and responsive.

I'm a goldfish gasping on a hot Cambridge sidewalk. At what time and in what parallel dimension has this ever happened. She expects reason and manners from the left. What is she drinking from her sippy cup?

Meanwhile she lectures the protesters not to get "too hot." She praises, sort of, the "great democratic yawp." But worries that the meetings will get angrier and angrier. She acknowledges that AFL-CIO president John Sweeney (like Castro, president for decades) is sending in union members (not the petite lady labor lawyers I'm guessing) to these town hall meetings. No union enforcers would dare intimidate ordinary people, much less thoughtful union members...

Finally, she claims we are in uncharted territory. In what sense is the democratic process uncharted territory? We have been here before, yea even unto colonial times. Whether it was hundreds of thousands of Black Americans or World War I veterans, or LA streets clogged with illegal aliens or gay activists. The town hall meetings look less like the Boston Tea Party and more like a Jodi Picoult book club in comparison to twentieth century activism. These people are mostly the middle class after all. Many of whom wear Dockers and Skechers -- not suits and dresses from the the upper floors of the Wall Street Brooks Brothers.

Let's hope "it doesn't turn dark" she writes at the end. It is dark Miss Noonan. Progressivism's bottomless lust for control gets dark indeed. But when it was all light and hope and change you should have seen this coming. Tens of millions of other Americans did.

Sam Macomb

RETURN OF THE "CHRIST FIGURE": Optimus Prime's Alien Trinity

August 8, 2009AD

I first came across Catholic magazines such as Commonweal and America in the small library of a high school seminiary I attended for two years in the last sixties. For awhile it seemed that almost every movie review identified a "Christ figure" in one protagonist or another. In Cool Hand Luke, Paul Newman's serial recidivist is actually laid out on a wooden table, arms outstretched as in a crucifiction. Certainly the movies gave the Jesuit reviewers plenty of symbolic raw material. At the end of Omega Man, again, Charleton Heston makes the ultimate sacrifice and lays sprawled in a public fountain, arms stretched out, a man broken on the cross.

You don't read that sort of thing anymore. Catholic reviewers still strain after threads and crumbs of Christianity in the movies even as the movies are as likely to attack the faith as consciously or no retell the Story.

So, on one of those beautiful summer evenings that have blessed a troubled metropolitan Detroit the past two months, I went to the movies expecting no more than I should.

John Candy's Canadian redneck movie reviewer would not be disappointed. Things "blow up real good" loudly and often in Michael Bay's TRANSFORMERS: Revenge of the Fallen.

But there it is in the final act: the Christ Figure. Optimus Prime, father figure -- spiritual savior? -- to so many boys of the 1980s is killed. If that's the right word for an alien robot. Sam Witwicki, the Autobot Transformers' first ally in the war against the Decepticons, himself dies attempting to get an alien deviced that will ressurect Optimus. He is brought to life in time to save the greatest of the Transformer autobots. Making the imagery more narratively complex than in those old 60's movies with anti-hero messiahs.

But even as the return of the Christ figure occured to me, I realized that Optimus Prime is more than that. He and his alien 'bots are the last of the descendants of the creations of the Allspark -- something between the Creator and George Lucas' Force. Optimus is also the Father figure to Sam; and his Inspiration. An alien trinity...

Is Michael Bay a crypto-Catholic insurgent in Hollywood? That's hard to believe. His alien trinity is no more a theological stretch than Newman's Cool Hand Luke whose supernatural powers are manifest in a hard-boiled egg eating contest. Luke also dies in the end, but I was never quite sure for what?

Michael Bay has been here before in THE ISLAND. A movie that he vehemently denies is pro-life. But the imagery is just as graphic as in TRANSFORMERS. There is a long-shot lottery of life that parallels the current crap shoot many of the unborn face every day -- and 4,000 lose. Then there are the great, wet placentas in which clones are gestated. In one scene a sack is violently destroyed. And certainly the movie asks hard questions about the bio-ethics of modern medical research and technology. (The movie was one of Bay's rare failures at the box office.)

The biggest surprise -- even if Bay wants to have it both ways -- is his treatment of Sam's romance with the girl he leaves behind to go to college. There's lots of innuendo; if you can use that word in Bay's sex-soaked coed world. A good portion of the movie set up involves Sam's strenuous refusal of easy sexual availability. He is in his own words to an astonished dad, "a one-girl boy."

Bay says he now wants to take a breather from hardware movies and do a "small film." Yet long before he made that admission, the French film journal Cahiers du Cinema published a piece proposing him as something more than a hawker of popcorn and Raisonettes. The French are perverse and the "daughter of the Church" has been wayward in post-war France, yet I am sypathetic with at least one francophone writer's exasperation with American pretentiousness that has now migrated from fiction to film. Even if he's just indulging a post-modern goof to meet a deadline.

There is a reason I went to see TRANSFOMERS and not the latest drama-free, post-angst timewaster from otherwise unemployable graduates of Hollywood on Washington Square. Like B.R. Myer's in his READERS MANIFESTO -- I just can't take it anymore.

Sam Macomb

THE ENEMY WITHIN

August 1, 2009AD

"It is so easy to be solemn; it is so hard to be frivolous." G.K. Chesterton, THE CASE FOR THE EPHEMERAL

For all of my conscious life I have watched things being destroyed in the name of justice and freedom. Perhaps as early as first grade...

A grim thought that may confirm Mr. Chesterton's observation to which I take exception only in this: sometimes it is too hard to be frivolous; and only possible to be solemn.

Chesterton was writing about his deadline essays, mostly on the frivolous, the "timely," the ephemeral.

But there is another kind of ephemera. At the very late date for Detroit of July 30, 2009, the Detroit News expensed consideral ink for words and photos on a story about the Klu Klux Klan. It's "on the rise" and on the move "reportedly" (the News' careful qualification).

A longtime resident and small businessman who died in 1990 has been revealed to have been an active member of the Klan. In the late 20th century active usually meant that you went to meetings; exchanged casual racial, religious, and ethnic epithets -- with the occasional embarassing rant -- and then went back to work the next door along side blacks, Catholics, tribal peoples and all the other targets of your evening bigotry.

Jim Burwell was a bit different. He was -- by description if not acknowledgment -- a community activist. He tried to help black ex-cons; he drove black kids to church; he was praised by the progressive Detroit establishment, including the News, the Archdiocese of Detroit, New Detroit etc.

His membership in the Klan is confirmed by papers and even a sheet that he left behind in his business garage on Cass Avenue. The garage is now boarded up -- like much of the "Corridor." Much of the city in fact. When a million people move away that leaves a lot of empty homes and businesses and churches and synagogues, and even Klan halls.

Was Mr. Burwell a racist? A private one mostly. The article does not speculate on the why of his philanthropy toward black Detroiters. It may very well have been insurance. Break-ins, robberies, assaults were and are common. As the comings and goings (always the goings) of a series of immigrant groups and their pawn shops, liquor stores, and gas stations attests. Burwell may not have liked immigrants (the issue that has "reportedly" revived the Klan in Michigan), but he acted like one. Smarter really. Less provincial than new Americans can often be. But street smarts, as necessary as they are in our large dying, devasted, and utlimately abandoned cities, have an endgame. Cynicism.

One civil rights activist quoted in the article is a former Black Panther. The Panthers across the country have their own narrative. Lunch and after school programs for children; drugs, violences, gunrunning, and murder for their parents. Not surprisingly, the News does not touch on that history.

Except that Jim Burwell did not break the law in Detroit. He did some good things with impure motives. The article ends with his death after seeing justice done for a 20-year-old woman who was murdered by her husband. Burwell knew he had done it. The Detroit Police -- consistent with their historic 50% homicide clearance rate -- refused again and again to investigate. But, on Sept. 28, 1990, justice was done four years after the murder. Jim Burwell went to the courthouse (Justice Centers now), heard the sentencing, went to his business, and died at age 62.

Was Mr. Burwell at peace with himself and his God? No one but Burwell and his God know. But at least one murder was avenged in Detroit. That's more can be said for the numerous children shot in recent years in drivebys.

The Klan is an organization long since run to ground by various law enforcement and civil rights groups. Whatever resurgence today would be nugatory. The days of nightriders lynching black men and terrorizing black women and children are over. And if illegal immigration is their rallying cry, well it is the immigrants themselves who flood the streets by the hundreds of thousands in highly-organized demonstrations. The Klan is today, let us face it, pathetic. There is in evil an inevitable self destruction. An enemy within.

But who is the enemy of Black Detroiters now? The Klan narrative, revived at a time when the city's schools are in bankruptcy, the city council marbled with the fat of corruption, the automobile industry transformed into nonprofits, the former mayor just released from prison, and and and... This media revival is bizarre in contemporary Detroit. Perhaps it is too painful to see so much enfeeblement, so much decline in the horse you backed for so long.

To look at the city today is to see a result indistinguishable from racism. But old enemies, clear battle lines -- it is an irresistable nostalgia for old miseries. The physical decay, the dysfunctional and dirty schools, the council president on the take and facing prison -- her husband safely esconced in the House of Representatives -- the whole reliquary of failure and moral squalor requires blind devotion to what Shelby Steele calls the "cultural narrative." This narrative will not brook deviation as we saw with President Obama and Prof. Gates recently. The News may sometimes digress into criticism of "black nationalism," but in Thursday's paper, it returned to the story line. The back story being too painful.

Mr. Steele writes that of the three principles in the dramatis personae of the Harvard farce, only Sgt. James Crowley "functioned outside his cultural narrative." Could not the same be said for Jim Burwell?

The Klan is 21st century ephemera in the service of the maintaining the status quo. That requires keeping within the narrative. No matter what the cost.

As for my personal conclusion. Like some 1990s Hollywood action hero -- keep to the objective no matter how high the body count. And if not bodies, then those institutions that aimed to encourage our better selves. But the public school, the publishing industry, the law school, even the Church, have been devastated by a pursuit of justice that, like Detroit itself, can be indistinguisable from considered revenge. In the ideological triage of the bloody aftermath, the pragmatic and the cynical are blamed for accepting the terms of survival and abandoned to the judgements of the Narrative.

Sam Macomb