How We Declared War On Syria (Or Didn't)
I think no current issue showcases the absolute dysfunction of American politics than Syria.
Before we continue, let us just admit that Syria’s a shit sandwich. Each side appears to be happy to slaughter thousands of Syrians, and neither side appears to love America. If we invade unilaterally, our best hope of war seems to be some kind of Iraq-style situation where we commit enough troops to basically sit on a powderkeg and hope we starve the fire of oxygen: expensive, bloodier than we’d like, and probably causing a lot of festering resentment at the US of A. If we don’t go in, then we send the message that hey, maybe chemical weapons are back on the table, and every war from now on becomes even more horrific. Plus, we basically say, “Hey, if you guys wanna commit atrocities on each other, that’s none of our business!”
No matter what we do, it sucks. Can we just acknowledge this as adults? That literally no matter what Obama or the Republicans chose to do, it would have ugly costs that nobody wanted?
Thank you.
But the thing that strikes me about Syria is that we don’t even know what our own politicians want. I’ve heard Obama being called another bloodthirsty warmonger and a man with secret hopes of peace. He went to Congress to get authorization to go to war, but we all know Congress couldn’t zip its fly after dribbling pee down its pants.
Was that the act of a man hoping to hand his war plans to a Congress he fully expected to bobble it, so he could tell the world, “Well, I wanted to go to war but they said no?” Was it a man who was hoping to call Republicans out, forcing them to see the gravity of the situation so they’d have to stop dicking around for FOX news and vote rationally? Was it a man who, unable to carry out his war-crazed agenda on a war-weary public, reluctantly shuffled off to Congress in a last-ditch effort to get the missiles flying?
We have hit the point in American politics where we can tell you precisely what our politicians are doing, but can’t even formulate a consistent theory as to why. Motivations have ceased to exist in the ridiculous Crossfire wind where existing biases and relentless 24/7 coverage has obscured any hope of understanding why anyone did anything.
And then Syria caved? Or did they? Is it a delaying tactic inspired by Russia? What the hell.
I’m not saying politics is simple: it’s always been hard discerning someone’s true motivations. But this is the first time I can recall a President has asked for authorization to go to war and there’s a very reasonable case to be made that he does not in fact want to go to war, that he’s counting on a dysfunctional Congress to fuck it up so he doesn’t have to. This could well be the moral equivalent of the husband who hates doing laundry, so he does a load where the whites all emerge pink and the wife sighs, “Oh, for God’s sake, forget it.”
How much does Obama want war? Fuck if I know. And I don’t think anyone has a clear opinion on that except for Obama, and maybe not even him.
Comments That Bother Me, Part 1.
So I head to a personal essay that’s been widely linked around the ‘net – the heartfelt discussion of a problem someone has with a culture. It has hundreds of comments from people going, “Oh God yes, I know exactly how that feels” and “Thanks for putting this into words” and linkbacks saying “She says it for me.”
Then you drill down and you find this:
“I don’t get this. I’ve never met anyone who complained about this before. Who would feel this way?”
Maybe the hundreds of other people who already left comments, you dope.
Look, I get being surprised when someone violently hates something that doesn’t bother you. That happens to me all the time. And many times, I think what they’re complaining about is overblown, their griping sans merit.
But if I see an essay that has five hundred likes on Facebook, I don’t deny the feeling exists. The fact that I have never encountered it before does not mean that, quantum-style, it failed to be before I clapped my googly little eyes on it. It means I never ran into anyone with this opinion, which is an entirely different thing.
And when someone leaves a comment like this, I wonder: no wonder you didn’t meet anyone like this before. You just met one right now, along with a battalion of cheering admirers, and you just fucking erased them. Can you halt for a moment to note your own blithering, Magoo-like blindness?
The evidence is literally before your eyes. You may not agree with these people, but for fuck’s sake, at least acknowledge them.
Oscarbait: Some Ramblings, With Bonus "The Butler" Musings
So we saw The Butler this weekend, a movie that’s tailor-made Oscarbait. And after some Twitter-discussions with Monty Ashley, who thought “Oscarbait” was a negative term, I wanted to discuss what I think Oscarbait is. Because it’s a weird little topic, the studios making a certain type of film in the hopes of getting Oscars (and hence more cash).
Because here’s the deal: Monty said that “Oscarbait” was a “noun, used to describe a movie of high quality that the speaker nevertheless wants to describe in a derogatory fashion.” The problem is that most Oscarbait movies aren’t of high quality. It’s said that the failure mode of “sarcasm” is “asshole,” and the failure mode of “Oscarbait” is “tedious drama.” Few people would argue that “Radio” (starring Cuba Gooding) or “The Lovely Bones” were quality films beyond the obvious definition of “made by professionals without any Plan 9-style errors,” but damn if someone in the production company wasn’t hoping for Oscar gold.
The problem is that not all Oscarbait movies are bad, either. I loved “The King’s Speech,” but it was pretty goddamned blatant. Likewise, I loved “The Pianist” when I rewatched it the other day. You can be Oscarbait and not Oscar-worthy, but the two are not inextricably linked in either direction.
So what is Oscarbait? Having thought about it, the usual Oscarbait traits are:
1) A Sweeping Historical Drama, or:
2) A Biopic About A Serious Historical Figure And/Or Artist, or;
3) A Story About Ordinary People Facing Serious Challenges, Like Drug Addiction or Retardation or Attention Deficit Disorder;
4) Starring and/or directed by many more than one previous Oscar nominee;
5) That is Very Serious.
Obviously, you don’t need to have all of them to qualify: “The Lovely Bones” was #4 and #5, but obviously not #1 or #2. But as I said to Monty, the Oscars have a distinct preference for dramatic, humorless tearjerkers. “Best Picture” is almost invariably defined as “Best Drama” in Oscar terms (although thankfully, the Drama definition is fluid enough to overlap with also-funny movies like “Silver Linings Playbook” and with action-tinged films like “The Departed” and “Argo.”).
Yet the fact is, there were many good movies that would never get an Oscar nomination. I think we can all agree that “Die Hard” is perhaps one of the greatest action movies ever, but can you imagine it getting an Oscar nomination for Best Picture? “The Dark Knight Rises” was a tense action thriller that also happened to star Batman, but would it get nominated? Nope. “The Hangover” and “Galaxy Quest” and “Shaun of the Dead” and “21 Jump Street” were all great comedies, but do comedies get nominated?
…when was the last time a horror movie got nominated? Are we saying there have been no high-quality horror movies since “Silence of the Lambs”?
As Monty correctly points out, your best way of guaranteeing an Oscar nomination is to make a great fucking film. But nobody knows how to make those – and even if you did, you could make the greatest teenaged road trip fart comedy in history and still not glimpse the gold. So instead, studios angle their Oscary cash towards making films the Oscar people are biased towards, spending big dollars on Serious Films that are often misfires. I mean, I thought Philip Seymour Hoffman put in a brilliant performance in “Capote,” but the rest of the film kind of sucked.
It also should be noted that you do not have to win to be successful Oscarbait. A nomination in one of the Big Five will boost your box office gross considerably, and get you back in the theaters if you were released in fall and bombed, so just having the Academy acknowledge you is key. (And besides, some great Oscar performances have been robbed – hellooooo, Viola Davis – so sometimes the nomination is worthy in and of itself.)
But the point is that studios don’t know how to make great films. So instead, if they’re feeling Oscary, they greenlight the big sweepy films packed with previous winners and also-rans in an attempt to get in there. That’s not necessarily a negative thing, because often – or at least “often” in the sense of “most films fail” – you wind up with something that’s actually very awesome. Les Miserables is Oscarbait, just as Phantom of the Opera was before it, but only one really hit it out of the park.
Tl;dr: Oscarbait is a strategy, not a judgment.
As it is, I’m gonna get slammed for this, but despite the Oscar-baityness of it all, I don’t think “The Butler” is a particularly good movie. It hits a lot of emotional notes, but those notes were often not generated by the film but by the knowledge this tragedy actually happened to people. It’s what I think of as a “Your Dead Dog” movie – it doesn’t take much to make you tear up by evincing emotions of your beloved pet. But that doesn’t mean that slapping the words “I Love You Sparky” over a photo of your dog is high art. It means someone took something that’s deeply personal to you and dug it up, which is a) really effective, and b) kind of a cheap shot.
“The Butler” felt like Civil Rights 101 to me – a worthy goal, and I’m glad people are seeing it for the education, but as a film I’m not sure it holds up. I know the point is the generation gap between black families back then, but the film spent a lot of time focusing in on the guy who literally did nothing to affect the flow of history. That’s a great point, African-Americans totally had to sublimate everything to fit in back then, and I’m really glad that’s brought up… but in terms of interesting decision-making, Cecil doesn’t actually make many. And the movie knows this. Cecil’s job is to watch history from the sidelines, being almost passive as Kennedy and Truman do their thing, and when the civil rights movement calms down the film has zero issues literally fast-forwarding past fifteen years of Cecil’s life in a quick montage, because it knows Cecil is the least interesting thing in it.
The son is the active character, the one who fights, and I find myself wishing there had been more of a balance between the activist son and the surviving dad, which would have really contrasted both of their experiences more. As it is, “The Butler” was pretty good Oscar-bait, and it’ll almost certainly get nominated, and hell, it may even be Oscar-worthy. But I don’t think it’ll wear well.
But hey. I could be wrong about the quality of “The Butler.” But as a Sweeping Historical Drama Starring and/or Directed by many more than one previous Oscar Nominee, that is Very Serious, it’s definite Oscarbait. Now let’s see whether it’s the kind of film that we’re still watching thirty years from now, which is something Oscar has nothing to do with.
Praise and Thanks Be
There are times I think Shasta is a gift from God.
What with all of the cancer and accidents and death lately, having a small creature that gets us out of the house is a blessing. Her antics ensure that we can’t lapse into the all-misery channel of conversation; she’s always got some new behavioral quirk to be dissected, or some goofy new habit to share. At a time of intense pressure, the dog forces us to take our mind off our troubles. And so I’m grateful.
Then I think: it’d be a lot better, God, if you just laid off of Jimmy, Grammy, and the Meyers.
How You Can Help My Mood, Part 2.
So Rebecca’s still got brain cancer.
That’s not a way to start a happy post, but it happens to be the truth: Rebecca is five, and she’s about to go in for dangerous proton therapy and a cocktail of chemo. No child should be forced to go through this. No family should. And I posted an article yesterday on how misleading the survival rates are for children’s cancer (hint: lower than grownup cancer), and though Rebecca’s chances are better than many others, they’re still not good.
So we walk.
A couple of weeks from now, I’ll be doing a two-mile walk to raise funds to help battle children’s cancer. I will be doing it in a big swoopy purple cape, for Becca loves purple and she loves capes. I doubt the funds raised here will help Rebecca directly, but here’s thing:
Rebecca is a window. Rebecca is how I view the millions of other families enduring this, the uncertainty, the terror, the oscillating between hope and despair until you collapse in a wet heap in the middle. Nobody should have to go through this.
Let me repeat: nobody should have to go through this.
And so I’m going to do my small part to try to fix this. I’m not a doctor, or a researcher, or anyone who’s scientifically gifted in any way. But I have a voice, and a small audience, and I am going to ask that audience to donate if they can.
Because fuck cancer. Let’s take that fucking tumor and shove it down the universe’s throat. With a smiling girl with an uncertain future by the wayside, laughing, in her own purple superhero goddamned cape.
A Gift You Can Kill With
Some days, I think the greatest gift you can be given is the illusion that life is fair. It isn’t. For every day that you’ve survived intact, a thousand other people have died for stupid reasons, been financially screwed for random reasons, gotten shafted by a roll of the dice. We have survivor syndrome in that all our triumphs – including our continued breathing – seem like an inevitable finish as opposed to a lot of luck in our direction.
We can affect that luck to some extent, and we should. Smart decisions will sometimes save you when bad ones would kill. But sometimes you make the smartest decisions with the best information, and some unstoppable force smashes all your plans.
That illusion of fairness, though… it’s comforting. It makes you feel in control, which is a feeling so good people have literally murdered for it. It gives you the sense that there is a consistent reward and more consistent punishments, which in turn makes it easier for you to make the smart decisions, since you have this sense that it’ll work out if you just work smart.
And then, if you’re not careful, you become a monster.
Drink into that illusion too far, and you start thinking in absolutes: everyone who failed deserved to fail. Everyone who’s rich now is hard-working and talented. Everyone who’s well is eating properly, and those who are sick must have been doing something wrong.
If you buy into that ideal too far, you start making the world less fair. Because the only way to change the world properly is to look it in the eye, and if you’re the sort of person who believes people with bad outcomes must be bad decision-makers, then you start unwittingly creating ways to punish people down on their luck. Worse, you start rewarding people who made it to the top by accidents of circumstances.
The truth is that life is unfair – a harsh, and will-sapping, truth. A little lie to skew the universe’s reward ratio helps you get up in the morning, helps you make better choices, improves your life to the extent it can be improved.
But don’t forget that bad things also happen to good people sometimes, and it’s not their fault. Because when you forget that, you start hurting good people.