Art Is Subjective (No Duh)

Everyone has a favorite movie. Okay. Maybe that's a bit hyperbolic. Everyone who has ever seen more than one movie probably has a favorite movie. If you happen to be someone who has seen more than one movie, then your job can become a little more difficult. Over the course of my life, there have been a number of films that have occupied that top spot. There was a great deal of sentiment that went along with the artistic integrity of the original King Kong, and that was my go-to for a very long time. When I went to college and studied film, I sat in front of screens upon which there were dozens of what I was led to understand were the best of the best. These were exemplary pieces of cinema that were worthy of my attention and eventual worship. Many of them were in black and white. Some of them were silent. Most of them were at least as old as Kong, or older. Some of them were in foreign languages. While this barrage of culture continued, I kept going to see movies outside of class. I saw your major studio releases in the 1980's. I also worked in a video store. I re-watched a whole bunch of movies so that I could decide if any one of them had the stuff to take on Kong.
Some of them did. I added to the list. From the past I brought Bride of Frankenstein. From the future, I brought Brazil. And I watched Hitchcock and Fellini and Murnau and Bunuel. I learned an awful lot about the art of film and the people who made them. I watched a lot of other people's favorite films. I learned to appreciate how that could be. I fell in and out of love with movies of all size, shape and stripe. I kept Kong on a shelf, in the back of my mind, with the idea that I might someday return.
And I remembered when I loved The Deer Hunter.It was a masterpiece. It came from the same director as Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, a movie my older brother introduced me to, and I was pleased and happy when it kept that ball rolling. I lined up to see Heaven's Gate, because I believed that good things would keep coming from this Michael Cimino fellow. Well, that's where the love affair ended, and when my roommate and video store colleague convinced me to go see Cimino's return from movie jail, Year of the Dragon, I wanted it to be something more. It worked for my friend. It became a favorite of his.
I went back to Skull Island. I left Michael Cimino to his own devices, not knowing that his career was just about done. And now it is for sure. Mister Cimino went to that big screening room in the sky. For a few minutes there, I was back in high school and I was in love with Robert DeNiro and Meryl Streep and Russian Roulette all over again. The big ape can wait. Aloha, Michael Cimino. You may not have stomped on the Terra, but you made it look like others did. Nice job.

Outdoor World

I have been asked a great many times what my plans are for the summer. I told most of those people, "build a fence." This task took up a week of my family's life, and then the rest of the summer stretched out in front of us like an open highway. In the past, this has been our cue to hit that open road and make good with the trip thing. We have driven all over California. We have made a grand circle out of the desert southwest. We have flown to Colorado and made a race out of returning home via competing modes of transportation. Spoiler alert: the guys in the airplane won. We have flown across the country to drive up and down the east coast. Somehow, in the flurry that is summer vacation, we carelessly glossed over Yosemite National Park.
This oversight has been noticed by family and friends much in the same way the dearth of Grateful Dead CDs is treated when those same family and friends view my music collection. Shock and disbelief. With just a twist of disbelief. How have we managed to live in the Golden State for this long without ever taking in the breathtaking majesty of nature's splendor found just a few hours away?
The answer can be found most readily in the number of times my family has made the trek to the Happiest Place on Earth. The argument could be made that anywhere I go with my family is the happiest place on earth, but while that remains generally true, there have been plenty of summers in which our saving grace came at the House of Mouse. All of this leaves me with the sad confession that I am integrally connected to the mountains of Space, Big Thunder and Splash, while I have never witnessed the looming presence of El Capitan or Half Dome. It is my understanding that neither of these have roller coasters hidden inside them.
And that's fine. I don't mind a little nature. I have been known, on occasion, to take long walks in the woods for purposes other than searching for lost keys. Way back when, I spent most of my summers in a log cabin in woods not dissimilar from those where keys get lost. I hauled water and brought home bags of pine cones and kindling to fuel our wood-burning stove and read comic books in the evenings by the light of a kerosene lamp. What I am suggesting here is that I have done rustic before.
Yet somehow I missed Yosemite. I built a fence out of redwood, but I have yet to take a hike in those pre-lumbered forests. I suppose I can always pretend that I am making my way to the nearest churro stand. They do have churros in Yosemite, don't  they?

Take A Stab At This

The pen, we are told, is mightier than the sword. That is one of those life lessons that seem counter-intuitive at first. Would you really rather go into a fight with a Bic round stic or a machete? Upon further reflection, it occurs to me that if you were to anticipate the fight by writing to a letter to someone, or sign a requisition for a grenade launcher. Or maybe you could use that pen to write legislation outlawing the use of machetes in civil disputes. The guys with the pens make the rules, after all. Sometimes that's because they used their machetes to liberate all the pens in the first place, but that's where the whole mess gets into chicken and egg territory, so we'll let that be for a moment.
What about extrapolating that test to include video cameras and handguns? To be more precise, would you rather go into a fight armed with your cell phone camera or a service revolver? Rohnert Park resident Don McComas did just that in a confrontation involving a police officer with his choice of a weapon. The standoff occurred on the mean streets of Rohnert Park, fifty miles north of San Francisco. McComas was in his front yard, putting a trailer on his vehicle. Officer David Rodriguez was on regular patrol, searching for parking violations. There was concern registered by the officer not for the camera, but for the hand in McComas' pocket. What happened in that neighborhood in the middle of the day in Rohnert Park is the kind of thing that happens at all times of night and day all over the country. The pen is left far behind. The sword is out of reach. They all turned into a lawsuit. That's the good news.
The bad news is that all of this tension isn't mediated by cell phone video or lawsuits or guns. If everyone was working with the same set of tools. Machete, revolver, Bic round stic, cell phone camera. We have lost our collective agreements about acing like a society. When you go looking for a confrontation, that's what you find. The good news here is that there were no shots fired. The lawsuit was filed by a survivor of a very tense situation. The officer was suspended pending an investigation, and eventually returned to duty. Mister McComas put his video up on YouTube for the world to decide.
Which is mightier? Who knows? There is another expression: Might does not make right. Let's use that pen to write a love letter.

The Rational Review

Okay, I know I've said this a lot lately, but on our nation's two hundred fortieth birthday, I will return to a favorite chorus: "We the people, in order to establish a more perfect union" do establish and ordain a more perfect union. A Rationalia. Doctor Neil deGrasse Tyson has suggested a country with a one line constitution: All policy shall be based on the weight of evidence. If you want something to be a law, you have to prove it. Rationally.

What good are stop signs? Speed limits? If they are really going to work, they should work in all cases and should be proven to do so. Scientifically. I would love to hear the scientific rationale behind parking meters, but I suspect there is one and it may look very different from the "because I said so" model we have in place currently.

The good doctor is operating from a position that is informed primarily as global warming truther. He would rather that people not use anything but facts like temperatures and rising sea levels when discussing this event. Or its existence. Making choices or legislation that does not take the reality of how we are slowly turning our planet into that pot of water that will eventually boil a frog is not something up for debate. Find scientific proof that there is nothing to worry about, and a discussion can be had.

Parking meters? Still working on that.

Meanwhile, there has been plenty of pushback from more conservative minds, like those at the National Review. Coming up with a contrary position to Doctor deGrasse Tyson's isn't terrifically difficult. Kevin D. Williamson refers to Rationalia as a "pipe dream," and devotes a good deal of space and time discussing just what a bad idea it is, comparing it to "The Terror," historically connecting it to the French Revolution. This comes from a group whose semi-major-demigod once said that "Facts are stupid things."

Ronnie may have been edging toward quoting John Adams when he malapropped himself into history's quotebank, but no matter how stubborn facts are, they continue to vex those of us who would like to ignore them. Doctor Neil is a burr under the saddle of those who might choose to parse them or ignore them completely. The facts, that is. And the fact is that we are all subject to our own realities that come with buckets full of rationalization. Ask a room full of physicists if light is a particle or a wave, and you will see just how rational science can be. Newton was on to something, but Einstein improved on his model in ways that we are still trying to comprehend. Just like we are anxious to try and rewrite Thomas Jefferson for the twenty-first century. A world full of cars and planes and automatic weapons and Al Gore's Internet.

So I will let Doctor Neil deGrasse Tyson enjoy his pipe dream, because it is that kind of dream upon which republics have been built, and if we all spent a little more time thinking about what sort of nation we would like to live in we might all like to live in it.

Body Count

Okay. I understand that there is a reason why I should be shocked and saddened by the news of forty-nine people dying in a hail of gunfire. I don't completely understand why it makes a difference if they were killed by a homophobe or a jihadist. I don't know if it will matter in a month or a year, but understanding the motivations behind anyone's killing makes it easier to take. Or something like that. Which is why we are regularly treated to profiles of gunmen, or suspected gunmen. Or terrorists. Or dangerous characters of any stripe. I confess that all the books and articles I have read over the past sixteen years have led me only the tiniest measure closer to comprehending what brought Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold to shoot up Columbine High School. The initial suggestions of video games and Marilyn Manson have fallen by the wayside, but these factors sit on a shelf with all the nature and nurture that will fit. There is a science connected to this. We call those who are proficient in the art "profilers." They do the good kind of profiling: the kind that saves lives. The problem being that there is always the one that slithers through the net. This is the refrain we hear so often: "We never would have expected Randy McRandom to be the kind of guy who would shoot up a school/bar/movie theater/church."
That is because they are outliers. They are the ones who sit on the edge of the graph and can't quite be tracked until it is too late. Then there are the ones who don't show up on any database because there are just too many people out there who might have a reason to blow up an airport terminal. The three suicide bombers who blew themselves up in Turkey this past week were from Kyrgyzstan, Russia and Uzbekistan. What they were doing at the Istanbul airport is now a matter of record. They were not on holiday. They were on a mission. They were there to bring death and destruction to their target. We wait and expect that there will be a clean, clear line linking these three to a known terrorist organization that will claim responsibility for the lives they took and the innocents they wounded. Now we understand. It was terror they were after, and they delivered.
Just down the map a country or two we find Iraq, where US warplanes killed two hundred fifty ISIS fighters in an airstrike last Wednesday. In simple human terms, we managed to more than double the casualties in one strategic blast than the airport bombers and nightclub shooter managed in their most recent flurries.
I know. Our airstrikes were different. We only kill the bad guys. Enemy combatants. We are blowing up soldiers in the desert, not in crowded airports or discotheques. That is because we are the good guys. See what I mean? Crystal clear.

Off Season

This fall I will begin my twentieth year of teaching. It has been, to quote the poet, "a long, strange trip." In many ways, it has been a cyclical struggle with regular reminders of why I went into education in the first place. Those moments when I truly connect with a kid, when I see that synapse fire and I know a connection has been made, the struggle is forgotten. Nonetheless, there is still that sense of Sisyphus rolling that rock up the hill with the certainty of having to start all over again once summer ends. 

But for now, hope springs from the possibilities of what a new school year will bring. New faces on the playground. New faces in the staff room. All that potential for hope and change. This is the time for teachers to collect themselves and prepare for what lies ahead. We rest. We go to trainings. We look forward to finding ways to do our jobs that will make it easier on everyone. On  the playground. In the staff room. In the class room.

For many of us, the climb we are making up the ladder of tenure and salary offers the hope that there will be rewards for sticking with it. If you lived in Wisconsin, you might be having a less-than-tranquil summer, since they have this fellow named Scott Walker for a governor. He was recently asked by reporters whether he thought incentive-driven salary programs would make it harder for K-12 schools to retain teachers in his state."If the Green Bay Packers pay people to perform and if they perform well on their team, (the Packers) pay them to do that," Walker said. "They don't pay them for how many years they've been on the football team. They pay them whether or not they help (the Packers) win football games."

Well, it turns out that they do, and the National Football League players have a union that ensures that its players get paid well over the average yearly salary of fifty thousand dollars that teachers make. And every year there are whole teams who fail miserably in an attempt to win the Super Bowl, and every year they get asked to come back and try again. Sometimes they move the teams. Sometimes they fire coaches or cut players, but they get paid. More and more each year. 

I try not to think about football much during the summer. Maybe Governor Walker should do the same. 

Child Proof

IKEA is recalling twenty-nine million dressers. Not just because they have silly names with unnecessary umlauts, but because they have crushed six children. The news item I read felt moved to include the phrase "to death" at the end of that crushing part, as if there should be some distinction between crushing that is fun and healthy and that which is not. I will not at this point discuss the adults who may have succumbed to an aneurysm while trying to construct these pieces of furniture via the "easy-to-follow" instructions with bags full of indiscriminate fistfuls of pegs and screws, but that will wait for another day.
Here's what I have to say about the Malm dresser:  We have two of them in our house, and knock particle board, no one has been crushed. Part of the reason we have gone this many days without a furniture-related incident is that we followed the manufacturer's directive to attach the potentially top-heavy hunk of wood to the wall. This was expressly important to us back in the days that we had a child who might have felt the need to use the furniture as some sort of playground apparatus. Perhaps because our son is prone to more sedentary pursuits, we passed through that period of time when the potential for crushing was at its highest. These days, the circumstances that would lead to a chest of drawers toppling over on him would be mediated by the fact that he is big enough to shove that not inconsequential weight back against the wall where it belongs if such a physics event became a reality.
The same could be said for all the cabinet doors and latched doors that we installed once upon a time when every loose object was a potential choking hazard and the morning couldn't come quickly enough so we had the light to see what we might have missed in our endeavor to make every step and breath our little boy took free from possible danger.
Now he drives his own car, and though I confess that I still have horrible flashes when I imagine the lug nuts on all four wheels failing while he is driving down the road, I have mostly surrendered to the inevitable when it comes to his  safety. Meanwhile, his mother and I continue to open the drawers to our Malms with only a hint of caution. If we were to be confronted by our own build-it-yourself furniture, we would only have ourselves to blame. And those sketchy directions.