All Hallow's Eve

Back on the couch again. This time I'm watching the credits begin to pop up for "Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers." I can feel myself tense as I begin to anticipate the measured and deliberate dismemberment of another slew of teenagers in a small Illinois town. I am thinking about what a well timed showing this turns out to be, and how lucky I am to have access to the wide variety of broadcasting offered by cable television. I am looking at a movie that I watched with this same fevered anticipation back in 1988. Then I started to remember the formula by which these teenagers would be killed, with the wicked intent of generating yet another sequel. I was twenty-six when I first saw "Halloween 4." I was sixteen when I saw the first one.
I remember sitting in the band room of our high school with my friend Clark and I sat slack-jawed as Lance Hardesty, who was a year ahead of us, gave a shot-by-shot re-enactment of John Carpenter's magnum opus. We were transfixed, and when we finally went to see the film ourselves a few nights later, it was a terrifying experience that had not been dulled by Lance's bravura performance.
Now I'm creeping toward fifty, and outside the tear gas has dissipated from Oakland's most recent riot. The homicide rate for the year in this city is climbing toward one hundred. The news magazines and Internet are still awash with the matter-of-fact photos of the bloody corpse of Muammar Qaddafi. When I was ten, Halloween was about costumes and Trick-or-Treating. When I was twenty it was about drunken debauchery and pushing back the veil of night. When I was in my thirties I watched my son begin his own pilgrimage up to the porch to beg for candy dressed as a truck. In my forties I have started to wonder what Halloween really is.
I switched the channel to watch the World Series.

Michael Moore's Address To The Occupy Oakland Protesters

I want you folks to remember that no bastard ever won a demonstration by getting hit in the head for his cause. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard get hit in the head for his cause. All this stuff you’ve heard about the ninety-nine percent not wanting to fight, wanting to stay out of jail, is a lot of horse hockey. Americans love to demonstrate. All real Americans love the stink and clash of sleeping out in a park. When you were kids, you all admired the sit-ins, the thinnest member of the hunger strike, the big league hippies, and the highest -grossing documentary film makers. Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser. Americans play to a tie all the time. I wouldn’t give a hoot in heck for a man who lost and laughed. That’s why Americans have never lost and will never lose a non-violent demonstration. The very thought of losing is hateful to Americans. An occupying non-violent cooperative is a team. It lives, eats, sleeps, and fights as a team. This individuality stuff is a bunch of hooey. The ninnies who write that silly stuff about individuality for the Utne Reader, don’t know any more about real protest than they do about hydroponic gardening. We have the finest food and equipment, the best spirit, and the best men, women and children in the world. I pity those poor authority-types we’re going up against. We’re not just going to sit here, we’re going to mess up their parks and public plazas and use them as our personal waste stations. We’re going to annoy those lousy one-percenters by the bushel basket. Some of you are wondering whether or not you’ll chicken out under fire. Don’t worry about it. I can assure you from my office in Los Angeles that you’ll all do your full duty. The Man is the enemy. Wade into them. Spill their Jamba Juice. Tip over thier garbage cans. When you put your hand into a bunch of poo, that a moment before was in your best friend, you’ll know what to do. There’s another thing I want you to remember. I don’t want to get any messages saying we’re advancing constantly. We’re holding our position, and we’re not interested in advancing onto anything except the next patch of dead grass. We’re going to hold onto ourselves and we're going to hug each other. We’re going to hug each other all the time. We’re going to sit here like geese. There’s one thing you folks will be able to say when you get back home, and you may be thankful for it. Thirty years from now, when you’re sitting around your fireside, with your grandson on your knee, and he asks, “What did you do in the great Occupy Wall Street Demonstration?” You won’t have to say, “Well, I watched it on TV.” Alright, you sons of factory workers, you know how I feel. I’ll be proud to lead you wonderful guys into non-violent demonstration anywhere, anytime, but right now I'm late for a taping of Bill Maher's show. Oh, and don't forget that "Capitalism: A Love Story" is available on Blu-Ray and DVD from Amazon.

Dawn

I see Dawn just about every morning when I ride to work. She's the neighborhood bag lady. I don't use this term in a derogatory way, it is simply the best way I know to describe her. She has bags full of different things, depending on the day. She could be cleaning up the street, or she might be collecting treasure. Some days she looks up from her chores and smiles. Others she keeps her head down, focusing on the task in front of her, whatever that task might be. I've stopped on a couple of occasions to talk, but these chats usually dissolve after a few moments. Maybe it's me, but they don't track very well.
Consequently, I don't know a lot about Dawn outside of our brief encounters on my ride to school. She may be at home the rest of the day, busy making wads of cash on her E-Trade account. She may be living in a mansion up on the hill, making her way down to this corner of the 'hood to help out in any way she can. I do know that Dawn has been having some trouble getting around lately. I watched her negotiate a curb a few weeks ago, and that meant she needed to set her bags down, get herself up out of the street, then pick up the bags again. I didn't see her again for a couple of weeks, and I wondered if she had to retire.
Happily, this week I saw that she had acquired a shopping cart to aid in her constitutionals. I waved, but she was intent on keeping the wheels on the sidewalk, moving straight ahead. She had someplace she needed to be.

To B53 Or Not B53

Another execution took place in Texas. Only this one probably won't have the same groups up in arms as the last one. In Amarillo, the last of the United States B53 nuclear bombs was dismantled. This delivery system for death from above, hundreds of times more powerful than the one that was dropped on Hiroshima, is being taken out of service. The disassembling is taking place one year ahead of schedule as part of the President's goal of reducing our nuclear stockpile.
First put into service in 1962, when Cold War tensions peaked during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the B53 weighed ten thousand pounds and was the size of a minivan. The significant difference would be that you probably couldn't use it to drive the kids to soccer. It was designed to be carried by B-52 bombers with the stated purpose of destroying underground bunkers. Since the Cold War ended a few decades ago (you can blame Ronald Reagan for that), there isn't as big a need to destroy underground bunkers. Instead, our efforts in national defense center around shoes, underwear, and model planes, not to mention the occasional minivan.
It's a different world, and you can expect that we will continue to take apart those weapons of mass destruction as part of our dedication to peace. That's the kind of job creation I'm happy to see. Now there's just about nine thousand, nine hundred left to go.

That Bites

I thank the Flying Spaghetti Monster for delivering with his noodly appendages such a character as Pat Robertson. Over the years he has redefined ridiculous with his moral outrage. He has found ways to connect God to any number of triumphs and tragedies in ways that can best be described as conspiratorial. Usually there is some punishment involved for some perceived oversight or misdeed on the part of the unbelievers. Hurricanes seem to seek out those who don't see the world the way the Reverend Pat does. Death awaits those who don't fall into line with the Gospel According to Robertson.
It happened again last week in Zanesville, Ohio. Terry Thompson, who had recently been released from jail for a gun conviction, chose to settle the accounts of his disturbed life by setting free the fifty-six wild animals that he kept on his farm, including eighteen Bengal tigers. These were among the dozens of animals that were killed as authorities attempted to deal with the bizarre occurrence. While the debate rages on about how the animals were dealt with, both in Mister Thompson's care and after they were set loose on an unsuspecting populace, God's Little Elf has the answer: “God allowed those wild animals to escape because he wanted them to find gay people and bite them.” Citing the Book of Revelation he made explicit reference to “escaped lions, tigers and bears running around Ohio biting gay people” as a prelude to the Rapture.
Pastor Harold Camping reportedly smacked himself in the forehead sighing, "If only I could have seen the signs."

A League Of Their Own

Like every good American, I was watching the World Series on Saturday night, primarily because the college football games were ending and because I wanted to see what was becoming a monumental display of hitting a baseball. Albert Pujols of the St. Louis Cardinals was putting on a show with his bat. He hit three home runs, batting in six runs. All of these were tape-measure jobs that seemed to leap out into the Texas night like fireworks. It was an exhibition. I made a point of sharing it with my son, and later my wife, who asked "Was it steroids?"Initially I was shocked. How cynical could this woman be? Degrading our national pastime with such talk. Here's this stunning achievement, and all she can do is imply some sort of conspiracy. How about a little simple appreciation for the physical feat? Under pressure with a worldwide television audience? Can't she just pause long enough to be impressed by the spectacle? Not every professional athlete is fueled by stimulants and bovine growth hormones.Then I noticed a face peering out from the Cardinal dugout. A little older, and perhaps a little wiser: Mark McGwire. One of the original Bash Brothers. The guy who hit seventy home runs in a season. The guy who whiffed mightily in front of Congress when he was asked about taking steroids to enhance his performance on the baseball diamond. He later got around to crying about it to Bob Costas.I guess it would have been better if he had talked to Tom Hanks. There is no crying in baseball. But thanks to guys like Mark, there will always be plenty of questions.

Shocked And Awed

Is anybody keeping score out there? Yes, I know the economy is still in the tank, and there's probably very little a jobs program or a flat tax or anything short of a redistribution of wealth will fix anytime soon. But didn't I just read that the war in Iraq is over, at least for Americans. The troops are coming home.
Then there's that little matter of Libya, where regime change was accomplished without U.S. soldiers on the ground. The dictator was toppled the old fashioned way: by the people he was oppressing. Okay, maybe the NATO air strikes played a part, but after forty years, the Mad Dog of the Middle East has been put down. And the mastermind behind the Taliban and al-Qaeda was dispatched with quiet efficiency as well. Over the past six months, a great many of the "bad guys" have been sent packing. It's almost as if there was a list or something.
And so it doesn't quite stand up to the image of Hope and Change we might have all imagined on that November evening three years ago, but things are happening. "Terrorists and dictators, lacking the filibuster, have no effective defense against Barack Obama," tweeted Democratic strategist Rebecca Kirszner Katz this past week. It's kind of sad that all of a sudden we have traded our Presidential image from Martin Sheen to Arnold Schwarzenegger, but these are curious times. Maybe some Navy Seals could push through some education reform.