Another Week: Number 98

Cool Hand Luke (1967)

Sunday night at my mom’s, I retreived Cool Hand Luke from her cloud DVR. It’s a movie I’ve watched at least a dozen times on commercial TV, but she had never seen it. Like anyone, she’s a Paul Newman fan, so it was past time for her to take in this classic.

Newman plays Lucas “Luke” Jackson, a World War II veteran with a drinking problem that leads him one night to lop the heads off of parking meters. That crime lands him in a Florida prison camp, sentenced to spend two years on a chain gang clearing weeds and improving roads.

The prison camp and its warden, played by Strother Martin, are severe and unbending. Luke, meanwhile, is a smiling, stubborn rebel without a cause.

So there’s your central conflict.

Cool Hand Luke springs from the counterculture of the Vietnam era, alongside films like Easy Rider and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Various visual suggestions allude to Luke as a Jesus figure. George Kennedy took home an Oscar for his role as Luke’s disciple.

It would be a better story if the hero was less aimless — but it still works, as I could see by the way my mom talked to the screen during the egg contest.

So Rugged and Mountainous, by Will Bagley

Years ago, judging this book solely by its blurbs on Amazon, I gifted my brother-in-law Wayne with a copy. He had read a lot about the Civil War, so I thought he might enjoy some adjacent history. This August, I started reading it myself to see if it was any good.

So Rugged and Mountainous collects a hoard of details regarding the westward emigration of pioneers in covered wagons, generally embarking from Independence, Missouri on the Oregon and California trails in the 1840s. Author Will Bagley had a twisty career as a historian and planned this book as Volume One of a four-volume set on America’s westward expansion, but he only lived to complete two.

This first book is largely a compendium of names, place names, dates, numbers, and compass directions. For example:

The expedition divided at Mound Springs, south of present-day Wells, Nevada. Frémont and Kit Carson led a contingent of ten men south from Ruby Valley to Walker Lake, while Lieutenant Theodore H. Talbot followed Joe Walker across Secret Pass to the Humboldt River and then down the California Trail. From the rendezvous at Walker Lake, Talbot’s detachment entered the Sierra via the Walker River, while Frémont turned north to examine the new emigrant road over Truckee Pass. Following wagon tracks to the settlements, he reached Sutters Fort on 10 December 1845.

Plenty of logistical details, inadequate human story.

At first, I thought this material might work better as a film — with routes traced on a map, and photos of the landscape — but I soon gave up trying to decipher these journeys on Google Earth. The tidbits jump around chronologically and refer to an array of various expeditions, so the overall picture is hopelessly fractured.

To make matters worse, Bagley injects cliffhanger-like teases but fails to pay them off. After repeatedly alluding to the Donner Party, even that horrific disaster gets only a glancing treatment.

There were a few scattered gems — but for the most part, this book was a months-long trudge through a dry and monotonous landscape, a few dreary paragraphs at a time.

Sorry, Wayne.

Election 2024

My sister Karen, her husband Kevin and I watched MSNBC’s election night coverage with Mom at her apartment. Steve Kornacki’s keen analysis quickly made it clear that this would be a very disappointing night. I left at nine and went home to bed, waking the next morning at five to see a notification on my phone declaring Donald J. Trump the winner 15 minutes prior.

The first thing that crossed my mind was a song lyric: Or was it all a dream? / Was it all a crazy dream?

It took me a moment to place that voice. It was Patterson Hood, singing his Drive-By Truckers song, “Two Daughters and a Beautiful Wife,” about musician Bryan Harvey, who was randomly murdered with his wife and two daughters in the basement of their Richmond, Virginia home on New Year’s Day in 2006.

But on Wednesday morning this week, I was instead absorbing the death of the American experiment — what Benjamin Franklin had declared “A republic, if you can keep it.”

Was it all a crazy, 237-year dream?

If the oath is a joke …

Trump has warned for years that “You’re not going to have a country anymore.” Now, he’s positioned to pull the plug.

Eight years ago, he stood at the Capitol with his left hand on two Bibles (intentionally befouling the Lincoln Bible, previously used only by President Obama), raised his right hand, and took an oath to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

He broke that oath numerous times — most egregiously when he tried to overturn his election loss by sending a mob to attack that same U.S. Capitol. You may have heard about that one. It was on TV.

Winning this election means that on January 20th, Trump is scheduled to recite the same oath he previously shat upon, at the same Capitol his mob shat upon. The man who swiped boxes and boxes of our nation’s military secrets and stashed them in his bathtub is going to raise his hand again. In so doing, he will render that oath a complete joke.

And if the oath is a joke, is the Constitution itself anything more than a silly vestige — something like, say, “The Twelve Days of Christmas?”

Cancer comes back

In the early morning hours, as the 2016 election was called for Trump, my wife Amy was so despondent that she said, “I hope my cancer comes back.” It was not a flippant outburst. She knew exactly what she had been through.

Her cancer did come back. She died this past January. In her last days, she expressed disappointment that she would never know the conclusion to the preposterous Trump saga.

Perhaps none of us will.

Our national cancer has returned. Fascism is a European disease against which we have no immunity. This is not the sort of thing we’re likely to recover from.

I’m glad Amy’s not here to witness this because it would have killed her.

Are you better off now?

The last time Trump was president, the federal deficit skyrocketed. He reversed environmental regulations and tried to end Obamacare and cut Medicare. We lost over a million lives to a pandemic that he badly mismanaged. We suffered a recession. The economy lost 2.7 million jobs. The murder rate rose to its highest level since 1997. My hometown burned; he used it as a photo-op and promised millions of dollars for rebuilding that was all bullshit. He was impeached for trying to extort Ukraine to give him political dirt on Joe Biden. He tried to overturn the election he lost and was later impeached again for that.

These days, we simply pretend none of that happened.

But sure — gas prices were cheaper at the end of Trump’s term. Do you remember why? It was because no one was driving anywhere.

And yes, consumer prices increased once Biden took office. This wasn’t something Biden caused — inflation soared around the globe as businesses tried to offset their pandemic losses. In fact, Biden led a U.S. economic recovery seen as “the envy of the world.”

Americans are much better off now. So, of course, we’ve brought back the perfect guy to fix that.

We’ll see how grocery prices do without farm workers or imports.

Poor decisions

Latino support grew for the candidate who has spent his entire political career disparaging Latinos.

Women voted not for the woman, but for the rapist.

People who found Joe Biden too old voted to elect the oldest president ever.

Those frightened by crime voted for the convicted felon.

Muslims furious over Netanyahu’s mass slaughter will now have his pal as their president.

“We want to take a blowtorch …”

Since the Great Depression, the United States has made a lot of progress — the New Deal, Social Security, NATO, the Voting Rights Act, several Civil Rights Acts, and so on.

Now these structures that took decades to construct will be thoughtlessly dismantled and replaced with nothing. House Speaker Mike Johnson said, “We want to take a blowtorch to the regulatory state.”

People often have negative feelings about regulations without considering what regulations do. Regulations aim to make things more regular. For instance, a regulation might require that cars have headlights. This way, motorists can see things when they’re driving at night, and other motorists can see them.

When things are irregular, well that’s the law of the jungle. Our government “for the people” and its regulations aim to protects us from the more brutal results of the law of the jungle.

Johnson says regulations are “like a boot on the neck of job creators and entrepreneurs.” And in fact, insurance companies can make more money when there’s no regulation requiring them to insure people with pre-existing conditions.

How many people with pre-existing conditions (a little cancer, perhaps) voted for Trump and his blowtorch? Do they realize they’re slitting their own future throats?

This new course is going to harm so many of us in so many unimagined ways. Trump’s calamitous first administration was just a warm-up.

Another working day

So we have a few weeks before Trump’s Gestapos begin their mass deportation of workers who are vital to our country’s economy, and Trump adds his 200% tariffs to the price of all imported goods, and media outlets are shuttered for reporting negatively on these things, and Gaza is bulldozed for luxury resort development, and Russia starts positioning little green men around the Polish border.

It “will be wild!”

In the meantime, I have tuned out of MSNBC after more than a decade spent listening day in and day out. Throughout the Mueller investigation, the first impeachment, January 6, the second impeachment, and all the rest, the people at MSNBC did an outstanding job — but ultimately, it made no difference and only upset my digestion. A report says they’ll soon be sold for scrap. I’m sure some oligarch will provide new content for our telescreens.

My days are quieter for now, the better to hear myself think. Much of that, it turns out, consists of song lyrics.

The Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion

I knew nothing about Joan Didion until Amy and I watched Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold on Netflix five or six years ago.

Then Amy read The Year of Magical Thinking, and the book joined all the others on our shelves. This week, I pulled it out and read it myself.

The Year of Magical Thinking is about Didion’s grief after her husband and longtime writing partner John Gregory Dunne suddenly died of a heart attack in their New York apartment before dinner on December 30, 2003. The couple had just returned from visiting their hospitalized daughter Quintana, age 37, who had been unconscious for five days after her flu-like symptoms morphed into pneumonia and septic shock.

In this memoir, Didion reports on a full year of what followed — the eventual funeral service, many more days spent at hospitals, time with friends and relatives, resurfaced memories of poignant life events, published texts and literature on grief, cardiology, and neurology, brief exchanges with strangers, and so on.

She pays particular attention to the way her mind dodges difficult facts and attempts to rewind or undo them. For example, she’s reluctant to get rid of her husband’s shoes because he may need them if he comes back.

The book is a deeply personal piece of journalism, but there was plenty I could relate to my own grief — and while she doesn’t offer remedies, her courage in documenting this intimate process is a kind of sympathetic comfort.

Nor can we know ahead of the fact (and here lies the heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself.

On Saturday night, I watched the documentary again — this time with my mom, who has lost both parents, two husbands, her brother, a daughter, and a daughter-in-law.

The film provides much greater context regarding Didion, her career, Dunne, their family and friends, and their lives and times in California and New York.