The Dog Ate My Homework

President Obama’s press conference yesterday in Sweden will one day be shown in Psychiatry classrooms the world over as a classic example of the concept of transference. While every news outlet in America was running clips of Republicans and Democrats alike blaming the entire Syrian mess on Obama’s ill-advised “red line” remark of last September, there was our President responding to a reporter’s question about that red line thusly:

“I didn’t set a red line; the world set a red line. My credibility isn’t on the line; the world’s credibility is on the line…”

This is essentially the President of the United States explaining that the dog ate his homework.

Ok, let me get this straight. Virtually everyone in Washington understands that Obama has been painted into a corner because of his red line remark, and now has to be supported or he and our country will lose all international credibility. We watch the spectacle of historically dovish Democratic Senators tying themselves into pretzels of illogical contradictions trying to rationalize support for something that they would be marching in the streets protesting if Obama were a Republican President. We hear Chris Matthews demand that Democrats vote “yes” on Syria in order to “save the President’s hide.” And yet, half way around the world the President stands in front of a bank of microphones blaming the entire world for the very red line that his own words produced.

All of which begs this simple question, if the President is right and this really is the “worlds” problem, then why isn’t the UN in charge? World problems need to be addressed by the world in the world’s forum…the United Nations. Why are we unilaterally declaring this an American mission? I seem to recall this President being a huge fan of the UN, a big supporter of coalitions. So, why are we a coalition of one?

There are many reasons a nation goes to war, some better than others. But to jump into the middle of another Middle Eastern cat fight to recover a President’s prestige and reputation is possibly the worst reason of all.

Parental Vindication

This week has brought a feeling of vindication to the Dunnevant home. The work of being a parent is a never ending treadmill of struggle and self doubt, a work without many tangible rewards. It’s like cutting the grass, no matter how well you do it, next week you have to do it all over again. You constantly second guess yourself. Was I too strict? Did I shield them too much from life’s brutal consequences? Did I teach them too much theory and not enough practical life skills? Should I have made them do more chores? Underlying all of this angst is the fearful question; will they make it out there on their own?

Well, this week brings two small rewards, a tantalizing hint that Pam and I just may have pulled it off. My daughter had her first day with students as a middle school English teacher, and my son tried out for the biggest, most prestigious choir he’s even encountered, one that had rejected him a year ago…and made it.

Kaitlin has handled the preparation for her first full time job with uncharacteristic calm. Usually, she hasn’t done well with new things, change. In the past she has been crippled by doubt and feelings of inadequacy. Suddenly, as she has approached this biggest stage of her life, a new Kaitlin has emerged, a confident, well-prepared, professional who seems to know that she’s ready and able. Spending two years cloistered with extremely smart and ideologically hostile people at Wake Forest has apparently instilled a mental and emotional toughness in my daughter that has been thrilling to observe.

Patrick has always been able to rise to the top of every musical environment in which he has been planted. Whether in high school or college he has been able to distinguish himself merely by demonstrating his enormous talent. Then he got accepted at Westminster Choir College for grad school and naturally tried out for their premiere showcase choir, the one that gets to sing behind world famous singers in Central Park, and for the first time in his life, he didn’t make it. To his credit, he didn’t fume and throw a fit like many ego-heavy musicians would have, he just figured he wasn’t good enough and needed to get better as a singer. After getting knocked a few rungs down on the self-esteem ladder, he shrugged it off and went to work. Well, last night he got word that this year, he made it. He couldn’t have been happier, and we are justifiably proud of his hard work and persistence.

Of course, after watching Breaking Bad for the past two weeks, what we are really thankful for is the fact that neither of our children are cooking meth and hiding their rolls of hundred dollar bills in air conditioner vents.

It’s all relative, really. Just thankful for the little things.   

Breaking Bad... and Me.

About a week ago, I gave in to heavy pressure from my son and started watching Breaking Bad on Netflix. I am now into season two and feel that I have watched enough to form an opinion. What follows is a review of what I have seen so far.

I should say at the outset that I have a strange, almost neurotic aversion to depictions of drug use in movies or on television. Simply put, it makes me queasy. It’s the oddest thing since I can watch the goriest war movie, or other violent productions without hesitation, but show someone shooting up and I reach for the Pepto-Bismol. When I shared this weakness with my secretary(another recent Breaking Bad addict) her response was, “Don’t be such a baby!” So, there’s that. But after listening to my son rave about this show 24/7, Pam and I decided to give it a shot.

The central plot revolves around a 50 year old high school chemistry teacher named Walt who is married to an oddly irritating woman named Skyler, who is pregnant with a “surprise” baby. They also have a physically handicapped high school aged son boringly named Walter Jr. Early on Walt is diagnosed with a rather advanced case of lung cancer, strange since Walt isn’t a smoker. He spends practically all of season one hiding his diagnosis from his family while coughing his head off all day and night. The viewer gets the impression that although Walt is a long time teacher in the New Mexico school system, he somehow has very bad insurance, and is otherwise in precarious financial shape. With this terminal illness hanging over his head, and a baby on the way, Walt decides to do what anyone else might do under the same circumstances…he decides to put his chemistry knowledge to work cooking crystal meth for profit. In this enterprise, he is assisted by one of his former reprobate students, Jesse, himself a small time Meth chef who spends most of his time sampling the inventory and acting like the 20 year old meth addict loser that he is. Just to make the story even more bizarre, Skyler’s kleptomaniac sister Marie is married to a foul-mouthed DEA agent, Hank, whose job it is to hunt down Meth dealers. In other words, on paper, it’s difficult to root for any of these people.

So, how come eight shows in, I find myself feeling such an emotional attachment to Walt? How come I’m growing so fond of Jesse and his baggy pants, oversized sweatshirts and his constant use of the word, “Yo”? How come despite Hank’s degenerate brand of humor and his psychopathic fondness for gore, I actually like the guy? This is the genius of Breaking Bad.

Walt rationalizes his turn to the drug trade as a desperate eleventh hour bid to provide for his family, and in the beginning, it may have even been true. But as the show goes on, I get the impression that Walt is a man who has gone through life playing it safe and doing what he was told to the point where he has nothing but regrets. Now that he knows that the end is near, the violence, chaos and danger of the drug business has empowered him somehow, making him feel more alive than he has ever been. Along with the money has come a blurring of lines. Why are some things legal and other things illegal he asks his DEA brother-in-law? Aren’t the legal lines we draw as a society arbitrary? I can only assume that future seasons of the show will show fresh rationalizations.

The show is expertly written, superbly acted and brilliantly directed. There are scenes that you want to watch again simply because the humanity was so electric, the emotions so raw. Walt is a man capable of going either way, capable of both great tenderness and raw violence, an almost meek man who loves his family but can come up with the idea of an acid bath to destroy the evidence of a dead body. The central idea that pulses through this amazing show seems to be the question of how far would you go to provide for those you love if you knew you were about to die? Would you respect the law? How ruthless would you be willing to become?

Captivating television.

Two South Carolinas

I had a business appointment in South Carolina over the weekend so Pam and I decided to make the most of it by driving down a day early and making a little getaway out of it. Amazing what a couple of days sitting around on a beach listening to the waves can do for your mood.  It was a wonderful 48 hours.

Not much planning went into this particular trip. I picked a hotel online just a couple of days before we left. I chose the Surfside Beach Resort because it was only 15 minutes from my client’s house and because it had the word “resort” in the name, leading me to believe that it wouldn’t be some dump out by the airport right across the street from a strip club. Well, it was on the beach, and there were no strip clubs to be seen, but to call this place a “resort” is sort of like calling the State Penitentiary “all-inclusive.” As we were checking into our room, the cleaning lady was exiting with a spray bottle of air freshener and a gas mask…not a good sign. For the first thirty minutes or so our room smelled like orange peel, desperately trying to hide something else more sinister. This is what happens to you when you start watching Breaking Bad.

But we didn’t come to Surfside Beach to lie around all afternoon in our room, so we hit the beach around 2 in the afternoon and suddenly realized that we had walked onto the set of Jersey Shore. Everywhere we looked there were heavily tattooed men and women, large people with loud mouths and stern rebukes that dripped from their lips at their children whose only sin seemed to be, wanting to have fun in the water. Cigarette butts littered the sand around us and more than once I found myself picking up empty Doritos bags that someone had thought too much of an inconvenience to throw in the trash. Mr. Thicke’s summer anthem belched from a boom box somewhere nearby. Pam and I looked at each other and realized that we weren’t in Hatteras anymore.

The second night we drove 20 minutes further south and had dinner at a Frank’s. It was then that we realized that our hotel was in the East End and Frank’s was in Short Pump. The parking lot told us everything we needed to know about the place. The total net worth of the vehicles parked there would be enough money to balance New Jersey’s budget. The atmosphere of this place was magical, complete with outdoor seating under 100 year old live oaks covered with Spanish moss and Christmas lights. Fans hung strategically from the tent roofs making every seat comfortable. A jazz singer whispered Ella Fitzgerald tunes quietly in the background as Pam and I enjoyed two delicious entrees and marveled at the well dressed, perfectly coifed southerners who filled the tables around us. After dinner we took a driving tour of the island where all of these people, no doubt were staying. Pawley’s Island, that arrogantly shabby enclave at the southern most end of the Grand Strand that stubbornly refuses to get with the commercial program of the rest of Horry county. There are no restaurants, no gas stations, and no stores of any kind anywhere on the island. Nothing but old homes with even older shrubbery nestled in between the Ocean to the east and a marsh to the west. Magical.

On the way home we passed through Conway South Carolina, the first half of which looked typically elegant with its beautiful homes and finely trimmed lawns. Then abruptly the appearance of a pawn shop announced that we were now entering the wrong side of town. Over the next three miles we counted no less than 17 signs advertising bail bonds, featuring towering billboards featuring the face of some very shifty looking attorney asking the question, “Made Bail?? Talk to Joe Axelrod Today!!”

‘Merica!!

Horrified at 6 AM!!!

This is getting out of hand. This morning I pull up the weather channel website to check out the forecast and there on the side bar to the right is a picture of Miley Freaking Cyrus with the tagline, “We can’t help but stare at Miley Cyrus.” Ahh yes, the face that launched a million pageviews. Et tu, Weather.com?

Not to be outdone, when I clicked on the forecast for Myrtle Beach, the bottom right hand corner featured the most frightening photograph I’ve seen since that Buddhist monk sat himself on fire in Saigon 45 years ago. Even writing a description of it will be harrowing. I thought of cutting and pasting the thing but this is a family blog and I don’t want any angry fan mail. It’s a picture of a man (I think), leaning back suggestively on one elbow wearing a white dress shirt unbuttoned all the way down the front. This deeply tanned man has done this ostensibly to reveal his pectoral muscles which are the size of basketballs. These things are so gigantic, the over-flexed muscles have apparently swallowed his nipples since none are seen. It’s as if he has had breast enlargement surgery using bowling balls. It is the single most disturbing visual image I have come across in my adult life. What is it an advertisement for you ask, why, a new perfectly legal steroid formula for all you serious body builders out there. Well, if you want to end up looking like this dude, I suppose you better be serious. Compared to his otherworldly pecks, the poor man’s head sits atop this heaving mass of muscle looking for all the world like an afterthought, a swiveled raisin atop a truck load of cantaloupes. I swear, I may never visit weather.com again.

Which makes me wonder why this particular ad ran on this particular website? Everyone knows that Google knows everything about all of our predilections, our buying habits etc. What does this bizarre ad say about…me?? I’m 55 and a member of American Family fitness, do they now assume that I would be interested in turning my chest into a flotation device? Well, just in case someone at the NSA is reading this, let the information gatherers over at Google know that I’m perfectly happy with my C cup, thank you very much.

Shheeeese!

Irony and Unintended Consequences

How ironic that on the 50^th anniversary of MLK’s “I have a Dream Speech,” our President will be speaking at the very same time that he is scrambling fighter jets and bombers to rain down destruction on Syria, a country that hasn’t attacked or invaded us and with whom we have very little trade or interaction. The reason given for this action is that chemical weapons have been used in that country’s civil war and our intelligence services are pretty sure that Bashir Assad was behind it. I say “pretty sure” because this morning brings news that the intelligence we have connecting Assad to the chemical weapons attack is “not a slam dunk.” For instance, we aren’t totally sure who controls the chemical weapons stockpile in Syria or for that matter, where they are  located, and at this hour there remains no solid evidence linking Assad himself with the order to use them.

Now, back when Barack Obama was a US Senator from Illinois, it was exactly this sort of thing that sent him into high dudgeon when George W. Bush was in the White House. “The President does not have the power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual imminent threat to the nation,” he intoned back in 2008 as a candidate for W’s job. Vice-President Biden went even further back then, claiming that if Bush went to war in Iraq without first getting approval from Congress it would be grounds for impeachment. Of course, it certainly isn’t news when a candidate for President says one thing on the campaign trail, and dramatically changes his tune after he gets his first daily intelligence briefing as President, but still, at the very least, both of these men seem to owe old George an apology.

Just a thought before I wrap this up. What happens if one of the bombs floating down from 35,000 feet happens to land smack dab in the unknown location of Syria’s chemical weapons stockpile, spewing deadly gas throughout Damascus killing thousands of innocent people? Will our President be brought up on war crimes charges at The Hague? Will he have to return his Nobel Peace prize?

God save us from the unintended consequences of our folly.

What Do The People Really Want?

On Monday morning I wrote about the very real probability that the United States was about to open military hostilities with Syria. The readership of this blog responded with a collective yawn, a few scattered page views. Yesterday, I wrote about a raunchy performance by Miley Cyrus at the MTV awards show and everything blows up, the most page views I’ve had in over a year. Apparently, even at a sleepy back water media outpost like The Tempest, sex sells.

Everyone I know complains about the media. It’s too biased; it’s too infatuated with the sensational, too enamored with flash, while ignoring “real” news. After writing a blog for nearly three years now, I can say without hesitation that, while the political and cultural bias of the media is a reflection of them, their promotion of the sensational is a reflection of us.

If this blog was my living, if I depended on page views for my income, in order to survive I would constantly have to write about the salacious. It is guaranteed to attract readers… period. Works every time. The fact is that people aren’t interested in the federal budget deficit. They aren’t interested in government corruption, malfeasance, or the erosion of our Fourth amendment rights to privacy. They don’t even seem all that concerned about our participation in yet another military adventure in the Middle East. But let a twenty year old spoiled brat shake her bottom on an awards show and all of a sudden Americans snap to attention.

Let me be clear on this. When I say “Americans,” I’m talking about myself too. When I click on the Drudge Report or the Huffington Post, I too tend to be drawn to the most provocative story. When I’m browsing through the first page of the Wall Street Journal, what do I read first, the story about the possible nominees to replace Ben Bernanke at the Fed, or the latest embarrassing sexual depravity to be unearthed about Anthony Weiner? Too often, it’s Weiner. Which one of these stories will have the biggest impact on our nation and actually affect my daily life and prosperity? Seeing as the Chairman of the Federal Reserve is the most powerful man/woman in the world, the answer is self-evident, but my eyes can’t resist the dirt on Weiner.

Maybe it’s all a giant conspiracy. Maybe the big shots in the media think that if they can keep us all excited and exercised about Miley Cyrus, Anthony Weiner, Alex Rodriguez and Lady Gaga, we won’t notice that the wheels are flying off the country and we’re headed for the Grand Canyon.

Bread and circuses.