Whiplash.....a review.

I saw an incredible movie last night. It starred one of my favorite actors, J.K. Simmons, which was reason enough to watch since he has never been in a bad movie or given a bad performance. It also had a music theme, jazz, to be specific. So there was a lot to recommend...Whiplash. But as the credits rolled after an hour and forty five minutes I simply did not know what to think.

It was a mesmerizing thing to watch. Simmons was brilliant. His performance was taut and crackling with intensity. Every time he entered a room dressed tightly in black I feared him. He plays a jazz band conductor at an elite music conservatory in New York City who begins all of his classes at the stroke of the hour. The players all look utterly terrified, not just of playing a sour note, but even being noticed by this profane, raging volcano of a man. Early in the film he happens upon a 19 year old freshman drummer practicing alone in an empty room. He takes an interest in his evident talent and the rest of the film tells the story of how this man goes about trying to draw the very best out of the kid. Simmon's tactics are...shall we say, a bit light on affirmation.

Terence Fletcher is a bully. His preferred teaching technique seems to be humiliation. He is violent, abusive and a world class devotee of imaginative profanity. As you watch him do his thing you begin to hate him. No one, no matter how talented should have the authority to be such an asshole. No amount of giftedness can possibly excuse such cruelty. And yet...

 Fletcher is a character that is well known throughout the history of mankind. It's the lunatics of this world who produce the most astounding works of art. The men and women who have demonstrated the willingness to go beyond good to relentlessly pursue great, are the ones who end up as legends. It's just not much fun to watch. Fletcher seems obsessed with the story of young Charlie Parker who allegedly had a cymbal thrown at him by the drummer Jo Jones after making a mistake on his sax solo. According to Fletcher's telling, it was this humiliation that fired Parker to become a more committed, determined musician and was ultimately responsible for his genius. Maybe. Something tells me that true musical genius has less to do with 20,000 hours of practice than it does with genetics, but that's just me. But, as you watch the ferocious, abusive techniques employed by Terence Fletcher and the disastrous consequences it has on young Andrew Teller, you find yourself thinking, "Would it kill this guy to give the kid a compliment?"

The most memorable line in the film comes when Fletcher tells Teller, " There are no two words in the English language more harmful than good job." Not exactly an epitaph most people want on their tombstone, but for the pursuit of artistic greatness perhaps there's a grain of truth. 

As I watched this movie I couldn't help thinking about Sherri Matthews. No, she was not an abusive, profane maniac. But she didn't exactly have much patience for mediocrity either. She did give compliments, but never false ones. She instilled a healthy fear in her students, not fear of failing, but a fear of laziness, a fear of the consequences of not giving their best effort. Her high standards and exacting demands created an environment that produced beautiful, award winning music and inspired more than a few musicians on to bigger and better things, my son being one of them.

Maybe Jazz is different. Maybe Fletcher's style is required to root out the good from the great. If so, no wonder so many jazzmen kill themselves!

What Free People Do

A few days ago I wrote a blog about the shooting in Garland, Texas. In it I questioned why anyone would want to stage a "draw Muhammad" contest with a cash prize of $10,000. It seemed gratuitously insulting to people of the Muslim faith. I stand by that opinion. But what I have been reading since about the reactions of many on the left to this incident is disturbing to me, so I feel the need to clarify a bit.

Whenever I see the Westboro Baptist Church in the news, I feel the need to take a long hot shower. These people show up at the sight of extreme pain for some family who has just lost a child, or a young woman, or a soldier. They stand on a corner somewhere within earshot of a private funeral and begin chanting the most vile, hateful filth, the intent of which is to provoke a reaction. They carry signs  claiming that God is delighted with the death of yet another pervert. It makes me want to hop on a plane, fly out there and wipe the street up with them. 

But, do I want them silenced? Do I want my government to be vested with the power to lock them up for their ignorant rantings? No. A million times, no. Why? Because I do not live in Castro's Cuba or Stalin's Soviet Union, Mao's China or the Germany of Adolph Hitler. The most precious thing in the founding documents of my country is the Bill of Rights, and the first of those rights is Freedom of Speech. If this guarantee has any meaning at all, it must protect all speech, especially the ignorant and vile. We do not need a Bill of Rights to protect the public reading of a Shakesperian sonnet or the soaring speeches of Martin Luther King. We need a Bill of Rights to protect us against a government who arbitrarily decides what kinds of speech it wants to silence. The price of this freedom, this dearest of human rights, the right of self-expression, is the tolerance of opinions that we loathe.

That's why I am against any high-minded attempts to carve out exclusions, to cordone off certain groups, to mark as off-limits any group, no matter how marginalized or dangerous they may be. Sorry, that's just the way it has to be in a free society.

So, let the Westboro folks carry their signs. Let the full light of day illuminate their wickedness for all of us to see. We can all make our own judgements on what we think of them. We are free people and that's what free people do.

Strange Bedfellows

Color me cynical, but when Barack Obama and Mitch McConnell both desperately want the same thing, you better grab your wallet, because we're about to get royally screwed.

That "thing" is fast-track trade authority. The President wants it and McConnell wants him to have it. It will give him the right to negotiate trade pacts, particularly the Trans-Pacific Partnership, without congress being able to gum up the approval process with endless amendments. On this one weird issue, a bizarrely suspicious coalition has grown up in Congress which places the President in the awkward position of being in cahoots with the Republican establishment on one side against a handful of Republicans and almost the entire Democrat party on the other. It also places me temporarily in the nauseating position of being in agreement with the single biggest dirtbag in the history of politics...Harry Reid.( I may have to wash my fingers for an hour after typing that last sentence.)

The Trans-Pacific Partnership is basically NAFTA for the Asian world. I don't want to leave the impression that I am well versed enough in the field of economics and global trade policy to site chapter and verse on something as large and complicated as T-PP, but after seeing the benefits of NAFTA, I want nothing to do with "son of NAFTA." What were the benefits of NAFTA, you ask? Basically it was a windfall for manufacturing jobs...in Mexico. 

So, while the political establishment will hail the passage of T-PP as a triumph of bi-partisanship, I'll take gridlock any day of the week.

Father Knows Best

This past Saturday, I was visited by the mother of all allergy attacks. After a morning of cutting the grass and taking Lucy for a three mile walk, I apparently inhaled just the right amount of airborne allergens to trigger an entire afternoon and evening of world class sneezing. When I was in my twenties, this sort of thing would happen several times a week during April and May. Then I visited a specialist who administered a round of shots that essentially delivered me from my misery. Still, every once in a while I have an isolated relapse.

My poor wife had to suffer through along with me because of something I learned from my Dad. He was of the belief that if you tried to stifle a sneeze, dire consequences would follow. He would warn us that if we held back a sneeze, we ran the risk that we might blow our brains out of our ears. As a kid, I kind of knew he was kidding, but to hear my Dad sneeze made a believer out of me. It would shake the house! He held nothing back. Mom would fuss at him because it would scare her to death!

All these years later, I'm still a heavy sneezer. Saturday I put on an epic display. By the time dinner rolled around, Pam very calmly turned to me after a particularly forceful effort asking, "Is that really necessary?" Bless her heart.

Around midnight, my fitful sleep was interrupted by...well, there's no need to go into the gory details. Suffice it to say that more Benadryl was needed...STAT. So, I went downstairs, not wanting to wake her up. I threw a couple of the tiny pink pills down, then laid on the couch waiting for relief, a box of tissues in hand. Then it happened. I could feel the pressure building, the slight tickle somewhere deep inside my beleaguered nasal passages. This was going to be huge. I scrambled for a clean tissue, a couple of tissues. Despite being downstairs, I sensed that this particular sneeze might have sleep interrupting characteristics not only for Pam but for the neighbors. I remembered her plaintive plea, "Is this really necessary?" So, against my every instinct, I slammed the tissues over my mouth and nose stifling the mighty force rising within me. Just like the recoil from a shotgun blast, the sneeze lifted me six inches off of the sofa...whereupon I felt a pop. I had pulled a muscle between my shoulder blades. The pain was immediate and excruciating. I might not have blown my brains out through my ears, but pulling a muscle in my back is the next worse thing.

Once again, Dad was right. 

Don't Mess With Texas?

Texas is different. Although it's a southern state, it's different than the South. It's part of the American West, but it's different than the West. Everything seems bigger there. You order a steak there and they bring you a 20 oz. by God steak. Texas is big on confidence, attitude and pride. If any state could conceive of holding a "Draw Muhammad" contest and offer the winning cartoonist $10,000, it would be Texas. If any state could come up with the idea of inviting famed Dutch politician Geert Wilders to be the keynote speaker of the Draw Muhammad contest, it would be Texas. This is how they roll in the Lone Star State.

So, overnight in the Dallas suburb of Garland, the latest front in the War on Terror was opened. Two heavily armed men attempted to storm the community center where the cartoon contest was being held. One security guard was shot in the leg, and very soon afterwards the two men were sent to their 72 virgins. The Curtis Culwell Center was placed on lockdown. Inside, the 100 or so attendees lifted a prayer for the injured security guard and sang patriotic songs. 

I found most of these details not from the Associated Press version of events which was remarkably light on crucial details, but from the huge spread, complete with at least a dozen pictures, in the British newspaper, the Daily Mail. I have found this to be consistently true when it comes to reporting on terrorist attacks. American news outlets have a hard time forming words into coherent sentences when reporting on anything having to do with Islam, so tortured are they by ambivalence. On the one hand, they want to report the facts, but on the other hand, they walk carefully through a mine field of their own construction, strewn with potential trigger words and micro-aggression phrases that might land them in the progressive doghouse.

I am left with two conflicting emotions towards the news from Garland. On the one hand, I fear that this sort of thing is now here to stay, bands of radicalized ISIS sympathizers roaming my country avenging the Prophet's honor. With our porous southern border, I suppose it's inevitable. Although at this hour it isn't known whether the two gunmen in question were new arrivals or home grown, it doesn't much matter. America the beautiful may have become the new battleground.

The second, competing emotion I feel is embarrassment. Something called the American Freedom Defense Initaitive(AFDI) sponsored this event. It's leader, a Pamela Geller claimed that the event was necessary as a response to the "jihad against free speech." I feel relatively certain that the 100 people who attended would all consider themselves to be born again Christians and patriotic Americans. So, why does this whole thing feel so tacky to me? I mean, I'm as patriotic as it gets, and certainly no fan of radical Islam, but offering 10 grand to the person who can best humiliate the followers of someone else's faith in the name of freedom of speech seems less about free speech and more about rudeness to me. Listen, just because we have free speech in this country doesn't give us license to wield it like a club. Do I have the constitutionally protected right to draw a cartoon of Muhammad? Certainly, I do. Should I make a big bragging show of that right by going out of my way to intentionally humiliate Muslims? Not if I have...manners.

The primary difference between the liberal, civilized western world and that of the 7th century ISIS types is one of confidence. ISIS cannot deal with the freedom and enlightenment that has evolved in the West over the past 200 years. They feel threatened by the free world. We should have the confidence that comes with the technological advancements and human rights victories won in our part of the world. A confident people don't need garish events like the "Draw Muhammad" contest in Garland, Texas. A confident people need not humiliate others to feel better about ourselves. 

Last Night I Had The Strangest Dream

Last night I had the strangest dream...

I found myself at what appeared to be a high school, where I was late arriving for a speech being given by a man who used to work for Life of Virginia 25 years ago. By the time I finally found the auditorium, the place was packed with people I haven't seen in at least that long, all from my days with that deceased company. The weird thing was that all of them looked like they did back then. No one had aged, except me. Not only that, but the speaker was talking about some new product they were introducing, and his pitch was so chocked full of lies and distortions that I found myself challenging him from my seat in the back..."What a crock of crap!!" I heard myself yell accompanied by a collective gasp from the crowd. I proceeded to inform the crowd of what total bulls**t they were being fed since the product the guy was introducing would turn out to be a colossal failure resulting in endless litigation and the eventual sale of the company to General Electric. 

Unfortunatley, my sage warnings were not well received by the speaker or the crowd. I was roundly booed. Epitaphs began flying around..."it's just Dunnevant, he's always such a contrarian douchebag!"

After the speech, I began walking around and realized that I was at a convention of sorts. But instead of some tropical locale, the big shots at the company had chosen to have the big event at a high school full of students. I saw small groups of people at tables drinking milk out of little cartons, and they were all having the best time ever. Every now and then I would see someone who recognized me and they would call me over to their table, give me a hug and then rip me for interrupting the speech.

Then, some woman came up to me to inform me that I hadn't properly registered for the event. The registration table was in the girls locker room. The towel-clad teenagers looked none too pleased with our presence, but after receiving my ID badge, I left and saw an elegant tent out on the football field under which, was a group of a hundred or so people in black tie and festive gowns. The sign on the tent said, Top of the Table. I was part of this group since there was a place setting with my name on it, but it was back in the corner and I was the only one at the table. To make things even more awkward, I was dressed in sweat pants and a wife-beater. Pam was nowhere to be found. Even in my dreams, she has the good sense not to be seen in public with me.

After a while, I excused myself to go find a bathroom. The search seemed endless, the type of exhausting, tedious trek that one often has in dreams. When I finally found a workable men's room, it was jammed packed with a film crew shooting a commercial for a medicine that fights toenail fungus starring none other than...Rush Limbaugh. The sight of him made up in yellowish green tights was too much to bear, even in my dreams. I woke up and hurried downstairs to get all the details down before I forgot anything.

Might it have been something I ate? Cajun pasta at Rock Bottom perhaps? Or was it some suppressed message from my sub-conscious telling me the unvarnished truth...that I really am a contrarian douchebag?

Fixing Our Cities

Over the past several days, my blog and my attention have been dominated by the mess in Baltimore. Like everyone else, I have watched events unfold there with a combination of sadness and anger. But mostly, I have been overcome by a sense of hopelessness, the idea that the problems in our cities are simply beyond remedy. My son, after reading one of my blogs, made this statement: “OK, so liberal policies haven’t worked. What’s YOUR plan?” His question has hung in the air ever since. It is one thing to point out the clear failures of others, another thing entirely to offer up a reasonable alternative. I have thought of little else since.

What follows is the result of all of this introspection. I must state up front that I’m no social planner, I have no particular training in urban studies and certainly, I am no politician. So, I have no idea whether the solutions I’m about to offer would actually work. My ideas aren’t immune to that worst nightmare of all central planners, the law of unintended consequences. Still, these are a start, if for no other reason than to provide me with a sense that our problems might in fact have a workable solution.

I should probably point out that most of the problems of the inner city have their origins in the erosion of the family, an unintended consequence of a whole host of policies which had loftier intentions. Despite the fact that most of America's big cities have been run almost exclusively by the Democratic Party for the past 40 years, I will endeavor to discuss these problems without assigning blame because frankly, at this point it doesn’t matter whose fault it all is. It just needs to be fixed! The question then becomes, are there policies that could be brought to bear that would encourage the re-establishment of the family structure, and are there policies that we could eliminate that discourage intact families from staying so?

So, without further delay, here’s what I would do if I were King to attempt to fix our cities.

1    1.     End the War on Drugs.

By any measure, the War on Drugs has been a colossal failure. We have spent a fortune, made criminals out of two generations of mostly black men and accomplished no significant public good. This war has been fought almost entirely in the inner city and the vast majority of those in jail for drug crimes are black. This despite the fact that white suburbanites have prodigious appetites for everything from pot to heroin, and without white customers willing and able to pay, the drug business would be in serious trouble. One has to ask the question, what societal good is accomplished by arresting a twenty year old for smoking a couple of joints and saddling him with a criminal record and jail time? Are his prospects of finding gainful, lawful employment helped or hurt by his time being locked up with a thousand other hardened criminals? And before you start lecturing me about how horrible a problem drug addiction is for society, check yourself. There’s no chance in hell that pot smoking is more injurious to society at large than alcohol abuse. How many people get killed by people driving while high compared to driving while drunk? How many pot smokers get all hyped up on cannabis and then go home and beat their wives?

I’m not a drug user and I would strongly discourage anyone I know and love from becoming one, but the only thing the War on Drugs has accomplished is removing millions of black men from their homes, and from their neighborhoods, creating the very fatherless homes that conservatives lament.

2.  Replace welfare with a jobs program.

Yes, yes, I know what all of you House of Cards fans are thinking, “He stole that idea from Frank Underwood!” No, not exactly. Well, maybe…a little. First of all, what I’m about to propose will sound strange coming from someone as Libertarian as I am, I know. Secondly, I am very aware that the government has shown itself to be pathetically inept at “creating jobs” so I concede that this idea has more holes in it than Swiss cheese. But, hear me out.

FDR’s famous New Deal did not bring this country out of the Great Depression; that would have been World War II and the beneficial impact of placing the entire nation’s industrial output on a war footing. However, the jobs that the government did create accomplished something quite profound. They transformed, in the public imagination, the notion that they were not on the public doll…something for Americans of all races in the 1930’s would have been anathema. Instead, men like my grandfather, who worked on the Civilian Conservation Corps that built the Skyline Drive, were able to hold onto their pride as working men. When they cashed their government paychecks it was for services rendered, and that allowed them to be in full possession of their dignity.

By contrast, the checks that keep most inner cities barely viable are in exchange for nothing. In fact, the more dysfunctional your life becomes the bigger the check. Accordingly, I propose putting every able-bodied welfare recipient to work as a requirement of receiving government assistance. If we are committed to spending money on welfare, why not allow its recipients to earn it. What kind of jobs would these be? Frankly, I don’t know. But you can’t tell me that a nation that put a man on the freaking moon can’t get the smartest people from business and government together and figure this thing out. How about cleaning up the streets, block by block? How about replacing burnt out empty lots with gardens, not ones planted by a bunch of do-gooder college kids, but by the people who live next door?

Of course these make-work jobs are temporary. But make-work jobs are infinitely better than no job. To provide more permanent, sustainable employment, we will need to consider….

3.  Repealing NAFTA.

Back in the 1990’s I was a vocal supporter of the free trade movement. Nafta was a bi-partisan policy that was initially pushed by Republicans but ultimately passed by Bill Clinton. I thought at the time that the benefits of free trade would far outweigh the negatives. On the positive side, I thought that we would all benefit from lower prices on practically everything, and I was right. Witness the rise of giant retailers like Walmart and Costco who sell us adorable clothes for toddlers at  everyday low low prices. But, I challenge you to go into your closet right now and see if you can find any garment that was made in this country. Chances are, you won’t, because we no longer have a textile industry, especially in the State of Virginia, the southside of which used to be filled with textile plants churning out everything from jeans to overcoats. Who used to work in those plants? Generally speaking, whites and blacks with high school educations or lower who despite their limitations could get a factory job and manage to enter the middle class. Where do they work now? Many of them don’t. But, not to worry, they get welfare and food stamps so, it’s all good. No…it is not!!

We manufacture nothing in this country anymore which may be fine for many people since that adorable Osh Kosh By Gosh jumper is on sale for $3.99, but for large segments of what used to be called the Middle Class, it matters greatly. It turns out that the noble idiot, Ross Perot, was right when he described that giant sucking sound as the sound of American jobs for the working classes heading down to Mexico!

Yes, many jobs that were shipped overseas have been replaced with other jobs in industries that were unheard of in the 1990’s and that’s all wonderful. But if you eliminate the jobs that working people relied upon and replace them with jobs that require a Master’s Degree in computer science, that’s not going to help Bubba and Leroy provide for their families. When we tell welfare recipients in Baltimore to “get a job,” where exactly do we suggest they go to look? Nepal? Because that’s where those adorable toddler jumpers are being sewn together by 12 year old girls working 17 hour days so we can have money left over for our pedicures.

And yes, I know that one of the reasons American workers aren’t as competitive as those elsewhere in many cases are the result of ridiculously generous and inflexible union contracts. But again, somewhere out there, there has got to be someone who can come up with some sensible compromises that can begin to bring manufacturing jobs back to America.

4.  Demilitarize Policing

No one appreciates the job that policemen do more than I do. These men and women work long hours doing a demanding job for embarrassingly low pay. The vast majority of them do their jobs well. But something has gone terribly wrong with policing tactics when video keeps surfacing showing three cops using violent force apprehending a citizen guilty of nothing more than selling loose cigarettes. The rules of engagement that encourage such extreme force have to be revisited. Our cops look more like members of some elite SWAT team than cops. Now, I know that Mayberry was a fictional place and that Sherriff Andy Taylor was a character in a television show, but who among us doesn’t long to be protected by a cop with the wisdom and grace of Andy Taylor, he of the empty gun holster. 

Yes, times have changed. Today’s criminals are meaner, and better armed than ever. Still, it’s hard to see the benefit of armored personnel carriers, tanks and strike forces loaded down with automatic rifles roaming the streets and think to yourself, “Aww…to protect and defend.” What jumps quicker to mind is, “Aww…to invade and destroy.” Something is wrong when hardly a week goes by without some cell phone video hitting the Drudge Report showing some officer somewhere beating the crap out of some unarmed kid…or worse. It makes a cynical person wonder how often this type of stuff went on before cell phone cameras became ubiquitous.

My advice? Dial it back about ten notches with the Dirty Harry routine. Start demonstrating some restraint and go back to reserving the rough stuff for guys who are committing actual violent crimes, not the poor slob who has a blown out back up light.

Ok, that’s my short list. It’s not perfect, some of it may not work. I have not addressed many other big problem areas like education, but it's a start.  And at least my son can't say I haven't offered an alternative besides the status quo.