Walter White says bye-bye, ‘Baby Blue’

Posted on September 30, 2013 by oddmanout215

Walter White to his long-suffering wife Skyler in their final scene together: “I did it for me. I liked it. I was good at it. And I was really… I was alive.”

Breaking Bad was an unusually good TV show partly because its creator, Vince Gilligan, never stopped poking fun at contemporary notions of acceptable behavior. For a long while, we could root for Walt the cancer-riddled meth cook because he was trying to make sure his family would be provided for after he died. Then Gilligan revealed a more ruthless and arrogant Walt, until we couldn’t help but wonder how much of his professed commitment to family was to rationalize the pleasure he took in wielding power.

Most viewers “get” that ours is a dog-eat-dog society in which conventional morality is usually an obstacle to success and well-being, and that the people who wield real power in this country are far more beastly than Walt at his worst. (Dick Cheney is Ozymandias, not Walter White.)

But there are still limits to the amount of nasty behavior a TV audience will accept in a protagonist, even if he’s an anti-hero. Walt crossed the line when he let Jesse’s junkie girlfriend choke to death on her own vomit, a sin that indirectly caused many more deaths. He clearly “deserved” to die, but only after some terrible comeuppance.

He suffered many comeuppances in the show’s final season. His “I did it for my family” became an ironic motif, especially to feminist critics who see patriarchy as the root of all evil. He seemed to have reached the limit of his self-awareness.

But Gilligan threw one final curveball in the finale, when Walt fessed up to having taken pleasure in breaking bad. His “I was alive” declaration, reminiscent of some existential hipster dreamed up by Norman Mailer, was also an admission that his quest to do right by his family had corrupted him and done terrible damage to them and others.

Gilligan apparently sensed that fans didn’t want the show to end on a morally simplistic note, so he left us with a Walt whose vengeful final actions were also about trying to undo some of the harm he’d done. He died fully aware of his guilt but more or less at peace with himself, an Everyman, if Everyman could cook perfect blue meth and had the guts to fight back, however recklessly, against those who would expect him or her to die without trying to, yes, provide for his or her family.

Footnote: An old Badfinger hit was used in Walt’s death scene as a lament for killer meth (… the special love I had for you, Baby Blue). Gilligan’s ability to use music in a subversive way is on a par with Quentin Tarrentino’s.

Posted in arts, economic collapse, fiction, mainstream media, pop music, The New Depression | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Media still propping up economic recovery myth

Posted on September 29, 2013 by oddmanout215

Don't be fooled by joblessness and hunger. The economy is recovering.

Don’t be fooled by declining wages, foreclosures and hungry children. Happy days are here again.

My shack in Tinicum was in a miserable state, so I paid Swamp Rabbit to help me clean and paint it. Afterwards, the place looked good from the porch but when I stepped inside, I fell through the floor into three feet of swamp water. It hit me that my shack was like the economy, a total wreck no matter how many times the media try to slap a new coat of paint on it and claim it’s as good as new.

Richard Wolff put it this way:

Here is the “recovery…” The top 1% of income-earners in the US took 19% of the national income in 2012, the largest share since 1928. That 1% also saw their average income rise by 31.4% from the current crisis’s low point in 2009, through 2012. The top 1% certainly enjoyed a recovery.

In total contrast, income for the other 99% rose by an average of 0.4% during the same period. Many of those people actually saw their earnings drop…

Many mass media corporations render the service of hyping the recovery eagerly to their advertisers. These advertisers wish to avoid association with bad news that might distress audiences. The mainstream media therefore offers up infotainment with economic recovery “highlights.” They also emphasize reports about countries whose experiences with the global economic crisis are worse than that of the U.S.

For example, immense attention focuses on Greece and Spain, rather than Germany or Sweden. The crisis has been far, far less damaging in the latter than in the former or in the U.S. Likewise, when the mass media here cover the high unemployment rates in certain European countries, they often conveniently omit that unemployment there does not affect citizens’ health insurance coverage, pensions, or most public services and subsidies as negatively as it does in the U.S.

I pulled myself out of the hole in the floor and began to rant: It’s no accident that America’s corporate media never present stories that compare quality of life in the U.S. and western Europe! It’s about time they started reporting what’s really going on!

The rabbit cracked open a bottle of Wild Turkey, his reward for helping clean up. “Great speech,” he said, “but who’s gonna pay them to write what’s real? Depressions are depressing, Odd Man.”

Posted in economic collapse, health care, humor, mainstream media, The New Depression, unemployment | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Stranger than Strangelove

Posted on September 22, 2013 by oddmanout215

Slim Pickens rides the bomb in 'Dr. Strangelove." No worries.

Slim Pickens rides the bomb in ‘Dr. Strangelove.” No worries.

I was back at the shack, beside myself with angst, reading to Swamp Rabbit about a catastrophe that almost happened a half-century ago:

A secret document, published in declassified form for the first time by the Guardian today, reveals that the US Air Force came dramatically close to detonating an atom bomb over North Carolina that would have been 260 times more powerful than the device that devastated Hiroshima.

The document, obtained by the investigative journalist Eric Schlosser under the Freedom of Information Act, gives the first conclusive evidence that the US was narrowly spared a disaster of monumental proportions when two Mark 39 hydrogen bombs were accidentally dropped over Goldsboro, North Carolina on 23 January 1961. The bombs fell to earth after a B-52 bomber broke up in mid-air, and one of the devices behaved precisely as a nuclear weapon was designed to behave in warfare: its parachute opened, its trigger mechanisms engaged, and only one low-voltage switch prevented untold carnage.

I reminded the rabbit that we live a hop and a skip from Philadelphia. The bomb might have wiped out Philly and the rest of the mid-Atlantic region faster than you could say “Duck and cover.”

“‘Almost’ don’t count,” the rabbit said. He was drinking Wild Turkey and Coke, a rustic concoction that brings out the philosopher in him. “The Germans almost took Stalingrad. Dylan almost died in a motorcycle accident. What’s your point, Odd Man?”

I threw an empty bottle of Guinness at him and said, “The point is that real life is stranger than fiction. Even Stanley Kubrick, in Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, couldn’t have made up a story this strange. If not for one measly switch, that bomb would have gone off.”

The rabbit gulped his drink, spilling some on his greasy coat, and said, “So what, Odd Man? If the bomb had gone off, then you wouldn’t be sitting here worrying out loud like some old lady with rheumatism. That was Kubrick’s point, don’t you know? In an absurd world, why worry?”

I watched the Guinness bottle bobbing in the swamp and said, “You stupid rodent. Dr. Strangelove was a cautionary tale. Kubrick was trying to wise people up to the danger of nuclear war.”

“Dr. Strangelove was a comedy,” he said. “Ain’t no way nobody like you could have done nothin’ about no nuclear war, not when the Cold War was on. You might just as well laugh. If you want to worry, then worry about where you’re gonna sell them stories you write. Worry about where you gonna git money for food now that there ain’t no jobs.”

I almost tossed him in the swamp by his ears but resisted the urge. What good is angst if you don’t have an audience for it?

Posted in arts, economic collapse, fiction, history, humor, mainstream media, movies, Philadelphia, unemployment | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

The sport of kings, and of corporate welfare

Posted on September 19, 2013 by oddmanout215

horse

Most non-fans of horse-racing, if they think of the sport at all, probably picture frantic racetrack patrons at ticket windows, or at computers, placing last-minute bets as horses and jockeys mosey up to the starting gate. But an article on Philly.com today explains why it’s incorrect to assume the horse-racing industry in PA is funded by people who gamble on horses:

…Rather, it’s funded by the tens of thousands of small-time Pennsylvania casino patrons who play — and lose at — slot machines. Thanks to a law written primarily by the horse-racing industry itself, slots players — many of whom are retired and elderly — are the primary funders of what some consider a massive corporate welfare program that props up the state’s horse-race industry, and often benefits rich horse owners.

In just six years, more than $1.5 billion has gone to horse owners, race-horse breeders and others in the industry, thanks to a little-known state subsidy that feeds 12 percent of casino slot revenues to the horse-race industry. Last year, slots pulled in $2.4 billion in revenue. While schools struggle, pension funds decline and the state’s roads and bridges crumble, many of the recipients of the horse-race subsidy are out-of-state multimillionaires. Some are billionaires several times over…

Way to go, Ed Rendell, and all you other politicians who played a part in linking the casino racket to horse-racing, once called the sport of kings, which was on its last legs, so to speak, before receiving a massive infusion of cash from the serfs who play the slots.

Footnote: The philly.com story neatly illustrates one of the ways in which state-sponsored casino gambling pretends to pump up regional economies while actually draining money from them.

Posted in casinos, Philadelphia, sports, taxes, The New Depression | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Summers’ end (exit Iago)

Posted on September 17, 2013 by oddmanout215

“Look, it’s Larry Summers,” said Swamp Rabbit, pointing at an oil slick on the wetlands that surrounds my shotgun shack in Tinicum. “I think he’s heading north, maybe back to Harvard.”

“No way,” I said. “He gambled away a big chunk of Harvard’s endowment.”

We’d just read that Summers will not be nominated to head the Federal Reserve Board. One less malignant hustler using a powerful post to undermine the quality of life of Americans who aren’t rich. I can’t think of a better possible story out of Washington, D.C. Maybe if Summers had been knocked on his ass by someone who lost a home to one of the banks he helped bail out during the economic crisis he helped cause.

No surprise that Barack Obama, according to The New York Times, had wanted Summers for the job but apparently didn’t choose him because of the political risks:

…But as that Oval Office meeting last year also suggests, Mr. Obama’s one concern about nominating Mr. Summers has been the potential for a Senate battle — not only from Republicans spoiling for fights, but also from Democrats who view Mr. Summers as having been too friendly toward deregulating big banks when he was Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration…

“Too friendly” — how’s that for polite understatement? Summers played a key role in the repeal of Glass-Steagall. After the big banks went belly up, he saved them with taxpayers’ money, much of which should have been spent to replace millions of lost jobs, and on a large-scale foreclosure-blocking program. And now, even though he won’t head the Fed, the self-satisfied little toad is still playing Iago to Obama’s Othello.

Footnote: From a piece by Peter Beinart that explains why the Democratic Party will become even more like the GOP unless progressives completely overhaul it:

From Tony Coelho, who during the Reagan years taught House Democrats to raise money from corporate lobbyists to Bill Clinton, who made Goldman Sachs co-chairman Robert Rubin his chief economic adviser, to Barack Obama, who gave the job to Rubin’s former deputy and alter ego, Larry Summers, Democrats have found it easier to forge relationships with the conservative worlds of big business and high finance because they have not faced much countervailing pressure from an independent movement of the left.

Posted in economic collapse, Goldman Sachs, Great Recession, mainstream media, New York Times, Obama, The New Depression, unemployment, Wall Street | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

J.D. Salinger groupie tells all — again!

Posted on September 16, 2013 by oddmanout215

Great stuff, but not as juicy as Joyce Maynard's memoir

Good stuff, but not as juicy as Joyce Maynard’s memoir

My friend Swamp Rabbit, an autodidact who tries to hide his deep knowledge of American literature, was surprised and appalled by a recent piece in The New York Times by the writer Joyce Maynard. It began:

In the 50 years since J.D. Salinger removed himself from the public eye and stopped publishing, he has been viewed — more accurately, worshiped — as the human embodiment of purity, a welcome antidote to phoniness. To many, he was a kind of god.

Now comes the word — though not really news, to some — that over the years when he was cherishing his privacy, Salinger was also carrying on relationships with young women 15, and in my case, 35 years younger than he.

“This ain’t about Salinger, it’s about Joyce Maynard,” the rabbit said after reading the rest of the piece. “Why does she want the whole world to know she was a Salinger groupie?”

My carrot-gnawing friend hasn’t seen much of the world beyond the swamp we both live in and therefore couldn’t believe it when I told him that many Americans would rather read something about Salinger than by him. And they’d rather a tell-all with sex details than, say, a re-evaluation of why Salinger’s first-person narrator in The Catcher In the Rye was so popular with critics and the public.

The rodent looked befuddled. I tried again to explain why people who are bored by Salinger the recluse can’t help but be aroused by the idea that he “was a kind of god” who turned out to be Charlie Manson in disguise, an evil manipulator of innocent girls. They know, sometimes without having read them, that none of the Nine Stories could possibly be as juicy as the story of how poor little rich girl Joyce was victimized during an eight-month “relationship” with the famous author, who died in 2010.

“That’s crazy talk,” Swamp Rabbit said. “We all get used and abused, conned and compromised, bamboozled and betrayed at some time by someone we looked up to or fell in love with. Why carry a grudge like that for forty years?”

My scrawny friend is so naive. I told him that Maynard’s Times piece was written to be in sync with the release of Shane Salerno’s documentary film about Salinger, and with a Salinger biography by Salerno and David Shields. More importantly, she had already dished the dirt on Salinger in her 1999 memoir At Home In the World and is reissuing that book now that the gossipy new movie and biography are out. Which means her Times piece is as much a self-promotional device as it is a cautionary tale for starry-eyed young girls or another stab at revenge. It certainly isn’t news.

Footnote: From Zoe Heller’s 2001 review of At Home In the World:

It is one of the cast-iron rules of biographical writing: the more damaging and transgressive the revelations on offer, the more fervently priggish the author’s explanation of his or her motive.

One more: The Salernos and Maynards of the world will never forgive Salinger for that most un-American of sins — refusing to be a celebrity.

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Making the world safe for plutocracy

Posted on September 12, 2013 by oddmanout215

Obama is a singing an updated version of an old song by Woodrow Wilson.

Obama is singing a variation on an old song by Woodrow Wilson.

I tuned in Wednesday evening for Barack Obama’s let’s-bomb-Syria speech and heard this:

What kind of world will we live in if the United States of America sees a dictator brazenly violate international law with poison gas and we choose to look the other way?

My friend Swamp Rabbit stopped reading the new biography of Woodrow Wilson and spit out the window into the swamp. He said to the TV, “Dude, you should never ask a question that begs for an answer you won’t like.”

My pesky, rodent-like friend had a point. An honest answer to Obama’s question would be that we live in a cynical world where dictators — and some presidents — invoke morality and basic decency to justify using raw power to advance their own interests.

As for international law, Obama must be oblivious to irony. Most civilized countries would have put George W. Bush on trial for crimes committed in prosecuting the so-called war on terror, but Obama, when he took office, quickly snuffed out hope that Bush and his gang would even face a federal investigation.

Predictably, Obama used his Wednesday speech to invoke American exceptionalism, something presidents have been doing since Woodrow Wilson asked Congress to declare war on Germany so that the world could “be made safe for democracy.” But the joke was on Obama when the devious Vladimir Putin scolded him in yesterday’s New York Times: “It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation.”

Footnote: Among other things, Obama’s obsession with bombing Syria is his way of distracting attention from the fact that he has done little to restore the economic health of America’s middle class and everything to bail out and increase the wealth of the plutocrats who run the big banks and corporations. Robert Reich:

More than four years after the recession officially ended, 11.5 million Americans are unemployed, many of them for years. Nearly 4 million have given up looking for work altogether…

…And the median wage keeps dropping, adjusted for inflation. Incomes for all but the top 1 percent are below where they were at the start of the economic recovery in 2009…

A decent society would put people to work — even if this required more government spending on roads, bridges, ports, pipelines, parks and schools.

All in good time, I guess. Maybe after the plutocrats hoard another trillion or two.

Posted in economic collapse, history, Iraq war, mainstream media, New York Times, Obama, unemployment, Wall Street | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

I don’t see color. Obama looks just like Bush.

Posted on September 10, 2013 by oddmanout215

I was back at my shack in Tinicum swamp, eating pizza and reading the Obama administration’s rationale for wanting to bomb Syria. It passes the “common sense test,” an aide said. I don’t know how Barack Obama is defining common sense, but Tom Paine must be spinning in his grave.

Then I read this, from AP:

The U.S. government insists it has the intelligence to prove it, but the American public has yet to see a single piece of concrete evidence – no satellite imagery, no transcripts of Syrian military communications – connecting the government of President Bashar Assad to the alleged chemical weapons attack last month that killed hundreds of people.

In the absence of such evidence, Damascus and its ally Russia have aggressively pushed another scenario: that rebels carried out the Aug. 21 chemical attack. Neither has produced evidence for that case, either. That’s left more questions than answers as the U.S. threatens a possible military strike.

“Neat trick,” I said to my friend Swamp Rabbit. “Obama has turned himself into George W. Bush. This is worse than Libya. It’s the Iraq war scam all over again.”

The rabbit was on the windowsill, leafing through the September issue of Vogue. “And this surprises you?” he said. “You got a lotta nerve calling me stupid.”

I threw a piece of pizza crust at him. It sailed over his head and into the swamp. I hate when the rabbit is right.

Obama’s recent war dance made me think of Stephen Colbert’s recurring joke about race. He looks at the camera and in the solemn tone of a dewy-eyed liberal says something like, “I don’t see color. People tell me I’m white and I believe them because I don’t get frisked.”

I don’t see color either, not when it comes to politics in that swamp called Washington, D.C. From where I sit, out here in my swamp, Obama looks just like Bush.

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Yo, Daily News! Bike theft more than ‘pesky’

Posted on September 5, 2013 by oddmanout215

Don't forget to lock up the bike, you lovebirds.

Don’t forget your bike lock, you lovebirds.

From Tuesday’s Philadelphia Daily News:

Cops in Center City are trying an unusual approach to thwarting bike thieves: They’re letting them steal bikes. Undercover cops… set up stings – like the one Aug. 15 observed by the Daily News – leaving an unlocked “bait bike” out somewhere and then waiting for someone to take it.

They’ve logged more than a dozen arrests this way this year for a pesky quality-of-life crime that historically has had low arrest rates.

It’s great that a local paper devoted time and space to bicycle theft in Philly, where riders have been making slow but steady progress in forcing drivers to share the roads with them. Too bad the reporter didn’t mention some of the reasons why bike theft is so rampant.

Start with the fact that city government and private businesses have done a lousy job of creating parking space for the growing number of riders in Center City and other popular biking areas. Some racks and corrals have been installed, and some poles fitted with metal rings, but finding a safe outdoor spot to lock up can still be a challenge. It’s not uncommon to see a bunch of bikes mashed together and somehow locked to the same pole.

Also, cops rarely put much effort into trying to catch bike thieves, despite the crude entrapment strategy described in the Daily News story. I had more than a half-dozen good bikes stolen in Philly over the past decade and reported each theft. The cops who responded to my complaints shrugged them off, and in some cases laughed in my face.

The Daily News reporter called bike theft “a pesky quality-of-life crime,” an expression that hints at police indifference and points to a big contradiction in the story. Is pesky the right word, given that “11,000 bicycles were reported stolen from 2007 through 2012 in Philly”? Bikes are as important to cyclists as cars are to drivers, but would the Daily News describe the theft of a gas-guzzling Hummer as pesky? And what if the bike owner catches up with the thief and someone gets his head bashed in? Still pesky?

Give the Daily News credit for calling attention to the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia and StolenBicycleRegistry.com and the Facebook page called Philadelphia Stolen Bikes. Otherwise, the story was mostly a puff piece for the Philly police.

Footnote: Philly might have more bike commuters per capita than any other major city in America, so it’s nice to know city officials are at least working with the Bicycle Coalition to install more racks.

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Obamabots to Cornel West: Shut the f*ck up!

Posted on September 2, 2013 by oddmanout215

Cornel West recently called MSNBC’s Al Sharpton “the bonafide house negro of the Barack Obama plantation” in connection with media coverage of the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington and Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. A cheap shot but funny, and it’s hard to argue with West’s main contention — that most media commentators, including Sharpton, voiced nothing but platitudes about the historic speech and didn’t seriously speculate on what MLK might have said about the status quo in contemporary America.

West, the gap-toothed provocateur with the French-style cuffs and old-style Afro, thinks MLK would have found many of Obama’s policies only marginally less repugnant than those of the yahoo who preceded him as president. He figures MLK would have spoken out against bank bailouts, drone bombs, trade agreements that destroy American jobs, and perhaps against Obama’s attempts to portray himself as working to build on MLK’s efforts to help create a more equitable society.

One thing’s for sure — Democrats who aren’t progressive wish West would just go away. I mean Dems like Obama, who congratulates himself for stands he never took (remember how he ignored labor unions under attack by Wisconsin’s reactionary governor?) and is routinely patted on the back by so-called liberals who won’t admit that Obama, although not nearly as loathsome as the high-profile Republicans, has been a major disappointment to progressives of all races.

Footnote: If Sharpton is a house negro, then what should we call MSNBC’s other talking heads — Chris Matthews, Rachel Maddow, Melissa Harris-Perry, Chris Hayes and the insufferable Lawrence O’Donnell? I guess “Obamabots” will have to do, although that’s a bit unfair to Maddow. The problem with MSNBC is that support for Obama is intrinsic to its brand, at least for now. Who knows where the network’s unprincipled president, Phil Griffin, will steer it if its ratings continue to plummet?

One more: MSNBC became totally predictable after Keith Olbermann quit, or was fired. He was the only host who seemed a true progressive, eager to shine a light on all the bad guys, not just on the usual suspects.

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