Monsters! The Golem
WHAT DOES THE PROTAGONIST WANT? That’s the easy part — to save the Jewish community of Prague.
WHAT IS THE MONSTER? The Golem is a creature made out of clay and brought to life through the power of "the dark arts."
WHAT IS THE WARNING? On the surface, the warning is no more complicated than "There is no easy solution when it comes to self-protection," but underneath there are a whole bunch more interesting, and disturbing, things going on.
Some notes on the second presidential debate
I wasn’t that impressed or thrilled by the first presidential debate — I honestly thought it was a draw. Even though I find myself in a rare consonance with many things Obama believes, I thought he was stiff and mysteriously unconvincing, and while I disagree with almost everything John McCain says, I thought he presented himself well, especially considering all the hysterical drama he had tried to manufacture surrounding the event.
This was different.
Economic update
I’m sure glad they passed that $700 billion-dollar bailout (with an added $150 billion pork attached). Now the economy is saved!
For those interested, below the fold is the text of the email I received in response from my senator Barbara Boxer:
Obligatory Vice-Presidential Debate Thread
You know who I miss? Lloyd Bentsen. And Admiral Stockdale. Those guys were great.
Congratulations are due to governor Sarah Palin for recovering her poise — it’s much easier to watch her recite her fake homilies and Republican talking points than it was to watch George W. Bush fumble his way through simple sentences consisting of words of one syllable.
I’ve never actually seen Joe Biden ever do anything before tonight, and I was impressed with him as well — his thinking is both fluid and pointed, and he looks exactly like someone you’d cast in the role of vice-president.
In general, I enjoyed last night’s debate. Knockout blows like the ones delivered by Lloyd Bentsen twenty years ago seem to have been written out of debates these days, so they lack in drama — Obama tends to shy away from appearing too angry about the past eight years of governmental mismanagement, McCain must keep his contempt for his opponent in check or risk appearing to look like a cranky old man, Biden is lucid but polite, Palin (last night, anyway) was polished but insubstantial. (And, for my younger readers, let me add that Lloyd Bentsen, despite mopping the floor with Dan Quayle, then wringing him out and hanging him up to dry, did not, after all, become vice-president.)
So Governor Palin informed us that gay people are so by choice, and that, as a governor, she must tolerate their presence. That’s an honest, if politic, answer from a conservative fundamentalist, and if you feel similarly, go ahead and vote for her. Same with her views on global warming: she’s not here to think about what caused it, she only knows what needs to be done about it, and that seems to involve doing absolutely nothing to stop the exploitation and burning of fossil fuels. Again, well-spoken and lucid, and if you feel similarly, go ahead and vote for her. She also stated that she thinks that Dick Cheney missed a couple of opportunities to expand the powers of the vice presidency. Which, you know, good for her, and if you want Sarah Palin to be more powerful than Dick Cheney is, go ahead and vote for her (that is, certainly, the hopes of the Republican base she is meant to energize). She misidentified our troop leader in Afghanistan as General McClellan, which I think is an honest mistake to make — if you, like McClellan, are an arch-conservative secessionist (to say nothing of the whole slavery thing).
Talking Giraffe Movie
Some people don’t test well. I totally get it. If you point a camera at me and ask me to name a Supreme Court decision I disagreed with, I will probably blank too. (Well, not really — the one that illegally installed Bush in the presidency is rarely far from my mind.) Maybe Sarah Palin is a wonderful executive, smart and canny, capable of inspiring others to their best work, able to negotiate complex networks of ever-shifting political alliances and directing huge forces of manpower and economic strength. Who knows? I don’t.
Here’s the thing:
Fairies and Fantasy: The Wizard of Oz part 3
At the end of Act II of The Wizard of Oz, the Wizard sends Dorothy out to get the broom of the Wicked Witch. Dorothy immediately grasps the import of this command: the Wizard’s not in need of a broom, he’s ordering her to kill the Witch.
Why? Has the Witch been troubling the Emerald City? I don’t see how — the Emerald Citizens are all jolly, healthy and well cared-for — not a winged monkey in sight. Does he send her to kill the Witch because she’s kind of "brought the Witch to their doorstep?" Maybe — maybe he thinks that the "SURRENDER DOROTHY" that the witch writes in the sky over the Emerald City is directed towards himself. "Uh-oh, the Witch wants this little girl, I’d better give her what she want, maybe then she’ll go away." Is the Wizard the Neville Chamberlain of Oz, and Dorothy Czechoslovakia?
Now is the winter of our discontent
I was reading this article over at ABC News and came across this little item:
Bush’s Disapproval Rating Highest in History
Just two presidents have had lower approval (Richard Nixon and Harry Truman) than President Bush, and none has had higher disapproval in polls since 1938.
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This is, of course, not news, and certainly not around my house, where Bush’s disapproval ratings have maintained their 100% level for eight years, even among the cats, who are staunch supply-siders. I only mention it because I was reading the article a little too fast and for a moment I thought it said "Just two presidents have had lower approval (Richard III and Harry Truman)."
Fairies and Fantasy:The Wizard of Oz part 2
swan_tower , who is smarter than me, and quite bit better educated, writes —
"You should be aware that most folklorists consider Bettelheim’s work to be a load of bunk. He’s terrifyingly reductionist, and wilfully made up psychological anecdotes to support his theories. And that’s before you take a step back to all the critiques of Freudian psychology in general. I wouldn’t recommend using him for the starting point of any analysis of a fantasy story."
Anyway:
Money
[This is a monologue from a very early play of mine, High Strangeness, written in 1988 when I was 27 and knew everything. The action of the scene is that the monologue is being spoken by an idealistic young man who’s trying to impress a comely young woman. The play was produced a couple of times in the early 90s and the monologue was a semi-regular fixture of my one-man shows.]
…and if you needed furniture, you made furniture. If you needed clothes, you made clothes. Everybody had the skills they needed in order to survive. You knew how to grow food, or find food, you knew how to sew, how to spin, how to weave, and if you didn’t, then you knew someone who did. So you worked something out, a bushel of corn for fixing a shirt, I don’t know. But now, but now, what do we have? No one knows how to make anything. Could you make a shirt? I can’t. A toaster? A refrigerator? A car? Bake a loaf of bread? It’s impossible. We can’t conceive of the work that goes into any of those things. The clothes we wear, the food we eat, where did we get them? We traded some pieces of paper and shiny metal for them! Or better still, we showed the shopkeeper our plastic card and got them for nothing! And so we become disassociated from our own possessions. And from our fellow human beings. And from our environment. And from our God. And why? For what? Money. Money is the answer to every question you can ask in this world. What is time? Money. Why do I work? Money. What keeps society from breaking down? Money. Why don’t we grow our own food anymore? Because we can can pay other people to grow it for us. Without money we’d starve. How did buildings get so tall? Because we can pay other people to make them that way. Without money we’d still be having, I don’t know, barn-raisings. Money goes beyond being good or evil, money is simply there. Everywhere. It’s like saying air or fire is good or evil. Money is the fifth element. And it cancels out the original four because it can take their place at any moment! You don’t need to be able to tame fire, you just need to pay your gas bill! You don’t have to douse for water, a buck-fifty will get you a bottle of Perrier on any street corner! Scientists say that everything is a form of energy, but they’re not taking it far enough, everything is really a form of money! The sun isn’t the source of all life, it’s the source of all money! To the Indians, the land was sacred, it was holy! But anyone will tell you today that it’s just capital waiting to be exploited. Everything we do, everything we see, everything we feel, everything that affects us does so because someone is making money off it. No one and nothing escapes. The whole planet is a business: Earth, Inc., assets 48 kazillion dollars! What is that?! Is that a planet?! Is that a race?! Is that a reason for opening your eyelids in the morning? When things get this bad, something always happens. It could be one of a million things: nuclear war, environmental crisis, worldwide depression, all of these…it’s an interesting time to live.
What I know so far.
I’ll say it again: I am not an economist and, unlike a lot of people skulking around the internet at this point in time, I won’t pretend to be one. If there is anyone in my readership who can better illuminate the current economic situation, I would very much like to hear from you.