Monday, July 26, 2010

Inception

This messy film defines "inception" as the act of placing an idea in a person's mind. According to our heroes, the best way to do this is to enter that person's dreams. Leonardo DiCaprio and friends spend two and half hours trying to prove that they're right.

But the best way to create an idea in a person's mind is through art.

So if "Inception" aspires to artistry—and I assume that it does—then it's attempting to do to us what Leonardo DiCaprio is trying to do to his dreamer. In other words, the premise of the film is actually a metaphor of the relationship between a film—any film—and its audience.

The question then becomes: What idea is this film trying to plant in our heads?

Unlike literature, unlike the theater, movies communicate their ideas primarily through imagery. Film is not language-driven. Despite its conventions of plot, dialogue, and narrative voice-over, film is much closer to photography than to the novel. To apprehend its ideas, we must contemplate its images.

There are some fantastic images in "Inception." Many of them you can see in its trailers.

Aside from the scene when a Parisian street explodes around our reposed stars, the best image in the film is the moment when DiCaprio and his wife rest their heads on a railroad track and await an approaching train. The camera shows us a rusting steel rail trembling against its spikes. Marion Cotillard's hair blows in the wind driven in advance of the train.

In the end, however—as with "The Dark Knight"—the images in "Inception" never coalesce into a forceful idea. The thought we're left with is is not really an idea but a question: What the hell is going on? All the fancy imagery seem to exist for Christopher Nolan not as approaches to metaphor but as a way to play with cool toys. The images are curiosities. They are exercises, in the end, in cinematic vanity.

So perhaps that's the idea: We live in an age of explosive vanity. Better, in the end, to live in our dreams.

The End of the Middle Class

• 83 percent of all U.S. stocks are in the hands of 1 percent of the people.
• 61 percent of Americans "always or usually" live paycheck to paycheck, which was up from 49 percent in 2008 and 43 percent in 2007.
66 percent of the income growth between 2001 and 2007 went to the top 1% of all Americans.
• 36 percent of Americans say that they don't contribute anything to retirement savings.
• A staggering 43 percent of Americans have less than $10,000 saved up for retirement.
• 24 percent of American workers say that they have postponed their planned retirement age in the past year.
• Over 1.4 million Americans filed for personal bankruptcy in 2009, which represented a 32 percent increase over 2008.
Only the top 5 percent of U.S. households have earned enough additional income to match the rise in housing costs since 1975.
• For the first time in U.S. history, banks own a greater share of residential housing net worth in the United States than all individual Americans put together.
• In 1950, the ratio of the average executive's paycheck to the average worker's paycheck was about 30 to 1. Since the year 2000, that ratio has exploded to between 300 to 500 to one.
• As of 2007, the bottom 80 percent of American households held about 7% of the liquid financial assets.
The bottom 50 percent of income earners in the United States now collectively own less than 1 percent of the nation’s wealth.
• Average Wall Street bonuses for 2009 were up 17 percent when compared with 2008.
• The top 1 percent of U.S. households own nearly twice as much of America's corporate wealth as they did just 15 years ago.
• In America today, the average time needed to find a job has risen to a record 35.2 weeks.
• More than 40 percent of Americans who actually are employed are now working in service jobs, which are often very low paying.
• For the first time in U.S. history, more than 40 million Americans are on food stamps, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture projects that number will go up to 43 million Americans in 2011.
• Approximately 21 percent of all children in the United States are living below the poverty line in 2010 - the highest rate in 20 years.
• Despite the financial crisis, the number of millionaires in the United States rose a whopping 16 percent to 7.8 million in 2009.
• The top 10 percent of Americans now earn around 50 percent of our national income.

I put in bold the bullet-points that most astonished me.

All this from here.

The question, of course, is: Why this is happening?

According to conservatives, it's caused by too much regulation, over-taxation, illegal immigration, a crushing federal deficit, reckless globalization, and a culture of entitlement.

According to liberals it's caused by extremely low tax rates on the rich; inadequate regulation; two unfunded wars; reckless globalization; and a culture of greed and self-interest.

I'd guess that the truth is somewhere in the middle. Isn't it usually?

Given the fact, however, that the last time tax rates on the wealthy were so low was 1929, it doesn't seem unreasonable to conclude that extremely low tax rates on the rich are leading to the consolidation of our national wealth in the hands of only a few of us. When that happens, the economy locks up, and the once flourishing middle class, which exploded during Eisenhower's 1950s, ends up back in the bread lines.

Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Barack Obama, American Jew


The Iowa Tea Party compares Obama to Hitler, but in truth it sees Obama as Hitler saw Jews: a racially impure outsider who by conspiracy, over-learnedness, and economic exploitation seeks to destroy America.

Hence, this billboard's irony: by comparing Obama to Hitler, the Tea Party is actually behaving like Hitler, summoning us to the defense of our nation against the insidious outsider insurrectionist, Obama.

It must be said that Obama bears some blame for this. During his campaign he sometimes ended his speeches by saying, "Let's go change the world." Such language thrilled many of my fellow citizens, especially at the end of the Bush catastrophe. The world, it seemed, needed changing. But after the 20th century, reasonable men and women everywhere have great reason to be terrified of talk of change, not least because of Hitler and Lenin. You tell a decent, hardworking man like my stepfather that you're going to change the world, and he's going to reach for his gun. The status quo has been good to him. He's seen family, friends, and neighbors die to maintain it. He's not interested in an unknown, oddly named, odd-looking man from a Chicago university rising to power by calling for change.

Thankfully—and to the great outrage of many of those who voted for him—Obama (unlike Bush) has not tried to change the world. Campaign hyperbole aside, Obama knows that revolution is rarely more than a euphemism for murder, terror, and suicide.

Instead, Obama has tried to restore America to an earlier idea of itself. Healthcare reform was not a transformation of our society but an attempt to return us to what we used to be: New Deal America, Marshall Plan America, "ask not" America. This country, Obama argued, is not a place where we allow our sick to die because they are poor or unlucky. In America, he said, we take care of each other.

Of course he's wrong: America IS a place where we allow our sick to die if they are poor or unlucky. But he might be right that it didn't used to be, and he's certainly right that it shouldn't be.

In this regard Obama is the most conservative president of my lifetime, attempting to return us to our past, even if it's a past that never fully existed. Obama wants us to be what we should have been—what, I think he believes, the Bush aberration aside, we actually are.

It's not unreasonable to disagree with that ambition. But to compare Obama to Hitler and Lenin misunderstands both who he is and what he hopes to achieve. There are no Jews in Obama's worldview. As he sees it, we are all merely fellow Americans. He asks us to honor that good fortune by remembering our pre-"greed is good," pre-terrified selves.

All That Money

Today a neighbor told me that his two boys are going to summer school for the first time. Upon signing them up, he'd been shocked to learn that not only is summer school free, but the school district provides a free lunch for every registered child.

When he'd asked where the money to feed all the kids comes from (everyone in town knows our school district is broke) he was told that it came from a federal grant. The justification for the grant—or perhaps one of its justifications—was that for most of the kids, the school's lunch is their only square meal of the day, and hungry kids are hard to teach.

He said, "And out of all the kids going, my boys are two of maybe five who are white."

I waited for the punchline. I didn't have to wait long.

He said, "It just seems like they could think of a better way to spend all that money."

"On what, for instance?" I asked.

"I don't know," he said. "Something."

Friday, July 9, 2010

LeBron the Beautiful

"It's not about sharing. You know, it's about everybody having their own spotlight." — LeBron James
He's a beautiful man, clear gleaming eyes, an exuberant smile, electric with health. And still fresh-faced, despite the fact that he's now fully adult. On the entire planet there are, I would guess, only a few physical specimens to match him: towering, explosively powerful, a modern-day Ajax.

But perhaps too much an Ajax. He has betrayed on more than one occasion an inability—perhaps an unwillingness—to finish his enemy. I've always sensed that there's something broken in LeBron James—maybe because it's a kind of brokenness I recognize. In the end, he would rather be loved than respected. As a consequence, he will be neither.

In this regard he differs from the great players of my lifetime who preceded him: Magic and Bird, Michael Jordan (basketball history's Achilles), and now the seething, insufferable Kobe Bryant. Of those four athletes, I love only one of them (Magic); but I respect all of them, and in a man's life there's no greater achievement than universal respect.

I said earlier in this blog that sports are an art-form and, as such, are a metaphor of life. Each of these athletes represents some aspect of the American experience: urban black America (Magic), rural white America (Bird), coastal, internationalist America (Bryant). Each embodies some aspect of our national character. LeBron, being the most contemporary, offers us the clearest insight into our current disposition, our current obsessions and values.

It should come as no surprise, then, that King James, as he calls himself, has chosen the the pleasures and decadence of Miami over Cleveland's grim, working-class loyalty or New York's materialist artistry. (LA and Chicago were unthinkable options, having been marked already by greater heroes). He, like the rest of his generation, has been taught to take the easy road on the quest for immortality. He's learned that lesson well.

We live in an age of conspiracies. We shouldn't be surprised that our heroes now conspire together to achieve greatness. Watching "The Decision" last night, a nation of sports fans thought: We've met the enemy. As always, he is us.

Fair enough. Better that he be us—smiling, playful, pleasant, doomed; a child enjoying the fruits of earlier heroes's labors—than an unknown outsider, singleminded with ambition, plotting our Apocalypse.