JAMES WOODS DOES GOOD STUFF OUT OF SIGHT

Mertie and I just watched a little James Wood’s movie with Melanie Griffith, Vincent Kartheiser and Natasha Gregson Wagner. It’s called “Another Day In Paradise” made in 1998. I never heard of it before I bought it 2 films for 5 bucks at Hollywood Videos, but for unrelieved intensity, it’s been awhile since I’ve come across such an impressive film. Maybe I’m just vulnerable, but the movie was so real to me that it depressed me. Usually I can be pretty detached from even the most powerful films now in my older age, but this one hooked me. The film’s director is Larry Clark of “Kids” infamy.

Two old love/hate crooks, Sid (Griffith) and Mel (Woods) adopt a pair of young lovers and take them into the heart of a crime spree—a series of false moves and gunplay which over and over again threatens their lives until Rosie dies from an overdose (okay, so I told you) and then the shit really hits the fan. I wouldn’t call the ending so much redemptive as a relief. Yes, I breathed a sigh of relief at the end. I was glad to be out of Wood’s increasing madness too. And nothing in the concluding moments is not foreshadowed so that each tick of the final clock, you can nod a yes to. A well put together piece of work. And James Wood’s ought to get his pockmarked face plastered onto an Oscar someday.



BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA: BIBLE BELT HEARTS AND POWERS

Jay Reeves, in an Associated Press release in the Spokesman Review (March 27, 2005) reports that:

“Evidence in Richard Scrushy's fraud trial has made the goings-on at HealthSouth Corp. sound more like an episode of ‘The Dukes of Hazzard’ than the operations of a Fortune 500 company.

After eight weeks of testimony, a picture has emerged of a Southern-fried culture at the rehabilitation and medical services chain.

According to testimony, Scrushy and another executive held a meeting in the middle of a sprawling Alabama lake known for floating beer bashes and bass fishing, and Scrushy once told a CFO they all needed to stay aboard ‘this pickup truck’— HealthSouth—despite its financial problems.

Meanwhile, a witness told of a bar brawl that broke out at a going-away party for a key executive who quit the company rather than get involved in the fraud, which prosecutors say amounted to $2.7 billion in inflated earnings over about seven years.

Prosecutors say Scrushy was at the heart of a conspiracy to overstate HealthSouth earnings from 1996 through 2002, directing subordinates to commit fraud so it would appear the company was meeting Wall Street estimates...............

Scrushy has recently been projecting a more church-going image, singing hymns with his third wife Leslie who is his former secretary at HealthSouth and the daughter of a Methodist preacher. Scrushy has preached in at least two churches during his trial and his wife has been seen praying with supporters around the courthouse.

The couple have taken a break during the trial from their daily TV show, which typically features Bible study.”

Yep, that’s right, the Scrushys, like almost all Southern crooks, practice the guitar picking, Bible studying, Bible thumping, praying in tongues, pickup running, deep South morality which currently runs our country top to bottom from the mightiest boardroom to the least pulpit, from the smallest office space to the loudest pulpit. Scrushy is just one bole weevil under the pickup floorboard of the South which is full of those morality weevils. Look at Lay of Enron and born again Ebbers at WorldCom. Look at Biblemouth Delay and all his Southern buddies. Southern corruption, religion coated, is everywhere. Even in Spokane the guy who ran Spokane’s Washington Water Power into financial trouble was an Enron Texan, that so and so. The guys who bilked California rate payers were Southern crooks. These Southern crooks are all psuedo-religious con men.

And still Southerner Bush holds onto a 45% favorable rating. How could that be? You got to study the South and live there and know the Bible belt mentality. These are not sophisticated people down there. They’ve been taken in by lying Bible thumpers all their lives. How can we expect them to see through the dishonesty lodged in their churches now? Bush and Rove and his crew are playing naive Southerners like a school of speckled trout. They’re pulling them out of the warm Gulf waters on their double hooked spec rigs as fast as they can hook ‘em horns. It’s not that everyone in the South is corrupt; it’s just that way too many of them are so Bible-sated that they can’t tell when they’re being conned by Bible cons, religious and commercial.

We just 40 years ago dragged the South kicking and screaming into the 20th century. How can we expect a bunch of people who only yesterday were knee deep in the cotton fields of segregation to even begin to develop a healthy, fairly honest democratic mentality, a mind sharp enough to tell a truth so deep as atheism, the root of the best democracy. This is the South where the dishonesty and corruption is founded on the lies taught in every fundamentalist church in the South.

Let me simplify. You go to church down there all your life and learn to love Jesus and that kind old preacher man who heads up your congregation. You’re told there is not one falsehood in that Bible book fully of historical inaccuracies, fictions and poetry, bad morality and invented characters. You don’t read a lot of other books that can show you the falsehoods because you’ve been taught that to be too well informed is in bad taste. It makes you a “smarty pants” and smarty pantses don’t have many friends. So you buckle down and swallow the lies. You stay naive. You start your life listening to someone lie to you who does not know he is lying. That’s the most effective liar—someone who believes his own lies. So you are being set up to believe lies of all kinds by the very best liars, liars you love and honor. Your kindly old pastor is an effective liar because he bought the lie too and now his lie to you is of the very best quality. So it goes generation to generation.

And, in the midst of those churches are the smarter guys who only half believe the Bible lies. So they learn they can con you by using your religion as a hook. They say all the right things and pull all the correct strings, and they con you and keep you poor and dumb and down. And you don’t like to think of yourself as being so dumb as to defeat yourself so you hang on ever more tightly to your Bible mentality and you “hate with all your might” any wiseass who attacks the faith of your babyhood because if you have to admit to that, then your whole faith system comes tumbling down, and you’d have to see just how badly you are being conned by these wonderful con men. You’d have to admit you’re a fool. You might even have to face that god is a con. Sad to say, that even a few of the kindly old gentlemen in the pulpits are also lying to you and knowing they lie. They are the worst of the Southern liars.

And that’s how you end up supporting a rogue like Bush, a con man who maybe half believes his own con. That’s the South I know and met when I lived there. Nice friendly people who’ll stab you in the back because they’ve been taught to be nice and swallow the lie pill with a smile and don’t dare call the preacher man a liar. They are gutted, breaded and skillet fried to a golden brown for devouring.