LIKABLE MAIN CHARACTERS

My wife and I recently rented a little gem of a movie called “Young Adam” with Ewan McGregor and Tilda Swinton (The Deep End). When it was over, I said to her, “I remember when I was sending novels out, and they came back rejected because they’d say that my main character was not likable or was unsympathetic. This movie, none of the characters are likable; they’re just human and real.” And it struck me hard that the characters in “Young Adam” aren’t the happy ending type. Most of them just are and are just real and flawed and not particularly good or bad. And that’s the way we all are, and why can’t we see more movies like that, with real flawed human beings in them so we can all let ourselves off the hook and get comfortable with the darkness within us all?


NO MORE TINY TIMS

Watching TV tonight and an ad came on for a local charity. A voice proclaimed, “Can you imagine Christmas with no toys under the tree?” Something like that. Then the pitch for whatever charity it was to donate toys and money.

I’ve got a better idea. . .

Eliminate Christmas. If we get rid of Christmas, we get rid of dishonesty and fakery. Quit creating an expectation in children large and small, grown up and prepubescent, that some nonexistent being will reward them for being good or bad throughout the year. Quit telling people that there’s some pie in the sky ending to life where the good will get their final reward and the bad their comeuppance. Just use your common sense. If we hadn’t been brainwashed as children, who would believe such nonsense?

Just this morning I was watching a televangelist and her spiel about how to be happy by turning your negative thoughts loose. Quite the opposite from AA which says we can’t think our way to a new way of living but can only live our way into a new way of thinking, this woman said that we couldn’t be happy until we changed our minds.

Got it all backward, she does. Then, of course, she made a pitch for a book and tapes which would show people how to get to the imaginary superbeing that she says exists in order to have a reason to sell things to people. Cons, cons, just about all of them a pile of cons. No wonder the average fundamentalist, no matter how intelligent, couldn’t see through George Bush. Lied to from birth to death, they don’t have a mental standard for divining the truth. Sad. Sad. . . .


MORE RIGHT WING CONSERVATIVE, NEOCON TORTURE COMING OUT

“The memos reveal behind-the-scenes tensions between the FBI and U.S. military and intelligence task forces running prisoner interrogations at Guantanamo and in Iraq as the Bush administration sought better intelligence to fight terrorists and the deadly Iraq insurgency.”

A recent AP report reveals that the torture of prisoners in Iraq and Guatanamo is more wide spread and condoned by more higher ups than Bush administration people want to let on. But there is no surprise in this. Right wing, conservatives for as long as I can remember and as far back in history as I can read are the kind of people who walk on human rights like so many stepping stones to power. From Nicaragua to Chile, from Guantanamo to Munich and Stalingrad, from South Africa to the American South, conservatives are the kind of people who do not care what happens to others just so long as they maintain power over the people. The sad thing is how often religious people are duped into following conservatives, but I think that is a condition which naturally flows from religions which look up into the sky for their leadership rather than looking to their own humanity for their guidance.

Mark my words, if you need a power greater than yourself in order to feel safe, then some power will come along to fill that need.
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"I would rather go to bed with Lillian Russell stark naked than Ulysses S. Grant in full military regalia." —Mark Twain (Think about it!)