Month: September 2009

Guilding Light’s Out


The end of the 72-year run of the soap opera Guiding Light, started in 1937 on the radio, and since 1952 on television, probably got more play on CBS recently than the show has garnered in years. Stories on both 60 Minutes (along with Barack Obama and Teddy Kennedy, FCOL,) and CBS Sunday Morning showed that the institution was finally getting its due, even if it was to sound its death knell.

When I was a kid, my grandmother and my great aunt used to watch their “stories” almost every day. Binghamton, in the early 1960s, only had two TV stations, Channels 12 (CBS) and 40 (NBC), and only one was a VHS station that did not require rabbit ears, and that was the former, WNBF.

So they would watch Edge of Night and Secret Storm, which were on, if I remember correctly, at 3:30 and 4 pm, respectively. I saw them often enough that I was reasonably familiar with the story lines and characters. But the other CBS shows they watched, The Guiding Light and Search for Tomorrow, were on while I was at school. This bout of soap watching ended when I was old enough to go to my own home after school rather than to my grandma’s, at some point between fifth and seventh grade.

I did watch many of the soaps in February 1975, but I was depressed.

When I was a Census enumerator in 1990, after I had made my initial daytime passes to the homes, I had to concentrate on nights and weekends. So I was home a lot during the day. I caught on NBC a soap called Generations, followed by Days of our Lives and Another World. Generations got canceled in 1991, and Days had some plot line so ridiculous, even by soap opera standards, that I dumped it in 1992 or so. Another World I watched until a week before it ended in 1999, when Carol and I went to Barbados on our honeymoon. I could have taped them on the VCR, but there was only six hours of capacity, and I opted for prime time, season-ending fare. I keep hoping that the Soap Opera channel someday shows that last week of AW.

So, for some obscure reason, I watched the last episode of Guiding Light. It looks a LOT different than it used to. It’s mostly outside, for one thing, and they don’t appear to be using the same type of filming techniques.

There was a LOT of hugging in this episode, so much that if I had made it a drinking game, I would have had to have been rushed to the hospital with alcohol poisoning. To the degree I can tell, the lesbian couple are now happy because one member of the couple has made peace with her ex-husband, naming the baby she’s carrying after him; one of the actress used to be on Days. The black couple finally gets married on its fourth attempt; good thing, too, because SHE’S pregnant as well. Some time before this, the black couple walks in on the interracial couple in the midst of them about to have sex. One young woman going away to college in California is suddenly joined by a second young woman, because her mother made a phone call to get her instantly admitted; while it’s never stated where Springfield is, obviously it is far from California.

The only people in this show I know at all are the “supercouple”, Reva and Joshua, who have each been married nine times, three times to each other. Will they get back together for good? That gets resolved in a One Year Later motif.

Was it worthwhile watching? Maybe not; tying up all those loose ends seemed terribly convenient. But there’s something to be said for acknowledging a passing.
 ROG

ROG

The Pirate Life QUESTIONS


Well, it’s another Talk Like A Pirate Day. Frankly, I always thought I had an “in” in this pirate game. After all, my original name is Jolly Roger, though I have taken on the pirate name of Cap’n Jim Poopdeck for the nonce.

So, matey, I’ve got me some questions for you lubbers:

1. How many of the pirate laws do you follow? To be honest, I only got about one-fifth of them, but one of them is definitely #65.

2. Who are your favorite pirates? Here are some suggestions. If none of these are suitable, you may consider Pittsburgh Pirates, Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and I suppose, Oakland Raiders (but no L.A. Raiders; that was just WRONG). I’ve always been fond of Jean Laffite, Roberto Clemente, Willie “Pops” Stargell and Daryle Lamonica. In fact, the last two times I ever wagered on a baseball game involved Pirates; 1979, “pop’s team. Down 3-1 in the World Series to Baltimore, I picked them to win, in turn, Games 5 and 6. but I wasn’t brave enough to pick them for game 7, which they also won. Arrrr!

3. You’ve no doubt heard about how Kayne West pirated the VMAs from Taylor Swift and how President Obama called him a jackass. There was a Twitter poll and 90% thought Obama was justified. The question: who are the other 10%?
a. people who don’t think Obama should use the word “jackass”
b. people who don’t think Obama should comment on popular culture issues
c. people who don’t think Obama should talk at all
d. people who support the actions of Kayne West

4. I think the Muppet folks pirated Janice Muppet’s name from Janis Joplin, but pirated the look from Mary Travers of Peter, Paul and Mary, who died this week. Anyone else see the resemblance?

Jaquandor posted some PPM music videos though not including the one I REALLY wanted and in fact can’t find anywhere, Big Blue Frog. Ironically, I CAN find that song being performed by…you guessed it, the Muppets.
I saw the trio numerous times on TV, probably including this one, plus live at a number of rallies for one cause or another.
***
Mark Evanier had a nice obit of Henry Gibson, who also died this week. His last Twitter post was an R.I.P. for Larry Gelbart. My favorite of his roles may have been one of his last ones, as the most peculiar judge, Clark Brown, on Boston Legal, where he’d purloin the scene from the other actors.

ROG

AUDIO BOOK REVIEW: The Breakthrough by Gwen Ifill


Annoyed that I’ve started so many books without actually finishing them, when I saw Gwen Ifill’s book The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama in audio form at the library, read by the author, I decided that this would be a more productive way to read a book. Then I got a whole bunch of new CDs and didn’t listen to it at all for the first four weeks and had to renew it.

In her introduction, she addressed “the controversy” over her moderating the debate between Vice-Presidential candidates Joe Biden and Sarah Palin. As you may recall, there was a considerable amount of flak suggesting that she should disqualify herself as moderator because writing this book would have made her biased towards the Democrat, Biden. As it turned out, she did moderate the debate; I thought her effectiveness in cutting off the rambling and non-answers to her questions – Palin famously said she was not going to answer question A but would instead answer with stump speech response B – was compromised. Ifill in the book and also on Meet the Press expressed her discomfort of being the subject, rather than the reporter, of the story.

It’s almost too bad she couldn’t have shared her notes of the book, because this is no love story about Obama. It’s about how the various factors, not the least of which is race, played in the campaign. And the campaign’s outcome, whether he won or he lost, was largely irrelevant; if he had lost, she might have to change some conclusions but little else.

The early chapters served as a rehash, an instant history of the campaign, with issues of, e.g., how some black female politicians were split as to which “first” they should be supporting, a first black president or a first woman President. Likewise, black men supporting Clinton or white women supporting Obama were seen in some circles as traitors to their race or gender, an issue white men did not have to deal with.

But the bulk of this book is not about Barack Obama at all, or only peripherally. It’s covering an array of young black leaders who came to the fore in this century. Some are sons of black leaders, such as Harold Ford and Jesse Jackson, Jr. Others are mayors or other local politicians. Whole chapters are dedicated to Corey Booker, mayor of Newark, NJ; Artur Davis, congressman from Alabama who wants to be governor; and Deval Patrick, who became Massachusetts governor, as Ifill points out, not even having been elected dogcatcher in the state.

The common thread for almost all these politicians is this: they are relatively young, they are impatient and don’t feel they have to “wait their turn”. They respect the old guard civil rights leaders but aren’t beholden to them. And their strategy of getting elected generally involves appealing to white voters and hoping black voters will understand and eventually follow.

This happened with Barack Obama. Despite a revisionist culture that suggested that the black population was always going to go with the black candidate, polls in South Carolina in December 2007 had Obama losing the South Carolina black vote by two to one, in large part because the Clintons had paid their dues to the black community nationally and Barack had not. It was not until the Iowa primary, when Obama won a 98% white state, “transformative” as Ifill quotes Obama aide David Axelrod, that black people flocked to Obama in SC, and he won the primary handily. The reason Bill Clinton’s remark about Jesse Jackson winning the state twenty years earlier was seen as racially insensitive, Ifill suggests, is that something very different took place. Jackson may have won because he was black; Obama won, almost in spite of that fact.

For Obama’s campaign, quite consciously avoided talking about race, which may comforted whites (“post-racial!”) but became a concern in some blacks that he didn’t address their specific concerns during his campaign. In fact, if it weren’t for the Jeremiah Wright controversy, Ifill notes, he probably would not have talked about race at all.

The chapter that most resonated with me was the one on Deval Patrick. He attended the Milton Academy in Massachusetts, and when he was home back in Illinois on a break, his sister taunted him with “you talk like a white boy!” Ifill reports how, decades later, that really stung him, and maybe still does a little. (All I’ll say on this point is: boy, can I relate.)

I should note that she reads her own prose well, although one can sometimes tell when the recording breaks occur because the new text is slightly louder or softer. And I don’t know if this is intentional, but occasionally, when quoting certain speakers, she seems to be taking on their vocal patterns and accents as well.

I’m glad I “read” this book. While the early chapters retold what this political junkie already knew but might have forgotten, the non-Obama chapters, particularly the ones on Booker, Davis and Patrick, were especially interesting. An Amazon review the last chapter as reading “a little like a baseball scouting report from the minor leagues, listing the hottest young prospects for future seasons”; I agree with that assessment.

From Salon: What role does race play in who likes the president? His BLACK support is higher now than on Inauguration Day. The Blackening of the president by Joan Walsh.

Barack Obama’s coming to Troy, NY on Monday.

You say you’ll change the constitution


I happened to be flicking through the channels this past weekend. C-SPAN 3 was showing a 1958 interview of Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas for the ABC show Mike Wallace Interviews. Wallace asked Douglas, who was very strong on First Amendment rights, where he stood on the classic case of a man yelling fire in a crowded theater. Douglas didn’t take the interviewer’s bait. He stated that it would be an incitement to riot, that it was illegal and should be illegal. That example is one often used to show that there are restrictions, even on things as fundamental to the American experience as the Bill of Rights.

As a recipient of a lot of right-wing material, you would think that the Second Amendment was imperiled. This is just a taste:

Dear Concerned American,

The great pay-back has begun, and it’s going to be ugly.

Liberals in Congress are paying back the anti-gun extremists who put them in office, and Barack Obama’s H.R. 45 is the first step…

…and it’s a big step….

I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that gun registration is the first step on the road toward totalitarian confiscation of all firearms by a federal power.

In fact, the most brutal dictators of the last century were famous for their gun registration and confiscation schemes.

It was easy work for Hitler’s brown-shirt Gestapo to confiscate the firearms of German citizens because years earlier, well-meaning liberals had forced all guns to be registered with the government … all in the name of safety.

When Hitler came to take their guns, he had a list of who owned every gun and where they lived!

Ah, the Hitler comparison. Again.

If a two-day waiting period, a written exam and a gun tax aren’t infringing our rights, I don’t know what is!

I feel every has the right to buy assembled AR-10 rifle and keep it with them without the government interfering. But as things are progressing, the days of owning guns for safety or personal use might soon come to an end.

This harangue despite a major victory in the Supreme Court last session.

Here’s the thing: the Second Amendment rights aren’t without limits either. We restrict guns to minors, to convicted felons (boy, I wish that actually worked better) and certain other groups of people.

Which brings me to those folks who somehow believe that packing heat when the President comes to town should be protected. Here’s, of all people, “Morning Joe” Scarborough on the August 23, 2009 edition of NBC’s Meet the Press:

And, and it seems to me that leaders on both parties, Democrats and Republicans alike, have a–have an affirmative responsibility to step forward and speak out against this hate speech and speak out against people carrying guns to rallies…As a guy with a 100 percent lifetime rating with the NRA, I can tell you that not only hurts those of us who believe in Second Amendment rights, it makes the job of the Secret Service so much harder and our law enforcement personnel so much harder.

Joe is, of course, right. I think it’s insane for antagonistic people to be packing heat around the President. Think of the history of this country: four Presidents assassinated, all by the gun; at least five attempts on Presidents using firearms. Not to mention two prominent candidates in my lifetime shot four years apart: Bobby Kennedy in 1968 (assassinated) and George Wallace in 1972 (paralyzed).

My great fear ids that either the President will get shot at (or worse), or the Secret Service will end up shooting a guy with a gun when he makes what they perceive to be a threatening move; the brouhaha after THAT debacle would make the summer town meetings look like a picnic.

I’d rather the Secret Service restrict the use of firearms around POTUS rather than have him risk his life trying to prove that he isn’t going to take away their guns; they already believe he’s stripping them of their weapons regardless.

ROG

ROG

I is for Instant Runoff Voting


Elections in most of the United States are dominated by one of, or if one is lucky, by the two major political parties, the Democrats and the Republicans. People often complain about the Tweedledee/Tweedledum nature of voting, having to select the “lesser of two evils”, or, as is almost as likely as not, decline from voting at all.

Ever since I heard about Instant Runoff Voting would be a solution to a multitude of problems in the American system. Here’s how IRV works:

Voters rank candidates in order of choice: 1, 2, 3 and so on. It takes a majority to win. If a majority of voters rank a candidate first, that candidate is elected. If not, the last place candidate is defeated, just as in a runoff election, and all ballots are counted again, but this time each ballot cast for the defeated candidate counts for the next ranked candidate listed on the ballot. The process of eliminating the last place candidate and recounting the ballots continues until one candidate receives a majority of the vote. With modern voting equipment, all of the counting and recounting takes place rapidly and automatically.

IRV acts like a series of runoff elections in which one candidate is eliminated each election. Each time a candidate is eliminated, all voters get to choose among the remaining candidates. This continues until one candidate receives a majority of the vote.

In most places in the US, a candidate is awarded a seat and wins the most votes in an electoral area; a majority vote is not required to win. Thus the winner in a race with more than two candidates may not represent the majority of the people.

Let’s take three mythical candidates and call them, Bush, Gore and Nader. Say that a goodly number of voters are inclined to vote for Nader but see in the polls that he’s trailing the other two. His supporters might well reluctantly vote for one of the other two, or not bother voting. Nader ends up with say 6% of the vote, with Bush and Gore each with 47% each; which ever one ekes out a victory will not be supported by a majority of the voters.

But let’s say IRV were in place. Perhaps Bush and Gore garner 40% each and Nader 20%, most likely of a higher number of actual voters, because the citizens are not afraid that their initial vote has been “wasted”. The Nader vote will be distributed among those who picked Bush or Gore as their second pick. If 11% picked Bush and 9% picked Gore, then Bush would win.

This also addresses the issue of those places, such as the state of Louisiana, that require a runoff election when neither candidate reaches the majority threshold. A runoff is expensive, and ironically usually brings out a smaller number of voters. IRV will eliminate the need of having a second go-round at all.

There are places in the US that already use IRV or some variation, but it appears more popular elsewhere in the world.

One element proponents here seem to make a point of NOT stressing is the possibility that the system is more likely to generate a third-party winner. Using the old example, lets say it’s Bush 35%, Nader 35% and Gore 30%; it would then be Gore’s votes that would be split between the remaining two candidates. I think proponents don’t want to scare the guardians of the status quo.

Something that excites me as an Oscar buff is the fact that in the past month the Motion Picture Academy has adopted Instant Runoff Voting for the Best Picture balloting. It was used “by the Academy in Best Picture voting before 1945, which was the last time ten pictures were nominated…The nominee with the fewest votes is eliminated, and ballots cast for that film are moved to voter’s next choice among the remaining films. The process continues until one film has more than half the votes and is declared Best Picture of the Year…

“Earlier this year, the Academy announced that it would expand the Best Picture category from five to 10 nominees. Given that the nomination threshold will now be about a tenth of the vote, keeping the ‘first-past-the-post’ voting system where voters can indicate a preference for just one choice would theoretically allow a film to take home the Oscar despite being potentially disliked by 89%. With IRV in place, the Best Picture winner is sure to be preferred by a large share of Academy members.”

Let’s say that Oscar voters, confusing box office success with quality, nominate Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen for best picture. Under the old system, 11% of the voters could determine that it was the finest film of 2009, even if 89% thought it was dreck. With IRV in place, more of a consensus will be reached within the Academy.
ROG

ROG
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