Music of the Day: Andy Narell, Fire in the Engine Room.

The Thanksgiving holiday has come and gone; a visit with my wife's family gave me the opportunity to view, for the first time, a home-made video from Iraq. I'll have some thoughts on this in my next posting here--but other, more important, matters take precedence at this time. Average Joe will be back in a few days with more wild screed on various subjects.

Thanks for reading.

AJ

Music of the Day: Goodness, by Houston Person.

a couple of weeks ago, some gas-bag politician made a "joke" about the relatively low level of intelligence of the men and women in the armed forces--study hard, he told a group of university students, or you'll wind up in the military and in Iraq. the underlying assumption is of course that the American military is the last refuge of the desperate, the chronically unemployed, and the semi-literate; remember, this same gas-bag said that his fellow Vietnam veterans were war criminals and psychopathic murderers, so his mind-set apparently hasn't changed much since the 1960's. (so much for the idea that this particular gas-bag is a "progressive thinker;" it's pretty clear that his thinking hasn't progressed in the last 30+ years.)

this particular gas-bag never tires of referring to his heroic deeds in Vietnam--so maybe as he compares others to himself, he always finds others lacking in smarts, talent, and heroism. maybe if the current members of the military were as smart, talented, and heroic as the gas-bag claims he was in Vietnam, the war in Iraq would already be over. the guy was in Vietnam for all of 120 days and in that short span he still found time to write himself up for some purple hearts and a silver star; maybe if everybody else hadn't been so busy burning villages and murdering civilians we could have won the war in Vietnam.

hey, i spent a full year in Vietnam and not only did i not have time to burn villages or murder civilians, i didn't have time to write myself up for any medals, so i must have been a slacker.

but, i digress; the point i was going to make before i went off on that overlong swipe at the aforementioned gas-bag was this: in the summer of 2005 i had the opportunity to spend a day on one of our Navy's guided missile destroyers. granted, one day isn't much, but i did get to talk to lots of people on the ship--the CO, the XO, most of the junior officers, many of the enlisted men and women, cooks, the kids manning the M60's as we left and returned to port--and here's what i noticed. they were ALL articulate young men and women. they were ALL immensely proud of their ship, their CO, and their branch of the service. i didn't hear a single member of the crew grouse or bitch or bad-mouth the Navy or the President or the United States of America. maybe they were all brain-washed automatons just mouthing phrases they'd been told to repeat to the civilians, but most of them demonstrated a sense of humor that tended to belie the notion that they were unthinking robots.

my guess is that the gas-bag doesn't spend a whole lot of time around members of the American military or else he wouldn't have said what he said; i'm guessing that it's more than likely that his "progressive" mind cannot grasp that the American military might have changed since 1969, although i gotta' say here and now that i never met anybody in Vietnam, or any Vietnam vet after the war, who did any of the stuff this guy claims was done routinely.

i think the good news is that the gas-bag has again shown that he is a self-loathing mediocrity and like the old Soviet Union, his legacy will be found on the ash heap of history.

AJ

p.s.: see this recent piece about one of the gas-bag's colleagues and his view of our men and women in the military: http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/013/010swkxg.asp

Music of the Day: Andy Narell, The Hammer.

i've had about 48 hours to think about the movie and to finally stop laughing, but i'm guessing that i'm still going to struggle with what to say--i spent much of my time in the theatre with my glasses off, using my handkerchief to wipe the tears from my eyes. i know i missed a few lines because i couldn't hear anything but my own laughter and that of my lovely wife and our friends. afterwards the four of us sat around in an Applebee's and attempted to eat and drink and laugh and talk all at the same time--it's a wonder no one choked to death. i can't possibly write the kind of review of the film Mr. Hitchens wrote, (see my favorite sites for Hitchens' website), but i can tell you that the four of us really enjoyed ourselves. maybe we need counseling. . . .

one interesting observation--with the exception of three college-aged guys, we were about the youngest people in the theatre; we fully expected the "under-30" crowd to be out in force for Borat, but the rest of the audience was pretty gray and, in some cases, had some serious wrinkles. The Good Doctor explained that the film was playing nearby, at the cooler movie location, so maybe all the under-30's were there, leaving the semi-geezers to the other theatre. whatever the reason, the audience demographic was all wrong; still, there was much laughter throughout the show, although frankly i'm not sure if any of the other folks were laughing or not. i was laughing too hard to tell.

so, go see the movie; it's a hoot. try not to take it too seriously. try not to be offended.

here's a question that we can follow-up on later: will Brent Bozell like the movie or will he hate it?

i'm guessing he'll hate it. . . .

AJ

Music of the Day: It's All Good, Brian Simpson.

Next posting: Borat.

AJ

Music of the Day: The Further Adventures of Flim & the BB's.

today, as promised, i have some thoughts to share on Bill Bryson's latest book, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid. generally speaking, i like Mr. Bryson's writing; i think i described it, in a previous posting, as smooth as butter, which is almost always true in the case of Thunderbolt Kid. I'm familiar with Mr. Bryson's work, having also read some of his other books including Mother Tongue, Notes from A Small Island, A Walk in the Woods, In A Sunburned Country, and A Short History of Nearly Everything (not just once, but twice, no small feat given the fact that the book is 544 pages in length).

Thunderbolt Kid is about Mr. Bryson's childhood experiences growing up in Iowa in the 1950s and when he sticks to the subject, he is his usual good-humored and entertaining self. i often read while eating my lunch, usually alone (my wife's lunch schedule rarely coincides with mine), but i have to WARN you that eating and reading Mr. Bryson is a potentially dangerous combination--his sense of humor is powerful enough, and is sufficiently unpredictable, that you might find yourself choking to death on a piece of the open-faced turkey-melt sandwich you're eating. it's easy to aspirate food or drink while reading Mr. Bryson's work, but now that you know, you can be more careful. i found myself laughing out loud often while reading Thunderbolt Kid and while i freely admit that any scatological term always makes me laugh Mr. Bryson doesn't need to frequently resort to that particular convention to make me laugh.

his descriptions of childhood friends are mostly sweet and his recollections about his weird family life resonated with me (mostly because i think my family was pretty weird, too). while i found his nostalgia for certain anachronistic aspects of 50's life a bit disconcerting, i enjoyed the book, though not nearly as much as most of the other books of his that i've read.

here's why. chapter 7 of Thunderbolt Kid is a jarring departure from the rest of the book and is, i think, a cheap political screed, a strangely humorless chapter, and a failed attempt at being serious in an otherwise decidedly and amusingly unserious book. this chapter, entitled Boom, could have instead been called We Were Crazy to Fear Communism. or it could have been called We Spent Too Much Money on National Defense! or it could have been called We Should Not Have Built Nuclear Weapons Even Though the Russians Did.

while the scurrilous Joseph McCarthy is mentioned, as is the "fear" and "hysteria" Americans had of communism, Mr. Bryson fails to mention the simple but brutal facts of communism in the 20th century--millions of dead in the former Soviet Union (Mr. Bryson calls the Soviet Union an "irritant"), China, Cuba, Cambodia, and Vietnam. not to put too fine a point on it, but Mr. Bryson fails to mention the scores of millions of dead in those communist countries--which ought to give some credence to American "fear" and "hysteria" concerning communist regimes and leaders.

Mr. Bryson also takes exception to the notion that certain Hollywood films were pro-communist in scope and tone and he unbelievably writes that "on reflection no one could actually think of any Hollywood movie that seemed even slightly sympathetic to Marxist thought." yikes! not even any of Dalton Trumbo's stuff?!?

Mr. Bryson takes an undeserved swipe at Dr. Edward Teller whom he calls "the semi-crazed Hungarian-born physicist who was one of the presiding geniuses behind the development of the H-bomb." indeed, Dr. Teller was one of the men who pushed the development of the hydrogen bomb, but he was also one of the men who worked on the Manhattan Project that produced the weapons that finally convinced the Japanese militarists to surrender in 1945. Dr. Teller was, if i remember correctly, a refugee from Hungary during that time in European history when Adolf Hitler was running amok, so his experiences with totalitarian regimes and tyrants was not purely academic--it was personal. i had the privilege to meet and talk with Dr. Teller nearly 20 years ago and while he was old and powerfully opinionated, he was not "semi-crazed." he was lucid, provocative, thoughtful, interesting, and quite human--at no time did he seem to me to be "semi-crazed."

in Chapter 13 Mr. Bryson stoops to portraying American Blacks in the most stereotypical way: Blacks in Iowa were, he writes, "stronger, fleeter, tougher, braver, hipper, and cannier" than whites were and were, of course, poorer--but they were much better at basketball. if a similar section had been penned by a conservative author, that author would have been immediately branded a bigot, a racist, and an unreconstructed cave-dweller. in this same chapter Mr. Bryson laments, with good reason, the shameful history of racism in the American south that manifested itself too often in fatal violence, but he completely neglects to mention the simple fact that the most virulent anti-integrationist politicians of the day were Southern Democrats.

finally, in Chapter 11 Mr. Bryson writes this: "The film world reminded us that we might equally be attacked by flying saucers or stiff-limbed aliens with metallic voices and deathly ray guns, or introduced us to the stimulating possibilities for mayhem inherent in giant mutated insects, blundering mega-crabs, be-stirred dinosaurs, monsters from the deep, and one seriously pissed-off fifty-foot woman. I don't imagine that many people, even those who now faithfully vote Republican, believe that any of that would actually happen. . . ." did you get that bit about those who now faithfully vote Republican? do i need to explain what the deconstructionists call the "subtext?" only truly stupid and gullible people would believe those movie-things. . .you know, the kind of truly stupid and gullible people who would faithfully vote Republican.

when Mr. Bryson sticks to telling stories from his childhood, the book works quite nicely; when he attempts to get serious about things political or when he attempts some historical interpretation (one source he cites--Howard Zinn!) the book sadly devolves into the standard cliches and cheap shots employed too often by (i must be mindful of the terminology here) liberals, leftists, progressives. generally, Thunderbolt Kid is worth reading but i'd suggest borrowing it from your local public library, not shelling out $25 on it as i did.

AJ