Liberalism & The Arts

February 24, 2007

We hear a lot about the “Liberal Media” and Hollywood, “The Left Coast”, like it’s a bad thing. While it’s usually best to resist blanket statements and generalizations – because it’s just not possible to paint any group of people with a single brush stroke – this is delicious food for thought.

According to The Oxford English Dictionary, the liberal attitude is defined as “Favorable to or respectful of individual rights and freedoms; spec. (in politics) favoring free trade and gradual political and social reform that tends towards individual freedom or democracy”. A generic definition of liberal is “generous”.

There is a common denominator between the media and the entertainment industry, and that is the writer. What a writer must do, to do the job well, is to get to the heart of the subject at hand, and at the heart of any subject are human beings – complex human beings with a vast range of sometimes conflicting experiences and emotions. As challenging as it may be at times, journalists work hard to present both sides of a story; anything less would be propaganda. To tell a story comprehensively, or even interestingly, writers must suspend judgment in the interest of presenting real people (or characters) whose background, thoughts and feelings have motivated them to act or react as they have to the situation at hand.

This is also true for actors, whose job it is to “become” multi-dimensional flesh and blood characters. Like the writer, a good actor can’t afford the luxury of judging of a character to be portrayed but must instead do everything possible to understand and embody the totality of that character and, in essence, what makes him or her “tick”. Meryl Streep comes to mind, and her remarkable ability to “channel” a character.

Actors, directors, and writers have the advantage of being exposed to a variety of people on a regular basis, whether working in communities of the hundreds of diverse personalities employed on each movie or filming on location in other countries for months at a time. When they don’t have the opportunity to meet the character they’re portraying, they try to meet similar people and otherwise delve into their imaginations to draw on their own intricate psyches.

After all, ain’t none of us as simple as we might like to think we are. We are each the sum total of our experiences and our behavior follows logical patterns. We have the potential for all good and all bad in us, including character traits and abilities that range from thoughtful and kind to thoughtless and cruel. We make constant choices as to which facet of our personality we’ll draw upon in our daily interactions with others. Hopefully we choose to let our higher natures influence our behavior but often it’s an unconscious combination of our experiences and resulting emotions that dictate our reactions. An actor knows all of this; these are the tools that s/he draws upon in the course of his or her work. While most of us are busy living our single lives, an actor will live several lives in one, inhabiting numerous “bodies” and embracing various life experiences. Actor Peter O’ Toole commented recently that “actors are people, only more so”, a thought echoed by Jim Carrey who said, “we all walk around with a lot of people in our heads”. An actor has, you might say, “walked in another man’s moccasins” and knows that, in many cases, “there but for fortune go I”.

In his best selling book, The Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle emphasizes the importance of living in the present moment. Actors have always been keenly aware of the necessity of “being in the moment” in order to be fully present and spontaneous in a scene. When we’re in the moment, we cease to be judgmental about how life – or other people – should be. We accept things as they are.

Once we understand that each person on earth feels pain, and bleeds, and has hopes, dreams, and a simple desire to live in peace, as do we, compassion and acceptance follow naturally. We care what happens to others because, beneath superficial differences like “color”, “race” and “religion”, we know that our similarities far outweigh our differences. It’s no longer easy to make judgments of “good” or “bad, “right” or “wrong”. This was well expressed by Oscar winner Helen Mirren, who grew up with a disdain for the monarchy but “fell in love” with Queen Elizabeth II while portraying her.

Ultimately, in this increasingly globalized world, we’re all beneficiaries of the work done by actors, writers and directors, who give us an understanding of countries we’ll never see and people we may never have the opportunity to meet.

Maybe we should each try walking in someone else’s moccasins for awhile. It might just save a lot of lives.

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On Love

When we think of love, most often it’s interpersonal love; the stuff of which relationships are made. The dancing-on-a-cloud or addicted-to-you kind. Or the heart-breaking, cry all night, never-gonna-love-again stuff. It’s oh so human to think in limited terms, isn’t it?

But what is love really? According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it can be many things, including “no score” in tennis and, of course, a strong sexual affection. The first definition given is: “That state of feeling with regard to a person which manifests itself in concern for the person’s welfare, pleasure in his or her presence, and often desire for his or her approval; deep affection, strong emotional attachment.” (It’s also noted that a former meaning is “an act of kindness”.) And affection is defined in part as “goodwill, kindly feeling, love.”

I submit that in its highest state, love can be a cohesive spiritual force that encompasses all life.

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John Kerry's Foot

November 1, 2006

What is it with the Democrats lately? Those who aren’t struck dumb by the Bush administration’s rhetoric open their mouths and insert their feet.

It’s an understatement to say that John Kerry, or Howard Dean, would have been far superior to George Bush as the president of the United States; as Cheney would say, “that’s a no-brainer”. But when it comes to getting out messages, they stumble all over the place.

I think it’s anger. Righteous anger, but delayed – and even misplaced – anger. Kerry – like Al Gore before him – seems to have what a friend calls the “dinosaur syndrome”. You hit a dinosaur on the head today and he reacts to it much later.

It took Al Gore a couple of years after he “lost” the 2000 election to start making angry speeches about the policies of the Bush administration. But even then, he never really funneled that anger (as so many of us longed for him to do) into the fact that – as evidence has shown – he was the rightful winner of that election. And now, two years after “losing” the 2004 election, Kerry is fighting mad... finally. But, instead of talking about the theft of the 2004 election – the Ohio debacle, the voting machines, even directly addressing the Swift Boating itself – he blurts out a statement meant to attack George Bush’s failed policy in Iraq, but which instead sounds more like an attack on the American troops.

Now John Kerry is so angry about being Swift-Boated in 2004 that he was initially reluctant to apologize for what even he called a “botched joke”, which is understandable, but it took Imus repeated attempts this morning to get him to make a coherent statement about what he really meant to say.

Maybe it’s something in the water in Washington. After all, George Bush can barely string a series of words into a clear sentence and John Kerry’s history with mis-statements goes back to his most infamous: “I voted for it before I voted against it”.

Kerry appears to be a very bright and thoughtful man with his heart in the right place, but the complexities of his mind are not serving him – or us – well. More importantly, where was he when we needed him to stand up and speak out? There was a time when speaking up would have made the difference between war and peace, when it would have protected our Bill of Rights from being dismantled and our country from being sold out to the interests of big money.

As he postures himself for another possible run at the presidency, John Kerry’s latest foot-in-mouth episode reminds us that in 2008 we need a candidate with a cohesive message and the ability to express it coherently and consistently.

With the 2006 elections a week away, the Democrats really need to pull together and to help or get out of the way.

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A Deer In Headlights

October 4, 2006

Watching the Mark Foley scandal unfold has been amusing in a sad sort of way. You could almost see his mind working feverishly to get out of it.

Friday September 29th: Oh God! I’ve been caught. What am I gonna do? What am I gonna do? Why me? Why now? I thought we were invincible! If only I could find a way that it’s not my fault. Let’s see. Who’s fault could it have been? How could I have been the victim here?

Wait! I’ve got it! It wasn’t my fault because I’m an alcoholic. Alcoholism is a disease, right? I’m the victim of a disease. I didn’t know what I was doing because – I was drinking!

His attorney, David Roth, might have countered with something like: ‘But Mark, are you really an alcoholic?’

‘Doesn’t matter. I’ll check right into rehab to prove it. Do you think the doctors can tell whether I’m an alcoholic?’

Roth: ‘I think they’ll have to take your word for it.’

‘There you go! I’m an alcoholic – a victim. Demon Alcohol made me do things I would never have done. Phew!’

Then came what seemed to be an interminably long weekend. Mark Foley is left alone with his thoughts. He begins to worry all the more. This is bad! I hope being an alcoholic is enough. My defense needs to be fool proof. What else? And then he hits on just the thing.

A-ha! I went to parochial school! I could have been molested by a pedophile priest when I – too – was just a young teenager! It scarred me for life, and made me an alcoholic. I had no choice but to act out with teenagers the age I was when it happened to me. This is perfect! And credible. I’m a victim – the ultimate victim!

Monday finally comes, but Mark Foley continues to worry. What else? What else can I say? In a conversation with Roth, he asks if the media is buying his story, then he has what he thinks is a stroke of genius:

“Oh! And did I mention I’m gay?”

And so it was that, in trying to save himself, former Congressman Mark Foley took alcoholics, priests, victims of sexual abuse and gays down with him.

***

On Being In The Moment

Everywhere I turn
I hear them say
The exact same thing
in various ways

Be in the moment!
Enjoy your life now!
Get into the flow!
I only ask “how?”

Stilling the mind
is so hard to do
There’s so much to think of,
such a long list “To Do”

The pen and the paper
before me await
my undivided attention
and I’m ready... But wait!

The dog wants some food
and that plant needs water.
Look at that dust!
And can’t this coffee be hotter???!

Oops, the cat’s on the ledge!
Now my mind’s whirling,
my nerves are on edge,
tossing, turning, churning....

Take a deep breath now
and settle in again.
Straighten the legal pad,
pick up the pen.

Then, oh my, that curtain
how it needs to be washed!
Now off to the basement,
the laundry to be tossed.

Okay, that’s better,
now I can think.
But first better put
some dishes in the sink.

Oh, there’s the mailman,
I wonder what came.
Bills to be paid, and,
Hey, great! It’s that game!

Should pay the bills now,
and letters to write.
Geez, now it’s so late
might as well give up for the night.

I think of young mothers
most every day.
How do they focus
in the heat of the fray?

As I sit here alone struggling
to connect paper and pen...
It seems my unconscious
is just not my friend.

PLEASE Get Our President Some Therapy!

September 30, 2006

The emperor has no clothes! There. Someone had to say it.

What’s more, it’s time we acknowledge that we the people are in a truly dysfunctional relationship with our president, and that far too many of us are “staying the course” in the hope that everything will work out in the end. Guess what. That’s as likely to happen as staying in an abusive love relationship will eventually pay off.

Sadly, we have a president with a classic alcoholic personality (making all the more ironic the 2004 poll results which indicated that a large percentage of voters liked him because they thought he would be more “fun to have a beer with”). We’re told that he quit drinking some fifteen years ago, and maybe the rumors that he’s drinking again aren’t true. It doesn’t matter. Drinking or not, the dysfunctional personality of an addict rarely changes without therapy or the 12 step program used by A. A. They call people who quit drinking without therapy “dry drunks”.

Any recovering addict, and anyone who’s ever lived with an addict, knows the symptoms all too well: the unwillingness to admit a mistake or take responsibility, instead blaming others when things go wrong; angry outbursts and even bullying; lecturing (often about religion) rather than sharing information; secrecy; acting like a petulant child, and – the hallmark of an alcoholic personality – denial. Sound familiar?

Those of us who grew up with an alcohol- or drug-addicted parent (and there are at least 76 million of us) are also programmed to live in denial. They call alcoholism a family disease. No matter how bad things get at home, the unspoken but silently agreed upon position of the family is “if you don’t talk about it, it doesn’t exist”. The addict demands this “loyalty” of us and we assume that others will go along with this charade. As a result, we become Enablers.

Bad enough when we enable those people whose behavior is hurting us at home, but many of us are so deeply mired in our mutual denial we can’t see that it’s extended to enabling the “leader of the free world” – the man who could also push a button and destroy the earth – to operate not with intelligence but by following his personal “instincts”. Simply put, our president is living in denial of reality and he bullies anyone who doesn’t go along with him, using such phrases as “You’re either for us or ag’in’ us”.

Years ago on a talk show, actor John Larroquette made a comment that summed it up perfectly, even prophetically in this case. “Alcoholics,” he said, “don’t have relationships; they take hostages.”

George W. Bush has some powerful Enablers, not only in his cabinet – whose jobs are to enable him – but also in those employees who make up our Congress. The republicans apparently feel duty-bound to support their party at any cost and the democrats have been bullied so much that they’re afraid to speak the truth, lest they (again) be labeled “weak on national security”or worse – and all of them feel obligated to enable the corporations who put them there (many of which are profiting from this war). This president – who once commented how much easier it would be if this were a dictatorship “as long as I’m the dictator” – also bullies the media by threatening to withhold information (amusing, considering how little information is released anyway) and labels as unpatriotic those citizens who disagree with him.

So far, at least, this is still a democracy, and yet we’re letting it get away from us by enabling this dysfunctional man and his administration to – among so many other things – operate in secrecy; to trash international support for America; to launch an ill-planned, ill-equipped unilateral war based on a lie; to “stay the course” against public opinion; to strip away our civil liberties; to take and hold prisoners indefinitely without charge and even torture them (despite the Geneva Conventions and the best intelligence that torture doesn’t work). Meanwhile, over $300 billion dollars have been spent with no end in sight, nearly 3,000 American and more than 130,000 Iraqi lives have been lost, thousands of Americans are permanently disabled and our country is less prepared for disaster than ever.

As reported by Bob Woodward in his latest book, appropriately titled State of Denial, even former President George H. W. Bush is enabling his son by withholding his (informed and valid) concerns about waging war in Iraq because somehow he thought it more important to let the boy “be himself.” Say what?! It seems that Woodward himself might have further enabled Bush by withholding, for his third book, information that might have affected the 2004 election and saved thousands of lives. Is anyone looking out for our country here?

Now, despite escalating chaos in Iraq and a critical shortage of troops, our president is fixated on Iran. Will someone please get this man some therapy before he gets us all killed. That’s not going to happen until we come out of our mutual denial and stop indulging our president’s petulant behavior. As hard as it can be to accept that a loved one has become dysfunctional, how much more difficult it is to admit when it’s our president we’re talking about – but how much more important.

What we need right now is a healthy grownup; one who can admit mistakes and deal with facts. And an electorate who will stop enabling dysfunctional leaders. Maybe we all need therapy.

***

Why Jon Stewart Matters

August 20, 2006

A study conducted prior to the 2004 elections was published recently in American Politics Research, reporting that researchers have connected The Daily Show to lower opinions of politicians and greater cynicism toward the mainstream media and the electoral process itself, further hypothesizing that Jon Stewart could make young people less likely to vote.

In response to a poll indicating that a number of college students are getting their news solely from The Daily Show, Stewart himself hastened to point out that not only is he a comedian doing “fake news” but that his audience wouldn’t even get his jokes if they weren’t keeping up with the news from other sources. Aside from that, the Daily Show doesn’t report the news but instead uses real news footage with Stewart merely reacting to it. Therefore, even if we were only getting our information from The Daily Show – which is unlikely – what we’re getting is a regular look at politicians – our "leaders" – speaking for themselves and, in the process, often making contradictory, questionable and disturbing statements.

In fact, unlike the cable news talk show hosts, or “on air talent”, as their employers more appropriately call them, Jon Stewart seems to sincerely care about his country. Take for example his 2004 appearance on CNN’s yell-fest, "Crossfire", during which he implored Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala to "please stop", because "you’re hurting America" by pandering to political spin. It seems to be more than mere coincidence that CNN canceled "Crossfire" soon after that and let Tucker Carlson’s contract lapse; yet what Jon was referring to continues unabated on cable news talk shows. Commentators and "pundits" (to use a generous word) regularly pass off as fact their personal opinions on critical issues – often at the top of their voices – making erroneous, biased and otherwise misleading statements. Instead of challenging or correcting them, the hosts encourage their guests’ mis-statements, political spin and the ensuing arguments. It makes a better show, after all. Even the most supposedly credible guests – from Bob Woodward to members of the 9/11 commission – choose and couch their words so carefully that any meaning or point, if there was one, gets lost along the way. Those who dare speak out candidly – like, say, Joe Wilson or Dan Rather – are swift-boated and we the people are left with propaganda.

A recent example of our incompetent and irresponsible news media at work came on August 3 when the majority of news hosts let go unquestioned Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s statement to the Senate Armed Services Committee that one would "have a dickens of a time trying to find instances where I've been excessively optimistic" about the war in Iraq. Unlike most of the real news shows, it took The (fake news) Daily Show no time at all to find – and air – clips of Rumsfeld’s optimistic pre-war claims. On August 11, CNN Headline News host Chuck Roberts, discussing the impact of the foiled British terror plot on the Lieberman/Lamont campaign with Hotline senior editor John Mercurio, asked, “And might some argue, as some have, that Lamont is the al Qaeda candidate?” He has since apologized for this, but by then the Cheney-Rove machine had set all of the media puppets’ tongues to waggin’ with the suggestion that a vote for a Democrat is a vote for Al Qaeda.

It doesn’t even seem to matter anymore that a number of these hosts and hostesses are "news models" (a phrase aptly coined by Air America’s Randi Rhodes) who merely read from cue cards, often mispronouncing names – painfully reminiscent of Tom Grunick, the William Hurt character in Broadcast News. (Remember his manufactured tear?) The only job requisite for these hosts and their guests would seem to be merely a “gift of gab”. Everyone these days has an agenda – and often a book – to sell and they’re using the bully pulpit of television to peddle it. It’s all a game to them.

How perfectly ironic to learn from Gotham Magazine this summer that the president of CNN is only using his position as a day job while pursuing his real career of screenwriter. It’s no longer a secret that highly rated Fox News is merely a mouthpiece for the Bush administration or that Bill O’Reilly, among others, invents his own “facts”. Tucker Carlson – having learned nothing from Jon Stewart’s comments on “Crossfire” – moved on to MSNBC where, on his already revamped show, he called Al Gore a "wild-eyed religious nut" whose "religion is the environment", implying that global climate change should not be taken seriously. The spin on subjects like evolution and the war in Iraq is enough to make a person dizzy, and make it almost impossible to separate fact from fiction. Other critical issues, from the genocide in Darfur to the Republicans’ recent attempt to raise minimum wage in the same bill that includes a repeal of the estate tax for the wealthy, rarely rate a mention; but tune into any of these channels and you’ll be fully informed about Mel Gibson’s drunk driving episode, Britney Spears’ latest mishap or the search for a photo of Tom and Katie’s baby. In spite of that, the recent efforts of Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt and Bono to focus attention on problems in Africa have yielded little coverage of those issues.

Worse yet are some of the talk radio hosts. Rush Limbaugh regularly makes outrageous and inaccurate statements – and even crops audio quotes – to serve his purpose, and Dennis Prager has been known to repeat unfounded claims against such democrats as Hillary Clinton. Others, like Michael Savage, don’t care whom they hurt with their boldly stated untruths. On the August 7 edition of his nationally syndicated radio program, Savage declared that CNN hosts Wolf Blitzer and Larry King "look like the type that would have pushed Jewish children into the oven to stay alive one more day to entertain the Nazis." Although Larry King and Wolf Blitzer are as likely as any of them to let false statements go by, this is unconscionable.

Sadly, you’re less likely to find truth than (with a tip of the hat to Stephen Colbert) “truthiness” on television newscasts at a time when speed is more important than accuracy; corporations own the media; ratings equate to income; stockholders want their share and everyone has an ulterior motive.

Speaking as a not-so-young regular viewer of The Daily Show who does keep up with the news and has voted too often for the lesser of two evils, Jon Stewart does not make me cynical; politicians on both sides of the aisle and our untrustworthy media do that all too well on their own. Jon Stewart, on the other hand, keeps me sane with his daily reality-check of the news. More often than not, he echoes my own thoughts and reactions, reminds me that I’m not imagining things, and sometimes, yes, I even learn something.

The next time researchers want to spend time on a study, they might try looking into why our news media are collaborating with politicians to mislead the American people.

Meanwhile, watch for Tucker Carlson’s upcoming guest spot on Dancing With The Stars. Remember – when it comes to TV news, it’s just show biz. And it is hurting America.

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