WAITING FOR SUPERMAN (2010): The Education of Our Children

Whatever the merit is of his films, Director Davis Guggenheim has a knack for getting his documentaries discussed in the mainstream media.  The last documentary that was discussed as much as Waiting for Superman was An Inconvenient Truth, released in 2006 and also directed by Guggenheim.  With An Inconvenient Truth Guggenheim was doing the bidding for those in the environmental movement that supported legislative reform such as “Cap and Trade,” and with Waiting for Superman he is doing the bidding of those that support educational reform such as those that advocate further implementation of the use of charter schools.  I guess Guggenheim deserves credit for on one hand going after the corporate polluters (endearing him to liberals such as Al Gore) and on the other hand going after teacher unions (endearing him to cultural conservatives that feel our public education system is failing our children).  Then again, Guggenheim is probably guilty of opportunism by pushing whatever cause may be popular at the time.

Waiting for Superman does raise some extremely valid points.  Whether our educational system is or is not failing our children, there is not a thoughtful person in our nation that doesn’t hope that our school system can do better.  George W. Bush brought in “No Child Left Behind,” and the Obama administration is now calling to overhaul that legislation with their own initiative named “Race to the Top,” calling it our “Sputnik moment” to improve our educational system (see President Obama’s State-of-the-Union address).  The educational reform movement would not have become so politicized unless the whole issue was vital to the American public. 

In Waiting for Superman, we follow the families of five students desperate enough to apply for admission to charter schools so these students can escape a public school system plagued by crime, violence, drug abuse and incompetent teachers and administrators.  Anthony, who is being raised by his grandmother, is applying for a school with 69 applicants vying for 24 admissions.  Francisco lives in Harlem and is among 792 students applying for 40 possible openings.  Bianca, who also lives in Harlem, is among 767 students applying for 35 openings.  Emily, who lives in Silicon Valley, is nevertheless applying for a charter school because in even such a wealthy community the schools are failing their students.  And sadly, the prodigal Daisy, who desires to become a doctor and shows a great aptitude for learning, is one of 135 students applying for a charter school in Los Angeles with only 10 openings.  The students applying to charter schools such as these are chosen through a lottery system, and their presence is required when the numbers are drawn to see if they are or are not selected for admission.

We’re fed a lot of statistics in Waiting for Superman - with little context provided throughout the showing.  In this the film lacks any in-depth analysis, which was also missing in An Inconvenient Truth.  Yes, the statistics report that America’s school system is falling behind those of other industrial nations (our students are 21^st in science and 25^th in math in the rankings), but accepting this at face value is dependent on whether those statistics presented from other nations and our own are actually reported accurately.  We also have sound bites from individuals such as Geoffrey Canada, a former educator and current educational activist with a non-profit organization called “The After School Corporation.”  Michelle Rhee, the controversial former Chancellor of the District of Columbia Public Schools, utters some incendiary remarks about the quality of our teachers and schools (“I know they’re getting a crappy education …”).  Bill Strickland, who served on the board for the National Endowment of the Arts, is shown in a charter school demonstrating his novel application of the arts to reach youths from troubled neighborhoods.   Strickland is quoted as saying that “everybody is going to drown” if we don’t do something about our schools.  Bill Gates talks about his own foundation's effort to finance alternate forms of education.  Finally, Randi Weingarten, the President of the American Federation of Teachers, makes an appearance not so much to present the other side of the story, but to be quoted to supposedly demonstrate that the teachers’ union is unsympathetic and basically opposed to any kind of education reform.

Waiting for Superman contains a good storyline in that it demonstrates how potentially good students are being neglected a decent education - especially in the poorer neighborhoods of our country.  For example, we discover a school that graduated only 20,000 of the 60,000 students that had attended it.  And though they are not becoming executives among our corporations, minorities are populating our prisons.  We spend approximately $667 billion in federal money annually on our schools (though according to one set of Congressional budget statistics, only 23 cents of every dollar allotted to education is actually spent on education) and propose $100 billion dollars of educational spending increases in Congress every year.  As Guggenheim is quick to point out, lack of funding might not be the problem.

But Guggenheim presents to us a problem without much of a solution.  Charter Schools, he seems to be saying, are the Holy Grail.  That he only presents to us a handful of charter schools, and that we have no way of knowing if the schools he shows are either as good as he suggests or representative of charter schools as a whole, does not seem to concern Guggenheim.  We’re not given a complete answer as to why some schools succeed and others fail.  Blame in this film is directed at the public schools, the teachers’ union, and the failure of either to base teacher salaries upon merit.  Guggenheim barely addresses crime, drug abuse and violence.  A criticism of Waiting for Superman is that it only presents students raised by family members motivated in seeing their children succeed.  These students may not be typical of those in our public schools.  If students in charter schools are more successful (and that contention is debatable), it may be because they have someone at home that cares enough to see them succeed.  Also, what denotes a failing school is tossed around in the movie without precision.  “No Child Left Behind” has been criticized because it encourages schools to focus on making children better at taking tests while not making them better students.  Certain charter schools prepare students to take standard tests without preparing them to function better in the outside world.  Nor do we ever learn in the film how feasible it would be to create a system of charter schools that could be used by more than a small percentage of the population.

Still, what critics of Waiting for Superman have missed is that the importance of the film is not in a specific solution, but in its plea that something needs to be done.  Whether we do or do not think the public school system is in as difficult of a predicament as Guggenheim seems to suggest, educational reform is not an issue that is going to go away.  (I even saw a remark in a Mother Jones article, a magazine known for forwarding progressive causes, criticizing many liberals for not getting behind the reform of our educational system.)  Whether we are or are not satisfied with the quality of education in this country, again, no one is saying that we do not want for our schools to be better.  Critics of Waiting for Superman poke fun at Guggenheim’s suggestion that charter schools are the answer, but these critics do not provide any solution of their own – outside of suggesting we spend more money.  Waiting for Superman is a 102 minute conversation starter.

When watching the children waiting to see if their number is picked in the heartless lottery system that the charter schools employed (and for some reason the five students featured in this film had to witness), one still felt empathy for the children and hoped that each of them somehow could receive an education that would better their situations.  If the quality of our education is truly the most important consideration to the future of our country, then we also need to address the competency of our teachers and the resistance of the teachers’ union to change.

February 8, 2011

©  Robert Miller 2011

BLACK SWAN (2010): Ballet Horror Flick

Black Swan is about a young dancer’s plunge into madness.  It is a joyless film displaying good choreography and an incredible work ethic on the part of the lead actress that will endear it to pretentious critics and the Academy Award Committee.  It is much like The Reader with its muddled storyline that some audience members will label as brilliance.  It’s much more like Carrie starring Sissy Spacek (though not nearly so good because Carrie really was intended to be a horror flick) in that both movies attempt to blur the line between reality and fantasy.

Nina (Natalie Portman), a naïve and somewhat sexually confused young woman, tries out for the lead in Swan Lake.  Along with this comes many of the more negative attributes of being in such a profession (self-loathing, addiction to overworking, eating disorders, etc.).  Her mother (Barbara Hershey) is a controlling mother and failed ballet dancer that secretly wishes that her daughter would fail in any particular pursuit.  Thomas (Vincent Cassel), the director of the ballet, is a lecher and a tyrant who spends his time humiliating his cast – and in particular, Nina, who he believes in as the “White Swan” but not as the “Black Swan.”  Beth (Winona Ryder) is the aging ballerina that used to be the favorite of Thomas before Nina began to impress the director with her (Nina’s) dancing skills.  Finally, there is Lily (Mila Kunis), who at first pretends to befriend Nina, but later becomes her competitor for the role of the lead in the ballet.  Thomas spends his time fondling Nina and insulting her alleged frigidity to supposedly help Nina metamorphose into the “Black Swan.”   He encourages Nina to masturbate which is somehow supposed to help her better understand her role.  Nina also begins to fantasize about having a lesbian encounter with Lily.  Beth is so jealous of Nina that Beth throws herself in front of a car and badly injures herself to gain the attention of Thomas.  Nina’s mother is so jealous of Nina spending all her time in training that she tries to keep Nina at home to sabotage Nina’s career.  All of this leads to Nina going insane.  The insanity manifests itself in hallucinations, fantasies, rages and the belief that she is growing feathers and has webbed feet and hands.  Nina nevertheless perseveres and gives a brilliant rendition of the “White Swan” and the “Black Swan” in front of a live audience.  Only at the end do we discover that she had pierced herself with a piece of broken glass and as a result she dies just after the performance of Swan Lake was completed.  (We’re not sure if she actually dies or if this is one more fantasy.)

There’s no question that Black Swan has its attributes.  The dance sequences are dazzling, and Natalie Portman is believable as the dancer determined to be a success at all costs to her own peace of mind.  There is a certain suspense that is sustained throughout the movie as we are always kept guessing at to what will happen next.  And juxtaposing the “Black Swan” role along with Nina’s mental state is actually some effective use of symbolism.

There’s also no question that the movie is a mess.  There is no coherent storyline, and nobody in the supporting cast does a decent job in playing their part. Hershey, Cassel, Kunis and Ryder come across as real and one-dimensional as plastic plants.  If the parts these individuals played were the only characters to provide Nina with guidance, one couldn’t blame her for committing (a supposed) suicide in the end.  The portrayal of sexuality throughout the film is relatively mild by today’s standards, but in the context of this particular film it comes out about as wholesome as if we watched a couple of hours of hardcore porn.  It’s gratuitous and completely false.  And the filmmakers did a bit too adequate of a job in making Nina’s flight into madness completely over the top.  It’s too easy hiding a faulty storyline behind the mental fog of a deranged individual.  It would be more difficult to attempt to make sense of the main character’s insanity by providing some plot development.  She was supposed to be an innocent girl, so why did she plunge herself into such depravity?  As it is, whether “White Swan,” “Black Swan,” or combination of “White Swan” and “Black Swan,” we never have the feeling that whatever direction Nina chose to go her destiny would have been anything but tragic. 

The movie runs for 108 minutes, rather short for a movie blockbuster, and this is at least a relief.  It’s directed by Darren Aronofsky, who also directed The Wrestler.  Perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising.  A female friend of mine felt that Black Swan was too much like a teenage boy’s idea of how young women dancers would speak and behave - when not practicing their dance moves.  Black Swan is one of the most disappointing movies that I have seen in years (usually I don’t expect much to begin with) because, as evidenced by The Wrestler, I thought that Anonofsky could hold such an unpredictable storyline together as we have in Black Swan.

We will see what kind of accolades Black Swan receives at all of the award ceremonies.  Not surprisingly, Natalie Portman won a Golden Globe award.  She was at least believable as a dancer and as a fragile human being.  The more important indicator of the quality of this movie will be determined over time.  Will this movie standup in ten or fifteen years?  I’m not convinced that it will because in just twenty-four hours I have no desire to ever see this movie again.  It is a movie that tears down yet never builds anything up in its place.  It is entirely negative in its treatment.  One walks away from this and so many other Hollywood movies with little to give anyone hope.

January 17, 2011

© Robert S. Miller 2011

THE FIGHTER (2010): Story of Micky Ward and Dicky Ecklund

The Fighter is part Rocky and part Raging Bull with the same attributes and flaws of these two earlier fight movies.  Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg) comes from an extremely dysfunctional family whose influence he cannot seem to escape.  His mother Alice (Melissa Leo) is a controlling woman, completely blind to the behavior of her children, and who insists on taking an active role in managing the fight career of Micky.  Micky’s sisters abide by whatever asinine directions their mother gives.  Micky’s father George (Jack McGee) tries to be a decent husband and father but has no control over limiting his family’s insanity.  Most significantly, Dicky Ecklund (Christian Bale), Micky’s half brother, is a crack smoking ex-fighter who wants to train Micky while at the same time engaging in all sorts of felonious behavior.  (Dicky’s claim to fame is that he once unofficially knocked down Sugar Ray Leonard in a professional bout while many people at ringside called the knockdown a push.)  Micky does find a girlfriend, Charlene (Amy Adams), a mini-skirted and tough talking waitress and bartender, who has the courage to stand up to Micky’s family.  Through Charlene’s influence and through Dicky’s conveniently getting himself jailed for assaulting several policemen Micky is able to keep his act together well enough to put together a few impressive wins, and this enables him to get a shot at the World Boxing Union Light Welterweight championship of the world.  (The World Boxing Union is only one of about a dozen sanctioning committees that hands out boxing titles - so the viewer should be only marginally impressed that Micky has been granted this title bout.)  By this time, Dicky is released from jail, gets himself off of crack, and is able to make a positive contribution to Micky’s training for the championship bout.  Micky’s mother also apologizes for being so controlling and promises to stay out of the way.  Micky manages to hang on during the early rounds of this bout and wins the title by technical knockout in the eighth round.  We are told at the end of the movie that Micky eventually marries Charlene. 

How much one enjoys The Fighter is largely dependent upon one’s ability to suspend their disbelief.  The ending of the movie resolves itself too neatly and happily to hold up under any strict scrutiny.  Micky won his title bout during the year of 2000 and, unfortunately, his brother Dicky has been in quite a bit of trouble since that time.  He was busted for possession of crack in 2006 and may soon be charged with attempted murder.  I’m also doubtful that the Alice, as portrayed in the movie, could have so completely removed herself from interfering with Micky’s life. 

Like in almost every boxing movie made (including Rocky and Raging Bull), the fight scenes and training sequences are completely staged and unconvincing.  Movie directors cannot resist the urge to brutalize the fight sequences and turn the whole encounter into a David versus Goliath scenario.  Ringside accounts of the Micky Ward and Shea Neary title bout had Ward winning almost every round.  Probably, we did not have the dramatics of Charlene begging everyone that the fight be stopped to save Micky from a savage beating.  I suppose having Mark Wahlberg look somewhat like a conditioned fighter should be enough when taken in context to other fight films.  To be fair, it is almost impossible to film fictionalized fight scenes that contain the nuances of the real thing.  The Joe Louis Story, an extremely low budget movie filmed in 1953, may be the only film that ever got it right because it used actual footage from fights involving the heavyweight champion.

It is almost as difficult to write about boxing as even some accomplished literary figures could not resist over dramatization.  Norman Mailer and Joyce Carol Oates mythologized fighters by making the fight game appear like a religious quest.  Jack London created fantastic characterizations of fighters, but he could not resist politicizing the actual fight sequences by making it sound like a battle of the oppressor versus the oppressed.  Ring Lardner could not put away his cynical disdain whenever a fighter accomplished something significant.  And even Hemingway, who wrote as eloquently about physical action as any American writer and who composed probably the greatest boxing story ever written (“Fifty Grand”), could not help but cast moral aspersions at fighters he did not like such as Jack Dempsey or Max Baer.  The best descriptions of fight sequences continue to be written up in Ring Magazine and other sports’ journals because these reporters cover far too many fights to romanticize each bout and are aware of the behavior of too many fighters to ever be impressed or misty eyed about a fight such as a WBU Championship bout.

Nevertheless, The Fighter contains probably the best acting of any boxing movie since Raging Bull was released back in 1980.  Mark Wahlberg, Christian Bale and Melissa Leo played their roles almost perfectly in their struggles with their own personality flaws.  I’m not as convinced concerning the acting of Amy Adams.  The tough talking but attractive leading lady characterization goes all the way back to Mae West and by now has become a Hollywood type.  Yet even Adams plays her typecast role adeptly.

This movie can also be gut wrenchingly intense – especially in almost every sequence that Christian Bale appears.  Whether his sudden conversion seems forced, Dicky still comes across as disturbingly real.  The character of Dicky knows that he just missed his chance for greatness when fighting Sugar Ray Leonard.  Though it is difficult to tell if he actually did knock down Leonard or if this was the result of a push, Dicky did manage to hurt Leonard in their fight and would have made boxing history had Dicky gone on to beat the great fighter.  Dicky’s skills as a fighter were undone by his own character flaws.

By no means do I consider The Fighter to be a great movie because so much of it doesn’t seem believable.  Yet in today’s Hollywood setting such a criticism could apply to almost every film.  At least we had three characters that seemed flawed and real in this movie.

January 16, 2011
© Robert S. Miller 2011

MARK TWAIN: And the NewSouth Books Controversy

Many associate reading with a high school English teacher we can’t imagine ever having been young.   To be fair, the teachers have done the best they can.  Seeing that they were probably good students themselves, somewhat idealistic and naïve in desiring to pursue the goal of education, instructors are not the perfect candidates to comprehend violence, drug abuse or nymphomania.  They have practically nothing in common with the skinhead, pot smoker, slut or loser.  They will probably have problems keeping up with the simple adolescent rebel.  With the overcrowding of schools, they may limit themselves to the students they can handle: the good, compliant and well-behaved student who lacks the imagination to question anything.

When it comes to education the debate always becomes political concerning what our children should read.  And when we speak about censorship, the one book always mentioned is The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain.  Huck Finn was a troublesome novel from the start, though its author understood how to use such adverse publicity to his own benefit.   After the novel was banned in several Boston libraries in 1885 Mark Twain remarked that such publicity guaranteed another 5,000 copies of the book would be sold.  Literary historians have been trying to figure out since that time why this particular novel has been so targeted.  Why not instead go after some dime-store smut novel?  Why not concern ourselves with the journals of Marquis de Sade?  Why not ban Mein Kampf?

The answer concerns the quality of our education because Huckleberry Finn is about as far as most English teachers are ready to take the debate.  The novel has been so defended by scholars that educators know somewhere they will find an intellectual justification for teaching it in class.  However lame the argument will be teachers know that they will never have to argue about the merits of the novel from their own perspective.  What is wrong is that the teachers really do not believe in Huckleberry Finn.  They believe in the novel only as a piece of history, a novel that must be placed in the context of time.  They present it as a quaint, entertaining piece of fiction, but they’ve never felt personally challenged by the narrative.

The novel, of course, is controversial because of the use of the term “nigger.”  Here is where we come dangerously close to exceeding the teacher’s comfort zone.  The teacher has been trained to point out that: (1) Twain never used the term “nigger” in a derogatory fashion; (2) the term was part of the common idiom in the pre-Civil War south; and (3) the point of the novel is that “Nigger” Jim was in fact a human being.  That probably would be the end of the discussion in a rural school in Kansas or North Dakota.  It might go over if a black teacher taught it to an all-black school.  There would be more problematic if a white teacher were to teach it to a school that was made up of mostly black students.  Most teachers would never use the term “nigger” themselves but, historical context aside they know damn well what the term implies.  Still, since the novel is a beloved phenomenon most scholars would rather explain away its faults than be accused of censorship.

 NewSouth Books is now trying to make it easier for our educators.  Not only are they willing to publish a book for our schools with the offending adjective left out, they are even willing to change the wording as if Twain had never written anything offensive to begin with (the term “nigger” will now become “slave” and “Injun” will become “Indian”).  We’re told that there will be a suitable introduction to this new volume explaining why the publishers believe such a step is necessary.  The publishers will even pat themselves on the back by proselytizing how this will encourage more young people to learn to appreciate a classic piece of literature.  I’m guessing little will be written concerning how NewSouth Books hopes to make a bundle in financial deals with schools.

NewSouth Books will have its defenders.  If these individuals are sincere at all, the mistake I still believe that they are making is that they overestimate the impact that reading will have upon the young.  Most students are so apathetic about reading in the first place that they only become eloquent when scratching out graffiti upon the bathroom walls.  They will not go out of their way to read Huckleberry Finn.  They certainly will not go out of their way to read Marx, Proust or Joyce.  Their interest might be peaked by one or two books of Henry Miller, but this will die very quickly.  As it is, many students will get more steamed up about a romance novel that appears in a Good Housekeeping magazine than by anything they will ever read in a school library.   Therefore, I think we should worry more about our child’s ability to read at all than attempt to create imagined controversies.  Why not let the kids read the Communist Manifesto or Lady Chatterley’s Lover?  I would be proud of any child who could make his way through Ulysses and still be able to figure out any alleged obscenities. 

I will say, however, that those calling this “political correctness run amuck” may want to be careful about what they wish for as the uncensored Twain often did not make for happy reading.  The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is mild in comparison to other of Twain’s works.  The Innocents Abroad first published in 1867 portrayed American’ tourists as rubes that groveled at the feet of their European ancestors.  Cannibalism in the Cars was a short story where members of Congress stranded on a train started consuming each other while all the long adhering to parliamentary protocol.  In 1901, Twain wrote two essays entitled To the Person Sitting in the Darkness and To My Missionary Critics lambasting the imperialist policies and religious pretensions of the McKinley’ administration (and supporters) concerning American intervention in China and the Philippines.  (So controversial were these essays that Vice President Theodore Roosevelt referred to Twain as a traitor.)  Letters from the Earth (not released in printed form for more than fifty years after Mark Twain’s death because Twain’s last surviving daughter would not allow this book to be published while she was still alive), What is Man and The Mysterious Stranger are as darkly pessimistic and anti-religious writings as anything published in the English language.  Far from comprehending the phenomena of Mark Twain, cultural conservatives only embrace the cheery humorist that was largely a fictional persona created by Samuel Langhorne Clemens (a.k.a. Mark Twain).

There’s too much outrage and too little honesty coming from both sides of this debate.  I hope NewSouth Books continues in its plans to print the expurgated volume of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and that not a single school system purchases a copy.  I also hope the unexpurgated version of Huckleberry Finn sits side by side in the library with The Merchant of Venice, Catcher in the Rye and Mein Kampf * (to show that the destiny and life of Hitler - the great fruitcake - should have been boring, ludicrous and inconsequential as evidenced by his writing).  Finally, whether The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is or is not read in the schools in the final intended form that Mark Twain allowed to be published, I hope that what is presented in our schools is not just material that educators feel they can comfortably present.  The term “nigger” is a word that is hurtful to a large group of descendents of slaves in the United States, and the term will not disappear simply because it is officially deleted from published material.  Racism needs to be directly confronted.  Unfortunately, racism will never completely go away.

*In 1939, a reporter named Alan Cranston (and later United States Senator) was sued by Hitler’s publisher for copyright infringement for attempting to bring out a more accurate translation of Mein Kampf than had already appeared in English.  Hitler’s publishers were worried that American readers might make the assumption that Hitler was an anti-Semite if a too accurate translation of Mein Kampf was actually released in English.  Too bad for Hitler that he won his lawsuit only after a half-million copies of the Cranston’ translation already was sold.

January 6, 2011 

© Robert S. Miller 2011

THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF 2008: Yes We Can (Maybe)

I’ve written about the Iowa Caucus and the conventions for both major political parties, so I suppose I should say something about the general election.  However, if I honestly felt I had nothing more to say than what has already been printed in the newspapers and editorials I would hope that I wouldn’t say anything at all.  People speak too freely about politics as if only their side had any relevance.  We see our neighbors stick up their campaign signs or slap political bumper stickers on the back of their cars and we immediately form an opinion of them.  If that opinion is negative, we immediately put up campaign signs of our own as if that sort of statement makes us seem superior.  The other side is always wrong, more biased or engages in more negative campaigning.  This seems obvious, or so we think, because the other side’s media sources are loaded with misinformation.

Close to a quarter of a million people were in Grant Park where Barak Obama made his first public appearance after it was announced that he was elected to be President.  I suppose it was to be expected that there would be a lot of celebration going on.  This was a victory for the black youth in the crowd and for the civil rights’ workers that had sacrificed so much during the 1960s.  These individuals have a right to celebrate.  And then there are the rest.  Outside of telling them to go to hell, I’m not sure how to respond to Bruce Springsteen, Sheryl Crow and Oprah Winfrey for feeling duty bound to tell the rest of us how to vote.  Likewise, to be fair, in Arizona where John McCain gave what was probably the most gracious concession speech I’ve ever heard, celebrity supporters like Patricia Heaton and John Voight can sulk and go home to their million dollar mansions after learning that their candidate lost.  Most of us cannot fully comprehend what we have at stake in such an election to get emotional about the outcome, and the best action we can take is to wait.

There is something to be said about Barak Obama, however.  I was struck by how alone he looked when he walked out on the stage to give his speech.  Unlike his running mate, Joe Biden, he doesn’t seem to enjoy himself when he’s speaking to the crowds.  Certainly, Obama is very good at giving speeches, but I doubt he believes in all of the hype.  I hope he doesn’t anyway or else the slogan for “change” and the chant, “Yes we can!” is going to get old very quickly.   Obama, like many other intelligent men, has probably had to look interested while having to endure the opinions of many individuals convinced of their own genius that have never uttered an original thought in their entire existences.   To be elected, Obama has had to depend on many individuals that he may not like and say things that he may not necessarily believe.  Yet to be a great leader (or so I imagine the politicians all tell themselves) he also must have the confidence to believe that his abilities make all the minor deceptions necessary if that is what it takes to be elected.  Every President from Washington to Lincoln to George W. Bush probably needed to do the same thing.  Such seeming aloofness that Obama happens to exhibit was also characteristic of great and unflappable Presidents like Jefferson and Lincoln.  On the other hand, these qualities were also at least partially responsible for the overreaching of the Wilson and Nixon administrations.  Woodrow Wilson and Richard Nixon were men with lonely thoughts left unchecked because neither had any real friends to share them with and put matters into perspective.

The election was not a landslide, but it also was not particularly close.  A five percent advantage is somewhat substantial when you consider that neither major candidate was an incumbent.  The Democrats did a better job of blaming the other side for the looming “financial crisis” that we’ve heard so much about since the month of September.  Really, both parties were to blame.  The Republicans have done nothing to keep down government spending and probably have spent too much time bailing out big business no matter what mantras it has repeated concerning the merits of the free market.  Yet while Democrats bemoan what they call “corporate welfare” on the part of the Republican Party, they fail to acknowledge that it’s the very growth of the government that especially occurred between the years of 1932 to 1968 that allowed the government the ability to prop up large corporations and to make determinations as to what industries should succeed and what businesses should fail.  This eventually resulted in more corporate mergers of mega companies occurring than in anytime in history since the 1990s.  We’ve heard recent justifications of the Wall Street bailout that emphasize the point that many banks and businesses are now “too big to fail.”  Yet how these businesses went from big companies to corporate conglomerates was that the corporations received favorable loans while the sole proprietorships and small partnerships disappeared.  These same small businesses were simply unable to compete and had no hopes of ever being bailed out by the government.  (I say this at the risk of sounding too much like Ralph Nader, the consumer advocate and third-party candidate that probably would have done no more to absolve the abuses of government than anyone else running for President, and who has now further embarrassed himself by referring to the first African American elected as President as being an “Uncle Tom.”)

Much of the Republican Party establishment has probably failed to appreciate what has just occurred, or understand the role that they have played in the defeat of their chosen candidate.  John McCain was a decent choice that had little chance of winning, no matter who he may have chosen for his running mate.  Yet the choice of Sarah Palin was indicative as to how far the Republican base would go to sabotage his campaign.  Palin, whatever her qualifications to be Vice President truly could be (and the American’ media did everything in its power to tell us that those qualifications were not there), was McCain’s gift to the conservative pundits that would rather sacrifice an election than concede that many of their ideals were politically and socially impalpable.  No emotionally secure individual should ever feel threatened by the personal behavior of others that in no way physically threatens other individuals.  The behavior may irritate us, but there are better ways to deal with irritation than legislation or amendments to constitutions that promise retribution.  And I'm all for decency because there is so little of it in much of our culture, but decency can seldom be created by decree.  If the Republican Party continues to claim they are the supporters of limited government and strong national defense, let them stop looking around the country and the world to pick fights with individuals too conscience stricken to even once in their life have picked up a gun.  To continue claiming we live in a free society, we have to drop a social agenda that does not allow private individuals to do what they want or else the concept of freedom becomes a fiction.  And the Republicans are as guilty of using the tax code for social engineering as any Democrat.  If they truly believe in the use of tax cuts to relieve the burden of the middle class, make the tax cuts universal rather than engineering complicated tax breaks that only individuals with six and seven figure incomes can take advantage of.

Yet the Democratic Party also needs to stop short of showing glee by proclaiming the demise of the Republican Party.   For one, they need to keep in mind that similar pronouncements were made about the Democratic Party after the reelection of George W. Bush in 2004.  For two, a party that has a platform of advancing civil rights and civil liberties (and helping the poor) while at the same time advocating a stronger centralized government may not appreciate how schizophrenic holding such differing objectives can be.  That same strong and centralized government besides bringing us Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy also brought us Lyndon Baines Johnson, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush that used their executive powers contrary to what the liberal establishment may have wanted to achieve.  (Yes, I know that LBJ was a Democrat, but today’s Democrat is not particularly nostalgic about Johnson’s policies concerning the war in Viet Nam.)  Big Government is almost impossible to reign in no matter what well meaning justifications and legislative acts are created by the most tolerant and enlightened of individuals.  Somehow, governmental control eventually gets in the hands of the wrong people.

And then there is the Iraqi’ War.  The latest discussion has been that there may not be any major withdrawal of the troops until 2011.  The dirty and not so well kept secret about the Democratic Party is, despite all of their pious talk of “bringing the troops home,” that the party leadership (Clinton, Kerry and Edwards) has voted to fund the war from the very beginning and have never truly faced George Bush down on the issue.  I know, “Bush lied,” and this is the major justification they can give for caving into a President they claim to have never trusted.  The reason that Obama has escaped scrutiny is because he was not in the United States Senate when the major proposals were voted on in 2002, 2003 and 2004.  When he takes office, Obama will have a Democratic controlled Senate and Congress behind him, so we will see if he truly does move up the timetables for withdrawal.  However, I think that opponents of the war should prepare to be disappointed.

What is an interesting aside to every Presidential election is the lament concerning lack of voter turnout.  Actually, in the last three elections since 2000 voter turnout has increased.  This year’s election showed voter turnout rates nationwide at somewhere around 64 percent, the highest rates we have seen in forty years.  This is actually quite low compared to the rate in many European nations, but I for one am not one of those persons distressed by this fact.  We do have more college educated people today, so it’s not surprising that rates are somewhat growing.  Yet I’m not particularly interested in having my vote cancelled out by a bunch of undecided voters that finally cast their ballot based upon a bunch of drivel that they have recently heard on television.  Now perhaps I am being uncharitable in making such a statement because I sometimes do tend to judge people too harshly.  However, the voter that says they did not decide on whom to vote for until they actually entered the voter booth does not sound like a promising prospect to me.  What motivated them to make their choice?  One candidate’s name was listed further up on the ballot than the others?  One’s name was too difficult to pronounce so they lost a vote?  One candidate’s name sounded like a close relative?  I understand struggling with what candidate to vote for, but I certainly hope that the struggle is over something relevant and had been thought about over the course of many months.  We tend to blame the candidates and the media for not informing us about what is going on.  It’s not their fault.  That information is already out there if we really want to look for it.  The candidates and media by mouthing platitudes are merely providing us with the information being requested by the very most important individuals voting in every election: the undecided voters.  In short, the message is being dumbed down precisely for them.  We don’t need an educated electorate.  What we need is an experienced electorate whose knowledge is derived from a direct connection with the world and senses the direct consequences of what will occur if a certain official is elected.  I heard somewhere that young voters did not turn out to a much greater degree in this election than they did in 2004.  If that’s the case, it is only going to cost them because eventually politicians and everyone else are going to quit caring for what they think.

And in an election that was all about “change,” let’s deeply consider a few things before we try to throw the old items out.  Let’s pause and consider why items like the Electoral College, our method of voter registration, our crazy private institutions (i.e. businesses, churches and the press) that don’t always seem in tune with the wishes of our government, and the cantankerous electorate have functioned so effectively for so long - though no one has every really diagnosed why.  We live in an ungrateful nation if we don’t see that so many traditions have worked better here than almost anywhere else.  (My only wish now is that I will not be beleaguered in 2016 with arguments over the Presidential election of 2008 as we have been beleaguered for the past eight years concerning the election of 2000 and how the outcome could have been different.)

To state the obvious, Barak Obama is our first elected African American President.  That is one thing that should have been made allowable more than 200 years ago, and it shouldn’t have just come allowable at this point in time.  I wish the President–Elect well.  Other than a few Republican hopefuls that are now looking towards the Congressional elections of 2010, it benefits none of us if Obama ends up being a failure as a leader.  However, as with any President that is always a possibility, and we should do our best not to let this destroy our lives if the new President does not live up to our expectations.  When our happiness becomes dependent upon the leadership of one man - that is more indicative of problems than if we mistakenly voted in a buffoon.  We can live with buffoons in the government so long as we don’t become dependent upon that same government.

November 16, 2008

© Robert S. Miller 2008