I have a lot of things to say about what is discussed in this video, but first I’d like people to give a listen.
Jonathan Haidt Explains Our Contentious Culture from BillMoyers.com on Vimeo.
As a teaser, let me say that what Jonathan Haidt has to say needs to be heard by both sides of current political divide in this country before we completely screw ourselves out of a functioning community. More to follow.
Congress is holdings hearings on President Obama’s mandate that insurance companies cover contraception for employees of religious institutions. His earlier initiative, that such institutions pay for it themselves through their employee insurance plans, was met with outrage over a presumed infringement of religious liberty. He made what I, at least, consider an admirable compromise, sidestepping the primary complaint by mandating that the insurance companies pick up the costs. However, that didn’t satisfy congressional Republicans and religious conservatives.
Hearings were held.
Representative Issa of California held a panel to discuss the issue comprised entirely of men. All his witnesses were men. When challenged about why there were no women testifying, the reply was that the issue was not about contraception but about federal infringement of religion.
Women don’t have an opinion on that?
This is simple: the hullabaloo is over contraception coverage. The counterargument is that forcing religious institutions to provide for it, even by association, is a violation of their First Amendment rights, that if something violates religious conscience that religion has the right to refuse to participate.
I could concoct any number of scenarios in which that position is questionable at best. But for our Congress then to accept not only that proposition but to accept the further condition that even discussion of the fulcrum issue is out of order is absurd and not what we’re paying them for.
It is about birth control. State supercession over religious privileges happens all the time. Santeria animal sacrifice practices are regulated and in many areas prohibited because they violate secular health laws. Christian Scientists may not deny their children medical care unto death. Peyote use among certain Native American tribes is proscribed, regardless of the ceremonial claims and religious liberty arguments. And here’s the thing—outside of the group affected these are not controversial. So it must be asked, what is it about this that makes it different?
Contraception. Religious conservatives claim Obama is waging war on religion. As John Stewart has pointed out, “don’t confuse war with not getting everything you want.”
What is clear is that religious conservatives are conducting an extreme campaign to roll back contraceptive liberties, which ought to have no religious test. This is very much about women and civil liberties and health care costs and the sensitivities of groups who hold archaic views of “a woman’s place” and traditional values. For Congress to hold hearings that tacitly ignore this aspect is politically irresponsible at best, campaign year posturing at a minimum, and socially negligent at worst.
But the most aggravating aspect is the pretense that they aren’t talking about birth control. Of course they are. The religious position is that birth control violates religious conscience. Since when do we let religious conscience that does not reflect the views of even a majority of adherents to those institutions dictate secular policy? This is a breech of the wall of separation in the other direction. If I go to work for a Catholic hospital, I do not take that job to support Catholicism but to support myself and my family. If they’re going to offer me health coverage, then they should offer it in parity with what any other comparable facility offers, because as my employer they do not represent my convictions and have no right to dictate conscience to me through essentially punitive economic policies. (I shouldn’t even have to say that in this employment environment, to tell me that if I don’t like it I should get another job would border on criminal. What other job?)
I will be tremendously disappointed if Obama backs down from this. I am tired to having my conscience violated simply because I have no religion. I do not wish to live in a country run according to theocratic principles.
Yes. It is about birth control. Also about control. Period.
This pretty much sums up my feelings about the subject.
This was polite. The way I’d say it would be, smoke whatever you want, but don’t blow the smoke up my ass. It may be psychically carcinogenic.
There’s an aspect of this flap over Obama’s insistence that health care policies offered by institutions with religious affiliation cover birth control that I don’t see many people discussing. All the posturing over how this is anti-religious and a blatant slap at religious freedom, blah blah, is both predictable and irrelevant. For one, it’s not. For one thing, it doesn’t even approach the kind of infringement of a basic freedom that Bush’s infamous “gag rule” on abortion information represented, which Obama overturned.
But there is a common link between both that Bush-era ruling and the current stance taken by the Catholic bishops. Namely, a complete lack of confidence in their message. What it comes down to is a denial that people have not only the right but the ability to make decisions for themselves based on good information.
It’s simple. The Gag Rule assumed that if people never found out about certain options, then they wouldn’t use those options, but that if they did learn about them, they would. It represented a complete lack of confidence that people could both hear all the options and then make decisions in their own best interest, some of which would be consistent with the policy Bush’s administration was backing. Likewise here. Just because birth control is covered by an insurance policy purchased for the benefit of employees does not automatically mean that all these people will start using birth control. If the Catholic message is sound, if it has merit, that option will never be exercised.
But no. Safer, they must think, to restrict access, to keep it off the table, to ban the pamphlet, and remove the service than to trust that people will do what the Catholic Church wants them to do.
For all the posturing about what is or is not “American,” this is as unAmerican as it gets. Honored more in rhetoric than practice, the right of the individual to decide for him or herself is supposed to be at the heart of what makes us who we are. So how does barring choice square with that?
Granted, we do it all the time. We do it in drug use, we have age-specific restrictions dealing with movies, bars, driving, we have all manner of qualifying rules and regulations that keep people away from certain options, and a lot of it makes perfect sense.
But this is not one of them. If we were going to ban coverage of birth control from all insurance policies, then there would be no controversy over religious issues. It would be controversial for a different reason, but since the ban would be universal it would not be liable to the kind of ideological argumentation we’re now seeing. But if you’re going to offer it to some and not others based on where they work, then you have a basic civil rights question.
Look, this isn’t even about making churches provide birth control. It’s about church-affiliated institutions with large employee payrolls that are not denomination-exclusive—like universities and hospitals—being required to serve that employee base in accord with the standards every other employer must meet. Despite the association with a religious institution, what we’re talking about is workplace rules where the institution and the community interface on the level of employment.
But that argument will be made in court, no doubt. What strikes me about this is the so far unremarked tendency in this country to not trust in our own messages. We do this all the time, suppressing certain ideas, barring certain speakers from addressing certain audiences, criticizing open discourse over things which we fear—it’s arguable that most Americans had no idea what communism actual was back during the Cold War, debatable whether we do now, but we so feared it that we wouldn’t even talk about it—and frankly that’s not us. It’s not who we claim to be, not who we’d like to be, but there it is.
Of course, in this instance the Catholic bishops have a real concern. According to studies, 98% of Catholic women use or have used birth control. Obviously, the message the Church wants delivered doesn’t have as much traction as they’d like. By that token, taking a stand on this is clearly in response to evident failure.
But it’s still a matter of personal choice, something the Catholic Church—or, for that matter, any church—has never been comfortable with. Trusting an individual to make a decision like this for herself has always been fraught with the likelihood that they will make the right choice—but not the one desired.
This is vestigial moralizing. If we accept as a concept that all people should be considered equal, then it follows that the opportunities and privileges available to everyone should be equal. At one time, that equality was meted out based on the notion of a family unit. The family, represented by the man, enjoyed the rights and privileges of the community. With changes in technology and the economy, the focus has shifted more narrowly on the individual, which has eroded the primacy of the male as women have become more and more able to act independently*. If we are serious about equality, then it should come as no surprise that we have to make adjustments for those things that enable the expression of equality. That is the American message and all this political posturing over birth control is exactly apposite that message.
In the wake of the Susan G. Komen/Planned Parenthood kerfluffle, it seems finally enough people are waking up to the fact that if we do not assert the primacy of that message, we could lose what equality we’ve gained since—
Well, since the 1920s when you could receive a prison sentence for distributing pamphlets about birth control. Or since the 1940s when women were forced out of jobs they had held all during WWII and were told they were incapable of doing those jobs by virtue of their sex. Or since 1965, when finally the Supreme Court declared that couples had a basic right to contraception. Or—
The Catholic Church obvious doesn’t trust its people to heed its message. It may be that the message is flawed. Or maybe Americans are beginning to trust their own message.
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*I am talking here about the way society was structured, not the right or wrong of the distribution of rights and privileges. It is an unfortunate fact that the basic biological reality concerning reproduction has placed women in a vulnerable position in regards to power relations. My belief is that there has never been a excuse for the disenfranchisement of women, but until effective birth control and the subsequent changes in economic life that resulted, the initiative has been with men to set the rules. Even so, it took a long time for men as a group to accept equality as a reality, never mind as a principle, and I do not for a minute believe that the majority of men who now take it as given are of sufficient numbers to guarantee we would never return to a culture of female subjugation. The attack on reproductive rights strikes at the main foundation of contemporary political freedoms for women.
Rick Santorum won the three primary-type elections yesterday. Missouri, Minnesota, and Colorado. A sweep. But really, I should put that Won in quotes. He “won” by virtue of garnering more votes than the others, which I admit is the traditional way in which winning is established.
But, really, did he? The largest voter turn-out was Missouri, with 6% of eligible, registered voters going to the polls. Out of that he took somewhere around 40%, which means he got less than 3% of Missouri’s potential vote. It was worse in the other two states, Minnesota with 1% and Colorado with 2%.
And yes, these are caucuses, nonbinding, no delegates are assigned based on these, it was more a moral support effort.
But still. In the past, it has been the Republican base that has been the most energized in these things, and this time their showing was pathetic. Less than.
So, what exactly did Santorum win?
Not much, but please, let us not make assumptions. It’s a long way to August, much less November, and all kinds of bizarreness can happen before then. The idea that Rick Santorum could be the GOP nominee for president fills me with both glee and trepidation. Glee because the only candidate the GOP has fielded that has a chance of challenging Obama is Romney, no matter what the Party faithful might wish to believe. Trepidation because I tend to hedge my mental bets these days concerning the political landscape and the thought that Santorum might actually unseat Obama scares the bejeezus out of me. In his own way, he is as polarizing as George Wallace in 1968. (Gingrich less so, for two reasons—he is inconsistent in his message and he is far too intellectual. He’s the closest thing the GOP has right now to an Egghead, something they have tended to vote against for a very long time due to a nebulous perception that “average” Americans won’t vote for someone who is too smart.) The positions he has taken on privacy issues troubles me no end. Even if he couldn’t get his program through Congress on these matters, the fact that enough of my fellow citizens would put him in office would frighten me. It wouldn’t be Santorum who would concern me so much as my next door neighbor.
Hence, my admonition that we should not feel smug, we who would rather see Obama get a second term than any Republican who has the remotest chance of winning. National politics is a fey and fickle creature and has surprised people before.
But more than that, if I read this correctly, we are seeing the self-dismantling of a major political party. For the first time in decades, the Democrats are showing more solidarity and cohesion than the Republicans, and may end up being the remaining “super power” when this is over, the GOP having splintered into factions that will eventually recombine into something else.
There is a danger here that comes with all such victories, that of self-satisfied, uncritical assumption of Being Right.
Being Right is the disease to which the Republicans are succumbing. Not that they have been—right, that is—but that they have built their entire strategy on the assumption that (a) this is what people vote for and (b) that they in fact are right. It has led to a number of unfortunate distortions of the political process in the name of saving the country that, I think, have also led to their current malaise. It has pushed the Republicans into more and more strident and restricted positions from which they have become ineffective in the actual job they’ve been hired to do—namely, govern the country. (I mean, seriously—who gives a damn about who is or is not allowed to get married when there are 58 million adults without jobs? And given the ranking of American schools in math, science, history, and reading, does anyone think allowing prayer in the class—which as a silent practice is not now prohibited—is really the issue we need to focus on?)
Americans as individuals can make the call as to what is right. That’s not what we send representatives to Washington do establish. We send them there to conduct the people’s business, a phrase I haven’t seen in general use for a very long time. Yes, there is a right way and a wrong way to go about that, but this is a tactical question. I do not look to Washington to tell me what my morals should be. Nor do I want Washington telling my neighbor why I am not to be trusted because I have ideas that might run counter to the current rhetorical postures on offer.
Democrats have no better claim than Republicans on that. While much lip service is given to America’s pluralism, at the end of the day, when the campaign ads run, and the blood flows in the primaries, both parties indulge in the politics of false unity. They both paint Americans as this or that and our differences are minimized to the point that if someone actual has a distinct need or identity, we either ignore it or try to force him or her into a mold that conforms to current prejudice.
A political party that feels it has a mandate as representing True Americans is a dangerous thing, because it can forget to represent All Americans. Cycles of rapid turn-over in congressional seats are indicative of the kind of blunt messaging an ill-served electorate sends when they elect someone who then goes to Washington and doesn’t do what they were sent to do, but instead takes winning that seat as a ticket to try to make the government conform to his or her vision of True America. (I sent you there to rein in spending, not gut the SEC. I sent you there to fix Social Security, not blame the Democrats for pursuing socialism. I sent you there to do something about education, not shoehorn in your pet projects.)
The Democratic Party has its share of blindnesses and prejudices and we should all be wary of seeing them burgeon into the kind of bombastic over-confidence that the Republicans are now paying for in their own party. Since the Depression, the Democrats have more and more become the party of the One Solution To Fix It All, blithely ignoring local conditions and the very uniquenesses both parties like to brag about but neither really knows how to deal with. If there is a problem, a federal agency must be created to fix it, and while that has certainly been effective in some things, in other matters it has been an irritant if not downright destructive.
(The model for federal agencies, it seems to me, should be NASA. No, seriously. When you look at NASA and how it is structured and what it is actually supposed to do, it’s a terrific idea. It hasn’t, of course, stuck to its original concept, but close enough for an example. NASA is publicly seen as a government space program that is supposed to do all of our off-earth exploring and so forth. This is a mischaracterization. NASA was established as a federally-funded research-and-development organ that would create the technology to be used in space exploration, with the idea that, once developed and tested, this technology would be available to the private sector or to universities to do with as they will. NASA was supposed to continually develop solutions that we could then take off the shelf and use. It was never intended to set priorities and dictate the direction we would take, although by default it has done so. This would be an effective model if deployed more as it was intended. Other agencies do exhibit these protocols—OSHA, for example—but many are imperial, dictating rather than assisting. This is a product of the kind of arrogance we have yet to figure out how to be rid of in government.)
Starting now, with what is so evidently happening to the Republican Party, all of us should be more aware of what the Democrats do. I shy away from predictions with too much specificity—the more detailed you get the farther off target you fall—but if not this year then by the next election cycle I would not be surprised to see the rise of an effective third party and the eventual obliteration of the Republican Party as we have known it. I don’t think this would in itself be a bad thing—in 1976 they courted and in 1980 brought in an infection that has transformed it into something its own leadership is uncomfortable with and cannot effectively control—but I don’t think it would be automatically a good thing, either. We have seen what happens in countries with only one political party and we should fear it.
I’ve been hesitant to write anything about the Susan G. Komen fiasco. Not for fear of invoking controversy, but because things started unraveling so fast it was difficult to know when it would play out. Here is a handy overview of the series of events. The position taken by the Komen charity group shifted, mutated, and reeled in the sudden upwelling of negative response, that on any given day whatever I might have said would be irrelevant the next morning.
One aspect, however, strikes me as significant. That response. It came swiftly and it came from all quarters and it came with cash. I cannot recall a similar response happening so swiftly and so decisively in this ongoing struggle over abortion rights. One of the most annoying things about being progressive and/or liberal is the tepidity with which we meet challenges. It would appear that all of us who espouse a progressive view, when it gets down to the nitty gritty of political position-taking and infighting, have feet not even of clay but of silly putty. It is actually heartening to see an abrupt and united response that is categorically decisive for once.
It would be even better if this were the harbinger of the rediscovery of our collective spine. The Religious Right has been canvassing, politicking, and buying politicians for a long time now, absolutely dedicated to their position, over which it has been clear for over three decades that what they want is not negotiable. What hasn’t been so clear till the last few years has been the full extent of what they want and finally—finally—progressives are beginning to understand that this is not a disagreement but a war.
Thanks to people like Rick Santorum the full program of the antichoice movement is impossible to ignore. If they were interested in eliminating abortion only, there would have been several points along the way over this long and acrimonious struggle where common cause could have been made. But the fact is they wish to eliminate what they see as inexcusable permissiveness, sexual license, and immorality, and they would do this by eliminating access to all forms of birth control. What they doubtless assume is that if pregnancy once more regained its power to scare women into celibacy then the United States would become the country they prefer to live in and their version of morality would hold sway. They have a number of reasons for pursuing this, some less plausible than others, but at the end of the day they very much want people to stop having safe sex.
Safe, that is, in terms of pregnancy.
Rick Santorum has gone on record believing that even within marriage sex for pleasure is a no-no. Probably most people think that’s just an eccentricity of his and that he would be unable to actually turn the clock back to try to make such a condition a general reality. More and more people, I think, are beginning to realize that there is a rather large and loud segment of the population that would support him in this. Not a majority, not by any means a majority, but the political Right acts like it speaks for the majority all the time, so it might be understandable if people in general had the idea that the majority of their fellow citizens were like this.
They also don’t realize, probably, that the foundational Supreme Court case establishing a right to contraception—Griswold v. Connecticut—was over a married couple’s right to control their reproductive life.
I also don’t think a lot of people, especially young women, have given much thought to the kinds of opportunities that would close up in their faces in such a regime. They do in some states. Whether or not abortion is legal and a right nationally, there are some states where the anti-choice movement has made it so difficult for clinics to remain open—often using extra-legal means—that this is a right in name only.
I’ve been wondering how much more would have to happen before the actual majority finally said enough and acted. Planned Parenthood lost a grant of roughly $640,000 from Komen. They’ve received over three million as replacement. The outcry of protest has been loud enough that Komen is trying to backtrack. They’ve made noises about reinstating the grant, but it remains to be seen if they actually will.
In the meantime I have had some exchanges with people who think what Komen did was absolutely correct and a moral victory and the troubling thing about these was the mendacity attached to the arguments. One response to me was that only three percent of Planned Parenthood’s budget went to non-abortion services, while in fact the reverse is true. As argument continued, I responded with actual numbers. Planned Parenthood performed around 325,ooo abortions last year. They provided contraceptive services to nearly five million women. And contraceptive services do not account for even half of what they do. The rest are services for STDs, counseling, and related health services. The counterargument ended there.
These are publicly available figures and the number of abortions is a mandated report.
Komen handled this badly. They have suffered resignations within their own organization over it. Brinker herself tends to the Right politically, but she hired a vice president who is on record as having run on an anti-abortion, anti-choice platform—unsuccessfully—and from appearances seems to have used her position to strike a blow against Planned Parenthood.
Again, what I found most encouraging in all this was the sudden and clear reaction on the part of people who may finally be reaching their limit over the hypocrisy of this conflict.
Hypocrisy? One of the more interesting facts about the whole anti-choice movement has been the numbers of women who end up in the very clinics they have been protesting when they come up pregnant. Some even sit in the waiting room preaching at the others there how they will all go to hell for killing their babies, and then go in and have a D and C to rid themselves of their own “inconvenience.” I’m not particularly surprised or shocked by this. People compartmentalize. What seems to be the case here is a desire for the law to change to prevent them from doing what they know they’ll do if something they detest is legal. They can’t face up to their own responsibilities so they want the rest of society to make them do it. But for that to happen, everyone else has to be under the same restrictions. “Somebody stop me!”
What may finally be changing is the forebearance of all the other people whose lives would be negatively affected by the changes being demanded. We can tolerate easily the hypocrisy in our neighbor—until such hypocrisy becomes a national movement and threatens our freedoms.
I know there is a genuine disagreement over the basic question here—not so much when does life begin but when is such life Human? If you believe that it is from the moment sperm fertilizes egg, well and good. But if, like me, you believe “human” is more than a biological definition and requires a personality, then we’re talking about a progression from nonhuman to human that takes nine months and then some.
That leaves the decision up to each individual, though, and I can even understand the argument that collectively we cannot endorse murder. And yet we have numerous legal distinctions to qualify the taking of life that is not murder. We all understand what constitutes murder and we all understand what constitutes self defense and all the shades in between. As a practical matter, to me, abortion is self defense. In very real terms, an unwanted pregnancy is a life-threatening condition. Perhaps the mother will not die from it, but that does not mean her life will not be threatened with profound and in many instances unwanted and detrimental change. In the case of the poor, this is a materially significant fact. If you can’t feed yourself, how to you feed another that you didn’t even invite into your home?
And the Komen decision to end that grant went straight to poor women, because that’s who received the benefit of that money.
Let’s be clear—abortion has always been available to people with means. It did not become an issue until the poor came into the equation. And if it is once more rendered illegal, women with money will still have access. Only the poor will suffer. This is reality.
In combination with Occupy Wall Street, there is a groundswell of populist anger directed toward the basic inequities in our society. We will never be rid of certain inequities—that is human nature, and let’s face it, our success, at least economically, is based on such inequities and the promise of “rising above”—but we should at least strive to eliminate the grosser aspects that serve only to rub the less fortunate’s collective face in the mud of failure. People do not have to be rich in order to be safe and comfortable and feel secure and invested in their society. They only have to feel that in certain fundamental ways they are treated fairly and have the same rights as any one else, rights that are not exclusive to the wealthy, the privileged, or the hypocritical.
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As a coda to all this, here is a report on one of the items offered as part of Komen’s awareness outreach. In conjunction with a weapons distributor, a pink Walther P-22 is available for purchase to support Komen’s program.
It has always struck me how often the aggressive advocacy of 2nd Amendment rights, support of the death penalty, and a kind of libertarian default to the power of the gun seem to be expressed by the very same people most vocal about the “immorality” of abortion. The horror, it sometimes seems, of taking human life is very categorical. The apparent contradiction evaporates when seen from a religious viewpoint that centers on spiritual concepts of innocence and an oft unspoken assumption that this is a determining factor in deciding the appropriateness of killing. Adults are not innocent by definition and fall automatically into a different category than a fetus which has never had a chance to “sin.”
Even so, the apparent hypocrisy is even less difficult to understand when seen from the viewpoint of people determined that their ideas of public morality should trump all personal rights that fall outside of a tightly-defined range of so-called “decency”—a view advanced and backed up by the implicit threat of violence demonstrated by a political posture that sees no contradiction between a “right to life” stance on the one hand and a willingness to mete out death to the deserving on the other.
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One more addendum in a story that I am sure will continue to repercuss for months if not years to come, the person at the center of the policy flap at Susan G. Komen has resigned. Of course she is trying to spin the situation, but where there is smoke, as the saying goes. I suspect at the core of this was a ploy of some orchestration between Ms. Handel and certain politicians—enactment of the “policy” then the move to investigate Planned Parenthood—or maybe not. Maybe this was all just a confluence of unlikely coincidence and no one had an ulterior motive. What’s that about pigs and air travel?
The last motion picture theater of my youth is gone.
For several years, The Avalon, sitting on Kingshighway, across the street from a mortuary that has now become a church, has been shuttered and slowly decaying and finally has met its inevitable fate.
In a way, good. It has been an eyesore for some time, a constant reminder of neglect and a ruin of a bygone era.
Hyperbole? Indeed, yes, but true nonetheless. As you can tell by what remained, it was an elegant, simple building, with a lovely facade. A symbol of an age thoroughly gone—the single-screen, stand-alone movie theater.
The last film I saw there was back in 1986 or ’87—The Last Temptation of Christ. The theater had passed into the hands of a single owner who was a bit of an eccentric, and he tried everything to keep it going. He had a bit of a windfall with that film because of the timidity of every other movie theater in the city and county. They all refused to show Scorcese’s flawed depiction of Jesus’ final days. The Avalon announced it would screen it and it was no doubt the last time it had sell-out audiences for several days.
By then, the wear and tear was already very apparent. One of the speakers had been busted for years, generating an annoying buzz off to stage left, and he had never, evidently, made enough money to fix it or replace it. For ordinary dialogue it was fine, the buzz only became noticeable during very loud sequences. Probably a torn cone.
But the air conditioning worked, the concession stand still operated, and the seats were kept in repair.
After that, we never went back. When the doors closed, I expected someone to buy it and try to restore it, but I always thought that during the ’80s and ’90s, when so many of these disappeared one way or the other.
There’s a scene in Woody Allen’s film Radio Days that shows the family Going To The Movies during the 1930s. In Allen’s handling, it is a reverential scene, like people going to church, slow, a processional, and while I never quite felt that way, there is certainly something of that in my memory. Nostalgia often becomes a frame for reverence. Going to the movies for us was a Big Deal and our major entertainment, up till the age of VCRs. I have vivid memories of a childhood with many options for movie-going. St. Louis was full of them.
A few of the buildings remain. The ultra-modernist Martin Cinerama is still there, but it serves as a church now, which pains me. It was the most expensive theater to go to, but it was the only Cinemascope screen in town. I remember seeing Grand Prix there. I also saw 2001: A Space Odyssey there four times. But not much else. We may have seen How the West Was Won there, but my more vivid memory of that was seeing it in our local theater, The Shenendoah, and being annoyed at the peculiar warp in the center of the screen where the wide Cinemascope picture had been compressed.
The Melvin is still there, but it, too, is a church, one of those little revival things that can barely support itself.
And of course The Fox is still there, majestic centerpiece of our threater district, and up the street a little bit is Powell Hall, which was once The American, a movie house of the grand tradition.
The rest? All the stand-alone neighborhood theaters are pretty much gone.
The ones I spent my adolescence in were within walking distance, albeit long walks: The Shenendoah, The Ritz, The Washington, and The Columbia. I saw Gone With The Wind in The Columbia. To be fair, that one is somewhat still there. The building is, anyway. After the theater closed, it was converted into a sports facility for a while, with handball courts. It burned. Now it is a private home, a showcase bit of architectural bravura owned by the architect. I sometimes wonder how many people anymore know what it once was.
But the others are just gone, torn down. Parking lots. That’s also what became of The Granada, another of my favorites. I remember when it was demolished, standing in the remaining space and trying to fit the immense theater of my memory into the claustrophobic area of the empty lot. That’s another one I recall the last picture I saw in—Star Crash. It rained hard that night, too.
The Granada in particular galls. I knew a bunch of people, my age, who had formed a company to try to buy it so they could turn it into a revival theater. The owner, for reasons that escaped us all, refused to sell, delayed and delayed, until one year the roof fell in and the building became a hazard. The cost of renovation at that point was too high and soon after it fell to the wrecking ball.
The Ritz…yes, I remember the last picture I saw there, as well. The owners had tried to convert it into a multi-screen venue, which sort of worked, but the crowd had deteriorated into a Roman mob and I was threatened with a knife in the hands of a ten-year-old I told to shut up. The film? Airplane II.
Not sure about all the others.
The litany is long, like absent friends. The Crest, the Crestwood, the Ambassador, all the Loews theaters, Midtown, State, another one that eludes memory just now, the Mark Twain, the Creve Coeur…
I remember the first time I went to a multiplex. I didn’t know then that it was the wave of the future. My dad took me to The Des Peres to see 2001, on a screen not much larger than a widescreen LCD you can put in your home now. They were known as “Jerry Lewis Intimate Theaters” and we thought they were a joke. Well.
Movie houses, as they were once affectionately called, suffered, I think, the demise of the B Picture more than anything else. In an era where the cheapest Hollywood production can only be done for close to ten million, the need for box office returns simply will not support the way theaters used to operate. Oh, there are certainly B pictures, but they go direct to television (cable) or direct to DVD. No one is going to pay the cost of an evening at the theater for less than a major motion picture, so the bread-and-butter of the former age is gone.
I can understand, intellectually, what happened, and if I had been a businessman in the movie house business back then I probably would have taken the same series of decisions that has resulted in the current loss of what for many decades was an American institution.
Going to the movies is a social activity. It’s not like gathering a couple friends at your home to watch a DVD. It is a civilizing activity when conducted the way it once was.
One benefit of this, probably unforeseen (I didn’t see it), is the revival of live theater. If you’re going to pay a lot of money to go be entertained, the novelty and impact of the stage is the thing that draws the audience. Not, perhaps, large audiences—many local theater groups struggle—but devoted audiences, and this, I think, is a good thing. Live theater is about the story, the characters, not the special effects. At live theater, you have to pay attention.
I miss going to the movies. We stopped doing it years ago because, frankly, it was just more convenient to rent the video. The “pause” button has spoiled us, weakening out bladders, giving us opportunity to replay what just happened because we don’t pay as close attention as we used to, and avoiding sitting in a hall with people who don’t know how to shut up during the film. It became expensive and a bother.
Now it’s a special event, something we might do once or twice a year. (I have every intention of going to see John Carter of Mars at the theater.) And, yes, there are still theaters—multiplexes, often in shopping malls (although that peculiar institution itself is struggling, so who knows what may happen)—and they are expensive. Now we have OMNIMAX theaters, which, impressive as they sometimes are, is nevertheless part of an ongoing tradition in film to try to coax people to leave their homes and go to the movies, like VistaVision, Todd-AO, Cinemascope and a dozen others, all trying to offer people what could not be had on television. The current revival of 3-D is such a gimmick.
Anyway, I thought I’d take some space to lament the passing of yet another monument from my youth. The intersection where The Avalon once stood was home once to a remarkable piece of urban architecture, a Famous-Barr department store that, when it was built, was shocking for its modernity. That’s gone now, too, a strip mall in its place with a Walgreens and an Office Max. Around the neighborhood you can see the architectural motifs on apartment buildings and private homes that speak of a more optimistic, confident time—and, perhaps, a more thoughtful time.
Or not. Nostalgia is deceptive and memory a dangerously mutable realm. But there is still some comfort there, to go along with the melancholy.
Cory Booker is the mayor of Newark. I’ve seen him on other occasions and he is articulate and, from what I’ve seen, fearless, a rare combination today in politics. In this excerpt he’s talking about gay marriage.
No, that’s not right. He’s talking about equality. And that’s what is at the heart of so much today. Listen:
He says what I believe. Being an American, to me, means something very basic and unequivocal. Equality is not a commodity, available for a price, which some folks can afford more of than others. it comes with the territory and the idea that we still, after all this time, have to have special legislation to defend various aspects of what should be presumed without question irritates me.
His remark about the utility of popular votes is also spot on. We like to assume democracy is applicable in all cases, but it is not. This is one reason we have a republic rather than a full-blown democracy. A democratically empowered republic, yes, but in a republic the passions of the moment do not hold sway, or should not. Lest anyone thinks otherwise, for a vast portion of this country slavery existed by dint of popular mandate. So did the chattel condition of women. While it may be true that these things would have (and did) erode in time, that is not the same as saying democracy worked. Other factors were involved, but in the case of slavery a war had to be fought in order to enforce what ought to have been recognized as a fundamental right.
Americans are no different in many ways than any other person on the planet. We have our foibles, our prejudices, our blindnesses. Many of us really don’t think through the meaning of our convictions and in some uncomfortable areas we would rather the issue never come up than have to deal with it. And doubtless a great many of us want to feel special if not superior in relation to others. We have many euphemisms for those with whom we wish to have no association, and most of them are class-based, some are race-based, others are behavior-based. None of them should be permitted to dictate legal status.
Equal means equal. Until we internalize that, breathe it like the very air we take for granted, we will continue to suffer the kind of strife that often renders our politics abusive and fruitless.
Just sayin’.
This a collection of excerpts from interviews with a wide range of writers, some science fiction, some fantasists, several so-called “mainstream,” on their belief—actually disbelief—in a deity.
I think the most difficult thing for many people to grasp is the idea of purposelessness, the concept that the universe simply Is and has no other purpose for its existence. Humans like to have a sense of where they’re going, what they’re supposed to do when they get there, and why. To say that these answers must come entirely from within is, to put it mildly, a bit unsettling, especially as in the first part of one’s life someone has kept stressing that there is an innate purpose, that “nothing happens without a reason,” and that this purpose comes from what we call god, a being who first made the universe entirely with us in mind that we might live according to some plan. I admit, this would be very comforting. Life is a confusing collection of event and reaction and it would be nice if there were an instruction book. Barring that, simply trusting that it all leads to something is one way to get through a day, a year, a life. To then have the idea that this is not the case dropped on us is understandably discommoding.
But is it? I found it liberating, since now I no longer had to worry about living up to a standard kept mystically hidden. And I could do my own work figuring out what “it all means.”
Anyway, I found this thoughtful and interesting, so…enjoy.
Recently I’ve received a spate of those nasty politically-naive, rather insipid yet clever emails that go round and round, forwarded from one to another to hundreds, spouting off about the woes of the country, the supposed sins of the Left, and all containing a germ of truth wrapped in misinformation, outrights lies, and substanceless assertion. Mostly I delete them without a second thought. They are noise, distraction, mud thrown into the waters of discourse where above all clarity should be our goal.
All of them have to do with what liberalism has done to our country. All of them are concerned with telling anyone who will listen what the Right is trying to “save us” from. And all of them are pretty thoughtless. It would be funny if there wasn’t so much at stake.
Below is a post from Lawrence O’Donnell, a newscaster and polemicist who I have listened to occasionally. I don’t follow such people, on either side. From time to time I listen to someone from both camps. I’ve found Mr. O’Donnell more reasonable than most. But I thought he really captured something with this, so I’m borrowing it to express my own views.
For the record, I am very tired of the attempt to make me feel guilty for the progress I support. The only charge I ever heard that had any traction with me about the problems with liberals was the “tax-and-spend” one, but that doesn’t even hold water anymore with me. Conservatism these days seems—may I stress seems—to be all about preventing people from doing things, about taking rights away from those deemed undeserving. Liberalism has always, even traditional free market liberalism (which, yes, free market enterprise is a liberal invention), been about letting people do more, have more rights. I don’t see much wrong with that as a fundamental principle.
So, just to let anyone interested know…