Hope For One Term

Deval Patrick's newly-announced budget has accomplished one victory in his war for hope: he's managed to convince someone as cynical as me that just because you think the current situation is bad, doesn't mean it can't get worse. I figured "hope" would end up looking like the equivalent of midnight basketball, school uniforms, and maybe a few token reforms. Even in my darker moments I didn't imagine that his vision of the future would end up looking like the beer-and-cigarette-stained carpets around the dollar slots at Foxwoods.

When the Massachusetts legislature, in which Republicans play a role only slightly less ceremonial than the Sergeant-at-Arms, starts openly wondering if your plan is based on too much flimflam and tax increases, it's time to call the men in white coats. These guys shovel money out right up to the moment they think they smell constituents approaching with torches and pitchforks. Short of racking up capital gains taxes or requiring every ice cream shop in the state to give away free cones one day a week, it's hard to think of a way to make this baloney bonanza worse.

This budget goes a long way towards proving that his disappointing first year was due to more than beginner's [bad] luck. The Globe story implies that the legislature owes Patrick some sort of deference since he's a Democrat:

But during 16 years of Republican governors, the Democratic-held Legislature got
used to controlling the process and not having to yield to the priorities of someone in their own party.

"They made no bones that a Romney budget went into a circular file," said Thomas Trimarco, who oversaw the budget under Governor Mitt Romney. "They are not used to it. They have not adjusted to this new dynamic."

Poppycock. Patrick ran against the legislature more than he ran against Muffy Healey, so what do they owe him? If anything, this is a sign to start tearing him down in preparation for a contested primary, or hounding him off to a cabinet office in Washington should the Democrats win the presidency. It's not like this is a contested state where Democrats need the Patrick's coattails to win elections. Patrick's position is more like the one Jesse Ventura found himself in as governor of Minnesota, where the GOP and DFL were only too hapy to team up to clothesline him.

I wouldn't have given odds on this three weeks ago, but now it's a whole new world. Deval's put his cards on the table and he's showing a pair of twos. A year is a lifetime in electoral politics: just ask Hillary and John McCain, who've had the plug pulled on them more times than Terri Schiavo. Like Monty Python's Black Knight, Patrick's not dead yet, but he'd better come up with something quick if he wants to make it past 2010.  ¶ 8:30 AM 0 Comments

  He Who Strikes a King

I'd apologize for the terrible quality of the cellphone picture I snapped this morning, but the Bigfoot-like quality of it seems sort of appropriate. A couple of days ago, I spotted this bumper sticker on the side of a mailbox on Summer street just across the bridge from South Station. For those who don't have a copy of CSI: The Software handy ('Take those ten pixels of a person's head and turn them into a 5x7 glossy photo'), the sticker says "End Tyranny / Menino Must Go.com '09":


Anyhow, curious to see which band of insurgents might be responsible for this bit of mischief, I went to do a Whois search and see who registered the domain. Needless to say, at the time this was published, the domain remained unregistered. Oops. For the less technical among you, that means anyone--including the mayah hisself--could go to GoDaddy and plunk down $8 and register it themselves. First come, first served.

I'm sorely tempted to register it myself, but I have a feeling that will end up with either a bunch of irate firefighters throwing empty beer bottles through my windshield, or the mayor ensuring that my car gets booted and towed every time I miss the resident parking sign. But, don't let that stop you...  ¶ 10:51 AM 1 Comments

  Barack Obama's Race Problem

Dick Morris hasn't been a serious player in close to a decade--which is about how old his NY Post file photo looks--but he knows how sausage gets made as well as anyone. His column today contained one very striking piece of information:

Already, [Hillary] carries white voters by 2 to 1.

It would be especially interesting to see this broken down by household income and education level. If Hillary wins without the support of rank-and-file black Democrats, the turnout picture in November could turn really ugly.  ¶ 6:23 PM 0 Comments

  Cloverfield

Saw it on a whim Saturday night, and... wow. On reflection, what's most interesting about it is that it strikes me as a movie that couldn't have been made before 9/11. War of the Worlds met with some hand-wringing by the "too soon" crowd, but in the end the usual ultra-glossy finish Spielberg puts on all of his movies allowed the audience to keep an emotionally-safe distance. But some of the early scenes in Cloverfield knock you down, kick you in the teeth, and drag you in with a ferocity that will leave you more shaken than you expect.

We don't know what it's like to have the Mongol Horde at the city gates, knowing that a brutal and humiliating death is imminent. Most of us don't know what it must have been like to see the gate on the landing craft drop in front of Omaha Beach. None of us has any idea how we would process a giant monster stomping its way through our city, though pants would be shat. We do, however, know with awful clarity what it looks like when a skyscraper collapses. When you see crowds of people running in terror from King Kong or Godzilla, you laugh because they have a certain absurd quality to them. Surely some day people will laugh at the crowds running for their lives in Cloverfield too, but not until those of us who saw clouds of debris billowing down the concrete canyons have all been fitted with adult diapers and locked away in the home. For now it feels like being five years old and staring out into the woods at night alone. You don't care what Mom or Dad says, every fiber of your being tells you there's something large and hungry out there.

What's almost as interesting, and the reason why I think this movie hasn't prompted as much hand-wringing, is the conspicuous lack of allegory; so complete in fact, that the lack tempts allegory in itself. Hollywood has told us that nothing happens without a reason. A cigar is always a repressed desire to suck cock. If there is a monster, we probably caused it to appear. Nearly every awful thing that's happened in a movie in the past twenty years was caused by Republicans, evil corporations, warmongering generals, global warming, or excessively rigid toilet training by a father who voted for Goldwater. If the US military appears in the film, there is almost always a conspiracy of some kind, and if there's a sympathetic character, it's the junior officer who bravely defies orders to prematurely nuke the city.

In Cloverfield, though, the monster simply appears out of nowhere, and just like the characters, we get no backstory, no reason to explain its appearance, no hint of deeper intentions. Sometimes evil just crawls up from the depths or falls out of the sky and harshes the fuck out of your mellow. Welcome to life, there are no guarantees and you don't get your money back. Meanwhile, when the junior officer warns our characters of the hour when the nukes will fall, you may find yourself saying "WTF are you waiting for? Didn't you see that thing just eat a tank?" Given infinite opportunities to take a cheap shot, this movie takes none. Perhaps it's just maintaining the minimalism that serves the film so well, but it's refreshing nonetheless. And it's this, I think, that helps explain why the unsubtle use of 9/11 images hasn't brought out the predictable scolds*. Using awful events as the basis for entertainment is not only not beyond the pale, it's par for the course. Godzilla was made in a country full of people who could tell you just what an atomic bombing smelled like. It's fine to exploit our collective memories for dramatic effect. Just don't patronize us in the process.

*As a matter of fact, I do resemble that remark.  ¶ 8:24 AM 1 Comments