Trial by Jurors

I got called for jury duty a couple of months ago.

This was the 11th or 12th time I've been called for jury duty. My wife, who's shared addresses, voter registration, motor vehicle licensing, and just about every other form of public record with me for the past 20 years has been summoned exactly twice. I've had to go down to a court house on all but one of those 11 (or 12) occasions; both times my wife, eager enough to do her civic duty, was able to ascertain from a voicemail message or website on Friday that she didn't have to go in on Monday.

I go to jury duty willingly enough, but resigned that in terms of performing a public service, I'm simply filling a black circle in a statistical pool and will never, ever actually serve on a jury. I've never been picked, and now that I've been called a relatively significant number of times, I am confident I won't be. I had a friend in Boston who got called when he was a graduate student -- in chemistry -- and who had the academic's uniform of a big bushy beard and long hair and a slightly sleep-deprived wild look about him. He returned from his stint at jury duty explaining how the prosecution and defense were all over themselves trying to excuse him for some reason after their pre-emptory challenges had been exhausted; the judge, in appraising Bob's appearance and list of graduate degrees, apparently abetted them in searching frantically for a legal reason to excuse him. As he explained it: if you want to avoid jury service -- which Bob did not -- wear a beard and talk in full sentences with thoughtfulness when asked questions during the jury questioning. I'm sure the beard did it for me once. The closest I ever got to being seated was, believe it or not, on a capital murder case. I was asked my opinion of the death penalty, and I explained truthfully and with perhaps too much nuance that I was personally opposed to it because I thought it was a barbaric practice which accomplished nothing other than spreading a culture of violence, but that I fully understood my obligations as a citizen and as a juror to carry out the law as my fellow citizens had agreed to it and that I would not hesitate to recommend the death penalty should the evidence and the instructions of the judge concerning the law require it. As I spoke my piece, which was rather brief, I could see furrows of concern across the prosecutor's face and then the defense attorney's. My recollection is that they were down to one pre-emptory challenge each and from the body language they seemed reluctant to use it on a potential borderline juror. Then they got to the list of witnesses, and way down at the bottom there was a police officer whom I knew very casually, and that was enough for an excuse for cause. The next closest time I got was on a civil case that looked very long and boring and which did not seem to me to be worth my time, so I was actually vaguely hoping to be excused but was judged acceptable by both sides. Then it turned out my neighbor's wife had already been seated on the jury and, jury of peers notwithstanding, apparently if you know anybody at all involved with the case, you're kicked off. So there's another hint for avoiding jury duty if you're of that school of thought: just get to know a lot of people.

Now these days I have no beard, short hair, and a boring resume with only one advanced degree on it, but I think rather that I now look like a cop, and no defense attorney is going to have me on, either, and my listed occupation -- stay at home father -- presents a burden for long trials that I would probably willingly claim in any kind of complicated adjudication, plus I bet it doesn't fit into a profile. And so it was that I went off to jury duty on a Monday morning relatively confident that I'd be home by the end of the day and possibly for lunch.

On the jury summons, it states very clearly in the instructions to jurors: Business Attire Required. I supposed I could've been sophistic and claimed my business attire for my regular job is a pair of dirty jeans and a t-shirt with banana and juicy juice stains on it, but being (apparently) an uptight East Coast type, I took the instructions seriously and showed up in a suit and tie. As I entered the jury room and checked in, I scanned the room of 300 or so people, and found exactly zero people in similar attire. There was one older lady who looked like she might be wearing her Sunday clothes, but otherwise it was a sea of polo shirts with commercial logos on them, low-butt-cut tattoo-revealing hip-huggers, and the occasional casually-rumpled button-down. Hey, it's California, I realized: maybe this is Business Attire.

The instructions to the jurors had one common theme: you will probably get out of jury duty! Even in the video they showed extolling the interesting and potentially educational process of being a juror, which occasionally mentioned the awesome powers in a democracy accorded to one as a juror, most of it was focussed on how the jurors had all really wanted to get out of jury duty but ended up being OK with the fact they didn't. The supervisor of jurors gave us a running play by play that morning of each of the four trials scheduled to open, in between reassuring updates on how she knew we all wanted to get out of there.

I enjoyed the Judge's instructions very much.

Fairly early on, she explained to us that in order to be a juror, we had to be 18 years of age, a US Citizen, and we must never have been convicted of a felony, and if we didn't qualify for any reason, we must come up and see her. I was stuck away in a corner doing a Sudoku and idly reading Collapse but within earshot of the little booth where the supervisor of jurors did her business. After the spiel about qualifications, one gentleman approached her. "Do you have to have been convicted of a felony to get out of jury duty?" he asked very hopefully. She explained that yes, you have to have been convicted and asked him, have you been convicted of a felony, and he looked disappointed and said, no, not convicted and trudged back to his seat. I wonder still whether he'd been freed on a technicality or simply never caught, and then shuddered at the idea of serving on a jury with him, and in turn, ever being in a position where I was being tried for a crime with a jury consisting of twelve of that particular kind of peer.

As the morning wore on, the level of noise and conversation in the room increased. There were several complaints about there being no TV (thank god for small favors) and two requests by separate potential jurors that the supervisor of jurors turn the TV in the front that had been used for the instructional video to a soap opera. No dice -- no antenna or cable connection. Actual TV having been denied, there was significant talk around me that reminisced fondly of various TV legal dramas, trials, and so forth. One guy did a repeated Jack Nicholson, saying "YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH!" to the guy next to him. It was a credible impersonation, I must say, I half expected him to whip out a golf club and take it to the windows.

The guy I was seated next to happened to work at one of the golf courses near where we live. There are a lot of them around here, so this is not a terrible coincidence, but he wanted to know my opinion of the course played, the lunch at the restaurant, how the greens were kept, whether I preferred a cart or carrying a bag, and so on. My answer to the first question was, "I don't play golf, I'm afraid", which, with variations, was also my answer to the next ten or twelve questions he asked.

The woman in front of me had a tattoo just above her ass that read, at least in part, "Too Hot to..." I almost discovered what the rest of the inscription was when she leaned over to answer her cell phone, but fortunately I had Collapse with me, which I quickly deployed to block my view.

The presiding judge came down mid-morning to welcome us and provide us with a civics lecture on how great it was to be a juror and how much he, too, wanted us all to get out of jury duty, which I took to be an elaborate campaign speech in the end. He mentioned 9/11 six times in his speech, underscoring how if we don't serve on a jury, the terrorists win. He mentioned (inaccurately) that only six countries in the world have a trial by jury system, and that with only six democracies in the world, we had to serve as jurors to keep Democracy alive, and he'd do the best he could to make sure we never actually had to serve on one. I wondered if he was counting the US as one of the six democracies in the world.

Towards the end of the day, there was a heated discussion behind me about the OJ Simpson trial. Both parties agreed that the jury was idiotic and they would never be that idiotic and then proceeded to discuss all sorts of things that to the best of my knowledge were never brought into evidence in said trial as evidence of OJ's guilt. At this point I looked around the room of about 300 or so, and counted up the number of apparently African-American people present. One. Two. Two was the total.

The supervisor of jurors came out about 11 AM and informed us that she'd just been on the phone with the bailiff or judge from the last trial...and they had been working hard on the case...and blah blah blah about it she went on, before finally getting to the point that the case had been settled and we were all free to go. Why the first words out of her mouth weren't "you can all go home now!" is beyond me. Here's how I figure her speech cost society in terms of lost leisure or productivity time: let's just assume everybody there had time worth at least the Federal minimum wage of $5.15 an hour. 300 people were there, and we all listened to his completely unnecessary speech for about five minutes, which is 1500 minutes. That's 25 hours of lost time, collectively, to find out we were allowed to leave five minutes ago, which I make out to be about $128.75 of lost time, not counting the time it took my wife to iron my necktie that morning.

On the way out to the parking lot (a few blocks away from the courthouse) my golfing buddy tagged along and wanted to talk about what had gone on that morning and his big decision about whether to go back to work today or just take the rest of the day off. "Why don't you take the rest of the day off and play a round?" I suggested. "You must get bored playing your own course all the time." "Golf? On my day off? No way!" he replied. The last thing he said to me as we went to our separate cars was, "Hey, come down and try the lunch at the clubhouse! It's great! You'll come try it, right...?"

Eyes on the Prize: Springsteen Meets Seeger in Throwdown Match

Guthrie, Dylan Both Spin Round and Round in their Graves, Toes a Tapping

I once had a conversation with Dick Dale after he'd played a gig -- around when he was a mere pup of sixty years or so -- where he explained Rock and Roll music to me. "Rock and roll is all about fucking," he opined. "The only reason to become a rock musician is to get laid. I know it worked for me." I think this was right after he'd become a father again, mind you. Some geek (not me, I swear) in the little throng around Dick by the stage offered as how Dick's latest album was really meaningful, since it had an environmental message and all. "Shit, if you want music that's meaningful, go listen to folk or something," said Dale. "The only message to my music is below the waist." (Dale also claimed that he wasn't really playing the guitar on stage, he was playing the drums, just with strings.)

So I find it kind of cute, nearly endearing in a way, that Bruce Springsteen has discovered folk music in general and Pete Seeger specifically after all these years, as evidenced with the release of We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions. It's nearly 25 years since Bruce strapped on the Dylan impersonation gear for Nebraska and thirty or more years since he started trying to be epic in that good-timey saxophony way he's always had. And Bruce has just discovered now that all that attempt to be "meaningful" snuck into rock by way of folk? How quaint.

It should be set from the outset here that Pete Seeger is the original, ultimate poseur in this little chain of American folk life -- and I say that with all the affection and respect in the world (the Seegers were neighbors of my dad's sixty years back). Pete's Dad, Charles, was an egghead, an ethnomusicologist, professor, and official government wonk on the people's music, and Pete never even heard "folk music" until he was sixteen, so the stories go. He even dropped out of Harvard, just like Bill Gates. So for all the encyclopedic work Pete's done covering the American folk song, it must be said in the chain of "authenticity", whatever the hell that word is worth, Pete's a derivative beast. Hell, you have to remember Seeger was a top 10 artist with the Weavers and he wrote songs that kept popping up the charts in the 1960s, including faux-meaningful chestnuts like "Turn, Turn, Turn". He may have been convicted of failing to cooperate with the HUAC, but most of what he learned about hard time was second-hand from Leadbelly. (Pete got off on a technicality.)

Look, I'm Relevant!

So there's two things about these two gents. I've seen them both live and listened to a lot of their recordings over the years -- I grew up with Pete as a birthright of my parents, and with Bruce as a byproduct of the era -- and they have something in common. They both give great live shows (or at least did), and they both ultimately come out significantly more flat on record, at least in their studio albums. With Seeger, it's easy enough to figure out why. A lot of the energy from folk music comes from the audience feeling the song, even singing along, and most of the Seeger concerts were sing-alongs. So, too, have been Springsteen shows, but you can't hear the crowd singing because of the amplification. I've never been a big fan of the Boss, truth to tell, but on my top five concerts of all-time rank a couple of shows he put on in DC in 1981; three hours of non-stop giving, a weird symbiosis with a crowd that came in thinking they knew the music and left having had it rethreaded into their bones.

I'd like to make a little variation on the great Mr. Dale's pronouncment: I've always thought great rock music was about performance, perhaps above and beyond any other pop genre. You can take practically any song and turn it into a great rock song with the right attitude (or the wrong attitude, as the case may be) and the moment and sufficient butt-pumping. With folk -- at least, with American folk -- the greatness comes from reconnecting specific origination points and somehow making it resonate in a contemporary context. Minimalism and individual performance have a lot to do with that emphasis on the text and the audience meeting, whereas rock is nearly always a collective effort -- group and audience, amplifier manufacturer and roadie and promoter and the electric company and many others conspiring to make the thing happen (even if it's in a garage, Dad's got to pay the bills and move the Buick out of the way.) I like the stories about Pete Seeger during his blacklist days just showing up in a town, going to a radio station, unannounced, in the morning, finagling his way on for an interview on the basis of his hits with the Weavers, and getting a full crowd to come out to a concert ten hours later. Have banjo and a comprehensive musicology education, will travel.

Here's the other unpleasant truth about these two gents, and I again say this with considerable respect. Seeger has often been just tooooo serious to take seriously. Even in his really fun concerts with Arlo Guthrie in the 1970s, there was a self-importance about spreading the message that made it hard to really live inside the music. Your head was being pulled back out of its ass when your heart just wanted to sing along, and forget about your butt coming along for the ride.

With Springsteen, his redeeming quality -- especially for his live performances -- was that you could forget he was supposed to be "important" when everybody in the room was dancing along. This became quite a bit harder in the larger venues, and it's the main reason I haven't see the Boss in 20 years or more. Nor have I seen Pete Seeger during that time, for that matter, although Pete's on a slightly different point than Bruce in his career arc. Relevant? Just look at the differences: one is a millionaire living on his farm in the New Jersey countryside, the other lives in the woods in the New York Hudson Valley countryside. Thank god for the internet.

And I will report before I start to chew the gristle too much that I enjoy The Seeger Sessions. It ain't folk music, at least not any more than Clifton Chenier is folk music. Springsteen's version of a folk tribute is to get an all-star group of musicians around him and play "live", secluded in his home studio, well away from an audience. The songs have horns, bouncy piano, rousing choruses full of backing vocals, and jollility aplenty. Hardly a tear of indignation to be shed, and it's hard to feel really outraged even for "Eyes on the Prize", and you can't help but smile when that sweet-ass accordion kicks in. There are a few banjo licks vaguely reminiscent of Seeger, but that's not enough to convince me Bruce is really suffering. With Pete, man, you knew he was pissed off when he sang on stage, when he sang on record, even when he sang "Froggy Went a Courtin'" he was pissed off. Bruce is the happiest "folk" singer I've ever heard. "Pay Me My Money Down" might've been on Born to Run and the kids would've made out in the backseat to "Shenandoah", too, had the time traveling twelve-track been invented. The version of "We Shall Overcome" sounds like, well, they overcame and are having a nostalgic smoke in bed afterwards.

Woody's Body Not Even Cold Yet

Such a strange "tribute" album: not a one of Seeger's most famous or accomplished originals, not a trace of his style, just a wholesale sampling of Pete's corpus consisting almost entirely of covers and/or traditional songs. Holy cow, even my college punk band did the occasional cover of "If I Had a Hammer", which made a hilarious faux protest paean to anarchy with a simple switch of emphasis to I for each verse and chorus. There's certainly enough good Pete to make a cool album. But Bruce just sort of used Seeger as his hook to do a sampler of cool folk songs with a nice group of musicians, and had fun doing it, and by god there's nothing wrong with that at all. I just hope the goofballs don't start calling it important music, because that will spoil the party.

Of course, Springsteen's peak moment in the American Psyche was probably "Born in the USA", a song all about the collapse of the American dream that became an anthem of mindless patriotism merely because of (a) the chorus, which sounded like something you'd like to shout at a Reagan Youth rally, and (b) because of who Bruce was, already, by that point. It's easy to ignore Springsteen, really, and has been since the mid-70s, most especially when he's doing protest albums about the fall of the twin towers or finally getting his ass out on the stump for the unlikely cause of John Kerry, well after the threat to his popularity and the potential danger of such a gesture had disappeared. (Let's remember that a version of "If I Had a Hammer" was sung at a Tom DeLay fundraiser in 2005.)

I'm not enough of a Springsteenologist to really know how much of his myth Bruce willingly brought on himself, nor am I enough of a fan to want to, say, go out and buy three-CD reissues because I happened to enjoy the hell out of myself at a show twenty-five years ago. But I did end up buying this album because I liked the way it sounds, and at long last, I don't really have to think to hard about the great importance of the music I grew up with (and rejected, for quite a while, in favor of earbleed punk, among other more visceral genres.) For that I thank both Bruce and Pete.

Now, back to my Clifton Chenier.

Right Hand Interviews Left

From two articles, both in today's Monterey County Herald, both starting on page 1.

Lawyer James Michael Dead at 78

by Virginia Hennessy, Herald Salinas Bureau
Monterey County lawyers and judges are mourning the passing of attorney James Michael, a "legend" in the local criminal justice system.

Mr. Michael, who died Monday at the age of 78, was remembered Thursday as a mentor with a wry sense of humor and, said Salinas attorney Tom Worthington, "probably the finest lawyer that ever practiced in Central California." {remainder of article omitted}

And....

Beautician facing murder charge

WOMAN ACCUSED IN DEATH BY COOKING OIL INJECTION

by Virginia Hennessy, Herald Salinas Bureau
A Salinas cosmetologist accused of killing a client by injecting her with cooking oil has been charged with murder.

Martha Mata Vasquez, 39, had been charged with involuntary manslaughter and practicing medicine without a license. She was arrested Thursday on the upgraded charge and booked into Monterey County jail in lieu of $1 million bail. She faces a potential sentence of 15 years to life in prison.

Vasquez is accused of injecting Mazola vegetable oil into the buttocks of Oliva Aguirre-Castillo of Castroville on Nov. 17. Aguiree-Castillo, who believed she was receiving an anti-wrinkle treatment, fell into a coma and died a week later from massive organ failure.

[Four paragraphs omitted.]

Vasquez, who is married with two children, had been free on $25,000 [sic]. Her attorney, Tom Worthington of Salinas, was out of the country and unavailable for comment Thursday.

Lost in Time (Buffalo Soldiers, 2001)

One hilarious bit of trivia about the movie Buffalo Soldiers: the title in Germany was Buffalo Soldiers, Army Go Home! That, of course, is the spin they put on a movie essentially released in 2004, though made in 2000 and slated for original release in 2001, because that's the sentiment that's being reflected in the current era of unilateralism. You wouldn't think we'd won the cold war in a good part by gambling with West Germany and West Germans: scores of divisions, tactical nukes, and brinksmanship for over forty years, the only frontier where US and Soviet troops faced off across the barbed wire. No, these days it's all about whether you can print cartoons and toxic waste dumps of old armored vehicle lubricants and evacuaton hospitals. What have you done for me lately, eh.

Buffalo Soldiers is set in 1989, and one of the schticks in this tale of drugged out, corrupt, stealing Sad Sacks cum Sergeant Bilkos is that you constantly see scenes of the Berlin Wall falling and the end of communism -- in the background, on TVs playing around. It's meant to be some kind of poetic or symbolic device, I suppose, about the crumbling relevancy of the US Army or maybe military power in general or maybe just a contrast between the power plays in the plot and real life. But I think it's kind of a hollow device in the end, because it's not really used to drive any point home. And in any event, it seems obvous to me that the original mise en scene, the ambient geweltschaft, wasn't the Army of the late 1980s, but that of the late 1970s. The army wasn't taking in the rejects and high school dropouts and kids sent there by the judge insted of to prison by the late 80s: the volunteer army had, in fact, become the kind of well-oiled machine full of esprit de corps that a citizen-volunteer army had the potential to be, and Buffalo Soldiers, in an attempt to be acidic, is a bit off-target.

Personally, I think it's all the more hilarious to envision a bunch of dopeheads guarding nukes and running battle tanks over filling stations in the late 1970s, when we were still going toe to toe with the Commies, because the absurdity of the conflict in cultures was that much more stark. The whole subplot with the command master sergeant's history in Vietnam and the domesticated status of his nearly adult daughter would've made more sense in the tailing period of the 1970s than the 1980s. And as I can attest to, living in a military community just isn't the same as it once was, being that paradoxically socialized existence where Big Brother hands it all to you and all you have to do is do whatever you're told to do. That uncertain cusp between the old army and the new army in the late 1970s was full of all sorts of contradictions that Buffalo Soldiers tries hard to capitalize on. Even the title is a bit of an anomoly: the old reggae cry to American blacks, harkening back to the memories of the elite but still segregated black troops of the Indian wars, one oppressed minority sent by the Man to go oppress another minority even more. I don't quite get that in the 1980s, and especially without more compelling black characters in the movie to underscore the racial tensions of having a "volunteer" army of the underclass be in charge of the nation's arms, the way I got the sense in the late 1970s.

Another movie I felt the same way about at the time it came out was Bull Durham, which was a pretty good movie. But the whole set-up screamed of the mid-1960s, not the mid-1980s, from the discussions of Susan Sontag to the sense of genteel decline of the minor leagues at that point. If you're going to do a story about individual character triumphing over the decline and fall of western civilization, best to pick your nadir to make a point. Minor league baseball in the 1980s was already well on the way back, and Crash Davis would've been signing autographs and doing interviews for SportsCenter, not toiling in obscurity with only a line in the Sporting News to show for a career achievement.

Now what are we going to do, Gomer?

And of course the other weird factoid about Buffalo Soldiers was it got quashed on release because it came out right after 9/11, and it was not viewed as commercially or politically expedient to have a film that did not show the US military in the best light. We've got the anti-hero, the amiable Ray Elwood, and the bumbling careerist officer from a wealthy background, Colonel Berman, who of course is manipulated all over the map by Ray, but in a friendly symbiotic way. Each man goes about his own meaningless business, one for gelt, the other for a shiny star on his shoulder. Enter the heavy, the straight career enlisted man who's seen it all, who knows he's smarter than any officer and that he's got to prove he's the alpha dog, Sergeant Lee. He's going to get Ray in line, he is. Complications ensue from this conflict. So far we have the basic plot outline used in most McHale's Navy episodes. Can't have that anymore, that's a September 10th mindset, eh?

Things with the Army these days are so serious, in fact, I'm not even sure you could make Three Kings again. Hollywood's tried to make a couple of films, or at least TV shows, about the war-in-progress, notably the kind of difficult to watch Over There (which, bending over backwards to try to be authentic, ended up about as fakey as an episode of Combat), and fails and fails again. It's because in all phases of war, it's hard as hell to figure out what's going on until well after it's over.

That in turn is why I think a movie like Buffalo Soldiers would've been better off set a bit further back. Not only would the distance give some perspective, it would give some safety for the viewer to think about the context without having to get defensive towards the present-day Army. Indeed, since the current US military, at least below those ranks where Eagles and Stars fly, is as professional and dedicated and well-trained and educated military as the world has ever seen, it would take a real idiot to confuse what goes on on-screen with Buffalo Soldiers with Operation Iraqi Freedom. Yet I think there's a strong underlying question about running our army in a foreign land: why are we there? Why do we bring ourselves over, essentially unchanged, into a foreign land, and remain unchanged? How is it that we can go thousands of miles from home and remain an island unto ourselves? Can I and I survive in Babylon? (The irony, of course, from the Marley lexical quilt is that we now are quite literally in the actual Babylon.)

I once wrote that I thought that Saving Private Ryan was one of the most dishonest movies ever made. My basic point was that the filmmakers made a big deal about the "authenticity" of everything, right down to buying up remaining stocks of original uniforms vintage 1944 to clad the actors with. The version of "authenticity" had a sting to it because of the graphic violence of the movie, particularly the opening scenes. But the technique was more to make a fake war documentary, right down to copping the visual feel of old kodachrome 16 mm stock, and wrap it around a ludicrous "Why We Fight" story that was as cornball and hackneyed as any porpaganda film that was made during World War II. I was watching Guadalcanal Diary the other day (featuring a young Anthony Quinn, by the way, in a bit part), which is as strong an exemplar as you might find of the formulaic war picture, and enjoyed it a lot more than I did Saving Private Ryan. Despite all the campiness, racism, and bloodless violence, the film is authentic in a way because it captures the feeling of what it was like to be on the losing side of a war (as we were in 1942-43) and desperately trying to keep it together to see the struggle out. It's got immediacy which trumps the anachronisms, and real immediacy in that it was rushed out soon after the events depicted had transpired (even though, as history, it's complete junk.) The king of that genre has to be Wake Island, which was made in 1942 and depicts (sort of) an Alamo-like loss by US forces in December 1941. As propaganda, I have utterly no sense of how it might've been received by its audience at the time. The reality of the atrocities at Wake Island was barely known even by the authorities back then, and what really happened -- a massacre of hundreds of civilians, the brutalization of US POWs in ways that even the North Vietnamese or Sadaam's goons didn't quite come close to -- and an open question about what resistance to the invasion of the island really accomplished, certainly contemporary audiences had utterly no clue about any of that. As a rallying cry, it was a way of taking horror and chunking it up into something motivating. Saving Private Ryan had none of that honesty to it, because it was meant as an hommage, a re-writing of history that ultimately divorced itself too far from the fear, the terror, the killing to really make a reasonable point about motivation. (My proposed solution for that movie at the time was to have the final scene be a pull-back to show the tombstone was actually Private Ryan's, and the narrator/survivor old man would've been the technical corporal played by Jeremy Davies, the guy who couldn't pull the trigger until he had unarmed prisoners in front of him to kill. Wouldn't that have made the movie play differently?)

We don't get contemporary war movies, perhaps in part because this is a kind of shadow war that's a war largely because the powers that be are calling it a war. It's just difficult to know what to rally around, much less how to rally the movie-watching public. One seems to glean through the fog of history that FDR wasn't going around in 1942 saying we were winning that war just yet, but then again national survival seemed significantly more at stake and obviously so than in our present day circumstances.

In between -- that era represented by Buffalo Soldiers -- there was that long war of attrition, the Cold War, an era of vicious little conflicts punctuated by long periods of boredom. And in the end I guess that's why I still liked the movie. Even displaced out of its natural setting and time in a way that is kind of jarring and patently unfair, it does have a sense of chaotic truth to it. Nice guys get out, the operators survive, the brutalists do, in the end, eat their own livers.

Maybe someday someone is going to do a movie that will explain Abu Ghraib's Lord of the Flies groupthink. If they do, it won't actually be about Operation Iraqi Freedom: better to set it someplace else, but use those contemporary emotions to fuel the authenticity. Maybe I should say honesty instead of authenticity, since the latter is an abused word. An honest reckoning is one which pulls no punches, and in that regard I think I can recommend Buffalo Soldiers, even if it's not the kind of desperate testimony of losing ground, fingers tearing for a handhold, that mght help us through these dark times.

Tis the Sleazin' of Joy [It's a Wonderful Life(1946)]

Some years ago Connie Willis wrote (via a mouthpiece character in a short story in her collection Miracle and Other Christmas Stories) about the undeserved reputation the movie It's a Wonderful Life as embodying the true spirit of Christmas. (I'd quote her at length, but our copy of Miracle was lent out a while back and not yet returned -- how about that for the spirit of Christmas.) She preferred Miracle on 34th Street (1947): the mystery of the existence of Santa Claus isn't really ever tipped, and the question about whether old Kris Kringle is krazy, or maybe it's just society that's insane, is left more or less open through the end of the picture despite some heavy sentimental tipping about what you're supposed to believe. This question of faith in the unknowable presence of an unseen spirit in life made mysteriously manifest twice a year (Easter, and revisionistically, Christmas) is the essence of religious faith, or whatever part of the human spirit that in turn becomes organized as religious faith. That's always been the overlap between the Santa and Jesus legends. Santa has become popular because of the equation of literal materialistic gifts with the moral code of conduct required to get them ("he knows when you've been bad or good" "he's making a list") and the annual nature of his visits, which is a lot more predictable than the second coming. It's a Wonderful Life has to trot out an actual angel from the first frame of the film to assure the audience of the literal intervention of divine forces in life, even one so ill-examined as George Bailey's. It's Santa Claus to Miracle's Jesus, and it shows up at the same time every year on TV, too.

I don't disagree at all with the estimable Ms. Willis, and it's hard for me to argue that Miracle isn't better storytelling on nearly every front than It's a Wonderful Life. The latter movie tanked at the box office, and has accumulated its reputation as a Christmas classic slowly over the years. How this happened, I am not sure: a combination of repeated exposure to the baby boom generation on TV and the cult of Zuzu's petals. Miracle, on the other hand, was successful enough that the film industry has seen refit to re-make it four times (thus far), and, like A Christmas Carol, has lent its basic plot to a gazillion other movies since. Faith lost; faith redeemed; faith embodied in the love between a man and a woman; innocence restored.

Yet for some reason I continue to be drawn to watch It's a Wonderful Life over and over every chance I get. I've absorbed what sweet tidbits Miracle has, and as a screensaver to the season it's pleasant enough. It's a Wonderful Life is a twisted, bitter, and clinically diagnosable suicide note, and not incidentally was basically the end for Frank Capra's career. It is not, not, a good movie: but dissecting it every year, I seem to always notice something different about the film that makes me thankful for small favors. Those favors are not exactly what the literal text of the movie suggests, of course.

Let's review from the back to the front of the film. The miraculous delivery of George Bailey at the end of the movie is supposed to be because of not only his own self-review of the meaning of his life, but because of the intervention by prayer of the many people who love George, intervention which has brought Clarence down from heaven (where the rigid caste system in force keeps Clarence from moving up one class of Angelness unless he saves George from himself). It's a whirlwind of problems solving themselves in the last two minutes of celluloid which belies the deeply depressing turn of events of the previous couple of hours. The feeling is nothing so much like Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge -- speaking of great movies about to be remade, although I am thinking more of the cynical concision of the original Ambrose Bierce. I think too of the little Edward Gorey ditty:

The suicide, as she is falling,
Illuminated by the moon,
Regrets her act, and finds appalling
The thought she will be dead so soon.

I have an acquaintance who was on duty below the Golden Gate bridge -- jumper duty -- who had the unhappy experience of fishing the bodies of suicides out of the water from time to time. He tells of one jumper who was still alive, most of the bones in his body broken, who muttered, "I guess that was a dumb idea," before he passed out (and I think later died, although I actually can't remember that part of the story.)

What else to make of the ending of Wonderful Life? George Bailey, faced with a living hell, jumps to his death. On the way down, he considers the alternative distopia to the ugly distopia of his own life, and decides after all it's worth living. Too late: but before he hits, his brain invents a happy ending with everybody he loves around him, fade to black, The End.

Capra made Life coming off his celebrated series of propaganda movies during World War II, and of course his strangely cynically optimistic "classic" movies of the 30s before that. Life reads like a little resume of the woes of the first half of the twentieth century leading up to the A-bomb, wrapped up in the style and mindscreen of the propagandist.

In the "Wonderful" version of George Bailey's life, his little town is dominated by the mean old Scroogian miser, Potter. Potter, unlike Scrooge or every last "villain" of Miracle on 34th Street, is left unredeemed at the end of the movie, still apparently in possession of George's $8000. (What kind of sadist makes the beloved Lionel Barrymore into such a disgusting villain? Well, probably Barrymore himself, but talk about casting against type!) In the alternative universe of George's imagination, the one where he'd never been born, the slavery of Bedford Falls to Potter is simply one of degree. Without the single hold out of the Savings and Loan, the town which has been a confining purgatory to George his entire wanderlust-encrusted life becomes a true living hell: booze, floozies, hopheads, wage slavery, poverty, unrelenting personal misery, and most literally, the ruin of the very house George restored from ruins in his "real" life with Mary. Some wonderful life. George had every reason to be bitter and frustrated, the way the forces of entrepreneurial capitalism and normative social moires trapped him in a town he hated. For all the supposed idealism of the small town setting, do we ever see Bedford Falls in the present in the light of day? It's Christmas noir

It seems, in the end, very unlikely it was the threat of prison and disgrace, fueled with alcohol, that suddenly gave George the idea of suicide. (And here's another loophole left unresolved: George couldn't have believed the insurance company would honor his policy if he suicided.) No, he must've been thinking of it for years, and finally reached a tipping point. That, in turn, is probably why I find the movie so clinically fascinating at this time of hope and redemption, while Miracle gets an obligatory nod and yawn. Another year, we're all still here, that's a good thing.

I have observed this particular point about It's a Wonderful Life in previous years. On this year's re-viewing, however, I noticed another bit of subtext that had escaped me previously. George's despair is all about...sex!

The clues are there on the surface, and they're pretty disgusting. Violet Bick, the town slut whom George "saves" by giving her money to get out of town for a fresh start -- in New York City? -- what was George thinking about? is shown trying to dangle her wares in front of Georgie at the age of 10, the innocent future Mrs. Bailey watching and waiting inches away. Violet has to represent the "wanderlust" that George has for travel and exotic experience -- for going to college ("there's a time and a place for everything, and it's called college") -- for variety outside of his humdrum predictable Bedford Falls life. His downfall is precipitated in part by the suggestion that his alleged embezzlement is due to some kind of pay off to Violet for favors we don't need to mention, wink wink. In the scene in Mary's house after she and George have walked home after their dip into the high school pool (nothing symbolic about that drop through the gaping crevasse that appears with the throw of a switch, eh), Mary's mother asks what the heck George Bailey is doing there, when good old Sam Wainwright is offering his considerable charms -- in New York City!!! -- just at the other end of the phone line. "He's Making VIOLENT LOVE TO ME, Mother!" she yells up the stairs, pausing the glance at George for his reaction. In George's alternative life, the one where he never existed, the final horror he has to be shown by Clarence, the ghost of Christmas present, is -- what happened to Mary? Clarence, shudders, reluctant to tell the horrible truth about what happened to Mary without George -- "she's an OLD MAID!" he sobs, and George is horrified. The state of continued virginity in the middle of the sin city that has now become Bedford Falls in George's absence is the WORST THING THAT COULD POSSIBLY HAPPEN. (Just to rub it in to poor Mary's character's fate, she is, of course, that classic stereotype of spinsterhood -- the librarian!)

So, in the end, George's sacrifice of his own wanderings and sexual adventurism is to save Mary from the worst fate that could possibly happen to a fruitful woman. In the world of Bedford Falls without George, everybody's gettin' some except for his putative wife. Zuzu's petals, indeed. He has to undo his selfish nihilistic act of suicide in order to redeem her. The path not taken, the path that would have lead to George breaking out of both the geographical confines of his town and the strict moral code of bourgeois middle class America, must be shown to be terrible, so the quotidian reality of his life can be palatable.

The final scenes of the movie show George being showered in money, the fruits of his loins restored to him, everybody surrounding him watching him cheering him on. It's a Wonderful Life -- but what a sick, sick movie.