Tuesday, May 24, 2011

Now on HBO: Recent History

There's a passage toward the end of The Perfect Storm where Sebastian Junger is trying to explain the desperation of a commercial fishing craft caught in an unprecendented, deadly storm. Paraphrasing here, Junger writes that one can measure the direness of one's situation by looking at how one's choices have narrowed. A week earlier, the ship's captain could have made choices that avoided the storm altogether; now, his choices are pretty much to turn the ship, which is dangerous, or not turn the ship, which is suicidal.

I was reminded of that passage last night when I watch HBO's new movie, "Too Big to Fail," which dramatizes the critical period in the fall of 2008 between Lehman Brothers foundering and the U.S. government stepping in with the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP), commonly known as the bank bailout.

(Soapbox: TARP/"the bailout" and what's known as "the stimulus" are two different pieces of legislation signed by two different presidents under two different sessions of Congress. Sorry, I get irritated when people use those terms interchangeably, especially when they're blaming President Obama for both of them.)

I enjoyed it. It was hard for ordinary Americans to grasp what was happening while it was happening, so it's nice to have a streamlined-for-fiction version to refer to, complete with a scene in which several Treasury administrators blatantly Captain Exposition-style explain what subprime mortgages and credit default swaps to another Treasury administrator, who presumably would be up on this (but whatev, story device). Characters are helpfully identified with supers and played by actors you've seen in everything, so you can tell who's who, even if it's just "government guy" or "Wall Street guy." (Bill Pullman! Tony Shalhoub! Evan Handler! Cynthia Nixon! Paul Giamatti! Sorry.)

I think what I enjoyed most, and what surprised me most, was seeing Pres. Bush's Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson (played by William Hurt, who, c'mon, is William Hurt) emerge as kind of the hero in this story. Yes, I know it's TV, but from everything I remember at the time or have read since, the portrayal of Paulson isn't far off. The scene where he gets on his knees to beg House Speaker Nancy Pelosi not to give up on TARP actually happened. And a scene with Paulson's reaction to Sen. John McCain suspending his presidential campaign to deal with the crisis may be fiction, but it sure was entertaining. It's trippy to see stuff I wrote about at the time play out on screen.

As the film shows him, Paulson tried mightily to find a "private sector solution" to Lehman Brothers' meltdown, only to see American and world investors turn their backs on the troubled firm. A taxpayer bailout was absolutely not his first choice. In a world where financial institutions were simultaneously reckless and cautious, carelessly interdependent and skittish, TARP was the ship captain's choice between riding a deadly wave or being smashed by it. Somewhat damned if you do, completely and possibly irreparably damned if you don't.

I also appreciated that the film's endnotes noted the immediate impact of TARP: namely, that the public gave banks billions specifically to unfreeze credit markets, and they proceeded to not loan out any of it. The government's action averted a catastrophic depression, while the banks' actions (before and after) just screwed taxpayers more. By the way, the ultimate cost to taxpayers is estimated to be $25 billion, all of which has been or is being repaid.

Anyway, good film. It should be required viewing, particularly for people who complained about every action the government took that fall - who should then be asked what they would've done differently. No one wanted TARP, and yes, the crisis was a long time coming, but Congress, President Bush and Secretary Paulson deserve credit for making the difficult, and brave, decisions when it counted.

Who knew Darrell Waltrip worked for the Iredell County Sheriff's Department?

So here I am waiting for the "Dancing With the Stars" finale results, worrying that my cable's going to blink out for a third time tonight because of the weather, and feeling like a complete jerk because I'm even thinking about missing a frakking TV show when there are people losing their homes, or worse, to tornadoes in the Midwest as I write this...

... and then I read that Kyle Busch was cited this afternoon for driving 128 in a 45 m.p.h. zone just a few counties southwest of here.

And I feel like slightly less of a jerk. Because, while most of us are guilty of speeding in Iredell County at one point or another (it's just so full of nice, rolling hills, and also a giant speed-trap), going that fast is criminal. Literally. The last time I checked, anything faster than 25 m.p.h. means you automatically get your license revoked. If a driver does hurt someone going that fast, he or she could face criminal charges.

Kyle got a citation for reckless driving.

I realize that Busch drives a lot faster than 128 m.p.h. for a living, but he usually does so on a closed course with other highly experienced professional drivers. Not a country road where someone's grandmother or 16-year-old could be pulling out in front of him.

This is not about my distaste for Busch as a NASCAR driver. He should be ashamed of himself, and so should whatever law enforcement officer let him go.*

*Hopefully, as more is reported about this in the coming days, the situation won't turn out to be quite as egregious as it does now.

Friday, May 6, 2011

A lady intervention for "Justified"

I kept trying and failing to write something about the second season finale of “Justified,” which aired Wednesday – failing, because there are professionals who parse this show with benefit of screeners, and what am I going to add to their observations? Also, I wrote about my general thoughts on “Justified” a few weeks back, and the finale didn’t really change anything in what I thought.

In its second season, “Justified” matured from an above-average cop procedural to an epic-feeling dive into a culture Hollywood rarely handles with any accuracy. A big part of the reason why is the introduction of the Bennett clan, whose crime empire and decades-long feud with the family of Our Hero Raylan enriched the show’s backstory and set up plotlines that could unspool over several seasons (God willing).

I adore this show and its writing and acting so much that it felt almost disloyal to think about the few things about it that bothered me, and that didn’t improve in season two. It boils down to one big thing, I guess – and no, not Raylan’s magic ability to drive from Lexington to Harlan in the space of one commercial break. That’s just TV. And, besides, he’s a federal employee, so I’m sure he gets reimbursed for mileage.

I have a serious issue with the female characters on “Justified.”

Not all of them, though. I have to give major credit to the show’s runners for making Mags Bennett “Mags,” and not “Milton” or “Junior” or “Billy Ray.” She’s simply one of the most memorable and frightening characters – not female characters, characters period – in recent TV memory. Weeks later, she’s still got my own mother looking reasons to say “You sit your bony ass down and listen to my counter while thay’s still pieces of you big enough to fiiiiii-iiind.” Please cast Margo Martindale in everything from now on. Likewise, the young Loretta McCready (Kaitlyn Dever) was wonderful, to the point where she reminded me of every slightly sketch girl I knew in high school.

I could complain about Aunt Helen, who officially joined the Women in Refrigerators ranks a few episodes back, or Erica Tazel’s U.S. Marshall Rachel Brooks, who’s on pace to get about five lines of dialogue per season. But these characters’ fates are due less to their female-ness and more to where they fit in the story. Certainly there are male characters who are in the same boat.

But we have to talk about the Raylan Jinx.

I’m not talking about the increased likelihood that a woman dating an envelope-pushing federal officer will be exposed to potentially life-threatening danger. I’m talking about the demonstrated effect that getting involved with Raylan Givens has on how writers seem to view a character. Namely, dating Raylan is the No. 1 cause of death-of-anything-interesting-about-you.

Is it an accident that Ava became infinitely more compelling after she and Raylan split, or that Winona became frustratingly uninteresting this season after she and Raylan got back together? Ava went from uneasy truce with her late husband’s bother (late, by the way, because she shot him) to a relationship that has potential for some real Lady Macbeth-style badassery, while Winona was reduced to finding different ways to get into trouble so Raylan could rescue her.

It wouldn’t bother me that Raylan apparently gets more attracted to women when they’re vulnerable and in need of a knight in shining armor – as long as someone acknowledged it in some way. Otherwise, it looks less like a character choice and more like lack of imagination on the part of the show’s writers.

I mean, Raylan’s awesome, and he’s got depth, and he’s a decent person, and he looks like Timothy Olyphant, so I can understand a girl getting weak in the knees. But surely these women still have jobs, and families, and things in their lives that don’t revolve around some dude.

“Justified,” I only criticize because I love.

Monday, May 2, 2011

5/11

Unless you are like the poor woman in my office who went to bed before 11 p.m. Sunday night and managed not to see a newspaper before lunchtime Monday, you know that U.S. forces finally located Osama bin Laden in Pakistan on Sunday (EST). During the raid, bin Laden and some of his crew were killed.

My first reaction was shock, only a happy kind of shock – pretty much the inverse of what I felt sitting in the library at Forsyth Tech on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. I called and texted several people to make sure they were watching the news, too, and I got pretty emotional during President Obama’s speech announcing the raid. And I’ll admit, I did get a little “Team America: World Police” in those first moments. For me, it was a natural reaction to finally – after almost a decade after 9/11 – seeing some justice for all of the innocent people bin Laden and Al-Qaeda spent much of the last 20 years terrorizing. I probably would not have been as magnanimous as our professional military was, which is why I’m glad they were there and I wasn’t.

I’ve spent much of today thinking about that reaction, and the reaction to the reaction in some of the media. For instance, it pissed me off as a proud leftie that the majority of the OBL-related posts that Salon.com put up today seemed to be less about the operation and its impact, and more about how gross it is that people got shot and stuff. (This is why we don’t let Internet columnists of any political stripe fight our wars.)

In particular, this piece entitled “USA! USA! Is the wrong response” missed the mark for me. I can understand why the writer found the impromptu demonstrations at the White House and Ground Zero distasteful, but I disagree with him. I don’t think I get to judge how other people respond to such a tremendously emotional moment. Some of us cried, some of us prayed, some of us posted gallows humor on Facebook, or all the above and more. It’s completely unfair to characterize the people singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” in front of the White House “blood-thirsty” or to suggest that they’re no different than the terrorist sympathizers who cheered in the streets after 9/11.

For starters, as should be obvious, the people whose murders bin Laden plotted, funded and inspired were by and large ordinary citizens at embassies, on vacation, on the way to work or working in their offices when they were attacked. Celebrating their deaths, as bin Laden did in video after video, is very different from celebrating his death.

Should his death be “celebrated”? As a Christian, I’m not supposed to relish the thought of a life ending. I’m supposed to have compassion for my enemy. And as someone taught to think critically, I absolutely believe that citizens should ask what will be different now in the “war on terror” – are we still doing warrantless wiretapping, for instance?

I don’t know what the word is to describe what I feel – satisfied? Relieved? It isn’t a negative emotion, I know that much. Osama bin Laden wasn’t some freedom fighter striking a blow against power on behalf of the powerless. This isn’t someone about whom anyone could say, “I disapprove of his methods, but he has a point.” He was a mass murderer who gleefully went after easy targets like civilians instead of actual decision makers, and who sent others to die and take as many others with them as possible.

His actions – which had him on the FBI’s Most Wanted List well before 9/11 – led directly to U.S. intervention in Afghanistan, where thousands of Americans and Afghans have died. He supported a repressive regime in the Taliban, whose government destroyed religious icons and stripped human rights from women and girls. He almost single-handedly destabilized an entire region.

So, no, I don’t feel like I’m wrong to feel good that he’s gone. And I don’t feel that the people gathering last night in the very places Al-Qaeda tried to destroy were wrong, either. Some have said that last night was totally different than, say, V-E Day (anniversary was Sunday, by the way), because one marked the end of a criminal and the other the end of a war. Well, this is likely the only “end” to this war that we’re going to get. There’s no Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan to sign terms of surrender, there’s no Berlin Wall to knock down. This is it.

Of course it isn’t the end. Terrorism existed long before bin Laden, and it will still exist after him. Maybe killing him was totally symbolic, but in my opinion it’s a symbol our country – and the world – desperately needed. I can understand the nuances surrounding the situation and still be happy that Osama bin Laden no longer occupies the same planet as other human beings.